Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,159

Too, they clumped together in twos, threes, and larger groups, the better to exchange words as they looked up and regarded Egdod hovering in the sky above them. He noticed that when they stood close together, the auras that swathed their heads would sometimes flow together, as creeks joined together to make larger streams. The auras would swirl about and circulate among several souls’ heads at once, as if they had combined into one.

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MonsterCon 3 was what everyone at the Forthrast Family Foundation called the event, because its official name was too unwieldy. The terminology leaked out over the various mail and messaging systems that they used to coordinate it with the Waterhouse-Shaftoe Family Foundation, with El Shepherd’s network, and other interested parties, obliging Zula to send out a fatwa abolishing its use, scrubbing all Frankenstein imagery, and reminding everyone that it was supposed to be called the Third Annual Conference on Trends in Advanced Neural System Simulation. Or, if that was too much verbiage, ACTANSS 3. They still held it at the same resort in British Columbia where they had held the first one. This meant holding the head count down to fifty, with twenty-five support staff sleeping in RVs, and even tents, scattered around the property.

“Discovered” and mapped by white people before the advent of brand management consultants and focus groups, the geography of the West Coast abounded in strange and terrifying place names. The very name “California” came from a phantasmal Spanish novel about rampant Amazon Negresses. The Desolation Sound region, about halfway up the landward coast of Vancouver Island, confronted map-browsing visitors with a variety of features that were by turns named after whatever the first English or Spanish explorers considered inspiring (Enlightenment virtues such as discovery), devotional (diverse saints and theological debating points), important to grovel to (members of royal families, heroes, the admiralty), or dangerous enough to call for heavy hints that future colonizers shouldn’t go there. In the latter category was Devastation Narrows, joining Surge Rocks to Whirlpool Bay, and running, no joke, between Scylla Point and Charybdis Head. This exceptional concentration of scare words was the result of factors both geographical and cultural. The overall Desolation Sound region, if you zoomed out far enough, was the elbow in the five-hundred-kilometer-long sleeve of water separating Vancouver Island from the mainland. From that elbow the Queen Charlotte Strait ran wide and mostly unobstructed to the Pacific Ocean to the west. To the south, the Strait of Georgia was a similar highway of deep water to the confluence of the Strait of Juan de Fuca and Puget Sound. Tides ebbed and flowed along all of these. In less complicated waters, the direction of the water’s movement could be guessed simply by checking a tide table and then glancing at the map to note the direction of the open Pacific. But the rise and fall of the world’s largest body of water could reach Desolation Sound as readily from the west as from the south. That, combined with the exceptional number of islands, the maze of glacier-cut channels between them, and the verticality of the shores, made for movements of water that were as rapid as they were chaotic. Whirlpools, weird standing waves, undertows, bore tides, and abrupt reversals in the direction of flow were the norm.

In 1792, a longboat carrying a mixed English and Spanish crew had ventured into the apparently placid waters of what they took to be a blind inlet, only to find themselves in the grip of sudden and violent tidal surge that had overpowered their oarsmen and sent them on what amounted to a white-water rafting adventure down a chute between a craggy islet and a limb of rock protruding from a large island. They had sideswiped the former hard enough to stave in one side of the boat, which had begun shipping water and then gone under after getting caught in a whirlpool. The bodies—long since dead of hypothermia—and the wreckage had washed up on a driftwood-strewn shore some miles away, the home of a band of the sorts of people nowadays referred to, in Canada, as First Nations. To the officers of the European ship who had observed all of these goings-on through their spyglasses, they were Indians. And to the less adventurous white people who years later had read accounts of the tragedy while dragging their fingers along the course of the doomed boat on nautical charts, they were cannibals and slavers and such. More sensitive descriptions of