Reamde - Страница 49

Richard knew better than to draw actionable conclusions from this one chance encounter. Corporation 9592 had an entire department full of people with advanced degrees in statistics, managing a code base that monitored a million Dales per second, analyzing them six ways from Sunday. Any wisdom that proceeded from this sketchy conversation with Dale would be listened to, politely but incredulously, and then classified as “anecdotal” and forgotten. But Richard couldn’t help himself. Unlike the K’Shetriae, which were basically elves, and the Dwinn, which were basically dwarves, the Var’ had no discernible antecedents in folklore, unless you counted focus groups of nerds as folk. They were technologically primitive but capable of channeling the forces of weather, for example, shooting lightning bolts at their enemies but only during thunderstorms, freezing them to death but only during blizzards, and so on. A perfect match, in other words, for midwesterners. Just like Republicans or Democrats who spent so much time socializing with others of their kind that they could not believe any normal-seeming, mentally sound person could possibly belong to the opposite faction, Dale was a rock-ribbed Forces of Brightness man. As such, he exemplified a trend that had already been analyzed to exhaustion by the demographers. The Earthtone Coalition was 99 percent Anthrons, K’Shetriae, and Dwinn: the old-school races found in the works of Tolkien and his legion of imitators. Players who opted to belong to the newfangled races such as the Var’, on the other hand, tended to join up with the Forces of Brightness.

He was working on a theory that it was all related to the Rice Krispie Treats.

Bear with me, he said (not out loud, of course), showing his palms to the Furious Muses. Just hear me out.

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). And of course any recipe that called for a can of cream of mushroom soup fell into the same category. 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. Was it too much of a stretch to think that the rejection, by the Dales of the world, of traditional fantasy-world races such as elves and dwarves was motivated by the same deep, mysterious cultural mojo as their spurning of onions and salt in favor of onion salt?

The recombinant food thing was a declaration of mental bankruptcy in the complexity of modern material culture. Likewise, Dale and his friends, living in a world where libraries were already stuffed with hundreds of thousands of decaying novels that would never again be read, where any television program or movie ever filmed could be downloaded and viewed, simply did not have the bandwidth to absorb a vast amount of detailed background material about fictitious races on a made-up planet. They just wanted to kick ass.

Anyway, Dale got them to their rental car, not before pumping Richard for a few tips about the latest from the Torgai Foothills. Weather in that region could be violent, which was a good thing for Var’ raiders, and so Dale’s group had been hanging out on some windy crag and staging raids on the freebooters who had been raiding the ransom bearers. Richard allowed as how “nothing lasts forever” and “the situation is fluid” before shaking Dale’s hand and thanking him and closing the rental car’s door.

The largest and newest billboard on the airport access road sported a huge picture of a blue-haired elf and said KSHETRIAE KINGDOM in ten-foot-high block letters. Beyond that, the roadsides were mercifully free of T’Rain-related clutter until they hove in view of the theme park itself. Taking advantage of the digital map on the car’s GPS device, Richard diverted onto a gravel road about half a mile short of the main entrance and gave the whole complex a wide berth; he had remembered that the park included some fiberglass terrain features — mountains with painted-on snow, dotted with fanciful K’Shetriae temple architecture — that most certainly would not pass muster with Pluto, and he didn’t want the rest of the day to be about that. 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.

A straight shot down a paved state highway took them to the gate of the Possum Walk Trailer Park, which had been beefed up and connected to an electronic security system. Childish as the emotion was, Richard could not help but feel resentful over being interrogated by an electronic box thrust out on a pipe. He had come to this place several years ago when it had still reeked of exploded meth factories and hog confinement facilities. In those days, Devin had been a mere tenant, living alone in a thirty-year-old mobile home that gave and groaned beneath his weight whenever he troubled himself to get up and move around. Of course, he had long since bought the entire property, as well as a couple of adjoining lots, and evicted his erstwhile neighbors and sold their trailers on eBay. His original trailer stood alone, a weird hybrid of Little House on the Prairie and Grapes of Wrath. A prefab steel roof had been erected above it to protect it from vengeful elements. Farther back from the highway, concrete pads had been poured and steel buildings erected to form a U-shaped compound embracing the small, separate building, little different from a mobile home in size and layout, where Devin worked and lived. The purpose of the U was to house his lawyers, accountants, managers, and sous-novelists.

The gate droned aside. As Richard drove through it, the GPS unit announced: “You have arrived!” Idling past the old mobile home, Richard gazed at its front door for a few moments and let himself be that guy from several years ago who had come up those rotten wooden steps to knock on that door and offer Devin a job. Then he snapped out of it and turned his attention to a woman just emerging from the closest prong of the U. She was struggling with her weight, and was dressed and coiffed in a way that, seen on the streets of Seattle, would have been incontrovertible proof of Sapphism. But Richard knew he had to be careful about making such assumptions here. As he parked in one of about seven thousand available spaces, she drifted over toward the driver’s side of the car and began simpering at him through the window. Richard prepared himself to receive disagreeable news manfully.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Forthrast, I’m Wendy.”

“Nice to meet you, Wendy.” Until a couple of years ago, he’d have gone through the ritual of insisting that she address him as Richard, but the fact was that he had flown here from Seattle in a private jet and she had driven her Subaru.

“He just went into F. S. about fifteen minutes ago,” she said apologetically. “Would you like to come in and make yourself comfortable?”

The first of these sentences meant that, according to the biometric sensors on Devin’s body, he had just entered into what psychologists referred to as the flow state, and he was not to be disturbed until he emerged from it of his own volition.

The second of these sentences meant sitting around and eating. As Richard knew all too well, there was a waiting room stocked with bowls of Chex Party Mix and recombinant gorp, with fridges along the walls replete with soft drinks, and a coffee urn. Sitting in that room, using the free Wi-Fi, was an inevitable prelude to any meeting with Devin, who had an uncanny knack for ascending into the flow state only minutes before any scheduled visit. As a way to head off tiresome, repetitive objections from visitors who could not be placated with gorp and sugar water, Devin’s staff had printed up copies of a complimentary handout sheet, “Flow State FAQ,” and scattered them around the feeding troughs. Pluto, who had never been here before, picked one of them up and went into the flow state himself as he learned all about this amazingly productive psychological/physiological regimen and how all history’s greatest artists and geniuses had done their best work while immersed in it. Richard, who’d had plenty of opportunities to familiarize himself with the document’s contents, knew that it contained only one operative phrase, which was that interruptions were inimical to the flow state and had to be prevented at all costs. It was the most passive-aggressive way imaginable for Devin Skraelin to tell people that he was in the middle of something and fuck off.

Having already committed an unpardonable sin against his body by eating the Rice Krispie Treat at the airport, Richard forced himself to ignore the proffered food. He opened his laptop and checked his email.

• As far as T’Rain was concerned, he saw nothing that couldn’t wait. Everyone who mattered at Corporation 9592 knew that he was doing this and so they weren’t bothering him.

• There was a little uptick of traffic on his Schloss Hundschüttler email address. The weather had turned warm during the last few days, as they’d expected, and the skiing, which had been marginal during Peter and Zula’s visit, had gone decisively to hell. The long-range forecast looked worse. So Chet had declared that Mud Month would commence in two days. This was a mandatory four-week break in the Schloss’s operations, when all the employees got to go home, and the place sat empty.