Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,248

so sharp and bitter that it did not register on their senses as a change in temperature but as shock followed by pain and then numbness. El, it seemed, had caused the top of the pinnacle to be wrapped in a bubble of warm air. But now the angel had taken them out of it into the atmosphere just beyond. Which was turbulent as well as cold, for it bore them sharply heavenward as they were caught in an updraft.

The angel beat its wings to take them in a sweeping arc around the pinnacle’s summit, and so they were able to view the broken place in the Garden’s wall; the expanse of wild forest behind the Garden; and its sacred grove of immense trees, out of which the waters of the spring gushed forth and leapt off the edge of the crag as a waterfall, thin as a silver hair, trailing down into darkness. As they continued to wheel round they saw the Forest give way to the other side of the Garden’s wall, which ran straight to the side of the Palace. Adam and Eve had, of course, never seen this before. They had grown used to the sight of its towers from the back, and acquired some sense of its design, but were now fascinated and overawed by the face it presented to the Land below, its towers and walls and buttresses as well as the gatehouses and other lesser structures arranged on the narrow shelf of level ground between its front and the place where the crag dropped off as a sheer vertical cliff.

Around and around the crag spiraled the angel during the long descent, allowing Adam and Eve to view all aspects of it again and again. They learned to recognize the gossamer strand of Spring’s waterfall on the dark side, and to expect a blaze of white light on the other.

But they did not understand what was making the light. At the beginning of the descent it had shone from the Palace, which stood above the Land like a torch on a stone post. But below that—well down the pinnacle, at altitudes nearer the clouds than the Palace—light still blasted forth from the side opposite to the cataract of Spring in its gloomy declivity. The entire western face of the crag was covered by radiant stuff. As the angel bore them down into regions where the atmosphere was thicker, Adam and Eve knew that it made sound as well: a thrumming tone that seemed to emanate from every part of it at once.

Such was the velocity of their descent, however, and so close did the glowing face of the tower rush by, that it was difficult to see particulars. As they dropped into the clouds, the angel banked away to greater distance, enabling them to glimpse, in the moments before it blurred, dimmed, and disappeared behind cloud tops, a view of the whole thing. And they saw that although its lower reaches were irregular and winding, above it had organized itself into a regular matrix of six-sided cells.

They tore through damp fog for a while, then emerged into the clear only a short distance above the ground. This was carpeted by the same sort of glowing and humming cell-stuff. Farther out, it thinned and splayed out tendrils that trailed off into darkness. But closer to the base it massed high and thick. Movement and change could be discerned within the translucent matrix of cells. Patterns of light and trends in sound swept across it in waves that crested here, dissipated there.

The angel had pierced the base of the cloud layer at impressive speed and soon pulled up into a level glide and banked away from the base of the pinnacle, skimming over the outer reaches of the glow toward its elaborate boundary with the darkness beyond. It was there that it set them down and released them from the grip of its aura. They felt firm ground beneath their feet. Their lungs drew in air that was dense, damp, and cool but not cold. “Here you can move about without hazard,” said the angel.

“What is hazard?” Eve asked.

“It is what you felt when you stood at the edge of the cliff,” said the angel, glancing upward, “and imagined the consequences of falling. Down here is a better place for souls of your type. You may move about and seek some way of living in the Land as suits you.” And with no more ceremony than