Fall; or, Dodge in Hell

by Stephenson, Neal

  “Sprung,” said a woman’s voice.

  Prim turned to see an Autochthon in a long white gown who had entered the room while Prim had been gazing out the window. She had long full yellow hair cast back behind her shoulders, and such was her bearing that it looked as though that hair was going to stay where it had been put. It was hard to guess how long she had been there, but a faint sweet fragrance now making itself welcome in Prim’s nostrils hinted that she had only just arrived. “Souls patterned after Spring, and her notions of what people ought to look like,” the woman explained. “Sprung. That is our word for them. For you.”

  “You are—” Prim began.

  “Externally similar. The same really. Aesthetics apart.” She looked Prim up and down. “The world would be less confusing if Autochthons had a completely different form from Sprung—if we were as different on the outside as we are here.” She raised a hand, causing a white sleeve to tumble away from a graceful, pale wrist, and tapped her forehead. “But El in his wisdom had reasons for giving us a like form.” She turned slightly toward the east and inclined her head as she said El’s name. Prim remembered her manners just in time and did likewise. “It is good in one way, which is that it enables us to converse, as you and I are doing now. Thus do the Sprung serve as an endless source of fascination and bemusement to us.”

  “Happy to be of service,” said Prim. Distracted as she was by all of the curious things that the woman was saying—as well as by her beauty—it was all she could do to remember to speak with the far-north accent she’d been feigning. For this woman was speaking perfectly the language that Sprung spoke on the Bits, and she’d be quick to notice any inconsistency in the visitor’s pronunciation.

  “Then you may be of further service by writing out a word.” The woman was going through Prim’s writing box as if she owned it. She chose a fresh leaf of paper and spread it out on the table. Next to it she set out a quill and a bottle of ink, which she gave a little shake, and unstoppered. “Quercus. Or, in your language, oak-gall,” she announced, after giving it a sniff. “Good stuff.” She said it in a way that left considerable room for doubt as to whether she was being sarcastic. “You may write your name,” she said, and looked Prim in the eye.

  “In which alphabet?”

  “Does it matter? The purpose of the exercise, quite obviously, is to test the veracity of the story you’re telling. Write it as Pestle would. Go ahead.”

  Prim had written out hundreds of pages of flowing confident script in the old alphabet, the new, and others besides, and understood perfectly well all that had just been explained to her. But to show this would have contradicted her story. So she dipped the quill into the ink and copied “Primula” out with a deliberation that must have been as frustrating to the lady as it was to Prim, making sure that the quill dumped stray puddles of ink here and there. At last she sat back so that her work could be inspected.

  “Well,” said the lady, “the Academy has its work cut out for it.” The Autochthon took the page and examined Prim’s work. But her response was curiously delayed, in a way that gave Prim the feeling she had somehow made a poor choice.

  “Primula is your name?”

  “Prim for short, if you please. May I know your name?”

  The Autochthon looked sharply at her, as if this were an exceedingly odd question. “My full name is Sooth of El.” She seemed bemused that anyone would not already know this. “In the kind of speech used by Sprung, it is unwieldy, and so you may call me Sooth.”

  “Thank you,” said Prim, a little preoccupied now as she wondered what other kinds of speech the lady might have in mind.

  “You are from some far northern Bit.”

  “Shatterberg.”

  Sooth gave a little shiver. “No wonder you go about wrapped in a blanket. The language you speak up there must be very queer and old. Primula is what we would refer to, in these parts, as the common daisy.”

  “Yes, that is so. You call it ‘daisy’ here.”

  “Is that a common flower, then, up on Shatterberg?”

  “The growing season is short,” said Prim. “Only a few simple flowers have time to spring up and grow.”

  Sooth was gazing at her fixedly. “The name has a . . . complicated history that goes back to very ancient times and that is particularly important to us. If your parents had studied the ancient myths, they might have known as much, and thought better of calling you Daisy. But to them, yes, it would just be the name of a local weed. They wouldn’t mean anything by bestowing it on a daughter. A daughter they never expected to leave Shatterberg and find herself among cultivated people.”

  Prim could feel herself blushing. She well knew the legends of which the lady spoke. Daisy was the last member of the Pantheon of Egdod. According to the old myths, she had appeared suddenly on the very eve of the coming of El, and tried to warn the Pantheon of what was coming, and been cast out along with Egdod and the others.

  “Well, Primula, I am calling you Prim when we are in polite company, and hoping that no one else knows it is a synonym for Daisy.”

  “Polite company?”

  “Others like me,” Sooth explained.

  “I thought that I might simply be on my way,” said Prim.

  “Why so hasty? The Academy of Pestle has been there since the dawn of this age.”

  “I was told it is best not to stay in the city after dark,” said Prim, trying to cast her best worried-country-bumpkin look out the window, where the shadows were stretching across the street.

  “Good advice for a girl on her own,” said Sooth. “As my guest, you have nothing to worry about.”

  “I’m . . . your guest?”

  “I believe that is what I just said, Prim.”

  “Why would you bother? With one such as I?”

  “It is a sensible question and I shall give you a plain answer,” said the lady. “I am cultivating you. Recruiting you. Even one as backward as you must have heard that El’s domain extends here”—she divided the tabletop with a downward slice of her hand—“And no farther. That way”—she gestured toward the waterfront, and by extension all the Shivers and Bits that lay beyond—“is the domain of giants, wild souls. Rumors there are, even, of a giant talking raven who flies about trying to deceive the ignorant Sprung who live in those parts into believing all sorts of claptrap that is an abomination to El. Autochthons we send across the First Shiver are as apt to fall into dark doings as they are to remain faithful. When I meet a young, unspoiled Sprung from those parts, of a decent family, already somewhat literate and wishing to become more so, I consider it my sacred duty to make her welcome in this city. You shall dine well and sleep soundly tonight, and tomorrow I shall see to it that you be conducted up to the Temple, where you may view the glory of El’s Palace from afar, and see the magnificence of all that has been built there. Prim, you need not travel one step farther south if your purpose is to learn the art of writing. There is nothing taught in Toravithranax that is not to be learned here; and here you may learn it without all the rubbish that Pestle brought with her in the old days.”

  Prim had no choice but to thank the lady most kindly and to go where she was taken next: an apartment in one of the watchtowers, guarded and looked after by Beedles, but reserved for Autochthons and their guests. This had a little balcony with a fine view out across the water toward the Campside shore, and it was equipped with certain conveniences, in the way of bath and toilet, the likes of which had never even crossed Prim’s mind. The house where she had grown up on Calla was reputed to be a rather good one, and she had never found it lacking in any respect, yet it came off poorly in comparison.

  A less blanketlike garment was found for her: a white gown made after the same general pattern as that worn by Sooth. To Prim it seemed markedly impractical until she reflected that dressing in such a way might actually make sense as long as chamber pots were being emptied and other such chores being taken care of by Beedles.

  She attended an Autochthons’
mess in a hall on the tower’s ground floor, where the officers who looked after the waterfront, and a few Sprung guests, sat at long tables and had dishes brought out to them by Beedle waiters in special uniforms. Prim listened carefully to the conversation but understood little. Oh, she understood their speech perfectly well. But the nature of what they were talking about—abstractions related to money, law, the management of Beedles, and the day-to-day operations of a city—did not always make sense to her. The unsophisticated Shatterberg girl she was pretending to be would have been able to follow almost none of it. So her role was an easy one to play: she ate, spoke when spoken to, stared at the pictures on the walls. She had been realizing that these depicted some of the same historical events as the tapestries that decorated the Hall of the Calladons; but she had not understood this at first, because the roles of the heroes and the villains had been reversed.

  The next day she accompanied Sooth up to the Temple. No Autochthon would dream of making that ascent in any way other than astride a mount. It was possible for a big mount to carry two souls, but Prim expressed a willingness to give riding a try. Sooth said that a mount might be available, which was owned by a friend of hers but available to be borrowed.

  Here Prim had to conceal the fact that she knew perfectly well how to handle a mount. She had been riding since she was little. But she had to feign ignorance as the Autochthon who supervised the stables explained things to her. She could not conceal the fact that she was confident and calm in the presence of such beasts. The mount she was borrowing—a very big and impressive black one—sensed as much and behaved so well Sooth expressed surprise. Prim tried to explain it away by claiming that her family back home used a few mounts as draft animals and that it had been her job to groom them.

  The ride up the switchbacks looked long from below. Prim dreaded all of the fake conversation she would be obliged to make with her hostess en route. But once Sooth was satisfied that Prim would not fall off her mount, she made no great effort to stay close or to keep up a steady stream of words. And this left Prim alone to think about the unexpected turn that the Quest had taken during the last day.

  By any reasonable standard it had gone gravely awry. Yet in a way, this ride through the forest and up the mountain felt less strange to her than the Quest per se. It was not terribly different from what she and her family did on Calla when they were in the mood for an outing.

  That feeling came to an end when they topped the ridge and came in view of the Temple of Elkirk, which presented her with so much to see that she reined in the mount and sat there for some time taking it all in.

  Almost straight ahead was a squat tower, not much to look at, that Prim guessed from her history lessons must be the original Elkirk. Right next to it, nearly as old, was a gate. She knew that this was the beginning—or, depending on how you looked at it, the end—of the road that stretched all the way to the Far Teeming on the opposite side of the Land. The part of it that she could see was lined with stone buildings that were of similar age and size to much of what constituted Secondel.

  All told, these mean old buildings made up but a small fraction of the complex. The story told by the rest of it was that Autochthons had shown up, found a place where Pluto had been so considerate as to leave a sizeable deposit of white rock, domesticated a lot of Beedles, and, for an eon, made them pile stone higher and higher, building ever larger structures: magnificent ones facing east toward the distant Palace, and imposing ones glowering down over Secondel, the First Shiver, and the Bits beyond.

  Somewhat later, after they had run out of ideas, stone, or Beedles, the Hive had made contact with this place. This it had done by growing slowly from the base of the Palace, sending a long tendril along the road like a vine growing along a tree branch. Once it had connected to the Temple complex here, it had broadened and ramified, filling gaps between the stone buildings with a foamy lattice of cells. It reminded Prim of what happened when you left bread dough to rise, and forgot about it, and came upon it much too late to find it had expanded right out of its bowl and found other places to go. Yet it seemed to have a kind of commonsensical ability to avoid windows and doors: those still peered out in regular rows and columns through curtains of Hive-stuff that were otherwise bulgy and lacking in any sense of plan or of order as Autochthons or Sprung might think of it.

  It occurred to her that she had been sitting still for quite a while, taking this all in, and yet Sooth—who had ridden some distance farther toward the gate—was showing no signs of her usual brisk impatience. Instead she was allowing her mount to crop grass from a broad lawn that stretched along the west front of the Temple complex, and was just sitting there in the saddle, quiet but attentive, as though listening to music. Prim persuaded her own mount to stop tearing at the grass and rode slowly toward Sooth. Yet the Autochthon took no notice but only kept her face turned toward the east, like one who has emerged from a storm wet and cold and now wishes to bask in the warmth of the sun. Which was definitely the sort of look she had on her face when Prim circled round to approach her from that direction. Prim had in the meantime become conscious of a low hum suffusing the air and the ground.

  “The Hive,” said Sooth. “So much is in it that I shall never fully understand. Yet even in what little comes through, I feel myself connected to it and to El.”

  They left their mounts to graze near the gate. Sooth showed Prim the old tower of Elkirk, which was no longer used for giving forms to newly spawned souls; but she saw the old statues, looking halfway between Beedle and Sprung, from which in ancient times the souls of Eltown had taken their original shapes. A much larger building now served the same function, and was equipped with statues of various subtypes of Beedles after which new souls were patterning themselves in preparation for service down below. The same building had upper stories that Sooth described as a school where Beedles who had ripened to their final forms learned how to empty chamber pots, chop vegetables, carve stone, or fight.

  The fighters, once they had acquired a few skills, seemed to spend most of their time out of doors, drilling in formation on expanses of pounded dirt under the direction and the discipline of mounted Autochthon officers. Those were of various ranks, and they lived in barracks, each with a bed or a private room according to their seniority and their sex. Sooth breezed through the living quarters of males and females alike as if she owned the place, and each Autochthon who saw her afforded her some small gesture of respect before casting a curious glance Prim’s way. These barracks had baths in them, and male Autochthons emerging from those steamy places always covered themselves with towels. This raised a question in Prim’s mind she had never previously thought to ask. She knew—or at least had been told—that Autochthons did not become pregnant. They were never children. El brought them into being fully formed in the Palace.

  “We have the parts that you have,” said Sooth, “for sex.” They had emerged from the barracks and were skirting a courtyard where twoscore Beedles were being trained to shoot arrows at targets consisting of vaguely humanoid bundles of grass. Not for the first time, Prim knew that Sooth had somehow guessed what she was thinking.

  “Our sex does not cause the creation of new souls,” Sooth went on. “Spring erred in bestowing that power upon her children. We do not believe she was evil in so doing. Merely unwise—deceived and beguiled by Egdod, who wished to populate the whole Land with his spawn. El makes only as many of us as are needed to hold dominion. Beedles, left to their own whims, would ruin the place, and so it is given to us to regulate them and see to it that their labors are spent in ways that better the Land rather than exhausting it.”

  They had reached an aperture in a side of the courtyard, which would take them toward larger buildings beyond. Prim, before passing through it, cast a look over her shoulder at the Beedles riddling straw men with arrows. They put the military part of the complex behind them and entered a covered gallery that stretched across a garden, running eastward toward a building whose shape and deco
rations hinted at a more sacred function. The garden was planted with a variety of plants the likes of which Prim had only read about.

  “You see the Beedles at arms, practicing to fight,” said Sooth, “and part of you scoffs at me for claiming that they are bettering the Land. But just across the First Shiver are outlaws: runaway Beedles, barbarian Sprung, and wild souls who acquired immense and strange powers during the First Age when there were no limits as to what a soul could do. Confined to the Bits, there is only so much damage that they can inflict—especially if they are at odds with one another. But the price, for us, of keeping things that way is eternal vigilance. You admire this garden. I can see how much you like it, feel the pleasure you are taking in the beauty of each flower. But it is only thus because of the likes of him.” And she pointed to a small gnarled Beedle who was down on his knees in a corner, worrying weeds out of the dirt with a metal shiv.

  Then they entered a great door carven with too many decorations for Prim to take in, and passed into a vast light-filled space. Long and barrel-shaped, it was oriented toward the east, and the far end of it consisted mostly of windows. Rising up from the middle of the floor to about the height of Prim’s head was a stepped platform which blocked their view until they circumvented it. Doing so opened up a full view of the Land to the east: rolling hills and valleys giving way to grassland that stretched away many days’ journey. Far away, half obscured by haze, was a white needle projecting straight up into the air, impossibly high.

  So this was the first time Prim had seen the Pinnacle and the Palace with her own eyes. It took several moments for her to register them against the many depictions she had seen and descriptions she had read during her education, all of which approximated, but none of which quite approached, the real thing. Few details could be made out at this distance, but that only made the thing seem more enormous. Its upper half was sheer and narrow, but below that it broadened rapidly to a wide base that Prim knew consisted almost entirely of Hive. Prim had eyes mostly for what was on its very top. Gazing at it long and hard, she fancied she could resolve tiny features such as towers and outbuildings. Haze and distance made those evanescent.