Snow Crash

by Neal Stephenson

  “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 passes through the nether world and reaches the temple that is ruled over by Ereshkigal, goddess 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 hell 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 netherworld, goes to the gods asking for their help. None of the gods is willing to help except for Enki.”

  “So our buddy, Enki, the hacker god, has to bail her ass out of Hell.”

  “Enki creates two people and sends them into the netherworld 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-assed 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 fiberglass: 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.

  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 ashore 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 offshore.

  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 shitty 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.

  43

  When she first woke up, she was still in her RadiKS coverall, mummified in gaffer's tape, lying on the floor of a shitty 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 pissed. 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 everythin
g 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 Marla 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 pass out on the toilet or something. But the next time she has to pee, Marla 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 space for them.

  She spent most of the next two days packed into the van between Bonnie and Marla, 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 embarrassingly 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 scrapes 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 bumped 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, shitty, 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 fuck 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 scum 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 massive 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 in
to 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 hassle. 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. Glassy-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 pissed.