Richard resisted the temptation to say
Once D-squared had at last solved the user-interface problem of how to pick stuff up and put it in his poke, and had caused the Anthron to loot all the gold, plus some Boots of Elemental Mastery and a Diadem of Scrying that he took a fancy to, Egdod grabbed him (the Anthron, that is) by the scruff of the neck again and flew him, with a velocity that the Don described as “faintly sickening,” about halfway around the planet to visit a moneychanger who, being situated almost at the antipode of where all the action was, was offering fast service and good rates.
It was possible to interact with an MC verbally, and thereby remain “in-world,” which was equivalent to an actor remaining “in character,” but the impatient Richard diverted the Don to a user interface window replete with medievally styled buttons and popup menus. “You want to make a Potlatch to Argelion. It’s the third checkbox down on the right.”
“The god of mammon and lucre!?”
“You know perfectly well what Argelion is.”
“I should have thought so! But I recall nothing about a Potlatch! Why, that is a concept from Pacific Coast Indian tradition! Such a thing has no place in—”
“It is one of those things that we added to the world so long ago that we forgot it wasn’t your idea,” Richard said. “We can argue about it during dinner, if you like. Half of those guys at High Table are probably playing T’Rain in secret; they’ll enjoy hearing your thoughts on why Potlatches are bad. But for now, if you would just click on the friggin’ box…”
“All right, I have done so. And now new things!” The Don said this in the wondering tone that he always adopted when confronted by unexpected dynamism in a user interface. “‘One-quarter, one-half, three-quarters, all. Or enter an amount.’”
“Giving you options as to how much of your gold is going to Potlatch,” Richard explained. “Click ‘All.’”
This suggestion only triggered the same miserly tendencies that had caused the Anthron, until recently, to spare himself the expense of footwear. “No! All of that gold!? It’s just going to disappear?”
“
The Don, looking scandalized and beleaguered, clicked ‘All’ and then hit the ‘Potlatch’ button. Then he sighed. “Easy come, easy go.”
Richard did not answer for a few moments, as he was busy logging out. “Okay,” he said, closing his laptop, and resuming the journey to the Bible stand. Next time he stayed here, he’d bring roller skates. “I’m going to need your credit card again.”
“Why!?” the Don exclaimed, as if this was exactly what he’d been worrying about.
“The same one you used to set up the account. Please.”
By the time Richard got over there, D-squared had worried the card out of what looked like Queen Anne’s wallet and handed it over. Richard flipped the card onto its face, pulled out his phone, set it on Speaker, and then dialed the customer service number printed on its back.
A lovely British voice came on, introducing them to the root of a branching tree of automated service options. Richard navigated to “Check recent transactions” and then punched in D-squared’s credit card number.
The most recent transaction, according to this disembodied robot on the other end of the line, was a credit in the amount of ?842.69, time-stamped about five minutes ago.
“I guess you owe me a drink,” Richard said to the openmouthed and bulging-eyed face of the Don, “because you are now eight hundred quid—you call them ‘quid,’ right?—richer. Thanks to that little escapade.”
“That was the Potlatch?”
“Yes. Money disappears from T’Rain, as a burnt offering to Argelion. It never comes back. But that’s just a cover story that we have set up to enable players to extract hard currency.”
“I see!”
“I believe that you
“I had known, of course, that such transactions were possible in principle—”
“But there’s nothing quite like having money in the bank, is there?”
“I believe I just
“And I would happily accept. But what I would really like to do, while we are hoisting that pint, is to talk to you about what might happen in the next couple of weeks to the other three million dollars’ worth of gold pieces that are just lying there on the ground. Free for the taking.”
ZULA ATE AN MRE, stuffed the empty tray into the tangle of camouflage that had been erected around the truck, burrowed into her sleeping bag, and went to sleep faster than she had thought possible. She dreamed of China: a disconnected and rearranged version of Xiamen that incorporated bits of Seattle and the Schloss and the cave bunkers of Eritrea. It made perfect sense in dream-logic.
She woke up once to a deeply troubling sound that she identified, after a few moments, as the howling of wolves, or perhaps coyotes. Then she was stuck awake for a long time. She ate another MRE, supposing that a full stomach might do her some good. This did not seem to help especially. She was paying, now, for the ease with which she had slipped into sleep earlier. After a while, she gave up any hope of sleeping again and just tried to make herself comfortable. But from the fact that she ended up dreaming later, it followed that she must have drifted away in spite of herself.
The first couple of nights after the thing with Khalid she had not dreamed of it at all, at least that she could remember. But yesterday during the interminable truck ride, she had found herself remembering the moment of those shards being driven into his face by her hands, and the blood, or something, that had been on her fingers after. This night Khalid did come back to her in her dreams, and she devoted some effort to fighting him off. Not physically fighting him but half-consciously trying to erect some kind of psychic defense against ever seeing his image again, sensing that if he appeared in her thoughts during the day and her dreams at night, he would never be gone, she would still be dreaming of him and reliving the moments in the back of that jet in the unlikely event that she lived to the age of ninety.
She was hearing a kind of snuffling, coughing noise and thought that maybe she had begun crying in her sleep and was hearing her own sobs in the disembodied way that sometimes happened around the foggy frontier between sleeping and waking. Something was grabbing her ankle. The chain, of course. Pulling on it urgently. Really it was just her pulling against it as she rolled around in her sleep. But in the dream it was a man pulling on her wrist. Remarkable that, in a dream, a wrist could substitute for an ankle. But she was seeing the face of an old man who had been with them in the caves in Eritrea and who had walked with them on the long barefoot trek to Sudan. The caves were, among other things, a field hospital for casualties from the war against Ethiopia. Young fighters showed up with burns, gunshot wounds, shrapnel. The doctors tried to fix them up. Some of them died. Some of them could not be fixed—they underwent amputations, and hung around until they could find some place to go. But there was this older guy—in retrospect, probably not older than fifty—with a hollow, sucked-in face carpeted with a patchy gray beard, and urgent, avid green-brown eyes, who showed up there, apparently healthy, and never left. They came to understand, in time, that he was a psychological casualty. Any grown-up could see in a few moments that he was not right in the head. Children didn’t have that instinct. The man had things he very much wanted to say, and he seemed to learn, after a time, that adults would veer away from him, pretend not to hear him, even shoo him away. But children unaccompanied by adults—as they quite often were—could give him a few moments’ company, the social balm that all humans, even crazy old war veterans, had to have. His way of getting you to pay attention to him was to grab you by the wrist and tug until you were obliged to look into his crazy eyes.
After which, he didn’t have a lot to say, since he appeared to have suffered a head injury and could not really form words. But he could gesture at things and look you in the eyes and try to get you to understand. And to the extent that young Zula could follow his train of thought at all, he seemed to be trying to warn her, and any other kid whose wrist he was able to grab, about something. Something really big and bad and scary that was out there in the world beyond this valley where they had found refuge in the caves. In this particular dream he was trying to warn her about Khalid and she was trying to explain that she was pretty sure Khalid was dead, but he wouldn’t believe her, wouldn’t let go of her wrist, just kept yanking. The snuffling and coughing: her crying? But she wasn’t crying; the sounds were coming from somewhere else.
