Нил Стивенсон - Termination Shock

All this coincided with a phase during which Rufus was asking himself what in God’s name he was even doing here. He had long ago got the picture that T.R. was the living embodiment of what was now denoted ADHD. He went off on tangents, a small percentage of which made money. It was just the survival into modern times of old-time wildcatters running around Texas drilling wells and hoping to get lucky. Sooner or later these initiatives came under the heading of “special projects” in his bureaucracy and then continued to be funded in some irregular and hard-to-understand way until someone got around to pulling the plug—probably while T.R. was looking the other way. As long as Special Projects were suffered to remain in existence they could bang into each other in the dark and swap DNA. Setting Rufus up as the Drone Ranger had been one of those. The only thing that had come of it so far was some improvements to the marble mine and the rescue and rehabilitation of a stray horse with a market value of one dollar. It would be way overstating the case to claim that T.R. had any kind of coherent plan for bringing the falconers and the eagles up to the marble mine. But Thordis must be telling him something he enjoyed hearing. Rufus didn’t know whether Tsolmon and Piet were being paid, or simply allowed to be on the property. Clearly it suited them. Tsolmon wasn’t much of a talker but she obviously knew her way around horses. So that was a load off his mind. Piet, though probably in his forties, had the physique of a fifteen-year-old circus acrobat and was a fervid practitioner of the sport of rucking, which apparently was nothing more than running around with a heavy weight strapped to one’s back. The general point was that neither of the new arrivals caused any trouble, and it cost almost nothing to keep them alive.

Rufus therefore came around to the view that his employment on the ranch was likely to be terminated at any moment without warning or explanation, but that while he was waiting for the axe to fall he might as well try to make himself useful to the falconers, who seemed to have momentum within what might optimistically be called the organization of T.R. This meant dropping the pretense that he could actually do anything useful, security-wise, with drones, over and above what Black Hat was already doing. Thenceforth he put all his drone-related know-how to work in the service of the Special Project that accounted for Skippy, Nimrod, and Genghis being here: the idea—pioneered years ago by Piet, developed further by Thordis, and still getting a bit of side-eye from Carmelita and Tsolmon—that trained eagles could be used to defend against hostile drones. The Schiphol project had been shitcanned partly because of protests from animal rights activists. Such people were, to put it mildly, neither common nor welcome on the Flying S, or any other West Texas, ranch.

First, though, Rufus had to settle some misgivings that had been rumbling in the back of his mind since the moment on top of the mountain when Nimrod’s hood had been removed and he had realized that she was a golden, as opposed to a bald, eagle. At that instant this whole thing had suddenly turned into a family affair. For complicated reasons, he had to go back to Lawton and make sure he wasn’t burning any bridges by taking part in a weaponized eagle program. So he took a couple of days off, got into his truck, and drove five hundred miles east-northeast to the place where he had been born, and, up to the age of eighteen, raised.

There was the usual amount of driving down streets that he had known since boyhood, and thereby having random memories triggered. Lawton and the immense army base of Fort Sill were wrapped around each other like two wrestlers on a mat. Much of the town’s population were ex-, active, or future army. There were a few carefully delineated pockets of squalor, and the odd person who didn’t mow his lawn, but those only emphasized the place’s overall windswept tidiness.

It was a roomy place where all the development had long since gone over to modern commercial big-box strips. The only change since his childhood was that old signs had been ripped out and replaced with electronic ones on which managers could advertise the latest specials or job openings from the air-conditioned comfort of their offices. These provided a weird sort of digital peephole into their minds. A bakery was looking to hire a dependable baker. Two miles down the road, an auto parts store had a job opening for a dependable sales associate. Dependability was a major preoccupation of Lawton’s managerial class. Rufus could see people walking, bicycling, or skateboarding up and down the same streets who, it could be inferred, had failed the dependability test.

Young Rufus might have assumed that this drought of dependability was a problem peculiar to Lawton, had he not joined the army and become aware of the fact that it was a worldwide phenomenon. If you did happen to be one of those rare people blessed or cursed—take your pick—with dependability, there were opportunities everywhere. The world’s howling need for it would suck you into all kinds of situations that might look peachy if you had just fallen off the Lawton turnip truck but that, in the light of experience, probably needed to be vetted a little more carefully before saying yes. Which was part of why he was here. T.R. had checked the “dependable” box next to Rufus’s name. Rufus now had better keep his wits about him.

Despite carrying a tribal ID card, he had always refrained from calling himself a Comanche. It seemed presumptuous, and it put him at risk of being called a Pretendian, which was absolutely not a label you ever wanted to have slapped on you. And yet that branch of his family had always been more welcoming and, for lack of a more devious way of saying it, loving, in an unconditional way, than any of the others, whenever he came around to visit. Possibly because he didn’t come around that often.

He drove north out of town past the Comanche Reformed Church. This massive red-rock pile had always been there. It was where he had first heard names like Bildad and Peleg being read out from the pulpit. But recent developments in his life had made him aware that it had been founded by Dutch missionaries. So it was technically an offshoot of the Dutch Reformed Church, which in a roundabout way was the same church Saskia belonged to. He’d been to his share of christenings, weddings, and funerals in the place. But he had never been aware of its connection to the Netherlands, and certainly could never have imagined the whole Saskia thing, which as time went on seemed more and more like a dream or hallucination to him.

North of the military base the country became a little more rolling, with a good number of small trees casting shade on the ground but still letting enough light through that grass could grow and provide grazing for cattle and horses. The grid of streets was broken up by rivers, hills, and lakes. Roads rambled wherever the rambling was good. Strung along them like beads were the hundred-and-sixty-acre parcels known as allotments.

The allotment now controlled by his grandmother Mary was a bit smaller because part of it had been submerged in an artificial lake some decades ago, but on balance that wasn’t such a bad thing because lakefront property was worth more. Like many of these things its ownership had, after a few generations, become splintered among a couple of dozen descendants of the original allotee. Making decisions had become difficult. Part of the property had been leased out as a sod farm. Some of the lower-lying ground near the water had become overgrown with juniper, cedar, and mesquite—all invasive species that back in the old days had been kept at bay by grazing bison. Rufus, fifteen years ago, had contributed to an effort whereby Mary and three of her other descendants had bought out most of the other co-owners. He’d also showed up with a chain saw on weekends to help clear away the unwanted brush along the lake. Now it was an RV park with seventy-five spaces. About half those were occupied by permanent residents, mostly military retirees with a weakness for fishing. The other half were available for short stays by transient vacationers. An L-shaped arrangement of mobile homes, spliced together with a prefab steel building, served both as front office and as a residence for Mary and some of her descendants—aunts, uncles, and cousins to Rufus. To get there, you had to drive along the edge of the former sod farm, which had now been fenced and turned over to three horses and a donkey. The horses were said to be descendants of some that had survived the depredations of the U.S. Army during the Red River War. Unable to defeat the Comanches on the battlefield, they had killed all the bison and drove herds of captured horses over cliffs, reducing the Indians to starvation and thus forcing them into captivity at Fort Sill.