Fall or, Dodge in Hell. Neal Stephenson
roads, some paved and some gravel, dicing the flat green territory up into square-mile production units.
Ameristan couldn’t have had less in common with how it would have been depicted in a movie or video game. Tom and Kevin had perceived or imagined some threat. Its nature was hinted at by the handmade sign they had passed at the crossroads. Maybe these guys also had access to edit streams of geodata showing hot spots of gunfire and of traffic slowdowns that might suggest roadblocks or checkpoints. But whatever they were worried about would have little to no visual signature. There was not going to be a central base, a nerve center with roads and wires converging on it. You could put anything in a barn.
Or maybe Kevin was bored and wanted to exercise the drone.
Their overall course was diagonal, but because of the grid they were always going either north or west. This made sense and worked perfectly in the almost obscenely flat middle part of the state. But the big rivers all ran from very slightly higher ground in the northwest to the very slightly lower southeast. So the caravan’s rectilinear zigzagging caused them to cross and recross rivers, and around the rivers there was some interesting topography, some actual valleys between legit hills, forested country a stain on the land infallibly marking every part of it that was too steep to profitably cultivate. The higher places—worn-down traces of a glacial moraine, she suspected—sprouted wind turbines of the most enormous type. The bigger they were, the slower they turned, which was a good thing for birds. Some didn’t turn at all because, one assumed, they were down for maintenance, or not finished yet. She grew used to them as hours went by.
And that was how the giant Flaming Cross of the Leviticans sneaked up on her, though the people working on it would probably have felt that she sneaked up on them. It wasn’t actually flaming. It wasn’t even capable of flaming yet, because it wasn’t finished. Its general size and shape were not terribly far off from that of a wind turbine. It was sited on the top of what passed for a hill around here—not to catch the wind, but to be seen from a distance as it burned in the night. Anyway, by the time she accepted that she was actually seeing it, the thing was less than a mile away. She could see a clutter of pickup trucks parked around its base and some pop-up canopies sheltering tables where workers could take water breaks. A row of portable toilets stood sentry next to an office trailer.
On an impulse, she opened a voice channel to Tom. In normal circumstances, his edit space and Sophia’s were totally disjoint; they would never encounter each other online, never meet, never see the same news stories. Anything that originated from the likes of Tom would be fastidiously pruned by the algorithms used by Sophia’s editor before human eyes ever reviewed it, and anything that came from Princeton or Seattle would never reach Tom’s feed until it had been bent around into propaganda whose sole function was to make Tom afraid and angry. But for today’s purposes they had a direct channel, unfiltered, unedited. “Hey,” she said, “how do you think those people would feel about our dropping in for a visit? Just, you know, in tourist mode?”
“Copy. Stand by,” Tom returned.
The sound of Sophia’s voice had broken her companions out of their media reverie, and so now came several moments of their pushing up their glasses, being astonished by the spectacle of the cross, talking about it, pulling glasses back down to search for more information.
“There’s a visitor center,” Tom reported. “With changing rooms. Probably easiest unless you want to have all your garments inspected.”
“Well, if there’s a visitor center, they must be okay with visitors,” Sophia said.
Phil, Julian, and Anne-Solenne could not hear Tom’s audio stream and so the changing rooms came as a surprise to them. They were in separate trailers for men and women; all of the Princetonians knew that it would be pointless, and probably inflammatory, to make inquiries about non-gender-binary cases. But the idea of having to don different garments just to set foot on a specific property was new to them.
“If we don’t, they’ll have to stone us to death,” Sophia explained. “And according to their interpretation of Leviticus, the modern equivalent of stoning people is shooting them.”
“Oh, I get it,” Phil said. “Because bullets are like little rocks.”
“Exactly. And a gun is just a modern labor-saving device that makes it easier to throw the little rocks really fast. Basically, to them, every reference to stoning in the Bible is a sort of dog-whistle reference to guns.”
Phil was working it out: “God knew guns would be invented in the future because omniscient, but He couldn’t insert direct references to them in the Bible because that would be a spoiler for the Bronze Age audience. So He used stoning as a placeholder.”
“And our clothing is immodest or something?” Julian asked.
“Not at all.” Sophia reached out as if to grab Julian by the scruff of the neck. Instead of which, she flipped the collar of his T-shirt inside out so that she could read the tag. “Mostly cotton but with some spandex. To make it stretchy I guess. If you wore this up there, they would have to stone—i.e., shoot—you.”
“They have something against spandex?”
“Against mixing fibers.” Sophia pointed to a sign mounted to the wall above a table on which a display of neatly folded white paper bunny suits had been laid out, in a range of sizes. The sign was a quote from the Bible, set in Comic Sans:
Ye shal kepe mine ordinances. Thou shalt not let thy cattel gendre with others of divers kindes. Thou shalt not sowe thy field with mingled sede neither shal a garment of divers things, as of linen and wollen come upon thee.
—Leviticus 19:19
Phil couldn’t get past the first bit. “Is that a proscription of bestiality between different kinds of animals?”
“Ssh,” said Anne-Solenne, for sitting nearby was an Iowan lady of perhaps sixty, monitoring a table of cookies and coffee, free but, in classic Midwest passive-aggressive style, with a jar for suggested donations.
“I guess they were anti-mule. Look. Point being we can either strip down and have her read all the labels on our garments, which is gross, or just change into the bunny suits.”
“What about him?” Julian asked, gesturing toward Tom, who was emerging from the men’s toilet. Then, realizing he had been a little rude, he turned to address Tom directly. “Tom, are you going to change clothes?”
“No need,” Tom said, and went into a curious routine of patting himself in various places. All of his garb was Tactical, Mil Spec, Rugged, and Grueling, even down to suspenders and socks. All of the tags were on the outside—not concealed in collars and waistbands, as was the normal practice. Which wasn’t obvious because the tags were tactical camo, olive drab or what have you, so that they wouldn’t stand out in a faraway sniper’s scope like stars in the night sky.
The Princetonians now all felt at liberty to approach and examine. The lettering and logos on the tags were subdued tactical colors and difficult to read until you got close. But all of them—along with the manufacturers’ logos and the incomprehensible laundry glyphs—bore a symbol consisting of a block letter L with a crossbar near the top and flames coming out of it. “It’s just easier to wear Levitican-approved shit,” he explained, “’cause of where I go in the line of duty sometimes.”
“So you don’t believe it?” Phil asked.
“Oh, fuck no,” said Tom. “But they do. And it’s real good clothing. Tactical.”
They changed into bunny suits—but not before the cookie warden had beckoned Sophia and Anne-Solenne over to the refreshment table and asked them sotto voce whether it was, for either of them, That Time of the Month. Both answered in the negative and exchanged a look meaning Let’s just not even go there. Later they could consult Leviticus as to what limits and penalties might apply to women who were on the rag.
“Oh, the KKK Libel. Good question. Glad you asked. That is one of the greatest misconceptions,” said Ted, Son of Aaron (as he was identified