They"re crossing a big broad platform. Suddenly he"s right behind her, his arms are around her body, and he draws her back into him. Her toes are just barely touching the ground. She can feel his cool nose against her temple and his hot breath coming into one ear. It sends a tingle straight down to her toes.
"Short-term goal or long-term goal?" Raven whispers.
"Um-long term."
"I used to have this plan-I was going to nuke America."
"Oh. Well, that"d be kind of harsh," she says.
"Maybe. Depends on what kind of a mood I"m in. Other than that, no long-term goals." Every time he whispers something, another breath tickles her ear.
"How about medium-term then?"
"In a few hours, the Raft comes apart," Raven says. "We"re headed for California. Looking for a decent place to live. Some people might try to stop us. It"s my job to help the people make it safe and sound up onto the sh.o.r.e. So you might say I"m going to war."
"Oh, that"s a shame," she mumbles.
"So it"s hard to think of anything besides the here and now."
"Yeah, I know."
"I rented a nice room to spend my last night in," Raven says. "It"s got clean sheets."
Not for long, she thinks.
She had thought that his lips would be cold and stiff, like a fish. But she"s shocked at how warm they are. Every part of his body feels hot, like that"s his only way of keeping warm up in the Arctic.
About thirty seconds into the kiss, he bends down, wraps his great thigh-sized forearms around her waist, cinches her up into the air, lifting her feet up off the deck.
She was afraid he would take her to some horrible place, but it turns out he rented a whole shipping container, stacked way up high on one of the containerships in the Core. The place is like a luxury hotel for big Core wheels.
She"s trying to decide what to do with her legs, which are now dangling uselessly. She"s not quite ready to wrap them around him, not this early in the date. Then she feels them spreading apart-way, way apart-Raven"s thighs must be bigger around than his waist. He has lifted one leg up into her crotch and put the foot up on a chair so she"s straddling his thigh, and with his arms he"s holding her body up against him, squeezing and relaxing, squeezing and relaxing, so that she"s helplessly rocking back and forth, all her weight on her crotch. Some huge muscle, the upmost part of his quadricep, angles up where it attaches to the bone in his pelvis, and as he rocks her in closer and tighter she ends up straddling that, shoved against it so tight that she can feel the seams in the crotch of her coverall, feel the coins in the key pocket of Raven"s black jeans. When he slides his hands downward, still pressing her inward, and squeezes her b.u.t.t in both hands, so big it must be like squeezing an apricot, fingers so long they wrap around and push up into her crack and she rocks forward to get away from it but there"s nowhere to go except into his body, her face breaking away from the kiss and sliding against the perspiration of his broad, smooth, whiskerless neck. She can"t help letting out a yelp that turns into a moan, and then she knows he"s got her. Because she never makes noises during s.e.x, but this time she can"t help it.
And once she"s decided that, she"s impatient to get on with it. She can move her arms, she can move her legs, but the middle part of her body is pinned in place, it"s not going to move until Raven moves it. And he"s not going to move it until she makes him want to. So she goes to work on his ear. That usually does it.
He tries to get away from her. Raven, trying to run away from something. She likes that idea. She has arms that are as strong as a man"s, strong from hanging on to that poon on the freeway, so she wraps them around his head like a vise and presses her forehead against the side of his head and starts...o...b..ting the tip of her tongue around the little folded-over rim of his outer ear.
He stands paralyzed for a couple of minutes, breathing shallowly, while she works her way inward, and when she finally shoves her tongue into his ear ca.n.a.l, he bucks and grunts like he"s just been harpooned, lifts her up off his leg, kicks the chair across the room so hard it cracks against the steel wall of the shipping container. She feels herself falling backward toward the futon, thinks for a moment she"s about to get crushed beneath him, but he catches all the weight on his elbows, except for his lower body, which slams into hers all at once, sending another electric shot of pleasure up her back and down her legs. Her thighs and calves have turned solid and tight, like they"ve been pumped full of juice, she can"t relax them. He leans up on one elbow, separating their bodies for a moment, plants his mouth on hers to maintain the contact, fills her mouth with his tongue, holds her there with it while he one-hands the fastener at the collar of her coverall and yanks the zipper all the way down to the crotch. It"s open now, exposing a broad V of skin converging from her shoulders. He rolls back onto her, grabs the top of the coverall with both hands and pulls it down behind her, forcing her arms down and to her sides, stuffing the ma.s.s of fabric and pads down underneath the small of her back so she stays arched up toward him. Then he"s in between her tight thighs, all those skating muscles strained to the limit, and his hands come back inside to squeeze her b.u.t.t again, this time his hot skin against hers, it"s like sitting on a warm b.u.t.tered griddle, makes the whole body feel warmer. There"s something she"s supposed to remember at this point.
Something she has to take care of. Something important. One of those dreary duties that always seems so logical when you think about it in the abstract and, at moments like this, seems so utterly beside the point that it never even occurs to you.
It must be something to do with birth control. Or something like that. But Y.T. is helpless with pa.s.sion, so she has an excuse. So she squirms and kicks her knees until the coverall and her panties have slid down to her ankles.
Raven gets completely naked in about three seconds. He pulls his shirt off over his head and throws it somewhere, bucks out of his pants and kicks them off onto the floor. His skin is as smooth as hers, like the skin of a mammal that swims through the sea, but he feels hot, not cold and fishy. She doesn"t see his c.o.c.k, but she doesn"t want to, what"s the point, right?
She does something she"s never done before: comes as soon as he goes into her. It"s like a bolt of lightning shoots out from the middle, down the backs of her tensed legs, up her spine, into her nipples, she sucks in air until her whole ribcage is poking out through the skin and then screams it all out. She just rips one.
Raven"s probably deaf now. Which is his f.u.c.king problem.
She goes limp. So does he. He must have come at the same time. Which is okay. It"s early, and poor Raven was h.o.r.n.y as a goat from being out to sea. Later on, she"ll expect more endurance.
Right now, she"s content to lie underneath him and suck the warmth out of his body. She"s been cold for days. Her feet are still cold, hanging out in the air, but that just makes the rest of her feel much better.
Raven seems content, too. Uncharacteristically so. Talk about bliss. Most guys would already be flipping through channels on the TV. Not Raven. He"s content to lie here all night, breathing softly into her neck. As a matter of fact, he"s gone to sleep right on top of her. Like something a woman would do.
She dozes, too. Lies there for a minute or two, all these thoughts going through her head.
This is a pretty nice place. Like a mid-priced business hotel in the Valley. She never figured anything like this existed on the Raft. But there"s rich people and poor people here, too, just like anywhere else.
When they came to a certain place on the walkway, not far from the first of the big Core ships, there was an armed guard blocking the way. He let Raven go on through, and Raven took Y.T. with him, leading her by the hand, and the guard gave her a look but he didn"t say anything, he was keeping most of his attention on Raven.
After that, the walkway got a lot nicer. It was broad, like the boardwalk at the beach, and not quite so crowded with old Chinese ladies carrying gigantic bundles on their backs. And it didn"t smell like s.h.i.t quite so much.
When they got to the first Core ship, there was a stairway that took them from sea level up to its deck. From there, they took a gangplank across to the innards of another ship, and Raven led her through the place like he"d been through it a million times, and eventually they crossed another gangplank into this containership. And it was just like a f.u.c.king hotel in there: bellhops with white gloves carrying luggage for guys in suits, a registration desk, everything. It was still a ship-everything"s made out of steel that has been painted white a million times over-but nothing like what she expected. There"s even a little helipad where the suits can come and go. There"s a chopper parked next to it with a logo she"s seen before: Rife Advanced Research Enterprises. RARE. The people who gave her the envelope to deliver to EBGOC headquarters. All of this is fitting together now: the Feds and L. Bob Rife and the Reverend Wayne"s Pearly Gates and the Raft are all part of the same deal.
"Who the h.e.l.l are all these people?" she asked Raven when she first saw it. But he just shushed her.
She asked him again later, as they were wandering around looking for their room, and he told her: These guys all work for L. Bob Rife. Programmers and engineers and communications people. Rife"s an important man. Got a monopoly to run.
"Rife"s here?" she asked him. Putting on an act, of course; she had it figured out by that point.
"Ssh," he said.
It"s a nice piece of intel. Hiro should like it, if she can just get it to him. And even that"s going to be easy. She never thought there"d be Metaverse terminals here on the Raft, but on this ship there"s a whole row of them, so that visiting suits can call back to civilization. All she has to do is get to one without waking up Raven. Which could be tricky. It"s too bad she couldn"t drug him with something, like in the Raft movies.
That"s when the realization comes. It swims up out of her subconscious in the same way that a nightmare does. Or when you leave the house and remember half an hour later that you left a teakettle going on the stove. It"s a cold clammy reality that she can"t do a d.a.m.n thing about.
She has finally remembered what that nagging thing was that bothered her for a moment, right before the actual moment of f.u.c.king.
It was not birth control. It was not a hygiene thing.
It was her dentata. The last line of personal self-defense. Along with Uncle Enzo"s dog tags, the one piece of stuff that the Orthos didn"t take. They didn"t take it because they don"t believe in cavity searches.
Which means that at the moment Raven entered her, a very small hypodermic needle slipped imperceptibly into the engorged frontal vein of his p.e.n.i.s, automatically shooting a c.o.c.ktail of powerful narcotics and depressants into his bloodstream.
Raven"s been harpooned in the place where he least expected it. Now he"s going to sleep for at least four hours.
And then, boy, is he ever going to be p.i.s.sed.
Hiro remembers Eliot"s warning: Don"t go onto the Raft itself without a local guide. This kid must be a Refu that Bruce Lee recruited from some Filipino neighborhood on the Raft.
The kid"s name is Transubstanciacion. Tranny for short. He climbs into the zodiac before Hiro tells him to.
"Wait a sec," Hiro says. "We have to do some packing first."
Hiro risks turning on a small flashlight, uses it to rummage around the yacht, picking up valuable stuff: a few bottles of (presumably) drinkable water, some food, extra ammunition for his nine. He takes one of the grappling hooks, too, coiling its rope neatly. Seems like the kind of thing that might be useful on the Raft.
He has one other ch.o.r.e to take care of, not something he"s looking forward to.
Hiro has lived in a lot of places where mice and even rats were a problem. He used to get rid of them using traps. But then he had a run of bad luck with the things. He would hear a trap snap shut in the middle of the night, and then instead of silence he would hear pliable squeaking and thrashing, whacking noises as the stricken rodent tried to drag itself back to safety with a trap snapped over some part of its anatomy, usually its head. When you have gotten up at three in the morning to find a live mouse on your kitchen counter leaving a contrail of brain tissue across the formica, it is hard to get back to sleep, and so he prefers to set out poison now.
Somewhat in the same vein, a severely wounded man-the last man Hiro shot-is thrashing around on the deck of the yacht, up near the bow, babbling.
More than anything he has ever wanted to do, Hiro wants to get into the zodiac and get away from this person. He knows that in order to go up and help him, or put him out of his misery, he"s going to have to shine the flashlight on him, and when he does that he"s going to see something he"ll never be able to forget. But he has to do it. He swallows a couple of times because he"s already gagging and follows his flashlight beam up to the bow.
It"s much worse than he had expected.
This man apparently took a bullet somewhere around the bridge of his nose, aimed upward. Everything above that point has been pretty much blown off. Hiro"s looking into a cross-section of his lower brain.
Something is sticking up out of his head. Hiro figures it must be fragments of skull or something. But it"s too smooth and regular for that.
Now that he"s gotten over his initial nausea, he"s finding this easier to look at. It helps to know that the guy is out of his misery. More than half of his brain is gone. He"s still talking-his voice sounds whistly and gaseous, like a pipe organ gone bad, because of the changes in his skull-but it"s just a brainstem function, just a twitch in the vocal cords.
The thing sticking up out of his head is a whip antenna about a foot long. It is encased in black rubber, like the antennas on cop walkie-talkies, and it is strapped onto his head, above the left ear. This is one of the antenna-heads that Eliot warned them about.
Hiro grabs the antenna and pulls. He might as well take the headset with him-it must have something to do with the way L. Bob Rife controls the Raft.
It doesn"t come off. When Hiro pulls, what"s left of the guy"s head twists around, but the antenna doesn"t come loose. And that"s how Hiro figures out that this isn"t a headset at all. The antenna has been permanently grafted onto the base of the man"s skull.
Hiro switches his goggles into millimeter-wave radar and stares into the man"s ruined head.
The antenna is attached to the skull by means of short screws that go into the bone, but do not pierce all the way through. The base of the antenna contains a few microchips, whose purpose Hiro cannot divine by looking at them. But nowadays you can put a supercomputer on a single chip, so anytime you see more than one chip together in one place, you"re looking at significant warez.
A single hair-thin wire emerges from the base of the antenna and penetrates the skull. It pa.s.ses straight through to the brainstem and then branches and rebranches into a network of invisibly tiny wires embedded in the brain tissue. Coiled around the base of the tree.
Which explains why this guy continues to pump out a steady stream of Raft babble even when his brain is missing: It looks like L. Bob Rife has figured out a way to make electrical contact with the part of the brain where Asherah lives. These words aren"t originating here. It"s a pentecostal radio broadcast coming through on his antenna.
Reason is still up top, its monitor screen radiating blue static toward heaven. Hiro finds the hard power switch and turns it off. Computers this powerful are supposed to shut themselves down, after you"ve asked them to. Turning one off with the hard switch is like lulling someone to sleep by severing their spinal column. But when the system has snow-crashed, it loses even the ability to turn itself off, and primitive methods are required. Hiro packs the Gatling gun a.s.sembly back into the case and latches it shut.
Maybe it"s not as heavy as he thought, or maybe he"s on adrenaline overdrive. Then he realizes why it seems so much lighter: most of its weight was ammunition, and Fisheye used up quite a bit. He half-carries, half-drags it back to the stern, making sure the heat exchanger stays in the water, and somersaults it into the zodiac.
Hiro climbs in after it, joining Tranny, and starts attending to the motor.
"No motor," Tranny says. "It snag bad."
Right. The spiderweb would get wrapped around the propeller. Tranny shows Hiro how to snap the zodiac"s oars into the oarlocks.
Hiro rows for a while and finds himself in a long clear zone that zigzags its way through the Raft, like a lead of clear water between ice floes in the Arctic.
"Motor okay," Tranny says.
He drops the motor into the water. Tranny pumps up the fuel line and starts it up. It starts on the first pull; Bruce Lee ran a tight ship.
As Hiro begins to motor down the open s.p.a.ce, he is afraid that it is just a little cove in the ghetto. But this is just a trick of the lights. He rounds a corner and finds it stretching out for some distance. It is a sort of beltway that runs all the way around the Raft. Small streets and even smaller alleys lead from this beltway into the various ghettos. Through the scope, Hiro can see that their entrances are guarded. Anyone"s free to cruise around the beltway, but people are more protective of their neighborhoods.
The worst thing that can happen on the Raft is for your neighborhood to get cut loose. That"s why the Raft is such a tangled mess. Each neighborhood is afraid that the neighboring "hoods are going to gang up on them, cut them loose, leave them to starve in the middle of the Pacific. So they are constantly finding new ways to tie themselves into each other, running cables over, under, and around their neighbors, tying into more far-flung "hoods, or preferably into one of the Core ships.
The neighborhood guards are armed, needless to say. Looks like the weapon of choice is a small Chinese knockoff of the AK-47. Its metal frame jumps out pretty clearly on radar. The Chinese government must have stamped out an unimaginable number of these things, back in the days when they spent a lot of time thinking about the possibility of fighting a land war with the Soviets.
Most of them just look like indolent Third World militia the world over. But at the entrance to one neighborhood, Hiro sees that the guard in charge has a whip antenna sticking straight up in the air, sprouting from his head.
A few minutes later, they get to a point where the beltway is intersected by a broad street that runs straight into the middle of the Raft, where the big ships are-the Core. The closest one is a Nipponese containership-a low, flat-decked number with a high bridge, stacked with steel shipping containers. It"s webbed over with rope ladders and makeshift stairways that enable people to climb up into this container or that. Many of the containers have lights burning in them.
"Apartment building," Tranny jokes, noting Hiro"s interest. Then he shakes his head and rolls his eyes and rubs his thumb against his fingertips. Apparently, this is quite the swell neighborhood.
The nice part of the cruise comes to an end when they notice several fast skiffs emerging from a dark and smoky neighborhood.
"Vietnam gang," Tranny says. He puts his hand on Hiro"s and gently but firmly removes it from the outboard motor"s throttle. Hiro checks them out on radar. A couple of these guys have the little AK-47s, but most of them are armed with knives and pistols, obviously looking forward to some close-up, face-to-face contact. These guys in the boats are, of course, the peons. More important-looking gents stand along the edge of the neighborhood, smoking and watching. A couple of them are wireheads.
Tranny revs it up, turns into a spa.r.s.e neighborhood of loosely connected Arabian dhows, and maneuvers through the darkness for a while, occasionally putting his hand on Hiro"s head and gently pressing it down so he doesn"t catch a rope with his neck.
When they emerge from the fleet of dhows, the Vietnamese gang is no longer in evidence. If this happened in daylight, the gangsters could track them by following Reason"s steam. Tranny steers them across a medium-sized street and into a cl.u.s.ter of fishing boats. In the middle of this area an old trawler sits, being cut up for sc.r.a.p, cutting torches illuminating the black surface of the water all around. But most of the work is being done with hammers and cold chisels, which radiate appalling noise across the flat echoing water.
"Home," Tranny says, smiling, and points to a couple of houseboats lashed together. Lights are still burning here, a couple of guys are out on the deck smoking fat, makeshift cigars, through the windows they can see a couple of women working in the kitchen.
As they approach, the guys on the deck sit up, take notice, draw revolvers out of their waistbands. But then Tranny speaks up in a happy stream of Tagalog. And everything changes.
Tranny gets the full Prodigal Son welcome: crying, hysterical fat ladies, a swarm of little kids piling out of their hammocks, sucking their thumbs and jumping up and down. Older men beaming, showing great gaps and black splotches in their smiles, watching and nodding and diving in to give him the occasional hug.
And on the edge of the mob, way back in the darkness, is another wirehead.
"You come in, too," says one of the women, a lady in her forties named Eunice.
"That"s okay," Hiro says. "I won"t intrude."
This statement is translated and moves like a wave through the some eight hundred and ninety-six Filipinos who have now converged on the area. It is greeted with the utmost shock. Intrude? Unthinkable! Nonsense! How dare you so insult us?
One of the gap-toothed guys, a miniature old man and probable World War II veteran, jumps onto the rocking zodiac, sticks to the floor like a gecko, wraps his arm around Hiro"s shoulders, and pokes a spliff into his mouth.
He looks like a solid guy. Hiro leans into him. "Compadre, who is the guy with the antenna? A friend of yours?"
"Nah," the guy whispers, "he"s an a.s.shole." Then he puts his index finger dramatically to his lips and shushes.
It"s all in the eyes. Along with picking handcuffs, vaulting Jersey barriers, and fending off perverts, it is one of the quintessential Kourier skills: walking around in a place where you don"t belong without attracting suspicion. And you do it by not looking at anyone. Keep those eyes straight ahead no matter what, don"t open them too wide, don"t look tense. That, and the fact that she just came in here with a guy that everyone is scared of, gets her back through the containership to the reception area.
"I need to use a Street terminal," she says to the reception guy. "Can you charge it to my room?"