Fall; or, Dodge in Hell

by Neal Stephenson

  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.

  “Would you inflict pain on them?” Spring inquired. “Or deprive them of pleasures?”

  “Or destroy their forms altogether?” Ward asked, with a glance at Egdod. For Egdod had long ago spoken to Ward of certain ideas that had at one time come into his mind: the image of the soul on the mountain holding a bright bolt in his hand, and the idea that it might be possible to derange a thing so utterly that it would lack all power to recover.

  Freewander had no fixed opinion on what form the punishment ought to take. Greyhame questioned whether punishment was even called for. There were plenty of bees, he pointed out.

  “Even supposing that they have done wrong,” Egdod said, “and deserve punishment, is it ours to judge and to punish?”

  “It is yours,” Freewander proclaimed, “for it is you who made the Land. And just as you fly about and better the shapes of mountains, rivers, and trees that are wrongly formed, likewise should you better the actions of souls who act against the beauty of the place.”

  “I would have punished you on the day that I brought flowers down out of the Garden to the Park,” Egdod said, “for you plucked some of them and braided them into your aura and I was wroth.”

  “You beat me back with the force of your wings,” she remembered.

  “But this is a different thing from the kind of punishment you have in mind for the killers of the bees,” Egdod said. “In time I came to understand that you were bettering the place in ways that had not occurred to me yet. The Land is now much better because you were not punished.”

  “I fail to understand how the wanton destruction of bees betters the place.”

  “It troubles me too,” Egdod admitted, “though I cannot yet make out why.”

  “Perhaps it is for the reason mentioned when we first spoke of food, and eating apples,” said Ward. “That discourse put me strongly in mind of eating, and I knew hunger for the first time. But through the wisdom of others at this table I soon understood that for souls such as we to eat food is without purpose. Bees require food in order to be bees. Souls such as we do not, and so if we eat, it is only to pleasure ourselves.”

  Greyhame was nodding. “The souls who killed the bees,” he said, “took food from creatures that needed it, for no purpose other than to satisfy their cravings.”

  “Now that you have put it in those terms,” said Egdod, “I judge their actions to have been wrongful and I see that once again Freewander has exceeded me in the quickness of her thinking. But to mete out punishment is a different matter altogether. I shall think on it. First though I would appeal to the wisdom of Spring concerning a matter that is closer to hand.”

  Spring had been quiet to this point, though the behavior of her aura suggested that she had listened closely and was pondering these matters with much care. She turned her gaze upon Egdod. Being so looked at gave Egdod pleasure, for he saw great beauty in Spring, and in respect of her had begun to feel cravings of a different kind from hunger. Putting such matters out of his mind for the time being, though, he asked her, “Do trees need apples in the same way that bees need honey? Is it the case that to pick an apple is to steal food from a tree?”

  Spring did not ponder it for long before shaking her head. “Trees get their food from the ground and from the sun. The apples are akin to leaves. They will fall to the ground and wither and the trees will not miss them.”

  “In that case,” Egdod said, “before rendering any judgment or punishment in the matter of the killing of the bees and the stealing of the honey, I propose that we have our feast so that we too may know what it is to eat food and to satisfy our cravings.”

  Knotweave had cleverly woven twisted bundles of grass into containers called baskets. The souls of the table went out to the Garden and filled several of them with apples. As Egdod had predicted, these were now of a size to fit in the palm of a hand, and mostly red. They carried the baskets into the Palace and upended them onto the table, which Knotweave had covered with a woven cloth the color of autumn leaves. Thingor had made a tool called “knife,” which he demonstrated the use of in cutting the apples into smaller pieces. They discovered hard pellets in the middle of each fruit, which Spring caressed with a fingertip for a moment before announcing that life was within them and that they were the beginnings of new trees of the same kind, and therefore should not be eaten. Then finally they began to experiment with introducing the pieces of the apples into their mouths, which until then they had used only for the shaping of words.

  Thus did Egdod discover yet a new way in which the Land could talk to him. He had begun with seeing and hearing, then learned to feel the ground with his feet, and with his nose to smell the fragrance of the pine trees in the mountains. Now he tasted food for the first time since he had died. As always when he discovered, or rediscovered, a new sense, the astonishment of it lasted for some time. But when he had recovered his ability to think about these matters, he began to wonder where the pieces of the apple, having been swallowed, had gone. They were in him now. New forms must come into existence within his body to digest the apple and expel the parts of it that were of no use to him. Or perhaps those forms had been latent within him all along, and were only now being roused to wakefulness.

  Like things must have been going on in the bodies of all the souls in Town who had consumed honey.

  He told the others to pick the remainder of the apples and bring them in baskets after him. Then he took wing and flew down the Street toward Town. As he drew near, a new fragrance came into his nostrils. It was not one that he loved, but neither could he identify its source. He looped around the Park and saw many souls gathered about the tower in its center, trying to find a way in. Their purpose was clear: they had heard from the killers of the bees about the desirability of honey and craved it now. The bees, sensing that they were under attack, had issued from the small portals in the tower’s sides and were stinging souls and being squashed.

  Egdod beat his wings mightily as he settled to a perch on the tower’s top. The blast of air dispersed the swarms of bees and sent many of the souls reeling, or knocked them flat to the ground. The odor he had noticed was stronger here. He saw a soul not far away who had adopted a curious pose, squatting on his haunches with his hindquarters only a small distance above the grass. A jet of brown fluid emerged from him and stained the ground below, and Egdod knew that this was the source of the bad smell. And he understood where it had come from.

  “From ones who have eaten honey, some of you have heard tell of the pleasures to be gained thereby,” Egdod announced, making his voice very loud. “I say to you that there is truth in it, and that to enjoy such pleasures is in all of us. But to steal it from the bees is to introduce a kind of wrongness to the Land that goes against all of the past efforts that I have made to better it. It is in the bees’ nature to require honey, but it is not in yours. There is however another means of getting food, which does not entail the crushing of bees, or taking from those that have a requirement for food above mere self-pleasuring. The fruits of it are winging your way even now from the Garden.” And he extended a hand toward the Palace. The souls turned their heads that way to see Ward, Freewander, Speaksall, Thingor, Longregard, Greyhame, and Knotweave flying toward them heavily laden with baskets.

  “Of the apple tree in my Garden you shall eat, if eat you must,” Egdod proclaimed. “The bees you shall not molest. Rather, look to the bees as models to shape your own way of doing things in the future.”

  Thus the bees of the tower were saved by the actions of Egdod, and the souls of Town enjoyed a feast of apples, and knew what it was to taste and to eat. Later they knew too what it was to shit. Those souls who had strong arms for delving went to work digging holes for that purpose, and up on the top of
the hill Egdod fashioned some holes that were very deep indeed, so that the odor of the shit would not trouble his nostrils as he enjoyed the beauty of the Garden.

  35

  Winter came then. Egdod felt the cold in a way he had not before and began spending more time inside the Palace. Flying over the Town, quiet under the snows, he saw very few souls about and knew that they were feeling the cold as well. This, he came to understand, was all because they had eaten. To consume food brought pleasure but also made the body liable to less agreeable sensations. Egdod, who could alter the world in any way that suited him, could surround himself with a cloak of warm air if he so chose, and protect himself from it in a way that other souls could not. He had Town all to himself as its souls huddled together in their houses. Knotweave had shown them the art of making blankets that they could draw about themselves for greater warmth.

  Walking past one small house Egdod heard two souls inside of it making loud vocalizations that were not quite words. He gazed into the window and saw two souls wrapped up in each other’s auras.

  “They are giving pleasure to each other,” said a voice.

  Egdod looked up and saw a soul sitting on the roof of the little house. She had soft wings, luxuriant with many thick feathers as white as snow. She had folded these and wrapped them about herself for warmth.

  “That is an understatement,” Egdod returned. “Or so it would seem, if I am any judge of such matters.”

  “There is an art to it that, once mastered by both, causes the pleasure to wax beyond all bounds.” Having delivered this information, the other soul was content to sit in her warm tent of wings and gaze down on him in silence for a time.

  “There are many ways,” Egdod said, “in which one soul may afford pleasure to another. By making things that are of great beauty. By utterance of pleasing words, or making of music. Or simply—” He looked at the soul on the roof, and went on looking at her for some time. “By embodying beauty that is pleasurable to gaze upon, as do you. What these two are doing is indeed of another order.”

  He understood that the two had felt, and surrendered themselves to, cravings of the same sort that he had lately been feeling in respect of Spring.

  “Why do souls so long to recover sensations that belong to a different world?” he mused. “It began with the eating of food. And now this.”

  “Do you remember it?” asked the soul, whom Egdod had named Warm Wings.

  “Now that I have seen it,” Egdod said, “I am most certain that I did likewise, before I came to this place.”

  “We all did,” said Warm Wings. “It is in the nature of souls to want it, as bees go to flowers.”

  “Why are you on their roof?” Egdod asked. “Is it you who brought them together?”

  Warm Wings smiled. “They required no assistance in that.”

  “If I came down tomorrow night and went to another house where two souls were coupling in this way, would I find you there as well?”

  “Would you like to find me there?”

  Egdod now felt the craving strongly and understood that it, as well as the cravings for food and warmth, would be of great import in the future of the Town as it continued to fill up with other souls. And not only the Town but the whole of the Land; for Longregard had let him know that many more souls had been coming in of late. And finding that Town had no room left in its houses, they had been venturing out beyond it as their forms became robust enough to afford them freedom of movement.

  “I would like you to dwell in the Palace,” Egdod said. And he resolved that he would make for Warm Wings an abode there that was far from the parts of it he frequented, for her beauty and her manner of speaking about pleasure, though far from disagreeable, were troubling in a certain way. “If you make it your habit to fly to Town on your beautiful white wings and know more about such things”—and he nodded at the window where the two souls were continuing to pleasure each other—“then I should be glad of it if you would sit at the table with the other souls of the Palace and discourse of it, since I believe it to be a thing of some importance.”

  Warm Wings was in no way displeased to have been given such an invitation, yet it was not in her nature to grasp at it. “Who are those souls, and what is that table?” she inquired. “It is the topic of much conjecture in Town.”

  It had not occurred to Egdod that the souls of Town would concern themselves with such questions. Now he understood that it must inevitably be so, for it was in the nature of souls not just to want food and to crave other sorts of pleasures, but to be curious.

  “It is the Pantheon,” Egdod told her. “That is the name that came to the mind of Speaksall. You will have noticed that it is in the nature of some souls to develop greater powers than is common. You for example have made for yourself a form unlike that of any other. I will wager that other souls in Town, gazing upon your beauty, have tried to alter themselves after your fashion but have failed to achieve it. They might lack sufficient control over their own forms. More likely they do not have your wits. The perfection of your form belies the long toil that must have gone into its devising; which indeed is part of its artfulness. For how many seasons did you work at making yourself thus, perhaps hidden away in some house where no other soul could observe what you were doing? In that time you might have asked yourself what was the point of so much striving. But I say to you now that in doing so you were setting yourself apart from these others who did not think to strive in such a way; or if they did, lacked the will or the wit to go on. That is why your place is at my table and not down here among these. For here in Town you will ever be the one who perches on the roof.”

  Warm Wings made no answer, but listened with utmost care.

  Egdod went on: “I see that you understand my words and know well of what I speak. Souls such as you are required in my Pantheon for a reason that is simple to explain: you see things to which I am blind and in various other ways exceed me. Come to the Palace with me, Warm Wings.” And she did.

  The coldness of the winter compelled the souls of Town to adopt new ways. Some few who had the power to wreak great alterations in their forms covered their skin with feathers or hair to keep the cold out. Among others, the crafts of Knotweave spread, and souls made blankets, then garments of such rude fabric as could be fashioned from the fibers of fallen leaves and dead grass. That the same things could also be burned to make warmth they learned from Thingor, who, the better to work metal, had grown adept at making fire.

  Some time ago Egdod had seen fit to imbue trees with the property of shedding branches from time to time, as when struck by a great wind, and in consequence they now lay heavy on the ground in certain places in the Forest. Those too would burn, as Thingor showed the cold souls of Town, who then made it their practice to venture into the Forest and carry away such branches as they had the strength to move. Others of Thingor’s inventions then were found useful for cutting the wood into smaller pieces, so that, by the time that winter began to relent, it was common for souls in Town to be seen carrying knives and axes.

  Many though still suffered from cravings that the Land afforded no means of requiting. One day as the snow began to melt, Ward was flying over the Park when he made note of a soul standing before the little tower there, striking at its walls with an axe. He wheeled about and landed on the top of the tower and observed him for a time. Again and again this soul struck at the stone of the tower with the metal tools that Thingor had taught the Town how to fashion, but the stone of the tower was obdurate and nothing resulted save little showers of sparks. So fruitless were the soul’s efforts that Ward was uncertain as to his purpose in pursuing them with such ferocity. He flapped his wings once and dropped to the ground nearby. Sensing his presence, the soul turned to look on him, and left off beating the tower with the axe. “What is it you would achieve by this, Swat?” Ward asked. For he had recognized the soul as one who during the autumn had been a great destroyer of hives and eater of honey. Stung many times, he had learned to
defend himself from the angry bees by swatting them dead, and had taught the practice to other hungry souls.

  Swat answered: “Seeing how the axe bites into the wood of trees, I supposed it might have a like effect on the tower.”

  “Egdod made the tower here as a thing of beauty for all souls to look on,” Ward pointed out. “It is not given to you to in any way alter its form.”

  “It is full of honey,” said Swat.

  “Honey that belongs to the bees—as Egdod said lo these many months ago before the feast of the apples.”

  “Apples we have not eaten, or even seen, since that day,” Swat returned. “In the meantime our craving has grown powerful and we would now sate it by consuming the honey that is in this tower.”

  “You may not,” said Ward, and held out his hand in the gesture that, since the beginning of the Land, had been his signal for other souls to desist and back away.

  “Ever you have been the soul who told other souls where they could and could not go, barring our way into the Palace and telling us not to venture into the Park,” Swat complained. “Now it is the same again—save that I have an axe, and you do not. And though the axe may be powerless to alter the adamant form of this tower, be it said that the form you have made for yourself, o proud Ward, is made of softer stuff—softer even than the branches of the trees that yield so easily to the bite of the axe. If you would not like to suffer grievous alterations in your own form, you would do well to stand aside.”

  Ward, barely wotting that he had just been threatened, stepped forward to seize the axe; but Swat swung its bright head down upon Ward’s outstretched arm, making a gash in the skin that had, until that moment, always stood between him and the world. Out of the gash came red blood that fell on the snow. He stepped away more in astonishment than fear, and watched himself bleed. Pain came.