Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,209

a cannabis pipe that was making the rounds. But the social scene was winding down, and she was tired, so she climbed out and grabbed one of the thick bathrobes from the shelves. After putting it on, she wrapped Daisy up in her workout clothes. She padded back along the resort’s web of footpaths, boardwalks, and covered walkways to the little cottage that had been assigned to her as her lodging. This comprised a small living/working/dining room with a kitchenette and a bedroom, both of which had views out over the waters of Desolation Sound through glass doors. Just outside was a flagstone terrace barely wide enough to accommodate a couple of deck chairs and a coffee table. The cottage had been sited close to the brink of the steep drop-off to the waterfront, so a waist-high glass barrier had been erected to prevent drunk or sleepy guests from plunging over it. An opening in that led to a wooden staircase that rambled down to the complex of docks and boardwalks about ten meters below. The most prominent feature down there was the resort’s helipad, a surprisingly tiny platform that projected out over the turbulent strait.

Sophia wasn’t sure why she had been assigned this cottage. It was one of the resort’s finer accommodations. Most of the other attendees were in hotel rooms that were very nice, but hotel rooms nonetheless. As a rule her mother, and others directly connected with the foundation, made a point of staying in such, to avoid sending the wrong message. To Sophia—not the sort who habitually flew around in choppers—the helipad was strictly a nuisance; whenever one of those things was landing or taking off, all conversation was drowned out for a couple of minutes. But she could see how a certain kind of luxury traveler might revel in the ability to hop out of a chartered whirlybird and scamper up a few steps to a private cottage.

On its back side, the place sported the sort of bathroom that such a traveler would demand. Sophia walked straight into it, tossed her workout clothes on the floor, hung Daisy on the door hook, and set her wearable on the counter while the shower was warming up. She shed the bathrobe and kicked it into the corner, then stepped into the shower and began to rinse the hot tub’s chlorine out of her hair. She soaped up and washed herself off.

When she emerged from the shower she was conscious of a hissing noise that hadn’t been there when she had turned the water on. She felt light-headed, and braced herself against the bathroom counter for a few moments until she felt more certain of her balance. This was weird. The bathroom had a built-in steam generator with hard-to-understand controls. She guessed she might have inadvertently turned it on. Perhaps it had been hissing away the whole time, bringing the heat up to the point where she was getting dizzy. She looked at the control panel but couldn’t make sense of it. No steam seemed to be coming out. The hiss must have been from the plumbing, or one of the cottage’s other systems. Going to the door she noticed that the transparent plastic sleeve on Daisy was fogged over. She pulled it off the door hook and put it around her neck. Then she hauled the door open, letting in cooler air from the bedroom. She was still feeling short of breath and not altogether healthy. She felt a powerful urge to get out on the terrace and breathe some fresh cold air.

The hiss became much more distinct. The room was dark, but she noticed an odd pattern of lights—colored LEDs—in the corner of the bedroom by the terrace doors. The light spilling over her shoulder from the bathroom showed an object at the foot of her bed that hadn’t been there when she’d come in a few minutes ago. It was a heavy industrial cart with fat tires. It carried a squat blue steel box with a control panel, currently dark, and thick loops of cable and hose. Standing behind that was a cylinder about her height, easily recognizable as one of the tanks used to contain industrial gases.

This was a welding cart. The steel box was the welding machine itself. The cylinder was the supply of inert gas used to keep the red-hot metal from oxidizing. And it was the source of the hissing noise. For the regulator had been unscrewed from the valve on