Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,182

into which life might be breathed, supposing that Spring was willing to so use her powers. He brought Thingor and his teams of delvers back from the Fastness laden with materials of many kinds that they had quarried and refined in the deeps of that place. Together they devised other forms that were akin to those of the bees, but variously larger or smaller, with bodies of diverse shapes. Few of them, as it turned out, were capable of being imbued with life, and many that were lived only for a short time. None propagated more of their kind. Neither Egdod nor Spring could fathom the reason for these failures until Longregard explained it one evening.

The souls who dwelled in the Palace had acquired a custom of gathering around the table when the sun was low and practicing the art of talking to one another. To the early group of Egdod, Ward, Freewander, Speaksall, Longregard, and Thingor had been added Spring as well as souls from Town whom Egdod had named Greyhame and Knotweave. The former Egdod valued for his skill in thinking about abstruse matters, which he commonly did while tugging at a swirl of colorless aura that enclosed his lower face and surrounded his mouth. Knotweave was another like Thingor who took joy in fashioning persistent things out of stuff that she had borrowed from the produce of the Land, but whereas Thingor’s favored materials were stone and metal, she tended to make use of material she had acquired from plants of various kinds. Together she and Thingor had tried to fashion a creature having eight legs but no wings, for Knotweave had conceived the idea, which was agreed to by several others, that such a being should be capable of spinning a kind of fabric out of the air itself. This was one of the few new kinds of creature that Spring had been able to give life to, but it had died soon after, and never acquired the gift of spinning air into knots.

Longregard had of late been observing the bees closely, approaching the flower beds with patience and caution so that they would not sting her, and she had formed the opinion that they were taking the stuff of the flowers themselves into their bodies and carrying it away to the places where they abided during the night: yellow-white excrescences, like little copies of Town, that they were wont to build in crooks of trees and other such places. Hives, they were called. Earlier in the summer, Longregard had been obliged to fly or climb into the trees to watch the bees building them, but of late they had begun making the largest hive of all inside the little stone tower that Egdod had placed in the middle of the Park as an ornament. It was too small for souls to live in but it could accommodate thousands of bees, and the slits that he had left in its walls served as doorways through which they could swarm in and out. Peering in to observe, Longregard had seen them exuding directly from their bodies the yellow-white stuff of which hives were made.

Greyhame had begun pulling at his chin. He ventured the opinion that the wax must have been made out of the very stuff that the bees were taking from the flowers. Thingor volunteered the observation that when he made a thing of any kind whatsoever out of some stuff, the amount of stuff that was consumed was equal to the size of the thing made; and so how could bees make a hive without getting its stuff from somewhere? Freewander quickly assented, saying that she had many times flitted close enough to hives to smell the wax, and that it undoubtedly bore the scent of flowers.

“The answer to this riddle—if indeed it amounts to one—is here amid us,” Egdod said.

The other souls looked about curiously, as if the answer were about to fly in among them in the manner of a swarm of bees, but instead Egdod slapped the palm of his hand down on the surface of the table. “Ever since we made a habit of sitting about this table in the evening, I have felt that something was lacking, just as, when we had flower beds but no bees to hum in them, they seemed lonely. This table is lonely. Not only that, but it lacks all purpose since we never put anything upon it save, occasionally, the creations of Thingor and