Fall; or, Dodge in Hell

by Stephenson, Neal

  “Behold it indeed,” said Egdod. In one hand he was gripping a bundle of jagged sticks that were too bright to look upon. With his other he reached down and gripped Ward’s unwounded arm, then hauled him into the air and flew away with him to the Palace.

  36

  Spring breathed life into a new creature, similar to a bee in most ways, but larger, better equipped for delivering pain, and unable to make honey; she named it Hornet and sent it forth into the Land to build nests out of mud and to visit pain. But it was to no purpose, for no further efforts were made by the souls of Town to molest the bees. On the contrary they began to evince great reverence for the hives, and in particular for the great hive in the tower. As the weather warmed and the need for burning wood lessened, they put their axes to use in building a new structure: four walls that enclosed the tower and the burned place in the ground where Egdod’s thunderbolt had struck. On that spot they kindled a fire, and made a practice of keeping it alight night and day.

  Hovering on the spring winds high above the Palace, or standing atop the watchtower of Longregard, Egdod brooded upon the smoke that rose above the park and the queue of souls coming and going with their burdens of firewood. Speaksall had explained to him that they construed these as gifts to Egdod: gestures of apology for the error of Swat, and pleas that Egdod not strike any more of them down with bright thunderbolts. The wooden walls they began to replace with stone. First they broke down the houses that Egdod had made for them and piled the rubble into foundations and walls. Since they had not Egdod’s power to shape adamant from chaos, they instead sought out places where Pluto had bettered the Land by making new types of rocks, and brought those in and piled them up. Certain souls began to make their dwelling there, the better to oversee the feeding of the flame and the expansion of the building. They learned the art of talking to the bees, or so they claimed, and from time to time they would join their auras into one and make a hum that on a quiet evening could be heard in the Palace. Speaksall commonly went there to walk among them and listen to their speech, but he could hear no more meaning in it than in that of the bees themselves.

  Egdod found himself grievously distracted by these strange doings. Outright defiance he had prepared himself for, by working with Thingor on the fashioning of bright thunderbolts. But the loosing of a single one of those had sufficed to reduce all of the souls into a state of fearful obedience. Out of this, they had contrived new ways of busying themselves that to Egdod were more troubling than the impudence of Swat.

  After the arrival in the Palace of Warm Wings, the other souls of the Pantheon had not been slow in learning the arts by which they might give each other pleasure that exceeded all bounds. She herself taught it to, and did it with, Ward while she nursed his wound. Other couplings then came about: Thingor and Knotweave, Speaksall and Freewander. Greyhame did not couple with any of the Pantheon, but it was known that he went to Town from time to time and there engaged in pleasurable couplings with various souls in certain houses. Neither Egdod nor Spring was approached by any of the other souls with any such intentions, for it was understood by all, without the need for speaking of it, that those two were apart from all the rest and intended for each other.

  Because of Warm Wings, Egdod now understood the cravings that he had felt in respect of Spring from the first time he had seen her in the little stream that flowed from the dark cleft high up in the Forest. Soon after Warm Wings had come to dwell in the Palace, Egdod went out one evening when the moon shone on the Fountain and found Spring there bathing in its waters. He approached her and ventured to speak to her of his feelings and intentions. Spring listened to his words until he was sated with talking, then told him that she must consider his suit and that he should come and find her in the Forest the next day.

  The next day, when the sun was shining warmly on the Forest, Egdod went to the spring with flowers that he had harvested from the Garden, and sat in the dark cleft and waited for her to make a form for herself that might be suited for the sorts of pleasure that Warm Wings had put him in mind of. In time she did so, but it was a form made entirely of water, streaming cold and clear. “You and I are of a different order from the rest,” she reminded him.

  “That much is true,” Egdod said, “and yet we share with them like cravings and sensations.”

  “We may couple in the same way as those,” she agreed, “and indeed I would take great pleasure in doing so and it has been much on my mind, even before Warm Wings came and spoke of it.”

  “Then let us—” Egdod began, but Spring interrupted him:

  “Though your and my coupling might be like theirs in its general form, its consequences will be altogether of a different order. For it is you who have the power to create and shape all things that the Land comprises, and it is given to me to imbue certain things with life. Our coupling will result in the creation of new souls.”

  “In that I see no obstacle,” Egdod said, for his craving was very strong and he was not in any frame of mind to give careful consideration to the wisdom of Spring.

  “I speak not of bees or of birds,” Spring went on, “but of souls like us, capable of speech.”

  “New souls enter the Land every day,” Egdod pointed out.

  “Yes,” Spring agreed, “and they do so by dying in whatever place they used to abide, and awakening here. Understand, Egdod, that the souls that will emerge from our coupling will be new creations that never before lived, and never died. I do not know the meaning of it or what consequences it might have. They might be akin to others of the Pantheon, and dwell with us happily. But they might be greater than we in their power, and capable of destroying our forms with thunderbolts just as you did in the case of Swat.”

  “Once again you exceed me in wisdom and in the penetration of your thought,” Egdod said. “In respect of that—and not, be it said, for any lack of desire—I shall withdraw and consider what you have said.” So he left the flowers by the side of the stream and went away to the Palace and thought the matter over at length.

  The following day he returned with more flowers and a renewed ardor. But it ended in the same way and he took wing and flew great distances over the Land to ponder certain additional points that Spring had made. But the next day he returned for a third time and said to her, “Be it so then.” And he went into her and was surrounded by her as a rock in a river is enfolded in its waters, smooth and yet strong, and their auras merged as when two rivers come together deep in a forest and flow as one to exhaust themselves much later into the ocean.

  After that Spring went weeks without manifesting herself in any particular form. Egdod went to the Fastness to ponder what had happened between them. There, far from the distractions posed not only by Spring but by the curious behavior of the souls in Town, he worked with Thingor on the making of new contrivances, each more complex than the last. The feathers of Warm Wings had put the Pantheon in mind of flying creatures covered with the same, larger than bees, that would make nests for themselves in the branches of trees. The construction of their wings must needs be different from those of the bees and so long effort went into its devising.

  The Chasm gaped below the Knot as ever, and the workshops and watchtowers of the Fastness overlooked it. The other souls who came to visit the place looked on it as a defect. Pluto in particular was of the view that it was an error in need of fixing and had ideas as to how this rift in the Land’s fabric might be stitched up. But Egdod forbade it, and reminded him that he himself had first emerged from that same pit.

  “What else might then crawl up out of it, I wonder?” was Pluto’s answer.

  “Anything whatsoever,” Egdod said, “and that is the promise and the danger of it. For the chaos that you see down there is the source of all you see and all you are.” But in his private thoughts Egdod weighed the words of Pluto and of the others. During idle moments he would perch on the edge of the wall he had thrown up around the Fastness, gazing down into the chaos below and testing himself by seeing what
new forms he could draw forth from it. Motes of color he saw in the static, such as he had painstakingly shaped into leaves in the very beginning, and these he sought to form into new shapes that might clothe the flying creatures he was building with Thingor. And in the roar of noise that came up from the pit he sometimes heard strains that had about them some character of melody or rhythm. Those he pursued in the windings of his mind, and lost them more often than not. But when they did not elude him he was able to draw them forth out of the noise and to discover music in them. He was not creating the music but rescuing it by stripping away the harsh and formless noise in which it had somehow become ensnared. Rich strains of music began to fill the Fastness. All who visited the place remarked on its beauty, and it gave new vigor to Thingor, who seemed to possess some art of transmuting sounds into new objects of beauty and ingenuity that had not before been seen in the Land.

  Nor was he the only one at work making new wonders in the Fastness. The blankets and the garment-stuff of Knotweave had put the Pantheon in mind of making smaller and finer fabrics on which marks could be inscribed using loose feathers from wings dipped in black potions concocted from the fruits and barks of certain trees. The ingenuity of Knotweave thus came together with Warm Wings’s feathers and Freewander’s knowledge of trees and flowers to create paper and ink. Longregard and Freewander roamed about drawing maps of the Land and pictures of mountains and trees. Speaksall and Greyhame for their parts devised a system of writing and put it to use setting down accounts of what had happened in the Land, as best as it could be remembered. They taught these arts to certain souls of Town, foremost among them a woman who came to be known as Pestle.

  When summer was nearing its peak, Egdod flew out from the Fastness carrying the form of a bird that Thingor had devised, into which he hoped Spring might breathe life. But before going her way he flew in a broad sweep across the Land, climbing high into the air to seek out the wild souls who made its winds and its weathers, and making a circuit of its coast to speak with the wild souls of the oceans. To each of them he made it known that in a few months’ time, when the apples were harvested in the Garden, there would be a feast, and that each of them would be welcome to take part in it.

  When he had made this invitation to the last of the wild souls, who inhabited the eastern sea where it beat against the great rock, he flew up the course of the river and followed its branchings all the way to the Forest, and then likewise all the way up to the abode of Spring. There he found her much as he had seen her before, but strangely different. And before long the nature of this change made itself clear in his mind and he knew that she was creating two new souls just as she had foretold. But because of the greatness of the work it was a thing that would be much longer in doing: not the work of a few moments, as when she had put life into the first bee, but of seasons to come.

  Abashed, he showed her the form of the bird that he and Thingor had fashioned, and gave it over into her hands. As she regarded it and caressed its feathers, Egdod said to her, “I see now that you are at work on a task much greater than putting life into a bird, and so I regret that I have so troubled you with what now strikes me as a small matter.”

  “On the contrary,” Spring answered, “the toil of making a new soul has given me strength I lacked before and made light work of it.” And the bird’s wings began to flap of their own volition and it took to the air, clumsily at first, but soon acquiring all the skill and grace of Freewander.

  “Thus birds,” Spring said. “It is a good thing to have done. But know that while you have been secreted in the Fastness working on such, the souls of Town have likewise been busy, and I think you would do well to spread your wings and fly higher and look farther in that direction.”

  Troubled by Spring’s words, Egdod flew to the watchtower of Longregard and perched upon its roof so that he could see what was afoot in Town. And he was astonished by the change that had come over the place in his absence. Formerly, the new building that the souls had been making in the Park had squatted low to the ground, barely rising above the top of the little tower in its center. Only a small portion of the Park had been covered by it. Now, however, its foundation covered the Park entirely, so that not a single blade of grass or bed of flowers could be seen, and in some directions it had expanded across streets to cover ground where houses had once stood. Such a foundation was required to support all that had been constructed above it: a tower that seemed to Egdod like a kind of mockery of the little one he had made there to begin with. For, though it was yet incomplete, this one had a like shape. And as he perceived on further inspection, it had a like purpose, with souls, instead of bees, swarming and humming about it.

  The stuff of which the Tower was being made was various and changeable. Its foundations were of rubble and wood. When the Tower’s builders had exhausted their supply of those, they had borrowed the style of building employed by hornets in the making of their nests, daubing mud and leaving it to dry. In this manner they were piling up many more stories, so that the top of their works was nearly of a height with the Palace. Likewise they had begun to copy the manner of construction favored by bees and hornets; while the Tower’s lower courses were in horizontal layers, piled one atop the other, the farther up they built it, the more they had caused it to resemble the style of a wax hive or a mud nest that is erected in a tree, with winding internal passageways and clusters of cells in which souls could live. Even at this remove, Egdod could hear on the wind a low hum that was being made by many of those souls speaking in consonance. It seemed that their habit of emulating the speech of bees, which had so puzzled Speaksall, had driven the words from their mouths and rendered them deaf and dumb to the old ways of talking. No strain of melody nor pulse of rhythm informed it, for they had forgotten music as well.

  “These are very considerable changes,” Egdod said, “and I find it strange that no one of the Palace came to the Fastness to make me aware that such things were afoot.”

  “It began slowly, then came on with a suddenness in the last few days,” said Longregard. “Freewander sought you there but was told that you had gone on a long journey. In the time since, the height of the Tower has more than doubled. The humming can be heard at all hours, for those souls no longer go into their houses of an evening, but stay together in the myriad cells of the Tower and join their voices into that weird song and combine their auras as well.”

  “I shall ponder what to do about this,” Egdod said, “but in the meantime I am of a mind to build this hill and this Palace higher. For I do not like having yon Tower of a height equal to my abode, as I require silence and privacy in order to go about my work of bettering the Land.”

  Egdod then flew away and sought out the wild soul whose form was the west wind, which often brought clouds and rain. At Egdod’s bidding, this one brought down a heavy storm that enshrouded the hill and the Palace. Thereby concealed, Egdod raised the hill to twice its former height, and made the walls and towers of the Palace grow higher as well. When the storm cleared in the morning, however, he saw that the state of things had not improved so much as he had fancied; for the storm had not washed the upper part of the Tower away, and during the hours of darkness the souls had built it up even higher.

  “How can it be that a thing made of mud can rise to such a height and withstand the fury of the storm?” Egdod asked Greyhame in the morning.

  Greyhame answered, “Not only mud is it made of, but of the souls themselves. As the bees exude wax to make their hives, these souls put something of themselves into the stuff of the Tower, weaving their very auras into it. As long as they remain conjoined there by this mingling of their souls and the singing of the bees’ speech, the Tower will stand and grow.”

  “What drives them to do this?” asked Egdod. “True, I told them last year at the feast of the apples that they ought to emulate the bees rather than swat them, but they cannot have understood my words to mean such wrongful alterations in their way of being.”

  “Th
ey are all souls like you, Egdod,” Greyhame returned, “and as such they are heir to the boredom and frustration that once drove you to make the Land. But they are not equal to you in their powers to shape their world, and so they make do with what they have, which is the workings of their own minds and the meager capabilities of their own forms.”

  Egdod took to the air and went down the street and flew around the tower for a time, gazing into its tortuous passageways of packed mud in such places as they were exposed to view, sensing the hum of the souls through its gray walls. The sound of it waxed and waned, and disturbances in it propagated up and down. In it Egdod sensed a savor of that mutual pleasuring that Warm Wings had brought knowledge of and that most members of the Pantheon had now known. But whereas they had done it two by two, now it seemed that all of the souls were doing it with all of the others at once.

  That night Egdod summoned not just the west wind but the other three as well, and called down a storm of great violence. In the midst of it he built the hill and the Palace taller yet, thinking thereby to gain an even greater vantage over whatever might remain of the Tower in the morning. But when the storm lessened he could hear the humming as loud as before, and when the sun rose in the morning he saw the Tower standing unaffected, and taller than at sundown.

  37

  Corvallis sometimes thought back on the day, three decades ago, when Richard Forthrast had reached down and plucked him out of his programming job at Corporation 9592 and given him a new position, reporting directly to Richard. Corvallis had asked the usual questions about job title and job description. Richard had answered, simply, “Weird stuff.” When this proved unsatisfactory to the company’s ISO-compliant HR department, Richard had been forced to go downstairs and expand upon it. In a memorable, extemporaneous work of performance art in the middle of the HR department’s open-plan workspace, he had explained that work of a routine, predictable nature could and should be embodied in computer programs. If that proved too difficult, it should be outsourced to humans far away. If it was somehow too sensitive or complicated for outsourcing, then “you people” (meaning the employees of the HR department) needed to slice it and dice it into tasks that could be summed up in job descriptions and advertised on the open employment market. Floating above all of that, however, in a realm that was out of the scope of “you people,” was “weird stuff.” It was important that the company have people to work on “weird stuff.” As a matter of fact it was more important than anything else. But trying to explain “weird stuff” to “you people” was like explaining blue to someone who had been blind since birth, and so there was no point in even trying. About then, he’d been interrupted by a spate of urgent text messages from one of the company’s novelists, who had run aground on some desolate narrative shore and needed moral support, and so the discussion had gone no further. Someone had intervened and written a sufficiently vague job description for Corvallis and made up a job title that would make it possible for him to get the level of compensation he was expecting. So it had all worked out fine. And it made for a fun story to tell on the increasingly rare occasions when people were reminiscing about Dodge back in the old days. But the story was inconclusive in the sense that Dodge had been interrupted before he could really get to the essence of what “weird stuff” actually was and why it was so important. As time went on, however, Corvallis understood that this very inconclusiveness was really a fitting and proper part of the story.