An extract from Playground by Richard Powers

Before the earth,

before the moon,
before the stars,

before the sun,

before the sky,
even before the sea,

there was only time and Ta’aroa.

–

Ta’aroa made Ta’aroa. Then he made an egg that could house him.
He set the egg spinning in the void. Inside the spinning egg, suspended in that endless vacuum, Ta’aroa huddled, waiting.

With all that endless time and all that eternal waiting, Ta’aroa grew weary inside his egg. So he shook his body and cracked the shell and slid out of his self-made prison.
Outside, everything was muted and still. And Ta’aroa saw that he was alone.

Ta’aroa was an artist, so he played with what he had. His first medium was eggshell. He crunched the shell into countless pieces and let them fall. The pieces of eggshell drifted down to make the foundations of the Earth.

His second medium was tears. He cried in his boredom and his loneliness, and his tears filled up the Earth’s oceans and its lakes and all the world’s rivers.
His third medium was bone. He used his spine to make islands. 
Mountain chains appeared wherever his vertebrae rose above his pooled tears.

Creation became a game. From his fingernails and toenails, he made the scales of fish and the shells of turtles. He plucked out his own feathers and turned them into trees and bushes, which he filled with birds. With his own blood, he spread a rainbow across the sky.

Ta’aroa summoned all the other artists. The artists came forward with their baskets full of materials— sand and pebbles, corals and shells, grass and palm fronds and threads spun from the fibers of many plants. And together with Ta’aroa, the artists shaped and sculpted Tāne, the god of forests and peace and beauty and all crafted things.

Then the artists brought the other gods into being— scores of them. Kind ones and cruel ones, lovers and engineers and tricksters. And these gods filled in the rest of the unfolding world with color and line and creatures of all kinds— land, air, and sea.

Tāne decided to decorate the sky. He toyed with the possibilities, dotting the blackness with points of light that spun around the center of the night in great pinwheels. He made the sun and moon, which split time into day and night.

Now that there were days and months, now that the world was sparked with branching and unfolding life, now that the sky was itself a work of art, it was time for Ta’aroa to finish his game. He fashioned and split the world into seven layers, and in the bottom most layer he put people— someone to play with at last.

He watched the people puzzle things out, and it delighted him. 
The people multiplied and filled the lowest layer like fish fill up a reef. The people found plants and trees and animals and shells and rocks, and with all their discoveries they made new things, just as Ta’aroa had made the world.

Growing in number, human beings felt hemmed in. So when they discovered the portal that led up to the level of the world above theirs— the doorway that Ta’aroa had hidden just for them— they pried it open, passed through, and started spreading out again, one layer higher.