“… so can you,” Wallace finished. “I think that is all bollocks, but I shall take my leave now and wish you luck.”
“IS PETER A drug user?” Richard asked.
“No, he’s straight edge,” Zula said with a quick roll of the eyes and air quotes. “Why?”
“Because that looked like a drug transaction to me.”
She looked back over her shoulder. “Really? In what way?”
“Just something about the psychological dynamic.”
She gave him a penetrating look through her glasses.
“Which I admit doesn’t explain the antics with the thumb drive and trying to kill himself with a DVD,” he allowed.
She averted her gaze and shrugged.
“Never mind,” he continued.
“So D-squared lowered the boom on Skeletor about the apostrophes.”
“Yeah. A well-planned attack, I’d say. And it led to, among other things, the change where D’uinn became Dwinn.”
“Gosh, the way people talk about it on the Internet…”
“You’d think it was a much bigger deal. No. Not at the time, anyway. But this is how history is done now. People wait until they have a need for some history and then they customize it to suit their purposes. A year ago? Only the most hard-core T’Rain geeks would have heard of the Apostropocalypse and it would be considered a footnote. Maybe amusing at most.”
“But ever since the Forces of Brightness went all Pearl Harbor against the Earthtone Coalition — ”
“It’s become important in retrospect,” Richard said, “and it’s been blown up into this big thing. But really? It was just an excruciatingly awkward dinner. D’uinn got changed into Dwinn. Supposedly for linguistic reasons. But it set a precedent that Don Donald had the authority to change things that Devin had done in the world.”
“Which he then went on to abuse?”
“According to the Forces of Brightness,” Richard said. “But the fact is that D-squared has been discreet, restrained, only changed things in places where Devin really pissed down his leg. Things that Devin himself would have changed, had he gone back and reread his work and thought about it a little harder. So it’s mostly not a big deal.”
“To you maybe,” Zula said, “but to Devin?”
Richard thought about it. “At the time, he really acted like he didn’t care.”
“But maybe he really did,” Zula said, “and has been plotting his revenge ever since. Hiding things deep in the Canon. Details of history that Geraldine and herm it was like a dog whistle.”
Richard shrugged and nodded. Then he noticed that Zula was gazing at him. Waiting for more.
“You don’t care!” she finally exclaimed. Then a smile.
“I did at first,” he admitted. “I was shocked at first. One of my characters got ganked, you know. Attacked without warning by other characters in his party. Cut down while he was defending them. So of course that was upsetting at the time. And the furor, the anger over the last couple of months — how could you not get caught up in that, a little? But — I’m running a business.”
“And the War of Realignment is making money?”
“Hand over fist.”
“Who’s making money hand over fist?” asked Peter, breaking in on them. He unslung a black nylon duffel bag and placed it on his lap as he sat down. He was gripping a rolled-up wad of paper napkins, applying direct pressure to his DVD wound.
“You ask an interesting question,” said Richard, looking Peter in the eye.
“Just joking,” Peter said, immediately breaking eye contact.
“Well,” said Zula, and tapped her phone to check the time. “Could you take a picture of me and my uncle before we hit the road?”
AS GOOGLE MAPS made dispiritingly clear, there was no good way to drive from that part of B.C. to Seattle, or anywhere for that matter; all the mountain ranges ran perpendicular to the vectors of travel.
The Schloss’s access road took them across the dam and plugged them in to the beginning of a provincial two-laner that followed the left bank of the river to the southern end of the big lake Kootenay: a deep sliver of water trapped between the Selkirks and the Purcells. It teed into a larger highway in the middle of Elphinstone, a nicely restored town of about ten thousand residents, nine thousand of whom seemed to work in dining establishments. A gas stop there developed into a half-hour break for Thai food. Peter talked hardly at all. Zula was used to long silences from him. In principle she didn’t mind it, since between her phone, her ebook reader, and her laptop she never really felt lonely, even on long drives in the mountains. But usually when Peter was quiet for a long time it was because he was thinking about some geek thing that he was working on, which made him cheerful. His silence on the drive down from Schloss Hundschüttler had been in a different key.
From Elphinstone they would go west over the Kootenay Pass. After that, they would have to choose the lesser of two evils where routing was concerned. They could go south and cross the border at Metaline Falls. This would inject them into the extreme north-eastern corner of Washington, from which they could work their way down to Spokane in a couple of hours and thence bomb right across the state on I-90. That was the route they’d taken when they’d come here on Friday. Or —
“I was thinking,” said Peter, after he’d spent fifteen minutes twirling his pad thai around his fork and attempting to burn a hole through the table with his gaze, “that we should go through Canada.”
He was talking about an alternate route that would take them across the upper Columbia, through the Okanagans, and eventually to Vancouver, whence they could cross the border and plug in to the northern end of I-5.
“Why?” Zula asked.
Peter gazed at her for the first time since they’d sat down. He was almost wounded by the question. It seemed for a moment as if he’d get defensive. Then he shrugged and broke eye contact.
Later, as Peter was driving them west, Zula put away her useless electronics (for phone coverage was expensive in Canada and the ebook reader couldn’t be seen in the dark) and just stared out the windshield and replayed the encounter in her head. It pivoted around that word “should.” If he’d said, It would be fun to go a new way, or I’d like to go through Canada just for the hell of it, she would not have come back with Why? since she’d been thinking along similar lines herself. But he’d said, We should go through Canada, which was an altogether different thing. And the way he’d deflected her question afterward put her in mind of the way he’d behaved around that stranger in the tavern. Uncle Richard’s question about a drug deal had irritated her at the time. Peter’s look, his clothing, the way he acted, caused older people to make wrong assumptions about who he was. But she knew perfectly well that he was a sweet and decent guy and that he never put anything stronger than Mountain Dew into his body.
Should. What possible difference could it make? The Metaline Falls border crossing was rinky-dink to be sure, but by the same token, it was little used, and so you rarely had to wait. The border guards were so lonely they practically ran out and hugged you. The Vancouver crossings were among the largest and busiest on the whole border.
He was avoiding something.
That was the one thing about Peter. If something made him uneasy, he’d dodge around it. And he was good at that. Probably didn’t even know that he was dodging. It was just how he instinctively made his way in the world. He wasn’t an Artful Dodger. More of an Artless Dodger, guileless and unaware. As a young child Zula had seen some of that behavior in Eritrea, where confronting your problems head-on wasn’t always the smartest way; the patriarch of her refugee group had devised a strategy for getting even with the Ethiopians that revolved around walking barefoot across the desert to Sudan, checking into a refugee camp long enough to make his way to America, starting a life there, getting rich (at least by Horn of Africa standards), and sending money back to Eritrea to fund the ongoing war effort.