The little white church on the hillside was unchanged since the last time he’d been here—it must have recently been repainted—but the houses around it were different. He turned his back on the settlement, and his gaze fell on the ocean. The sun was rising, shades of blue and pink rippling over the water. He liked the way it moved, the gentle repetition of waves. He found himself thinking of his mother now, for the first time in a while. She’d spent time on Earth as a child. She’d kept a framed photo of an Earth ocean in the kitchen of his childhood home, a small rectangle of waves on the wall near the stove. He remembered her gazing at it while she stirred soup. And yet for himself, he realized, the ocean carried no weight in his heart, it featured in none of his childhood memories and none of the important moments of his life; it was just a place he’d seen in movies and visited for work, so he couldn’t summon much feeling for it, and after a moment he turned and walked away down the beach, following the coordinates that flashed softly on his device. He walked beyond the last house, then into the forest.
Walking through this forest was easier now than when he’d been wearing a priest’s robe, but he still had no talent for it. The ground was too soft; branches caught at his clothes; he felt assailed from all sides. It was a sunny afternoon, but it must have rained that morning. Ferns pulled wetly at his legs. His shoes were less waterproof than he’d thought. His device pulsed softly in his hand, with a message that he was very close to the place he sought; he let go of the branch he’d been holding to study the screen, and the branch slapped him across the face.
Here was the maple tree, eighty-two years older than the last time he’d seen it. It had gained less in height than in breadth and magnificence. The clearing around it had widened with the passage of time. He walked under the canopy of its branches, to look up at the sunlight shifting through leaves, and for the first time in memory, he felt true reverence.
When would Vincent Smith come here? There was no way to know. Gaspery stepped just outside the clearing, and fought his way into a thicket of dense leaves, where he knelt on the cool, wet earth, and waited.
He was very still, listening. Another thing he didn’t like about forests was the constant sound. It wasn’t the steady white noise of the moon cities, the distant mechanicals that increased the gravity to Earth levels and kept the air inside the domes breathable and created the illusion of a breeze. There was no pattern to the white noise of a forest, and the randomness put Gaspery on edge. Time passed, hours. His muscles cramped. He was desperately thirsty. He stood a few times, to stretch, then crouched low again. It was impossible to hear anything coming, until it wasn’t. A little after four in the afternoon, he heard the girl’s soft footsteps on the path.
Vincent Smith at thirteen: she looked like she’d cut her own hair with blunt scissors before she’d dyed it bright blue. Her eyes were ringed in black. She radiated neglect. She walked slowly, looking through the viewfinder of her camera, and from his hiding place Gaspery recognized the scene: once he’d sat in a theater in New York City and watched a somewhat tedious musical performance accompanied by the footage that Vincent was creating at this moment. She stopped under the tree, angled the camera upward—
—and reality broke: Gaspery and Vincent were in the cavernous echoing cathedral of the Oklahoma City Airship Terminal, where Olive Llewellyn was walking just ahead of them and notes were rising from a nearby violin. And here too, impossibly, was Edwin St. Andrew, face upturned toward the branches/the terminal ceiling—
Vincent staggered and all but dropped her camera. Gaspery’s hands were clasped over his mouth, because he wanted to scream, and the terminal was gone. It’s one thing to know in the abstract that one moment might corrupt another moment; it’s another to experience both moments at once; it’s something else again to suspect what it might mean. Vincent was staring around wildly, but Gaspery was crouched low and she didn’t see him. He closed his eyes, sank his hands into the mud, and tried to convince himself that the cold water seeping through the knees of his pants was real.
3
But what makes a world real?
Gaspery was lying on his back in the mud, staring up at leaves silhouetted against a darkening sky, and it seemed to him that he’d been there for some time. Night was falling in the forest. Vincent was gone. He sat up, with some effort—his back was stiff; how long had he been lying there unmoving?—and sent a message through his device: I saw it! I saw the file corruption! It’s real, Zoey.