The Movie Star Quadrant is easier to look at. Actors love to come here because in The Black Sun, they always look as good as they do in the movies. And unlike a bar or club in Reality, they can get into this place without physically having to leave their mansion, hotel suite, ski lodge, private airline cabin, or whatever. They can strut their stuff and visit with their friends without any exposure to kidnappers, paparazzi, script-flingers, assassins, exspouses, autograph brokers, process servers, psycho fans, marriage proposals, or gossip columnists.
He gets up off the bar stool and resumes his slow orbit, scanning the Nipponese Quadrant. It's a lot of guys in suits, as usual. Some of them are talking to gringos from the Industry. And a large part of the quadrant, in the back corner, has been screened off by a temporary partition.
Bigboard again. Hiro figures out which tables are behind the partition, starts reading off the names. The only one he recognizes immediately is an American: L. Bob Rife, the cable-television monopolist. A very big name to the Industry, though he's rarely seen. He seems to be meeting with a whole raft of big Nipponese honchos. Hiro has his computer memorize their names so that, later, he can check them against the CIC database and find out who they are. It has the look of a big and important meeting.
“Secret Agent Hiro! How are you doing?”
Hiro turns around. Juanita is right behind him, standing out in her black-and-white avatar, looking good anyway. “How are you?” she asks.
“Fine. How are you?”
“Great. I hope you don't mind talking to me in this ugly fax-of-life avatar.”
“Juanita, I would rather look at a fax of you than most other women in the flesh.”
“Thanks, you sly bastard. It's been a long time since we've talked!” she observes, as though there's something remarkable about this.
Something's going on.
“I hope you're not going to mess around with Snow Crash,” she says. “Da5id won't listen to me.”
“What am I, a model of self-restraint? I'm exactly the kind of guy who would mess around with it.”
“I know you better than that. You're impulsive. But you're very clever. You have those sword-fighting reflexes.”
“What does that have to do with drug abuse?”
“It means you can see bad things coming and deflect them. It's an instinct, not a learned thing. As soon as you turned around and saw me, that look came over your face, like, what's going on? What the hell is Juanita up to?”
“I didn't think you talked to people in the Metaverse.”
“I do if I want to get through to someone in a hurry,” she says. “And I'll always talk to you.”
“Why me?”
“You know. Because of us. Remember? Because of our relationship—when I was writing this thing—you and I are the only two people who can ever have an honest conversation in the Metaverse.”
“You're just the same mystical crank you always were,” he says, smiling so as to make this a charming statement.
“You can't imagine how mystical and cranky I am now, Hiro.”
“How mystical and cranky are you?”
She eyes him warily. Exactly the same way she did when he came into her office years ago.
It comes into his mind to wonder why she is always so alert in his presence. In college, he used to think that she was afraid of his intellect, but he's known for years that this is the last of her worries. At Black Sun Systems, he figured that it was just typical female guardedness—Juanita was afraid he was trying to get her into the sack. But this, too, is pretty much out of the question.
At this late date in his romantic career, he is just canny enough to come up with a new theory: She's being careful because she likes him. She likes him in spite of herself. He is exactly the kind of tempting but utterly wrong romantic choice that a smart girl like Juanita must learn to avoid.
That's definitely it. There's something to be said for getting older.
By way of answering his question, she says, “I have an associate I'd like you to meet. A gentleman and a scholar named Lagos. He's a fascinating guy to talk to.”
“Is he your boyfriend?”
She thinks this one over rather than lashing out instantaneously. “My behavior at The Black Sun to the contrary, I don't fuck every male I work with. And even if I did, Lagos is out of the question.”
“Not your type?”
“Not by a long shot.”
“What is your type, anyway?”
“Old, rich, unimaginative blonds with steady careers.”
This one almost slips by him. Then he catches it. “Well, I could dye my hair. And I'll get old eventually.”
She actually laughs. It's a tension-releasing kind of outburst. “Believe me, Hiro, I'm the last person you want to be involved with at this point.”
“Is this part of your church thing?” he asks. Juanita has been using her excess money to start her own branch of the Catholic church—she considers herself a missionary to the intelligent atheists of the world.
“Don't be condescending,” she says. “That's exactly the attitude I'm fighting. Religion is not for simpletons.”
“Sorry. This is unfair, you know—you can read every expression on my face, and I'm looking at you through a fucking blizzard.”
“It's definitely related to religion,” she says. “But this is so complex, and your background in that area is so deficient, I don't know where to begin.”
“Hey, I went to church every week in high school. I sang in the choir.”
“I know. That's exactly the problem. Ninety-nine percent of everything that goes on in most Christian churches has nothing whatsoever to do with the actual religion. Intelligent people all notice this sooner or later, and they conclude that the entire one hundred percent is bullshit, which is why atheism is connected with being intelligent in people's minds.”
“So none of that stuff I learned in church has anything to do with what you're talking about?”
Juanita thinks for a while, eyeing him. Then she pulls a hypercard out of her pocket. “Here. Take this.”
As Hiro pulls it from her hand, the hypercard changes from a jittery two-dimensional figment into a realistic, cream-colored, finely textured piece of stationery. Printed across its face in glossy black ink is a pair of words
9
The world freezes and grows dim for a second. The Black Sun loses its smooth animation and begins to move in fuzzy stop-action. Clearly, his computer has just taken a major hit; all of its circuits are busy processing a huge bolus of data—the contents of the hypercard—and don't have time to redraw the image of The Black Sun in its full, breathtaking fidelity.
“Holy shit!” he says, when The Black Sun pops back into full animation again. “What the hell is in this card? You must have half of the Library in here!”
“And a librarian to boot,” Juanita says, “to help you sort through it. And lots of videotapes of L. Bob Rife—which accounts for most of the bytes.”
“Well, I'll try to have a look at it,” he says dubiously.
“Do. Unlike Da5id, you're just smart enough to benefit from this. And in the meantime, stay away from Raven. And stay away from Snow Crash. Okay?”
“Who's Raven?” he asks. But Juanita is already on her way out the door. The fancy avatars all turn around to watch her as she goes past them, the movie stars give her drop-dead looks, and the hackers purse their lips and stare reverently.
Hiro orbits back around to the Hacker Quadrant. Da5id's shuffling hypercards around on his table—business stats on The Black Sun, film and video clips, hunks of software, scrawled telephone numbers.
“There's a little blip in the operating system that hits me right in the gut every time you come in the door,” Da5id says. “I always have this premonition that The Black Sun is headed for a crash.”
“Must be Bigboard,” Hiro says. “It has one routine that patches some of the traps in low memory, for a moment.”
“Ah, that's it. Please, please throw t
hat thing away,” Da5id says.
“What, Bigboard?”
“Yeah. It was totally rad at one point, but now it's like trying to work on a fusion reactor with a stone ax.”
“Thanks.”
“I'll give you all the headers you need if you want to update it to something a little less dangerous,” Da5id says. “I wasn't impugning your abilities. I'm just saying you need to keep up with the times.”
“It's fucking hard,” Hiro says. “There's no place for a freelance hacker anymore. You have to have a big corporation behind you.”
“I'm aware of that. And I'm aware that you can't stand to work for a big corporation. That's why I'm saying, I'll give you the stuff you need. You're always a part of The Black Sun to me, Hiro, even since we parted ways.”
It is classic Da5id. He's talking with his heart again, bypassing his head. If Da5id weren't a hacker, Hiro would despair of his ever having enough brains to do anything.
“Let's talk about something else,” Hiro says. “Was I just hallucinating, or are you and Juanita on speaking terms again?”
Da5id gives him an indulgent smile. He has been very kind to Hiro ever since The Conversation, several years back. It was a conversation that started out as a friendly chat over beer and oysters between a couple of longtime comrades-in-arms. It was not until three-quarters of the way through The Conversation that it dawned on Hiro that he was, in fact, being fired, at this very moment. Since The Conversation, Da5id has been known to feed Hiro useful bits of intel and gossip from time to time.
“Fishing for something useful?” Da5id asks knowingly. Like many bitheads, Da5id is utterly guileless, but at times like this, he thinks he's the reincarnation of Machiavelli.
“I got news for you, man,” Hiro says. “Most of the stuff you give me, I never put into the Library.”
“Why not? Hell, I give you all my best gossip. I thought you were making money off that stuff.”
“I just can't stand it,” Hiro says, “taking parts of my private conversations and whoring them out. Why do you think I'm broke?”
There's another thing he doesn't mention, which is that he's always considered himself to be Da5id's equal, and he can't stand the idea of feeding off Da5id's little crumbs and tidbits, like a dog curled up under his table.
“I was glad to see Juanita come in here—even as a black-and-white,” Da5id says. “For her not to use The Black Sun—it's like Alexander Graham Bell refusing to use the telephone.”
“Why did she come in tonight?”
“Something's bugging her,” Da5id says. “She wanted to know if I'd seen certain people on the Street.”
“Anyone in particular?”
“She's worried about a really large guy with long black hair,” Da5id says. “Peddling something called—get this—Snow Crash.”
“Has she tried the Library?”
“Yeah. I assume so, anyway.”
“Have you seen this guy?”
“Oh, yeah. It's not hard to find him,” Da5id says. “He's right outside the door. I got this from him.”
Da5id scans the table, picks up one of the hypercards, and shows it to Hiro.
“Da5id,” Hiro says, “I can't believe you took a hypercard from a black-and-white person.”
Da5id laughs. “This is not the old days, my friend. I've got so much antiviral medicine in my system that nothing could get through. I get so much contaminated shit from all the hackers who come through here, it's like working in a plague ward. So I'm not afraid of whatever's in this hypercard.”
“Well, in that case, I'm curious,” Hiro says.
“Yeah. Me, too.” Da5id laughs.
“It's probably something very disappointing.”
“Probably an animercial,” Da5id agrees. “Think I should do it?”
“Yeah. Go for it. It's not every day you get to try out a new drug,” Hiro says.
“Well, you can try one every day if you want to,” Da5id says, “but it's not every day you find one that can't hurt you.” He picks up the hypercard and tears it in half.
For a second, nothing happens. “I'm waiting,” Da5id says.
An avatar materializes on the table in front of Da5id, starting out ghostly and transparent, gradually becoming solid and three-dimensional. It's a really trite effect; Hiro and Da5id are already laughing.
The avatar is a stark naked Brandy. It doesn't even look like the standard Brandy; this looks like one of the cheap Taiwanese Brandy knockoffs. Clearly, it's just a daemon. She is holding a pair of tubes in her hands, about the size of paper-towel rolls.
Da5id is leaning back in his chair, enjoying this. There is something hilariously tawdry about the entire scene.
The Brandy leans forward, beckoning Da5id toward her. Da5id leans into her face, grinning broadly. She puts her crude, ruby-red lips up by his ear and mumbles something that Hiro can't hear.
When she leans back away from Da5id, his face has changed. He looks dazed and expressionless. Maybe Da5id really looks that way; maybe Snow Crash has messed up his avatar somehow so that it's no longer tracking Da5id's true facial expressions. But he's staring straight ahead, eyes frozen in their sockets.
The Brandy holds the pair of tubes up in front of Da5id's immobilized face and spreads them apart. It's actually a scroll. She's unrolling it right in front of Da5id's face, spreading it apart like a flat two-dimensional screen in front of his eyes. Da5id's paralyzed face has taken on a bluish tinge as it reflects light coming out of the scroll.
Hiro walks around the table to look. He gets a brief glimpse of the scroll before the Brandy snaps it shut again. It is a living wall of light, like a flexible, flat-screened television set, and it's not showing anything at all. Just static. White noise. Snow.
Then she's gone, leaving no trace behind. Desultory, sarcastic applause sounds from a few tables in the Hacker Quadrant.
Da5id's back to normal, wearing a grin that's part snide and part embarrassed.
“What was it?” Hiro says. “I just glimpsed some snow at the very end.”
“You saw the whole thing,” Da5id says. “A fixed-pattern of black-and-white pixels, fairly high-resolution. Just a few hundred thousand ones and zeroes for me to look at.”
“So in other words, someone just exposed your optic nerve to, what, maybe a hundred thousand bytes of information,” Hiro says.
“Noise, is more like it.”
“Well, all information looks like noise until you break the code,” Hiro says.
“Why would anyone show me information in binary code? I'm not a computer. I can't read a bitmap.”
“Relax, Da5id, I'm just shitting you,” Hiro says.
“You know what it was? You know how hackers are always trying to show me samples of their work?”
“Yeah.”
“Some hacker came up with this scheme to show me his stuff. And everything worked fine until the moment the Brandy opened the scroll—but his code was buggy, and it snow-crashed at the wrong moment, so instead of seeing his output, all I saw was snow.”
“Then why did he call the thing Snow Crash?”
“Gallows humor. He knew it was buggy.”
“What did the Brandy whisper in your ear?”
“Some language I didn't recognize,” Da5id says. “Just a bunch of babble.”
Babble. Babel.
“Afterward, you looked sort of stunned.”
Da5id looks resentful. “I wasn't stunned. I just found the whole experience so weird, I guess I just was taken aback for a second.”
Hiro is giving him an extremely dubious look. Da5id notices it and stands up. “Want to go see what your competitors in Nippon are up to?”
“What competitors?”
“You used to design avatars for rock stars, right?”
“Still do.”
“Well, Sushi K is here tonight.”
“Oh, yeah. The hairdo the size of a galaxy.”
“You can see the rays from here,” Da5id says, waving toward the next quad
rant, “but I want to see the whole getup.”
It does look as though the sun is rising somewhere in the middle of the Rock Star Quadrant. Above the heads of the milling avatars, Hiro can see a fan of orange beams radiating outward from some point in the middle of the crowd. It keeps moving, turning around, shaking from side to side, and the whole universe seems to move with it. On the Street, the full radiance of Sushi K's Rising Sun hairdo is suppressed by the height and width regulations. But Da5id allows free expression inside The Black Sun, so the orange rays extend all the way to the property lines.
“I wonder if anyone's told him yet that Americans won't buy rap music from a Japanese person,” Hiro says as they stroll over there.
“Maybe you should tell him,” Da5id suggests, “charge him for the service. He's in L.A. right now, you know.”
“Probably staying in a hotel full of bootlickers telling him what a big star he's going to be. He needs to be exposed to some actual biomass.”
They inject themselves into a stream of traffic, winding a narrow channel through a rift in the crowd.
“Biomass?” Da5id says.
“A body of living stuff. It's an ecology term. If you take an acre of rain forest or a cubic mile of ocean or a square block of Compton and strain out all the on living stuff—dirt and water—you get the biomass.”
Da5id, ever the bithead, says, “I do not understand.” His voice sounds funny; there's a lot of white noise creeping into his audio.
“Industry expression,” Hiro says. “The Industry feeds off the human biomass of America. Like a whale straining krill from the sea.”
Hiro wedges himself between a couple of Nipponese businessmen. One is wearing a uniform blue, but the other is a neo-traditional, wearing a dark kimono. And, like Hiro, he's wearing two swords—the long katana on his left hip and the one-handed wakizashi stuck diagonally in his waistband. He and Hiro glance cursorily at each other's armaments. Then Hiro looks away and pretends not to notice, while the neo-traditional is freezing solid, except for the corners of his mouth, which are curling downward. Hiro has seen this kind of thing before. He knows he's about to get into a fight.