Fall; or, Dodge in Hell

by Neal Stephenson

  Winter came as he populated his Garden. That season was not conducive to the Garden’s purpose and so he caused winter not to happen there. His body had made him sensible of conditions he had not known before, including warmth and cold. He caused the Garden to be warm at all times and for light to shine upon it even when the sun was not visible in the sky. He spent days there, bringing forth and perfecting trees of various kinds. When he grew weary of that, he walked up and down the cold street, or else took wing and flew out over the Land.

  In due course the snow began to melt in the street and the forest, and the trees began to put forth leaves. Egdod turned his attention away from the bettering of the Garden and walked through the small gate into the enclosure he had made. The ground within the walls he had covered with more stone and made it smooth, which was called floor. He walked across the floor toward the large gate, for he was of a mind to walk down the street and see how the new leaves were budding.

  Standing there just at the gate’s threshold was a thing shaped after the fashion of Egdod himself: feet terminating a pair of legs that supported a body. Emerging at various places from the body, a pair of arms with hands at their ends, wings, and a head. The wings still bore the appearance of dried leaves; they were not so much folded as crumpled. The head was ill formed, being a globe of fluctuating chaos. It was smaller than Egdod; its wings, though sized appropriately for the body, were in fact not much larger than fallen leaves.

  Egdod regarded this being for a time and sensed that it was, as best it could, looking right back at him. When Egdod moved about, it seemed to shift its position. After some little while had gone by, Egdod had the feeling that it had changed its shape during the time that they had been looking at each other; the wings, he thought, were becoming more orderly. More like Egdod’s.

  The appearance of this creature was not altogether a surprise. As the autumn had progressed he had sensed, on his occasional strolls down the street, that some of the souls were taking on greater coherence, becoming permanent. They were not allowing themselves to disappear into trees or streams but attempting to condense into distinct forms of their own. This one was simply the strongest of those, the most advanced. It had not occurred to him until now that such a creature would choose to adopt a form after the fashion of Egdod’s, but neither was it surprising. Perhaps this one and Egdod had both looked thus before they had died, and were naturally trying to re-create the bodies they had inhabited while living. Or perhaps this one was merely imitating Egdod. As every leaf on every tree was a similar-but-different version of the first leaf, perhaps the Land was now going to become populated with similar-but-different creatures walking around on legs and flying on wings, like Egdod.

  Egdod still intended to go for a walk down the street. He walked toward the gate. The other soul was still planted right in the middle of the aperture. As Egdod drew closer, he sensed it would be wrong for two souls to occupy the same space, and so he diverted to one side. The aura of shaped chaos that stood in for the other soul’s head changed its shape, swirling like a scuttle of leaves. It put out a golden tendril that brushed Egdod’s knee. Egdod sensed the touch of it.

  Some while ago he had clothed himself in a skin whose reason for being was to separate the stuff of which he was made from that belonging to other souls. Since then, stiff winds had blown against it, hot and cold. The spray of the ocean waves had spattered it. The leaves and branches of trees had tested his skin, and beneath the soles of his feet and under the skin of his palm he had felt stone of various textures. His skin had been proof against all of those. But he had never yet come into contact with a body constructed by another soul, or—as now—the shifting nimbus of aura that betrayed the presence of a soul too newly arrived to have made a proper form in which to dwell, or contained itself in a skin of its own. He recoiled from its touch and felt it fizzing on the skin of his knee. The sensation was to his sense of touch what flickering static was to vision or the hiss of white noise was to hearing. It was not painful, nor did it wreak any change on him that could be detected. A wisp of aura separated from the end of the tendril. As he strode away it swirled about his leg for a moment before dispersing. He no longer sensed the contact. He was glad of that. For, though the touch had not been painful, it had put him in mind of an earlier state of being that it was good to have put behind him.

  After he had gone on for several paces and entered into the upper part of the street, he looked back over his shoulder and saw that the other soul—somewhat diminished, perhaps, by the loss of the tendril—was attempting to follow him. It did not have the knack of moving smoothly, or in anything like a straight line, yet got it right more often than wrong. Falling farther and farther behind, it kept after Egdod, improving the quality of its movement as it struggled along.

  Egdod named the soul Follower. He wondered where Follower had been obtaining the stuff of which he was making himself. Egdod had been able to avail himself of an infinite field of chaos, out of which he had fashioned not only a form to house Egdod, but an entire world. Follower was trying to create himself in a world from which, as far as Egdod knew, chaos had been almost eradicated. Perhaps he had a foot in each universe and was trying to force his way into Egdod’s through a little gap or flaw while most of him remained trapped in the chaos on the other side. Or perhaps he was drawing stuff out of the world Egdod had made, as trees grew up out of its soil.

  The trees that lined the street were all in order. Once Egdod had created them in such-and-such a way, they had neither the inclination nor the power to alter themselves, other than to become somewhat larger each year and to put forth more branches. Souls were living in some of them now, and so he felt himself looked at by those as he passed by. The outward form of those was, however, no different.

  In the time, now many years past, when he had first made all of this, Egdod had been driven by a loathing of chaos and a corresponding love of what was steady and regular in its nature. Since then, he had, in general, sought to make the world more various. The waves that had beat against the rocks of the coast—that, he supposed, were beating against it now, though he was not there to watch—had in them a kind of chaos, and indeed seemed more like proper waves to him the more wildly they thrashed against the stones and flung themselves into the air. The disorder that they manifested in so doing felt of a different nature from the dread chaos out of which Egdod had first brought himself into being and then fashioned everything else. And so it seemed that the world could have a kind of wildness and irregularity about it without coming to pieces and reverting to chaos in the way he had, in the early going, feared that it would. As he walked down the street now he saw its regularity as the work of an earlier Egdod, a fearful Egdod. By no means was it wrong for him to have fashioned the street in this way. He was not now of a mind to tear it apart into a chaotic wilderness. The trees—the oldest trees in the Land now—he would allow to grow and alter their forms with greater variety, so that each would be different from the next in the branchings and contortions of its boughs. But the nature of the street he would not change, rather leaving it as a relic of his first stirrings, and as a place to which the new dead might be drawn and in which they might find sanctuary.

  Egdod had never given the street a definite conclusion or thought about what would happen if he continued walking down it beyond a certain point. At a suitable remove from the top of the hill, where the trees gave out, he now made the ground flat and put grass on it. From the dead ground below the grass he drew out stones and piled them up into walls, and made the walls run straight, not for great distances but just until they intersected other walls at crisp corners, forming enclosures. Those were smaller than the one he had made for himself at the top of the hill but large enough that a few souls might abide in each one, provided that the bodies they made for themselves were of a reasonable size. It seemed wrong for them to have nothing on the top and so he made roofs for them too. The street he caused to branch this way and that among the houses, as the veins of
a leaf or the tributaries of a river were wont, save that the street’s branchings were of a more regular nature, with straight lines and right angles that were consonant with the vertical walls and sharp corners of the empty dwellings. Facing the streets he made apertures that he guessed might seem inviting to wandering souls, as the one in his palace atop the hill had apparently beckoned to Follower. In placing the houses and running the streets he followed his whims and his sense of how such a place ought to be laid out; Town, as he called it, had a kind of regularity, but not the perfectly monotonous patterning that he had bestowed on the original street. Some of the streets were longer than others, and not all of the houses were of the same size or shape.

  Having put Town’s streets and houses where he thought meet, he left them vague and unfinished, as an invitation to other souls to alter their forms in whatever manner they saw fit. He belted Town with open space where grass grew, and seeded it too with diverse small plants that he had been cultivating in his Garden. In its center he placed a square space devoid of houses, containing only grass.

  He was now of a mind to return to the place he had made for himself at the top of the hill and build a roof atop its walls—a thing that had not occurred to him until he had looked at the smaller enclosures of Town and sensed that, without roofs, they were incomplete. He walked out into the little park that he had made in the middle of Town, spread his wings, and took to the air. He flew in a broad circle around Town, viewing its grid of streets from above, and satisfied himself that it was of a correct form. Then he flew up the street until he had reached the space above the hill and the big house he had made there and the Garden behind it. He flew around it a few times, considering what manner of roof would best complete his abode. The name Palace came to him. He descended to the smooth stone floor of the Palace and walked about, regarding it from different angles. Presently he came to its front gate and, gazing down the hill, spied a small form making its way up the street toward him. It was Follower, walking most of the time, occasionally taking to the air and struggling along on his wings for a short distance.

  By the time Follower had attained the hilltop, Egdod had prepared for him a smaller house attached to the front of the Palace. He wished for Follower to know that this new thing, the Gatehouse, was for him but that the Palace was Egdod’s alone. Egdod did not know how best to make another soul know and understand something that originated in Egdod’s head. Again he had the sense that such had been routine in the place where he and Follower had presumably abided before they had died.

  He sensed that he had the power utterly to destroy the form that Follower was making for himself, should the latter become an important source of trouble. A picture flashed into his mind of a fist clutching a bright bolt, ready to hurl it down from the top of the hill. He knew not where the picture had come from. It was the natural way of things to fly apart into chaos, but some orderings had the property of not doing so, and of persisting even when less than perfect at the beginning or when damaged later. But now that Egdod had come to know as much, he, by the same token, had thoughts of how such things might be perturbed in ways from which there would be no getting better. Preferable, though, would be to convey his intentions into the confused and whirling mind of Follower without undoing him.

  In the front of the Gatehouse he had made an aperture facing the street. He stood in this as the other approached. It was moving more steadily now, growing bigger and better defined, its wings more like Egdod’s and less like leaves. As Follower drew closer, Egdod withdrew into the Gatehouse, but stopped at the next threshold, where it was joined to the Palace. Follower seemed to take his meaning. He passed through the aperture into the Gatehouse and seemed to look about it. Egdod turned his back on him and walked several steps into the Palace, then turned around to see whether the other would persist in following him. Indeed, Follower approached the aperture that joined his new abode to Egdod’s. But as he had done earlier, he stopped at the threshold. Egdod extended his arm toward Follower and showed the palm of his hand, as if pushing him back. The point was taken; Follower moved two paces backward into the Gatehouse, then bent forward at the middle of his body in a gesture that Egdod somehow recognized.

  Satisfied, Egdod devoted some time to building a roof on the Palace. His first efforts were not altogether satisfactory and he knew that he would be improving it for a while. When he tired of that, he caused the stone beneath the Garden to rise up through the grass in one place and make a little island. He pushed the top of this down in its center so that it would hold water. He made water well up out of the ground and fill it, and waited for it to lie still, so that it reflected the branches of the trees that grew above it. Then Egdod approached this little pool and bent over it to regard himself.

  When next he entered the Palace, Egdod had a face. The face had eyes in its front so that other souls could discern, by looking on him, what he was gazing at. It had nostrils through which he could take in the air and smell it. Below that was another orifice, as yet ill formed; he sensed it ought to be there but was unclear as to its purpose. For the time being it was an oval of glowing aura. His head was wreathed in the same stuff. The head was not finished but it suited his purposes for now, and when he showed himself to Follower, the latter seemed to take close heed, and began to shape his own form in a like manner.

  Matters in Town began to take shape in more or less the way that Egdod had envisioned. Souls continued to manifest themselves, perhaps one or two a day, and to develop forms by which they could be distinguished and seen. Some still chose to inhabit things such as trees that had not the power of movement, but most patterned themselves after Follower, who patterned himself after Egdod. Curious variations could be seen, but most seemed to derive comfort from having a kind of sameness with others. From the Palace Egdod could look down and see them trying to walk on their legs or fly on their wings. Some wandered up the hill, but Follower warded them off at the threshold of the Gatehouse just as Egdod had warded Follower off, and so by process of elimination they tended to end up in Town. The houses there offered no amenities that souls actually needed, but they seemed to prefer having places of their own, just as Egdod preferred having a Palace and a Garden.

  Satisfied that all was sorted here, mindful that spring was under way, he bent his mind to the perfection of the new kinds of trees and other plants. He began flying far afield to parts of the Land that he knew must exist, since he had surrounded them with a coast, perforated where rivers might flow out and drain the interior. Hills and mountains he saw (to see something, now, was to create it), and these grew up from the coast and hemmed in the river valleys as was proper. But making a sufficient number of hills and mountains to decorate the coast with river mouths did not begin to fill in all of the Land that he had circumscribed. The center of it was vast and void, and so he made of it a flat country, green with grass in some places, but in others an expanse of rock and sand. To break up the monotony of it he here and there put isolated mountains, or ranges of them, and drained them through networks of rivers and chains of lakes, letting the water find its own way eventually to the coast with sometimes amusing results, as it often had to wind about in circuitous ways before it detected low points around which it could pool, and sought outlets through which it could make good its escape.

  As the water was finding its way about, he busied himself with the seeding of trees and plants and grasses in such parts of the Land as he thought suitable for their kinds. The running waters spoke to him, as they had long ago in the forest when they had reminded him of his name. They told him the names of the different kinds of trees: pine, fir, oak, maple.

  Flying back to the Palace he conceived a desire to have the ability of making such sounds with his own body, rather than relying on noisy rivers to do it for him. By the time he had alit in the Garden to view his reflection in the pool, he had a new thing on his face called a mouth. When he opened his mouth wide, glowing static could still be seen within, and a faint hiss of noise would
emerge, but by moving the parts of his mouth in different fashions he could modulate that sound to mimic the names of things that he had heard in the rushing and burbling waters. Once he had got the knack of making the sounds of the trees and of certain other things he knew the names of, he entered the Palace and went to the Gatehouse and showed the new form of his face to Follower, and made some sounds to demonstrate its use, pointing to himself and uttering, “Egdod,” and to the other and uttering, “Ward.” For he had decided to give Follower a new name that better reflected his occupation. Follower—now, and henceforth, Ward—had continued to grow taller and to perfect his form; his head now came up to Egdod’s shoulder and his wings were symmetrical and well articulated. He nodded his head and set about the task of shaping a mouth after the manner of Egdod’s and learning how it might be used to fashion various words. Egdod knew that other souls would in due course see this and begin to pattern their own forms likewise.

  He wondered what Town would be like when its houses and streets were full of souls making sounds at each other. It would be very different from what it was now. But he sensed that such was the natural order of things when many souls were together. The essence of being a soul, as opposed to a rock or a leaf, was the ability to behave in manners that Egdod could not predict. He could do nothing about the fact that new souls were coming here all the time, each acting as it saw fit. He could set an example for them, as he was doing with Ward, and he could make a Town for them to live in, but ultimately they would do as they liked and there was no point in much troubling himself over it.

  The making and bettering of the lands beyond seemed of greater import. There was nothing in those that he could not shape as he saw fit. So he bent his efforts to that work, sometimes spending many days in his Garden discovering new kinds of plants that had sprung up there, seemingly of their own accord. Different plants were suited to different parts of the Land. Gathering them up, he took wing and ranged far out to places that were in want of shaping and seeding. Deserts he made, populated with fragrant thorny plants that grew low to the ground. The lowlands around the central gulf were soggy in places where the ground trapped water; these he covered with reeds in some places and spreading trees in others. Mountains were best when cloaked in dark evergreens, though on their upper slopes he thought it better to grow tiny rugged plants of the same sort that he used to carpet the ground at one end of the Land that he conceived of as being the north. At the other end, which was south, different conditions prevailed and trees were larger. At every place where he imagined he might have found an end to the Land’s complexity, he instead discovered further small matters that needed sorting out.