Нил Стивенсон - Termination Shock

“Granted. But you have to admit it’s extremely well staffed and organized.”

Alastair nodded. “That is indeed the big spend here. Almost none of these people actually works for T.R., of course. He has hired an event planning firm, a very good one.”

Saskia gazed down the length of the carriage. Bob had occupied a table at the other end for an impromptu catch-up with his entourage. A waiter was taking orders and a busboy was pouring water. Nearby was a man who was obviously security, just standing there, not gazing out the window, not checking his phone. An outgoing woman of about thirty was chatting with Fenna and Amelia, working in tour guide mode, explaining the history of this carriage, showing them old photographs. Of course it would be crazy for T.R. to have all these people on his permanent full-time staff. Of course it was a contract job.

“So what is your point, Alastair? That it’s all just smoke and mirrors?”

“Oh, no, on the contrary,” he returned. “The sulfur pile is as real as it gets. The tech he showed you—?”

“An experimental engine that burns sulfur.”

“Smoke then, but no mirrors,” he cracked.

“Sulfur dioxide actually.”

“What I’m really trying to say is that the man is really quite canny.” He pronounced the word as only a Scotsman could. “He spends where he needs to. That’s all.”

“That sounds like an endorsement, then.”

He recoiled slightly. “Of the whole program? Perhaps not. Not yet . But his overall conduct of the thing shows much more intelligence and sophistication than I was expecting when your staff first reached out to me about this, and I watched a lot of vintage T.R. McHooligan videos on YouTube.”

Rufus was seated across the aisle from them, arms folded, just gazing out the window. Alastair had glanced at him once or twice, as if offering to draw him into the conversation, but Rufus had paid him no heed. Finally now some little shift in Rufus’s body language signaled an opening.

“The land of your forebears?” Alastair asked.

“Hmm?”

“I downloaded a couple of books about the Comanches,” Alastair confessed.

Rufus shook his head. “Tough ol’ bastards.”

Alastair’s face relaxed slightly. Rufus had defused any social awkwardness that might have surrounded the Comanches’ well-documented practice of torturing captives to death.

“That’s putting it mildly,” Alastair agreed. “Anyway, according to the maps, we’re passing across the southern bit of Comancheria, am I right?”

Rufus looked at him. “We’ve been there the whole time.”

“I suppose that is true,” Alastair admitted, a little unsure. “Waco, the Brazos . . .”

“Nah, I mean in a larger sense.”

Alastair exchanged a bemused look with Saskia and said, “Do tell.”

Rufus had taken to rasping his stubbled chin between the thumb and index finger of one hand, as if limbering up his jaw for speech. He now used that hand to point, in a subtle, flicking way, down the length of the carriage. “That right there is a Comanche,” he said.

Alastair could see the “Comanche” directly. Saskia had to turn round. The only person Rufus could possibly be referring to was the security guy stationed at the head of the car. He was dressed in what amounted to a uniform among such people. He had long sandy hair pulled back in a ponytail and a reddish beard. His eyes, which were presumably blue, were hidden by wraparound sunglasses. He was wearing a bulky vest over bulky cargo pants tucked into matte black speed-laced boots. Without an assault rifle he seemed naked. He looked straight out of an American Special Forces squad in Afghanistan circa 2002.

“Looks more Scottish,” Alastair said drily.

“You been reading those books you downloaded, you already know it was never about the DNA,” Rufus said.

“Indeed,” Alastair said, “the Comanches were enthusiastic recruiters.”

“Had to be, once they started dying out,” Rufus said.

Saskia shot him a curious look.

“A euphemism,” Alastair admitted. “They took captives on raids. Most of them . . .” He trailed off and shot an uneasy glance at Rufus.

“Were just put to death. You can say it.” Rufus said. “But kids like my great-great-granddad—he was taken when he was eight—they were adopted into the tribe. Consequently there was white Comanches, Black Comanches, Mexicans, you name it.” He put an index finger to his forehead. “You just had to adopt the mindset, that’s all.”

Alastair glanced at the Special Forces poster child down at the far end of the carriage. Rufus caught it. “How did we end up with dudes like him in the military ?” Rufus asked. “Well, you got to go back to times before the Civil War, when Texas was young. Alamo times. Moby-Dick times. Regular army couldn’t even come close to dealing with the Comanches. So they started the Texas Rangers. Most of ’em just got killed. Old man Darwin having his way. The few who survived, survived because they lived and fought exactly the same as Comanches . That was the only way. They became Comanches to fight Comanches. Later, regular army saw those same Rangers fighting in the Mexican war, as scouts, and called ’em white savages. No uniform, bearded, long hair, undisciplined, random weapons, unconventional tactics.”

“Got it,” Alastair said. “And that’s how we ended up with . . .”

“With dudes like him running around in Afghanistan,” Rufus concurred. “Being glorified in movies and such. Don’t get me wrong, the Texas Rangers of today is clean-shaven, spit and polish. But the idea of the old-school Ranger with the beard and the Bowie knife, traipsing around eating snakes and ambushing people . . . that stayed with us and it went viral beyond Texas into the whole United States. And any time you see one of these young white dudes at the range with the wraparounds and twenty-five different weird guns, flaunting that Ranger chic . . . that is the survival into our time of that. So, yeah. To answer your original question, Alastair. We are passing across the southern part of Comancheria. It’s just you and I have different takes on what that is. To you it’s a patch of Texas and Oklahoma and New Mexico that used to exist back in the old days. To me it’s the whole United States of America right now .”

“It never really died out, you’re saying,” Saskia put in.

“It’s a pandemic,” Rufus diagnosed.

“Do you think it is spreading now?”

“It spreads where it succeeds. Or leastways where people make believe it’s succeeding. Young fellas, they’re predisposed to love that shit. They want to have guns and violence and adventure. ‘It is a way of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation.’ But in the regular army, none of that’s to be had without discipline . Young fellas chafe under that. Comanches got the best of both worlds. Guns, violence, adventure, and glory with no one to boss you around. It worked out here”—Rufus waved his hand out the window—“when there was infinite buffalo and plenty of open space.” He now pulled his focus back into the interior of the antique railway car. “But it don’t give you all this here.” He picked up a silver fork from the table. “A fork! Comanche can’t make a metal fork to save his life.” He tossed it back onto the table. “To get all this, they had to give up their ways. And since their ways was all that they were —being that there was this come one, come all philosophy as far as DNA and all that—they diminished.”

Alastair glanced at the red-bearded “Comanche” at the end of the carriage. “And became America.”

“Seems that way to me,” Rufus answered with a diffident shrug. “Now, to be clear, you got your Mississippian woodland maize cultivators and your Plains horse tribes. Your Cherokees as well as your Comanches.”