REAMDE

“They would use a different terminal,” Ivanov growled.

 

“No, I’m not speaking of commercial fishermen. I mean hobbyists. Anglers. I saw a few of them earlier. Just regular Chinese guys. Retirees. They were coming home from a day out fishing, I suppose on one of those little islands out there.” He turned to Ivanov and caught his eye. “They wear funny hats.”

 

“I have seen them. Coolie hats,” Ivanov said.

 

“No, not those. The guys I’m talking about wear huge hats made out of light-colored cloth. Big bills sticking out the front to keep the sun off their faces. With skirts hanging down the sides and the back, all the way to the shoulders. Like what an Arab would wear in a sandstorm. The head and face are almost totally hidden. More so if they wear big sunglasses.”

 

“They sit out in the sun all day,” Ivanov said, getting it. “You can’t hold a parasol while you are fishing.”

 

“Yes. The other thing about them is that they have these fancy cases to hold their rods.” Sokolov held his hands about a meter apart, indicating the length. “With a bulge at one end to make room for the reel.”

 

Ivanov’s face relaxed and he began to nod.

 

“Better yet,” Sokolov said, “each one of them is carrying a little cooler.”

 

“Perfect,” Ivanov said.

 

“Everyone ignores these guys.”

 

“Of course,” Ivanov said, “just like you or I would ignore an old fisherman on a bridge in Moscow.”

 

“Sometimes you see one all alone,” Sokolov said, “but it’s not unusual for them to travel in a group—they’ll hire one of those boats to take them to their favorite fishing hole.”

 

“I see.”

 

“Now. We can’t walk around all day in such costumes without someone figuring out that we’re not Chinese,” Sokolov said. “But we don’t need to. We just need to get from a vehicle into a building, or to walk down a street for half a block, without every fucking Chinese person in a kilometer radius taking phone pictures of us and calling home to Mama.”

 

“Very good,” Ivanov said. “Very good.”

 

Sokolov decided not to mention his other observation, which was that the only other category of person who went completely ignored were the beggars who lay down flat on the ground in crowded pedestrian districts.

 

“We will make a plan,” Ivanov said. “One plan. And it will work.”

 

There’ll be no more talk of backup plans.

 

“Yes, sir.”

 

“Bring in the others,” Ivanov said. “We will discuss, and make preparations for tomorrow.”

 

THEY HAD ALL—FOUNDERS, executives, engineers, Creatives, toilers in Weird Stuff—been trying to think about big long-term issues raised by the Wor: the War of Realignment. Without a doubt T’Rain was making money from the Wor in the short term, but the question that was bothering the hell out of all of them was: Will it last? Because they had making money before, when the story of the world had actually made sense. Now it had mutated into something that seemed to lack exactly the kind of coherent overarching narrative that they had hired the likes of Skeletor and D-squared to supply.

 

All their meetings since the beginning of the Wor had been circular and pointless, even more so than meetings generally. Much of it came down to idle speculation about the internal mental states and processes of Devin Skraelin. Could the Wor really be laid at his feet? Suppose they could prove that he had orchestrated the whole thing, should they charge him with breach of contract? Or should they just lean on him to write his way out of the problem? In which case, Skeletor had only succeeded in drumming up more business for himself. Or was Devin helpless in the toss of cultural-historical forces beyond his ken? In which case, should they fire him and hire one of the thousands of ambitious, eager, and perfectly qualified young writers all hoping for an opportunity to take his place?

 

Neal Stephenson's books