NEAL STEPHENSON

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wasn’t a fanatic like the Orthos. I mean, if he had been a fanatic they wouldn’t have given him command of a nuclear-missile submarine, right?”

“Supposedly.”

“You had to be psychologically stable. Whatever that means. Anyway, after things fell apart in Russia, he found himself in possession of this very dangerous weapon. He made up his mind that he was going to offload all of the crew and then scuttle it in the Marianas Trench. Bury all those weapons forever.

“But, somehow, he was persuaded to use this submarine to help a bunch of the Orthos escape to Alaska. They, and a lot of other Refus, had started flocking to the Bering coast. And the conditions in some of these Refu camps were pretty desperate. It’s not like a lot of food can be grown in that area, you know. These people were dying by the thousands. They just stood on the beaches, starving to death, waiting for a ship to come.

“So Ovchinnikov let himself be persuaded to use his submarine-which is very large and very fast-to evacuate some of these poor Refus to TROKK.

“But, naturally, he was paranoid about the idea of letting a whole bunch of unknown quantities onto his ship. These nukesub commanders are real security freaks, for obvious reasons. So they set up a very strict system. All the Refus who were going to get on the ship had to pass through metal detectors, had to be inspected. Then they were under armed guard all the way across to Alaska.

“Well, the Stern Orthos have this guy named Raven-“

“I’m familiar with him.”

“Well, Raven got onto that nuclear submarine.”

“Oh, my God.”

“He got over to the Siberian coast somehow-probably surfed across in his fucking kayak.”

“Surfed?”

“That’s how the Aleuts get between islands.”

“Raven’s an Aleut?”

“Yeah. An Aleut whale killer. You know what an Aleut is?”

“Yeah. My Dad knew one in Japan,” Hiro says. A bunch of Dad’s old prison-camp tales are beginning to stir in Hiro’s memory, working their way up out of deep, deep storage.

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