The Big U

by Neal Stephenson

  When he opened the door again, all he had to do was push the barrel of the shotgun out of the way and push his saber through one of the owner’s lungs. The gun came free in his hand and he hurled it backward out the window, where it bounced off the cadaver and fell to Tar City. In the ensuing melee Casimir slashed and whipped several Terrorists with the blade, or punched them with the guard, and then they were all gone and he was walking down the stairs.

  His destination was a room in a back hallway far beneath A Tower: University Locksmithing. This was the most heavily fortified room in the Plex, as a single breach in its security meant replacing thousands of locks. It had just one outside window, gridded over by heavy steel tubes, and the door was solid steel, locked by the toughest lock technology could devise. As Casimir approached it, he found the nearby corridors empty. The security system was still on the ball, he supposed. But the events of the day had unleashed in Casimir’s mind a kind of maniacal, animal cunning, accumulated through years of craftily avoiding migraines and parties.

  The corridors in this section were relatively narrow. He put his feet against one wall and his hands against the other, pushed, hard enough to hold himself in the air, slowly “walked” up the walls until his back was against the pipes on the ceiling, then “walked” around the corner and down the hall toward that steel door. Usually the only beings found on the ceilings of the Plex were bats, and so the little TV camera mounted above the door was aimed down toward the floor. Eventually Casimir was able to rest his hands directly on the camera’s mounting bracket and wedge his feet into a crack between a ceiling pipe and the ceiling across the hall. Not very comfortable, he used one hand to undo his belt buckle. In five minutes, during which he frequently had to rest both arms, he was able to get the belt over another pipe and rebuckle it around his waist, giving himself an uncomfortable but stable harness.

  Within half an hour, the TV camera, inches from his face, began to swivel back and forth warily. Casimir loosened his belt buckle. The lock clicked open and an old man emerged, holding a pistol. Casimir simply dropped, pulled the gun free, flung it back into the room, then dragged the locksmith inside. While the man was regaining his breath, Casimir went through his pockets and came up with a heavily laden keychain.

  After a while the locksmith sat up. “Whose side are you on?” he said.

  “No side. I’m on a quest.”

  The locksmith, apparently familiar with quests, nodded. “What do you want with me?” he asked.

  “The master keys, and a place for the night. It looks as though I’ve got both.” Casimir tossed the keys in his hand. “Where were you taking these keys?”

  The locksmith rose to his feet, looking suddenly fierce and righteous. “I was getting them out of the Plex, young fella! Listen. I didn’t spend thirty-five years here so’s I could sell the masters to the highest bidder soon as things got hairy. I was taking those out of the Plex for safekeeping and damn you for insulting me. Give ’em back.”

  “I have no right to take them, then,” said Casimir, and dropped the keys into the locksmith’s hands. The man stepped back first in fear, then in wonder.

  There was a high crack and the locksmith fell. Casimir ran for the door, where a loner with a bolt-action .22 was frantically trying to get a second round into the chamber. Casimir nailed him with the saber, kicked him dead into the hallway, grabbed the .22 and locked the door.

  The locksmith was struggling to his feet, pulling something bright from his sock. The big keychain was still on the floor where he’d dropped it. He now held seven loose keys in his hands, and with a distant, dying look he gazed through the crossbars of the window at the million lights of the city. Casimir ran and stood before him, but seeing his shadow cross the man’s face, fell to his knees.

  “Thirty-five years I looked for someone worthy to take my place,” whispered the Locksmith. “Thought I never would, thought it was all turning to shit. And here in the last five minutes…here, lad, I pass my charge on to you.” He parted his hands, allowing the keys to fall into Casimir’s. Then he dropped his hands to his sides and died. Casimir gently laid him out on a workbench and crossed his arms over his heart.

  After pinching the barrel of the .22 shut in a vise, Casimir curled up on a neighboring workbench and slept.

  Though Casimir considered Sarah and Hyacinth safe, they were only relatively safe when they and Lucy left E12S. Their destination was the Women’s Center, and their route was a young and disorganized war.

  They went first to my suite—I had given Lucy a key. They remained for a couple of hours, borrowing clothes, eating, calming down and building up their courage.

  Fully clothed, equipped and reloaded, they broke out my picture window in midafternoon and lowered themselves a few feet onto Tar City. For the time being they kept their guns concealed. Running across the roof it was possible to cover ground swiftly and avoid the thronged corridors. After a couple of hundred feet and a few far misses by bombardiers above, they arrived at one of the large holes in the roof and ducked down into the kitchen warehouses. Approaching quietly, they slid into the narrow space between the boxes and the ceiling and avoided detection. Following Hyacinth, they slid on their bellies down the shelf to the nearest door. This turned out to be guarded by a GASF soldier, who watched the door while a dozen TUGgies methodically tore open and examined crates of food. Hyacinth slid a hundredweight of pasteurized soybean peanut butter substitute onto the guard’s head and they dropped to the floor, pulling more crates with them to hinder pursuit. Running into the kitchens, they found themselves cheerfully greeted by more TUGgies. Fortunately the kitchen was huge, full of equipment and partitions and fallen junk and clouds of steam and twists and turns, and after some aimless running around they came to the giant wad of Cheezy Surprise Tetrazzini, squeezed past it through the door, and entered a little-used service corridor filled with the wounded and scared. Four of the latter, also women, seeing that these three were armed and not as scared as they were, joined up. The seven edged into a main hall and made for the Women’s Center.

  This was in the Student Union Bloc, an area not as bitterly contested as the Caf or the Towers. Hyacinth wounded two Droogs on the way and reloaded. Eventually they came to a long hall lined with the offices of various student activities groups, dark and astonishingly still after their riotous trip. Here they slowed and relaxed, then began to file along the corridor. Soon they smelled sweet incense, and began to make out the distant sounds of chanting and the tinkling of bells. Moving along quietly, they paused by each door: the Outing Club; the Yoga, Solar Power and Multiple Orgasm Support Group; the Nonsocietal Assemblage of Noncoercively Systematized Libertarian Individuals; Let’s Understand Animals, Not Torture Them; the men’s room; the punk fraternity Zappa Krappa Claw; the Folk Macramé Explorers. As they approached the Women’s Center, the sweet odors grew stronger, the soprano-alto chant louder.

  “Looks like the Goddess worshipers got here first,” said Sarah. “I guess I can live with that, if they can live with someone who shaves her pits.” She and Lucy and Hyacinth concealed their guns again, not wanting to seem obtrusive. Hyacinth knocked. There was a lull, then the voice of Yllas Freedperson, then a new chant.

  “You don’t know the True Knock,” said Yllas.

  “Well, we’re women, this is the Women’s Center.”

  “Not all women can enter the Women’s Center.”

  “Oh.”

  “Some have more man than woman in them. No manhood can be allowed here, for this place is sacred to the Goddess.”

  “Who says?”

  “Astarte, the Goddess. Athena. Mary. Vesta. The Goddess of Many Names.”

  “Have you been talking to her a lot lately?” asked Hyacinth.

  “Since I offered her my womb-blood at the Equinox last week, we have been in constant contact.”

  “Well look,” said Hyacinth, “we didn’t come to play Dungeons and Dragons, we’re here for safety, okay?”

  “Then you must puri
fy yourself in the sight of the Goddess,” said Yllas, opening the door. She and the two dozen others in the Center were all naked. All the partitions that had formerly divided the place into many rooms had been knocked down to unify the Center into a single room. They couldn’t see much in the candlelight, except that there was a lot of silver and many daggers and wands. The women were chanting in perfect unison.

  “You cannot touch our lives in any way until you have been made one with us,” continued Yllas.

  Sarah and company declined the invitation with their feet. Before they got far, Yllas started bellowing. “Man-women! Heteros! Traitors! Impurities! Stop them!”

  Nearby doors burst open and several women jumped out with bows and arrows taken from the nearby P.E. Department. Sarah began a slow move for her gun, but Hyacinth prevented it.

  “Take them to the PAFW,” decreed Yllas, “and when Astarte tells us what is to be done, we will take them away one by one and give them support and counseling.”

  Escorted by the archers, they traveled for several minutes through Axis hallways, leaving the Union block and entering the athletics area. Here they were turned over to a pair of shotgun-wielding SUBbies, who led them into the darkened hallway behind the racquetball courts. Each of the miniature doors they passed had been padlocked; and looking through the tiny windows, they saw several people in each court. Finally they arrived at an open door and were ushered into an empty court, the door padlocked behind them. On the walkway that ran above the back walls of the courts two guards paced back and forth. Taped above the door was a hastily Magic-Markered sign:

  WELCOME

  TO THE

  PEOPLE’S ALTERNATIVE FREEDOM WORKSHOP

  The Axis clearly lacked experience in running prisons. They did not even search them for weapons. The few guards were not particularly well armed and followed no strict procedures; they seemed incapable of dealing with relatively simple situations, such as requests for feminine hygiene materials. All tough decisions such as this had to be transmitted to a higher authority, who was holed up at the far end of the upper walkway.

  After a few hours, several more people had been put in their cell, among them some large athletes. Escape was easy. They waited until the pacing guards on the walkway were both at one end, and then two large men simply grabbed Hyacinth by the legs and threw her up over the railing. She rolled on her stomach and plugged the two guards, who did not even have time to unsling their weapons. The rest of the incompetent, somnambulistic personnel were disarmed, and everyone was free. Five high-spirited escapees ran down the walkway toward the office of the high-muck-a-muck, firing through its door the entire way. When they finally kicked open the bent and perforated remains, they found themselves in the courts reservation office. A Terrorist sat in a chair, rifle across lap, staring into a color TV whose picture tube had been blasted out. Hyacinth, Lucy and Sarah, not interested in this, headed for the Burrows with several other refugees in tow. The domain of Virgil was near.

  Not far from that gymnasium bloc, on the fourth floor, Klystron/Chris inspected his lines. He had just approved one of the border outposts when Klystron had called him back and berated him for his greenhornish carelessness. Right there, he pointed out, a crafty insurrectionist might creep unseen down that stairway and set up an impregnable firepost! The GASF soldiers, awed by his intuition, extended their lines accordingly.

  As Klystron/Chris stood on those stairs making friendly chitchat with the men, the warble of a common urban pigeon sounded thrice from below, warning of approaching hostiles. Klystron/Chris whirled, leapt through a group of slower aides and crouched on the bottom step to peer down the hallway. His men were assuming defensive stances and rolling for cover.

  He exposed himself just enough to see the vanguard of the approaching force. As he did, the voice of Shekondar came into his head, as it occasionally did in times of great stress:

  “She is the woman I want for you. You know her! She is ideal for you. The time has come for you to lose your virginity; at last a worthy partner has arrived. Look at that body! Look at that hair! She has long legs which are sexually provocative in the extreme. She is a healthy specimen.”

  He could hardly disagree. She was evolutionarily fit as any female he had ever observed; he remembered now how the firm but not disgusting musculature of her upper arm had felt when he had set her down on that dinner table during her fainting spell. But at this juncture, when she needed to be strong in order to prevail and preserve her ability to reproduce, she showed the bounce and verve that marked her as the archetypal Saucy Wench of practically every dense sword-and-sorcery novel he had ever consumed in his farmhouse bed on a hot Maine summer afternoon with his tortilla chips on one side and his knife collection on the other. Later, after he had saved her from something—saved her from her own vivacious feminine impulsiveness by an act of manly courage and taken her to some sanctuary like the aisle between the CPU and the Array Processing Unit—then she could allow herself to melt away in a rush of feminine passion and show the tenderness combined with fire that was enticingly masked behind her conventional calm sober behavioral mode. He wondered if she were the type of woman who would tie a man up, just for the fun of it, and tickle him. These things Shekondar did not reveal; and yet he had told him that they matched! And that meant she could be nothing other than the fulfillment of his unique sexual desires!

  The group approached their perimeter. Klystron/Chris staggered boldly into the open, hindered by a massive erection, hitched up his pants with the butt of the Kalashnikov and waved the group to a halt.

  She dipped behind a pillar and covered him with a small arm—a primitive chemical-powered lead-thrower that was nevertheless dangerous. Then, seeing many automatic weapons, she pointed her gun at the ceiling. Her troop slowed to a confused and apprehensive halt. They were disorganized, undisciplined, obviously typical refugee residue, led by a handful of Alpha types with guns—not a minor force in this theater, but helpless against the GASF.

  “Hi, Fred,” she said, and the obvious sexual passion in her voice was to his ears like the soothing globular tones of the harp-speakers of lliafharxhlind. “We were headed for the Burrows. How are things between here and there?”

  It was easiest to explain it in math terms. “We’ve secured a continuous convex region which includes both this point and the region called the Burrows, ma’am. It’s all under my command. How can we help you?”

  “We need places to stay. And the three of us here need to get to the Science Shop.”

  So! Friends of the White Priest! She was very crafty, very coy, but made no bones about what she was after. These women thought of only one thing. Klystron/Chris liked that—she was quite a little enticer, but subtle as she was, he knew just what the audacious minx was up to! Shekondar tuned in again with unnecessary advice: “Please her and you will have a fine opportunity for sexual intercourse. Do as she asks in all matters.”

  He straightened up from his awkward position and smiled the broadest, friendliest smile he could manage without exceeding the elastic limit of his lip tissue. “Men,” he said to his soldiers, “it’s been a secret up to now, but this woman is a Colonelette in the Grand Army of Shekondar the Fearsome and a priestess of great stature. I’m putting Were-wolf Platoon under her command. She’ll need passage into the Secured Region—unless she changes her mind first!” Women often changed their minds; he glanced at her to see if she had caught this gentle ribbing. She put on an emotionless act that was almost convincing.

  “Well, gee. It’s kind of a surprise to me too. Can we just go, then?”

  “Permission granted, Colonelette Sarah Jane Johnson!” he snapped, saluting. She threw him a strange look, no doubt of awe, thanks and general indebtedness, and after giving a few cutely tentative orders to her men, headed into the Secured Region. Fired with new zest for action, Klystron/Chris wheeled and led his men toward the next outpost of the Purified Empire.

  I declined Fred Fine’s offer and waited below E Tower f
or my friends. Before long it became obvious that I would never meet anyone in that madhouse of a lobby, and so I set out for the Science Shop.

  The safest route took me down Emeritus Row, quiet as always. I checked each door as I went along. Sharon’s office had long since been ransacked by militants looking for rail-gun information. Other than the sound of dripping water falling into the wastecans below the poorly patched hole in Sharon’s ceiling, all I heard on Emeritus Row was an old man crying alone.

  He was in the office marked: PROFESSOR EMERITUS HUMPHREY BATSTONE FORTHCOMING IV. Without knocking (for the room was dark and the door ajar) I walked in and saw the professor himself. He leaned over the desk with his silvery dome on the blotter as though it were the only thing that could soak up his tears, his hands flung uselessly to the side. The rounded tweed shoulders occasionally humped with sobs, and little strangled gasps made their way out and died in the musty air of the office.

  Though I intentionally banged my way in, he did not look up. Eventually he sat up, red eyes closed. He opened them to slits and peered at me.

  “I—” he said, and broke again. After a few more tries he was able to speak in a high, strangled voice.

  “I am in a very bad situation, you see. I think I may have suffered ruination. I have just…have just been sitting here”—his voice began to clear and his wet eyes scanned the desk—“and preparing to tender my resignation.”

  “But why,” I asked. “You’re not that old. You seem healthy. In your field, it’s not as though you have equipment or data that’s been destroyed in the fighting. What’s wrong?”

  He gave a taut, clenched smile and avoided my eyes, looking around at the stacks of manuscript boxes and old books that lined the room. “You don’t understand. I seem to have left my lecture notes in my private study in the Library bloc. As you can appreciate, it will be rather difficult for a man of my years to retrieve them under these conditions.”