Corvallis looked out the window and saw nothing but stars, and a single, isolated light down below that must have been a ship.
He realized that it had been done by Elmo Shepherd.
The awareness came full-blown into his brain. No train of thought led to it and no evidence supported it, but he knew it as certainly as if El had been sitting across from him in the jet and confided in him personally. Like a scholar looking at an anonymous holograph in a library, Corvallis had simply recognized El’s handwriting.
Australia—at least the first bit of it that hove into view—was greener than Corvallis had been led to expect. He was debating whether to wake Maeve up, but some internal alarm seemed to have gone off in her head alerting her to their arrival in her home country’s airspace. He dreaded asking her whether she’d made a choice regarding what Pluto had proposed. She had a placid confidence about her that he hadn’t seen since she’d found herself in the crosshairs of the Moab truthers. After enjoying a heavy breakfast served up by the flight attendant, she took over the bathroom for half an hour and emerged in triumphal makeup. Maeve took an all-or-nothing approach to makeup, going completely without it most of the time but turning it into an impressive production when she had decided the occasion was right. Corvallis hadn’t known her long enough to be able to predict what those occasions would be; it wasn’t always the obvious triggers, like going on a date. He knew without asking that it was all tied in with Sthetix and that, if he dared ask, she’d explain to him that makeup was just another prosthetic, and she’d remind him that the root of the word had something to do with strength. She looked strong when she came out of the plane’s bathroom, though not necessarily strong in a way that would be recognized or respected by her legions of Miasma detractors. She was getting ready to use her face to send a message to her family, written in a code of incredible sophistication that he would never understand.
By that time Australia had turned red-beige and begun to make Utah look, by comparison, like a rain forest. She spent the last hour of the flight quizzing Pluto about APEs and about how it was all going to work once he unleashed them. They agreed it would be better to wait for a day or two so that she could explain matters to her mother and her sister.
Once they had landed and cleared customs, they dropped into family mode, which from a fundamentalist nerd standpoint meant a way of being that caused vast amounts of time to disappear while people pursued activities that ruled out getting any sort of productive work done. The first few hours were entirely devoted to collecting Mary Catherine, who was the mother, and Lady, the imperiled Lhasa apso. Lady got dropped off at a kennel for a few days. From there they went to the hospital to pick up Verna, who had finished her round of chemo. They drove out to the McLaren Vale, south of town. An acquaintance of Corvallis—the centurion of a Roman legion reenactment group in South Australia—had recommended a certain retreat center embedded in a winery, and Corvallis’s assistant had booked a little villa there. They moved Verna and her support technology into its best bedroom so that she could recuperate. Never until now had Corvallis been close enough to a chemotherapy patient to be exposed to all of the details. He saw that Cancer Land was a whole alternate civilization, as complicated as everything he did for a living.
Only after a few hours of getting to know the family and sharing a meal and getting Verna squared away was Corvallis able to get some time to himself and alert his colleagues at Lyke to what was in the works. Most of his nerd mind, however, was still fixated on Elmo Shepherd. Not clear to him was whether El might somehow sense that Corvallis had figured it out—might indeed be disappointed in Corvallis, as a teacher is disappointed with a prize pupil, if Corvallis failed to say anything the next time they encountered each other.
And encounter each other they would. For El and his panoply of non-, not-for-, and for-profit entities had become inextricably intertwined with the fate of Dodge and Dodge’s brain. A disproportionate amount of the time that Corvallis spent on his own foundation and nonprofit work was devoted to puzzling out the latest gambits of El’s attorneys. Indeed the last board meeting that he had attended, the day he had driven out to the Roman-legion camp in Montana, had been dominated by a discussion of a new maneuver that had only just been initiated by El. He could not help wondering now whether there was some connection between that and the launching of the hoax—a link that would only become obvious to him years from now. For he always had the sense that he was playing tic-tac-toe while El was playing four-dimensional hyperspace chess.
Australia in general, and this winery in particular, were fine places to reside while a stupendous onslaught of Miasma defamation was launched against Maeve Braden. Astonishing birdcalls were woven through its dry, quiet air, which was scented with eucalyptus and softened with a haze of reddish dust filtering down from the great desert to the north. Broad tin roofs and heavy steel screens sheltered them from sun and bug while somehow making them feel they were right in the middle of the trees and the vines. The design of the place was simple and comfortable without any taint of what was normally thought of as luxury. Verna’s bedroom opened onto a second-story verandah under deep eaves, which felt like a treehouse. Maeve would sit there for hours with her, chatting and drinking tea, while Mary Catherine bustled and fussed. She was first-generation Irish-Australian, messily divorced from the father of Maeve and Verna, who had some kind of complicated-sounding dual citizenship that enabled him to flee to America when his relatives in Oz were sick of him, and vice versa. The Miasma had long since doxxed him and gleefully posted mug shots commemorating his brushes with the law in jurisdictions that were so improbably far-flung as to deliver a certain dry comedic payload. Mary Catherine’s obsessive devotion to small, nearby, concrete matters, such as scones and the doings of nearby birds, was the perfect antidote to the Miasma.
As Verna got her energy back, he spent more time with her. In the early going, Maeve was always in the room to keep an eye on things and nudge the conversation forward when it stalled, but as the days went by the discourse between Corvallis and Verna became more and more geeky, and Maeve withdrew by degrees, sitting in the corner reading or knitting, then absenting herself. Verna turned out to be the real deal: a programmer, largely self-taught, who, once the chemo fog had abated, was able to hold up her end of a conversation with C-plus. Had the situation been different, he’d have considered hiring her. She’d have come in for interviews. Other programmers would have circled round her warily. They’d have reached the conclusion that she was “awesome” but they’d have found reasons to reject her due to a lack of cultural fit, and they’d have passed her on to smaller, more off beat startups run by friends. All of which was still possible in theory. But having cancer was still going to be a full-time job for her for a while.
He wished he could have introduced her to Dodge.
He checked in with Pluto, who had ensconced himself in the most expensive hotel suite that was to be had in Adelaide. He contacted Corvallis every few hours on a “burner” phone that Corvallis had picked up on arrival in Australia, when he’d discovered that his usual phone number had been doxxed and rendered useless by a festival of reckless hatred originating from a cluster of racist conspiracy theorists. It wasn’t until forty-eight hours after they’d landed in Australia that Pluto was ready to spawn his troop of APEs, and Lyke was ready to fend them off. Pluto called Corvallis to inform him that his right pinky was hovering over the Enter key on his keyboard, and that if said key were momentarily depressed, it would all happen.
Corvallis received the call while pacing aimlessly around the villa’s ground floor. “Okay,” he said.
“Okay as in you have understood what I just said?” Pluto asked. “Or okay as in ‘Yes, go ahead and do it’?”
“Go ahead and do it.”
“Do you want to check one last time with Maeve?” Pluto inquired, showing, for him, an unusual degree of sensitivity.
“If I ask her one more time she’ll probably slap me,” Corvallis said. “Here, it’s a done deal. She and her sister are discussing what to do next—hatching a plan.”
“Okay, here goes,” Pluto said, and let Corvallis hear the key getting whacked before hanging up the phone.
Corvallis sent a text message to his colleagues at Lyke and then shut off his phone.
If everything went according