Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,379

nothing more than an Asking-like stretch of bare rock?

Before their theories and speculations on the matter could advance very far, they got to where they could see answers—or at least hints that would point them to answers—with their own eyes. Trees that had fallen yesterday were already dissolving into the wet earth, and green shoots coming up. If it was in the nature of Spring’s creation for living things to die, and for their dead forms to give up the stuff of which they’d been made for the use of new things that were growing, why then Spring had so ordained it that, here, it all happened faster.

“I wouldn’t say faster,” Pick eventually said, watching as a slender green vine spiraled up the shaft of his stick like a snake ascending a tree. This sort of thing had been fascinating ten minutes ago and was well on its way to becoming a nuisance.

“Really? How can you say that’s not fast?” Lyne demanded.

“It’s as fast as it needs to be,” Pick explained. “If all of the vines were behaving thus all of the time, why, every tree standing would be overwhelmed by them in no time. Once the forest has reestablished itself, it settles down.”

They were interrupted by a squawk from Corvus. Rare for him, he sounded surprised—even alarmed. He had perched on a broken-off side branch projecting from what was left of a big old tree. This bare snag, and the perch, which was about twice a man’s height off the ground, had probably looked safe from above. But in the few moments that Corvus had been resting there, ivy had grown over his talons and lashed his feet in place. He was flapping his wings to no avail. The green tendrils stretched and tore, but the few that didn’t snap drew thickness from those broken, which thinned and withered like twists of smoke from a snuffed candle. They were well on their way to becoming barked branches by the time Burr climbed to a lower bough from which he was able to reach up carefully with his spear and use its edged head to chop through the sturdiest branches. Corvus then burst free, vegetation still flailing from his feet, and flapped about in an ill temper until the clinging vines had withered and he had shaken them off. Burr climbed down in a decisive way as the ivy had become interested in him.

This was all quite entertaining after a fashion, while it was in process, but when Burr kicked his way free, bringing the performance to an end, and they all glanced down to see new growth spiraling up their legs, they all had in their minds a common daydream of where it might have gone, had things come out slightly differently: Corvus and Burr both lashed to the tree, smothered and strangled by vines that had hardened into wood, asphyxiated, and now food for nourishment of fresh growth.

Within a very few moments, they were all simply running.

The leaden sky afforded no clues as to where the sun might be and so they had no sense of direction, and might have run in circles were it not for Corvus and Mab, who knew the way to go. Just as important, they warned of dead ends and stretches of difficult going where they might have faltered long enough for the plants to make a meal out of them. Fallen branches, scattered everywhere, impeded them enough to make things interesting even where the going was level.

Before they utterly exhausted themselves, they crested a rise and spied below them a blaze of red-orange: the channel of a small river running across their path. The shape of the land had sheltered this from the whirlwind, so it was still covered with mature deciduous trees that were all the colors of flame. They ran down into it and thereby passed out of the swath carved through the wilderness by yesterday’s storm. They kept running anyway, just to be sure, and sloshed across the river and finally stopped in a small clearing. Every one of them stared fixedly at their feet for some while. Or to be precise at the ground around their feet. They were waiting for thin green vines to erupt. When this did not happen, they needed no discussion to agree it was time to put down their burdens and rest.

They had lost one of the big packs that they carried on a pole; Mard and Lyne had set it down for