Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,171

down into the bag, where presumably they were connected to IV lines. There was a control system too, embodying a snarl of cables at least as complicated as the plumbing system; all the cables terminated in the back of a workstation, an old-school tower PC with a flat-panel screen. Some of the cables led to the chiller box, others to much smaller devices mounted on the IV lines. And one led to a landline telephone.

“Where do you even buy one of those nowadays?” Zula asked, focusing on the latter.

“China. Some businesses still use them for specialized purposes. Sort of like fax machines hung on forever and ever.”

“That’s how the police were summoned?”

“His lawyer first. The call was timed so that Pluto’s heart was already stopped by the time anyone arrived. The last will and testament, the disposition of remains, all of that stuff was laid out and waiting. The medics showed up fifteen minutes later, saw that the EKG was flatlined, and decided not to smash their way in. Now it’s kind of a standoff. They’re waiting for the coroner.”

“He’s already dead, being the point. The medics have no purpose here,” Zula said. “It’s just like Uncle Richard except much better organized.”

“Um, this is neither here nor there, but it turns out he had cancer,” Corvallis said. “It’s in one of the documents that he left for us to find.” He held up a folder and rattled it. “Colon. Spread to the liver. He’s known about it for a year.”

“Long enough to build this?”

“I guess so. But apparently this is a more recent project. That guy over there is his doctor.” Corvallis pointed to a man in a white coat who was having an animated discussion with a burly rural fireman. “He says that Pluto was seeking aggressive treatment, doing everything he could to fight the disease, until a few months ago.”

“ACTANSS,” Zula said.

“Yeah. Maybe a coincidence but . . .”

“But probably not. I’d love to know what’s playing on that VR rig.”

“Pluto had ideas,” Corvallis said. “He sketched them out for me in a bar at ACTANSS. He has been—had been—thinking about the thread of consciousness. Do you take your memories with you into Bitworld? Do the people wandering around that town remember where they came from?”

“Or are they like souls in Hades, who have drunk from the waters of Lethe and forgotten all?” Zula said. “I’m guessing the latter.”

“Well, they certainly don’t show a lot of interest in talking to us.”

“No, they don’t!”

“So, what happens when you cross . . .”

“The Styx?”

“Is there, like, an unbroken thread of awareness, such that you just pick up where you left off?”

“Well, what we saw at ACTANSS tells us something,” Zula said. “The Landform is obviously a re-creation of the general kind of environment that those people were familiar with here in Meatspace.”

“Not up to Pluto’s standards,” C-plus cracked.

“But nothing could be,” Zula finished the thought.

“So I’m thinking that the VR rig is Pluto trying to influence the outcome. He wanted to go to sleep with ideas, images in his short-term memory that would somehow be captured by the scan and rebooted fresh in his mind. He didn’t want to drink from the waters of Lethe.”

“Well, I guess we’ll know soon enough,” Zula said, “when we get him out of there and find out what’s showing on that thing.”

Corvallis reached into the folder and pulled out a sealed envelope. “This is for you.”

Affixed to the front of the envelope was a sticker on which had been printed the words TO BE OPENED ONLY BY ZULA FORTHRAST (OR THE CURRENT DIRECTOR OF THE FORTHRAST FAMILY FOUNDATION).

“Do I even need to open this?”

“I think you can consider it another of your symbolic duties,” Corvallis said. “But if it’s not Pluto donating his brain to science, then I’ll go and lay down on that contraption myself.”

32

Egdod took wing and flew far away into the mountains, seeking out a curious place that he remembered from past visits. The windings of four different rivers, converging toward the middle of the Land from outlets widely spaced along the coast, had necessitated the raising of several ranges of mountains to keep them separately channeled and to account for the direction of their flows. He had got himself into trouble thereby, and ended up with a kind of knot where all of those ranges had come together and got involved with one another in a way that he sensed was wrong. Between them were strange gaps where the water