on myth, in which heaven and earth are united
to begin with,  but  the  world  is  not  really  created until  the two are
separated.   Most  Creation  myths  begin  with   a  'paradoxical  unity  of
everything, evaluated either as chaos or  as Paradise,' and the world  as we
know it does  not really  come  into being  until this  is changed. I should
point out here that Enki's original name was En-Kur, Lord of  Kur. Kur was a
primeval ocean - Chaos - that Enki conquered."
     "Every hacker can identify with that."
     "But Asherah has similar connotations. Her  name in  Ugaritic, 'atiratu
yammi' means 'she who treads on (the) sea (dragon).' "
     "Okay, so  both Enki and  Asherah were figures who  had  in  some sense
defeated chaos. And your point  is that this defeat of chaos, the separation
of  the  static,  unified world into  a binary  system,  is identified  with
creation."
     "Correct."
     "What else can you tell me about Enki?"
     "He was the en of the city of Eridu."
     "What's an en? Is that like a king?"
     "A  priest-king of sorts. The en was the custodian of the local temple,
where the me - the rules of the society - were stored on clay tablets."
     "Okay. Where's Eridu?"
     "Southern Iraq. It has only been excavated within the past few years."
     "By Rife's people?"
     "Yes. As Kramer has it, Enki is the god of wisdom -  but  this is a bad
translation. His  wisdom is  not  the wisdom  of an  old  man, but  rather a
knowledge of how to do things, especially occult things. 'He astonishes even
the other gods with  shocking solutions  to apparently impossible problems.'
He is a sympathetic god for the most part, who assists humankind."
     "Really!"
     "Yes. The most important Sumerian myths center on him. As  I mentioned,
he is associated with water. He fills the rivers, and the extensive Sumerian
canal system, with his life-giving semen. He  is  said to have  created  the
Tigris in a single epochal act  of masturbation.  He  describes  himself  as
follows: 'I am lord. I am the one  whose word endures. I am eternal.' Others
describe him: 'a word from you - and heaps and piles stack high with grain.'
'You  bring down  the  stars of heaven, you have computed  their number.' He
pronounces the name of everything created..."
     "'Pronounces the name of everything created?"'
     "In  many  Creation  myths,  to name a  thing is to  create  it.  He is
referred  to,  in various  myths,  as 'expert who instituted  incantations,'
'word-rich,' 'Enki, master of all the right commands,'  as Kramer and  Maier
have  it, 'His  word  can bring order  where  there  had been only chaos and
introduce disorder where there had been harmony.' He devotes a great deal of
effort to imparting his knowledge to his son, the god Marduk, chief deity of
the Babylonians."
     "So the Sumerians  worshipped Enki, and the Babylonians, who came after
the Sumerians, worshipped Marduk, his son."
     "Yes, sir. And whenever Marduk got stuck,  he would ask his father Enki
for help.  There is a representation of Marduk here on this stele - the Code
of Hammurabi. According to Hammurabi, the Code was  given to  him personally
by Marduk."
     Hiro wanders  over to the  Code of  Hammurabi  and  has  a gander.  The
cuneiform means  nothing to him, but the  illustration on top is easy enough
to understand. Especially the part in the middle."
     "Why,  exactly, is Marduk handing Hammurabi a  one  and a zero in  this
picture?" Hiro asks.
     "They were emblems of royal power," the  Librarian says. "Their  origin
is obscure."
     "Enki must have been responsible for that one," Hiro says.
     "Enki's most important role is as  the creator and guardian  of the  me
and the gis-hur, the 'key words' and 'patterns' that rule the universe."
     "Tell me more about the me."
     "To quote  Kramer  and Maier again,  '[They believed in] the  existence
from time primordial of a fundamental, unalterable, comprehensive assortment
of powers and duties, norms and  standards, rules and regulations,  known as
me, relating to the cosmos and its components, to gods and humans, to cities
and countries, and to the varied aspects of civilized life.' "
     "Kind of like the Torah."
     "Yes, but they have a kind of mystical or magical force. And they often
deal with banal subjects - not just religion."
     "Examples?"
     "In  one myth,  the goddess Inanna goes  to Eridu  and tricks Enki into
giving her ninety-four me and brings them  back  to her home  town  of Uruk,
where they are greeted with much commotion and rejoicing."
     "Inanna is the person that Juanita's obsessed with."
     "Yes, sir. She is hailed  as a savior  because 'she brought the perfect
execution of the me.'"
     "Execution? Like executing a computer program?"
     "Yes.  Apparently,  they are like algorithms  for carrying out  certain
activities  essential  to the  society.  Some of  them have to  do  with the
workings of priesthood and kingship. Some explain how to carry out religious
ceremonies. Some relate to the  arts of war and diplomacy. Many of them  are
about  the arts and crafts:  music, carpentry,  smithing, tanning, building,
farming, even such simple tasks as lighting fires."
     "The operating system of society."
     "I'm sorry?"
     "When you  first  turn  on a computer, it  is  an  inert  collection of
circuits that can't really do anything. To start up the machine, you have to
infuse those  circuits  with a  collection of  rules  that tell  it  how  to
function. How to  be a computer. It sounds as though  these me served as the
operating system  of the  society, organizing an inert  collection of people
into a functioning system."
     "As you wish. In any case, Enki was the guardian of the me."
     "So he was, a good guy, really."
     "He was the most beloved of the gods."
     "He  sounds  like  kind of a  hacker.  Which  makes  his  nam-shub very
difficult to understand. If he was such a nice guy, why  did he do the Babel
thing?"
     "This  is  considered to  be one of the mysteries of  Enki. As you have
noticed, his behavior was not always consistent with modern norms."
     "I  don't  buy  that.  I  don't  think he actually  fucked  his sister,
daughter,  and so on. That story has to be a metaphor for  something else. I
think  it  is a metaphor for some  kind of  recursive informational process.
This whole myth  stinks of  it. To these people, water equals  semen.  Makes
sense, because they probably had no concept of pure water - it was all brown
and muddy and full of viruses anyway. But from a modern standpoint, semen is
just  a  carrier  of information  -  both  benevolent  sperm and  malevolent
viruses. Enki's  water - his  semen, his  data, his me - flow throughout the
country of Sumer and cause it to flourish."
     "As you may be aware, Sumer existed on the floodplain between two major
rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates. This is where all the clay came from -
they took it directly from the riverbeds."
     "So Enki even provided them with their medium for conveying information
- clay. They  wrote on wet clay and then they dried it out  - got rid of the
water. If water got to it later, the information was destroyed.  But if they
baked  it and drove out all the water,  sterilized Enki's semen  with  heat,
then the tablet lasted forever, immutable, like the words of the Torah. Do I
sound like a maniac?"
     "I  don't  know," the Librarian says, "but  you do sound  a little like
Lagos."
     "I'm thrilled. Next thing you know, I'll turn myself into a gargoyle."

        34

     Any  ped can get into  Griffith  Park without  being  noticed. And Y.T.
figures  that despite the barriers across the road, the Falabala camp  isn't
too well  protected, if you've got off-road capability. For a skate ninja on
a brand-new  plank in a brand-new pair of Knight  Visions (hey, you  have to
spend  money  to  make money)  there will be  no  problem.  Just find a high
embankment that  ramps down into the  canyon,  skirt the edge until  you see
those campfires down below. And then lean down that hill. Trust gravity.
     She realizes  halfway down that her blue-and-orange coverall, fly as it
may be, is going to be a real attention getter in the middle of the night in
the Falabala zone, so she reaches up to her  collar, feels a hard  disk sewn
into the fabric,  presses it between thumb and finger until  it  clicks. Her
coverall darkens, the colors shimmer through  the electropigment like an oil
slick, and then it's black.
     On her first  visit she didn't check this place out all  that carefully
because she hoped she'd never come  back. So the embankment turns out  to be
taller and steeper  than Y.T. remembered. Maybe  a  little more of  a cliff,
drop-off, or abyss than she thought.  Only thing that makes her think so  is
that  she seems to be doing  a lot of free-fall work here. Major plummeting.
Big time ballistic styling. That's cool, it's all part of the job, she tells
herself. The smartwheels are good for it. The tree  trunks are bluish black,
standing out not so well against a blackish blue background. The  only other
thing she can see  is the red laser light of the digital speedometer down on
the front  of her  plank, which  is not  showing  any real  information. The
numbers have vibrated  themselves  into a cloud of  gritty  red light as the
radar speed sensor tries to lock onto something.
     She turns the speedometer off. Running totally black now. Precipitating
her way toward the sweet 'crete of the creek bottom like  a black angel  who
has  just had  the shroud lines of  her celestial parachute  severed  by the
Almighty.  And  when the wheels finally  meet  the pavement,  it just  about
drives   her  knees   up   through  her  jawbone.  She  finishes  the  whole
gravitational  transaction with not much  altitude and a nasty  head of dark
velocity.
     Mental note: Next time just jump off a fucking bridge. That way there's
no question of getting an invisible cholla shoved up your nose.
     She whips around a corner, heeled over so far she could lick the yellow
line,  and  her  Knight  Visions reveal all  in  a  blaze  of  multispectral
radiation. On infrared, the Falabala encampment is a turbulating  aurora  of
pink fog punctuated by the white-hot bursts of campfires. All of it rests on
dim bluish pavement, which means, in the false-color  scheme of things, that
it's  cold.  Behind  everything  is  the jagged  horizon line of  that funky
improvised barrier technology that  the Falabalas  are so good at. A barrier
that has  been  completely spurned,  snubbed, and confounded  by  Y.T.,  who
dropped out of the sky into the middle  of  the camp like  a Stealth fighter
with an inferiority complex.
     Once you're into the actual encampment, people  don't  really notice or
care who you  are. A couple people see her, watch her slide on by, don't get
all hairy about it. They probably get a lot of Kouriers coming through here.
A  lot  of dippy, gullible,  Kool-Aid-drinking  couriers.  And  these people
aren't  hip  enough  to  tell  Y.T. apart from  that breed. But that's okay,
she'll pass for  now, as long  as  they don't check out the detailing on her
new plank.
     The  campfires provide enough plain old  regular visible  light to show
this sorry affair for what it is: a bunch of demented Boy Scouts, a jamboree
without merit  badges or hygiene. With the IR supered on top of the visible,
she can also see  vague, spectral  red  faces  out in the shadows  where her
unassisted eyes would only see darkness. These new Knight Visions cost her a
big wad  of her Mob drug-running  money. Just the  kind of thing Mom  had in
mind when she insisted Y.T. get a part-time job.
     Some of the people who were  here last time are gone now, and there's a
few new ones she doesn't recognize.
     There's  a couple of people  actually  wearing duct-tape straitjackets.
That's  a  fashion  statement reserved for the ones  who  are totally out of
control, rolling and thrashing around on the  ground. And there's a few more
who are spazzing  out, but not as  bad,  and one  or two who are just  plain
messed up,  like plain old  derelicts that  you might see at the Snooze  'n'
Cruise.
     "Hey,  look!"  someone  says. "It's  our friend  the Kourier!  Welcome,
friend!"
     She's  got  her  Liquid Knuckles  uncapped, available, and shaken  well
before use.  She's got high-voltage, high-fashion metallic cuffs  around her
wrists in case someone tries to grab her by same. And a bundy stunner up her
sleeve. Only the  most tubular throwbacks carry  guns. Guns take a long time
to  work  (you  have  to wait  for  the  victim  to  bleed  to  death),  but
paradoxically  they end up killing people  pretty  often. But nobody hassles
you after you've hit them with a bundy stunner. At least that's what the ads
say.
     So  it's not like she exactly feels vulnerable or anything.  But still,
she'd like to pick her target. So she maintains  escape velocity until she's
found  the woman who seemed friendly - the bald chick in the torn-up  Chanel
knockoff - and then zeroes in on her.

     "Let's get off into the woods, man," Y.T.  says, "I want to talk to you
about what's going on with what's left of your brain."
     The  woman  smiles,  struggles  to  her   feet  with  the  good-natured
awkwardness  of  a retarded person  in  a good  mood.  "I like to talk about
that," she says. "Because I believe in it."
     Y.T. doesn't stop to do a lot of  talking, just grabs the woman by  the
hand, starts  leading her uphill, into the  scrubby little trees,  away from
the road. She doesn't see any pink faces lurking up here in the infrared, it
ought  to be safe. But there are  a couple behind  her,  just  ambling along
pleasantly, not looking directly at her, like they just decided it  was time
to go  for a stroll in  the woods in the middle of the night. One of them is
the High Priest.
     The  woman's probably  in her  mid-twenties, she's a  tall gangly type,
nice- but not good-looking, probably was a spunky but low-scoring forward on
her  high school basketball team.  Y.T. sits  her down on a rock out in  the
darkness.
     "Do you have any idea where you are?" Y.T. says.
     "In  the  park,"  the  woman says, "with  my friends. We're helping  to
spread the Word."
     "How'd you get here?"
     "From the Enterprise. That's where we go to learn things."
     "You mean, like, the Raft? The Enterprise Raft? Is that  where you guys
all came from?"
     "I don't know where we came from," the woman says. "Sometimes it's hard
to remember stuff. But that's not important."
     "Where were you before? You didn't grow up on the Raft, did you?"
     "I  was  a  systems  programmer  for 3verse Systems  in Mountain  View,
California,"  the woman says,  suddenly whipping off  a string  of  perfect,
normal-sounding English.
     'Then how did you get to be on the Raft?"
     "I don't know. My old life stopped. My new life started. Now I'm here."
Back to baby talk.
     "What's the last thing you remember before your old life stopped?"
     "I was working late. My computer was having problems."
     "That's it? That's the last normal thing that happened to you?"
     "My  system crashed," she said. "I saw  static. And then I became  very
sick. I went to the hospital.  And  there in the hospital, I met  a man  who
explained  everything  to me. He  explained that  I had  been  washed in the
blood. That I belonged to the Word now. And suddenly it  all made sense. And
then I decided to go to the Raft."
     "You decided, or someone decided for you?"
     "I just wanted to. That's where we go."
     "Who else was on the Raft with you?"
     "More people like me."
     "Like you how?"
     "All programmers. Like me. Who had seen the Word."
     "Seen it on their computers?"
     "Yes. Or sometimes on TV."
     "What did you do on the Raft?"
     The woman pushes up  one sleeve of her raggedy  sweatshirt to expose  a
needle-pocked arm.
     "You took drugs?"
     "No. We gave blood."
     "They sucked your blood out?"
     "Yes. Sometimes we would do a little coding. But only some of us."
     "How long have you been here?"
     "I don't know. They move us  here when our veins don't work anymore. We
just do things to help spread the Word -drag stuff around,  make barricades.
But we don't really spend much time working. Most of the time we sing songs,
pray, and tell other people about the Word."
     "You want to leave? I can get you out of here."
     "No," the woman says, "I've never been so happy."
     "How can you say that? You were a big-time hacker. Now you're kind of a
dip, if I may speak frankly."
     "That's okay, it doesn't hurt my feelings. I wasn't really happy when I
was a hacker. I  never thought about the important things.  God. Heaven. The
things  of the spirit. It's hard to think about those things in America. You
just  put  them  aside. But  those are  really the important  things  -  not
programming computers or making money. Now, that's all I think about."
     Y.T.  has been keeping an eye  on the High Priest  and  his buddy. They
keep  moving closer,  one step at a time. Now they're close enough that Y.T.
can smell their dinner. The woman puts her hand on Y.T.'s shoulder pad.
     "I want you to  stay  here with me. Won't you come  down and  have some
refreshments? You must be thirsty."
     "Gotta run," Y.T. says, standing up.
     "I  really have  to object to  that," the  High Priest  says,  stepping
forward. He doesn't say it angrily. Now he's trying to be like  Y.T.'s  dad.
"That's not really the right decision for you."
     "What are you, a role model?"
     "That's okay. You don't have to agree. But let's go down and sit by the
campfire and talk about it."
     "Let's  just  get the  fuck  away  from Y.T.  before  she goes  into  a
self-defense mode," Y.T. says.
     All three Falabalas step back away from her. Very cooperative. The High
Priest  is holding up his hands, placating her. "I'm  sorry if we  made  you
feel threatened," he says.
     "You guys just come on a little weird," Y.T. says, flipping her goggles
back onto infrared.
     In the infrared, she can see that the third Falabala, the  one who came
up here with  the High Priest, is holding a small  thing in one hand that is
unusually warm.
     She  nails  him  with her penlight, spotlighting  his  upper body  in a
narrow yellow beam. Most of him is dirty and dun colored and reflects little
light. But there is a brilliant glossy red thing, a shaft of ruby.
     It's a hypodermic needle.  It's full of  red fluid. Under  infrared, it
shows up warm. It's fresh blood.
     And she doesn't exactly get it - why these guys would be walking around
with a syringe full of fresh blood. But she's seen enough.
     The Liquid Knuckles shoots out  of the can in a long narrow  neon-green
stream, and when it nails the needle man in the face, he jerks his head back
like  he's  just been axed across the  bridge  of  the nose  and falls  back
without making a sound. Then she gives the High Priest a shot of it for good
measure. The woman just stands there, totally, like, appalled.

     Y.T. pumps herself up out of the canyon so fast that when she flies out
into traffic, she's going  about as fast as  it is. As  soon  as she  gets a
solid poon on a nocturnal lettuce tanker, she gets on the phone to Mom.
     "Mom, listen. No,  Mom,  never mind the roaring noise. Yes, I am riding
my skateboard in traffic. But listen to me for a second, Mom - "
     She has to hang up on the old bitch. It's impossible  to  talk  to her.
Then she  tries to make  a voice linkup  with Hiro. That  takes a couple  of
minutes to go through.
     "Hello! Hello! Hello!" she's shouting. Then she hears the honk of a car
horn. Coming out of the telephone.
     "Hello?"
     "It's Y.T."
     "How are  you  doing?" This  guy always seems a little too laid back in
his personal dealings. She doesn't really  want  to  talk  about  how  she's
doing.  She  hears another honking horn  in the  background,  behind  Hiro's
voice.
     "Where the hell are you, Hiro?"
     "Walking down a street in L.A."
     "How  can you be goggled in if you're  walking down a street?" Then the
terrible reality sinks in: "Oh, my God, you didn't turn into a gargoyle, did
you?"
     "Well," Hiro says. He is hesitant, embarrassed, like it hadn't occurred
to him yet that this was what  he was doing. "It's not exactly like being  a
gargoyle.  Remember when you  gave me  shit about spending all my  money  on
computer stuff?"
     "Yeah."
     "I  decided  I  wasn't spending  enough.  So I got  a beltpack machine.
Smallest ever made. I'm walking down the street  with this thing strapped to
my belly. It's really cool."
     "You're a gargoyle."
     "Yeah, but it's not like having all this clunky shit strapped  all over
your body - "
     "You're a gargoyle. Listen, I talked to one of these wholesalers."
     "Yeah?"
     "She  says  she  used to be a hacker. She saw something strange  on her
computer. Then she got sick for a while and joined this cult and ended up on
the Raft."
     "The Raft. Do tell."
     "On the Enterprise. They take their blood, Hiro. Suck  it  out of their
bodies. They infect people by injecting them with the blood of sick hackers.
And when their  veins  get  all  tracked  out like a junkie's, they cut them
loose and put them to work on the mainland running the wholesale operation."
     "That's good," he says. "That's good stuff."
     "She says she saw some  static on her computer screen  and  it made her
sick. You know anything about that?"
     "Yeah. It's true."
     "It's true?"
     "Yeah. But you don't have to worry about it. It only affects hackers."
     For  a minute she can't  even  speak, she's  so pissed. "My mother is a
programmer for the Feds. You asshole. Why didn't you warn me?"
     Half an hour later, she's there. Doesn't bother to change back into her
WASP disguise  this time,  just  bursts into the  house in basic, bad black.
Drops her plank on  the  floor on the way in.  Grabs one of Mom's curios off
the shelf - it's a  heavy crystal award - clear plastic, actually - that she
got  a couple  years ago for sucking up to her Fed boss  and passing all her
polygraph tests - and goes into the den.
     Mom's there. As  usual. Working on her computer. But  she's not looking
at the screen right now,  she's got some notes  on  her lap that she's going
through.
     Just as Mom is looking up at her, Y.T.  winds up and throws the crystal
award. It goes right  over Mom's shoulder,  glances off the computer  table,
flies right through the picture tube. Awesome results. Y.T. always wanted to
do that. She  pauses  to  admire her  work for a few seconds while  Mom just
flames off all kinds  of weird emotion. What are you  doing in that uniform?
Didn't I tell you not to ride your skateboard on a real  street? You're  not
supposed to throw things in the house. That's my  prized possession. Why did
you break the computer?  Government property. Just what  is  going  on here,
anyway?
     Y.T. can  tell that this is going to  continue for a couple of minutes,
so she goes to the kitchen, splashes some water on her face, gets a glass of
juice, just letting Mom  follow her  around and ventilate over her  shoulder
pads.
     Finally Mom winds down, defeated by Y.T.'s strategy of silence.
     "I just saved your fucking  life, Mom," Y.T. says. "You  could at least
offer me an Oreo."
     "What on earth are you talking about?"
     "It's like, if you - people of  a certain age  - would make some effort
to just stay in touch with sort of basic, modern-day events, then  your kids
wouldn't have to take these drastic measures."

        35

     Earth  materializes,  rotating majestically in front of his face.  Hiro
reaches out and grabs it. He  twists  it  around so  he's looking at Oregon.
Tells it to get rid of the  clouds, and  it does, giving him  a  crystalline
view of the mountains and the seashore.
     Right out there, a couple of  hundred miles off the  Oregon coast, is a
sort of granulated  furuncle growing on the  face of the water. Festering is
not too strong a word. It's a couple of hundred miles south of Astoria  now,
moving south. Which explains  why Juanita went  to Astoria a couple of  days
ago: she wanted to get close to the Raft. Why is anyone's guess.
     Hiro looks up,  focuses his gaze on Earth, zooms  in for a look.  As he
gets closer, the imagery he's looking at shifts from the long-range pictures
coming in from  the geosynchronous satellites to the good stuff being spewed
into the CIC computer from a  whole fleet of  low-flying spy birds. The view
he's looking at is a mosaic of images shot no more than a few hours ago.
     It's  several  miles across.  Its shape constantly  changes, but at the
time these pictures were shot, it had kind of a fat kidney  shape; that  is,
it is trying to be a V, pointed southward like a flock of geese, but there's
so much noise  in the system,  it's so  amorphous  and disorganized,  that a
kidney is the closest it can come.
     At the center  is a pair of enormous vessels: the Enterprise and an oil
tanker, lashed  together side  by side. These two behemoths are walled in by
several other major vessels,  an assortment  of  container  ships and  other
freight carriers. The Core.
     Everything else is pretty tiny. There  is the occasional hijacked yacht
or decommissioned  fishing  trawler. But most  of the boats in  the Raft are
just that: boats. Small pleasure craft, sampans, junks, dhows, dinghys, life
rafts, houseboats,  makeshift structures built  on air-filled oil  drums and
slabs of styrofoam. A  good fifty  percent of it isn't real boat material at
all,  just a  garble of  ropes,  cables, planks, nets, and other debris tied
together on top of whatever kind of flotsam was handy.
     And L. Bob Rife is sitting in the middle of it. Hiro doesn't quite know
what he's doing, and he doesn't know how Juanita is connected. But it's time
to go there and find out.

     Scott Lagerquist  is standing right on the  edge of  Mark Norman's 24/7
Motorcycle  Mall, waiting, when the  man  with the  swords comes into  view,
striding  down  the  sidewalk. A  pedestrian is  a  peculiar sight  in L.A.,
considerably more peculiar than a man with swords. But a welcome one. Anyone
who drives out to a motorcycle  dealership already has a car, by definition,
so it's hard to give them a really hard sell. A pedestrian should be cake.
     "Scott  Wilson  Lagerquist!"  the  guy yells  from fifty feet  away and
closing. "How you doing?"
     "Fabulous!"  Scott says. A little off guard, maybe. Can't remember this
guy's name, which is a problem. Where has he seen this guy before?
     "It's  great  to see you!" Scott says,  running forward and pumping the
guy's hand. "I haven't seen you since, uh - "
     "Is Pinky here today?" the guy says.
     "Pinky?"
     "Yeah. Mark. Mark  Norman.  Pinky was his nickname back  in  college. I
guess  he probably  doesn't like  to be called that now  that he's  running,
what, half a dozen dealerships, three McDonaldses, and a Holiday Inn, huh?"
     "I didn't know that Mr. Norman was into fast food also."
     "Yeah. He's got three  franchises down  around  Long  Beach. Owns  them
through a limited partnership, actually. Is he here today?"
     "No, he's on vacation."
     "Oh, yeah.  In Corsica.  The Ajaccio Hyatt.  Room  543. That's right, I
completely forgot about that."
     "Well, were you just stopping by to say hi, or - "
     "Nah. I was going to buy a motorcycle."
     "Oh. What kind of motorcycle were you looking for?"
     "One of the new Yamahas? With the new generation smartwheels?"
     Scott grins  manfully, trying  to put the  best face on the awful  fact
that he is  about to reveal. "I know exactly the one you mean. But I'm sorry
to tell you that we don't actually have one in stock today."
     "You don't?"
     "We don't. It's a brand-new model. Nobody has them."
     "You sure? Because you ordered one."
     "We did?"
     "Yeah. A month  ago." Suddenly  the  guy cranes his  neck,  looks  over
Scott's  shoulder  down the boulevard. "Well, speak of the  devil.  Here  it
comes."
     A Yamaha semi is pulling into the truck entrance with a new shipment of
motorcycles in the back.
     "It's  on that truck,"  the guy says. "If  you can give me  one of your
cards, I'll jot down the  vehicle  identification number on back  so you can
pull it off the truck for me."
     "This was a special order made by Mr. Norman?"
     "He claimed he was just ordering it as a display  model, you  know. But
it sort of has my name on it."
     "Yes, sir. I understand totally."

     Sure enough, the bike comes off the truck,  just as  the  guy described
it, right  down  to  color  scheme  (black)  and  vehicle ID number. It's  a
beautiful bike. It draws a crowd just sitting on the parking lot - the other
salesmen actually put down  their coffee cups and take their  feet off their
desks to  go outside  and  look at  it. It looks like a  black land torpedo.
Two-wheel drive, natch. The wheels are so advanced they're not even wheels -
they look like giant, heavy-duty versions of the smartwheels that high-speed
skateboards  use, independently telescoping spokes with fat traction pads on
the ends. Dangling out over the front, in the nose  cone of the  motorcycle,
is the sensor package  that monitors road conditions, decides where to place
each spoke as it rolls forward, how much to extend it, and how to rotate the
footpad  for maximum  traction. It's  all controlled by  a bios - a Built-In
Operating System - an onboard  computer with  a flat-panel screen built into
the top of the fuel tank.
     They say that  this baby will do a hundred and twenty miles per hour on
rubble.  The bios patches itself into the CIC weather  net so that it  knows
when it's  about  to run  into precip. The aerodynamic  cowling  is  totally
flexible, calculates its own most efficient shape for the current speed  and
wind conditions,  changes its curves accordingly,  wraps around  you  like a
nymphomaniacal gymnast.
     Scott figures this guy is going to waltz off with this thing for dealer
invoice, being a  friend and confidant  of Mr. Norman. And  it's not an easy
thing for  any redblooded  salesman to write out a contract to sell  a  sexy
beast like this one at dealer  invoice. He hesitates for  a  minute. Wonders
what's going to happen to him if this is all some kind of mistake.
     The guy's watching him intently, seems to sense his nervousness, almost
as if he can hear Scott's heart beating. So at the last minute he eases  up,
gets magnanimous - Scott loves these big-spender types-decides to throw in a
few  hundred Kongbucks over  invoice, just so  Scott can  pull  in  a meager
commission on the deal. A tip, basically.
     Then - icing on the cake - the guy goes nuts in the Cycle Shop. Totally
berserk. Buys a  complete outfit. Everything. Top of the line. A full  black
coverall  that  swaddles  everything   from  toes  to  neck  in  breathable,
bulletproof fabric, with armorgel  pads in all the right places and  airbags
around the  neck.  Even safety fanatics  don't  bother  with  a helmet  when
they're wearing one of these babies.
     So once he's figured out how to attach his swords on the outside of his
coverall, he's on his way.
     "I gotta say this," Scott says as  the guy is sitting on his  new bike,
getting his swords adjusted,  doing something incredibly unauthorized to the
bios, "you look like one bad motherfucker."
     "Thanks, I guess."  He twists the throttle up once and Scott feels, but
does not hear, the power of the engine. This baby is so efficient it doesn't
waste power by making noise. "Say hi to your brand-new niece," the guy says,
and then lets go the clutch. The  spokes flex and  gather themselves and the
bike springs forward out of the  lot, seeming to jump off its electric paws.
He cuts right across the  parking lot of the neighboring NeoAquarian  Temple
franchise  and pulls out  onto the road. About  half a second later, the guy
with the swords is a dot on the horizon, Then he's gone. Northbound.

        36

     Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under
the right  circumstances  he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world.
If I  moved to a  martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard  for
ten  years. If my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore
myself to revenge. If I  got  a fatal disease, had one year to live, devoted
it  to wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to
being bad.
     Hiro used to feel  that way, too, but then he ran into Raven. In a way,
this is liberating. He no longer has to worry about trying to be the baddest
motherfucker in the world. The position is  taken.  The  crowning touch, the
one thing that really  puts true world-class badmotherfuckerdom  totally out
of reach, of  course,  is  the hydrogen bomb. If it  wasn't for the hydrogen
bomb, a man could still aspire. Maybe find Raven's Achilles' heel. Sneak up,
get a  drop, slip a  mickey, pull a fast one.  But Raven's  nuclear umbrella
kind of puts the world title out of reach.
     Which is okay. Sometimes it's  all right  just to  be a little  bad. To
know your limitations. Make do with what you've got.
     Once he  maneuvers  his  way  onto  the  freeway,  aimed  up  into  the
mountains, he goggles into his office. Earth is still there, zoomed in tight
on the Raft. Hiro contemplates it, superimposed in ghostly  hues on his view
of the highway, as he rides toward  Oregon at a hundred and forty  miles per
hour.
     From a distance, it looks bigger than it really is. Getting  closer, he
can see that  this illusion is caused by an enveloping self-made slick/cloud
of sewage and air pollution, fading out into the ocean and the atmosphere.
     It orbits the  Pacific clockwise. When  they fire up the boilers on the
Enterprise,  it can control its direction a little bit,  but real navigation
is a  practical  impossibility  with all  the other  shit lashed onto it. It
mostly has to go where the wind and the Coriolis effect take it. A couple of
years ago, it was going by the Philippines, Vietnam, China, Siberia, picking
up  Refus. Then it swung up the Aleutian chain,  down the Alaska  panhandle,
and now  it's gliding past the small town of Port Sherman,  Oregon, near the
California border.
     As the Raft moves through the Pacific, riding mostly on ocean currents,
it  occasionally  sheds great  hunks of itself. Eventually,  these fragments
wash up in  some place like Santa Barbara, still lashed together, carrying a
payload of skeletons and gnawed bones.
     When  it  gets to California, it will enter  a  new phase of  its  life
cycle.  It will  shed much of its sprawling improvised bulk as a few hundred
thousand Refus cut themselves loose  and paddle to shore. The only Refus who
make it  that far are, by definition, the ones who were agile enough to make
it out to  the Raft in  the first  place, resourceful enough to  survive the
agonizingly  slow passage through the arctic waters, and tough enough not to
get killed by any of the other Refus. Nice  guys, all of them. Just the kind
of people you'd like to have showing up on your private beach in groups of a
few thousand.
     Stripped  down to a  few major  ships, a little more  maneuverable, the
Enterprise then will swing across the South Pacific, heading for  Indonesia,
where it will turn north again and start the next cycle of migration.
     Army ants  cross  mighty rivers  by  climbing on top of each other  and
clustering together into  a little ball  that floats. Many  of them fall off
and sink, and naturally the  ants on the bottom of the ball drown.  The ones
who are  quick and  vigorous enough  to keep clawing their  way  to the  top
survive. A lot of  them make  it across, and that's why you can't stop  army
ants  by  dynamiting the bridges. That's how Refus come  across the Pacific,
even though  they are too  poor  to  book passage on a real ship  or  buy  a
seaworthy boat. A new wave washes up onto the West Coast every five years or
so, when the ocean currents bring the Enterprise back.
     For  the  last couple of  months,  owners  of  beachfront  property  in
California  have  been hiring security people,  putting  up  spotlights  and
antipersonnel fences along  the tide line, mounting  machine  guns  on their
yachts. They  have  all  subscribed to  CIC's twenty-four-hour Raft  Report,
getting the  latest news flash, straight from  the satellite,  on  when  the
latest contingent of twenty-five thousand starving  Eurasians has cut itself
loose  from  the Enterprise and started  dipping its myriad  oars  into  the
Pacific, like ant legs.

     "Time to do more digging,"  he tells the Librarian. "But this is  going
to have to  be totally verbal, because I'm headed up I-5 at  some incredible
speed right now, and I have to watch out for slow-moving bagos and stuff."
     "I'll keep that  in mind,"  the voice  of  the Librarian says  into his
earphones. "Look out  for the  jackknifed truck south of Santa  Clarita. And
there is a large chuckhole in the left lane near the Tulare exit."
     "Thanks. Who  were these  gods  anyway?  Did  Lagos  have an opinion on
that?"
     "Lagos believed that they might have been  magicians  - that is, normal
human beings with special powers - or they might have been aliens."
     "Whoa, whoa,  hold  on. Let's  take these one at a time. What did Lagos
mean when he talked about 'normal human beings with special powers'?"
     "Assume  that the nam-shub of Enki really functioned as a virus. Assume
that someone named  Enki invented it. Then  Enki  must have had some kind of
linguistic power that goes beyond our concept of normal."
     "And how would this power work? What's the mechanism?"
     "I can only give you forward references drawn by Lagos."
     "Okay. Give me some."
     "The  belief in the magical power of  language is not unusual,  both in
mystical and  academic literature.  The  Kabbalists -Jewish mystics of Spain
and Palestine - believed that supernormal insight and power could be derived
from  properly combining the letters  of  the Divine Name. For example,  Abu
Aharon, an  early Kabbalist who emigrated from Baghdad to Italy, was said to
perform miracles through the power of the Sacred Names."
     "What kind of power are we talking about here?"
     "Most Kabbalists  were  theorists who  were  interested  only  in  pure
meditation.  But there were so-called 'practical  Kabbalists'  who  tried to
apply the power of the Kabbalah in everyday life."
     "In other words, sorcerers."
     "Yes.  These  practical   kabbalists  used  a   so-called  'archangelic
alphabet,' derived from first-century Greek and  Aramaic theurgic alphabets,
which  resembled cuneiform. The Kabbalists referred to this alphabet as 'eye
writing,' because the  letters were  composed of  lines  and  small circles,
which resembled eyes."
     "Ones and zeroes."
     "Some Kabbalists  divided up  the letters of the alphabet  according to
where they were produced inside the mouth."
     "Okay. So  as  we would think of it, they  were  drawing  a  connection
between the printed letter on the page and the neural  connections  that had
to be invoked in order to pronounce it."
     "Yes. By analyzing the  spelling of various  words, they  were able  to
draw  what they thought were profound  conclusions  about their  true, inner
meaning and significance."
     "Okay. If you say so."
     "In  the academic realm, the literature is naturally not  as  fanciful.
But  a great deal of  effort has  been devoted  to explaining Babel. Not the
Babel event - which most  people  consider to be a myth - but the  fact that
languages  tend  to  diverge.  A  number  of  linguistic theories have  been
developed in an effort to tie all languages together."
     "Theories Lagos tried to apply to his virus hypothesis."
     "Yes. There are  two schools: relativists and  universalists. As George
Steiner summarizes it, relativists tend to believe that language  is not the
vehicle  of  thought  but its determining  medium. It  is  the framework  of
cognition. Our  perceptions  of everything are  organized  by  the  flux  of
sensations passing over that framework. Hence, the study of the evolution of
language is the study of the evolution of the human mind itself."
     "Okay,  I  can  see   the  significance   of  that.  What   about   the
universalists?"
     "In contrast with the relativists, who believe  that languages need not
have anything  in common with each other, the  universalists believe that if
you can analyze languages enough, you can find that all of them have certain
traits in common. So they analyze languages, looking for such traits."
     "Have they found any?"
     "No. There seems to be an exception to every rule."
     "Which blows universalism out of the water."
     "Not necessarily. They  explain this problem by saying that the  shared
traits are too deeply buried to be analyzable."
     "Which is a cop out."
     "Their point is  that at some level,  language has to happen inside the
human brain. Since all human brains are more or less the same - "
     "The hardware's the same. Not the software."
     "You are using some kind of metaphor that I cannot understand."
     Hiro whips past a big Airstream that is rocking from side to  side in a
dangerous wind coming down the valley.
     "Well,   a  French-speaker's  brain  starts   out   the   same   as  an
English-speaker's brain. As they grow up, they get programmed with different
software-they learn different languages."
     "Yes. Therefore, according  to the universalists,  French and English -
or any other languages - must share certain traits that  have their roots in
the 'deep structures' of the human brain. According to Chomskyan theory, the
deep structures are innate components of the brain that enable it to cam out
certain  formal kinds of  operations  on strings of symbols. Or,  as Steiner
paraphrases Emmon Bach: These deep  structures eventually lead to the actual
patterning  of the cortex with its immensely ramified yet, at the same time,
'programmed' network of electrochemical and neurophysiological channels."
     "But these deep structures are so deep we can't even see them?"
     "The universalists place the active nodes of linguistic life - the deep
structures  - so deep  as to  defy observation and description.  Or  to  use
Steiner's analogy: Try to draw  up the  creature from the depths of the sea,
and it will disintegrate or change form grotesquely."
     "There's that  serpent again. So which theory did Lagos believe in? The
relativist or the universalist?"
     "He did not  seem to think there was  much of a difference. In the end,
they are both somewhat mystical. Lagos believed that both schools of thought
had essentially arrived at the same place by different lines of reasoning."
     "But  it  seems  to me there  is  a key  difference," Hiro  says.  "The
universalists think that we are determined by the prepatterned structure  of
our brains - the pathways in the  cortex. The relativists don't believe that
we have any limits."
     "Lagos modified the strict Chomskyan theory by supposing that  learning
a language  is  like blowing  code  into  PROMS  -an analogy that  I  cannot
interpret."
     "The analogy is clear. PROMS are Programmable  Read-Only Memory chips,"
Hiro says. "When they come from the factory, they have no content. Once  and
only once,  you can  place information into those chips and  then  freeze it
-the information, the software, becomes frozen into the chip -it  transmutes
into hardware. After you have blown the code into the PROMS, you can read it
out,  but you can't  write to them anymore.  So Lagos was trying to say that
the newborn human  brain has no structure - as the relativists would have it
-  and that as the child learns  a language, the developing brain structures
itself  accordingly, the language gets 'blown into' the hardware and becomes
a permanent  part of the brain's deep structure - as the universalists would
have it."
     "Yes. This was his interpretation."
     "Okay. So when he talked  about Enki  being a real person with  magical
powers,  what he  meant  was  that Enki  somehow  understood  the connection
between language and the brain, knew how to manipulate it. The same way that
a hacker,  knowing the  secrets of  a computer  system,  can  write  code to
control it - digital nam-shubs."
     "Lagos said  that Enki  had the ability to ascend  into the universe of
language and  see it before his eyes. Much as humans go  into the Metaverse.
That gave him  power  to create  nam-shubs.  And nam-shubs had the power  to
alter the functioning of the brain and of the body."
     "Why isn't anyone  doing this kind of  thing nowadays? Why aren't there
any nam-shubs in English?"
     "Not all languages are the  same, as Steiner points out. Some languages
are better at metaphor than others. Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, and Chinese lend
themselves  to  word play and  have  achieved  a  lasting grip  on  reality:
Palestine had Qiryat Sefer, the "City  of the Letter," and Syria had Byblos,
the "Town of the Book." By contrast other civilizations seem "speechless" or
at least, as may have been the case in Egypt, not  entirely cognizant of the
creative  and  transformational powers  of  language.  Lagos  believed  that
Sumerian was an extraordinarily powerful language - at least it was in Sumer
five thousand years ago."
     "A language that lent itself to Enki's neurolinguistic hacking."
     "Early  linguists, as well as the Kabbalists, believed  in a  fictional
language called the tongue of Eden, the language of Adam. It enabled all men
to  understand each other, to  communicate  without misunderstanding. It was
the language of the Logos, the moment when God created the world by speaking
a word. In  the tongue of Eden, naming a thing was  the same as creating it.
To quote Steiner again, 'Our speech interposes  itself between  apprehension
and truth like a dusty pane or warped mirror. The tongue of Eden was  like a
flawless glass;  a light of  total understanding  streamed through it.  Thus
Babel was  a  second Fall.' And Isaac  the  Blind, an early Kabbalist,  said
that,  to  quote  Gershom  Scholem's translation,  'The  speech  of  men  is
connected with divine speech  and  all language  whether  heavenly  or human
derives  from  one  source: the  Divine Name.' The practical kabbalists, the
sorcerers, bore the title Ba'al Shem, meaning 'master of the divine name.'"
     "The machine language of the world," Hiro says.
     "Is this another analogy?"
     "Computers  speak  machine language," Hiro says. "It's written in  ones
and zeroes-binary  code. At  the lowest level,  all computers are programmed
with strings of  ones and zeroes. When you program  in machine language, you
are  controlling the computer  at its brainstem,  the root of its existence.
It's the tongue of Eden. But it's very difficult to work in machine language
because you go crazy after  a while, working  at such  a  minute level. So a
whole Babel of computer languages has been created for programmers: FORTRAN,
BASIC, COBOL, LISP,  Pascal, C, PROLOG, FORTH. You talk  to the computer  in
one of these languages,  and a  piece of software called a compiler converts
it into machine language. But you never can  tell exactly what the  compiler
is doing. It doesn't always come out the way you want. Like a  dusty pane or
warped  mirror. A really advanced  hacker comes to understand the true inner
workings of the machine - he sees through the  language he's  working in and
glimpses the secret functioning of the binary code - becomes a Ba'al Shem of
sorts."
     "Lagos  believed  that  the  legends  about  the  tongue  of Eden  were
exaggerated versions  of true events,"  the  Librarian  says. "These legends
reflected nostalgia for a time when people spoke Sumerian, a tongue that was
superior to anything that came afterward."
     "Is Sumerian really that good?"
     "Not as  far as modern-day linguists can tell," the Librarian says. "As
I  mentioned, it is largely impossible for us to grasp. Lagos suspected that
words worked differently in  those days. If one's native  tongue  influences
the physical structure of the developing brain, then  it is fair to say that
the Sumerians  -  who  spoke a language radically different from anything in
existence  today  -  had fundamentally different brains  from  yours.  Lagos
believed that for this reason, Sumerian was a language ideally suited to the
creation and propagation of viruses. That a virus, once released into Sumer,
would spread rapidly and virulently, until it had infected everyone."
     "Maybe Enki knew  that also,"  Hiro says. "Maybe the  nam-shub  of Enki
wasn't such a bad  thing. Maybe Babel was the best  thing that ever happened
to us."

        37

     Y.T.'s mom works  in Fedland. She has parked her little  car in her own
little numbered  slot,  for which  the  Feds  require  her  to pay about ten
percent of  her  salary (if  she  like it  she can take a taxi  or walk) and
walked  up several levels of a blindingly lit  reinforced-concrete helix  in
which most  of the spaces -  the good  spaces closer to  the surface  -  are
reserved  for  people other than  her,  but empty. She  always walks  up the
center of the ramp, between the rows of parked cars, so that the  EBGOC boys
won't think she's lurking, loitering, skulking, malingering, or smoking.
     Reaching the subterranean entrance of  her building, she  has taken all
metal objects from her pockets and removed what little jewelry she's wearing
and dumped them into a dirty plastic bowl and walked through  the  detector.
Flashed  her  badge.  Signed her  name  and  noted  down  the digital  time.
Submitted  to a frisking from an EBGOC girl.  Annoying,  but it sure beats a
cavity search. They have a right to do a cavity search if they want. She got
cavity-searched every day for a month once, right after she had spoken up at
a meeting and suggested that her supervisor might be on the wrong track with
a major programming project. It was  punitive and vicious, she  knew it was,
but she  always wanted to give something  back  to her country, and whenever
you work for the Feds you just accept the fact that there's going to be some
politicking.  And that as a low-level person you're going to bear the brunt.
And later on,  you  climb the  GS ladder,  don't have to put up with as much
shit. Far  be it from  her to  quarrel with  her supervisor. Her supervisor,
Marietta, doesn't  have an especially stellar GS  level, but  she does  have
access. She has connections. Marietta knows people who know people. Marietta
has  attended cocktail parties  that were also attended by  some people who,
well, your eyes would bug out.
     She has passed  the  frisking with  flying collars. Put the metal stuff
back  into her pockets.  Climbed up half a  dozen flights  of stairs to  her
floor. The elevators here still work,  but some very highly placed people in
Fedland  have  let it be known -  nothing  official,  but they have  ways of
letting this stuff out - that  it is a duty to conserve energy. And the Feds
are  real serious about duty.  Duty, loyalty,  responsibility.  The collagen
that binds  us  into the United  States of  America. So the  stairwells  are
filled with sweaty wool and clacking leather.  If you took  the elevator, no
one  would  actually  say  anything, but  it would  be  noticed. Noticed and
written down and taken into account. People would look at you, glance you up
and down,  like, what happened, sprain  your ankle? Taking the stairs  is no
problem.
     Feds don't smoke. Feds generally don't overeat. The health plan is very
specific,  contains major incentives,  get too  heavy or  wheezy and, no one
says  anything about  it  - which  would be rude - but  you feel a  definite
pressure, a sense of not fitting  in, as you walk  across  the sea of desks,
eyes glance up to follow you, estimating the mass  of your saddlebags,  eyes
darting back  and forth  between desks as, by consensus, your co-workers say
to themselves, I wonder how  much he or she is driving up  our  health  plan
premiums?
     So Y.T.'s mom has  clacked  up the stairs  in her  black pumps and gone
into her  office, actually a  large room with  computer workstations  placed
across it in a grid. Used to be divided up by partitions, but the EBGOC boys
didn't like it, said what would happen if there had to be an evacuation? All
those  partitions would impede the free flow of  unhinged panic. So  no more
partitions.  Just  workstations and chairs. Not even  any desktops. Desktops
encourage  the use of paper, which is archaic and reflects  inadequate  team
spirit. What is so special about your work that you have to write it down on
a  piece of  paper that only you  get to see? That you have to  lock it away
inside  a desk? When you're working for the  Feds, everything  you do is the
property of the United States of America. You do  your work on the computer.
The  computer  keeps  a copy of  everything,  so  that  if  you get  sick or
something, it's  all there where  your  co-workers and supervisors  can  get
access to  it. If you  want to write  little  notes or make  phone  doodles,
you're perfectly free to do that at home, in your spare time.
     And  there's the  question  of  interchangeability.  Fed workers,  like
military people,  are intended to be interchangeable  parts. What happens if
your workstation should break down? You're going  to sit  there  and twiddle
your thumbs until it  gets fixed? No siree, you're going to  move to a spare
workstation and get to  work on that. And you don't have that flexibility if
you've  got half  a  ton  of personal stuff cached inside of a  desk, strewn
around a desktop.
     So  there  is  no paper in a Fed office.  All  the workstations are the
same. You come in  in the morning, pick one  at random, sit down, and get to
work.  You could try to  favor  a particular station, try to sit there every
day, but it would be  noticed. Generally you pick the unoccupied workstation
that's closest to the door. That way, whoever came in earliest sits closest,
whoever came  in latest is way in the back, for the  rest of  the  day  it's
obvious  at a glance who's on the ball in this office and  who is - as  they
whisper to each other in the bathrooms - having problems.
     Not that it's any big secret, who comes in first. When you sign on to a
workstation  in  the  morning, it's not  like the  central computer  doesn't
notice that fact. The central computer notices just about everything.  Keeps
track of every key  you hit on the keyboard, all day long, what time you hit
it, down to the microsecond,  whether it was the right key or the wrong key,
how many mistakes you make and when you make  them. You're only  required to
be at your  workstation from eight to five, with a half-hour lunch break and
two ten-minute coffee breaks, but  if you  stuck  to that  schedule it would
definitely  be noticed, which is why Y.T.'s mom is sliding  into  the  first
unoccupied workstation and signing  on to  her machine  at quarter to seven.
Half a dozen other people are already here, signed on to workstations closer
to  the entrance, but this isn't bad. She  can look forward to a  reasonably
stable career if she can keep up this sort of performance.
     The Feds still  operate  in Flatland.  None  of this  three-dimensional
stuff, no goggles, no stereo  sound. The computers are all basic flat-screen
two-dimensional numbers.  Windows appear  on the  desktop, with  little text
documents  inside. All part of the  austerity program.  Soon  to reap  major
benefits.
     She signs  on and checks her mail. No personal  mail, just a  couple of
mass-distributed pronouncements from Marietta.

        NEW TP POOL REGULATIONS
     I've been asked to distribute the new regulations regarding office pool
displays. The  enclosed memo  is  a  new subchapter of  the  EBGOC Procedure
Manual, replacing the old subchapter entitled  PHYSICAL PLANT/CALIFORNIA/LOS
ANGELES/BUILDINGS/OFFICE    AREAS/PHYSICAL    LAYOUT    REGULATIONS/EMPLOYEE
INPUT/GROUP ACTIVITIES.
     The old subchapter was a flat prohibition on the use of office space or
time for "pool" activities  of  any  kind,  whether permanent (e.g.,  coffee
pool) or one-time (e.g., birthday parties).
     This prohibition  still applies, but a single, one-time  exception  has
now been made for any office  that wishes to pursue a  joint bathroom-tissue
strategy.
     By way of introduction, let me just make a few general comments on this
subject. The  problem  of distributing  bathroom tissue to workers  presents
inherent challenges for any  office management  system  due to  the inherent
unpredictability  of   usage  -  not   every   facility  usage   transaction
necessitates  the use of  bathroom tissue,  and  when it is used, the amount
needed (number of squares) may vary quite  widely from person to person and,
for  a given person, from one transaction to  the next.  This does  not even
take   into   account  the   occasional   use   of   bathroom   tissue   for
unpredictable/creative   purposes   such   as  applying/removing  cosmetics,
beverage-spill management,  etc. For  this  reason,  rather than  trying  to
package  bathroom tissue in small one-transaction packets  (as  is done with
premoistened towelettes, for example), which  can  be wasteful in some cases
and limiting in other cases, it has been traditional to package this product
in bulk distribution units whose size exceeds  the maximum amount of squares
that an individual  could conceivably use in a  single  transaction (barring
force  majeure).  This reduces to  a  minimum the  number of transactions in
which  the  distribution unit  is  depleted  (the roll  runs out during  the
transaction, a situation that can  lead to emotional stress for the affected
employee. However,  it does present the manager with some challenges in that
the  distribution unit  is rather  bulky and must  be  repeatedly  used by a
number of different individuals if it is not to be wasted.
     Since  the  implementation  of  Phase  XVII  of the Austerity  Program,
employees have been  allowed  to bring their own  bathroom tissue from home.
This  approach is somewhat  bulky  and redundant,  as every  worker  usually
brings their own roll.
     Some  offices  have attempted  to meet this  challenge  by  instituting
bathroom-tissue pools.
     Without  overgeneralizing,  it  may  be  stated  that  an inherent  and
irreducible feature  of any bathroom-tissue pool implemented at  the  office
level, in an environment  (i.e.,  building) in which  comfort  stations  are
distributed  on a  per-floor basis (i.e., in which  several offices  share a
single facility) is that  provision must be made within the confines  of the
individual  office for temporary stationing  of bathroom tissue distribution
units  (i.e., rolls). This follows  from the fact that if the  BTDUs (rolls)
are  stationed, while inactive, outside  of  the purview of  the controlling
office  (i.e., the office that has collectively purchased  the  BTDU) - that
is, if the  BTDUs are stored,  for example,  in  a lobby area or  within the
facility  in  which  they  are  actually utilized, they will  be  subject to
pilferage  and "shrinkage"  as unauthorized persons  consume them, either as
part of a conscious  effort to pilfer  or out of an honest misunderstanding,
i.e.,  a  belief that  the  BTDUs  are being provided free of charge by  the
operating agency  (in  this case the United  States Government),  or  as the
result of  necessity, as in the case of a beverage spill that is encroaching
on sensitive electronic  equipment and whose  management  will thus brook no
delay.  This fact has led certain offices (which shall go unnamed - you know
who you are, guys) to  establish makeshift BTDU depots  that  also  serve as
pool-contribution collection points. Usually, these depots  take the form of
a table,  near  the  door  closest to the facility, on which  the BTDUs  are
stacked or otherwise deployed, with a bowl or some other receptacle in which
participants  may  place their contributions, and typically with  a  sign or
other  attention-getting  device  (such  as  a  stuffed animal  or  cartoon)
requesting donations. A quick glance at the  current  regulations  will show
that placement  of  such  a  display/depot  violates the  procedure  manual.
However,  in   the   interests   of  employee  hygiene,  morale,  and  group
spiritbudding, my higher-ups have agreed to make a one-time exception in the
regulations for this purpose.
     As with any  part  of  the procedure manual, new or  old,  it  is  your
responsibility  to  be thoroughly  familiar  with  this  material. Estimated
reading  time for  this document is 15.62 minutes (and don't  think we won't
check).  Please  make note of  the  major points made  in this  document, as
follows:
     1) BTDU depot/displays are  now allowed, on a trial basis, with the new
policy to be reviewed in six months.
     2) These must be operated on a voluntary, pool-type basis, as described
in  the  subchapter on employee pools. (Note: This  means keeping books  and
tallying all financial transactions.)
     3)  BTDUs must be brought in by the employees (not shipped through  the
mailroom) and are subject to all the usual search-and-seizure regulations.
     4) Scented BTDUs are prohibited as  they  may cause allergic reactions,
wheezing, etc. in some persons.
     5)  Cash  pool donations, as with all monetary transactions  within the
U.S. Government, must use official U.S. currency - no yen or Kongbucks!
     Naturally, this will lead  to  a bulk problem if people try  to use the
donation  bucket  as a  dumping  ground  for bundles  of  old  billion-  and
trillion-dollar bills. The  Buildings and  Grounds people  are worried about
waste-disposal  problems  and the  potential fire  hazard  that may ensue if
large  piles  of billions and trillions begin to mount up. Therefore,  a key
feature of  the new  regulation is that the donation  bucket must be emptied
every  day  -  more  often if an  excessive  build-up  situation  is seen to
develop.
     In  this vein, the B & G people  would also like  me to point out  that
many of you who have excess U.S. currency to get rid  of have been trying to
kill two  birds with one stone  by using  old billions  as bathroom  tissue.
While creative, this approach has two drawbacks:
     1) It clogs the plumbing, and
     2)  It constitutes  defacement of  U.S.  currency,  which is a  federal
crime.
     DON'T DO IT.
     Join  your   office  bathroom-tissue  pool  instead.  It's  easy,  it's
hygienic, and it's legal.
     Happy pooling!
     Marietta.

     Y.T.'s mom pulls up  the new memo, checks the  time, and starts reading
it. The estimated  reading time  is 15.62 minutes. Later, when Marietta does
her end-of-day statis-tical roundup, sitting in her private office  at  9:00
P.M.,  she will see the name  of each employee and next to it, the amount of
time spent  reading this memo, and  her reaction,  based on the time  spent,
will go something like this:
     Less than 10 min. Time for an employee conference and possible attitude
     counseling.
     10-14 min. Keep an eye on this employee; may be developing
     slipshod attitude.
     14-15.61 min. Employee is an efficient worker, may sometimes miss
     important details.
     Exactly 15.62 min. Smartass. Needs attitude counseling.
     15.63-16 min. Asswipe. Not to be trusted.
     16-18 min. Employee is a methodical worker, may sometimes get hung
     up on minor details.
     More than 18 min. Check the security videotape, see just what this
     employee was up to (e.g., possible unauthorized
     restroom break).
     Y.T.'s mom  decides  to  spend  between  fourteen and  fifteen  minutes
reading the memo. It's better for younger workers to spend too long, to show
that they're careful,  not  cocky. It's better for  older  workers  to go  a
little  fast, to  show good management  potential. She's pushing forty. She'
scans through the memo,  hitting the  Page Down button at reasonably regular
intervals,  occasionally  paging back up  to  pretend to reread some earlier
section. The computer is going to notice all this. It approves of rereading.
It's  a small  thing, but over a decade or so this stuff really  shows up on
your work-habits summary.
     Having got  that  out  of  the way,  she  dives  into  work. She  is an
applications  programmer  for the  Feds.  In the old  days,  she would  have
written computer  programs for  a living. Nowadays, she writes fragments  of
computer programs. These  programs are designed by Marietta  and  Marietta's
superiors in massive  week-long meetings on the top floor. Once they get the
design  down,  they  start breaking up  the problem  into tinier and  tinier
segments, assigning them to  group managers, who break them  down even  more
and feed little bits of work to the individual programmers. In order to keep
the work done by the individual coders from colliding, it all has to be done
according to a set of rules  and regulations even bigger and more fluid than
the Government procedure manual.
     So  the  first thing that  Y.T.'s  mother does,  having  read  the  new
subchapter on bathroom  tissue  pools, is to sign  on  to a subsystem of the
main  computer system that handles the particular programming  project she's
working on. She  doesn't know what the project  is - that's classified -  or
what it's called. It's just her project. She  shares  it  with a few hundred
other programmers, she's not sure exactly who. And  every day when she signs
on  to  it,  there's  a stack of  memos  waiting  for  her,  containing  new
regulations and  changes to  the  rules that they  all have  to  follow when
writing code for the  project. These regulations make the business with  the
bathroom tissue seem as simple and elegant as the Ten Commandments.
     So  she  spends  until  about   eleven  A.M.  reading,  rereading,  and
understanding  the new  changes in the  Project. There  are  many  of these,
because  this  is a Monday morning and Marietta and her higher-ups spent the
whole  weekend  closeted  on the top  floor,  having a  catfight  about this
Project, changing everything.
     Then she starts going back over all the code she has previously written
for the Project  and making  a list  of all the  stuff that  will have to be
rewritten in  order  to  make  it  compatible with the  new  specifications.
Basically,  she's going  to  have to  rewrite all of  her material  from the
ground up. For the third time in as many months.
     But hey, it's a job.
     About eleven-thirty, she looks  up, startled, to see that  half a dozen
people are standing around her workstation. There's Marietta. And a proctor.
And some male Feds. And Leon the polygraph man.
     "I just had mine on Thursday," she says.
     "Time for another one," Marietta says. "Come on, let's get this show on
the road."
     "Hands out where I can see them," the proctor says.

        38

     Y.T.'s mom stands up, hands to her sides, and starts walking. She walks
straight out of the office. None of the other  people look up.  Not supposed
to.  Insensitive to  co-workers' needs.  Makes the testee feel  awkward  and
singled out, when in fact the polygraph is just part of the whole Fed way of
life. She can hear the snapping footsteps of the proctor behind her, walking
two paces behind, watching, keeping her eyes on those hands so they can't be
doing anything, like popping a Valium or something else that might throw off
the test.
     She stops in front of the bathroom door. The proctor  walks in front of
her, holds it open, and she walks in, followed by the proctor.
     The last  stall on  the  left is oversized, big enough for two  people.
Y.T.'s mom goes in, followed by the proctor, who closes and locks the  door.
Y.T.'s mom pulls down her panty hose, pulls up her skirt, squats over a pan,
pees.  The  proctor watches every drop go into the pan, picks it up, empties
it into a test tube that is already labeled with her name and today's date.
     Then it's back out to the  lobby, followed again by the proctor. You're
allowed to use the elevators on your way to the polygraph room, so you won't
be out of breath and sweaty when you get there.
     It used to be just a plain office with a chair and  some instruments on
a  table. Then they got the new, fancy polygraph system. Now it's like going
in for some kind of  high-tech medical scan. The room is completely rebuilt,
no vestige  of its original  function,  the window covered  over, everything
smooth and  beige  and smelling like a hospital. There's only one  chair, in
the middle. Y.T.'s mom goes and sits down in it, puts her  arms  on the arms
of the chair, nestles her  fingertips and  palms into the little depressions
that  await. The neoprene  fist  of the blood-pressure  cuff gropes blindly,
finds her  arm, and seizes  it. Meanwhile,  the room lights are dimming, the
door is closing, she's all  alone. The crown of thorns closes over her head,
she feels the pricks  of the electrodes through  her scalp, senses the  cool
air   flowing   down   over   her   shoulders   from   the   superconducting
quantum-interference  devices that serve as radar  into her brain. Somewhere
on the other side of  the wall, she knows,  half a dozen personnel techs are
sitting in a control room, looking at a big-screen blow-up of her pupils.
     Then she  feels a  burning prick in  her forearm and knows  she's  been
injected with something. Which means it's not a normal polygraph exam. Today
she's in for something special. The burning spreads throughout her body, her
heart  thumps, eyes water.  She's been shot  up with  caffeine to  make  her
hyper, make her talkative.
     So much  for getting any work done today. Sometimes these things go for
twelve hours.
     "What is your name?" a voice  says. It's an unnaturally calm and liquid
voice. Computer generated. That way, everything it says to her is impartial,
stripped of emotional content, she has no way to  pick up any cues as to how
the interrogation is going.
     The caffeine, and the other things that they inject  her with, screw up
her sense of time also.
     She hates these things, but  it happens to everyone from  time to time,
and when you  go to work for the Feds' you sign on the  dotted line and give
permission for it. In a way, it's a mark  of pride  and honor.  Everyone who
works for  the Feds has their  heart in it. Because if they didn't, it would
come out plain as day when it is their turn to sit in this chair.
     The questions  go on and on. Mostly  nonsense questions. "Have you ever
been  to Scotland? Is white  bread more expensive than wheat bread?" This is
just to get her settled down, get all systems running smoothly.  They  throw
out all the stuff they get from the first hour of the interrogation, because
it's lost in the noise.
     She  can feel herself relaxing  into  it. They  say that  after  a  few
polygraphs, you  learn to relax, the whole  thing  goes  quicker.  The chair
holds her in place, the caffeine keeps her  from getting drowsy, the sensory
deprivation clears out her mind.
     "What is your daughter's nickname?"
        "Y.T."
     "How do you refer to your daughter?"
     "I call her by her nickname. Y.T. She kind of insists on it."
     "Does Y.T. have a job?"
     "Yes. She works as Kourier. She works for RadiKS."
     "How much money does Y.T. make as a Kourier?"
     "I don't know. A few bucks here and there."
     "How often does she purchase new equipment for her job?"
     "I'm not aware. I don't really keep track of that."
     "Has Y.T. done anything unusual lately?"
     "That depends on what you mean." She knows  she's equivocating.  "She's
always doing things  that  some people might label as unusual." That doesn't
sound too  good, sounds like an endorsement  of nonconformity. "I guess what
I'm saying is, she's always doing unusual things."
     "Has Y.T. broken anything in the house recently?"
     "Yes." She gives up. The  Feds  already know this, her  house is bugged
and tapped, it's a wonder it doesn't short  out the electrical grid, all the
extra stuff wired into it. "She broke my computer."
     "Did she give an explanation for why she broke the computer?"
     "Yes. Sort of. I mean, if nonsense counts as an explanation."
     "What was her explanation?"
     "She was afraid - this is so ridiculous - she was afraid I was going to
catch a virus from it."
     "Was Y.T. also afraid of catching this virus?"
     "No. She said that only programmers could catch it."
     Why  are they asking her all of these questions? They have  all of this
stuff on tape.
     "Did you believe Y.T.'s explanation of why she broke the computer?"
     That's it.
     That's what they're after.
     They want to know the only thing they can't directly tap - what's going
on in her mind. They want to know whether she believes Y.T.'s virus story.
     And she knows she's making  a  mistake just  thinking  these  thoughts.
Because those supercooled SQUIDs around her  head are  picking it  up.  They
can't  tell what she's thinking. But they can tell that something's going on
in her  brain, that she's using parts of her brain right now that she didn't
use when they were asking the nonsense questions.
     In other  words, they can  tell that she  is  analyzing  the situation,
trying to figure them  out. And she wouldn't be doing that unless she wanted
to hide something.
     "What is it you want  to know?" she says. "Why don't you just come  out
and  ask me  directly? Let's  talk about this face to  face. Just  sit  down
together in a room like adults and talk about it."
     She feels another sharp prick  in her arm, feels numbness  and coldness
spreading all across her body over an interval of a couple of seconds as the
drug  mixes  with  her  bloodstream.  It's  getting  harder  to  follow  the
conversation.
     "What is your name?" the voice says.

        39

     The Alcan  -  the Alaska  Highway - is  the  world's longest  franchise
ghetto,  a one-dimensional  city two thousand miles long and a hundred  feet
wide, and  growing at  the rate of  a hundred miles a year, or as quickly as
people can  drive up to  the edge of the wilderness and  park their bagos in
the next available slot. It is the only way out for people who want to leave
America but don't have access to an airplane or a ship.
     It's all two-lane,  paved  but not well paved,  and  choked with mobile
homes, family vans, pickup trucks with camper backs. It  starts somewhere in
the middle of British Columbia, at the crossroads of Prince George, where  a
number of tributaries  feed in together to make a single northbound highway.
South of  there, the tributaries  split  into  a  delta of feeder roads that
crosses the  Canadian/American border at a dozen or more places  spread  out
over  five  hundred  miles from the fjords of British Columbia  to the  vast
striped  wheatlands of central Montana. Then it ties into the  American road
system,   which  serves   as   the   headwaters  of  the   migration.   This
five-hundred-mile  swath  of  territory  is   filled  with  would-be  arctic
explorers in great wheeled houses, optimistically  northbound, and more than
a few rejects  who  have  abandoned their bagos in  the  north  country  and
hitched  a  ride  back  down  south.  The  lumbering  bagos   and  top-heavy
four-wheelers form a moving slalom course for Hiro on his black motorcycle.
     All  these  beefy Caucasians with  guns!  Get  enough of them together,
looking for  the  America they always believed they'd grow  up  in, and they
glom together  like overcooked rice, form  integral,  starchy little  units.
With  their  power  tools,  portable generators,  weapons,  four-wheel-drive
vehicles, and personal computers, they are like beavers hyped up  on crystal
meth, manic engineers  without a blueprint, chewing  through the wilderness,
building things and abandoning them, altering the flow  of mighty rivers and
then moving on because the place ain't what it used to be.
     The byproduct of  the lifestyle is  polluted rivers, greenhouse effect,
spouse abuse, televangelists, and serial  killers. But as  long  as you have
that four-wheel-drive vehicle and  can keep driving north,  you can  sustain
it, keep moving just quickly enough to stay one step ahead of your own waste
stream. In twenty years, ten million white people will converge on the north
pole  and  park their  bagos  there.  The  low-grade  waste  heat  of  their
thermodynamically  intense  lifestyle will  turn the  crystalline  ice-scape
pliable and treacherous. It will melt a hole  through  the polar icecap, and
all that metal will sink to the bottom, sucking the biomass down with it.
     For  a fee, you  can  drive  into  a  Snooze 'n'  Cruise  franchise and
umbilical  your bago. The magic words are  "We Have Pull-Thrus," which means
you can enter the franchise, hook up, sleep,  unhook, and drive out  without
ever having to shift your land zeppelin into reverse.
     They used to claim it was a campground,  tried to design  the franchise
with  a rustic motif, but the customers kept chopping up those log-and-plank
signs  and  wooden picnic tables and using them for cooking fires. Nowadays,
the signs are electric  polycarbonate bubbles, the corporate identity is all
round and polished and smooth, in the same  way that a urinal is, to prevent
stuff from building up in  the cracks. Because it's  not really camping when
you don't have a house to go back to.
     Sixteen hours out of California, Hiro pulls into a Snooze 'n' Cruise on
the eastern slope of the Cascades  in northern Oregon.  He's several hundred
miles north of where  the Raft is,  and on the  wrong side of the mountains.
But there's a guy here he wants to interview.
     There are three parking lots. One out of sight down a  pitted dirt road
marked with falling-down  signs. One  a little bit closer, with scary hairys
hanging around its edges, silvery disks  flashing and popping under the full
moon as they aim the bottoms of their beer cans at the sky. And one right in
front of the Towne Hall, with gun-toting attendants. You have to pay to park
in that lot. Hiro, decides to pay. He leaves his bike pointing outward, puts
the bios into warm shutdown so he can hot-boot it later if he has to, throws
some Kongbucks at an attendant. Then he turns his head back and forth like a
hunting dog, sniffing the still air, trying to find the Glade.
     There's an area a hundred  feet away, under the moonlight,  where a few
people have been adventurous enough to  pitch a tent; usually, these are the
ones with the most guns, or the least to lose. Hiro goes  in that direction,
and pretty soon he can see the spreading canopy over the Glade.
     Everyone  else calls  it the Body Lot. It  is, simply, an open patch of
ground,  formerly grass  covered, now covered  with successive truckloads of
sand that have become mingled  with litter, broken glass, and human waste. A
canopy  is stretched over it  to keep  out the rain, and big mushroom-shaped
hoods  stick out of  the  ground every few feet, exhaling  warm air on  cold
nights. It is pretty cheap to sleep  in the Glade. It is  an innovation that
was created by some of the franchises farther south  and has been  spreading
northward along with its clientele.
     About  half a dozen  of  them are scattered around under  the  warm-air
vents,  bandaged against the chill in their  army blankets. A couple of them
have a small fire  going, are playing cards by its light. Hiro ignores them,
starts wandering around through the remainder.
     "Chuck Wrightson," he says. "Mr. President, are you here?"
     The second time  he says it, a pile of wool off to his  left begins  to
writhe and thrash  around. A head comes  out of  it. Hiro turns  toward him,
holds up his hands to prove he's unarmed.
     "Who is that?" he says. He is abjectly terrified. "Raven?"
     "Not Raven," Hiro says. "Don't worry.  Are you Chuck  Wrightson? Former
President of the Temporary Republic of Kenai and Kodiak?"
     "Yeah. What do you want? I don't have any money."
     "Just to talk. I work for CIC, and my job is to gather intelligence."
     "I need a fucking drink," Chuck Wrightson says.
     The Towne Hall is a big inflatable building in the middle of the Snooze
'n'  Cruise.  It is  Derelict Las Vegas:  convenience store,  video  arcade,
laundromat,  bar, liquor store, flea market, whorehouse. It  always seems to
be ruled by that small percentage of the human population that is capable of
partying until five in the morning every single night, and that has no other
function.
     Most  Towne Halls have a few  franchises-within-franchises. Hiro sees a
Kelley's Tap, which is about  the nicest trough you are likely to find  at a
Snooze 'n' Cruise, and leads Chuck Wrightson  into it. Chuck is wearing many
layers  of clothing that used to  be different colors. Now they are the same
color as his skin, which is khaki.
     All  the  businesses  in a Towne Hall, including this  bar,  look  like
something  you'd see on a prison ship - everything nailed down, brightly lit
up twenty-four  hours a  day,  all of the personnel sealed  up  behind thick
glass barriers that have gone  all yellow and murky. Security at  this Towne
Hall is provided by The Enforcers, so there  are a lot of steroid addicts in
black armorgel outfits, cruising up and down the  arcade in twos and threes,
enthusiastically violating people's human rights.
     Hiro and Chuck grab the closest thing they can find to  a corner table.
Hiro  buttonholes  a  waiter  and  surreptitiously orders a  pitcher  of Pub
Special, mixed half  and half  with nonalcoholic beer. This way, Chuck ought
to remain awake a little longer than he would otherwise.
     It doesn't take much to make him  open up. He's  like one of  these old
guys from a  disgraced presidential administration,  forced out  by scandal,
who devotes the rest of his life to finding people who will listen to him.
     "Yeah, I  was president  of TROKK for two years. And  I still  consider
myself the president of the government in exile."
     Hiro  tries  to keep  himself  from rolling  his  eyes.  Chuck seems to
notice.
     "Okay, okay, so that's not much. But TROKK  was a thriving country, for
a while. There's a lot of people  who'd like to see something like that rise
again. I mean,  the only  thing  that  forced us  out -  the only way  those
maniacs were able to seize  power -was just totally, you know - " He doesn't
seem  to have  words  for it. "How  could  you have  expected something like
that?"
     "How were you forced out? Was there a civil war?"
     "There were some uprisings,  early on. And  there were  remote parts of
Kodiak  where we never had a firm grip on power. But there was never a civil
war per se. See, the Americans liked our  government. The  Americans had all
the weapons, the equipment, the infrastructure. The Orthos were just a bunch
of hairy guys running around in the woods."
     "Orthos?"
     "Russian Orthodox. At first they were a tiny minority. Mostly Indians -
you know, Tlingits and Aleuts  who'd been converted by the Russians hundreds
of  years ago.  But when things  got  crazy in  Russia, they started to pour
across the Dateline in all kinds of different boats."
     "And they didn't want a constitutional democracy."
     "No. No way."
     "What did they want? A tsar?"
     "No.  Those tsar guys  - the traditionalists -  stayed in  Russia.  The
Orthos who came to TROKK were total rejects. They had been forced out by the
mainline Russian Orthodox church."
     "Why?"
     "Yeretic.  That's how Russians say  'heretic.' The Orthos  who came  to
TROKK were a new sect - all Pentecostals. They were tied in somehow with the
Reverend Wayne's Pearly Gates.  We had missionaries from Texas coming up all
the  goddamn time to meet with  them. They were always speaking in  tongues.
The mainline Russian Orthodox church thought it was the work of the devil."
     "So how many of  these Pentecostal Russian Orthodox people came over to
TROKK?"
     "Jeez, a hell of a lot of them. At least fifty thousand."
     "How many Americans were in TROKK?"
     "Close to a hundred thousand."
     "Then how exactly did the Orthos manage to take the place over?"
     "Well, one morning we woke up and there was an Airstream parked in  the
middle  of Government  Square in New Washington,  right in the middle of all
the bagos where we had set up  the government. The Orthos had towed it there
during the  night,  then  took the  wheels off  so it  couldn't be moved. We
figured it was a protest action. We told them to  move it out of there. They
refused and issued a  proclamation, in Russian. When we got this damn  thing
translated, it  turned  out to be an order  for us to pack up  and leave and
turn over power to the Orthos.
     "Well, this  was ridiculous. So we went up to this Airstream to move it
out of there, and Gurov's waiting for us with this nasty grin on his face."
     "Gurov?"
     "Yeah. One of the Refus  who came over  the  Dateline  from the  Soviet
Union. Former KGB  general turned religious fanatic. He was kind of like the
Minister  of  Defense for  the  government that the Orthos set up. So  Gurov
opens the  side  door of  the Airstream and  lets  us get a  load of  what's
inside."
     "What was inside?"
     "Well, mostly it  was  a  bunch  of equipment,  you  know,  a  portable
generator,  electrical  wiring,  a  control panel, and so  forth. But in the
middle of the trailer,  there's this big black  cone  sitting on the  floor.
About the shape of an ice cream cone, except  it's about five feet long  and
it's smooth and black. And  I asked what the hell is that thing.  And  Gurov
says,  that  thing is  a  ten-megaton  hydrogen  bomb  we  scavenged from  a
ballistic missile. A city-buster. Any more questions?"
     "So you capitulated."
     "Couldn't do much else."
     "Do you  know how  the Orthos came to be  in possession  of  a hydrogen
bomb?"
     Chuck Wrightson clearly knows. He sucks  in his  deepest breath  of the
evening, lets it out, shakes his head, staring  off over Hiro's shoulder. He
takes a couple of nice long swigs from his glass of beer.
     "There  was a Soviet nuclear-missile submarine. The commander was named
Ovchinnikov. He  was religiously faithful, but  he 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 nuke-sub  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.
     "The Aleuts just paddle out in  their kayaks and catch a wave. They can
outrun a steamship, you know."
     "Didn't know that."
     "Anyway,  Raven went to one of these Refu  camps and passed himself off
as a Siberian tribesman. You can't tell  some of  those Siberians apart from
our Indians. The Orthos apparently had  some confederates in these camps who
bumped Raven up to the head of the line, so he got to be on the submarine."
     "But you said there was a metal detector."
     "Didn't help. He uses glass knives. Chips them out of plate glass. It's
the sharpest blade in the universe, you know."
     "Didn't know that either."
     "Yeah. The edge is only a single  molecule wide.  Doctors use them  for
eye surgery - they can cut your cornea and not leave a scar. There's Indians
who make a living doing that, you know. Chipping out eye scalpels."
     "Well, you learn something new every day. That kind of a knife would be
sharp enough to go through bulletproof fabric, I guess," Hiro says.
     Chuck Wrightson  shrugs.  "I lost track of the  number of people  Raven
snuffed who were wearing bulletproof fabric."
     Hiro says, "I thought  he must be carrying some kind of high-tech laser
knife or something."
     "Think again. Glass knife. He had  one on board  the  submarine. Either
smuggled  it on  board  with him,  or else  found  a  chunk of glass on  the
submarine and chipped it out himself."
     "And?"
     Chuck gets his thousand-yard stare  again, takes another slug of  beer.
"On a sub, you know, there's  no place for things to drain to. The survivors
claimed that the  blood  was knee-deep all through the submarine. Raven just
killed everyone. Everyone except the Orthos, a skeleton crew, and some other
Refus who  were able  to barricade themselves  in little compartments around
the ship. The survivors say,"  Chuck says, taking another swig, "that it was
quite a night."
     "And  he forced  them  to  steer the submarine  into  the hands  of the
Orthos."
     "To  their  anchorage  off  Kodiak,"  Chuck says. "The Orthos  were all
ready. They had  put together a crew of ex-Navy  men, guys who had worked on
nuke subs in the past - X-rays, they call them - and they came and  took the
sub over. As for us, we had no idea that any of this had happened. Until one
of the warheads showed up in our goddamn front yard."
     Chuck  glances up  above Hiro's head,  noticing  someone. Hiro feels  a
light tap on his shoulder. "Excuse me, sir?" a man is saying. "Pardon me for
just a second?"

        40

     Hiro turns around. It's  a big porky white man with wavy,  slicked-back
red hair and a beard. He's got a baseball  cap perched on top  of  his head,
tilted way  back to  expose the following  words, tattooed in block  letters
across his forehead:
        MOOD SWINGS
     RACIALLY INSENSITIVE
     Hiro is looking up at all of this over the curving horizon of the man's
flannel-clad belly.
     "What is it?" Hiro says.
     "Well, sir, I'm sorry to disturb you in the middle of your conversation
with this gentleman here. But me and my friends were just wondering. Are you
a lazy  shiftless  watermelon-eating black-ass nigger,  or a  sneaky  little
v.d.-infected gook?"
     The man reaches  up, pulls the brim of his  baseball  cap downward. Now
Hiro can  see the  Confederate  flag printed  on the  front, the embroidered
words "New South Africa Franchulate #153."
     Hiro  pushes himself  up over  the  table,  spins  around,  and  slides
backward on his ass toward Chuck, trying to get  the  table  between him and
the  New South African.  Chuck has  conveniently  vanished, so Hiro  ends up
standing with his back comfortably to the wall, looking out over the bar.
     At the same time, a dozen  or so other  men are standing up from  their
tables, forming up behind the first one in a grinning, sunburned  phalanx of
Confederate flags and sideburns.
     "Let's see," Hiro says, "is that some kind of a trick question?"
     There are a lot of Towne Halls in a lot of Snooze 'n' Cruise franchises
where you  have  to check your weapons  at the entrance. This  is not one of
them.
     Hiro isn't sure if that  is bad or good. Without weapons, the New South
Africans  would just beat the crap out  of him. With weapons, Hiro can fight
back, but  the stakes  are higher. Hiro is  bulletproof up to his  neck, but
that just  means the New South Africans will  all be going for a  head shot.
And they pride themselves on marksmanship. It is a fetish with them.
     "Isn't there an NSA franchise down the road?" Hiro says.
     "Yeah," says  the point man, who has  a long,  spreading body and short
stumpy legs. "It's heaven. It really is. Ain't no place on earth like a  New
South Africa."
     "Well, then if you don't mind my asking,"  Hiro says,  "if it's so damn
nice, why don't y'all go back to your egg sac and hang out there?"
     "There is one problem with New South Africa," the guy says. "Don't mean
to sound unpatriotic, but it's true."
     "And what is that problem?" Hiro says.
     "There's no niggers, gooks, or kikes there to beat the shit out of."
     "Ah. That is a problem," Hiro says. "Thank you."
     "For what?"
     "For announcing your intentions - giving me the right to do this."
     Then Hiro cuts his head off.
     What else can he do? There are at least twelve of them. They  have made
a  point  of  blocking  the  only  exit.  They  have  just  announced  their
intentions. And presumably they are all carrying heat. Besides, this kind of
thing  is going to happen  to him about every ten  seconds when he's on  the
Raft.
     The New South African has no idea what's coming, but he starts to react
as Hiro is swinging the katana  at his neck, so he  is flying backward  when
the decapitation occurs. That is good, because about half  his blood  supply
comes  lofting out the  top  of  his neck. Twin jets, one from each carotid.
Hiro doesn't get a drop on himself.
     In the Metaverse, the blade  just passes right through, if you swing it
quickly  enough. Here in Reality, Hiro's expecting a powerful shock when his
blade hits  the New South African's neck,  like when you hit a baseball  the
wrong way, but he  hardly feels  a thing. It just  goes  right  through  and
almost swings  around  and buries itself in the  wall.  He must  have gotten
lucky  and hit a  gap  between vertebrae. Hiro's training comes back to him,
oddly. He forgot to squeeze  it off, forgot  to stop the  blade himself, and
that's bad form.
     Even though he's expecting it, he's startled for a minute. This sort of
thing doesn't happen with avatars. They just fall down. For an astonishingly
long time,  he just stands there and looks at the guy's body. Meanwhile, the
airborne  cloud  of blood  is  seeking  its  level, dripping  from  the hung
ceiling, spattering down from shelves behind the  bar. A  wino sitting there
nursing a double shot of vodka shakes and shivers, staring into his glass at
the galactic swirl of a trillion red cells dying in the ethanol.
     Hiro  swaps a  few  long glances  with  the New  South  Africans,  like
everyone in  the bar is trying to come to a consensus as to what will happen
next. Should they laugh? Take a picture? Run away? Call an ambulance?
     He makes  his way  around toward  the  exit by running across  people's
tables.  It  is rude, but  other patrons scoot back, some of them are  quick
enough to  snatch  their beers out  of his  way, and no  one  gives him  any
hassles.  The sight of  the bare katana  inspires everyone  to a practically
Nipponese level of politeness.  There  are  a couple more New South Africans
blocking Hiro's way out, but not because they want to stop anyone. It's just
where they happen to be standing when  they  go into  shock.  Hiro  decides,
reflexively, not to kill them.
     And Hiro is off into the lurid main avenue  of the Towne Hall, a tunnel
of flickering and pulsating loglo through which black creatures sprint  like
benighted  sperm up the old  fallopians, sharp  angular  things  clenched in
their hands. They are The Enforcers. They make the average MetaCop look like
Ranger Rick.
     Gargoyle time. Hiro  switches everything on: infrared,  millimeter-wave
radar, ambient-sound  processing.  The  infrared doesn't do  much  in  these
circumstances, but the  radar picks out all the weapons, highlights them  in
The  Enforcers'  hands, identifies them by make, model, and ammunition type.
They're all fully automatic.
     But  The Enforcers and  the New South Africans don't need  radar to see
Hiro's katana with blood and spinal fluid running down the blade.
     The music of Vitaly Chernobyl and the Meltdowns is blasting through bad
speakers  all  around him. It  is their first single to  hit  the  Billboard
charts,  entitled "My  Heart Is a Smoking  Hole in the Ground." The  ambient
sound  processing cuts it to a more reasonable  level,  evens  out the nasty
distortion from the speakers  so  that he can hear his roommate singing more
clearly. Which makes it all  particularly surreal. It just goes to show that
he's out of his element. Doesn't  belong here. Lost in the biomass. If there
was  any  justice,  he could jump into those speakers and trace up the wires
like a digital sylph, follow the  grid back to L.A., where he belongs, there
on top of the world, where everything comes from,  buy Vitaly a drink, crawl
into his futon.
     He  stumbles forward  helplessly  as something  terrible happens to his
back.  It feels like being massaged with a hundred ballpeen  hammers. At the
same  time, a yellow sputtering light  overrides the loglo. A  screaming red
display  flashes up on  the goggles informing him  that the  millimeter-wave
radar has noticed a stream of  bullets headed in his direction and would you
like to know where they came from, sir?
     Hiro has just been shot in  the  back with a burst of machine-gun fire.
All of the bullets have slapped into his vest and dropped to  the floor, but
in doing so  they have  cracked  about half of the ribs on that side of  his
body and bruised a few internal organs. He turns around, which hurts.
     The Enforcer has given up on bullets and whipped out another weapon. It
says so right  on Hiro's goggles:  PACIFIC ENFORCEMENT HARDWARE,  INC. MODEL
SX-29 RESTRAINT PROJECTION DEVICE (LOOGIE GUN). Which is what he should have
used in the first place.
     You can't just carry a sword around as  an empty  threat. You shouldn't
draw it,  or  keep it drawn, unless  you  intend to kill someone.  Hiro runs
toward  The  Enforcer, raising the  katana to strike. The Enforcer  does the
proper thing, namely, gets the hell out of his way. The silver ribbon of the
katana shines up above the  crowd. It attracts Enforcers and repels everyone
else, so  as Hiro runs down the center of the  Towne Hall, he  has no one in
front of him and many shiny dark creatures behind him.
     He turns  off all of the  techno-shit in his  goggles.  All it does  is
confuse him; he stands there  reading statistics about his own death even as
it's happening  to him. Very post-modern.  Time to get immersed  in Reality,
like all the people around him.
     Not even Enforcers will fire  their big  guns  in a crowd, unless  it's
point-blank range, or they're in a really bad mood. A few loogies shoot past
Hiro,  already so spread out  as to be nothing  more than  an annoyance, and
splat into bystanders, wrapping them in sticky gossamer veils.
     Somewhere between the 3-D video-game arcade and the display window full
of terminally bored prostitutes, Hiro's eyes clear up and he sees a miracle:
the  exit  of  the  inflatable dome,  where  the doors  exhale  a  breeze of
synthetic beer breath and atomized body fluids into the cool night air.
     Bad things and good things are happening  in quick succession. The next
bad thing happens when a steel grate falls down to block the doors.
     What the hell, it's  an inflatable  building. Hiro  turns  on the radar
just for a moment and the walls seem to drop away and become invisible; he's
seeing through them now, into the  forest of  steel outside. It doesn't take
long  to locate the parking lot where he left his bike, supposedly under the
protection of some armed attendants.
     Hiro fakes toward the whorehouse,  then cuts directly toward an exposed
section of wall. The fabric  of the building is tough, but his katana slices
a six-foot rent  through  it  with a single  gliding motion,  and then  he's
outside, spat out of the hole on a jet of fetid air.
     After that  - after Hiro  gets onto his  motorcycle, and  the New South
Africans  get  into  their all-terrain  pickups, and  The Enforcers get into
their slick black Enforcer mobiles,  and  they all go screaming out onto the
highway - after that it's just a chase scene.

        41

     Y.T. has been to some unusual places in  her career. She has  the visas
of some three dozen countries laminated onto her  chest. And  on  top of the
real countries  she has picked up and/or  delivered to such charming  little
vacation spots as the  Terminal  Island Sacrifice Zone and the encampment