Нил Стивенсон - Termination Shock

“Weh! Weh!” was how they greeted Rufus, a word meaning “Come on inside!” It almost seemed as though they were expecting him, which made him wonder if he’d been spotted by some cousin while pumping gas in Lawton, and his arrival heralded on social media. Once he was through the door of the mobile home, all further conversation was in English. With one exception: his grandmother always addressed him as Eka, which was simply the Comanche word for Red. His hair had been red-tinged as a boy, and no visit was complete without her standing up on tiptoe and reaching up to tug at his locks, pretending to inspect for red roots.

It was a long reach. Like many of that tribe she was sturdy, but had not been of great stature even in her prime. Now she was pushing ninety. To find a genetic basis for the comparative tallness of Rufus, it was necessary to look elsewhere in the family tree. Perhaps to his great-great-grandfather Hopewell (though no one had ever measured him) but more likely to Bob Staley, his maternal grandfather, who had been some combination of white and Osage. And the Osage were as famous for their large stature as the Comanches were for the opposite; it was rumored that if the Osage branch of the family were traced back far enough it would include Heavy Runners, warriors who could chase down a Comanche pony in the middle of a fight, grab it by the tail, and bring it to the ground. For that reason Comanches, preparing to fight Osages, would bob or tie up their horses’ tails.

Big Bob had been stationed in Korea with the U.S. Marines during and after the war there. He had married a younger Korean woman and brought her back to the States, eventually settling in the vicinity of Fort Sill where there were enough Koreans to prevent his bride from feeling completely isolated. Their oldest daughter had met, and briefly and unhappily married, Rufus’s dad. That whole generation was a little bit of a sparse patch in the family tree, though. Rufus’s mom had died young in a car crash and his dad, as the polite euphemism went, “was not in the picture”; a charming pathological gambler, he had faded away, when Rufus had been in his teens, as a steadily widening circle of family and acquaintances had called him on his bullshit. All of which helped to explain why Rufus had simply joined the army upon graduation from high school, and why he had completed his twenty years’ service while still a young and healthy man.

On the Korean/Osage/white side—his mother’s branch of the family—there had been a general turn toward extremely fervent Christianity and the production of a lot of cousins Rufus didn’t know very well, since their incessant Jesus talk was so tiresome. By process of elimination, then, when he returned to this part of the country, the people he was seeing were his ninety-year-old grandmother, Mary, and the offspring of his two aunts on that side, who were enmeshed by many family and social ties in the KCA or Kiowa/Comanche/Apache network around Lawton.

An impromptu barbecue was fomented in the L-shaped compound as word got out that Rufus had slid into town. Various shirttail relations and friends began to pull up. Accustomed to solitude, Rufus had to suppress a fight-or-flight reaction as one person after another came up to interact with him socially. Most of these exchanges were either (1) rote friendly joshing about Rufus’s unusual looks, stature, and way of life, frequently softened by the exclamation “kee!” meaning “not!” or “just kidding!” or (2) congratulating him in a more serious way about his destruction of Snout. This feat—minus the part of the story where a business jet did most of the work for him—had somehow made its way into the oral tradition. Everyone, of course, knew the first part of that story: what had happened to Adele. Word seemed to have got around that Snout was no more and that Rufus had something to do with that. People had filled in the missing details with a conjectural story line that made Rufus out to be pretty heroic. Explaining what had actually happened was, of course, completely out of the question, and so all Rufus could do was nod and accept their warm admiration.

It all delayed the real conversation that Rufus wanted to have, which was with Mary. Which meant also having it with his aunt Beth, who had become the chief Mary caretaker and living repository of Mary lore. But eventually when the barbecue broke up, everyone went home, and the younger kids were in bed, he found himself sitting around the remains of a campfire with Mary and Beth in the cool of the evening. And then he laid the whole thing out, as much as he could without violating his NDA.

“I don’t want to burn any bridges with y’all or get mixed up in anything y’all would consider sacrilegious,” Rufus said, where “y’all” here basically meant that portion of his surviving family who lived around Lawton and identified as Comanche. “But it looks like I’m getting involved in this project that involves eagles.”

“Like the fighter planes?” Beth asked.

“No, ma’am. Birds. Some falconers—eagle tamers, basically—from different parts of the world, all come together to work on this thing I can’t talk about in West Texas. But these eagles have been brought up around humans and trained to use their eagle superpowers in certain ways—”

“Bald eagles?” Mary demanded to know.

“No. Golden.”

Mary nodded decisively. “Good.”

Beth was nodding too. “Because fuck those things.”

What was being referred to here was a long history of ambivalent feelings toward U.S. patriotic imagery, with bald eagles and the Stars and Stripes at the top of the list. Lots of Indians in this part of the country had served in the military and spent their careers saluting that flag, but they were all perfectly aware of the fact that effigies of bald eagles, and the red, white, and blue, were the last things that many of their ancestors had ever seen.

“That’s my understanding,” Rufus said hastily. “That when Comanches related to eagles it was always goldens. Balds were not part of the picture for us.”

Mary nodded. Beth exchanged a few muttered words with her, including pia huutsu , which Rufus was pretty sure was the word for bald eagle, and kwihnai , which he knew for sure was the word for goldens. Then they looked at him expectantly.

“But that don’t clear the picture up for me, ma’am,” Rufus continued. “I get that y’all got no time for pia huutsu and that y’all have reverence for kwihnai . But that might just make the situation worse, if you see what I’m saying, if I am mixed up in a project where the kwihnai are being, for lack of a better term, used.”

Beth totally got the picture and nodded. She discussed it with Mary for a minute or two in a rapid-fire mix of drawling Oklahoma English and Comanche.

“Our ancestors never did what these falconers do. Training them that way. We just captured them and held them captive,” Mary said. “For eagle medicine—because, you know, for some people, their personal medicine was eagle medicine—and for feathers.”

“Right! So do you think it’s okay to—”

“You said these falconers came from all over the world,” Beth said. “None of these people are Comanches, right?”

“Of course not.”

“So we don’t really have an opinion as to whether they should train golden eagles. It’s a different group of people, different religion, none of our dang business.”

“Yeah, but I’m involved and I don’t want y’all to think I’m being disrespectful.”

“What are these kwihnai being used for?” Mary asked. “What are they doing?”

“Catching rabbits?” Beth asked. “Isn’t that what falconers usually do?”

“Fighting,” Rufus said. “Fighting off invaders, I guess you could say.”