Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,47

Moab, and in otherwise dark parts of the frame you could see how Moab-facing hillsides and mountains were lit up by it.

He handed the Tesla off to one of the ground crew for parking, then walked about fifty feet to the jet. One of the pilots was already in the cockpit doing his piloty things while the other was getting the luggage hatch squared away. A flight attendant, whom Corvallis vaguely recognized as Bonnie, was standing at the top of the steps. He wasn’t sure where the jet company obtained people like Bonnie, but his working hypothesis was that they were fashion models who had turned thirty. They lived in a world that was as disjoint from his world as ancient Egypt, even though it coexisted in the same time and place. In rare moments, such as when Corvallis climbed the steps into his jet and greeted Bonnie or one of her colleagues, his world glanced off of hers, and if he wasn’t too distracted he might sneak a look at her and ponder the sheer differentness of their respective existences.

Today, her passenger just happened to be a tech geek who, while technically not a billionaire, might as well have been one. He happened to be wearing the tunic and cloak of a Roman legionary, but it might as well have been jeans, T-shirt, and hoodie.

Bonnie’s welcoming smile faltered a little when she saw how he was dressed, but she bore up well under the shock and seemed to have recovered her professionally mandated persona by the time his caligae crossed the plane’s threshold. His iron hobnails clacked on the exotic hardwood flooring until he reached the aisle of the main cabin, which was carpeted. He peeled off his woolen cloak and handed it to Bonnie, who ran her hand over it in an evaluative way, then took it forward to the little closet.

Perhaps her eye had been drawn to the embroidery that ran around the edge of the garment: a repeating pattern of crows’ heads. In reenactment groups it was customary for each participant to adopt a persona, or, at a bare minimum, a nickname that wouldn’t sound too jarringly anachronistic when called out in the heat of action. Corvallis had become Corvus, which was just the Latin word for “crow.” It was partly an obvious contraction of his real name and partly a reference to his coloration. One of his parents had been half Japanese, the other South Asian. Noticing this, and calling it out in a nickname, wouldn’t have been polite by modern standards. But there was no getting around the fact that, in a Roman legion, he’d have stood out as some sort of exotic from the Eastern provinces. The other Romans would have slapped some such name on him. Corvus it was. At first he’d been mildly uncomfortable with it, as he’d associated such birds with Edgar Allan Poe and goth culture in general. With time and repetition his thinking had adjusted. He now saw it through a hybrid of Pacific Northwest aboriginal myths and Roman aviomancy. The only birds you saw in Seattle were seagulls, crows, and eagles. Seagulls were ubiquitous, mindless consumers. Eagles were spectacular, huge, badass, but comparatively rare; people would actually stop what they were doing and look up when an eagle flew by. Crows, or ravens (the distinction was unclear), were set apart by their extreme intelligence, memory, and resourcefulness; but no matter how well they embodied those fine traits, no one appreciated them.

Of crows, people tended to predicate the same traits that they did of Asians when they had forgotten politically correct habits of speech, or never acquired them in the first place. Crows were commendably intelligent, and forever busy, but you couldn’t tell them apart and their motives were inscrutable. But living inside of his own head, Corvus well knew his own motives. There was nothing wrong with those motives and he didn’t need to justify them to anyone else.

When Richard Forthrast had been alive, Corvallis’s relationship to him had been like that of a raven to an eagle. Or so he had convinced himself in retrospect; and every time he looked out a window to see an eagle gliding above the lake, being harried by a dive-bombing crow, he thought of himself and Dodge. He’d become comfortable with the nickname Corvus. As he’d gone deeper into the reenactment world, and spent more money on clothing, armor, and weapons, he’d taken the trouble to personalize all of it