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.