Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,150

actually quite small compared to the amount of consternation that their arrival had caused him.

More arrived. The number did not increase suddenly, but neither did it ever decrease. It would seem that the place they came from emitted more dead people all the time but had no way of reabsorbing them. Why this was so, and whether it made sense, there was no point in troubling his mind with. All that mattered for the time being was that their number was small and that they were so weak as to make little difference to him, at least now that he had drawn a thick skin about himself. He saw no harm then in leaving, for a time, the place that he had built, and where he had abided, since he had died. He strode up the street to the park at the top of the hill. His body talked to him in a new way that was neither seeing nor hearing; he could feel the ground beneath his feet now. And when he reached the park where the wind blew, and went to a grassy place where there was ample room to unfold his wings, he likewise felt the air beneath them. The winds that he had once brought into being to carry away the dead leaves now picked him up and lifted him toward the sky. He changed the wings’ relationship to the air so that he wheeled toward the forest and began to soar over it. The ground dropped away. He saw how the veins in the earth came together to make the river. The river ran downhill. He followed it. It flowed into a space that put him in mind of chaos, since he had not yet ventured into it and given it a form. But he had long since mastered the craft of drawing solid adamant out of chaos, as water froze into ice. It was a small matter, therefore, to bestow form on it now, making it a simple extension of the forest he had already made. The shape of it was different, the trees and the leaves all unique; the veining of the rivers had a similar-but-different pattern from those on the slopes below his park.

Thus for a time he extended the Land and the forest vastly in whatsoever direction he chose to fly. It became monotonous, though, and the river draining it grew so wide that when he lit on one of its banks he could not see to the other side. Summoning more vague memories of how things ought to be, he put an ocean at the river’s end. Because there was some indefinable wrongness in the forest’s going all the way to the water’s edge, he made between them a strip of bare adamant. The monotony of this displeased him and so he broke it up into various pieces called rocks. His first rocks were all of a common shape and size but he bettered them by making some tinier and more numerous than snowflakes, others bigger than the hill of the park but less often seen. Distributed along the boundary between the forest and the ocean, these made beaches and cliffs, which protected the trees from the onslaught of the waves with which he thought it best to populate the surface of the sea. He soared and wheeled above the largest of all the rocks, which, just to amuse himself, he had made so large that the street and the park and much of the forest could have rested comfortably on its top. From its apex he beheld the way his waves crashed against it.

In the water’s movements he saw manifold imperfections. The waves and the manner of their beating against the rock begged for improvement. He spent some days bettering this, until when they clashed against the rock they hurled spray into the air. When he swooped low he could feel spray pelting the skin he had made to separate himself from things-that-were-not-Egdod, and the waves’ roar enveloped him almost as fully as the hiss of chaos had once done eons ago. The spray was made of tiny, hurtling balls of water that were all but invisible against the sky. He knew that this was wrong and that each ball of water ought to catch the light of the sun and reflect it, making the spray glitter brightly. More than that, each ball ought to be supplying a reflection of the world around it—including Egdod. Until they did so,