Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,157

The houses there offered no amenities that souls actually needed, but they seemed to prefer having places of their own, just as Egdod preferred having a Palace and a Garden.

Satisfied that all was sorted here, mindful that spring was under way, he bent his mind to the perfection of the new kinds of trees and other plants. He began flying far afield to parts of the Land that he knew must exist, since he had surrounded them with a coast, perforated where rivers might flow out and drain the interior. Hills and mountains he saw (to see something, now, was to create it), and these grew up from the coast and hemmed in the river valleys as was proper. But making a sufficient number of hills and mountains to decorate the coast with river mouths did not begin to fill in all of the Land that he had circumscribed. The center of it was vast and void, and so he made of it a flat country, green with grass in some places, but in others an expanse of rock and sand. To break up the monotony of it he here and there put isolated mountains, or ranges of them, and drained them through networks of rivers and chains of lakes, letting the water find its own way eventually to the coast with sometimes amusing results, as it often had to wind about in circuitous ways before it detected low points around which it could pool, and sought outlets through which it could make good its escape.

As the water was finding its way about, he busied himself with the seeding of trees and plants and grasses in such parts of the Land as he thought suitable for their kinds. The running waters spoke to him, as they had long ago in the forest when they had reminded him of his name. They told him the names of the different kinds of trees: pine, fir, oak, maple.

Flying back to the Palace he conceived a desire to have the ability of making such sounds with his own body, rather than relying on noisy rivers to do it for him. By the time he had alit in the Garden to view his reflection in the pool, he had a new thing on his face called a mouth. When he opened his mouth wide, glowing static could still be seen within, and a faint hiss of noise would emerge, but by moving the parts of his mouth in different fashions he could modulate that sound to mimic the names of things that he had heard in the rushing and burbling waters. Once he had got the knack of making the sounds of the trees and of certain other things he knew the names of, he entered the Palace and went to the Gatehouse and showed the new form of his face to Follower, and made some sounds to demonstrate its use, pointing to himself and uttering, “Egdod,” and to the other and uttering, “Ward.” For he had decided to give Follower a new name that better reflected his occupation. Follower—now, and henceforth, Ward—had continued to grow taller and to perfect his form; his head now came up to Egdod’s shoulder and his wings were symmetrical and well articulated. He nodded his head and set about the task of shaping a mouth after the manner of Egdod’s and learning how it might be used to fashion various words. Egdod knew that other souls would in due course see this and begin to pattern their own forms likewise.

He wondered what Town would be like when its houses and streets were full of souls making sounds at each other. It would be very different from what it was now. But he sensed that such was the natural order of things when many souls were together. The essence of being a soul, as opposed to a rock or a leaf, was the ability to behave in manners that Egdod could not predict. He could do nothing about the fact that new souls were coming here all the time, each acting as it saw fit. He could set an example for them, as he was doing with Ward, and he could make a Town for them to live in, but ultimately they would do as they liked and there was no point in much troubling himself over it.

The making and bettering of the lands beyond seemed of greater import. There was nothing in those that he could not shape as