h the colors of the different  pirate
groups, so by examining them through  the sight he  can  tell  who they are:
Clint  Eastwood  and  his band parallel them  for  a  few  minutes  one day,
checking them out,  and  the Magnificent  Seven send out one of their  small
boats  to  zoom by them and  look for potential booty. Hiro's  almost hoping
they get taken prisoner  by the Seven, because they  have the nicest-looking
pirate  ship: a former luxury yacht with  Exocet launch tubes kludged to the
foredeck. But this reconnaissance leads  nowhere. The pirates, unschooled in
thermodynamics, do not grasp the implications of  the eternal plume of steam
coming from beneath the life raft.
     One  morning,  a  big  old  trawler  materializes  very close to  them,
congealing  out  of nothing as  the  fog  lifts.  Hiro has  been hearing its
engines for a while, but didn't realize how close it was.
     "Who  are they?"  Fisheye says,  choking on a  cup of  the freeze-dried
coffee he despises so much. He's wrapped  up in  a  space blanket and partly
snuggled underneath the boat's waterproof  canopy,  just his face  and hands
visible.
     Eliot  scopes them  out with the sight. He is not a real  demonstrative
guy, but it's clear that he is not very happy with what  he  sees.  "That is
Bruce Lee," he says.
     "How is that significant?" Fisheye says.
     "Well, check out the colors," Eliot says.
     The ship is close enough that everyone can see the flag pretty clearly.
It's a red  banner  with a silver fist  in the middle,  a  pair of  nunchuks
crossed beneath it, the initials B and L on either side.
     "What about 'em?" Fisheye says.
     "Well, the guy  who calls himself Bruce Lee, who's  like the leader? He
got a vest with those colors on the back."
     "So?"
     "So, it's  not  just  embroidered  or painted, it's  actually  done  in
scalps. Patchwork, like."
     "Say what?" Hiro says.
     "There's a rumor, just a rumor man, that he went through the Refu ships
looking for people with red or silver hair so he could collect the scalps he
needed."
     Hiro is still absorbing that when Fisheye makes an unexpected decision.
"I want to talk to this Bruce Lee character," he says. "He interests me."
     "Why the hell do you want to talk to this fucking psycho?" Eliot says.
     "Yeah," Hiro  says. "Didn't you  see that  series  on  Eye  Spy? He's a
maniac."
     Fisheye throws up his  hands as  if to say the answer is, like Catholic
theology, beyond mortal comprehension. "This is my decision," he says.
     "Who the fuck are you?" Eliot says.
     "President  of  the  fucking boat,"  Fisheye  says. "I hereby  nominate
myself. Is there a second?"
     "Yup," Vic says, the first time he has spoken in forty-eight hours.
     "All in favor say aye," Fisheye says.
     "Aye," Vic says, bursting into florid eloquence.
     "I win," Fisheye says. "So how  do we  get these Bruce Lee guys to come
over here and talk to us?"
     "Why should they want to?" Eliot says. "We got nothing they want except
for poontang."
     "Are  you  saying  these  guys  are  homos?"  Fisheye  says,  his  face
shriveling up.
     "Shit,  man," Eliot says, "you didn't even blink when I told  you about
the scalps."
     "I knew I didn't like any of this boat shit," Fisheye says.
     "If this makes any difference to you, they're not gay in the sense that
we usually think of it,"  Eliot explains. "They're het, but they're pirates.
They'll go after anything that's warm and concave."
     Fisheye makes a snap  decision.  "Okay, you  two guys, Hiro  and Eliot,
you're Chinese. Take off your clothes."
     "What?"
     "Do it. I'm the president, remember? You want Vic to do it for you?"
     Eliot and Hiro can't  help  looking over at Vic,  who  is just  sitting
there like a lump. There is something  about  his extremely  blase  attitude
that inspires fear.
     "Do  it or I'll fucking  kill you," Fisheye  says, finally  driving the
point home.
     Eliot and  Hiro, bobbing awkwardly on  the unsteady  floor of the raft,
peel off their  survival suits and step  out of them. Then they pull off the
rest  of their clothes,  exposing smooth  bare skin to the air for the first
time in a few days.
     The  trawler comes right alongside of  them, no  more than  twenty feet
away,  and cuts its engines. They are nicely equipped: half a  dozen Zodiacs
with new outboards, an Exocet-type missile, two  radars, and a fifty caliber
machine  gun  at each  end of  the  boat,  currently  unmanned.  A couple of
speedboats are being towed behind the trawler like dinghys and each of these
also has  a  heavy machine gun. And there is  also  a  thirty-six-foot motor
yacht, following them under its own power.
     There are a couple of dozen guys in  Bruce Lee's pirate band,  and they
are  now lined up along  the trawler's railing, grinning, whistling, howling
like wolves, and waving unrolled trojans in the air.
     "Don't  worry, man, I'm not  going to let 'em fuck  you," Fisheye says,
grinning.
     "What you gonna do," Eliot says, "hand them a papal encyclical?"
     "I'm sure they'll listen to reason," Fisheye says.
     "These  guys aren't  scared  of the Mafia, if  that's what you have  in
mind," Eliot says.
     "That's just because they don't know us very well."
     Finally, the leader comes out,  Bruce Lee himself, a fortyish guy in  a
Kevlar vest, an ammo vest stretched over that, a diagonal bandolier, samurai
sword -  Hiro would love  to take  him  on - nunchuks, and  his colors,  the
patchwork of human scalps.
     He flashes them a nice grin, has a look at Hiro and Eliot, gives them a
highly suggestive, thrusting thumbs-up gesture, and then struts  up and down
the length  of  the boat one time, swapping  high fives with his  merry men.
Every so often,  he picks out  one of the pirates  at random and gestures at
the man's  trojan.  The pirate puts his condom to his  lips and  inflates it
into  a  slippery ribbed balloon. Then Bruce  Lee inspects  it, making  sure
there are no leaks. Obviously, the man runs a tight ship.
     Hiro  can't help staring at the scalps on Bruce Lee's back. The pirates
note his interest and mug for him, pointing to the scalps, nodding,  looking
back at him with  wide, mocking  eyes. The colors look much too uniform - no
change  in the  red  from  one to  the next. Hiro concludes that  Bruce Lee,
contrary to his reputation, must have just gone out and gotten scalps of any
old color, bleached them, and dyed them. What a wimp.
     Finally,  Bruce Lee  works  his way  back to midship  and  flashes them
another big grin. He has a great,  dazzling grin and he knows it; maybe it's
those one-karat diamonds Krazy Glued to his front teeth.
     "Jammin' boat," he says. "Maybe you, me swap, huh? Hahaha."
     Everyone on the life raft, except for Vic, just smiles a brittle smile.
     "Where you goin'? Key West? Hahaha."
     Bruce Lee examines Hiro and Eliot for a while, rotates his index finger
to indicate that they  should spin around  and display their business  ends.
They do.
     "Quanto?" Bruce Lee says, and all the  pirates get uproarious, most  of
all Bruce Lee. Hiro can feel his anal sphincter contracting to the size of a
pore.
     "He's asking how much we cost," Eliot says. "It's a joke,  see, because
they know they can come over and have our asses for free."
     "Oh, hilarious!" Fisheye  says. While Hiro  and Eliot literally  freeze
their asses, he's still snuggled up under the canopy, that bastard.
     "Poonmissile,  like?" Bruce  Lee says, pointing to one  of the antiship
missiles on the deck. "Bugs? Motorolas?"
     "Poonmissile is  a  Harpoon  antiship missile,  real  expensive," Eliot
says.  "A  bug is a Microchip.  Motorola  would be  one brand,  like Ford or
Chevy.  Bruce Lee deals  in a  lot of electronics  - you know, typical Asian
pirate dude."
     "He'd give us a Harpoon missile for you guys?" Fisheye says.
     "No! He's being sarcastic, shithead!" Eliot says.
     "Tell him we want a boat with an outboard motor," Fisheye says,
     "Want one zode, one kicker, fillerup," Eliot says.
     Suddenly Bruce Lee gets real serious and actually considers it.  "Scope
clause, chomsayen? Gauge and gag."
     "He'll consider  it  if  they  can come and  check out the  merchandise
first," Eliot says. "They want to check out how tight we are, and whether we
are  capable  of sup-pressing our gag  reflex. These are  all terms from the
Raft brothel industry."
     "Ombwas scope like twelves to me, hahaha."
     "Us homeboys  look  like we have twelve-gauge  assholes,"  Eliot  says,
"i.e., that we are all stretched out and worthless."
     Fisheye speaks up on his own. "No, no, four-tens, totally!"
     The entire deck of the pirate ship titters with excitement.
     "No way," Bruce Lee says.
     "These ombwas," Fisheye says, "still got cherries up in there!"
     The  whole deck  erupts in rude, screaming laughter. One of the pirates
scrambles up to  balance on  the railing,  gyrates one fist in the  air, and
hollers: "ba ka na zu ma  lay ga no ma la aria ma na po no a  ab zu ... " By
that point all the other pirates have stopped laughing, gotten serious looks
on  their  faces,  and joined  in, bellowing  their  own private streams  of
babble, rattling the air with a profound hoarse ululation.
     Hiro's  feet go out from under him as the raft  moves suddenly; he  can
see Eliot falling down next to him.
     He  looks up at Bruce Lee's ship  and flinches involuntarily as he sees
what looks like a dark wave cresting over the rail, washing over  the row of
standing pirates, starting at the stern  of  the trawler and working its way
forward. But this is just  some kind of optical illusion. It is not really a
wave at all. Suddenly, they are fifty feet away from the trawler, not twenty
feet. As the  laughter on  the railing  dies away, Hiro hears a new sound: a
low  whirring noise from  the  direction of Fisheye, and from the atmosphere
around  them,  a tearing,  hissing noise,  like  the  sound  just  before  a
thunderbolt strikes, like the sound of sheets being ripped in half.
     Looking  back  at  Bruce Lee's trawler, he sees that  the dark wavelike
phenomenon was a wave of blood, as though someone hosed down the deck with a
giant severed aorta.  But it  didn't come  from outside. It erupted from the
pirates' bodies, one at a time, moving from the stem to the bow. The deck of
Bruce Lee's  ship is  now utterly quiet and motionless except for  blood and
gelatinized internal  organs sliding  down  the  rusted steel  and  plopping
softly into the water.
     Fisheye is up on his knees now and has  torn away the canopy  and space
blanket that have covered him until this point. In one hand  he is holding a
long device a  couple of  inches in diameter, which  is  the source  of  the
whirring noise. It is a circular bundle of parallel tubes about pencil-sized
and  a couple of feet long, like a miniaturized Gatling gun. It whirs around
so quickly that the individual tubes are difficult  to make  out; when it is
operating,  it is  in  fact  ghostly and transparent  because of  this rapid
motion,  a glittering, translucent  cloud  jutting out of Fisheye's arm. The
device is attached  to a wrist-thick bundle  of black tubes  and cables that
snake  down into the  large suitcase, which lies open on  the bottom  of the
raft. The  suitcase has a built-in color monitor screen with graphics giving
information about the  status of this weapons system: how much ammo is left,
the  status  of  various subsystems.  Hiro  just gets  a quick glimpse at it
before all of the ammunition on board Bruce Lee's ship begins to explode.
     "See, I told you they'd listen to Reason,"  Fisheye says, shutting down
the whirling gun. Now Hiro sees a nameplate tacked onto the control panel.
        REASON
     version 1.0B7
     Gatling-type 3-mm hypervelocity railgun system
     Ng Security Industries, Inc.
     PRERELEASE VERSION - NOT FOR FIELD USE
     DO NOT TEST IN A POPULATED AREA
     - ULTIMA RATIO REGUM- -
     "Fucking  recoil   pushed   us   halfway  to   China,"   Fisheye   says
appreciatively.
     "Did you do that? What just happened?" Eliot says.
     "I  did  it.  With  Reason.  See, it  fires  these  teeny little  metal
splinters. They go real fast -  more  energy  than  a rifle bullet. Depleted
uranium."
     The spinning barrels have now slowed  almost to a stop.  It looks  like
there are about two dozen of them.
     "I thought you hated machine guns," Hiro says.
     "I hate this fucking raft  even  more. Let's go get ourselves something
that goes, you know. Something with a motor on it."
     Because of the  fires and  small explosions going off  on  Bruce  Lee's
pirate ship, it takes them a minute to realize that several people are still
alive there, still shooting at them. When Fisheye becomes aware of this,  he
pulls the trigger again,  the barrels whirl themselves up into a transparent
cylinder,  and the tearing, hissing noise begins again.  As he waves the gun
back and forth, hosing the target down with a hypersonic  shower of depleted
uranium,  Bruce Lee's  entire  ship seems to sparkle and glitter,  as though
Tinkerbell was flying back and forth from stem to stern, sprinkling  nuclear
fairy dust over it.
     Bruce Lee's  smaller yacht makes  the mistake of coming  around to  see
what's  going on.  Fisheye turns  toward  it  for  a  moment  and  its high,
protruding bridge slides off into the water.
     Major structural  elements of  the trawler are losing their  integrity.
Enormous popping and  wrenching noises are coming from  inside as big pieces
of Swiss-cheesed metal give way, and the superstructure is slowly collapsing
down  into the  hull  like a botched souffle. When  Fisheye  notes this,  he
ceases fire.
     "Cut it out, boss," Vic says.
     "I'm melting!" Fisheye crows.
     "We could  have  used that trawler,  asshole," Eliot says, vindictively
yanking his pants back on.
     "I didn't mean to blow it all  up.  I guess the little  bullets just go
through everything."
     "Sharp thinking, Fisheye," Hiro says.
     "Well,  I'm  sorry I took a little action to save  our  asses. Come on,
let's go get one of them little boats before they all burn."
     They paddle in the direction of the decapitated yacht. By the time they
reach  it,  Bruce Lee's trawler is  just a listing,  empty steel  hull  with
flames and smoke pouring out of it, spiced by the occasional explosion.
     The  remaining portion of the yacht has many, many tiny little holes in
it,  and  glitters  with  exploded  fragments of fiberglass:  a million tiny
little glass fibers about a millimeter long.  The skipper and a crew member,
or rather the stew that they turned into when the bridge  was hit by Reason,
slid off into the water along with the rest of the debris, leaving behind no
evidence of  their having been  there except  for  a pair  of  long parallel
streaks trailing off into the water. But there is a Filipino boy down in the
galley, the galley so low, unhurt and only dimly aware of what happened.
     A number of electrical cables have been sawn in  half.  Eliot digs up a
toolbox from  belowdecks and spends  the next  twelve hours patching  things
together to the point where the  engine can be started and the yacht can  be
steered. Hiro, who has a rudimentary knowledge of electrical stuff,  acts as
gofer and limp-dicked adviser.
     "Did you hear the way the pirates were  talking, before Fisheye  opened
up on them?" Hiro asks Eliot while they are working.
     "You mean in pidgin?"
     "No. At the very end. The babbling."
     "Yeah. That's a Raft thing."
     "It is?"
     "Yeah.  One guy  will start  in and the rest will follow.  I think it's
just a fad."
     "But it's common on the Raft?"
     "Yeah.  They  all  speak  different  languages,  you  know,  all  those
different ethnic groups. It's like  the fucking Tower of Babel. I think when
they  make  that  sound  - when  they  babble at each  other -  they're just
imitating what all the other groups sound like."
     The Filipino kid starts making them some food. Vic and Fisheye sit down
in  the  main  cabin  belowdecks, eating,  going  through Chinese magazines,
looking  at pictures  of  Asian chicks, and occasionally looking at nautical
charts. When Eliot  gets the electrical  system  back  up and  running, Hiro
plugs his personal computer in, to recharge its batteries.
     By the  time  the yacht  is  up  and running  again, it's  dark. To the
southwest, a fluctuating column of light is  playing  back and forth against
the low overhanging cloud layer.
     "Is  that the Raft over there?" Fisheye says, pointing to the light, as
all hands converge on Eliot's makeshift control center.
     "It is,"  Eliot  says.  "They light it up at night so that  the fishing
boats can find their way back to it."
     "How far away do you think it is?" Fisheye says.
     Eliot shrugs. "Twenty miles."
     "And how far to land?"
     "I  have  no  idea.  Bruce Lee's skipper probably knew,  but he's  been
pureed along with everyone else."
     "You're  right,"  Fisheye says. "I  should  have set  it on  'whip'  or
'chop.'"
     "The  Raft usually stays at least a hundred miles offshore," Hiro says,
"to reduce the danger of snags."
     "How we doing on gas?"
     "I  dipped the tank," Eliot says, "and it looks like we're not doing so
well, to tell you the truth."
     "What does that mean, not doing so well?"
     "It's not always easy to read  the level when you're out to sea," Eliot
says. "And I don't know how efficient these engines are. But if we're really
eighty or a hundred miles offshore, we might not make it."
     "So we go to the Raft," Fisheye says. "We  go to the  Raft and persuade
someone it's in  his best interests to give us some fuel. Then,  back to the
mainland."
     No one really believes it's  going  to  happen this  way, least  of all
Fisheye.  "And," he continues,  "while we're there - on the Raft -  after we
get the fuel and before we go home - some other stuff might happen, too, you
know. Life's unpredictable."
     "If you have something in mind,  why don't  you just spit it out?" Hiro
says.
     "Okay.  Policy decision. The  hostage  tactic failed.  So  we go for an
extraction."
     "Extraction of what?"
     "Of Y.T."
     "I go along with that," Hiro says, "but I have another person I want to
extract also, as long as we're extracting."
     "Who?"
     "Juanita. Come on, you said yourself she was a nice girl."
     "If she's on the Raft, maybe she's not so nice," Fisheye says.
     "I want to extract her anyway. We're all in this together, right? We're
all part of Lagos's gang."
     "Bruce Lee has some people there," Eliot says.
     "Correction. Had."
     "But what I'm saying is, they're going to be pissed."
     "'You  think they're going to be  pissed. I think they're going  to  be
scared  shitless,"  Fisheye  says. "Now drive the boat,  Eliot. Come on, I'm
sick of all this fucking water."

        50

     Raven ushers  Y.T. onto a  flat-assed boat with a canopy on  top. It is
some    kind    of   a   riverboat   that    has   been   turned   into    a
Vietnamese/Arnerican/Thai/Chinese  business   establishment,   kind   of   a
bar/restaurant/whorehouse/gambling  den. It has a few big rooms, where  lots
of people are letting it all hang out, and a lot of little tiny steel-walled
rooms down below where God knows what kind of activity is taking place.
     The  main room is packed  with  lowlife  revelry.  The  smoke  ties her
bronchial  passages  into  granny  knots.  The  place  is  equipped  with  a
shattering  Third World sound system:  pure distortion  echoing  off painted
steel walls at three hundred decibels. A television set bolted onto one wall
is showing  foreign cartoons, done up in a two-color scheme of faded magenta
and lime green, in which a ghoulish wolf, kind of  like Wile E.  Coyote with
rabies, gets repeatedly executed in ways more violent than even Warner Bros.
could think up.  It's a snuff  cartoon. The soundtrack is either  turned off
completely or else overwhelmed by  the  screeching melody coming out  of the
speakers. A bunch of erotic dancers are performing at one end of the room.
     It's impossibly crowded,  they'll never get a place to sit. But shortly
after  Raven comes  into the room,  half a dozen guys  in the comer suddenly
stand bolt upright and scatter from a  table, snatching up their  cigarettes
and  drinks  almost  as an afterthought. Raven pushes  Y.T. through the room
ahead of him,  like she's a figurehead on his kayak, and everywhere they go,
people are shoved out of her way by  Raven's almost  palpable personal force
field.
     Raven bends  down and looks  under the table, picks  a chair up off the
floor and looks  at the underside - you can never be too careful about those
chair bombs  - sets  it  down, pushed all the way back into the corner where
two steel walls meet,  and sits down. He  gestures  for Y.T. to do the same,
and she  does, her back to the action.  From here, she can see Raven's face,
illuminated mostly by occasional stabs of light  filtering through the crowd
from  the  mirrored ball over the  erotic  dancers, and  by  the generalized
green-and-magenta haze coming  out  of the  TV set, spiked by the occasional
flash when the cartoon wolf makes the mistake of swallowing another hydrogen
bomb, or has the misfortune to get hosed down again with a flamethrower.
     A  waiter's  there  immediately. Raven commences  hollering across  the
table at her. She can't hear him, but maybe he's asking her what she wants.
     "A cheeseburger!" she screams back at him.
     Raven laughs, shakes his head. "You see any cows around here?"
     "Anything but fish!" she screams.
     Raven talks to the waiter for a while in some variant of Taxilinga.
     "I ordered you some squid," he hollers. "That's a mollusk."
     Great. Raven, the last of the true gentlemen.
     There is a shouted  conversation lasting the better  part  of  an hour.
Raven does most  of  the  shouting.  Y.T. just listens,  smiles,  and  nods.
Hopefully, he's  not saying something like "I enjoy really  violent, abusive
sex  acts."  She doesn't think he's talking  about that at all. He's talking
politics. She hears  a fragmented history of the Aleuts, a burst here and  a
burst here, when Raven isn't poking squid into his mouth and the music isn't
too loud:
     "Russians fucked  us  over ...  smallpox had a ninety-percent mortality
rate ... worked as slaves in  their sealing industry ... Seward's folly  ...
Fucking Nipponese took away  my father in forty-two, put him in  a  POW camp
for the duration ...
     "Then the Americans fucking nuked us. Can you believe that shit?" Raven
says. There's a lull in the music; suddenly she can hear complete sentences.
"The Nipponese say they're the  only people who were ever  nuked.  But every
nuclear power has  one  aboriginal group whose territory they nuked to  test
their weapons. In America, they nuked the Aleutians. Amchitka.  My  father,"
Raven says, grinning proudly,  "was nuked twice:  once  at Nagasaki, when he
was blinded, and then again in 1972, when the Americans nuked our homeland."
     Great, Y.T.  thinks.  She's got a  new  boyfriend  and he's  a  mutant.
Explains one or two things.
     "I  was born a  few months  later," Raven continues, by way  of totally
hammering that point home.
     "How did you get hooked up with these Orthos?"
     "I  got  away  from our  traditions and  ended up  living in  Soldotna,
working on oil rigs," Raven  says, like  Y.T. is supposed to just know where
Soldotna  is. "That was when I  did my  drinking  and got  this,"  he  says,
pointing to his tattoo.  "That's also when I learned how  to make love  to a
woman - which is the only thing I do better than harpooning."
     Y.T. can't  help but think  that  fucking  and  harpooning are  closely
related activities in Raven's  mind. But as crude  as the man  is, she can't
get around the fact that he's making her uncomfortably horny.
     "I  used to work fishing boats  too, to  make a little extra money.  We
would come back  from a  forty-eight-hour halibut opening - this was back in
the old days when they had fishing regulations -and we'd put on our survival
suits, stick beers into the pockets, and jump  into the water and just float
around  drinking all night long. And one time we were doing this and I drank
until I passed out. And when I  woke  up, it  was  the next day, or maybe  a
couple of days later, I don't  know. And I was floating in my survival  suit
out in the middle of the Cook Inlet, all alone. The other guys on my fishing
boat had forgotten about me."
     Conveniently enough, Y.T. thinks.
     "Anyway, I floated for  a couple of  days. Got  real thirsty. Ended  up
washing ashore on Kodiak Island. By this time, I was real sick with  the DTs
and everything else. But I washed up near a Russian Orthodox church and they
found me, took me in, and straightened  me out. And that was when I saw that
the Western, American lifestyle had come this close to killing me."
     Here comes the sermon.
     "And  I saw  that  we  can  only live  through  faith, living a  simple
lifestyle. No booze. No television. None of that stuff."
     "So what are we doing in this place?"
     He  shrugs. "This is an example  of  the bad places I used to hang out.
But if you're going to get decent food on. the Raft, you  have to  come to a
place like this."
     A  waiter approaches  the  table.  His  eyes  are  big,  his  movements
tentative.  He's not coming to  take  an  order;  he's coming to deliver bad
news.
     "Sir, you are wanted on the radio. I'm sorry."
     "Who is it?" Raven says.
     The waiter just  looks around him like he can't even speak  the name in
public. "It's very important," he says.
     Raven heaves a big sigh, grabs one last piece of fish and pokes it into
his mouth. He  stands up, and before Y.T. can react, gives her a kiss on the
cheek. "Honey, I got a job to do, or something. Just wait right here for me,
okay?"
     "Here?"
     "Nobody will fuck with you," Raven says, as much for the benefit of the
waiter as for Y.T.

        51

     The  Raft  looks  uncannily  cheerful  from a few miles away.  A  dozen
searchlights,  and  at least  that many lasers,  are mounted on the towering
superstructure of the  Enterprise,  waving back and forth against the clouds
like a  Hollywood  premiere. Closer up, it doesn't look so bright and crisp.
The vast matted tangle of small boats radiates a murky cloud of yellow light
that spoils the contrast.
     A  couple of patches of the Raft are burning. Not a nice cheery bonfire
type of thing, but a high burbling flame with black smoke sliding out of it,
like you get from a large quantity of gasoline.
     "Gang warfare, maybe," Eliot theorizes.
     "Energy source," Hiro guesses.
     "Entertainment,"  Fisheye says. "They  don't have cable on  the fucking
Raft."
     Before they  really plunge into  Hell, Eliot takes the lid off the fuel
tank  and  slides  the  dipstick into  there, checking the  fuel supply.  He
doesn't say anything, but he doesn't look especially happy.
     "Turn off  all the  lights," Eliot  says when  it seems  they are still
miles away. "Remember that we have already  been  sighted by several hundred
or even several thousand people who are armed and hungry."
     Vic is already going around the boat shutting off lights via the simple
expedient of  a  ball  peen  hammer. Fisheye  just  stands there and listens
intently to Eliot,  suddenly respectful. Eliot continues.  "Take off all the
bright orange clothing,  even  if it means we get cold. From now on, we  lay
down on the decks, expose ourselves as little as possible, and we don't talk
to  each other unless necessary. Vic, you stay midships with  your rifle and
wait for someone to hit us with a spotlight. Anyone hits us with a spotlight
from any direction, you shoot  it out. That  includes flashlights from small
boats. Hiro,  your job  is gunwale  patrol. You  just keep going around  the
edges  of this yacht, anywhere that  a swimmer could climb  up over the edge
and slip on board, and when that happens, cut his arms off.  Also, be on the
lookout for any  kind of grappling-hook type stuff.  Fisheye, if  any  other
floating object comes within a hundred feet of us, sink it.
     "If you see Raft people with antennas coming out of their heads, try to
kill them first, because they can talk to each other."
     "Antennas coming out of their heads?" Hiro says.
     "Yeah. Raft gargoyle types," Eliot says.
     "Who are they?"
     "How  the fuck should I  know?  I've just seen 'em a few times,  from a
distance. Anyway,  I'm going  to take us straight in  toward the center, and
once  we get close enough, I'll turn to starboard and swing  around the Raft
counterclockwise, looking for someone who  might be willing to sell us fuel.
If worse comes to worst and we end  up on the Raft itself, we stick together
and we hire ourselves a guide, because  if  we  try to  move across the Raft
without  the  help of someone  who  knows the  web,  we'll  get  into  a bad
situation."
     "Like what kind of a bad situation?" Fisheye asks.
     "Like hanging on a rotted-out slime-covered cargo net between two ships
rocking different ways, with nothing  underneath us except ice water full of
plague rats, toxic waste, and killer whales. Any questions?"
     "Yeah," Fisheye says. "Can I go home now?"
     Good. If Fisheye is scared, so's Hiro.
     "Remember what happened to the pirate named Bruce Lee," Eliot says. "He
was  well-armed  and powerful.  He pulled up alongside a life  raft  full of
Refus one day, looking for some poontang, and he was dead before he knew it.
Now there are a lot of people who want to do that to us."
     "Don't  they  have some kind of cops or something?" Vic says. "I  heard
they did."
     In other words, Vic has killed a lot of  time going  to Raft movies  in
Times Square.
     "The people  up on  the Enterprise  operate in  kind of a  wrath-of-God
mode," Eliot says. "They have big guns mounted around the edge of the flight
deck - big Gatling guns like Reason  except with  larger bullets.  They were
originally  put  there to  shoot down Exocet missiles.  They strike with the
force of a meteorite. If  people act up out on the Raft, they will  make the
problem go away.  But  a little murder  or  riot isn't  enough  to get their
attention. If it's a rocket duel between rival pirate  organizations, that's
different."
     Suddenly, they've been nailed with a spotlight so big and powerful they
can't look anywhere near it.
     Then it's dark again, and a gunshot from Vic's  rifle  is  searing  and
reverberating across the water.
     "Nice shooting, Vic," Fisheye says.
     "It's, like, one of them  drug dealer boats," Vic says, looking through
his magic sight. "Five guys on it. Headed  our way." He fires another round.
"Correction. Four guys on it." Boom. "Correction, they're not headed our way
anymore." Boom. A fireball  erupts  from the  ocean  two  hundred feet away.
"Correction. No boat."
     Fisheye  laughs  and  actually slaps his thigh.  "You recording all  of
this, Hiro?"
     "No," Hiro says. "Wouldn't come out."
     "Oh." Fisheye seems taken aback, like this changes everything.
     "That's  the first  wave," Eliot  says. "Rich  pirates looking for easy
pickings. But they've got a lot to lose, so they scare easy."
     "Another big  yacht-type boat  is  out there,"  Vic  says, "but they're
turning away now."
     Above the deep  chortling noise of their yacht's  big diesel,  they can
hear the high whine of outboard motors.
     "Second wave," Eliot  says. "Pirate wannabes. These guys will come in a
lot faster, so stay sharp."
     "This thing  has  millimeter  wave on it,"  Fisheye says. Hiro looks at
him;  his face is illuminated from below by  the glow  of  Reason's built-in
screen. "I can see these guys like it's fucking daylight."
     Vic fires several rounds,  pops the  clip out of his rifle, shoves in a
new one.
     A zodiac zips past, skittering across the wavetops,  strafing them with
weak flashlight beams. Fisheye fires  a couple of short bursts  from Reason,
blasting clouds of warm steam into the cold night air, but misses them.
     "Save your ammo," Eliot says. "Even with  Uzis, they can't hit us until
they slow down a little bit. And even with radar, you can't hit them."
     A second zodiac whips past them on the other side, closer than the last
one.  Vic and  Fisheye both  hold their  fire. They hear  it  orbiting them,
swinging back around the way it came.
     "Those two  boats  are getting together out there," Vic says. "They got
two more of them. A total of four. They're talking."
     "We've been reconned," Eliot says, "and they're planning their tactics.
The next time is for real."
     A second later, two  fantastically loud blasts sound  from the  rear of
the yacht, where Eliot is, accompanied by brief flashes of light. Hiro turns
around to  see  a body collapsing  to  the  deck.  It's not Eliot. Eliot  is
crouching there holding his oversized halibut shooter.
     Hiro runs back, looks  at the dead swimmer  in the dim light scattering
off the clouds. He's naked except for  a thick coating of black grease and a
belt with a gun and a knife in it. He's still holding on to the rope that he
used to pull himself on board. The rope is attached to a grappling hook that
has caught in the jagged, broken fiberglass on one side of the yacht.
     "Third wave  is coming a little early," Eliot says, his voice high  and
shaky. He's trying  so hard to sound  cool that it  has the opposite effect.
"Hiro, this gun's got  three rounds left in it, and  I'm saving the last one
for you if any more of these motherfuckers get on board."
     "Sorry," Hiro says. He draws the  short wakizashi. He would feel better
if he could carry his  nine in the other hand, but he needs one hand free to
steady himself and keep from failing overboard. He makes a  quick circuit of
the yacht, looking for more grappling hooks, and actually  finds one  on the
other side, hooked into one of the railing stanchions, a taut rope  trailing
out behind it into the sea.
     Correction: It's  a taut cable. His sword won't cut it. And the tension
on the rope is such that he can't get it unhooked from the stanchion.
     As he's squatting there playing with the grappling  hook, a greasy hand
rises  up  out  of  the water and grabs his  wrist. Another hand  gropes for
Hiro's other  hand and grabs the  sword instead. Hiro yanks the weapon free,
feeling it  do damage, and shoves  the wakizashi point first into the  place
between those two hands  just as  someone is sinking his  teeth  into Hiro's
crotch.  But  Hiro's crotch is  protected - the motorcycle outfit has a hard
plastic cup  - and so this human  shark just  gets a mouthful of bulletproof
fabric.  Then his grip loosens, and he falls into the sea. Hiro releases the
grappling hook and drops it in with him.
     Vic fires  three rounds in quick succession, and a fireball illuminates
one whole  side of the ship. For  a moment,  they can see everything  around
them for  a distance of a hundred yards,  and the  effect is like turning on
your kitchen lights in the middle of  the night and finding your countertops
aswarm with rats. At least a dozen small boats are around them.
     "They got Molotov cocktails," Vic says.
     The people in the boats can see them, too. Tracers fly around them from
several  directions. Hiro can see muzzle flashes in at least  three  places.
Fisheye opens up once, twice with Reason, just firing  short bursts of a few
dozen rounds each, and produces one fireball, this one farther away from the
yacht.
     It's been  at  least five  seconds since Hiro moved,  so he checks this
area for grappling hooks again  and resumes his circuit  around  the edge of
the yacht.  This time it's clear. The two greaseballs must have been working
together.
     A  Molotov  cocktail arcs through the sky and impacts on  the starboard
side of the yacht, where it's not going to do much damage. Inside would be a
lot worse. Fisheye uses Reason to hose down the area from  which the Molotov
was thrown, but now that the side of the boat is all lit up from the flames,
they draw more small-arms  fire. In  that light,  Hiro can  see trickles  of
blood running down from the area where Vic ensconced himself.
     On  the port  side,  he sees something long and narrow and low  in  the
water, with the torso of a man rising out of it.  The man has long hair that
falls down around his  shoulders, and he's holding an eight-foot pole in one
hand. Just as Hiro sees him, he's throwing it.
     The harpoon darts across twenty feet of open water. The million chipped
facets of  its glass head refract the light and make it look  like a meteor.
It takes  Fisheye in the back, slices easily through the bulletproof  fabric
he's wearing under his suit, and comes all the way out the other side of his
body. The impact lifts Fisheye into the air  and throws him off the boat; he
lands face-first in the water, already dead.
     Mental note: Raven's weapons do not show up on radar.
     Hiro looks back  in the direction  of Raven, but  he's already  gone. A
couple more greaseballs, side by side, vault over the railing about ten feet
forward of Hiro, but for a  moment they're dazzled by the flames. Hiro pulls
out his nine, aims it their way, and keeps pulling the trigger until both of
them have fallen back into the water. He's not sure how many rounds are left
in the gun now.
     There's  a  coughing, hissing noise, and  the  flame light gets dim and
finally goes out. Eliot nailed it with a fire extinguisher.
     The yacht  jerks out from under Hiro's feet,  and he hits the deck with
his  face  and shoulder.  Getting up,  he realizes that either  they've just
rammed, or  been rammed by, something big.  There is a thudding  noise, feet
running  on  the deck. Hiro  hears some of these  feet near  him, drops  his
wakizashi,  pulls  his katana,  whirls  at the  same time, snapping the long
blade  into someone's  midsection. Meanwhile they're  dragging  a long knife
down his back, but it doesn't penetrate the fabric, just hurts a little. His
katana comes free easily, which  is dumb luck, because he forgot to  squeeze
off  the  blow,  could  have  gotten it  wedged in  there. He  turns  again,
instinctively  parries  a knife thrust  from  another greaseball, raises the
katana and snaps  it down into his brainpan. This  time  he  does it  right,
kills him without sticking the  blade. There are greaseballs on two sides of
him  now.  Hiro  chooses a direction, swings it sideways, decapitates one of
them.
     Then  he  turns  around.  Another greaseball is  staggering toward  him
across  the  pitching deck  with a spiked  club, but  unlike  Hiro  he's not
keeping his balance.  Hiro shuffles up to  meet him, keeping  his  center of
gravity over his feet, and impales him on the katana.
     Another greaseball is watching all of this in astonishment from up near
the bow. Hiro shoots him, and he collapses to the deck. Two more greaseballs
jump off the boat voluntarily.
     The yacht is tangled up in a spider's web of shitty old ropes and cargo
nets that were stretched out across the surface of the water as a snare  for
poor suckers like them. The yacht's engine  is still straining, but the prop
isn't moving; something got wrapped around the shaft.
     There's no sign of Raven now. Maybe it was just a one-time contract hit
on Fisheye. Maybe he didn't want  to  get tangled up in the spiderweb. Maybe
he figured that, once Reason  was taken out, the greaseballs would take care
of the rest.
     Eliot's no longer at  the  controls. He's no  longer even on the yacht.
Hiro calls out his name, but there's no response. Not even  thrashing in the
water.  The  last thing  he  did  was  lean  over  the edge  with  the  fire
extinguisher, putting out the Molotov flame; when they were jerked to a halt
he must have tumbled overboard.
     They're  a  lot closer to the Enterprise than he had ever thought. They
covered  a lot of  water  during the fight, got closer in  than  they should
have. In  fact, Hiro's surrounded on all  sides by the Raft at  this  point.
Meager,  flickering illumination  is provided by the burning remains  of the
Molotov  cocktail-carrying  Zodiacs, which  have  become tangled  in the net
around them.
     Hiro does not think it would be wise  to take the yacht back out toward
open  water. It's a  little too competitive  there. He  goes up forward. The
suitcase that serves as Reason's power supply and ammo  dump is open on  the
deck next to him,  its color monitor screen reading: Sorry,  a fatal  system
error occurred. Please reboot and try again.
     Then, as  Hiro's looking at it, it fritzes out completely and dies of a
snow crash.

     Vic got hit by one of the machine-gun  bursts and is also  dead. Around
them, half a dozen other boats ride on the  waves,  caught in the spiderweb,
nice-looking  yachts all of them. But they are all  empty hulks, stripped of
their  engines and  everything else.  Just  like duck  decoys in front of  a
hunter's blind. A hand-painted sign rides on a buoy nearby, reading FUEL  in
English and other languages.
     Farther  out to  sea,  a number of the  ships  that were  chasing  them
earlier are lingering, steering  well clear of the spiderweb. They know they
can't  come  in here;  this  is  the exclusive domain  of  the  black grease
swimmers, the spiders in the web, almost all of whom are now dead.
     If he goes onto the Raft itself, it can't be any worse. Can it?
     The  yacht has its own little dinghy, the smallest  size  of inflatable
zodiac, with a small outboard motor. Hiro gets it into the water.
     "I go with you," a voice says.
     Hiro whirls, hauling  out his gun, and finds himself aiming it into the
face of  the Filipino cabin boy. The boy blinks, looks a  little  surprised,
but not especially scared. He has been hanging  out with pirates, after all.
For that matter, all the  dead guys  on the  yacht don't  seem  to faze  him
either.
     "I be your guide," the boy says. "ba la zin ka nu pa ra ta..."

        52

     Y.T.  waits so long  that she thinks the sun must have come  up by now,
but she knows it can't  really be more than a couple of hours. In  a way, it
doesn't  even matter. Nothing ever changes: the  music  plays,  the  cartoon
videotape rewinds itself and starts up again, men come in and  drink and try
not to get caught staring at her. She might as well be shackled to the table
anyway; there's no way she could  ever find  her way back home from here. So
she waits.
     Suddenly, Raven's  standing in  front  of her.  He's wearing  different
clothes,  wet slippery  clothing made out of animal skins or something.  His
face is red and wet from being outside.
     "You get your job all done?"
     "Sort of," Raven says. "I did enough."
     "What do you mean, enough?"
     "I mean I don't like being called out of a  date to do bullshit  work,"
Raven says. "So I got things in order out there and my  attitude is, let his
gnomes worry about the details."
     "Well, I've been having a great time here."
     "Sorry,  baby.  Let's get out of  here,"  he  says,  speaking with  the
intense, strained tones of a man with an erection.
     "Let's go to the Core," he says, once they get  into the cool air above
deck.
     "What's there?"
     "Everything," he  says. "The people who run  this whole  place. Most of
these  people" - he  waves his hand out over  the  Raft - "can't go there. I
can. Want to see it?"
     "Sure, why not," she says, hating herself for sounding like such a sap.
But what else is she going to say?
     He starts  leading  her  down  a long moonlit series of gangplanks,  in
toward the big ships in the middle of the Raft. You could almost skate here,
but you'd have to be really good.
     "Why are you different  from the  other people?" Y.T. says. She kind of
blurts it out without doing a whole lot of thinking first. But it seems like
a good question.
     He laughs. "I'm an Aleut. I'm different in a lot of ways - "
     "No. I  mean your brain works  in a different way," Y.T.  says. "You're
not  wacked out.  You know what I mean? You haven't mentioned the  Word  all
night."
     "We have a thing we do in kayaks. It's like surfing," Raven says.
     "Really? I surf, too - in traffic," Y.T. says.
     "We  don't do this for fun," Raven says. "It's part  of how we live. We
get from island to island by surfing on waves."
     "Same  here," Y.T. says, "except we go from one franchulate to the next
by surfing on cars."
     "See,  the world is  full of things more powerful  than  us. But if you
know how to catch a ride, you can go places," Raven says.
     "Right. I'm totally hip to what you're saying."
     "That's  what I'm doing with  the  Orthos.  I agree with some of  their
religion. But not all of  it. But their movement  has a  lot  of power. They
have a lot of people and money and ships."
     "And you're surfing on it."
     "Yeah."
     "That's cool, I can relate. What are you  trying to do? I  mean, what's
your real goal?"
     They're crossing a big broad  platform. Suddenly he's right behind her,
his arms are around  her body, and he draws her back into  him. Her toes are
just barely  touching  the ground. She can feel  his  cool nose  against her
temple and his hot breath coming into  one ear. It sends a  tingle  straight
down to her toes.
     "Short-term goal or long-term goal?" Raven whispers.
     "Um - long term."
     "I used to have this plan - I was going to nuke America."
     "Oh. Well, that'd be kind of harsh," she says.
     "Maybe. Depends  on  what kind of a  mood I'm in. Other  than  that, no
long-term goals." Every time he whispers something,  another  breath tickles
her ear.
     "How about medium-term then?"
     "In a few hours, the  Raft comes apart," Raven says. "We're  headed for
California.  Looking  for a decent  place to live.  Some people might try to
stop us. It's my job to  help the people make it safe and sound  up onto the
shore. So you might say I'm going to war."
     "Oh, that's a shame," she mumbles.
     "So it's hard to think of anything besides the here and now."
     "Yeah, I know."
     "I rented a nice room to spend my last night in," Raven says. "It's got
clean sheets."
     Not for long, she thinks.

     She had thought that his lips would be cold and stiff, like a fish. But
she's shocked  at  how warm they are. Every part of his body feels hot, like
that's his only way of keeping warm up in the Arctic.
     About thirty seconds  into  the kiss,  he bends down,  wraps his  great
thigh-sized forearms  around her waist, cinches her up into the air, lifting
her feet up off the deck.
     She  was afraid he would take her  to some horrible place, but it turns
out he rented a  whole shipping container, stacked way up high on one of the
containerships in the Core.  The  place is like a luxury hotel  for big Core
wheels.
     She's trying to decide what to do with her legs, which are now dangling
uselessly. She's not quite ready to wrap them around him, not this  early in
the date. Then she  feels them  spreading apart - way, way  apart  - Raven's
thighs must be bigger around  than his waist.  He has lifted one leg up into
her crotch and put the foot up on a chair so she's straddling his thigh, and
with his arms he's holding her  body up against him, squeezing and relaxing,
squeezing and relaxing, so that she's helplessly rocking back and forth, all
her  weight  on  her  crotch. Some  huge  muscle, the  upmost  part  of  his
quadricep, angles up where it attaches to the bone in his  pelvis, and as he
rocks her in closer and tighter  she ends up straddling that, shoved against
it so tight that she can feel the seams  in the crotch of her coverall, feel
the coins in the key pocket of Raven's black jeans. When he slides his hands
downward, still pressing her inward, and squeezes her butt in both hands, so
big it must be like squeezing an apricot, fingers so  long they  wrap around
and push up into her  crack and she  rocks forward to  get  away from it but
there's nowhere to go except into his body,  her face breaking away from the
kiss and sliding against  the perspiration of his broad, smooth, whiskerless
neck. She can't help letting out a yelp that turns into a moan, and then she
knows he's got her. Because she never makes noises during sex, but this time
she can't help it.
     And once she's decided that, she's impatient to get on with it. She can
move her  arms,  she can move her legs, but  the  middle part of her body is
pinned in place, it's  not going to move until Raven  moves it. And he's not
going  to move it until she makes  him want to. So she goes  to work  on his
ear. That usually does it.
     He  tries  to  get  away from  her. Raven,  trying  to  run  away  from
something. She likes that idea. She has arms that are as strong as a  man's,
strong from hanging on to that poon on the freeway, so she wraps them around
his head  like a  vise and presses her forehead against the side of his head
and starts orbiting the tip of  her tongue around the little folded-over rim
of his outer ear.
     He stands paralyzed for a couple of minutes, breathing shallowly, while
she works her  way inward,  and  when she finally shoves her tongue into his
ear canal, he bucks and grunts like he's just been  harpooned, lifts her  up
off his leg, kicks the  chair across the  room so hard it cracks against the
steel  wall of the shipping  container.  She feels herself falling  backward
toward the  futon,  thinks for a moment she's about to  get crushed  beneath
him, but he catches all the weight on his elbows, except for his lower body,
which slams into hers all at once, sending another electric shot of pleasure
up  her back and down her legs. Her thighs  and calves have turned solid and
tight,  like they've  been  pumped  full of juice, she can't  relax them. He
leans  up on one elbow, separating their  bodies for a  moment,  plants  his
mouth on hers to  maintain  the contact, fills her  mouth  with  his tongue,
holds her there with it while he one-hands the fastener at the collar of her
coverall and yanks the zipper all the way down to the crotch. It's open now,
exposing a broad V of skin converging from her shoulders. He rolls back onto
her, grabs the top of the coverall with both hands and pulls it  down behind
her, forcing her arms down and to her sides, stuffing the mass of fabric and
pads down underneath the small of her  back so she stays  arched  up  toward
him.  Then he's  in between  her  tight  thighs, all  those skating  muscles
strained to the limit, and his hands  come back inside to  squeeze  her butt
again, this  time  his hot skin against hers,  it's  like sitting on  a warm
buttered griddle, makes the whole body feel warmer.
     There's something  she's  supposed to remember at this point. Something
she has  to take care of.  Something important. One  of  those dreary duties
that always seems so logical when you think about it in the abstract and, at
moments like this,  seems  so utterly  beside the point  that it never  even
occurs to you.
     It must be something to  do with birth control. Or something like that.
But Y.T. is  helpless with passion, so she has an excuse. So she squirms and
kicks  her knees until the coverall  and her panties have  slid down  to her
ankles.
     Raven  gets completely naked in about three seconds. He pulls his shirt
off over his head and throws it  somewhere, bucks out of his pants and kicks
them off onto the floor. His skin is as smooth as hers, like the  skin  of a
mammal that swims through the sea, but he feels hot, not cold and fishy. She
doesn't, see his cock, but she doesn't want to, what's the point, right?
     She does  something she's never done before: comes as  soon as  he goes
into her. It's like a bolt of lightning shoots out from the middle, down the
backs of her  tensed legs, up her spine, into her nipples, she sucks in  air
until her whole ribcage is poking out through the skin  and then screams  it
all out. She just rips one. Raven's probably deaf  now. Which is his fucking
problem.
     She goes limp. So does he. He must have come at the same time. Which is
okay. It's early, and poor Raven was horny as a goat from being out to  sea.
Later on, she'll expect more endurance.
     Right now, she's content to lie underneath  him and suck the warmth out
of his body. She's been cold for days. Her feet are still cold,  hanging out
in the air, but that just makes the rest of her feel much better.
     Raven seems content,  too. Uncharacteristically  so. Talk about  bliss.
Most guys would already be flipping through channels  on the  TV. Not Raven.
He's content  to  lie here all  night, breathing  softly into her neck. As a
matter of fact, he's  gone to sleep right  on top  of her. Like  something a
woman would do.
     She dozes,  too.  Lies there  for a minute or  two, all these  thoughts
going through her head.
     This  is a pretty nice place.  Like a mid-priced business hotel in  the
Valley. She ever figured anything like this existed on the Raft. But there's
rich people and poor people here, too, just like anywhere else.
     When  they came to a  certain place  on the  walkway, not far from  the
first  of the big Core ships, there was an armed guard blocking  the way. He
let Raven go on through, and Raven  took  Y.T. with  him, leading her by the
hand, and  the  guard  gave her a look  but he didn't  say  anything, he was
keeping most of his attention on Raven.
     After  that,  the  walkway  got a lot nicer. It  was  broad,  like  the
boardwalk at  the  beach,  and not quite  so crowded with old Chinese ladies
carrying gigantic bundles  on  their backs.  And it  didn't smell  like shit
quite so much.
     When they got to  the first Core ship, there was  a  stairway that took
them from sea level up to its deck. From there, they took a gangplank across
to the innards  of another ship,  and Raven  led her  through the place like
he'd been through it a million times, and  eventually they  crossed  another
gangplank into  this  containership. And it was just like a fucking hotel in
there:  bellhops  with white gloves  carrying luggage for  guys in suits,  a
registration  desk, everything. It  was still a ship - everything's made out
of steel that has been painted white a million times over - but nothing like
what  she expected. There's even a little helipad  where the suits  can come
and  go. There's a chopper parked next to it with  a logo she's seen before:
Rife  Advanced  Research  Enterprises.  RARE. The people who  gave  her  the
envelope to deliver to EBGOC headquarters. All  of  this is fitting together
now: the Feds  and L. Bob Rife and the Reverend Wayne's Pearly Gates and the
Raft are all part of the same deal.
     "Who the hell are all these people?" she asked Raven when she first saw
it. But he just shushed her.
     She asked him again later, as  they  were  wandering around looking for
their  room, and  he  told  her:  These  guys all  work  for  L.  Bob  Rife.
Programmers  and engineers and  communications  people. Rife's  an important
man. Got a monopoly to run.
     "Rife's here?" she asked him. Putting on an  act, of course; she had it
figured out by that point.
     "Ssh," he said.
     It's a nice piece of intel. Hiro should like it, if she can just get it
to  him.  And  even that's  going to be easy. She never thought  there'd  be
Metaverse terminals here  on the Raft, but on this ship  there's a whole row
of them, so that visiting  suits can call back to civilization.  All she has
to do is get to one without waking up Raven. Which could be tricky. It's too
bad she couldn't drug him with something, like in the Raft movies.
     That's when the realization comes. It swims up out  of her subconscious
in  the same way  that a nightmare does.  Or  when you leave  the house  and
remember half an hour later that  you  left a teakettle going  on the stove.
It's a cold clammy reality that she can't do a damn thing about.
     She  has  finally remembered what  that nagging thing was that bothered
her for a moment, right before the actual moment of fucking.
     It was not birth control. It was not a hygiene thing.
     It was her dentata. The last line  of personal self-defense. Along with
Uncle Enzo's dog tags, the  one piece  of stuff that the Orthos didn't take.
They  didn't  take it  because they don't believe in cavity  searches. Which
means that at the moment Raven  entered her, a  very small hypodermic needle
slipped  imperceptibly  into  the  engorged  frontal   vein  of  his  penis,
automatically shooting a cocktail of powerful narcotics and depressants into
his bloodstream.
     Raven's  been harpooned in the place where  he  least expected  it. Now
he's going to sleep for at least four hours.
     And then, boy, is he ever going to be pissed.

        53

     Hiro remembers Eliot's warning: Don't go onto the Raft itself without a
local  guide.  This kid must be a  Refu that  Bruce Lee recruited from  some
Filipino neighborhood on the Raft.
     The kid's name is Transubstanciacion. Tranny for  short. He climbs into
the zodiac before Hiro tells him to.
     "Wait a sec," Hiro says. "We have to do some packing first."
     Hiro risks turning on a small flashlight, uses it to rummage around the
yacht, picking up valuable stuff -  a few bottles  of (presumably) drinkable
water, some  food,  extra  ammunition for  his nine.  He  takes one  of  the
grappling hooks, too, coiling  its rope neatly. Seems like the kind of thing
that might be useful on the Raft.
     He  has one other chore  to  take care of, not  something  he's looking
forward to.
     Hiro has  lived in  a lot of places where mice  and  even  rats  were a
problem. He used to  get rid of them  using traps. But then he had a  run of
bad luck  with the things. He  would hear a trap snap shut  in the middle of
the night, and then  instead of silence he would hear pitiable squeaking and
thrashing, whacking noises as the stricken rodent  tried to drag itself back
to  safety with a trap snapped over  some  part of its anatomy, usually  its
head. When you have gotten up at three in the morning  to find a  live mouse
on  your kitchen  counter  leaving  a contrail  of  brain tissue  across the
formica,  it  is hard  to get back to sleep, and  so  he  prefers to set out
poison now.
     Somewhat in the same  vein, a severely wounded man - the last  man Hiro
shot - is  thrashing  around  on  the deck  of  the yacht, up near the  bow,
babbling.
     More than anything he has ever wanted to do, Hiro wants to get into the
zodiac and get  away from this person. He knows that in  order to go  up and
help him,  or put him out  of  his misery, he's going  to have  to shine the
flashlight on him,  and when he does  that he's going to see something he'll
never be able to forget.
     But he  has  to  do it. He swallows  a couple of  times,  because  he's
already gagging and follows his flashlight beam up to the bow.
     It's much worse than he had expected.
     This  man apparently took  a bullet somewhere around  the bridge of his
nose, aimed upward. Everything above that  point has been pretty  much blown
off. Hiro's looking into a cross-section of his lower brain.
     Something  is sticking up out  of  his head. Hiro  figures it  must  be
fragments of skull or something. But it's too smooth and regular for that.
     Now that he's gotten over his initial nausea, he's  finding this easier
to look at. It helps to  know that the guy is out  of his  misery. More than
half of his brain is gone. He's still talking - his voice sounds whistly and
gaseous, like  a pipe organ gone bad, because of  the changes in his skull -
but it's just a brainstem function, just a twitch in the vocal cords.
     The  thing sticking  up out of his head  is a whip antenna about a foot
long.   It  is   encased   in  black  rubber,   like  the  antennas  on  cop
walkie-talkies, and  it is strapped onto his head, above the  left ear. This
is one of the antenna-heads that Eliot warned them about.
     Hiro grabs the antenna and  pulls. He might  as  well take the  headset
with him -  it must  have something to do with the way  L. Bob Rife controls
the Raft.
     It doesn't come  off.  When Hiro  pulls, what's left of  the guy's head
twists  around, but the antenna doesn't  come  loose.  And that's  how  Hiro
figures out  that  this isn't  a  headset  at  all.  The  antenna  has  been
permanently grafted onto the base of the man's skull.
     Hiro  switches his goggles into millimeter-wave radar and  stares  into
the man's ruined head.
     The antenna is attached to  the skull by means of short screws  that go
into  the bone,  but do  not pierce all  the way through.  The base  of  the
antenna  contains a  few  microchips, whose purpose Hiro  cannot  divine  by
looking at them. But nowadays you can put a supercomputer  on a single chip,
so anytime you see more than one chip together in one place, you're  looking
at significant ware.
     A single  hair-thin  wire  emerges from the  base  of  the  antenna and
penetrates the skull. It passes straight through to  the brainstem  and then
branches and  rebranches into a network of  invisibly tiny wires embedded in
the brain tissue. Coiled around the base of the tree.
     Which explains  why  this guy  continues to pump out a steady stream of
Raft babble even  when his brain is  missing: It looks like L.  Bob Rife has
figured  out a way to  make electrical  contact with the part  of  the brain
where Asherah lives. These words aren't originating here. It's a Pentecostal
radio broadcast coming through on his antenna.
     Reason is still up top, its monitor screen radiating blue static toward
heaven.  Hiro finds the hard power  switch and turns it off. Computers  this
powerful  are supposed to shut  themselves down, after you've asked them to.
Turning one off  with the  hard  switch is like lulling someone  to sleep by
severing their spinal column. But when the system has snow-crashed, it loses
even the ability  to  turn itself off, and  primitive methods are  required.
Hiro packs the Gatling gun assembly back into the case and latches it shut.
     Maybe it's not  as heavy  as  he thought,  or maybe he's on  adrenaline
overdrive. Then he realizes why it seems so much lighter: most of its weight
was ammunition, and Fisheye used up quite a bit. He half-carries, half-drags
it back to the stem, making sure the heat exchanger  stays in the water, and
somersaults it into the zodiac.
     Hiro climbs in after it,  joining Tranny,  and starts attending to  the
motor.
     "No motor," Tranny says. "It snag bad."
     Right. The spiderweb  would get  wrapped  around  the propeller. Tranny
shows Hiro how to snap the zodiac's oars into the oarlocks.
     Hiro  rows  for  a while  and finds himself in a long clear  zone  that
zigzags  its way through  the Raft, like a lead of clear  water  between ice
floes in the Arctic.
     "Motor okay," Tranny says.
     He drops  the motor into the  water. Tranny pumps up the  fuel line and
starts it up. It starts on the first pull; Bruce Lee ran a tight ship.
     As Hiro begins to motor down  the open space, he  is  afraid that it is
just a little cove in the ghetto. But this is just a trick of the lights. He
rounds a corner and finds it stretching out for some distance. It  is a sort
of beltway that  runs all  the way  around the Raft. Small  streets and even
smaller alleys lead from this beltway  into the various ghettos. Through the
scope,  Hiro can see  that  their  entrances are  guarded.  Anyone's free to
cruise  around  the  beltway,  but  people  are  more  protective  of  their
neighborhoods.
     The worst thing that can happen on the Raft is for your neighborhood to
get cut loose. That's why the Raft is such a tangled mess. Each neighborhood
is afraid that the neighboring 'hoods are going to gang up on them, cut them
loose,  leave  them to starve  in  the middle  of the  Pacific.  So they are
constantly finding  new ways to tie  themselves  into  each  other,  running
cables  over, under, and  around their neighbors, tying into more  far-flung
'hoods, or preferably into one of the Core ships.
     The  neighborhood  guards  are armed, needless  to say. Looks  like the
weapon of choice  is a  small Chinese knockoff of the AK-47. Its metal frame
jumps out pretty clearly on radar. The  Chinese government must have stamped
out an unimaginable number of these things, back in the days when they spent
a lot of time thinking about the possibility of fighting a land war with the
Soviets.
     Most  of  them just look like  indolent  Third World  militia the world
over. But at the  entrance to one neighborhood, Hiro sees that the guard  in
charge has a whip antenna sticking straight  up in  the air, sprouting  from
his head.
     A  few  minutes  later,  they  get to  a  point  where the  beltway  is
intersected  by a broad street  that  runs straight  into  the middle of the
Raft,  where the big ships are  -  the Core. The closest one is a  Nipponese
containership -  a low,  flat-decked number with a high bridge, stacked with
steel shipping containers. It's webbed over with rope  ladders and makeshift
stairways that  enable people to climb up  into this container or that. Many
of the containers have lights burning in them.
     "Apartment  building  " Tranny jokes, noting  Hiro's  interest. Then he
shakes  his  head  and  rolls  his eyes  and  rubs  his  thumb  against  his
fingertips. Apparently, this is quite the swell neighborhood.
     The nice part of the cruise comes  to  an end  when they notice several
fast skiffs emerging from a dark and smoky neighborhood.
     "Vietnam gang," Tranny says. He  puts his hand on Hiro's and gently but
firmly  removes it from  the outboard motor's throttle. Hiro checks them out
on radar. A  couple of  these  guys have the little AK-47s, but most of them
are armed  with  knives  and  pistols,  obviously  looking  forward  to some
close-up, face-to-face  contact. These guys in the boats are, of course, the
peons.  More   important-looking  gents   stand   along  the  edge   of  the
neighborhood, smoking and watching. A couple of them are wireheads.
     Tranny  revs  it  up,  turns  into a  sparse  neighborhood  of  loosely
connected Arabian  dhows,  and maneuvers through the darkness  for a  while,
occasionally putting his hand on Hiro's head and gently pressing  it down so
he doesn't catch a rope with his neck.
     When they emerge from the fleet  of  dhows, the  Vietnamese gang is  no
longer in evidence. If this happened in daylight,  the gangsters could track
them by  following Reason's steam.  Tranny steers them across a medium-sized
street and into a cluster of  fishing boats. In the middle  of this  area an
old trawler sits, being cut  up for  scrap, cutting torches illuminating the
black surface of the water all  around. But  most  of the work is being done
with hammers and cold chisels, which radiate appalling noise across the flat
echoing water.
     "Home," Tranny  says,  smiling,  and points to  a  couple of houseboats
lashed together.  Lights are still burning here, a couple of guys are out on
the deck  smoking fat, makeshift cigars, through the  windows they can see a
couple of women working in the kitchen.
     As  they approach,  the  guys  on the  deck sit  up,  take notice, draw
revolvers  out  of their waistbands. But  then  Tranny speaks up in  a happy
stream of Tagalog. And everything changes.
     Tranny  gets the full  Prodigal  Son welcome:  crying,  hysterical  fat
ladies,  a swarm of little kids  piling out of their hammocks, sucking their
thumbs and jumping up  and down. Older men beaming,  showing  great gaps and
black splotches in their smiles, watching and nodding and  diving in to give
him the occasional hug.
     And  on the  edge  of  the mob, way  back in the  darkness, is  another
wirehead.
     "You come in, too," says one of  the women, a lady in her forties named
Eunice.
     "That's okay," Hiro says. "I won't intrude."
     This statement is  translated and moves  like a wave  through  the some
eight hundred and  ninety-six  Filipinos who have now converged on the area.
It is  greeted  with the utmost shock.  Intrude? Unthinkable!  Nonsense! How
dare you so insult us?
     One of the gap-toothed guys, a miniature old man and probable World War
II veteran, jumps onto the rocking zodiac, sticks to the floor like a gecko,
wraps his arm around Hiro's shoulders, and pokes a spliff into his mouth.
     He looks like a solid guy. Hiro  leans into  him. "Compadre, who is the
guy with the antenna? A friend of yours?"
     "Nah," the  guy whispers,  "he's an asshole."  Then  he  puts his index
finger dramatically to his lips and shushes.

        54

     It's all in  the eyes. Along  with  picking handcuffs, vaulting  Jersey
barriers, and  fending off perverts, it is one of the quintessential Kourier
skills: walking around in a place where you don't belong  without attracting
suspicion. And  you do it by not looking at anyone. Keep those eyes straight
ahead  no matter what, don't open them too wide, don't look tense. That, and
the fact that she just came  in here with a guy that everyone is  scared of,
gets her back through the containership to the reception area.
     "I need  to use a Street terminal," she says to the reception guy. "Can
you charge it to my room?"
     "Yes, ma'am," the reception guy says. He doesn't have to ask which room
she's in. He's all smiles, all  respect.  Not the kind of thing you get very
often when you're a Kourier.
     She could  really  get  to like  this relationship  with  Raven, if  it
weren't for the fact that he's a homicidal mutant.

        55

     Hiro  ducks  out of  Tranny's  celebratory dinner rather  early,  drags
Reason  off the zodiac  and onto the  front porch of the houseboat, opens it
up, and jacks his personal computer into its bios.
     Reason reboots with no problems. That's to be expected. It's also to be
expected  that later, probably when he most  needs Reason to work,  it  will
crash again, the way it did for Fisheye. He could keep turning it off and on
every time it does this, but this is awkward in  the heat of battle, and not
the  type of solution that  hackers admire. It would be  much  more sensible
just to debug it.
     Which he could do by hand, if he had  time. But there  may be a  better
way of going  about it. It's possible that,  by  now, Ng Security Industries
has  fixed the bug - come  out with a new version of the software. If so, he
should be able to get a copy of it on the Street.
     Hiro materializes in  his office. The Librarian  pokes his head out  of
the next room, just in case Hiro has any questions for him.
     "What does ultima ratio regum mean?"
     " 'The Last Argument  of Kings,'  " the Librarian says. "King Louis XIV
had  it stamped onto  the barrels  of all  of  the cannons that were  forged
during his reign."
     Hiro stands up and walks out into his garden. His motorcycle is waiting
for  him  on  the gravel path that  leads to the  gate. Looking up over  the
fence, Hiro can see the lights of Downtown rising in the distance again. His
computer has succeeded in jacking into L. Bob Rife's global network;  he has
access  to the Street. This  is as Hiro had expected. Rife must have a whole
suite of satellite uplinks there on  the Enterprise, patched into a cellular
network  covering the Raft. Otherwise,  he  wouldn't be able  to  reach  the
Metaverse from  his very own watery fortress, which would never do for a man
like Rife.
     Hiro climbs on his bike, eases it through the neighborhood and onto the
Street,  and then  gooses it  up  to a few hundred miles an  hour, slaloming
between the stanchions  of  the monorail, practicing. He runs into a  few of
them and stops, but that's to be expected.
     Ng Security Industries has a whole floor of a mile-high neon skyscraper
near Port One, right in the middle  of Downtown. Like everything else in the
Metaverse, it's open  twenty-four hours, because  it's always business hours
somewhere in the  world.  Hiro leaves his  bike  on  the  Street, takes  the
elevator up to the 397th floor, and comes  face to face  with a receptionist
daemon.  For a moment,  he can't peg her racial background; then he realizes
that this daemon is half-black, half-Asian - just like him. If  a white  man
had stepped off  the  elevator, she probably  would  have  been  a blonde. A
Nipponese businessman  would have come face  to face with a  perky Nipponese
office girl.
     "Yes, sir," she says. "Is this in regard to sales or customer service?"
     "Customer service."
     "Whom are you with?"
     "You name it, I'm with them."
     "I'm sorry?" Like human receptionists, the  daemon is especially bad at
handling irony.
     "At  the  moment,  I think  I'm working  for the  Central  Intelligence
Corporation, the Mafia, and Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong."
     "I  see,"  says  the  receptionist, making  a note. Also  like  a human
receptionist, it is not  possible to impress her. "And  what product is this
in regards to?"
     "Reason."
     "Sir! Welcome to Ng Security Industries," says another voice.
     It  is  another  daemon,  an  attractive black/Asian  woman  in  highly
professional dress,  who has materialized from  the  depths  of  the  office
suite.
     She ushers Hiro down a long, nicely paneled  hallway, down another long
paneled  hallway, and then down  a long paneled hallway. Every few steps, he
passes by a reception area where  avatars from  all over the  world  sit  in
chairs, passing  the  time. But  Hiro doesn't have to wait.  She ushers  him
straight into a nice  big  paneled office where an Asian  man sits  behind a
desk littered with  models of helicopters. It is Mr.  Ng  himself. He stands
up; they swap bows; the usher lady checks out.
     "You  working  with Fisheye?"  Ng  says, lighting up a  cig. The  smoke
swirls  in  the  air  ostentatiously.  It  takes  as  much  computing  power
realistically to model  the smoke coming  out of  Ng's  mouth as it does  to
model the weather system of the entire planet.
     "He's dead," Hiro says. "Reason crashed at a critical  juncture, and he
ate a harpoon."
     Ng  doesn't react.  Instead, he  just  sits there  motionless for a few
seconds, absorbing this  data,  as if  his customers  get  harpooned all the
time. He's probably got a mental database of everyone  who has ever used one
of his toys and what happened to them.
     "I told him it  was a beta version," Ng says. "And he should have known
not to use it for infighting. A two-dollar switchblade would have served him
better."
     "Agreed. But he was quite taken with it."
     Ng  blows  out  more  smoke,  thinking.  "As  we  learned  in  Vietnam,
high-powered weapons are so sensorily overwhelming that they are similar  to
psychoactive  drugs.  Like LSD,  which  can convince  people they can  fly -
causing them to jump out of windows - weapons can make people overconfident.
Skewing their tactical judgment. As in the case of Fisheye."
     "I'll be sure and remember that," Hiro says.
     "What  kind  of  combat environment  do you want to  use Reason in?" Ng
says.
     "I need to take over an aircraft carrier tomorrow morning."
     "The Enterprise?"
     "Yes."
     "You  know," Ng says, apparently  in a conversational  mood, "there's a
guy who actually took  over a  nuclear-missile  submarine armed with nothing
more than a piece of glass - "
     "Yeah, that's the  guy who killed Fisheye. I might  have to tangle with
him, too."
     Ng laughs. "What is your ultimate objective? As you know, we are all in
this together, so you may share your thoughts with me."
     "I'd prefer a little more discretion in this case..."
     "Too late for that, Hiro," says another voice. Hiro turns around; it is
Uncle Enzo, being ushered  through the door by the receptionist - a striking
Italian woman. Just a few paces behind him is a small Asian businessman  and
an Asian receptionist.
     "I took the liberty of calling them in when you  arrived," Ng says, "so
that we could have a powwow."
     "Pleasure," Uncle Enzo says, bowing slightly to Hiro.
     Hiro bows back. "I'm really sorry about the car, sir."
     "It's forgotten," Uncle Enzo says.
     The small Asian man has now come into the room. Hiro finally recognizes
him.  It is the photo that  is on  the wall of every Mr.  Lee's Greater Hong
Kong in the world.
     Introductions and bows all around.  Suddenly, a number of  extra chairs
have materialized in the office, so everyone pulls one up. Ng comes out from
behind his desk, and they sit in a circle.
     "Let us cut to the chase, since I assume that your situation, Hiro, may
be more precarious than ours," Uncle Enzo says.
     "You got that right, sir."
     "We would all like to  know what the  hell  is going on," Mr. Lee says.
His English is almost devoid  of  a Chinese accent; clearly his cute,  daffy
public image is just a front.
     "How much of this have you guys figured out so far?"
     "Bits and pieces Uncle Enzo says. "How much have you figured out?"
     "Almost all of it," Hiro  says. "Once I talk to Juanita, I'll  have the
rest."
     "In that case,  you are in  possession of  some  very valuable  intel,"
Uncle  Enzo says. He reaches into his  pocket and pulls out a hypercard  and
hands it toward Hiro. It says
        TWENTY-FIVE
     MILLION
     HONG KONG
     DOLLARS
     Hiro reaches out and takes the card.
     Somewhere on earth, two computers swap bursts  of electronic  noise and
the money gets transferred from the Mafia's account to Hiro's.
     "You'll take care of the split with Y.T.," Uncle Enzo says.
     Hiro nods. You bet I will.

        56

     "I'm  here  on  the Raft looking for a piece of  software -  a piece of
medicine  to  be specific  - that was written five  thousand years ago  by a
Sumerian personage named Enki, a neurolinguistic hacker."
     "What does that mean?" Mr. Lee says.
     "It means a person who was  capable of programming other people's minds
with verbal streams of data, known as nam-shubs."
     Ng is totally expressionless. He takes another drag  on his  cigarette,
spouts  the smoke  up above his head  in a  geyser,  watches it  spread  out
against the ceiling. "What is the mechanism?"
     "We've got two kinds of language in our heads. The kind we're using now
is acquired. It patterns our brains as we're learning it. But there's also a
tongue that's  based in  the  deep  structures  of  the brain, that everyone
shares. These structures consist of basic neural circuits that have to exist
in order to allow our brains to acquire higher languages."
     "Linguistic infrastructure," Uncle Enzo says.
     "Yeah.  I guess 'deep structure'  and 'infrastructure'  mean  the  same
thing.  Anyway,  we can access those parts  of  the  brain  under  the right
conditions. Glossolalia  -  speaking in  tongues -is the output side  of it,
where  the  deep  linguistic  structures  hook into our tongues  and  speak,
bypassing all the higher, acquired languages. Everyone's known that for some
time."
     "You're saying there's an input side, too?" Ng says.
     "Exactly. It  works in reverse. Under the right conditions, your ears -
or eyes - can  tie into  the deep structures,  bypassing the higher language
functions. Which is  to  say,  someone who knows the  right words can  speak
words, or show you visual symbols, that  go  past all your defenses and sink
right into your brainstem. Like a cracker who breaks into a computer system,
bypasses all the security  precautions, and plugs  himself  into  the  core,
enabling him to exert absolute control over the machine."
     "In that  situation, the people who own the computer  are helpless," Ng
says.
     "Right.  Because  they access the machine at a higher level,  which has
now been overridden. In the same  sense, once a neurolinguistic hacker plugs
into  the deep  structures of our  brain, we can't get  him out - because we
can't even control our own brain at such a basic level."
     "What  does this have  to do with a clay tablet on the Enterprise?" Mr.
Lee says.
     "Bear  with me. This language  - the mother tongue - is a vestige of an
earlier  phase  of  human  social  development.  Primitive  societies   were
controlled by verbal rules called me. The me were  like  little programs for
humans. They were a necessary part of the transition from caveman society to
an  organized, agricultural  society. For example,  there was a  program for
plowing a furrow  in the ground and  planting grain. There was a program for
baking bread  and another  one for making  a house.  There were also me  for
higher-level functions such as war, diplomacy, and religious ritual. All the
skills required to operate a self-sustaining culture were contained in these
me,  which were  written  down  on  tablets  or  passed around  in  an  oral
tradition. In any case,  the  repository  for the  me was the local  temple,
which was  a database of me, controlled by  a priest/king called an en. When
someone needed  bread, they would go to the en or one of his underlings  and
download the bread-making me from the  temple. Then they would carry out the
instructions - run the program - and when they were  finished, they'd have a
loaf of bread.
     "A central database was necessary, among other reasons, because some of
the  me  had   to   be   properly   timed.  If   people   carried   out  the
plowing-and-planting me  at  the wrong time of year,  the harvest would fail
and everyone  would  starve. The  only  way  to make  sure that the me  were
properly timed  was to  build  astronomical observatories to watch the skies
for the  changes of season. So the  Sumerians built towers 'with their  tops
with the heavens' - topped with astronomical  diagrams.  The en would  watch
the skies and dispense the agricultural me at the  proper  times of  year to
keep the economy running."
     "I think you have a chicken-and-egg problem," Uncle Enzo says. "How did
such a society first come to be organized?"
     "There is an informational  entity known as the metavirus, which causes
information systems  to  infect themselves with customized viruses. This may
be just a basic principle  of nature, like Darwinian selection, or it may be
an actual piece of information that floats around the universe on comets and
radio waves - I'm  not sure. In any case, what it comes down to is this: Any
information system of sufficient complexity  will inevitably become infected
with viruses - viruses generated from within itself.
     "At  some point in the distant past, the metavirus  infected  the human
race and  has been with us ever since. The first thing it did was to spawn a
whole Pandora's box of DNA viruses - smallpox, influenza, and  so on. Health
and longevity became a thing of the past. A distant memory  of this event is
preserved in legends of the Fall from Paradise, in which mankind was ejected
from a life of ease into a world infested with disease and pain.
     "That plague  eventually reached some kind  of a  plateau. We still see
new  DNA  viruses  from  time  to  time, but it seems  that  our bodies have
developed a resistance to DNA viruses in general."
     "Perhaps," Ng  says, "there are only so many viruses that  will work in
the human DNA, and the metavirus has created all of them."
     "Could be.  Anyway,  Sumerian  culture - the society  based on  me -was
another manifestation  of the metavirus. Except that in this case, it was in
a linguistic form rather than DNA."
     "Excuse me,"  Mr. Lee says. "You are saying  that civilization  started
out as an infection?"
     "Civilization in its primitive form, yes. Each me  was a sort of virus,
kicked out by the metavirus principle.  Take the example of the bread-baking
me. Once that  me  got  into society,  it was  a  self-sustaining  piece  of
information.  It's a  simple question of natural selection: people who  know
how to bake bread will live better and be more  apt to reproduce than people
who  don't know how. Naturally, they will spread the me, acting as hosts for
this self-replicating piece of information.  That makes it a virus. Sumerian
culture - with its temples full of me - was  just a collection of successful
viruses  that  had  accumulated  over  the  millennia. It  was  a  franchise
operation, except  it had  ziggurats  instead  of  golden  arches, and  clay
tablets instead of three-ring binders.
     "The  Sumerian  word for 'mind,' or 'wisdom,'  is identical to the word
for 'ear.' That's all  those people were: ears with bodies attached. Passive
receivers  of information. But Enki was  different. Enki was an en  who just
happened  to be especially good  at his job. He  had the  unusual ability to
write new  me  - he was a hacker. He was, actually, the first  modem  man, a
fully conscious human being, just like us.
     "At some  point, Enki realized that Sumer  was  stuck in a rut.  People
were carrying out the same old me all the time, not coming up with new ones,
not thinking  for themselves. I suspect that he was lonely, being one of the
few  -  perhaps the only -  conscious human being in the world. He  realized
that in order for  the human race to advance, they had  to be delivered from
the grip of this viral civilization.
     "So he created the nam-shub of Enki, a countervirus  that  spread along
the  same  routes as  the  me and  the  metavirus. It  went  into  the  deep
structures of  the brain  and reprogrammed them.  Henceforth,  no one  could
understand the  Sumerian  language,  or  any  other deep  strucure  -  based
language. Cut  off from our common  deep structures, we began to develop new
languages  that had  nothing in common  with each other.  The  me  no longer
worked and it was not possible to write new me. Further transmission of  the
metavirus was blocked."
     "Why  didn't  everyone starve  from  lack  of  bread, having  lost  the
bread-making me?" Uncle Enzo says.
     "Some probably did. Everyone else had to  use  their  higher brains and
figure it out. So you might say that the nam-shub of Enki was the beginnings
of human consciousness - when we first had to think  for  ourselves. It  was
the beginning of rational religion, too, the first time that people began to
think about abstract  issues like God and  Good  and Evil. That's where  the
name Babel comes  from. Literally it means  'Gate of  God.' It was  the gate
that allowed God to reach the human race. Babel is a gateway in our minds, a
gateway that was opened by the nam-shub  of Enki that broke us free from the
metavirus  and gave us the ability to think - moved  us from a materialistic
world  to a dualistic world - a  binary world  - with  both a physical and a
spiritual component.
     "There was probably chaos and  upheaval. Enki, or his son Marduk, tried
to reimpose order on society by supplanting the old system of me with a code
of laws  -  The  Code of  Hammurabi.  It  was  partially successful. Asherah
worship continued in  many places,  though.  It  was an incredibly tenacious
cult, a throwback to Sumer, that spread itself both verbally and through the
exchange of bodily fluids - they had cult prostitutes, and they also adopted
orphans and spread the virus to them via breast milk."
     "Wait a minute," Ng says. "Now you are talking about a biological virus
again."
     "Exactly.  That's the whole point of Asherah. It's both. As an example,
look at herpes simplex. Herpes heads straight for the nervous system when it
enters  the  body. Some strains  stay in the peripheral nervous  system, but
other strains head  like a bullet for the central nervous system and take up
permanent residence in the cells of the brain -coiling  around the brainstem
like  a  serpent around a tree. The Asherah virus, which  may be  related to
herpes, or they  may be one and the same, passes through the cell  walls and
goes  to  the  nucleus and  messes with the cell's DNA  in the same way that
steroids do. But Asherah is a lot more complicated than a steroid."
     "And when it alters that DNA, what is the result?"
     "No  one has  studied it,  except maybe  for L.  Bob  Rife. I think  it
definitely brings the mother tongue closer to the surface, makes people more
apt to  speak in  tongues and more susceptible to me. I would guess that  it
also  tends  to  encourage irrational  behavior,  maybe lowers  the victim's
defenses to viral ideas, makes them sexually promiscuous, perhaps all of the
above."
     "Does every viral idea have a biological virus counterpart?" Uncle Enzo
says.
     "No. Only  Asherah does, as far  as I know. That is  why, of all the me
and all  the gods and religious practices that predominated  in  Sumer, only
Asherah is still  going strong today.  A viral idea can be stamped  out - as
happened with Nazism, bell bottoms, and Bart Simpson T-shirts - but Asherah,
because it has  a biological aspect,  can remain latent in  the  human body.
After Babel, Asherah was still resident in the human brain, being passed  on
from mother to child and from lover to lover.
     "We are all susceptible to the pull of viral ideas. Like mass hysteria.
Or a  tune that gets  into your head that you keep on humming all  day until
you  spread  it to someone  else.  Jokes. Urban legends. Crackpot religions.
Marxism. No matter  how smart we  get, there  is always this deep irrational
part that  makes  us potential hosts  for  self-replicating information. But
being  physically infected with a virulent strain of the Asherah virus makes
you a whole lot  more susceptible. The  only thing  that keeps  these things
from taking  over  the world  is the  Babel factor  -  the walls  of  mutual
incomprehension that  compartmentalize the human race and stop the spread of
viruses.
     "Babel led to an explosion in the number of languages. That was part of
Enki's  plan.  Monocultures,  like  a  field  of  corn, are  susceptible  to
infections, but genetically diverse cultures, like a  prairie, are extremely
robust. After  a few  thousand years, one  new language developed - Hebrew -
that possessed  exceptional flexibility  and  power. The  deuteronomists,  a
group of radical monotheists in  the sixth and seventh centuries  B.C., were
the  first  to take  advantage  of  it.  They  lived  in  a  time of extreme
nationalism and  xenophobia, which made it easier for them to reject foreign
ideas like Asherah worship. They formalized their old stories into the Torah
and  implanted  within it  a  law that  insured  its propagation  throughout
history - a law that said, in effect, 'make an exact copy of  me and read it
every day.' And they encouraged a sort of informational hygiene, a belief in
copying  things  strictly and taking great care with  information, which  as
they  understood,  is potentially dangerous.  They made  data  a  controlled
substance.
     "They may have gone beyond that. There is evidence of carefully planned
biological warfare against the army of Sennacherib  when he tried to conquer
Jerusalem. So the  deuteronomists may have  had an en of their very own.  Or
maybe they just  understood  viruses well  enough that they knew how to take
advantage of naturally occurring strains. The  skills  cultivated  by  these
people were passed  down  in  secret from  one generation  to  the next  and
manifested  themselves  two  thousand  years  later,  in  Europe,  among the
kabbalistic sorcerers, ba'al shems, masters of the divine name.
     "In  any  case, this  was the birth of  rational religion.  All  of the
subsequent  monotheistic  religions - known  by  Muslims, appropriately,  as
religions of the Book - incorporated those ideas to some extent. For example
the Koran states over and over again that it is a transcript, an exact copy,
of a book in Heaven.  Naturally, anyone who believes that will  not  dare to
alter the  text  in  any  way!  Ideas  such as these were  so  effective  in
preventing  the spread of Asherah that, eventually, every square inch of the
territory where the viral  cult had once thrived - from India to Spain - was
under the sway of Islam, Christianity, or Judaism.
     "But  because of its latency -  coiled about the  brainstem of those it
infects, passed from one generation to the  next -  it always  finds ways to
resurface. In the case of Judaism, it came in the form of the Pharisees, who
imposed  a  rigid  legalistic  theocracy on  the  Hebrews.  With  its  rigid
adherence to laws stored in a temple, administered by priestly types  vested
with civil  authority, it resembled the old Sumerian system, and was just as
stifling.
     "The  ministry  of  Jesus Christ was  an effort to break Judaism out of
this condition - sort of an echo of  what Enki did. Christ's gospel is a new
nam-shub, an attempt to take religion out of the temple, out of the hands of
the priesthood,  and  bring the Kingdom  of God  to  everyone.  That is  the
message  explicitly  spelled  out  by his sermons,  and it  is  the  message
symbolically embodied in the empty tomb. After the crucifixion, the apostles
went to  his  tomb hoping  to find his body and  instead  found nothing. The
message was  clear enough:  We are not  to  idolize Jesus, because his ideas
stand alone, his church is no longer centralized in one person but dispersed
among all the people.
     "People who were used  to the rigid theocracy of the Pharisees couldn't
handle the idea of a popular, nonhierarchical church. They wanted  popes and
bishops and  priests. And so the myth of the Resurrection was added onto the
gospels. The message was  changed to a form of idolatry. In this new version
of the gospels, Jesus came back to earth and organized a church, which later
became the  Church of  the Eastern and Western Roman Empire - another rigid,
brutal, and irrational theocracy.
     "At the same time, the Pentecostal church was being founded. The  early
Christians spoke  in tongues.  The  Bible  says,  'And all were  amazed  and
perplexed, saying to one another, "What does  this mean?"' Well,  I  think I
may be able to  answer that  question. It was a  viral outbreak. Asherah had
been  present, lurking in  the  population,  ever  since  the triumph of the
deuteronomists. The informational  hygiene  measures  practiced  by the Jews
kept it suppressed. But  in the early days of Christianity, there  must have
been a lot of chaos,  a  lot of radicals and  free thinkers  running around,
flouting   tradition.  Throwbacks  to  the  days  of  prerational  religion.
Throwbacks to Sumer. And sure enough, they all started talking to each other
in the tongue of Eden.
     "The mainline Christian  church refused  to  accept  glossolalia.  They
frowned on it for a few centuries and officially purged it at the Council of
Constantinople  in 381. The glossolalic cult  remained on the fringes of the
Christian  world.  The  Church  was  willing  to  accept  a  little  bit  of
xenoglossia. if  it  helped  convert heathens, as in the  case  of St. Louis
Bertrand  who  converted  thousands  of Indians  in  the  sixteenth century,
spreading glossolalia across the continent faster than smallpox. But as soon
as they were  converted,  those Indians were  supposed  to shut up and speak
Latin like everyone else.
     "The  Reformation opened the  door  a little wider.  But Pentecostalism
didn't  really  take  off  until  the  year  1900,  when a  small  group  of
Bible-college  students in Kansas began to speak in tongues. They spread the
practice to Texas. There it became known as the revival  movement. It spread
like wildfire, all across the United  States,  and then the world,  reaching
China and India in 1906.  The  twentieth century's mass media, high literacy
rates, and high-speed transportation all  served  as superb  vectors for the
infection.  In a packed  revival  hall or  a Third World refugee encampment,
glossolalia spread  from  one person  to the next as  fast as  panic. By the
eighties,  the number of Pentecostals worldwide  numbered  in  the  tens  of
millions.
     "And then came television,  and the  Reverend Wayne,  backed up by  the
vast  media  power of  L.  Bob  Rife.  The behavior  that the Reverend Wayne
promulgates through  his television  shows, pamphlets, and franchises can be
traced  in  an  unbroken  line  back  to  the  Pentecostal  cults  of  early
Christianity, and from  there back  to  pagan glossolalia cults. The cult of
Asherah lives. The Reverend Wayne's Pearly Cates is the cult of Asherah."

        57

     "Lagos  figured all of this out. He was originally a researcher  at the
Library of Congress, later became part of CIC when it  absorbed the Library.
He made  a living by discovering interesting things in the Library, facts no
one else had bothered to dig up. He would organize these facts and sell them
to  people.  Once he figured  out all of  this  Enki/Asherah  stuff, he went
looking for someone who would pay for it and settled on L. Bob Rife, Lord of
Bandwidth, owner of the  fiber-optics monopoly, who at  that  time  employed
more programmers than anyone else on earth.
     "Lagos, typically for a nonbusinessman, had a  fatal  flaw: he  thought
too   small.   He  figured   that   with  a  little  venture  capital,  this
neurolinguistic  hacking could be developed  as a new technology  that would
enable Rife to maintain possession of  information that had passed  into the
brains  of  his programmers. Which, moral considerations aside, wasn't a bad
idea.
     "Rife  likes to  think big. He immediately saw that this idea could  be
much more powerful. He took Lagos's idea and told Lagos himself to buzz off.
Then he started  dumping a lot of money into Pentecostal churches. He took a
small church in Bayview, Texas, and built it up into a university. He took a
smalltime preacher, the Reverend Wayne Bedford,  and made him more important
than  the  Pope.  He  constructed  a  string  of  self-supporting  religious
franchises all over  the world,  and used his university,  and its Metaverse
campus, to crank out tens of thousands of missionaries,  who  fanned out all
over  the  Third  World and  began  converting  people  by  the hundreds  of
thousands,  just like St. Louis Bertrand. L. Bob Rife's glossolalia  cult is
the most successful  religion since the creation of  Islam. They do a lot of
talking about Jesus, but like many self-described Christian churches, it has
nothing to do  with Christianity  except  that  they  use his name.  It's  a
postrational religion.
     "He  also  wanted  to spread  the biological  virus as  a  promoter  or
enhancer  of  the  cult, but he couldn't  really get  away with  doing  that
through   the  use   of   cult   prostitution  because   it   is  flagrantly
anti-Christian.  But  one  of  the  major  functions  of  his   Third  World
missionaries was  to go out into the hinterlands and vaccinate  people - and
there was more than just vaccine in those needles.
     "Here in  the First World, everyone has already been vaccinated, and we
don't let  religious  fanatics come  up and poke needles into us. But we  do
take a lot of drugs. So for us, he devised  a means for extracting the virus
from human blood serum and packaged it as a drug known as Snow Crash.
     "In  the meantime,  he  got the  Raft going  as a way  of  transporting
hundreds of thousands  of his cultists from the wretched parts of  Asia into
the  United States. The  media image  of the  Raft is that it is a place  of
utter chaos, where thousands of  different languages are spoken and there is
no central authority. But it's not like  that  at all. It's highly organized
and  tightly  controlled. These  people  are all talking  to each  other  in
tongues. L. Bob Rife has taken xenoglossia and perfected  it, turned it into
a science.
     "He can control  these people by grafting radio  receivers  into  their
skulls, broadcasting instructions  - me - directly into their brainstems. If
one  person  in a hundred has a  receiver,  he can act  as the  local en and
distribute the me of L. Bob Rife to all the others. They will act out L. Bob
Rife's instructions as  though they have been programmed to.  And right now,
he has about a million of these people poised off the California coast.
     "He  also  has  a  digital metavirus, in binary code,  that can  infect
computers, or hackers, via the optic nerve."
     "How did he translate it into binary form?" Ng says.
     "I don't  think he did. I  think he  found  it  in space. Rife owns the
biggest  radio astronomy network in the world. He  doesn't do real astronomy
with it - he just listens for signals from other planets. It stood to reason
that sooner or later, one of his dishes would pick up the metavirus."
     "How does that stand to reason?"
     "The metavirus is  everywhere. Anywhere life exists,  the metavirus  is
there, too,  propagating through it. Originally,  it  was  spread  around on
comets.  That's  probably  how  life  first came  to the Earth,  and  that's
probably  how the metavirus came here also.  But  comets  are slow,  whereas
radio waves are fast. In binary form, a virus can bounce around the universe
at the  speed  of light.  It  infects a  civilized  planet,  gets  into  its
computers, reproduces, and inevitably gets broadcast on television or  radio
or whatever. Those transmissions  don't stop at the edge of the atmosphere -
they radiate out into space, forever. And if they  hit a planet with another
civilized culture, where people are listening to the stars the way Rife  was
doing, then that planet gets infected,  too.  I think that was Rife's  plan,
and I  think it worked.  Except  that Rife  was  smart -he caught  it  in  a