Korzenowski, before his assassination—before the completion of the Way—had designed this place on practical yet utopian principles, using plant and animal, insect and microorganism, as harmonious pieces in an isolated perfection. He had given himself one constraint: that all living things within the park would be unaltered and natural. The utopian artifice had come from keeping certain species separate, and limiting the park’s ecology to a few well-chosen and complementary combinations.

The result had been peace.

One could walk through the park at any time of the year—the weather mimicked Earth’s seasons from the point of view of England in the late eighteenth century—and see nothing but growth. Remote gardeners groomed the park regularly, trimming away dead growth and mulching it on the spot. Insects and microorganisms did not prey on plants so much as work with them.

Here was topiary on a grand scale, arranged across Hilbert rather than Euclidean space; its shape was not that of animal or geometry, but of perfect biology, a kind of living heaven. Eden, as it might have been seen by an English gardener; certainly as Konrad Korzenowski saw it.

He had done this. He hardly knew who or what he was now; was he the Engineer, living history, animated legend, accorded formal respect and informal suspicion by both neo-Geshels and Naderites? Was he Konrad Korzenowski, natural-born human being, brilliant son of orthodox Naderite parents, mathematician and designer? Was he a container for the unhappy spirit of Patricia Luisa Vasquez?

It didn’t matter much; he was a mote of dust in a high wind, and what he had been or done in the past seemed more than remote. It seemed irrelevant.

Soon, the Hexamon would try to push back into the Way. There was a good possibility the current claimants to the Way would force them to destroy Thistledown; if that happened, very likely he would be annihilated in the firestorm.

Powers, forces, dominations.

He could barely remember the time he had spent working on the park. Those memories had been poorly represented in the partials that had been gathered and archived after his assassination.

He had been murdered by orthodox Naderites.

Shunned by his own parents for forcing the Exiling.

Troublemaker.

That just about summed it up.

He entered a circular hedge maze at the geometric center of the park. The waist-high outer hedges wandered in uneven tessellations, following no particular radiant or arc of the circle; some angles were in fact projections of three-dimensional figures, which made the outer maze particularly troublesome. Humans with implants had little difficulty riddling the maze, since they could easily visualize and manipulate it in their heads; without implants, it was a substantial brain-bender.

He remembered building it with the hope that those with implants would not use them…But most did. That had taught him something about human nature, that challenge and difficulty mattered less to the great majority than accomplishment and gain, even in the Hexamon.