Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,413
its front door. She divided her time between Land and Firmament. While she was here, she worked in Pick’s Cube with Thingor and Corvus and Knotweave and other curious souls who were skilled at plumbing the deep nature of things. They strove to divine the hidden secrets of the other plane of existence and to fashion ever tinier and more sophisticated machines.
Spring could force a tree to grow tall in an hour if that was what she wanted, but she preferred to let them take their time. Only a few years had passed since the Fastness had been unchained. She had begun coming here to look after the park, and so most of what grew here was flowers and vines and grasses. In one place Dodge had caused stone arches to curve out of the rubble and enclose a little place where he had set an adamant bench and a low table. Spring had made flowering vines grow exuberantly on the arches, covering the stone altogether to make a vaulted bower of blossoms just now opening their petals and turning toward the sun.
The girl was waiting on the bench just as she did every morning. She was paging quietly through one of the picture books strewn about the table. Egdod sat next to her. “You’ve lost our place!” he exclaimed in mock dismay. “How are we going to pick up the story now?”
Sophia knew perfectly well that her uncle was only teasing her. “We were almost at the end!” she chided him. “I went back to look at the picture of the lady with the yellow hair. In the white temple. She’s pretty! But mean. She was cruel to poor Prim.”
“Yes, she was.”
“I wish she was dead!”
“You should never,” Dodge said, “wish that of anyone. Just imagine: what if your wish came true?”
But Sophia had already lost interest in the picture of the lady with the yellow hair and paged forward to very near the end of the book. “We were here,” she said, showing him a two-page illustration crowded with small figures. It was a map of the Land, drawn in a childlike style with oversized buildings and other features here and there: the Palace in the middle atop its Pinnacle, the Fastness to its north amid snow-covered mountains, cities along the western coast, and various castles and legendary beasts scattered among the Bits and in the ocean beyond.
“Right!” Dodge said. “Where were we?”
Sophia reminded him by putting her fingertip on a depiction of a boat sailing in the western ocean. Aboard was a dark-skinned woman, decorated with jewels and markings on her skin.
“Fern had finally seen what she had been searching for ever since the sea monster had taken her family when she was a little girl,” Dodge said. “Having seen it, she was satisfied, and wanted only to live a seafaring life. And since her new friends the Bufrects were famous mariners, she went with Mard and Lyne to Calla, and there built a boat and called it Swab.”
Sophia’s finger had already strayed to the island of Calla (she had heard this story a hundred times) and come to rest on a castle rising from the top of a green hill. “Hello, giant!” she said. “I see you!” For the artist had cleverly drawn the hill so that if you looked at it the right way you could see it as a hill-giant curled up on the ground sleeping.
“Ssh, you’ll wake it up!”
“That’s not what it says in the book!”
“All right. After King Brindle gave his life for the Quest, Paralonda Bufrect was the rightful queen of Calla. But she had no desire to rule and so she passed the crown to Prince Anvellyne.”
“His friends called him Lyne,” Sophia informed him gravely.
“And King Anvellyne ruled wisely over Calla with Mardellian as his closest friend, adviser, and . . .”
“Magician!”
“Mard the One-Handed became a wizard, yes. Together they saw to it that . . .”
Sophia’s finger had already strayed north to a cottage surrounded by livestock. A white-haired woman was shown carrying a bushel of wheat on her hip. “Edda!”
“. . . that Edda the Giantess was made to feel welcome whenever she chose to stay alone in her cottage. But she loved to wander back and forth between there and . . .”
Sophia’s finger made a huge swipe eastward across Bits and Shivers and Bewilderment to a golden glen in the mountains not far from a towering black fortress.
“Yes,” said Dodge, “the glen where she loved to spend time with her mother and her grandmother.”
A wild look came into Sophia’s eyes and she looked up into Dodge’s face. “How tall is a giantess, Uncle Dodge?” she asked, as if she did not ask the same question every single day.
“As tall as she wants to be,” said Dodge.
Acknowledgments
Eric Fahlman and Casey Little of Fahlman Olson & Little, PLLC are gratefully acknowledged for their patient and cheerful efforts to bring me up to speed on all matters related to wills, health care directives, per stirpes, and the bureaucracy of death in general.
Anyone who has read David Deutsch’s The Fabric of Reality will notice that Fall owes an intellectual debt to it. Anyone who hasn’t, but who found Fall interesting, is urged to do so.
Another source of ideas was a series of conversations over the years with Steve A. Wiggins, author most recently of Holy Horror: the Bible and Fear in Movies and of the blog Sects and Violence in the Ancient World. His area of specialization is the ancient city of Ugarit, which to make a long story short was an interesting place from a religious standpoint, sitting in the Venn diagram intersection of what we think of as Semitic and what we think of as Greek ideas about god(s), and in an interesting transitional phase between poly- and monotheism.
Some of the ideas mentioned in the Moab section of the book, under the heading of the Ethical Network Sabotage Undertaking, have been floating around for decades; Matt Blaze first mentioned them in my hearing under the name of the Encyclopedia Disinformatica, during the mid-1990s, at the Hackers Conference.
The term “Meatspace,” frequently used in this novel, appears to have been coined by Doug Barnes in 1993.
Finally, there have been various big-picture conversations over the years with George Dyson and Jaron Lanier that undoubtedly influenced this book.