Fall; or, Dodge in Hell

by Neal Stephenson

  It had all been because of Daisy. She—not Egdod, not Ward nor any other member of the Pantheon—was the one they feared.

  Still pinned under the stone, Egdod could not move. He looked up at Ward, who was in the air above him. Egdod’s broken wing was dissolving into chaos. He reached up with a tendril of it, just as that other soul had once reached out to him, and touched Ward’s ankle. In that moment a stream of impressions passed between them, and Ward understood. He wheeled in midair and dove toward the table just as El was hurling his thunderbolt at Daisy. The blast struck Ward in his midsection and quite nearly unmade him. He was hurled back against the table, where one of his flailing arms struck the clay pot. This flew back and shattered upon the floor. Longregard, who had been taking shelter on that side of the table, sprang forward and flung herself down to shield the fragile new soul. Egdod could not see it but he knew that Daisy was now torn loose from the soil. Another bolt would finish her, and probably several others as well. He ripped the shreds of his wing loose, and got to his feet, and began striding across the wreckage of the Palace toward El.

  El seemed loath to turn his attention from Daisy but could not ignore the approach of his most powerful foe. Rather than reach for another thunderbolt, he pointed at Egdod. “Long has this one held undeserved sway over the Land. He has shaped it according to his stunted and ill-formed recollections of the world from which we all sprang. I have just come from it with clearer memories than any other soul, and I say to you that it is not a world to which we should long to return, or that ought in any way to serve as the pattern of what we build to dwell in hereafter. To make such a world anew is to assume the burdens and the limitations of the old. Behold Egdod with his broken wing. Behold Thingor with his crippled leg and the Palace with its shattered roof. Why should any such evils be admitted here? And yet that is the world Egdod has made, first out of ignorance and next out of pride. He has obliged all other souls to obey him and to accept the limits he would impose upon what can be thought and done, and the manner in which souls may converse. He has punished with destruction those who dared imagine other states of affairs. I hereby banish Egdod and his Pantheon and all those loyal to him. I send them away to a place where they can suffer the pains and endure the confinements they themselves have chosen!”

  A burst of light, of infinite brilliance, blinded Egdod for a moment. He felt his form wrapped in crushing force against which struggle was useless and sensed that he was being borne up off the rubble-strewn floor of the Palace. When he could see again he found himself gazing directly into the face of El, who had reached down with one hand and picked Egdod up as if he were of no more substance than a fallen leaf. The radiance of El’s face had not diminished, but Egdod’s faculty of vision had accustomed itself to its power and was no longer overwhelmed; he could now see things that he had not seen before: not only the details of El’s face, and other things near to hand, but indeed things that had been hidden from Egdod’s notice for the entire time that he had been dwelling in the Land.

  He had long known that the bright light of the sun, shining down in the middle of the day, revealed small features and flaws in his creation that during the night were hidden from view. When he made it his practice to inspect the Land, or the fabric of the Palace, and ponder how they might be improved, he did so when the sun was at its zenith, showing him things that by the fainter light of the stars and the moon would escape his notice. He had always sensed, without knowing why, that the alternation of these two kinds of light was as it should be. The softer illumination of the nighttime brought relief from seeing and knowing so much, and made it so that even the most industrious souls could find a few hours’ relief from the intensity of their perceptions and the burdens thereof.

  The brightness of midday had always seemed sufficient to Egdod. Never had it occurred to him, during all the years he had spent in the Land, that there was any need to place a second, or a third, sun in the sky to illuminate the world with greater intensity; no detail, or so he had assumed, was escaping his attention in the light of the single sun that he had put in the heavens. Now, though, in the grip of El, he was exposed to such a light as might have shone from a hundred suns at once. And just as the light of the one sun gave him the power of seeing and knowing things that were hidden in moonlight, the light of a hundred revealed to him many things that had lain hidden in the deep shadows of his mind from when he had first become conscious after his death.

  He knew that he was Dodge and that Egdod had been a figment of Dodge’s fancy. He knew that he had come from Iowa, where there had been a town with a stone tower in its park like the one that Egdod had made here. He knew that he had lived in Seattle, where there were trees with red leaves in autumn, and apples, and friends and members of his family. He knew that Pluto was one of the former and that Sophia was one of the latter and that he had known her when she was small.

  Many other fleeting impressions were recalled to his mind in those moments that he stared El in the face, and he knew that all of them had resided in the shadows of his mind from the very beginning and that he had been slowly recovering them in a haphazard and diminished form the entire time he had been in the Land and that all of the things he had made here had originally come from them.

  But too he saw memories and perceptions that came to him from the mind of El. These were of a different flavor, and he could sense that they came from a mind that was in some sense disordered. He perceived buildings, faces, vehicles that the eyes of Dodge had never looked upon.

  A moment of connection occurred then between the minds of El and of Dodge as El knew that Dodge was seeing what ought to belong only to El. From this El recoiled in a kind of horror or disgust, and hurled Dodge as one might throw away a burning coal.

  Dodge saw the Palace falling away from him. Or perhaps he was falling away from it: falling into the sky, as up and down had been stripped of meaning. Before the Palace receded into the distance he saw it: the roof torn open, terrified souls spilling out of its gates into the Garden or simply taking flight into the cold air surrounding the top of the mountain, hieing away to whatever refuges they thought most remote from El. Some were being harried by El’s minions with their white wings and their flaming swords, but there was not a sufficient number of those to follow those who fled. Other Feast guests did not get away, and Dodge’s first thought was that they were being held at bay; but then a more troubling notion came to him, which was that they had chosen to remain of their own volition, and to make common cause with the newcomer. More urgently, though, he thought of Spring, and directed his gaze toward the wet green vale in the Forest where she had ever dwelled. Visible there was a ring of stars arrayed about it, which he knew to be angels of El, standing in a circle, brandishing their thunderbolt swords at any who might approach—or try to leave. Spring, he knew, was in the middle, both protected and imprisoned.

  These things grew more difficult to resolve as he hurtled backward through cold space, burning as he fell and leaving a fiery wake behind. About him at greater or lesser distances were shooting stars that he knew to be other members of the Pantheon, as well as lesser souls likewise hurled away to banishment. The Land dropped away. He saw the Street lined with red trees, spiraling down the Pinnacle to the ruins of the abandoned Town. Spattered across the landscape were the new habitations that had been built up by the various kinds of souls who had gone out into the Land after Dodge had brought down the Tower. Their faces must now all have been lifted up toward the bright prodigy that was El upon the mountain. Perhaps some as well looked higher and saw the streaks of fire being drawn across the firmament by Dodge and the others. Dodge could now see the entirety of the Land: the white shores where the waves of the sea crashed against it and the snow-covered mountain in the middle, blurred by eternal clouds and flashing storms above the place of the Knot.

  About him the sky had given way to chaos. Dodge drew strength from it and knew that he had fallen to a depth where he was so solitary that the sweep of his
powers had returned. He did not wish to fall so far that he would no longer be able to gaze on the Land, and so with a sweep of his wing he made the arc of chaos below him into a black shell of adamant. This he fell into with a crash that pocked its newly made surface with a fiery crater.

  Dodge became conscious.

  In the center of the lake of fire he lay for a time, gazing up at the Land as a distant moon in his sky, and counting the impacts of the others as he felt them: Daisy, Thingor, Knotweave, Pluto, Warm Wings, Paneuphonium, Speaksall, Freewander, Greyhame, Ward, and Longregard. All of them, as well as many smaller ones, crashed into the black firmament at greater or lesser distances, and Dodge knew that souls in the Land, gazing up into the night sky, would tonight see a new constellation of red stars.

  The fire did not cause him pain. Yesterday it would have burned him and he would have recoiled from it. It would have unmade those parts of his form that it touched, reducing them to chaos and obliging him to make himself whole again and to shape once again the boundary that separated Dodge from not-Dodge. Today he understood that all of it—the world he had made, the form he had crafted for himself, and the cauldron of fire he had dug in the hard black firmament—were all figments.

  In truth he had long suspected as much. Indeed it was self-evident from the manner in which he had been able to summon forth all of these appearances from his own mind. But those appearances had given him comfort and pleasure and the society of others, and so he had not looked too deeply or thought with very much penetration about the nature of things. From El now he had learned a lesson he dared not forget. To treat of appearances as if they were real was to make himself foolish and weak in the grip of one such as El who knew and was the master of the powers upon which those appearances were founded. In token of which he paid no heed to the pain of the fire, and refused to be burned by it, and was not burned. Nor did he make any effort to douse the flames, much less to replace them with green fields and blue lakes and other such pleasing visions. For he understood now that to be seduced by those self-made pleasures was to place himself into the power of El.

  For years he might have lain there in the bowl of his crater, pondering all that he had seen in those moments when his mind had connected to El’s and the light had burned away the shadows in which the memories of his past life had for so long been secreted. But he knew that the other members of his Pantheon, and hundreds of lesser souls as well, were scattered all about him in the black shell of the firmament that he had brought into being to break their fall. They had not seen what Dodge had seen. Consequently they lacked the understanding that would give them the power to vanquish pain and to ignore the ravages of fire, cold, and chaos. For their sake Dodge therefore drew himself up and walked up out of the burning lake. His damaged wing dragged behind him, but as he went he formed it again as it ought to be, so that by the time he stepped up onto the black rim of the crater it was whole again. In the absence of air his wings had no power of bearing him up and so he caused there to be air. Where there was air there was now sound: the crackle of the flames, the thunder of boulders and the chatter of smaller stones cascading from high places to low, and the cries of nearby souls bewailing their pain and their desolation. Dodge spread his wings and flew into the air that he had spread over the Firmament, taking the measure of the place, beating its bounds and counting the larger and smaller craters where various souls had crashed into its surface. He thought it not much smaller than the Land, which hovered in the sky above, blue and green and white, and now of a size that he could hide it behind his outstretched hand. Likewise the souls in the Land, gazing into their night sky, must now see a constellation of the same size. So he guessed it would be for a long time to come. Not wishing to be seen in this estate, he drew across the Firmament a veil of smoke and chaos to confuse any light such as might escape from it. Then he took stock of all that lay beneath that pall: his new domain. The Firmament had been a smooth sweep of rock, like a potshard, until Dodge and the others had reshaped it into a field of craters. Now it had greater variety of form, though not so much as the Land.

  Dodge’s first impulse was to better this place as he had done with the Land: to raise up a high place and build upon it a fair Palace in which to dwell and take his pleasure. But remembering the lesson he had just learned, he chose otherwise, and took the Firmament just as it was. Air had given the place a sort of weather, driven by the heat of the fires that burned in the craters, and from place to place whirlwinds formed, some smaller and some larger. Several merged to make a great one that towered high above the place, lit from below by the fires of several craters. Dodge deemed this as good a place as any to convene all of the souls who had been flung hither by El, and so he flew from one end of the Firmament to the other, urging all to go there. Their forms had all been more or less damaged, and none of them possessed the understanding given to Dodge concerning figments and appearances. So they were all crippled, and changed beyond recognition, and their movement toward the whirlwind was not swift. But Dodge abided there patiently until all of them had arrived, and gathered around him.

  “Hail Egdod, who has passed through the fire unscathed!” cried one of them, whom he recognized, with some difficulty, as Ward.

  “Here, I am Dodge,” Dodge proclaimed. “You too are deserving of a new name to go with your altered form and your new dwelling place. I shall know you henceforth as War, for that is likely to be your business.”

  Confused mutterings were spreading outward among the various souls still straggling in. “Egdod was but a fancy of mine,” Dodge explained to them, making his voice louder so that it could be heard by all. “It was a fiction created for amusement. An appearance built upon something of a different nature altogether.” He knew that to describe Egdod as a character in a video game would mean nothing to these who had not seen into their memories as profoundly as Dodge had done when the light of El had pierced him. “In the place whence we all came, such amusements were commonplace, and at times very nearly took on the attributes of reality. Those who partook in them were called gamers, and saw those figments and appearances as if they truly existed. They created imaginary selves, with faces and forms and powers, which journeyed and fought and adventured. But when one of those figments was struck down by the sword of a foe, behold, the gamer was not in any way injured, save in his self-pride. All that was true of gamers and their imagined selves is true of you as well. It is not that I passed through the fire unscathed. All of you were at the Feast. All of you saw my wing crushed by a stone and my body gripped helplessly in the fist of El. Now my wings are whole and I fly freely because I have shed the false form that was Egdod, and with it both the pleasures and the pains to which it was, by its very nature, susceptible.”

  “Might we acquire the power of doing likewise, O Dodge?” asked a melted and misshapen creature whom Dodge recognized, by the tone of her voice, as Warm Wings.

  “Nothing prevents it save your own attachment to the appearances and figments of which that place is made,” said Dodge, extending his hand upward to draw their gaze toward the Land.

  “That is hard news for me,” said Warm Wings.

  “You above all others, Love,” Dodge agreed, “who so reveled in the pleasures of the body. I do not say that we can never enjoy such things again. Only that we must accept pain with pleasure, and that never again will we perceive any of it in the simple and childlike way of before.”

  He then paused. This word “childlike” had come to him naturally as a thing he knew of from his living memories. But it had never been uttered before by him or any other soul of the Land, for there had been no children. And this struck him now with force because he knew that Spring was gestating new souls, which she should soon bring into the world. And he knew that when they sprang forth, they would do so as children, with a simple understanding of matters, and with no memories of past lives to shape—or to misshape—their thinking.

  Dodge resolved that he must return to the Land to free Spring from her
imprisonment and to make himself known to the new souls that she was bringing to life. For those would come into existence with no innate knowledge of their father and grow up as wards of El.

  He made many attempts to go back to the Land. In each case he was thwarted, not only by the vigilant angels, but by the wards and spells that El had cast up as invisible barriers to Dodge and all of the others who had been cast out.

  Sometimes Dodge went alone, cloaked in stealth. Sometimes he ventured forth with a small group. Three times, as the centuries passed, he went at the head of an army, armed and armored with new creations from the great forges that Thingor had built upon the burning craters of the Firmament.

  Hurled back time and again in defeat, he and his comrades in arms were seen by upraised eyes in the Land as shooting stars in the night sky. Each time their trajectories ended in fresh craters pocked in the black surface of the Firmament.

  On one of his solitary forays, he penetrated so close to the Palace that he could see its inhabitants feasting on the fruit of its trees; but then El himself rose up in wrath and hurled him back with such violence that he shattered the Firmament itself and broke partway through to the other side, beyond which was all chaos ranging to infinity. War had seen Dodge coming on like a comet and summoned the others of the Pantheon to pull Dodge out of the shattered hole. On its brink Dodge reposed for a time, resting and recovering his strength. Knotweave suggested that they all return to the dark castle they had been building nearby out of the ejecta from many craters, for some rude comforts were to be had within its walls. But Dodge, still recovering the power of speech, held up one hand to stay them. His gaze was fixed not up at the Land, but down into the chaos-filled pit that he had dug with the force of his impact. Or perhaps it was more correct to say that El had dug it by hurling Dodge with such violence.