Devin shrugged. “Beats me.” Not the most adroit answer and yet richard was wrong-footed by its sincerity. He had known Devin for a long time and thought he could read the man’s body language reasonably well.
Another tack. “The thing is,” Richard said, “not half an hour ago I’m pulling out of the airport with Pluto and I see that huge billboard for K’Shetriae Kingdom, with the blue-haired guy on it, and in the light of all that has been going on, I can’t help seeing that as dog whistle politics.”
“Dog whistle politics?”
“A signal that only certain people can hear. The very blueness of that hair is a shout-out to the Forces of Brightness. Earthtone Coalition people see it and don’t go any further than to shudder at its tastelessness and look the other way. But Forces of Brightness people see it as a rallying point.”
“I think it’s just that a blue-haired humanoid is more eye-catching. And the purpose of a billboard is to be eye-catching.”
Richard could hardly contest those points. He leaned forward, put his elbows on the red Formica of the diner table, clamped his head between his fingertips. “What bothers me is the trivialization,” he said. “T’Rain is one huge virtual killing machine. It is just warriors with poleaxes and magicians with fireballs fighting this endless series of duels to the death. Not real death, of course, since they all just go to Limbo and get respawned, but still, the engine that makes the whole system run—and by that, I mean generate revenue—is the excitement and sense of competition that comes out of these mano a mano confrontations. Which is why we had Good vs. Evil. Okay, it wasn’t very original, but at least it was an explanation for all the conflict that drives our revenue stream. And now, because of the Wor, Good vs. Evil has been replaced by—what? Primaries vs. Pastels?”
Devin shrugged again. “It works for the Crips and the Bloods.”
“But is that the story you’ve been writing?”
“It’s every bit as good as what we had before.”
“How so?”
“What we had before wasn’t really Good vs. Evil. Those were just names pasted on two different factions.”
“Okay,” Richard said, “I’ll admit I’ve often had similar thoughts myself.”
“The people who called themselves Evil weren’t really doing evil stuff, and the people who called themselves Good were no better. It’s not like the Good people were, for example, sacrificing points in the game world so that they could take the time to help little old ladies across the street.”
“We didn’t give them the opportunity to help little old ladies across the street,” Richard said.
“Exactly, we set them certain tasks or quests that had the ‘Good’ label slapped on them; but, art direction aside, they were indiscernible from ‘Evil’ tasks.”
“So the Wor is our customers calling bullshit on our ‘Good/Evil’ branding strategy, you’re saying,” Richard said.
“Not so much that as finding something that feels more real to them, more visceral.”
“Which is what exactly?”
“The Other,” said Skeletor.
“Say what!?”
“Oh come on, you did it yourself when you saw the billboard at the airport. ‘Ugh! Blue hair! How tasteless!’ When you did that, you identified, you categorized that character as belonging to the Other. And once you have done that, attacking it, murdering it, becomes easier. Perhaps even an urgent need.”
“Wow.” Richard was seriously taken aback because Furious Muse number 5, a comparative literature graduate student at the University of Washington who had toiled in Corporation 9592’s creative salt mines for a summer, had barely been able to make it through a paragraph without invoking the O-word. Hearing it from the mouth of Skeletor had taken Richard right out of the here-and-nowness of the conversation and left him wondering if he had fallen asleep on the business jet and was only dreaming this. He made a mental note to google F.M. number 5 at the next opportunity and find out if she had moved to Nodaway.
Richard had always writhed uncomfortably during O-word conversations, since he had the general feeling, which he could not quite prove, that certain people used it as a kind of intellectual duct tape. And yet any resistance to it on Richard’s part led to the accusation that he was classifying people who liked to talk about the Other as themselves belonging to the Other.
And so the general result of Skeletor’s invocation of the O-word at this point was to make Richard want to pull the rip cord on this whole conversation.
But no. There were shareholders to think of. At some level he had to justify spending a bazillion dollars on jet fuel just to translocate his ass to this diner chair.
On one level this was stressful and pressure-laden, but on another he could not have been more comfortable. Richard knew a few people who, like himself, basically could not stop making money no matter what they did; they could be kicked out the door of a moving taxi anywhere in the world and be operating a successful business within weeks or months. It usually took a few tries to get the hang of it. Beyond that, it was possible to succeed beyond all reasonable bounds if one kept at it. Some found an adequately successful business early enough in life that they were golden-handcuffed; others only figured out how to make money as they were approaching the age of retirement. After the smuggling and the Schloss, Richard had gotten to the place where he just knew how to do it, in the sense that every teenaged tinkerer who played with electricity knew that in order to make anything happen you had to connect a wire to each terminal of the battery. At some level, making any business run was that simple. Everything else was fussing with the knobs.
“Say more about the Crips and the Bloods,” Richard said, stalling for time while he tried to get his mental house in order.
“To us they look the same. Urban black kids with similar demographics and tastes. Seems like they all ought to pull together. But that’s not where they’re at. They are shooting each other to death because they see the Other as less than human. And I’m saying it has been the case for a long time in T’Rain that those people we have lately started calling the Earthtone Coalition have always looked at the ones we now call the Forces of Brightness and seen them as tacky, uncultured, not really playing the game in character. And what happened in the last few months was that the F.O.B. types just got tired of it and rose up and, you know, asserted their pride in their identity, kind of like the gay rights movement with those goddamned rainbow flags. And as long as it’s possible for those two groups to identify each other on sight, each one of them is going to see the other as, well, the Other, and killing people based on that is way more ingrained than killing them on this completely bogus and flimsy fake-Good and fake-Evil dichotomy that we were working with before.”
“I get it,” Richard said. “But is that all we are? Just digital Crips and Bloods?”
“What if it’s true?” Devin shrugged.
“Then you’re not doing your fucking job,” Richard said. “Because the world is supposed to have a real story to it. Not just people killing each other over color schemes.”
“Maybe you’re not doing yours,” Devin said. “How can I write a story about Good and Evil in a world where those concepts have no real meaning—no consequences?”
“What sort of consequences do you have in mind? We can’t send people’s characters to virtual Hell.”
“I know. Only Limbo.”
They both laughed.
Devin thought about it a little more. “I don’t know. I think you have to create an existential threat to the world.”
“Such as?”
“Comparable to a nuclear holocaust or what would have happened if Sauron had gotten his hands on the One Ring.”
“I’m going to have all kinds of fun getting that idea past the shareholders.”
“Well, maybe the shareholders have a point. The company is making money, right?”
“Yeah, but the reason I’m here is that there is some concern that this may not continue to be the case. If the
F.O.B. kill all the Earthtone Coalition, which they are likely to do, then what is there left to do in that world?”
Devin shrugged. “Kill each other?”
“There’s always that.”
Day 3
“Homegirl, this is the third time you come by here, let me put you out of your misery!”
The voice was a confident alto: someone with an excellent ear for pronunciation, even if her command of certain idioms was a little shaky. Zula spun around on her heel, then dropped her gaze twenty degrees to discover a face—somewhat familiar—smiling back at her from five feet and two inches above street level.
This was the woman—no, girl—no, woman—who had sold her a kilogram of green tea on the street yesterday afternoon. A kilogram being a rather huge amount. But she had made it seem like such a reasonable idea at the time.
The girl/woman confusion was irresolvable. She was petite and trim, traits hardly unusual among Chinese females. She had a pixie haircut, which was unusual. But this did not seem to be a fashion statement, given that she was wearing blue jeans and a pair of knee-high, bright blue pull-on boots—the kind of boots that working people used when scrubbing a boat deck or sloshing around in a rice paddy. A black T-shirt and a black vest completed the ensemble. No makeup. No jewelry except for a man’s watch, clunky on her wrist. She was rooted to the ground in a way that kept catching Zula’s eye: she planted those boots shoulder width apart on the pavement and stood square to whomever she was talking to, occasionally bounced a little on the balls of her feet when she was amused or excited by something. Her confidence made her seem forty but her skin was that of a twenty-year-old, so Zula concluded that she was young but odd in some way that would take Zula a little while to sort out.
Not all young women around here wore high heels and dresses, but it was certainly common enough that this tea-selling woman was placing herself miles outside of the mainstream by looking the way she did. And yet Zula didn’t get any sense of in-your-face nonconformism. She was not consciously making any kind of statement. This was who she was.
She had approached Zula and struck up a conversation yesterday afternoon. Zula, Csongor, and Sokolov had found their way to a street where a number of tea sellers had their shops, and Zula had been eyeing them, trying to decide which one she would approach, psyching herself up for another round of bargaining. And then suddenly this woman had been in front of her, blue boots planted, smiling confidently, and striking up a conversation in oddly colloquial English. And after a minute or two she had produced this huge bolus of green tea, seemingly from nowhere, and told Zula a story about it. How she and her people—Zula had forgotten the name of the group, but Blue Boots wanted it understood that it was a separate ethnicity—lived way up in the mountains of western Fujian. They had been chased up there a zillion years ago and lived in forts on misty mountaintops. Consequently, no one was upstream of them—the water ran clean from the sky, there was no industrial runoff contaminating their soil, and there never would be. Blue Boots had gone on to enumerate several other virtues of the place and to explain how these superlative qualities had been impregnated into the tea leaves at the molecular level and could be transferred into the bodies, minds, and souls of people condemned to live in not-so-blessed realms simply by drinking vast quantities of said tea. A kilogram of the stuff would vanish in no time and Zula would be begging for more. But it would be hard to buy more in America. Speaking of which, Blue Boots was keen on finding a Western Hemisphere distributor for this product, and Zula seemed like a fine candidate…
If Zula had actually been a tourist, just wanting to be left alone, she’d have grown tired of Blue Boots. But as it was she felt so happy to see a quasi-familiar face that she had to hold back an impulse to gather the tiny thing in her arms.
“Good morning,” Zula said. “You were right. I drank all that tea.”
“Ha, ha, you are full of shit!” said Blue Boots delightedly.
“You’re right. I don’t need any more today, thank you.”
“You want a distributorship?”
“No,” Zula began, but then perceived that Blue Boots was only teasing her and broke it off.
“You are so fricking lost it’s sad,” said Blue Boots. “Everyone on the street is talking about it.”
“We are trying to find a wangba,” Zula said.
“A turtle egg? That is a very bad insult. Be careful who you say it to.”
“Maybe I’m pronouncing it wrong.”
“In English?”
“We are trying to find an Internet café,” Zula said.
Blue Boots wrinkled her nose in a way that from most other females her age would have seemed like an effort to be cutesy but from her seemed as pure as the mountain waters of her native region. “What does Internet and coffee have to do with each other?”
“Café,” Zula said, “not coffee.”
“Café is a place where you drink coffee!”
“Yes, but—”to do with each
“This is China,” said Blue Boots, as if Zula might not have noticed. “We drink tea. Have you forgotten our conversation of yesterday? I know we all look the same to you but—”
“I’m from Eritrea. We grow coffee there,” Zula said, thinking fast.
“Here instead of a café we would have a teahouse.”
“I get it. But we are not looking for something to drink. We are looking for Internet.”
“Come again?”
Zula looked to Csongor who wearily held up a piece of paper with the Chinese characters for wangba printed on it. They had been showing it to random people on the street for the last half hour or so. Everyone they talked to seemed to have at least a vague idea of where such a thing could be found and pointed them in one direction or another while speaking earnestly, usually in Chinese but sometimes in English.
“Why didn’t you say so?” said Blue Boots. She pointed. “It’s that way, just above the—”
Zula shook her head. “How do you think we got so fricking lost?”
“Come on, I’ll take you there.” And she took Zula’s hand in hers and began walking with her. The gesture was a bit familiar but, at least for now, it felt nice to be holding anyone’s hand and so Zula laced her fingers together with her guide’s and let her arm swing freely.
It seemed inconceivable that any of them, even Sokolov, would defy her, so Csongor and Sokolov dutifully fell in behind.
The pixie haircut was shaking in dismay. “You need translator, man.”
“Agreed.”
“Excellent!” And Blue Boots let go of Zula’s hand, stopped, pivoted, and thrust out her right. Zula, out of habit, began to extend her hand, then realized she was about to enter into a binding contract and hesitated.
“Awwa!” said Blue Boots, and snapped her fingers in frustration. “Almost had you over a barrel.”
“We don’t even know your name.”
“I don’t know yours.”
“Zula Forthrast,” said Zula quietly. She looked back at Sokolov, who was distractedly gazing around with his habitual, posttraumatic, thousand-yard stare. A trace of a grin came onto her face.
“What?” Blue Boots wanted to know.
Zula killed the smile and shook her head. She had passed her name on to someone. And if that someone were to google the name, what might come up? Perhaps an article from the Seattle Times about a young woman who had inexplicably gone missing.
“I am Qian Yuxia.”
Zula, who had spent her life with her nose pressed up against the window of the straight-haired world, was growingly obsessed with Qian Yuxia’s haircut, which was one of those wedgy, short-on-top, longer-on-the-bottom productions. Someone who loved Qian Yuxia and who was very good with sharp objects had been maintaining this, and Qian Yuxia had just as determinedly been ignoring it.
“Is that a common name where you are from?” Zula asked, just making conversation.
“Yongding,” Yuxia reminded her. “Where the Big-Footed Women make the gaoshan ch
a. High mountain tea.”
“Are you a Big-Footed Woman?”
Yuxia looked at her like she was an idiot and extended a blue boot.
Zula shrugged. “But you might have a very small foot inside there!”
“I am Hakka,” said Qian Yuxia, as if that should put this entire part of the conversation to rest immediately. “I told you yesterday.”
“Sorry, I forgot the name.”
“What is up? Why are you here?”
Sokolov had now drawn close enough that Zula felt it best to stick to the script. Because they had worked out a script yesterday. “You’ve heard about the conference? About Taiwan?”
“Yes, what are you, the ambassador of Eritrea?”
“I’m here with the American delegation,” Zula said. “Csongor, here, is with the Hungarians and—”
“Ivan Ivanovich,” said Sokolov, with a courtly nod.
“Ivan is with the Russians. We have a couple of days off and so we are just—”
“Chillin’?”
“Yes. Chillin’.”
“Is one of these guys your boyfriend?”
“No. Why?”
Qian Yuxia gave Zula a playful backhanded slap on the arm, as if to chide her for being a slow pupil. “I want to know if it is cool to flirt with them!”
“Sure, go ahead!” Zula had been kind of assuming that Qian Yuxia was a dyke. Maybe she wasn’t. Or maybe she was a dyke who found it amusing to flirt with heterosexual males.
“Your hotel doesn’t have Internet!?”
“Of course it does.” Which did not answer the implicit question. “Csongor is such a nerd that he can’t go a whole hour without checking his email.”
“Hmm. Well, here is a place.”
Yuxia had led them across an intersection and down a side street lined with little shops. Next to one of these, a stairway led up and into the interior of a building. It was unmarked except for an old piece of World of Warcraft paraphernalia, the head of a creature called a Tauren, pasted to the wall. Like a medieval tavern sign, almost.