Reamde

by Neal Stephenson

to build a pilot plant near Mt. Rainier: the stupendous volcanic shotgun pointed at Seattle’s head.

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. Get Zula a job at Corporation 9592.

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.

The Walmart was like a starship that had landed in the soybean fields.

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.

The client wanted the skin. I told him it was illegal. He offered me money to do this thing for him. So I started skinning it. This took days. A horrible job. Butchering even domesticated, farm-bred animals is pretty unspeakable, which is why we bring Mexicans to Iowa to do it,”

“emotionally available.” The phrase had left him dumb with disbelief the first time a woman had gone upside his head with it. He guessed that many of his emotions were not really fit to be shared with anyone, much less someone, such as a girlfriend, he was supposed to be nice to, and associated “emotional availability” with unguarded moments such as the one that had led to his getting the nickname Dodge.

He was expecting bright simple colors, which would have been true of the Hy-Vee diners of his youth. But this one had post-Starbucks decor, meaning no primary colors, everything earthtone, restful, minutely textured.

“Exactly, but in a way it’s almost more patronizing to the Chinese to assume that, just because they are from China, they can’t relate to elves and dwarves.”

“Who is there?” Ivanov wanted to know. “I hear female voice sayink holy shit.” Then he switched to Russian.

Ivanov listened raptly, breaking in from time to time. Half of the time this was to compliment her, since he seemed convinced that any female who did not receive a compliment every five minutes would stab him with an ice pick in his sleep.

The brain, as far as Richard could determine from haphazard skimming of whatever came up on Google, was sort of like the electrical system of Mogadishu.

Waging war on his enemies had been Sokolov’s habit and his profession for a long time, but being chivalrous to everyone else was simply a basic tenet of having your shit together as a human and as a man.

“Find motherfucker who fucked me!” Ivanov shouted, so loudly that he could have been heard in Vladivostok.

Westerners on foot, unnoticed and unpestered, were as much an affront to civic order as gushing fire hydrants and warbling car alarms.

“You will have noticed that many if not most works of fantasy literature revolve around physical objects, usually ancient, imbued with numinous power. The Rings in the works of Tolkien being the best-known example.”

Having now lived for a few decades in parts of the United States and Canada where cooking was treated quite seriously, and having actually employed professional chefs, he was fascinated by the midwestern/middle American phenomenon of recombinant cuisine. Rice Krispie Treats being a prototypical example in that they were made by repurposing other foods that had already been prepared (to wit, breakfast cereal and marshmallows).

The unifying principle behind all recombinant cuisine seemed to be indifference, if not outright hostility, to the use of anything that a coastal foodie would define as an ingredient.

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.

Qian Yuxia had in the meantime stomped up to the counter and addressed one of the employees in the style of a drill sergeant greeting a trainee who had showed up drunk and disheveled.

Sokolov had spoken to them of the need to sever the loop: the loop of observing, thinking, deciding, and acting. In normal circumstances the loop was a good thing but not now; they had to act without thinking for a few moments, and only then could they observe and think and decide.

Olivia imagined a D-day-style invasion of the island, gardeners with saws and shovels parachuting out of the sky and storming the beaches—and were being liberated from the thorny or flowery embrace of climbing vines, deratted, reroofed, fixed up, and condoized.

(he had once tried to capitalize on the latter by becoming a saber fencer, but, as the coach explained to him, “There is too much of you to hit”).

Russians, on the other hand, were fatalists of a somewhat different kind, believing, or at least strongly suspecting, that they were fucked no matter what, and that they had better just make the best of it anyway,

“You have a gun?” Her tone of voice was not: It would be really cool and useful if you had a gun. It was, rather, If you have a gun, we are in even worse trouble than I had thought.

Why then no trust? Because he had crashed through her office window at a particularly difficult moment and aimed an assault rifle at her and then broken into her apartment, probably.

“Is funny joke,” Sokolov said. “That’s a strange thing for you to say since I don’t see the slightest trace of amusement on your face.” “Is Russian sense of humor. What you call dry.”

“What are we—” Csongor began, but Marlon cut him off. He was hanging up the phone. “I told her gao de tamen ji quan bu ning,” he said. “What does that mean?” Marlon grinned, stalling Csongor while he worked through the translation. “Make it so that not even their dogs and chickens are at peace.”

“I cannot fucking believe this,” Csongor said. “Four days ago I am in Budapest drinking beer. Now I have hijacked a boat in China and I have fallen in love and I have killed people.”

“SOKOLOV,” SAID THE Russian into the phone. “We met earlier when I killed half of your men. Ten minutes ago I killed the other half. Now there is just you, motherfucker. A fucking piece of shit who uses phone to send better men to die. Then runs away to airport.”

In the background, some guy was screaming single-word utterances in Latin. There was rhythmic tromping. “What the fuck are you doing?” “Maneuvers.” C-plus said.

Uncle Richard had warned Zula, once, that bears were the conversational equivalent of a black hole, in the sense that any conversation that fell into that topic could never escape it. Considering how rare bears and bear attacks were in the real world, Zula, the rational-skeptic college kid, had doubted the veracity of Dodge’s observation.