Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,97

held beliefs of varying levels of weirdness. On the whole, it felt like he was becoming more sane over time, which was good as far as it went. But the way Pete had said You know that Jake has this ONE thing caused Sophia to brace herself for some manner of appallingly strange wacky Jake news.

“Yeah. They have, I guess you could call it an outreach program aimed at the Levitican types. He tries real hard not to use the M-word.”

“M-word?”

“‘Missionaries.’ He feels like he can sort of speak their language a little bit, because of Idaho.”

“Okay.”

“So, now that Jake has sort of come in from the wilderness and started living a more, I don’t know, settled and responsible life, he feels like a legitimate thing for ONE to be doing is to be maintaining some level of contact with some of the weirder sects out there. The people around where we live, even the hard-core Leviticans, you know they come into town to get teeth pulled or what have you, so we have some amount of day-to-day contact with those people. But over there”—he waved his hand vaguely at Nebraska—“some of them have really gone off the deep end.”

“You mean, they have gone off the deep end compared to people who build two-hundred-foot-tall flaming crosses next to the Applebee’s!?” Sophia asked.

“Yeah,” Pete said, laconic for once, allowing Sophia’s imagination to have her way in the ensuing silence. “So believe it or not he knows people through ONE who are actually willing to go into places like that and have conversations with the people there.”

“Or exchange words with them at any rate,” said Sophia, recalling the Red Card.

“Point being,” Pete said, “one of those people is across the river at the moment, not that far away, and Jake called me last night to say that they had lost contact with this individual and that they have drone video suggesting that he might be in serious trouble. He asked me if I might consider going across the river today and in a peaceable and neighborly way trying to sort things out.”

“You control more money than the Roman Empire at its peak,” Sophia reminded him.

“Yup.”

“Don’t you have people for this?”

“At times like this, the ‘Ameristan’ label becomes more than just a clever bit of wordplay,” Pete said. “Think Afghanistan or Pakistan. How does it work there? They have warlords. The warlords are big men, respected just because they are big men. If the big man shows up to a parley, it’s a gesture of respect and it helps to calm things down. If the big man sends a lackey, it can . . . have the opposite effect.”

Pete Borglund, warlord. It was such a bizarre juxtaposition that it shut Sophia up for a little while. He turned his attention back to Tom. “We pretty much have to go to Sioux City anyway, because of where the bridges are.”

“We could pay someone to ferry us over,” Tom pointed out.

“I don’t want to mess around with those ferry guys. Too sketchy for me. I’m a fan of bridges.”

“Okay. Bridges it is.”

“That works out great for these guys,” Pete said, nodding at Sophia and waving at the Land Cruiser. “Sophia and her crew can hand the LC back over to you guys and jump back into the car they sent ahead. Then we can use the LC as part of our caravan across the river.”

Tom nodded. Sophia didn’t. Pete’s plan made perfect sense. But now she had this feeling of people going on an adventure to which she clearly was not invited.

“If sending a warlord is a gesture of respect,” she said, “isn’t it even more respectful to send a warlady too?”

The warlady insisted on swapping places with one of the lackeys in Pete’s SUV who was qualified to take her place behind the wheel of the Land Cruiser. She didn’t even want to think about what the conversation was like in that vehicle. But here in Pete’s SUV, the topic was the wild tribes across the river and their practices.

The two-laner they’d been following westward T’d into the interstate highway that ran north along the east bank of the Missouri for some miles up to Sioux City. In most of the country, being on an interstate meant that you were in sane and settled territory—it was the network that linked the reality-based nodes of society. The vacancies between—the interstices between the intersections, as Dr. Johnson would have it—were the domain of the fantasists, subsisting