Нил Стивенсон - Termination Shock

When those two had come down a bit from the emotional high of seeing each other, and Rufus had got everything squared away in the back of his truck, they got into an interesting dance around the seating arrangement. The truck had a back row of seats accessible via small doors, both of which Rufus had left open in a manner that he hoped they would construe as inviting. Carmelita hopped right in and made herself at home, but Thordis—to the extent her facial expressions could be read under the reflective aviator sunglasses, spandex sun cowl, broad-brimmed hat, and half an inch of zinc-based sunscreen—deemed it maybe insensitive for the two guests to sit in back and be chauffeured. So she claimed that sitting in back might cause motion sickness and took shotgun instead. Rufus stayed impassive throughout. Making nice with these two was going to have a lot in common with how he had cultivated his relationship with Bildad. He just had to be cool and let them observe him. Which they did quite a bit of, during the drive. He could always tell when someone had googled him and pulled up the old newspaper stories.

On his way in to the airstrip this morning he had swung by the ranch office and picked up a fifth-wheel travel trailer that was supposed to be the lodgings of Thordis and Carmelita until better arrangements could be made. This jounced along behind them as the roads got worse and the mountains got closer. As a conversationalist, Rufus never got out of first gear until they came in view of the mine head and Bildad came strolling out to investigate. Thordis turned out to be a horse person. Apparently horses were a big deal in Iceland. So everything literally came to a stop as Bildad shoved his face into the back of the truck looking for hay, and jostled Nimrod’s box. Carmelita urgently wanted out so that she could make sure Nimrod wasn’t in a bad situation, but Thordis had to get out first because of how the seats and the doors worked. And Thordis had eyes only for Bildad. So after some delay the final leg of the trip was as follows: Thordis escorting her new best friend Bildad, followed at a distance by Carmelita carrying Nimrod on her arm—this involved a special glove—and finally Rufus in his truck idling along in low gear and towing the trailer toward a site he had taken the liberty of picking out that would keep it out of the midday sun while remaining far enough away from Rufus’s trailer to give the ladies a feeling of privacy. Earlier those two had engaged in a minor public display of affection and then turned to look at Rufus to see whether he would spontaneously combust. He had given them the Bildad treatment. It seemed to have had the same reassuring effect. Which was all well and good, but Rufus could have used a bit of reassurance himself as his formerly isolated hermit’s retreat had suddenly acquired a horse, an eagle, and two ladies.

Just getting the trailer leveled and hooked up, and other such duties, consumed a fair bit of the afternoon. When the day began to cool off, he showed them how you could hike a couple of hundred yards back down the road and then double back on a path that ran steeply upward to the top of the peak that loomed above the mine’s entrance. The maintenance crews who came out every so often to work on the radio tower or the solar array used ATVs for that leg of their journey. Thordis did it on Bildad, who turned out to be as sure-footed as might be expected of a horse who’d spent much of his life in the wild. Rufus and Carmelita trudged along behind, carrying the Nimrod containment device between them on a pole stuck through its top handle. When the top of the mountain came in view, Thordis rode on ahead, causing Rufus to feel a twinge of jealousy as to his formerly exclusive personal relationship with Bildad.

“How much does ol’ Nimrod weigh?” Rufus asked, shifting the pole on his shoulder.

“Sixty-five hundred and eighty grams,” came the answer from the other end of said pole.

Mere hours ago, this level of precision would have been startling to Rufus, but he had already seen enough of these falconry people to get the picture that they were a little different. He had to mentally convert six and a half kilograms to pounds, a skill he had developed in the army. It must be somewhere north of fourteen pounds.

Rufus shook his head. He might have whistled if his lips weren’t dry. “Don’t sound like much. But holding that on your arm for any length of time—” He risked looking straight at Carmelita. Deadpan, she flexed her bicep. As the tattoo rippled in the afternoon sun he saw traces of an older tattoo that had been covered up by the solid block of ink. Maybe in a few weeks, if she was still around, he’d ask her about that. For now he just tried to show due appreciation for Carmelita’s upper-body development without seeming weird about it.

“You got to keep her close into your body to support her weight,” she explained.

“Nimrod’s a female?”

“Yeah. Females are, like, twice the size of males.”

“Good to know.”

“But then you get hit in the face a lot.”

“Hit in the face?”

“When she moves her wings.”

“I guess every job has its downside.”

“What’s the downside of your job, Rufus?”

“I’m waiting for that shoe to drop.”

He had only been up to the summit a couple of times. Now he saw it through the fresh eyes of Thordis and Carmelita and he had to admit it was glorious. From here you could see much of the ranch, but the best view was south across the Rio Grande and into Mexico. The low sun had gone red orange. Everyone said Pina2bo would make for beautiful sunsets all around the world. He didn’t know whether it was really having an effect yet. Whatever the cause, the angle of it was bringing out the shapes of the landforms bracketing the river. These stood out all the more crisply for being almost totally bare of vegetation.

“Yippee—ki-yi-yay!” was the exuberant verdict of Thordis. Seeing it through her eyes Rufus understood how it must look like a western. Not one of your low-budget spaghetti westerns but a bigbudget wide-screen feature.

“Beats the dump” was Carmelita’s more understated verdict as she got busy doing Nimrod stuff. Even a complete falconry ignoramus such as Rufus could guess that this was the best place in the world to be an eagle. Thordis dismounted to help out, and in short order they had Nimrod out of the box.

At first a hood covered Nimrod’s eyes. But after conducting some pre-flight checks and unwrapping some raw meat—apparently some sort of incentive program—they took the hood off to expose Nimrod’s eagle head, and her eagle eyes looked out to the south.

When T.R. had mentioned that an eagle was going to show up, Rufus’s mind had immediately gone to the image of a bald eagle. But Nimrod was a golden eagle: all different shades of brown, edged with gold where the sunlight caught it just so. Her beak was edged with bright yellow, which Rufus interpreted as lips. Her eyes were yellow. The scaly dinosaur skin covering her feet was yellow. From her toes sprouted steel-gray talons. The toe and the talon combined were as long as one of Rufus’s fingers.

Rufus convinced himself that the expression on Nimrod’s eagle face was one of profound interest. But probably eagles always looked that way. She whacked Carmelita in the face as she spread her wings to take off, and then she was airborne, finding a thermal almost immediately above the sunbaked slope to the south.

“If you look thataway,” Rufus said, making a blade of his hand and chopping it down along a certain azimuth, “you can see the parasails spiraling down and hitting the nets on the mesa.” From this distance they were no bigger than dust motes in a sunbeam, but once you focused on them the eye was drawn to their neat spacing and orderly movement.