Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,201

In return he expected—nay, demanded—symmetrical treatment from them. Nothing could be more reasonable.

All fine and simple in principle. The details very complicated, of course. No one really at fault; these things happened when brilliant energetic people hurled themselves into the fray. No progress could be made by such marvelous minds if they were second-guessing themselves at every turn, minding the legal p’s and q’s, torturing themselves thinking about possible future entanglements, contradictions, conflicts. You had to let these people do what they did. Lesser minds like Sinjin could follow along in their wake tidying up.

It was, however, time to tidy up. Not a big deal really. Some things had grown out of proportion, got out of whack, the current state of affairs not exactly in alignment with contracts that all of the principals had willingly entered into years ago. Unforeseen developments now called for some pruning, some rerouting of the financial plumbing, some add-ons and codicils to the agreements that were already in place. No need to hand it over to the terribly inefficient legal system.

No one wanted that.

39

Egdod saw that the Tower was an abomination, not merely because of its tallness and its situation but because of the joining together of the souls’ auras.

He summoned Thingor forth out of the Fastness and with him forged a thunderbolt much greater than any of the others. When it was ready Egdod flew up above the Palace holding it in his right hand. The heat of it burned him and the brightness of it blinded him. He hurled it at the Tower and struck it in its midsection, which was destroyed in an instant, and the top part of it fell down upon the bottom and smote it to dust all the way down to its stone foundations, which after that were no longer visible, being buried under a heap of pulverized mud.

Flying over this Egdod could see the dust moving as souls within it struggled to emerge. They had been greatly diminished by the annihilation of the Tower into which they had woven much of their own beings, but still they lived, and as they called out, they did so not in the hum they had stolen from the bees but in the various kinds of speech that they had used before they had taken up that habit. “Build no more Towers,” Egdod said to them, “and dwell not in hives, but in houses, as you did at the beginning. You shall have to build them yourselves, since you have so foolishly destroyed the ones that I made for you. And do not join your auras together in place of speaking, but shape your thoughts into words, as is proper for souls.”

“They do not all speak in the same tongue, of course,” Speaksall pointed out to him later. “They will clump according to their manner of talking; and the new houses that they build for themselves may be sown far and wide across the Land rather than being together in a single Town that lies within your view and beneath the threat of your terrible weapons.”

“So be it,” Egdod said. And so it was, for souls had already begun grouping themselves in the manner that Speaksall had foretold, and were struggling out of Town in various directions. It could be guessed that each was of a mind to build its own town far away from others who spoke in different tongues, and far away from the abode of Egdod. Egdod took no measures to prevent it.

But after the Town was empty, and contained no souls to gaze on his work, he persisted in his practice of building the hill higher, until the Palace had become a soaring tower unto itself, perched on the summit of a pillar that projected above the clouds. No longer did the hum of the Hive trouble his ears. Instead his work was accompanied by sweet sounds made by a new soul who had lately come into the Land. Longregard had discovered her perched on a rubble heap below, amid the ruins of the Hive, playing a tune by blowing over the top of a hollow bone. She—or perhaps he, for this soul never seemed to make up his or her mind as to sex—had been adopted by those who dwelled in the Palace, and become a favorite of Thingor and Knotweave, who had assisted her, or him, in fashioning many kinds of new devices for making all sorts of sounds. Egdod had named this soul Paneuphonium