He knows he was totally unprepared. The spear just came at him. He slapped at it with the blade. He happened to slap it at the right time, and it missed him. But he did this almost absentmindedly.
Maybe that"s how great warriors do it. Carelessly, not wracking their minds with the consequences.
Maybe he"s flattering himself.
The sound of a helicopter has been getting louder for some minutes now. Even though Hiro lives right next to the airport, this is unusual. They"re not supposed to fly right near LAX, it raises evident safety questions.
It doesn"t stop getting louder until it is very loud, and at that point, the helicopter is hovering a few feet above the parking lot, right out in front of Hiro and Vitaly"s 20-by-30. It"s a nice one, a corporate jet chopper, dark green, with subdued markings. Hiro suspects that in brighter light, he would be able to make out the logo of a defense contractor, most likely General Jim"s Defense System.
A pale-faced white man with a very high forehead-c.u.m-bald spot jumps out of the chopper, looking a lot more athletic than his face and general demeanor would lead you to expect, and jogs across the parking lot directly toward Hiro. This is the kind of guy Hiro remembers from when his dad was in the Army-not the gristly veterans of legends and movies, just sort of regular thirty-five-year-old guys rattling around in bulky uniforms. He"s a major. His name, sewn onto his BDUs, is Clem.
"Hiro Protagonist?"
"The same."
"Juanita sent me to pick you up. She said you"d recognize the name."
"I recognize the name. But I don"t really work for Juanita."
"She says you do now."
"Well, that"s nice," Hiro says. "So I guess it"s kind of urgent?"
"I think that would be a fair a.s.sumption," Major Clem says.
"Can I spare a few minutes? Because I"ve been working out, and I need to run next door."
Major Clem looks next door. The next logo down the strip is THE REST STOP.
"The situation is fairly static. You could spare five minutes," Major Clem says. Hiro has an account with The Rest Stop. To live at the U-Stor-It, you sort of have to have an account. So he gets to bypa.s.s the front office where the attendant waits by the cash register. He shoves his membership card into a slot, and a computer screen lights up with three choices: M F NURSERY (UNIs.e.x).
Hiro slaps the "M" b.u.t.ton. Then the screen changes to a menu of four choices: - OUR SPECIAL LIMITED FACILITIES-THRIFTY BUT SANITARY - STANDARD FACILITIES-JUST LIKE HOME-MAYBE JUST A LITTLE BETTER - PRIME FACILITIES-A GRACIOUS PLACE FOR THE DISCRIMINATING PATRON - THE LAVATORY GRANDE ROYALE He has to override a well-worn reflex to stop himself from automatically punching SPECIAL LIMITED FACILITIES, which is what he and all the other U-Stor-It residents always use. Almost impossible to go in there and not come in contact with someone else"s bodily fluids. Not a pretty sight. Not at all gracious. Instead-what the f.u.c.k, Juanita"s going to hire him, right?-he slams the b.u.t.ton for LAVATORY GRANDE ROYALE.
Never been here before. It"s like something on the top floor of a luxury high-rise casino in Atlantic City, where they put semi-r.e.t.a.r.ded adults from South Philly after they"ve blundered into the mega-jackpot. It"s got everything that a dimwitted pathological gambler would identify with luxury: gold-plated fixtures, lots of injection-molded pseudomarble, velvet drapes, and a butler. None of the U-Stor-It residents ever use The Lavatory Grande Royale. The only reason it"s here is that this place happens to be across the street from LAX. Singaporean CEOs who want to have a shower and take a nice, leisurely c.r.a.p, with all the sound effects, without having to hear and smell other travelers doing the same, can come here and put it all on their corporate travel card.
The butler is a thirty-year-old CentroAmerican whose eyes look a little funny, like they"ve been closed for the last several hours. He is just throwing some improbably thick towels over his arm as Hiro bursts in.
"Gotta get in and out in five minutes," Hiro says.
"You want shave?" the butler says. He paws at his own cheeks suggestively, unable to peg Hiro"s ethnic group.
"Love to. No time."
He peels off his jockey shorts, tosses his swords onto the crushed-velvet sofa, and steps into the marbleized amphitheatre of the shower stall. Hot water hits him from all directions at once. There"s a k.n.o.b on the wall so you can choose your favorite temperature.
Afterward, he"d like to take a dump, read some of those glossy phone book-sized magazines next to the high-tech s.h.i.tter, but he"s got to get going. He dries himself off with a fresh towel the size of a circus tent, yanks on some loose drawstring slacks and a T-shirt, throws some Kongbucks at the butler, and runs out, girding himself with the swords.
It"s a short flight, mostly because the military pilot is happy to eschew comfort in favor of speed. The chopper takes off at a shallow angle, keeping low so it won"t get sucked into any jumbo jets, and as soon as the pilot gets room to maneuver, he whips the tail around, drops the nose, and lets the rotor yank them onward and upward across the basin, toward the spa.r.s.ely lit ma.s.s of the Hollywood Hills.
But they stop short of the Hills, and end up on the roof of a hospital. Part of the Mercy chain, which technically makes this Vatican airs.p.a.ce. So far, this has Juanita written all over it.
"Neurology ward," Major Clem says, delivering this string of nouns like an order. "Fifth floor, east wing, room 564."
The man in the hospital bed is Da5id.
Extremely thick, wide leather straps have been stretched across the head and foot of the bed. Leather cuffs, lined with fluffy sheepskin, are attached to the straps. These cuffs have been fastened around Da5id"s wrists and ankles. He"s wearing a hospital gown that has mostly fallen off.
The worst thing is that his eyes don"t always point in the same direction. He"s hooked up to an EKG that"s charting his heartbeat, and even though Hiro"s not a doctor, he can see it"s not a regular pattern. It beats too fast, then it doesn"t beat at all, then an alarm sounds, then it starts beating again.
He has gone completely blank. His eyes are not seeing anything. At first, Hiro thinks that his body is limp and relaxed. Getting closer, he sees that Da5id is taut and shivering, slick with perspiration.
"We put in a temporary pacemaker," a woman says.
Hiro turns. It"s a nun who also appears to be a surgeon.
"How long has he been in convulsions?"
"His ex-wife called us in, said she was worried."
"Juanita."
"Yes. When the paramedics arrived, he had fallen out of his chair at home and was convulsing on the floor. You can see a bruise, here, where we think his computer fell off the table and hit him in the ribs. So to protect him from further damage, we put him in four-points. But for the last half hour he"s been like this-like his whole body is in fibrillation. If he stays this way, we"ll take the restraints off."
"Was he wearing goggles?"
"I don"t know. I can check for you."
"But you think this happened while he was goggled into his computer?"
"I really don"t know, sir. All I know is, he"s got such bad cardiac arrhythmia that we had to implant a temporary pacemaker right there on his office floor. We gave him some seizure medication, which didn"t work. Put him on some downers to calm him, which worked slightly. Put his head into various pieces of imaging machinery to find out what the problem was. The jury is still out on that."
"Well, I"m going to go look at his house," Hiro says.
The doctor shrugs.
"Let me know when he comes out of it," Hiro says.
The doctor doesn"t say anything to this. For the first time, Hiro realizes that Da5id"s condition may not be temporary.
As Hiro is stepping out into the hallway, Da5id speaks, "e ne emmariiagiaginimumamadameneemamankigaagia gi.."
Hiro turns around and looks. Da5id has gone limp in the restraints, seems relaxed, half asleep. He is looking at Hiro through half-closed eyes. "e ne em dam gal nun na a gi agi e ne em u mu unabzukaagiaagi ..."
Da5id"s voice is deep and placid, with no trace of stress. The syllables roll off his tongue like drool. As Hiro walks down the hallway he can hear Da5id talking all the way.
"i ge en i ge en nu ge en nu ge en us sa tur ra lu ra ze em men..."
Hiro gets back into the chopper. They cruise up the middle of Beachwood Canyon, headed straight for the Hollywood sign.
Da5id"s house has been transfigured by light. It"s at the end of its own little road, at the summit of a hill. The road has been blocked off by a squat froglike Jeep-thing from General Jim"s, saturated red and blue light sweeping and pulsing out of it. Another helicopter is above the house, supported on a swirling column of radiance. Soldiers creep up and down the property, carrying hand-held searchlights.
"We took the precaution of securing the area," Major Clem says.
At the fringes of all this light, Hiro can see the dead organic colors of the hillside. The soldiers are trying to push it back with their searchlights, trying to burn it away. He is about to bury himself in it, become a single muddy pixel in some airline pa.s.senger"s window. Plunging into the bioma.s.s.
Da5id"s laptop is on the floor next to the table where he liked to work. It is surrounded by medical debris. In the middle of this, Hiro finds Da5id"s goggles, which either fell off when he hit the floor, or were stripped off by the paramedics.
Hiro picks up the goggles. As he brings them up toward his eyes, he sees the image: a wall of black-and-white static. Da5id"s computer has snow-crashed. He closes his eyes and drops the goggles. You can"t get hurt by looking at a bitmap. Or can you?
The house is sort of a modernist castle with a high turret on one end. Da5id and Hiro and the rest of the hackers used to go up there with a case of beer and a hibachi and just spend a whole night, eating jumbo shrimp and crab legs and oysters and washing them down with beer. Now it"s deserted, of course, just the hibachi, which is rusted and almost buried in gray ash, like an archaeological relic. Hiro has pinched one of Da5id"s beers from the fridge, and he sits up here for a while, in what used to be his favorite place, drinking his beer slowly, like he used to, reading stories in the lights.
The old central neighborhoods are packed in tight below an eternal, organic haze. In other cities, you breathe industrial contaminants, but in L.A., you breathe amino acids. The hazy sprawl is ringed and netted with glowing lines, like hot wires in a toaster.
At the outlet of the canyon, it comes close enough that the light sharpens and breaks up into stars, arches, glowing letters. Streams of red and white corpuscles throb down highways to the fuzzy logic of intelligent traffic lights. Farther away, spreading across the basin, a million sprightly logos smear into solid arcs, like geometric points merging into curves. To either side of the franchise ghettos, the loglo dwindles across a few shallow layers of development and into a surrounding dimness that is burst here and there by the blaze of a security spotlight in someone"s back-yard.
The franchise and the virus work on the same principle: what thrives in one place will thrive in another. You just have to find a sufficiently virulent business plan, condense it into a three-ring binder-its DNA-Xerox(tm) it, and embed it in the fertile lining of a well-traveled highway, preferably one with a left-turn lane. Then the growth will expand until it runs up against its property lines.
In olden times, you"d wander down to Mom"s Cafe for a bite to eat and a cup of joe, and you would feel right at home. It worked just fine if you never left your hometown. But if you went to the next town over, everyone would look up and stare at you when you came in the door, and the Blue Plate Special would be something you didn"t recognize. If you did enough traveling, you"d never feel at home anywhere.
But when a businessman from New Jersey goes to Dubuque, he knows he can walk into a McDonald"s and no one will stare at him. He can order without having to look at the menu, and the food will always taste the same. McDonald"s is Home, condensed into a three-ring binder and xeroxed. "No surprises" is the motto of the franchise ghetto, its Good Housekeeping seal, subliminally blazoned on every sign and logo that make up the curves and grids of light that outline the Basin.
The people of America, who live in the world"s most surprising and terrible country, take comfort in that motto. Follow the loglo outward, to where the growth is enfolded into the valleys and the canyons, and you find the land of the refugees. They have fled from the true America, the America of atomic bombs, scalpings, hip-hop, chaos theory, cement overshoes, snake handlers, spree killers, s.p.a.ce walks, buffalo jumps, drive-bys, cruise missiles, Sherman"s March, gridlock, motorcycle gangs, and bun-gee jumping. They have parallel-parked their bimbo boxes in identical computer-designed Burbclave street patterns and secreted themselves in symmetrical sheetrock s.h.i.tholes with vinyl floors and ill-fitting woodwork and no sidewalks, vast house farms out in the loglo wilderness, a culture medium for a medium culture.
The only ones left in the city are street people, feeding off debris; immigrants, thrown out like shrapnel from the destruction of the Asian powers; young bohos; and the technomedia priesthood of Mr. Lee"s Greater Hong Kong. Young smart people like Da5id and Hiro, who take the risk of living in the city because they like stimulation and they know they can handle it.
Y.T. can"t really tell where they are. It"s clear that they"re stuck in traffic. It"s not like this is predictable or anything.
"Y.T. must get under way now," she announces.
No reaction for a sec. Then the hacker guy sits back in his chair, stares out through his goggles, ignoring the 3-D compu-display, taking in a nice view of the wall. "Okay," he says.
Quick as a mongoose, the man with the gla.s.s eye darts in, yanks the aluminum case out of the cryogenic cylinder, tosses it to Y.T. Meantime, one of the lounging-around Mafia guys is opening the back door of the truck, giving them all a nice view of a traffic jam on the boulevard.
"One other thing," the man with the gla.s.s eye says, and shoves an envelope into one of Y.T."s mult.i.tudinous pockets.
"What"s that?" Y.T. says.
He holds up his hands self-protectively. "Don"t worry, it"s just a little something. Now get going."
He motions at the guy who"s holding her plank. The guy turns out to be fairly hip, because he just throws the plank. It lands at an odd angle on the floor between them. But the spokes have long ago seen the floor coming, calculated all the angles, extended and flexed themselves like the legs and feet of a basketball player coming back to earth from a monster dunk. The plank lands on its feet, banks this way, then that, as it regains its balance, then steers itself right up to Y.T. and stops beside her.
She stands on it, kicks a few times, flies out the back door of the semi, and onto the hood of a Pontiac that was following them much too closely. Its windshield makes a nice surface to bank off of, and she gets her direction neatly reversed by the time she hits the pavement. The owner of the Pontiac is honking self-righteously, but there"s no way he can chase her down because traffic is totally stopped, Y.T. is the only thing for miles around that is actually capable of movement. Which is the whole point of Kouriers in the first place.
The Reverend Wayne"s Pearly Gates #1106 is a pretty big one. Its low serial number implies great age. It was built long ago, when land was cheap and lots were big. The parking lot is half full. Usually, all you see at a Reverend Wayne"s are old beaters with wacky Spanish expressions nail-polished on the rear b.u.mpers-the rides of CentroAmerican evangelicals who have come up north to get decent jobs and escape the relentlessly Catholic style of their homelands. This lot also has a lot of just plain old regular bimbo boxes with license plates from all the Burbclaves.
Traffic is moving a little better on this stretch of the boulevard, and so Y.T. comes into the lot at a pretty good clip, takes one or two orbits around the franchise to work off her speed. A smooth parking lot is hard to resist when you are going fast, and to look at it from a slightly less juvenile point of view, it"s a good idea to scope things out, to be familiar with your environment. Y.T. learns that this parking lot is linked with that of a Chop Shop franchise next door ("We turn any vehicle into CASH in minutes!"), which in turn flows into the lot of a neighboring strip mall. A dedicated thrasher could probably navigate from L.A. to New York by coasting from one parking lot into the next.
This parking lot makes popping and skittering noises in some areas. Looking down, she sees that behind the franchise, near the dumpster, the asphalt is strewn with small gla.s.s vials, like the one that Squeaky was looking at last night. They are scattered about like cigarette b.u.t.ts behind a bar. When the footpads of her wheels pa.s.s over these vials, they tiddlywink out from underneath and skitter across the pavement.
People are lined up out the door, waiting to get in. Y.T. jumps the line and goes inside.
The front room of the Reverend Wayne"s Pearly Gates is, of course, like all the others. A row of padded vinyl chairs where worshippers can wait for their number to be called, with a potted plant at each end and a table strewn with primeval magazines. A toy corner where kids can kill time, reenacting imaginary, cosmic battles in injection-molded plastic. A counter done up in fake wood so it looks like something from an old church. Behind the counter, a pudgy high school babe, dishwater blond hair that has been worked over pretty good with a curling iron, blue metal-flake eyeshadow, an even coat of red makeup covering her broad, gelatinous cheeks, a flimsy sort of choir robe thrown over her T-shirt.
When Y.T. comes in, she is right in the middle of a transaction. She sees Y.T. right away, but no three-ring binder anywhere in the world allows you to flag or fail in the middle of a transaction.
Stymied, Y.T. sighs and crosses her arms to convey impatience. In any other business establishment, she"d already be raising h.e.l.l and marching around behind the counter as if she owned the place. But this is a church, d.a.m.n it.
There"s a little rack along the front of the counter bearing religious tracts, free for the taking, donation requested. Several slots on the rack are occupied by the Reverend Wayne"s famous bestseller, How America Was Saved from Communism: ELVIS SHOT JFK.
She pulls out the envelope that the man with the gla.s.s eye stuck into her pocket. It is not thick and soft enough to contain a lot of cash, unfortunately. It contains half a dozen snapshots. All of them feature Uncle Enzo. He is on the broad, fiat horseshoe driveway of a large house, larger than any house Y.T. has ever seen with her own two eyes. He is standing on a skateboard. Or falling off of a skateboard. Or coasting, slowly, arms splayed wildly out to the sides, chased by nervous security personnel.
A piece of paper is wrapped around the pictures. It says: "Y.T.-Thanks for your help. As you can see from these pictures, I tried to train for this a.s.signment, but it"s going to take some practice. Your friend, Uncle Enzo."
Y.T. wraps the pictures up just the way they were, puts them back in her pocket, stifles a smile, returns to business matters.
The girl in the robe is still performing her transaction behind the counter. The transactee is a stocky Spanish-speaking woman in an orange dress.