Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,254

moaned. “Why would you make your creatures thus? Having such appetites?” And his gaze strayed to the thighs and buttocks of Eve as she squatted on her haunches next to him.

Eve shrugged. “It is apparently the way of things. If we survive long enough to find Spring, perhaps we can put the question to her.”

“At least we understand, now, the curious word that the angel used,” Adam said. “‘Hazard.’”

“We need to find a way through those hazards between us and the far side of those hills,” Eve said, “where perhaps there are more souls like us who have devised some way of not being eaten. Your diminishment is of no help to us in that. You have no recourse but to eat something.” She looked up into the canopy of the tree. “Unfortunately this one does not bear apples, for some reason.”

Mab flitted up into the tree’s branches. A minute later, a small brown object fell to the ground near them. Its size, shape, and wrinkled surface recalled what hung below Adam’s penis. “A nut,” Mab said. “I have access to the knowledge that it might be edible. First you have to crack it though.”

Eve worked out a means of doing so between two rocks, and Adam ate food for the first time. Shortly nuts were raining out of the tree as Eve clambered and Mab flew through its branches. Adam, regaining some vigor, pounded away with the rocks. Later, at Mab’s suggestion they descended into the belt of shrubs that the hill had drawn around itself to keep out the wolves, and found berries. The leaves of certain small plants also were edible, and so, by evening, Adam and Eve were able to sit atop the hill and know the new sensation of food in their mouths, and to feel their insides coming awake.

The night was colder, or perhaps having eaten changed them so that they felt it more. Mab caused flame to spring forth from a little heap of dried leaves and twigs, and they learned that fire too was hungry and could be fed—in this case, with branches that had fallen from the tree. That and the heat of their own bodies kept them warm through the night, provided they remained pressed snugly together. Which was a thing they were naturally inclined to in any case. Once again Adam’s penis spilled forth the white stuff, but this time Eve was awake to see it and to observe the effect that it had on him. Remembering what the worm had told them about how the organs of pleasure could be put together, they soon found parts of Eve’s body that could serve her likewise. Adam was nearly as pleased by this as she was, since he had worried that she would be unwilling to provide him with the pleasure he now always sought unless there was something for her in return.

In the morning they discovered shit, and immediately formed the habit of doing it as far away as possible from their camp, even if that meant descending the hill and doing it in the grassland where wolves might still be about. But they had to go down there anyway, for along with their other hungers they now thirsted after water. And Mab had pointed out that water flowed downhill, and told them in which direction they must walk in order to find its nearest source.

In addition to eating, shitting, and pissing, Eve took up the startling habit of bleeding every so often from a place adjacent to her organs of pleasure. Her hunger, and that of Adam, seemed to mount a little every day. Adam fell into the habit of gazing down upon the rabbits that ran through the grass below, in much the same frame of mind as wolves had once looked up at Adam and Eve. One day, finding a scarcity of nuts and berries, he went down there and did not come back until he had a dead rabbit on a pointed stick. “It came into my mind that we too could be hazards,” he explained.

The day after that he got two more, for disappointingly little of the first one had turned out to be edible. It became necessary to get more and more of them and to range farther from the base of the hill in order to find ones that had not been killed or scared away. The uneaten bits of them began to clutter their hilltop camp and to make a stink