On her first visit she didn't check this place out all that carefully because she hoped she'd never come back. So the embankment turns out to be taller and steeper than Y.T. remembered. Maybe a little more of a cliff, drop-off, or abyss than she thought. Only thing that makes her think so is that she seems to be doing a lot of free-fall work here. Major plummeting. Big time ballistic styling. That's cool, it's all part of the job, she tells herself. The smartwheels are good for it. The tree trunks are bluish black, standing out not so well against a blackish blue background. The only other thing she can see is the red laser light of the digital speedometer down on the front of her plank, which is not showing any real information. The numbers have vibrated themselves into a cloud of gritty red light as the radar speed sensor tries to lock onto something.
She turns the speedometer off. Running totally black now. Precipitating her way toward the sweet 'crete of the creek bottom like a black angel who has just had the shroud lines of her celestial parachute severed by the Almighty. And when the wheels finally meet the pavement, it just about drives her knees up through her jawbone. She finishes the whole gravitational transaction with not much altitude and a nasty head of dark velocity.
Mental note: Next time just jump off a fucking bridge. That way there's no question of getting an invisible cholla shoved up your nose.
She whips around a corner, heeled over so far she could lick the yellow line, and her Knight Visions reveal all in a blaze of multispectral radiation. On infrared, the Falabala encampment is a turbulating aurora of pink fog punctuated by the white-hot bursts of campfires. All of it rests on dim bluish pavement, which means, in the false-color scheme of things, that it's cold. Behind everything is the jagged horizon line of that funky improvised barrier technology that the Falabalas are so good at. A barrier that has been completely spurned, snubbed, and confounded by Y.T., who dropped out of the sky into the middle of the camp like a Stealth fighter with an inferiority complex.
Once you're into the actual encampment, people don't really notice or care who you are. A couple people see her, watch her slide on by, don't get all hairy about it. They probably get a lot of Kouriers coming through here. A lot of dippy, gullible, Kool-Aid-drinking couriers. And these people aren't hip enough to tell Y.T. apart from that breed. But that's okay, she'll pass for now, as long as they don't check out the detailing on her new plank.
The campfires provide enough plain old regular visible light to show this sorry affair for what it is: a bunch of demented Boy Scouts, a jamboree without merit badges or hygiene. With the IR supered on top of the visible, she can also see vague, spectral red faces out in the shadows where her unassisted eyes would only see darkness. These new Knight Visions cost her a big wad of her Mob drug-running money. Just the kind of thing Mom had in mind when she insisted Y.T. get a part-time job.
Some of the people who were here last time are gone now, and there's a few new ones she doesn't recognize. There's a couple of people actually wearing duct-tape straitjackets. That's a fashion statement reserved for the ones who are totally out of control, rolling and thrashing around on the ground. And there's a few more who are spazzing out, but not as bad, and one or two who are just plain messed up, like plain old derelicts that you might see at the Snooze 'n' Cruise.
“Hey, look!” someone says. “It's our friend the Kourier! Welcome, friend!”
She's got her Liquid Knuckles uncapped, available, and shaken well before use. She's got high-voltage, high-fashion metallic cuffs around her wrists in case someone tries to grab her by same. And a bundy stunner up her sleeve. Only the most tubular throwbacks carry guns. Guns take a long time to work (you have to wait for the victim to bleed to death), but paradoxically they end up killing people pretty often. But nobody hassles you after you've hit them with a bundy stunner. At least that's what the ads say.
So it's not like she exactly feels vulnerable or anything. But still, she'd like to pick her target. So she maintains escape velocity until she's found the woman who seemed friendly—the bald chick in the torn-up Chanel knockoff—and then zeroes in on her.
“Let's get off into the woods, man,” Y.T. says, “I want to talk to you about what's going on with what's left of your brain.”
The woman smiles, struggles to her feet with the good-natured awkwardness of a retarded person in a good mood. “I like to talk about that,” she says. “Because I believe in it.”
Y.T. doesn't stop to do a lot of talking, just grabs the woman by the hand, starts leading her uphill, into the scrubby little trees, away from the road. She doesn't see any pink faces lurking up here in the infrared, it ought to be safe. But there are a couple behind her, just ambling along pleasantly, not looking directly at her, like they just decided it was time to go for a stroll in the woods in the middle of the night. One of them is the High Priest.
The woman's probably in her mid-twenties, she's a tall gangly type, nice- but not good-looking, probably was a spunky but low-scoring forward on her high school basketball team. Y.T. sits her down on a rock out in the darkness.
“Do you have any idea where you are?” Y.T. says.
“In the park,” the woman says, “with my friends. We're helping to spread the Word.”
“How'd you get here?”
“From the Enterprise. That's where we go to learn things.”
“You mean, like, the Raft? The Enterprise Raft? Is that where you guys all came from?”
“I don't know where we came from,” the woman says. “Sometimes it's hard to remember stuff. But that's not important.”
“Where were you before? You didn't grow up on the Raft, did you?”
“I was a systems programmer for 3verse Systems in Mountain View, California,” the woman says, suddenly whipping off a string of perfect, normal-sounding English.
“Then how did you get to be on the Raft?”
“I don't know. My old life stopped. My new life started. Now I'm here.” Back to baby talk.
“What's the last thing you remember before your old life stopped?”
“I was working late. My computer was having problems.”
“That's it? That's the last normal thing that happened to you?”
“My system crashed,” she said. “I saw static. And then I became very sick. I went to the hospital. And there in the hospital, I met a man who explained everything to me. He explained that I had been washed in the blood. That I belonged to the Word now. And suddenly it all made sense. And then I decided to go to the Raft.”
“You decided, or someone decided for you?”
“I just wanted to. That's where we go.”
“Who else was on the Raft with you?”
“More people like me.”
“Like you how?”
“All programmers. Like me. Who had seen the Word.”
“Seen it on their computers?”
“Yes. Or sometimes on TV.”
“What did you do on the Raft?”
The woman pushes up one sleeve of her raggedy sweatshirt to expose a needle-pocked arm.
“You took drugs?”
“No. We gave blood.”
“They sucked your blood out?”
“Yes. Sometimes we would do a little coding. But only some of us.”
“How long have you been here?”
“I don't know. They move us here when our veins don't work anymore. We just do things to help spread the Word—drag stuff around, make barricades. But we don't really spend much time working. Most of the time we sing songs, pray, and tell other people about the Word.”
“You want to leave? I can get you out of here.”
“No,” the woman says, “I've never been so happy.”
“How can you say that? You were a big-time hacker. Now you're kind of a dip, if I may speak frankly.”
“That's okay, it doesn't hurt my feelings. I wasn't really happy when I was a hacker. I never thought about the important things. God. Heaven. The things of the spirit. It's hard to think about those things in Americ
a. You just put them aside. But those are really the important things—not programming computers or making money. Now, that's all I think about.”
Y.T. has been keeping an eye on the High Priest and his buddy. They keep moving closer, one step at a time. Now they're close enough that Y.T. can smell their dinner. The woman puts her hand on Y.T.'s shoulder pad.
“I want you to stay here with me. Won't you come down and have some refreshments? You must be thirsty.”
“Gotta run,” Y.T. says, standing up.
“I really have to object to that,” the High Priest says, stepping forward. He doesn't say it angrily. Now he's trying to be like Y.T.'s dad. “That's not really the right decision for you.”
“What are you, a role model?”
“That's okay. You don't have to agree. But let's go down and sit by the campfire and talk about it.”
“Let's just get the fuck away from Y.T. before she goes into a self-defense mode,” Y.T. says.
All three Falabalas step back away from her. Very cooperative. The High Priest is holding up his hands, placating her. “I'm sorry if we made you feel threatened,” he says.
“You guys just come on a little weird,” Y.T. says, flipping her goggles back onto infrared.
In the infrared, she can see that the third Falabala, the one who came up here with the High Priest, is holding a small thing in one hand that is unusually warm.
She nails him with her penlight, spotlighting his upper body in a narrow yellow beam. Most of him is dirty and dun colored and reflects little light. But there is a brilliant glossy red thing, a shaft of ruby.
It's a hypodermic needle. It's full of red fluid. Under infrared, it shows up warm. It's fresh blood.
And she doesn't exactly get it—why these guys would be walking around with a syringe full of fresh blood. But she's seen enough.
The Liquid Knuckles shoots out of the can in a long narrow neon-green stream, and when it nails the needle man in the face, he jerks his head back like he's just been axed across the bridge of the nose and falls back without making a sound. Then she gives the High Priest a shot of it for good measure. The woman just stands there, totally, like, appalled.
Y.T. pumps herself up out of the canyon so fast that when she flies out into traffic, she's going about as fast as it is. As soon as she gets a solid poon on a nocturnal lettuce tanker, she gets on the phone to Mom.
“Mom, listen. No, Mom, never mind the roaring noise. Yes, I am riding my skateboard in traffic. But listen to me for a second, Mom—”
She has to hang up on the old bitch. It's impossible to talk to her. Then she tries to make a voice linkup with Hiro. That takes a couple of minutes to go through.
“Hello! Hello! Hello!” she's shouting. Then she hears the honk of a car horn. Coming out of the telephone.
“Hello?”
“It's Y.T.”
“How are you doing?” This guy always seems a little too laid back in his personal dealings. She doesn't really want to talk about how she's doing. She hears another honking horn in the background, behind Hiro's voice.
“Where the hell are you, Hiro?”
“Walking down a street in L.A.”
“How can you be goggled in if you're walking down a street?” Then the terrible reality sinks in: “Oh, my God, you didn't turn into a gargoyle, did you?”
“Well,” Hiro says. He is hesitant, embarrassed, like it hadn't occurred to him yet that this was what he was doing. “It's not exactly like being a gargoyle. Remember when you gave me shit about spending all my money on computer stuff?”
“Yeah.”
“I decided I wasn't spending enough. So I got a belt-pack machine. Smallest ever made. I'm walking down the street with this thing strapped to my belly. It's really cool.”
“You're a gargoyle.”
“Yeah, but it's not like having all this clunky shit strapped all over your body—”
“You're a gargoyle. Listen, I talked to one of these wholesalers.”
“Yeah?”
“She says she used to be a hacker. She saw something strange on her computer. Then she got sick for a while and joined this cult and ended up on the Raft.”
“The Raft. Do tell.”
“On the Enterprise. They take their blood, Hiro. Suck it out of their bodies. They infect people by injecting them with the blood of sick hackers. And when their veins get all tracked out like a junkie's, they cut them loose and put them to work on the mainland running the wholesale operation.”
“That's good,” he says. “That's good stuff.”
“She says she saw some static on her computer screen and it made her sick. You know anything about that?”
“Yeah. It's true.”
“It's true?”
“Yeah. But you don't have to worry about it. It only affects hackers.”
For a minute she can't even speak, she's so pissed. “My mother is a programmer for the Feds. You asshole. Why didn't you warn me?”
Half an hour later, she's there. Doesn't bother to change back into her WASP disguise this time, just bursts into the house in basic, bad black. Drops her plank on the floor on the way in. Grabs one of Mom's curios off the shelf—it's a heavy crystal award—clear plastic, actually—that she got a couple years ago for sucking up to her Fed boss and passing all her polygraph tests—and goes into the den.
Mom's there. As usual. Working on her computer. But she's not looking at the screen right now, she's got some notes on her lap that she's going through.
Just as Mom is looking up at her, Y.T. winds up and throws the crystal award. It goes right over Mom's shoulder, glances off the computer table, flies right through the picture tube. Awesome results. Y.T. always wanted to do that. She pauses to admire her work for a few seconds while Mom just flames off all kinds of weird emotion. What are you doing in that uniform? Didn't I tell you not to ride your skateboard on a real street? You're not supposed to throw things in the house. That's my prized possession. Why did you break the computer? Government property. Just what is going on here, anyway?
Y.T. can tell that this is going to continue for a couple of minutes, so she goes to the kitchen, splashes some water on her face, gets a glass of juice, just letting Mom follow her around and ventilate over her shoulder pads.
Finally Mom winds down, defeated by Y.T.'s strategy of silence.
“I just saved your fucking life, Mom,” Y.T. says. “You could at least offer me an Oreo.”
“What on earth are you talking about?”
“It's like, if you—people of a certain age—would make some effort to just stay in touch with sort of basic, modern-day events, then your kids wouldn't have to take these drastic measures.”
35
Earth materializes, rotating majestically in front of his face. Hiro reaches out and grabs it. He twists it around so he's looking at Oregon. Tells it to get rid of the clouds, and it does, giving him a crystalline view of the mountains and the seashore.
Right out there, a couple of hundred miles off the Oregon coast, is a sort of granulated furuncle growing on the face of the water. Festering is not too strong a word. It's a couple of hundred miles south of Astoria now, moving south. Which explains why Juanita went to Astoria a couple of days ago: she wanted to get close to the Raft. Why is anyone's guess.
Hiro looks up, focuses his gaze on Earth, zooms in for a look. As he gets closer, the imagery he's looking at shifts from the long-range pictures coming in from the geosynchronous satellites to the good stuff being spewed into the CIC computer from a whole fleet of low-flying spy birds. The view he's looking at is a mosaic of images shot no more than a few hours ago.
It's several miles across. Its shape constantly changes, but at the time these pictures were shot, it had kind of a fat kidney shape; that is, it is trying to be a V, pointed southward like a flock of geese, but there's so much noise in the system, it's so amorphous and disorganized, that a kidney is the closest it can come.
At the center is a pair of enormous vessels:
the Enterprise and an oil tanker, lashed together side by side. These two behemoths are walled in by several other major vessels, an assortment of container ships and other freight carriers. The Core.
Everything else is pretty tiny. There is the occasional hijacked yacht or decommissioned fishing trawler. But most of the boats in the Raft are just that: boats. Small pleasure craft, sampans, junks, dhows, dinghys, life rafts, houseboats, makeshift structures built on air-filled oil drums and slabs of styrofoam. A good fifty percent of it isn't real boat material at all, just a garble of ropes, cables, planks, nets, and other debris tied together on top of whatever kind of flotsam was handy.
And L. Bob Rife is sitting in the middle of it. Hiro doesn't quite know what he's doing, and he doesn't know how Juanita is connected. But it's time to go there and find out.
Scott Lagerquist is standing right on the edge of Mark Norman's 24/7 Motorcycle Mall, waiting, when the man with the swords comes into view, striding down the sidewalk. A pedestrian is a peculiar sight in L.A., considerably more peculiar than a man with swords. But a welcome one. Anyone who drives out to a motorcycle dealership already has a car, by definition, so it's hard to give them a really hard sell. A pedestrian should be cake.
“Scott Wilson Lagerquist!” the guy yells from fifty feet away and closing. “How you doing?”
“Fabulous!” Scott says. A little off guard, maybe. Can't remember this guy's name, which is a problem. Where has he seen this guy before?
“It's great to see you!” Scott says, running forward and pumping the guy's hand. “I haven't seen you since, uh—”
“Is Pinky here today?” the guy says.
“Pinky?”
“Yeah. Mark. Mark Norman. Pinky was his nickname back in college. I guess he probably doesn't like to be called that now that he's running, what, half a dozen dealerships, three McDonaldses, and a Holiday Inn, huh?”