Snow Crash

by Neal Stephenson

  “How far away do you think it is?” Fisheye says.

  Eliot shrugs. “Twenty miles.”

  “And how far to land?”

  “I have no idea. Bruce Lee's skipper probably knew, but he's been pureed along with everyone else.”

  “You're right,” Fisheye says. “I should have set it on ‘whip' or ‘chop.' ”

  “The Raft usually stays at least a hundred miles offshore,” Hiro says, “to reduce the danger of snags.”

  “How we doing on gas?”

  “I dipped the tank,” Eliot says, “and it looks like we're not doing so well, to tell you the truth.”

  “What does that mean, not doing so well?”

  “It's not always easy to read the level when you're out to sea,” Eliot says. “And I don't know how efficient these engines are. But if we're really eighty or a hundred miles offshore, we might not make it.”

  “So we go to the Raft,” Fisheye says. “We go to the Raft and persuade someone it's in his best interests to give us some fuel. Then, back to the mainland.”

  No one really believes it's going to happen this way, least of all Fisheye. “And,” he continues, “while we're there—on the Raft—after we get the fuel and before we go home—some other stuff might happen, too, you know. Life's unpredictable.”

  “If you have something in mind, why don't you just spit it out?” Hiro says.

  “Okay. Policy decision. The hostage tactic failed. So we go for an extraction.”

  “Extraction of what?”

  “Of Y.T.”

  “I go along with that,” Hiro says, “but I have another person I want to extract also, as long as we're extracting.”

  “Who?”

  “Juanita. Come on, you said yourself she was a nice girl.”

  “If she's on the Raft, maybe she's not so nice,” Fisheye says.

  “I want to extract her anyway. We're all in this together, right? We're all part of Lagos's gang.”

  “Bruce Lee has some people there,” Eliot says.

  “Correction. Had.”

  “But what I'm saying is, they're going to be pissed.”

  “You think they're going to be pissed. I think they're going to be scared shitless,” Fisheye says. “Now drive the boat, Eliot. Come on, I'm sick of all this fucking water.”

  50

  Raven ushers Y.T. onto a flat-assed boat with a canopy on top. It is some kind of a riverboat that has been turned into a Vietnamese/American/Thai/Chinese business establishment, kind of a bar/restaurant/whorehouse/gambling den. It has a few big rooms, where lots of people are letting it all hang out, and a lot of little tiny steel-walled rooms down below where God knows what kind of activity is taking place.

  The main room is packed with lowlife revelry. The smoke ties her bronchial passages into granny knots. The place is equipped with a shattering Third World sound system: pure distortion echoing off painted steel walls at three hundred decibels. A television set bolted onto one wall is showing foreign cartoons, done up in a two-color scheme of faded magenta and lime green, in which a ghoulish wolf, kind of like Wile E. Coyote with rabies, gets repeatedly executed-in ways more violent than even Warner Bros. could think up. It's a snuff cartoon. The soundtrack is either turned off completely or else over-whelmed by the screeching melody coming out of the speakers. A bunch of erotic dancers are performing at one end of the room.

  It's impossibly crowded, they'll never get a place to sit. But shortly after Raven comes into the room, half a dozen guys in the corner suddenly stand bolt upright and scatter from a table, snatching up their cigarettes and drinks almost as an afterthought. Raven pushes Y.T. through the room ahead of him, like she's a figurehead on his kayak, and everywhere they go, people are shoved out of her way by Raven's almost palpable personal force field.

  Raven bends down and looks under the table, picks a chair up off the floor and looks at the underside—you can never be too careful about those chair bombs—sets it down, pushed all the way back into the corner where two steel walls meet, and sits down. He gestures for Y.T. to do the same, and she does, her back to the action. From here, she can see Raven's face, illuminated mostly by occasional stabs of light filtering through the crowd from the mirrored ball over the erotic dancers, and by the generalized green-and-magenta haze coming out of the TV set, spiked by the occasional flash when the cartoon wolf makes the mistake of swallowing another hydrogen bomb, or has the misfortune to get hosed down again with a flamethrower.

  A waiter's there immediately. Raven commences hollering across the table at her. She can't hear him, but maybe he's asking her what she wants.

  “A cheeseburger!” she screams back at him.

  Raven laughs, shakes his head. “You see any cows around here?”

  “Anything but fish!” she screams.

  Raven talks to the waiter for a while in some variant of Taxilinga.

  “I ordered you some squid,” he hollers. “That's a mollusk.”

  Great. Raven, the last of the true gentlemen.

  There is a shouted conversation lasting the better part of an hour. Raven does most of the shouting. Y.T. just listens, smiles, and nods. Hopefully, he's not saying something like “I enjoy really violent, abusive sex acts.”

  She doesn't think he's talking about that at all. He's talking politics. She hears a fragmented history of the Aleuts, a burst here and a burst here, when Raven isn't poking squid into his mouth and the music isn't too loud:

  “Russians fucked us over . . . smallpox had a ninety-percent mortality rate . . . worked as slaves in their sealing industry . . . Seward's folly . . . Fucking Nipponese took away my father in forty-two, put him in a POW camp for the duration . . .

  “Then the Americans fucking nuked us. Can you believe that shit?” Raven says. There's a lull in the music; suddenly she can hear complete sentences. “The Nipponese say they're the only people who were ever nuked. But every nuclear power has one aboriginal group whose territory they nuked to test their weapons. In America, they nuked the Aleutians. Amchitka. My father,” Raven says, grinning proudly, “was nuked twice: once at Nagasaki, when he was blinded, and then again in 1972, when the Americans nuked our homeland.”

  Great, Y.T. thinks. She's got a new boyfriend and he's a mutant. Explains one or two things.

  “I was born a few months later,” Raven continues, by way of totally hammering that point home.

  “How did you get hooked up with these Orthos?”

  “I got away from our traditions and ended up living in Soldotna, working on oil rigs,” Raven says, like Y.T. is supposed to just know where Soldotna is. “That was when I did my drinking and got this,” he says, pointing to his tattoo. “That's also when I learned how to make love to a woman—which is the only thing I do better than harpooning.”

  Y.T. can't help but think that fucking and harpooning are closely related activities in Raven's mind. But as crude as the man is, she can't get around the fact that he's making her uncomfortably horny.

  “I used to work fishing boats too, to make a little extra money. We would come back from a forty-eight-hour halibut opening—this was back in the old days when they had fishing regulations—and we'd put on our survival suits, stick beers into the pockets, and jump into the water and just float around drinking all night long. And one time we were doing this and I drank until I passed out. And when I woke up, it was the next day, or maybe a couple of days later, I don't know. And I was floating in my survival suit out in the middle of the Cook Inlet, all alone. The other guys on my fishing boat had forgotten about me.”

  Conveniently enough, Y.T. thinks.

  “Anyway, I floated for a couple of days. Got real thirsty. Ended up washing ashore on Kodiak Island. By this time, I was real sick with the DTs and everything else. But I washed up near a Russian Orthodox church and they found me, took me in, and straightened me out. And that was when I saw that the Western, American lifestyle had come this close to killing me.”

  Here comes the sermon.

&
nbsp; “And I saw that we can only live through faith, living a simple lifestyle. No booze. No television. None of that stuff.”

  “So what are we doing in this place?”

  He shrugs. “This is an example of the bad places I used to hang out. But if you're going to get decent food on the Raft, you have to come to a place like this.”

  A waiter approaches the table. His eyes are big, his movements tentative. He's not coming to take an order; he's coming to deliver bad news.

  “Sir, you are wanted on the radio. I'm sorry.”

  “Who is it?” Raven says.

  The waiter just looks around him like he can't even speak the name in public. “It's very important,” he says.

  Raven heaves a big sigh, grabs one last piece of fish and pokes it into his mouth. He stands up, and before Y.T. can react, gives her a kiss on the cheek. “Honey, I got a job to do, or something. Just wait right here for me, okay?”

  “Here?”

  “Nobody will fuck with you,” Raven says, as much for the benefit of the waiter as for Y.T.

  51

  The Raft looks uncannily cheerful from a few miles away. A dozen searchlights, and at least that many lasers, are mounted on the towering superstructure of the Enterprise, waving back and forth against the clouds like a Hollywood premiere. Closer up, it doesn't look so bright and crisp. The vast matted tangle of small boats radiates a murky cloud of yellow light that spoils the contrast.

  A couple of patches of the Raft are burning. Not a nice cheery bonfire type of thing, but a high burbling flame with black smoke sliding out of it, like you get from a large quantity of gasoline.

  “Gang warfare, maybe,” Eliot theorizes.

  “Energy source,” Hiro guesses.

  “Entertainment,” Fisheye says. “They don't have cable on the fucking Raft.”

  Before they really plunge into Hell, Eliot takes the lid off the fuel tank and slides the dipstick into there, checking the fuel supply. He doesn't say anything, but he doesn't look especially happy.

  “Turn off all the lights,” Eliot says when it seems they are still miles away. “Remember that we have already been sighted by several hundred or even several thousand people who are armed and hungry.”

  Vic is already going around the boat shutting off lights via the simple expedient of a ball peen hammer. Fisheye just stands there and listens intently to Eliot, suddenly respectful. Eliot continues. “Take off all the bright orange clothing, even if it means we get cold. From now on, we lay down on the decks, expose ourselves as little as possible, and we don't talk to each other unless necessary. Vic, you stay midships with your rifle and wait for someone to hit us with a spotlight. Anyone hits us with a spotlight from any direction, you shoot it out. That includes flashlights from small boats. Hiro, your job is gunwale patrol. You just keep going around the edges of this yacht, anywhere that a swimmer could climb up over the edge and slip on board, and when that happens, cut his arms off. Also, be on the lookout for any kind of grappling-hook type stuff. Fisheye, if any other floating object comes within a hundred feet of us, sink it.

  “If you see Raft people with antennas coming out of their heads, try to kill them first, because they can talk to each other.”

  “Antennas coming out of their heads?” Hiro says.

  “Yeah. Raft gargoyle types,” Eliot says.

  “Who are they?”

  “How the fuck should I know? I've just seen 'em a few times, from a distance. Anyway, I'm going to take us straight in toward the center, and once we get close enough, I'll turn to starboard and swing around the Raft counterclockwise, looking for someone who might be willing to sell us fuel. If worse comes to worst and we end up on the Raft itself, we stick together and we hire ourselves a guide, because if we try to move across the Raft without the help of someone who knows the web, we'll get into a bad situation.”

  “Like what kind of a bad situation?” Fisheye asks.

  “Like hanging on a rotted-out slime-covered cargo net between two ships rocking different ways, with nothing underneath us except ice water full of plague rats, toxic waste, and killer whales. Any questions?”

  “Yeah,” Fisheye says. “Can I go home now?”

  Good. If Fisheye is scared, so's Hiro.

  “Remember what happened to the pirate named Bruce Lee,” Eliot says. “He was well-armed and powerful. He pulled up alongside a life raft full of Refus one day, looking for some poontang, and he was dead before he knew it. Now there are a lot of people who want to do that to us.”

  “Don't they have some kind of cops or something?” Vic says. “I heard they did.”

  In other words, Vic has killed a lot of time going to Raft movies in Times Square.

  “The people up on the Enterprise operate in kind of a wrath-of-God mode,” Eliot says. “They have big guns mounted around the edge of the flight deck—big Gatling guns like Reason except with larger bullets. They were originally put there to shoot down Exocet missiles. They strike with the force of a meteorite. If people act up out on the Raft, they will make the problem go away. But a little murder or riot isn't enough to get their attention. If it's a rocket duel between rival pirate organizations, that's different.”

  Suddenly, they've been nailed with a spotlight so big and powerful they can't look anywhere near it.

  Then it's dark again, and a gunshot from Vic's rifle is searing and reverberating across the water.

  “Nice shooting, Vic,” Fisheye says.

  “It's, like, one of them drug dealer boats,” Vic says, looking through his magic sight. “Five guys on it. Headed our way.” He fires another round. “Correction. Four guys on it.” Boom. “Correction, they're not headed our way anymore.” Boom. A fireball erupts from the ocean two hundred feet away. “Correction. No boat.”

  Fisheye laughs and actually slaps his thigh. “You recording all of this, Hiro?”

  “No,” Hiro says. “Wouldn't come out.”

  “Oh.” Fisheye seems taken aback, like this changes everything.

  “That's the first wave,” Eliot says. “Rich pirates looking for easy pickings. But they've got a lot to lose, so they scare easy.”

  “Another big yacht-type boat is out there,” Vic says, “but they're turning away now.”

  Above the deep chortling noise of their yacht's big diesel, they can hear the high whine of outboard motors.

  “Second wave,” Eliot says. “Pirate wannabes. These guys will come in a lot faster, so stay sharp.”

  “This thing has millimeter wave on it,” Fisheye says. Hiro looks at him; his face is illuminated from below by the glow of Reason's built-in screen. “I can see these guys like it's fucking daylight.”

  Vic fires several rounds, pops the clip out of his rifle, shoves in a new one.

  A zodiac zips past, skittering across the wavetops, strafing them with weak flashlight beams. Fisheye fires a couple of short bursts from Reason, blasting clouds of warm steam into the cold night air, but misses them.

  “Save your ammo,” Eliot says. “Even with Uzis, they can't hit us until they slow down a little bit. And even with radar, you can't hit them.”

  A second zodiac whips past them on the other side, closer than the last one. Vic and Fisheye both hold their fire. They hear it orbiting them, swinging back around the way it came.

  “Those two boats are getting together out there,” Vic says. “They got two more of them. A total of four. They're talking.”

  “We've been reconned,” Eliot says, “and they're planning their tactics. The next time is for real.”

  A second later, two fantastically loud blasts sound from the rear of the yacht, where Eliot is, accompanied by brief flashes of light. Hiro turns around to see a body collapsing to the deck. It's not Eliot. Eliot is crouching there holding his oversized halibut shooter.

  Hiro runs back, looks at the dead swimmer in the dim light scattering off the clouds. He's naked except for a thick coating of black grease and a belt with a gun and a knife in it. He's still holding on to
the rope that he used to pull himself on board. The rope is attached to a grappling hook that has caught in the jagged, broken fiberglass on one side of the yacht.

  “Third wave is coming a little early,” Eliot says, his voice high and shaky. He's trying so hard to sound cool that it has the opposite effect. “Hiro, this gun's got three rounds left in it, and I'm saving the last one for you if any more of these motherfuckers get on board.”

  “Sorry,” Hiro says. He draws the short wakizashi. He would feel better if he could carry his nine in the other hand, but he needs one hand free to steady himself and keep from falling overboard. He makes a quick circuit of the yacht, looking for more grappling hooks, and actually finds one on the other side, hooked into one of the railing stanchions, a taut rope trailing out behind it into the sea.

  Correction: It's a taut cable. His sword won't cut it. And the tension on the rope is such that he can't get it unhooked from the stanchion.

  As he's squatting there playing with the grappling hook, a greasy hand rises up out of the water and grabs his wrist. Another hand gropes for Hiro's other hand and grabs the sword instead. Hiro yanks the weapon free, feeling it do damage, and shoves the wakizashi point first into the place between those two hands just as someone is sinking his teeth into Hiro's crotch. But Hiro's crotch is protected—the motorcycle outfit has a hard plastic cup—and so this human shark just gets a mouthful of bullet-proof fabric. Then his grip loosens, and he falls into the sea. Hiro releases the grappling hook and drops it in with him.

  Vic fires three rounds in quick succession, and a fireball illuminates one whole side of the ship. For a moment, they can see everything around them for a distance of a hundred yards, and the effect is like turning on your kitchen lights in the middle of the night and finding your countertops aswarm with rats. At least a dozen small boats are around them.

  “They got Molotov cocktails,” Vic says.

  The people in the boats can see them, too. Tracers fly around them from several directions. Hiro can see muzzle flashes in at least three places. Fisheye opens up once, twice with Reason, just firing short bursts of a few dozen rounds each, and produces one fireball, this one farther away from the yacht.