and April are compressed into a terse executive summary. It is about as tantalizing as a strip-tease video played on fast-forward. The landscape turns wet, and so green it's almost blue, and bolts straight up out of the soil in the space of about a mile. The fast lanes of Interstate 90 are strewn with brown snow turds melted loose from homebound skiers' Broncos. Semis plummet past them in writhing conical shrouds of water and steam. Randy's startled to see new office buildings halfway up the foothills, sporting high-tech logos. Then he wonders why he's startled. Amy has never been here, and she takes her feet down from the airbag deployment panel and sits up straight to look, wishing out loud that Robin and Marcus Aurelius had come along, instead of turning back towards Tennessee. Randy remembers to glide over into the right lanes and slow down as they shed the last thousand feet of altitude into Issaquah, and sure enough the highway patrol is out there ticketing speeders. Amy's duly impressed by this display of acumen. They are still miles outside of the city core, in the half-forested suburbs of the East Side, where street and avenue numbers are up in the triple digits, when Randy pulls onto an exit ramp and drives them down a long commercial strip that turns out to be just the sphere of influence of a big mall. Several satellite malls have burst from the asphalt all around it, wiping out old landmarks and screwing up Randy's navigation. Everything is crowded because people are out returning their Christmas gifts. After a little bit of driving around and cursing, Randy finds the core mall, which looks a little shabby compared to its satellites. He parks in the far corner of the lot, explaining that it is more logical to do this and then walk for fifteen seconds than it is to spend fifteen minutes looking for a closer space.
Randy and Amy stand behind the Acura's open trunk for a minute peeling off layers of suddenly gratuitous Eastern Washington insulation. Amy frets about her cousins and wishes that she and Randy had donated all of their cold-weather gear to them; when last seen they were circling the Impala like a pair of carrier-based fighter aircraft orbiting their mother ship in preparation for landing, checking tire pressures and fluid levels with an intensity, an alertness, that made it seem as if they were about to do something much more exciting than settle their asses into bucket seats and drive east for a couple of days. They have a gallant style about them that must knock the girls dead back home. Amy hugged them both passionately, as if she'd never see them again, and they accepted her hugs with dignity and forbearance, and then they were gone; resisting the urge to lay a patch until they were a couple of blocks distant.
They go into the mall, Amy still wondering aloud why they are here, but game. Randy is a little bit turned around, but eventually homes in on a dimly heard electronic cacophony-digitized voices prophesying war-and emerges into the mall's food court. Navigating now partly by sound and partly by smell, he comes to the corner where a lot of males, ranging from perhaps ten to forty years old, are seated in small clusters, some extracting quivering chopstick-loads of Szechuan from little white boxes but most fixated on what, from a distance, looks like some kind of paperwork. As backdrop, the ultraviolet maw of a vast game arcade spews digitized and sound-lab- sweetened detonations, whooshes, sonic booms and Gatling farts. But the arcade seems nothing more than a defunct landmark around which has gathered this intense cult of paperwork-hobbyists. A wiry teenager in tight black jeans and a black t-shirt prowls among the tables with the provocative confidence of a pool hustler, a long skinny cardboard box slung over his shoulder like a rifle. 'These are my ethnic group,' Randy explains in response to the look on Amy's face. 'Fantasy role-playing gamers. This is Avi and me ten years ago.
'They look like they're playing cards.' Amy looks again, and wrinkles her nose. 'Weird cards.' Amy barges curiously into the middle of a four-nerd game. Almost anywhere else, the appearance of a female with discernible waist among these guys would cause some kind of a stir. Their eyes would at least travel rudely up and down her body. But these guys only think about one thing: the cards in their hands, each contained in a clear plastic sleeve to keep it mint condition, each decorated with a picture of a troll or wizard or some other leaf on the post-Tolkienian evolutionary tree, and printed on the back with elaborate rules. Mentally, these guys are not in a mall on the East Side of greater Seattle. They are on a mountain pass trying to kill each other with edged weapons and numinous fire.
The young hustler is sizing Randy up as a potential customer. His box is long enough to contain a few hundred cards, and it looks heavy. Randy would not be surprised to learn something depressing about this kid, like that he makes so much money from buying cards low and selling them high that he owns a brand-new Lexus he's too young to drive. Randy catches his eye and asks, 'Chester?'
'Bathroom.'
Randy sits down and watches Amy watching the nerds play their game. He thought he'd hit bottom in Whitman, out there on the parking lot, that surely she would get scared and flee. But this is potentially worse. A bunch of tubby guys who never go outside, working themselves into a frenzy over elaborate games in which nonexistent characters go out and do pretend things that mostly are not as interesting as what Amy, her father, and various other members of her family do all the time without making any fuss about it. It is almost like Randy is deliberately hammering away at Amy trying to find out when she'll break and run. But her lip hasn't started to writhe nauseously yet. She's watching the game impartially, peeking over the nerds' shoulders, following the action, occasionally squinting at some abstraction in the rules.
'Hey, Randy.'
'Hey, Chester.'
So Chester's back from the bathroom. He looks exactly like the Chester of old, except spread out over a somewhat larger volume, like the classic demo of the expanding-universe theory in which a face, or some other figure, is drawn on a partly inflated balloon which is then inflated some more. The pores have gotten larger, and the individual shafts of hair farther apart, which produces an illusion of impending baldness. It seems like even his eyes have gotten farther apart and the flecks of color in the irises grown into blotches. He is not necessarily fat-he has the same rumpled heftiness he used to. Since people do not literally grow after their late teens, this must be an illusion. Older people seem to take up a larger space in the room. Or maybe older people see more.
'How's Avid?'
'As avid as ever,' Randy says, which is lame but obligatory. Chester is wearing a sort of photographer's vest with a gratuitous number of small pockets, each of which is stuffed with gaming cards. Maybe that's why he seems big. He has like twenty pounds of cards strapped to him. 'I note that you have made the transition to card- based RPGs,' Randy says.
'Oh, yeah! It is so much better than the old pencil-and-paper way. Or even computer-mediated RPGs, with all due respect to the fine work that you and Avi did. What are you working on now?'
'Something that might actually be relevant to this,' Randy says. 'I was just realizing that if you have a set of cryptographic protocols suitable for issuing an electronic currency that cannot be counterfeited-which oddly enough we do-you could adapt those same protocols to card games. Because each one of these cards is like a banknote. Some more valuable than others.'
Chester nods all the way through this, but does not rudely interrupt Randy as a younger nerd would. Your younger nerd takes offense quickly when someone near him begins to utter declarative sentences, because he reads into it an assertion that he, the nerd, does not already know the information being imparted. But your older nerd has more self-confidence, and besides, understands that frequently people need to think out loud. And highly advanced nerds will furthermore understand that uttering declarative sentences whose contents are already known to all present is part of the social process of making conversation and therefore should not be construed as aggression under any circumstances. 'It's already being done,' Chester says, when Randy's finished. 'In fact, that company you and Avi worked for in Minneapolis is one of the leaders-'
'I'd like you to meet my friend, Amy,' Randy interrupts, even though Amy is a good distance away, and not paying attention. But Randy is afraid that Chester's about to tell him that stock in that Minneapolis company is now up to the point where its market capitalization exceeds that of General Dynamics, and that Randy should've held onto his shares. 'Amy, this is my friend Chester,' Randy says, leading Chester between tables. At this point some of the gamers actually do look up interestedly-not at Amy, but at Chester, who (Randy infers) has probably got some one-of-a-kind cards tucked away in that vest, like THE THERMONUCLEAR ARSENAL OF THE UNION OF SOVIET SOCIALIST REPUBLICS or YHWH. Chester exhibits a marked improvement in social skills, shaking Amy's hand with no trace of awkwardness and dropping smoothly into a pretty decent imitation of a mature and well- rounded individual engaging in polite small talk. Before Randy knows it, Chester has invited them over to his house.
'I heard it wasn't done yet,' Randy says.
'You must've seen the article in The
'That's right.'
