Zodiac by Neal Stephenson

Author:Neal Stephenson [Stephenson, Neal]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction, SciFi, Thriller, Ecology
ISBN: 0871131811
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press

Chapter Twenty

When I got back home there was the usual post-trip crap to take care of. Mail and messages. Had to get a birthday present for Auntie. Had to sign a bunch of papers to continue Tanya’s “studies” at GEE. They shut off our phone service so we all had to sit down and thrash out about three months’ worth of unpaid long-distance bills. In the middle of a spirited discussion of who had made seven consecutive calls to Santa Cruz at three in the morning, Ike got up and announced that he was moving out. He was tired of the plumbing problems, he said, and the weird messages on the answering machine, and Roscommon had come in while he was at work and torn down the Mel King campaign poster on our front balcony. That was okay. Ike was a shitty gardener anyway and he complained when I ran my model trains after bedtime. Tess and Laurie, the lesbian carpenters, announced that they liked the kitchen better after we’d untrashed it and cleaned it up, so why not try to keep it that way? I pointed out that I had bought three new badminton birdies before I left for Buffalo and now they were all gone. Should we call this place a “co-op” or a “commune"? How about calling it a “house"? Who had scrubbed the Teflon off the big frying pan?

Since Tess had weeded the garden, how many tomatoes did she get? Whose hair predominated in the shower drain—the women’s, since they had more, or the men’s, since they were losing more? Was it okay to pour bacon grease down the drains if you ran hot water at the same time? Could bottles with metal rings on the necks be put in the recycling box? Should we buy a cord of firewood? Maple or pine? Did we agree that the people next door were abusing their children? Physically or just psychologically? Was boric acid roach powder a bioaccumulative toxin? Where was the bicycle-tire pump, and was it okay to take it on an overnight trip? Whose turn was it to scrub the green crap out from between the tiles in the bathroom?

They had gone to extreme inconvenience to save a message for me on the phone answering machine. I had to listen to it three times because I couldn’t believe it. It was Dolmacher. He sounded friendly. He wanted me to go up to New Hampshire with him and participate in the survival game—pretending to be a commando in the woods. He was trying to get more people to come up from Boston, he explained, and—get this—the people he worked with were “all terrible nerds.”

I did have to give him one thing: he had the intestinal fortitude to go up there every weekend and do combat with those shaggy inbreds from New Hampshire. They didn’t use real bullets, but the dirt and cold were real.

He sounded so damn happy, that’s what bothered me. The Grail project must be doing well.

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