other van.
Sokolov gave a directive. The vans went into motion, driving through a gate in the security barrier and out onto an airport road. A black Mercedes pulled in ahead of them. Zula kept waiting for the moment when they’d roll up to a security checkpoint, but it didn’t happen. They never got checked at all. At some point they merged into traffic on a highway. They were in China.
CHET HAD TO drive into Elphinstone to pick up some supplies for the Mud Month shutdown, so he gave Richard a lift to the town’s one-runway airport. A twin-engine, propeller-driven airplane awaited him there, and Chet, who knew the drill, simply drove right up to it, rolled down his window, and exchanged some banter with the pilot while Richard pulled his bag out of the back of Chet’s truck and heaved it through the plane’s tiny door. Thirty seconds later they were in the air. Richard, who made this journey a couple of dozen times a year, had set up a deal with a flying service based out of the Seattle suburb of Renton, and so all this was as routine as it could be. The amount of time he would spend in the air was less than what some Corporation 9592 employees would spend in their cars this morning, stuck on floating bridges or bottled up behind random suburban fender benders.
The first and last thirds of the route were entirely over mountains. The middle third traversed the irrigated basin around Grand Coulee Dam. No matter how many times Richard flew it, he was always startled to see the ground suddenly level out and develop a rectilinear grid of section-line roads, just like in the Midwest. Early on, the pattern was imposed in fragments scattered over creviced and disjoint mesas separating mountain valleys, but presently these flowed together to form a coherent grid that held together until it lapped up against some terrain that was simply too rugged and wild to be subjected to such treatment. The only respect in which these green farm-squares differed from the ones in the Midwest was that here, many of them sported inscribed circles of green, the marks of center-pivot irrigation systems.
Richard could never look at them without thinking of Chet. For Chet was a midwestern boy too and had grown up in a small town in the eastern, neatly gridded part of South Dakota where he and his boyhood friends had formed a proto-motorcycle gang, riding around on homemade contraptions built from lawnmower engines. Later they had graduated to dirt bikes and then full-fledged motorcycles. The world’s unwillingness to supply Chet with all the resources he needed for upkeep and improvement of his fleet of bikes had led him into the business of small- town marijuana dealing, which must have seemed dark and dangerous at the time, but that now, in these days of crystal meth, seemed as wholesome as running a lemonade stand. Chet had logged a huge number of miles riding around on those section-line roads, which he preferred to the state highways and the interstates since there was less traffic and less of a police presence.
One evening in 1977 he had been riding south from a lucrative rendezvous in Pipestone, Minnesota. It was a warm summer night; the moon and the stars were out. He leaned back against his sissy bar and let the wind blow in his long hair and cranked up the throttle. Then he woke up in a long-term care facility in Minneapolis in February. As was slowly explained to him by the occupational therapists, he had been found in the middle of a cornfield by a farmer’s dog. It seemed that his nocturnal ride had been terminated by a sudden west-ward jog in the section-line road. Failing to jog, he had flown off straight into the cornfield, doing something like ninety miles an hour. The corn, which was eight feet tall at that time of the year, had brought him to a reasonably gentle stop, and so he had sustained surprisingly few injuries. The long, tough fibrous stalks had split and splintered as he tore through them, but his leathers had deflected most of it. Unfortunately, he had not been wearing a helmet, and one splinter had gone straight up his left nostril into his brain.
The recovery had taken a while. Chet had gotten most of his brain functions back. He had not lost any of his wits, unless discretion and social skills could be so designated, so he had devoted a lot of attention to the question of why the transit-brandishing pencil-necks who had laid out the section lines a hundred years ago had been so particular about sticking to a grid pattern and yet had perversely inserted these occasional sideways jogs into the grid. Examining maps, he noticed that the jogs only occurred in north-south roads, never east-west.
The answer, of course, was that the earth was a sphere and so it was geometrically impossible to cover it with a grid of squares. You could grid a good-sized patch of it, but eventually you would have to insert a little adjustment: move one row of sections east or west relative to the row beneath it.
It being the 1970s, and Chet being a high school dropout with a damaged brain, he could not help but perceive something huge in this discovery. Nor could he avoid coming to the conclusion that the mistake he had made on that beautiful moonlit night had been a sort of message from above, a warning that, during the grubby, day-to-day work of small-town pot dealing, he had been failing to attend to larger and more cosmic matters.
He had moved west, as Americans did in those days when they were searching for the cosmic. A few hundred miles short of the Pacific, he had fallen in with the biker group that collaborated with Richard on his backpack smuggling scheme. Among them he had acquired a sort of shamanistic aura and become the high priest of a breakaway faction calling itself the Septentrion Paladins to distinguish themselves from their predominantly Californian parent group. They had moved north of the border and established themselves in southern B.C. A second, near-fatal crash had only enhanced Chet’s mystical reputation.
Not long after Chet had been released from the hospital after the second crash, the Septentrion Paladins had embarked on a project to, as Chet put it, “get in touch with our masculinity.”
When this policy initiative had abruptly been made known to Richard in the middle of a barroom conversation on seemingly unrelated topics, awe and horror had struggled for supremacy in his mammalian brain as his reptilian had begun to tally all exits, conventional and un-, from the bar; lubricated his whole body with sweat; and jacked his pulse rate up into a frequency range that had probably jammed Mounties’ radar guns out on Highway 22. For he had known these men all too well in their premasculine days and could not imagine what they were about to get up to
TURNING HIS ATTENTION back to matters inside the plane’s cabin, Richard resumed reading the
Torgai Foothills—The mortality rate in this unexpectedly war-ravaged region today skyrocketed through one million percent. Local observers attributed the unusual figure to an “epochal” influx of outsiders, compelled, by as yet unexplained astral phenomena, to pay tribute to a local troll. The visitors or, as they have come to be known to locals, “Meat,” are laden with tribute and hence make tempting targets for highwaymen (the one million percent benchmark is considered by analysts to be an important psychological barrier that separates a war-ravaged inferno from a chiliastic gore storm).
Steadying himself on an eight-foot wizard’s staff as he waded through a knee-high river of blood washing down the market street of Bagpipe Gulch—a community that once prized its status as the “Gateway to Torgai”— Shekondar the Fearsome, a local alchemist, denied that the trend was a negative influence on the town’s image, insisting that the influx of “Meat,” and the bandits, land pirates, and cutthroats who had come to prey on them, had