That"s easy. There"s a Spectrum 2000 right in the middle of the waterfront. As the name implies, each one has a whole range of rooms, from human coin lockers in the lobby all the way to luxury suites on the top. And a whole range of rooms has been rented out by a bunch of people with names ending in -off and -ovski and other dead Slavic giveaways. The foot soldiers sleep in the lobby, laid out straight and narrow in coin lockers next to their AK-47s, and the priests and generals live in nice rooms higher up. Hiro pauses to wonder what a Pentecostal Russian Orthodox priest does with a Magic Fingers.
The suite on the very top is being rented out by a gentleman by the name of Gurov. Mr. KGB himself. Too much of a wimp to hang out on the actual Raft, apparently.
How"d he get from the Raft to Port Sherman? If it involves crossing a couple of hundred miles of North Pacific, it must be a decent-sized vessel.
There are half a dozen marinas in Port Sherman. At the moment, most of them are clogged with small brown boats. It looks like a post-typhoon situation, where a few hundred square miles of ocean have been swept clean of sampans that have piled up against the nearest hard place. Except this is slightly more organized than that The Refus are coming ash.o.r.e already. If they"re smart, and aggressive, they probably know that they can walk to California from here.
That explains why the piers are clogged with trashy little boats. But one of them still looks like a private marina. It"s got a dozen or so clean white vessels, lined up neatly in their slips, no riffraff. And the resolution of this image is good enough that Hiro can see the pier speckled with little doughnuts: probably rings of sandbags. That"d be the only way to keep your private moorage private when the Raft was hovering offsh.o.r.e.
The numbers, flags, and other identifying goodies are harder to make out. The satellite has a hard time picking that stuff out.
Hiro checks to see whether CIC has a stringer in Port Sherman. They have to, because the Raft is here, and CIC hopes to make a big business out of selling Raft intelligence to all the anxious waterfronters between Skagway and Tierra del Fuego.
Indeed. There are a few people hanging out in this town, uploading the latest Port Sherman intel. And one of them is just a punter with a video camera who goes around shooting pictures of everything.
Hiro reviews this stuff in fast-forward. A lot of it is shot from the stringer"s hotel window: hours and hours of coverage of the stream of s.h.i.tty little brown boats laboring their way up the harbor, tying up to the edge of the mini-Raft that"s forming in front of Port Sherman.
But it"s semi-organized, in that some apparently self-appointed water cops are buzzing around in a speedboat, aiming guns at people, shouting through a megaphone. And that explains why, no matter how tangled the mess in the harbor becomes, there"s always a clear lane down the middle of the fjord, headed out to sea. And the terminus of that clear lane is the nice pier with the big boats. There are two big vessels there. One is a large fishing boat flying a flag bearing the emblem of the Orthos, which is just a cross and a flame. It is obvious TROKK loot; the name on the stern is KODIAK QUEEN, and the Orthos haven"t bothered to change it yet. The other large boat is a small cruise vessel, made to carry rich people comfortably to nice places. It has a green flag and appears to be connected with Mr. Lee"s Greater Hong Kong.
Hiro does a little more poking around in the streets of Port Sherman and finds out that there is a pretty good-sized Mr. Lee"s Greater Hong Kong franchulate here. In typical Hong Kong style, it is more of a spray of small buildings and rooms all over town. But it"s a dense spray. Dense enough that Hong Kong has several full-time employees here, including a proconsul. Hiro pulls up the guy"s picture so he"ll recognize him: a crusty-looking Chinese-American gent in his fifties. So it"s not an automated, unmanned franchulate like you normally see in the Lower 48.
When she first woke up, she was still in her RadiKS coverall, mummified in gaffer"s tape, lying on the floor of a s.h.i.tty old Ford van blasting across the middle of nowhere. This did not put her into a very favorable mood. The stun bunny left her with a persistent nosebleed and an eternal throbbing headache, and every time the van hit a chuckhole, her head bounced on the Corrugated steel floor.
First she was just p.i.s.sed. Then she started having brief moments of fear-wanting to go home. After eight hours in the back of the van, there was no doubt in her mind that she wanted to go home. The only thing that kept her from giving up was curiosity. As far as she could tell from this admittedly poor vantage point, this didn"t look like a Fed operation.
The van pulled off the highway, onto a frontage road, and into a parking lot. The rear doors of the van opened up, and a couple of women climbed in. Through the open doors, Y.T. could see the Gothic arch logo of a Reverend Wayne"s Pearly Gates.
"Oh, you poor baby," one of the women said. The other woman just gasped in horror at her condition. One of them just cradled her head and stroked her hair, letting her sip sweet Kool-Aid from a Dixie cup, while the other tenderly, slowly took the gaffer"s tape off.
Her shoes had already been removed when she woke up in the back of the van, and no one offered her another pair. And everything had been removed from her coverall. All the good stuff was gone. But they hadn"t gone underneath the coverall. She still had the dog tags. And one other thing, a thing between her legs called a dentata. There"s no way they could have found that.
She has always known that the dog tags were probably a fake thing anyway. Uncle Enzo doesn"t just go around giving his war souvenirs to fifteen-year-old chicks. But they still might have an effect on someone.
The two women are named Maria and Bonnie. They are with her all the time. Not only with her, but touching her. Lots of hugs, squeezes, hand-holding, and tousled hair. The first time she goes to the bathroom, Bonnie goes with her, opening the stall door and actually standing in there with her. Y.T. thinks that Bonnie is worried that she"s going to pa.s.s out on the toilet or something. But the next time she has to pee, Maria goes with her. She gets no privacy at all. The only problem is she can"t deny that she likes it, in a way. The ride in the van hurt. It really hurt bad. She never felt so lonely in her life. And now she"s barefoot and defenseless in an unfamiliar place and they"re giving her what she needs.
After she had a few minutes to freshen up-whatever that means-inside the Reverend Wayne"s Pearly Gates, she and Marla and Bonnie climbed into a big stretch van with no windows. The floor was carpeted but there were no seats inside, everyone sat on the floor. The van was jammed when they opened the rear doors. Twenty people were packed into it, all energetic, beaming youths. It looked impossible; Y.T. shrank away from it, backing right into Marla and Bonnie. But a cheerful roar came up from the van people, white teeth flashing in the dimness, and people began to scrunch out a tiny s.p.a.ce for them.
She spent most of the next two days packed into the van between Bonnie and Maria, holding hands with them constantly, so she couldn"t even pick her nose without permission. They sang happy songs until her brain turned to tapioca. They played wacky games.
A couple of times every hour, someone in the van would start to babble, just like the Falabalas. Just like the Reverend Wayne"s Pearly Gates people. The babbling would spread throughout the van like a contagious disease, and soon everyone would be doing it.
Everyone except for Y.T. She couldn"t seem to get the hang of it. It just seemed embarra.s.singly stupid to her. So she just faked it.
Three times a day, they had a chance to eat and eliminate. It always happened in Burbclaves. Y.T. could feel them pulling off the interstate, finding their way down twisty development lanes, courts, ways, and circles. A garage door would rise electrically, the van would pull in, the door would shut behind them. They would go into a suburban house, except stripped of furniture and other family touches, and sit on the floor in empty bedrooms-one for boys, one for girls-and eat cake and cookies. This always happened in a totally empty room in a house, but there was always different decor: in one place, flowery countryish wallpaper and a lingering smell of rancid Glade. In another, bluish wallpaper featuring hockey players, football players, basketball players. In another, just plain white walls with old crayon marks on them. Sitting in these empty rooms, Y.T. would study the old furniture sc.r.a.pes on the floors, the dents in the sheetrock, and muse over them like an archaeologist, wondering about the long departed families who had once lived here. But toward the end of the ride, she wasn"t paying attention anymore.
In the van, she could hear nothing but singing and chanting, see nothing but the jammed-together faces of her companions. When they stopped for gas, they did it in giant truck stops out in the middle of nowhere, pulling up to the most distant pump island so that no one was near them. And they never stopped driving. They just got relayed from one driver to the next.
Finally, they got to a coast. Y.T. could smell it. They spent a few minutes waiting, engine idling, and then the van b.u.mped over some kind of a threshold, climbed a few ramps, stopped, set its parking brake. The driver got out and left them all alone in the van for the first time. Y.T. felt glad that the trip was over.
Then everything started to rumble, like an engine noise but a lot bigger. She didn"t feel any movement until a few minutes later, when she realized that everything was rocking gently. The van was parked on a ship, and the ship was headed out to sea.
It"s a real ocean-going ship. An old, s.h.i.tty, rusty one that probably cost about five bucks at the ship junkyard. But it carries cars, and it goes through the water, and it doesn"t sink.
The ship is just like the van, except bigger, with more people. But they eat the same stuff, sing the same songs, and sleep just as rarely as ever. By now, Y.T. finds it perversely comforting. She knows that she"s with a lot of other people like her, and that she"s safe. She knows the routine. She knows where she belongs.
And so finally they come to the Raft. No one has told Y.T. this is where they"re going, but by now it"s obvious. She ought to be scared. But they wouldn"t be going to the Raft if it was as bad as everyone says.
When it starts coming into view, she half expects them to converge on her with gaffer"s tape again. But then she figures out it"s not necessary. She hasn"t been causing trouble. She"s been accepted here, they trust her. It gives her a feeling of pride, in a way.
And she won"t cause trouble on the Raft because all she can do is escape from their part of it onto the Raft per se. As such. The real Raft. The Raft of a hundred Hong Kong B-movies and blood-soaked Nipponese comic books. It doesn"t take much imagination to think of what happens to lone fifteen-year-old blond American girls on the Raft, and these people know it.
Sometimes, she worries about her mother, then she hardens her heart and thinks maybe the whole thing will be good for her. Shake her up a little. Which is what she needs. After Dad left, she just folded up into herself like an origami bird thrown into a fire.
There is kind of an outer cloud of small boats surrounding the Raft for a distance of a few miles. Almost all of them are fishing boats. Some of them carry men with guns, but they don"t f.u.c.k around with this ferry. The ferry swings through this outer zone, making a broad turn, finally zeroing in on a white neighborhood on one flank of the Raft. Literally white. All the boats here are clean and new. There"s a couple of big rusty boats with Russian lettering on the side, and the ferry pulls up alongside one of them, ropes are thrown across, then augmented with nets, gang-planks, webs of old discarded tires.
This Raft thing does not look like good skating territory at all. She wonders if any of the other people on board this ferry are skaters. Doesn"t seem likely. Really, they are not her kind of people at all. She has always been a dirty sc.u.m dog of the highways, not one of these happy singalong types. Maybe the Raft is just the place for her.
They take her down into one of the Russian ships and give her the grossest job of all time: cutting up fish. She does not want a job, has not asked for one. But that"s what she gets. Still, no one really talks to her, no one bothers to explain anything, and that makes her reluctant to ask. She has just run into a ma.s.sive cultural shock wave, because most of the people on this ship are old and fat and Russian and don"t speak English.
For a couple of days, she spends a lot of time sleeping on the job, being prodded awake by the hefty Russian dames who work in this place. She also does some eating. Some of the fish that comes through this place looks pretty rank, but there"s a fair amount of salmon. The only way she knows this is from having sushi at the mall-salmon is the orange-red stuff. So she makes some sushi of her own, munches down on some fresh salmon meat, and it"s good. It clears her head a little.
Once she gets over the shock of it and settles into a routine, she starts looking around her, watching the other fish-cutting dames, and realizes that this is just like life must be for about 99 percent of the people in the world. You"re in this place. There"s other people all around you, but they don"t understand you and you don"t understand them, but people do a lot of pointless babbling anyway. In order to stay alive, you have to spend all day every day doing stupid meaningless work. And the only way to get out of it is to quit, cut loose, take a flyer, and go off into the wicked world, where you will be swallowed up and never heard from again.
She"s not especially good at cutting up fish. The big stout Russian chicks-stomping, slab-faced babushkas-keep giving her a ha.s.sle. They keep hovering, watching her cut with this look on their face like they can"t believe what a dork she is. Then they try to show her how to do it the right way, but still she"s not so good at it. It"s hard, and her hands are cold and stiff all the time.
After a couple of frustrating days, they give her a new job, farther down the production line: they turn her into a cafeteria dame. Like one of the slop-slingers in the high school lunchroom. She works in the galley of one of the big Russian ships, hauling vats of cooked fish stew out to the buffet line, ladling it out into bowls, shoving it across the counter at an unending line consisting of religious fanatics, religious fanatics, and more religious fanatics. Except this time around, there seem to be a lot more Asians and hardly any Americans at all.
They have a new species here too: people with antennas coming out of their heads. The antennas look like the ones on cop walkie-talkies: short, blunt, black rubber whips. They rise up from behind the ear. The first time she sees one of these people, she figures it must be some kind of new Walkman, and she wants to ask the guy where he got it, what he"s listening to. But he"s a strange guy, stranger than all of the others, with a permanent thousand-yard stare and a bad case of the mumbles, and he ends up giving her the creeps so bad that she just shoves an extra-large dose of stew in his face and hurries him on down the line. From time to time, she actually recognizes one of the people who were in her van. But they don"t seem to recognize her; they just look right through her. Gla.s.sy-eyed. Like they"ve been brainwashed.
Like Y.T. was brainwashed.
She can"t believe it has taken her this long to figure out what they were doing to her. And that just makes her more p.i.s.sed.
In Reality, Port Sherman is a surprisingly tiny little burg, really just a few square blocks. Until the Raft came along, it had a full-time population of a couple of thousand people. Now the population must be pushing fifty thousand. Hiro has to slow down a little bit here because the Refus are all sleeping on the street for the time being, an impediment to traffic.
That"s okay, it saves his life. Because shortly after he gets into Port Sherman, the wheels on his motorcycle lock up-the spokes become rigid-and the ride gets very b.u.mpy. A couple of seconds after that, the entire bike goes dead, becomes an inert chunk of metal. Not even the engine works. He looks down into the flat screen on top of the fuel tank, wanting to get a status report, but it"s just showing snow. The bios has crashed. Asherah"s possessed his bike.
So he abandons it in the middle of the street, starts walking toward the waterfront. Behind him, he can hear the Refus waking up, struggling out of their blankets and sleeping bags, converging over the fallen bike, trying to be the first to claim it.
He can hear a deep thumping in his chest, and for a minute he remembers Raven"s motorcycle in L.A., how he felt it first and heard it later. But there are no motorcycles around here. The sound is coming from above. It"s a chopper. The kind that flies.
Hiro can smell the seaweed rotting on the beach, he"s so close.
He comes around a corner and finds himself on the waterfront street, looking straight into the facade of the Spectrum 2000. On the other side is water. The chopper"s coming up the fjord, following it inland from the open sea, headed straight for the Spectrum 2000. It"s a small one, an agile number with a lot of gla.s.s. Hiro can see the crosses painted all over it where the red stars used to be. It is brilliant and dazzling in the cool blue light of early morning because it"s shedding a trail of stars, blue-white magnesium flares tumbling out of it every few seconds, landing in the water below, where they continue to burn, leaving an astral pathway marked out down the length of the harbor. They aren"t there to look cool. They are there to confuse heat-seeking missiles. From where he"s standing, he can"t see the roof of the hotel, because he"s looking straight up at it. But he has the feeling that Gurov must be waiting there, on top of the tallest building in Port Sherman, waiting for a dawn evacuation to carry him away into the porcelain sky, carry him away to the Raft.
Question: Why is he being evacuated? And why are they worried about heat-seeking missiles? Hiro realizes, belatedly, that some heavy s.h.i.t is going on.
If he still had the bike, he could ride it right up the fire stairs and find out what"s happening. But he doesn"t have the bike.
A deep thump sounds from the roof of a building on his right. It"s an old building, one of the original pioneer structures from a hundred years ago. Hiro"s knees buckle, his mouth comes open, shoulders hunch involuntarily, he looks toward the sound. And something catches his eye, something small and dark, darting away from the building and up into the air like a sparrow. But when it"s a hundred yards out over the water, the sparrow catches fire, coughs out a great cloud of sticky yellow smoke, turns into a white fireball, and springs forward. It keeps getting faster and faster, tearing down the center of the harbor, until it pa.s.ses all the way through the little chopper, in through the windshield and out the back. The chopper turns into a cloud of flame shedding dark bits of sc.r.a.p metal, like a phoenix breaking out of its sh.e.l.l.
Apparently, Hiro"s not the only guy in town who hates Gurov. Now Gurov has to come downstairs and get on a boat.
The lobby of the Spectrum 2000 is an armed camp, full of beards with guns. They"re still putting their defense together; more soldiers are dragging themselves out of their coin lockers, pulling on their jackets, grabbing their guns. A swarthy guy, probably a Tatar sergeant left over from the Red Army, is running around the lobby in a modified Soviet Marines uniform, screaming at people, shoving them this way and that.
Gurov may be a holy man, but he can"t walk on water. He"ll have to come out to the waterfront street, make his way two blocks down to the gate that admits him to the secured pier, and get on board the Kodiak Queen, which is waiting for him, black smoke starting to cough out of its stacks, lights starting to come on. Just down the pier from the Kodiak Queen is the Kowloon, which is the big Mr. Lee"s Greater Hong Kong boat.
Hiro turns his back on the Spectrum 2000 and starts running up and down the waterfront streets, scanning the logos until he sees the one he wants: Mr. Lee"s Greater Hong Kong.
They don"t want to let him in. He flashes his pa.s.sport; the doors open. The guard is Chinese but speaks a bit of English. This is a measure of how weird things are in Port Sherman: they have a guard on the door. Usually, Mr. Lee"s Greater Hong Kong is an open country, always looking for new citizens, even if they are the poorest Refus.
"Sorry," the guard says in a reedy, insincere voice, "I did not know-" He points to Hiro"s pa.s.sport.
The franchulate is literally a breath of fresh air. It doesn"t have that Third World ambience, doesn"t smell like urine at all. Which means it must be the local headquarters, or close to it, because most of Hong Kong"s Port Sherman real estate probably consists of nothing more than a gunman hogging a pay phone in a lobby. But this place is s.p.a.cious, clean, and nice. A few hundred Refus stare at him through the windows, held at bay not by the mere plate gla.s.s but by the eloquent promise of the three Rat Thing hutches lined up against one wall. From the looks of it, two of those have just been moved in recently. Pays to beef up your security when the Raft is coming through.
Hiro proceeds to the counter. A man is talking on the phone in Cantonese, which means that he is, in fact, shouting. Hiro recognizes him as the Port Sherman proconsul. He is deeply involved in this little chat, but he has definitely noticed Hiro"s swords, is watching him carefully.
"We are very busy," the man says, hanging up.
"Now you are a lot busier," Hiro says. "I would like to charter your boat, the Kowloon."
"It"s very expensive," the man says.
"I just threw away a brand-new top-of-the-line motorcycle in the middle of the street because I didn"t feel like pushing it half a block to the garage," Hiro says. "I am on an expense account that would blow your mind."
"It"s broken."
"I appreciate your politeness in not wanting to come out and just say no," Hiro says, "but I happen to know that it is, in fact, not broken, and so I must consider your refusal equivalent to a no."
"It"s not available," the man says. "Someone else is using it."
"It has not yet left the pier," Hiro says, "so you can cancel that engagement, using one of the excuses you have just given me, and then I will pay you more money."
"We cannot do this," the man says.
"Then I will go out into the street and inform the Refus that the Kowloon is leaving for L.A. in exactly one hour, and that they have enough room to take twenty Refus along with them, first come, first served," Hiro says.
"No," the man says.
"I will tell them to contact you personally."
"Where do you want to go on the Kowloon?" the man says.
"The Raft."
"Oh, well, why didn"t you say so," the man says. "That"s where our other pa.s.senger is going."
"You"ve got someone else who wants to go to the Raft?"
"That"s what I said. Your pa.s.sport, please."
Hiro hands it over. The man shoves it into a slot. Hiro"s name, personal data, and mug shots are digitally transferred into the franchulate"s bios, and with a little bit of key-pounding, the man persuades it to spit out a laminated photo ID card.
"You get onto the pier with this," he says. "It"s good for six hours. You make your own deal with the other pa.s.senger. After that, I never want to see you again."
"What if I need more consular services?"
"I can always go out and tell people," the man says, "that a n.i.g.g.e.r with swords is out raping Chinese refugees."
"Hmm. This isn"t exactly the best service I"ve ever had at a Mr. Lee"s Greater Hong Kong."
"This is not a normal situation," the man says. "Look out the window, a.s.shole." Not much has apparently changed down at the waterfront.
The Orthos have organized their defense in the lobby of the Spectrum 2000: furniture has been overturned, barricades set up. Inside the hotel itself, Hiro presumes furious activity is going on.
It"s still not clear whom the Orthos are defending themselves against. Making his way through the waterfront area, Hiro doesn"t see much: just more Chinese Refus in baggy clothes. It"s just that some of them look a lot more alert than others. They have a whole different affect. Most of the Chinese have their eyes on the mud in front of their feet, and their minds on something else. But some of them are just strolling up and down the street, looking all around, alertly, and most of these people happen to be young men wearing bulky jackets. And haircuts that are from a whole other stylistic universe than what the others are sporting. There is evidence of styling gel.
The entrance to the rich people"s pier is sandbagged, barb-wired, and guarded. Hiro approaches slowly, his hands in plain sight, and shows his pa.s.s to the head guard, who is the only white person Hiro has seen in Port Sherman.
And that gets him onto the pier. Just like that. Like the Hong Kong franchulate, it"s empty, quiet, and doesn"t stink. It bobs up and down gently on the tide, in a way that Hiro finds relaxing. It"s really just a train of rafts, plank platforms built over floating hunks of styrofoam, and if it weren"t guarded it would probably end up getting dragged out and lashed onto the Raft.
Unlike a normal marina, it"s not quiet and isolated. Usually, people moor their boats, lock them up, and leave. Here, at least one person is hanging out on each boat, drinking coffee, keeping their weapons in plain sight, watching Hiro very intently as be strolls up the pier. Every few seconds, the pier thunders with footsteps, and one or two Russians run past Hiro, making for the Kodiak Queen. They are all young men, all sailor/soldier types, and they"re diving onto the Kodiak Queen as if it"s the last boat out of h.e.l.l, being shouted at by officers, running to their stations, frantically attending to their sailor ch.o.r.es. Things are a lot calmer on the Kowloon. It"s guarded too, but most of the people appear to be waiters and stewards, wearing snappy uniforms with bra.s.s b.u.t.tons and white gloves. Uniforms that are intended to be used indoors, in pleasant, climate-controlled dining rooms. A few crew members are visible from place to place, their black hair slicked back, clad in dark wind. breakers to protect them from the cold and spray. Hiro can only see one man on the Kowloon who appears to be a pa.s.senger, a tall slender Caucasian in a dark suit, strolling around chatting into a portable telephone. Probably some Industry jerk who wants to go out for a day cruise, look at the Refus on the Raft while he"s sitting in a dining room having a gourmet dinner.
Hiro"s about halfway down the pier when all h.e.l.l breaks loose on sh.o.r.e, in front of the Spectrum 2000. It starts with a long series of heavy machine-gun bursts that don"t appear to do much damage, but do clear the street pretty fast. Ninety-nine percent of the Refus just evaporate. The others, the young men Hiro noticed, pull interesting high-tech weapons out of their jackets and disappear into doorways and buildings. Hiro picks up the pace a little, starts walking backward down the pier, trying to get some of the larger vessels in between him and the action so he doesn"t get hit by a stray burst.
A fresh breeze comes off the water and down the pier. Pa.s.sing by the Kowloon, it picks up the smell of bacon frying and coffee brewing, and Hiro can"t help but meditate on the fact that his last meal was half of a cheap beer in a Kelley"s Tap in a Snooze "n" Cruise.
The scene in front of the Spectrum 2000 has devolved into a generalized roar of unbelievably loud white noise as all the people inside and outside of the hotel fire their weapons back and forth across the street.
Something touches his shoulder. Hiro turns to brush it away, sees that he"s looking down at a short Chinese waitress who has come down the pier from the Kowloon. Having gotten his attention, she puts her hands back where they were originally, to wit, plastered over her ears.
"You Hiro Protagonist?" she mouths, basically inaudible over the ridiculous noise of the firefight.
Hiro nods. She nods back, steps away from him, jerks her head toward the Kowloon. With her hands plastered over her ears this way, it looks like some kind of a folk-dance move.
Hiro follows her down the pier. Maybe they"re going to let him charter the Kowloon after all. She ushers him onto the aluminum gangplank.