Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,238

the Garden?” the girl asked.

“Perhaps we fall like leaves and cease to be and are remade.”

The girl nodded. “In the face of El I thought I discerned satisfaction at the answers I gave and the questions I asked. Perhaps we are a thing he remakes from time to time, bettering us with each remaking. The curious dreams we had last night are traces of those earlier girls and boys.”

“There is a way we might judge the truth of this idea,” said the boy, and he pointed to the ground at the girl’s feet. It was muddy there because of the overflow of the fountain, and her feet had left prints in it wherever she had stepped.

“I understand,” the girl said. Hand in hand they went off into the Garden searching for a secluded place where the ground was soft and bare, in which they could make some mark that would be preserved even if they fell like leaves and were remade.

Their search took them to a corner where two walls came together. Because of the shade, few plants grew. So the ground was mostly bare, and damp as well, since the sun did not parch it.

As they drew closer, the boy stooped to pick up a branch that had fallen from a tree. He snapped it over his knee, thinking he would use it to scratch a mark into the bare earth.

The girl went on ahead of him, passing through the last low shrubs into the bare place in the corner.

He heard her exclaim in surprise. He ran to catch up with her and found her gazing down in astonishment.

There in the angle of bare earth, amid many footprints like theirs, many scratches had been made in the ground. Discarded among them were many broken sticks.

El entered into the Garden one fine afternoon in the fall and found the boy and the girl at the fountain clearing away leaves. He bade them sit on the curved benches of stone that encircled the fountain. He told them that he was well pleased with their progress. “If you could but remember the state in which you first came into the Garden, you would scarce recognize yourselves,” he said. “You then bore the same relation to what you are now as seeds in the pith of an apple do to this spreading tree.” And he elevated his hands, directing their gaze to an old apple tree above them. “You were then infants. Later you were Boy and Girl. Today, after many years, you are Man and Woman. Nevermore shall the thread of your consciousness be interrupted, save when you lay down to sleep. For my questioning of you, and even more so the questions you have begun to ask me in kind, have demonstrated to my satisfaction that your intellect, and the coherence of your souls, has attained a degree of perfection equal to that of others. You may call me Father, as it pleases me to call you my beloved children.”

The man and the woman were silent for a time as they considered El’s words. Apples had fallen from the tree and lay on the ground. The woman picked up one that had gone soft. She crushed it in her hand. A worm fell from it and landed at her feet. She ignored it, working the pulp of the fruit between her fingers until she felt a small hard object, like a tiny stone. Crossing to the fountain she immersed her hand and stirred it about in the water until the soft pulp had been washed away. Remaining was a hard pip, which she let lie in the hollow of her hand. The surface of the water stilled and became a mirror in which she saw her face as well as those of the man and of bright El, who had come to gaze over her shoulder. In the face of El she thought she perceived some look of concern or bemusement she had not seen before. Then he seemed to become aware that he was being looked on, and his face set itself anew. “My words concerning the apple seed have stirred your curiosity, and led you to new investigations,” he said, “and that is as it should be, for curiosity and the seeking out of greater knowledge are faculties without which no woman or man can be said to have a soul.”

“Every fall, the apples rot on the ground and we smell their fragrance,” the woman said, “but I had