Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,154

leaves. It put out a golden tendril that brushed Egdod’s knee. Egdod sensed the touch of it.

Some while ago he had clothed himself in a skin whose reason for being was to separate the stuff of which he was made from that belonging to other souls. Since then, stiff winds had blown against it, hot and cold. The spray of the ocean waves had spattered it. The leaves and branches of trees had tested his skin, and beneath the soles of his feet and under the skin of his palm he had felt stone of various textures. His skin had been proof against all of those. But he had never yet come into contact with a body constructed by another soul, or—as now—the shifting nimbus of aura that betrayed the presence of a soul too newly arrived to have made a proper form in which to dwell, or contained itself in a skin of its own. He recoiled from its touch and felt it fizzing on the skin of his knee. The sensation was to his sense of touch what flickering static was to vision or the hiss of white noise was to hearing. It was not painful, nor did it wreak any change on him that could be detected. A wisp of aura separated from the end of the tendril. As he strode away it swirled about his leg for a moment before dispersing. He no longer sensed the contact. He was glad of that. For, though the touch had not been painful, it had put him in mind of an earlier state of being that it was good to have put behind him.

After he had gone on for several paces and entered into the upper part of the street, he looked back over his shoulder and saw that the other soul—somewhat diminished, perhaps, by the loss of the tendril—was attempting to follow him. It did not have the knack of moving smoothly, or in anything like a straight line, yet got it right more often than wrong. Falling farther and farther behind, it kept after Egdod, improving the quality of its movement as it struggled along.

Egdod named the soul Follower. He wondered where Follower had been obtaining the stuff of which he was making himself. Egdod had been able to avail himself of an infinite field of chaos, out of which he had fashioned not only a form to house Egdod, but an entire world. Follower was trying to create himself in a world from which, as far as Egdod knew, chaos had been almost eradicated. Perhaps he had a foot in each universe and was trying to force his way into Egdod’s through a little gap or flaw while most of him remained trapped in the chaos on the other side. Or perhaps he was drawing stuff out of the world Egdod had made, as trees grew up out of its soil.

The trees that lined the street were all in order. Once Egdod had created them in such-and-such a way, they had neither the inclination nor the power to alter themselves, other than to become somewhat larger each year and to put forth more branches. Souls were living in some of them now, and so he felt himself looked at by those as he passed by. The outward form of those was, however, no different.

In the time, now many years past, when he had first made all of this, Egdod had been driven by a loathing of chaos and a corresponding love of what was steady and regular in its nature. Since then, he had, in general, sought to make the world more various. The waves that had beat against the rocks of the coast—that, he supposed, were beating against it now, though he was not there to watch—had in them a kind of chaos, and indeed seemed more like proper waves to him the more wildly they thrashed against the stones and flung themselves into the air. The disorder that they manifested in so doing felt of a different nature from the dread chaos out of which Egdod had first brought himself into being and then fashioned everything else. And so it seemed that the world could have a kind of wildness and irregularity about it without coming to pieces and reverting to chaos in the way he had, in the early going, feared that it would. As he walked down the street now he saw its regularity as the work of an earlier Egdod, a