controlled manner. He put it in a bottle. An informational warfare agent for
him  to use  at his  discretion.  When it  is  placed  into a  computer,  it
snow-crashes the computer  by causing it  to infect itself with new viruses.
But it is much more devastating when  it  goes into the mind of  a hacker, a
person  who  has  an  understanding  of  binary  code  built  into the  deep
structures  of  his brain. The binary metavirus will destroy  the mind of  a
hacker."
     "So  Rife can  control  two  kinds of people," Ng says. "He can control
Pentecostals by using me  written in  the mother  tongue. And he can control
hackers in a much  more violent fashion by damaging their brains with binary
viruses."
     "Exactly."
     "What do you think Rife wants?" Ng says.
     "He wants to be Ozymandias, King  of Kings. Look, it's simple:  Once he
converts you to his religion, he can control you with me. And he can convert
millions of people to his religion because it spreads like a fucking virus -
people  have no resistance to it because no  one is  used  to thinking about
religion, people aren't rational enough to  argue about this kind  of thing.
Basically, anyone who reads the National Enquirer or  watches pro  wrestling
on TV  is  easy  to convert. And  with Snow  Crash  as a promoter, it's even
easier to get converts.
     "Rife's key realization  was that  there's no difference between  modem
culture and  Sumerian.  We  have  a  huge  workforce that  is illiterate  or
alliterate  and relies on TV -  which  is sort of an oral tradition. And  we
have a small,  extremely literate power elite  -  the people who go into the
Metaverse, basically  - who  understand  that information  is power, and who
control  society  because they have this semimystical ability to speak magic
computer languages.
     "That makes us a big stumbling block to Rife's plan. People like L. Bob
Rife can't do anything without us  hackers. And even if he could convert us,
he wouldn't be able to use us, because what we do  is creative in nature and
can't be duplicated by people running me. But he  can  threaten us  with the
blunt instrument of Snow Crash. That, I think, is what happened to Da5id. It
may  have  been  an experiment, just to see if Snow  Crash worked on  a real
hacker, and it may have been a  warning shot intended to  demonstrate Rife's
power to the hacker community. The  message:  If Asherah gets broadcast into
the technological priesthood - "
     "Napalm on wildflowers," Ng says.
     "As far as I know, there's no way to stop the binary virus. But there's
an antidote  to Rife's bogus religion. The nam-shub of Enki still exists. He
gave a copy to his  son  Marduk, who passed it  on to Hammurabi. Now, Marduk
may or may not have been a real  person. The point  is that Enki went out of
his way to leave the impression that  he had passed  on his nam-shub in some
form. In other words, he  was planting a message that  later generations  of
hackers were supposed to decode, if Asherah should rise again.
     "I am fairly certain that the information we need is contained within a
clay envelope  that was excavated from the ancient Sumerian city of Eridu in
southern Iraq ten years ago. Eridu  was  the  seat of Enki; in other  words,
Enki was the local  en of  Eridu,  and the temple of Eridu contained his me,
including the nam-shub that we are looking for."
     "Who excavated this clay envelope?"
     "The Eridu  dig  was  sponsored entirely by  a  religious university in
Bayview, Texas."
     "L. Bob Rife's?"
     "You  got it.  He created an archaeology department whose sole function
was to dig up the city of Eridu, locate the temple where Enki stored all  of
his me, and  take it all home.  L. Bob  Rife wanted  to reverse-engineer the
skills that Enki possessed; by  analyzing Enki's me, he wanted to create his
very own neurolinguistic hackers, who could  write new me  that would become
the  ground rules, the  program,  for  the  new  society that Rife wants  to
create."
     "But among these me is a copy of the nam-shub of Enki," Ng says, "which
is dangerous to Rife's plan."
     "Right.  He wanted  that tablet, too - not to analyze but  to  keep  to
himself, so no one could use it against him."
     "If you  can  obtain  a copy of this  nam-shub," Ng  says, "what effect
would it have?"
     "If we could transmit the nam-shub of  Enki  to  all of the en  on  the
Raft, they would relay  it  to all of  the Raft people.  It would  jam their
mother-tongue neurons and prevent Rife  from programming them with new  me,"
Hiro says. "But we really need to get this done before the  Raft breaks up -
before the Refus all come ashore. Rife talks to  his  en  through a  central
transmitter  on the Enterprise,  which  I take to be  a fairly  short-range,
line-of-sight type of thing. Pretty soon he'll use this system to distribute
a big me that will cause all the Refus to come ashore as a unified army with
coordinated marching orders. In other  words, the Raft  will break  up,  and
after that it won't be possible to  reach all of these people anymore with a
single transmission. So we have to do it as soon as possible."
     "Mr. Rife will be most unhappy," Ng predicts. "He will try to retaliate
by unleashing Snow Crash against the technological priesthood."
     "I know that," Hiro  says  "but I  can  only worry about one thing at a
time. I could use a little help here."
     "Easier said than done," Ng says. "To reach the Core, one must fly over
the Raft or drive a small boat through its midst. Rife has a million  people
there  with  rifles  and missile launchers. Even  high-tech weapons  systems
cannot defeat organized small-arms fire on a massive scale."
     "Get some choppers out to  this vicinity, then," Hiro says. "Something.
Anything. If I can get my hands on the nam-shub of  Enki and infect everyone
on the Raft with it, then you can approach safely."
     "We'll see what we can come up with," Uncle Enzo says.
     "Fine," Hiro says. "Now, what about Reason?"
     Ng mumbles  something  and a  card appears  in his hand.  "Here's a new
version of  the  system software," he  says. "It  should  be  a  little less
buggy."
     "A little less?"
     "No piece of software is ever bug free," Ng says.
     Uncle Enzo says, "I guess there's a little  bit  of Asherah in  all  of
us."

        58

     Hiro finds his own way out and takes the elevator all the way back down
to the Street. When he exits the neon skyscraper, a black-and-white  girl is
sitting on his motorcycle, messing with the controls.
     "Where are you?" she says.
     "I'm on the Raft, too. Hey, we just made twenty-five million dollars."
     He is sure that just  this one  time, Y.T.  is going to be impressed by
something that he says. But she's not.
     "That'll  buy me a really happening funeral when they mail me home in a
piece of Tupperware," she says.
     "Why would that happen?"
     "I'm in trouble," she admits - for the first time in her life. "I think
my boyfriend is going to kill me."
     "Who's your boyfriend?"
     "Raven."
     If  avatars  could turn pale and woozy and  have to  sit  down  on  the
sidewalk, Hiro's would. "Now I know why he has POOR IMPULSE CONTROL tattooed
across his forehead."
     "This  is great. I was hoping to get a  little cooperation  or at least
maybe some advice," she says.
     "If you think he's going to kill you, you're wrong, because if you were
right, you'd be dead," Hiro says.
     "Depends  on  your assumptions," she  says. She  goes on to  tell him a
highly entertaining story about a dentata.
     "I'm going to try to help you," Hiro says, "but I'm not necessarily the
safest guy on the Raft to hang out with, either."
     "Did you hook up with your girlfriend yet?"
     "No. But I have high hopes for that. Assuming I can stay alive."
     "High hopes for what?"
     "Our relationship."
     "Why?" she asks. "What's changed between then and now?"
     This  is one  of  these utterly  simple  and  obvious questions that is
irritating  because Hiro's not sure of the answer. "Well,  I think I figured
out what she was doing - why she came here."
     "So?"
     Another simple  and obvious question. "So, I feel like I understand her
now."
     "You do?"
     "Yeah, well, sort of."
     "And is that supposed to be a good thing?"
     "Well, sure."
     "Hiro, you are such a geek. She's a  woman,  you're a dude. You're  not
supposed to understand her. That's not what she's after."
     "Well, what is she  after, do you suppose - keeping in mind that you've
never actually met the woman, and that you're going out with Raven?"
     "She  doesn't want you  to understand her. She knows that's impossible.
She just wants you to understand yourself. Everything else is negotiable."
     "You figure?"
     "Yeah. Definitely."
     "What makes you think I don't understand myself?"
     "It's just obvious. You're a really smart hacker and the greatest sword
fighter  in the world - and you're delivering  pizzas and promoting concerts
that you don't make any money off of. How do you expect her to - "
     The rest is  drowned out  by sound breaking in  through  his earphones,
coming in from Reality: a screeching, tearing noise riding in high and sharp
above the rumbling noise of  heavy impact. Then there is just the  screaming
of  terrified  neighborhood children, the cries of  men in Tagalog, and  the
groaning and  popping sound of a steel  fishing trawler collapsing under the
pressure of the sea.
     "What was that?" Y.T. says.
     "Meteorite," Hiro says.
     "Huh?''
     "Stay tuned," Hiro says, "I think I just got into a Gatling gun duel."
     "Are you going to sign off?"
     "Just shut up for a second."

     This neighborhood is U-shaped, built around a sort of  cove in the Raft
where  half a dozen rusty  old fishing boats are tied  up.  A floating pier,
pieced together from mismatched pontoons, runs around the edge.
     The empty trawler, the one they've been cutting up for  scrap, has been
hit by a burst  from the big  gun on the deck of the Enterprise. It looks as
though  a big wave picked it  up and tried to wrap it  around a pillar:  one
whole  side is collapsed in, the bow and the stem are actually  bent  toward
each other. Its  back is broken.  Its empty  holds are ingurgitating a vast,
continuous rush  of murky brown seawater, sucking in that  variegated sewage
like a drowning man sucks air. It's heading for the bottom fast.
     Hiro shoves  Reason back into the  zodiac,  jumps  in, and  starts  the
motor. He doesn't have time to untie the boat  from the pontoon, so he snaps
through the line with his wakizashi and takes off.
     The pontoons  are  already sagging inward and down, pulled  together by
the ruined ship's mooring  lines. The trawler is falling off  the surface of
the water, trying to pull in the entire neighborhood like a black hole.
     A couple of Filipino  men are already out with short knives, hacking at
the stuff that webs the neighborhood together, trying to cut loose the parts
that  can't be salvaged.  Hiro  buzzes over  to  a pontoon  that is  already
knee-deep under  the  water, finds  the ropes that connect it  to  the  next
pontoon,  which  is  even more  deeply submerged, and probes  them with  his
katana.  The  remaining  ropes pop like  rifle shots, and  then  the pontoon
breaks loose, shooting up to the surface so fast that it almost capsizes the
zodiac.
     A whole section  of  the pontoon  pier,  along the side of the trawler,
can't be salvaged. Men with fishing knives and  women with kitchen  cleavers
are  down on their knees, the  water already  rising up under  their  chins,
cutting  their  neighborhood  free.  It breaks  loose one  rope  at  a time,
haphazardly,  tossing  the Filipinos up into the  air. A  boy with a machete
cuts the  one remaining line, which  pops up and lashes him across the face.
Finally, the raft is  free and flexible once again, bobbing and waving  back
toward  equilibrium,  and  where  the  trawler was, there's  nothing  but  a
bubbling whirlpool that  occasionally  vomits  up a loose  piece of floating
debris.
     Some others  have  already  clambered up onto the fishing boat that was
tied up next to the trawler. It has suffered  some damage,  too: several men
cluster around  and  lean over  the rail to examine a couple of large impact
craters on the side. Each  hole  is surrounded by a shiny dinner plate-sized
patch that has  been blown free  of  all paint  and rust. In the middle is a
hole the size of a golf ball.
     Hiro decides it's time to leave.
     But before  he  does, he reaches into his  coverall, pulls out a  money
clip, and counts out a few thousand Kongbucks. He  puts them on the deck and
weighs them down under the corner of a red steel gasoline tank. Then he hits
the road.
     He   has  no  trouble   finding  the  canal  that  leads  to  the  next
neighborhood. His paranoia level is way up, and so he glances back and forth
as he pilots his way out of there, looking up all the  little alleys. In one
of those niches, he sees a wirehead, mumbling something.
     The next neighborhood is Malaysian. Several dozen of them  are gathered
near  the  bridge,  attracted  by  the  noise.  As  Hiro  is entering  their
neighborhood, he sees men running down  the  undulating  pontoon bridge that
serves as the main street, carrying guns and knives. The local constabulary.
More  men  of the  same description emerge from the byways  and  skiffs  and
sampans, joining them.
     A tremendous whacking  and  splintering and tearing noise  sounds right
beside him,  as though  a  lumber truck has just crashed into  a brick wall.
Water splashes his body,  and an exhalation  of steam passes  over his face.
Then it's  quiet again. He turns around, slowly and reluctantly. The nearest
pontoon isn't there  anymore, just a bloody, turbulent soup of splinters and
chaff,
     He turns around and looks behind him. The wirehead he saw a few seconds
ago is  out in the open now, standing all by himself at the edge of a  raft.
Everyone else  has  cleared  out of  there.  He  can see the  bastard's lips
moving. Hiro whips the boat around and returns to him, drawing his wakizashi
with his free hand, and cuts him down on the spot.
     But there will be more. Hiro knows they're all out looking for him now.
The gunners  up there on the Enterprise don't  care how many of  these Refus
they have to kill in order to nail Hiro.
     From the Malaysian neighborhood, he passes into a Chinese neighborhood.
This  one's a lot more built  up,  it contains a number of steel  ships  and
barges. It extends off into  the distance, away from the Core, for as far as
Hiro can see from his worthless sea-level vantage point.
     He's being  watched by a man high up in the  superstructure  of one  of
those Chinese ships, another wirehead. Hiro can see  the guy's  jaw flapping
as he sends updates to Raft Central.
     The  big Gatling gun on the deck of the Enterprise opens  up again  and
fires  another  meteorite  of depleted uranium  slugs  into  the side  of an
unoccupied  barge about twenty feet  from Hiro. The entire side of the barge
chases itself inward, like the steel has become liquid and is running down a
drain,  and the metal  turns bright as  shock  waves simply  turn that thick
layer of rust into an aerosol, blast it  free from the steel borne on a wave
of  sound so powerful that it hurts Hiro down inside his chest and makes him
feel sick.
     The gun is radar controlled. It's very accurate when it's shooting at a
piece of metal. It's a lot  less accurate when it's trying to  hit flesh and
blood.
     "Hiro? What the fuck's going on?" Y.T. is shouting into his earphones.
     "Can't talk. Get me to my office," Hiro says. "Pull me onto the back of
the motorcycle and then drive it there."
     "I don't know how to drive a motorcycle," she says.
     "It's only got one control. Twist the throttle and it goes."
     And then he points  his boat out toward  the  open water and drills it.
Dimly superimposed on Reality, he can see the black-and-white figure of Y.T.
sitting in front of him on the motorcycle; she reaches out  for the throttle
and both of them jerk forward and slam into the wall of a skyscraper at Mach
1.
     He  turns off  his view  of the Metaverse entirely, making  the goggles
totally transparent. Then he switches his  system into  full gargoyle  mode:
enhanced visible  light  with  false-color  infrared,  plus  millimeter-wave
radar.
     His view of the world goes into  grainy black and white,  much brighter
than it was before. Here and  there, certain objects glow fuzzily in pink or
red. This comes from the infrared,  and it means  that these things are warm
or hot; people are pink, engines and fires are red.
     The millimeter-wave radar stuff is superimposed  much more cleanly  and
crisply in  neon  green.  Anything  made of  metal  shows up.  Hiro  is  now
navigating  down a grainy, charcoal-gray  avenue of water lined with grainy,
light gray pontoon bridges tied up to crisp neon-green barges and ships that
glow reddishly from place to place, wherever they are generating  heat. It's
not pretty. In fact, it's so ugly that it  probably  explains  why gargoyles
are, in general,  so socially retarded. But it's a lot  more useful than the
charcoal-on-ebony view he had before.
     And it saves his life. As he's  buzzing down a curving, narrow canal, a
narrow  green parabola  appears hanging  across the water in  front of  him,
suddenly rising out of the water and snapping into a perfectly straight line
at neck level. It's a piece of piano wire. Hiro ducks under it, waves to the
young Chinese men who set the booby trap, and keeps going.
     The radar picks out three fuzzy pink individuals holding Chinese AK-47s
standing  by  the side of the channel. Hiro  cuts  into  a side channel  and
avoids them. But it's a narrower channel, and he's not sure where it goes.
     "Y.T.," he says, "where the hell are we?"
     "Driving  down the street toward your house. We  overshot it  about six
times."
     Up ahead,  the channel dead-ends. Hiro does a one-eighty. With the  big
heat exchanger dragging behind it, the boat is not nearly as maneuverable or
as  fast as Hiro wants it  to be.  He passes back underneath the  booby-trap
wire and starts exploring another narrow channel that he passed earlier.
     "Okay, we're home. You're sitting at your desk," Y.T. says.
     "Okay," Hiro says, "this is going to be tricky."
     He coasts down to a dead stop  in the  middle  of the  channel, makes a
scan  for   militia  men  and  wireheads,  and  finds  none.   There   is  a
five-foot-tall  Chinese  woman in  the boat  next to him  holding  a  square
cleaver, chopping something. Hiro figures it's  a risk he can handle, so  he
turns off Reality and returns to the Metaverse.
     He's sitting at his desk. Y.T.  is standing  next to him, arms crossed,
radiating Attitude.
     "Librarian?"
     "Yes, sir," the Librarian says, padding in.
     "I need blueprints of the aircraft carrier Enterprise. Fast. If you can
get me something in 3-D, that'd be great."
     "Yes, sir," the Librarian says.
     Hiro reaches out and grabs Earth.
     "YOU ARE HERE," he says.
     Earth spins around until he's staring straight  down at  the Raft. Then
it plunges toward him  at  a terrifying rate.  It takes all of three seconds
for him to get there.
     If he  were  in  some  normal, stable  part of  the  world  like  lower
Manhattan, this would actually work in 3-D. Instead, he's got to put up with
two-dimensional satellite imagery. He  is looking at a  red dot superimposed
on a black-and-white photograph of the Raft. The red dot is in the middle of
a narrow black channel of water: YOU ARE HERE.
     It's still an  incredible maze. But it's a lot easier  to solve  a maze
when you're looking down on  it. Within about sixty seconds, he's out in the
open Pacific.  It's  a  foggy gray dawn. The plume of steam  coming  out  of
Reason's heat exchanger just thickens it a little.
     "Where the hell are you?" Y.T. says.
     "Leaving the Raft."
     "Gee, thanks for all your help."
     "I'll be  back  in  a  minute. I just  need  a  second  to  get  myself
organized."
     "There's a lot of scary guys around here," Y.T. says. "They're watching
me."
     "It's okay," Hiro says. "I'm sure they'll listen to Reason."

        59

     He flips open the big suitcase. The screen  is still on, showing him  a
flat desktop display with a menu bar at the top. He uses a trackball to pull
down a menu:
        HELP
     Getting ready
     Firing Reason
     Tactical tips
     Maintenance
     Resupply
     Troubleshooting
     Miscellaneous
     Under  the "Getting ready" heading is  more  information than he  could
possibly want on  that subject, including  half an hour of badly overexposed
video  starring a stocky,  scar-faced Asian guy  whose  face seems paralyzed
into a permanent look of disdain. He puts on his clothes. He limbers up with
special stretching exercises. He opens up Reason. He checks the  barrels for
damage or dirt. Hiro fast-forwards through all of this.
     Finally the stocky Asian man puts on the gun.
     Fisheye wasn't really using Reason the right way; it comes with its own
mount that straps to your body so that you can soak up the recoil  with your
pelvis, taking the  force right in your  body's center of gravity. The mount
has shock  absorbers and  miniature hydraulic goodies to compensate  for the
weight and the recoil. If you put all this stuff on the right way, the gun's
a lot easier to use accurately. And if you're goggled into a computer, it'll
superimpose a handy cross hairs over whatever the gun's aimed at.
     "Your information, sir," the Librarian says.
     "Are you smart enough to tie that information into YOU ARE  HERE?" Hiro
says.
     "I'll see  what  I can do, sir. The formats appear  to be reconcilable.
Sir?"
     "Yes?"
     "These  blueprints  are several years  old. Since  they were made,  the
Enterprise has been purchased by a private owner - "
     "Who may have made some changes. Gotcha."
     Hiro's back in Reality.
     He finds  an open boulevard of water  that leads inward to the Core. It
has  a  sort of  pedestrian catwalk  running  along one side  of it,  pieced
together  haphazardly,  a  seemingly   endless   procession  of  gangplanks,
pontoons, logs, abandoned skiffs, aluminum canoes, oil  drums. Anywhere else
in the  world, it would be an obstacle course; here in the Fifth World, it's
a superhighway.
     Hiro takes the boat straight down the middle, not very fast. If he runs
into something, the boat might flip. Reason will sink.  And  Hiro's strapped
onto Reason.
     Flipping into  gargoyle mode, he can clearly  make  out a sparse picket
line  of hemispherical  domes  running  along  the edge  of the Enterprise's
flight deck. The radar gear thoughtfully identifies these, onscreen, as  the
radar  antennas  of  Phalanx  antimissile  guns.  Underneath  each  dome,  a
multibarreled gun protrudes.
     He slows to a near  stop  and waves the barrel of Reason back and forth
for a while until a cross hairs whips across his field of vision. That's the
aiming  point. He gets it settled down in the middle, right on  one of those
Phalanx guns, and jerks the trigger for half a second.
     The big dome turns into a fountain of jagged, flaky  debris. Underneath
it, the  gun barrels are still visible, speckled with a  few red marks; Hiro
lowers the cross  hairs a tad and fires another fifty-round  burst that cuts
the  gun loose from  its mount. Then its  ammunition  belt starts  to  burst
sporadically, and Hiro has to look away.
     He looks at  the  next Phalanx gun and  finds  himself staring straight
down its barrels. That's  so scary  he jerks  the trigger  involuntarily and
fires  a long burst that appears to do  nothing at  all.  Then his  view  is
obscured by something close  up; the  recoil  has  pushed him  back behind a
decrepit yacht tied up along the side of the channel.
     He knows what's going to happen next - the steam makes him easy to find
- so  he whips  out of there. A  second later, the yacht gets simply  forced
under the water  by a burst  from  the big gun. Hiro runs for a few seconds,
finds a pontoon where he can steady himself, and opens up again with a  long
burst;  when  he's  finished,  the  edge  of  the  Enterprise  has a  jagged
semicircular bite taken out of it where the Phalanx gun used to be.
     He takes  to the main channel  again  and follows it  inward  until  it
terminates beneath one  of the Core ships, a containership, converted into a
high-rise  apartment complex. A cargo net serves as  a  ramp from one to the
other.  It probably serves  as a drawbridge also, when  undesirables try  to
clamber up out of the ghetto. Hiro is about as  undesirable as anyone can be
on the Raft, but they leave the cargo net there for him.
     That's quite  all  right. He's  staying on the little  boat for now. He
buzzes down the side of the containership, makes a U-turn around its prow.
     The next vessel is  a big oil  tanker, mostly empty  and riding high in
the water. Looking  up  the sheer steel  canyon separating the two ships, he
sees no handy cargo  nets stretched between them. They don't want thieves or
terrorists to come up onto the tanker and drill for oil.
     The next ship is the Enterprise.
     The two giant  vessels,  the  tanker  and  the  aircraft  carrier, ride
parallel,  anywhere from ten to  fifty feet  apart,  joined by  a  number of
gigantic  cables and  held apart  by huge airbags,  like they squished a few
blimps between  them to keep them from rubbing. The heavy cables aren't just
lashed from  one ship to another, they've done something clever with weights
and pulleys, he suspects, to  allow for some slack when rough seas  pull the
ships opposite ways.
     Hiro  rides  his  own  little  airbag in between them. This  gray steel
tunnel is  quiet and isolated compared to the  Raft; except for him, no  one
has any  reason  to be here. For a minute, he  just wants  to sit there  and
relax.
     Which is not too likely, when you think  about  it. "YOU ARE  HERE," he
says.
     His  view  of the Enterprise's hull - a gently  curved expanse of  gray
steel  - turns into a three-dimensional wire frame drawing,  showing him all
the guts of the ship on the other side.
     Down  here along  the waterline, the  Enterprise  has  a belt  of thick
antitorpedo armor. It's not too promising. Farther up, the armor is thinner,
and there's good stuff on the other side of it, actual rooms instead of fuel
tanks or ammunition holds.
     Hiro chooses a room marked WARDROOM and opens fire.
     The hull  of the Enterprise is surprisingly tough.  Reason doesn't just
blow a  crater straight through;  it  takes a few moments for the  burst  to
penetrate. And then all it does is make a hole about six inches  across. The
recoil pushed Hiro back against the rusted hull of the oil tanker.
     He  can't take the  gun with him anyway.  He holds the trigger down and
just tries  to  keep  it  aimed  in a  consistent  direction  until all  the
ammunition is gone. Then he  unstraps it from  his body  and dumps the whole
thing overboard.  It'll go to the bottom and mark its position with a column
of steam; later, Mr.  Lee's  Greater  Hong Kong  can  dispatch  one  of  its
environmental direct-action posses to  pick  it up.  Then they can haul Hiro
before  the Tribunal  of Environmental Crimes, if they want to. Right now he
doesn't care.
     It takes half  a dozen tries to secure the grappling hook in the jagged
hole, twenty feet above the waterline.
     As he's wriggling  through  the  hole, his  coverall makes popping  and
hissing noises as the hot, sharp metal melts and tears through the synthetic
material. He ends up leaving scraps  of it behind, welded to the hull.  He's
got a few first-  and second-degree burns on  the parts of his skin that are
now  exposed, but they  don't really hurt yet. That's  how wound up  he  is.
Later, they'll hurt. The soles of  his shoes melt and sizzle as he treads on
glowing bunks of shrapnel.  The room is rather smoky, but  aircraft carriers
are nothing  if not fire  conscious,  and  not  too  much in this  place  is
flammable.  Hiro just walks through the smoke to  the door,  which  has been
carved into a steel doily by Reason. He kicks it out of its frame and enters
a place that, in  the blueprints, is simply marked PASSAGEWAY. Then, because
this seems as good a time as any, he draws his katana.

        60

     When her  partner is off  doing something  in Reality, his avatar  goes
kind of slack.  The body  sits  there like an inflatable love doll, and  the
face continues to go through all kinds of stretching exercises. She does not
know what he's doing, but it looks like it must be exciting, because most of
the time he's either extremely surprised or scared shitless.
     Shortly  after  he gets done  talking to  the Librarian dude about  the
aircraft carrier, she begins to hear deep rumbling noises - Reality noises -
from outside. Sounds like  a cross between  a  machine gun and a  buzz  saw.
Whenever she hears that noise, Hiro's face gets  this astonished look  like:
I'm about to die.
     Someone is  tapping her on the  shoulder. Some  suit who  has an  early
morning appointment in the Metaverse, figures that  whatever this Kourier is
doing can't be all that important. She ignores it for a minute.
     Then Hiro's  office goes out of focus, jumps  up  in the air like it is
painted on a window  shade, and  she's looking  into  the face of a  guy. An
Asian guy. A creep. A wirehead. One of the scary antenna dudes.
     "Okay," she says, "what do you want?"
     He grabs her by the arm and hauls her out of the booth. There's another
one with him, and he  grabs  her other  arm. They all start  walking  out of
there.
     "Let go my fucking arm," she says. "I'll go with you. It's okay."
     It's not  the  first time she's been thrown out  of  a building full of
suits.  This  time it's a little  different, though. This time, the bouncers
are a couple of life-sized plastic action figures from Toys R Us.
     And it's not just that these  guys  probably don't speak  English. They
just don't act  normal. She actually manages to  twist one of her arms loose
and the guy doesn't smack her or anything, just turns rigidly toward her and
paws at her mechanically until he's  got her by the arm again,  No change in
his face. His eyes stare like busted headlights. His mouth is open enough to
let  him  breathe  through  it,  but  the  lips  never  move,  never  change
expression.
     They are  in a complex of  ship  cabins and sliced-open containers that
acts as the lobby of the  hotel. The  wireheads drag her out the door,  over
the blunt cross hairs of the helipad. Just in time,  too, because a  chopper
happens to be coming  in for a landing.  The safety procedures in this place
suck; they could have got their heads chopped off. It is the slick corporate
chopper with the RARE logo that she saw earlier.
     The wireheads try to drag her  over a gangplank thingy  that leads them
across open  water  to  the  next ship. She manages  to  get  turned  around
backward, grabs the  railings with both  hands,  hooks  her ankles  into the
stanchions, and hangs on. One of them grabs her around the waist from behind
and tries to yank  her body loose while the other one stands in front of her
and pries her fingers loose, one at a time.
     Several guys  are piling out of  the  RARE chopper.  They  are  wearing
coveralls  with gear  stuck  into  the pockets, and  she  sees  at least one
stethoscope. They haul  big  fiberglass  cases out of the chopper,  with red
crosses painted on their  sides, and run into the  containership. Y.T. knows
that this  is not being  done  for the benefit of  some fat  businessman who
stroked a lobe over  his stewed prunes. They are going in there to reanimate
her boyfriend. Raven pumped full of speed: just  what the world needs  right
now.
     They drag her across the deck of the next ship. From  there they take a
stairway thingy  up  to  the next ship  after  that, which  is very big. She
thinks it's an oil  tanker. She can  look across  its broad deck,  through a
tangle of pipes, rust seeping through white paint, and see the Enterprise on
the other side. That's where they're going.
     There's no direct connection. A crane on the deck of the Enterprise has
swung  itself over to dangle a small wire cage over the tanker,  just a  few
feet off the  deck; it bobs  up and down and  glides back and forth  over  a
fairly large area as the two ships rock in different ways and it swings like
a pendulum at  the  end of its cable.  It has a  door on  one side, which is
hanging open.
     They sort  of toss her into it head  first, keeping  her arms pinned to
her sides so she can't  push it away from  her,  and then they  spend a  few
seconds  folding  her  legs in behind her. It's obvious by now  that talking
doesn't work, so she just fights silently. She manages to give one of them a
good  stomp to the  bridge  of the nose,  and both feels  and hears the bone
break, but the man doesn't react in  any way, other than  snapping  his head
back on impact. She's so busy  watching him, waiting to  see when he's going
to  figure out that  his nose is broken and  that she's responsible for  it,
that she stops  kicking and flailing long enough to get all  shoved into the
cage. Then the door snaps shut.
     An  experienced raccoon could  get the latch open. This cage isn't made
to hold people. But by the time she gets her body worked around to the point
where she can reach it, she's twenty feet above  the deck, looking down on a
lead of black water between the  tanker  and the Enterprise. Down below, she
can see an abandoned zodiac caroming back and forth between the steel walls.
     Not everything is exactly right on the Enterprise. Something is burning
somewhere. People are firing guns. She's not entirely sure she  wants to  be
there. As long as she is high up in  the air, she reconnoiters the  ship and
confirms that there is no way off, no handy gangplanks or stairway thingies.
     She is being  lowered toward the Enterprise. The cage is careening back
and  forth, skimming  just over the deck on its cable, and  when  it finally
touches the deck, it skids for a few feet  before coming to a halt. She pops
the latch and climbs out of there. Now what?
     There's a bullseye painted on the deck, a few helicopters parked around
the  edges  and  lashed  down.  And  there  is  one  helicopter,  a  mammoth
twin-engine  jet number, kind of  a flying bathtub  festooned  with guns and
missiles, sitting right in the middle of the bullseye, all of its lights on,
engine  whining,  rotors spinning desultorily.  A  small  cluster of  men is
standing next to it.
     Y.T. walks toward it. She hates  this. She  knows this is  exactly what
she's  supposed to do.  But there  really  is  no other choice. She  wishes,
profoundly,  that  she had  her  plank with  her. The  deck of this aircraft
carrier is  some of the best  skating  territory  she has ever seen. She has
seen,  in movies,  that  carriers  have  big  steam catapults  for  throwing
airplanes  into  the  sky.  Think of  what it would be like to ride a  steam
catapult on your plank!
     As she is walking toward the helicopter, one of the men standing by  it
detaches  himself from the group and walks toward her. He's big, with a body
like a fifty-five-gallon drum, and a mustache that turns  up at the corners.
And as he comes toward her he is laughing in a  satisfied  way, which pisses
her off.
     "Well, don't you look like a forlorn lil thang!" he says. "Shit, honey,
you look like a drowned rat that got dried out again."
     "Thanks," she says. "You look like chiseled Spam."
     "Very funny," he says.
     "Then how come you're not laughing? Afraid it's true?"
     "Look," he says, "I don't have time for this fucking adolescent banter.
I grew up and got old 'pecifically to get away from this."
     "It's not that  you don't have time,"  she  says. "It's that you're not
very good at it."
     "You know who I am?" he asks.
     "Yeah, I know. You know who I am?"
     "Y.T. A fifteen-year-old Kourier."
     "And  personal buddy  of Uncle Enzo," she says, whipping off the string
of dog tags and tossing them. He holds out one hand, startled, and the chain
whips around his fingers. He holds them up and reads them.
     "Well, well," he says, "this is quite a little memento." He throws them
back at her. "I know you're buddies with Uncle Enzo. Otherwise I just woulda
dunked  you  instead  a bringing you here  to my spread. And I frankly don't
give  a  shit," he  says,  "because by the time this  day is through, either
Uncle Enzo will  be out  of  a job, or else I'll be,  as  you said, chiseled
Spam.  But  I  figure that  the Big Wop will be a lot less likely to throw a
Stinger  through  the turbine  of  my chopper there  if he knows  his little
chiquita is on board."
     "It's not like that," Y.T. says. "It's not a relationship where fucking
is part of it." But she  is chagrined to learn that the dog tags,  after all
this time, did not have any magical effect on the bad guys.
     Rife turns around and  starts walking back to the chopper.  After a few
steps, he turns back and looks at  her, just standing  there, trying  not to
cry. "You coming?" he says.
     She looks at the chopper. A ticket off the Raft.
     "Can I leave a note for Raven?"
     "Far  as Raven is concerned, I think you already made your point -  haw
haw haw. Come on, girl, we're wasting jet fuel  over there - that ain't good
for the goddamn environment."
     She follows him to  the chopper, climbs on board.  It's warm and  light
inside  here,  with nice seats.  Like coming in off a  hard February  day of
thrashing the grittier highways and settling into a padded easy chair
     "Had  the interior redone," Rife  says. "This is a big  old Sov gunship
and it wasn't made for comfort. But that's  the price you  pay for  all that
armor plating."
     There's  two other guys in here. One is about fifty, sort of gaunt, big
pores,  wire-rimmed  bifocals, carrying a laptop. A techie. The other  is  a
bulky African-American  with a  gun. "Y.T.," says the  always polite  L. Bob
Rife, meet Frank Frost,  my  tech  director, and Tony Michaels, my  security
chief."
     "Ma'am," says Tony.
     "Howdy," says Frank.
     "Suck my toes," says Y.T.
     "Don't step on that, please," Frank says.
     Y.T. looks down. Climbing into the empty seat nearest the door, she has
stepped on a  package resting on the floor. It's about  the dimensions of  a
phone book, but irregular,  very heavy, swaddled  in bubble  pack and  clear
plastic. She can see  glimpses  of  what's inside. Light  reddish  brown  in
color. Covered with chicken scratches. Hard as a rock.
     "What's that?" Y.T. says. "Homemade bread from Mom?"
     "It's an ancient artifact,"  Frank says, all pissed off. Rife chuckles,
pleased and relieved that Y.T. is now insulting someone else.
     Another man  duck-walks across the flight  deck, in mortal fear  of the
whirling rotor blades, and climbs  in. He's about sixty, with a dirigible of
white hair that was not ruffled in any way by the downdraft.
     "Hello,  everyone," he says cheerfully. "I  don't think I've met all of
you. Just got here this morning and now I'm on my way back again!"
     "Who are you?" Tony says.
     The new guy looks crestfallen. "Greg Ritchie," he says.
     Then, when no one seems to react, he  jogs their memory. "President  of
the United States."
     "Oh! Sorry. Nice to meet you, Mr. President,"  Tony says, extending his
hand. "Tony Michaels."
     "Frank Frost," Frank says, extending his hand and looking bored.
     "Don't  mind  me," Y.T.  says, when  Ritchie  looks  her  way.  "I'm  a
hostage."
     "Torque this baby," Rife says to the pilot. "Let's go to L.A. We got  a
Mission to Control."
     The pilot has an angular face that, after  her experiences on the Raft,
Y.T. recognizes as typically Russian. He  starts  dicking with his controls.
The engines whine louder and the thwacking of the chopper blades picks up.
     Y.T. feels,  but does not hear, a couple of small explosions.  Everyone
else feels it, too, but only Tony reacts; he  crouches down on  the floor of
the  chopper, pulls a gun out  from under  his jacket, and opens the door on
his  side.  Meanwhile,  the  engines  sigh back down in pitch and  the rotor
coasts back down to an idle.
     Y.T. can see him out the window. It's Hiro. He's all covered with smoke
and blood, and he's holding a  pistol in one  hand. He's just fired a couple
of shots in the air, to get their attention, and now he  backs behind one of
the parked choppers, taking cover.
     "You're a dead man," Rife shouts. "You're stuck on the Raft, asshole. I
got a million Myrmidons here. You gonna kill 'em all?"
     "Swords don't run out of ammo," Hiro shouts.
     "Well, what do you want?"
     "I want the tablet. You give  me the tablet, then you can  take off and
let your million wireheads kill me. You don't give me  the tablet, I'm gonna
empty this clip into the windshield of your chopper."
     "It's bulletproof! Haw!" Rife says.
     "No it isn't," Hiro says, "as the rebels in Afghanistan found out."
     "He is right," the pilot says.
     "Fucking Soviet piece of shit! They put all that steel in its belly and
then made the windshield out of glass?"
     "Give me the tablet," Hiro says' "or I'm taking it."
     "No you ain't," Rife says, "cause I got Tinkerbell here."
     At the last minute, Y.T. tries to duck  down and hide, so he won't  see
her. She's ashamed. But Hiro  locks eyes with her for just a moment, and she
can see the defeat come into his face.
     She makes a dive for the door and gets halfway out, under the downblast
of the  rotors. Tony grabs her coverall's collar and hauls her back  inside.
He  shoves her down on her belly and puts one knee in the small of  her back
to hold her there. Meanwhile, the engine is  powering up again,  and out the
open  door she can see the  steel  horizon of  the carrier's deck drop  from
view.
     After all this time, she fucked up the plan. She owes Hiro a refund.
     Or maybe not.
     She  puts the heel of one hand against the edge of the clay  tablet and
shoves  as  hard  as  she  can.  It  slides across the floor, teeters on the
threshold, and spins out of the chopper.
     Another delivery made, another satisfied customer.

        61

     For a  minute  or  so, the chopper hovers twenty feet overhead. All the
people inside are staring  down  at  the tablet, which has burst out  of its
wrappings in the  middle of the bullseye.  The plastic has torn apart around
the corners and fragments - large fragments - of the tablet have sprayed out
for a few feet in either direction.
     Hiro stares  at  it,  too, still safe behind  the  cover  of  a  parked
chopper. He stares at it so hard that  be forgets to stare at anything else.
Then  a  couple of wireheads land on his back, smashing  his  face into  the
flank of the chopper. He slides down and lands on his  belly. His gun arm is
still  free, but a couple more wireheads sit on  that. A couple on his legs,
too. He can't  move  at all. He  can't see  anything but  the broken tablet,
twenty feet  away on the flight deck.  The sound  and wind of Rife's chopper
diminish into  a distant puttering noise that  takes a  long time to go away
completely.
     He  feels a  tingling behind his ear, anticipating the scalpel  and the
drill.
     These wireheads are operating under remote control from somewhere else.
Ng  seemed to think that  they had an  organized Raft  defense system. Maybe
there's  a hacker-in-charge, an  en,  sitting  in  the  Enterprise's control
tower, moving these guys around like an air traffic controller.
     In any case, they are not  very big on spontaneity. They sit on him for
a few minutes before they  decide  what  to do next. Then, many hands  reach
down and clasp him around the wrists and ankles, elbows and knees. They haul
him across the flight deck like pallbearers, face up. Hiro looks up into the
control tower and sees a  couple of faces looking down at him. One of them -
the en - is talking into a microphone.
     Eventually, they come  to a big  flat elevator that sinks down into the
guts of the ship, out of view of the control tower. It comes to  rest on one
of the  lower decks, apparently a  hangar deck where they used  to  maintain
airplanes
     Hiro hears  a  woman's voice, speaking words gently but clearly: "me lu
lu mu al nu urn me en ki me en me lu lu mu me al  nu urn me al nu ume  me me
mu lu e al nu um me dug ga mu me mu. lu e al nu urn me..."
     It's three  feet straight down to the deck, and he covers  the distance
in free fall,  slamming down on his  back, bumping his  head. All his  limbs
bounce loosely on the  metal.  Around him  he sees  and hears the  wireheads
collapsing like wet towels falling off a rack.
     He cannot move any part of his body. He  has a little control  over his
eyes. A face comes into view, and he  has trouble resolving it,  can't quite
focus, but he recognizes something  in her posture,  the way  she tosses her
hair  back over her shoulder when it falls down. It's  Juanita. Juanita with
an antenna rising out of the base of her skull.
     She kneels down beside him, bends down, cups one hand  around his  ear,
and whispers. The hot air tickles his ear, he tries to move away from it but
can't.  She's  whispering  another  long  string  of  syllables.   Then  she
straightens up and gooses him in the side. He jerks away from her.
     "Get up, lazybones," she says.
     He  gets  up.  He's  fine now. But all  the wireheads  lay around  him,
perfectly motionless.
     "Just a little nam-shub I whipped up," she says. "They'll be fine."
     "Hi," he says.
     "Hi. It's good  to see you,  Hiro.  I'm  going to  give you a hug now -
watch out for the antenna."
     She does. He hugs her back. The antenna is upside his  nose, but that's
okay.
     "Once we get this thing  taken  off, all the hair and stuff should grow
back," she whispers. Finally, she lets him go. "That hug was really more for
me than for you It's been a lonely time here. Lonely and scary."
     This   is   typically  paradoxical  behavior  for  Juanita  -   getting
touchy-feely at a time like this.
     "Don't get me wrong," Hiro says, "but aren't you one of  the  bad  guys
now?"
     "Oh, you mean this?"
     "Yeah. Don't you work for them?"
     "If so, I'm  not doing  a very good job." She laughs, gesturing at  the
ring of motionless wireheads. "No. This  doesn't work on me. It sort of did,
for a while, but there are ways to fight it."
     "Why? Why doesn't it work on you?"
     "I've spent  the  last  several years hanging around with Jesuits," she
says. "Look. Your brain has an immune system, just like your body.  The more
you use it  - the more viruses  you get exposed to - the  better your immune
system becomes. And  I've got a hell of an immune system. Remember, I was an
atheist for a while, and then I came back to religion the hard way."
     "Why didn't they screw you up the way they did Da5id?"
     "I came here voluntarily."
     "Like Inanna."
     "Yes."
     "Why would anyone come here voluntarily?"
     "Hiro, don't you realize? This is it.  This is the  nerve  center of  a
religion  that  is at once brand new and  very ancient.  Being here  is like
following Jesus or Mohammed around, getting  to observe  the birth  of a new
faith."
     "But it's terrible. Rife is the Antichrist."
     "Of  course he  is.  But  it's  still  interesting.  And  Rife has  got
something else going for him: Eridu."
     "The city of Enki."
     "Exactly. He's got every tablet Enki  ever  wrote.  For a person  who's
interested in religion and hacking, this  is the only  place in the world to
be. If  those tablets  were  in  Arabia,  I'd  put on  a  chador and burn my
driver's license and go there. But the tablets  are here,  and so I let them
wire me up instead."
     "So all this time, your goal was to study Enki's tablets."
     "To get the me, just like Inanna. What else?"
     "And have you been studying them?"
     "Oh, yes."
     "And?"
     She points to  the fallen wireheads. "And I can do it now. I'm  a ba'al
shem. I can hack the brainstem."
     "Okay, look. I'm happy for you, Juanita. But at the time being, we have
a little problem. We are surrounded by a million people who want to kill us.
Can you paralyze all of them?"
     "Yes," she says, "but then they'd die."
     "You know what we have to do, don't you, Juanita?"
     "Release the nam-shub of Enki," she says. "Do the Babel thing."
     "Let's go get it," Hiro says.
     "First things first," Juanita says. "The control tower."
     "Okay, you get ready to grab  the tablet, and I'll take out the control
tower."
     "How are you going to do that? By cutting people up with swords?"
     "Yeah. That's the only thing they're good for."
     "Let's do it the other way around," Juanita says. She gets up and walks
off across the hangar deck.

     The nam-shub  of Enki is a tablet wrapped up in a clay envelope covered
with the cuneiform equivalent  of a warning sticker. The entire assembly has
shattered into dozens of pieces.  Most of them have stayed wrapped up inside
the  plastic, but  some  have  gone  spinning across the  flight deck.  Hiro
gathers them up from the helipad and returns them to the center.
     By the time he's got the plastic wrapper cut away, Juanita is waving to
him from the windows on top of the control tower.
     He takes all the pieces that look to be part  of the  envelope and puts
them  into a separate pile.  Then  he  assembles the remains  of the  tablet
itself into a  coherent group.  It's  not obvious,  yet,  how to  piece them
together, and  he  doesn't have time for jigsaw puzzles. So  he goggles into
his  office, uses  the  computer  to  take  an  electronic snapshot  of  the
fragments, and calls the Librarian.
     "Yes, sir?"
     "This  hypercard contains a picture of  a shattered clay tablet. Do you
know of some software that would be good at piecing it back together?"
     "One moment,  sir," the Librarian says. Then a hypercard appears in his
hand. He gives it  to  Hiro.  It contains a picture of  an assembled tablet.
"That's how it looks, sir."
     "Can you read Sumerian?"
     "Yes, sir."
     "Can you read this tablet out loud?"
     "Yes, sir."
     "Get ready to do it. And hold on a second."
     Hiro walks over to the base of the control tower. There's  a door there
that  gives him  access to a stairwell. He climbs up to the control  room, a
strange  mixture  of  Iron  Age  and  high-tech.  Juanita's  waiting  there,
surrounded by peacefully slumbering wireheads. She taps a microphone that is
projecting from a communications panel at the end  of a flexible gooseneck -
the same mike that the en was speaking into.
     "Live to the Raft," she says. "Go for it."
     Hiro puts his computer into speakerphone mode and stands up next to the
microphone.  "Librarian, read it back," he says.  And a string  of syllables
pours out of the speaker.
     In the middle of it, Hiro glances  up at Juanita. She's standing in the
far comer of the room with her fingers stuck in her ears.
     Down at the base  of the stairs,  a wirehead begins to  talk. Deep down
inside the Enterprise, there's more  talking  going on. And none of it makes
any sense. It's just a lot of babbling.
     There's an external  catwalk on the control tower. Hiro  goes out there
and listens to the Raft. From all around them comes a dim roar, not of waves
or wind, but of a million unchained human voices speaking in a  confusion of
tongues.
     Juanita  comes out to listen, too. Hiro sees a trickle of red under her
ear.
     "You're bleeding," he says.
     "I  know.  A little bit  of primitive surgery," she says.  Her voice is
strained and uncomfortable. "I've  been carrying  around a scalpel blade for
cases like this."
     "What did you do?"
     "Slid  it up under the base of  the antenna and  cut the wire that goes
into my skull," she says.
     "When did you do that?"
     "While you were down on the flight deck."
     "Why?"
     "Why do you think?" she says. "So I wouldn't be exposed to the nam-shub
of  Enki.  I'm a neurolinguistic hacker now,  Hiro.  I went through  hell to
obtain this knowledge. It's  a part  of  me. Don't  expect me to submit to a
lobotomy."
     "If we get out of this, will you be my girl?"
     "Naturally," she says. "Now let's get out of it."

        62

     "I was just doing my job, man," she says. "This Enki dude wanted to get
a message to Hiro, and I delivered it."
     "Shut up," Rife says. He doesn't say it like he's pissed. He just wants
her to  be quiet. Because what  she did doesn't make any difference now that
all those wireheads have piled on top of Hiro.
     Y.T. looks out the window. They are buzzing across the Pacific, keeping
pretty low down so  that the water skims quickly  beneath  them. She doesn't
know how fast they're going, but it looks to be pretty damn fast. She always
thought the ocean was supposed  to be blue, but in fact it's the most boring
gray color she's ever seen. And there's miles and miles of it.
     After  a few minutes, another  chopper catches up with  them and begins
flying alongside, pretty close, in formation. It's the RARE chopper, the one
full of medics.
     Through  its cabin  window,  she can  see Raven sitting in  one of  the
seats. At  first she thinks he's  still  unconscious because  he's  kind  of
hunched over, not moving.
     Then he  lifts  his  head and  she sees that  he's  goggled  in  to the
Metaverse.  He reaches up with one hand and pulls the  goggles  up  onto his
forehead for  a moment, squints out  the window, and  sees her watching him.
Their eyes meet and her heart starts flopping around weakly, like a bunny in
a Ziploc bag. He grins and waves.
     Y.T. sits back in her seat and pulls the shade down over the window.

        63

     From Hiro's front yard  to L.  Bob  Rife's black  cube at Port  127  is
halfway around the Metaverse, a distance of 32,768 kilometers. The only hard
part, really, is  getting out of Downtown.  He can  ride  his bike  straight
through  the  avatars as  usual,  but the  Street  is  also  cluttered  with
vehicles, animercials commercial displays,  public plazas, and other bits of
solid-looking software that get in his way.
     Not to mention a few distractions. Off to his  right, about a kilometer
away from The Black Sun is a deep hole in the hyper-Manhattan skyline. It is
an open  plaza about a mile wide, a park of  sorts where avatars  can gather
for concerts  and  conventions and festivals.  Most of it  is occupied  by a
deep-dish amphitheater that is capable of seating close to a million avatars
at once. Down at the bottom is a huge circular stage.
     Normally,  the  stage is  occupied by major rock groups. Tonight, it is
occupied by the grandest and most brilliant computer hallucinations that the
human mind can invent. A three-dimensional marquee hangs above it announcing
tonight's event: a benefit graphics concert staged on behalf of Da5id Meier,
who is still hospitalized with an inexplicable  disease. The amphitheater is
half filled with hackers.
     Once he  gets  out of Downtown, Hiro twists his throt-tle up to the max
and  covers  the remaining thirty-two  thousand and some  kilometers  in the
space of about ten minutes. Over his head, the express  trains are whooshing
down the  track at a metaphorical speed of  ten  thousand miles per hour; he
passes them like they're standing still. This only works because he's riding
in an absolutely straight line. He's got a routine coded into his motorcycle
software that makes it  follow  the monorail track automatically so  that he
doesn't even have to worry about steering it.
     Meanwhile, Juanita's standing next to him in Reality. She's got another
pair of goggles; she can see all the same things that Hiro sees.
     "Rife's got a mobile uplink on his corporate chopper, just like the one
on commercial airliners, so he can patch into the Metaverse when he's in the
air. As long as he's airborne, that's his only link to the Metaverse. We may
be able to hack our way into that one link and block it or something..."
     "That low-level communications stuff is too full of medicine for us  to
mess with  it in this decade," Hiro says, braking his motorcycle  to a stop.
"Holy shit. It's just like Y.T. described it."
     He's in  front of  Port 127.  Rife's black cube  is there, just as Y.T.
described it. There's no door.
     Hiro starts walking away  from the Street, toward the cube. It reflects
no  light at all, so he can't tell whether it's ten  feet or ten miles  away
from him until the security daemons begin to  materialize. There  are half a
dozen  of  them,  all  big  sturdy  avatars  in  blue   coveralls,  sort  of
quasi-military looking,  but  without rank.  They  don't need  rank  because
they're all running the same program.  They materialize around him in a neat
semicircle with a radius of about ten feet, blocking Hiro's way to the cube.
     Hiro mumbles  a word under his breath and vanishes - he slips  into his
invisible avatar. It  would  be very interesting to hang around and  see how
these security daemons  deal  with  it,  but right now he has  to get moving
before they get a chance to adjust.
     They  don't,  at least  not very well.  Hiro runs between  two  of  the
security daemons and heads for the wall of the cube.  He finally gets there,
slamming into it, coming to  dead stop. The security daemons have all turned
around and are chasing  him. They can figure out where he is -  the computer
tells them  that much - but they  can't  do  much  to him. Like the  bouncer
daemons  in The Black Sun, which Hiro helped write, they shove people around
by applying  basic rules of avatar physics. When Hiro is invisible, there is
very little for  them to shove. But  if they are well written, they may have
more subtle ways of messing him up,  so he's not  wasting any time. He pokes
his katana through the side of  the cube and follows it through the wall and
out the other side.
     This is a hack. It is really based on a very old hack, a  loophole that
he found years ago when he was trying to graft the sword-fighting rules onto
the existing Metaverse software. His blade doesn't have the power  to  cut a
hole in the wall - this would mean permanently changing the shape of someone
else's building - but it does have the power to penetrate things. Avatars do
not have that power.  That is the  whole purpose of a wall in the Metaverse;
it  is  a  structure that does not allow avatars to penetrate  it.  But like
anything else in  the Metaverse,  this  rule  is nothing  but a protocol,  a
convention that different computers agree to follow. In theory, it cannot be
ignored. But in practice, it depends upon the ability of different computers
to  swap information very precisely,  at  high speed,  and at just the right
times. And when you are connected to  the system over a satellite uplink, as
Hiro is, out here on the Raft, there is a delay as the signals  bounce up to
the satellite and back down. That  delay can be  taken  advantage of, if you
move quickly and don't look back. Hiro passes right through the wall  on the
tail end of his all-penetrating katana.
     Rifeland  is a vast, brightly lit space occupied  by elementary  shapes
done  up  in primary colors. It  is like  being  inside an  educational  toy
designed  to  teach  solid  geometry  to  three-year-olds:  cubes,  spheres,
tetrahedrons polyhedrons,  connected with a  web of cylinders and lines  and
helices. But in this case, it has gone way, way out of control,  as if every
Tinkertoy set and  Lego  block ever made had been slapped together according
to some long-forgotten scheme.
     Hiro's  been around the Metaverse long enough  to know that despite the
bright  cheery  appearance of this  thing, it is,  in  fact,  as simple  and
utilitarian as an Army camp. This is a model  of a system. A big complicated
system. The shapes probably represent computers, or central  nodes in Rife's
worldwide network, or Pearly Gates franchises,  or  any other kind of  local
and  regional offices that Rife has going around  the  world.  By clambering
over this structure and, going into those bright shapes, Hiro could probably
uncover  some  of the  code  that makes Rife's  network  operate.  He could,
perhaps, try to hack it up, as Juanita suggested.
     But there is no point in  messing with something he doesn't understand.
He might waste hours fooling around with some piece of code only to find out
that  it was  the software to control the  automatic toilet flushers at Rife
Bible College. So  Hiro  keeps  moving, keeps looking  up at the  tangle  of
shapes, trying to find  a  pattern. He knows, now, that he has found his way
into the boiler room  of the entire Metaverse.  But he has no idea what he's
looking for.
     This system, he realizes, really consists of several  separate networks
all tangled together  in the same  space.  There's  an extremely complicated
tangle of fine red lines,  millions of them, running back  and forth between
thousands  of small red balls. Just as a wild guess, Hiro figures that  this
may  represent  Rife's  fiber-optics  network,  with  its  innumerable local
offices  and nodes  spread all over the world. There  are  a number  of less
complicated networks in other colors,  which  might represent coaxial lines,
such as they used to use for cable television, or even voice phone lines.
     And  there is a crude, heavily  built, blocky  network all  done up  in
blue.  It consists of a small  number - fewer  than  a dozen - of  big  blue
cubes. They are connected  to each other,  but to nothing else,  by  massive
blue tubes;  the tubes are transparent, and  inside  of  them, Hiro can  see
bundles of smaller  connections in various colors. It has taken Hiro a while
to see all of this, because the blue cubes are nearly obscured; they are all
surrounded  by little  red balls and other  small  nodes,  like trees  being
overwhelmed  with kudzu. It appears  to be an older, preexisting network  of
some kind, with its own internal channels, mostly primitive ones  like voice
phone. Rife has patched into it, heavily, with his own, higher-tech systems.
     Hiro maneuvers until he can get a closer look at one of the blue cubes,
peering through the clutter of lines that has grown around it. The blue cube
has a big white star on each of its six faces.
     "It's the Government of the United States," Juanita says.
     "Where hackers go to die,"  Hiro  says. The  largest, and yet the least
efficient, producer of computer software in the world.
     Hiro and  Y.T. have eaten  a  lot  of junk food  together in  different
joints all over  L.A. - doughnuts, burritos, pizza, sushi, you name it - and
all  Y.T.  ever talks about is  her mother and the terrible job that she has
with the Feds. The regimentation. The lie-detector  tests. The fact that for
all the work she does, she really has no idea what it is that the government
is really working on.
     It's always  been a  mystery  to  Hiro, too,  but then, that's how  the
government is. It was  invented to  do stuff that private enterprise doesn't
bother with,  which  means that there's probably no reason for it; you never
know what  they're doing or  why. Hackers have traditionally looked upon the
government's coding sweatshops with horror and just tried to forget that all
of that shit ever existed.
     But  they have  thousands of  programmers. The  programmers work twelve
hours  a  day  out  of  some  twisted  sense  of  personal  loyalty.   Their
software-engineering   techniques,   while   cruel   and   ugly,   are  very
sophisticated. They must have been up to something.
     "Juanita?"
     "Yeah?"
     "Don't ask me why I think this. But  I  think that  the  government has
been undertaking a big software development project for L. Bob Rife."
     "Makes sense," she says. "He has such a love-hate relationship with his
programmers -  he needs them, but he won't trust them.  The government's the
only organization he would trust to write something important. I wonder what
it is?"
     "Hold on," Hiro says. "Hold on."
     He is now a stone's  throw away  from a big blue cube sitting at ground
level. All the other blue cubes sort of  feed into it. There is a motorcycle
parked next  to the cube,  rendered in color, but just one notch above black
and white: big jaggedy pixels and a limited color palette. It has a sidecar.
Raven's standing next to it.
     He  is carrying something in his arms. It  is  another simple geometric
construction, a  long smooth blue ellipsoid a couple of feet in length. From
the way  he's moving, Hiro thinks  that Raven  has just removed it from  the
blue  cube;  he  carries it  over to the motorcycle  and nestles it into the
sidecar.
     "The Big One," Hiro says.
     "It's exactly what we were afraid of," Juanita says. "Rife's revenge."
     "Headed for the amphitheater. Where all the hackers are gathered in one
place. Rife's going to infect all of them at once. He's going to burn  their
minds."

        64

     Raven's already on the motorcycle. If Hiro chases him on foot, he might
catch him before he reaches the Street.
     But he might  not. In that case, Raven would be on his  way to Downtown
at  tens of  thousands of miles per hour while Hiro was  still trying to get
back  to his own motorcycle. At  those speeds, once Hiro has  lost sight  of
Raven, he's lost him forever.
     Raven starts his bike, begins maneuvering carefully through the tangle,
headed for the exit. Hiro takes off as fast as  his invisible legs can carry
him, headed straight for the wall
     He punches through a couple  of seconds later, runs back to the Street.
His tiny little invisible avatar can't operate the motorcycle, so he returns
to  his normal look, hops on  his bike, and gets  it turned around.  Looking
back, he sees Raven  riding out toward the Street,  the logic bomb glowing a
soft blue, like heavy water in a reactor. He doesn't even see Hiro yet.
     Now's his chance. He draws his katana, aims his bike at Raven, pumps it
up to sixty or so miles an hour. No point  in coming  in too fast;  the only
way to kill Raven's avatar is to take its head off. Running it over with the
motorcycle won't have any effect.
     A security daemon is running toward Raven, waving his arms. Raven looks
up, sees Hiro bearing down  on  him, and bursts forward. The sword cuts  air
behind Raven's head.
     It's too late.  Raven must be gone now  - but  turning  himself around,
Hiro can see him  in  the middle  of the  Street. He slammed into one of the
stanchions  that holds  up the monorail  track - a perennial  irritation  to
high-speed motorcyclists.
     "Shit!" both of them say simultaneously.
     Raven gets turned toward Downtown and  twists his throttle just as Hiro
is pulling in behind him on the Street, doing the same.  Within  a couple of
seconds, they're both  headed for  Downtown at something like fifty thousand
miles an  hour. Hiro's half a mile behind Raven but can see him clearly: the
streetlights have  merged  into a  smooth  twin streak of yellow, and  Raven
blazes in the middle, a storm of cheap color and big pixels.
     "If I can take his head off, they're finished," Hiro says.
     "Gotcha," Juanita says. "Because if you kill Raven,  he gets kicked out
of the system. And he can't sign back on until the Graveyard Daemons dispose
of his avatar."
     "And I control the Graveyard Daemons. So all  I have to do  is kill the
bastard once."
     "Once they get their choppers back to land, they'll have  better access
to the net - they can  have someone else go into the Metaverse and take over
for him," Juanita warns.
     "Wrong. Because Uncle Enzo and Mr. Lee  are waiting  for  them on land.
They have to do it during the next hour, or never."

        65

     Y.T.  suddenly  wakes  up.  She  hadn't realized that she  was  asleep.
Something about the thwop of the rotor blades must have lulled her. She must
be tired as shit, is what it really is.
     "What the fuck is going on with my com net?" L. Bob Rife is squalling.
     "No  one answers," the Russian pilot  says.  "Not Raft, not  L.A.,  not
Khyooston."
     "Get  me LAX on the phone, then," Rife says. "I want to take the jet to
Houston.  We'll get our butts over to the campus and  find out  what's going
on."
     The pilot messes around on his control panel. "Problem," he says.
     "What?"
     The pilot just shakes his head forlornly. "Someone is messing  with the
skyphone. We're being jammed."
     "I might be  able to get a  line," the President says.  Rife just gives
him a look like, right, asshole.
     "Anybody  got  a fucking  quarter?" Rife hollers.  Frank  and  Tony are
startled  for a minute. "We're gonna have to  touch down  at  the  first pay
phone  we  see and make a  goddamn phone call." He laughs. "Can  you believe
that? Me, using a telephone?"
     A  second  later, Y.T. looks out the window and is  blown away  to  see
actual land down  there, and a two-lane highway winding its way down  a warm
sandy coastline. It's California.
     The  chopper  slows,  cuts  in  closer  to land,  begins following  the
highway. Most of it is free of plastic and neon lights, but before long they
home in on a short  bit of franchise ghetto, built on both sides of the road
in a place where it has cut away from the beach some distance.
     The chopper sets down in the parking lot of a Buy 'n' Fly. Fortunately,
the lot's mostly empty, they don't cut any heads off. A couple of youths are
playing video games inside, and they barely look up at the astonishing sight
of the chopper. She's glad; Y.T. is totally embarrassed to be seen with this
dull assortment of old  farts. The chopper just sits there, idling, while L.
Bob Rife jumps out and runs over to the pay phone bolted to the front wall.
     These guys were stupid enough to put her in  the seat right next to the
fire extinguisher. No reason  not to take advantage of that  fact. She jerks
it  out of  its bracket,  pulling out  the  safety pin in virtually the same
motion, and squeezes the trigger, aiming it right into Tony's face.
     Nothing happens.
     "Fuck!"  she shouts, and throws  it  at him, or rather pushes it toward
him. He's just leaning forward, grabbing at her wrist, and the impact of the
extinguisher hitting his  face  is enough  to put a major dent in his 'tude.
Gives her enough time to swing her legs out of the chopper.
     Everything's getting fucked up. One of  her pockets is zipped open, and
as   she's   half-falling,   half-rolling   out   of   the    chopper,   the
fire-extinguisher bracket catches in that pocket and  holds her. By the time
she's gotten free of that, Tony's back, now on his hands and knees, reaching
out for her arm.
     That she  manages to avoid. She's running  out freely into  the parking
lot. At the back, she's hemmed in by the Buy 'n' Fly, along the sides by the
tall border fence that separates this place from a NeoAquarian Temple on one
side and a Mr.  Lee's Greater Hong  Kong  franchulate on the other. The only
way to escape is out onto the  road  - on the other side of the chopper. But
the pilot and Frank and  Tony have already jumped  out and are blocking  her
exit out onto the road.
     NeoAquarian  Temple  isn't going to help  her. If she  begs and pleads,
they  might just include her  in  their  mantras  next  week.  But Mr. Lee's
Greater Hong Kong is another story. She runs  to the fence and starts trying
to  climb  it. Eight  feet of chain  link with razor ribbon on  top. But her
clothing should stop the razor ribbon. Mostly.
     She  gets about halfway  up. Then, pudgy but strong arms are around her
waist.  She's out  of luck. L. Bob Rife lifts her right off the  fence, both
arms and both legs kicking the air uselessly. He backs up  a couple of steps
and starts carrying her back toward the chopper.
     She looks back at the Hong Kong franchise. It was a close thing.
     Someone's in the  parking lot. A Kourier, cruising  in off the highway,
just kind of chilling out and taking it real easy.
     "Hey!" she screams. She reaches  up and punches the lapel switch on her
coverall,  turning it bright blue and orange. "Hey! I'm a Kourier! My name's
Y.T.! These maniac scum guys kidnapped me!"
     "Wow," the Kourier says. "What a drag." Then he asks her something. But
she can't hear it because the helicopter is whirling up its blades.
     "They're  taking me  to LAX!" she screams at the top of her lungs. Then
Rife  slams her into the chopper face  first. The chopper lifts off, tracked
precisely by an audience of antennas  on the  roof of Mr. Lee's Greater Hong
Kong.
     In the parking lot, the Kourier  watches the chopper taking  off.  It's
really cool to watch, and it has a lot of bumping guns on it.
     But those dudes inside of the chopper were harshing that chick major.
     The Kourier pulls his personal phone  out  of  its holster, jacks  into
RadiKS Central Command, and punches a big red button. He calls a Code.

     Twenty-five  hundred  Kouriers are  massed on  the  reinforced-concrete
banks of the  L.A.  River. Down  in the  bottom trench of the river,  Vitaly
Chernobyl and the Meltdowns  are  just hitting the really good part of their
next  major  hit  single,  "Control Rod Jam."  A number of the Kouriers  are
taking advantage of  this sound track to style  up and down the banks of the
river;  only Vitaly, live,  can get their adrenaline pumping hard enough  to
enable  them  to skate a sharp bank  at eighty miles per  hour  plus without
doing a wilson into the crete.
     And  then  the  dark  mass of  Meltdown  fans  turns  into  a gyrating,
orange-red  galaxy   as  twenty-five  hundred  new  stars  appear.   It's  a
mind-blowing sight, and  at  first they think it's  a new visual effect  put
together by Vitaly  and his  imageers. It is like a  mass flicking of  Bics,
except brighter and  more organized; each  Kourier looks down on his  or her
belt to see  that a red light is flashing on their personal telephone. Looks
like some poor skater called in a Code.

     In a Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong franchise on the outskirts of Phoenix,
Rat Thing number B-782 comes awake.
     Fido is waking up because the dogs are barking tonight.
     There  is always  barking. Much of the barking is very far  away.  Fido
knows  that faraway barks are  not  as important as close  barks, and  so he
often sleeps through these.
     But sometimes a faraway bark will carry a special sound that makes Fido
excited, and he can't help waking up.
     He is hearing one of those barks right  now. It comes from far away but
it is urgent. Some nice doggie somewhere is very upset. He is so  upset that
his barking has spread to all the other doggies in the pack.
     Fido listens to the bark. He gets excited, too. Some bad strangers have
just been very close to a nice doggie's yard. They were in a  flying  thing.
They had lots of guns.
     Fido doesn't like guns very much.  A stranger with  a gun shot him once
and made him hurt. Then the nice girl came and helped him.
     These are  extremely bad  strangers. Any nice doggie in  his right mind
would want to hurt them and make  them go away. As Fido listens to the bark,
he  sees  what they look like and hears  the way they sound. If any of these
very bad strangers ever come into his yard, he will be extremely upset.
     Then  Fido notices that the  bad strangers are  chasing someone. He can
tell they are hurting her by the way her voice sounds and the way she moves.
     The bad  strangers are  hurting the nice girl who loves  him! Fido gets
more angry than  he has ever been, even more  angry than when a bad man shot
him long ago.
     His  job  is to keep bad strangers out  of his  yard.  He does  not  do
anything else.
     But it's even  more important to protect  the nice  girl who loves him.
That is more important than anything. And nothing can stop him. Not even the
fence.
     The  fence  is very tall. But he  can remember a long time ago  when he
used to jump over things that were taller than his head.
     Fido comes out of his doggie house,  curls his long  legs beneath  him,
and jumps over the fence around his yard before he has remembered that he is
not capable of jumping over it. This contradiction  is lost  on him, though;
as a dog, introspection is not one of his strong points.
     The  bark is spreading to another place far away.  All the nice doggies
who live in this faraway place are being warned to look out for the very bad
strangers and the girl who loves Fido, because they are going to that place.
Fido sees the place in his mind. It is big and wide and  flat and open, like
a nice field for chasing Frisbees. It has lots of big flying  things. Around
the edges are a couple of yards where nice doggies live.
     Fido can hear those nice doggies  barking in reply. He knows where they
are.  Far away. But you can get there by streets. Fido knows a whole  lot of
different streets. He just runs  down streets, and he knows where he is  and
where he's going.
     At first, the only trace that B-782 leaves of his passage is a  dancing
trail  of sparks down the center of  the franchise ghetto. But once he makes
his way  out onto  a  long  straight  piece of highway,  he  begins to leave
further evidence: a spume of shattered blue safety glass spraying outward in
parallel  vanes  from  all  four lanes  of traffic as  the  windows and  the
windshields of the cars blow out of their frames, spraying into the air like
rooster tails behind a speedboat.
     As  part  of  Mr.  Lee's good  neighbor  policy,  all  Rat  Things  are
programmed never to break the sound  barrier in a populated area. But Fido's
in too much of a  hurry to worry about the  good neighbor  policy. Jack  the
sound barrier. Bring the noise.

        66

     "Raven," Hiro says, "let me tell you a story before I kill you."
     "I'll listen," Raven says. "It's a long ride."
     All  vehicles in the Metaverse have voice  phones on  them. Hiro simply
called home to the  Librarian and  had him look up Raven's number.  They are
riding  in lockstep across  the black surface  of the imaginary  planet now,
though Hiro is gaining on Raven, meter by meter.
     "My dad was in the Army in World War Two. Lied about his age to get in.
They put him  in the Pacific doing scut work. Anyway, he got captured by the
Nipponese."
     "So?"
     "So they  took him back to Nippon. Put him in a prison camp. There were
a lot of Americans there, plus some Brits  and some Chinese. And a couple of
guys that  they  couldn't  place.  They  looked like Indians. Spoke a little
English. But they spoke Russian even better."
     "They were Aleuts," Raven says. "American citizens. But no one had ever
heard of them.  Most people don't  know that the Japanese conquered American
territory during the war - several islands at the end of the Aleutian chain.
Inhabited. By  my people. They took the  two  most  important Aleuts and put
them in prison camps  in Japan. One of them was the mayor of Attu - the most
important civil authority. The other  was even more important, to us. He was
the chief harpooneer of the Aleut nation."
     Hiro says, "The mayor got sick and died. He didn't have any immunities.
But the harpooneer was  one tough son  of a bitch.  He got sick a few times,
but  he survived. Went out to work in the fields along with the rest  of the
prisoners, growing food for the war effort. Worked in the kitchen, preparing
slop for  the prisoners and the guards. He kept to himself  a  lot. Everyone
avoided him because he smelled terrible. His bed stank up the barracks."
     "He  was  cooking up  aconite  whale  poison from mushrooms  and  other
substances that he  found in the fields and secreted in his clothing," Raven
says.
     "Besides,"  Hiro continues,  "they were  pissed at him because he broke
out a windowpane in the barracks  once,  and it let cold air in for the rest
of  the winter.  Anyway,  one  day,  after  lunch,  all of the guards became
terribly sick."
     "Whale poison in the fish stew," Raven says.
     "The prisoners  were already out  working  in the fields, and  when the
guards began to get sick, they began to march them  all  back  in toward the
barracks,  because they couldn't keep watch over them when they were doubled
over with stomach cramps. And this late in  the war, it wasn't easy to bring
in  reinforcements. My  father was last  in the  line of prisoners. And this
Aleut guy was right in front of him."
     Raven says,  "As  the prisoners  were crossing an irrigation ditch, the
Aleut dove into the water and disappeared."
     "My father didn't know what to do," Hiro says, "until he  heard a grunt
from the guard who was  bringing up the  rear. He turned around and saw that
this guard had a bamboo spear  stuck all the way through his body. Just came
out of nowhere. And he still couldn't see the Aleut. Then another guard went
down with his throat slit, and there was the  Aleut, winding up and throwing
another spear that brought down yet another guard."
     "He had been making harpoons and hiding  them under the  water  in  the
irrigation ditches," Raven says.
     "Then my father realized," Hiro continues, "that he was doomed. Because
no matter what he said to the guards, they would consider him to have been a
part of an escape attempt, and they would  bring a  sword and  lop  his head
off. So, figuring that he might as well bring down a few of the enemy before
they  got to  him, he took the  gun  from the first guard who had been  hit,
jumped down into the cover of the irrigation  ditch, and shot another couple
of guards who were coming over to investigate."
     Raven says, "The Aleut ran  for the border fence,  which  was a  flimsy
bamboo  thing. There was supposedly a minefield there  but  he  ran straight
across it with  no trouble. Either he was lucky or else the mines - if there
were any - were few and far between."
     "They didn't bother  to  have  strict  perimeter security," Hiro  says,
"because Japan  is an island - so even if someone escaped, where could  they
run to?"
     "An Aleut could do it, though," Raven says. "He could go to the nearest
coastline  and build himself a kayak.  He could take to  the open water  and
make his  way up  the  coastline of Japan,  then surf from one island to the
next, all the way back to the Aleutians."
     "Right," Hiro says, "which is the only part of  the  story that I never
understood - until  I saw you on the open water, outrunning a  speedboat  in
your kayak. Then I put it all together. Your father  wasn't  crazy. He had a
perfectly good plan."
     "Yes. But your father didn't understand it."
     "My father ran  in your  father's  footsteps across the minefield. They
were free - in Nippon. Your  father started  heading  downhill,  toward  the
ocean. My  father wanted to head uphill, into  the  mountains, figuring that
they could maybe live in an isolated place until the war was over."
     "It was a stupid  idea," Raven says. "Japan is heavily populated. There
is no place where they could have gone unnoticed."
     "My father didn't even know what a kayak was."
     "Ignorance is no excuse," Raven says.
     "Their  arguing  - the  same  argument  we're  having  now -  was their
downfall.  The  Nipponese  caught up with them  on  a road just  outside  of
Nagasaki. They  didn't even have  handcuffs, so they tied their hands behind
their  backs with bootlaces and made them kneel -  on  the road, facing each
other. Then the lieutenant  took  his sword  out  of  its  sheath. It was an
ancient sword; the lieutenant was from a proud  family  of samurai, and  the
only reason he was on this home-front detail was that he had nearly  had one
leg blown off earlier in the war. He raised the  sword up above my  father's
head."
     "It  made a high ringing sound in  the air,"  Raven says, "that hurt my
father's ears."
     "But it never came down."
     "My  father saw your  father's skeleton kneeling in front of  him. That
was the last thing he ever saw."
     "My  father  was  facing  away  from  Nagasaki,"  Hiro  says.  "He  was
temporarily blinded by the  light; he fell forward and pressed his face into
the ground to  get the terrible light  out of his eyes. Then  everything was
back to normal again."
     "Except my father was blind," Raven says. "He could only listen to your
father fighting the lieutenant."
     "It  was a half-blind, one-legged  samurai with a  katana versus  a big
strong healthy  man with  his arms  tied, behind his back,"  Hiro  says.  "A
pretty interesting fight. A pretty fair one. My father won. And that was the
end of the war. The occupation troops got there a couple  of weeks later. My
father went home and kicked  around for a while and finally had a kid during
the seventies. So did yours."
     Raven  says,  "Amchitka,  1972.  My  father  got  nuked  twice  by  you
bastards."
     "I understand the depth of your feelings,"  Hiro  says. "But don't  you
think you've had enough revenge?"
     "There's no such thing as enough," Raven says.
     Hiro  guns  his motorcycle  forward  and  closes on Raven, swinging his
katana.  But Raven reaches back - watching him  in the rearview mirror - and
blocks the blow; he's carrying a big long knife in one hand. Then Raven cuts
his  speed  down  to almost nothing and  dives  in  between a couple  of the
stanchions. Hiro overshoots  him, slows down too much, and gets a glimpse of
Raven screaming past him on the other side of the monorail; by the time he's
accelerated and cut through another gap,  Raven has already slalomed over to
the other side.
     And  so  it goes. They  run  down  the  length  of  the  Street  in  an
interlacing zigzag  pattern, cutting back and forth under the  monorail. The
game is a simple one. All Raven has to do is make Hiro run into a stanchion.
Hiro will  come to a stop for a moment. By that time Raven will be gone, out
of visual range, and Hiro will have no way to track him.
     It's an  easier game for Raven than for Hiro. But Hiro's better at this
kind  of thing than Raven is. That makes it a pretty even match. They slalom
down the monorail  track at  speeds from sixty  to sixty  thousand miles per
hour;  all around them, low-slung commercial developments and high-tech labs
and amusement parks sprawl  off into the darkness. Downtown is before  them,
as high and bright as the aurora borealis rising from the black water of the
Bering Sea.

        67

     The first poon  smacks into the belly of the chopper as they are coming
in  low over the  Valley. Y.T. feels it rather than hears it; she knows that
sweet impact so well that she can  sense it like one of those supersensitive
seismo-thingies that detects  earthquakes on the  other side of  the planet.
Then half  a dozen other poons  strike in  quick succession, and  she has to
force  herself not to  lean over  and  look  out the  window. Of course. The
chopper's belly is a solid wall of Soviet steel. It'll hold poons like glue.
If they  just keep flying low enough to poon -  which they have  to, to keep
the chopper under the Mafia's radar.
     She can hear  the radio crackling up  front. "Take it up, Sasha, you're
picking up some parasites."
     She  looks  out  the window.  The other  chopper, the  little  aluminum
corporate number, is  flying alongside them, a little bit higher in the air,
and all the  people inside of it  are peering out  the windows, watching the
pavement underneath them. Except for Raven. Raven is still goggled into  the
Metaverse.
     Shit. The pilot's pulling the chopper to a higher altitude.
     "Okay,  Sasha.  You  lost 'em,"  the  radio says.  "But you still got a
couple of  them poon things hanging off  your belly, so make  sure you don't
snag 'em on anything. The cables are stronger than steel."
     That's all Y.T. needs. She opens the door and jumps out of the chopper.
     At least that's how it looks to the people inside. Actually she grabs a
handhold on her way down and ends up  dangling from the swinging, open door,
looking inward toward the  belly of the chopper. A couple of poons are stuck
to it;  thirty feet below,  she can see the handles dangling on the  ends of
their lines, fluttering  in  the airstream. Looking  into the open door  she
can't hear  Rife  but she  can see  him,  sitting  there next to the  pilot,
motioning: Down, take it down!
     Which is what she  figured. This hostage thing works two ways. She's no
good to Rife unless he's got her, and she's in one piece.
     The chopper starts losing altitude again,  heading back down toward the
twin stripe of  loglo that  marks  out  the  avenue  beneath them. Y.T. gets
swinging  back and forth on the door a little, finally swings in far  enough
that she can hook one of the poon cables with her foot.
     This next  bit is going to hurt like hell. But the  tough fabric of the
coverall should prevent her from losing too much skin. And the sight of Tony
lunging at  her,  trying to grab  her  sleeve, reinforces  her  own  natural
tendency not to think about it too hard. She  lets  go of the chopper's door
with one of  her hands, grabs the poon cable, winds it around the outside of
her glove a couple of times, then lets go with the other hand.
     She was right. It does hurt  like  hell.  As she swings  down under the
belly of the chopper, out of Tony's grasp, something pops inside her hand  -
probably  one  of  those  dinky little  bones. But  she gets  the poon cable
wrapped around her body the same way Raven did when he rappeled off the ship
with her, and manages a controlled, burning slide down to the end.
     Down  to the  handle, that is.  She hooks it onto her belt so she can't
fall and then thrashes around for what seems like a whole minute until she's
not  tangled up in the cable anymore,  just dangling  by the waist, twisting
around  and around  between the chopper and the street, out of control. Then
she gets  the  handle  in  both hands and unhooks  it from her belt so she's
hanging by the arms again, which was the whole point of the exercise. As she
rotates, she sees the other chopper above her and off  to the side, glimpses
the  faces watching her, knows  that all of this is  being relayed, over the
radio, to Rife.
     Sure  enough. The chopper cuts to  about half  its former  speed, loses
some altitude.
     She  clicks another  control and reels out the  line all the way to the
end,  dropping twenty feet  in  one thrill-packed moment. Now  she's  flying
along, ten or fifteen feet  above the highway,  doing maybe forty-five miles
an hour. The logo signs shoot past  her on either  side like meteors.  Other
than a swarm of Kouriers, traffic is light.
     The  RARE chopper comes thwacking in, dangerously  close, and she looks
up  at it, just  for an instant, and sees Raven  looking  at her through the
window. He's pulled his  goggles up on his forehead, just for a second. He's
got a certain look on his face, and she realizes that he's not pissed at her
at all. He loves her.
     She lets go of the handle and goes into free fall.
     At the same time,  she jerks the manual release  on her cervical collar
and  goes into  full Michelin Man  mode  as tiny gas cartridges  detonate in
several strategic locations around her bod. The biggest one goes off like an
M-80  at  the nape of  her  neck,  unfurling  the  coverall's collar into  a
cylindrical gasbag  that shoots  straight up  and encases  her  entire head.
Other airbags  go  off  around her  torso  and  her pelvis,  paying  lots of
attention to that spinal  column. Her  joints are already protected  by  the
armorgel.
     Which  is not to say that it doesn't hurt when she lands. She can't see
anything because  of the airbag around her  head,  of course.  But she feels
herself bouncing at least ten times.  She skids for a quarter of  a mile and
apparently  caroms off several cars along  the way; she can hear their tires
squealing. Finally, she goes  butt  first  through someone's windshield  and
ends up sprawled across their front seat;  they veer into a  Jersey barrier.
The airbag  deflates  as soon  as everything stops moving,  and she claws it
away from her face.
     Her ears  are ringing or something. She can't  hear anything. Maybe she
busted her eardrums when the airbags went off.
     But there's  also the question of the  big chopper,  which has a talent
for  making noise. She  drags herself out onto  the hood of the car, feeling
little hunks of safety glass beneath her carving parallel scratches into the
paint job.
     Rife's big Soviet  chopper is right there,  hovering  about twenty feet
above the avenue, and by  the time she sees it, it has already accumulated a
dozen more poons. Her  eyes follow  the cables down to street level, and she
sees Kouriers straining at the lines; this time, they're not letting go.
     Rife gets  suspicious,  and the  chopper  gains  altitude, lifting  the
Kouriers off their planks. But  a  passing double-bottom semi sheds  a small
army of Kouriers  -  there must  be  a hundred of them pooned onto  the poor
thing - and  within a few seconds, all their MagnaPoons are airborne  and at
least half of them  stick to the armor plating on the first try. The chopper
lurches downward  until all  of the Kouriers are on the ground again. Twenty
more  Kouriers come  flying  in and nail  it;  those  that  can't, grab onto
someone else's handle and add their weight. The chopper  tries several times
to rise, but it may as well be tethered to the asphalt by this point.
     It  starts to come down. The Kouriers fan  out away from it so that the
chopper comes down in the middle of a radial burst of poon cables.
     Tony, the security  guy,  climbs down out  of  the  open  door,  moving
slowly,  high-stepping  his  way  through  the  web  of cables  but  somehow
retaining his balance  and his dignity. He walks away from the chopper until
he is out from under the  rotor blades, then pulls an Uzi out from under his
windbreaker and fires a short air burst.
     "Get the fuck away from our chopper!" he is shouting.
     The Kouriers, by and large, do. They're  not  stupid. And  Y.T. is  now
walking around  safe on the pavement, the mission  is accomplished, the Code
is finished, there's no reason to hassle these  chopper dudes anymore.  They
detach their poons from the belly of the chopper and reel in the cables.
     Tony looks  around and sees  Y.T.  She's  walking directly  toward  the
chopper. Her sprained body moves awkwardly.
     "Get back in the chopper, you lucky bitch!" he says.
     Y.T. picks up a loose poon handle that  no one has bothered to  reel in
yet. She hits the button that turns off the electromagnet and its head drops
off  the chopper's armor. She reels  it in until about four feet of slack is
there between the reel and the head.
     "There was this dude  named Ahab that I read about," she says, whirling
the poon around her head. "He got his poon cable  all wrapped up around  the
thing he was trying to poon. It was a big mistake."
     She  lets the  poon  fly. It passes  up through the plane  of the rotor
blades, near the center, and she can see the unbreakable cable start to wind
itself  around the delicate parts of the rotor's axle, like a garrote around
a  ballerina's  neck.  Through  the  chopper's windshield she can  see Sasha
reacting, flipping switches frantically, pulling levers, his mouth  making a
long  string of  Russian curses.  The poon's handle gets snapped out  of her
hand, and she sees it get whipped into the center like it's a black hole.
     "I guess he  just didn't  know when to let go,  like some people,"  she
says. Then she turns around and walks away from the chopper. Behind her, she
can hear large pieces of metal going the wrong way, running into one another
at high speed.
     Rife has figured it  out a long time ago. He's already running down the
middle of the highway with a submachine  gun in one hand, looking  for a car
to commandeer. Above, the RARE chopper hovers  and watches; Rife looks up to
it and motions forward with one hand, shouting, "Go to LAX! Go to LAX!"
     The chopper makes one last orbit over the scene, watching as Sasha puts
the   ruined  gunship  into   cold   shutdown,   watching  furious  Kouriers
overwhelming  and disarming Tony and  Frank and  the President, watching  as
Rife stands in the middle of the left lane and forces a CosaNostra Pizza car
to a stop,  forces the driver out.  But  Raven  isn't watching any of  these
things. He's looking out the window at Y.T. And as the chopper finally tilts
forward  and  accelerates into the night, he grins  at her and gives her the
thumbs  up. Y.T. bites her lower lip and flips him the bird. With that,  the
relationship is over, hopefully for all time.
     Y.T. borrows a plank from an awed skater and  pushes herself across the
street to the nearest Buy 'n' Fly and starts trying to  call  Mom for a ride
home.

        68

     Hiro loses Raven a few miles outside of Downtown, but it doesn't matter
by this point; he  goes straight to the  plaza and  then starts to orbit the
rim of the amphitheater  at high speed, a one-man picket  fence. Raven makes
his  approach  within a few seconds. Hiro breaks out  of his orbit and heads
straight for him, and they come together like a couple of medieval jousters.
Hiro  loses  his left  arm  and Raven drops  a leg. The  limbs topple to the
ground.  Hiro  drops his  katana  and  uses his  remaining arm  to  draw his
one-handed sword - a better  match for  Raven's long knife anyway.  He  cuts
Raven off just as he's about to plummet over the lip of the amphitheater and
forces him aside; Raven's  momentum takes  him  half a  mile away in  half a
second. Hiro  chases him down by following a series of educated guesses - he
knows this territory like Raven  knows the currents  of the  Aleutians - and
then  they  are blasting  through  the narrow  streets  of  the  Metaverse's
financial district,  waving long  knives at each  other, slicing and  dicing
hundreds of pinstriped avatars who happen to get in their way.
     But they never seem to hit  each other. The speeds are just too  great,
the targets too small. Hiro's been lucky so far - he has got Raven caught up
in the thrill of  competition, made him spoil for a fight. But Raven doesn't
need  this.  He  can  get back  to  the  amphitheater  pretty easily without
bothering to kill Hiro first.
     And  finally, he realizes it. He  sheathes his knife  and dives into an
alley  between  skyscrapers. Hiro follows him, but  by  the time he's gotten
into that same alley, Raven's gone.

     Hiro goes  over the  lip of the amphitheater doing a  couple of hundred
miles per hour and soars  out into space, in free fall, above the heads of a
quarter of a million wildly cheering hackers.
     They  all know Hiro. He's  the  guy with  the  swords. He's a friend of
Da5id's.  And  as  his  own  personal  contribution  to  the  benefit,  he's
apparently  decided  to  stage a sword  fight  with  some kind  of  hulking,
scary-looking daemon on  a  motorcycle. Don't touch that dial, it's going to
be a hell of a show.
     He lands on the stage and bounces to a halt next to his motorcycle. The
bike still works, but it's  worthless down here. Raven is ten  meters  away,
grinning at him.
     "Bombs away," Raven says. He  pulls the glowing blue lozenge out of his
sidecar  with  one hand and  drops it on the  center of the amphitheater. It
breaks open like the shell of an egg and  light shines out of it.  The light
begins to grow and take shape.
     The crowd goes wild.
     Hiro runs  toward the egg. Raven cuts him off.  Raven can't move around
on his feet now, because he's lost a leg. But he can still control the bike.
He's got his long knife out now, and the two  blades come together above the
egg, which  has become the vortex of a blinding, deafening  tornado of light
and sound. Colored shapes,  foreshortened by their immense speed, shoot from
the  center  of  it  and  take  positions  above  their  heads,  building  a
three-dimensional picture.
     The hackers are going nuts. Hiro knows  that the Hacker Quadrant in The
Black Sun  is, at this moment, emptying itself  out.  They are all  cramming
through the exit and running down the Street toward the plaza, coming to see
Hiro's fantastic show of light, sound, swords, and sorcery.
     Raven  tries to shove Hiro back. It would work in Reality because Raven
has such overpowering strength.  But avatars are equally  strong, unless you
back them up in just the right  way. So Raven gives a  mighty  push and then
pulls his  knife back so that  he can  take a  cut  at Hiro's neck when Hiro
flies away from him; but Hiro doesn't fly away. He waits for the opening and
then  takes Raven's sword  hand off. Then, just  in  case,  he takes Raven's
other hand off. The crowd screams in delight.
     "How do I stop this thing?" Hiro says.
     "Beats me. I just deliver 'em," Raven says.
     "Do you have any concept of what you just did?"
     "Yeah. Realized my lifelong ambition," Raven  says, a huge relaxed grin
spreading across his face. "I nuked America."
     Hiro cuts his head off. The crowd of doomed hackers rises  to its  feet
and shrieks.
     Then  they  go silent as Hiro abruptly disappears. He has switched over
to  his small,  invisible avatar.  He is hovering in the air now  above  the
shattered remains of the egg; gravity takes  him right