"We don"t give out our names."
"I need to know who"s delivering this."
"Why? You said it wasn"t important."
The guy gets really fl.u.s.tered. "Okay," he says. "Forget it. Just deliver it, please."
Okay, be that way, she mentally says. She mentally says a number of other things, too. The man is an obvious pervert. It"s so plain, so open: "And your name is?" Give me a break, man.
Names are unimportant. Everyone knows Kouriers are interchangeable parts. It"s just that some happen to be a lot faster and better.
So she skates out of the office. It"s all very anonymous. No Corporate logos anywhere. So as she"s waiting for the elevator, she calls RadiKS, tries to find out who initiated this call.
The answer comes back a few minutes later, as she"s riding out of the office park, pooned onto a nice Mercedes: Rife Advanced Research Enterprises. RARE. One of these high-tech outfits. Probably trying to get a government contract. Probably trying to sell sphygmomanometers to the Feds or something like that. Oh well, she just delivers "em. She gets the impression that this Mercedes is sandbagging-driving real slow so she"ll poon something else-so she poons something else, an outgoing delivery truck. Judging from the way it"s riding high on its springs, it must be empty, so it"ll probably move along pretty fast.
Ten seconds later, predictably, the Mercedes blasts by in the left lane, so she poons that and rides it nice and hard for a couple of miles.
Getting into Fedland is a drag. Most Fedsters drive tiny, plastic and aluminum cars that are hard to poon. But eventually she nails one, a little jellybean with glued-on windows and a three-cylinder engine, and that takes her up to the United States border.
The smaller this country gets, the more paranoid they become. Nowadays, the customs people are just impossible. She has to sign a ten-page doc.u.ment-and they actually make her read it. They say it should take at least half an hour for her just to read the thing.
"But I read it two weeks ago."
"It might have changed," the guard says, "so you have to read it again."
Basically, it just certifies that Y.T. is not a terrorist, Communist (whatever that is), h.o.m.os.e.xual, national-symbol desecrator, p.o.r.nography merchant, welfare parasite, racially insensitive, carrier of any infectious disease, or advocate of any ideology tending to impugn traditional family values. Most of it is just definitions of all the words used on the first page.
So Y.T. sits in the little room for half an hour, doing housekeeping work-going over her stuff, changing batteries in all her little devices, cleaning her nails, having her skateboard run its self-maintenance procedures. Then she signs the f.u.c.king doc.u.ment and hands it over to the guy. And then she"s in Fedland. It"s not hard finding the place. Typical Fed building-a million steps. Like it"s built on top of a mountain of steps. Columns. A lot more guys in this one than usual. Chunky guys with slippery hair. Must be some kind of cop building. The guard at the front door is a cop all the way, wants to give her a big ha.s.sle about carrying her skateboard into the place. Like they"ve got a safe place out front to keep skateboards.
The cop guy is completely hard to deal with. But that"s okay, so is Y.T.
"Here"s the envelope," she says. "You can take it up to the ninth floor yourself on your coffee break. Too bad you have to take the stairs."
"Look," he says, totally exasperated, "this is EBGOC. This is, like, the headquarters. EBGOC central. You got that? Everything that happens within a mile is being videotaped. People don"t spit on the pavement within sight of this building. They don"t even say bad words. n.o.body"s going to steal your skateboard."
"That"s even worse. They"ll steal it. Then they"ll say they didn"t steal it, they confiscated it. I know you Feds, you"re always confiscating s.h.i.t."
The guy sighs. Then his eyes go out of focus and he shuts up for a minute. Y.T. can tell he"s getting a message over the little earphone that"s plugged into his ear, the mark of the true Fed.
"Go on in," he says. "But you gotta sign."
"Naturally," Y.T. says.
The cop hands her the sign-in sheet, which is actually a notebook computer with an electronic pen. She writes "Y.T." on the screen, it"s converted to a digital bitmap, automatically time stamped, and sent off to the big computer at Fed Central. She knows she"s not going to make it through the metal detector without stripping naked, so she just vaults the cop"s table-what"s he going to do, shoot her?-and heads on into the building, skateboard under her arm.
"Hey!" he says, weakly.
"What, you got lots of EBGOC agents in here being mugged and raped by female Kouriers?" she says, stomping the elevator b.u.t.ton ferociously.
Elevator takes forever. She loses her patience and just climbs the stairs like all the other Feds. The guy is right, it"s definitely Cop Central here on the ninth floor. Every creepy guy in sungla.s.ses and slippery hair you"ve ever seen, they"re all here, all with little fleshtone helices of wire trailing down from their ears. There"s even some female Feds. They look even scarier than the guys. The things that a woman can do to her hair to make herself look professional-Jeeezus! Why not just wear a motorcycle helmet? At least then you can take it off.
Except none of the Feds, male or female, is wearing sun-gla.s.ses. They look naked without them. Might as well be walking around with no pants on. Seeing these Feds without their mirror specs is like blundering into the boys" locker room.
She finds Room 968A easily enough. Most of the floor is just a big pool of desks. All the actual, numbered rooms are around the edges, with frosted gla.s.s doors. Each of the creepy guys seems to have a desk of his own, some of them loiter near their desks, the rest of them are doing a lot of hall-jogging and impromptu conferencing at other creepy guys" desks. Their white shirts are painfully clean. Not as many shoulder holsters as she would expect; all the gun-carrying Feds are probably out in what used to be Alabama or Chicago trying to confiscate back bits of United States territory from what is now a Buy "n" Fly or a toxic-waste dump.
She goes on into Room 968A. It"s an office. Four Fed guys are in here, the same as the others except most of them are a tad older, in their forties and fifties.
"Got a delivery for this room," Y.T. says.
"You"re Y.T.?" says the head Fed, who"s sitting behind the desk.
"You"re not supposed to know my name," Y.T. says. "How did you know my name?"
"I recognized you," the head Fed says. "I know your mother." Y.T. does not believe him. But these Feds have all kinds of ways of finding out stuff.
"Do you have any relatives in Afghanistan?" she says.
The guys all look back and forth at each other, like, did you understand the chick? But it"s not a sentence that is intended to be understood. Actually, Y.T. has all kinds of voice recognition ware in her coverall and in her plank. When she says, "Do you have any relatives in Afghanistan?" that"s like a code phrase, it tells all of her spook gear to get ready, shake itself down, check itself out, p.r.i.c.k up its electronic ears.
"You want this envelope or not?" she says.
"I"ll take it," the head Fed says, standing up and holding out one hand.
Y.T. walks into the middle of the room and hands him the envelope. But instead of taking it, he lunges out at the last minute and grabs her forearm.
She sees an open handcuff in his other hand. He brings it out and snaps it down on her wrist so it tightens and locks shut over the cuff of her coverall.
"I"m sorry to do this, Y.T., but I have to place you under arrest," he"s saying.
"What the f.u.c.k are you doing?" Y.T. is saying. She"s holding her free arm back away from the desk so he can"t cuff her wrists together, but one of the other Feds grabs her by the free wrist, so now she"s stretched out like a tightrope between the two big Feds.
"You guys are dead," she says.
All the guys smile, like they enjoy a chick with some s.p.u.n.k.
"You guys are dead," she says a second time.
This is the key phrase that all of her ware is waiting to hear. When she says it the second time, all the self-defense stuff comes on, which means that among other things, a few thousand volts of radio-frequency electrical power suddenly flood through the outsides of her cuffs.
The head Fed behind the desk blurts out a grunt from way down in his stomach. He flies back away from her, his entire right side jerking spastically, trips over his own chair, and sprawls back into the wall, smacking his head on the marble windowsill. The jerk who"s yanking on her other arm stretches out like he"s on an invisible rack, accidentally slapping one of the other guys in the face, giving that guy a nice dose of juice to the head. Both of them hit the floor like a sack of rabid cats. There"s only one of these guys left, and he"s reaching under his jacket for something. She takes one step toward him, swings her arm around, and the end of the loose manacle strokes him in the neck. Just a caress, but it might as well be a two-handed blow from Satan"s electric ax handle. That funky juice runs all up and down his spine, and suddenly, he"s sprawled across a couple of s.h.i.tty old wooden chairs and his pistol is rotating on the floor like the spinner in a children"s game.
She flexes her wrist in a particular way, and the bundy stunner drops down her sleeve and into her hand. The manacle swinging from the other hand will have a similar effect on that side. She also pulls out the can of Liquid Knuckles, pops the lid, sets the spray nozzle on wide angle.
One of the Fed creeps is nice enough to open the office door for her. He comes into the room with his gun already drawn, backed up by half a dozen other guys who"ve flocked here from the office pool, and she just lets them have it with the Liquid Knuckles. Whoosh, it"s like bug spray. The sound of bodies. .h.i.tting the floor is like a ba.s.s drum roll. She finds that her skateboard has no problem rolling across their p.r.o.ne bodies, and then she"s out into the office pool. These guys are converging from all sides, there"s an incredible number of them, she just keeps holding that b.u.t.ton down, pointed straight ahead, digging at the floor with her foot, building up speed. The Liquid Knuckles acts like a chemical flying wedge, she"s skating out of there on a carpet of bodies. Some of the Feds are agile enough to dart in from behind and try to get her that way, but she"s ready with the bundy stunner, which turns their nervous systems into coils of hot barbed wire for a few minutes but isn"t supposed to have any other effects.
She"s made it about three-quarters of the way across the office when the Liquid Knuckles runs out. But it still works for a second or two because people are afraid of it, keep diving out of the way even though there"s nothing coming out. Then a couple of them figure it out, make the mistake of trying to grab her by the wrists. She gets one of them with the bundy stunner and the other with the electric manacle. Then boom through the door and she"s out into the stairwell, leaving four dozen casualties in her wake. Serves them right, they didn"t even try to arrest her in a gentlemanly way.
To a man on foot, stairs are a hindrance. But to the smartwheels, they just look like a forty-five-degree angle ramp. It"s a little choppy, especially when she"s down to about the second floor and is going way too fast, but it"s definitely doable.
A lucky thing: One of the first-floor cops is just opening the stairwell door, no doubt alerted by the symphony of alarm bells and buzzers that has begun to merge into a solid wall of hysterical sound. She blows by the guy; he puts one arm out in an attempt to stop her, sort of belts her across the waist in the process, throws her balance off, but this is a very forgiving skateboard, it"s smart enough to slow down for her a little bit when her center of ma.s.s gets into the wrong place. Pretty soon it"s back under her, she"s banking radically through the elevator lobby, aiming dead center for the arch of the metal detector, through which the bright outdoor light of freedom is shining. Her old buddy the cop is up on his feet, and he reacts fast enough to spread-eagle himself across the metal detector. Y.T. acts like she"s heading right for him, then kicks the board sideways at the last minute, punches one of the toe switches, coils her legs underneath her, and jumps into the air. She flies right over his little table while the plank is rolling underneath it, and a second later she lands on it, wobbles once, gets her balance back. She"s in the lobby, headed for the doors.
It"s an old building. Most of the doors are metal. But there"s a couple of revolving doors, too, just big sheets of gla.s.s.
Early thrashers used to inadvertently skate into walls of gla.s.s from time to time, which was a problem. It turned into a bigger problem when the whole Kourier thing got started and thrashers started spending a lot more time trying to go fast through office-type environments where gla.s.s walls are considered quite the concept. Which is why on an expensive skateboard, like this one definitely is, you can get, as an extra added safety feature, the RadiKS Narrow Cone Tuned Shock Wave Projector. It works on real short notice, which is good, but you can only use it once (it draws its power from an explosive charge), and then you have to take your plank into the shop to have it replaced.
It"s an emergency thing. Strictly a panic b.u.t.ton. But that"s cool. Y.T. makes sure she"s aimed directly at the gla.s.s revolving doors, then hits the appropriate toe switch.
It"s-my G.o.d-like you stretched a tarp across a stadium to turn it into a giant tom-tom and then crashed a 747 into it. She can feel her internal organs move several inches. Her heart trades places with her liver. The bottoms of her feet feel numb and tingly. And she"s not even standing in the path of the shock wave.
The safety gla.s.s in the revolving doors doesn"t just crack and fall to the floor, like she imagined it would. It is blown out of its moorings. It gushes out of the building and down the front steps. She follows, an instant later.
The ridiculous cascade of white marble steps on the front of the building just gives her more ramp time. By the time she reaches the sidewalk, she"s easily got enough speed to coast all the way to Mexico. As she"s swinging out across the broad avenue, aiming her crosshairs at the customs post a quarter mile away, which she is going to have to jump over, something tells her to look up.
Because after all, the building she just escaped from is towering above her, many stories full of Fed creeps, and all the alarms are going off. Most of the windows can"t be opened, all they can do is look out. But there are people on the roof. Mostly the roof is a forest of antennas. If it"s a forest, these guys are the creepy little gnomes who live in the trees. They are ready for action, they have their sungla.s.ses on, they have weapons, they"re all looking at her.
But only one guy"s taking aim. And the thing he"s aiming at her is huge. The barrel is the size of a baseball bat. She can see the muzzle flash poke out of it, wreathed in a sudden doughnut of white smoke. It"s not pointed right at her; it"s aimed in front of her.
The stun bunny lands on the street, dead ahead, bounces up in the air, and detonates at an alt.i.tude of twenty feet.
The next quarter of a second: There"s no bright flash to blind her, and so she can actually see the shock wave spreading outward in a perfect sphere, hard and palpable as a ball of ice. Where the sphere contacts the street, it makes a circular wave front, making pebbles bounce, flipping old McDonald"s containers that have long been smashed flat, and coaxing fine, flourlike dust out of all the tiny crevices in the pavement, so that it sweeps across the road toward her like a microscopic blizzard. Above it, the shock wave hangs in the air, rushing toward her at the speed of sound, a lens of air that flattens and refracts everything on the other side. She"s pa.s.sing through it.
As Hiro crests the pa.s.s on his motorcycle at five in the morning, the town of Port Sherman, Oregon, is suddenly laid out before him: a flash of yellow loglo wrapped into a vast U-shaped valley that was ground out of the rock, a long time ago, by a big tongue of ice in an epochal period of geological c.u.n.n.i.l.i.n.g.u.s. There is just a light dusting of gold around the edges where it fades into the rain forest, thickening and intensifying as it approaches the harbor-a long narrow fjordlike notch cut into the straight coastline of Oregon, a deep cold trench of black water heading straight out to j.a.pan.
Hiro"s back on the Rim again. Feels good after that night ride through the sticks. Too many rednecks, too many mounties.
Even from ten miles away and a mile above, it"s not a pretty sight. Farther away from the central harbor district, Hiro can make out a few speckles of red, which is a little better than the yellow. He wishes he could see something in green or blue or purple, but there don"t seem to be any neighborhoods done up in those gourmet colors.
But then this isn"t exactly a gourmet job.
He rides half a mile off the road, sits down on a flat rock in an open s.p.a.ce-ambush-proof, more or less-and goggles into the Metaverse.
"Librarian?"
"Yes, sir?"
"Inanna."
"A figure from Sumerian mythology. Later cultures knew her as Ishtar, or Esther."
"Good G.o.ddess or bad G.o.ddess?"
"Good. A beloved G.o.ddess."
"Did she have any dealings with Enki or Asherah?"
"Mostly with Enki. She and Enki were on good and bad terms at different times. Inanna was known as the queen of all the great me."
"I thought the me belonged to Enki."
"They did. But Inanna went to the Abzu-the watery fortress in the city of Eridu where Enki stored up the me-and got Enki to give her all the me. This is how the me were released into civilization."
"Watery fortress, huh?"
"Yes, sir."
"How did Enki feel about this?"
"He gave them to her willingly, apparently because he was drunk, and besotted with Inanna"s physical charms. When he sobered up, he tried to chase her down and get them back, but she outsmarted him."
"Let"s get semiotic," Hiro mumbles. "The Raft is L. Bob Rife"s watery fortress. That"s where he stores up all of his stuff. All of his me. Juanita went to Astoria, which was as close as you could get to the Raft a couple of days ago. I think she"s trying to pull an Inanna."
"In another popular Sumerian myth," the Librarian says, "Inanna descends into the nether world."
"Go on," Hiro says.
"She gathers together all of her me and enters the land of no return."
"Great."
"She pa.s.ses through the nether world and reaches the temple that is ruled over by Ereshkigal, G.o.ddess of Death. She is traveling under false pretenses, which are easily penetrated by the all-seeing Ereshkigal. But Ereshkigal allows her to enter the temple. As Inanna enters, her robes and jewels and me are stripped from her and she is brought, stark naked, before Ereshkigal and the seven judges of the underworld. The judges "fastened their eyes upon her, the eyes of death; at their word, the word which tortures the spirit, Inanna was turned into a corpse, a piece of rotting meat, and was hung from a hook on the wall." Kramer."
"Wonderful. Why the h.e.l.l would she do something like that?"
"As Diane Wolkstein puts it, "Inanna gave up all she had accomplished in life until she was stripped naked, with nothing remaining but her will to be reborn...because of her journey to the underworld, she took on the powers and mysteries of death and rebirth.""
"Oh. So I guess there"s more to the story?"
"Inanna"s messenger waits for three days, and when she fails to return from the nether world, goes to the G.o.ds asking for their help. None of the G.o.ds is willing to help except for Enki."
"So our buddy, Enki, the hacker G.o.d, has to bail her a.s.s out of h.e.l.l."
"Enki creates two people and sends them into the netherworid to rescue Inanna. Through their magic, Inanna is brought back to life. She returns from the netherworld, followed by a host of the dead."
"Juanita went to the Raft three days ago," Hiro says. "It"s time to get hacking."
Earth is still where he left it, zoomed in to show a magnified view of the Raft. In the light of last night"s chat with Chuck Wrightson, it"s not hard to find the hunk of raft that was staked out by the Orthos when the Enterprise swung by TROKK a few weeks back. There"s a couple of big-a.s.sed Soviet freighters tied together, a swarm of small boats around them. Most of the Raft is dead brown and organic, but this section is all white fibergla.s.s: pleasure craft looted from the comfortable retirees of TROKK. Thousands of them.
Now the Raft is off Port Sherman, so, Hiro figures that"s where the high priests of Asherah are hanging out. In a few days, they"ll be in Eureka, then San Francisco, then L.A.-a floating land link, tying the Orthos" operations on the Raft to the closest available point on the mainland. He turns away from the Raft, skims across the ocean to Port Sherman to do a bit of reconnoitering there.
Down along the waterfront, there"s a nice crescent of cheap motels with yellow logos. Hiro rifles through them, looking for Russian names.