Neal Stephenson - Reamde

“It’d be a good thing for all of us,” the man said in strangely accented English, “if you could keep your hands north of your navel, as you’ll note I’m doing, and maintain a little distance. Then we can have a productive conversation. Until then, it’s going to be all about what we’re carryin’. And since you are new to these parts, let me tell you, we don’t want to go there.”

If Csongor had heard this correctly, the man had just threatened to pull out a gun and shoot him.

As if to confirm that his interpretation of matters was correct, the two other customers in the café bolted, leaving only Csongor, Yuxia, Marlon, and the newcomer.

While taking the threat quite seriously, Csongor was not as intimidated as he might have been prior to events in Xiamen. “My life has already ‘gone there,’ so I am not afraid to ‘go there’ again if you are causing a problem for my friend,” he said.

Yuxia, sensing that the situation wasn’t what she’d assumed at first, had backed off a couple of paces and sidestepped a bit closer to Csongor. Meanwhile the Filipino man running the front desk had stuck his head into the room to investigate. Csongor’s eyes darted toward him. The blond man, noting this, pivoted that way, relaxing his hands, and rattled off a sentence in what Csongor gathered was the Filipino language. He sounded and looked quite cheerful. Whatever he said erased the apprehensive look from the manager’s face and caused him to nod and back out smiling.

“What did you say to him?” Yuxia asked.

“Since you are so sensitive about being mistaken for a T-bird, I probably shouldn’t tell you,” the man said. “But I told him that you and I were having a little tiff, a common sort of dispute in a place like this, and that we had settled it.”

“What is a T-bird?” Csongor asked.

“A tomboy,” said the man. “In this context, a real or fake lesbian who caters to mongers who get off on that sort of thing.”

Far from wanting to pull a gun and shoot the man, Csongor now wanted to stand here and ask him questions all day. It was such a pleasure to be around someone who actually knew what the hell was going on.

“What is your name?” Yuxia asked.

“James O’Donnell,” the man decided.

“Are you a monger?” she asked.

“No. But please don’t tell anyone.”

Yuxia laughed. “Why? You are ashamed to not be a disgusting pervert?”

“Because that’s the only reason to be here?” Csongor guessed.

The man calling himself James nodded. “Any Western male in a town like this who is not a sex tourist will only arouse suspicion and curiosity. I’m guessing the locals are fascinated by him .” And he nodded toward Marlon, who had glanced up from his monitor once or twice during all this but, since there’d been no gunplay, had not seen fit to interrupt his work.

“ You should talk,” said Yuxia, looking at James’s monitor. James had also been playing T’Rain. Csongor was interested to note that James’s character seemed to be tromping around in an environment very similar to the Torgai Foothills. As a matter of fact, the mountain peak in the background looked awfully familiar; James’s character was within a few kilometers of Marlon’s.

“You’re following us,” he said, “in two worlds at the same time.”

James nodded. “I cannot tell a lie. I been doing it for a few hours.”

“Do you want some of the gold?” Yuxia asked.

“Fuck the gold,” said James. “I want to know anything you might know about Abdallah Jones.”

“YOU ASKED ME to tell you when he got over the one-million-dollar mark,” Clover mentioned, “and I think it just happened.”

“You think !?”

“It fluctuates up and down as raiding parties steal money from him. He has got a lot of raiding parties coming after him right now.”

“Anything major?”

“No, nothing as big as the party we put together. There hasn’t been time. But I’d say that word is getting around that something big is happening in the Torgai. Within an hour I’d expect to see some fairly well-organized hundred-man raids homing in on him.”

“I think that’s actually a good thing,” Egdod said, after thinking about it for a while. Richard had been playing T’Rain for something like fourteen consecutive hours, and his conversational skills weren’t everything that they could be. “I think it gives him more incentive to get it done now. He’s unHidden a million bucks’ worth of gold…”

“One point one million,” Clover corrected him. “He just raked in a big score.”

“Anyway, the point is that for him to re-Hide all of it now, with so many people watching him, would be difficult. Easier to make his strike tonight.”

“So what does that mean for us? Or for you, rather, since I am about as puissant as a bacterium living in Chuck Norris’s bowels.”

“It means that the time has come.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Are you wearing headphones?”

“Yeah.”

“I suggest you take them off.”

“I WAS EXPECTING one Chinese virus-writer kid, alone,” said the man calling himself James, with a nod in Marlon’s direction. “I didn’t realize he’d have a girlfriend, and a Hungarian bodyguard with a pistol in his pocket.”

They had withdrawn to a corner of the Internet café where they could speak privately and google things. The place was filling up with mongers.

“I’m not his girlfriend,” Yuxia said. “I don’t think he likes tomboys.”

“De gustibus non est disputandem,” said the man.

“What does that mean?”

“It means he’s a fucking idiot.”

Csongor, a bit taken aback to realize that James and Yuxia were flirting with each other, felt himself receding to the periphery of relevance.

“I like him,” Yuxia said, “like a brother. But…” and she held out her hand, fingers splayed, and wiggled it in the air.

“Gotcha,” said James, looking at her fascinatedly. But then he seemed to remember his manners, and his gaze strayed to Csongor. “What’s your story, big guy? Fish out of water, huh?”

While not immune to James’s insouciant charm, Csongor could only think of Zula, so he broke eye contact and looked out the window in a way that must have seemed brooding. He noticed that he was drumming his fingers on the counter, each calloused, sun-dried tip bashing the Formica like a ball-peen hammer.

“I shot him in the head,” he said finally.

He turned to look at James, who had shut up for once. “I. Shot. Him. In. The. Head.”

“Hold on a sec, are you talking about Jones?”

“Yeah. But it was only, what do you call it?” Csongor pantomimed a bullet caroming off the side of his head.

“A graze,” James said. “I fucking hate that.” He pondered it for a few moments. “You shot Abdallah Jones in the head.”

“Yeah. With this.” Csongor slapped the heavy thing in his pocket.

“From how far away?”

“Too close.” And Csongor related the story. This ended up taking a while. He got the impression that this was the longest span of time that “James” had gone without saying anything since he had obtained the power of speech as a toddler.

But before James could follow up on some of the story’s very remarkable features—which was something that he clearly wanted to do in the worst way—they were interrupted by a sharp exclamation from Marlon: “Aiyaa!”

It was the first time since all of this had begun that Marlon had expressed even mild concern about anything. But this was more than that: it was a pang of dismay. He had taken both hands off the keyboard—a completely unprecedented lapse—and clapped them to the sides of his head, and was staring at the screen in astonishment.