Neal Stephenson - Reamde

Until that point Richard had been engaging in a staredown with Mitch Mitchell, who apparently wanted Richard to believe that the melanoma had very much gone to his brain, and perhaps wiped out some of his behavioral inhibitions; but this seemed important enough for Richard to shift his gaze to Jones. He had seen various pictures of the man on the Internet and in the pages of the Economist and was still experiencing some of that disorientation that sets in when you find yourself in the actual presence of a famous person.

“Well, let’s withdraw to the tavern then, if you don’t mind being in a place that serves alcohol.”

“As long as you’re not serving it now,” Jones said.

“Are you kidding? It’s five in the morning.”

The jest fell flat. Richard led them into the tavern, where T’Rain was still displayed on the big screen. A sizable crowd of people had gathered around Egdod. They were all exhibiting minor bothaviors such as breathing, scratching, and shifting their weight from foot to foot. But nothing was happening. This because (as a large dialog box superimposed on the screen was proclaiming) Richard had lost his Internet connection, and so nothing he saw here reflected what was “actually” (whatever that meant) going on in the T’Rain world. He fired off the command-key combo that shut down the game and was greeted by the usual Windows desktop. Jones meanwhile had shoved a thumb drive into a USB slot on the front of the computer. This showed up as a removable drive. Richard opened it to find one file: Zula.mpeg.

“This isn’t going to infect my computer with a virus, is it?” he asked. Again, it was difficult to get a laugh out of these guys.

He double-clicked the icon. Windows Media Player opened up and showed him crappy webcam footage of his niece, sitting on a rumpled bed in a black room, reading yesterday’s issue of the Vancouver Sun .

“Tried to get the Globe and Mail, ” Jones said apologetically, “but they were all out.”

So that was it. Jones wanted to be the guy making the smart-ass quips.

Richard broke down weeping, and they had to leave him alone for a couple of minutes.

“FOR NOW, YOUR assistance in getting across the border would do nicely” had been Jones’s answer, when Richard had got his composure back and had asked them what they wanted.

This surprised him a bit. He was so accustomed to people wanting his money. Being asked for his services as a smuggler filled him with a kind of pride, and almost made him grateful to Jones—as if Jones had done him a favor by showing respect for certain of Richard’s hidden qualities that no one else gave a shit about anymore.

“You’re almost there,” Richard said. “Go south. You can’t miss it.”

“I have been led to believe,” said Jones through a thin smile, “that it’s a bit more difficult than you make it sound, and that you are especially good at getting across without drawing unwanted attention.”

The helpful, earnest Iowa Boy Scout in Richard made him want to sketch Jones a map and provide detailed instructions, right on the spot. But that wasn’t what Jones wanted. The terms of the transaction didn’t really need to be spelled out, and Jones probably didn’t want to say them out loud: he had retained at least that amount of British understatement. But he must have left Zula under the control of some people who were supposed to kill her if Jones and his party failed to make it across the border safe and sound.

Which meant that Richard was going on a little hike. Throwing in his lot with these guys, sharing their fate.

“I guess I’d better pack then,” he said.

“We have a good deal of what you’ll be needing,” Jones said. “But if there is any particular equipment you require, clothing, pharmaceuticals—”

“Weapons?”

The thin smile came back. “I believe we have that adequately covered.”

WHEN THEY HAD displayed her, up at the top of the hill with a chain around her neck, he had gone into another weeping fit. They were tears of joy. A bit odd, that. But knowing was so much better than wondering; and knowing that she was still alive was sweeter yet.

The first day’s hike was straight south along the rail line. It got steeper as it went, until it began to push the limits of what nineteenth-century locomotive technology was really capable of. For the watershed of the Blue Fork was terminated, to the south and east, by a vaguely Cape Cod–shaped range of mountains: a beefy bicep projecting eastward from the Selkirks, and a bony forearm running generally north-south, eventually merging into a branch of the Purcells. They were traversing along the flank of the latter, gradually putting more and more vertical distance between themselves and the Blue Fork. The trail began going on little excursions, elbowing its way into mountain valleys to spring over tributaries, then feeling its way around projecting ridges that separated such valleys. As these became more precipitous, the builders had resorted to constructing trestles across the valleys and dynamiting short tunnels through the ridges, which must have been maddeningly difficult and insanely expensive at the time, but now provided the bikers and skiers who used the trail with amusing distractions.

Eventually they got trapped in the crook of the elbow, where progress was barred by the bulging bicep that ran roughly east-west, several miles north of the border, high enough that its upper slopes were devoid of vegetation: just towering, sand-colored ramparts with snow on the tops. They might have been mistaken for craggy dunes. Richard, who had been all over them, knew them as exposed buttresses of granite whose outer surfaces had spent the last few million years being slowly shivered and whittled away by the ridiculously unpleasant climate. Every small victory of element over mountain was celebrated by a small avalanche as a boulder, the size of a house, a car, a pumpkin, or a teakettle, exploded loose and headed downhill until stopped by older ones. The result was a large terrain of slopes, all at roughly the same angle, ramping up to the high, nearly vertical cliffs from which the rocks were being shed. Nothing much would grow in rubble, so there was no shade from the sun or shelter from the elements, and (perhaps just as important, for the psychological well-being of hikers) no variety to relieve the tedium. Walking across it was a nightmare, not just because it was steep but because its irregularity made it impossible to get into any sort of rhythm; indeed, the term “walking” could not even really be applied to the style of locomotion that the place forced on anyone stupid or unlucky enough to find himself in the middle of it.

It was up in this country where the baron had finally given up on his railway project. He had only run the line this far south as a feint, threatening to extend it into Idaho to spur the Canadians to more decisive action around Elphinstone. But here he had reached a point where he could go no farther unless he bored a mile-long tunnel southward through the ridge. To sell the bluff, he had made some progress, widening an existing mine tunnel for some distance, but had abandoned the project once he had gotten what he’d really wanted: a better connection to the Canadian national system at Elphinstone.

The first day of the journey, then, consisted of walking up to the place where the trail terminated at the head of this aborted tunnel project. Jones could have done this much without Richard’s help. Zula had apparently explained that to him already. Richard’s special knowledge of the terrain would come into play tomorrow.

And so it was an easy enough hike that day, and a sort of vacation: a chance to let his mind, unshackled by the Internet, roam wherever it willed. Mostly he thought about the reactions he had been having to the discovery that Zula was still alive. For during the last several days he had, as it were, been trying the idea that she was dead on for size, and trying to get his head around what that meant. Certainly he was no stranger to people he knew dying. He had reached the age where he had to attend a couple of contemporaries’ funerals a year, and even had a special suit and pair of shoes that he kept handy for such events. But all deaths were as different as the persons who had died. Each death meant that a particular set of ideas and perceptions and reactions was gone from the world, apparently forever, and served as a reminder to Richard that one day his ideas and perceptions and reactions would be gone too. It was never good. But it seemed particularly unfair in the case of Zula. If he was now trading his death for hers, well, that was much better overall, and a trade that—as Jones knew perfectly well—he would gladly accept.