Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,408

else, watched it happen. The Time Slip Ratio was definitely less than one, and so things happened slowly, on a time scale that reminded her of grand opera, where a twenty-minute aria might stand in for what normal people would cover in a quick exchange of text messages. Some kind of epic slugfest was taking place between El and a rock monster. All kinds of other things were going on too and were being excitedly noticed and pointed to by various onlookers. A lot of El’s custom-made humanoids were galloping toward Escherville. Other humanoids, and things that moved like bears, were on the move with Verna, crossing a bridge luxuriant with flowered vines, forming a defensive perimeter.

Her growing sense of Uncle Claude–like confusion was—mercifully—broken by a touch on her elbow. It was True That. “Something you should see, ma’am.”

“More so than all of this?” she exclaimed, gesturing at the melee in Escherville.

“I think so. Oh, and would you like a snack? It’s after midnight.” He proffered an energy bar or something, a gnarled confection of chocolate and granola. She accepted it gratefully, and chomped into it with artificial teeth.

She followed True That into the corner where he and his claque had been hanging out for the last few hours. They had extinguished their inscrutable data-viz-ware and replaced it with a rendering of a city.

It was a city she had never seen before. As she walked closer to it, she assumed it was somewhere in Europe. As she got closer, she began to think China. Some older burg, low lying, built on broken terrain, with an irregular medieval-style street pattern and the odd ancient castle. But it had been modernized with newer high-rises. One in particular rose above it all: a dark tower that somehow managed to combine features of a modern skyscraper and an ancient fortification.

The only thing that made it not look like a realistic rendering of a city on Earth was a huge figure poised atop that tower. It had wings. Leathery, not feathery. It was gazing downward in a brooding way at a big lake below the tower. The lake was almost perfectly circular.

“What is that?” Zula asked.

“Landform Two,” True That said. “Uncloaked. This is the first time we’ve ever actually seen what it looks like. As you know. Ma’am.”

“And the figure on the top of the tower is—”

He nodded. “The REAP.”

It was about then that the whole room came apart into pandemonium as, apparently, very dramatic and exciting things happened in Escherville. Zula didn’t know what to look at. The REAP spread his wings and sprang into the air. He was diving into the lake. But he did so in slow motion.

A few minutes after disappearing beneath the surface of the round lake, he popped up in Escherville, on top of the castle that he had built there long ago. The stuff El had bolted around it had all fallen off. She couldn’t make out where her daughter was. This distressed her as a mother.

Much as she wanted to stare at Landform 2, nothing was going on there. All of the Pantheon had followed Dodge (there was no point in calling him anything else now) through the portal that apparently connected the lake to the unshackled castle. So she made her way back to the place where everyone was watching that. Some kind of slow-motion melee played out. The rock monster made another appearance and bear-hugged El into a canyon. People screamed, not so much in horror as in sheer astonishment.

Long ago in the early days of the Pantheon, Zula had got in the habit—which she knew at some level was lazy and wrongheaded—of identifying certain of its members with classical deities of antiquity. Dodge was some combination of Zeus and God. Pluto was, well, Pluto. One of them had always struck her as very Mercury-like in the way he moved about. Another she saw as a kind of Mars. Not that there were a lot of wars to fight in those days, but he was big and seemed to serve as a kind of bouncer. Since they spent all their time in Landform 2, it had been decades since she had seen them.

But there they were, embroiled in this melee around Escherville. Two of them—“Mars” and “Mercury”—took flight, headed south. Whoever was controlling the display made it zoom out so that the spectators could keep those two in view. They were winging southward, soaring over snowcapped mountains, and pretty obviously headed for the palace on