Neal Stephenson - Reamde

It was on a cartoonish, schematic map of something called the International Selkirk Loop: a circuit of American and Canadian highways, straddling the border, that, to judge from the numerous pictures, passed by lots of pretty lakes and through some nice mountain scenery. This brochure badly wanted Seamus to understand that a person could drive this loop on a motorcycle or an RV over the course of a leisurely day or two, see a lot of natural beauty, eat tasty food, buy cool stuff. It was, in other words, a tourist brochure, and fundamentally of no interest whatever to Seamus.

Except for that one word “Elphinstone.”

That was the name of the town where Richard Forthrast had his cat skiing resort. The place where he had gone missing a couple of days ago.

Correction: Seamus had no proof that he had gone missing per se. He had abruptly stopped playing T’Rain. Pretty thin evidence, that. But it had been something like twenty-four hours—difficult to tell exactly, what with the time zones and all—anyway, a hell of a long time—since Seamus had checked in on Egdod. And to judge from what the boss had said, Olivia had been dealing with troubles of her own, related to someone, something, or somewhere called Tukwila. Jones, or more likely his minions, were blowing shit up on the border, drawing every cop in the world to the epicenter. So it seemed a good bet that no one had been attending to the somewhat Mysterious Case of the possibly Missing Online Gaming Entrepreneur in a while. Seamus hadn’t been thinking about it, at least not at a conscious level, since getting these people illegally into the country had been foremost in his thoughts, and he had just been going on instinct and impulse for at least a day. When stuck in the American embassy in Manila with three illegals liable to be arrested and deported at any minute, it’s hard to focus on hypothetical events that might be taking place near the Idaho/B.C. border.

But now he was here. Literally, he was on the map. For when he pulled the Selkirk Loop brochure out of the rack, Coeur d’Alene became visible on the map, down toward the bottom. His eyes began jumping back and forth, top to bottom: Elphinstone, Coeur d’Alene. Elphinstone, Coeur d’Alene.

The only problem being that horizontal line drawn through the middle of the Loop: the Canada/U.S. border. No way was he getting Marlon and Yuxia across that.

But maybe he didn’t need to. Maybe what he was looking for was coming to him.

“Seamus?”

He looked up. Csongor was there, and Marlon, and Yuxia, all freshly showered and looking like the Xiamen branch of the Lynyrd Skynyrd Fan Club. He had the sense that they’d been looking at him for a while, wondering when he was going to snap out of it.

“Are you hungry?” Csongor continued. Not that he gave a shit; Csongor was hungry.

Now, some part of Seamus was wondering why these kids didn’t just walk over to the restaurant and order food, if that was what they wanted. But he had dragged them to this place and created a situation in which they were totally dependent on him—appointed himself the Dr. Reed Richards of this little band of superheroes—and he had to step up to his responsibilities.

“Yeah,” he said. “Just thinking about tomorrow’s program of activities.”

“Yay,” Yuxia said. “Activities!” She translated this abstraction into Mandarin, and Marlon nodded, a little uncertainly.

Csongor was unsure to what degree Seamus was being sarcastic, and he was now watching with heightened vigilance. “What did you have in mind?” he asked.

“Well,” Seamus pointed out, “we’re dressed for hunting.”

“We don’t have guns.”

“Speak for yourself.”

Csongor was now watching very carefully. Seamus broke eye contact and returned his attention to the rack for a minute. “Just kidding,” he said. He scanned an index finger across a row, looking for something he’d noticed earlier.

There it was. He snapped the brochure out, then turned toward the exit. “Let’s eat,” he said.

But the others were having none of it. They bunched behind him, peering over his shoulder or around his elbow to read the cover of the brochure he’d just pulled from the rack: SELKIRK HELICOPTER TOURS.

AFTER HE’D LED the terrorists through the mine and out the other side, Richard was aware, at some level, that he really needed to start in on the sell job of his life: he needed to get Abdallah Jones to believe that making it past American Falls would be no picnic and that his skills as guide were still—in the parlance of old what’s-his-name, the CEO of Corporation 9592—mission critical. That Richard still had world-class value-added here.

But Richard could not bring himself to do this, for exactly the same reason that, when Corporation 9592 had grown to a certain size, he had become listless during meetings and allowed himself to drift to the periphery of relevance. Richard was, at bottom, a guy who did stuff. A farmer. A plumber. A Barney.

What he wasn’t so good at was manipulating the internal states of other humans, getting them to see things his way, do things for him. His baseline attitude toward other humans was that they could all just go fuck themselves and that he was not going to expend any effort whatsoever getting them to change the way they thought. This was probably rooted in a belief that had been inculcated to him from the get-go: that there was an objective reality, which all people worth talking to could observe and understand, and that there was no point in arguing about anything that could be so observed and so understood. As long as you made a point of hanging out exclusively with people who had the wit to see and to understand that objective reality, you didn’t have to waste a lot of time talking. When a thunderstorm was headed your way across the prairie, you took the washing down from the line and closed the windows. It wasn’t necessary to have a meeting about it. The sales force didn’t need to get involved.

Hence his recent surge of reinvolvement in the company, sorting out various troubles attributable to the Wor. The Wor had given him something to do and he had just gone out and done it. Likewise looking for Zula. As long as there had been doors to hit with sledgehammers, he’d been all over it. Later in that project, when it had become a matter of maintaining the “Where’s Zula?” Facebook page and politicking with cops, he had become listless and of no use.

And now this: Jones had wanted help finding his way through the mine tunnels or else he would kill Zula. Richard had packed a sleeping bag and some spare clothes and applied himself to getting that done. They had punched through it while the sun was rising and emerged on the south slope to enjoy a view that in other circumstances he’d have found immensely pleasing: the low sun setting fire to torn diaphanous curtains of mist rising from stands of ancient cedars, the distant roar of the falls, swollen by snowmelt, the Selkirks and the Purcells and other ranges of mountains rambling off into the distance, affording peeks at deep blue lakes and cavernous valleys. The granitic mass of Abandon Mountain rising out of its rampart of talus, just a few miles south of the border, its sheer eastern face glowing in the rich golden light of the early sun.

Mission accomplished. Jones, or any idiot for that matter, could see right across the border now, would understand that Richard could simply be shot in the head and left here and they’d find some way of getting down past the falls and into the United States without his assistance.

It was time, in other words, to call out the sales force, take Jones to lunch, begin gardening personal contacts, shape his perception of the competitive landscape. Forge a partnership. Exactly the kind of work from which Richard had always found some way to excuse himself, even when large amounts of money were at stake.