Reamde - Страница 55

Then her leg was yanked out from under her, spinning her back and around as she fell so that, as she went down on the concrete floor, she could see a man standing twenty feet away, holding her empty shoulder bag, one foot stomped down on the end of the chain.

Sokolov.

He picked up the end of the chain. With his free hand he then made a one-word call on his mobile phone.

And then back up to the ladies’ room where the chain was detached from Sokolov, passed up into the ceiling space, and padlocked around a cast-iron pipe six inches in diameter.

RICHARD WAS IN the hammerbeam hall of a red sandstone castle on the Isle of Man, being announced by D-squared’s herald in a language that sounded vaguely French.

Once again his arrival had been unexpected (though not, as it turned out, unheralded). This time, the element of surprise was down to a backup that had developed in D-squared’s email pipeline. Don Donald used email when he was at Cambridge and when he was traveling, but he had banned Internet in his castle, and even installed a phone jammer in the dovecote. He came here to read, to write, to drink, to dine, and to have conversations, none of which activities could be improved by electronic devices. And yet he had this awkward problem that much of his livelihood was derived from T’Rain. And even though he did not play the game himself, professing to find the very ideal “frightful,” he couldn’t really ply that trade without communicating rather frequently with people at Corporation 9592.

Richard had once looked D-squared up on Wikipedia and learned that he was a laird or an archduke or something. This castle, however, was not his ancestral demesne. He had bought it, cash on the barrelhead. At first his staff had made use of a trailer parked outside its south bastion, placed there to serve as a portable office for the contractors who were fixing the place up. It was equipped with Internet and a laser printer on which emails that merited the attention of the lord of the manor could be printed up on A4 paper and conducted into the donjon in a leather wallet. Later the white paper was discontinued in favor of light brown pseudoparchment. This was a simple matter of taste. Modern paper, with its eye-searing 95 percent albedo, simply ruined the look that was slowly coming together inside the walls. The sans-serif typefaces were swapped out for faux-ancient ones. But it was not as if a man of Donald Cameron’s erudition could be taken in by a scripty-looking typeface chosen by an assistant from Word’s mile-long font menu. And the style and content of these messages from Seattle were every bit as jarring as the paper they were printed on. A medievalist, he quite liked being in a medieval frame of mind; in fact, had to be, in order to write. Sitting in his tower “with prospects, on a fair day, west to Donaghadee and north to Cairngaan,” writing with a dip pen at a thousand-year-old desk, he entered into a flow state whose productivity was rivaled only by that of Devin Skraelin. Suddenly to be confronted by a hard copy of an email in which a twenty-four-year-old Seattleite with a nose ring wrote something like “we r totally stressing out cuz chapter 27 is not resonating with 16 yo gamer demographic” was, to say the least, inimical to progress. Some way needed to be devised for important communications to get through to him without disturbing the requisite ambience.

Fortunately he had, without really trying, attracted a coterie of people who, depending on the point of view of the observer, might have been described as hangers-on, lackeys, squatters, parasites, or acolytes. They were of divers ages and backgrounds, but all of them shared D-squared’s fascination with the medieval. Some were blue-collar autodidacts who had made their way up through the ranks of the Society for Creative Anachronism, and others had multiple Ph.D.s and were fluent in extinct dialects. They had begun to show up at his doorstep, or rather his portcullis, when word had got out that he was considering the possibility of turning some parts of the castle into a reenactment site as a way to generate a bit of coin and to keep the castle from falling victim to the subtle but annihilating hazards of desuetude. In those days the plan had been to maintain a sort of firewall between the part of the manor where he lived and the part where the reenactment was to happen. But a few years’ experience had taught him that as long as one paid a bit of attention to weeding out the drunks and the mental defectives, the sorts of people who were willing to live in medieval style 24/7 were just the ones he needed to have around.

As easy and as tempting as it was to have some fun at the expense of D-squared and his band of medievalists, Richard had to admit that several of them were as serious and dedicated and competent as anyone he’d ever worked with in twenty-first-century settings; and in some very enjoyable conversations shared over mead or ale (brewed on-site, of course) they had managed to convince him that the medieval world wasn’t worse or more primitive than the modern, just different.

And so the email pipeline now worked like this: down in Douglas, which was the primary city of the Isle of Man, the girlfriend of one of the medievalists, who dwelled in a flat there (“I happen to rather like tampons”), would read D-squared’s email as it came in, filter out the obvious junk, and print out a hard copy of anything that seemed important, and zip it up in a waterproof messenger bag. When it came time to walk her dog, she would stroll up the waterfront promenade until she reached the wee elven train station at its northern end, where she would hand the bag to the station agent, who would later hand it over to the conductor of the narrow-gauge electrical train that wound its way from there up into the interior of the island. At a certain point along the line it would be tossed out onto the siding and later picked up by D-squared’s gamekeeper, who would carry it up the hill and place its contents on the desk of the in-house troubadour, who would translate it into medieval Occitan and then sing and/or recite it to D-squared at mealtime. The lord of the manor would then dictate a response that would follow the reverse route back down the hill to the girlfriend’s laptop and the Internet.

Ludicrous? Yes. All done with a straight face? Of course not. Having taken a few meals there, Richard could tell, from the reactions of those present — at least, the ones who understood Occitan — that the troubadour was a laff riot. Much of the laughter seemed to be at the expense of American cubicle fauna who thought in Power-Point and typed with their thumbs, and so Richard was now careful to phrase all his emails to Don Donald in such a way as to make it clear that he was on to the joke.

The one in which he’d announced his imminent arrival at IOM was still being translated.

And yet for Don Donald to receive a surprise visit was much less of a problem than it was for Skeletor. This was the medieval world. Communications were miserable. Most visits were surprise visits. As long as the visitors didn’t have poleaxes or buboes, it was fine. There was plenty of room in the castle, and there were buffers in place, which was to say, servant-reenactors, who made Richard and Pluto comfortable as word percolated inward to the donjon. When D-squared next descended his perilous, zillion-year-old stone spiral staircase to the hall to take a meal, Richard and Pluto were announced, courteously and a bit pompously, by the herald — actually (since the place was a bit understaffed) a man who shuttled among the roles of Herald, Brewer, and Third Drunk.

“THERE MIGHT BE a need to confer extraordinary powers upon the Earthtone Coalition,” Richard proposed.

Don Donald leaned back in his chair and began messing around with his pipe. When Richard had been a boy, all men had smoked pipes. Now, as far as he could discern, D-squared was the only pipe smoker remaining in the entire world.

“To keep them from being wiped out, you’re saying.”

“Yes.”

“How could such a thing be done,” D-squared wondered, biting his pipe stem and squinting at something above Richard’s right shoulder, “without ratifying an invidious distinction?”

“Are you speaking Occitan? Because I have to tell you that between the jet lag and the delicious claret — ”

“There is no basis in the game world,” said D-squared, “for any of what has happened during the last four months. Town guards, military units, raiding parties fissured, without warning, into two moieties, at daggers drawn. Or perhaps I should say dagger drawn since, if the reports I’ve heard are to be credited, a good many of what you call the Earthtone Coalition found themselves suddenly and inexplicably in Limbo with particolored bodkins in their backs.”

“There’s no doubt it was a well-planned Pearl Harbor — ish kind of event,” Richard said.

“And many of your customers appear to be having great fun with it. Bully for them. But it poses a problem, doesn’t it, in that this extraordinary fission of the society is in no way justified, prefigured, even hinted at, in any of the Canon that Mr. Skraelin and I and the other writers have supplied.”

D-squared’s feelings were hurt, and he didn’t care who knew it. He went on, “I daresay you ought to just roll it back. It is really a hack, isn’t it? As though someone hacked into your website and defaced it with childish scrawlings. When such a thing happens, you don’t incorporate the vandalism into your website. You set it to rights and carry on.”

“Too much has happened,” Richard said. “Since the beginning of the Wor we have registered a quarter of a million new players. Everything they know about the world and the game has been post-Wor. To roll the world back would be to unmake every single one of their characters.”