Fall; or, Dodge in Hell

by Neal Stephenson

  Adam was still looking on in amazement, trying to make sense of the intense new sensations running up his arm into his mind, when Mab dove straight toward the wolf’s forehead, blazing with such brilliance that both Adam and the wolf were blinded for a moment. The wolf’s jaws were no longer gripping his hand, but the unpleasant sensation was still there. He lifted his hand to his face to rub his eyes and felt a wet hot liquid. Eve was tugging sharply on his other arm, pulling him to his feet. “We must get away!” she cried. “They are coming for us!”

  They ran. Behind them, alongside them, and even ahead of them ran wolves, pursuing them across the grassland. Mab was everywhere, sometimes pulling sharply upward, the better to illuminate the way ahead and to spy upon the movements of the wolves, other times diving this way or that to rush into the face of a wolf that had ventured in to nip at Adam’s or Eve’s pounding legs. Behind and around them they could hear the snap of jaws as a beast would rear up to bite the onrushing sprite out of the air, and a whir of wings as Mab dodged the flashing fangs. For all the distraction that Mab provided, it seemed impossible that they would reach the hill before their legs gave out and the wolves took them down. Even were they to reach it, the wolves could climb it as easily as they could.

  A heavy thud reverberated through the ground. Then there was another, and another, the pace gradually quickening. Mab, during a brief respite between the attacks of the wolves, swooped up to cast light on the way ahead of them. This ought to have been a featureless sea of grass. But instead there was the hill, so close to them that Mab faltered and recoiled from it. The hill was in the wrong place; it was much steeper than when they had left it; and it was moving.

  Mab could not cast enough light to illuminate the whole thing at once, and in any case the impressions of Adam and Eve were confused and fragmentary. But they saw giant stout stumps projecting from its bottom, like legs fashioned from piles of boulders glued together and lubricated by mud, and a midsection that looked like the hill they remembered, and the great tree at the top, looking like a head of stiff hair. The legs took turns moving in a sort of gait that had as much in common with mudslides and avalanches as it did with walking. The thuds they had felt coming up out of the ground were its footfalls. It would have given them pause, had they not been pursued by worse. The wolves faltered and the tone of their voices changed. “Run to it as fast as you can!” Mab urged them. “Whatever the hill-giant does to you cannot be as bad as what these wolves have in mind.”

  Adam and Eve put their remaining strength into a last sprint. The hill settled, planting both of its bouldery legs, which collapsed into rock piles that were in the next instant covered and enshrouded by the green skirts of its slopes. Adam was losing his strength but Eve darted ahead and found a way up, and he followed her, just pulling his foot clear of the foremost wolf’s jaws, which snapped harmlessly in the air.

  Looking back down at that beast, and the other members of the pack who soon joined him, they had the impression that the animals were slipping down and away from them. They understood that the hill was still reshaping itself, stretching upward to form a vertical cliff all the way around, just a little too high for the wolves to jump to its top. Branches crackled, and a bramble wove at the cliff’s edge, forming a living parapet. Then all became still, and the hill was as it had been before, except in a different place, and with a different shape.

  Daybreak found them camped on the summit of the hill at the base of the great tree. Looking west they could see the paths that they had trampled into the grass during their headlong retreat. Intertwined with this were the arcs made by the wolves as they had pursued, curving inward from time to time to attack, then veering away as Mab had swooped down to dazzle them. To the east, they could see the trail that the hill-giant had made as it had strode toward them, scattering wet black earth and stray boulders and leaving craters where it had planted its legs.

  The feet of Adam and Eve were bleeding from many small cuts. Their legs had been nipped by fangs and scratched by branches. But the largest and bloodiest wound was that on Adam’s hand. They had never seen blood before and so watched it leak from him in fascination.

  From time to time Eve would stand and make a circuit of the hilltop, looking down the slope in all directions to the grass sea below. A few wolves lingered around the base of the hill, looking up at her in a way that she now understood was indicative of hunger, and a tendency to see her as food. But none of them could breach the defenses with which the hill had surrounded itself.

  Adam for his part was content to lie in the shade of the tree watching the blood run out of his hand. The flow lessened as the morning wore on, but he had become pale and listless. “So many new fluids escaping my body,” he remarked, which was a puzzlement to Eve since she knew only of the blood. “If bodies are like other things, then what has been lost must needs be replaced if I am not to be diminished.”

  “In the Garden we saw bugs eating the stuff of plants, and birds eating bugs,” Eve said. “The worm ate an apple, and recommended it. And the wolves seem to have eating us in mind.”

  “O Spring!” Adam moaned. “Why would you make your creatures thus? Having such appetites?” And his gaze strayed to the thighs and buttocks of Eve as she squatted on her haunches next to him.

  Eve shrugged. “It is apparently the way of things. If we survive long enough to find Spring, perhaps we can put the question to her.”

  “At least we understand, now, the curious word that the angel used,” Adam said. “‘Hazard.’”

  “We need to find a way through those hazards between us and the far side of those hills,” Eve said, “where perhaps there are more souls like us who have devised some way of not being eaten. Your diminishment is of no help to us in that. You have no recourse but to eat something.” She looked up into the canopy of the tree. “Unfortunately this one does not bear apples, for some reason.”

  Mab flitted up into the tree’s branches. A minute later, a small brown object fell to the ground near them. Its size, shape, and wrinkled surface recalled what hung below Adam’s penis. “A nut,” Mab said. “I have access to the knowledge that it might be edible. First you have to crack it though.”

  Eve worked out a means of doing so between two rocks, and Adam ate food for the first time. Shortly nuts were raining out of the tree as Eve clambered and Mab flew through its branches. Adam, regaining some vigor, pounded away with the rocks. Later, at Mab’s suggestion they descended into the belt of shrubs that the hill had drawn around itself to keep out the wolves, and found berries. The leaves of certain small plants also were edible, and so, by evening, Adam and Eve were able to sit atop the hill and know the new sensation of food in their mouths, and to feel their insides coming awake.

  The night was colder, or perhaps having eaten changed them so that they felt it more. Mab caused flame to spring forth from a little heap of dried leaves and twigs, and they learned that fire too was hungry and could be fed—in this case, with branches that had fallen from the tree. That and the heat of their own bodies kept them warm through the night, provided they remained pressed snugly together. Which was a thing they were naturally inclined to in any case. Once again Adam’s penis spilled forth the white stuff, but this time Eve was awake to see it and to observe the effect that it had on him. Remembering what the worm had told them about how the organs of pleasure could be put together, they soon found parts of Eve’s body that could serve her likewise. Adam was nearly as pleased by this as she was, since he had worried that she would be unwilling to provide him with the pleasure he now always sought unless there was something for her in return.

  In the morning they discovered shit, and immediately formed the habit of doing it as far away as possible from their camp, even if that meant descending the hill and doing it in the grassland where wolves might still be about. But they had to go down there anyway, for along with their other hungers they now thirsted after water. And Mab had pointed out that water flowed downhill, and told them in which
direction they must walk in order to find its nearest source.

  In addition to eating, shitting, and pissing, Eve took up the startling habit of bleeding every so often from a place adjacent to her organs of pleasure. Her hunger, and that of Adam, seemed to mount a little every day. Adam fell into the habit of gazing down upon the rabbits that ran through the grass below, in much the same frame of mind as wolves had once looked up at Adam and Eve. One day, finding a scarcity of nuts and berries, he went down there and did not come back until he had a dead rabbit on a pointed stick. “It came into my mind that we too could be hazards,” he explained.

  The day after that he got two more, for disappointingly little of the first one had turned out to be edible. It became necessary to get more and more of them and to range farther from the base of the hill in order to find ones that had not been killed or scared away. The uneaten bits of them began to clutter their hilltop camp and to make a stink not much preferable to that of shit. Mab, consulting the mysterious reservoirs of data to which she somehow had access, provided them with instructions on how those by-leavings might be put to use, and so they began to acquire such things as needles of bone and threads of sinew. They went about clad in skins and feathers of various creatures that Adam in his never-ending quest for satiety had brought back up out of the grassland.

  The hill embodied a soul, which they could only assume had dwelled in it since the dawn of the First Age. It had chosen to save Adam and Eve from the wolves. It had then gone still and silent. It did not seem to have either the faculty of speech or the desire to communicate with them. Mab tried many times to reach into it with her aura but found nothing there. Or rather found a soul whose organization was so different from theirs as to render communication impossible.

  A few months later, without warning or explanation, it stood up again and walked for a little while and then slumped to the ground in a new location, closer to the river valley and the range of hills. Between the lack of food and the change in location, it seemed that the hill might be letting them know that they had worn out their welcome. The tree was denuded of nuts, the hill of berries and greens. Wood to feed the fire had to be dragged from trees along the rim of the river valley. They encountered wolves, and creatures of other kinds that were unmistakably hazards.

  Eve stopped her occasional bleeding as abruptly as it had started, and with as little explanation. Her belly grew. Mab advised them that their need for food, shelter, and clothing would soon exceed what could be supplied from here. But they did not bid farewell to that hospitable hill until the leaves of the great nut tree had turned red and begun to detach themselves and fall to the ground. Without discussion, both Adam and Eve knew this to be a signal to which they must respond. So one morning they gathered up the things they had made and lashed them to tree branches with ropes of twisted grass. They set off into the west, dragging their possessions behind them. Mindful now of the hazards, they made quick progress down into the valley and forded the river at midday, then climbed as high as they could into the range of hills on the other side before the shadows of afternoon grew long. Then they picked out a tree suitable for climbing, and kindled a fire near the base of it, and stoked it well with fallen branches before climbing up into its boughs and making themselves as comfortable as they could for the night. Wolves howled and came close enough that the light of the fire could be seen gleaming in their eyes, but when morning came Mab reported that none was nearby.

  They climbed down out of the tree and spent the rest of that day ascending the hills, suffering from thirst and hunger, avoiding wild beasts, and finding springs and berry bushes only through the assistance of Mab. On the other side of each hill was another hill, which grew disheartening. But at dusk Mab led them up a gorge between steep walls of rock and they emerged on a shelf, surrounded by forest but bare of trees, from which they could look up to the brow of the highest hill yet. On its top was a white building that in some respects put them in mind of the Palace, though it was incomparably smaller and meaner. As they climbed toward it, following a path that had obviously been made by other souls, they were able to look back the way they had come and see the upper part of El’s pinnacle, rising far in the distance from the center of the Land. Atop it, the Palace of El seemed to be gazing right back at them.

  Presently they attained the ridgeline that led up to the white building. Thence they looked down into the red fires and smoky air of a city spread out below.

  44

  During the fifteen years following her daughter’s ascension into the simulated world of the dead, Zula spent much time wondering about what, if anything, she was doing there. But as time went on she grew accustomed to the mystery. Her mind filed it away and only hauled it out to contemplate it on rare occasions. She spent some time thinking about it, for example, while lying in a street gutter one October morning with wrecked knees.

  While stepping off a curb during her walk to work, she’d felt a sharp pain in her leg and heard a pop. As that leg had collapsed, she had tried to break her fall by planting the other leg, which had produced another pop, another lance of pain, and a full-body collapse into the gutter. It had rained the night before, the first really serious rain of the fall, and so she found herself sharing the gutter with a curiously Seattle medley of damp leaves, discarded coffee cups, and one used hypodermic syringe. A raven flew down out of a fir to see if she was edible yet. The only explanation she could think of was that some asshole had shot her a couple of times and then run away. But there were no holes, no bleeding.

  Nothing happened for an amazingly long time. It was a mixed neighborhood of high-density housing and commercial buildings on the slope that joined the base of Capitol Hill to the shores of Lake Union. It ought to have been bustling. In a sense it was; cars whooshed by every few seconds, swinging wide to avoid the vaguely human-shaped blob that their infrared cameras had noticed in the gutter. In no time all of the cars had let each other know about said blob and rerouted traffic to mitigate the risk. The humans inside of them were, of course, otherwise occupied and so never looked up. The people in the apartment buildings, offices, and cafés were likewise paying no notice to goings-on in the gutter. Zula was left alone to ponder existential topics.

  The tragedy—and the entire point—of being a parent was the moment when the story stopped being about you. It was prefigured and foreshadowed in the tear-jerking moments that parents captured in snapshots, and that advertisers looted for use in commercials: baby’s first steps, day one at kindergarten, riding a bicycle, soloing behind the wheel of a car. Zula and Csongor had been through all of those with Sophia, and had taken pictures and shed tears like everyone else. But the one that had really struck home had been when Sophia had gone off to college and blithely not communicated with them at all for three weeks. No text messages, no tweets, no phone calls: just a silence that might as well have been that of the grave. It wasn’t that she didn’t remember and love the family she had left behind. What she was doing at college was so fascinating that it simply didn’t occur to her to phone home. Csongor had suffered it in silence. Zula had reached out to her fellow bereaved: the mothers of Sophia’s school friends and soccer teammates. Some of them were still hearing from their kids several times a day, and tracking them on social media, but others were feeling what Zula felt: the sense of having been left behind, as if you were a character in a movie who gets run over by a bus at the end of the first reel, clearing the way for a younger, more charismatic star to act out the main story.

  Losing your child was the opposite of that. A perverse twist in the story, where the wrong person gets hit by that bus, leaving behind, alone on the stage, survivors who never expected and never wanted to be in the spotlight. It wasn’t the worst thing about losing your child, of course, but it was a part of the dismal picture.

  A decade and a half after Sophia’s death, the tears still came to Zula at the strangest moments. In many ways, the consequences to her and Csongor, and to their relationship, had been typical.
They had gone for a week, then a month, then a year without having sex. Csongor had moved out of the condo, unable to bear its associations with the daughter they’d raised there, and Zula had become almost a recluse inside of it. After two years they had gone through the formality of a divorce. They didn’t hate each other. They didn’t not love each other. But the entire basis of the marriage seemed to have been erased.

  As years had gone by, however, Zula’s grief had come less frequently. More often she had felt emotions akin to those that had vexed her so when Sophia had gone away to college. For they had, of course, scanned Sophia’s remains when they’d pulled her out of the water. She hadn’t been dead that long, and the brain had been well preserved by the cold. A new process had been launched, in accordance with detailed and unprecedented instructions that Sophia had left behind in a last will and testament that she had gone to a lot of trouble to prepare in the weeks before her death. Corvallis Kawasaki had been the executor of that will and he had seen to it that everything was done.

  The resulting process had, from time to time, interacted with the granddaddy of all processes—the one that Sophia herself had launched out of Dodge’s Brain—until the latter had mysteriously ceased functioning. Around the same time, observers in Meatspace had begun to lose visibility into Bitworld. Until then, the whole Landform had been an open book, containing nothing that was hidden from the all-seeing eye of the Landform Visualization Utility. But the new place that had been established by Dodge, Sophia, and the Pantheon—Landform Prime or Landform 2, as some called it—was obfuscated by some kind of trickery. “Obnubilated,” according to Enoch Root—a word that had forced everyone to go to their dictionaries. It meant “hidden under clouds.”

  Sophia had coinvented the Landform Visualization Utility and so it seemed most unlikely that this was a mere coincidence.