Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,358

reflected his true feelings toward it.

“To be elsewhere,” said Corvus. “Look, I am a bird and I do not love having rock over my head. So I’m going to get out from under the Overstrike and do what birds do.”

“Eat worms?” Querc asked.

“Shit all over everything?” said Lyne.

“That’s the spirit! Now shut up and keep Pick from killing himself down there,” said Corvus, and after a few hops back down the way they had come, took off squawking into the sunlight.

“You’re going . . . down there?” Lyne asked Pick.

Pick unlocked the front of the sample case, which hinged down to form a table, variously burned and stained. Revealed were numerous niches and drawers, labeled in very old script such as Pestle had, according to legend, learned from the Old Gods in First Town. Prim, who knew how to read it, saw words like PRIMORDIAL ADAMANT—FROM THE LARGEST ROCK and AURIC CHAOS—PARTIALLY SENTIENT and other terms that made considerably less sense even than those.

The general plan of action was to anchor ropes up here that Pick could use to secure himself as he descended the ramplike surface of the crack face. Up here it was strewn with stuff that had fallen on it over the centuries, but once he descended to a depth “profound enough to be worth visiting,” it would be as clean and featureless as the opposite, overhanging face, and he would begin to slide.

“You can’t just stop there,” Mard objected.

“What do you mean?” Pick asked. He was uncoiling, and inspecting, a very long rope.

“‘Begin to slide.’ Then what?”

“Keep sliding?” Lyne guessed.

“At increasing velocity?” Querc offered.

“But, to where?” Mard demanded. “Where would you stop?”

“Better to ask whether,” Pick said. “Careless as he was, I see no reason to assume that Egdod bothered to supply every hole in the ground with a bottom. Tedious work, that. Not his way.”

This left the younger members of the expedition in silence as they went about their work—though the vision of Pick’s falling into a bottomless chasm did have the salutary effect of making them very keen about sound knot-work and proper anchoring of rope ends. They more and more avoided the lip of the fault.

At some length Pick approached the sample case and opened a drawer labeled PURE CHAOS, which had been noticed and remarked on by the others but which perhaps understandably they had been reluctant to open. They crowded around to look. It was full of a nothing that made the upper face of the Overstrike, featureless as that was, seem like something. The drawer itself was not dovetailed wooden planks but hewn from black stone—the primordial rock that Pick referred to as adamant. Its outer surface was barely visible; when he pulled it open, its inner surfaces could not be seen at all. With very close attention they could see fluctuations of light and dark, and hear a dull hiss. It reminded Prim somewhat of aura she had seen around Delegate Elshield and in the cells of the Hive. But that had been radiant and had moved in ways that, though unpredictable, bespoke a kind of sense. This stuff was to that as a rotting corpse was to a living animal.

Aura reached out from Pick’s head like a beetle’s pincers, converged on the drawer, and pinched off a bit of the chaos about the size of a nut. He closed the adamant drawer. The sample of chaos moved with him, suspended in front of his face at arm’s length, enveloped in a swirling pattern of aura. He moved now with the gliding, cautious gait of a servant who is carrying a brimful glass of rare wine on a slippery tray. He made his way to the brink, where Querc passed the rope around his body in a very particular manner, enclosing him in a kind of sliding hitch that would enable him to control his descent with a single hand. In his other, no surprise, he held his pick. He backed slowly away from them over the brink of the fault, moving with care as he planted each foot—he had taken his boots off—on the surface below and behind him. In this manner he gradually receded from their view, his form growing smaller and less distinct, until all they could see was the glow of his aura. That too became small and faint. The only way they could be sure he was still in and of the Land was the rope, ever tense, but twitching, and occasionally traversing from