Later Ward came in from the street and entered his Gatehouse so that Egdod could see him through the aperture that joined it to the Palace. Egdod could see that the other was regarding the new furniture with curiosity. Egdod sat down in his big chair, then made a gesture with his hand as if trying to waft Ward into the Palace with a puff of air. He remembered the words and shaped them with his mouth: “Come in.”
Ward walked through the aperture and across the expanse of stone and took a seat in the chair that was of a size befitting him. While Egdod had been away shaping the lands beyond, Ward’s body had grown broad and his face had taken on greater definition. Lips, and other things that he was remembering the names of—teeth, tongue—were, it seemed, of use in more perfectly shaping sounds from the hissing chaos of breath. “Flowers beautiful,” he said, more clearly than Egdod could have done. Or at least those were the two words that Egdod recognized; they were embedded in a sentence of greater complexity, joined together with small words that somehow made them work better. Egdod understood that Ward had been spending time in Town with the other souls and that they had developed the art of talking beyond what Egdod, who spent all of his time alone, had yet achieved.
It occurred to him that neither Ward nor any of the others had seen the lands that Egdod had been building. They had no understanding of what he had been doing. One day they would develop their legs, or in some cases wings, to the point where they could range over great distances and see it all with their own eyes. In the meantime, Egdod fancied that he might, by the use of words, try to explain what he had been doing. He embarked on that project but found himself limited by his crude powers of speech, which were not up to the task of conveying even a hint of his creations’ size and complexity. Soon he resorted to gestures and disjointed words, pointing one way and uttering “mountains” and another way “ocean” and so forth. Then he lapsed into silence as he understood the futility of what he was attempting.
That silence was interrupted by a rush of chaotic noise from Ward. Egdod looked at him to see that his aura was getting larger, sending out a tendril of aura in Egdod’s direction. This was a thing that souls in Town did when they were standing close together. Experimentally Egdod did likewise, letting the aura around his head reach out over the table. When it touched and merged with that of Ward, he felt, saw, heard, and smelled new things.
Long ago, when Ward had first turned up in the doorway of the Palace, he had touched Egdod’s knee with a tendril of his aura and it had produced a fizzing sensation. There was some of that now, but for the most part it was more perfectly formed than that. To make such contact between auras, Egdod now saw, was to feel what the other was feeling and even to think what they were thinking without the necessity of putting it into words. He was seeing things now as Ward saw them, not just in the here and now but in his memory. Ward was recollecting a visit to Town earlier today. Through his mind’s eye, Egdod was regarding the faces of souls whom Ward had encountered there. It was all clearly recognizable, yet curiously faded and mottled, as if contaminated with chaos. Perhaps this was a defect in how ideas were transmitted between auras, or perhaps it was actually how Ward saw everything.
Egdod made an effort to summon up a memory of high mountains, seen from above, the snow that collected on them and dark forests that cladded their lower slopes. He sensed that this was getting through to Ward, and so he called to mind other memories of the lands that, a minute earlier, he had been trying and failing to describe in words.
It was all a bit much for Ward. If the latter’s perceptions had seemed small, wan, and unclear to Egdod, then what was it like for him to see the full grandeur of the lands beyond with the clarity and force of Egdod’s eye? Ward became dazzled or weary. The aura bridge narrowed, weakened, and snapped back to his head. After that his aura was small and closely contained. He withdrew to his Gatehouse and lay on a thing he had made there—“Bed”—and did not stir for a while.
Egdod for his part was pondering some of the images that had entered his mind from the aura bridge. Among other things, he had seen the park in the middle of Town. It was a flat square of grass and it was empty of souls, buildings, and trees. This was how he had made it, a long time ago, according to his normal practice, which was to shape the land first in a crude manner, putting a mountain here and a river there, and then return later to better them. The glimpse of the park that he had seen through the eyes of Ward told him that its improvement was overdue. Moreover his own lack of facility with forming words told him that he might benefit from more contact with souls in Town.
So he walked out into the Garden and reminded himself of the shapes of some of the flowers that had lately appeared there. Then he took wing and flew down the length of the street and touched down in the middle of that featureless square of grass. Walking about on it he began to place flowers here and there, not spreading them all about like grass but clustering them in groups that were more pleasing to the eye. As he did so he was again struck by the knowledge—confident, unremarkable—that he was not creating anything anew but rather summoning up a memory of his previous life. He sensed that when the park was finished, paths of something like stone would meander through it, coming near each of the flower beds. In its center would rise a structure made out of stone. Not a large one. Nothing like the Palace. Scarcely large enough to contain a few souls. Not a thing to dwell in but rather an ornament to look at.
In his efforts to summon and sharpen these memories he had stopped paying attention to goings-on around him. Coming back to the here and now for a moment, he gazed about and saw that souls had gathered all around the edge of the park. He was surprised by the number of them: more than he could easily count. Thousands. They were not ordered in uniform ranks but rather clumped together according to some pattern that evidently suited them. As before, some of them spoke to their neighbors by forming words, while others joined their auras together so that they could share perceptions and thoughts directly. Those who did speak used a greater variety of words than Egdod had expected. “Egdod” seemed to be universal but “flower” was not. Different clumps of souls seemed to have different opinions as to which sound patterns designated which things. It was another of those realizations that came to Egdod’s mind as a fresh thing but that he sensed had been commonplace in wherever it was that he had come from. Souls were not all the same, but grouped according to degrees of similarity that existed among them, and one of the ways they did so was according to their use of words.
All save one of them, however, seemed reluctant to step upon the park’s grass. The exception was a relatively large and well-formed soul who was moving freely about the park, flying more often than walking, moving from one bed of flowers to the next as if inspecting Egdod’s handiwork. Egdod named her Free Wander. He tried to convey by gestures and a few words that she was welcome in the park, but this was of little value since Freewander appeared to know this already—or perhaps did not care.
Watching and listening to this exchange was another distinct and mature soul whom Egdod had noticed moving among the different clumps of souls. Egdod named him Speaks All.
Egdod now summoned Freewander and Speaksall to his presence, and beheld the different forms that they had made for themselves. Freewander’s body was as slender and strong as a new green branch. She seemed to be made mostly of wings, which she used more adeptly than any of the other souls. Her aura was a waterfall of white static into which she had already braided skeins of flowers harvested from those that Egdod had only just introduced to the park. Egdod was irked by this, but casting his gaze over the flower beds he saw that they had not diminished from Freewander’s harvesting but were replenishing themselves already.
Speaksall was more robust than Freewander but less so than Ward. He had taken the unusual step of distributing small wings about various parts of his body—ankles, hips, elbows—in addition to the usual pair on the back. His aura was small and groomed close to his head, perhaps reflecting a preference for the use o
f words, at which he seemed to excel all other souls. Accordingly, his face—in particular the nose and mouth—was more perfectly shaped than any of the others’ and indeed was uncommonly pleasant to look upon.
Egdod mistrusted his own ability to communicate with this creature. His words would seem crude by comparison. The bridging of the auras was more effective but he did not wish to overwhelm these as he had done with poor Ward. A brief connection with Freewander’s fragrant aura let him know, however, that her perceptions were better developed and she less likely to be stunned by a direct connection of this nature. She then could speak with better effect to Speaksall, who seemed to have a command of the words needed to communicate with all of the different types of souls. In this manner Egdod, with the help of these other two souls, managed to convey that it was desirable for all of the souls to move freely about the park.
Thinking that he might as well now fashion the little tower that he had glimpsed in his memory, Egdod walked to the middle of the park and summoned the adamant that he knew to lie under the grass. Below his feet, he sensed that it was striving to break through into the air and shape itself according to his will. But when he looked down he saw nothing but grass. In one place it bulged slowly upward and the soil parted to reveal a stump of rock, striving to grow higher, but to little effect. The farther it climbed, the slower it went. Sensing that something had gone awry, Egdod left off trying to command its shape, and it congealed as a formless knob no higher than his knee.
This troubled him considerably, and so he took flight and returned to the Palace. Freewander followed him for some distance but Egdod, already exasperated by her presumption, wheeled around and beat his wings to create immense gusts of air that hurled her back toward Town. She dodged round them with a nimbleness that irked him even as he admired it. But she took the message and left him alone.
The idea of the solitary tower in the park had called to mind another memory, which was that palaces sometimes had towers where their walls met to form corners. He touched down in the back, on the side facing the Garden and the forest, where he could work unseen by the souls in Town. For there was something about being watched while he did his work that unsettled his mind. At the Palace’s corner he attempted to form a tower, just as he had a few minutes ago down in the park. Almost as quickly as he could think of it, the adamant had grown up out of the bedrock and shaped itself into a round tower. He went to the other back corner and did it again. And again it worked. He moved around to the front side of the Palace, overlooking the street, and tried it a third time. It was much more difficult. The fourth corner he did not even attempt.
The “discovery” and announcement of the Landform cratered the agenda of ACTANSS 3. No one would talk about anything else after that. People stayed up all night wandering around that tennis court, just sightseeing. The Landform Visualization Utility, as Matilda’s and Sophia’s software became known, was mirrored to servers whence colleagues could access it so that, after the conference was over, they could go on exploring the place from the comfort of their own homes and offices.
During the weeks that followed, reports began to show up that read less like modern scientific papers and more like journals from eighteenth-century explorers. Some of those virtual Captain Cooks, such as Pluto, were more interested in the Landform itself, while others focused on the hotspot in the middle. Even to the most skeptical observers, this looked a hell of a lot like a town, with streets and houses. Sophia noticed a thing that, once she’d pointed it out, could not be unseen, which was that the layout of the “town” was oddly similar to that of the one in Iowa where Richard and the other Forthrasts had grown up.
As more programming talent and processing power were devoted to the improvement of the LVU, it became possible to resolve—albeit in ghostly, pointillistic form—the virtual bodies that corresponded to individual processes. Most appeared to be strictly—almost disappointingly—humanoid. But some had been augmented with wings or other appendages, and a few had shapes that were very strange indeed.
Once that fact had been noticed, it was the work of a few days to run statistics. The results were too striking to be argued with. The earlier a process had been launched—the older the scan on which it was based—the less likely it was to have a conventional humanoid form. Weirdest of all were Dodge, the Most Favored Nation processes, and the Ephrata Eleven. Of those, Dodge had been booted up first and the others, beginning with Verna and soon numbering a few dozen all told, had been launched only after Dodge had existed in Bitworld for a while.
And it wasn’t simply the case that their bodies all started out humanlike and got weirder over time. In the stats it was possible to see a crisp fault line that coincided with the advent of full-body scanning. Processes that entered Bitworld with full information about the bodies from which they were derived ended up living in digital simulacra of those bodies. Those that had come into the world from severed heads showed a wider range of morphologies. But they also had a much higher failure rate, and some left no trace in the system at all. If they were alive, they were not discernible.
31
Sorry to see you here under these, uh, circumstances,” Corvallis said.
“It’s okay,” Zula returned. “It’s my job or something now to be the Angel of Death.”
Zula and Corvallis, along with two ambulance crews, a fire engine, several sheriff’s deputies, three lawyers, a mortician, and a doctor had all, during the last forty-five minutes or so, convened, between a house and a garage that was nearly as big as the house, in the countryside northeast of Seattle. The buildings were at the end of a quarter-mile-long driveway—the private extension of a county road that snaked its way up into the foothills of the Cascades from a river valley patchworked with dairy farms and horse barns. Snow-covered mountains rose up into the mist only a few miles away. Cold wet air drained out of them, encouraging people to stand in the lee of Pluto’s garage.
Which might have been seen as ironic given that Pluto’s garage was much, much colder yet, at least on the inside.
Pluto had bought the property ages ago and lived in the house—a fairly dull bit of 1970s architecture gone somewhat mildewy—while gradually, over a span of decades, turning the garage into a fully equipped science lab and machine shop. Neighbors had looked on with consternation as heavy trucks had negotiated the puddle-spattered dirt driveway towing multiton machine tools on flatbeds. Deliveries of bottled gases and cryogenic fluids had become commonplace. No one really knew what he did there. The answer seemed to be: whatever he felt like at the time. He’d gone through a phase of making various kinds of lava by melting stones with huge oxy-fuel burners of his own design. He had built rocket engines and tested them in his backyard.
Today one of the garage doors had been hauled open to reveal his latest project, which was an exceptionally complicated suicide machine hermetically sealed behind a wall of bulletproof glass plastered with prominent signs and legal documents.
On the hour-long drive up here, Zula had been given some of the details over the phone, so she knew approximately what to expect. On the other side of that glass wall, Pluto was reclining on a gurney in the middle of the science lab. Everything was illuminated brilliantly by the cold white light of LEDs. So it was possible to see a great many tubes. His body and all of his head, except for his face, were swaddled in some kind of thing that looked like an expeditionary sleeping bag, and most of his face was covered by a virtual reality headset hooked up to its own computer. The sleeping bag—or perhaps “dying bag” was a better term for it—was pervaded by a network of tubes. Whatever was in those tubes was cold, judging from the jackets of frost that had gathered on them. The tubes ran away to a boxy device in the corner that, one had to guess, was some kind of a chiller. Lots of smaller tubes ran into the thing, snaking round the curve of Pluto’s jaw and down into the bag, where presumably they were connected to IV lines. There was a control system too, embodying a snarl of cables at least as complicated as the plumbing sys
tem; all the cables terminated in the back of a workstation, an old-school tower PC with a flat-panel screen. Some of the cables led to the chiller box, others to much smaller devices mounted on the IV lines. And one led to a landline telephone.
“Where do you even buy one of those nowadays?” Zula asked, focusing on the latter.
“China. Some businesses still use them for specialized purposes. Sort of like fax machines hung on forever and ever.”
“That’s how the police were summoned?”
“His lawyer first. The call was timed so that Pluto’s heart was already stopped by the time anyone arrived. The last will and testament, the disposition of remains, all of that stuff was laid out and waiting. The medics showed up fifteen minutes later, saw that the EKG was flatlined, and decided not to smash their way in. Now it’s kind of a standoff. They’re waiting for the coroner.”
“He’s already dead, being the point. The medics have no purpose here,” Zula said. “It’s just like Uncle Richard except much better organized.”
Fall; or, Dodge in Hell Page 40