. He's just fired a couple of shots in the air, to get their attention, and now he backs behind one of the parked choppers, taking cover. "You're a dead man," Rife shouts. "You're stuck on the Raft, asshole. I got a million Myrmidons here. You gonna kill 'em all?" "Swords don't run out of ammo," Hiro shouts. "Well, what do you want?" "I want the tablet. You give me the tablet, then you can take off and let your million wireheads kill me. You don't give me the tablet, I'm gonna empty this clip into the windshield of your chopper." "It's bulletproof! Haw!" Rife says. "No it isn't," Hiro says, "as the rebels in Afghanistan found out." "He is right," the pilot says. "Fucking Soviet piece of shit! They put all that steel in its belly and then made the windshield out of glass?" "Give me the tablet," Hiro says' "or I'm taking it." "No you ain't," Rife says, "cause I got Tinkerbell here." At the last minute, Y.T. tries to duck down and hide, so he won't see her. She's ashamed. But Hiro locks eyes with her for just a moment, and she can see the defeat come into his face. She makes a dive for the door and gets halfway out, under the downblast of the rotors. Tony grabs her coverall's collar and hauls her back inside. He shoves her down on her belly and puts one knee in the small of her back to hold her there. Meanwhile, the engine is powering up again, and out the open door she can see the steel horizon of the carrier's deck drop from view. After all this time, she fucked up the plan. She owes Hiro a refund. Or maybe not. She puts the heel of one hand against the edge of the clay tablet and shoves as hard as she can. It slides across the floor, teeters on the threshold, and spins out of the chopper. Another delivery made, another satisfied customer. 61 For a minute or so, the chopper hovers twenty feet overhead. All the people inside are staring down at the tablet, which has burst out of its wrappings in the middle of the bullseye. The plastic has torn apart around the corners and fragments - large fragments - of the tablet have sprayed out for a few feet in either direction. Hiro stares at it, too, still safe behind the cover of a parked chopper. He stares at it so hard that be forgets to stare at anything else. Then a couple of wireheads land on his back, smashing his face into the flank of the chopper. He slides down and lands on his belly. His gun arm is still free, but a couple more wireheads sit on that. A couple on his legs, too. He can't move at all. He can't see anything but the broken tablet, twenty feet away on the flight deck. The sound and wind of Rife's chopper diminish into a distant puttering noise that takes a long time to go away completely. He feels a tingling behind his ear, anticipating the scalpel and the drill. These wireheads are operating under remote control from somewhere else. Ng seemed to think that they had an organized Raft defense system. Maybe there's a hacker-in-charge, an en, sitting in the Enterprise's control tower, moving these guys around like an air traffic controller. In any case, they are not very big on spontaneity. They sit on him for a few minutes before they decide what to do next. Then, many hands reach down and clasp him around the wrists and ankles, elbows and knees. They haul him across the flight deck like pallbearers, face up. Hiro looks up into the control tower and sees a couple of faces looking down at him. One of them - the en - is talking into a microphone. Eventually, they come to a big flat elevator that sinks down into the guts of the ship, out of view of the control tower. It comes to rest on one of the lower decks, apparently a hangar deck where they used to maintain airplanes Hiro hears a woman's voice, speaking words gently but clearly: "me lu lu mu al nu urn me en ki me en me lu lu mu me al nu urn me al nu ume me me mu lu e al nu um me dug ga mu me mu. lu e al nu urn me..." It's three feet straight down to the deck, and he covers the distance in free fall, slamming down on his back, bumping his head. All his limbs bounce loosely on the metal. Around him he sees and hears the wireheads collapsing like wet towels falling off a rack. He cannot move any part of his body. He has a little control over his eyes. A face comes into view, and he has trouble resolving it, can't quite focus, but he recognizes something in her posture, the way she tosses her hair back over her shoulder when it falls down. It's Juanita. Juanita with an antenna rising out of the base of her skull. She kneels down beside him, bends down, cups one hand around his ear, and whispers. The hot air tickles his ear, he tries to move away from it but can't. She's whispering another long string of syllables. Then she straightens up and gooses him in the side. He jerks away from her. "Get up, lazybones," she says. He gets up. He's fine now. But all the wireheads lay around him, perfectly motionless. "Just a little nam-shub I whipped up," she says. "They'll be fine." "Hi," he says. "Hi. It's good to see you, Hiro. I'm going to give you a hug now - watch out for the antenna." She does. He hugs her back. The antenna is upside his nose, but that's okay. "Once we get this thing taken off, all the hair and stuff should grow back," she whispers. Finally, she lets him go. "That hug was really more for me than for you It's been a lonely time here. Lonely and scary." This is typically paradoxical behavior for Juanita - getting touchy-feely at a time like this. "Don't get me wrong," Hiro says, "but aren't you one of the bad guys now?" "Oh, you mean this?" "Yeah. Don't you work for them?" "If so, I'm not doing a very good job." She laughs, gesturing at the ring of motionless wireheads. "No. This doesn't work on me. It sort of did, for a while, but there are ways to fight it." "Why? Why doesn't it work on you?" "I've spent the last several years hanging around with Jesuits," she says. "Look. Your brain has an immune system, just like your body. The more you use it - the more viruses you get exposed to - the better your immune system becomes. And I've got a hell of an immune system. Remember, I was an atheist for a while, and then I came back to religion the hard way." "Why didn't they screw you up the way they did Da5id?" "I came here voluntarily." "Like Inanna." "Yes." "Why would anyone come here voluntarily?" "Hiro, don't you realize? This is it. This is the nerve center of a religion that is at once brand new and very ancient. Being here is like following Jesus or Mohammed around, getting to observe the birth of a new faith." "But it's terrible. Rife is the Antichrist." "Of course he is. But it's still interesting. And Rife has got something else going for him: Eridu." "The city of Enki." "Exactly. He's got every tablet Enki ever wrote. For a person who's interested in religion and hacking, this is the only place in the world to be. If those tablets were in Arabia, I'd put on a chador and burn my driver's license and go there. But the tablets are here, and so I let them wire me up instead." "So all this time, your goal was to study Enki's tablets." "To get the me, just like Inanna. What else?" "And have you been studying them?" "Oh, yes." "And?" She points to the fallen wireheads. "And I can do it now. I'm a ba'al shem. I can hack the brainstem." "Okay, look. I'm happy for you, Juanita. But at the time being, we have a little problem. We are surrounded by a million people who want to kill us. Can you paralyze all of them?" "Yes," she says, "but then they'd die." "You know what we have to do, don't you, Juanita?" "Release the nam-shub of Enki," she says. "Do the Babel thing." "Let's go get it," Hiro says. "First things first," Juanita says. "The control tower." "Okay, you get ready to grab the tablet, and I'll take out the control tower." "How are you going to do that? By cutting people up with swords?" "Yeah. That's the only thing they're good for." "Let's do it the other way around," Juanita says. She gets up and walks off across the hangar deck. The nam-shub of Enki is a tablet wrapped up in a clay envelope covered with the cuneiform equivalent of a warning sticker. The entire assembly has shattered into dozens of pieces. Most of them have stayed wrapped up inside the plastic, but some have gone spinning across the flight deck. Hiro gathers them up from the helipad and returns them to the center. By the time he's got the plastic wrapper cut away, Juanita is waving to him from the windows on top of the control tower. He takes all the pieces that look to be part of the envelope and puts them into a separate pile. Then he assembles the remains of the tablet itself into a coherent group. It's not obvious, yet, how to piece them together, and he doesn't have time for jigsaw puzzles. So he goggles into his office, uses the computer to take an electronic snapshot of the fragments, and calls the Librarian. "Yes, sir?" "This hypercard contains a picture of a shattered clay tablet. Do you know of some software that would be good at piecing it back together?" "One moment, sir," the Librarian says. Then a hypercard appears in his hand. He gives it to Hiro. It contains a picture of an assembled tablet. "That's how it looks, sir." "Can you read Sumerian?" "Yes, sir." "Can you read this tablet out loud?" "Yes, sir." "Get ready to do it. And hold on a second." Hiro walks over to the base of the control tower. There's a door there that gives him access to a stairwell. He climbs up to the control room, a strange mixture of Iron Age and high-tech. Juanita's waiting there, surrounded by peacefully slumbering wireheads. She taps a microphone that is projecting from a communications panel at the end of a flexible gooseneck - the same mike that the en was speaking into. "Live to the Raft," she says. "Go for it." Hiro puts his computer into speakerphone mode and stands up next to the microphone. "Librarian, read it back," he says. And a string of syllables pours out of the speaker. In the middle of it, Hiro glances up at Juanita. She's standing in the far comer of the room with her fingers stuck in her ears. Down at the base of the stairs, a wirehead begins to talk. Deep down inside the Enterprise, there's more talking going on. And none of it makes any sense. It's just a lot of babbling. There's an external catwalk on the control tower. Hiro goes out there and listens to the Raft. From all around them comes a dim roar, not of waves or wind, but of a million unchained human voices speaking in a confusion of tongues. Juanita comes out to listen, too. Hiro sees a trickle of red under her ear. "You're bleeding," he says. "I know. A little bit of primitive surgery," she says. Her voice is strained and uncomfortable. "I've been carrying around a scalpel blade for cases like this." "What did you do?" "Slid it up under the base of the antenna and cut the wire that goes into my skull," she says. "When did you do that?" "While you were down on the flight deck." "Why?" "Why do you think?" she says. "So I wouldn't be exposed to the nam-shub of Enki. I'm a neurolinguistic hacker now, Hiro. I went through hell to obtain this knowledge. It's a part of me. Don't expect me to submit to a lobotomy." "If we get out of this, will you be my girl?" "Naturally," she says. "Now let's get out of it." 62 "I was just doing my job, man," she says. "This Enki dude wanted to get a message to Hiro, and I delivered it." "Shut up," Rife says. He doesn't say it like he's pissed. He just wants her to be quiet. Because what she did doesn't make any difference now that all those wireheads have piled on top of Hiro. Y.T. looks out the window. They are buzzing across the Pacific, keeping pretty low down so that the water skims quickly beneath them. She doesn't know how fast they're going, but it looks to be pretty damn fast. She always thought the ocean was supposed to be blue, but in fact it's the most boring gray color she's ever seen. And there's miles and miles of it. After a few minutes, another chopper catches up with them and begins flying alongside, pretty close, in formation. It's the RARE chopper, the one full of medics. Through its cabin window, she can see Raven sitting in one of the seats. At first she thinks he's still unconscious because he's kind of hunched over, not moving. Then he lifts his head and she sees that he's goggled in to the Metaverse. He reaches up with one hand and pulls the goggles up onto his forehead for a moment, squints out the window, and sees her watching him. Their eyes meet and her heart starts flopping around weakly, like a bunny in a Ziploc bag. He grins and waves. Y.T. sits back in her seat and pulls the shade down over the window. 63 From Hiro's front yard to L. Bob Rife's black cube at Port 127 is halfway around the Metaverse, a distance of 32,768 kilometers. The only hard part, really, is getting out of Downtown. He can ride his bike straight through the avatars as usual, but the Street is also cluttered with vehicles, animercials commercial displays, public plazas, and other bits of solid-looking software that get in his way. Not to mention a few distractions. Off to his right, about a kilometer away from The Black Sun is a deep hole in the hyper-Manhattan skyline. It is an open plaza about a mile wide, a park of sorts where avatars can gather for concerts and conventions and festivals. Most of it is occupied by a deep-dish amphitheater that is capable of seating close to a million avatars at once. Down at the bottom is a huge circular stage. Normally, the stage is occupied by major rock groups. Tonight, it is occupied by the grandest and most brilliant computer hallucinations that the human mind can invent. A three-dimensional marquee hangs above it announcing tonight's event: a benefit graphics concert staged on behalf of Da5id Meier, who is still hospitalized with an inexplicable disease. The amphitheater is half filled with hackers. Once he gets out of Downtown, Hiro twists his throt­tle up to the max and covers the remaining thirty-two thousand and some kilometers in the space of about ten minutes. Over his head, the express trains are whooshing down the track at a metaphorical speed of ten thousand miles per hour; he passes them like they're standing still. This only works because he's riding in an absolutely straight line. He's got a routine coded into his motorcycle software that makes it follow the monorail track automatically so that he doesn't even have to worry about steering it. Meanwhile, Juanita's standing next to him in Reality. She's got another pair of goggles; she can see all the same things that Hiro sees. "Rife's got a mobile uplink on his corporate chopper, just like the one on commercial airliners, so he can patch into the Metaverse when he's in the air. As long as he's airborne, that's his only link to the Metaverse. We may be able to hack our way into that one link and block it or something..." "That low-level communications stuff is too full of medicine for us to mess with it in this decade," Hiro says, braking his motorcycle to a stop. "Holy shit. It's just like Y.T. described it." He's in front of Port 127. Rife's black cube is there, just as Y.T. described it. There's no door. Hiro starts walking away from the Street, toward the cube. It reflects no light at all, so he can't tell whether it's ten feet or ten miles away from him until the security daemons begin to materialize. There are half a dozen of them, all big sturdy avatars in blue coveralls, sort of quasi-military looking, but without rank. They don't need rank because they're all running the same program. They materialize around him in a neat semicircle with a radius of about ten feet, blocking Hiro's way to the cube. Hiro mumbles a word under his breath and vanishes - he slips into his invisible avatar. It would be very interesting to hang around and see how these security daemons deal with it, but right now he has to get moving before they get a chance to adjust. They don't, at least not very well. Hiro runs between two of the security daemons and heads for the wall of the cube. He finally gets there, slamming into it, coming to dead stop. The security daemons have all turned around and are chasing him. They can figure out where he is - the computer tells them that much - but they can't do much to him. Like the bouncer daemons in The Black Sun, which Hiro helped write, they shove people around by applying basic rules of avatar physics. When Hiro is invisible, there is very little for them to shove. But if they are well written, they may have more subtle ways of messing him up, so he's not wasting any time. He pokes his katana through the side of the cube and follows it through the wall and out the other side. This is a hack. It is really based on a very old hack, a loophole that he found years ago when he was trying to graft the sword-fighting rules onto the existing Metaverse software. His blade doesn't have the power to cut a hole in the wall - this would mean permanently changing the shape of someone else's building - but it does have the power to penetrate things. Avatars do not have that power. That is the whole purpose of a wall in the Metaverse; it is a structure that does not allow avatars to penetrate it. But like anything else in the Metaverse, this rule is nothing but a protocol, a convention that different computers agree to follow. In theory, it cannot be ignored. But in practice, it depends upon the ability of different computers to swap information very precisely, at high speed, and at just the right times. And when you are connected to the system over a satellite uplink, as Hiro is, out here on the Raft, there is a delay as the signals bounce up to the satellite and back down. That delay can be taken advantage of, if you move quickly and don't look back. Hiro passes right through the wall on the tail end of his all-penetrating katana. Rifeland is a vast, brightly lit space occupied by elementary shapes done up in primary colors. It is like being inside an educational toy designed to teach solid geometry to three-year-olds: cubes, spheres, tetrahedrons polyhedrons, connected with a web of cylinders and lines and helices. But in this case, it has gone way, way out of control, as if every Tinkertoy set and Lego block ever made had been slapped together according to some long-forgotten scheme. Hiro's been around the Metaverse long enough to know that despite the bright cheery appearance of this thing, it is, in fact, as simple and utilitarian as an Army camp. This is a model of a system. A big complicated system. The shapes probably represent computers, or central nodes in Rife's worldwide network, or Pearly Gates franchises, or any other kind of local and regional offices that Rife has going around the world. By clambering over this structure and, going into those bright shapes, Hiro could probably uncover some of the code that makes Rife's network operate. He could, perhaps, try to hack it up, as Juanita suggested. But there is no point in messing with something he doesn't understand. He might waste hours fooling around with some piece of code only to find out that it was the software to control the automatic toilet flushers at Rife Bible College. So Hiro keeps moving, keeps looking up at the tangle of shapes, trying to find a pattern. He knows, now, that he has found his way into the boiler room of the entire Metaverse. But he has no idea what he's looking for. This system, he realizes, really consists of several separate networks all tangled together in the same space. There's an extremely complicated tangle of fine red lines, millions of them, running back and forth between thousands of small red balls. Just as a wild guess, Hiro figures that this may represent Rife's fiber-optics network, with its innumerable local offices and nodes spread all over the world. There are a number of less complicated networks in other colors, which might represent coaxial lines, such as they used to use for cable television, or even voice phone lines. And there is a crude, heavily built, blocky network all done up in blue. It consists of a small number - fewer than a dozen - of big blue cubes. They are connected to each other, but to nothing else, by massive blue tubes; the tubes are transparent, and inside of them, Hiro can see bundles of smaller connections in various colors. It has taken Hiro a while to see all of this, because the blue cubes are nearly obscured; they are all surrounded by little red balls and other small nodes, like trees being overwhelmed with kudzu. It appears to be an older, preexisting network of some kind, with its own internal channels, mostly primitive ones like voice phone. Rife has patched into it, heavily, with his own, higher-tech systems. Hiro maneuvers until he can get a closer look at one of the blue cubes, peering through the clutter of lines that has grown around it. The blue cube has a big white star on each of its six faces. "It's the Government of the United States," Juanita says. "Where hackers go to die," Hiro says. The largest, and yet the least efficient, producer of computer software in the world. Hiro and Y.T. have eaten a lot of junk food together in different joints all over L.A. - doughnuts, burritos, pizza, sushi, you name it - and all Y.T. ever talks about is her mother and the terrible job that she has with the Feds. The regimentation. The lie-detector tests. The fact that for all the work she does, she really has no idea what it is that the government is really working on. It's always been a mystery to Hiro, too, but then, that's how the government is. It was invented to do stuff that private enterprise doesn't bother with, which means that there's probably no reason for it; you never know what they're doing or why. Hackers have traditionally looked upon the government's coding sweatshops with horror and just tried to forget that all of that shit ever existed. But they have thousands of programmers. The programmers work twelve hours a day out of some twisted sense of personal loyalty. Their software-engineering techniques, while cruel and ugly, are very sophisticated. They must have been up to something. "Juanita?" "Yeah?" "Don't ask me why I think this. But I think that the government has been undertaking a big software development project for L. Bob Rife." "Makes sense," she says. "He has such a love-hate relationship with his programmers - he needs them, but he won't trust them. The government's the only organization he would trust to write something important. I wonder what it is?" "Hold on," Hiro says. "Hold on." He is now a stone's throw away from a big blue cube sitting at ground level. All the other blue cubes sort of feed into it. There is a motorcycle parked next to the cube, rendered in color, but just one notch above black and white: big jaggedy pixels and a limited color palette. It has a sidecar. Raven's standing next to it. He is carrying something in his arms. It is another simple geometric construction, a long smooth blue ellipsoid a couple of feet in length. From the way he's moving, Hiro thinks that Raven has just removed it from the blue cube; he carries it over to the motorcycle and nestles it into the sidecar. "The Big One," Hiro says. "It's exactly what we were afraid of," Juanita says. "Rife's revenge." "Headed for the amphitheater. Where all the hackers are gathered in one place. Rife's going to infect all of them at once. He's going to burn their minds." 64 Raven's already on the motorcycle. If Hiro chases him on foot, he might catch him before he reaches the Street. But he might not. In that case, Raven would be on his way to Downtown at tens of thousands of miles per hour while Hiro was still trying to get back to his own motorcycle. At those speeds, once Hiro has lost sight of Raven, he's lost him forever. Raven starts his bike, begins maneuvering carefully through the tangle, headed for the exit. Hiro takes off as fast as his invisible legs can carry him, headed straight for the wall He punches through a couple of seconds later, runs back to the Street. His tiny little invisible avatar can't operate the motorcycle, so he returns to his normal look, hops on his bike, and gets it turned around. Looking back, he sees Raven riding out toward the Street, the logic bomb glowing a soft blue, like heavy water in a reactor. He doesn't even see Hiro yet. Now's his chance. He draws his katana, aims his bike at Raven, pumps it up to sixty or so miles an hour. No point in coming in too fast; the only way to kill Raven's avatar is to take its head off. Running it over with the motorcycle won't have any effect. A security daemon is running toward Raven, waving his arms. Raven looks up, sees Hiro bearing down on him, and bursts forward. The sword cuts air behind Raven's head. It's too late. Raven must be gone now - but turning himself around, Hiro can see him in the middle of the Street. He slammed into one of the stanchions that holds up the monorail track - a perennial irritation to high-speed motorcyclists. "Shit!" both of them say simultaneously. Raven gets turned toward Downtown and twists his throttle just as Hiro is pulling in behind him on the Street, doing the same. Within a couple of seconds, they're both headed for Downtown at something like fifty thousand miles an hour. Hiro's half a mile behind Raven but can see him clearly: the streetlights have merged into a smooth twin streak of yellow, and Raven blazes in the middle, a storm of cheap color and big pixels. "If I can take his head off, they're finished," Hiro says. "Gotcha," Juanita says. "Because if you kill Raven, he gets kicked out of the system. And he can't sign back on until the Graveyard Daemons dispose of his avatar." "And I control the Graveyard Daemons. So all I have to do is kill the bastard once." "Once they get their choppers back to land, they'll have better access to the net - they can have someone else go into the Metaverse and take over for him," Juanita warns. "Wrong. Because Uncle Enzo and Mr. Lee are waiting for them on land. They have to do it during the next hour, or never." 65 Y.T. suddenly wakes up. She hadn't realized that she was asleep. Something about the thwop of the rotor blades must have lulled her. She must be tired as shit, is what it really is. "What the fuck is going on with my com net?" L. Bob Rife is squalling. "No one answers," the Russian pilot says. "Not Raft, not L.A., not Khyooston." "Get me LAX on the phone, then," Rife says. "I want to take the jet to Houston. We'll get our butts over to the campus and find out what's going on." The pilot messes around on his control panel. "Problem," he says. "What?" The pilot just shakes his head forlornly. "Someone is messing with the skyphone. We're being jammed." "I might be able to get a line," the President says. Rife just gives him a look like, right, asshole. "Anybody got a fucking quarter?" Rife hollers. Frank and Tony are startled for a minute. "We're gonna have to touch down at the first pay phone we see and make a goddamn phone call." He laughs. "Can you believe that? Me, using a telephone?" A second later, Y.T. looks out the window and is blown away to see actual land down there, and a two-lane highway winding its way down a warm sandy coastline. It's California. The chopper slows, cuts in closer to land, begins following the highway. Most of it is free of plastic and neon lights, but before long they home in on a short bit of franchise ghetto, built on both sides of the road in a place where it has cut away from the beach some distance. The chopper sets down in the parking lot of a Buy 'n' Fly. Fortunately, the lot's mostly empty, they don't cut any heads off. A couple of youths are playing video games inside, and they barely look up at the astonishing sight of the chopper. She's glad; Y.T. is totally embarrassed to be seen with this dull assortment of old farts. The chopper just sits there, idling, while L. Bob Rife jumps out and runs over to the pay phone bolted to the front wall. These guys were stupid enough to put her in the seat right next to the fire extinguisher. No reason not to take advantage of that fact. She jerks it out of its bracket, pulling out the safety pin in virtually the same motion, and squeezes the trigger, aiming it right into Tony's face. Nothing happens. "Fuck!" she shouts, and throws it at him, or rather pushes it toward him. He's just leaning forward, grabbing at her wrist, and the impact of the extinguisher hitting his face is enough to put a major dent in his 'tude. Gives her enough time to swing her legs out of the chopper. Everything's getting fucked up. One of her pockets is zipped open, and as she's half-falling, half-rolling out of the chopper, the fire-extinguisher bracket catches in that pocket and holds her. By the time she's gotten free of that, Tony's back, now on his hands and knees, reaching out for her arm. That she manages to avoid. She's running out freely into the parking lot. At the back, she's hemmed in by the Buy 'n' Fly, along the sides by the tall border fence that separates this place from a NeoAquarian Temple on one side and a Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong franchulate on the other. The only way to escape is out onto the road - on the other side of the chopper. But the pilot and Frank and Tony have already jumped out and are blocking her exit out onto the road. NeoAquarian Temple isn't going to help her. If she begs and pleads, they might just include her in their mantras next week. But Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong is another story. She runs to the fence and starts trying to climb it. Eight feet of chain link with razor ribbon on top. But her clothing should stop the razor ribbon. Mostly. She gets about halfway up. Then, pudgy but strong arms are around her waist. She's out of luck. L. Bob Rife lifts her right off the fence, both arms and both legs kicking the air uselessly. He backs up a couple of steps and starts carrying her back toward the chopper. She looks back at the Hong Kong franchise. It was a close thing. Someone's in the parking lot. A Kourier, cruising in off the highway, just kind of chilling out and taking it real easy. "Hey!" she screams. She reaches up and punches the lapel switch on her coverall, turning it bright blue and orange. "Hey! I'm a Kourier! My name's Y.T.! These maniac scum guys kidnapped me!" "Wow," the Kourier says. "What a drag." Then he asks her something. But she can't hear it because the helicopter is whirling up its blades. "They're taking me to LAX!" she screams at the top of her lungs. Then Rife slams her into the chopper face first. The chopper lifts off, tracked precisely by an audience of antennas on the roof of Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong. In the parking lot, the Kourier watches the chopper taking off. It's really cool to watch, and it has a lot of bumping guns on it. But those dudes inside of the chopper were harshing that chick major. The Kourier pulls his personal phone out of its holster, jacks into RadiKS Central Command, and punches a big red button. He calls a Code. Twenty-five hundred Kouriers are massed on the reinforced-concrete banks of the L.A. River. Down in the bottom trench of the river, Vitaly Chernobyl and the Meltdowns are just hitting the really good part of their next major hit single, "Control Rod Jam." A number of the Kouriers are taking advantage of this sound track to style up and down the banks of the river; only Vitaly, live, can get their adrenaline pumping hard enough to enable them to skate a sharp bank at eighty miles per hour plus without doing a wilson into the crete. And then the dark mass of Meltdown fans turns into a gyrating, orange-red galaxy as twenty-five hundred new stars appear. It's a mind-blowing sight, and at first they think it's a new visual effect put together by Vitaly and his imageers. It is like a mass flicking of Bics, except brighter and more organized; each Kourier looks down on his or her belt to see that a red light is flashing on their personal telephone. Looks like some poor skater called in a Code. In a Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong franchise on the outskirts of Phoenix, Rat Thing number B-782 comes awake. Fido is waking up because the dogs are barking tonight. There is always barking. Much of the barking is very far away. Fido knows that faraway barks are not as important as close barks, and so he often sleeps through these. But sometimes a faraway bark will carry a special sound that makes Fido excited, and he can't help waking up. He is hearing one of those barks right now. It comes from far away but it is urgent. Some nice doggie somewhere is very upset. He is so upset that his barking has spread to all the other doggies in the pack. Fido listens to the bark. He gets excited, too. Some bad strangers have just been very close to a nice doggie's yard. They were in a flying thing. They had lots of guns. Fido doesn't like guns very much. A stranger with a gun shot him once and made him hurt. Then the nice girl came and helped him. These are extremely bad strangers. Any nice doggie in his right mind would want to hurt them and make them go away. As Fido listens to the bark, he sees what they look like and hears the way they sound. If any of these very bad strangers ever come into his yard, he will be extremely upset. Then Fido notices that the bad strangers are chasing someone. He can tell they are hurting her by the way her voice sounds and the way she moves. The bad strangers are hurting the nice girl who loves him! Fido gets more angry than he has ever been, even more angry than when a bad man shot him long ago. His job is to keep bad strangers out of his yard. He does not do anything else. But it's even more important to protect the nice girl who loves him. That is more important than anything. And nothing can stop him. Not even the fence. The fence is very tall. But he can remember a long time ago when he used to jump over things that were taller than his head. Fido comes out of his doggie house, curls his long legs beneath him, and jumps over the fence around his yard before he has remembered that he is not capable of jumping over it. This contradiction is lost on him, though; as a dog, introspection is not one of his strong points. The bark is spreading to another place far away. All the nice doggies who live in this faraway place are being warned to look out for the very bad strangers and the girl who loves Fido, because they are going to that place. Fido sees the place in his mind. It is big and wide and flat and open, like a nice field for chasing Frisbees. It has lots of big flying things. Around the edges are a couple of yards where nice doggies live. Fido can hear those nice doggies barking in reply. He knows where they are. Far away. But you can get there by streets. Fido knows a whole lot of different streets. He just runs down streets, and he knows where he is and where he's going. At first, the only trace that B-782 leaves of his passage is a dancing trail of sparks down the center of the franchise ghetto. But once he makes his way out onto a long straight piece of highway, he begins to leave further evidence: a spume of shattered blue safety glass spraying outward in parallel vanes from all four lanes of traffic as the windows and the windshields of the cars blow out of their frames, spraying into the air like rooster tails behind a speedboat. As part of Mr. Lee's good neighbor policy, all Rat Things are programmed never to break the sound barrier in a populated area. But Fido's in too much of a hurry to worry about the good neighbor policy. Jack the sound barrier. Bring the noise. 66 "Raven," Hiro says, "let me tell you a story before I kill you." "I'll listen," Raven says. "It's a long ride." All vehicles in the Metaverse have voice phones on them. Hiro simply called home to the Librarian and had him look up Raven's number. They are riding in lockstep across the black surface of the imaginary planet now, though Hiro is gaining on Raven, meter by meter. "My dad was in the Army in World War Two. Lied about his age to get in. They put him in the Pacific doing scut work. Anyway, he got captured by the Nipponese." "So?" "So they took him back to Nippon. Put him in a prison camp. There were a lot of Americans there, plus some Brits and some Chinese. And a couple of guys that they couldn't place. They looked like Indians. Spoke a little English. But they spoke Russian even better." "They were Aleuts," Raven says. "American citizens. But no one had ever heard of them. Most people don't know that the Japanese conquered American territory during the war - several islands at the end of the Aleutian chain. Inhabited. By my people. They took the two most important Aleuts and put them in prison camps in Japan. One of them was the mayor of Attu - the most important civil authority. The other was even more important, to us. He was the chief harpooneer of the Aleut nation." Hiro says, "The mayor got sick and died. He didn't have any immunities. But the harpooneer was one tough son of a bitch. He got sick a few times, but he survived. Went out to work in the fields along with the rest of the prisoners, growing food for the war effort. Worked in the kitchen, preparing slop for the prisoners and the guards. He kept to himself a lot. Everyone avoided him because he smelled terrible. His bed stank up the barracks." "He was cooking up aconite whale poison from mushrooms and other substances that he found in the fields and secreted in his clothing," Raven says. "Besides," Hiro continues, "they were pissed at him because he broke out a windowpane in the barracks once, and it let cold air in for the rest of the winter. Anyway, one day, after lunch, all of the guards became terribly sick." "Whale poison in the fish stew," Raven says. "The prisoners were already out working in the fields, and when the guards began to get sick, they began to march them all back in toward the barracks, because they couldn't keep watch over them when they were doubled over with stomach cramps. And this late in the war, it wasn't easy to bring in reinforcements. My father was last in the line of prisoners. And this Aleut guy was right in front of him." Raven says, "As the prisoners were crossing an irrigation ditch, the Aleut dove into the water and disappeared." "My father didn't know what to do," Hiro says, "until he heard a grunt from the guard who was bringing up the rear. He turned around and saw that this guard had a bamboo spear stuck all the way through his body. Just came out of nowhere. And he still couldn't see the Aleut. Then another guard went down with his throat slit, and there was the Aleut, winding up and throwing another spear that brought down yet another guard." "H