Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,91

from you in how to better protect their privacy. I worry over them when they go off to college and people find out who they are.”

Sophia let it pass with a nod. “My friends and I decided to see the country on our way out to the coast. I thought the least I could do was place some flowers on my grandmother’s grave—and on Alice’s.”

There. She’d said it. Her mother’s attorney in Seattle could not have phrased it better.

Pete nodded. “It would be my privilege to drive you there. Or you and your friends can follow me. It’s only about a mile—”

“One point two.”

Pete glanced away, a bit sheepishly.

“I’d love it if you would drive us there,” Sophia said.

Pete heaved a quiet sigh. It was a sigh of relief.

14

Anne-Solenne, Phil, Sophia, and Julian all knew and would have acknowledged that by virtue of being enrolled at Princeton they were members of a globe-spanning, self-perpetuating elite caste. They would all end up making millions or billions unless they made a conscious decision to drop out, and even if they became ghetto-dwelling junkie artists they would do so with an invisible safety net. So Sophia’s friends were almost eerily polite to the locals, starting with Pete Borglund and moving on, as the afternoon progressed, to Karen, to the Mexican-American caretaker at the grave site, and to various shirttail relatives, estate-running functionaries, and local dignitaries who came out to say hello and to accompany them on a tour of the house and of the creek bottom where the Forthrast boys had gone to play cowboys and Indians with live ammunition.

Eventually the visitors were treated to a thoroughly non-ironic dinner at an Applebee’s. A gender-based split materialized at the table—actually two tables pushed together. Sophia saw it happening in real time but, like Pharaoh watching the Red Sea part, was powerless to stop it. She did a passable impression of giving a shit about the lady talk but was close enough to the man end to be a quasi-participant in their conversation. Pete asked a few questions to which he clearly didn’t know the answers, and not in an interrogating way, but just out of curiosity. They were all strangely grateful to be in the presence of someone who was willing to be that vulnerable. Phil and Julian opened up, and so it was that Pete got the general story on how they had come to find themselves in an Applebee’s in northwestern Iowa. The nominal purpose of the journey was to drop Sophia off in Seattle and then swing down the coast to San Francisco, where Anne-Solenne had an internship lined up. After that, Julian would wander down to L.A., and Phil would fly back to New York to spend his summer writing hedge fund code on Wall Street.

Thus briefed on the visitors’ overall plan, Pete began to answer questions from Phil and Julian on how it all worked in this part of the world. The visitors were now thoroughly disoriented. They had barely had time to register their shock over the two-hundred-foot-tall flaming cross of the Leviticans—which was clearly visible from the Applebee’s—before they had found themselves in this small and apparently stable town that, while a far cry from Iowa City, was definitely a Blue State pocket. It was completely surrounded by Ameristan but it was populated by people like Pete who had a college degree, asked questions, and seemed to be plugged into sane and responsible edit streams. Pete tried to explain it. “People like that,” he said, cocking his head in the direction of the Leviticans’ cross, “claim to believe certain things. But obviously if you spend ten seconds looking for logic holes or inconsistencies, it all falls apart. Now, they don’t care.”

“They don’t care that their belief system is totally incoherent?” Phil asked. Not really asking. Since this much was obvious. Just making sure he was following Pete’s line of argument.

“That is correct.”

“Explains a lot!” Julian said.

“They can go a surprisingly long time without bumping up against reality,” Pete said, “but at the end of the day when a pregnant mother needs a C-section or you can’t get your Wi-Fi to work, or a thousand other examples I could give, why, then you do actually need someone nearby who can help you with that.”

“So you have doctors and dentists in this town?” Phil asked.

“No, they all moved away years ago, but we have practitioners who can help patients get urgent care over webcam, get telerobotic surgery, and that