“I simply didn’t know you had that many scan labs.”

“The equipment is now capable of being mass-produced. We have about fifty of them. Many in China, India, where the program has taken hold to a degree not fully appreciated in the West. Two of them in that building right over there.” El nodded at an eight-hundred-year-old half-timbered house a stone’s throw away. “Others in cities where a lot of rich people live.”

“You said ‘scanned and archived,’ but you didn’t say you had booted any up.”

“We started booting them up a week ago,” El announced, “leading to the pattern of activity that Sophia noticed and that presumably accounts for you sitting here in my beer garden talking to me. We are well aware that you have been doing the same.”

Corvallis nodded, perhaps a little hastily—trying too hard, perhaps, to show how transparent he was being? “I am here partly for that reason,” he said, “and partly to make you aware that, in accordance with our responsibilities, we have booted up the Ephrata Eleven and the Most Favored Nine.”

“And Verna.”

“Verna was the first, after Dodge.”

“They will never be the same as the others,” El said. “They should have waited.”

Chapter 28

Chapter 28

He was dead and so he must previously have been not-dead. Of not being dead he had no direct knowledge, but he could guess that he had abided in a place with leaves, trees, snow, rivers, wind, and stars. He had existed in some physical form probably not far different from the one that he had pulled about himself here. He had shared that existence with others. Others who were likewise becoming dead and finding their way to this place. Drawn to it, perhaps, by the availability of coherent things like red leaves. Longing to experience something other than chaos but not knowing how to summon those experiences forth out of the noise.

Why did they not then go away and suffer for eons as he had, and learn for themselves the knack of making whole and beautiful things out of chaos?

Because they didn’t have to. In the early going, if he himself had been able to find some other dead person’s ready-made world and there abide, he’d have done so and accounted himself fortunate. But no such thing had been within his reach and so he’d had no choice but to suffer and learn.