Zula showed at least polite attention, but Peter missed it on every level, since he had been spellbound by his phone ever since he had tramped into the place about fifteen minutes earlier, wind-and sunburned and deeply satisfied by a day’s snowboarding. Zula, like Richard, was no skier and had ended up turning this trip into a working vacation, spending several hours each day in the apartment, jacked in to Corporation 9592’s servers over the dedicated fiber connection that Richard had, at preposterous expense, brought up the valley to the Schloss. Peter, on the other hand, turned out to be a very hard-core snowboarder indeed, who, according to Zula, had spent a lot of time since the re-u shopping for special high-end snowboards optimized for deep powder; he had finally purchased one from a boutique in Vancouver just a few weeks ago. He now treated it like a Stradivarius, all but tucking it into bed each night, and Zula was not above showing a trace of jealousy.
Peter and Zula were making a long weekend of it. They’d left Seattle after Zula had got off work and had fought traffic up to Snoqualmie Pass, where most of the skiers peeled off to ride the conventional lifts. Feeling more elite by the minute, they had blasted across the state to Spokane and then headed north toward Metaline Falls, a tiny border station up on a mountain pass that just happened to coincide with the forty-ninth parallel. Crossing about an hour before midnight, they drove through the pass to Elphinstone, and then turned south along the poorly marked, bumpy, meandering mountain track that inclined to the Schloss. This plan actually did not sound insane to them, and thus reminded Richard once more of his advanced age. During the hours they’d been on the road, he’d found himself unable to stray from his computer, calculating which dangerous road they were driving down at a particular time, as if Zula were a part of his body that had gone off on its own and that needed to be kept track of. This, he supposed, was what it was like to be a parent. And as ridiculous as it was, he found himself haunted by thoughts of the re-u. For if Zula and Peter did have a crash on the way over, then later, when the story was told and retold at the re-u, laid like a brick into the family lore, it would be largely about Richard, when he’d learned of it, what actions he’d taken, the cool head he’d displayed, the correct decisions he’d made to manage it all, Zula’s relief when he had showed up at the hospital. The moral was preordained: the family took care of itself, even, no, especially in times of crisis, and consisted of good, wise, competent people. He might have to steer to the required denouement on slick and turning ways, through a whiteout. Just when he had been getting ready to pull ski pants over his pajamas and go out looking for them, they had arrived, precisely on their announced schedule, in Peter’s annoyingly hip, boxy vehicle, and then Richard had stopped seeing them as crazy wayward kids and thought them superhuman with their GPS telephones and Google Maps.
Now they were getting ready to do it again. Not wanting to waste a single hour of snowboarding, Peter had spent Monday afternoon on the slopes and intended to drive them back to Seattle tonight.
When Peter had first come in and sat down next to Zula, Richard had forgiven his close attention to the phone on the assumption that he was checking the weather and the road conditions. But then he started typing messages.
He seemed like a barnacle on Zula. Richard kept telling himself that she wasn’t a stupid girl and that Peter must have redeeming qualities that, because of his social ineptness, were not obvious.
Zula was looking at Richard through the big clunky eyeglasses, hoping for something a little more informative than the Treaty of Versailles joke. Richard grinned and leaned back into the embrace of his massive leather-padded chair. The tavern was a good place for telling stories and, in particular, for telling stories about T’Rain. Richard had been so impressed by a Dwinn mead hall drawn up by one of T’Rain’s retro-medieval-fantasy architects that he had, as a side job, hired the same guy to make a real version of it at the Schloss. This was a young architect who had never had an actual job building a physical structure. Coming out of school into a market smashed flat by the real estate crash, he’d been unable to find work in the physical universe and had gone straight into the Creative department of Corporation 9592, where he’d had to forget everything he knew about Koolhaas and Gehry and instead plunge himself into the minutiae of medieval post-and-beam architecture as it might have been practiced by a fictitious dwarflike race. Actually building such a thing at the Schloss had made him very happy, but the stress of dealing with real-world contractors, budgets, and permits had convinced him that he’d made the right move after all by confining his practice to imaginary places.
“I see vestiges of it when I go through Pluto’s old code,” Zula said. “The D’uinn.” She spelled it out.
“So the chronology is that we brought Don Donald in as our first Creative, but he didn’t have a lot of time to work on the project.”
“More high-level discussions is what I heard,” Zula put in.
“Yeah. I had to cram for these discussions by reading my Joseph Campbell, my Jung.”
“Why Jung?”
“Archetypes. We were having this big discussion about the races of T’Rain. There were reasons not to just use elves and dwarves like everyone else.”
“You mean, like—creative reasons or intellectual property reasons?”
“More the latter, but also from the creative standpoint there’s something to be said for making a clean sweep. Just creating an entirely new, original palette of races without any ties to Tolkien or to European mythology.”
“All those Chinese programmers…” Zula began.
“You’d be surprised, actually. The politically correct, campus radical take on it would be just what you’d think—”
“Elves and dwarves, c’mon, how could you be so Eurocentric?” Zula said.
“Exactly, but in a way it’s almost more patronizing to the Chinese to assume that, just because they are from China, they can’t relate to elves and dwarves.”
“Got it.”
“Turned out, though, that when we got Don Donald in here, he had good reasons why elves and dwarves were not just arbitrary races that could be swapped out for ones we made up but actual archetypes, going back…”
“How far?”
“He thinks that the elf/dwarf split was born in the era when Cro-Magnons coexisted in Europe with Neanderthals.”
“Interesting! Way back, then, like tens of thousands of years.”
“Yeah. Before even language, maybe.”
“Makes you wonder what we could find in African folklore,” she said.