Reamde: A Novel Read online

  Anyway, now Richard was on the plane over eastern Montana. Pluto was sitting across the aisle in a backward-facing seat, regarding the eastern foothills of the Rockies like a plumber gazing into a torn-open wall. Not that Pluto could really be of much direct use when it came to story issues. But it comforted Richard to have a God of Olympus on the plane with him. Pluto was a reminder that there were more elemental principles even than whatever it was Devin Skraelin did for a living. Pluto tended to view all Narrative Dynamics as nothing more than benign growths on his work, kind of like those microbes embedded on Martian meteorites. And indeed Richard supposed that, if it came down to that, Pluto could probably summon up a planetary catastrophe that would eradicate all life and history on T’Rain’s surface, and then start over again. But he would have a hard time sliding that one by the board of directors.

  Enough of this woolgathering. He forced himself to look back down at the Devin Skraelin novel open on his lap.

  Gnawed to a perilous weakness by the ravening flames, the drawbridge juddered under the footfalls of the massive Kar’doq. Its clenching talons pierced the carbonized wood of the failing timbers like nails driven into cheese. Peering down through a swirling nimbus of smoke, dyed all the lurid hues of Al’kazian silk by the particolored tongues of eldritch fire that lapped all around, its thin lips drew back to expose a silvery rictus of gibbering fangs. Staggered by the heat, which blasted his flesh like that of a swordsmith’s forge, Lord Kandador—knowing that his loyal guardsmen and guardswomen suffered yet worse agony—yet knowing that they would uncomplainingly go to their deaths before showing even the smallest hint of fear—gave the order to fall back. No sooner had the command escaped his parched throat than his young herald, Galtimorn, raised the glittering Horn of Iphtar to his cracked and bleeding lips and began to sound the melancholy tocsin of retreat. A few notes rang forth above the din of battle, then faltered, and Lord Kandador looked down to see Galtimorn crumpling to the smoking planks like a marionette with its strings cut, a stubby black iron arrow projecting obscenely from his chest. Had his guardsmen and guardswomen heard the signal? A sudden drawing-back, felt, rather than seen, suggested that they had. Transferring the full weight of his double-handed sword Glamnir to his right hand, Kandador reached down and in a single mighty gesture heaved the stricken young herald up onto his back. “To the keep!” he bellowed; and turning toward a phantom that had suddenly loomed in the corner of his eye, severed a Wraq’s bestial head from its gristly neck with a casual-seeming flick of the hungry blade.

  This (Volume 11 of T’Rain Origins: Chronicles of the Sundered: The Forsaken Magicks), and the many others like it, had to be understood as Devin’s implementation of a general world mythos that had been drawn up on the back of a napkin, as it were, by Don Donald after a five-hour lunch, heavy on liquids, with Richard and Pluto, way back in what Richard now thought of as the good old days of the company.

  The original plan had been that it was just going to be Richard and D-squared getting to know each other, serious meetings to happen later. But D-squared had ended up going from zero to seven hundred miles an hour in two pints. Richard ought to have foreseen this. But he’d had no idea, in those days, how guys like Don Donald and Devin Skraelin actually worked. He had guessed that they must be kind of like engineers, meaning that you had to have lots of meetings with them and explain the problem in PowerPoint presentations and get preliminary scoping meetings and contractual hoo-ha out of the way before they would actually begin to ply their trade per se.

  Richard picked Don Donald up at Sea-Tac and drove him to his downtown hotel, assuming he’d want to crash for at least a day to recover from jet lag and whatnot, but he ended up leaving his Land Cruiser at valet parking and stepping into the hotel restaurant with his guest for “a bite,” which, after D-squared noticed the row of tap handles projecting above the bar, improved to “a pint,” during which Richard basically explained the entire premise of the game. This led to a second pint during which Don Donald, showing zero symptoms of jet lag or intoxication, achieved missile lock on what he had identified as the central matter of interest, namely Pluto’s terrain-generating code, and plunged into that topic so deeply that Richard had been obliged to begin making phone calls to Pluto and eventually sent a taxi around to collect him. Pint number 3 was all about getting to know Pluto (who drank club soda). After a pause for a trip to what D-squared identified as “the W. C.—it is an abbreviation for water closet—the toilet, if you please,” he devoted pint numbers 4 and 5 to disgorging an entire cosmogonical schema that he had either just made up or been carrying around in his hip pocket in case someone asked for one.

  During the first part of this feat or whatever you wanted to call it, Richard, somewhat addled, labored under the misconception that he was listening to the plot of a book that D-squared had already written. But the Don kept working in details from what he had just learned ten minutes ago about T’Rain, which obliged Richard to the belated, stuporous recognition that D-squared was just making it all up on the spot. He was doing it. Now. At 12:38 he had been waiting in line at Sea-Tac to have his retina scanned by Homeland Security, and at 2:24 he was slamming back pints in the hotel restaurant and getting the job done. The job that they had paid him for. Or rather, that they were proposing to pay him for, since no actual written agreement was in place.

  Donald Cameron was sort of a one-stop shopping operation in that he supplied critical exegesis of his own work even as he was hurling it into the space around him. “You will have noticed that many if not most works of fantasy literature revolve around physical objects, usually ancient, imbued with numinous power. The Rings in the works of Tolkien being the best-known example.”

  Richard, hiding his face behind his pint for a moment, made a plausible guess as to the meaning of the word “numinous” and nodded agreement.

  “There is nearly always a chthonic link. The object-imbued-with-numinous-power tends to be of mineral origin: gold, perhaps mined from a special vein, or a jewel of extraordinary rarity, or a sword forged from a shooting star. I am merely describing,” D-squared added, with a flick of the fingers, “pulp. But the vast popularity of, say, a Devin Skraelin, attests to the power of these motifs to seize the reader’s attention, down at the level of the reptilian brain, even as the cerebrum is getting sick.”

  “Who or what is Devin Skraelin?” Richard asked.

  “A colleague who has distinguished himself by the sheer vastness of what you computer chaps like to call his output.”

  Richard looked down into his pint and rotated the glass gently between the palms of his hands, wondering how much stuff a person would have to write to be pegged, by Donald Cameron, of all people, as remarkably prolific.

  “You were saying something about the mineral origin,” said Pluto, crestfallen and maybe even a bit offended by the digression.

  “Indeed yes,” said D-squared. “I daresay it is an archetype.” He paused for a swallow. “One can only speculate as to its origins. Why is the serpent an archetype? Because snakes have been biting our ancestors for millions of years: long enough for our fear of them to have been ensconced in our brainstems by the processes of natural selection.” Another swallow. Then a shrug. “Hominids have been making stone tools since long before Homo sapiens existed. They must have noticed that certain types of stone made better tools than others.”

  “Granite doesn’t fracture the right way,” Pluto allowed. “The grain size is—”

  “Even troglodytes must have noticed that certain outcroppings of stone made wondrously effective weapons.”

  “Especially troglodytes!” Pluto corrected him.

  “For them it would have been a commonplace observation of the natural world, not nearly as ancient as ‘snakes are dangerous,’ and yet ancient enough that it must have played some role in the processes of natural selection that led to the development of human consciousness. Culture. And, loosely defined, literature.”

  Richard was more than happy to sit
and listen. It was the weirdest business meeting of his career so far, even using an elastic definition of “business,” and he saw that was good.

  “The point is,” said Don Donald, “that it works. Put a magic gem in a story and it grabs the reader. This can be done shamelessly, or with more or less artfulness, according to the tastes and talents of the author. I should say that Tolkien got it right by layering atop it a story about good and evil. The numinous mineral object is now also a technology; it has been imbued with power by a sentient will who possesses some sort of arcane wizardry. It can only be unmade by exposing it to a certain geological process that, being geological, is prior to, and takes precedence over, any work of culture.”

  Don Donald was clearly accustomed to addressing people whose only way of responding was to nod worshipfully and take notes. He did not, in other words, leave a lot of breaks in his testimony to allow for discussion. For the moment, that was fine, since it made it easier for Richard to drink.

  “If I have correctly understood your company and its technology, you possess a command of the geological underpinnings of your world that far exceeds that of any competitor. It would seem the natural and obvious step, then, to capitalize on this, by creating, or providing a facility for the creation of, numinous objects of mineral origin.”

  “NOMOs,” coined Pluto.

  D-squared looked taken aback until he got it.

  Richard put in: “Among geeks, the cool-soundingness of the acronym is more important than the existence of what it refers to.”

  “I might then be of service,” said D-squared, “by erecting a cultural (ahem) story atop that geological basement. The cultures would have artisans, metallurgists, gemologists, and so forth who would create the—er—NOMOs that would presumably be of central importance to the game.”

  “I was thinking about the formation of the moon the other day,” Pluto put in.

  “Pluto, would you care to expand on what you just said, since we do not understand it?” Richard asked.

  “There’s a theory that the moon was made when young Earth got sideswiped by something huge, almost planet sized. We don’t know where that thing went.” He shrugged. “It’s kind of weird. You’d think that if we got hit by something big enough to knock the moon off, it would still be around somewhere, orbiting the sun. But I was thinking: what if it fell back into Earth later and merged with it?”

  “What if it did?” Richard asked.

  “It would be a very strange situation,” Pluto said. He pointed out the window of the restaurant, up into the sky. “A piece of Earth is up there. Sundered. Separated forever. Not coming back.” Then he lowered his aim and pointed down at the floor. “While down inside the earth is alien stuff. Stuff that doesn’t belong. The residue of the thing that hit us and sundered the world.”

  Richard had been worried that D-squared would find Pluto incomprehensible and that the entire interview would be one long series of excruciating faux pas. But, perhaps because Cameron lived and dined with Premier League nerds at Cambridge, he seemed perfectly at ease with the shaggy Alaskan demiurge. He was either fascinated by Pluto’s idea, or putting forth a commendable effort to feign fascination, and it didn’t matter which. “Is it your idea that this alien planetesimal remains intact and hidden below the surface?”

  “Way deep down, a big chunk of it might be intact,” Pluto said, “but some of it would have been melted and carried away by magma flows. But not dissolved. It would manifest on the surface of T’Rain as veins of special ores and so on.”

  “Of course!” said Don Donald. “And the cultures that arose on the planet’s surface, knowing nothing of the geological facts, would come to recognize the special properties of these ores, whatever they might be.”

  “If the physics of the planetesimal were different, like because it came through a wormhole from another universe or something, then that would provide a basis for what we call magic,” said Pluto, “and the metallurgists, or whatever, who learned how to exploit it would become alchemists, brewers of potions, sorcerers—”

  “And they would get busy manufacturing lots of NOMOs,” Richard put in, just in case anyone was losing sight of this. Because he had played enough games to know that NOMOs equaled valuable virtual property which equaled cash flow for Corporation 9592. “I think my work here is done,” he said, rising to his feet by the always-safe drunken expedient of leaning against a wall as he straightened his legs. “I shall leave you two to work out the details.”

  Not for the first time, the future survival and prosperity of the company was secured by Pluto’s memory. After talking to D-squared for another couple of hours, he went home and wrote it all down in an emacs document entitled “it.txt,” which was later transmogrified into “it.docx” and thereby founded a lineage of more discursive documents and wiki pages, and a project and then a department that were all called “it” until one of the professional managers who had begun to infiltrate the company raised her eyebrows and it all had to be renamed Narrative Dynamics. The first major initiative of which had been to hire Devin Skraelin.

  The gist of “it,” as Richard only found out much later (he was a big believer in delegating responsibilities to people who actually cared about them), was that the T’Rainian biosphere supported two distinct types of DNA, one made exclusively out of original T’Rain elements, the other commingled with trace amounts of stuff from the swallowed planetesimal and therefore imbued with “magic,” where “magic” was now a social construct invented by T’Rain’s sentient races to explain the different physics that governed the alien atoms. Some species were made entirely of the mundane DNA, some were hybridized with a bit of the alien stuff, and a very few were made of 100 percent alien material and consequently had angelic/demonic/godlike qualities, though these had trouble reproducing since it was difficult to round up a sufficient biomass of the right kind of stuff.

  Of course. it was way more complicated than this made it sound; and it wasn’t long before tables and tree diagrams had to drawn up to keep it all straight, but this was the gist of it.docx, which, in its fully fledged, nine-point-seven-megabyte incarnation, they had handed off to Devin when they had made him the first, and the last, Writer in Residence.

  “HOW’S ZULA DOING?” Richard asked, trying to get a conversation started with Pluto. They were over the High Plains now and he supposed that his traveling companion might have less to gaze at.

  “I haven’t seen her in a few days,” Pluto said, without taking his eyes off the window. Perhaps his attention had been seized by the meanderings of the Platte.

  So that gambit had failed. Richard considered his options. Other people would want to sentimentalize about the old days, but the great thing about traveling with Pluto was that he only cared about you to the extent that you were interesting to him now. In that way he kept you on your toes. No aspect of the relationship could be counterfeited when it was being minted anew from moment to moment.

  “I meant,” Richard said, “how’s she doing in the job?”

  “As best as anyone can given the nature of the problem,” Pluto said, finally glancing Richard’s way for a fraction of a second.

  During the Titanian phase of the game’s development, when they had been laying down great slabs of world and story from one day to the next, Richard had pushed Pluto, hard, to supply them with material even before it was “ready,” which, for Pluto, meant that every cubic millimeter of solid matter in the world had to have a detailed backstory stretching 4.5 billion years. Pluto’s diligence in this and other matters had become a bottleneck delaying millions of dollars’ worth of efforts by other contributors. Richard had demanded that Pluto supply maps stipulating the locations of certain ore veins and gem deposits by fiat. In a thirteen-hour meeting, the memory of which still sent palpable horrors running up and down Pluto’s spine, Richard had stood at a whiteboard drawing out maps of the mineral deposits by hand. Photographs of the whiteboard had then been used to generate the actual maps used in the
game. Much of Pluto’s work since then had been in the newly created discipline of Teleological Tectonics, meaning that he started with Richard’s maps and then ran the tectonics and the magma flow simulations backward in time so that everything could be knit together into a lava narrative that made sense by Pluto’s lights. This project had perked along in the background for several years and only recently got to the place where serious computing resources could be thrown at it. That job had fallen to Zula. “The nature of the problem” was Pluto petulantly reminding Richard that Richard had been the originator of said problem.

  “How’s the Divine Intervention Queue looking?” said Richard, trying another tack.

  For there were limits to what Teleological Tectonics could achieve. They had discovered a number of irresolvable conflicts between what the simulations insisted ought to be there, and what was already present in T’Rain. These were simply going to have to be fixed through acts of divine intervention. In and of itself, this wasn’t a problem. There were lots of divinities in T’Rain. But even the craziest divinity didn’t just go around altering landforms at random, and so it had become part of Zula’s job to act as a liaison between the Departments of Teleological Tectonics and of Narrative Dynamics, cajoling the latter into cranking out storylines to explain why this or that god had decided to move a volcano three miles to the south-southeast, or transmute a vein of copper into limestone.