A little less than a year after the conference in the San Juan Islands, Corvallis Kawasaki—who was in Amsterdam on other business—rented a car and had it drive him down to the border. Zelrijk-Aalberg had changed very little, but the Dutch and Belgian hamlets that surrounded it had developed into boom towns where El’s employees lived, shopped, dined, and raised their families. The car dropped him off on a Belgian street in front of the famous tavern. Corvallis went in, bought a Belgian beer at the bar, and found his way into the back section. The crack in the floor was obvious. He stepped across it. Loitering in a nearby booth, nursing a club soda, was a man with a bulge in his blazer and a wearable on his face, presumably checking Corvallis’s identity. He let Corvallis pass without incident. The tavern had a rear exit leading to a little beer garden, which was where he found El, sitting at a table, sheltered from a light mist by a big canvas umbrella.

He hadn’t changed as much as Corvallis was expecting. He twitched his eyes toward a chair but made no move to get up or shake hands. Corvallis took a seat, sipped his beer, and looked at Elmo Shepherd for the first time in many years. He seemed fit. His face had got bigger and fleshier in the way that happened to everyone as they aged. About it was a peculiar rigidity. The tiny muscles that were responsible for expression must have been connected to the brain directly, or so Corvallis mused. He was no student of anatomy but it seemed unlikely that the spinal cord would be involved in eyebrow twitches, blinking, and such. Even people with very high spinal cord injuries could talk, and control wheelchairs with their mouths. The nerves must come directly out of the skull through little holes, or something. Anyway, something must have been messing with those connections in El’s case, because his face simply didn’t move in the way that faces normally did. And because humans were hardwired to be extremely perceptive and sensitive to facial expressions, this was very obvious to Corvallis—much more obvious than other forms of neurological breakdown might have been. He’d done a little bit of research into El’s disease and was pretty certain that this wasn’t caused by the disease proper, but by medications that El was taking to clamp down on its symptoms.

“Rumors of my insanity are greatly exaggerated,” El began. “Some of the new drugs coming out of my foundation are remarkably successful in slowing down the progression of symptoms. Without them I’d have died in a pretty unpleasant fashion a year ago.”

“Good.” Corvallis nodded. This was a lot of small talk by Elmo Shepherd standards, but it was to a purpose: to let the visitor know what he was dealing with, to calibrate the conversation.