Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,59

head except for an oval around the face where a few strands of sun-bleached hair had escaped. A lump in the back suggested that she had long hair, kept in a bun. Over that she was wearing a sun visor. An assortment of eyewear dangled on her chest. Red suspenders kept her massively overloaded cargo shorts from simply falling off. Projecting from the leg holes were the stump cups, knee joints, carbon-fiber shins, and plastic feet of her prosthetic legs.

“Thanks for picking us up.” She took a couple of steps toward him in a better-than-you’d-think-but-not-quite-right gait, and peeled the glove from her right hand to shake. Her hand was cold, sandy, and strong. The shake was perfunctory.

“I didn’t do much besides reading my credit card number over the phone.” Stupid thing to say. He was trying to be modest but came off sounding rich and petulant.

“We’ll make you whole.”

There were five available seats in the truck’s cab, and six Joneses, but some of them were small enough to double-buckle. Corvallis and Maeve ended up sitting in the vehicle’s open back, using luggage and camp mats for cushioning. Maeve loaned him a sun hat and looked with disfavor on his bare arms. The climb up the arroyo was such rough going that they ended up standing and holding on to the roll bar, absorbing the jounces with their leg muscles. Once they had made it to something that could pass for a proper road, they made themselves comfortable and he got her settled down by applying sunscreen to his arms.

“Do you mind?” she asked, and unstrapped one leg, then the other, and put them to one side so that she could air out her stumps. “Sand gets in there.”

“I wouldn’t dream of objecting to your making yourself comfortable,” Corvallis said.

The elaborate wording got her attention. She had put on dark wraparound sunglasses, but it was clear from the set of her face that she was giving him a close look. “What is that garment you’re wearing?”

Corvallis spent a while explaining his hobby and how he had come to be here. She listened without showing any outward signs of disgust and asked a couple of questions. Then she shrugged. “At the end of the day, all that matters is if it makes you healthier. And you don’t look like some bludger who camps out in Mum’s basement.”

“Thanks.”

“You don’t get deltoids like that by typing.”

Corvallis was unaccustomed to having his deltoids, or indeed any part of him, looked on in such a favorable way—let alone openly talked about—by a female observer. He had nothing to say for a few moments. He felt a brief tingle in his nuts and adjusted his tunic.

The simple reality of blasting down a road in the Utah canyonlands having this conversation with this person somehow cut the Gordian knot that had been tied in his skull this morning by millions of people being wrong on the Internet.

“You lift,” she said. Her tone was somewhere between question and statement. She was dourly resigned to the likelihood that he had a personal trainer in a fancy gym.

“I lift shovels full of dirt,” he said.

She liked that. “Is that some new hipster exercise?”

“It is an old Roman military exercise,” he said. “When a legion made camp, it dug a ditch all around, and threw the dirt up on the inside to make a rampart above the ditch. When it broke camp, the ditch had to be filled in.”

“That is a fuck-ton of digging.”

“The original legionaries were like elite athletes, if you look at all the physical activity they performed day in and day out. I’m not putting myself in that class, but I’ll say that reenacting is the best exercise program I’ve ever had.”

She was gazing off into the blue sky, trying to get her head around it. “To move all of that dirt—just to put it back—it seems, I don’t know—”

“It’s the same as paddling a boat,” he pointed out, “except with dirt.”

“Okay, fair.” She looked at him, which he found vaguely frightening and yet preferred to her not looking at him. “So when were you thinking of changing out of that getup?”

“My original plan was to be doing it now, in the backseat of the truck. It didn’t work out that way. But you know what? The fact is I only have one clean set of normal-person clothes. A blazer and a dress shirt. Leather shoes. No point in getting them covered with road dust. I’ll change when we