in
Griffith Park.  But  the weirdest job  of all is this new one: someone wants
her to  deliver  some stuff to  the United  States of America. Says so right
there on the job order.
     It's not much of a delivery, just a legal-size envelope.
     "You  sure you don't just want to mail this?" she asks the guy when she
picks it up. It's one of these creepy office parks out in the Burbs.  Like a
Burbclave for worthless  businesses  that  have offices and phones and stuff
but don't actually seem to do anything.
     It's a sarcastic question, of course. The mail doesn't work,  except in
Fedland.  All  the  mailboxes have been  unbolted and used  to decorate  the
apartments of  nostalgia freaks. But  it's also kind of a joke,  because the
destination is, in fact,  a building  in the middle of Fedland. So the  joke
is: If  you want  to  deal with the Feds, why not  use  their fucked-up mail
system? Aren't you afraid that by dealing  with  anything as incredibly cool
as a Kourier you will be tainted in their eyes?
     "Well, uh, the mail doesn't come out here, does it?" the guy says.
     No point in describing the office. No point in even allowing the office
to even register on  her eyeballs and  take up valuable memory space in  her
brain. Fluorescent lights and partitions with carpet glued to them. I prefer
my  carpet on  the floor, thank you. A color scheme. Ergonomic  shit. Chicks
with lipstick. Xerox smell. Everything's pretty new, she figures.
     The legal  envelope is  resting on the  guy's desk.  Not  much point in
describing him,  either. Traces of a southern or Texan  accent.  The  bottom
edge of the envelope is parallel  to the edge  of the desk, one-quarter inch
away  from it,  perfectly centered between the left and right sides. Like he
had  a  doctor come in  here  and put it on  the  desk with  tweezers. It is
addressed to: ROOM 969A,  MAIL STOP MS-1569835, BUILDING LA-6, UNITED STATES
OF AMERICA.
     "You want a return address on this?" she says.
     "That's not necessary."
     "If  I  can't deliver it,  there's  no way I can  get  it back to  you,
because these places all look the same to me."
     "It's not important," he says. "When do you think you'll get it there?"
     "Two hours max."
     "Why so long?"
     "Customs, man. The Feds haven't modernized  their system like  everyone
else."  Which is why most Kouriers  will do anything to  avoid delivering to
Fedland. But it's  a slow  day  today, Y.T. hasn't  been called in to do any
secret missions for the Mafia yet, and  maybe she can catch Mom on her lunch
break.
     "And your name is?"
     "We don't give out our names."
     "I need to know who's delivering this."
     "Why? You said it wasn't important."
     The  guy  gets  really flustered.  "Okay,"  he says. "Forget  it.  Just
deliver it, please."
     Okay, be  that way,  she mentally says. She  mentally says a  number of
other things,  too. The man is an obvious pervert. It's so plain,  so  open:
"And your name is?" Give me a break, man.
     Names are unimportant.  Everyone  knows  Kouriers  are  interchangeable
parts. It's just that some happen to be a lot faster and better.
     So  she skates out of the office. It's all very anonymous. No corporate
logos  anywhere.  So  as she's waiting for the  elevator, she  calls RadiKS,
tries to find out who initiated this call.
     The answer  comes  back a few minutes later, as she's riding out of the
office  park,  pooned   onto  a   nice  Mercedes:  Rife   Advanced  Research
Enterprises. RARE. One  of these high-tech outfits. Probably trying to get a
government contract. Probably trying to sell  sphygmomanometers to the  Feds
or something like that.
     Oh  well,  she just delivers 'em.  She  gets the  impression  that this
Mercedes is sandbagging - driving real slow so she'll poon something  else -
so she poons something else, an  outgoing delivery  truck. Judging from  the
way it's riding high on its  springs,  it must be  empty, so  it'll probably
move along pretty fast.
     Ten  seconds  later, predictably,  the Mercedes  blasts  by in the left
lane, so she poons that and rides it nice and hard for a couple of miles.
     Getting  into   Fedland   is  a  drag.   Most   Fedsters   drive  tiny,
plastic-and-aluminum cars  that are hard  to poon. But eventually  she nails
one, a  little jellybean with glued-on windows  and a three-cylinder engine,
and that takes her up to the United States border.
     The smaller this country gets, the more paranoid they become. Nowadays,
the customs people are just  impossible. She has to sign a ten-page document
- and  they actually make her read it. They say it should take at least half
an hour for her just to read the thing.
     "But I read it two weeks ago."
     "It might  have  changed," the  guard  says, "so  you  have  to read it
again."
     Basically,  it just certifies  that Y.T. is not a terrorist,  Communist
(whatever  that  is),  homosexual,  national-symbol  desecrator, pornography
merchant, welfare parasite,  racially insensitive, carrier of any infectious
disease,  or  advocate of any ideology tending to  impugn traditional family
values. Most  of it  is just definitions of all the words  used on the first
page.
     So Y.T. sits  in the little room for half  an hour,  doing housekeeping
work - going  over her stuff,  changing batteries in all her little devices,
cleaning   her   nails,  having  her  skateboard  run  its  self-maintenance
procedures. Then she  signs the fucking  document  and hands it  over to the
guy. And then she's in Fedland.
     It's  not  hard finding  the  place.  Typical  Fed building - a million
steps. Like it's built on  top of  a mountain of steps. Columns. A lot  more
guys  in this  one than usual.  Chunky guys with slippery hair. Must be some
kind  of  cop building.  The guard at the front door  is  a cop all the way,
wants to give her a big hassle about carrying her skateboard into the place.
Like they've got a safe place out front to keep skateboards.
     The cop  guy is completely  hard  to  deal with. But that's okay, so is
Y.T.
     "Here's the envelope," she says. "You can take it up to the ninth floor
yourself on your coffee break. Too bad you have to take the stairs.
     "Look," he says:,  totally exasperated, "this  is EBGOC. This is, like,
the  headquarters.  EBGOC central.  You got  that? Everything  that  happens
within a mile is being videotaped. People don't spit on  the pavement within
sight of  this building.  They  don't even say  bad words. Nobody's going to
steal your skateboard."
     "That's  even worse.  They'll steal it. Then  they'll  say  they didn't
steal it, they confiscated it.  I know you Feds,  you're always confiscating
shit."
     The guy sighs.  Then his eyes go  out  of focus  and he shuts  up for a
minute. Y.T. can tell he's getting a message over the little earphone that's
plugged into his ear, the mark of the true Fed.
     "Go on in," he says. "But you gotta sign."
     "Naturally," Y.T. says.
     The cop  hands  her  the sign-in sheet,  which is actually  a  notebook
computer with an  electronic pen.  She  writes  "Y.T."  on the  screen, it's
converted to a  digital bitmap, automatically time stamped, and sent  off to
the big  computer at Fed  Central. She  knows she's  not  going  to  make it
through the metal detector without  stripping naked,  so she just vaults the
cop's  table  - what's  he going to  do, shoot  her? - and heads on into the
building, skateboard under her arm.
     "Hey!" he says, weakly.
     "What,  you got lots  of EBGOC agents in here being mugged and raped by
female Kouriers?" she says, stomping the elevator button ferociously.
     Elevator takes  forever. She  loses her  patience  and just climbs  the
stairs like all the other Feds.
     The guy is right, it's definitely Cop  Central here on the ninth floor.
Every  creepy guy in sunglasses and slippery hair you've  ever seen, they're
all here, all with little fleshtone helices of wire trailing down from their
ears. There's even some female  Feds. They look even  scarier than the guys.
The things that a woman can do to her hair to make herself look professional
- Jeeezus! Why not just wear a motorcycle helmet? At least then you can take
it off.
     Except  none  of  the Feds, male or female, is wearing sunglasses. They
look naked without them.  Might  as well be walking around with no pants on.
Seeing these Feds  without their  mirror specs is  like blundering  into the
boys' locker room.
     She finds Room 968A easily enough. Most of the floor is just a big pool
of desks. All the actual,  numbered rooms are around the edges, with frosted
glass doors. Each of  the creepy guys seems to have a desk of his  own, some
of them loiter near their desks, the rest of them are doing a lot of hall  -
jogging and  impromptu conferencing at other creepy guys' desks. Their white
shirts are  painfully  clean.  Not  as many shoulder  holsters as  she would
expect; all  the gun-carrying  Feds are  probably  out  in what  used  to be
Alabama or Chicago trying to confiscate back bits of United States territory
from what is now a Buy 'n' Fly or a toxic-waste dump.
     She goes on into Room 968A.  It's an office. Four Fed guys are in here,
the same as the others except most of them are a tad older, in their forties
and fifties.
     "Got a delivery for this room," Y.T. says.
     "You're Y.T.?" says the head Fed, who's sitting behind the desk.
     "You're not supposed to know my name,"  Y.T. says. "How did you know my
name?"
     "I recognized you," the head Fed says. "I know your mother."
     Y.T. does  not believe  him. But  these Feds have all kinds of ways  of
finding out stuff.
     "Do you have any relatives in Afghanistan?" she says.
     The  guys  all  look  back  and  forth at  each  other,  like, did  you
understand  the  chick? But  it's not a  sentence  that  is  intended to  be
understood. Actually, Y.T.  has all kinds of voice recognition  ware  in her
coverall and in  her plank.  When  she  says, "Do you have  any relatives in
Afghanistan?" that's like  a  code phrase, it tells all of her spook gear to
get  ready, shake  itself down,  check itself  out, prick up  its electronic
ears.
     "You want this envelope or not?" she says.
     "I'll  take  it," the  head  Fed says, standing up and  holding out one
hand.
     Y.T. walks into the middle of the room and hands him  the envelope. But
instead  of  taking  it,  he  lunges out  at the last  minute and  grabs her
forearm.
     She sees an open handcuff in his other hand. He brings it out and snaps
it  down on her  wrist so it tightens  and locks  shut over the cuff of  her
coverall.
     "I'm  sorry to do this,  Y.T., but I have to place  you  under arrest,"
he's saying.
     "What the fuck are you doing?" Y.T. is saying.  She's  holding her free
arm back away from the desk so he can't cuff her wrists together, but one of
the other Feds grabs her by the free wrist, so now she's stretched out  like
a tightrope between the two big Feds.
     "You guys are dead," she says.
     All the guys smile, like they enjoy a chick with some spunk.
     "You guys are dead," she says a second time.
     This  is  the  key phrase that all of her ware is waiting to hear. When
she says it  the second  time, all the  self-defense  stuff  comes on, which
means  that among  other  things, a  few thousand volts  of  radio-frequency
electrical power suddenly flood through the outsides of her cuffs.
     The  head Fed behind the desk blurts out a grunt from  way down in  his
stomach.  He  flies back  away from  her,  his  entire  right  side  jerking
spastically, trips  over  his  own  chair, and sprawls back  into the  wall,
smacking his  head on  the marble windowsill. The jerk who's  yanking on her
other  arm  stretches  out  like  he's  on  an  invisible rack, accidentally
slapping one of  the other guys in  the face, giving that guy a nice dose of
juice to  the  head. Both of them hit the  floor  like a sack of rabid cats.
There's only one of these guys left,  and he's reaching under his jacket for
something. She takes one step toward him, swings her arm around, and the end
of the loose manacle strokes him in the neck. Just a caress, but it might as
well be a two-handed blow from Satan's electric ax handle. That  funky juice
runs all up and  down his spine, and suddenly, he's sprawled across a couple
of shitty old wooden chairs and his pistol is rotating on the floor like the
spinner in a children's game.
     She flexes her wrist in a particular  way, and the bundy stunner  drops
down her  sleeve and into her hand. The manacle swinging from the other hand
will have  a  similar effect  on that side. She also  pulls  out  the can of
Liquid Knuckles, pops the lid, sets the spray nozzle on wide angle.
     One of  the Fed creeps is nice  enough to open the office door for her.
He comes into the room with his gun already drawn, backed up by half a dozen
other guys who've flocked here from the office pool,  and she just lets them
have it  with the Liquid Knuckles. Whoosh, it's like bug spray. The sound of
bodies  hitting the floor  is  like  a bass drum  roll.  She  finds that her
skateboard has no problem rolling across  their prone bodies, and then she's
out into the office pool. These guys are converging from  all sides, there's
an incredible  number  of them,  she just keeps holding  that  button  down,
pointed straight ahead, digging at  the  floor  with  her foot,  building up
speed. The Liquid Knuckles acts like a  chemical flying wedge, she's skating
out of  there on a carpet  of  bodies. Some of the  Feds are agile enough to
dart in from  behind and try to get her that way, but she's  ready  with the
bundy stunner, which turns their nervous systems  into coils  of  hot barbed
wire for a few minutes but isn't supposed to have any other effects.
     She's made it about three-quarters of  the  way across  the office when
the Liquid Knuckles runs out. But it still works for a second or two because
people  are afraid  of  it, keep  diving out of  the way even though there's
nothing coming out. Then a couple of them figure it out, make the mistake of
trying  to  grab  her by  the wrists. She gets one  of them with  the  bundy
stunner  and the other with the electric manacle. Then boom through the door
and she's out into the stairwell, leaving four dozen casualties in her wake.
Serves them right, they didn't even try to arrest her in a gentlemanly way.
     To a man on foot, stairs are a hindrance. But to  the smartwheels, they
just  look like  a  forty-five-degree  angle  ramp. It's  a  little  choppy,
especially when she's down to about the  second  floor and  is going way too
fast, but it's definitely doable.
     A  lucky thing:  One  of  the  first-floor  cops  is  just  opening the
stairwell door, no doubt alerted by the symphony  of alarm bells and buzzers
that has begun to merge into a solid wall  of hysterical sound. She blows by
the guy; he puts one arm  out in an attempt  to stop her, sort of  belts her
across the waist in the process, throws her balance off, but this  is a very
forgiving skateboard,  it's smart enough to slow down for her a  little  bit
when her  center of mass  gets into the wrong place. Pretty  soon  it's back
under her,  she's banking radically through  the elevator lobby, aiming dead
center  for the arch of the metal detector, through which the bright outdoor
light of freedom is shining.
     Her old buddy the cop  is up on his feet, and  he reacts fast enough to
spread-eagle himself across the metal detector. Y.T. acts like she's heading
right for him, then kicks the board sideways at the last minute, punches one
of  the toe switches, coils her legs underneath her, and jumps into the air.
She flies right over his little table while the plank is rolling  underneath
it, and a second later she lands on it, wobbles once, gets her balance back.
She's in the lobby, headed for the doors.
     It's an old building. Most of the doors are metal. But there's a couple
of revolving doors, too, just big sheets of glass.
     Early thrashers used  to inadvertently skate  into walls of glass  from
time to time, which was a  problem. It turned into a bigger problem when the
whole Kourier thing got  started and thrashers started  spending  a lot more
time  trying to  go  fast through office-type environments where glass walls
are considered quite the concept. Which is  why on an expensive  skateboard,
like this one  definitely is, you can get, as an extra added safety feature,
the RadiKS  Narrow  Cone Tuned Shock Wave Projector. It  works on real short
notice, which is good, but you can only use it once (it draws its power from
an explosive charge), and then you have to take  your plank into the shop to
have it replaced.
     It's an emergency thing. Strictly a panic button. But that's cool. Y.T.
makes sure she's aimed directly at the glass revolving doors, then hits  the
appropriate toe switch.
     It's - my God - like you stretched a tarp across a  stadium  to turn it
into a  giant  tom-tom and  then  crashed  a 747 into  it. She can  feel her
internal organs move several inches. Her heart trades places with her liver.
The bottoms of her feet feel numb and tingly. And she's not even standing in
the path of the shock wave.
     The safety glass  in the revolving doors doesn't just crack and fall to
the floor, like she imagined it would.  It is blown out  of its moorings. It
gushes out of the building and down the front steps. She follows, an instant
later.
     The ridiculous  cascade  of  white marble steps on  the  front  of  the
building  just  gives  her more  ramp  time.  By  the  time she reaches  the
sidewalk, she's easily got enough speed to coast all the way to Mexico.
     As she's swinging out across the broad avenue, aiming her crosshairs at
the  customs post  a quarter mile  away, which she is going to  have to jump
over, something tells her to look up.
     Because after all, the building she just escaped from is towering above
her, many stories full of Fed creeps, and all the alarms are going off. Most
of the windows  can't be opened,  all they can do is look out. But there are
people on  the roof.  Mostly the roof is  a  forest  of antennas. If  it's a
forest, these guys  are the creepy little gnomes who live in the trees. They
are ready  for action, they  have their sunglasses on,  they  have  weapons,
they're all looking at her.
     But only  one  guy's taking  aim. And the thing he's aiming at  her  is
huge. The barrel is the size of a baseball bat. She can see the muzzle flash
poke  out of  it, wreathed in a sudden doughnut  of  white  smoke.  It's not
pointed right at her; it's aimed in front of her.
     The stun bunny lands on the street, dead ahead, bounces up in  the air,
and detonates at an altitude of twenty feet.
     The next quarter of a second: There's no bright flash to blind her, and
so  she  can  actually see the  shock  wave spreading  outward in a  perfect
sphere, hard and palpable as a ball  of  ice.  Where the sphere contacts the
street, it makes a circular wave  front, making pebbles bounce, flipping old
McDonald's containers that have long  been smashed flat, and  coaxing  fine,
flourlike dust  out of  all the tiny crevices in the pavement,  so  that  it
sweeps across the road toward her like a microscopic blizzard. Above it, the
shock  wave hangs  in the air, rushing toward her  at the speed  of sound, a
lens of air that flattens and refracts everything on the other  side.  She's
passing through it.

        42

     As Hiro crests  the pass on  his motorcycle at five in the morning, the
town of Port Sherman, Oregon, is suddenly laid out  before  him: a flash  of
yellow loglo wrapped into a  vast U-shaped valley that was ground out of the
rock,  a  long time ago, by a  big  tongue of  ice  in an  epochal period of
geological cunnilingus. There  is just a  light dusting of gold  around  the
edges where it fades into the rain forest, thickening and intensifying as it
approaches the harbor - a long narrow fjordlike notch  cut into the straight
coastline of  Oregon, a deep cold trench of black water heading straight out
to Japan.
     Hiro's back  on the Rim again. Feels good after that night ride through
the sticks. Too many rednecks, too many mounties.
     Even  from  ten miles away and a mile above, it's not  a pretty  sight.
Farther  away from the central  harbor district,  Hiro  can  make out  a few
speckles of red,  which is  a little better  than  the yellow. He  wishes he
could see something in green or blue or purple, but there don't seem  to  be
any neighborhoods done up in those gourmet colors.
     But then this isn't exactly a gourmet job.
     He rides half a mile off the road, sits down on a  flat rock in an open
space - ambush-proof, more or less - and goggles into the Metaverse.
     "Librarian?"
     "Yes, sir?"
     "Inanna."
     "A figure from Sumerian mythology.  Later  cultures knew her as Ishtar,
or Esther."
     "Good goddess or bad goddess?"
     "Good. A beloved goddess."
     "Did she have any dealings with Enki or Asherah?"
     "Mostly with Enki. She and Enki were on good and bad terms at different
times. Inanna was known as the queen of all the great me."
     "I thought the me belonged to Enki."
     "They did. But  Inanna went  to the Abzu  - the watery  fortress in the
city of Eridu where Enki stored up the me - and got Enki to give her all the
me. This is how the me were released into civilization."
     "Watery fortress, huh?"
     "Yes, sir."
     "How did Enki feel about this?"
     "He gave them to her willingly,  apparently because he  was drunk,  and
besotted  with  Inanna's  physical charms. When  he sobered up, he tried  to
chase her down and get them back, but she outsmarted him."
     "Let's get semiotic," Hiro mumbles.  "The  Raft is L. Bob Rife's watery
fortress. That's where he stores up all of his stuff. All of his me. Juanita
went to Astoria, which was as close as you could get to the Raft a couple of
days ago. I think she's trying to pull an Inanna."
     "In  another  popular  Sumerian  myth,"  the  Librarian  says,  "Inanna
descends into the nether world."
     "Go on," Hiro says.
     "She gathers together all of her me and enters the land of no return."
     "Great."
     "She passes  through the  nether world and reaches the  temple  that is
ruled  over  by Ereshkigal, goddess of Death. She  is traveling under  false
pretenses, which  are easily penetrated  by  the all-seeing  Ereshkigal. But
Ereshkigal  allows her to enter the temple. As Inanna enters, her robes  and
jewels and me are stripped from her and she is brought, stark  naked, before
Ereshkigal  and  the  seven judges  of the underworld. The judges  'fastened
their  eyes upon  her,  the eyes of death;  at  their word, the  word  which
tortures the spirit, Inanna  was turned  into a  corpse, a  piece of rotting
meat, and was hung from a hook on the wall.' Kramer."
     "Wonderful. Why the hell would she do something like that?"
     "As  Diane  Wolkstein  puts  it,  "Inanna  gave  up  ...  all  she  had
accomplished in life  until  she was stripped naked,  with nothing remaining
but her will  to be reborn ... because of her journey to the underworld, she
took on the powers and mysteries of death and rebirth."
     "Oh. So I guess there's more to the story?"
     "Inanna's messenger waits for three days, and when  she fails to return
from  the netherworld, goes  to the gods  asking for their help. None of the
gods is willing to help except for Enki."
     "So our buddy, Enki, the hacker god, has to bail her ass out of Hell."
     "Enki creates two people and  sends them into the netherworld to rescue
Inanna.  Through  their magic, Inanna is  brought back to  life. She returns
from the netherworld, followed by a host of the dead."
     "Juanita went to the Raft three days ago," Hiro says. "It's time to get
hacking."

     Earth is still where he left it, zoomed in to show a  magnified view of
the Raft. In the light of  last night's chat with  Chuck Wrightson, it's not
hard to find the hunk  of raft  that was staked  out by the Orthos when  the
Enterprise swung  by TROKK a  few weeks back. There's a  couple of big-assed
Soviet freighters tied together, a swarm of small boats around them. Most of
the  Raft  is dead  brown  and  organic,  but  this  section  is  all  white
fiberglass: pleasure  craft looted from  the comfortable  retirees of TROKK.
Thousands of them.
     Now the Raft is off Port  Sherman,  so, Hiro figures, that's where  the
high  priests of Asherah are  hanging  out.  In a few  days,  they'll  be in
Eureka, then San  Francisco,  then  L.A. - a  floating land link, tying  the
Orthos'  operations on  the  Raft  to  the  closest  available point on  the
mainland.
     He turns away from the Raft, skims across the ocean to Port Sherman  to
do a bit of reconnoitering there.
     Down along the waterfront, there's a nice crescent of cheap motels with
yellow logos. Hiro rifles through them, looking for Russian names.
     That's  easy. There's  a  Spectrum  2000  right  in the middle  of  the
waterfront. As the  name implies, each one  has a whole range of rooms, from
human coin lockers in the lobby all the way to luxury suites on the top. And
a whole range of rooms has been rented out by a bunch  of people  with names
ending in -off and -ovski and other dead Slavic giveaways. The foot soldiers
sleep in  the lobby,  laid out straight and  narrow in coin  lockers next to
their  AK-47s, and the  priests and  generals live  in nice rooms higher up.
Hiro pauses to wonder what a Pentecostal Russian Orthodox priest does with a
Magic Fingers.
     The suite on  the very top is being  rented out by  a  gentleman by the
name of Gurov. Mr. KGB himself. Too much of a wimp to hang out on the actual
Raft, apparently.
     How'd he get from the Raft to Port Sherman? If it  involves  crossing a
couple of hundred miles of North Pacific, it must be a decent-sized vessel.
     There are half a  dozen marinas in Port Sherman. At the moment, most of
them  are clogged with small  brown boats.  It  looks  like  a  post-typhoon
situation, where a  few hundred square miles of  ocean have been swept clean
of sampans that have piled up against the nearest hard place. Except this is
slightly more organized than that.
     The Refus are coining ashore already. If they're smart and  aggressive,
they probably know that they can walk to California from here.
     That explains why the piers  are clogged with trashy  little boats. But
one of  them still looks like a private marina. It's got a dozen or so clean
white  vessels,  lined up  neatly  in their  slips,  no  riffraff.  And  the
resolution of this image is good enough that Hiro can see  the pier speckled
with little doughnuts: probably rings of sandbags. That'd be the only way to
keep your private moorage private when the Raft was hovering offshore.
     The  numbers, flags, and other identifying goodies are  harder  to make
out. The satellite has a hard time picking that stuff out.
     Hiro checks  to  see whether CIC has  a stringer in Port  Sherman. They
have to, because the Raft is here, and CIC  hopes to make a big business out
of  selling Raft  intelligence  to  all the  anxious  waterfronters  between
Skagway and Tierra del Fuego.
     Indeed. There  are a few people hanging out in this town, uploading the
latest Port Sherman intel. And one  of  them  is just a punter with  a video
camera who goes around shooting pictures of everything.
     Hiro reviews this stuff in fast-forward.  A lot of it  is shot from the
stringer's hotel window: hours and hours of coverage of the stream of shitty
little brown boats laboring their way up the harbor, tying up to the edge of
the mini-Raft that's forming in front of Port Sherman.
     But  it's semi-organized, in that some apparently self-appointed  water
cops  are  buzzing around in  a speedboat, aiming guns  at  people, shouting
through  a megaphone. And that  explains why, no matter how tangled the mess
in  the  harbor becomes, there's always a  clear lane down the middle of the
fjord, headed out to sea. And the  terminus of that  clear lane  is the nice
pier with the big boats.
     There are two  big vessels there. One is a large fishing boat  flying a
flag bearing the emblem of the Orthos, which is just a cross and a flame. It
is  obvious TROKK loot; the name on the stem is KODIAK QUEEN, and the Orthos
haven't  bothered to  change it yet. The other large boat is  a small cruise
vessel, made to carry rich people comfortably to nice places. It has a green
flag and appears to be connected with Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong.
     Hiro does a little  more poking around  in  the streets of Port Sherman
and finds out that there is a pretty good-sized Mr.  Lee's Greater Hong Kong
franchulate here. In typical Hong Kong style, it is more of a spray of small
buildings and rooms all over town. But it's a dense spray.
     Dense  enough  that Hong  Kong  has several  full-time  employees here,
including a proconsul. Hiro  pulls up the  guy's picture so  he'll recognize
him: a  crusty-looking Chinese-American gent in his fifties.  So it's not an
automated, unmanned franchulate like you normally see in the Lower 48.

        43

     When she first woke up, she was still in her RadiKS coverall, mummified
in gaffer's  tape,  lying on the  floor of  a shitty old Ford  van  blasting
across  the middle of  nowhere. This did not put  her into  a very favorable
mood.  The stun bunny left her with a  persistent  nosebleed and an  eternal
throbbing headache, and every time the van hit a chuckhole, her head bounced
on the corrugated steel floor.
     First  she was just pissed. Then  she  started having brief  moments of
fear -  wanting to go home. After eight  hours in the back of the van, there
was  no doubt in her mind that  she wanted to go home.  The  only thing that
kept her from  giving up  was curiosity. As far as  she could tell from this
admittedly poor vantage point, this didn't look like a Fed operation.
     The  van  pulled  off  the  highway, onto  a frontage road, and  into a
parking lot.  The  rear doors of the  van opened  up,  and a couple of women
climbed in. Through the open doors, Y.T. could see the Gothic arch logo of a
Reverend Wayne's Pearly Cates.
     "Oh, you poor baby," one of the women said. The other woman just gasped
in  horror at her condition. One of them just cradled her  head  and stroked
her hair, letting her sip sweet Kool-Aid from  a Dixie  cup, while the other
tenderly, slowly took the gaffer's tape off.
     Her shoes had already been removed  when she woke up in the back of the
van, and  no one offered her another pair.  And  everything had been removed
from  her  coverall. All  the  good stuff  was gone.  But they  hadn't  gone
underneath the coverall. She still  had the dog tags. And one other thing, a
thing between  her  legs called  a dentata. There's  no  way they could have
found that.
     She  has always  known that  the  dog tags  were probably a fake  thing
anyway.  Uncle Enzo  doesn't  just  go around  giving his  war  souvenirs to
fifteen-year-old chicks. But they still might have an effect on someone.
     The two  women are named Marla and  Bonnie.  They are with her  all the
time.  Not  only  with  her,  but touching  her.  Lots  of  hugs,  squeezes,
hand-holding,  and tousled hair. The first  time she goes  to  the bathroom,
Bonnie  goes with her, opening the stall door and actually standing in there
with her. Y.T. thinks that Bonnie is worried that she's going to pass out on
the toilet or something. But the next time  she  has to pee, Marla goes with
her. She gets no privacy at all.
     The only problem  is she can't deny that she likes it,  in a  way.  The
ride in the  van hurt.  It really hurt bad.  She never felt so lonely in her
life. And now  she's  barefoot and  defenseless in  an  unfamiliar place and
they're giving her what she needs.
     After she had a few minutes to freshen up - whatever that means -inside
the  Reverend Wayne's Pearly Gates, she and Marla and Bonnie climbed  into a
big stretch  van with  no windows. The floor was carpeted but there  were no
seats inside, everyone sat on the floor. The van was jammed when they opened
the rear doors. Twenty  people were packed  into it, all energetic,  beaming
youths.  It  looked impossible; Y.T. shrank away from it, backing right into
Marla  and Bonnie. But a  cheerful roar  came up  from the van people, white
teeth flashing in the dimness, and people began to scrunch out a tiny  space
for them.
     She spent most  of the next two days packed into the van between Bonnie
and Marla, holding hands with them constantly, so she couldn't even pick her
nose without permission. They sang happy  songs  until  her brain turned  to
tapioca. They played wacky games.
     A couple of times every hour, someone in the van would start to babble,
just like the Falabalas. Just like the Reverend Wayne's Pearly Gates people.
The babbling would spread throughout the  van like a contagious disease, and
soon everyone would be doing it.
     Everyone except for Y.T. She couldn't seem  to get the  hang of it.  It
just seemed embarrassingly stupid to her. So she just faked it.
     Three  times a day,  they  had a chance to eat and eliminate. It always
happened  in Burbclaves. Y.T.  could feel them pulling  off the  interstate,
finding  their way down twisty development lanes, courts, ways, and circles,
A garage door would rise electrically, the van would pull in, the door would
shut behind them. They would go  into a suburban house,  except  stripped of
furniture and other family touches, and sit on the floor in empty bedrooms -
one for boys, one for girls - and eat cake and cookies. This always happened
in a totally empty room in a house, but there was always different decor: in
one  place, flowery  countryish  wallpaper  and a lingering  smell of rancid
Glade.  In  another,  bluish wallpaper  featuring  hockey players,  football
players, basketball  players.  In another, just plain  white  walls with old
crayon marks on them. Sitting in these empty rooms, Y.T. would study the old
furniture scrapes on the  floors, the dents  in the sheetrock, and muse over
them like  an  archaeologist, wondering about the long-departed families who
had  once  lived here.  But  toward the  end of the  ride, she wasn't paying
attention anymore.
     In  the van,  she could  hear  nothing  but  singing and chanting,  see
nothing  but the jammed-together faces of her companions. When they  stopped
for gas,  they  did it  in giant truck stops out in  the  middle of nowhere,
pulling up to the most distant pump island so that no one was near them. And
they  never stopped  driving.  They  just got relayed from one driver to the
next.
     Finally,  they  got to a coast. Y.T. could smell it. They  spent  a few
minutes waiting, engine idling, and  then the van bumped over some kind of a
threshold, climbed a few ramps,  stopped, set its parking brake.  The driver
got out  and left  them all alone  in the van for  the first time. Y.T. felt
glad that the trip was over.
     Then everything  started  to  rumble,  like an engine noise  but  a lot
bigger.  She  didn't feel any movement  until  a few minutes later, when she
realized that everything  was rocking gently. The  van was parked on a ship,
and the ship was headed out to sea.

     It's a real ocean-going  ship. An old, shitty, rusty  one that probably
cost about five bucks at the ship junkyard. But it carries cars, and it goes
through the water, and it doesn't sink.
     The ship  is just like the van, except bigger,  with  more  people. But
they eat  the  same stuff, sing the same songs, and sleep just as rarely  as
ever. By now, Y.T. finds it perversely comforting. She knows that she's with
a lot  of other people like her, and that she's safe. She knows the routine.
She knows where she belongs.
     And  so finally they come to  the Raft.  No one has  told  Y.T. this is
where they're going,  but by now it's obvious. She  ought  to be scared. But
they wouldn't be going to the Raft if it was as bad as everyone says.
     When it starts coming  into view, she  half expects them to converge on
her with gaffer's tape again. But then she  figures out  it's not necessary.
She hasn't  been causing trouble. She's been accepted here, they  trust her.
It gives her a feeling of pride, in a way.
     And  she  won't  cause trouble on the Raft because  all  she can  do is
escape from their part  of it onto the Raft per se. As such. The real  Raft.
The Raft of a hundred Hong Kong  B-movies  and blood-soaked  Nipponese comic
books.  It doesn't  take  much imagination to think of  what happens to lone
fifteen-year-old blond American girls on the Raft, and these people know it.
     Sometimes, she worries about her mother, then she hardens her heart and
thinks  maybe the whole thing will be  good for her. Shake her up  a little.
Which is what she  needs.  After Dad  left, she just folded up  into herself
like an origami bird thrown into a fire.
     There is kind of an outer cloud of small boats surrounding the Raft for
a  distance of a few  miles.  Almost all of them are fishing  boats. Some of
them  carry  men with guns, but they don't fuck  around with this ferry. The
ferry swings through  this  outer zone, making a broad turn, finally zeroing
in  on  a white neighborhood on one flank of  the Raft. Literally white. All
the boats here are clean and  new. There's a couple  of big rusty boats with
Russian lettering on the side, and the ferry pulls up alongside one of them,
ropes are thrown across, then  augmented with nets, gang-planks, webs of old
discarded tires.
     This Raft thing does not look like good skating territory at all.
     She wonders if any of the other people on board this ferry are skaters.
Doesn't seem likely. Really, they are not her kind of people at all. She has
always been  a dirty  scum  dog  of the highways,  not one  of  these  happy
singalong types. Maybe the Raft is just the place for her.
     They  take her down into one  of  the Russian ships  and give  her  the
grossest job  of all time: cutting up fish. She does not want a job, has not
asked for  one. But that's what she gets. Still, no one really talks to her,
no one bothers to explain anything, and that makes her reluctant to ask. She
has just run into a massive cultural shock wave, because most of the  people
on this ship are old and fat and Russian and don't speak English.
     For a couple of days, she  spends a  lot  of  time sleeping on the job,
being prodded awake  by the hefty Russian dames who work in this  place. She
also does some eating. Some of the fish that comes through this  place looks
pretty rank,  but there's a fair  amount of salmon.  The only way  she knows
this is from having sushi at the mall - salmon is  the  orange-red stuff. So
she makes some sushi of her own, munches down on some fresh salmon meat, and
it's good. It clears her head a little.
     Once  she gets  over the shock of it and settles into  a  routine,  she
starts  looking  around her,  watching  the  other fish-cutting  dames,  and
realizes  that  this is just like life must be  for about 99  percent of the
people in  the world. You're in this place. There's other people all  around
you, but they don't understand you and you don't understand them, but people
do a lot of pointless babbling anyway.  In order to stay alive, you  have to
spend  all day every day doing stupid meaningless work. And the only  way to
get  out  of  it is to  quit,  cut loose, take  a flyer, and go off into the
wicked world, where you will be swallowed up and never heard from again.
     She's not  especially  good  at cutting up fish.  The big stout Russian
chicks  - stomping,  slab-faced babushkas  - keep  giving her a hassle. They
keep hovering, watching her cut with this look on their face like they can't
believe what a dork she is. Then they try to show her how to do it the right
way, but  still she's not so good  at it.  It's hard, and her hands are cold
and stiff all the time.
     After a couple of frustrating  days, they give  her a new job,  farther
down  the production line: they  turn her into a cafeteria dame. Like one of
the slop-slingers in the high school lunchroom.  She works in the galley  of
one  of the big Russian ships, hauling vats  of cooked  fish stew out to the
buffet line, ladling it out into bowls, shoving it across  the counter at an
unending line consisting of religious fanatics, religious fanatics, and more
religious fanatics.  Except this time  around,  there seem to  be a lot more
Asians and hardly any Americans at all.
     They have a new species  here too:  people  with antennas coming out of
their  heads.  The antennas look like the ones on cop walkie-talkies: short,
blunt, black  rubber whips. They rise up from behind the ear. The first time
she sees  one of these  people,  she  figures it  must be some  kind of  new
Walkman, and  she wants to ask the guy where  he got it, what he's listening
to.  But  he's  a  strange  guy, stranger than  all  of the others,  with  a
permanent thousand-yard stare and a bad case of the mumbles, and  he ends up
giving her the creeps so bad  that she just  shoves  an extra-large dose  of
stew in his face and hurries him on down the line.
     From time  to time, she actually recognizes one of  the people who were
in her van.  But they don't  seem  to  recognize her;  they just  look right
through her. Glassy-eyed. Like they've been brainwashed.
     Like Y.T. was brainwashed.
     She can't believe it has taken her  this long  to  figure out what they
were doing to her. And that just makes her more pissed.

        44

     In Reality,  Port Sherman  is a surprisingly  tiny little burg,  really
just  a  few square  blocks. Until the  Raft came along, it had a  full-time
population  of  a couple  of  thousand people.  Now the population  must  be
pushing fifty thousand. Hiro has to slow down a little  bit here because the
Refus are  all sleeping on the street  for the  time being, an impediment to
traffic.
     That's okay, it saves his life. Because shortly after he gets into Port
Sherman, the wheels on  his motorcycle lock up  - the spokes  become rigid -
and the  ride  gets  very bumpy. A  couple of seconds after that, the entire
bike goes dead, becomes  an inert chunk of metal. Not even the engine works.
He looks down into the flat screen on top of the fuel tank, wanting to get a
status report, but it's just showing snow.  The bios  has crashed. Asherah's
possessed his bike.
     So he  abandons it in  the middle of the street, starts  walking toward
the waterfront. Behind him, he can hear the Refus waking up, struggling  out
of their blankets and sleeping bags, converging over the fallen bike, trying
to be the first to claim it.
     He can hear a deep thumping in his chest, and for a minute he remembers
Raven's motorcycle  in L.A., how he  felt  it first  and heard it later. But
there are no motorcycles around here. The sound is coming from above. It's a
chopper. The kind that flies.
     Hiro can  smell the seaweed rotting on  the beach,  he's  so close.  He
comes around  a corner and finds himself on  the waterfront street,  looking
straight into the facade of the Spectrum 2000. On the other side is water.
     The chopper's  coming up the fjord, following  it inland from the  open
sea, headed  straight for  the  Spectrum 2000.  It's a  small one,  an agile
number with a lot  of glass. Hiro  can see the crosses  painted  all over it
where  the red stars used  to be.  It  is brilliant and dazzling in the cool
blue  light  of  early  morning  because it's  shedding a  trail  of  stars,
blue-white magnesium flares tumbling out of it every few seconds, landing in
the  water  below,  where  they  continue to burn, leaving an astral pathway
marked out down  the length of the harbor. They aren't  there  to look cool.
They are there to confuse heat-seeking missiles.
     From where he's standing, he can't see  the roof of the hotel,  because
he's  looking straight up  at  it. But he has the feeling that Gurov must be
waiting there, on top of the tallest building in Port Sherman, waiting for a
dawn evacuation to carry him away into the porcelain  sky, carry him away to
the Raft.
     Question: Why  is he being  evacuated? And why are  they worried  about
heat-seeking missiles? Hiro realizes, belatedly,  that  some  heavy  shit is
going on.
     If he still had the bike, he could ride it right up the fire stairs and
find out what's happening. But he doesn't have the bike.
     A deep  thump sounds from the roof of a building  on his right. It's an
old building,  one of  the original pioneer  structures from a hundred years
ago.   Hiro's  knees   buckle,  his   mouth  comes  open,   shoulders  hunch
involuntarily, he  looks  toward the  sound. And  something catches his eye,
something small and dark, darting away from the building and up into the air
like  a  sparrow. But  when it's a  hundred yards  out over  the  water, the
sparrow catches fire, coughs out a great cloud of sticky yellow smoke, turns
into  a white fireball,  and springs  forward. It  keeps  getting faster and
faster, tearing down the center  of  the harbor, until it passes all the way
through the little chopper, in through the windshield and  out the back. The
chopper turns into a cloud  of flame shedding dark bits of scrap metal, like
a phoenix breaking out of its shell.
     Apparently, Hiro's not  the only guy in town who hates Gurov. Now Gurov
has to come downstairs and get on a boat.
     The lobby of the Spectrum 2000 is  an  armed camp, full  of beards with
guns.  They're  still  putting  their  defense together;  more soldiers  are
dragging  themselves out of  their coin  lockers, pulling on their  jackets,
grabbing their guns. A swarthy guy, probably a Tatar sergeant left over from
the  Red Army,  is running  around the  lobby  in a  modified Soviet Marines
uniform, screaming at people, shoving them this way and that.
     Gurov may be a holy man, but he can't walk on water. He'll have to come
out to the waterfront street, make his way two blocks down to the  gate that
admits him to the secured pier, and get on board the  Kodiak Queen, which is
waiting for him,  black smoke starting to cough  out of  its  stacks, lights
starting to  come  on.  just  down the  pier from  the Kodiak  Queen is  the
Kowloon, which is the big Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong boat.
     Hiro turns his back on the Spectrum 2000 and starts running up and down
the waterfront  streets, scanning the logos until he sees  the one he wants:
Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong.
     They don't want to let him in. He flashes his passport; the doors open.
The guard  is Chinese but speaks a  bit of English. This is a measure of how
weird things  are in Port Sherman: they have a  guard on the door.  Usually,
Mr. Lee's Greater Hong  Kong is  an  open  country,  always looking  for new
citizens, even if they are the poorest Refus.
     "Sorry," the guard says in a reedy, insincere voice, "I did not know  -
" He points to Hiro's passport.
     The franchulate  is literally a  breath of fresh  air. It  doesn't have
that Third World ambience, doesn't smell like urine at  all. Which means  it
must be the local headquarters, or close to it, because most of  Hong Kong's
Port Sherman  real  estate probably  consists of nothing  more than a gunman
hogging a pay phone in a lobby. But this place is spacious, clean, and nice.
A few hundred Refus stare at him through the windows, held at bay not by the
mere plate glass but by  the eloquent promise of the three Rat Thing hutches
lined up against one wall. From the looks of it, two of those have just been
moved in  recently. Pays to beef up  your security when the Raft  is  coming
through.
     Hiro  proceeds to  the counter.  A  man  is  talking  on the  phone  in
Cantonese, which means that he is, in fact, shouting. Hiro recognizes him as
the Port Sherman proconsul.  He is  deeply involved in this little chat, but
he has definitely noticed Hiro's swords, is watching him carefully.
     "We are very busy," the man says, hanging up.
     "Now you are a  lot busier," Hiro says.  "I  would like to charter your
boat, the Kowloon."
     "It's very expensive," the man says.
     "I just threw away a brand-new top-of-the-line motorcycle in the middle
of  the street because I didn't feel  like pushing it  half  a block  to the
garage," Hiro says. "I am on an expense account that would blow your mind."
     "It's broken."
     "I appreciate your politeness in not wanting  to  come out and just say
no," Hiro says, "but  I happen to know that it is,  in fact, not broken, and
so I must consider your refusal equivalent to a no."
     "It's not available," the man says. "Someone else is using it."
     "It has  not yet  left the pier," Hiro says, "so  you  can  cancel that
engagement, using one of the excuses you have just given me, and then I will
pay you more money."
     "We cannot do this," the man says.
     "Then  I will go out  into  the  street and inform the  Refus that  the
Kowloon is leaving for L.A. in exactly one hour, and  that  they have enough
room to take  twenty Refus along with them,  first come, first served," Hiro
says.
     "No," the man says.
     "I will tell them to contact you personally."
     "Where do you want to go on the Kowloon?" the man says.
     "The Raft."
     "Oh,  well, why didn't you say so," the  man  says. "That's  where  our
other passenger is going."
     "You've got someone else who wants to go to the Raft?"
     "That's what I said. Your passport, please."
     Hiro  hands  it over.  The man  shoves it into  a  slot.  Hiro's  name,
personal   data,   and  mug  shots   are  digitally  transferred   into  the
franchulate's bios, and with a little bit of key-pounding, the man persuades
it to spit out a laminated photo ID card.
     "You get onto the pier with this," he says. "It's good  for six  hours.
You make your own deal with the other passenger. After that, I never want to
see you again."
     "What if I need more consular services?"
     "I can always  go out  and  tell people," the man says,  "that a nigger
with swords is out raping Chinese refugees."
     "Hmm. This isn't exactly the best service I've ever had  at a Mr. Lee's
Greater Hong Kong."
     "This is not a normal situation," the  man  says. "Look out the window,
asshole."
     Not much has apparently changed down at the waterfront. The Orthos have
organized  their defense  in the lobby of the  Spectrum 2000: furniture  has
been  overturned,  barricades set up. Inside the hotel itself, Hiro presumes
furious activity is going on.
     It's still not clear whom the Orthos are defending themselves  against.
Making his way through the waterfront area, Hiro doesn't see much: just more
Chinese  Refus in baggy clothes. It's just that some of them look a lot more
alert than others. They have a whole different affect. Most of  the  Chinese
have  their eyes on  the mud in  front  of  their  feet, and their minds  on
something else. But some of them  are just strolling up and down the street,
looking all around, alertly, and most of these people happen to be young men
wearing bulky jackets. And haircuts that  are  from a  whole other stylistic
universe  than  what the  others are sporting. There is  evidence of styling
gel.
     The entrance to the rich  people's pier is  sandbagged,  barbwired, and
guarded. Hiro approaches  slowly, his  hands  in plain  sight, and shows his
pass to the head guard, who is the  only white  person Hiro has seen in Port
Sherman.
     And  that gets him onto  the  pier. Just like that.  Like the Hong Kong
franchulate, it's  empty, quiet,  and  doesn't stink.  It  bobs  up and down
gently  on  the tide, in a way that Hiro  finds relaxing. It's really just a
train of rafts, plank platforms built over floating hunks of styrofoam,  and
if  it weren't  guarded  it would  probably end up  getting  dragged out and
lashed onto the Raft.
     Unlike a normal  marina, it's  not quiet and isolated.  Usually, people
moor their boats, lock them  up, and  leave. Here,  at least  one  person is
banging out on  each  boat, drinking coffee,  keeping their weapons in plain
sight, watching Hiro very  intently as  he strolls  up  the pier.  Every few
seconds, the pier thunders with footsteps, and one  or two Russians run past
Hiro,  making  for  the   Kodiak  Queen.   They  are  all  young  men,   all
sailor/soldier types, and they're diving onto  the Kodiak Queen as  if  it's
last  boat out of  Hell, being  shouted  at by  officers,  running to  their
stations, frantically attending to their sailor chores.
     Things  are  a lot calmer on the Kowloon. It's guarded too, but most of
the people appear to be  waiters and stewards, wearing snappy uniforms  with
brass buttons and  white  gloves.  Uniforms  that  are intended to  be  used
indoors,  in  pleasant, climate-controlled dining  rooms. A few crew members
are visible from place to place, their black hair slicked back, clad in dark
windbreakers to protect them from the cold and spray. Hiro can  only see one
man on  the Kowloon who appears to be a passenger: a  tall slender Caucasian
in  a  dark  suit,  strolling  around  chatting into  a portable  telephone.
Probably some Industry jerk who wants to go out  for a day cruise,  look  at
the  Refus on the Raft while he's sitting in a dining room  having a gourmet
dinner.
     Hiro's about halfway down the pier when all bell breaks loose on shore,
in front  of  the  Spectrum  2000. It starts  with  a  long series of  heavy
machine-gun  bursts that don't  appear to  do much damage, but do  clear the
street pretty fast. Ninety-nine percent of  the  Refus  just evaporate.  The
others, the young men  Hiro noticed, pull interesting  high-tech weapons out
of their  jackets  and disappear into doorways and buildings. Hiro picks  up
the pace a little, starts walking backward down the pier, trying to get some
of the larger vessels in between him and the action so he doesn't get hit by
a stray burst.
     A  fresh breeze comes  off the water  and down the pier. Passing by the
Kowloon, it picks up the smell of bacon frying  and coffee brewing, and Hiro
can't  help but meditate on the fact that his last meal was half of  a cheap
beer in a Kelley's Tap in a Snooze 'n' Cruise.
     The scene in front of the Spectrum 2000 has devolved into a generalized
roar of  unbelievably  loud white noise as all the people inside and outside
of the hotel fire their weapons back and forth across the street.
     Something  touches his shoulder. Hiro turns to brush it away, sees that
he's  looking down at a short Chinese waitress who  has  come  down the pier
from the Kowloon. Having gotten his attention, she puts her hands back where
they were originally, to wit, plastered over her ears.
     "You  Hiro  Protagonist?"  she  mouths,  basically  inaudible over  the
ridiculous noise of the firefight.
     Hiro nods.  She nods back, steps away from him, jerks her  head  toward
the  Kowloon. With her hands plastered over her ears this way, it looks like
some kind of a folk-dance move.
     Hiro  follows her down the pier. Maybe they're going to let him charter
the Kowloon after all. She ushers him onto the aluminum gangplank.
     As he's walking across  it,  he looks up to one  of the  higher  decks,
where  a  couple  of  the  crew  members  are  hanging  out  in  their  dark
windbreakers.  One  of  them  is leaning  against  a  railing, watching  the
firefight through  binoculars. Another one,  an  older  one, approaches him,
leans  over  to  examine his back, slaps  him a couple of times  between the
shoulder blades.
     The guy drops his binoculars to see who's pounding him on the back. His
eyes are not  Chinese.  The older guy says something to him, gestures at his
throat. He's not Chinese, either.
     The  binocular guy nods,  reaches  up with one hand and presses a lapel
switch. The next time he  turns around, a word is written across his back in
neon green electropigment: MAFIA.
     The older guy turns away; his windbreaker says the same thing.
     Hiro turns around in the middle of the gangplank. There are twenty crew
members in plain sight an around him. Suddenly, their black windbreakers all
say, MAFIA. Suddenly, they are all armed.
     "I  was  planning to get  in touch with Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong and
file a complaint  about their  proconsul here  in Port Sherman," Hiro jokes.
"He was very uncooperative this morning when I insisted on renting this boat
out from under you."
     Hiro is sitting  in the first-class dining  room of the Kowloon. On the
other side  of the  white  linen tablecloth is the man Hiro  had  previously
pegged as the Industry creep on vacation. He's impeccably dressed in a black
suit,  and he has a glass eye. He has not bothered to  introduce himself, as
though he's expecting Hiro to know who he is already.
     The man  does  not  seem  amused  by  Hiro's  story. He  seems, rather,
nonplussed. "So?"
     "Don't see any reason to file a complaint now," Hiro says.
     "Why not?"
     "Well, because  now  I  understand his reluctance  not to  displace you
guys."
     "How come? You got money, don't you?"
     "Yeah, but - "
     "Oh!" the man with the glass eye says, and  allows  himself  sort  of a
forced smile. "Because we're the Mafia, you're saying."
     "Yeah," Hiro says, feeling  his face  get hot. Nothing  like  making  a
total dickhead out of yourself. Nothing in the world like it, nosireebob.
     Outside, the gun  battle  is  just  a  dim  roar.  This dining room  is
insulated from noise, water, wind, and hot  flying lead by a double layer of
remarkably thick glass, and the space between the panes is full of something
cool and gelatinous. The roar does not seem as steady as it used to be.
     "Fucking machine guns," the man says.  "I hate 'em.  Maybe one out of a
thousand  rounds  actually hits something worth  hitting. And they  kill  my
ears. You want some coffee or something?"
     "That'd be great."
     "We  got  a big buffet  coming up  soon. Bacon, eggs, fresh  fruit  you
wouldn't believe."
     The guy that Hiro  saw earlier, up  on the deck, pounding Binocular Man
on the back, sticks his head into the room.
     "Excuse me, boss, but we're moving into, like, third phase of our plan.
Just thought you'd wanna know."
     "Thank you, Livio. Let me know when the Ivans make it to the pier." The
guy sips his coffee, notices Hiro looking confused. "See, we got a plan, and
the plan is divided up into different phases."
     "Yeah, I got that."
     "The first phase was immobilization. Taking  out their chopper. Then we
had Phase Two,  which  was making  them think we were trying to kill them in
the hotel. I think that this phase succeeded wonderfully."
     "Me too."
     "Thank you.  Another important part of this phase was getting your  ass
in here, which is also done."
     "I'm part of this plan?"
     The man with the glass eye smiles  crisply. "If you  were not  part  of
this plan, you would be dead."
     "So you knew I was coming to Port Sherman?"
     "You know that chick Y.T.? The one you have been using to spy on us?"
     "Yeah." No point in denying it.
     "Well, we have been using her to spy on you."
     "Why? Why the hell do you care about me?"
     "That would be a tangent from our main conversation, which is about all
the phases of the plan."
     "Okay. We just finished Phase Two."
     "Now, in  Phase  Three, which  is ongoing, we allow them to think  that
they are making an incredible, heroic escape, running down the street toward
the pier."
     "Phase Four!" shouts Livio, the lieutenant.
     "Scusi,"  the  man with the glass eye says,  scooting his  chair  back,
folding  his napkin back onto the table. He gets up and  walks  out  of  the
dining room. Hiro follows him above deck.
     A couple of dozen  Russians are all  trying to force their way  through
the  gate onto the pier. Only a few of them can get through at once,  and so
they end up strung out over a couple of hundred feet, all running toward the
safety of the Kodiak Queen.
     But  a  dozen or so manage  to stay together in a  clump:  a  group  of
soldiers, forming a  human shield  around  a smaller cluster of  men  in the
center.
     "Bigwigs,"  the  man  with  the  glass   eye  says,  shaking  his  head
philosophically.
     They all run crablike down the pier,  bent down as far as they can  go,
firing the  occasional  covering  burst  of machine-gun fire back into  Port
Sherman.
     The man with the glass eye is squinting against a cool,  sudden breeze.
He turns to Hiro  with a hint  of a grin.  "Check this  out," he  says,  and
presses a button on a little black box in his hand.
     The  explosion  is  like  a single drumbeat, coming from  everywhere at
once. Hiro can feel it coming up out of the water, shaking his feet. There's
no  big flame  or cloud  of smoke, but there is a sort of twin geyser effect
that  shoots out  from underneath the Kodiak  Queen, sending  jets of white,
steamy  water upward like unfolding wings.  The  wings  collapse in a sudden
downpour, and then the  Kodiak  Queen seems shockingly low in the water. Low
and getting lower.
     All  the  men  who  are  running  down the pier suddenly stop in  their
tracks.
     "Now," Binocular Man mumbles into his lapel.
     There  are  some  smaller explosions down  on the pier. The entire pier
buckles and writhes like  a snake in  the water. One  segment in particular,
the  segment with  the  bigwigs on it, is rocking  and  seesawing violently,
smoke  rising from both ends. It has  been blown loose from the rest  of the
pier.
     All  of  its occupants  fall down  in the  same direction  as it  jerks
sideways and begins to move,  yanked out  of its place. Hiro can see the tow
cable rising  up out of the water as it is stretched tight, running a couple
of  hundred  feet to a small open boat with a big motor on it, which  is now
pulling out of the harbor.
     There's still  a dozen bodyguards on the segment. One  of them sizes up
the situation,  aims  his  AK-47 across the  water at the boat that's towing
them, and loses his brains. There's a sniper on the top deck of the Kowloon.
     All the other bodyguards throw their guns into the water.
     "Time for Phase Five," the man with the glass eye says. "A  big fucking
breakfast."
     By  the time  he and Hiro have sat back down  in the dining  room,  the
Kowloon  has pulled  away  from  the pier  and is  headed  down  the  fjord,
following a course parallel to the smaller boat that is towing  the segment.
As they eat,  they can look  out  the window, across a few hundred yards  of
open water, and see the segment keeping pace  with them. All the bigwigs and
the  bodyguards are on their asses now, keeping their centers of gravity low
as the segment bucks nastily.
     "When we  get farther  away from land, the waves get  bigger,"  the man
with the glass eye says. "I hate  that shit. All I want is to hang on to the
breakfast long enough to tamp it down with some lunch."
     "Amen," says Livio, heaping some scrambled eggs onto his plate.
     "Are you going to pick those  guys  up?" Hiro says. "Or  just  let them
stay out there for a while?"
     "Fuck 'em. Let 'em freeze their asses off. Then when we bring them onto
this  boat, they'll be ready  for it. Won't put up too much of a fight. Hey,
maybe they'll even talk to us."
     Everyone  seems  pretty  hungry.  For  a  while,  they  just  dig  into
breakfast. After  a while, the man  with the  glass  eye breaks the  ice  by
announcing how great  the food is, and everyone  agrees. Hiro  figures  it's
okay to talk now.
     "I was wondering why you guys were interested in me." Hiro figures that
this is always a good thing to know in the case of the Mafia.
     "We're all in the same happy gang," the man with the glass eye says.
     "Which gang is that?"
     "Lagos's gang."
     "Huh?"
     "Well, it's not really his gang. But he's the guy  who put it together.
The nucleus around which it formed."
     "How and why and what are you talking about?"
     "Okay." He shoves his plate away from him, folds up his napkin, puts it
on the table. "Lagos had all these ideas. Ideas about all kinds of stuff."
     "So I noticed."
     "He had  stacks all over  the  place, on  all different  topics. Stacks
where he would pull together knowledge from all over the fucking map and tie
it  all together. He  had  these things  stashed here  and there around  the
Metaverse, waiting for the information to become useful."
     "More than one of them?" Hiro says.
     "Supposedly. Well, a few years ago, Lagos approached L. Bob Rife."
     "He did?"
     "Yeah. See, Rife  has  a million  programmers  working for  him. He was
paranoid that they were stealing his data."
     "I know that he was bugging their houses and so on."
     "The reason you know that is because you found it in Lagos's stack. And
the reason  Lagos bothered to  look  it  up  is because he  was doing market
research. Looking for someone who might pay him hard  cash for the  stuff he
dug up in the Babel/Infocalypse stack."
     "He thought," Hiro says, "that  L. Bob Rife might have  a use for  some
viruses."
     "Right. See, I don't understand all this shit.  But I guess he found an
old virus or something that was aimed at the elite thinkers."
     "The technological priesthood," Hiro says. "The infocrats. It wiped out
the whole infocracy of Sumer."
     "Whatever."
     "That's crazy," Hiro says. "That's like if you find  out your employees
are stealing ballpoint pens, you take them out and kill them. He wouldn't be
able to use it without destroying all his programmers' minds."
     "In its original form," the man with the glass eye says. "But the whole
point is, Lagos wanted to do research on it."
     "Informational warfare research."
     "Bingo.  He wanted to isolate this  thing and modify it so it  could be
used to control the programmers without blowing their brains sky high."
     "And did it work?"
     "Who knows? Rife stole Lagos's idea. Just took  it and ran with it. And
after  that,  Lagos had no idea what Rife did with it. But a couple of years
later, he started getting worried about a lot of stuff he was seeing."
     "Like the explosive growth in Reverend Wayne's Pearly Gates."
     "And these  Russkies who speak in  tongues. And the fact  that Rife was
digging up this old city - "
     "Eridu."
     "Yeah.  And the radio astronomy thing. Lagos  had a lot of stuff he was
worried  about.  So  he  began  to  approach people.  He  approached  us. He
approached that girl you used to go out with -"
     "Juanita."
     "Yeah.  Nice girl. And  he approached Mr.  Lee. So you might say that a
few different people have been working on this little project."

        46

     "Where'd they go?" Hiro says.
     Everyone's already looking for the float, as though they all noticed at
once that it was missing. Finally  they see it, a quarter  mile behind them,
dead in the water. The bigwigs and  the  bodyguards are standing up now, all
looking in the same direction. The  speedboat is circling around to retrieve
it.
     "They must have figured out a way to detach the tow cable," Hiro says.
     "Not  likely," the man with the glass eye says. "It was attached to the
bottom, under  the water.  And it's  a steel cable, so  there's  no way they
could cut it."
     Hiro sees another  small  craft bobbing  on  the  water,  about halfway
between  the  Russians and the  speedboat  that was  towing  them.  It's not
obvious, because  it's tiny, close to  the  water  done up in  dull  natural
colors. It's a one-man kayak. Carrying a long-haired man.
     "Shit," Livio says. "Where the hell did he come from?"
     The kayaker looks behind  himself for a few moments, reading the waves,
then suddenly  turns back  around and  begins  to paddle hard, accelerating,
glancing back every few strokes. A big wave is coming, and just as it swells
up underneath the kayak,  he's matching its speed. The kayak stays on top of
the wave and shoots forward like a missile, riding the swell, suddenly going
twice as fast as anything else on the water.
     Digging at the wave with one end of his paddle, the kayaker makes a few
crude  changes in his direction. Then he parks the paddle athwart the kayak,
reaches down  inside, and hauls out a small dark  object, a tube about  four
feet long, which he hoists up to one shoulder.
     He  and  the   speedboat  shoot  past  each  other  going  in  opposite
directions, separated by a gap of only about twenty feet. Then the speedboat
blows up.
     The Kowloon has overshot the site of  all this action by a few thousand
yards. It's pulling around into as tight a turn as a vessel of this size can
handle, trying to throw a  one-eighty so it can  go back and  deal  with the
Russians and, somewhat more problematically, with Raven.
     Raven is paddling back toward his buddies.
     "He's  such an asshole," Livio says.  "What's he going to  do, tow them
out to the Raft behind his fucking kayak?"
     "This gives me the creeps," the man with the glass eye says. "Make sure
we got some guys up  there with Stingers. They must have a chopper coming or
something."
     "No other ships on the radar" says one of the other soldiers, coming in
from the bridge. "Just us and them. And no choppers either."
     "You know Raven carries a nuke, right?" Hiro says.
     "So  I  heard.  But that  kayak's  not  big enough.  It's tiny. I can't
believe you'd go out to sea in something like that."
     A mountain is  growing out of  the sea.  A bubble of black  water  that
keeps rising and broadening. Well behind the bobbing raft, a black tower has
appeared,  jutting vertically out of the  water, a  pair of  wings sprouting
from its  top. The tower keeps getting taller, the wings getting higher  out
of the water,  as before and  aft, the mountain rises and shapes itself. Red
stars and a few numbers. But  no one has to read the  numbers to know it's a
submarine. A nuclear-missile submarine.
     Then it stops. So close to the Russians on their little raft that Gurov
and friends can practically jump onto it. Raven paddles toward them, cutting
through the waves like a glass knife.
     "Fuck me," the man  with the glass  eye says. He is  utterly astounded.
"Fuck me, fuck me, fuck me. Uncle Enzo's gonna be pissed."
     "You couldn't of known," Livio says. "Should we shoot at 'em?"
     Before the man with the glass eye can make  a policy decision, the deck
gun on the top of the nuke sub opens up. The first shell misses them by just
a few yards.
     "Okay, we got a rapidly evolving situation. Hiro, you come with me."
     The crew of the Kowloon has already sized  up the  situation and placed
their bets on the nuclear submarine. They are running up and down the rails,
dropping large fiberglass capsules into the water. The capsules  break  open
to reveal bright orange folds, which blossom into life rafts.
     Once  the deck gunners  on  the nuke  sub  figure out  how  to hit  the
Kowloon, the situation begins to evolve even more rapidly. The Kowloon can't
decide whether to sink, bum, or simply disintegrate, so it does all three at
once. By  that time, most of the people  who were on it have made  their way
onto  a life  raft. They  all bob on the water,  zip themselves into  orange
survival suits, and watch the nukesub.
     Raven is the last person to go belowdecks on the submarine. He spends a
minute  or two removing some gear from  his kayak: a few items in  bags, and
one  eight-foot  spear  with  a  translucent, leaf-shaped  head.  Before  he
disappears into  the hatch, he turns toward the wreckage of the Kowloon  and
holds the harpoon up over his head, a gesture of  triumph and a  promise all
at  once. Then he's gone. A  couple of minutes later, the submarine is gone,
too.
     "That guy gives me the creeps," the man with the glass eye says.

        47

     Once it starts coming clear to her,  again,  that these people  are all
twisted freaks, she  starts to notice other  things about them. For example,
the whole time, no one ever looks her in the eye. Especially the men. No sex
at all in these guys,  they've got it pushed so far down inside of them. She
can  understand why  they  don't  look  at  the fat  babushkas. But she's  a
fifteen-year-old American chick, and  she is used to getting  the occasional
look. Not here.
     Until she looks up from her big vat of fish  one day and finds that she
is looking into some guy's chest. And when she  follows  his chest upward to
his neck, and  his  neck  all  the way up  to  his face,  she sees dark eyes
staring right back at her, right over the top of the counter.
     He's got something written on his forehead: POOR IMPULSE CONTROL. Which
is kind of scary. Sexy, too. It gives him a  certain measure of romance that
none of these other people have. She  was expecting the Raft to  be dark and
dangerous,  and instead it's just like working where her mother  works. This
guy  is  the first person she's seen around this place who really looks like
he belongs on the Raft.
     And he's got the look down, too. Incredibly rank style. Although he has
a long  wispy mustache that doesn't do much for his face.  Doesn't bring out
his features well at all.
     "Do you take the nasty stuff? One fish head or two?" she says, dangling
the ladle  picturesquely.  She always talks trash to people because none  of
them can understand what she's saying.
     "I'll take whatever you're offering," the guy says. In English. Sort of
a crisp accent.
     "I'm  not offering anything," she says, "but if you want to stand there
and browse, that's cool."
     He  stands  there  and  browses for  a while. Long  enough  that people
farther back in line stand up on tiptoe to see what the problem is. But when
they see that the problem  is this particular individual, they get  down off
their toes  real  fast,  hunch  down,  sort  of  blend  in  to the  mass  of
fishy-smelling wool.
     "What's for dessert today?" the guy asks. "Got anything sweet for me?"
     "We  don't  believe in  dessert,"  Y.T.  says.  "It's  a  fucking  sin,
remember?"
     "Depends on your cultural orientation."
     "Oh, yeah? What culture are you oriented to?"
     "I am an Aleut."
     "Oh, I've never heard of that."
     'That's  because we've been  fucked over," the  big scary  Aleut  says,
"worse than any other people in history."
     "Sorry to hear  that," Y.T. says. "So, uh, do you want me  to serve  up
some fish, or are you gonna stay hungry?"
     The big  Aleut  stares  at  her  for a while.  Then he  jerks his  head
sideways and says, "Come on. Let's get the fuck out of here."
     "What, and skip out on this cool job?"
     He grins ridiculously. "I can find you a better job."
     "In this job, do I get to leave my clothes on?"
     "Come  on. We're going now," he  says, those eyes burning into her. She
tries to ignore a sudden warm tense feeling down between her legs.
     She  starts following him  down the cafeteria line,  heading for a  gap
where  she can exit  into  the dining  area. The head babushka  bitch  comes
stomping out from in back, hollers at her in some incomprehensible language.
     Y.T. turns to  look back. She feels  a pair of big hands sliding up her
sides,  coming  up into her  armpits, and she  pulls her  arms to her sides,
trying to stop it. But it's no good, the hands come all the way up and  keep
lifting,  keep  rising  into the air, bringing her with  them. The  big  guy
hoists her right up over the counter  like she's  a three-year-old and  sets
her down next to him.
     Y.T. turns back  around  to see the  head  babushka bitch,  but  she is
frozen in a mixture of surprise,  fear, and sexual outrage. But in the  end,
fear wins out, she averts her eyes, turns away, and  goes to replace Y.T. at
vat position number nine.
     "Thanks  for  the  lift," Y.T. says,  her voice wowing  and  fluttering
ridiculously. "Uh, didn't you want to eat something?"
     "I was thinking of going out anyway," he says.
     "Going out? Where do you go out on the Raft?"
     "Come on, I'll show you."

     He leads her down passageways and up steep steel stairways and out onto
the  deck.  It's  getting  close to  twilight,  the  control  tower  of  the
Enterprise looms hard and black against a deep gray sky that's getting  dark
and gloomy so fast that it seems darker, now,  than it will at midnight. But
for now, none of  the lights are on and that's all there is, black steel and
slate sky.
     She follows him down the deck of the ship  to the stern. From here it's
a thirty-foot drop to the water, they are looking out across the prosperous,
clean white neighborhood  of the Russian people, separated from  the squalid
dark tangle  of  the Raft  per  se  by a wide canal patrolled  by gun-toting
blackrobes. There's no stairway  or rope ladder  here,  but there is a thick
rope hanging from  the railing. The big  Aleut guy hauls  up a chunk of rope
and drapes it under one  arm and  over one  leg in a  quick  motion. Then he
throws one arm around Y.T.'s  waist, gathering her  in the crook of his arm,
leans back, and falls off the ship.
     She absolutely refuses to  scream.  She  feels the rope stop his  body,
feels his arm squeeze her so tight  she chokes for a  moment, and then she's
hanging there, hanging in the crook of his arm.
     She's got her arms down to her side,  defiant. But just for the hell of
it, she leans into him, wraps her arms around his neck, puts her head on his
shoulder, and hangs on  tight. He rappels them down the rope, and soon  they
are standing on the sanitized, prosperous Russian version of the Raft.
     "What's your name anyway?" she says.
     "Dmitri Ravinoff," he says. "Better known as Raven."
     Oh, shit.

     The connections between  boats are tangled  and  unpredictable. To  get
from point A to point  B,  you have to wander  all over the place. But Raven
knows where he's going. Occasionally, he reaches out, grabs her hand, but he
doesn't yank her around even though  she's  going a lot slower than  he  is.
Every so often, he looks back at her with a grin,  like,  I  could hurt you,
but I won't.
     They come to a place  where the Russian  neighborhood is joined  to the
rest of the Raft by a wide plank bridge guarded by Uzi dudes.  Raven ignores
them, takes Y.T.'s hand again,  and walks right across the  bridge with her.
Y.T.  hardly has time  to  think through the  implications of this before it
hits her, she looks around, sees all these gaunt Asians, staring back at her
like she's  a five-course meal, and realizes: I'm on the  Raft.  Actually on
the Raft.
     "These are  Hong Kong Vietnamese," Raven says. "Started out in Vietnam,
came to  Hong  Kong as boat people after the  war  there - so  they've  been
living  on sampans  for a  couple of generations  now. Don't be scared, this
isn't dangerous for you."
     "I don't think I can find my way back here," Y.T. says.
     "Relax," he says. "I've never lost a girlfriend."
     "Have you ever had a girlfriend?"
     Raven  throws back his head and laughs. "A lot, in the old days. Not as
many in the past few years."
     "Oh, yeah? The old days? Is that when you got your tattoo?"
     "Yeah. I'm  an alcoholic. Used to get in a  lot of trouble. Been  sober
for eight years."
     "Then how come everyone's scared of you?"
     Raven  turns  to  her,  smiles broadly,  shrugs.  "Oh,  because I'm  an
incredibly ruthless, efficient, cold-blooded killer, you know."
     Y.T. laughs. So does Raven.
     "What's your job?" Y.T. asks.
     "I'm a harpooner," he says.
     "Like in  Moby Dick?"  Y.T. likes  this  idea.  She read  that book  in
school. Most of the people in her class, even  the power tools, thought that
the  book  was  totally  entrenched.  But  she  liked  all  the  stuff about
harpooning.
     "Nah. Compared to me, those Moby Dicksters were faggots."
     "What kind of stuff do you harpoon?"
     "You name it."
     From there on  out, she just  looks  at him. Or  at inanimate  objects.
Because otherwise she  wouldn't  see anything  except thousands of dark eyes
staring  back  at  her.  In  that way,  it's  a  big  change  from  being  a
slop-slinger for the repressed.
     Part of it is just because she's so different. But part  of  it is that
there's no privacy on the Raft, you make your way around by hopping from one
boat to the next. But each boat is home to about three dozen people, so it's
like  you  are  constantly  walking   through  people's  living  rooms.  And
bathrooms. And bedrooms. Naturally, they look.
     They tromp across a makeshift platform built on oil  drums. A couple of
Vietnamese dudes are there  arguing or haggling over something, looks like a
slab  of fish. The one who's  turned toward them sees them coming. His  eyes
flicker across Y.T.  without pausing, fix on  Raven, and  go wide. He  steps
back. The guy he's talking to,  who has  his back to them, turns  around and
literally jumps into the air, letting  out a  suppressed grunt. Both of them
back well out of Raven's path.
     And then  she  figures  out something important:  These  people  aren't
looking  at  her. They're not even giving her a second glance.  They're  all
looking at  Raven.  And it's not  just  a  case  of  celebrity  watching  or
something  like that. All of these Raft dudes, these tough scary homeboys of
the sea, are scared shitless of this guy.
     And she's on a date with him.
     And it's just started.
     Suddenly, walking  through another Vietnamese living room,  Y.T.  has a
flashback to the  most  excruciating  conversation she ever had, which was a
year ago when her mother tried to give her advice on what to do if a boy got
fresh with her. Yeah, Mom, right. I'll keep that in mind. Yeah, I'll be sure
to remember that. Y.T. knew that advice was worthless, and this goes to show
she was right.

        48

     There  are four men  in the life raft: Hiro  Protagonist, self-employed
stringer for the Central Intelligence Corporation, whose practice used to be
limited to so-called "dry" operations, meaning that he sat around and soaked
up  information  and  then later  spat  it back  into  the  Library, the CIC
database, without ever actually doing anything. Now  his practice has become
formidably  wet.  Hiro  is  armed  with  two  swords  and  a nine-millimeter
semiautomatic  pistol,  known colloquially  as  a  nine, with two ammunition
clips, each carrying eleven rounds.
     Vic, unspecified last name. If  there was still  such a thing as income
tax, then every year when Vic filled out his 1040 form he would put down, as
his  occupation,  "sniper."  In  classic  sniper  style,  Vic  is  reticent,
unobtrusive. He is armed  with  a  long, large-caliber  rifle  with  a bulky
mechanism mounted on its top, where a telescopic sight might be found if Vic
were not at the leading  edge of his  profession. The  exact  nature of this
device is not obvious, but Hiro  presumes that it is  an exquisitely precise
sensor  package  with fine  crosshairs  superimposed  on the middle. Vic may
safely be presumed to be carrying additional small concealed weapons.
     Eliot Chung. Eliot used to be the skipper of a boat called the Kowloon.
At the moment, he  is  between jobs. Eliot grew up  in  Watts, and  when  he
speaks  English,  he sounds  like a  black guy. Genetically speaking,  he is
entirely Chinese. He is fluent in both  black  and  white English as well as
Cantonese, Taxilinga, and some Vietnamese,  Spanish, and Mandarin. Eliot  is
armed with a  .44  Magnum  revolver, which  he carried  on board the Kowloon
"just for the  halibut," i.e., he used  it execute halibut before passengers
hauled them on board. Halibut  grow  very large and can  thrash so violently
that they can easily  kill the people who  hook them; hence it is prudent to
fire a number  of  shells through their  heads before taking them on  board.
This is the only reason Eliot carries a weapon; the other defensive needs of
the Kowloon  were seen  to by crew members who were specialists in that kind
of thing.
     "Fisheye." This is the man  with  the glass eye.  He will only identify
himself by his nickname. He is armed with a large, fat black suitcase.
     The suitcase is massively constructed, with built-in wheels, and weighs
somewhere  between three hundred pounds  and a metric ton, as Hiro discovers
when he tries to move it. Its  weight turns the normally flat  bottom of the
life raft into a puckered cone. The suitcase has a noteworthy attachment:  a
flexible  three-inch-thick  cable or hose  or something, a couple  of meters
long, that emerges  from one  comer, runs  up the sloping floor of the  life
raft, over the edge, and trails in the water. At the  end of this mysterious
tentacle is a hunk of metal about the size of a wastebasket,  but so  finely
sculpted  into so many narrow  fins and  vanes  that it appears  to  have  a
surface area the size of Delaware. Hiro only saw this thing out of the water
for a few chaotic moments, when it was being transferred into the life raft.
At that time it was glowing  red hot. Since then, it has  lurked  below  the
surface, light gray,  impossible to see clearly  because the water around it
is forever  churning  in  a full, rolling boil. Fist-sized bubbles  of steam
coalesce amid its fractal tracery of hot vanes and pummel the surface of the
ocean, ceaselessly, all day and all night. The powerless life raft, sloshing
around  the North Pacific, emits a vast, spreading plume of steam like  that
of  an Iron Horse chugging  full blast  over the Continental Divide. Neither
Hiro nor Eliot ever mentions, or even  notices, the by-now-obvious fact that
Fisheye is  traveling with  a small, self-contained  nuclear power  source -
almost  certainly  radiothermal isotopes  like the ones that  power  the Rat
Thing. As long as Fisheye refuses to notice  this fact, it would be rude for
them to bring it up.
     All of the participants  are clad in  bright orange  padded suits  that
cover their entire bodies. They are the North Pacific version of life vests.
They  are bulky and awkward, but Eliot  Chung likes to  say that in northern
waters, the only thing a life vest does is make your corpse float.
     The lifeboat is an  inflatable  raft about ten feet long that does  not
come equipped  with a motor. It has  a tentlike, waterproof canopy that they
can zip up  all the way around, turning it into a sealed capsule so that the
water stays out even in the most violent weather.
     For a  couple of days, a powerful  chill wind  coming down out off  the
mountains drives  them  out of  Oregon,  out toward  the open  water.  Eliot
explains, cheerfully, that this  lifeboat was invented back in the old days,
when  they had navies and coast guards that  would come and rescue  stranded
travelers.  All  you  had  to do  was float and  be  orange. Fisheye  has  a
walkie-talkie, but  it is a  short-range  device.  And  Hiro's  computer  is
capable of jacking into the net, but in this regard it functions much like a
cellular telephone. It doesn't work out in the middle of nowhere.
     When  the weather is extremely  rainy,  they sit under the canopy. When
it's less rainy, they sit above it. They all have ways of passing the time.
     Hiro dicks around  with his  computer, naturally.  Being stranded  on a
life raft in the Pacific is a perfect venue for a hacker.
     Vic  reads  and rereads  a soaked  paperback  novel that he had  in the
pocket of his MAFIA windbreaker  when  the Kowloon got  blown out from under
them.  These  days  of  waiting are much easier for  him. As a  professional
sniper, he knows how to kill time.
     Eliot looks  at things with his binoculars,  even though there is  very
little to  look at. He spends a  lot of time messing  around with the  raft,
fretting about  it in the way that  boat captains do.  And he  does a lot of
fishing. They  have plenty of  stored  food on the  raft, but the occasional
fresh halibut and salmon are nice to eat.
     Fisheye  has  taken  what appears to be an  instruction manual from the
heavy black suitcase.  It is  a miniature  three-ring  binder with  pages of
laser-printed text.  The binder  is just a cheap unmarked one  bought from a
stationery store. In these respects, it is  perfectly  familiar to  Hiro: it
bears the earmarks of a  high-tech product that is still  under development.
All  technical devices  require  documentation of a sort, but this stuff can
only be written by the techies who are doing the actual product development,
and they absolutely  hate it, always put the  dox question  off to the  very
last minute. Then they type up some material on a word processor, run it off
on the  laser  printer, send the  departmental  secretary out  for  a  cheap
binder, and that's that.
     But this only occupies Fisheye for  a little while. He spends the  rest
of the time just staring off at the horizon, as though he's expecting Sicily
to  heave into  view. It  doesn't.  He is despondent over the failure of his
mission, and spends a lot  of time mumbling under his breath, trying to find
a way to salvage it.
     "If  you don't  mind my  asking,"  Hiro says,  "what  was your  mission
anyway?"
     Fisheye thinks this one over for  a  while. "Well it depends on how you
look at it. Nominally, my objective is to get a  fifteen-year-old girl  back
from  these  assholes.  So my tactic was  to take a  bunch  of their bigwigs
hostage, then arrange a trade."
     "Who's this fifteen-year-old girl?"
     Fisheye shrugs. "You know her. It's Y.T."
     "Is that really your whole objective?"
     "The  important thing is,  Hiro, that you have to understand the  Mafia
way. And the  Mafia way  is that we pursue larger goals  under  the guise of
personal  relationships.  So,  for example, when  you were  a  pizza guy you
didn't deliver pizzas  fast because you made more money that way, or because
it was some kind  of a fucking policy. You did it because  you were carrying
out a personal covenant  between Uncle Enzo and  every customer. This is how
we  avoid the  trap of  self-perpetuating ideology. Ideology  is a  virus So
getting this chick back is  more  than just  getting a  chick back. It's the
concrete manifestation of an  abstract policy  goal. And  we like concrete -
right, Vic?"
     Vic allows himself a judicious sneer and a deep grinding laugh.
     "What's the abstract policy goal in this case?" Hiro says.
     "Not  my  department," Fisheye says. "But I think  Uncle  Enzo  is real
pissed at L. Bob Rife."

     Hiro is messing around in Flatland. He is doing this partly to conserve
the computer's  batteries; rendering a three-dimensional office takes  a lot
of processors  working  fulltime,  while a  simple  two-dimensional  desktop
display requires minimal power.
     But  his real  reason for being in Flatland is that  Hiro  Protagonist,
last of  the  freelance hackers, is hacking.  And  when hackers are hacking,
they don't mess around with the superficial world of Metaverses and avatars.
They descend  below this surface layer  and into the netherworld of code and
tangled nam-shubs  that  supports  it, where  everything that you see in the
Metaverse,  no  matter  how  lifelike  and beautiful  and three-dimensional,
reduces to a simple text file: a series of letters on an electronic page. It
is  a  throwback to  the  days  when  people  programmed  computers  through
primitive teletypes and IBM punch cards.
     Since  then,  pretty  and  user-friendly  programming  tools  have been
developed. It's possible to program a computer now  by sitting  at your desk
in  the  Metaverse and manually connecting little preprogrammed  units, like
Tinkertoys. But a real hacker would never use such techniques, any more than
a master  auto mechanic would  try  to fix  a  car by  sliding in behind the
steering wheel and watching the idiot lights on the dashboard.
     Hiro  does not know what he is  doing, what he is preparing for. That's
okay, though. Most of programming is a matter of laying groundwork, building
structures of  words that seem to have  no particular connection to the task
at hand.
     He knows one thing: The Metaverse has now become  a place where you can
get killed. Or at least have your brain  reamed out  to the point where  you
might as well be dead. This is a radical change in the nature of the  place.
Guns have come to Paradise.
     It  serves  them  right,  he  realizes  now.  They  made the place  too
vulnerable. They  figured that the  worst thing that could happen was that a
virus might get transferred into your computer and force you to ungoggle and
reboot your system. Maybe destroy  a little data if  you were  stupid enough
not to  install any  medicine.  Therefore, the  Metaverse is wide  open  and
undefended, like airports in the days before bombs and metal detectors, like
elementary schools in  the days  before maniacs  with assault rifles. Anyone
can go in and do anything that they want to.
     There are no cops. You can't defend  yourself, you can't chase the  bad
people. It's  going  to take a lot of work  to  change that  - a fundamental
rebuilding of the  whole Metaverse,  carried out on  a planetwide, corporate
level.
     In the meantime, there may be a role for individuals who know their way
around  the  place.  A few  hacks  can make  a  lot  of  difference  in this
situation. A freelance hacker could get a lot of shit done, years before the
giant software factories bestir themselves to deal with the problem.

     The  virus that  ate  through  Da5id's brain was  a  string  of  binary
information, shone into his face in the form of a bitmap - a series of white
and black pixels, where white represents zero and black represents one. They
put the bitmap onto scrolls and gave  the scrolls to avatars who went around
the Metaverse looking for victims.
     The Clint who  tried to  infect Hiro in  The Black Sun got away, but he
left his scroll behind - he didn't reckon  on having his  arms lopped  off -
and Hiro dumped it into the tunnel  system below  the floor, the place where
the Graveyard Daemons live. Later, Hiro had a Daemon take the scroll back to
his workshop. And anything that is in Hiro's house is, by definition, stored
inside his own computer. He doesn't  have to jack into the global network in
order to access it.
     It's  not easy  working with  a  piece of data  that can  kill you. But
that's okay. In Reality, people work with dangerous substances  all the time
- radioactive  isotopes and toxic chemicals. You just have to have the right
tools:  remote  manipulator  arms, gloves,  goggles, leaded  glass.  And  in
Flatland,  when  you need  a tool, you just  sit down and  write it. So Hiro
starts by writing  a few  simple programs that enable him to  manipulate the
contents of the scroll without ever seeing it.
     The scroll,  like any other  visible thing in the Metaverse, is a piece
of software. It contains some code  that describes  what  it  looks like, so
that your computer will know how to  draw it, and some  routines that govern
the way it rolls and unrolls. And it contains, somewhere inside of itself, a
resource, a hunk of data, the digital version of the Snow Crash virus.
     Once the virus has been  extracted and isolated, it is  easy enough for
Hiro  to  write  a  new program  called SnowScan.  SnowScan  is  a  piece of
medicine. That is, it is code that protects Hiro's system -both his hardware
and, as Lagos would put it, his bioware - from the digital Snow Crash virus.
Once Hiro has installed it  in  his  system,  it  will  constantly scan  the
information  coming in  from  outside,  looking  for  data that  matches the
contents of the scroll. If it notices such information, it will block it.
     There's  other work  to do in Flatland. Hiro's good with avatars, so he
writes  himself an invisible  avatar - just  because,  in  the new  and more
dangerous Metaverse, it  might come  in handy. This is easy to do poorly and
surprisingly  tricky to do well. Almost anyone  can  write  an  avatar  that
doesn't look like anything, but it will lead to a lot of problems when it is
used. Some Metaverse real  estate - including The Black Sun - wants  to know
how big your avatar is so that  it can figure out whether  you are colliding
with another avatar or some obstacle. If you give it an answer of zero - you
make your avatar infinitely small - you will either crash that piece of real
estate  or  else  make  it think that something is very wrong.  You will  be
invisible, but everywhere  you go in the Metaverse you will leave a swath of
destruction and  confusion a mile wide.  In other  places, invisible avatars
are illegal. If your avatar is transparent and reflects  no light whatsoever
- the easiest kind to write  - it will be recognized instantly as an illegal
avatar and alarms will go off. It has to be written in such a way that other
people can't see it,  but the real estate software doesn't realize that it's
invisible.
     There are about  a hundred little  tricks like this that  Hiro wouldn't
know  about  if  he hadn't been  programming avatars for  people like Vitaly
Chernobyl for  the last  couple of years. To write a really  good  invisible
avatar from scratch would  take a long  time, but  he  puts  one together in
several  hours  by recycling bits and pieces of old  projects left behind in
his computer. Which is how hackers usually do it.
     While he's doing that, he comes across  a rather old  folder  with some
transportation software in  it. This is left over from the  very old days of
the Metaverse, before the Monorail existed,  when the only way to get around
was to walk or to write a piece of ware that simulated a vehicle.
     In  the  early  days,  when the Metaverse was a featureless black ball,
this was a trivial job. Later on, when the Street went up and people started
building  real estate,  it became more  complicated. On the Street,  you can
pass through other people's avatars. But you  can't pass through walls.  You
can't enter private property. And you can't pass through other vehicles,  or
through permanent Street fixtures such as the Ports  and the stanchions that
support the monorail line. If  you try  to collide with any of these things,
you don't  die  or get  kicked out  of  the  Metaverse;  You just come  to a
complete stop, like a cartoon character running spang into a concrete wall.
     In other words, once the Metaverse began to fill up with obstacles that
you could run into, the  job of  traveling across it at high speed  suddenly
became  more  interesting. Maneuverability  became an issue.  Size became an
issue. Hiro  and  Da5id  and the rest  of them began to switch away from the
enormous, bizarre vehicles they had  favored at first  - Victorian houses on
tank  treads,  rolling ocean  liners, mile-wide crystalline spheres, flaming
chariots  drawn  by dragons  -  in  favor  of  small  maneuverable vehicles.
Motorcycles, basically.
     A Metaverse vehicle can be as  fast and nimble as a quark.  There's  no
physics to worry about no constraints on  acceleration,  no air  resistance.
Tires never squeal  and brakes  never lock up. The  one thing that can't  be
helped is the  reaction time of the user.  So  when  they were  racing their
latest motorcycle software, holding wild rallies through Downtown at Mach 1,
they  didn't  worry  about  engine  capacity. They  worried  about the  user
interface,  the controls  that enabled the rider to  transfer his  reactions
into  the  machine, to  steer, accelerate, or brake as  quickly as he  could
think. Because when  you're in a pack of bike racers going through a crowded
area at that speed, and you run  into something and suddenly slow down  to a
speed of  exactly zero, you can  forget  about catching up.  One mistake and
you've lost.
     Hiro had a pretty good motorcycle. He probably could have  had the best
one on the  Street,  simply  because his reflexes  are unearthly. But he was
more preoccupied with sword fighting than motorcycle riding.
     He opens  up the most recent version  of his motorcycle  software, gets
familiar  with  the  controls  again.  He  ascends  from  Flatland  into the
three-dimensional Metaverse and practices riding his  bike  around  his yard
for a  while. Beyond the boundaries of his  yard  is nothing but  blackness,
because  he's  not jacked into the net. It is  a lost, desolate sensation, -
kind of like floating on a life raft in the Pacific Ocean.

        49

     Sometimes they see boats in the distance. A  couple of these even swing
close by  to check them out, but none of  them  seems to be in that rescuing
mood. There are few altruists  in the  vicinity of the  Raft, and it must be
evident that they don't have much to steal.
     From time to time, they see an  old deep-water fishing boat, fifty to a
hundred feet long, with half a dozen or so small fast boats clustered around
it.
     When Eliot informs them that  these are pirate vessels, Vic and Fisheye
prick up their ears. Vic unwraps his rifle from the collection of Hefty bags
that he uses to protect it from the salt spray, and detaches the bulky sight
so that they can use it as a spyglass. Hiro can't see any reason to pull the
sight  off  the rifle in order to do this, other than  the fact that if  you
don't, it looks like you're drawing a bead on whatever you're looking at.
     Whenever  a pirate vessel comes into view, they all take  turns looking
at it  through the  sight,  playing with all  the  different  sensor  modes:
visible, infrared,  and so on.  Eliot has spent  enough time knocking around
the Rim that he has become familiar wit