Fall; or, Dodge in Hell

by Neal Stephenson

  Except for Enoch. “Explain it,” he urged her. “I’ve always wanted to understand.”

  “Ever since I was a child, I’ve been hearing physicists insist that nothing can travel faster than light. That it would break the universe somehow. Something to do with causality.”

  “You can’t have an effect until the cause has arrived,” Enoch said, nodding. “And causes can only travel so fast.”

  “Never completely made sense to me when it was explained that way. Seemed arbitrary. Like a rule that had been imposed from outside the system.”

  Enoch was nodding and smiling.

  Zula went on, “But it’s what we are doing at this very moment to Bitworld! We are saying that according to the rules of the simulation, everything, everywhere, has to march forward in lockstep. As much as we might like to see how it all comes out—whether that tear is going to break loose from Mercury’s eye, for example—we may not. We can’t throw more mana at it and fast-forward that one part of the simulation, because then it would be out of sync with all the other parts. It would break the world.”

  “And we can’t have that, can we?”

  “No! We can’t have that, Enoch.”

  Enoch looked over at the frozen god. “This is not going to change for a very long time,” he said, “for the reason that you just mentioned. There are young people here who may spend the next ten years of their lives managing the systems in orbit above us that will generate the next few moments of time in Bitworld. But you know what?”

  “No. What?”

  Enoch pivoted so that he was standing beside her, and bent his arm in what Zula recognized as a very old-fashioned courtly sort of gesture. She reached out with some caution, not wanting to poke him with her exoskeleton, and took it. “Outside,” Enoch said in a quiet voice just for her, “the sun is about to come up on the other side of the hill.”

  “We’ve been here all night!?”

  “We’ve been here all night,” he confirmed, “and I don’t know about you but I could use some fresh air and a leg stretch.”

  Without really talking about it, they walked in the general direction of the place where she had been living for the last few years, on the top of Capitol Hill. She had moved back up there after she’d become bored of the houseboat on the lake. The whole point of the boat had been to provide her with a flat walk to work, after her knees had gone bust. But the modern Fronk had no difficulty with hills and she had felt like getting a place with more of a view. So she had moved to a huge old mansion up on the crest of the hill, a thing built in the early 1900s for a ten-child family with a full complement of servants. It had been sitting empty for a while. She had acquired similar properties to either side of it, knocked the houses down, and converted their lots to gardens. It had amused her to populate these with small creatures, and so they now supported a carefully tended fake ecosystem of chickens, peacocks, goats, alpacas, and a pair of big mellow dogs. It was being looked after by a couple of young people who had been staying in her house for the last few months. She had forgotten their names. Having children was now an eccentric activity, so it was a good bet that their parents were what they had used to call hippies, or at least artists. Anyway they liked animals and enjoyed looking after them and had nothing else to do.

  As they ascended, she fancied for a moment that something had gone awry with her vision system, for everything began to look soft, and she couldn’t see as far. She drew air into her lungs. One of those was the original, the other had gone on the blink some while ago and been replaced with a brand-new printed substitute. Anyway, when she drew the cool air into her new and her old lung, she sensed it was heavy and humid. Then she understood that up on the heights where the air was cold, it was foggy. Or, to put it another way, she and Enoch had, in a quite literal and technical sense, ascended into the clouds.

  The time of year was late fall. Some leaves were still on the trees, and many more on the ground, but the color had gone from them, unless you considered dark brown to be a color. The lack of foliage drew attention to the trees themselves. These had become rampant. Planted along the streets two hundred years ago, they must have been mere saplings when the neighborhoods were new. By the time young Zula had moved to town, they had become problems. Their roots heaved up sidewalks and made great ripples across old red-brick streets. Their limbs fell off in windstorms. Their branches interfered with utility lines. Taxpayers paid for crews of arborists to roam about cutting weird rectangular vacancies in them for wires to run through. Paving crews did what they could about root damage.

  Those days were over, and had been for a long time. Modern vehicles were as likely to move about on legs as wheels, so no one really cared about bumps in pavement. Modern utilities ran underground. Even had those things not been the case, the tax base wasn’t there to support all those arborists and pavers. So the trees—all of them deciduous imports from the East Coast or Europe—had been doing as they pleased for decades. And what pleased them was apparently getting drunk on sky-high levels of atmospheric CO2 and flinging out roots and limbs as wide as they possibly could. Capitol Hill was becoming a forest straight out of Northern European high-fantasy literature. The fog was now becoming tinged with pink and gold light as the rising sun shone on it, and the boughs of the trees cast shadows through that.

  They reached her neighborhood, where the trees were hugest, and linked by nearly as ancient hedges of laurel and holly. A soft glow pervaded everything and tinged solid objects with iridescence. Beyond that, there was nothing. No sky, no neighboring houses, no trees, no mountains. The fog had clamped it all off. It muffled sound too. Not that there was much of that in a half-abandoned city where vehicles were a thing of the past. She and Enoch were existing in a bubble of space maybe a hundred paces across. Beyond it, as she knew perfectly well, was a whole world. But one of the delicious qualia that emerged from certain kinds of weather—snowfall was another of them—was the childish illusion that the world really was small and simple enough to be comprehended within a glance. And that she, the one doing the glancing, was always at its center.

  She wondered if it had been thus for Dodge in the beginning, when he had been alone in Bitworld and the Landform had begun to take shape around him.

  “This is where I leave you,” said the voice of Enoch.

  “Where on earth are you going?” Zula asked, looking about for him. But she had lost him in the radiant fog.

  His voice was clear, though. It was the only sound in the world.

  “I’m not entirely sure,” he admitted. “But I’m done here. I did what I was sent to do.”

  The golden light grew until it was all she could see, and his voice was heard no more.

  56

  Dodge became conscious.

  He had slept well despite dreaming long elaborate dreams about the other plane of existence. The sun had awakened him, rising above the rim of the distant Land and flooding the Firmament with light.

  He had slept, as he did most nights, on the open lid of a tower that rose high above the streets of the city. For many years the lid had been an open and featureless disk of stone, but more recently he had raised a ring of pillars around its edge, and between the pillars Spring had caused vines to grow and interweave to make a low barrier. It came only to midthigh on Dodge, but it was high enough to prevent a little soul from toppling over the edge.

  Spring had not slept with him last night, though. When Dodge got to his feet and strolled over to the western side of his tower he could look across several miles of city to the park. For long ages that had been a mound of rubble that the souls of the Firmament had carried there, one back-load at a time, and piled up as they had patiently excavated and reshaped the cratered landscape where they had come to rest on the day of the Fall. Thus they had built the city with its black streets lit by fire. But the rubble pile had not become a park until Spring had gone to it and begun to adorn it with her creations.

  He spread his wings and beat up into the air. His destina
tion would be the park, but, as was his habit, he took a brief excursion around the city first. Its buildings tended to be of regular shapes with straight sides and edges, framed of stone and faced with glass to afford views and admit light. But they were built along streets that since the beginning of the Second Age had veered round diverse hazards and obstructions. Most prominent of all such was the crater that Egdod had made when he had smashed into the Firmament and broken it. This was now a circular pond of chaos round whose shores many buildings had been erected out of the ring of rubble that had once surrounded it. Dodge flew over that, as he always did, and gazed down into it. In its depths he saw the Fastness. He could tell at a glance that all was well there. In its towers and courtyards would be many souls whose work it was to look after those realms of the Land where Egdod held sway. No doubt many of them would have news to relate and questions to ask. But there was nothing that required his attention this morning.

  Satisfied of that, he banked round over the district between the crater and the park. In the midst of that, a new building had gone up of late. Pick’s Cube, they called it. It was sheathed in adamant and styled after the Cube from which the members of the Quest had retrieved the key. They had named it after the soul who had fallen just short of that goal. On its roof, well back from the edges so that it could not be seen from the streets, was a perch surrounded by bones, and on the perch was a giant talking raven.

  Though it was early in the day, Dodge could see Querc approaching 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.

  About the Author

  NEAL STEPHENSON is the bestselling author of the novels The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. (with Nicole Galland), Seveneves, Reamde, Anathem, The System of the World, The Confusion, Quicksilver, Cryptonomicon, The Diamond Age, Snow Crash, and Zodiac, and the groundbreaking nonfiction work In the Beginning . . . Was the Command Line.

  Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com.

  Also by Neal Stephenson

  The Rise and F
all of D.O.D.O. (with Nicole Galland)

  Seveneves

  Some Remarks

  Reamde

  Anathem

  The System of the World

  The Confusion

  Quicksilver

  Cryptonomicon

  The Diamond Age

  Snow Crash

  Zodiac

  Copyright

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  FALL; OR, DODGE IN HELL. Copyright © 2019 by Neal Stephenson. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  FIRST EDITION

  Cover design by Owen Corrigan

  Cover photograph © plainpicture/Design Pics/Philippe Henry

  Maps by Nick Springer/Springer Cartographics LLC

  Title page and section opening art from Now Night Her Course Began by Gustave Doré (1832–33)/Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design/Bridgeman Images

  * * *

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Stephenson, Neal, author.

  Title: Fall; or, Dodge in hell : a novel / Neal Stephenson.

  Description: First edition. | New York, NY : William Morrow, [2019]