yone crouches for an instant as surprise buckles their knees. The tube does not come back to earth. "You fucking bitch," the skinny guy says. "That was a really cool plan," the UKOD says, "but the part I can't figure out is, why would a nice, smart girl like you participate in a suicide mission?" The sun comes out. About half a dozen suns, actually, all around them up in the air, so that there are no shadows. The faces of the skinny man and the UKOD look flat and featureless under this blinding illumination. Y.T. is the only person who can see worth a damn because her Knight Visions have compensated for it; the men wince and sag beneath the light. Y.T. turns to look behind herself. One of the miniature suns is hanging above the maze of shipping containers, casting light into all its crannies, blinding the gunmen who stand guard there. The scene flashes too light and too dark as her goggles' electronics try to make up their mind. But in the midst of this whole visual tangle she gets one image printed indelibly on her retina: the gunmen going down like a treeline in a hurricane, and for just an instant, a line of dark angular things silhouetted above the maze as they crest it like a cybernetic tsunami. Rat Things. They have evaded the whole maze by leaping over it in long, flat parabolas. Along the way, some of them have slammed right through the bodies of men holding guns, like NFL fullbacks plowing full speed through nerdy sideline photographers. Then, as they land on the road in front of the maze, there is an instant burst of dust with frantic white sparks dancing around at the bottom, and while all this is happening, Y.T. doesn't hear, she feels one of the Rat Things impacting on the body of the tall skinny guy, hears his ribs crackling like a ball of cellophane. Hell is already breaking loose inside the warehouse, but her eyes are trying to follow the action, watching the sparks-and-dust contrails of more Rat Things drawing themselves down the length of the road in an instant and then going airborne to the top of the next barrier. Three seconds have passed since she threw the tube into the air. She is turning back to look inside the warehouse. But someone's on top of the warehouse, catching her eye for a second. It's another gunman, a sniper, stepping out from behind an air-conditioning unit, just getting used to the light, raising his weapon to his shoulder. Y.T. winces as a red laser beam from his rifle sweeps across her eyes once, twice as he zeroes his sights on her forehead. Behind him she sees the Whirlwind Reaper, its rotors making a disk under the brilliant light, a disk that is foreshortened into a narrow ellipse and then into a steady silver line, Then it flies right past the sniper. The chopper pulls up into a hard turn, searching for additional prey, and something falls beneath it in a powerless trajectory, she thinks that it has dropped a bomb. But it's the head of the sniper, spinning rapidly, throwing out a fine pink helix under the light. The little chopper's rotor blade must have caught him in the nape of the neck. One part of her, is dispassionately watching the head bounce and spin in the dust, and the other part of her is screaming her lungs out. She hears a crack, the first loud noise so far. She turns to follow the sound, looking in the direction of a water tower that looms above this area, providing a fine vantage point for a sniper. But then her attention is drawn by the pencil-thin blue-white exhaust of a tiny rocket that lances up into the sky from Ng's van. It doesn't do anything; it just goes up to a certain height and hovers, sitting on its exhaust. She doesn't care, she's kicking her way down the road now on her plank, trying to get something between her and that water tower. There is a second cracking noise. Before this sound even reaches her ears, the rocket darts horizontally like a minnow, makes one or two minor cuts to correct its course, zeroes in on that sniper's perch, up in the water tower's access ladder. There is a great nasty explosion without any flame or light, like the loud pointless booms that you get sometimes at fireworks shows. For a moment, she can hear the clamor of shrapnel ringing through the ironwork of the water tower. Just before she kicks her way back into the maze, a dustline whips past her, snapping rocks and fragments of broken glass into her face. It shoots into the maze. She hears it Ping-Pong all the way through, kicking off the steel walls in order to change direction. It's a Rat Thing clearing the way for her. How sweet! "Smooth move, Ex-Lax," she says, climbing back into Ng's van. Her throat feels thick and swollen. Maybe it's from screaming, maybe it's the toxic waste, maybe she's getting ready to gag. "Didn't you know about the snipers?" she says. If she can keep talking about the details of the job, maybe she can keep her mind off of what the Whirlwind Reaper did. "I didn't know about the one on the water tower," Ng says. "But as soon as he fired a couple of rounds, we plotted the bullets' trajectories on millimeter-wave and back-traced them." He talks to his van and it pulls out of its hiding place, headed for I-405. "Seems like kind of an obvious place to look for a sniper." "He was in an unfortified position, exposed from all sides," Ng says. "He chose to work from a suicidal position. Which is not a typical behavior for drug dealers. Typically, they are more pragmatic. Now, do you have any other criticisms of my performance?" "Well, did it work?" "Yes. The tube was inserted into a sealed chamber inside the helicopter before it discharged its contents. It was then flash-frozen in liquid helium before it could chemically self-destruct. We now have a sample of Snow Crash, something that no one else has been able to get. It is the kind of success on which reputations such as mine are constructed." "How about the Rat Things?" "How about them?" "Are they back in the van now? Back there?" Y.T. jerks her head aft. Ng pauses for a moment. Y.T. reminds herself that he is sitting in his office in Vietnam in 1955 watching all of this on TV. "Three of them are back," Ng says. "Three are on their way back. And three of them I left behind to carry out additional pacification measures." "You're leaving them behind?" "They'll catch up," Ng says. "On a straightaway, they can run at seven hundred miles per hour." "Is it true they have nuke stuff inside of them?" "Radiothermal isotopes." "What happens if one gets busted open? Everyone gets all mutated?" "If you ever find yourself in the presence of a destructive force powerful enough to decapsulate those isotopes," Ng says, "radiation sickness will be the least of your worries." "Will they be able to find their way back to us?" "Didn't you ever watch Lassie Come Home when you were a child?" he asks. "Or rather, more of a child than you are now?" So. She was right. The Rat Things are made from dog parts. "That's cruel," she says. "This brand of sentimentalism is very predictable," Ng says. "To take a dog out of his body - keep him in a hutch all the time." "When the Rat Thing, as you call it, is in his hutch, do you know what he's doing?" "Licking his electric nuts?" "Chasing Frisbees through the surf. Forever. Eating steaks that grow on trees. Lying beside the fire in a hunting lodge. I haven't installed any testicle-licking simulations yet, but now that you have brought it up, I shall consider it." "What about when he's out of the hutch, running around doing errands for you?" "Can't you imagine how liberating it is for a pit bull-terrier to be capable of running seven hundred miles an hour?" Y.T. doesn't answer. She is too busy trying to get her mind around this concept. "Your mistake," Ng says, "is that you think that all mechanically assisted organisms - like me - are pathetic cripples. In fact, we are better than we were before." "Where do you get the pit bulls from?" "An incredible number of them are abandoned every day, in cities all over the place." "You cut up pound puppies?" "We save abandoned dogs from certain extinction and send them to what amounts to dog heaven." "My friend Roadkill and I had a pit bull. Fido. We found it in an alley. Some asshole had shot it in the leg. We had a vet fix it up. We kept it in this empty apartment in Roadkill's building for a few months, played with it every day, brought it food. And then one day we came to play with Fido, and he was gone. Someone broke in and took him away. Probably sold him to a research lab." "Probably," Ng says, "but that's no way to keep a dog." "It's better than the way he was living before." There's a break in the conversation as Ng occupies himself with talking to his van, maneuvering onto the Long Beach Freeway, headed back into town. "Do they remember stuff?" Y.T. says. "To the extent dogs can remember anything," Ng says. "We don't have any way of erasing memories." "So maybe Fido is a Rat Thing somewhere, right now." "I would hope so, for his sake," Ng says. In a Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong franchise in Phoenix, Arizona, Ng Security Industries Semi-Autonomous Guard Unit B-782 comes awake. The factory that put him together thinks of him as a robot named Number B-782. But he thinks of himself as a pit bull-terrier named Fido. In the old days, Fido was a bad little doggie sometimes. But now, Fido lives in a nice little house in a nice little yard. Now he has become a nice little doggie. He likes to lie in his house and listen to the other nice doggies bark. Fido is part of a big pack. Tonight there is a lot of barking from a place far away. When he listens to this barking, Fido knows that a whole pack of nice doggies is very excited about something. A lot of very bad men are trying to hurt a nice girl. This has made the doggies very angry and excited. In order to protect the nice girl, they are hurting some of the bad men. Which is as it should be. Fido does not come out of his house. When he first heard the barking, he became excited. He likes nice girls, and it makes him especially upset when bad men try to hurt them. Once there was a nice girl who loved him. That was before, when he lived in a scary place and he was always hungry and many people were bad to him. But the nice girl loved him and was good to him. Fido loves the nice girl very much. But he can tell from the barking of the other doggies that the nice girl is safe now. So he goes back to sleep. 33 "'Scuse me, pod," Y.T. says, stepping into the Babel/Infocalypse room. "Jeez! This place looks like one of those things full of snow that you shake up." "Hi, Y.T." "Got some more intel for you, pod." "Shoot." "Snow Crash is a roid. Or else it's similar to a roid. Yeah, that's it. It goes into your cell walls, just like a roid. And then it does something to the nucleus of the cell." "You were right," Hiro says to the Librarian, "just like herpes." "This guy I was talking to said that it fucks with your actual DNA. I don't know what half of this shit means, but that's what he said." "Who's this guy you were talking to?" "Ng. Of Ng Security Industries. Don't bother talking to him, he won't give you any intel," she says dismissively. "Why are you hanging out with a guy like Ng?" "Mob job. The Mafia has a sample of the drug for the first time, thanks to me and my pal Ng. Until now, it always self-destructed before they could get to it. So I guess they're analyzing it or something. Trying to make an antidote, maybe." "Or trying to reproduce it." "The Mafia wouldn't do that." "Don't be a sap," Hiro says. "Of course they would." Y.T. seems miffed at Hiro. "Look," he says, "I'm sorry for reminding you of this, but if we still had laws, the Mafia would be a criminal organization." "But we don't have laws," she says, "so it's just another chain." "Fine, all I'm saying is, they may not be doing this for the benefit of humanity." "And why are you in here, holed up with this geeky daemon?" she says, gesturing at the Librarian. "For the benefit of humanity? Or because you're chasing a piece of ass? Whatever her name is." "Okay, okay, let's not talk about the Mafia anymore," Hiro says. "I have work to do." "So do I." Y.T. zaps out again, leaving a hole in the Metaverse that is quickly filled in by Hiro's computer. "I think she may have a crush on me," Hiro explains. "She seemed quite affectionate," the Librarian says. "Okay," Hiro says, "back to work. Where did Asherah come from?" "Originally from Sumerian mythology. Hence, she is also important in Babylonian, Assyrian, Canaanite, Hebrew, and Ugaritic myths, which are all descended from the Sumerian." "Interesting. So the Sumerian language died out, but the Sumerian myths were somehow passed on in the new languages." "Correct. Sumerian was used as the language of religion and scholarship by later civilizations, much as Latin was used in Europe during the Middle Ages. No one spoke it as their native language, but educated people could read it. In this way, Sumerian religion was passed on." "And what did Asherah do in Sumerian myths?" "The accounts are fragmentary. Few tablets have been discovered, and these are broken and scattered. It is thought that L. Bob Rife has excavated many intact tablets, but he refuses to release them. The surviving Sumerian myths exist in fragments and have a bizarre quality. Lagos compared them to the imaginings of a febrile two-year-old. Entire sections of them simply cannot be translated - the characters are legible and well-known, but when put together they do not say anything that leaves an imprint on the modern mind." "Like instructions for programming a VCR." "There is a great deal of monotonous repetition. There is also a fair amount of what Lagos described as 'Rotary Club Boosterism' - scribes extolling the superior virtue of their city over some other city." "What makes one Sumerian city better than another one? A bigger ziggurat? A better football team?" "Better me." "What are me?" "Rules or principles that control the operation of society, like a code of laws, but on a more fundamental level." "I don't get it." "That is the point. Sumerian myths are not 'readable' or 'enjoyable' in the same sense that Greek and Hebrew myths are. They reflect a fundamentally different consciousness from ours." "I suppose if our culture was based on Sumer, we would find them more interesting," Hiro says. "Akkadian myths came after the Sumerian and are clearly based on Sumerian myths to a large extent. It is clear that Akkadian redactors went through the Sumerian myths, edited out the (to us) bizarre and incomprehensible parts, and strung them together into longer works, such as the Epic of Gilgamesh. The Akkadians were Semites - cousins of the Hebrews." "What do the Akkadians have to say about her?" "She is a goddess of the erotic and of fertility. She also has a destructive, vindictive side. In one myth, Kirta, a human king, is made grievously ill by Asherah. Only El, king of the gods, can heal him. El gives certain persons the privilege of nursing at Asherah's breasts. El and Asherah often adopt human babies and let them nurse on Asherah - in one text, she is wet nurse to seventy divine sons." "Spreading that virus," Hiro says. "Mothers with AIDS can spread the disease to their babies by breastfeeding them. But this is the Akkadian version, right?" "Yes, sir." "I want to hear some Sumerian stuff, even if it is untranslatable." "Would you like to hear how Asherah made Enki sick?" "Sure." "How this story is translated depends on how it is interpreted. Some see it as a Fall from Paradise story. Some see it as a battle between male and female or water and earth. Some see it as a fertility allegory. This reading is based on the interpretation of Bendt Alster." "Duly noted." "To summarize: Enki and Ninhursag - who is Asherah, although in this story she also bears other epithets - live in a place called Dilmun. Dilmun is pure, clean and bright, there is no sickness, people do not grow old, predatory animals do not hunt. "But there is no water. So Ninhursag pleads with Enki, who is a sort of water-god, to bring water to Dilmun. He does so by masturbating among the reeds of the ditches and letting flow his life-giving semen - the 'water of the heart,' as it is called. At the same time, he pronounces a nam-shub forbidding anyone to enter this area - he does not want anyone to come near his semen." "Why not?" "The myth does not say." "Then," Hiro says, "he must have thought it was valuable, or dangerous, or both." "Dilmun is now better than it was before. The fields produce abundant crops and so on." "Excuse me, but how did Sumerian agriculture work? Did they use a lot of irrigation?" "They were entirely dependent upon it." "So Enki was responsible, according to this myth, for irrigating the fields with his 'water of the heart.'" "Enki was the water-god, yes." "Okay, go on." "But Ninhursag - Asherah - violates his decree and takes Enki's semen and impregnates herself. After nine days of pregnancy she gives birth, painlessly, to a daughter, Ninmu. Ninmu walks on the riverbank. Enki sees her, becomes inflamed, goes across the river, and has sex with her." "With his own daughter." "Yes. She has another daughter nine days later, named Ninkurra, and the pattern is repeated." "Enki has sex with Ninkurra, too?" "Yes, and she has a daughter named Uttu. Now, by this time, Ninhursag has apparently recognized a pattern in Enki's behavior, and so she advises Uttu to stay in her house, predicting that Enki will then approach her bearing gifts, and try to seduce her." "Does he?" "Enki once again fills the ditches with the 'water of the heart,' which makes things grow. The gardener rejoices and embraces Enki." "Who's the gardener?" "Just some character in the story," the Librarian says. "He provides Enki with grapes and other gifts. Enki disguises himself as the gardener and goes to Uttu and seduces her. But this time, Ninhursag manages to obtain a sample of Enki's semen from Uttu's thighs." "My God. Talk about your mother-in-law from hell." "Ninhursag spreads the semen on the ground, and it causes eight plants to sprout up." "Does Enki have sex with the plants, then?" "No, he eats them - in some sense, he learns their secrets by doing so." "So here we have our Adam and Eve motif." "Ninhursag curses Enki, saying 'Until thou art dead, I shall not look upon thee with the "eye of life."' Then she disappears, and Enki becomes very ill. Eight of his organs become sick, one for each of the plants. Finally, Ninhursag is persuaded to come back. She gives birth to eight deities, one for each part of Enki's body that is sick, and Enki is healed. These deities are the pantheon of Dilmun; i.e., this act breaks the cycle of incest and creates a new race of male and female gods that can reproduce normally." "I'm beginning to see what Lagos meant about the febrile two-year-old." "Alster interprets the myth as 'an exposition of a logical problem: Supposing that originally there was nothing but one creator, how could ordinary binary sexual relations come into being?'" "Ah, there's that word 'binary' again." "You may remember an unexplored fork earlier in our conversation that would have brought us to this same place by another route. This myth can be compared to the Sumerian creation myth, in which heaven and earth are united to begin with, but the world is not really created until the two are separated. Most Creation myths begin with a 'paradoxical unity of everything, evaluated either as chaos or as Paradise,' and the world as we know it does not really come into being until this is changed. I should point out here that Enki's original name was En-Kur, Lord of Kur. Kur was a primeval ocean - Chaos - that Enki conquered." "Every hacker can identify with that." "But Asherah has similar connotations. Her name in Ugaritic, 'atiratu yammi' means 'she who treads on (the) sea (dragon).' " "Okay, so both Enki and Asherah were figures who had in some sense defeated chaos. And your point is that this defeat of chaos, the separation of the static, unified world into a binary system, is identified with creation." "Correct." "What else can you tell me about Enki?" "He was the en of the city of Eridu." "What's an en? Is that like a king?" "A priest-king of sorts. The en was the custodian of the local temple, where the me - the rules of the society - were stored on clay tablets." "Okay. Where's Eridu?" "Southern Iraq. It has only been excavated within the past few years." "By Rife's people?" "Yes. As Kramer has it, Enki is the god of wisdom - but this is a bad translation. His wisdom is not the wisdom of an old man, but rather a knowledge of how to do things, especially occult things. 'He astonishes even the other gods with shocking solutions to apparently impossible problems.' He is a sympathetic god for the most part, who assists humankind." "Really!" "Yes. The most important Sumerian myths center on him. As I mentioned, he is associated with water. He fills the rivers, and the extensive Sumerian canal system, with his life-giving semen. He is said to have created the Tigris in a single epochal act of masturbation. He describes himself as follows: 'I am lord. I am the one whose word endures. I am eternal.' Others describe him: 'a word from you - and heaps and piles stack high with grain.' 'You bring down the stars of heaven, you have computed their number.' He pronounces the name of everything created..." "'Pronounces the name of everything created?"' "In many Creation myths, to name a thing is to create it. He is referred to, in various myths, as 'expert who instituted incantations,' 'word-rich,' 'Enki, master of all the right commands,' as Kramer and Maier have it, 'His word can bring order where there had been only chaos and introduce disorder where there had been harmony.' He devotes a great deal of effort to imparting his knowledge to his son, the god Marduk, chief deity of the Babylonians." "So the Sumerians worshipped Enki, and the Babylonians, who came after the Sumerians, worshipped Marduk, his son." "Yes, sir. And whenever Marduk got stuck, he would ask his father Enki for help. There is a representation of Marduk here on this stele - the Code of Hammurabi. According to Hammurabi, the Code was given to him personally by Marduk." Hiro wanders over to the Code of Hammurabi and has a gander. The cuneiform means nothing to him, but the illustration on top is easy enough to understand. Especially the part in the middle." "Why, exactly, is Marduk handing Hammurabi a one and a zero in this picture?" Hiro asks. "They were emblems of royal power," the Librarian says. "Their origin is obscure." "Enki must have been responsible for that one," Hiro says. "Enki's most important role is as the creator and guardian of the me and the gis-hur, the 'key words' and 'patterns' that rule the universe." "Tell me more about the me." "To quote Kramer and Maier again, '[They believed in] the existence from time primordial of a fundamental, unalterable, comprehensive assortment of powers and duties, norms and standards, rules and regulations, known as me, relating to the cosmos and its components, to gods and humans, to cities and countries, and to the varied aspects of civilized life.' " "Kind of like the Torah." "Yes, but they have a kind of mystical or magical force. And they often deal with banal subjects - not just religion." "Examples?" "In one myth, the goddess Inanna goes to Eridu and tricks Enki into giving her ninety-four me and brings them back to her home town of Uruk, where they are greeted with much commotion and rejoicing." "Inanna is the person that Juanita's obsessed with." "Yes, sir. She is hailed as a savior because 'she brought the perfect execution of the me.'" "Execution? Like executing a computer program?" "Yes. Apparently, they are like algorithms for carrying out certain activities essential to the society. Some of them have to do with the workings of priesthood and kingship. Some explain how to carry out religious ceremonies. Some relate to the arts of war and diplomacy. Many of them are about the arts and crafts: music, carpentry, smithing, tanning, building, farming, even such simple tasks as lighting fires." "The operating system of society." "I'm sorry?" "When you first turn on a computer, it is an inert collection of circuits that can't really do anything. To start up the machine, you have to infuse those circuits with a collection of rules that tell it how to function. How to be a computer. It sounds as though these me served as the operating system of the society, organizing an inert collection of people into a functioning system." "As you wish. In any case, Enki was the guardian of the me." "So he was, a good guy, really." "He was the most beloved of the gods." "He sounds like kind of a hacker. Which makes his nam-shub very difficult to understand. If he was such a nice guy, why did he do the Babel thing?" "This is considered to be one of the mysteries of Enki. As you have noticed, his behavior was not always consistent with modern norms." "I don't buy that. I don't think he actually fucked his sister, daughter, and so on. That story has to be a metaphor for something else. I think it is a metaphor for some kind of recursive informational process. This whole myth stinks of it. To these people, water equals semen. Makes sense, because they probably had no concept of pure water - it was all brown and muddy and full of viruses anyway. But from a modern standpoint, semen is just a carrier of information - both benevolent sperm and malevolent viruses. Enki's water - his semen, his data, his me - flow throughout the country of Sumer and cause it to flourish." "As you may be aware, Sumer existed on the floodplain between two major rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates. This is where all the clay came from - they took it directly from the riverbeds." "So Enki even provided them with their medium for conveying information - clay. They wrote on wet clay and then they dried it out - got rid of the water. If water got to it later, the information was destroyed. But if they baked it and drove out all the water, sterilized Enki's semen with heat, then the tablet lasted forever, immutable, like the words of the Torah. Do I sound like a maniac?" "I don't know," the Librarian says, "but you do sound a little like Lagos." "I'm thrilled. Next thing you know, I'll turn myself into a gargoyle." 34 Any ped can get into Griffith Park without being noticed. And Y.T. figures that despite the barriers across the road, the Falabala camp isn't too well protected, if you've got off-road capability. For a skate ninja on a brand-new plank in a brand-new pair of Knight Visions (hey, you have to spend money to make money) there will be no problem. Just find a high embankment that ramps down into the canyon, skirt the edge until you see those campfires down below. And then lean down that hill. Trust gravity. She realizes halfway down that her blue-and-orange coverall, fly as it may be, is going to be a real attention getter in the middle of the night in the Falabala zone, so she reaches up to her collar, feels a hard disk sewn into the fabric, presses it between thumb and finger until it clicks. Her coverall darkens, the colors shimmer through the electropigment like an oil slick, and then it's black. On her first visit she didn't check this place out all that carefully because she hoped she'd never come back. So the embankment turns out to be taller and steeper than Y.T. remembered. Maybe a little more of a cliff, drop-off, or abyss than she thought. Only thing that makes her think so is that she seems to be doing a lot of free-fall work here. Major plummeting. Big time ballistic styling. That's cool, it's all part of the job, she tells herself. The smartwheels are good for it. The tree trunks are bluish black, standing out not so well against a blackish blue background. The only other thing she can see is the red laser light of the digital speedometer down on the front of her plank, which is not showing any real information. The numbers have vibrated themselves into a cloud of gritty red light as the radar speed sensor tries to lock onto something. She turns the speedometer off. Running totally black now. Precipitating her way toward the sweet 'crete of the creek bottom like a black angel who has just had the shroud lines of her celestial parachute severed by the Almighty. And when the wheels finally meet the pavement, it just about drives her knees up through her jawbone. She finishes the whole gravitational transaction with not much altitude and a nasty head of dark velocity. Mental note: Next time just jump off a fucking bridge. That way there's no question of getting an invisible cholla shoved up your nose. She whips around a corner, heeled over so far she could lick the yellow line, and her Knight Visions reveal all in a blaze of multispectral radiation. On infrared, the Falabala encampment is a turbulating aurora of pink fog punctuated by the white-hot bursts of campfires. All of it rests on dim bluish pavement, which means, in the false-color scheme of things, that it's cold. Behind everything is the jagged horizon line of that funky improvised barrier technology that the Falabalas are so good at. A barrier that has been completely spurned, snubbed, and confounded by Y.T., who dropped out of the sky into the middle of the camp like a Stealth fighter with an inferiority complex. Once you're into the actual encampment, people don't really notice or care who you are. A couple people see her, watch her slide on by, don't get all hairy about it. They probably get a lot of Kouriers coming through here. A lot of dippy, gullible, Kool-Aid-drinking couriers. And these people aren't hip enough to tell Y.T. apart from that breed. But that's okay, she'll pass for now, as long as they don't check out the detailing on her new plank. The campfires provide enough plain old regular visible light to show this sorry affair for what it is: a bunch of demented Boy Scouts, a jamboree without merit badges or hygiene. With the IR supered on top of the visible, she can also see vague, spectral red faces out in the shadows where her unassisted eyes would only see darkness. These new Knight Visions cost her a big wad of her Mob drug-running money. Just the kind of thing Mom had in mind when she insisted Y.T. get a part-time job. Some of the people who were here last time are gone now, and there's a few new ones she doesn't recognize. There's a couple of people actually wearing duct-tape straitjackets. That's a fashion statement reserved for the ones who are totally out of control, rolling and thrashing around on the ground. And there's a few more who are spazzing out, but not as bad, and one or two who are just plain messed up, like plain old derelicts that you might see at the Snooze 'n' Cruise. "Hey, look!" someone says. "It's our friend the Kourier! Welcome, friend!" She's got her Liquid Knuckles uncapped, available, and shaken well before use. She's got high-voltage, high-fashion metallic cuffs around her wrists in case someone tries to grab her by same. And a bundy stunner up her sleeve. Only the most tubular throwbacks carry guns. Guns take a long time to work (you have to wait for the victim to bleed to death), but paradoxically they end up killing people pretty often. But nobody hassles you after you've hit them with a bundy stunner. At least that's what the ads say. So it's not like she exactly feels vulnerable or anything. But still, she'd like to pick her target. So she maintains escape velocity until she's found the woman who seemed friendly - the bald chick in the torn-up Chanel knockoff - and then zeroes in on her. "Let's get off into the woods, man," Y.T. says, "I want to talk to you about what's going on with what's left of your brain." The woman smiles, struggles to her feet with the good-natured awkwardness of a retarded person in a good mood. "I like to talk about that," she says. "Because I believe in it." Y.T. doesn't stop to do a lot of talking, just grabs the woman by the hand, starts leading her uphill, into the scrubby little trees, away from the road. She doesn't see any pink faces lurking up here in the infrared, it ought to be safe. But there are a couple behind her, just ambling along pleasantly, not looking directly at her, like they just decided it was time to go for a stroll in the woods in the middle of the night. One of them is the High Priest. The woman's probably in her mid-twenties, she's a tall gangly type, nice- but not good-looking, probably was a spunky but low-scoring forward on her high school basketball team. Y.T. sits her down on a rock out in the darkness. "Do you have any idea where you are?" Y.T. says. "In the park," the woman says, "with my friends. We're helping to spread the Word." "How'd you get here?" "From the Enterprise. That's where we go to learn things." "You mean, like, the Raft? The Enterprise Raft? Is that where you guys all came from?" "I don't know where we came from," the woman says. "Sometimes it's hard to remember stuff. But that's not important." "Where were you before? You didn't grow up on the Raft, did you?" "I was a systems programmer for 3verse Systems in Mountain View, California," the woman says, suddenly whipping off a string of perfect, normal-sounding English. 'Then how did you get to be on the Raft?" "I don't know. My old life stopped. My new life started. Now I'm here." Back to baby talk. "What's the last thing you remember before your old life stopped?" "I was working late. My computer was having problems." "That's it? That's the last normal thing that happened to you?" "My system crashed," she said. "I saw static. And then I became very sick. I went to the hospital. And there in the hospital, I met a man who explained everything to me. He explained that I had been washed in the blood. That I belonged to the Word now. And suddenly it all made sense. And then I decided to go to the Raft." "You decided, or someone decided for you?" "I just wanted to. That's where we go." "Who else was on the Raft with you?" "More people like me." "Like you how?" "All programmers. Like me. Who had seen the Word." "Seen it on their computers?" "Yes. Or sometimes on TV." "What did you do on the Raft?" The woman pushes up one sleeve of her raggedy sweatshirt to expose a needle-pocked arm. "You took drugs?" "No. We gave blood." "They sucked your blood out?" "Yes. Sometimes we would do a little coding. But only some of us." "How long have you been here?" "I don't know. They move us here when our veins don't work anymore. We just do things to help spread the Word -drag stuff around, make barricades. But we don't really spend much time working. Most of the time we sing songs, pray, and tell other people about the Word." "You want to leave? I can get you out of here." "No," the woman says, "I've never been so happy." "How can you say that? You were a big-time hacker. Now you're kind of a dip, if I may speak frankly." "That's okay, it doesn't hurt my feelings. I wasn't really happy when I was a hacker. I never thought about the important things. God. Heaven. The things of the spirit. It's hard to think about those things in America. You just put them aside. But those are really the important things - not programming computers or making money. Now, that's all I think about." Y.T. has been keeping an eye on the High Priest and his buddy. They keep moving closer, one step at a time. Now they're close enough that Y.T. can smell their dinner. The woman puts her hand on Y.T.'s shoulder pad. "I want you to stay here with me. Won't you come down and have some refreshments? You must be thirsty." "Gotta run," Y.T. says, standing up. "I really have to object to that," the High Priest says, stepping forward. He doesn't say it angrily. Now he's trying to be like Y.T.'s dad. "That's not really the right decision for you." "What are you, a role model?" "That's okay. You don't have to agree. But let's go down and sit by the campfire and talk about it." "Let's just get the fuck away from Y.T. before she goes into a self-defense mode," Y.T. says. All three Falabalas step back away from her. Very cooperative. The High Priest is holding up his hands, placating her. "I'm sorry if we made you feel threatened," he says. "You guys just come on a little weird," Y.T. says, flipping her goggles back onto infrared. In the infrared, she can see that the third Falabala, the one who came up here with the High Priest, is holding a small thing in one hand that is unusually warm. She nails him with her penlight, spotlighting his upper body in a narrow yellow beam. Most of him is dirty and dun colored and reflects little light. But there is a brilliant glossy red thing, a shaft of ruby. It's a hypodermic needle. It's full of red fluid. Under infrared, it shows up warm. It's fresh blood. And she doesn't exactly get it - why these guys would be walking around with a syringe full of fresh blood. But she's seen enough. The Liquid Knuckles shoots out of the can in a long narrow neon-green stream, and when it nails the needle man in the face, he jerks his head back like he's just been axed across the bridge of the nose and falls back without making a sound. Then she gives the High Priest a shot of it for good measure. The woman just stands there, totally, like, appalled. Y.T. pumps herself up out of the canyon so fast that when she flies out into traffic, she's going about as fast as it is. As soon as she gets a solid poon on a nocturnal lettuce tanker, she gets on the phone to Mom. "Mom, listen. No, Mom, never mind the roaring noise. Yes, I am riding my skateboard in traffic. But listen to me for a second, Mom - " She has to hang up on the old bitch. It's impossible to talk to her. Then she tries to make a voice linkup with Hiro. That takes a couple of minutes to go through. "Hello! Hello! Hello!" she's shouting. Then she hears the honk of a car horn. Coming out of the telephone. "Hello?" "It's Y.T." "How are you doing?" This guy always seems a little too laid back in his personal dealings. She doesn't really want to talk about how she's doing. She hears another honking horn in the background, behind Hiro's voice. "Where the hell are you, Hiro?" "Walking down a street in L.A." "How can you be goggled in if you're walking down a street?" Then the terrible reality sinks in: "Oh, my God, you didn't turn into a gargoyle, did you?" "Well," Hiro says. He is hesitant, embarrassed, like it hadn't occurred to him ye