Snow Crash

by Neal Stephenson

  They are in a complex of ship cabins and sliced-open containers that acts as the lobby of the hotel. The wireheads drag her out the door, over the blunt cross hairs of the helipad. Just in time, too, because a chopper happens to be coming in for a landing. The safety procedures in this place suck; they could have got their heads chopped off. It is the slick corporate chopper with the RARE logo that she saw earlier.

  The wireheads try to drag her over a gangplank thingy that leads them across open water to the next ship. She manages to get turned around backward, grabs the railings with both hands, hooks her ankles into the stanchions, and hangs on. One of them grabs her around the waist from behind and tries to yank her body loose while the other one stands in front of her and pries her fingers loose, one at a time.

  Several guys are piling out of the RARE chopper. They are wearing coveralls with gear stuck into the pockets, and she sees at least one stethoscope. They haul big fiberglass cases out of the chopper, with red crosses painted on their sides, and run into the containership. Y.T. knows that this is not being done for the benefit of some fat businessman who stroked a lobe over his stewed prunes. They are going in there to reanimate her boyfriend. Raven pumped full of speed: just what the world needs right now.

  They drag her across the deck of the next ship. From there they take a stairway thingy up to the next ship after that, which is very big. She thinks it's an oil tanker. She can look across its broad deck, through a tangle of pipes, rust seeping through white paint, and see the Enterprise on the other side. That's where they're going.

  There's no direct connection. A crane on the deck of the Enterprise has swung itself over to dangle a small wire cage over the tanker, just a few feet off the deck; it bobs up and down and glides back and forth over a fairly large area as the two ships rock in different ways and it swings like a pendulum at the end of its cable. It has a door on one side, which is hanging open.

  They sort of toss her into it head first, keeping her arms pinned to her sides so she can't push it away from her, and then they spend a few seconds folding her legs in behind her. It's obvious by now that talking doesn't work, so she just fights silently. She manages to give one of them a good stomp to the bridge of the nose, and both feels and hears the bone break, but the man doesn't react in any way, other than snapping his head back on impact. She's so busy watching him, waiting to see when he's going to figure out that his nose is broken and that she's responsible for it, that she stops kicking and flailing long enough to get all shoved into the cage. Then the door snaps shut.

  An experienced raccoon could get the latch open. This cage isn't made to hold people. But by the time she gets her body worked around to the point where she can reach it, she's twenty feet above the deck, looking down on a lead of black water between the tanker and the Enterprise. Down below, she can see an abandoned zodiac caroming back and forth between the steel walls.

  Not everything is exactly right on the Enterprise. Something is burning somewhere. People are firing guns. She's not entirely sure she wants to be there. As long as she is high up in the air, she reconnoiters the ship and confirms that there is no way off, no handy gangplanks or stairway thingies.

  She is being lowered toward the Enterprise. The cage is careening back and forth, skimming just over the deck on its cable, and when it finally touches the deck, it skids for a few feet before coming to a halt. She pops the latch and climbs out of there. Now what?

  There's a bullseye painted on the deck, a few helicopters parked around the edges and lashed down. And there is one helicopter, a mammoth twin-engine jet number, kind of a flying bathtub festooned with guns and missiles, sitting right in the middle of the bullseye, all of its lights on, engine whining, rotors spinning desultorily. A small cluster of men is standing next to it.

  Y.T. walks toward it. She hates this. She knows this is exactly what she's supposed to do. But there really is no other choice. She wishes, profoundly, that she had her plank with her. The deck of this aircraft carrier is some of the best skating territory she has ever seen. She has seen, in movies, that carriers have big steam catapults for throwing airplanes into the sky. Think of what it would be like to ride a steam catapult on your plank!

  As she is walking toward the helicopter, one of the men standing by it detaches himself from the group and walks toward her. He's big, with a body like a fifty-five-gallon drum, and a mustache that turns up at the corners. And as he comes toward her he is laughing in a satisfied way, which pisses her off.

  “Well, don't you look like a forlorn lil thang!” he says. “Shit, honey, you look like a drowned rat that got dried out again.”

  “Thanks,” she says. “You look like chiseled Spam.”

  “Very funny,” he says.

  “Then how come you're not laughing? Afraid it's true?”

  “Look,” he says, “I don't have time for this fucking adolescent banter. I grew up and got old 'pecifically to get away from this.”

  “It's not that you don't have time,” she says. “It's that you're not very good at it.”

  “You know who I am?” he asks.

  “Yeah, I know. You know who I am?”

  “Y.T. A fifteen-year-old Kourier.”

  “And personal buddy of Uncle Enzo,” she says, whipping off the string of dog tags and tossing them. He holds out one hand, startled, and the chain whips around his fingers. He holds them up and reads them.

  “Well, well,” he says, “this is quite a little memento.” He throws them back at her. “I know you're buddies with Uncle Enzo. Otherwise I just woulda dunked you instead a bringing you here to my spread. And I frankly don't give a shit,” he says, “because by the time this day is through, either Uncle Enzo will be out of a job, or else I'll be, as you said, chiseled Spam. But I figure that the Big Wop will be a lot less likely to throw a Stinger through the turbine of my chopper there if he knows his little chiquita is on board.”

  “It's not like that,” Y.T. says. “It's not a relationship where fucking is part of it.” But she is chagrined to learn that the dog tags, after all this time, did not have any magical effect on the bad guys.

  Rife turns around and starts walking back to the chopper. After a few steps, he turns back and looks at her, just standing there, trying not to cry. “You coming?” he says.

  She looks at the chopper. A ticket off the Raft.

  “Can I leave a note for Raven?”

  “Far as Raven is concerned, I think you already made your point—haw haw haw. Come on, girl, we're wasting jet fuel over there—that ain't good for the goddamn environment.”

  She follows him to the chopper, climbs on board. It's warm and light inside here, with nice seats. Like coming in off a hard February day of thrashing the grittier highways and settling into a padded easy chair.

  “Had the interior redone,” Rife says. “This is a big old Sov gunship and it wasn't made for comfort. But that's the price you pay for all that armor plating.”

  There's two other guys in here. One is about fifty, sort of gaunt, big pores, wire-rimmed bifocals, carrying a laptop. A techie. The other is a bulky African-American with a gun. “Y.T.,” says the always polite L. Bob Rife, “meet Frank Frost, my tech director, and Tony Michaels, my security chief.”

  “Ma'am,” says Tony.

  “Howdy,” says Frank.

  “Suck my toes,” says Y.T.

  “Don't step on that, please,” Frank says.

  Y.T. looks down. Climbing into the empty seat nearest the door, she has stepped on a package resting on the floor. It's about the dimensions of a phone book, but irregular, very heavy, swaddled in bubble pack and clear plastic. She can see glimpses of what's inside. Light reddish brown in color. Covered with chicken scratches. Hard as a rock.

  “What's that?” Y.T. says. “Homemade bread from Mom?”

  “It's an ancient artifact,” Frank says, all pissed off. Rife chuckles, pleased and relieved that Y.T. is now insulting someone else.

  Another man duck-walks across the flight
deck, in mortal fear of the whirling rotor blades, and climbs in. He's about sixty, with a dirigible of white hair that was not ruffled in any way by the downdraft.

  “Hello, everyone,” he says cheerfully. “I don't think I've met all of you. Just got here this morning and now I'm on my way back again!”

  “Who are you?” Tony says.

  The new guy looks crestfallen. “Greg Ritchie,” he says.

  Then, when no one seems to react, he jogs their memory. “President of the United States.”

  “Oh! Sorry. Nice to meet you, Mr. President,” Tony says, extending his hand. “Tony Michaels.”

  “Frank Frost,” Frank says, extending his hand and looking bored.

  “Don't mind me,” Y.T. says, when Ritchie looks her way. “I'm a hostage.”

  “Torque this baby,” Rife says to the pilot. “Let's go to L.A. We got a Mission to Control.”

  The pilot has an angular face that, after her experiences on the Raft, Y.T. recognizes as typically Russian. He starts dicking with his controls. The engines whine louder and the thwacking of the chopper blades picks up. Y.T. feels, but does not hear, a couple of small explosions. Everyone else feels it, too, but only Tony reacts; he crouches down on the floor of the chopper, pulls a gun out from under his jacket, and opens the door on his side. Meanwhile, the engines sigh back down in pitch and the rotor coasts back down to an idle.

  Y.T. can see him out the window. It's Hiro. He's all covered with smoke and blood, and he's holding a pistol in one hand. He's just fired a couple of shots in the air, to get their attention, and now he backs behind one of the parked choppers, taking cover.

  “You're a dead man,” Rife shouts. “You're stuck on the Raft, asshole. I got a million Myrmidons here. You gonna kill 'em all?”

  “Swords don't run out of ammo,” Hiro shouts.

  “Well, what do you want?”

  “I want the tablet. You give me the tablet, then you can take off and let your million wireheads kill me. You don't give me the tablet, I'm gonna empty this clip into the windshield of your chopper.”

  “It's bulletproof! Haw!” Rife says.

  “No it isn't,” Hiro says, “as the rebels in Afghanistan found out.”

  “He is right,” the pilot says.

  “Fucking Soviet piece of shit! They put all that steel in its belly and then made the windshield out of glass?”

  “Give me the tablet,” Hiro says, “or I'm taking it.”

  “No you ain't,” Rife says, “cause I got Tinkerbell here.”

  At the last minute, Y.T. tries to duck down and hide, so he won't see her. She's ashamed. But Hiro locks eyes with her for just a moment, and she can see the defeat come into his face.

  She makes a dive for the door and gets halfway out, under the downblast of the rotors. Tony grabs her coverall's collar and hauls her back inside. He shoves her down on her belly and puts one knee in the small of her back to hold her there. Meanwhile, the engine is powering up again, and out the open door she can see the steel horizon of the carrier's deck drop from view.

  After all this time, she fucked up the plan. She owes Hiro a refund.

  Or maybe not.

  She puts the heel of one hand against the edge of the clay tablet and shoves as hard as she can. It slides across the floor, teeters on the threshold, and spins out of the chopper.

  Another delivery made, another satisfied customer.

  61

  For a minute or so, the chopper hovers twenty feet over-head. All the people inside are staring down at the tablet, which has burst out of its wrappings in the middle of the bullseye. The plastic has torn apart around the corners and fragments—large fragments—of the tablet have sprayed out for a few feet in either direction.

  Hiro stares at it, too, still safe behind the cover of a parked chopper. He stares at it so hard that he forgets to stare at anything else. Then a couple of wireheads land on his back, smashing his face into the flank of the chopper. He slides down and lands on his belly. His gun arm is still free, but a couple more wireheads sit on that. A couple on his legs, too. He can't move at all. He can't see anything but the broken tablet, twenty feet away on the flight deck. The sound and wind of Rife's chopper diminish into a distant puttering noise that takes a long time to go away completely.

  He feels a tingling behind his ear, anticipating the scalpel and the drill.

  These wireheads are operating under remote control from somewhere else. Ng seemed to think that they had an organized Raft defense system. Maybe there's a hacker-in-charge, an en, sitting in the Enterprise's control tower, moving these guys around like an air traffic controller.

  In any case, they are not very big on spontaneity. They sit on him for a few minutes before they decide what to do next. Then, many hands reach down and clasp him around the wrists and ankles, elbows and knees. They haul him across the flight deck like pallbearers, face up. Hiro looks up into the control tower and sees a couple of faces looking down at him. One of them—the en—is talking into a microphone.

  Eventually, they come to a big flat elevator that sinks down into the guts of the ship, out of view of the control tower. It comes to rest on one of the lower decks, apparently a hangar deck where they used to maintain airplanes.

  Hiro hears a woman's voice, speaking words gently but clearly: “me lu lu mu al nu um me en ki me en me lu lu mu me al nu um me al nu ume me me mu lu e al nu um me dug ga mu me mu lu e al nu um me . . .”

  It's three feet straight down to the deck, and he covers the distance in free fall, slamming down on his back, bumping his head. All his limbs bounce loosely on the metal. Around him he sees and hears the wireheads collapsing like wet towels falling off a rack.

  He cannot move any part of his body. He has a little control over his eyes. A face comes into view, and he has trouble resolving it, can't quite focus, but he recognizes something in her posture, the way she tosses her hair back over her shoulder when it falls down. It's Juanita. Juanita with an antenna rising out of the base of her skull.

  She kneels down beside him, bends down, cups one hand around his ear, and whispers. The hot air tickles his. ear, he tries to move away from it but can't. She's whispering another long string of syllables. Then she straightens up and gooses him in the side. He jerks away from her.

  “Get up, lazybones,” she says.

  He gets up. He's fine now. But all the wireheads lay around him, perfectly motionless.

  “Just a little nam-shub I whipped up,” she says. “They'll be fine.”

  “Hi,” he says.

  “Hi. It's good to see you, Hiro. I'm going to give you a hug now—watch out for the antenna.”

  She does. He hugs her back. The antenna is upside his nose, but that's okay.

  “Once we get this thing taken off, all the hair and stuff should grow back,” she whispers. Finally, she lets him go. “That hug was really more for me than for you. It's been a lonely time here. Lonely and scary.”

  This is typically paradoxical behavior for Juanita—getting touchy-feely at a time like this.

  “Don't get me wrong,” Hiro says, “but aren't you one of the bad guys now?”

  “Oh, you mean this?”

  “Yeah. Don't you work for them?”

  “If so, I'm not doing a very good job.” She laughs, gesturing at the ring of motionless wireheads. “No. This doesn't work on me. It sort of did, for a while, but there are ways to fight it.”

  “Why? Why doesn't it work on you?”

  “I've spent the last several years hanging around with Jesuits,” she says. “Look. Your brain has an immune system, just like your body. The more you use it—the more viruses you get exposed to—the better your immune system becomes. And I've got a hell of an immune system. Remember, I was an atheist for a while, and then I came back to religion the hard way.”

  “Why didn't they screw you up the way they did DaSid?”

  “I came here voluntarily.”

  “Like Inanna.”

  “Yes.”

 
“Why would anyone come here voluntarily?”

  “Hiro, don't you realize? This is it. This is the nerve center of a religion that is at once brand new and very ancient. Being here is like following Jesus or Mohammed around, getting to observe the birth of a new faith.”

  “But it's terrible. Rife is the Antichrist.”

  “Of course he is. But it's still interesting. And Rife has got something else going for him: Eridu.”

  “The city of Enki.”

  “Exactly. He's got every tablet Enki ever wrote. For a person who's interested in religion and hacking, this is the only place in the world to be. If those tablets were in Arabia, I'd put on a chador and burn my driver's license and go there. But the tablets are here, and so I let them wire me up instead.”

  “So all this time, your goal was to study Enki's tablets.”

  “To get the me, just like Inanna. What else?”

  “And have you been studying them?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “And?”

  She points to the fallen wireheads. “And I can do it now. I'm a ba'al shem. I can hack the brainstem.”

  “Okay, look. I'm happy for you, Juanita. But at the time being, we have a little problem. We are surrounded by a million people who want to kill us. Can you paralyze all of them?”

  “Yes,” she says, “but then they'd die.”

  “You know what we have to do, don't you, Juanita?”

  “Release the nam-shub of Enki,” she says. “Do the Babel thing.”

  “Let's go get it,” Hiro says.

  “First things first,” Juanita says. “The control tower.”

  “Okay, you get ready to grab the tablet, and I'll take out the control tower.”

  “How are you going to do that? By cutting people up with swords?”

  “Yeah. That's the only thing they're good for.”

  “Let's do it the other way around,” Juanita says. She gets up and walks off across the hangar deck.

  The nam-shub of Enki is a tablet wrapped up in a clay envelope covered with the cuneiform equivalent of a warning sticker. The entire assembly has shattered into dozens of pieces. Most of them have stayed wrapped up inside the plastic, but some have gone spinning across the flight deck. Hiro gathers them up from the helipad and returns them to the center.