Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,187

to each other,” said a voice.

Egdod looked up and saw a soul sitting on the roof of the little house. She had soft wings, luxuriant with many thick feathers as white as snow. She had folded these and wrapped them about herself for warmth.

“That is an understatement,” Egdod returned. “Or so it would seem, if I am any judge of such matters.”

“There is an art to it that, once mastered by both, causes the pleasure to wax beyond all bounds.” Having delivered this information, the other soul was content to sit in her warm tent of wings and gaze down on him in silence for a time.

“There are many ways,” Egdod said, “in which one soul may afford pleasure to another. By making things that are of great beauty. By utterance of pleasing words, or making of music. Or simply—” He looked at the soul on the roof, and went on looking at her for some time. “By embodying beauty that is pleasurable to gaze upon, as do you. What these two are doing is indeed of another order.”

He understood that the two had felt, and surrendered themselves to, cravings of the same sort that he had lately been feeling in respect of Spring.

“Why do souls so long to recover sensations that belong to a different world?” he mused. “It began with the eating of food. And now this.”

“Do you remember it?” asked the soul, whom Egdod had named Warm Wings.

“Now that I have seen it,” Egdod said, “I am most certain that I did likewise, before I came to this place.”

“We all did,” said Warm Wings. “It is in the nature of souls to want it, as bees go to flowers.”

“Why are you on their roof?” Egdod asked. “Is it you who brought them together?”

Warm Wings smiled. “They required no assistance in that.”

“If I came down tomorrow night and went to another house where two souls were coupling in this way, would I find you there as well?”

“Would you like to find me there?”

Egdod now felt the craving strongly and understood that it, as well as the cravings for food and warmth, would be of great import in the future of the Town as it continued to fill up with other souls. And not only the Town but the whole of the Land; for Longregard had let him know that many more souls had been coming in of late. And finding that Town had no room left in its houses, they had been venturing out beyond it as their forms became robust enough to afford them freedom of movement.

“I would like you to dwell in the Palace,” Egdod said. And he resolved that he would make for Warm Wings an abode there that was far from the parts of it he frequented, for her beauty and her manner of speaking about pleasure, though far from disagreeable, were troubling in a certain way. “If you make it your habit to fly to Town on your beautiful white wings and know more about such things”—and he nodded at the window where the two souls were continuing to pleasure each other—“then I should be glad of it if you would sit at the table with the other souls of the Palace and discourse of it, since I believe it to be a thing of some importance.”

Warm Wings was in no way displeased to have been given such an invitation, yet it was not in her nature to grasp at it. “Who are those souls, and what is that table?” she inquired. “It is the topic of much conjecture in Town.”

It had not occurred to Egdod that the souls of Town would concern themselves with such questions. Now he understood that it must inevitably be so, for it was in the nature of souls not just to want food and to crave other sorts of pleasures, but to be curious.

“It is the Pantheon,” Egdod told her. “That is the name that came to the mind of Speaksall. You will have noticed that it is in the nature of some souls to develop greater powers than is common. You for example have made for yourself a form unlike that of any other. I will wager that other souls in Town, gazing upon your beauty, have tried to alter themselves after your fashion but have failed to achieve it. They might lack sufficient control over their own forms. More likely they do not have your wits. The perfection of your form belies the long toil