Fall or, Dodge in Hell. Neal Stephenson
a dry arroyo that plunged straight into the Colorado. During the times when it actually carried water, it had deposited a rocky bar along the bank of the river, and it was there that Maeve and her colleague Tom had pulled two rafts up out of the water and set up a little day camp under a pop-up awning. Older Joneses were huddled in the shade of it, looking beleaguered. Younger ones were splashing in the river, completely unconcerned. Bob piloted the truck carefully across a shallow backwater and up onto the surface of the bar and stopped a few yards short of the camp. Directly on exiting the vehicle he was engaged by stressed-out moms and dads who were so glad to see him. This left Corvallis free to sneak out the passenger door and cut around the back of the truck and head toward the rafts, where Maeve and Tom were sorting through luggage, taking out the Joneses’ personal stuff while leaving company gear in the raft.
“Nice getup” was Maeve’s verdict on what Corvallis was wearing. She had given him a head-to-toe scan with eyes that were such a pale shade of blue as to be somewhat weird-looking.
“Right back at you,” Corvallis responded. Maeve was wearing a shirt of silvery Lycra. It had long sleeves, anchored at the ends by thumb holes. Her hands were covered in paddling gloves made of wetsuit material. The garment didn’t have a collar; it developed into a hood that covered her whole neck and head except for an oval around the face where a few strands of sun-bleached hair had escaped. A lump in the back suggested that she had long hair, kept in a bun. Over that she was wearing a sun visor. An assortment of eyewear dangled on her chest. Red suspenders kept her massively overloaded cargo shorts from simply falling off. Projecting from the leg holes were the stump cups, knee joints, carbon-fiber shins, and plastic feet of her prosthetic legs.
“Thanks for picking us up.” She took a couple of steps toward him in a better-than-you’d-think-but-not-quite-right gait, and peeled the glove from her right hand to shake. Her hand was cold, sandy, and strong. The shake was perfunctory.
“I didn’t do much besides reading my credit card number over the phone.” Stupid thing to say. He was trying to be modest but came off sounding rich and petulant.
“We’ll make you whole.”
There were five available seats in the truck’s cab, and six Joneses, but some of them were small enough to double-buckle. Corvallis and Maeve ended up sitting in the vehicle’s open back, using luggage and camp mats for cushioning. Maeve loaned him a sun hat and looked with disfavor on his bare arms. The climb up the arroyo was such rough going that they ended up standing and holding on to the roll bar, absorbing the jounces with their leg muscles. Once they had made it to something that could pass for a proper road, they made themselves comfortable and he got her settled down by applying sunscreen to his arms.
“Do you mind?” she asked, and unstrapped one leg, then the other, and put them to one side so that she could air out her stumps. “Sand gets in there.”
“I wouldn’t dream of objecting to your making yourself comfortable,” Corvallis said.
The elaborate wording got her attention. She had put on dark wraparound sunglasses, but it was clear from the set of her face that she was giving him a close look. “What is that garment you’re wearing?”
Corvallis spent a while explaining his hobby and how he had come to be here. She listened without showing any outward signs of disgust and asked a couple of questions. Then she shrugged. “At the end of the day, all that matters is if it makes you healthier. And you don’t look like some bludger who camps out in Mum’s basement.”
“Thanks.”
“You don’t get deltoids like that by typing.”
Corvallis was unaccustomed to having his deltoids, or indeed any part of him, looked on in such a favorable way—let alone openly talked about—by a female observer. He had nothing to say for a few moments. He felt a brief tingle in his nuts and adjusted his tunic.
The simple reality of blasting down a road in the Utah canyonlands having this conversation with this person somehow cut the Gordian knot that had been tied in his skull this morning by millions of people being wrong on the Internet.
“You lift,” she said. Her tone was somewhere between question and statement. She was dourly resigned to the likelihood that he had a personal trainer in a fancy gym.
“I lift shovels full of dirt,” he said.
She liked that. “Is that some new hipster exercise?”
“It is an old Roman military exercise,” he said. “When a legion made camp, it dug a ditch all around, and threw the dirt up on the inside to make a rampart above the ditch. When it broke camp, the ditch had to be filled in.”
“That is a fuck-ton of digging.”
“The original legionaries were like elite athletes, if you look at all the physical activity they performed day in and day out. I’m not putting myself in that class, but I’ll say that reenacting is the best exercise program I’ve ever had.”
She was gazing off into the blue sky, trying to get her head around it. “To move all of that dirt—just to put it back—it seems, I don’t know—”
“It’s the same as paddling a boat,” he pointed out, “except with dirt.”
“Okay, fair.” She looked at him, which he found vaguely frightening and yet preferred to her not looking at him. “So when were you thinking of changing out of that getup?”
“My original plan was to be doing it now, in the backseat of the truck. It didn’t work out that way. But you know what? The fact is I only have one clean set of normal-person clothes. A blazer and a dress shirt. Leather shoes. No point in getting them covered with road dust. I’ll change when we get to Moab.”
“If,” she corrected him.
“Bob’s pretty sure he can sneak us in somehow.”
She sighed. “I wonder what this is going to do to our business.”
“Long-term, it’s going to be great for your business. Because it’s going to bring attention to Moab, and that’s going to translate to clicks, and to revenue.”
“Clicks,” she repeated. “That’s what it’s all about I suppose.”
“If you write up the story of what’s happening right now and put it up on your social media accounts, it’ll get millions of page views.” Corvallis meant for this to be encouraging but he could tell he was getting nowhere. He was consistently getting the sense that she had a lot on her mind that she didn’t want to share with him, and that most of his conversational gambits were wide of the mark.
“I thought you techies wore hoodies and T-shirts,” she said.
“What?”
“You said you had a blazer and a dress shirt.”
“It’s what I wore to work the day I left Seattle. I had a board meeting.”
“Why didn’t you wear a T-shirt to your board meeting? Isn’t that what you do?”
“Yeah, but this wasn’t for a tech company. This is a private foundation. I serve on the board. It’s just a somewhat more conservative vibe. You’re in the room with lawyers and money people.”
“What kind of foundation?”
“A friend of mine died. He was rich. He’d made billions in the game industry. Some of his fortune went to this foundation.”
“Was it an untimely death?”
“Definitely.”
“Sorry to hear it.”
“Thanks. Anyway, the foundation looks for ways to put gamerelated technology to use in solving various social problems.”
They jounced over a calamitous pothole and she reached out to keep her artificial legs from jumping out of the truck.
Corvallis was straining to remember some advice