Neal Stephenson

“The Troll is really smart. And fast. I’ve watched him take down a few wandering bad guys. And the kids in his posse are every bit as formidable.”

“Ever make a raccoon trap?”

“No,” C-plus said. “I was told they carried rabies, and I couldn’t see why it would be desirable to catch one.”

Seamus had a Boston accent that could scrape the rust from a manhole cover.

“I don’t think you are actually retired,” Corvallis pointed out mildly.…

“It’s a selective retirement,” Richard explained, “a retirement from boring shit.”

“I think that’s called a promotion.”

Richard envisioned the aged wizard wading through swamps, trudging doggedly across deserts, scaling mountain ranges, and walking through forests. Kind of like he was doing.

Egdod, of course, carried a wizard’s staff, just a simple stick, no fancy carvings or jewels. Just like what Richard was carrying now. Richard found something hugely enjoyable about the fact that, at the same moment, both he and Egdod were wandering alone across their respective worlds, seeing everything close up in a way that they rarely had a chance to. Getting back in touch with the terrains from which they had sprung, autochthonously, early in their lives.

That, as far as she could tell, was the purpose of the religion she had been brought up in: It made people feel better when really horrible things happened, and it offered a repertoire of ceremonies that were used to add a touch of class to such goings-on as shacking up with someone and throwing dirt on a corpse.

Richard understood that the spryness he had been envying Yuxia for was at least partly an act, a willed refusal to show pain.

Because she didn’t want men covering for her.

Because chivalry sometimes came with a price.

Csongor noticed Marlon craning his neck to get a sidelong view of the speedometer. Glancing down, he saw that he was going ninety.

“It is not kilometers per hour,” Marlon informed him. “In the metric system, you are going at something like five thousand.”

“You’re reading [Sokolov] all wrong,” Olivia said.

They all just gazed at her, hoping she’d say more.

“He’s a gentleman,” she explained, for want of any better way to put it.

“Oh. Why didn’t you just say so?” said Uncle Meng.

James had also been playing T’Rain. Csongor was interested to note that James’s character seemed to be tromping around in an environment very similar to the Torgai Foothills. As a matter of fact, the mountain peak in the background looked awfully familiar; James’s character was within a few kilometers of Marlon’s.

“You’re following us,” he said, “in two worlds at the same time.”

But Richard had already gone the cop route and found it not nearly as productive as driving around with a sledgehammer and retaining the services of men with oxyacetylene torches.

Jones began to draw up a shopping list. “Cooking oil…mosquito repellent…matches…cordless drill…”

“Tampons,” Zula called out.

“What brand?” Jones asked without skipping a beat. “Lite, Regular, Super, Ultra?”

“You’ve actually had a girlfriend?”

“Anything else, as long as I’m in the pink-and-pastel aisle…or can I get back to planning atrocities?”

“Knock yourself out.”

“Seamus?”

He looked up. Csongor was there, and Marlon, and Yuxia, all freshly showered and looking like the Xiamen branch of the Lynyrd Skynyrd Fan Club.