Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,173

of souls new to death,” Egdod explained.

“We knew each other.”

“I am of a mind to agree,” Egdod said, “if for no other reason than that your speech rings more clearly to me than that of any other soul.”

“So there are others?”

“Many.”

“But not here.”

“No. This is a place where I abide in solitude, or in the company of particular souls with whom I have an affinity. You may abide here, since you and I were acquainted in life; but I urge you to venture forth and make the surrounding lands known to you, for there is much that remains undone in their shaping and perfection.”

The other soul did as Egdod suggested, and took on strength of mind, and coherency of form, faster than any other whom Egdod had seen. It came into this soul’s head that his name was Pluto.

With the shape of the Land Pluto had a particular fascination. Once he had learned the knack of doing so, he began to walk up and down on the Land—for he had no wings—and to reshape it. In this he did not change the nature or the broad form of what Egdod had made, but improved certain particulars and imbued it with greater complexity and variety. Sheer faces of adamant became cracked and convoluted, and shot through with veins and strata of diverse kinds of stone not before seen. The kinds of rock and other hard materials created by Pluto began to rival the plants of the Garden in their variety and their beauty. Egdod knew Pluto to be troubled by the compounding of errors that had caused the Knot to form, and suspected that if left to his own devices Pluto would smooth it out and do away with it altogether. Therefore Egdod decreed that it must remain as it was.

No longer impeded by the gaze of Pluto, Egdod redoubled his efforts on the building of the Fastness, and made it bigger and more elaborate than could serve any purpose. For his failure in the park had put doubt in his mind. To expel that doubt he needed to satisfy himself that his powers to shape the world according to his thoughts were as great as they had ever been. Of this he soon became certain, and he sensed that the nearby presence of chaos in the depth below helped rather than hindered his efforts. Once his dread foe, it had become a thing he could draw upon when needed. Flying out from under the shelter of the great overhang, where one range of mountains vaulted up over another, he further drew upon the power of chaos to shroud it in hurricanes, and the hurricanes stole spray from waterfalls ranked all about the place to become eternal storms that could only be penetrated by him and by Pluto.

Yet still when he returned to the front of the Palace he found it difficult to raise the fourth tower overlooking Town. Ward, who seemed to have recovered, looked on with bewilderment. A short distance away, Speaksall and Freewander looked on too, and Egdod was aware of more souls’ eyes upon him from Town in the distance.

Brooding upon all of this later in his Garden, he hit upon an understanding, which was that it was all a matter of other souls and their ability to perceive the changes that he was wreaking upon the world. Alone, he had the freedom to make changes at will and with as little effort as it took to imagine the desired result. When other souls were watching, however, it became much more difficult. He guessed it was because any changes that he made, for example in raising a tower, were wreaking concomitant changes in the minds of all of the souls that were perceiving it. And souls, it seemed, were powerful things in their own right, with a kind of inertia about them, not easily moved. Particularly when all of them had to be moved in a kind of unison, all agreeing as to the shape of what was being made despite seeing it from many different points of view. As if all things in the world were webbed together by bands that had to stretch or break in order for change to occur, and those bands were woven by the perceptions of souls.

He sent Ward, Freewander, and Speaksall away, then caused a mist to gather around the top of the hill. For weather of various kinds was a common enough thing in the skies above the Land.