Reamde полностью

“It’s fine,” John insisted, speaking to Richard from across a cultural divide that never got any easier to navigate. The idea being that even if John’s seat were positioned too far forward—limiting his legroom and reducing his level of physical comfort—the mere act of scooting it back a few inches was, by midwestern standards, a gratuitous waste of energy as well as an implicit admission that the scooter was the sort of person who could not handle a little bit of trouble.

Richard paused for a moment, sat back, and asked himself whether he should be driving at all. It was noon. He had not slept at all last night. Then he pulled himself together, looked in both mirrors, checked his blind spot, and accelerated smoothly into traffic. Just like in driver’s ed.

“You’ve got most of a day to kill before we leave for China,” Richard said, once they had made it out onto I-5. He had adjusted to the cultural thing now, so he didn’t say “a few hours to relax” or “freshen up” or “recover from the flight,” any of which would have been construed as Richard implying that John was not up to the stress of modern airline travel. Just “kill” implying that things really weren’t moving fast enough for Richard’s taste. “My condo is just down the street from the office, so you can go there and take a shower if you want, get on the Internet…”

“I’d like to sit down with you and look at it again,” John said.

“You’re not going to see anything new,” Richard said.

“Certain words are difficult to make out on my copy. Zula’s handwriting was never the best…”

“Your copy is my copy, John. Listen to me. We are talking about digital files here. What I emailed you is an exact, perfect copy of what I received from the guy in China. Looking at my copy is not going to help.”

“On the second page,” John insisted, “there’s one line that’s sketchy.”

“It is a handwritten note on brown paper towels,” Richard said. “The guy just spread it out on a counter and aimed his phone camera at it and prayed to his gods. The image quality is poor. But your copy is as good as mine. The only way to extract more information is to go to China, and we’re doing that in eight hours.”

“Why can’t we leave sooner?” John asked, though he already knew.

“The visas,” Richard reminded him.

FIVE DAYS AGO, directly following the meeting with Skeletor, Richard had told his pilots to take a day off enjoying the delights of the K’Shetriae Kingdom and then to meet him at the Sioux City FBO. He had then jumped into a rented Grand Marquis and started driving in the direction of home. He never referred to, or thought of, John’s farm as home unless things were really bad. He imagined that the drive would do him some good. It seemed that his brain needed to be doing something and the drive ought to be a good opportunity. He had been intensely occupied the last few days, playing on the worst character flaws of both Don Donald and Skeletor: the former’s avarice and the latter’s insecurity. A performance that ought to have brought the Furious Muses down on him in full resonance. Yet they were silent. Perhaps they’d at last left him for other ex-boyfriends who stood some chance of being improved by their suggestions. So his brain was strangely empty and inactive during the four-hour drive.

He did not snap out of it until he was on final approach to the farm, driving along the county road where he had gone bicycle riding when he’d been a kid, and staring in fresh amazement at the colossal wind turbines that John and Alice had been putting up. There was a decent breeze today, and the machines were churning along about as fast as they were ever allowed to. All of them were eye-catching because of that movement, to the point where it almost made it a little difficult for him to keep his eyes on the road. But then his gaze fastened on one that happened to be directly ahead, because of a little squiggle that the road had to make to avoid a bend in the crick. It was down for repairs, apparently, because the blades had been feathered and so it was just standing there inert, the one dead thing in this whirling carnival of white blades.

Richard was able to pull over onto the shoulder and stomp the parking brake before he broke down weeping.

That was why his brain had been silent. Because it knew that Zula was dead.

He showed up at John and Alice’s front door with red eyes and found them in the same condition. They did not ask him what he had been doing, why all the flying around. It was just as well. From this remove, the gambit with D-squared and Skeletor seemed ludicrously far-fetched and beside the point.