Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,283

it was too chaotic and volatile to linger for very long in any one place without an organizing soul to keep it collected. But what had not disappeared yet Eve was scooping up and applying to the infants’ bodies as if it were a balm. Seeing the way Adam looked on her she said, “The more of it is in us, the less is there for the use of El or any of his minions.”

“Do we then owe something to El by having it in us—constituting us?”

“We owe El nothing save retribution,” spat Eve.

“I mean, does it give El some power over us that he had not before?” Adam asked.

“I know not. But I am stronger now, more aware, than I was. And behold the little ones.”

Adam beheld them and saw that the twelve were not as little as they had been earlier. In form they were still infants, but they now gazed about them curiously instead of sleeping or fussing, and their size was greater than what it had been.

“It would appear that I need to cut down even more trees,” he said dryly. He met Eve’s eye and they shared an affectionate look. But this was cut short by a flicker of light, which drew their gazes directly to the floor between them. One of the boys had got up on hands and knees and crawled to the place where Messenger of El had been standing when Cairn had crushed him. The angel’s knife had there fallen to the floor and now lay shining like a tiny flake of thunderbolt, beguiling the eye. The child was reaching for it.

As one, Adam and Eve flung themselves at him. Adam was closer, and got there first, and clapped his hand over the bloody handle. He and Eve laughed. They had never laughed before.

Fighting did not come that day, or the next, or the next. Angels flew over Camp from time to time but did not alight. Adam did not go down to the river for two days, though he knew that Feller would dock his log pile. The twelve little ones wanted much attention. During the next few days they stayed close about Eve. The auras of the children and their mother were intertwined in a way that confounded Adam, but Eve, noting his amazement, let him know that this was all well and good, and that in this way the little ones drew from her both sustenance for their forms and knowledge that informed their minds. Each of them, she explained, was developing a personality of his or her own. She could with ease tell them apart. Adam was a little slower to discern them.

There were several souls in Camp who, though forgettish and even foolish in some ways, enjoyed the novelty of having small young souls about the place, and came by the cabin at all hours to look in on them. When it seemed that the little ones could be tended to without his being present, Adam resumed his practice of going down to the river at dawn to board Feller’s boat. But the nature of his dealings with Feller had changed. Formerly, Adam had respected Feller and wished to please him. Now all such desires were gone from his soul. For Adam had fathered progeny and struggled against an angel and seen that angel destroyed by an animated pile of rock from the First Age. He had absorbed angel-stuff into his own soul and form. These events made all of Feller’s doings seem so small and mean that Adam could scarcely be bothered to pay heed to the words coming from the boss’s mouth or to care about the petty deeds and squabbles that occupied every waking moment of the likes of Bluff and Edger. The days when Bluff’s size and strength had seemed impressive were now long past. And Adam was not the only soul who thought so, for it was now widely agreed in Eltown that Thunk, the free-roving woodcutter who came to town only infrequently, was the biggest and strongest soul in these parts, other than Adam.

In addition to axes, several other kinds of implements rattled in the bottom of Feller’s boat. As the days went by, Adam learned the uses of these: mauls and wedges for splitting tree trunks lengthwise, a saw for crosscutting, knives and fids for rope work. Too there were several rods of iron, about as long as a man’s forearm, devoid of any features that might hint at