Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,167

to the Palace. Egdod could see that the other was regarding the new furniture with curiosity. Egdod sat down in his big chair, then made a gesture with his hand as if trying to waft Ward into the Palace with a puff of air. He remembered the words and shaped them with his mouth: “Come in.”

Ward walked through the aperture and across the expanse of stone and took a seat in the chair that was of a size befitting him. While Egdod had been away shaping the lands beyond, Ward’s body had grown broad and his face had taken on greater definition. Lips, and other things that he was remembering the names of—teeth, tongue—were, it seemed, of use in more perfectly shaping sounds from the hissing chaos of breath. “Flowers beautiful,” he said, more clearly than Egdod could have done. Or at least those were the two words that Egdod recognized; they were embedded in a sentence of greater complexity, joined together with small words that somehow made them work better. Egdod understood that Ward had been spending time in Town with the other souls and that they had developed the art of talking beyond what Egdod, who spent all of his time alone, had yet achieved.

It occurred to him that neither Ward nor any of the others had seen the lands that Egdod had been building. They had no understanding of what he had been doing. One day they would develop their legs, or in some cases wings, to the point where they could range over great distances and see it all with their own eyes. In the meantime, Egdod fancied that he might, by the use of words, try to explain what he had been doing. He embarked on that project but found himself limited by his crude powers of speech, which were not up to the task of conveying even a hint of his creations’ size and complexity. Soon he resorted to gestures and disjointed words, pointing one way and uttering “mountains” and another way “ocean” and so forth. Then he lapsed into silence as he understood the futility of what he was attempting.

That silence was interrupted by a rush of chaotic noise from Ward. Egdod looked at him to see that his aura was getting larger, sending out a tendril of aura in Egdod’s direction. This was a thing that souls in Town did when they were standing close together. Experimentally Egdod did likewise, letting the aura around his head reach out over the table. When it touched and merged with that of Ward, he felt, saw, heard, and smelled new things.

Long ago, when Ward had first turned up in the doorway of the Palace, he had touched Egdod’s knee with a tendril of his aura and it had produced a fizzing sensation. There was some of that now, but for the most part it was more perfectly formed than that. To make such contact between auras, Egdod now saw, was to feel what the other was feeling and even to think what they were thinking without the necessity of putting it into words. He was seeing things now as Ward saw them, not just in the here and now but in his memory. Ward was recollecting a visit to Town earlier today. Through his mind’s eye, Egdod was regarding the faces of souls whom Ward had encountered there. It was all clearly recognizable, yet curiously faded and mottled, as if contaminated with chaos. Perhaps this was a defect in how ideas were transmitted between auras, or perhaps it was actually how Ward saw everything.

Egdod made an effort to summon up a memory of high mountains, seen from above, the snow that collected on them and dark forests that cladded their lower slopes. He sensed that this was getting through to Ward, and so he called to mind other memories of the lands that, a minute earlier, he had been trying and failing to describe in words.

It was all a bit much for Ward. If the latter’s perceptions had seemed small, wan, and unclear to Egdod, then what was it like for him to see the full grandeur of the lands beyond with the clarity and force of Egdod’s eye? Ward became dazzled or weary. The aura bridge narrowed, weakened, and snapped back to his head. After that his aura was small and closely contained. He withdrew to his Gatehouse and lay on a thing he had made there—“Bed”—and did not stir for a while.

Egdod for