Fall; or, Dodge in Hell

by Stephenson, Neal

  “Long enough to build this?”

  “I guess so. But apparently this is a more recent project. That guy over there is his doctor.” Corvallis pointed to a man in a white coat who was having an animated discussion with a burly rural fireman. “He says that Pluto was seeking aggressive treatment, doing everything he could to fight the disease, until a few months ago.”

  “ACTANSS,” Zula said.

  “Yeah. Maybe a coincidence but . . .”

  “But probably not. I’d love to know what’s playing on that VR rig.”

  “Pluto had ideas,” Corvallis said. “He sketched them out for me in a bar at ACTANSS. He has been—had been—thinking about the thread of consciousness. Do you take your memories with you into Bitworld? Do the people wandering around that town remember where they came from?”

  “Or are they like souls in Hades, who have drunk from the waters of Lethe and forgotten all?” Zula said. “I’m guessing the latter.”

  “Well, they certainly don’t show a lot of interest in talking to us.”

  “No, they don’t!”

  “So, what happens when you cross . . .”

  “The Styx?”

  “Is there, like, an unbroken thread of awareness, such that you just pick up where you left off?”

  “Well, what we saw at ACTANSS tells us something,” Zula said. “The Landform is obviously a re-creation of the general kind of environment that those people were familiar with here in Meatspace.”

  “Not up to Pluto’s standards,” C-plus cracked.

  “But nothing could be,” Zula finished the thought.

  “So I’m thinking that the VR rig is Pluto trying to influence the outcome. He wanted to go to sleep with ideas, images in his short-term memory that would somehow be captured by the scan and rebooted fresh in his mind. He didn’t want to drink from the waters of Lethe.”

  “Well, I guess we’ll know soon enough,” Zula said, “when we get him out of there and find out what’s showing on that thing.”

  Corvallis reached into the folder and pulled out a sealed envelope. “This is for you.”

  Affixed to the front of the envelope was a sticker on which had been printed the words TO BE OPENED ONLY BY ZULA FORTHRAST (OR THE CURRENT DIRECTOR OF THE FORTHRAST FAMILY FOUNDATION).

  “Do I even need to open this?”

  “I think you can consider it another of your symbolic duties,” Corvallis said. “But if it’s not Pluto donating his brain to science, then I’ll go and lay down on that contraption myself.”

  32

  Egdod took wing and flew far away into the mountains, seeking out a curious place that he remembered from past visits. The windings of four different rivers, converging toward the middle of the Land from outlets widely spaced along the coast, had necessitated the raising of several ranges of mountains to keep them separately channeled and to account for the direction of their flows. He had got himself into trouble thereby, and ended up with a kind of knot where all of those ranges had come together and got involved with one another in a way that he sensed was wrong. Between them were strange gaps where the water did not know what course it should take. One range failed to match up with another, forcing him to leave vertical walls in some places and bottomless gorges in others. It was the only such place in the whole Land: the place into which all of the wrongness had been concentrated and focused as he had expelled it from everywhere else. He had squeezed it now into an area not much larger than that occupied by Town, street, and Palace, but the more he reduced its extent the greater did its absurdities become. He had despaired of ever fixing the Knot and had even considered leaving it in its current state and simply raising a great wall about it so that no soul could ever come in and see there the sum of all Egdod’s mistakes. He did not now do this, but instead flew into an especially tortured convolution in the land. Here, a range of mountains skirted a chasm that had no bottom. In its depths, frank chaos could still be seen: the only place in the whole world, as far as he knew, where any vestige of it remained.

  This place could not be reached by walking. Flying to it was difficult, and as he went along, he purposely made it more so by shrouding it in cascades of icy water and causing the wind to crash against it with nearly as much force as the waves of the ocean did against the rocks of the coast.

  Thus had Egdod found refuge from others’ eyes by going to a place where no other soul could look upon him.

  Having thus found the solitude he required, Egdod perched on a ledge beneath the overarching mountain range. He prepared the ledge, making it broader and flatter. Upon it he then sought to raise up another structure. In some respects it was akin to the Palace, but he was of a mind to build this with greater complexity. It would have high walls and many towers. Names such as Castle and Fortress came to him as he wrought it, but the one he settled upon was Fastness. He brooded at length on what its shape was to be before beginning to draw forth its foundation from the living rock of the ledge. With time and patience, adamant reverted to chaos, became plastic, and moved as he wished. Having made the foundation, he then strove to raise up the first wall. Again the rock did not at first do his bidding, but again it presently conformed to his vision of what it should be.

  Egdod understood that he was not truly alone. Another was here, watching him. He gazed about, expecting to see Freewander or another soul from Town hovering in the air nearby. He saw none such, nor did he sense any trace of aura such as often signaled the presence of a newly arrived soul.

  Then he chanced to look down toward the chaos that filled the void below the Knot, and saw the other. A great face it was, emerging from the chaos as if breaching out of the sea. The head was larger than Egdod’s, and ill formed, wreathed in wild static that trailed behind it like stout tentacles and could not be clearly distinguished from its body. As it rose up toward Egdod it focused and coalesced into a form that agreed more closely with Egdod’s in its size and its general configuration, but still it was interpenetrated with the wild dark aura of the chaos from which it was struggling to more fully separate itself. Its inchoate limbs reached up to grasp the rock upon which Egdod was laying the foundation of the Fastness, and it drew itself up to his level and gazed at him. Egdod gazed back. This was not the strangest form he had known a wild soul to adopt. It had a face, at least, and the more Egdod gazed upon that face the more certain he became that he knew this soul.

  “How long have you abided thus?” Egdod asked, gesturing toward the pit of chaos below them.

  “Not long,” answered the other. “Out of it I climbed some days ago, and explored the curious habit of the rock hereabouts, and from a high place looked out over those lands that can be surveyed from here. Then weariness overtook me and I returned for a while. Several times I have done this, I think. But my recollections have a sameness that baffles the mind.”

  “Such is the way of souls new to death,” Egdod explained.

  “We knew each other.”

  “I am of a mind to agree,” Egdod said, “if for no other reason than that your speech rings more clearly to me than that of any other soul.”

  “So there are others?”

  “Many.”

  “But not here.”

  “No. This is a place where I abide in solitude, or in the company of particular souls with whom I have an affinity. You may abide here, since you and I were acquainted in life; but I urge you to venture forth and make the surrounding lands known to you, for there is much that remains undone in their shaping and perfection.”

  The other soul did as Egdod suggested, and took on strength of mind, and coherency of form, faster than any other whom Egdod had seen. It came into this soul’s head that his name was Pluto.

  With the shape of the Land Pluto had a particular fascination. Once he had learned the knack of doing so, he began to walk up and down on the Land—for he had no wings—and to reshape it. In this he did not change the nature or the broad form of what Egdod had made, but improved certain particulars and imbued it with gre
ater complexity and variety. Sheer faces of adamant became cracked and convoluted, and shot through with veins and strata of diverse kinds of stone not before seen. The kinds of rock and other hard materials created by Pluto began to rival the plants of the Garden in their variety and their beauty. Egdod knew Pluto to be troubled by the compounding of errors that had caused the Knot to form, and suspected that if left to his own devices Pluto would smooth it out and do away with it altogether. Therefore Egdod decreed that it must remain as it was.

  No longer impeded by the gaze of Pluto, Egdod redoubled his efforts on the building of the Fastness, and made it bigger and more elaborate than could serve any purpose. For his failure in the park had put doubt in his mind. To expel that doubt he needed to satisfy himself that his powers to shape the world according to his thoughts were as great as they had ever been. Of this he soon became certain, and he sensed that the nearby presence of chaos in the depth below helped rather than hindered his efforts. Once his dread foe, it had become a thing he could draw upon when needed. Flying out from under the shelter of the great overhang, where one range of mountains vaulted up over another, he further drew upon the power of chaos to shroud it in hurricanes, and the hurricanes stole spray from waterfalls ranked all about the place to become eternal storms that could only be penetrated by him and by Pluto.

  Yet still when he returned to the front of the Palace he found it difficult to raise the fourth tower overlooking Town. Ward, who seemed to have recovered, looked on with bewilderment. A short distance away, Speaksall and Freewander looked on too, and Egdod was aware of more souls’ eyes upon him from Town in the distance.

  Brooding upon all of this later in his Garden, he hit upon an understanding, which was that it was all a matter of other souls and their ability to perceive the changes that he was wreaking upon the world. Alone, he had the freedom to make changes at will and with as little effort as it took to imagine the desired result. When other souls were watching, however, it became much more difficult. He guessed it was because any changes that he made, for example in raising a tower, were wreaking concomitant changes in the minds of all of the souls that were perceiving it. And souls, it seemed, were powerful things in their own right, with a kind of inertia about them, not easily moved. Particularly when all of them had to be moved in a kind of unison, all agreeing as to the shape of what was being made despite seeing it from many different points of view. As if all things in the world were webbed together by bands that had to stretch or break in order for change to occur, and those bands were woven by the perceptions of souls.

  He sent Ward, Freewander, and Speaksall away, then caused a mist to gather around the top of the hill. For weather of various kinds was a common enough thing in the skies above the Land. While the Palace was shrouded in fog and mist, he went to the fourth corner and tried once again to erect a tower there, and found it easier. Too, he added more rooms to the front of the Palace: an antechamber between the Gatehouse and the main room, where he fancied that Speaksall might lodge and do the work of talking to other souls, and a tower above the Gatehouse where Freewander could perch if she found it to her liking.

  When the fog cleared and the people of Town could gaze up at the new form of the Palace, changes were thereby wrought in their minds, but somehow it was easier this way; Egdod did not have to do the work of it, for the world was simply telling them all what was there and what was not. As a further trial of this idea, he waited until night, when the people of Town were wont to go inside their houses. He went down to the park and found no one there to watch. Just to be sure of that, he drew a mist around the place, then returned to the ill-formed stump of rock he had left there earlier. With ease he was able to draw the stone up out of the grass and shape it into a little tower that echoed the shape of the ones he had made at the corners of his Palace.

  After this matters became more settled, for a time, in both Town and Palace. Speaksall took up residence in his antechamber, and Freewander made her home in the new tower above the Gatehouse.

  Summer passed into fall. Egdod made a practice of walking down the Street from time to time and strolling in the Park to observe the doings of the souls who now frequented it, but also to be observed by them. He came to recognize more souls who had distinguished themselves in some way. There was one who liked to perch on the top of the little tower in the middle of the Park and simply look about for days at a time; Egdod named her Long Regard and made her a chamber in the top of the Palace’s fourth tower, the one that most directly overlooked Town. Another had made his house extraordinarily complicated and handsome; Egdod named him Thingor and afforded him an outbuilding attached to the Palace’s side wall, where he could work on the making of new things away from the stifling gaze of other souls.

  Egdod taught Freewander the art of flying great distances and showed her how to pierce the storm wall surrounding the Fastness. This became extraordinarily fierce as winter set in, but Freewander’s supple body and nimble wings were equal to it. Thingor, by contrast, was a poor flyer whose wings got smaller and smaller the less he used them. Egdod carried him to the Fastness from time to time, and left him there for weeks at a stretch to better it. There Thingor learned new arts of fashioning things from diverse metals, sheets of transparent rock, and novel varieties of stone, all of which he discovered in the deranged underpinnings of the Knot, where Pluto had thought it good to place them. Thingor quarried those minerals from the depths with the help of other souls whom Longregard had made note of in Town for their interest in delving and shaping the earth.

  Egdod, for his part, spent many days in the Garden striving to achieve a thing more difficult than any he had ever attempted since he had first brought himself forth out of the chaos.

  Seeing the souls moving about in the Park from high above had put him in mind of another one of those almost-memories. He was growingly certain that the world in which he had lived before he had died had been inhabited by creatures that moved about of their own volition. In this, they were unlike trees and grass and flowers, which lacked the power of movement except when stirred by the wind. But neither were they like souls. They belonged to an order that lay somewhere between. The notion had been in his mind for a long time, and he had sensed that the Land was not complete without such beings. But it was so ill formed that he had made no headway with it until he had stumbled upon the notion of clustering flowers together into beds—a project that Freewander had made her own once Egdod had seeded the general idea of it. Thanks to her, flowers were now growing all over the place—even in places where they did not belong, such as on the branches of trees. Longregard would spend hours gazing at them with a vaguely troubled air about her, difficult to put into words but easy enough to convey through a bridging of auras: the flowers, though beautiful, were somehow lonely, and could be bettered if they were aswarm with tiny souls-that-were-not-quite-souls. These would fly about on small wings and visit the flowers and fill the air with a faint hum.

  Once Egdod had this idea in his mind he could not rest until he had learned the knack of making such things and bringing them into existence. He would toil on it in the Garden until the beauty and fragrance of the lonely flowers became a distraction, and then he would fly away to the Fastness, where he could try to draw it forth from chaos. He put a somewhat ill-formed picture of it into the mind of Thingor, who tried to fashion wings from new materials he had learned the art of making, such as metal and glass. The wings were beautiful and seemed to capture some of what was wanted, but they could not fly of their own accord. For that, an animating force was required, and making any such thing was beyond Egdod’s powers. When he returned from the Fastness he would carry Thingor’s latest creations with him and place them in the Garden, where the cold winter sun would glint in the glass and shine on the polished metal veins that held it in place, but no matter how small and delicate he made them, they would not move.

  One day Egdod was sitting next to a flower bed examining a pair of glass and metal wings so small that
they barely stretched over the width of a fingertip when he sensed the approach of another soul, and looked up to see Longregard gazing at him. “Come down into the Forest,” she said, “things are stirring in it to which you would do well to pay heed.”

  Egdod was aware that Longregard had lately shifted her attention from goings-on in Town to the Forest that sloped away from the Palace on its opposite side. He did not know what about it had drawn her eye. The snow was melting, as it had done every year since it had first dissolved into freshets and rills and creeks to make the first river. Plants were sprouting from the bare ground between the trees; many of these had, over the years, spread down the hill from the Garden, so they were of more various kinds here than anywhere else in the Land. As such the place would naturally be of interest to Longregard, the steady and patient observer. But many things were of interest to her that she did not bring to Egdod’s attention. She was a solitary soul who did not lightly interrupt others. So Egdod now rose and walked with Longregard out the back gate of the Garden. They entered into the budding trees and walked among the sprouting green things toward a place that Egdod knew well, since it was uppermost of all, where water erupted from the ground; it was the headwater of the first stream that Egdod, many years ago, had discovered at the melting of the first snow. By ranging far afield and following all of the river’s tributaries to their sources, he could find others of its kind, high up in mountains. Some were at greater elevation or produced a larger flow. But in Egdod’s mind this place, which he called the spring, was nonetheless the place where the river began. It was in the trickle of its water that he had first heard his name pronounced, and known what to call himself.

  Very early—perhaps even before Egdod had become aware of Ward—a soul had taken up residence in the spring. As he now approached it with Longregard, he sensed that many of the trees that had grown up around the spring had also become the homes of souls. The presence of one attracted more. The water in the ground made the trees grow strongly; they were taller and more elaborately developed here than anywhere else in the Land. The word “grove” came to him and he sensed that in its oldness, the size of its trees, and the number of souls present here, it was different from every other place. In its center was the dark wet fold in the earth from which the spring emerged.