ys. Y.T. looks back at him for a bit, waiting for him to continue. After a few seconds his attention drifts back to the monitors. "I do most of my work under a large contract with Mr. Lee," he blurts. Y.T. is waiting for the continuation of this sentence: Not "Mr. Lee," but "Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong." Oh, well. If she can drop Uncle Enzo's name, he can drop Mr. Lee's. "The social structure of any nation-state is ultimately determined by its security arrangements," Ng says, "and Mr. Lee understands this." Oh, wow, we're going to be profound now. Ng is suddenly talking just like the old white men on the TV pundit powwows, which Y.T.'s mother watches obsessively. "Instead of hiring a large human security force - which impacts the social environment - you know, lots of minimum-wage earners standing around carrying machine guns - Mr. Lee prefers to use nonhuman systems." Nonhuman systems. Y.T. is about to ask him, what do you know about the Rat Thing. But it is pointless; he won't say. It would get their relationship off on the wrong foot, Y.T. asking Ng for intel, intel that he would never give her, and that would make this whole scene even weirder than it is now, which Y.T. can't even imagine. Ng bursts forth with a long string of twangy noises, pops, and glottal stops. "Fucking bitch," he mumbles. "Excuse me?" "Nothing," he says, "a bimbo box cut me off. None of these people understand that with this vehicle, I could crush them like a potbellied pig under an armored personnel carrier." "A bimbo box - you're driving?" "Yes. I'm coming to pick you up - remember?" "Do you mind?" "No," he sighs, as if he really does. Y.T. gets up and walks around behind his desk to look. Each of the little TV monitors is showing a different view out his van: windshield, left window, right window, rearview. Another one has an electronic map showing his position: inbound on the San Bernardino, not far away. "The van is under voice command," he explains. "I removed the steering-wheel-and-pedal interface because I found verbal commands more convenient. This is why I will sometimes make unfamiliar sounds with my voice - I am controlling the vehicle's systems." Y.T. signs off from the Metaverse for a while, to clear her head and take a leak. When she takes off the goggles she discovers that she has built up quite an audience of truckers and mechanics, who are standing around the terminal booth in a semicircle listening to her jabber at Ng. When she stands up, attention shifts to her butt, naturally. Y.T. hits the bathroom, finishes her pie, and wanders out into the ultraviolet glare of the setting sun to wait for Ng. Recognizing his van is easy enough. It is enormous. It is eight feet high and wider than it is high, which would have made it a wide load in the old days when they had laws. The construction is boxy and angular; it has been welded together out of the type of flat, dimpled steel plate usually used to make manhole lids and stair treads. The tires are huge, like tractor tires with a more subtle tread, and there are six of them: two axles in back and one in front. The engine is so big that, like an evil spaceship in a movie, Y.T. feels its rumbling in her ribs before she can see it; it is kicking out diesel exhaust through a pair of squat vertical red smokestacks that project from the roof, toward the rear. The windshield is a perfectly flat rectangle of glass about three by eight feet, smoked so black that Y.T. can't make out an outline of anything inside. The snout of the van is festooned with every type of high-powered light known to science, like this guy hit a New South Africa franchise on a Saturday night and stole every light off every roll bar, and a grille has been constructed across the front, welded together out of rails torn out of an abandoned railroad somewhere. The grille alone probably weighs more than a small car. The passenger door swings open. Y.T. walks over and climbs into the front seat. "Hi," she is saying. "You need to take a whiz or anything?" Ng isn't there. Or maybe he is. Where the driver's seat ought to be, there is a sort of neoprene pouch about the size of a garbage can suspended from the ceiling by a web of straps, shock cords, tubes, wires, fiber-optic cables, and hydraulic lines. It is swathed in so much stuff that it is hard to make out its actual outlines. At the top of this pouch, Y.T. can see a patch of skin with some black hair around it - the top of a balding man's head. Everything else, from the temples downward, is encased in an enormous goggle/mask/headphone/feeding-tube unit, held onto his head by smart straps that are constantly tightening and loosening themselves to keep the device comfortable and properly positioned. Below this, on either side, where you'd sort of expect to see arms, huge bundles of wires, fiber optics, and tubes run up out of the floor and are seemingly plugged into Ng's shoulder sockets. There is a similar arrangement where his legs are supposed to be attached, and more stuff going into his groin and hooked up to various locations on his torso. The entire thing is swathed in a one-piece coverall, a pouch, larger than his torso ought to be, that is constantly bulging and throbbing as though alive. "Thank you, all my needs are taken care of," Ng says. The door slams shut behind her. Ng makes a yapping sound, and the van pulls out onto the frontage road, headed back toward 405. "Please excuse my appearance," he says, after a couple of awkward minutes. "My helicopter caught fire during the evacuation of Saigon in 1974 - a stray tracer from ground forces." "Whoa. What a drag." "I was able to reach an American aircraft carrier off the coast, but you know, the fuel was spraying around quite a bit during the fire." "Yeah, I can imagine, uh huh." "I tried prostheses for a while - some of them are very good. But nothing is as good as a motorized wheelchair. And then I got to thinking, why do motorized wheelchairs always have to be tiny pathetic things that strain to go up a little teeny ramp? So I bought this - it is an airport firetruck from Germany - and converted it into my new motorized wheelchair." "It's very nice." "America is wonderful because you can get anything on a drive-through basis. Oil change, liquor, banking, car wash, funerals, anything you want - drive through! So this vehicle is much better than a tiny pathetic wheelchair. It is an extension of my body." "When the geisha rubs your back?" Ng mumbles something and his pouch begins to throb and undulate around his body. "She is a daemon, of course. As for the massage, my body is suspended in an electrocontractive gel that massages me when I need it. I also have a Swedish girl and an African woman, but those daemons are not as well rendered." "And the mint julep?" "Through a feeding tube. Nonalcoholic, ha ha." "So," Y.T. says at some point, when they are way past LAX, and she figures it's too late to chicken out, "what's the plan? Do we have a plan?" "We go to Long Beach. To the Terminal Island Sacrifice Zone. And we buy some drugs," Ng says. "Or you do, actually, since I am indisposed." "That's my job? To buy some drugs?" "Buy them, and throw them up in the air." "In a Sacrifice Zone?" "Yes. And we'll take care of the rest." "Who's we, dude?" "There are several more, uh, entities that will help us." "What, is the back of the van full of more - people like you?" "Sort of," Ng says. "You are close to the truth." "Would these be, like, nonhuman systems?" "That is a sufficiently all-inclusive term, I think." Y.T. figures that for a big yes. "You tired? Want me to drive or anything?" Ng laughs sharply, like distant ack-ack, and the van almost swerves off the road. Y.T. doesn't get the sense that he is laughing at the joke; he is laughing at what a jerk Y.T. is. 30 "Okay, last time we were talking about the clay envelope. But what about this thing? The thing that looks like a tree?" Hiro says, gesturing to one of the artifacts. "A totem of the goddess Asherah," the Librarian says crisply. "Now we're getting somewhere," Hiro says. "Lagos said that the Brandy in The Black Sun was a cult prostitute of Asherah. So who is Asherah?" "She was the consort of El, who is also known as Yahweh," the Librarian says. "She also was known by other names: Elat, her most common epithet. The Greeks knew her as Dione or Rhea. The Canaanites knew her as Tannit or Hawwa, which is the same thing as Eve." "Eve?" "The etymology of 'Tannit' proposed by Cross is: feminine of 'tannin,' which would mean 'the one of the serpent.' Furthermore, Asherah carried a second epithet in the Bronze Age, 'dat batni,' also 'the one of the serpent.' The Sumerians knew her as Nintu or Ninhursag. Her symbol is a serpent coiling about a tree or staff. the caduceus." "Who worshipped Asherah? A lot of people, I gather." "Everyone who lived between India and Spain, from the second millennium B.C. up into the Christian era. With the exception of the Hebrews, who only worshipped her until the religious reforms of Hezekiah and, later, Josiah." "I thought the Hebrews were monotheists. How could they worship Asherah?" "Monolatrists. They did not deny the existence of other gods. But they were only supposed to worship Yahweh. Asherah was venerated as the consort of Yahweh." "I don't remember anything about God having a wife in the Bible." "The Bible didn't exist at that point. Judaism was just a loose collection of Yahwistic cults, each with different shrines and practices. The stories about the Exodus hadn't been formalized into scripture yet. And the later parts of the Bible had not yet happened." "Who decided to purge Asherah from Judaism?" "The deuteronomic school - defined, by convention, as the people who wrote the book of Deuteronomy as well as Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings." "And what kind of people were they?" "Nationalists. Monarchists. Centralists. The forerunners of the Pharisees. At this time, the Assyrian king Sargon II had recently conquered Samaria - northern Israel - forcing a migration of Hebrews southward into Jerusalem. Jerusalem expanded greatly and the Hebrews began to conquer territory to the west, east, and south. It was a time of intense nationalism and patriotic fervor. The deuteronomic school embodied those attitudes in scripture by rewriting and reorganizing the old tales." "Rewriting them how?" "Moses and others believed that the River Jordan was the border of Israel, but the deuteronomists believed that Israel included Transjordan, which justified aggression to the east. There are many other examples: the predeuteronomic law said nothing about a monarch. The Law as laid down by the deuteronomic school reflected a monarchist system. The predeuteronomic law was largely concerned with sacred matters, while the deuteronomic law's main concern is the education of the king and his people - secular matters in other words. The deuteronomists insisted on centralizing the religion in the Temple in Jerusalem, destroying the outlying cult centers. And there is another feature that Lagos found significant." "And that is?" "Deuteronomy is the only book of the Pentateuch that refers to a written Torah as comprising the divine will: 'And when he sits on the throne of his kingdom, he shall write for himself in a book a copy of this law, from that which is in charge of the Levitical priests; and it shall be with him, and he shall read in it all the days of his life, that he may learn to fear the LORD his God, by keeping all the words of this law and these statutes, and doing them; that his heart may not be lifted up above his brethren, and that he may not turn aside from the commandment, either to the right hand or to the left; so that he may continue long in his kingdom, he and his children, in Israel.' Deuteronomy 17:18-20." "So the deuteronomists codified the religion. Made it into an organized, self-propagating entity," Hiro says. "I don't want to say virus. But according to what you just quoted me, the Torah is like a virus. It uses the human brain as a host. The host - the human - makes copies of it. And more humans come to synagogue and read it." "I cannot process an analogy. But what you say is correct insofar as this: After the deuteronomists had reformed Judaism, instead of making sacrifices, the Jews went to synagogue and read the Book. If not for the deuteronomists, the world's monotheists would still be sacrificing animals and propagating their beliefs through the oral tradition." "Sharing needles," Hiro says. "When you were going over this stuff with Lagos, did he ever say anything about the Bible being a virus?" "He said it had certain things in common with a virus, but that it was different. He considered it a benign virus. Like that used for vaccinations. He considered the Asherah virus to be more malignant, capable of being spread through exchange of bodily fluids." "So the strict, book-based religion of the deuteronomists inoculated the Hebrews against the Asherah virus." "In combination with strict monogamy and other kosher practices, yes," the Librarian says. "The previous religions, from Sumer up to Deuteronomy, are known as prerational. Judaism was the first of the rational religions. As such, in Lagos's view, it was much less susceptible to viral infection because it was based on fixed, written records. This was the reason for the veneration of the Torah and the exacting care used when making new copies of it - informational hygiene." "What are we living in nowadays? The postrational era?" "Juanita made comments to that effect." "I'll bet she did. She's starting to make more sense to me, Juanita is." "Oh." "She never really made much sense before." "I see." "I think that if I can just spend enough time with you to figure out what's on Juanita's mind - well, wonderful things could happen." "I will try to be of assistance." "Back to work - this is no time for a hard-on. It seems that Asherah was a carrier of a viral infection. The deuteronomists somehow realized this and exterminated her by blocking all the vectors by which she infected new victims." "With reference to viral infections," the Librarian says, "if I may make a fairly blunt, spontaneous crossreference - something I am coded to do at opportune moments - you may wish to examine herpes simplex, a virus that takes up residence in the nervous system and never leaves. It is capable of carrying new genes into existing neurons and genetically reengineering them. Modem gene therapists use it for this purpose. Lagos thought that herpes simplex might be a modern, benign descendant of Asherah." "Not always benign," Hiro says, remembering a friend of his who died of AIDS-related complications; in the last days, he had herpes lesions from his lips all the way down his throat. "It's only benign because we have immunities." "Yes, sir." "So did Lagos think that the Asherah virus actually altered the DNA of brain cells?" "Yes. This was the backbone of his hypothesis that the virus was able to transmute itself from a biologically transmitted string of DNA into a set of behaviors." "What behaviors? What was Asherah worship like? Did they do sacrifices?" "No. But there is evidence of cult prostitutes, both male and female." "Does that mean what I think it does? Religious figures who would hang around the temple and fuck people?" "More or less." "Bingo. Great way to spread a virus. Now, I want to jump back to an earlier fork in the conversation." "As you wish. I can handle nested forkings to a virtually infinite depth." "You made a connection between Asherah and Eve." "Eve - whose Biblical name is Hawwa - is clearly the Hebrew interpretation of an older myth. Hawwa is an ophidian mother goddess." "Ophidian?" "Associated with serpents. Asherah is also an ophidian mother goddess. And both are associated with trees as well." "Eve, as I recall, is considered responsible for getting Adam to eat the forbidden fruit, from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Which is to say, it's not just fruit - it's data." "If you say so, sir." "I wonder if viruses have always been with us, or not. There's sort of an implicit assumption that they have been around forever. But maybe that's not true. Maybe there was a period of history when they were nonexistent or at least unusual. And at a certain point, when the metavirus showed up, the number of different viruses exploded, and people started getting sick a whole lot. That would explain the fact that all cultures seem to have a myth about Paradise, and the Fall from Paradise." "Perhaps." "You told me that the Essenes thought that tapeworms were demons. If they'd known what a virus was, they probably would have thought the same thing. And Lagos told me the other night that, according to the Sumerians, there was no concept of good and evil per se." "Correct. According to Kramer and Maier, there are good demons and bad demons. 'Good ones bring physical and emotional health. Evil ones bring disorientation and a variety of physical and emotional ills.... But these demons can hardly be distinguished from the diseases they personify ... and many of the diseases sound, to modern ears, as though they must be psychosomatic.'" "That's what the doctors said about Da5id, that his disease must be psychosomatic." "I don't know anything about Da5id, except for some rather banal statistics." "It's as though 'good' and 'evil' were invented by the writer of the Adam and Eve legend to explain why people get sick - why they have physical and mental viruses. So when Eve - or Asherah - got Adam to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, she was introducing the concept of good and evil into the world - introducing the metavirus, which creates viruses." "Could be." "So my next question is: Who wrote the Adam and Eve legend?" "This is a source of much scholarly argument." "What did Lagos think? More to the point, what did Juanita think?" "Nicolas Wyatt's radical interpretation of the Adam and Eve story supposes that it was, in fact, written as a political allegory by the deuteronomists." "I thought they wrote the later books, not Genesis." "True. But they were involved in compiling and editing the earlier books as well. For many years, it was assumed that Genesis was written sometime around 900 B.C. or even earlier - long before the advent of the deuteronomists. But more recent analysis of the vocabulary and content suggests that a great deal of editorial work - possibly even authorial work - took place around the time of the Exile, when the deuteronomists held sway." "So they may have rewritten an earlier Adam and Eve myth." "They appear to have had ample opportunity. According to the interpretation of Hvidberg and, later, Wyatt, Adam in his garden is a parable for the king in his sanctuary, specifically King Hosea, who ruled the northern kingdom until it was conquered by Sargon II in 722 B.C." "That's the conquest you mentioned earlier - the one that drove the deuteronomists southward toward Jerusalem." "Exactly. Now 'Eden,' which can be understood simply as the Hebrew word for 'delight,' stands for the happy state in which the king existed prior to the conquest. The expulsion from Eden to the bitter lands to the east is a parable for the massive deportation of Israelites to Assyria following Sargon II's victory. According to this interpretation, the king was enticed away from the path, of righteousness by the cult of El, with its associated worship of Asherah - who is commonly associated with serpents, and whose symbol is a tree." "And his association with Asherah somehow caused him to be conquered - so when the deuteronomists reached Jerusalem, they recast the Adam and Eve story as a warning to the leaders of the southern kingdom." "Yes." "And perhaps, because no one was listening to them, perhaps they invented the concept of good and evil in the process, as a hook." "Hook?" "Industry term. Then what happened? Did Sargon II try to conquer the southern kingdom also?" "His successor, Sennacherib, did. King Hezekiah, who ruled the southern kingdom, prepared for the attack feverishly, making great improvements in the fortifications of Jerusalem, improving its supply of drinking water. He was also responsible for a far-reaching series of religious reforms, which he undertook under the direction of the deuteronomists." "How did it work out?" "The forces of Sennacherib surrounded Jerusalem. 'And that night the angel of the LORD went forth, and slew a hundred and eighty-five thousand in the camp of the Assyrians; and when men arose early in the morning, behold, these were all dead bodies. Then Sennacherib king of Assyria departed...' 2 Kings 19:35-36." "I'll bet he did. So let me get this straight: the deuteronomists, through Hezekiah, impose a policy of informational hygiene on Jerusalem and do some civil-engineering work - you said they worked on the water supply?" "'They stopped all the springs and the brook that flowed through the land, saying, "'Why should the kings of Assyria come and find much water?"' 2 Chronicles 32:4. Then the Hebrews carved a tunnel seventeen hundred feet through solid rock to carry that water inside city walls." "And then as soon as Sennacherib's soldiers came on the scene, they all dropped dead of what can only be understood as an extremely virulent disease, to which the people of Jerusalem were apparently immune. Hmm, interesting - I wonder what got into their water?" 31 Y.T. doesn't get down to Long Beach very much, but when she does, she will do just about anything to avoid the Sacrifice Zone. It's an abandoned shipyard the size of a small town. It sticks out into San Pedro Bay, where the older, nastier Burbclaves of the Basin - unplanned Burbclaves of tiny asbestos-shingled houses patrolled by beetle-browed Kampuchean men with pump shotguns - fade off into the foam-kissed beaches. Most of it's on the appropriately named Terminal Island, and since her plank doesn't run on the water, that means she can only get in or out by one access road. Like all Sacrifice Zones, this one has a fence around it, with yellow metal signs wired to it every few yards. SACRIFICE ZONE WARNING. The National Parks Service has declared this area to be a National Sacrifice Zone. The Sacrifice Zone Program was developed to manage parcels of land whose clean-up cost exceeds their total future economic value. And like all Sacrifice Zone fences, this one has holes in it and is partially torn down in places. Young men blasted out of their minds on natural and artificial male hormones must have some place to do their idiotic coming-of-age rituals. They come in from Burbclaves all over the area in their four-wheel-drive trucks and tear across the open ground, slicing long curling gashes into the clay cap that was placed on the really bad parts to prevent windblown asbestos from blizzarding down over Disneyland. Y.T. is oddly satisfied to know that these boys have never even dreamed of an all-terrain vehicle like Ng's motorized wheelchair. It veers off the paved road with no loss in speed -ride gets a little bumpy - and hits the chain-link fence as if it were a fog bank, plowing a hundred-foot section into the ground. It is a clear night, and so the Sacrifice Zone glitters, an immense carpet of broken glass and shredded asbestos. A hundred feet away, some seagulls are tearing at the belly of a dead German shepherd lying on its back. There is a constant undulation of the ground that makes the shattered glass flash and twinkle; this is caused by vast, sparse migrations of rats. The deep computer-designed imprints of suburban boys' fat knobby tires paint giant runes on the clay, like the mystery figures in Peru that Y.T.'s mom learned about at the NeoAquarian Temple. Through the windows, Y.T. can hear occasional bursts of either firecrackers or gunfire. She can also hear Ng making new, even stranger sounds with his mouth. There is a built-in speaker system in this van - a stereo, though far be it from Ng to actually listen to any tunes. Y.T. can feel it turning on, can sense a nearly inaudible hiss coming from the speakers. The van begins to creep forward across the Zone. The inaudible hiss gathers itself up into a low electronic hum. It's not steady, it wavers up and down, staying pretty low, like Roadkill fooling around with his electric bass. Ng keeps changing the direction of the van, as though he's searching for something, and Y.T. gets the sense that the pitch of the hum is rising. It's definitely rising, building up in the direction of a squeal. Ng snarls a command and the volume is reduced. He's driving very slowly now. "It is possible that you might not have to buy any Snow Crash at all," he mumbles. "We may have found an unprotected stash." "What is this totally irritating noise?" "Bioelectronic sensor. Human cell membranes. Grown in vitro, which means in glass - in a test tube. One side is exposed to outside air, the other side is clean. When a foreign substance penetrates the cell membrane to the clean side, it's detected. The more foreign molecules penetrate, the higher the pitch of the sound." "Like a Geiger counter?" "Very much like a Geiger counter for cell-penetrating compounds," Ng says. Like what? Y.T. wants to ask. But she doesn't. Ng stops the van. He turns on some lights - very dim lights. That's how anal this guy is - he has gone to the trouble to install special dim lights in addition to all the bright ones. They are looking into a sort of bowl, right at the foot of a major drum heap, that is strewn with litter. Most of the litter is empty beer cans. In the middle is a fire pit. Many tire tracks converge here. "Ah, this is good," Ng says. "A place where the young men gather to take drugs." Y.T. rolls her eyes at this display of tubularity. This must be the guy who writes all those antidrug pamphlets they get at school. Like he's not getting a million gallons of drugs every second through all of those gross tubes. "I don't see any signs of booby traps," Ng says. "Why don't you go out and see what kind of drug paraphernalia is out there." She looks at him like, what did you say? "There's a toxics mask hanging on the back of your seat," he says. "What's out there, toxic-wise?" "Discarded asbestos from the shipbuilding industry. Marine antifouling paints that are full of heavy metals. They used PCBs for a lot of things, too." "Great." "I sense your reluctance. But if we can get a sample of Snow Crash from this drug-taking site, it will obviate the rest of our mission." "Well, since you put it that way," Y.T. says, and grabs the mask. It's a big rubber-and-canvas number that covers her whole head and neck. Feels heavy and awkward at first, but whoever designed it had the right idea, all the weight rests in the right places. There's also a pair of heavy gloves that she hauls on. They are way too big. Like the people at the glove factory never dreamed that an actual female could wear gloves. She trudges out onto the glass-and-asbestos soil of the Zone, hoping that Ng isn't going to slam the door shut and drive away and leave her there. Actually, she wishes he would. It would be a cool adventure. Anyway, she goes up to the middle of the "drug-taking site." Is not too surprised to see a little nest of discarded hypodermic needles. And some tiny little empty vials. She picks up a couple of the vials, reads their labels. "What did you find?" Ng says when she gets back into the van, peels off the mask. "Needles. Mostly Hyponarxes. But there's also a couple of Ultra Laminars and some Mosquito twenty-fives." "What does all this mean?" "Hyponarx you can get at any Buy 'n' Fly, people call them rusty nails, they are cheap and dull. Supposedly the needles of poor black diabetics and junkies. Ultra Laminars and Mosquitos; are hip, you get them around fancy Burbclaves, they don't hurt as much when you stick them in, and they have better design. You know, ergonomic plungers, hip color schemes." "What drug were they injecting?" "Checkitout," Y.T. says, and holds up one of the vials toward Ng. Then it occurs to her that he can't exactly turn his head to look. "Where do I hold it so you can see it?" she says. Ng sings a little song. A robot arm unfolds itself from the ceiling of the van, crisply yanks the vial from her hand, swings it around, and holds it in front of a video camera set into the dashboard. The typewritten label stuck onto the vial says, just "Testosterone." "Ha ha, a false alarm," Ng says. The van suddenly rips forward, starts heading right into the middle of the Sacrifice Zone. "Want to tell me what's going on?" Y.T. says, "since I have to actually do the work in this outfit?" "Cell walls," Ng says. "The detector finds any chemical that penetrates cell walls. So we homed in naturally on a source of testosterone. A red herring. How amusing. You see, our biochemists lead sheltered lives, did not anticipate that some people would be so mentally warped as to use hormones like they were some kind of drug. How bizarre." Y.T. smiles to herself. She really likes the idea of living in a world where someone like Ng can get off calling someone else bizarre. "What are you looking for?" "Snow Crash," Ng says. "Instead, we found the Ring of Seventeen." "Snow Crash is the drug that comes in the little tubes," Y.T. says. "I know that. What's the Ring of Seventeen? One of those crazy new rock groups that kids listen to nowadays?" "Snow Crash penetrates the walls of brain cells and goes to the nucleus where the DNA is stored. So for purposes of this mission, we developed a detector that would enable us to find cell wall-penetrating compounds in the air. But we didn't count on heaps of empty testosterone vials being scattered all over the place. All steroids - artificial hormones - share the same basic structure, a ring of seventeen atoms that acts like a magic key that allows them to pass through cell walls. That's why steroids are such powerful substances when they are unleashed in the human body. They can go deep inside the cell, into the nucleus, and actually change the way the cell functions. "To summarize: the detector is useless. A stealthy approach will not work. So we go back to the original plan. You buy some Snow Crash and throw it up in the air." Y.T. doesn't quite understand that last part yet. But she shuts up for a while, because in her opinion, Ng needs to pay more attention to his driving. Once they get out of that really creepy part, most of the Sacrifice Zone turns out to consist of a wilderness of dry brown weeds and large abandoned hunks of metal. There are big heaps of shit rising up from place to place - coal or slag or coke or smelt or something. Every time they come around a corner, they encounter a little plantation of vegetables, tended by Asians or South Americans. Y.T. gets the impression that Ng wants to just run them over, but he always changes his mind at the last instant and swerves around them. Some Spanish-speaking blacks are playing baseball on a broad flat area, using the round lids of fifty-five-gallon drums as bases. They have parked half a dozen old beaters around the edges of the field and turned on their headlights to provide illumination. Nearby is a bar built into a crappy mobile home, marked with a graffiti sign: THE SACRIFICE ZONE. Lines of boxcars are stranded in a yard of rusted-over railway spurs, nopal growing between the ties. One of the boxcars has been turned into a Reverend Wayne's Pearly Gates franchise, and evangelical CentroAmericans are lined up to do their penance and speak in tongues below the neon Elvis. There are no NeoAquarian Temple franchises in the Sacrifice Zone. "The warehouse area is not as dirty as the first place we went," Ng says reassuringly, "so the fact that you can't use the toxics mask won't be so bad. You may smell some Chill fumes." Y.T. does a double take at this new phenomenon: Ng using the street name for a controlled substance. "You mean Freon?" she says. "Yes. The man who is the object of our inquiry is horizontally diversified. That is, he deals in a number of different substances. But he got his start in Freon. He is the biggest Chill wholesaler/retailer on the West Coast." Finally, Y.T. gets it. Ng's van is air-conditioned. Not with one of those shitty ozone-safe air conditioners, but with the real thing, a heavy metal, high-capacity, bonechilling Frigidaire blizzard blaster. It must use an incredible amount of Freon. For all practical purposes, that air conditioner is a part of Ng's body. Y.T.'s driving around with the world's only Freon junkie. "You buy your supply of Chill from this guy?" "Until now, yes. But for the future, I have an arrangement with someone else." Someone else. The Mafia. They are approaching the waterfront. Dozens of long, skinny, single-story warehouses run parallel down toward the water. They all share the same access road at this end. Smaller roads run between them, down toward where the piers used to be. Abandoned tractor-trailers are scattered around from place to place. Ng pulls his van off the access road, into a little nook that is partly concealed between an old red-brick power station and a stack of rusted-out shipping containers. He gets it turned around so it's pointed out of here, kind of like he is expecting to leave rapidly "There's money in the storage compartment in front of you," Ng says. Y.T. opens the glove compartment, as anyone else would call it, and finds a thick bundle of worn-out, dirty, trillion-dollar bills. Ed Meeses. "Jeez, couldn't you get any Gippers? This is kind of bulky." "This is more the kind of thing that a Kourier would pay with." "Because we're all pond scum, right?" "No comment." "What is this, a quadrillion dollars?" "One-and-a-half quadrillion. Inflation, you know." "What do I do?" "Fourth warehouse on the left," Ng says. "When you get the tube, throw it up in the air." "Then what?" "Everything else will be taken care of." Y.T. has her doubts about that. But if she gets in trouble, well, she can always whip out those dog tags. While Y.T. climbs down out of the van with her skateboard, Ng makes new sounds with his mouth. She hears a gliding and clunking noise resonating through the frame of the van, machinery coming to life. Turning back to look, she sees that a steel cocoon on the roof of the van has opened up. There is a miniature helicopter underneath it, all folded up. Its rotor blades spread themselves apart, like a butterfly unfolding. Its name is painted on its side: WHIRLWIND REAPER. 32 It's pretty obvious which warehouse we are looking for here. Fourth one on the left, the road that runs down toward the waterfront is blocked off by several shipping containers - the big steel boxes you see on the backs of eighteen-wheelers. They are arranged in a herringbone pattern, so that in order to get past them you have to slalom back and forth half a dozen times, passing through a narrow mazelike channel between high walls of steel. Guys with guns are perched on top, looking down at Y.T. as she guides her plank through the obstacle course. By the time she makes it out into the clear, she's been heavily checked out. There is the occasional light-bulb-on-a-wire strung around, and even a couple of strings of Christmas-tree lights. These are switched on, just to make her feel a little more welcome. She can't see anything, just lights making colored halos amid a generalized cloud of dust and fog. In front of her, access to the waterfront is blocked off by another maze of shipping containers. One of them has a graffiti sign: THE UKOD SEZ: TRY SOME COUNTDOWN TODAY! "What's the UKOD?" she says, just to break the ice a little. "Undisputed King of the Ozone Destroyers," says a man's voice. He is just in the act of jumping down from the loading dock of the warehouse to her left. Back inside the warehouse, Y.T. can see electric lights and glowing cigarettes. "That's what we call Emilio." "Oh, right," Y.T. says. "The Freon guy. I'm not here for Chill." "Well," says the guy, a tall rangy dude in his forties, much too skinny to be forty years old. He yanks the butt of a cigarette from his mouth and throws it away like a dart. "What'll it be, then?" "What does Snow Crash cost." "One point seven five Gippers," the guy says. "I thought it was one point five," Y.T. says. The guy shakes his head. "Inflation, you know. Still, it's a bargain. Hell, that plank you're on is probably worth a hundred Gippers." "You can't even buy these for dollars," Y.T. says, getting her back up. "Look, all I've got is one-and-a-half quadrillion dollars." She pulls the bundle out of her pocket. The guy laughs, shakes his head, hollers back to his colleagues inside the warehouse. "You guys, we got a chick here who wants to pay in Meeses." "Better get rid of 'em fast, honey," says a sharper, nastier voice, "or get yourself a wheelbarrow." It's an even older guy with a bald head, curly hair on the sides, and a paunch. He's standing up on the loading dock. "If you're not going to take it, just say so," Y.T. says. All of this chatter has nothing to do with business. "We don't get chicks back here very often," the fat bald old guy says. Y.T. knows that this must be the UKOD himself "So we'll give you a discount for being spunky. Turn around." "Fuck you," Y.T. says. She's not going to turn around for this guy. Everyone within earshot laughs. "Okay, do it," the UKOD says. The tall skinny guy goes back over to the loading dock and hauls an aluminum briefcase down, sets it on top of a steel drum in the middle of the road so that it's at about waist height. "Pay first," he says. She hands him the Meeses. He examines the bundle, sneers, throws it back into the warehouse with a sudden backhand motion. All the guys inside laugh some more. He opens up the briefcase, revealing the little computer keyboard. He shoves his ID card into the slot, types on it for a couple of seconds. He unsnaps a tube from the top of the briefcase, places it into the socket in the bottom part. The machine draws it inside, does something, spits it back out. He hands the tube to Y.T. The red numbers on top are counting down from ten. "When it gets down to one, hold it up to your nose and start inhaling," the guy says. She's already backing away from him. "You got a problem, little girl?" he says. "Not yet," she says. Then she throws the tube up in the air as hard as she can. The chop of the rotor blades comes out of nowhere. The Whirlwind Reaper blurs over their heads; ever