Neal Stephenson - Reamde

There he went again, getting all caught up in seductive details. None of this mattered. The point was that Carthinias was a commercial entrepôt. It was the best place to connect with moneychangers. This would happen in a place called the Exchange. Just a few minutes after waking up in the inn, Lottery Discountz had passed through the city’s gate in the halting, meandering gait that marked him as an absolute newbie, and since then he had been caroming drunkenly along its narrow streets, trying to find this Exchange. Or rather trying to work out how the navigational user interface worked, which amounted to the same thing.

From all that he’d heard of such games, Csongor was astonished that he had not yet been jumped and killed for sport. There were certainly characters in the streets who looked capable of it. They ignored him. Every so often another merchant, or some lower-status character such as an errand boy, would bow to him, doff his hat, and utter some sort of polite greeting. It appeared that Lottery Discountz had status . One of the ways this was manifested in the game was that characters of a generally nonviolent sort would greet him respectfully. Perhaps it also explained why no one had gutted him in the street yet. But he had the idea that he was getting less and less respect the more he blundered about, so after another spate of wiki checking and turning over rocks in the user interface, he found out that indeed his general level of respectability had been declining steadily since the moment he had left his room at the inn. Apparently this was because he’d been failing to bow and doff his hat in return. The people he’d been inadvertently snubbing had been sending in bad reports of him. So he learned how to bow and doff his hat—it was a simple command-key combination—and ran up and down the street for a bit being extremely polite to everyone he met and rebuilding his reputation before he got killed.

Which he did anyway. Forcing him to learn the procedure for getting a character out of Limbo and back in the world of the living. But after that, in fairly short order, he was able to make his way to the Carthinias Exchange and stroll up and down its gilded colonnades, bowing and doffing, and listening in on the almost totally incomprehensible exchanges of chitchat among its denizens. For everything was couched in a highly compressed jargon optimized for non-native-English speakers who liked to type with the Caps Lock button engaged. It was, he realized, the T’Rain equivalent of the cryptic hand signals employed by commodities brokers who needed to communicate pithy instructions across a riotous trading pit.

Being in any virtual world, of course, required some ability to suspend one’s disbelief and enter into the consensual hallucination. So far Csongor had only experienced a few moments of this, and it had mostly been during simple activities such as bumping around his room at the inn or walking down the street. In this place he was finding it completely impossible, partly because he couldn’t follow what was going on and partly because, of all places in T’Rain, the fictional premise was most threadbare here. The entire point of this market was to move money back and forth between the virtual economy of T’Rain and that of the real world. When money moved out, it had to be destroyed—permanently and irrevocably removed from the T’Rain universe. This was accomplished by sacrificing it to gods. The amount of gold to be transferred would be taken to one of several temples that stood on craggy acropoli around the limits of the city and handed over to priests or priestesses who would employ some sort of ritual to make it cease to exist: in some cases, hurling it into cracks in the earth to be deatomized by supernatural forces; in others, piling it up on elevated sky altars from which it would, after the proper incantations were intoned, simply disappear. Repulsed and dismayed by the jargon-spouting traders in the Exchange, Csongor wandered up into those rocky hills and observed some of those rites. They did everything out in the open, in full view of sparsely attended observation galleries, probably to make it clear that it was all on the up-and-up and that none of the priests was sneaking a bit of extra gold into the pockets of his toga. Over the course of a quarter of an hour’s watching, Csongor saw something like half a million gold pieces ceasing to exist on one such altar, which—taking into account the fact that it was just one of half a dozen or so such establishments, and that it appeared to run at this pace around the clock—suggested (doing some math in his head, here) that on the order of $10 billion was passing out of T’Rain every year.

Ten billion a year.

Marlon needed to transfer $2 million out.

Csongor put his face in his hands, which was what he always did when thinking hard about something. Back at the hotel, he had taken the trouble to shave, and it was strange to feel his smooth cheeks. This arithmetic wasn’t that difficult, but he was tired and disoriented.

Ten billion a year worked out to something like a million dollars per hour. So they were going to have to monopolize the Carthinias Exchange for something like two solid hours. Either that, or eke the money out in smaller increments over a longer span of time.

Which, he realized, was what the merchants thronging the colonnades must be doing for a living: aggregating tiny transactions into big ones, or taking awkwardly huge ones and breaking them up into chunks of more convenient size, so that the holy money-furnaces could run at a steady pace day and night.

Understanding this much helped break him out of the state of hopeless despair into which he had been plunged by his initial stumblings about. Lottery Discountz was, for a moment, alone and safe on a marble bench in the viewing gallery of a temple where gold was being swallowed, digested, and shat out as worthless manure by a giant mutant beetle. It was safe to be Away from Keyboard for a few minutes.

Csongor got up and paced around to stretch his legs. Yuxia was perched on a chair in a fetal position, sleeping. Marlon was engaged precisely as he had been for a great many hours. But when Csongor circled around behind him to look at his screen, he saw that the “orc chart” had become as ramified as a two-hundred-year-old maple tree. Marlon had mobilized an army. At a glance, Csongor guessed that it couldn’t be less than a thousand strong.

Noting a strange glare coming from one end of the café, Csongor turned to look and realized, after a few moments’ disorientation, that the sun was coming up.

INSPECTOR FOURNIER WAS startled, and perhaps slightly irritated, that Olivia had made the decision to go bombing up the road to Vancouver without even mentioning it to him. She sensed him wishing that Commonwealth immigration policies could be tightened up a bit, so as to make it more difficult for inquisitive Brit spies to jump back and forth between nations. The Friday aspect of this certainly wasn’t helping; presumably Fournier had plans for the evening, even for the whole weekend, and now he was learning that he would be at least nominally obligated to act as this woman’s host.

“Where are you now?” he asked.

“Waiting in line at the border crossing.” The electronic signs were claiming that she’d be through in another ten minutes, which seemed pessimistic. That would put her directly into Vancouver’s outer suburbs; she’d be downtown in an hour. This fact embarrassed her. It had taken maybe fifteen seconds after the end of her first conversation with Fournier to realize that she had to go to Canada now, and she had gone into action without explaining to anyone—not even her FBI hosts—what she was doing. It would take too long for her to explain matters to everyone. She would make phone calls from her car as she was driving, explain it then. But then she had ended up managing matters with Richard and Uncle Meng, Seamus and the mysterious Csongor, and had quite forgotten to call ahead. No wonder Fournier was irked. It was a couple of hours past the normal close of business, he was in the office late, delaying his dinner and thinking about getting into a glass of wine, giving her a courtesy call to let her know what was going on—only to learn that she trying to penetrate his borders at this very moment.