Нил Стивенсон - Fall; or, Dodge in Hell

Those days were over, and had been for a long time. Modern vehicles were as likely to move about on legs as wheels, so no one really cared about bumps in pavement. Modern utilities ran underground. Even had those things not been the case, the tax base wasn’t there to support all those arborists and pavers. So the trees—all of them deciduous imports from the East Coast or Europe—had been doing as they pleased for decades. And what pleased them was apparently getting drunk on sky-high levels of atmospheric CO 2and flinging out roots and limbs as wide as they possibly could. Capitol Hill was becoming a forest straight out of Northern European high-fantasy literature. The fog was now becoming tinged with pink and gold light as the rising sun shone on it, and the boughs of the trees cast shadows through that.

They reached her neighborhood, where the trees were hugest, and linked by nearly as ancient hedges of laurel and holly. A soft glow pervaded everything and tinged solid objects with iridescence. Beyond that, there was nothing. No sky, no neighboring houses, no trees, no mountains. The fog had clamped it all off. It muffled sound too. Not that there was much of that in a half-abandoned city where vehicles were a thing of the past. She and Enoch were existing in a bubble of space maybe a hundred paces across. Beyond it, as she knew perfectly well, was a whole world. But one of the delicious qualia that emerged from certain kinds of weather—snowfall was another of them—was the childish illusion that the world really was small and simple enough to be comprehended within a glance. And that she, the one doing the glancing, was always at its center.

She wondered if it had been thus for Dodge in the beginning, when he had been alone in Bitworld and the Landform had begun to take shape around him.

“This is where I leave you,” said the voice of Enoch.

“Where on earth are you going?” Zula asked, looking about for him. But she had lost him in the radiant fog.

His voice was clear, though. It was the only sound in the world.

“I’m not entirely sure,” he admitted. “But I’m done here . I did what I was sent to do.”

The golden light grew until it was all she could see, and his voice was heard no more.

Dodge became conscious.

He had slept well despite dreaming long elaborate dreams about the other plane of existence. The sun had awakened him, rising above the rim of the distant Land and flooding the Firmament with light.

He had slept, as he did most nights, on the open lid of a tower that rose high above the streets of the city. For many years the lid had been an open and featureless disk of stone, but more recently he had raised a ring of pillars around its edge, and between the pillars Spring had caused vines to grow and interweave to make a low barrier. It came only to midthigh on Dodge, but it was high enough to prevent a little soul from toppling over the edge.

Spring had not slept with him last night, though. When Dodge got to his feet and strolled over to the western side of his tower he could look across several miles of city to the park. For long ages that had been a mound of rubble that the souls of the Firmament had carried there, one back-load at a time, and piled up as they had patiently excavated and reshaped the cratered landscape where they had come to rest on the day of the Fall. Thus they had built the city with its black streets lit by fire. But the rubble pile had not become a park until Spring had gone to it and begun to adorn it with her creations.

He spread his wings and beat up into the air. His destination would be the park, but, as was his habit, he took a brief excursion around the city first. Its buildings tended to be of regular shapes with straight sides and edges, framed of stone and faced with glass to afford views and admit light. But they were built along streets that since the beginning of the Second Age had veered round diverse hazards and obstructions. Most prominent of all such was the crater that Egdod had made when he had smashed into the Firmament and broken it. This was now a circular pond of chaos round whose shores many buildings had been erected out of the ring of rubble that had once surrounded it. Dodge flew over that, as he always did, and gazed down into it. In its depths he saw the Fastness. He could tell at a glance that all was well there. In its towers and courtyards would be many souls whose work it was to look after those realms of the Land where Egdod held sway. No doubt many of them would have news to relate and questions to ask. But there was nothing that required his attention this morning.

Satisfied of that, he banked round over the district between the crater and the park. In the midst of that, a new building had gone up of late. Pick’s Cube, they called it. It was sheathed in adamant and styled after the Cube from which the members of the Quest had retrieved the key. They had named it after the soul who had fallen just short of that goal. On its roof, well back from the edges so that it could not be seen from the streets, was a perch surrounded by bones, and on the perch was a giant talking raven.

Though it was early in the day, Dodge could see Querc approaching its front door. She divided her time between Land and Firmament. While she was here, she worked in Pick’s Cube with Thingor and Corvus and Knotweave and other curious souls who were skilled at plumbing the deep nature of things. They strove to divine the hidden secrets of the other plane of existence and to fashion ever tinier and more sophisticated machines.

Spring could force a tree to grow tall in an hour if that was what she wanted, but she preferred to let them take their time. Only a few years had passed since the Fastness had been unchained. She had begun coming here to look after the park, and so most of what grew here was flowers and vines and grasses. In one place Dodge had caused stone arches to curve out of the rubble and enclose a little place where he had set an adamant bench and a low table. Spring had made flowering vines grow exuberantly on the arches, covering the stone altogether to make a vaulted bower of blossoms just now opening their petals and turning toward the sun.

The girl was waiting on the bench just as she did every morning. She was paging quietly through one of the picture books strewn about the table. Egdod sat next to her. “You’ve lost our place!” he exclaimed in mock dismay. “How are we going to pick up the story now?”

Sophia knew perfectly well that her uncle was only teasing her. “We were almost at the end!” she chided him. “I went back to look at the picture of the lady with the yellow hair. In the white temple. She’s pretty! But mean. She was cruel to poor Prim.”

“Yes, she was.”

“I wish she was dead!”

“You should never, ” Dodge said, “wish that of anyone. Just imagine: what if your wish came true?”

But Sophia had already lost interest in the picture of the lady with the yellow hair and paged forward to very near the end of the book. “We were here,” she said, showing him a two-page illustration crowded with small figures. It was a map of the Land, drawn in a childlike style with oversized buildings and other features here and there: the Palace in the middle atop its Pinnacle, the Fastness to its north amid snow-covered mountains, cities along the western coast, and various castles and legendary beasts scattered among the Bits and in the ocean beyond.

“Right!” Dodge said. “Where were we?”

Sophia reminded him by putting her fingertip on a depiction of a boat sailing in the western ocean. Aboard was a dark-skinned woman, decorated with jewels and markings on her skin.

“Fern had finally seen what she had been searching for ever since the sea monster had taken her family when she was a little girl,” Dodge said. “Having seen it, she was satisfied, and wanted only to live a seafaring life. And since her new friends the Bufrects were famous mariners, she went with Mard and Lyne to Calla, and there built a boat and called it Swab .”