Neal Stephenson - Reamde

Fifteen minutes later he was at the Schloss. He was feeling a powerful urge to get on the computer right away, but he figured he might be busy for a while, so he decided to get his affairs in order first. In normal times, he’d have done this in his private apartment, but this was the middle of Mud Month and no one was here. So he decided to make himself comfortable in the tavern, which had a huge screen that could be connected to a computer. Since the machine had been rigged up for use during Corporation 9592 retreats, it was powerful, fully up-to-date, connected to the Internet by a fat pipe, and assiduously maintained, from Seattle, by the IT department. Its audio outputs were plumbed into the tavern’s excellent sound system, and the seating in front of it consisted of very comfortable leather recliners and sofas. Richard raided the kitchen and stockpiled a few thousand calories’ worth of snacks and soft drinks, sending the Furious Muses into Condition Red. In his apartment he could have placated them by walking on the treadmill while playing, but the tavern was not so equipped. He deployed his laptop on a side table and got it hooked up to its charger. He made a last trip to the toilet. On his way out, he noticed a bucket that had been left under the counter by Chet or someone while tidying the place. Following an old instinct, he snatched this up and took it into the tavern with him, setting it next to the place where he would be playing. It had been a long time since he had played a game with such commitment that he needed to pee into a receptacle, and it might very well be overkill here. But he was alone in the Schloss, no one would ever know, he was a man in his fifties, and there were a lot of caffeinated beverages within easy reach.

He turned everything on and booted T’Rain. While it was starting up, he noticed an annoying gleam of window light on the screen and went over to drop the wooden blinds. Then, just for good measure, he went all around the room and dropped the blinds on all the windows. For the sun might have the bad manners to move around and shine in from other directions. As he was finishing, movement caught his eye outside, and he noticed the RV he’d passed earlier, creeping up the road, slowing down even more so that its occupants could admire a roadside view of the Schloss. He gave it the evil eye, trying to use some kind of ESP to tell them to get lost. Sometimes such people would come up the drive and want to enter the place and use the facilities. Richard didn’t care as long as staff were in the place to deal with them, but he could see it getting unpleasant in a hurry if affable, retired RVers with vast amounts of time on their hands managed to get a foot in the door. To his relief, the giant vehicle picked up speed, leaving the Schloss’s driveway behind.

“I’m strapping in,” he announced to Corvallis over a Bluetooth earpiece that he had just worried into the side of his head. He slammed down into a leather sofa, glanced around to be sure that all he might need was within arm’s reach, and pulled the wireless keyboard onto his lap.

“He’s still there,” C-plus answered, “assembling a war band.”

“How many so far?” Richard asked. But Corvallis’s answer, if there was one, was drowned out by a cataract of awesome fanfares, kettledrum solos, pipe organ chords, and pseudo-Gregorian chanting emerging from subwoofers, tweeters, flat-panel speakers, and other noise-making technologies arrayed all about Richard.

“I take it,” Corvallis finally said, when it seemed safe to crawl out from under his desk in Seattle, “that you are logging on as Egdod.”

“If ever there was a time…”

“You know that if the Troll gets the slightest hint that Egdod even knows of his existence…”

“Egdod isn’t even going to pick his nose until he has surrounded himself with every disguise and cloaking device known to our servers.”

“He’s really smart. And fast. I’ve watched him take down a few wandering bad guys. And the kids in his posse are every bit as formidable.”

“Ever make a raccoon trap?”

“No,” C-plus said. “I was told they carried rabies, and I couldn’t see why it would be desirable to catch one.”

“You drill a hole into a tree stump, or something, big enough to admit the raccoon’s hand. But you drive some nails in around the edge of the hole and bend their heads inward so that he has to thread his little paw between them to get it into the hole. Then you leave a piece of bait in the hole. The raccoon insinuates his hand into this thing and grabs the bait. But he can’t pull his hand out between the nails unless he lets go of it. He ends up trapped by his refusal to let go, you see.”

“Have you ever actually done that? I mean, I know you had a very rural childhood and everything, but…”

“Of course not,” Richard scoffed. “What the hell was I going to do with a rabid animal welded to a tree stump?”

“That’s why I was asking…”

“It probably doesn’t even work. It’s just a metaphor.” But Richard did not follow up on this statement because he had become rather preoccupied with setting up the many layers of shields and disguises and wards that Egdod needed in order to venture out of the house.

“So,” Corvallis finally said, “the application of the metaphor, I’m guessing, is as follows. Right now the Troll could log out and lose nothing. He’s like a raccoon who hasn’t put his hand into the stump yet. But it looks like he’s fixing to go out with his posse and Find and unHide a lot of the gold they’ve stashed around the Torgai. Then he’ll try to carry it out to a moneychanger. At that point, he’s like a raccoon who has grabbed the bait. If you attack him and he gets killed, or just logs out, he doesn’t get the money he needs.”

“You got it,” Richard said. “And so it’s at that moment that I’ll try to pin this little prick down for a minute and have a conversation with him.”

CSONGOR HAD ALWAYS done his best thinking while pacing irritably back and forth: a trait that probably explained why he had not performed up to his full potential in traditional academic settings. It served him well now. What Marlon was doing was fascinating. More for its intricacy, and for Marlon’s fierce attention to its microscopic details, than for what was actually happening on the screen. For Reamde had not moved more than a few virtual paces from the cave exit. In a way, Csongor could not take his eyes off it, but in another way he could not stand to watch for more than a minute or two at a time, and this led to pacing.

The other computer, the one with the clean Linux install and the anonymized Net connection, was five steps away. Csongor kept wandering back to it. Yuxia seemed to have established some kind of chat-room connection to someone she knew back in China and was carrying on a sporadic exchange of messages. This relieved a huge emotional burden she’d been carrying ever since the beginning of their adventure. But there was a lot of downtime during which she was able to surf the web for information on Abdallah Jones and (as her investigation continued, and she developed leads) Zula Forthrast and Richard Forthrast and, for that matter, Csongor himself and Csongor’s brother in L.A. She had probably never used an Internet connection that was not hobbled by the Great Firewall, and she was already finding it addictive.

Csongor almost had to resort to impoliteness to get her to relinquish the machine for a few minutes. Then he carried out some Google searches, looking for pages that contained both “Zula” and “Abdallah Jones.” He pulled up a few pages about terrorism in the Horn of Africa, making reference to the Red Sea bay and the Eritrean port after which Zula had been named, but nothing about Zula Forthrast.