Fall; or, Dodge in Hell

by Neal Stephenson

  This was enough to send the stick swinger fleeing back down the other side of the wall. Now unobserved, Egdod resumed his usual form as he strolled down the center of the Front Yard toward the Fastness. This was not a neat rectangle like Town. It grew narrower as it bored in under the cover of the mountain arch and curved gently to the left, so that with each step more of the Fastness came into view. In the early going it was bare rocky ground covered with snow, but as Egdod passed beneath the shelter of the Overhang, the air warmed and the ground softened into proper soil. And in that soil, plants of various kinds grew, including great old trees as he drew closer to the Front Porch.

  The part of the Front Yard closest to the Porch lay beneath a sea of brilliant red, silent and damp now. But in that silence Egdod’s keen ears discerned shiftings from below. With a sweep of his wing, he made a gust of wind that drove all but a few of the leaves and laid the ground bare.

  Revealed was a flower that had sprouted beneath the shelter of the leaves and been growing there. It swayed and even seemed to quail under Egdod’s wing blast. Its slender stem did not snap but sprang back, remaining bent slightly away as if to gaze upward at the face of Egdod. No face did it have as such, but a disk in its center, round like the sun, enwreathed by petals that were arrayed in a curiously symmetrical and regular way. Below that, sprouting from each side of its thin stem was a long green leaf that in some way recalled the form of an arm. Egdod recognized the flower and yet knew with certainty that it was not of this Land; neither he nor Spring nor any of the other members of the Pantheon had conceived these shapes and so arranged them. Somehow he knew that it was called Daisy and that it was a thing of the other world where he and all of the other souls had dwelled before they had died. There he had seen her, and there she had meant something to him. With as great certainty he knew that Daisy was imbued with a soul of her own; the fringes of her petals and the middle of her round face were not of any one fixed color but responded to his inspection in the ever-shifting manner of the modulated chaos that was aura. “A soul is in you,” Egdod said, “and despite the untimely manner of your coming now in the season of fall, I see no cause why you should be counted as unworthy to dwell in my Front Yard; I shall let you alone and see in due course whether you make yourself into something.”

  He then raised a wall of adamant out of the ground to enclose this patch of the Front Yard in a sort of forecourt, and put a gate upon it, and locked the gate against any stick swingers who might venture this far. When he was satisfied that Daisy was safe, he climbed the steps to his Front Porch and entered his home. As he did, the stem of the new flower swayed toward him as if drawn, and its face turned as if to watch him go.

  The Fastness had once been as spare and empty as the Palace, but because it had become the workshop of Thingor and Knotweave and the talented souls who learned from them, it had filled with clever and beautiful objects that they had made. Other parts of it had become the haunt of Greyhame and his apprentice Pestle. They had covered many pages with writing and stored them on shelves in a room devoted to such things. Pluto had learned the arts of making ink and paper from them and drawn renderings of various parts of the Land and stored them in yet another room. These improvements and many more had gradually transformed the Fastness into an abode that in many ways was more enjoyable for Egdod than the Palace. All it lacked was Spring and her grove and her garden. Part of him wished to remain and abide here. But he had a Feast to organize, and just beyond the Front Yard of this very dwelling was a great and troubling mystery. So he went into the room where the disciples of Greyhame and Pestle scratched out words on paper, and told them to go through all of their documents and make him aware of any mention they might find of angels, or the One Who Comes, or Daisy, or death. They should then bring that information with them to the Feast, to which they would all be brought in three days’ time; and, finally, they should see to it that the Daisy growing in the forecourt was well watered.

  Having seen to all of that, he flew back through the storm to the Palace. There, all was just as he had left it, save that preparations were advancing. More strange wild souls had arrived from remote parts of the Land. Some lurked in the Forest as beasts, some hovered above the Pinnacle as whirlwinds, others were indistinguishable from mounds of rocks or hummocks of earth. Most were ill equipped to assist the ones who were making ready the Feast and so merely looked on.

  Thingor had conceived a way of building tables from the wood of trees, and Knotweave a way of making chairs by plaiting strips taken from certain vines. They had imparted these skills to other souls who had for some weeks applied themselves to making many of both. As these were completed they were moved into place for the Feast, filling the great hall of the Palace and adjoining parts of the Garden. As quickly as these could be set in place, they were filled, by other willing souls, with the produce of the Land: to begin with a layer of bright red leaves to clothe the bare wood of the tabletops, then woven baskets filled with apples as well as various other kinds of fruit that had lately begun to thrive in other regions. In cool cavities that Pluto had hollowed out beneath the Palace, infusions of aromatic herbs were stored in pots, as well as juice expressed from berries.

  On the day before the Feast, winged souls of the Pantheon began flying north to the Fastness, where they collected the ones who dwelled and worked there but lacked the power of flight. Those arrived a few at a time, carrying small clever things they had made in the forges and ateliers of the Fastness to decorate the tables and delight the guests. They, and others who had just arrived, lent hands to the laying of the tables so that the Feast could begin all the sooner the next morning.

  These final preparations were in clear view of Daisy. She had been carefully dug up from the forecourt where she had sprouted and transferred into a clay pot fashioned by Knotweave. Pestle had brought her to the Palace, hugging the pot to her chest with one arm and supporting Daisy’s frail stem with her other as Ward had flown them through the storm. From a place at Egdod’s high table inside the Palace she watched the others working through the night. And meanwhile the other souls watched Daisy, in pride and fascination. For Daisy refined her form and her being out of chaos with greater speed than any soul before known in the Land. Below, where her stem forked into roots, she was developing legs, and it was clear that very soon she would uproot herself from the soil where she had sprouted and begin to ambulate. Above, she patterned her form after that favored by most of the Pantheon, with the usual number and arrangement of limbs, and a stature that was well suited for conversation with the rest. But from some of the wild souls she adopted the ways of the Land. The long green leaves that had sprouted from her stalk became elongated wings. The petals that had surrounded her face gave up their sameness and adopted different forms, framing her visage, and she began to develop the organs of vision, hearing, and speech shared by nearly all of the other souls. When a thing of beauty came into her view, or when Paneuphonium, perched up on the wall, played a lively tune, she turned her face toward it.

  As was commonly the case, the power of speech was longer in coming to Daisy than the ability to hear what others said, but then it came on swiftly. For as soon as she could move she made it her practice to turn her attention toward Speaksall and to listen to his voice, which had ever been the most supple and expressive.

  Yet Daisy was not the newest soul to attend the Feast. For in the dark hours before the dawn of the day it was to take place, a light came over the horizon, not in the east where the sun would later rise, but in the north. Faster than the sun it came on, bright enough to cast shadows that shortened and became more profound as it drew nigh and hovered above the Garden for a time. It could be perceived as a ball of chaos, almost devoid of form or definition, but exceptional in its brilliance. Presently it descended into the Garden, drawing itself together and concentrating itself into a form compact enough to move among the other souls and pass through the doorways of the Palace. Those who hazarded looking directly on it fancied they co
uld see in its brilliance the beginnings of a face, beautiful and stern.

  “I chose not to look long or deeply,” Longregard told Egdod after the true sun had risen and the Pantheon had gathered around the Table to confer about the last preparations for the Feast. “Chaos is no new thing to me, but there is about that soul some intensity in which I feared I might be dissolved, and reduced to less than what I am.”

  “I have not seen this newcomer,” Egdod said, “but to judge from your description, I would suppose he is another of the wild souls that have lately been making themselves known to us. As other such inhabit mountains or seas or winds, and pattern their forms accordingly, perhaps this one is a creature of the celestial realms that are inhabited by light-giving orbs.”

  “This new one puts me more in mind of the brightness of thunderbolts that dazzle and destroy,” put in Greyhame, who had ventured into the Garden to look at the newcomer.

  “Many years passed before I acquired the craft of fashioning thunderbolts, and then only with the aid of Thingor,” Egdod pointed out. “The idea of it did not even occur to me until after long meditation on those toils by which we all distinguished ourselves from chaos and maintain our consciousness from one moment to the next. But all you who have looked on the newcomer agree that, bright as he may be, he has only just begun to acquire a face and form, and if he has developed the power of speech he has not yet manifested it. I deem it of little concern that he bears some passing resemblance to the bright thunderbolts Thingor forges in the depths of the Knot.”

  This seemed to ease the minds of those of the Pantheon who had not gazed on the newcomer with their own eyes. But just as it seemed the conversation was about to move on, they were interrupted by a new and unfamiliar voice, emanating from a soul that had approached the Table. “The newcomer is a soul the likes of which has never been seen in the Land before, and you would do well to keep thunderbolts near to hand when he is walking up and down in your Garden, O Egdod!”

  The music stopped. Egdod and the others of the Pantheon turned and looked to see that these words had come from Daisy. She was shifting uneasily in her pot, stirring the soil and striving to break free so that she could walk. Her long slender green wings fluttered.

  “This is a time of prodigies,” Greyhame remarked, “when one so new can ripen so soon.”

  “I am but a forerunner of what has now come, so close upon my heels that I have barely acquired the ability to speak in time to warn you,” she said.

  “Of what would you give warning, Daisy? The newcomer?”

  “My name is Sophia, which is Wisdom,” she returned, “and the name of the newcomer is El and we have both lately come from the world where all of us once lived in the time before we died. There, I knew some of you. The particulars are lost to memory, but you, Egdod, were known to me well.”

  “No memory have I of that or anything else, save a few shapes and forms that stir my soul when I see them,” Egdod said. “But this much I will allow, that the form you took when you sprouted in my Front Yard was one I knew.”

  “I knew Sophia,” Pluto confirmed. “I sense as much even though I cannot summon up stories of her.”

  “Is there one among you called Verna, or Spring?” Sophia asked. “I saw her from a distance yesterday and felt a similar pang of kinship.”

  “Spring is busy with the gestation of new souls and prefers to remain alone in her place in the Forest most days,” said Ward. “But I would know more of El, even if most of the particulars are gone from your recollection.”

  “I have seen enough in my brief time here to know that some souls have greater power than others to wreak alterations upon the world. I put it to you that El comes with greater power than any, exceeding even that of Egdod.”

  Sophia’s words were received skeptically by most of the Pantheon. “It is inconceivable that one so new could wield powers equal to what we have painstakingly acquired over many years,” said Warm Wings. But she drew her wings about her shoulders like a lowly soul in Town warding off a chill wind.

  “The answer lies in things that are beyond our ken, having to do with what the universe really consists of and how it is generated from moment to moment. This precedes all the sorts of powers of which you spoke, and makes of them mere appearances,” Sophia insisted.

  “If that is the case, then discussing it is idle,” said Egdod. But he allowed his gaze to alight first on Ward and then on Thingor. The former arose and strode away toward the part of the Palace where he dwelled among the lesser souls that assisted him in his duties. Thingor for his part went toward a certain part of the Palace where he had stored thunderbolts he had brought here after forging them in the Fastness. Rarely visited was that place, and the door was barred with elaborate machines of Thingor’s devising that could only be undone by one possessed of recondite secrets.

  “Let the gates be thrown open and the Feast begin!” Egdod decreed.

  And then for a time El and Sophia were forgotten as all went into flux in the Palace and the Garden. Well before the sun had reached its zenith, all of the souls had found chairs and begun to help themselves to the fruits of the harvest. After they had all supped for a brief time, Speaksall stood up from his chair and beat his wings, rising into the air above the Pantheon’s high table where all could see him. “Hear! Hear!” he called out in a voice of such clarity and power that all, even those seated out in the Garden, took notice and turned toward him. Paneuphonium played a blast on a metal horn. Speaksall continued, “Egdod, your host, would speak a few words of greeting.”

  Egdod now stood at the head of the high table. “To all who have come here from far-flung parts of the Land, I say welcome. May you never again be strangers to this place. We are at your service, all of us who dwell here: I and Ward; Longregard; Freewander; Greyhame; Speaksall, whose bright voice you have just heard; Warm Wings, who has much to teach you; Pluto, whom many of you wild souls will know from his wanderings about the Land and his improvements thereof; Knotweave; Spring, who is within the sound of my voice but could not join us; and—” Here Egdod faltered as his eye fell upon the chair allocated to Thingor, which was empty. “And Thingor, who, it would seem, prefers toiling in his forge to enjoying the society of other souls.”

  A figure entered the hall from the direction of the storeroom where the thunderbolts were kept. Egdod’s gaze went to him and did not know him at first, for he was curiously diminished, bent, and moving as though one leg was not equal to the other. But when this soul’s face turned toward him, Egdod knew him for Thingor. Not the Thingor, burly and proud, who had gone thither a short while ago but one damaged and less than he had been. He had gone to fetch thunderbolts and come back empty-handed.

  “What has happened?” Egdod demanded.

  “The contrivances with which I made fast the door of the Armory had all been undone,” Thingor said, his voice indistinct as raw chaos was gnawing at his form. “I opened the door and saw light that blinded me, and next thing I knew I was as you now see me!”

  Ward had risen into the air above the high table, the better to view Thingor. “What of the thunderbolts?”

  “They are gone,” Thingor answered.

  “Not gone!” said another voice. So deep and loud was this voice that it penetrated into the beings of all who heard it and caused the foundations of the Palace to quaver as if all that Egdod had built up here possessed no more substance than a leaf clinging to a twig in the fall gusts. Cracks spread up from the floor and into the roof, and blades of light shone through them and stabbed down among the tables of the Feast, where souls were obliged to shield their eyes beneath arms or wings. The light did not merely illuminate but cut and burned what it touched. It could now be seen that the Palace’s roof was being unmade by some onslaught directed against it from above.

  Egdod’s first thought was of Spring, and so he leapt into the air and beat his wings to propel himself toward the gate that led out to the Garden. But he had scarce become airborne when a heavy weight stru
ck him upon the back, driving his right wing to the floor and pinning it there. He felt the sensation that Spring had identified as pain, though this was worse by far than the sting of a wasp.

  The stone that had fallen upon his wing was a fragment of the Palace’s roof. It was, of course, a thing that Egdod himself had summoned forth out of chaos many years before, and so he ought to have had the power of dismissing it. But all eyes were upon him and so he was not able to unmake it so easily, for the same reason that he could not raise the tower in the Park while the souls of Town were all watching. He sought to draw a mist about him, but none would form in the heat and light now beating down upon his back through the widening cavity in the roof. Of dust and smoke there was plenty, though, and so in those he shrouded himself, cloaking his form in darkness in which he might dash the stone into chaos. But as soon as he did, the shroud was blown away by a blast of wind that issued from the lips of El. Words were borne on it: “Behold how the false one cloaks his doings in smoke and filth!”

  Egdod lifted his face toward the light and saw a mighty figure bestriding the Palace, which had been wholly unroofed. Ranked about him were lesser souls—angels!—wielding stolen thunderbolts, but instead of hurling them like javelins, they brandished them like fiery swords.

  The great figure was El, and he appeared as a giant form, bright and beautiful but wingless. Hands he had though, and with one of them he reached out toward the angel who flew closest to him. The angel handed him a thunderbolt, which El hefted above his shoulder. He swept his gaze across the roofless Palace, seeking his next target. Egdod lay exposed in plain sight. El took little note of him, though. Instead his gaze lit upon the table nearby, where Daisy—Sophia—stood rooted in the clay pot, still unable to break loose from the soil.

  Egdod recalled now the strange scenes at the bridge: the angels who feared to trespass on the Front Yard, the stick swinger warning him that it was the Abode of Death, the wall they were throwing up to protect themselves from whatever might come out from the direction of the Fastness.