Neal Stephenson - Reamde

It would not be accurate to say that a man of his age and weight could scamper, but he felt as if he scampered the last ten rungs and finally hurled himself on his belly at the top. Zula withdrew from her perch almost in unison with him and they ran for a hundred or more feet into the forest, side by side, before stopping. As if the bullets could chase them over the lip of the cliff and hunt them through the woods. But they couldn’t, of course. Only Jones and his men could do that. And as Richard had understood the moment he’d seen it, the ladder had given them a long head start on the jihadists.

Then Zula got in front of him and pulled a sharp U-turn and body-slammed him and wrapped her arms around his torso and ratcheted them down like enormous zip ties. Her face was in his chest and she was sobbing. Which Richard almost felt was his prerogative, since she had saved him; but he wasn’t about to make an issue of it. He was still so astonished by all that had happened in the few minutes that had elapsed since he had hopped away from the campsite to answer the call of nature that he could do very little but stand there dumbfounded and await the cardiac arrest that seemed as though it ought to be inevitable. He got the back of Zula’s head in the crook of his elbow and pulled it firmly in against his chest, planted his feet wide, and breathed.

IT WAS SHE who recovered first. He heard muffled noises and realized that she was trying to talk. He relaxed his grip on her, saw her face turn up toward him. A miracle. Every time he saw that face for the rest of his life he would call it a miracle.

Her lips were moving.

“What?” he said.

“Chet’s up above the falls,” she said. “He’s hurt badly.”

“Crap,” Richard said. “You know we have to get over to Prohibition Crick and warn Jake.”

“Yes,” Zula said, “I do know that. But I’m just saying.” In her tone was a kind of incipient, Furious Muse–like shock that Dodge would even consider not going back to check in on Chet.

“Did those fuckers shoot him?” Richard asked, jerking his head back the way they had come.

“Different fuckers,” she said. “But all part of the same group, as you may have guessed.” She added, “I’m not even sure if Chet is still alive, frankly. He was looking pretty bad.”

“Do you think you can find your way to Jake’s from here?”

This set her back on her heels for a second. “You’re saying we should split up? That I should run ahead to Jake’s while you circle back and see how Chet is doing?”

“Just a thought. I know a shortcut; I can get back to where Chet is in no time.”

“I think it’s the only way,” she admitted, looking like she was going to start crying again. A whole different kind of crying. The last jag had been letting go of terrible pent-up emotions. The coming one was sadness that she would have to go out on her own again so soon.

“The only thing is,” Zula said, and stopped, looking embarrassed at what she’d been about to utter.

“I have to get word back to the re-u.”

“Yeah.”

“I have to tell the story that you survived Xiamen, you survived whatever the hell you’ve been through the last couple of weeks, and you went on alone to warn the others.”

“Yeah,” she said. “Which means you have to survive.”

“I have to survive,” he corrected her, “if you don’t.”

“That’s true,” she said, as if he had made some cogent point during a business meeting.

“The flip side is—”

“ I have to survive if you don’t,” she said. “But you will. You always do.”

“No one does always,” he corrected her. “But I will try very hard to do so, knowing that only by surviving will I have the joy and privilege of telling your story to the world.”

“It’s not that great of a story,” she said shyly.

“Bullshit. Hey, look. Chet’s dying. The fucking terrorists are headed for Jake’s. We have to put this plan into execution. Even if that is a miserable fact that would never obtain in a good and fair world. Agreed?”

“Yeah.” She held up one gloved hand, palm out.

He met it with his hand. They clasped them tight for a few moments. “You’ve always been a sort of herolike figure to me,” he told her.

“You’ve always been my… uncle,” she answered.

“Honored.”

“See you.”

“Haul ass,” he said. “And remember, if you just get close and then empty that clip into the air, that’ll be enough to put Jake and his fellow wack jobs on red alert. Because it doesn’t take much.”

“Noted.” And she turned her back on him and began to walk away. After a few steps, she broke into a run.

“This must be kind of obvious by now,” he called after her, “but I love you.”

She turned her head and gave him a shy look over her shoulder, then bent to her work.

CHET WAS VISIBLE from half a mile away, sprawled on a boulder like a skydiver whose chute had failed to open. A stream of blood was running down the side of the rock. Something ungainly dangled from one hand. As Richard trudged up the mountain—a procedure that seemed to take forever—he resolved it as a pair of binoculars.

All that time on the elliptical trainer was paying off. Any other portly man of his age would have dropped dead a long time ago. He couldn’t remember the last time he hadn’t been panting and sweating.

He had quite satisfied himself that Chet was dead when the arm moved, the body sat up, the binoculars rose to his face. Richard came very close to screaming, just as anyone would who saw a dead man taking action. It almost made him not want to come any closer. But the agonizing slowness of travel on talus gave him plenty of time to get his primitive emotions under control as he got closer.

“Hey, Chet,” he said, when he was close enough to be heard. Chet had lain down again and not moved in a while.

“Dodge. You came.”

“You say that like you’re surprised.”

“I know you’re busy. Got a ton of stuff on your mind.”

“There’s always time for you, Chet. I’ve always tried to be clear about that.”

“It’s true. Appreciate it. Always have.”

“Don’t talk like that.”

“Aw, Dodge, you know I’m a dead man.”

“But you were a dead man once before—in the cornfield. Remember?”

“No. Had amnesia. Remember?” Chet laughed, and Richard grinned at him.

“That was when understanding came to me,” Chet went on, “about the parallels and the meridians. The fact that we live in curved space. Parallels run straight. Meridians bend toward each other and at their beginnings and their ends they are all one. When the Nautilus—the first nuclear sub—reached the North Pole, it transmitted a message. You know what the message was?”

“No,” Richard lied, even though he had heard Chet tell this story a hundred times to dumbfounded members of the Septentrion Paladins.

“‘Latitude ninety degrees north,’” Chet said. “See, they couldn’t specify their longitude, because there, all the meridians are one. They were on all the meridians, and so they were on none of them. It’s a singularity.”

Richard nodded.

“Birth and death,” Chet said. “The poles of human existence. We’re like meridians, all beginning and ending in the same place. We spread out from the beginning and go our separate ways, over seas and mountains and islands and deserts, each telling our own story, as different as they could possibly be. But in the end we all converge and our ends are as much the same as our beginnings.”

Richard kept nodding. He was afraid his voice wouldn’t work.

“Do you realize where we are?” Chet asked him.