Fall; or, Dodge in Hell

by Neal Stephenson

  But then he and all the others were dazzled by a flare of light, bright as the sun, as Walksfar drew the sword from its dark scabbard.

  “Before you utter another word in such a threatening tone,” said Walksfar, “I would that you consider this and recall the fate of him from whom we won it.”

  The Captain’s mount reared up on its hind legs and backed away from the sword of Thingor, and for a moment it was all he could do to bring the beast under control. When it had settled down, the Captain spoke wrathfully. “There are more where that came from,” he reminded Walksfar, “whole armories of them in the vaults of the Palace.”

  A whirring noise tore through the air and a stone smashed into the wall not far from the Captain, shattering a dry branch. All turned to see Whirr. Swinging from her hand was the sling she had just used to throw the stone, and she was already reaching into the pouch at her hip to select another. “Bring your swords from on high then,” she said to the Captain. “Down here is no lack of rocks.”

  Adam had turned round to pay heed to Whirr. He was now distracted, though, by something impossible. A slender object, red and wet, was protruding from his chest, almost to the length of his arm. Disbelieving his eyes, he reached for it with one hand, then the other, and found that it was every bit as real as the ground under his feet. Most of it was a smooth wooden pole, but at its tip was a pointed, double-edged blade of forged iron. He grasped this and its honed edges cut deeply into his palm. The pole had transfixed his body from back to front.

  He had been stabbed from behind by a spear such as the Autochthons carried to hold wolves at bay.

  He felt a powerful twisting followed by pain such as he had never known, which forced him to turn around until he was facing Captain once more. This also brought him in view of Eve. Her form seemed curiously bent out of shape and he perceived that another, smaller woman—Edger—had come up from behind her and put a blade against her throat. Eve had grabbed Edger’s wrist with both hands and was holding the weapon at bay, but Edger was gripping Eve’s hair with her free hand, and had sunk her teeth into Eve’s ear, and so they were locked in stalemate.

  This gave Adam a clue as to who was holding the spear. He turned his head to look back and confirmed that it was Bluff. The handle of the spear was long and so Bluff was too far away for Adam to reach him. Bluff himself did not deign to meet Adam’s gaze, but had eyes only for Captain. “Behold, Captain! Not all of us who live in Eltown are as disrespectful as these two!” Bluff said.

  He seemed to expect that Captain would approve of the actions that he and Edger were taking. But Captain’s face was a picture of shock and dismay.

  Adam sank to his knees and looked down to see his midsection dissolving into chaos. The spear was coming loose as his form dissolved around it. He toppled forward onto all fours and blood poured out of his mouth. Eve, still locked in struggle with Edger, moved toward him a pace.

  The light shifted as Walksfar advanced. This caught the eye of Edger, who stopped biting Eve’s ear long enough to exclaim, “Don’t come another step!” Eve took advantage of this to try to wriggle free. In the struggle she advanced closer to Adam. Adam pushed himself upright and sat back on his haunches. The spear no longer had power to control the movements of his dissolving body. His impressions were dark and confused but he saw Eve and Edger within arm’s length.

  With his last strength he drew the knife from his belt and drove it into the side of Edger’s body. Then his view of the world came apart into mere chaos.

  Edger fell from Eve’s back like a garment that has been shrugged off. Her knife fell from her hand. She lay next to Adam and the two of them came apart into chaos and were no more.

  Eve dropped to her knees and tried to gather Adam’s form back together with her hands, but it was like trying to collect smoke. The only thing that remained was his radiant knife. This she snatched up and beheld, though it stung her eyes. Then a notion of vengeance came into her mind and she looked toward Bluff.

  The murderer had dropped the spear and backed away from the menace of Walksfar’s sword, only to find himself caught between that and Thunk’s band. Eve advanced upon him, knife in hand. Captain rode forth to intercept her, but his mount pulled up short as Cairn moved into its path with a ponderous stride. The other Autochthons thought to advance, but Captain made a gesture to say that they should come no farther.

  “This valley has witnessed enough destruction for one day without your proposing more,” said Captain. “Adam is no more; Edger is no more; Bluff is disarmed and helpless, and for you to slaughter him now will in no way improve matters.”

  “He has done murder. We all saw it,” said Walksfar.

  Captain nodded. “El in his wisdom has seen the need to write laws and has appointed magistrates to enforce them. That is part of the reason for our coming to Eltown. Give Bluff over to us unharmed and we will see to it that El’s justice is done.”

  Walksfar considered it. “He is only one. What of the next Bluff, and the next one after that, who come here seeking to steal and kill?”

  Captain said, “We will make an example of Bluff that will give those others much to think about. But El has not granted me power to turn other minds aside from foolish decisions.”

  Bluff, spying a desperate chance, spun away and tried to run. Dusty was swifter, and enveloped him in a cloud of grit that blinded him. As he faltered he was struck in the back by a sling stone that dropped him to his knees. Two of the Autochthons cantered over to round him up.

  Once he was satisfied that Bluff had been made captive, Captain turned his attention back to Walksfar. “And speaking of foolish decisions . . .”

  “None of this changes our minds,” said Walksfar. “I cannot speak for all these souls. But to watch murder being done, and to hear your talk of laws and magistrates from El, only strengthens my resolve to be rid of this place.”

  Captain nodded. “We will see to it that you are left alone for a little while. After three days we will make no further efforts to protect Camp from the vengefulness of the dispossessed souls of Eltown; and then you may find that they too know about rocks.”

  Walksfar sheathed the sword, plunging the clearing back into the normal light of day, which seemed now like twilight.

  Captain issued commands to his Autochthons, who went out the gate and rode through those parts of Camp that lay outside the makeshift wall, seeing to it that the souls of Eltown left off sacking the cabins and withdrew to the river.

  Captain backed his mount toward the gate, gazing down at Eve, who stood weeping freely between Cairn and Walksfar. It was apparent in Captain’s face and in his aura that he was deep in thought. He shook his head. “This state of affairs,” he said, “could hardly be more different from how El imagined it when I met with him in the Palace only a few short weeks ago and he sent me forth with my company to bring the affairs of Camp and of Eltown under control.” He turned his head to one side and lifted his gaze to the hill-giant in the distance. “And I refer only to the terrible events just witnessed here. That creature is a surprise of a whole different order.”

  Eve had collected herself to a point where she could listen shrewdly. “Of Camp,” she repeated. “What said El of Camp, and how it was to be brought under control?”

  “That several souls dwelled in it, most of whom were willful and strange, but only two who were of any great concern to him.”

  “Adam and I,” said Eve.

  “Yes.”

  “Because of our ability to spawn more of our kind.”

  “Indeed.”

  “And what shall you say to El, when you make your report?” Eve asked.

  “That Adam is no more,” said Captain.

  “And that is all you will say?”

  “Yes,” said Captain, “but soon enough he will know the truth.” He glanced down toward Eve’s belly.

  “Then I thank you for sparing me, and for holding my secret in confidence,” said Eve.

  Captain considered it, and shru
gged. “It seems right,” he said. “It is not precisely what El wanted; but enthroned as he is in his Palace, viewing the Land from a high seat, he does not see its complexity. This Land was made wrong. All of his efforts to make it right only spread the wrongness about in new ways. It is left to souls like me to decide what to do about it; and though I cannot see all the answers, I can guess that adding more wrongness will not help matters.” And with that Captain made his mount turn around and rode out through the gate.

  Assisted by Thunk and his band, the people of Camp bent their backs taking what useful things as could be removed from the cabins and preparing them to be carried on a long journey. Two days were spent in the preparations, which only seemed to grow more complex and fall farther behind the more effort was put into them; but on the third day they all formed up, staggering under back-loads, and looked to Walksfar for some indication as to which way to start walking. “There are many places we could go,” he said, “but I believe our simplest course for now might be to walk in the footsteps of that thing.” And he pointed north toward the hill-giant, who in the last day had made a long stride westward out of the river, and seemed to have an intention of climbing up out of the valley to see what lay beyond the mountains.

  Down to the river they all went, and found it much wider than it had been yesterday, and brackish with salt from the distant sea.

  47

  Much of the time, watching Bitworld through the LVU was literally like watching grass grow. Eventually its souls might get around to inventing paint, and then spectators in Meatspace might also have the pleasure of watching it dry. And yet millions watched it anyway because there was just enough crazy to make it interesting.

  Sort of like baseball. Corvallis Kawasaki had never been a fan of that sport despite—or perhaps because of—a youthful stint in Little League and efforts on the Japanese side of his family to interest him in it. On the South Asian side they had all been cricket maniacs, and so the young Corvallis had had two vaguely similar sports to choose from, both of which were characterized by long spans of nothing happening with just enough sudden bursts of excitement to keep the fans from wandering off.

  That all came in handy during the year or so following Maeve’s death and the weird visit of the Metatron with its portentous and vaguely threatening talk of the REAP. Something was most certainly going on that involved the “Adam” and “Eve” processes. They didn’t move around much once they had settled down, but they interacted frequently with the Maeve process, and after a while they made babies. Something bizarre immediately happened involving one of Elmo Shepherd’s winged minions. There was what could only be described as an altercation between it and an old Mag 1 process that had decided to embody itself as an animated pile of rocks. Weird flows of mana had occurred. Accountants and lawyers from Zelrijk-Aalberg had taken the unusual step of flying to Seattle to yell at their counterparts in person. It was bad enough, they complained, for the “children” of Dodge and Verna to consume resources from Buildings and Grounds. It was worse yet for them to spawn more of their own kind. But now they were somehow absorbing mana directly from servers that the Zelrijk-Aalberg people had, at staggering expense, set up in orbit.

  They were cheating. Or, at least, the powers that be in Zelrijk-Aalberg felt cheated. Viewing the aftermath in the LVU, it just looked like raising babies and chopping down trees. Pointing that out did not in any way calm down the bean counters from Flanders. On the contrary, they saw it as C-plus’s willfully refusing to acknowledge facts obvious to them. They hinted that he was, at some level, smirking. This notion that C-plus was a secret smirker enraged them. Enoch Root had to be brought in to mediate.

  During those days the Time Slip Ratio had swung back and forth around approximately one, which was to say that sometimes the denizens of Bitworld appeared to move slowly and other times quickly, but they never just froze up, or dissolved into blurred streaks. On average, Bitworld time, as tallied by day/night cycles, was not far off from that in Meatspace. Fluctuations seemed to be tied not to what was happening in Bitworld—which didn’t change much—but rather to the progress of, or setbacks in, huge engineering projects being run out of Flanders, most notably a big habitat that the Zelrijk-Aalberg people were constructing in geosynchronous orbit.

  That had all stopped being true at the moment of the Grand Slam, as Corvallis thought of it.

  It was a baseball analogy. Sometimes in a baseball game a situation would gradually develop, over the course of a long, slow inning, where the bases became loaded, and the batting team was down to its last out, and the count had gone full, the manager had made a couple of trips to the mound, a replacement pitcher was warming up in the bullpen, the batter was fouling off one pitch after another, the crowd was about to piss itself—and then in a moment something happened that changed everything.

  Some such thing happened one day in Bitworld. Adam was dead. Eve was on the move, pregnant, following a member of the Ephrata Eleven that had incarnated itself as an enormous humanoid made of boulders and dirt. They were traveling across a chunk of the landform that had snapped off and was drifting out to sea, fragmenting as it went. New souls—apparently spawned from scratch, not based on scans of dead people—were issuing from El’s spire in the center of the Landform and taking up residence in strategic locations and, to all appearances, bossing around the souls that had got there in the usual way.

  It was all terrifically expensive, mana-wise. The events that triggered it—the chopping down of a tree, the awakening of a giant, the inundation of a town, the murder of “Adam,” and most of all the fission of the continent—took place over the course of a few days as experienced by the souls of Bitworld. Simulating all of that, however, ended up taking almost a year in Meatspace. Millions of spectators lost interest in the Landform Visualization Utility. Those who stuck with it had to find new sources of enjoyment, such as zooming in on individual flowers, gazing upon mountain vistas from various angles, going on virtual hikes through frozen landscapes where birds hung nearly motionless in the air.

  This intermission, if you wanted to think of it that way (in baseball terms, maybe a seventh-inning stretch), lasted for a couple of Meatspace years. During that time both SLU and Z-A were laying plans for the next phase of Bitworld’s expansion: the demographic transition from Mag 6 to Mag 8 (a million souls up to a hundred million); the bringing online, in orbit, of vast new arrays of solar power, computing systems, and thermal radiators to shine dull infrared into the cosmos. So it wasn’t a bad time anyway for an intermission. When finally the switches were thrown and the new equipment brought online, the Time Slip Ratio sprang ahead by orders of magnitude, to the point where months would fly by in Bitworld during a single day in Meatspace. Over the course of an afternoon C-plus could, if he so chose, watch bare trees wax soft and green, go red and orange with the colors of the fall, and lose their leaves.

  As such it became impossible to really track the stories of individual souls. The audience could no longer follow it like a Mexican soap opera or a Russian novel. Now the fans were all like psychohistorians, seeing history unfold in broad sweeps.

  The new race of souls that El had invented in his tower continued to issue forth in waves, and it seemed clear that El had given them the task of making things run smoothly, seeing to it that the customers—the much more numerous souls spawned from scanned biologicals—didn’t run rampant. They rarely crossed the widening channel that separated most of the Land from the chunk that had split off. This continued to fragment over time, gradually turning into a close-packed archipelago. Sooner or later most of the Mag 1–3 souls ended up there in various guises. The later children of Eve had sex with each other and made more of their kind.

  Centuries passed in Bitworld, years passed in Meatspace. C-plus felt himself undergoing a slow transition from young-old to old-old. He spent less and less time trying to track events in Bitworld, only checking in occasionally on Maeve, Verna, and a few others. Metatrons showed up occasionally to lodg
e complaints about alleged further activities of the REAP. C-plus heard them out patiently, as one did with a distant relative who has gone off his rocker and begun fulminating about the Illuminati. Dodge was here, Dodge was there, Dodge was everywhere in disguise, something had to be done about Dodge. Eventually they seemed to fix the problem and then they stopped complaining.

  He didn’t care, because he was flying.

  When he had been a child, ninety years ago, Corvallis Kawasaki had dreamed of flying. Not in a daydreamy way, but in really convincing night dreams in which he had spread his arms like wings and taken to the air above the town that was his namesake and banked and wheeled above his school playground, looking down on the other kids on their teeter-totters and jungle gyms. All of which had been just as exhilarating as you would expect.

  As with so many other things that seemed, in a child’s imagination, like they would be awesome, the reality of flight was more complicated, and how you dealt emotionally with the mismatch between the little-kid dream and the grown-up truth of the matter said a lot about you and basically kind of determined what you were going to do with your life. He had also, for a while, wanted to be a fireman, a ninja, and a private eye. But when he had come to understand what those occupations were really like, he had changed his mind. Being a Roman soldier had been fun for a while too, but past a certain age you couldn’t dig those ditches anymore.

  When Maeve had passed on, C-plus had already been an old man by some standards. He could tell as much by the way strangers treated him. Young women, no longer seeing him as a threat, were open and friendly. Other old men felt free to address him on the street as if he were a member of the same secret club.

  So when he had inherited Maeve’s flying apparatus and the somewhat disturbing stockpile of neuroactive pharmaceuticals that went with it, he might have been forgiven for junking it with the explanation that he was too old for this.