Fall; or, Dodge in Hell

by Neal Stephenson

  It now seemed for a little while that the world consisted entirely of noise. She had heard many loud noises of late, what with all of the Evertempest’s thunder and the clamorous boulder duel between El and the Chasmian. Those were but clicks and whispers compared to the sound that came now from the direction of the Fastness. It was so loud that it startled El, and the rider across the gorge, and her Lightning Bears. Prim, before her vision dissolved into chaos, had at least the satisfaction of seeing El turn around, and astonishment come over him. It was such a distinct reaction that she had to turn her head and see what he was seeing: the Fastness unbound, its iron dome rocking from side to side where it had been shrugged off, and chains and hasps still avalanching down all round it. Perched on the top of the castle was a figure nearly as great as the Chasmian, but of human form.

  Or so it seemed until it spread its wings.

  Egdod saw at once that the tempest he had laid over the Knot in ancient times had served its purpose and was no longer of use to him, and so with a wave of his hand he stilled it. In the calm air that followed he spread his wings and took flight, but glided only a short distance to the top of the stone anvil, where Sophia lay dying. He took her dissolving form up into his arms as a mother takes up a baby, and gathered her into his chest.

  “Once again our time together is all too brief,” said Sophia to Egdod, though she had lost the power of forming words and could only speak through the connection of their auras.

  “The sweeter for that,” Egdod returned. “Know that your sacrifice was not in vain. The Quest is complete.”

  “Edda will need rest,” she said, her aura growing very faint.

  “She has come to a good place for resting,” said Egdod, “as have you.”

  Then the thread of her life was severed.

  The sun had now erupted through the broken wall of clouds. It was not the only source of light. El had stood astonished for some while at the sight of the lock opened, the Fastness unbound, and Egdod free in the Land. Now he forsook the form of an ordinary soul walking. He rose into the air and made himself as large as Egdod, that the two of them might converse as beings of equal stature. He grew as well in brilliance, shining with a golden light as that of the sun. Egdod for his part seemed content with the form he had taken at the time of the Fall, which was as dark as the Firmament into which he and the other members of the Pantheon had been projected. For some while neither he nor El spoke. Both were marshaling their forces. Behind El, opposing sides of the Chasm had gone into movement, thickening and bending toward each other. When those two sides touched they would form an arch a hundred times broader than the old bridge. Waiting on its opposite side were Spring upon her mount, and her escort of bears; and behind them marching in a long file down the Shifting Path were legions of Dug she had summoned to arms.

  Seeing this El laughed in Egdod’s face. “Shall you and I trifle further about the bridge? You can build it up and I can throw it down for the next thousand years.”

  Egdod responded, “I am taking no action in the matter. The changes you see are the work of another who has an interest in such things.” And he looked back toward the Fastness. Atop its highest tower a hooded figure stood, extending his arms and sending forth his power. Besides Pluto, others could be seen now too: Love below on the steps, tending to Edda, who lay spent next to the open lock. Freewander darting high and Thingor limping along the battlements, directing the work of other souls who seemed to be emerging in force from the depths of it, and War marshaling formations of armed and armored souls pouring forth out of chaos from the Firmament, moving in synchrony with wild musics emanating from Pan and an orchestra of music-making souls that Pan had drawn up along a high parapet.

  “It is of no account whether your hand or Pluto’s shapes the bridge,” El said. “Even when I walked over the Stormland in the guise of an ordinary soul, alone and unarmed, I swept away Dug like so many insects, and the worst assaults of the Lightning Bears were mere diversions to me. The Chasmian that Spring made to greet me at your front door was a greater foe, I will admit; but it lies broken at the bottom of yonder gorge, and when it climbs out I shall break it again. Only Sophia had power against me; and I can see that she is no more.”

  Egdod held out his right hand. Cupped in it was a tiny knot of aura. “That is saying too much,” he answered.

  “We may also trifle over words,” said El, “but to put it plainly, your plan has failed.”

  “My plan,” said Egdod, “is still unfolding. Pent up for so long in the Fastness, I have learned patience. It is a faculty you have lost, ruling the Land from your high Palace where all things come quickly, and you confuse delay with failure.”

  Their sparring lapsed for some time as many things were happening all round. Above the glacier opposite, a giant raven could be seen wheeling over the vanguard of the Dug army, showing them the way. The farther they advanced, the broader their front became, as they found that the narrow path had swelled to a broad road. Pluto was healing the cracked glacier beneath their feet, mending the crevasses that since ancient times had always threatened to swallow unwary travelers. Their swiftest scouts were even now reaching the bridgehead. This was developing a green tinge as plants of various kinds erupted from what had long been barren ground. The two sides of the Chasm had extended to where they nearly touched above the center of the gorge. Vines and roots had already reached across the gap.

  But El had legions of his own. His angels, long held at bay by the Evertempest, must have issued forth from the Palace at the moment the key had entered the lock and undone the gate of the Fastness. On swift wings they had covered the distance from Pinnacle to Knot as Sophia had expired and Pluto had reshaped the Land and Thingor had begun his works upon the battlements. Now they were beginning to appear, in ones and twos and soon enough in echelons, in the clear sky above. Their bright swords they kept sheathed for now. The only unsheathed weapon in the whole scene was in the hand of winged War, who had emerged from the Fastness after Egdod, and drawn Burr’s angel sword out of the earth where it had stuck. He looked a match for any ten angels. But above were already more than ten, and soon there would be hundreds.

  Horns were blowing and hooves beating the earth to the north and west. A battle flag appeared over the crest of a ridge on the other side of the Chasm. Next came a row of lances whose sharp edges gleamed in the light of the sun. It was a regiment of Autochthon cavalry on their mounts, and at its head was a woman whose long yellow hair streamed like a pennant from beneath her bright helm: Sooth of El. They must have been summoned days ago through the weird emanations of the Hive, and ridden to this place.

  In this way did the armies of El converge toward the Fastness, and it had to be admitted that in their speed, their number, and their beauty they made the opposition seem feeble and disarrayed. It was only the towering form of Egdod himself, standing upon the stone anvil with the tiny ball of aura cupped in his hand, that could give any hope whatever to those who rejoiced at his return.

  The hoofbeats of a solitary mount traversed the Anvil Plain from the direction of the bridge. War flourished his sword in salute and bowed low to Spring as she galloped past him. Egdod gazed down on her approach with a face that showed sorrow and joy. But knowing that the eyes of El and many others were upon him he spoke brusquely, and not to Spring but to Freewander, who was dipping and wheeling about him: “Show her where to form up.”

  And so for a time the Anvil Plain was alive with preparations for battle as Freewander led Spring to a position where the advance of the Autochthons could be blocked, or at least slowed, should it come to a clash of arms. The Lightning Bears followed her and the Dug followed them. Behind the old rampart they formed up, facing north toward the bridge. War strode to and fro along their lines mustering them into battle array. The blasts of Pan’s trumpets brought order; the booming of Pan’s war drums made their blood boil.

  “None of this matters,” said El. “You can make whatever preparations you please on the grou
nd. The air is filled with my angels.”

  Sooth’s cavalry came in force over the bridge to the Anvil Plain. They arrayed themselves facing the Dug. Spring was amusing herself by causing thick sweet grass to grow in the place between, and Sooth’s mounts, seeing and smelling it, were causing no end of trouble for their riders. They must have been galloping for days from Secondel and they must have been ravenous.

  “Summon your angels to war then,” said El, and suddenly beat his wings and launched himself into the air. A few angels who had made bold to swoop low got well clear of him. He flew back to the Fastness and landed upon a high battlement from which he could see all and all could see him. Below, the gate boomed shut. Edda and the other members of the Quest had been made guests within.

  Defender of El led the charge, an echelon of warrior angels behind him. They wheeled down out of the blue sky in a wedge and came straight for Egdod.

  “Fire,” said Egdod.

  And there was fire: bolts of it stabbing from the tops of the Fastness’s walls and from embrasures farther down. It came from dark tubes of metal, each of which had a crew of souls to feed it, and as soon as all of them had been discharged, they set to work preparing them to fire again.

  All of which was a detail little noticed since Defender of El and many of his angels had fallen to the ground and were lying dead or broken on the plain between the anvil and the Fastness.

  Another rank of angels wheeled into position above, ready to renew the attack. Defender of El lay dead. All eyes turned to El, who hovered a little distance above the ground at the opposite end of the battlefield, near the wide bridge already carpeted in green and growing things.

  “At your command, Lord El!” shouted an angel who seemed to have assumed command.

  The same words were echoed a moment later by Sooth below. She had raised her sword as if to signal a charge.

  El hesitated.

  The ground was shaking, but El did not know it because his feet were not in contact with the Land.

  The Chasmian vaulted out of the gorge behind him. No longer impeded by its massive shield, it lashed out with both arms and wrapped them around El’s form from behind. In an effort to escape the bear hug, El became mostly a thing of aura. The two forms became intermingled as they struggled and writhed at the brink; then, with the slowness of a great tree that has been cut through at the root, they toppled into the Chasm and disappeared.

  “Hold your fire,” Egdod commanded, and took to the air again, flying in a broad circuit over the battlefield. Which was now merely a field, since it was suddenly clear to all present that no battle would be taking place on the Anvil Plain this day. To Sooth he spoke: “Your task has been accomplished. Not the one El had in mind for you, which was false. But the one I ordained, which was to see what you just saw. You may complete it by grazing your mounts on the sweet grass and then riding home to tell everyone you see—Autochthons, Beedles, Sprung, and wild souls of all shapes—what has here occurred.”

  He then beat his wings powerfully and mounted up into the air, where the surviving angels were arrayed in their echelons. Many were too bright to look upon, but they dimmed when Egdod commanded them to sheathe their swords and they did so. “Your weapons were stolen from Thingor,” Egdod said. “He will collect them below. If you regret giving them up, console yourselves with the knowledge that they are useless against what Thingor has conjured up in the ages since. Go out into the Land and do useful things. One day I shall come back to my Palace to inspect it; I expect that everything will be in good order there.”

  Swooping down low over the Fastness he spoke to all within and around it: “I have business in the Firmament. Before long I shall return. You know what to do.” And pulling up high, he made a pivot in midair, folded his wings, and dove headfirst into the center of the Fastness. Those standing outside, who saw him plunge out of view and who did not know that place’s secrets, might have expected to hear a crash as he plummeted headfirst into the ground. But those within saw him fall into the chaos upon which the building had been founded.

  The door of the Fastness opened. A frail old lady emerged, supported to either side by younger souls. She tottered down the long stair, pausing more than once to rest. The ground before her was strewn with fallen angels dissolving. The stuff of which they had been made began to converge upon the old lady, and she began to gain weight and strength from it as she drew it into her form.

  55

  Zula had fallen out of the habit of watching Bitworld, because, by and large, it happened too fast to be really intelligible. She wondered if she was senile—or if she seemed that way. She had a memory of a Thanksgiving, more than a hundred years ago, when she and some of her cousins had been hanging out in the TV room of the Forthrast farmhouse in Iowa, passing the time with a video game, and she had looked up at some point to see Uncle Claude, spry and curious at eighty-three, standing in the doorway looking at the big screen perfectly aghast. It was hard to tell how long he’d been standing there trying to make sense of it all. But there was clearly a feeling that some combination of age and culture shock had shifted Uncle Claude into a lower gear than all the other people in the room, that his clock was ticking at a slower rate than everyone else’s.

  When Zula—or anyone else in Meatspace—watched Bitworld, that was, of course, literally true. The Time Slip Ratio had veered all over the place during the century that Zula had been doing this job. But in the last couple of decades, since ALISS had gone orbital, the trend had been toward greater speed. Freed from earthbound limitations on how much power could be generated, how much heat dissipated, how much fiber laid, and how many resources quarried out of the ground (for they built everything out of asteroids now), they’d kept pace with demand and then some. Consequently time in Bitworld had, on the whole, sped up. It was no longer like watching a human drama acted out in real time. More like an ant colony.

  So she had stopped looking at it. Oh, she could see it perfectly well. Presbyopia had given way to cataracts, organic lenses replaced with artificial ones. The retinas she’d been born with had been swapped out for new ones, grown in a lab, hooked up to her optic nerve by a microscopic robot surgeon. For a while, her brain’s visual cortex hadn’t known what to make of the new and improved signals coming in on that channel, and so she had had to learn how to see again—a difficult thing for one of her age, but made easier by neuroplasticity medication derived from the stuff Maeve had experimented with ages ago.

  So now Zula could see every bit as well as she had been able to when she had been seven years old. It was just that she would rather use that faculty to look at things in the real world. When gazing into the land of the dead, she felt that same bafflement, the same disconnect, as Uncle Claude.

  Uncle Claude had stood there anyway and gamely tried to bend his old mind around it because he had known that the youngsters in that room were his kin and that this stuff was important to them. Likewise Zula was aware that during recent days (as time was measured in Meatspace) momentous things had been going on in Bitworld involving the processes that had been booted up there to simulate the consciousnesses of her daughter, Sophia; her friends Corvallis and Maeve; and perhaps others as well. They had been moving around the Landform rather a lot, and interacting with one another, and Sophia had terminated a few other processes. Zula was aware that this was all being watched with great interest by the dwindling population of living humans who still existed on planet Earth.

  So she walked down to the office one lovely fall evening to see what all the fuss was about. She could walk—or run, for that matter—all day if she wanted. Of course, it was Fronk whose feet actually contacted the ground, whose joints took her weight, whose sensors and algorithms saw to it she didn’t keel over. She had been wearing Fronk for decades now and would die pretty quickly if she doffed it. She could not have walked, or even stood up, without it. She wore it to bed. It was her bed.

  South Lake Union had held its own as a place where biological humans physica
lly came together to work on things. Nowadays, mostly what they worked on was the high-level management of ALISS. Of course, the bulk of the actual work was performed by robots in space. None of those was even remotely humanoid. Their AIs were tuned to analyze space rocks and to solve conundrums relating to scheduling of tasks, logistical coordination, and resource allocation. You couldn’t talk to them, and if you could, it would have been like having a conversation with a shovel. The humans working below on the surface of Earth were just keeping an eye on things, looking way down the road, making sure that the robots could go on finding more space rocks and fashioning them into more robots until they ran out of space rocks. Then, if they needed to, they could begin busting up unused moons and planets, or go out to the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, where there were many more rocks. The end state of all this would be a Dyson sphere: a hollow shell of rock and metal that would capture all of the sun’s power, spend it in computation, and radiate the waste heat into the cosmos as dull infrared light. But it would take a long, long time to get to that point. Long enough for every human now living to die of natural causes, even if they all used as many life-extension technologies as Zula. Earth, or at least a patch of Earthlike ecosystem, would be preserved as a kind of park, and bio-humans could live on it, if that was what they were into.

  Nowadays the building looked as it had in the very beginning, when the steelworkers and the concrete pumpers had roughed in the structure but the framers had not yet shown up with studs and drywall. The floor-to-ceiling windows still looked exactly like windows, but were now actually complicated robots in their own right, making all kinds of moment-to-moment decisions about which wavelengths, and how much of them, to let in or out of the building.