Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,158

he saw fit. So he bent his efforts to that work, sometimes spending many days in his Garden discovering new kinds of plants that had sprung up there, seemingly of their own accord. Different plants were suited to different parts of the Land. Gathering them up, he took wing and ranged far out to places that were in want of shaping and seeding. Deserts he made, populated with fragrant thorny plants that grew low to the ground. The lowlands around the central gulf were soggy in places where the ground trapped water; these he covered with reeds in some places and spreading trees in others. Mountains were best when cloaked in dark evergreens, though on their upper slopes he thought it better to grow tiny rugged plants of the same sort that he used to carpet the ground at one end of the Land that he conceived of as being the north. At the other end, which was south, different conditions prevailed and trees were larger. At every place where he imagined he might have found an end to the Land’s complexity, he instead discovered further small matters that needed sorting out.

In this he began to rely upon the help of those he had come to think of as wild souls: ones who had come to be in the Land in the same manner as those in Town, but who had been disinclined to lodge there and instead had ranged far, following rivers down toward the ocean or soaring on the high strong winds that blew above the mountains. Many of these came to rest within small things that Egdod had created, such as rocks, rivers, and trees. Others made forms for themselves that were of no great significance. A few though acquired forms that were remarkable in their size and complication, reflecting their affinities for the winds and the waves. When Egdod traveled to some distant coast and found the ocean crashing against it with greater perfection than at the time of his previous visit, he knew that some such soul had been at work bettering the movement of the waters.

On more than one occasion Egdod was absent for the better part of a season. When he did come back, he would fly high over Town and look down on it. Striking to him, when he did, was its combination of regular patterns—the grid of streets, the rectangular houses, the square park in the middle—with the unplanned rambling character of one of those places in the Land where he had years ago seeded something and since allowed it to develop according to its own nature. And yet he knew that the shape of Town was correct just as it was. Each house belonged where he had put it. Each street came to an end just where it ought to.

Town, seen from above, was alive with the stirrings of small souls. At a distance it looked like a place full of dry leaves scuttling about in a wind, but of course when he swooped lower he could see that these were not leaves but smaller forms. Some of those had wings but most did not. Those that did commonly lacked any great skill in flying, and over time the disused wings would shrink. He saw that they had been making alterations to their houses and to the swathes of grass separating one from the next. He had expected that they would do so, and yet he found it troubling in an indefinable way. He wanted them to learn the trick of shaping the world, just as he had learned to do, but he did not wish for them to acquire so much power that they could break the forms that he considered proper. Beating his wings, hovering above the park in the middle of Town, he saw the faces of the souls—all equipped with mouths now—turn upward to regard him. This he had expected and indeed hoped for, since he wished to show them a useful pattern that a soul ought to shape itself into. By and large he had done this through the intermediation of Ward. He could see that it had been working well, but there was nothing amiss in letting them look upon him directly from time to time.

What he had not expected was that the souls of the Town, upon spying him, used their mouths to call out to one another, uttering his name as well as other words that he could not distinguish so easily.