Reamde

On his way out of town, deeply preoccupied with the fact that the ersatz quasi-Elven race known as the K’Shetriae were now embedded (though sans the controversial apostrophe) in the memory chips of real-world GPS systems, he almost plowed into the back of what passed for a traffic jam around here: Black Friday shoppers trying to force-feed their vehicles into the parking lot, and their bodies through the doorway, of Walmart. In olden days he would have pumped the brakes judiciously, bringing the enormous vehicle to a stop, but nowadays he knew that this could be outsourced to antilock brakes, so he just crushed the pedal to the floor and waited. The pedal thrummed beneath his foot. The white plastic teat of his go cup discharged a globule of coffee and his banana boomeranged into the glove compartment lid. He watched dispassionately as the tailgate of a pickup truck grew huge in his windshield, not unlike a calendar item zooming onto the screen of his phone. No collision occurred. The driver gave him the finger. A light changed and traffic seeped forward. Soon enough, he was on the interstate, southbound. That rapidly grew boring, so he switched to two-lane roads, to the mounting chagrin of his GPS.

In spite of his cloak-and-dagger exit from the Ramada, his brain was jammed with family stuff. He had woken up in the wrong color! He had to get all traces of Blue out of his mind and achieve full Greenness before he got anywhere near the Iowa/Missouri line.

For this was not just a friendly meeting. Nuances in today’s conversation, things left unsaid, or said in the wrong way, could have expensive consequences. The day after Thanksgiving might have been time off for most of the country, but not for Skeletor. The parochial turkey-eating customs of the United States were of no interest at all to the hyperinternational clientele that he and Richard shared. And even their American players, though they might have taken a few hours off yesterday for family observances, would be devoting most of today to questing for virtual gold and vicarious glory in the world of T’Rain, making this one of the heaviest days of the year for Corporation 9592’s servers and the system administrators who kept them running.

But his mind kept drifting into the Blue. It was like a puzzle in a video game: he had to figure out what was really bothering him. It wasn’t the Furious Muses; after a brief howl of outrage when he’d almost rear-ended the pickup truck, they had been silent for hours.

Somewhere around Red Oak, he finally put it together: it was yesterday’s short but uneasy exchange with the Wikipedia-reading in-law.

The actual content of the Wikipedia entry was not at issue. What bothered Richard was the mere fact that such a thing existed and that he had been abruptly reminded of it at a moment when he just wanted to be Dodge, hanging around the old place, doing normal Iowa stuff.

The entry in question started with a summary of what Richard was now, and it filled in biographical details only when they seemed relevant to whatever mysterious stalker/scholars compiled such documents. He was not important enough, and the entry was insufficiently long, to include a biographical section laying out the whole story in narrative form. Which seemed all wrong to him, since the only way to make sense of what he was now was to tell the story of how he’d gotten that way.

WHEN HE HAD lugged that bearskin down the Selkirk Crest, he had done so without a plan—without even a motive—and certainly without a map. The ridges were steep and rocky. The sun shone on them like a torch. No water sprang from them. Attempts to descend into the cool-looking valleys were baffled by the density of the vegetation, called “dog fur” by the few people who actually lived in those parts, apparently because it made the hiker know what it must be like to be a flea navigating a dog’s hindquarters. Half out of his mind with hunger and exhaustion, he traversed a long talus slope that ramped down into the remnants of a dead silver mine, then descended through a belt of dog fur and, surprisingly, into a grove of ancient cedar trees. Decades later he would learn the term “microclimate.” At the time, he just felt that he had stepped through a wormhole to a damp and chilly rain forest perched above the Pacific. The canopy was so dense as to choke off the energy supply to everything beneath it, so the place was mercifully free of undergrowth, and a brook ran through the middle of it from a spring farther up the slope. Maybe it was just heatstroke and low blood sugar, but he felt something holy. He flung off his pack and sat down in the creek and let its cold water explore his clothes, lay down on his back, gasped at the cold, rolled over on his stomach, drank.