Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,135

The space in which they abided became larger. By regarding one leaf or another with greater care he was able to bring it into the center of his regard. He organized the leaves on bigger structures, themselves in a way leaflike. Those were branches, and branches could be organized on trees, and he could make as many trees as he chose, and arrange them as he wished: haphazardly, which was a thing called a forest, or dotted around here and there, which was a park, or in neat rows, which was a street. He created one of each, a street lined with red-leaved trees, leading to a park with a forest beyond.

As he gazed upon one tree or another, it would move closer to him, carrying all else along with it. When he grew accustomed to this, though, a change came over his thinking and he found it more fitting to conceive of the trees and the other things as remaining in one place while he moved through it. To fix them in their places, he created the ground.

By its nature, the ground did not alter its shape once he had brought it into being. For its purpose was to keep the trees and other things in a fixed relationship to one another. To serve that purpose it had to be much larger than the trees and the other things that it contained. Therefore it required the conversion of a vast expanse of static into something of an altogether different nature. The static was not easily tamed, but in time he learned how to change it into a thing dark and rigid and hard, and this was adamant. Once made, it would not alter its shape or its position unless he broke it once again into the static from which he had formed it, and made such alterations as he desired. The forest, the street, and the park were thus situated on an island of adamant that held its shape and position in the sea of static.

In the early going he’d had to build the leaf anew every time, but new things were now coming into being without his say-so, and he was stumbling upon them already made. He was rediscovering—becoming alive to—things that had been summoned and organized by him when he wasn’t paying attention. He knew, for example, that the leaf was red. Indeed they had emerged, in the beginning, from their redness; he’d seen motes that were different and assembled them into the leaf.

In the first eon he had ever been in some kind of torment, finding the static unendurable when it engulfed him and fearing it would never abate, then, after it had gone away, sensing the possibility that it might never return, stranding him in darkness and silence. But it had now come and gone so many millions of times that he had altogether put aside those fears. The putting of names on things gave him power. He named the static chaos. Chaos was terrible but he had learned the knack of summoning things forth out of it and thereby mastered it. The waves still came and went but the rhythm of their coming and going had become a part of him now. He named them day and night and knew them as being good for different purposes. The day was when new things were drawn forth from chaos, perfected and beheld. The night was for resting, and for the naming of what had been drawn forth during the day.

The street, the park, and the forest had at first wobbled in and out of existence and changed their shapes, but as he made it his way to inhabit them—walking up and down the street, strolling through the park, and looking into the forest—they became steady and ceased changing all the time. Leaves fell to the ground. He had no particular idea as to why this happened. To be a leaf was to fall. Early on, there had been no ground to stop them. For that matter there had been no up or down, just infinities of flickering chaos. But the trees seemed to want to be pointed in the same direction, with trunks down and leaves up, and the trunks had to stop somewhere and the leaves had to land somewhere. In that somewhere he began to see motes that were of a different nature, and yet not red. Beneath the trees’ spreading branches he made the ground all of a color, which was not