Reamde

by Neal Stephenson

  The trailer hitch had become the center of her personal universe. Above was the open tailgate, providing a kind of shelter from the weather. The ground beneath her was a bed of blunt nails, the sheared-off stumps of mowed-down foliage. She devoted some time to kicking at the stalks, shearing them off level with the ground, and stomping them into the earth. Once it had become passably level, she spread the plastic out on the ground and arranged the sleeping bag on top of that, then climbed inside it. The temperature was well above freezing, but the damp chill would kill her in hours if she did not keep moving and working.

  You seem to have made quite an impression on Mr. Sokolov. Jones had said that to her, apropos of nothing, the first evening at the mining camp. I couldn’t make out why until you did for Khalid. She’d been unable to make any sense at all of these statements and had put them out of her mind until now.

  How could Jones possibly know what Sokolov thought of her? Jones and Zula had spent hours going over the events in the apartment building. Most of this had been him extracting information from her. But from the nature of the questions he asked, she had been able to piece together a reasonably coherent picture of how the battle had gone. It was out of the question that Sokolov and Jones could have engaged in any conversation. And if they had, they would not have been chitchatting about Zula; even in the incredibly unlikely event that Sokolov wanted to talk about her in the middle of a crazy running gun battle, Jones didn’t even know that she existed at that point.

  Finally, now, she understood. The answer to the riddle had come to her while her conscious mind had been thinking about other things. Perhaps she’d gotten a clue from the way that Jones had kept an ear cocked toward the squawks coming from the CB radio in the truck. She’d seen a similar look on his face before, on the plane, at the FBO in Xiamen. He had received a call on his phone and whipped it open. His face had lit up with delight, which had immediately collapsed into shock and then settled into some kind of intense murderous fascination.

  It must have been Sokolov on the other end of that call. Sokolov had killed, or at least overcome, the men Jones had sent out to murder him, and ended up in possession of one of their phones, and hit the redial button. He had made some kind of a little speech to Jones. And he had mentioned Zula. That had to be it; that was the only time that Sokolov could ever have communicated with Jones.

  Why would Sokolov mention Zula in that conversation?

  (It took a while to work these things out. But Zula had a while.)

  Really that was two questions: first, how could Sokolov have known that Zula and Jones were together? And second, given that he knew this, why would he go to the trouble of mentioning her to Jones during their brief phone conversation?

  The answer to the first question was already in her head, and she needed only to pull it up from memory. On the boat, a couple of days ago, after the scene on the pier. Jones interrogating Zula. Zula telling him about the safe house, pointing to the skyscraper, calling out the forty-third floor. And wondering whether in doing so she was sending a message to Sokolov, letting him know that she, or some other member of the group, was still alive. Because if Jones’s men went snooping around on the forty-third floor of that building, it would raise the question: How had they learned the location of the safe house?

  As to the second question: Jones had answered it, in a way, with his remark You seem to have made quite an impression on Mr. Sokolov.

  What the hell did that mean?

  Maybe Sokolov had said to Jones: I hope you kill that conniving bitch! But Zula doubted this. Her interactions with Sokolov had been about as courteous and respectful as it was possible to get in an abductor/hostage relationship. She had felt, in a weird way, as though she were partners with him.

  Otherwise, she wouldn’t have done it.

  She realized this now. Calling out the wrong apartment number, sending them to 505 instead of 405: this was crazy. Suicidal. No wonder Peter had been furious with her. So furious that his next move had been to abandon her to her fate, leaving her handcuffed to a pipe. Csongor had been as shocked as Peter, but he’d taken her side in the matter because of dumb love. Why had Peter and Csongor been so incredulous at this decision that had seemed so easy, so obviously the correct move, to Zula?

  Because Peter and Csongor had not been privy to the almost subliminal exchanges of glances and—not even anything as obvious as glances or words, but hidden signals in postures, facial expressions, the way that Zula, getting on an elevator with a group of Russians, had always chosen to stand by Sokolov’s side. Zula and Sokolov were allies. He would protect her from whatever fate Ivanov had in mind for them. And, sensing that she was under his umbrella, she had felt safe enough to send them to 505 when she knew that the Troll was in 405.

  And she could do it again. She had been doing it again, this time with Jones. And part of the way you did it was by keeping your emotional shit together, not kicking and screaming, not suffering emotional breakdowns, showing you could handle it, could be trusted. Getting them used to having you around.

  That was why she had relaxed and shown no emotion when Abdul-Wahaab had padlocked the chain around her ankle. A little thing. But a little thing that Jones had noticed, even if—especially if—he wasn’t aware that he was noticing it.

  Could Jones really be that easily manipulated? He seemed so smart in all other ways.

  I couldn’t make out why until you did for Khalid.

  That explained it. Jones was at a loss to understand why Sokolov, his personal bête noire, thought enough of Zula to make her a primary topic of their one brief phone exchange. He had not observed the way that Zula and Sokolov had grown accustomed to each other during the days they’d been together; and even if he had, he might not have sussed it out, any more than Peter or Csongor had. Consequently, ever since hearing Sokolov’s voice coming out of that phone, Jones had been chewing on this, trying to figure out what Sokolov saw in her; and when she had killed Khalid, he had reckoned that this was the answer. He believed that Sokolov’s respect for Zula was rooted in an appreciation of Zula’s fighting spirit or her prowess with weapons or some other such quality: the kind of thing that a man like Jones would suppose that a man like Sokolov would hold in esteem.

  And this left Jones wide open. Ready to be blindsided by the same tactics Zula had used with Sokolov. The difference being that in the case of Sokolov they hadn’t been tactics, just Zula instinctively trusting the man. The question now was: Could she bring about a similar effect in Jones’s mind by doing similar things in a way that was utterly calculated and insincere?

  “ONE DAY, MY son, all of this could be yours,” Egdod intoned, swooping low over the Torgai Foothills. He was addressing an Anthron—a man, basically—whom he was holding by the scruff of the neck. The Anthron was dressed in the most nondescript possible woolen cloak. Between his bare feet (for he had declined to spend virtual money on shoes or even sandals), the mature coniferous forest of the Torgai streamed by, just a few hundred meters below.

  “Far be it from me to question your database,” the Anthron replied, “but I still don’t see—”

  “There!” Egdod called out, banking into a tight turn and spiraling down toward an outcropping of basalt. “Just at the base of those rocks.”

  “I do see a fleck of yellow, but I assumed it was a patch of eälanthassala,” said the Anthron, easily wrapping his tongue around the hexasyllabic name of the sacred flower of the montane branch of the K’Shetriae.

  “Look again,” Egdod said, and he shed altitude until they were poised only a few meters above the “fleck.” This was now revealed as a mound of shiny yellow coins. “I’m going to drop you.” He did so.

  “Heavens!” exclaimed the Anthron, then landed on his feet and fell awkwardly onto his arse, creating little gold-coin avalanches.

  “If your character had better Proprioception—which you could get by spending some of your Attribute credits, or by sending him off to undertake certain types of training, or by dr
inking the right potion—he would have landed a little more adroitly and rolled out like a paratrooper instead of taking minor damage to his butt, as yours just did,” Egdod said, sounding a little peevish for a creature of nearly godlike status. For this newly created Anthron had been absurdly stingy with his Attribute credits and still had most of them hoarded in reserve where they were doing him absolutely no good.

  The burst of gibberish left the Anthron utterly nonplussed.

  “Never mind,” Egdod said.

  “Who are those creatures coming out of the trees, over yonder?” the Anthron asked, turning his head to the left. Egdod—who was invisible to everyone in T’Rain except for the Anthron—spun in midair to see a pair of Dwinn marauders headed straight for them. One heavily armed and armored cataphract, unslinging a crossbow, and one mage, clad only in robes, but protected by a swirling nebula of colored lights: force field spells that she had thrown up to protect herself from random slings and arrows.

  “You could see the answer for yourself if you had spent some of your Attribute credits on Perceptivity,” Egdod groused, and lost altitude until he had positioned himself directly in the path of the incoming crossbow bolt.

  “I can’t see!” the Anthron complained.

  “Oh yeah—you’re the only person in the world to whom I am opaque,” Egdod said. He turned around to face the Anthron. “Check it out.”

  “Oh my word, you’ve been shot!” For Egdod actually did have a crossbow bolt projecting from the general vicinity of his liver. But as the Anthron watched, the bolt was spat out by the wound it had made. It flipped backward for about a meter and stuck in the grass. By the time the Anthron’s eyes had traveled back up to the wound, it had healed, leaving behind a pink scar that was rapidly fading. “A little trick I picked up about a thousand years ago,” Egdod explained. “Hold on a sec while I deal with these guys.”

  “Deal with them?”

  “I could incinerate them just by looking at them funny,” Egdod said, “but then they’d know that an extremely high-level character was running around the Torgai, and word might get around. So I’m going to do it the way a lower-level character might.” Egdod turned back toward the interlopers, raised his hands, and uttered a phrase in a dead classical language of T’Rain.

  Almost. “You used an incorrect declension of turom,” the Anthron complained.

  “It doesn’t seem to have reduced the effectiveness of the spell,” Egdod returned. The meadow between them and the two Dwinn was sprouting a crop of spears. Helmeted heads emerged next, and then the armored bodies of turai, which, in Classical T’Rain mythology, were fast-spawning autochthonous warriors analogous to the spartoi of Greek myth. The Dwinn mage was already waving her hands in the air trying to cast a spell that would throw the turai into confusion and possibly even cause them to attack one another, but there were too many of them and it was too late; the Dwinn had no choice but to retreat into the woods, pursued by the dozen or so turai who had proved resistant to the mage’s spell.

  “Okay, let’s get this done,” Egdod said, “because this kind of thing is going to happen over and over again as long as this pile of gold is just sitting here for the taking.”

  “Get what done, exactly?” the Anthron asked, standing there knee-deep in specie, clueless to a degree that was somewhere between funny and outrageous.

  “Pick up the fucking money and put it in your bag,” Egdod said. “Or just shift-option-right-click on the whole pile.”

  “Shift … option … is that some sort of computer terminology?”

  “Just hold your horses. I’m coming over there.”

  “I thought you were here.”

  “In the real world, like.”

  RICHARD TOSSED HIS laptop aside onto the mattress and swung his legs down off the edge of the Bed That Queen Anne Had Slept In. Its massive frame of pegged timbers gave out a groan almost as if Queen Anne were still in it now. He rose to his feet and gave his blood pressure a moment to equilibrate, then stalked across the room. Which took a bit of stalking. Other bits of England might be cramped, crowded, and cluttered, but only because all the available space had been claimed by this guest suite. It was situated right in Trinity College, and Richard guessed it had been laid out eight hundred years ago so that noble guests could ride their horses directly into the bedchamber and bring all of their squires and wolfhounds with them too. D-squared was standing with his back to Richard about three hundred feet away. The place lacked television and central heating, but it did have a massive stand surmounted by a four-inch-thick Bible signed by the Duke of Wellington. D-squared had set up a laptop of his own atop the Good Book and was hunched over it, peering and pecking.

  During the short drive in from the FBO at Cranfield, Richard had ordered the driver of his black taxi to swerve to a halt in front of the first computer store. The sales clerk, eager to be of service and to make sure that Richard ended up with a machine he’d be happy with, had been solicitous to a fault until Richard had finally got it through the man’s head that he had way more money than time and could they please get on with it. Five minutes later, Richard had strode out the door of the place and climbed back into the taxi carrying the new laptop (he had left its empty box sitting on the store’s counter and a trail of plastic packaging material all the way to the exit) and a boxed set of DVD-ROMs containing the Legendary Deluxe Platinum Collector’s Edition T’Rain software with Bonus Materials. The computer had finished crawling through its interminable boot-up as they were skirting Bedford, and he had jammed in the installation disc somewhere around St. Neots. The bemused cabbie had dropped him off at the Porter’s Lodge of Trinity when the installation progress bar was creeping along around the 21 percent mark and so Richard had just carried the machine in on his hip and kept it perched there, whirring and clicking and trying to force thunderous T’Rain sound track music through its tinny little speakers, as the bowler-hatted staff had dryly greeted him and escorted him to his cavernous lodgings. It was ten in the morning or something. Richard had found his way to the suite’s toilet, which was located somewhere in Oxfordshire, and showered and shaved, then fed another disc into the computer, napped for a couple of hours, enjoyed a liquid lunch with D-squared, and then brought him back here to teach him the rudiments of T’Rain.

  “Like this,” he said, reaching in over the Don’s arms in a manner that all but forced the poor man to jump out of the way, and seizing control of the keyboard. Then Richard did the thing that always pissed him off when Corvallis did it to him, which was that he manipulated the keys so fast that it was impossible for any normal person to understand what he had just accomplished. But D-squared, used to having people do things for him, was unruffled. He was far more interested in what had happened to all that money.

  “The gold!” he exclaimed. “Where did it all get to? Did those Dwinn take it?”

  The accusation was laughable. Far more important, though, was the look on the Don’s face, which was just a bit provoked, and his tone of voice, which could only be described as avaricious.

  Good.

  “No,” Richard said, “you took it, and put it in your poke.”

  “But how could I possibly carry so much gold in that wee bag?”

  “That’s the whole point of a poke. It’s magic. Enables you to carry a ridiculous amount of VP and thereby enhances our profit margins like you wouldn’t believe.”

  The Don nodded. Even he knew that VP stood for Virtual Property.

  “But that is not the point,” Richard went on. “The point is as follows.” And he turned away and hiked back over to the bed. This took long enough that a little band of Var’ skirmishers, almost offensively Bright, had time to scuttle out of the trees to investigate the strange phenomenon of a solitary Anthron, newly created and hence of essentially zero powers, unarmed and unequipped—unshod, even—just standing there like an idiot in possibly the most dangerous region of all T’Rain. It was so uncanny that they were approaching him with a kind of superstitious aw
e.

  As well they might, for Richard, after using certain of his powers to verify his suspicion that they were carrying a lot of money, zotted the whole band into pink mushroom clouds.

  “Richard, I’m surprised at you; I didn’t think you were going to stoop to such methods!”

  “I’m trying to make a point. I blew them away so fast that they didn’t have time to Sequester any of their belongings.”

  “What in heaven’s name does that mean?”

  “It means we get to steal all of the VP that they were carrying. Go and pick up all the gold that’s lying on the ground. And while you’re at it, why don’t you grab yourself some fucking shoes?”

  “Are you suggesting I loot corpses!?”

  “I know. What would Queen Anne say?”

  “I’ve no idea!”

  “You can take your laptop off that Bible first, if it makes you feel any cleaner about it.”

  “No need. I gather this sort of thing happens all the time, in T’Rain.”

  Richard resisted the temptation to say people make their livings off it.

  Once D-squared had at last solved the user-interface problem of how to pick stuff up and put it in his poke, and had caused the Anthron to loot all the gold, plus some Boots of Elemental Mastery and a Diadem of Scrying that he took a fancy to, Egdod grabbed him (the Anthron, that is) by the scruff of the neck again and flew him, with a velocity that the Don described as “faintly sickening,” about halfway around the planet to visit a moneychanger who, being situated almost at the antipode of where all the action was, was offering fast service and good rates.

  It was possible to interact with an MC verbally, and thereby remain “in-world,” which was equivalent to an actor remaining “in character,” but the impatient Richard diverted the Don to a user interface window replete with medievally styled buttons and popup menus. “You want to make a Potlatch to Argelion. It’s the third checkbox down on the right.”