Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,264

activities, though conducted on a very small scale, have had very large consequences. That they were overtly hostile and invasive, with potentially ruinous consequences. That they were, in a word, of a warlike nature.”

“War? Did you really just use the word ‘war’ in a sentence? Are you sure your programming is okay?” Zula demanded.

“My programming is fine and my choice of wording is carefully considered and is sanctioned by a higher power.”

“A higher power. What a choice of words!” Zula scoffed.

“Are you El Shepherd?” Corvallis asked.

Zula got a prickly feeling of the numinous. Talking to the dead wasn’t done. The dead didn’t want to talk to us. They didn’t care.

Or so they’d always assumed. The dead were amnesiacs; they drank of the waters of Lethe when they crossed over and, beneath the dark poplars, forgot their former lives. That was what bereaved people like Zula told themselves to soften the hurt they felt when dead people like Sophia didn’t phone home. But there was always this suspicion that it might not be that clear-cut.

Corvallis was insistent: “Am I in fact talking to El at this moment?”

“No,” said the Metatron. “But the quality of the communications between this world and the one where El lives is high enough that you may think of me as his representative. His ambassador.”

“His avatar,” Zula said. “His angel.”

“Now who is using funny words?” the Metatron asked.

“What is it you seek here?” Corvallis asked. “There must be more to your mission than just freaking us out. I mean, if you were just fishing—wondering how we’d react to this news about the Renascent Egdod-Associated Process—you have your answer. We were surprised. That’s your answer.”

“Surprised, and skeptical as hell,” Zula added.

“Now that you know as much, do you just get up and leave?” Corvallis went on.

“There are questions raised by this that set up a constitutional crisis for ALISS and that cannot wait until the next ACTANSS to be resolved,” said the Metatron.

“Go on,” said Corvallis.

“Oh, you can see it perfectly well,” said the Metatron, now showing some very human emotions. “All of the big issues are triggered by this. I will tick them off, just so we have an agenda. We have self-replicating processes now, capable in theory of exponential growth. Are those to be paid for from Buildings and Grounds? We are unwilling to pay the lion’s share—or any share, for that matter—of the costs that could spring from unlimited reproduction of such processes. We have made a good-faith effort to nip that problem in the bud, which has been sabotaged by the REAP—almost undoubtedly with the connivance of Sophia. Sophia, though dead, is a token holder with special powers—thanks to unprecedented steps that you took when you booted her process.”

“Oh my god, we’re back to that again!?” Zula exclaimed.

“Meanwhile we face a shortage of the mana required for full embodiment of our customers. Priority should be given to them—not to this new breed of self-replicators.”

“For fuck’s sake, there’s only two of those and they aren’t replicating yet!” Corvallis said. “It’s a purely theoretical problem at this point.”

“Your late wife accompanies them. We find this remarkable.”

“Have some decency!” Zula said. “She’s only been dead three weeks.”

But Corvallis took it better than Zula did. In the silence that followed, he stared out the window over the lake, seemingly unruffled. “It’s never been clear to me how you guys actually feel about phased embodiment,” he remarked. He was talking about their stopgap scheme for booting up new souls in a resource-efficient style. “When it suits your purposes, you complain about not having enough mana to launch every single new process at full fidelity. But I was there when the Wad was running, and I saw El’s fascination with it. You guys have never been comfortable with how the Landform came out—how Dodge made it in the image of the world he came from. How its souls pattern their forms and their lives after ours. You guys are aiming at something different. Heaven 2.0. That much is obvious to me. But I have no idea what you imagine it’s going to be like.”

“Your speculations about our motives and our dreams are fascinating in a way,” remarked the Metatron, “but wide of the mark and not relevant to the matter at hand.”

“The ‘constitutional crisis’?” Zula said.

“Even the processes we have now are placing insupportable burdens on the Landform,” said the Metatron. “They are making mistakes that we have already made in Meatspace. They need direction.”

“We need to tell them what