"Neurolinguistic pathways in your brain. Remember the first time you learned binary code?"
"Sure."
"You were forming pathways in your brain. Deep structures. Your nerves grow new connections as you use them-the axons split and push their way between the dividing glial cells-your bioware selfmodifies-the software becomes part of the hardware. So now you"re vulnerable-all hackers are vulnerable-to a nam-shub. We have to look out for each other."
"What"s a nam-shub? Why am I vulnerable to it?"
"Just don"t stare into any bitmaps. Anyone try to show you a raw bitmap lately? Like, in the Metaverse?"
Interesting. "Not to me personally, but now that you mention it, this Brandy came up to my friend-"
"A cult prost.i.tute of Asherah. Trying to spread the disease. Which is synonymous with evil. Sound melodramatic? Not really. You know, to the Mesopotamians, there was no independent concept of evil. Just disease and ill health. Evil was a synonym for disease. So what does that tell you?"
Hiro walks away, the same way he walks away from psychotic street people who follow him down the street.
"It tells you that evil is a virus!" Lagos calls after him. "Don"t let the nam-shub into your operating system!"
Juanita"s working with this alien?
Blunt Force Trauma play for a solid hour, segueing from one song into the next with no c.h.i.n.k or crevice in the wall of noise. All a part of the aesthetic. When the music stops, their set is over. For the first time, Hiro can hear the exaltation of the crowd. It"s a blast of high-pitched noise that he feels in his head, ringing his ears.
But there"s a low thudding sound, too, like someone pummeling a ba.s.s drum, and for a minute he thinks maybe it"s a truck rolling by on the overpa.s.s above them. But it"s too steady for that, it doesn"t die away.
It"s behind him. Other people have noticed it, turned to look toward the sound, are scurrying out of the way. Hiro sidesteps, turning to see what it is.
Big and black, to begin with. It does not seem as though such a large man could perch on a motorcycle, even a big chortling Harley like this one.
Correction. It"s a Harley with some kind of a sidecar added a sleek black projectile hanging off to the right, supported on its own wheel. But no one is sitting in the sidecar.
It does not seem as though a man could be this bulky without being fat. But he"s not fat at all, he"s wearing tight stretchy clothes-like leather, but not quite-that show bones and muscles, but nothing else.
He is riding the Harley so slowly that he would certainly fall over if not for the sidecar. Occasionally he gooses it forward with a flick of the fingers on his clutch hand.
Maybe one reason he looks so big-other than the fact that he really *is* big-is the fact that he appears totally neckless. His head starts out wide and just keeps getting wider until it merges with his shoulders. At first Hiro thinks it must be some kind of avant-garde helmet. But when the man rolls past him, this great shroud moves and flutters and Hiro sees that it is just his hair, a thick mane of black hair tossed back over his shoulders, trailing down his back almost to his waist.
As he is marveling at this, he realizes that the man has turned his head to look back at him. Or to look in his general direction, anyway. It"s impossible to tell exactly what he"s looking at because of his goggles, a smooth convex sh.e.l.l over the eyes, interrupted by a narrow horizontal slit.
He is looking at Hiro. He gives him the same f.u.c.k-you smile that he sported earlier tonight, when Hiro was standing in the entryway to The Black Sun, and he was in a public terminal somewhere.
This is the guy. Raven. This is the guy that Juanita is looking for. The guy Lagos told him not to mess with. And Hiro has seen him before, outside the entrance to The Black Sun. This is the guy who gave the Snow Crash card to Da5id.
The tattoo on his forehead consists of three words, written in block letters:
POOR IMPULSE CONTROL.
Hiro startles and actually jumps into the air as Vitaly Chern.o.byl and the Meltdowns launch into their opening number, "Radiation Burn." It is a tornado of mostly high-pitched noise and distortion, like being flung bodily through a wall of fishhooks.
These days, most states are franchulates or Burbclaves, much too small to have anything like a jail, or even a judicial system. So when someone does something bad, they try to find quick and dirty punishments, like flogging, confiscation of property, public humiliation, or, in the case of people who have a high potential of going on to hurt others, a warning tattoo on a prominent body part POOR IMPULSE CONTROL. Apparently, this guy went to such a place and lost his temper real bad.
For an instant, a glowing red gridwork is plotted against the side of Raven"s face. It rapidly shrinks, all sides converging inward toward the right pupil. Raven shakes his head, turns to look for the source of the laser light, but it"s already gone. Lagos has already got his retinal scan.
That"s why Lagos is here. He"s not interested in Hiro or Vitaly Chern.o.byl. He"s interested in Raven. And somehow, Lagos knew that he was going to be here. And Lagos is somewhere nearby, right now, videotaping the guy, probing the contents of his pockets with radar, recording his pulse and respiration.
Hiro picks up his personal phone. "Y.T.," he says, and it dials Y.T."s number. It rings for a long time before she picks it up. It"s almost impossible to hear anything over the sound of the concert.
"What the f.u.c.k do you want?"
"Y.T., I"m sorry about this. But something"s going on. Something big time. I"m keeping one eye on a big biker named Raven."
"The problem with you hackers is you never stop working."
"That"s what a hacker is," Hiro says.
"I"ll keep an eye on this Raven guy, too," she says, "sometime when I am working."
Then she hangs up.
Raven makes a couple of broad, lazy sweeps along the perimeter of the crowd, going very slowly, looking in all directions. He is annoyingly calm and unhurried.
Then he cuts farther out into the darkness, away from the crowd. He does a little more looking around, checking out the perimeter of the shantytown. And finally, he swings the big Harley around in a trajectory that brings him back to the big important Crip. The guy with the sapphire tie clip and the personal security detail.
Hiro begins weaving through the crowd in that direction, trying not to be too obvious about it. This looks like it"s going to be interesting.
As Raven approaches, the bodyguards converge on the head Crip, form a loose protective ring around him. As he comes nearer, all of them back away a step or two, as though the man is surrounded by an invisible force field. He finally comes to a stop, deigns to put his feet on the ground. He flicks a few switches on the handlebars before he steps away from his Harley. Then, antic.i.p.ating what"s next, he stands with his feet apart and his arms up.
One Crip approaches from each side. They don"t look real happy about this particular duty, they keep casting sidelong glances at the motorcycle. The head Crip keeps goading them forward with his voice, shooing them toward Raven with his hands. Each one of them has a hand-held metal-detecting wand. They swirl the wands around his body and find nothing at all, not even the tiniest speck of metal, not even coins in his pocket. The man is 100 percent organic. So if nothing else, Lagos"s warning about Raven"s knife has turned out to be bulls.h.i.t.
These two Crips walk rapidly back to the main group. Raven begins to follow them. But the head Crip takes a step back, holds both of his hands up in a "stop" motion. Raven stops, stands there, the grin returning to his face.
The head Crip turns away and gestures back toward his black BMW. The rear door of the BMW opens up and a man gets out, a younger, smaller black man in round wire-rims, wearing jeans and big white athletic shoes and typical studentish gear.
The student walks slowly toward Raven, pulling something from his pocket. It"s a hand-held device, but much too bulky to be a calculator. It"s got a keypad on the top and a sort of window on one end, which the student keeps aiming toward Raven. There"s an LED readout above the keypad and a red flashing light underneath that. The student is wearing a pair of headphones that are jacked into a socket on the b.u.t.t of the device.
For starters, the student aims the window at the ground, then at the sky, then at Raven, keeping his eye on the flashing red light and the LED readout. It has the feel of some kind of religious rite, accepting digital input from the sky spirit and then the ground spirit and then from the black biker angel.
Then he begins to walk slowly toward Raven, one step at a time. Hiro can see the red light flashing intermittently, not following any particular pattern or rhythm.
The student gets to within a yard of Raven and then orbits him a couple of times, always keeping the device aimed inward. When he"s finished, he steps back briskly, turns, and aims it toward the motorcycle. When the device is aimed at the motorcycle, the red light flashes much more quickly.
The student walks up to the head Crip, pulling off his headphones, and has a short conversation with him. The Crip listens to the student but keeps his eyes fixed on Raven, nods his head a few times, finally pats the student on his shoulder and sends him back to the BMW.
It was a Geiger counter.
Raven strolls up to the big Crip. They shake hands, a standard plain old Euro-shake, no fancy variations. It"s not a real friendly get-together. The Crip has his eyes a little too wide open, Hiro can see the furrows in his brow, everything about his posture and his face screaming out *Get me away from this Martian.*
Raven goes back to his radioactive hog, releases a few bungee cords, and picks up a metal briefcase. He hands it to the head Crip, and they shake hands again. Then he turns away, walks slowly and calmly back to the motorcycle, gets on, and putt-putts away.
Hiro would love to stick around and watch some more, but he has the feeling that Lagos has this particular event covered. And besides, he has other business. Two limousines are fighting their way through the crowd, headed for the stage.
The limousines stop, and Nipponese people start to climb out. Dark-clad, unfunky, they stand around awkwardly in the middle of the party/riot, like a handful of broken nails suspended in a colorful jello mold. Finally, Hiro makes bold enough to go up and look into one of the windows to find out if this is who he thinks it is.
Can"t see through the smoked gla.s.s. He bends down, puts his face right near the window, trying to make it real obvious.
Still no response. Finally, he knocks on the window.
Silence. He looks up at the entourage. They are all watching him. But when he looks up they glance away, suddenly remember to drag on their cigarettes or rub their eyebrows.
There is only one source of light inside the limousine that"s bright enough to be visible through the smoked gla.s.s, and that is the distinctive inflated rectangle of a television screen.
What the h.e.l.l. This is America, Hiro is half American, and there"s no reason to take this politeness thing to an unhealthy extreme. He hauls the door open and looks into the back of the limousine.
Sushi K is sitting there, wedged in between a couple of other young Nipponese men, programmers on his imageering team. His hairdo is turned off, so it just looks like an orange Afro. He is wearing a partly a.s.sembled stage costume, apparently expecting to be performing tonight. Looks like he"s taking Hiro up on his offer.
He"s watching a well-known television program called Eye Spy. It is produced by CIC and syndicated through one of the major studios. It is reality television: CIC picks out one of their agents who is involved in a wet operation-doing some actual cloak-and-dagger work and has him put on a gargoyle rig so that everything he sees and hears is transmitted back to the home base in Langley. This material is then edited into a weekly hour-long program.
Hiro never watches it. Now that he works for CIC, he finds it kind of annoying. But he hears a lot of gossip about the show, and he knows that tonight they are showing the second-to-last episode in a five-part arc. CIC has smuggled a guy onto the Raft, where he is trying to infiltrate one of its many colorful and s.a.d.i.s.tic pirate bands: the Bruce Lee organization.
Hiro enters the limousine and gets a look at the TV just in time to see Bruce Lee himself, as seen from the point of view of the hapless gargoyle spy, approaching down some dank corridor on a Raft ghost ship. Condensation is dripping from the blade of Bruce Lee"s samurai sword.
"Bruce Lee"s men have trapped the spy in an old Korean factory ship in the Core," one of Sushi K"s henchmen says, a rapid hissing explanation. "They are looking for him now."
Suddenly, Bruce Lee is pinioned under a brilliant spotlight that makes his trademark diamond grin flash like the arm of a galaxy. In the middle of the screen, a pair of cross hairs swing into place, centered on Bruce Lee"s forehead. Apparently, the spy has decided he must fight his way out of this mess and is bringing some powerful CIC weapons system to bear on Bruce Lee"s skull. But then a blur comes in from the side, a mysterious dark shape blocking our view of Bruce Lee. The cross hairs are now centered on-what, exactly? We"ll have to wait until next week to find out.
Hiro sits down across from Sushi K and the programmers, next to the television set, so that he can get a TV"s-eye view of the man.
"I"m Hiro Protagonist. You got my message, I take it."
"Fabul" Sushi K cries, using the Nipponese abbreviation of the all-purpose Hollywood adjective "fabulous."
He continues, "Hiro-san, I am deeply indebted to you for this once-in-a-lifetime chance to perform my small works before such an audience." He says the whole thing in Nipponese except for "once-in-a-lifetime chance."
"I must humbly apologize for arranging the whole thing so hastily and haphazardly," Hiro says.
"It pains me deeply that you should feel the need to apologize when you have given me an opportunity that any Nipponese rapper would give anything for-to perform my humble works before actual homeboys from the ghettos of L.A."
"I am profoundly embarra.s.sed to reveal that these fans are not exactly ghetto homeboys, as I must have carelessly led you to believe. They are thrashers. Skateboarders who like both rap music and heavy metal."
"Ah. This is fine, then," Sushi K says. But his tone of voice suggests that it"s not really fine at all.
"But there are representatives of the Crips here," Hiro says, thinking very, very fast even by his standards, "and if your performance is well received, as I"m quite certain it will be, they will spread the word throughout their community."
Sushi K rolls down the window. The decibel level quintuples in an instant. He stares at the crowd, five thousand potential market shares, young people with funkiness on their minds. They"ve never heard any music before that wasn"t perfect. It"s either studio-perfect digital sound from their CD players or performance-perfect fuzz-grunge from the best people in the business, the groups that have come to L.A. to make a name for themselves and have actually survived the gladiatorial combat environment of the clubs. Sushi K"s face lights up with a combination of joy and terror. Now he actually has to go up there and do it. In front of the seething bioma.s.s.
Hiro goes out and paves the way for him. That"s easy enough. Then he bails. He"s done his bit. No point in wasting time on this puny Sushi K thing when Raven is out there, representing a much larger source of income. So he wanders back out toward the periphery.
"Yo! Dude with the swords," someone says.
Hiro turns around, sees a green-jacketed Enforcer motioning to him. It"s the short, powerful guy with the headset, the guy in charge of the security detail. "Squeaky," he says, extending his hand.
"Hiro," Hiro says, shaking it, and handing over his business card. No particular reason to be coy with these guys. "What can I do for you, Squeaky?"
Squeaky reads the card. He has a kind of exaggerated politeness that is kind of like a military man. He"s calm, mature, rolemodelesque, like a high school football coach. "You in charge of this thing?"
"To the extent anyone is."
"Mr. Protagonist, we got a call a few minutes ago from a friend of yours named Y.T."
"What"s wrong? Is she okay?"
"Oh, yes, sir, she"s just fine. But you know that bug you were talking to earlier?"
Hiro"s never heard the term "bug" used this way, but he reckons that Squeaky is referring to the gargoyle, Lagos.
"Yeah."
"Well, there"s a situation involving that gentleman that Y.T. sort of tipped us off to. We thought you might want to have a look."
"What"s going on?"
"Uh, why don"t you come with me. You know, some things are easier to show than to explain verbally."
As Squeaky turns, Sushi K"s first rap song begins. His voice sounds tight and tense.
I"m Sushi K and I"m here to say I like to rap in a different way Look out Number One in every city Sushi K rap has all most pretty My special talking of remarkable words Is not the stereotyped bucktooth nerd My hair is big as a galaxy Cause I attain greater technology Hiro follows Squeaky away from the crowd, into the dimly lit area on the edge of the shantytown. Up above them on the overpa.s.s embankment, he can dimly make out phosph.o.r.escent shapes-green-jacketed Enforcers...o...b..ting some strange attractor.
"Watch your step," Squeaky says as they begin to climb up the embankment. "It"s slippery in places."
I like to rap about sweetened romance My fond ambition is of your pants So here is of special remarkable way Of this fellow raps named Sushi K The Nipponese talking phenomenon Like samurai sword his sharpened tongue Who raps the East Asia and the Pacific Prosperity Sphere, to be specific It"s a typical loose slope of dirt and stones that looks like it would wash away in the first rainfall. Sage and cactus and tumble-weeds here and there, all looking scraggly and half-dead from air pollution.
It"s hard to see anything clearly, because Sushi K is jumping around down below them on the stage, the brilliant orange rays of his sunburst hairdo are sweeping back and forth across the embankment at a speed that seems to be supersonic, washing grainy, gritty light over the weeds and the rocks and throwing everything into weird, discolored, high-contrast freeze frames.