Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,237

a grate of metal bars and run away into some place beyond of which the boy and the girl knew nothing save that it made sighing noises when the wind blew, as though many trees grew there. When leaves fell in the fall, this stone bowl would fill up with them and they would become limp and soggy and turn the water brown. The boy and the girl would scoop the leaves out with their hands so that the water might clarify itself in the next rainfall. But the purpose of having built the stone bowl in the first place was by no means clear to them.

El smiled and told the boy that his question was a good one and that it showed improvement in the power of his memory and of his intellect. Now was not the time for that question to be answered, but answers might come in due course. El then suggested the boy go and sleep or amuse himself in whatever manner he might choose, and summoned the girl.

Strangely exhausted by El’s questioning, the boy lay down on a bed of soft grass and slept until morning. His sleep, though, was filled with dreams of many such long conversations in the Garden with El.

When he awoke, dawn was approaching and the girl was standing there gazing down at him. “All night I walked in the Garden with El,” she said, “and answered many questions. Some of those were new, and forced me to consider things in a way I had not done before, but others struck me as familiar, as though I had answered them many times in the past—though my memory does not contain any clear recollections thereof.”

“Just now at the end of your conversation with El,” said the boy, “did he ask you whether you had questions for him?”

“He did,” the girl replied. “And I inquired about the shapes we perceive in the stars, and why they resembled certain forms of things here in the Garden, and whether they had been made thus by El or any other soul. I asked too about the red stars that glow so close together in yonder part of the sky,” she added, pointing toward a fiery blur that was low above the Garden’s west wall, paling in the light of the dawn.

“And did El supply answers to your questions?” the boy asked.

“No, but it seemed to me that he was pleased by my having asked them, and he said that I might receive answers later as I became ready to understand such matters.” The girl let herself down to the bed of soft grass where the boy had been sleeping, and reclined on her elbow, then lay down fully.

“You are weary from the questions of El,” the boy said, “just as I was. Sleep well and then we may have further talk when you are refreshed.”

The girl slept until the sun was high, and the boy whiled away the hours playing in the stone bowl, making things from bits of wood and leaves, and watching them float down the stone gutter to the grate where the water spated.

When the girl had awakened, she asked him what he was doing and he spoke of ideas forming in his head of where such floating things could float off to once they had passed out through the grate, supposing that the world beyond the wall was akin to the Garden. He asked the girl whether she had dreamed, and she told a story similar to his, about vague memories of many such conversations in the past between her and El.

“I dreamed thus too,” said the boy, “and it caused me to question my own memory and whether it faithfully captures all that has occurred in the time since we first came into being here in the Garden.”

The girl nodded. “It is strange that we have no memories of that first moment. Either we have been here eternally, or we were created at some instant of time before which we did not exist. In either case it would seem that we are not being perfectly served by our faculties of recollection.”

The boy pondered it for a time and said, “There is a third possibility, which is hinted at by the character of our dreams. And it is that we have been created not just once but many times, as many times or more as the sun has risen over the horizon.”

“Then why are there not many more of our kind in