The time of year was late fall. Some leaves were still on the trees, and many more on the ground, but the color had gone from them, unless you considered dark brown to be a color. The lack of foliage drew attention to the trees themselves. These had become rampant. Planted along the streets two hundred years ago, they must have been mere saplings when the neighborhoods were new. By the time young Zula had moved to town, they had become problems. Their roots heaved up sidewalks and made great ripples across old red-brick streets. Their limbs fell off in windstorms. Their branches interfered with utility lines. Taxpayers paid for crews of arborists to roam about cutting weird rectangular vacancies in them for wires to run through. Paving crews did what they could about root damage.

Those days were over, and had been for a long time. Modern vehicles were as likely to move about on legs as wheels, so no one really cared about bumps in pavement. Modern utilities ran underground. Even had those things not been the case, the tax base wasn’t there to support all those arborists and pavers. So the trees—all of them deciduous imports from the East Coast or Europe—had been doing as they pleased for decades. And what pleased them was apparently getting drunk on sky-high levels of atmospheric CO2 and flinging out roots and limbs as wide as they possibly could. Capitol Hill was becoming a forest straight out of Northern European high-fantasy literature. The fog was now becoming tinged with pink and gold light as the rising sun shone on it, and the boughs of the trees cast shadows through that.

They reached her neighborhood, where the trees were hugest, and linked by nearly as ancient hedges of laurel and holly. A soft glow pervaded everything and tinged solid objects with iridescence. Beyond that, there was nothing. No sky, no neighboring houses, no trees, no mountains. The fog had clamped it all off. It muffled sound too. Not that there was much of that in a half-abandoned city where vehicles were a thing of the past. She and Enoch were existing in a bubble of space maybe a hundred paces across. Beyond it, as she knew perfectly well, was a whole world. But one of the delicious qualia that emerged from certain kinds of weather—snowfall was another of them—was the childish illusion that the world really was small and simple enough to be comprehended within a glance. And that she, the one doing the glancing, was always at its center.

She wondered if it had been thus for Dodge in the beginning, when he had been alone in Bitworld and the Landform had begun to take shape around him.

“This is where I leave you,” said the voice of Enoch.

“Where on earth are you going?” Zula asked, looking about for him. But she had lost him in the radiant fog.