Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,151

the water was very far from being rightly formed and needed further betterment.

He knew that making it so would consume at least as many years as he had already devoted to the making of the street, the park, and the forest. Earlier, he might gladly have perched atop a large rock and spent years on the patient improvement of the waves’ shape and surge, but now the awareness that souls were arriving made him loath to spend more time than he needed to here. He beat his wings against the spray and lifted himself up above the great rock and took a last look down into the spray, a mere fog, not yet shining or reflecting as it ought to. Then he soared up the coast.

He could see this idea of the mirrored ball almost as if it were hanging in space before him—as if he were supporting such an object on the tips of his fingers and gazing into it.

Supposing that he could now summon up a mirrored ball—or a mirrored anything—and gaze into it, what would he see? What did he look like? The question had never occurred to him when he had lived alone. A tree could not look back at him. The souls who had recently begun flocking to his abode probably lacked the power to see anything clearly. In time, though, they might acquire such powers, just as Egdod had, and then they would gaze on him, just as they gazed on trees and rocks, and they would see something. What would it look like, what impression would it make upon them?

He could not very well know the answer until he knew what he looked like to himself, and so he formed a resolve to fashion a mirror one day, and gaze into it. But it was of little importance now and so he put it out of his mind. He flew above the world that he was creating.

Another fully formed thought came into his head: this was what he did. It was fitting and proper that he make the world out of chaos and better what he had made and make room in it for newly arriving souls, for he—not the dead Egdod flying above the forest, but the living Egdod who had once held leaves in his hand and looked at mirrored balls—had done it before. He was good at it. And the other souls that he had noticed in his domain were, perhaps, not invading it so much as seeking his protection.

The place where the Land gave way to the ocean was an enjoyable change from where he had abided until then. He beat his wings in a slow rhythm and made his way along that coast, circling back frequently to inspect and improve features that had caught his attention, but generally keeping the Land to his left side and the water to his right. Some stretches of the coast he carpeted with uncountable numbers of tiny rocks called sand, others he buttressed with big rocks. In some places he made the forest roll straight to the edge and then drop sheer into the water below, which were called cliffs. In others he made cliffs topped not with trees but with broad expanses of grass. So intoxicated did he become with coast building that he did not much concern himself with what lay inland of it.

After a time he sensed a kind of wrongness in his fashioning of so much coast without paying due attention to the lands it circumscribed. While continuing to fly above the place where the ocean beat against the shore, he thereafter made it his practice to bend his course ever to one direction, though with excursions to and fro when it suited him. In his mind he was seeing a figure closed in on itself, like a droplet of water suspended in flight. The Land was to become a bounded thing, as his body was now bounded by his skin. Along the way its boundary—the coast—would vary one way and then the other, sometimes in broad figures and other times in quick turnings out or in.

His flight was a long one, but in time he wheeled around a newly formed headland to see, in the distance, the large rock that he had fashioned at the place where his river ran down from his park. He flew to it and circled round it a few times to satisfy himself that it was as he had left it. And