Reamde

heavy on liquids, with Richard and Pluto, way back in what Richard now thought of as the good old days of the company.

The original plan had been that it was just going to be Richard and D-squared getting to know each other, serious meetings to happen later. But D-squared had ended up going from zero to seven hundred miles an hour in two pints. Richard ought to have foreseen this. But he’d had no idea, in those days, how guys like Don Donald and Devin Skraelin actually worked. He had guessed that they must be kind of like engineers, meaning that you had to have lots of meetings with them and explain the problem in PowerPoint presentations and get preliminary scoping meetings and contractual hoo-ha out of the way before they would actually begin to ply their trade per se.

Richard picked Don Donald up at Sea-Tac and drove him to his downtown hotel, assuming he’d want to crash for at least a day to recover from jet lag and whatnot, but he ended up leaving his Land Cruiser at valet parking and stepping into the hotel restaurant with his guest for “a bite,” which, after D-squared noticed the row of tap handles projecting above the bar, improved to “a pint,” during which Richard basically explained the entire premise of the game. This led to a second pint during which Don Donald, showing zero symptoms of jet lag or intoxication, achieved missile lock on what he had identified as the central matter of interest, namely Pluto’s terrain-generating code, and plunged into that topic so deeply that Richard had been obliged to begin making phone calls to Pluto and eventually sent a taxi around to collect him. Pint number 3 was all about getting to know Pluto (who drank club soda). After a pause for a trip to what D-squared identified as “the W. C.—it is an abbreviation for water closet—the toilet, if you please,” he devoted pint numbers 4 and 5 to disgorging an entire cosmogonical schema that he had either just made up or been carrying around in his hip pocket in case someone asked for one.

During the first part of this feat or whatever you wanted to call it, Richard, somewhat addled, labored under the misconception that he was listening to the plot of a book that D-squared had already written. But the Don kept working in details from what he had just learned ten minutes ago about T’Rain, which obliged Richard to the belated, stuporous recognition that D-squared was just making it all up on the spot. He was doing it. Now. At 12:38 he had been waiting in line at Sea-Tac to have his retina scanned by Homeland Security, and at 2:24 he was slamming back pints in the hotel restaurant and getting the job done. The job that they had paid him for. Or rather, that they were proposing to pay him for, since no actual written agreement was in place.

Donald Cameron was sort of a one-stop shopping operation in that he supplied critical exegesis of his own work even as he was hurling it into the space around him. “You will have noticed that many if not most works of fantasy literature revolve around physical objects, usually ancient, imbued with numinous power. The Rings in the works of Tolkien being the best-known example.”

Richard, hiding his face behind his pint for a moment, made a plausible guess as to the meaning of the word “numinous” and nodded agreement.

“There is nearly always a chthonic link. The object-imbued-with-numinous-power tends to be of mineral origin: gold, perhaps mined from a special vein, or a jewel of extraordinary rarity, or a sword forged from a shooting star. I am merely describing,” D-squared added, with a flick of the fingers, “pulp. But the vast popularity of, say, a Devin Skraelin, attests to the power of these motifs to seize the reader’s attention, down at the level of the reptilian brain, even as the cerebrum is getting sick.”

“Who or what is Devin Skraelin?” Richard asked.

“A colleague who has distinguished himself by the sheer vastness of what you computer chaps like to call his output.”

Richard looked down into his pint and rotated the glass gently between the palms of his hands, wondering how much stuff a person would have to write to be pegged, by Donald Cameron, of all people, as remarkably prolific.

“You were saying something about the mineral origin,” said Pluto, crestfallen and maybe even a bit offended by the digression.

“Indeed yes,” said D-squared. “I daresay it is an archetype.” He paused for a swallow. “One can only speculate as to its origins. Why is the serpent an archetype? Because snakes have been biting our ancestors for millions of years: long enough for our fear of them to have been ensconced in our brainstems by the processes of natural selection.” Another swallow. Then a shrug. “Hominids have been making stone tools since long before Homo sapiens existed. They must have noticed that certain types of stone made better tools than others.”

“Granite doesn’t fracture the right way,” Pluto allowed. “The grain size is—”

“Even troglodytes must have noticed that certain outcroppings of stone made wondrously effective weapons.”

“Especially troglodytes!” Pluto corrected him.

“For them it would have been a commonplace observation of the natural world, not nearly as ancient as ‘snakes are dangerous,’ and yet ancient enough that it must have played some role in the processes of natural selection that led to the development of human consciousness. Culture. And, loosely defined, literature.”

Richard was more than happy to sit and listen. It was the weirdest business meeting of his career so far, even using an elastic definition of “business,” and he saw that was good.

“The point is,” said Don Donald, “that it works. Put a magic gem in a story and it grabs the reader. This can be done shamelessly, or with more or less artfulness, according to the tastes and talents of the author. I should say that Tolkien got it right by layering atop it a story about good and evil. The numinous mineral object is now also a technology; it has been imbued with power by a sentient will who possesses some sort of arcane wizardry. It can only be unmade by exposing it to a certain geological process that, being geological, is prior to, and takes precedence over, any work of culture.”

Don Donald was clearly accustomed to addressing people whose only way of responding was to nod worshipfully and take notes. He did not, in other words, leave a lot of breaks in his testimony to allow for discussion. For the moment, that was fine, since it made it easier for Richard to drink.

“If I have correctly understood your company and its technology, you possess a command of the geological underpinnings of your world that far exceeds that of any competitor. It would seem the natural and obvious step, then, to capitalize on this, by creating, or providing a facility for the creation of, numinous objects of mineral origin.”

“NOMOs,” coined Pluto.

D-squared looked taken aback until he got it.

Richard put in: “Among geeks, the cool-soundingness of the acronym is more important than the existence of what it refers to.”

“I might then be of service,” said D-squared, “by erecting a cultural (ahem) story atop that geological basement. The cultures would have artisans, metallurgists, gemologists, and so forth who would create the—er— NOMOs that would presumably be of central importance to the game.”

“I was thinking about the formation of the moon the other day,” Pluto put in.

“Pluto, would you care to expand on what you just said, since we do not understand it?” Richard asked.

“There’s a theory that the moon was made when young Earth got sideswiped by something huge, almost planet sized. We don’t know where that thing went.” He shrugged. “It’s kind of weird. You’d think that if we got hit by something big enough to knock the moon off, it would still be around somewhere, orbiting the sun. But I was thinking: what if it fell back into Earth later and merged with it?”

“What if it did?” Richard asked.

“It would be a very strange situation,” Pluto said. He pointed out the window of the restaurant, up into the sky. “A piece of Earth is up there. Sundered. Separated forever. Not coming back.” Then he lowered his aim and pointed down at the floor. “While down inside the earth is alien stuff. Stuff that doesn’t belong. The residue of the thing that hit us and sundered the world.”

Richard had been worried that D-squared would find Pluto incomprehensible and that the entire interview would be one long series of excruciating faux pas. But, perhaps because Cameron lived and dined with Premier League nerds at Cambridge, he seemed perfectly at ease with the shaggy Alaskan demiurge. He was either fascinated by Pluto’s idea, or putting forth a commendable effort to feign fascination, and it didn’t matter which. “Is it your idea that this alien planetesimal remains intact and hidden below the surface?”