Reamde

by Neal Stephenson

Richard was pretty sure that when they ventured out onto Richard’s branch of the family tree—and a long, stark, forkless branch it was—they got a certain look in their eyes that the kids could read in the rearview mirror, a tone of voice that in this part of the country said more than words were ever allowed to.

He kept wondering when he was going to develop the aquiline, silver-haired good looks of the men in the prostate medication ads on their endless seaplane junkets and fly-fishing idylls. Instead he was turning out to be an increasingly spready and mottled version of what he had been at thirty-five.

Now Richard had a new item on his list, which, unlike Zula’s, was a stew of nagging worries, vague intentions, and dimly perceived karmic debts that he carried around in his head.

“Tensors?” Richard had no idea what a tensor was, but he had noticed that when math geeks started throwing the word around, it meant that they were headed in the general direction of actually getting something done.

Richard had assumed, based on how Peter handled the gun, that he’d done it before. Now he reconsidered. This might be the first time Peter had ever touched a semiautomatic. But he was a quick study. An autodidact. Anything that was technical, that was logical, that ran according to rules, Peter could figure out. And knew it. Didn’t bother to ask for help. So much quicker to work it out on his own than suffer through someone’s well-meaning efforts to educate him—and to forge an emotional connection with him in so doing. There was something, somewhere, that he could do better than most people. Something of a technical nature.

“Waiting for cancer” would have been too honest an answer. “Fighting a bitter rear-guard action against clinical depression” would have given the impression that he was depressed today, which he wasn’t.

“You fly through Seattle?” Peter asked, jumping rather hastily to the last-resort topic of air travel.

Richard’s reaction to this was more complicated than Peter might have imagined. He was gratified that Peter and Zula had identified him as one of the cool kids and were now inviting him to share their wryness. On the other hand, he had grown up on this farm, and part of him didn’t much care for their attitude. He suspected that they were already facebooking and twittering this, that hipsters in San Francisco coffee bars were even now ROFLing and OMGing at photos of Peter with the Glock.

Richard’s ex-girlfriends were long gone, but their voices followed him all the time and spoke to him, like Muses or Furies. It was like having seven superegos arranged in a firing squad before a single beleaguered id, making sure he didn’t enjoy that last cigarette.

The girl in the passenger seat said she had never before been in “a car like this,” meaning, apparently, a sedan. Richard felt far beyond merely old.

Peter was not exactly chomping at the bit to divulge facts about himself. Richard was fine with that. People who had job titles and business cards could say easily where they worked and what they did for a living, but those who worked for themselves, doing things of a complicated nature, learned over time that it was not worth the trouble of supplying an explanation if its only purpose was to make small talk. Better to just go directly to airline travel.

They gazed out the windows at the frost-burned landscape. This was western Iowa. People from anywhere else, traveling across the state, would have been hard-pressed to see any distinction between its east and its west—or, for that matter, between Ohio and South Dakota. But having grown up here, and gone on many a pirate quest and Indian ambush down along the crick, Richard sensed a gradient in the territory, was convinced that they were on the threshold between the Midwest and the West, as though on one side of the crick you were in the land of raking red leaves across the moist, forgiving black soil while listening to Big Ten football games on the transistor radio, but on the other side you were plucking arrows out of your hat.

They went inside. The young ones shuffled to a stop as their ironic sensibilities, which served them in lieu of souls, were jammed by a signal of overwhelming power. Richard kept moving, since he was the one with a mission.

“When did you move to Canada?” asked the young woman. “1972,” he answered. The old man gave him a look over his bifocals: Draft dodger! None of the younger people made the connection. He wondered if they even knew that the country had once had a draft, and that people had been at pains to avoid it.

“The client’s dog started it. Hassled the poor bear. The bear picked the dog up in its jaws and started shaking it like a squirrel.” “Was it like a poodle or something?” Vicki asked. “It was an eighty-pound golden lab,” Richard said. “Ohmygod!” “That is kind of what I was saying. When the lab stopped struggling, which didn’t take long, the bear tossed it into the bushes and advanced on us like If you had anything whatsoever to do with that fucking dog, you’re dead. That’s when the shooting happened.”

Without being unduly bitter about it, Richard had always wondered why the offspring of Nicholas who had settled down and lived exemplary, stable, churchgoing lives in the upper Midwest were viewed as carrying on the man’s heritage and living according to his example, given that the single most celebrated episode in the man’s life had been beating a bunch of storm troopers to death with an improvised bludgeon.

John and Alice and their lawyers were being perfectly rational, of course, but to him they’d seemed like a town council of hobbits drafting a resolution to demand an apology from the Ringwraiths.

THE FOOTBALL GAME did not exactly end but, like most of them, reached a point where it was simply unwatchable.

He was neither dead nor here, but in Idaho, a state often confused, by bicoastal folks, with Iowa, but that in fact was the anti-Iowa in many respects, a place that Iowans would only go to in order to make some kind of statement.

A light changed and traffic seeped forward. Soon enough, he was on the interstate, southbound. That rapidly grew boring, so he switched to two-lane roads, to the mounting chagrin of his GPS.

As a fantasy writer, he was not highly regarded (“one cannot call him profoundly mediocre without venturing so far out on the critical limb as to bend it to the ground,” “so derivative that the reader loses track of who he’s ripping off,” “to say he is tin-eared would render a disservice to a blameless citizen of the periodic table of the elements”), but he was so freakishly prolific that he had been forced to spin off three pen names and set each one up at a different publishing house.

Neal Stephenson <3

“The Apostropocalypse is to the current realignment in T’Rain what the Treaty of Versailles was to the Second World War,” said Richard, deliberately mocking the tone of a Wikipedia contributor in hopes that the others would get it.

All Chet knew of fantasy literature was that it was a useful source of van art.

Richard left out all material having to do with drug money and motorcycle gangs, since that was amply covered by the Wikipedia entry that all present had presumably read and perhaps even edited.

“The cruelty and opportunism of the Russians are greatly overstated,” Wallace said, “but they contain a kernel of truth. You, Peter, have chosen to trade in illegal goods. In doing so, you are stepping outside of the structures of ordinary commerce, with its customer service reps, its mediators, its Angie’s List. If the transaction fails, your customers will not have any of the normal forms of recourse. That’s all I’m saying. So even if you’re a complete shite-for-brains with no regard for the safety of yourself or your girlfriend, I’ll ask you to answer my question as to provenance, because I still have a choice as to whether I’ll proceed with this transaction, and I’ll not go into business with a shite-for-brains.”

“So those guys stole your money?” asked Peter, violating the rule, earlier laid down by Wallace, that he couldn’t ask stupid questions about how T’Rain worked.

When this policy initiative had abruptly been made known to Richard in the middle of a barroom conversation on seemingly unrelated topics, awe and horror had struggled for supremacy in his mammalian brain as his reptilian had begun to tally all exits, conventional and un-, from the bar; lubricated his whole body with sweat; and jacked his pulse rate up into a frequency range that had probably jammed Mounties’ radar guns out on Highway 22.

“God, that sounds like just the sort of can of worms that I retired to get away from.” “I don’t think you are actually retired,” Corvallis pointed out mildly. “I mean, you just flew in from Elphinstone and tomorrow you’re taking a jet to Missouri and from there—” “It’s a selective retirement,” Richard explained, “a retirement from boring shit.” “I think that’s called a promotion.”

“Turns out,” Corvallis warned him, “that federal law enforcement types haven’t yet bought into the whole APPIS mind-set, and so they aren’t real big on terms like ‘booty,’ ‘swag,’ ‘hoard,’ ‘treasure,’ or anything that is evocative of a fictitious Medieval Armed Combat scenario. To them, it’s all payments. And since our system uses real money, it’s all—well—real.”

If you knew what was normal to the enemy, then everything became easy: you could lull them to sleep by feeding them normal, and you could scare the hell out of them by suddenly taking normal away.

Don Donald was clearly accustomed to addressing people whose only way of responding was to nod worshipfully and take notes. He did not, in other words, leave a lot of breaks in his testimony to allow for discussion. For the moment, that was fine, since it made it easier for Richard to drink.

“Among geeks, the cool-soundingness of the acronym is more important than the existence of what it refers to.”

The GPS unit became almost equally obstreperous, though, over Richard’s unauthorized route change, until they finally passed over some invisible cybernetic watershed between two possible ways of getting to their destination, and it changed its fickle little mind and began calmly telling him which way to proceed as if this had been its idea all along.

“Say more about the Crips and the Bloods,” Richard said, stalling for time while he tried to get his mental house in order. “To us they look the same. Urban black kids with similar demographics and tastes. Seems like they all ought to pull together. But that’s not where they’re at. They are shooting each other to death because they see the Other as less than human. And I’m saying it has been the case for a long time in T’Rain that those people we have lately started calling the Earthtone Coalition have always looked at the ones we now call the Forces of Brightness and seen them as tacky, uncultured, not really playing the game in character. And what happened in the last few months was that the F.O.B. types just got tired of it and rose up and, you know, asserted their pride in their identity, kind of like the gay rights movement with those goddamned rainbow flags. And as long as it’s possible for those two groups to identify each other on sight, each one of them is going to see the other as, well, the Other, and killing people based on that is way more ingrained than killing them on this completely bogus and flimsy fake-Good and fake-Evil dichotomy that we were working with before.”

Csongor, who spoke no Chinese at all, was impressed, thus far, by Marlon’s fluency in the universal English of action movies and chat rooms.

It seemed as though prayers were in order. Prayers for the dead, for the missing, and for herself. Given that she had been raised by churchgoing folk, it was a bit odd that this hadn’t occurred to her before. No aspect of what was going on seemed as though it might be improved by communication with a deity. With the possible exception, that is, that it might make her feel better. That, as far as she could tell, was the purpose of the religion she had been brought up in: it made people feel better when really horrible things happened, and it offered a repertoire of ceremonies that were used to add a touch of class to such goings-on as shacking up with someone and throwing dirt on a corpse. None of which especially bothered Zula or made her doubt its worthwhileness. Making sad people feel better was a fine thing to do.

“To the best of my knowledge, all has gone exactly according to plan. If you have better information, I should be obliged—” “Of that I have no doubt,” she said. “What I don’t know is what the bloody fuck was the plan!?”

“I have his cell,” Olivia said, “but if I want to fuck with him—which I do—it would be better to call his landline, wouldn’t it?” “THIS FRICKIN’ PHONE is attached to the wall by an actual wire,” said Seamus Costello, with a mix of horror and disgust, when he became awake enough to understand such facts. “How the hell are you reaching me over a wire!?”

“Any time you want to start making sense, I’m ready.”

the moneychanger responded immediately with “K,” that being the chat abbreviation for the unwieldy two-letter message “OK.”

But all deaths were as different as the persons who had died. Each death meant that a particular set of ideas and perceptions and reactions was gone from the world, apparently forever, and served as a reminder to Richard that one day his ideas and perceptions and reactions would be gone too. It was never good.

Seamus had to hand it to the girl. He was getting to the point where he could not get his day started without a dramatic early-morning text message or phone call from Olivia. If he continued working with this person, he was going to have to get into the habit of going to bed early and perhaps even sober.

The Fantastic Foreigners were also dumbfounded by the size and variety of the gun section, and in this way they lost another forty-five minutes to culture shock, pure and simple. Seamus could tell that Csongor was lusting after a 1911, but fortunately the paperwork would have made purchasing such a thing impossible, and so the relationship had to remain platonic for now.