Fall; or, Dodge in Hell

by Stephenson, Neal

  “You want to break out of that,” Zula said. “Shake things up, start from scratch again with a bigger scope.”

  “An open mind, at least, to the possibility that these souls—I’ll call them souls—could be doing something other than reproducing what they experienced and did and thought in their past lives.”

  Corvallis said, “So what is it you are asking us for, El?”

  “What I should have insisted on at the beginning,” El said, “which is full, coequal toho status. I want to be a token holder with unlimited administrative privileges on all aspects of these processes.”

  It actually wasn’t an unreasonable request from a man who—it had to be admitted—had done more than anyone else to make all of this happen. Which explained the long silence that followed. If he’d asked for something ridiculous, something unfair, they could have scoffed at it.

  Corvallis spoke first. “El, just to be clear. Right now, for historical reasons, the only toho with that level of power is Sophia. She used it to launch the Process that, as you’ve pointed out, now dominates everything else. She has the power to shut that Process down. To kill it. If you had equal privileges to hers, you could do the same.”

  “Look, C, think for just a second about what is going on with Verna and the little processes she is spawning. Which is about to become your problem, because the Forthrast Family Foundation is footing the bill for all of those. What happens when a trillion of those get spawned and you run out of money?”

  “As you know, that’s not what would happen. We would just slow down the speed at which the simulation is running, so that we could keep all of those processes going at whatever burn rate we can actually sustain.”

  “A PR disaster,” El said. “The LVU started out as a research tool, but now it is being watched by millions of people as a form of entertainment. They’re fascinated by what is going on in the world of the dead. If you slow it to a crawl, then nothing seems to happen. They lose interest. They stop signing contracts. Money stops flowing into the system. We can’t add the computing infrastructure that we need. The whole enterprise goes into a death spiral.”

  “I’m not as pessimistic as you are,” Corvallis said.

  “Call it pessimism if you like. Numbers don’t lie. These new ‘fruit fly’ processes have to be terminated.”

  “Look, I’m glad you brought Verna’s ‘fruit flies’ to our attention. We’ll keep an eye on them. But that is not what I am talking about—as I think you know perfectly well. I’m talking about the big processes that are based on human connectomes. Processes that we have now given names to, and begun to think of and to talk about as if they were human souls. A toho with root privs could kill any of those.”

  “You know my thinking on this, C,” El returned. “More than anyone else in this room, I am of the belief that all of these processes are alive. As alive as you or me. As such, I believe that to shut them down would be in every way the same thing as committing murder. So, for you to point out that I could kill any one of these processes is true. And yet it’s as completely beside the point as for you to point out that in Meatspace, I could hire hit men to have a person killed.”

  It took a bit for that to sink in. Jake said, “El, are you making abstract philosophical points here, or issuing threats?”

  Corvallis looked across the table at Zula. She looked back at him. On the side of her head that was hidden from the view of the Metatron, she raised her hand, extended her index finger toward her ear, and twirled it around.

  34

  Once Spring had put life into several bees, it was not necessary to create more of the same kind, since bees had the power to make more bees. Over the course of the summer they propagated into swarms that filled the air like clouds. Freewander led a swarm down the Street to Town, where they found the flower beds that Egdod had created in the Park and that Freewander had since been bettering. On his visits to Town, Egdod observed that the souls were fascinated by the bees and liked to stroll in the Park observing them as closely as could be done without risk of suffering pain from their stings. A solitary bee made a noise too faint to be easily heard, but a swarm of them hummed palpably. Speaksall was fascinated by the sound, and would stand in the Garden for much of the day listening to it and trying to make out whether it was a type of speech. Souls in Town could be heard mixing the buzz of the bees into their sentences, and when two or more gathered to connect their auras, they sometimes emitted a hum so convincing that the bees themselves were drawn thither to investigate. Egdod, still not the most articulate of souls, paid little heed to buzzes and hums, preferring to better the functioning of his mouth parts and his ability to fashion whole sentences. When Speaksall was not trying to make sense of the bees’ speech he would sometimes help Egdod with this, sitting with him at the table in the Palace and engaging him in conversation about the latest improvements in the Land and the doings in Town. Together they would call words to mind and practice the use of them. To frame thoughts in words and sentences required effort, but Egdod saw it was effort worth making.

  A few nights after the first bee had been brought to life, Egdod drew a mist about the Garden and changed the shape of the mirror pool that he had fashioned there long ago, when he had first conceived a desire to see himself and to give himself a face. He broadened the pool and then caused a little tower to rise up in the midst of it, then made it so that water would spout from its top and trickle down into the pool. Its overflow found its way into a tiny stream that ran through the Garden before vaulting down into the Forest to join its waters with those that had emerged from Spring. The rim of the pool he broadened into a flat place where a soul might sit or recline. Egdod hoped that Spring might find her way up to this fountain and use it as a kind of abode, within the precincts of the Palace and yet of a nature that suited her. For he now understood at long last that it was she who had been the author of the many different kinds of plants that had sprung forth in the Garden from the early days of the Land. He desired that she should make a home in the place that she had created.

  At first Spring seemed to take little note of the fountain, but one morning Longregard let Egdod know that, the previous evening, looking down from her tower, she had seen Spring emerge from the pool in moonlight, shaping herself into a form with arms and legs and sitting on the edge, much as Egdod had hoped that she might. After that she began to frequent the place and even to walk about the Garden and the Palace in that form.

  The sight of bees swarming among flowers confirmed to Egdod that his thinking about souls-that-were-not-souls had been correct, and emboldened him to consider more small forms into which life might be breathed, supposing that Spring was willing to so use her powers. He brought Thingor and his teams of delvers back from the Fastness laden with materials of many kinds that they had quarried and refined in the deeps of that place. Together they devised other forms that were akin to those of the bees, but variously larger or smaller, with bodies of diverse shapes. Few of them, as it turned out, were capable of being imbued with life, and many that were lived only for a short time. None propagated more of their kind. Neither Egdod nor Spring could fathom the reason for these failures until Longregard explained it one evening.

  The souls who dwelled in the Palace had acquired a custom of gathering around the table when the sun was low and practicing the art of talking to one another. To the early group of Egdod, Ward, Freewander, Speaksall, Longregard, and Thingor had been added Spring as well as souls from Town whom Egdod had named Greyhame and Knotweave. The former Egdod valued for his skill in thinking about abstruse matters, which he commonly did while tugging at a swirl of colorless aura that enclosed his lower face and surrounded his mouth. Knotweave was another like Thingor who took joy in fashioning persistent things out of stuff that she had borrowed from the produce of the Land, but whereas Thingor’s favored materials were stone and metal, she tended to make use of material she had acquired from plants of various kinds. Together she and Thingor had tried to fashion a creat
ure having eight legs but no wings, for Knotweave had conceived the idea, which was agreed to by several others, that such a being should be capable of spinning a kind of fabric out of the air itself. This was one of the few new kinds of creature that Spring had been able to give life to, but it had died soon after, and never acquired the gift of spinning air into knots.

  Longregard had of late been observing the bees closely, approaching the flower beds with patience and caution so that they would not sting her, and she had formed the opinion that they were taking the stuff of the flowers themselves into their bodies and carrying it away to the places where they abided during the night: yellow-white excrescences, like little copies of Town, that they were wont to build in crooks of trees and other such places. Hives, they were called. Earlier in the summer, Longregard had been obliged to fly or climb into the trees to watch the bees building them, but of late they had begun making the largest hive of all inside the little stone tower that Egdod had placed in the middle of the Park as an ornament. It was too small for souls to live in but it could accommodate thousands of bees, and the slits that he had left in its walls served as doorways through which they could swarm in and out. Peering in to observe, Longregard had seen them exuding directly from their bodies the yellow-white stuff of which hives were made.

  Greyhame had begun pulling at his chin. He ventured the opinion that the wax must have been made out of the very stuff that the bees were taking from the flowers. Thingor volunteered the observation that when he made a thing of any kind whatsoever out of some stuff, the amount of stuff that was consumed was equal to the size of the thing made; and so how could bees make a hive without getting its stuff from somewhere? Freewander quickly assented, saying that she had many times flitted close enough to hives to smell the wax, and that it undoubtedly bore the scent of flowers.

  “The answer to this riddle—if indeed it amounts to one—is here amid us,” Egdod said.

  The other souls looked about curiously, as if the answer were about to fly in among them in the manner of a swarm of bees, but instead Egdod slapped the palm of his hand down on the surface of the table. “Ever since we made a habit of sitting about this table in the evening, I have felt that something was lacking, just as, when we had flower beds but no bees to hum in them, they seemed lonely. This table is lonely. Not only that, but it lacks all purpose since we never put anything upon it save, occasionally, the creations of Thingor and Knotweave when they are making something here.” Egdod was about to go on in this vein but saw now that it was not needed since most of the others were signaling agreement by nodding their heads or changing the shapes of their auras.

  “‘Food’ is the name of it,” said Speaksall. “And ‘drink.’”

  “Both of those things I now begin to remember,” announced Ward. “And to remember them is to miss them, for I am of half a mind to believe that they once gave me great pleasure.”

  “They are for the living,” Spring announced. “Bees must eat, to make wax for their hives and so that they can create more of their kind. We do not make wax. And to create more of our kind is far beyond our powers when we are beset with so many difficulties in making even small creatures such as the one of Knotweave’s conception.”

  “Perhaps the reason it could not spin threads out of air was that it had nothing to eat,” said Knotweave.

  Thingor nodded. “It would have to obtain the stuff of the threads from somewhere.”

  “Be that as it may,” said Greyhame, “it does not touch upon Spring’s essential point, which is that, as we make nothing out of our forms, we do not have any use for food and drink.”

  “I do not question this,” Longregard said. “But souls in Town have lately taken up a curious practice, which is that they will sit together in a house and make sounds together. Sounds that serve no purpose other than to please the ones making them, and the ones listening.”

  “I have heard it,” said Speaksall. “They got the idea from the humming of the bees, but their sounds have become more complex and more beautiful.”

  “I have heard it too,” Egdod admitted, “and I crave hearing more.”

  “That is curious,” said Greyhame, “but I do not understand its connection to the matter I was only just speaking of.”

  “The connection is clear enough in my mind,” said Ward, “though perhaps it is only because I am now feeling a thing that is akin to pain, though not as disagreeable. I believe it is called hunger. I hunger for food and drink. It is not because I need to make a hive out of stuff exuded from my body. Nor is it because I am attempting to spawn more copies of myself. I want it for the same reason that Egdod craves the hearing of certain sounds: simply because to have it would give me pleasure.”

  “Your explanation is satisfactory,” said Greyhame, “but it is neither here nor there, as food is entirely lacking. And for my own part I have no idea as to where it might be obtained.”

  “I could attempt to make some,” said Thingor, “but I know not the form of it, and imagining what it would be like to eat a thing made of iron gives me no foretaste of pleasure.”

  “I have a thought on the matter,” announced Freewander, “easier to show than to explain.”

  “Shall we join our auras then?” said Ward.

  “No,” said Freewander, “I had in mind that you would instead accompany me to a certain place that I know of in the Garden.” And she rose from her chair and took wing in the same quick movement. The other souls, less nimble, followed her afoot. Outside it was nearly dark, but some light from the sun still shone flat into the Garden through gaps in the surrounding hedge.

  Freewander led them to a small gnarled tree that grew near the fountain. Egdod had created it many years ago with a thought of seeding many such in a part of the Land that struck him as ill suited for tall trees. Thus far he had made little use of it, though, and Freewander, seeing it as a lonely and neglected part of creation, had adorned it with white blossoms. Egdod had found this ridiculous, since flowers to him were small plants growing close to the ground, but as often happened with Freewander’s whims, it had grown on him, and he now had to admit that the tree had been pleasing to look at and to smell during the spring when its flowers had grown so dense as to obscure its green leaves, and drawn swarms of bees. Now it was late summer and the blossoms were long gone. “The petals fell months ago,” Freewander pointed out, “and left behind only small dry apertures at the ends of the twigs that had once supported them. The bees who had so loved this tree abandoned it, and I thought it seemed lonely. But lo, the ends of the twigs swelled. The buds that had once sported white blossoms did not develop into leaves but rather into these round things, which can now be seen all over it.” She was cupping one of the round things—a little green moon—in the palm of her hand. But indeed as the others looked they saw more such all over the tree—as many of them as there had been flowers in the spring. “I put it to you,” Freewander announced, “that somehow, by their visiting of this tree, the bees—”

  And here her ability to put thoughts into words failed her. But Spring knew. “The bees, having life, conferred a new kind of life on this tree, and altered its nature so that it would produce these.”

  “Apples,” said Ward. “They are called that. We should eat them.”

  Freewander thought ill of this proposal. Before she could object, Egdod spoke: “They are not finished growing,” he announced.

  “How can you tell?” asked Greyhame.

  “I know it,” said Egdod. “Of apples I have a curiously strong memory—nearly as strong, now that it has been awakened, as the memory of leaves that led to my making this place in the beginning of the Land. And I say to you that an apple is not food until it has grown to the size of the palm of one’s hand and turned red.”

  “Red!?” Ward exclaimed.

  “It will happen,” Egdod predicted, “at the time of the turning of the leaves. Then we shall pick the apples and carry them to the table and enjoy eating them.”

  Fall arr
ived in due course. Some of the leaves began to blush. The bees applied themselves to their work with greater diligence every day, as if laying preparations for the winter, and from their hives came a new scent, not unlike that of the flowers, but sweeter. Ward ventured that in their hives might be found another sort of food, different from apples. He seemed of a mind to have some of it until Freewander pointed out that the bees must be making it for a reason. Greyhame proposed that it was food that the bees would eat during the months when no flowers were available. Speaksall remembered that it was named honey and Egdod forbade Ward from stealing any of it from the hives.

  Later in the fall, however, as the leaves and the apples alike began to change from green to red, Longregard announced that she had seen souls in Town extracting honey from some of the hives that were more easily reached, and putting it into their mouths. They had done so at the cost of many painful stings, and some had discovered that a bee could be killed by striking it with the palm of the hand. Quite a few bees had been killed in this manner, though not so many as to greatly reduce their numbers.

  This news affected the souls around the table in diverse ways. Freewander was enraged, and strongly of a mind that those souls who had killed bees should be “punished.” The word was vaguely familiar to, but poorly understood by, all who sat around the table.