Neal Stephenson - Reamde

“Hos,” she announced, “keep coming around to ask if we want anything .” Making air quotes around the final two words.

Csongor felt as if he should be abjectly apologizing in the name of every white male who had ever lived, but he didn’t know quite where to begin. He still had not quite gotten his mind around the nature of this place and what went on here—particularly the middle-aged ladies, who seemed to be acting in approximately the same role as pimps, but who didn’t seem like professionals. They seemed almost like chaperones. But singularly ineffectual ones.

“I’m sorry that this is the first place outside of China that you have ever seen,” Csongor said. “It’s not all like this. Someday I will take you to Budapest and show you around. Very, very different.”

“First we have to get the eff out of here,” Yuxia pointed out.

“I got some local money,” Csongor said. “Enough to buy this.” He nodded at the food, whose aroma, by now, had drawn Marlon out of the bathroom with a towel wrapped around his waist. “We can all get some cheap clothes and pay for maybe one more night here.”

“Aren’t you going to get in touch with your mother?” Yuxia asked, sounding a bit shocked. “Can’t she send you money?”

Csongor considered it. You would think that by this time he and Yuxia and Marlon would know everything there was to know about one another, but the rigors of the voyage had left little time for getting acquainted; Yuxia knew that Csongor’s father was deceased, but little else about his family. “My mother is a nice lady with high blood pressure who has little strokes all the time. I will send her a note saying I’m out of the country on business, but I can’t possibly tell her what has been going on—it would be like throwing her off a bridge. My brother is in Los Angeles working on his dissertation and I talk to him maybe four times a year.”

Yuxia seemed taken aback that any family could be so small and poorly organized.

“What I really want to do is some research,” Csongor said. “I want to see if there is any information about a black, English-speaking Islamic terrorist whose code name or real name might be Jones.”

I’d like you to have a look at the pistol that Mr. Jones is holding up to my neck, Zula had said on the pier.

“For all we know,” Csongor went on, “there are pictures of Mr. Jones up on the Internet, and if I can identify him by name, then I could consider going to the authorities and telling them ‘So-and-so was in Xiamen a couple of weeks ago and he has a hostage.’”

“Which authorities?” Marlon asked.

“I have no idea,” Csongor said.

“Whoever cares,” Marlon suggested.

They dove into the food, almost literally, and did not speak much for a while. It was the finest meal of Csongor’s life, and he cursed himself for not having bought ten times as much of it.

“Do you want to get in touch with your family, Yuxia?” Csongor asked, when he was able to speak again. This created a pang that was obvious on her face and that left both of her companions somewhat aghast. “It is all I think about,” she said eventually, “but I want to wait until we are somewhere that feels safer.”

Csongor went into the bathroom and found Yuxia’s and Marlon’s damp clothes strung up all over the place. All of them had been wearing the same garments for two weeks, rinsing them occasionally in salt water. He turned on the shower and climbed in fully clothed, using bar soap to squeeze lather in and out of the fabric, then stripped down and left it all on the floor of the tub while he washed himself, letting the soapy water run off his body and down into the clothing, treading on it with his feet. Finally he spent a minute squeezing rinse water through them, then turned off the shower and began toweling himself off. He was a hairy man, a living advertisement for the body waxing industry, and it seemed as though his pelt was capable of holding a liter of water. He wrung out his clothing as best he could and hung it up wherever he could find a place, but despaired of its ever getting dry. But under the sink was a hair dryer stashed on a little ledge, which he pulled out and used to dry his underwear, then his trousers—which he had long ago cut off at the knees to make into shorts—and then his shirt.

After he was dressed, Yuxia and then Marlon rotated through the bathroom, drying out their clothes and putting them on, and then they went downstairs and across the street to NetXCitement!, where they devoted a little time to getting themselves situated. The standards and practices here were radically different from what prevailed in a Chinese wangba, and this took Marlon a bit of getting used to. Here there was no need to show ID, and there were no PSB cops hanging around to keep an eye on things. The place might be large by the standards of this provincial town but it was tiny compared to a Chinese wangba; it had no more than twenty terminals, plus counter space where perhaps another twenty patrons could plug in their own personal laptops. And instead of being filled with Chinese teenagers mostly playing games, it played host to a smattering of old white men mostly looking at racy pictures.

Having negotiated these cultural rapids, Marlon claimed the fastest and most expensive computer in the place, on the grounds that running T’Rain consumed a lot of memory and processing power, and Csongor rented a run-of-the-mill one nearby.

There was yet more culture shock as Marlon discovered that T’Rain was not even installed on his computer and that he would have to download it, a procedure that in some precincts would have consumed a great many hours. Here it took twenty minutes. For whatever reason, NetXCitement! had an extremely fast Internet connection.

Meanwhile Csongor had been thinking about Yuxia’s predicament. “I think I know of a way you could send a message to your family without giving away our location,” he said.

He had been clicking around on the computer he’d rented and found that it was so riddled with spyware, trojans, and viruses as to be nearly unusable. And so he had begun a project of rebuilding the machine from scratch. He divided its drive into two partitions, a big one and a small one, and reinstated its existing bootleg copy of Windows, and all of its other bootleg software, viruses, and so on onto the big partition. Then he set about downloading Linux onto the small partition. This entailed a seemingly endless number of reboots, during which he had plenty of time to explain matters to Yuxia. “We’ll get Tor running on this thing,” he said. “It will anonymize all of our IP traffic, provided we use the right browser… as long as you don’t come out and tell your family where we are, no one will be able to trace us using IP addresses.”

The news that she’d soon be able to check in with her family had powerfully affected Yuxia. Csongor was preoccupied for a time with explaining to her why the procedure was taking so long, why he had to keep rebooting the machine, why he insisted on opening up many small files filled with cryptic Unix jargon and making small edits to them, what it meant to get Tor configured and installed. When he finally got the machine up and running a fully secure, firewalled, anonymized installation of Linux—a feat for which he might have charged a commercial client lots of euros—he handed the machine over to her and then got up and strolled five paces over to where Marlon was just in the final phases of getting T’Rain online.

“How does it work?” Csongor asked. “Your character goes to this place—”

“He has been there the whole time,” Marlon said, “waiting in his HZ for me to log in again.”

“Okay, but anyway he has vassals?”