Neal Stephenson - Reamde

Miss Levy was only a “Miss” because lesbians couldn’t get married in the state of Washington, but she was willing to let it slide. “That would be huge for us,” she said. “That part of the Canon is just a gaping void right now.”

“Happy to be of service. Some questions, though.”

“Yes?”

“K’Shetriae. The name of the elven race. Strangely reminiscent of Kshatriya, is it not?”

Everyone at this end of the table drew a blank except for Nolan. Halfway down the table, though, Premjith Lal, who headed one of their Weird Stuff departments, had pricked up his ears.

“Yes!” Nolan exclaimed, nodding and smiling. “Now that you mention it—very similar.”

“Mind explaining it?” Richard asked.

“Premjith!” Nolan called out. “Are you Kshatriya?”

Premjith nodded. He was too far away to talk. He reached up with both hands, grabbed his ears, and pulled them up, making them pointy and elven.

“It is a Hindu caste,” Nolan explained. “The warrior caste.”

“One cannot help wondering if the person who coined that name might have heard the word ‘Kshatriya’ in some other context and later, when groping for an exotic-sounding sequence of phonemes, pulled it back up, as it were, from memory, thinking that it was an original idea.”

Richard tried ever so hard not to look at Devin, but it was as if someone had put a crowbar into his ear and kicked it. Within a few seconds everyone was looking at Devin, who was turning red. He killed time for a few moments by sipping from his Diet Coke and fussing with his napkin, then looked up with great confidence and said, “There are only so many phonemes, and only so many combinations of them that you can string together to make words in imaginary languages. Any name you come up with is going to sound like the name of a caste or a god or an irrigation district somewhere in the world. Why not just put your head down and get on with it?”

Premjith was just barely in range. “There are something like a hundred million Kshatriya who are going to be bemused by this aspect of the Canon,” he pointed out. He wasn’t upset, just… bemused. Richard made a mental note to take Premjith out for sushi and find out if there were any other things he’d noticed seriously wrong with T’Rain that he hadn’t felt like mentioning.

“Hundred million…” Devin repeated, not loudly enough for Premjith to hear him. “I’ll bet within five years of T’Rain going live, we’ll have more K’Shetriae than there are Kshatriya.”

“Now, that is—if memory serves—spelt with an apostrophe between an uppercase K and an uppercase S, is it not?” Don Donald asked.

“That’s right,” said Devin, and glanced at Geraldine, who nodded.

“Now the apostrophe is used to mark an elision.”

“A missing letter,” Pluto translated. “Like the o in ‘couldn’t.’” He snorted. “The second o, that is!”

“Yes, just so,” the Don continued. “Which leads me to ask why the S in ‘K’Shetriae’ is capitalized. Should one infer from this that ‘Shetriae’ is a separate word that is a proper noun? And if so, what are we to make of the K-apostrophe? Is it, for example, some sort of article?”

“Sure, why not,” said Devin.

D-squared, having set the hook, was content with a few moments’ discreet silence, but Pluto erupted: “Why not? Why not? ”

Richard could only watch, like staring across a valley at an avalanche overtaking a skier.

“If it is an article,” said Don Donald, “then what is the T-apostrophe in T’Rain? What is the D-apostrophe in D’uinn? How many articles does this language have?”

Silence.

“Or perhaps the K, the T, and the D are not articles but some other features of the language.”

Silence.

“Or perhaps the apostrophe is being used to indicate something other than elision.”

Silence.

“In which case, what does it indicate?”

Richard couldn’t bear it anymore. “It just looks cool,” he said.

Don Donald turned toward him with a bright, fascinated look. Behind him, Richard could see everyone else collapsing; things had gotten a bit tense.

“I beg your pardon, Richard?”

“Donald, look. You’re the only guy in this particular sector of the economy who has the whole ancient-languages thing down pat to the extent that you do. Everyone else just totally makes this stuff up. When some guy wants a word that seems exotic, he’ll throw in a couple of apostrophes. Maybe smash a couple of letters together that don’t normally go, like Q and Z. That’s what we’re dealing with here.”

Silence in a different flavor.

“I am aware that it doesn’t exactly jibe with your M.O.,” Richard added.

“M.O.?”

“Modus operandi.”

“Mmm,” said the Don.

“If you want to make up some languages,” offered Devin, “knock yourself out.”

“Mmm,” the Don said again.

Richard glanced at Geraldine, who was thinking so hard that coils of smoke were rising from her sensible hairdo.

“Mr. Olszewski,” the Don finally said, “may I plant a volcano here?”

“ Here!? ”

“Yes, on the site of this property.”

“Any particular type of volcano you had in mind?”

“Oh, let’s say a Mount Etna. I’ve always favored that one.”

“No way,” said Pluto. “That is a highly active, young stratovolcano. The Selkirks aren’t that geologically active. The type of rock here—”

“It simply wouldn’t make sense,” said the Don, summing up and cutting short what promised to be a long and devastatingly particular tour of the world of volcanology. “It would be incoherent.”

“Totally!”

“I fear that an analogous situation may obtain in the case of all these apostrophes. My colleague has refrained from coining words, it is true. But it has been necessary, hasn’t it, to coin names for the races of T’Rain, and indeed for the world itself. And in some cases, such as ‘K’Shetriae’, the apostrophe is followed by a capitalized letter, while in others, as ‘D’uinn,’ the following letter is lowercase, a situation that requires some sort of coherent explanation. At least if I am to proceed with my work in the manner to which I am accustomed.”

Richard noted the implicit threat there.

“THANKS FOR COMING all the way out from Vancouver,” Peter said. They had not introduced themselves, or shaken hands, just sized each other up and confirmed with nods that they were who they were.

“ This is a hell of a place,” said Wallace. He did not seem like the kind of man who was utterly confounded—or would admit to it, anyway—very often. For a good half minute he had eyes for nothing but the interlocking timbers that pretended to hold up the roof. “Where have I seen those before?” Then his eyes dropped to regard Peter, who was eyeing him somewhat warily. He turned his attention back to the tavern: its rustic furniture, its leaded glass windows, its floor of pegged wooden planks. But finally it was the silverware that tipped him off. He picked up a fork and stared in amazement at the motif stamped into its handle: a raw geometric pattern inspired by Nordic runes. “Jesus fucking Christ,” he said. “Dwinn!”

“I beg your pardon?” Peter said, aghast at how this was going.

Wallace cracked up—another thing that, one suspected, he didn’t do often—and cast a glance at his laptop bag, which he’d left sitting on the empty chair next to him. “I could show you,” he said. “I could go to this place right now, in T’Rain.”

“You play T’Rain?” Peter inquired, seeing in this an opportunity for, at least, a conversational gambit.

“We all have our vices. Each brings its own brand of trouble. That connected with an addiction to T’Rain is less dangerous than many I could name. Speaking of which, what does a man have to do to get a club soda in this place?” Wallace spoke with a Scottish accent, which came as a surprise to Peter and created a one-second time lag in all Peter’s responses as he worked to understand what Wallace had just said. But once he’d parsed “club soda,” he turned in his chair, half rose, and secured the attention of a waiter.