Reamde

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.