Reamde - Страница 46

Sokolov said nothing.

“I don’t get it, Sokolov. Explain your thinking to me.”

“Tactical maneuver in this city is going to be nearly impossible,” Sokolov said. He nodded at a window. “Just look at it. All the space is taken up. But the water is a different story. It’s crowded, yes. But it’s the only option we’ve got if we need to — ”

“To what, Sokolov?”

“To fall back. Improvise. Move creatively.”

There was now a silence of perhaps thirty seconds as Ivanov marshaled every resource of energy and strength at his disposal to control his rage.

Sokolov wasn’t the least bit worried about what would happen when Ivanov lost that struggle and blew his stack. He was much more worried about what was going on in the boss’s circulatory system in the meantime. For during all their comings and goings today, he had managed to spend a few minutes on some hotel lobby Internet terminals, and he had confirmed that Ivanov was on two varieties of blood pressure medication.

Assuming, of course, that he was still actually taking his pills.

So what really worried Sokolov was that this visible struggle to hold in his fury was driving Ivanov’s blood pressure up to levels normally seen only in deep-sea oil wells. Flaking off more bits of stuff that were going straight to his brain.

If Ivanov dropped dead, how the hell would they get out of this country?

So lost did Sokolov get in these ruminations that he forgot that Ivanov was still alive, still in the room, and still in the middle of a conversation with him.

“Your job,” Ivanov finally said, extremely quietly, “is not to move creatively. There will be no falling back. No improvising.”

“I understand, sir,” Sokolov said, “but it is simply a normal practice to be familiar with the area and to have some kind of backup plan.”

It felt like a reasonable thing to say, but it seemed to disturb Ivanov more deeply than anything Sokolov had done during the entire interview. It was not merely that Ivanov thought a backup plan was unnecessary. He actually thought Sokolov was up to something fishy. Sokolov’s interest in a backup plan made him actively suspicious.

But Sokolov was not above doing some tactical maneuvering, some falling back, even here. He shrugged, as if the backup plan remark had been mere whimsy. “Anyway,” he said, “I got an idea.”

“Yes? What kind of idea?”

Sokolov took a few steps over to the window and looked down toward the waterfront. It was only about seven in the evening and so people were still flooding and surging by the thousands in and out of the ferry terminals’ gates. Ivanov turned to the window as well, tried to see whatever it was that Sokolov was looking at.

“Yes?” Ivanov prompted him, after a few moments.

“I can’t see any just now,” Sokolov said. “They are not that numerous compared to the commuters, the students, and so on.”

“Who are these people you can’t see any of?”

“Fishermen.”

“They would use a different terminal,” Ivanov growled.

“No, I’m not speaking of commercial fishermen. I mean hobbyists. Anglers. I saw a few of them earlier. Just regular Chinese guys. Retirees. They were coming home from a day out fishing, I suppose on one of those little islands out there.” He turned to Ivanov and caught his eye. “They wear funny hats.”

“I have seen them. Coolie hats,” Ivanov said.

“No, not those. The guys I’m talking about wear huge hats made out of light-colored cloth. Big bills sticking out the front to keep the sun off their faces. With skirts hanging down the sides and the back, all the way to the shoulders. Like what an Arab would wear in a sandstorm. The head and face are almost totally hidden. More so if they wear big sunglasses.”

“They sit out in the sun all day,” Ivanov said, getting it. “You can’t hold a parasol while you are fishing.”

“Yes. The other thing about them is that they have these fancy cases to hold their rods.” Sokolov held his hands about a meter apart, indicating the length. “With a bulge at one end to make room for the reel.”

Ivanov’s face relaxed and he began to nod.

“Better yet,” Sokolov said, “each one of them is carrying a little cooler.”

“Perfect,” Ivanov said.

“Everyone ignores these guys.”

“Of course,” Ivanov said, “just like you or I would ignore an old fisherman on a bridge in Moscow.”

“Sometimes you see one all alone,” Sokolov said, “but it’s not unusual for them to travel in a group — they’ll hire one of those boats to take them to their favorite fishing hole.”

“I see.”

“Now. We can’t walk around all day in such costumes without someone figuring out that we’re not Chinese,” Sokolov said. “But we don’t need to. We just need to get from a vehicle into a building, or to walk down a street for half a block, without every fucking Chinese person in a kilometer radius taking phone pictures of us and calling home to Mama.”

“Very good,” Ivanov said. “Very good.”

Sokolov decided not to mention his other observation, which was that the only other category of person who went completely ignored were the beggars who lay down flat on the ground in crowded pedestrian districts.

“We will make a plan,” Ivanov said. “One plan. And it will work.”

There’ll be no more talk of backup plans.

“Yes, sir.”

“Bring in the others,” Ivanov said. “We will discuss, and make preparations for tomorrow.”

THEY HAD ALL — FOUNDERS, executives, engineers, Creatives, toilers in Weird Stuff — been trying to think about big long-term issues raised by the Wor: the War of Realignment. Without a doubt T’Rain was making money from the Wor in the short term, but the question that was bothering the hell out of all of them was: Will it last? Because they had making money before, when the story of the world had actually made sense. Now it had mutated into something that seemed to lack exactly the kind of coherent overarching narrative that they had hired the likes of Skeletor and D-squared to supply.

All their meetings since the beginning of the Wor had been circular and pointless, even more so than meetings generally. Much of it came down to idle speculation about the internal mental states and processes of Devin Skraelin. Could the Wor really be laid at his feet? Suppose they could prove that he had orchestrated the whole thing, should they charge him with breach of contract? Or should they just lean on him to write his way out of the problem? In which case, Skeletor had only succeeded in drumming up more business for himself. Or was Devin helpless in the toss of cultural-historical forces beyond his ken? In which case, should they fire him and hire one of the thousands of ambitious, eager, and perfectly qualified young writers all hoping for an opportunity to take his place?

These meetings tended to start out with confident PowerPoint presentations and gradually trail off into quasi-philosophical management-speak aphorisms, more and more eyes turning to Richard as if to say, Please O please help us. Because Corporation 9592, at bottom, didn’t make anything in the way that a steel mill did. And it didn’t even really sell anything in the sense that, say, Amazon.com did. It just extracted cash flow from the players’ desire to own virtual goods that would confer status on their fictional characters as they ran around T’Rain acting out greater or lesser parts in a story. And they all suspected, though they couldn’t really prove, that a good story was as foundational to that business as, say, a blast furnace was to a steel mill. But you could slap a white hard hat onto an investor and take him into the plant and let him verify that the blast furnace was still there. Whereas a fantasy world was — well — a fantasy world. This had not prevented a lot of investors from entrusting many steel mills’ worth of capital to the board of directors of Corporation 9592 and the CEO they had hired to look after the business. And in normal times, it made money and everyone was happy, probably because they weren’t thinking about this potentially troublesome fantasy-world-based aspect of the business. But now they were thinking about it quite hard, and the more they thought about it, the more troubled they became. Corporation 9592 seemed to be undergoing an ontogenical retroversion to something like a start-up company. Richard was the only link back to that phase of the company’s development, the only one who could think and function in that environment. The rabid dog they kept locked in the basement. Most of the time.

Anyway, now Richard was on the plane over eastern Montana. Pluto was sitting across the aisle in a backward-facing seat, regarding the eastern foothills of the Rockies like a plumber gazing into a torn-open wall. Not that Pluto could really be of much direct use when it came to story issues. But it comforted Richard to have a God of Olympus on the plane with him. Pluto was a reminder that there were more elemental principles even than whatever it was Devin Skraelin did for a living. Pluto tended to view all Narrative Dynamics as nothing more than benign growths on his work, kind of like those microbes embedded on Martian meteorites. And indeed Richard supposed that, if it came down to that, Pluto could probably summon up a planetary catastrophe that would eradicate all life and history on T’Rain’s surface, and then start over again. But he would have a hard time sliding that one by the board of directors.