Snow Crash (15 page)

These days, most states are franchulates or Burbclaves, much too small to have anything like a jail, or even a judicial system. So when someone does something bad, they try to find quick and dirty punishments, like flogging, confiscation of property, public humiliation, or, in the case of people who have a high potential of going on to hurt others, a warning tattoo on a prominent body part. POOR IMPULSE CONTROL. Apparently, this guy went to such a place and lost his temper real bad.

For an instant, a glowing red gridwork is plotted against the side of Raven's face. It rapidly shrinks, all sides converging inward toward the right pupil. Raven shakes his head, turns to look for the source of the laser light, but it's already gone. Lagos has already got his retinal scan.

That's why Lagos is here. He's not interested in Hiro or Vitaly Chernobyl. He's interested in Raven. And somehow, Lagos knew that he was going to be here. And Lagos is somewhere nearby, right now, videotaping the guy, probing the contents of his pockets with radar, recording his pulse and respiration.

Hiro picks up his personal phone. “Y.T.,” he says, and it dials Y.T.'s number.

It rings for a long time before she picks it up. It's almost impossible to hear anything over the sound of the concert.

“What the fuck do you want?”

“Y.T., I'm sorry about this. But something's going on. Something big time. I'm keeping one eye on a big biker named Raven.”

“The problem with you hackers is you never stop working.”

“That's what a hacker is,” Hiro says.

“I'll keep an eye on this Raven guy, too,” she says, “sometime when I
am
working.” Then she hangs up.

16

Raven makes a couple of broad, lazy sweeps along the perimeter of the crowd, going very slowly, looking in all directions. He is annoyingly calm and unhurried.

Then he cuts farther out into the darkness, away from the crowd. He does a little more looking around, checking out the perimeter of the shantytown. And finally, he swings the big Harley around in a trajectory that brings him back to the big important Crip. The guy with the sapphire tie clip and the personal security detail.

Hiro begins weaving through the crowd in that direction, trying not to be too obvious about it. This looks like it's going to be interesting.

As Raven approaches, the bodyguards converge on the head Crip, form a loose protective ring around him. As
he comes nearer, all of them back away a step or two,
as though the man is surrounded by an invisible force
field. He finally comes to a stop, deigns to put his feet on the ground. He flicks a few switches on the handlebars before he steps away from his Harley. Then, anticipating what's next, he stands with his feet apart and his arms up.

One Crip approaches from each side. They don't look real happy about this particular duty, they keep casting sidelong glances at the motorcycle. The head Crip keeps goading them forward with his voice, shooing them toward Raven with his hands. Each one of them has a hand-held metal-detecting wand. They swirl the wands around his body and find nothing at all, not even the tiniest speck of metal, not even coins in his pocket. The man is 100 percent organic. So if nothing else, Lagos's warning about Raven's knife has turned out to be bullshit.

These two Crips walk rapidly back to the main group. Raven begins to follow them. But the head Crip takes
a step back, holds both of his hands up in a “stop” motion. Raven stops, stands there, the grin returning to his
face.

The head Crip turns away and gestures back toward his black BMW. The rear door of the BMW opens up and a man gets out, a younger, smaller black man in round wire-rims, wearing jeans and big white athletic shoes and typical studentish gear.

The student walks slowly toward Raven, pulling something from his pocket. It's a hand-held device, but much too bulky to be a calculator. It's got a keypad on the top and a sort of window on one end, which the student keeps aiming toward Raven. There's an LED read-out above the keypad and a red flashing light underneath that. The student is wearing a pair of headphones that are jacked into a socket on the butt of the device.

For starters, the student aims the window at the ground, then at the sky, then at Raven, keeping his eye on the flashing red light and the LED readout. It has the feel of some kind of religious rite, accepting digital input from the sky spirit and then the ground spirit and then from the black biker angel.

Then he begins to walk slowly toward Raven, one step at a time. Hiro can see the red light flashing intermittently, not following any particular pattern or rhythm.

The student gets to within a yard of Raven and then orbits him a couple of times, always keeping the device aimed inward. When he's finished, he steps back briskly, turns, and aims it toward the motorcycle. When the device is aimed at the motorcycle, the red light flashes much more quickly.

The student walks up to the head Crip, pulling off his headphones, and has a short conversation with him. The Crip listens to the student but keeps his eyes fixed on Raven, nods his head a few times, finally pats the student on his shoulder and sends him back to the BMW.

It was a Geiger counter.

Raven strolls up to the big Crip. They shake hands, a standard plain old Euro-shake, no fancy variations. It's not a real friendly get-together. The Crip has his eyes a little too wide open, Hiro can see the furrows in his brow, everything about his posture and his face screaming out: Get me away from this Martian.

Raven goes back to his radioactive hog, releases a few bungee cords, and picks up a metal briefcase. He hands it to the head Crip, and they shake hands again. Then he turns away, walks slowly and calmly back to the motorcycle, gets on, and putt-putts away.

Hiro would love to stick around and watch some more, but he has the feeling that Lagos has this particular event covered. And besides, he has other business. Two limousines are fighting their way through the crowd, headed for the stage.

The limousines stop, and Nipponese people start to climb out. Dark-clad, unfunky, they stand around awkwardly in the middle of the party/riot, like a handful of broken nails suspended in a colorful jello mold. Finally, Hiro makes bold enough to go up and look into one of the windows to find out if this is who he thinks it is.

Can't see through the smoked glass. He bends down, puts his face right near the window, trying to make it real obvious.

Still no response. Finally, he knocks on the window.

Silence. He looks up at the entourage. They are all watching him. But when he looks up they glance away, suddenly remember to drag on their cigarettes or rub their eyebrows.

There is only one source of light inside the limousine that's bright enough to be visible through the smoked glass, and that is the distinctive inflated rectangle of a television screen.

What the hell. This is America, Hiro is half American, and there's no reason to take this politeness thing to an unhealthy extreme. He hauls the door open and looks into the back of the limousine.

Sushi K is sitting there wedged in between a couple of other young Nipponese men, programmers on his imageering team. His hairdo is turned off, so it just looks like an orange Afro. He is wearing a partly assembled stage costume, apparently expecting to be performing tonight. Looks like he's taking Hiro up on his offer.

He's watching a well-known television program called
Eye Spy
. It is produced by CIC and syndicated through one of the major studios. It is reality television: CIC picks out one of their agents who is involved in a wet operation—doing some actual cloak-and-dagger work—and has him put on a gargoyle rig so that everything he sees and hears is transmitted back to the home base in Langley. This material is then edited into a weekly hour-long program.

Hiro never watches it. Now that he works for CIC, he finds it kind of annoying. But he hears a lot of gossip about the show, and he knows that tonight they are showing the second-to-last episode in a five-part arc. CIC has smuggled a guy onto the Raft, where he is trying to infiltrate one of its many colorful and sadistic pirate bands: the Bruce Lee organization.

Hiro enters the limousine and gets a look at the TV just in time to see Bruce Lee himself, as seen from the point of view of the hapless gargoyle spy, approaching down some dank corridor on a Raft ghost ship. Condensation is dripping from the blade of Bruce Lee's samurai sword.

“Bruce Lee's men have trapped the spy in an old Korean factory ship in the Core,” one of Sushi K's henchmen says, a rapid hissing explanation. “They are looking for him now.”

Suddenly, Bruce Lee is pinioned under a brilliant spotlight that makes his trademark diamond grin flash like the arm of a galaxy. In the middle of the screen, a pair of cross hairs swing into place, centered on Bruce Lee's forehead. Apparently, the spy has decided he must fight his way out of this mess and is bringing some powerful CIC weapons system to bear on Bruce Lee's skull. But then a blur comes in from the side, a mysterious dark shape blocking our view of Bruce Lee. The cross hairs are now centered on—what, exactly?

We'll have to wait until next week to find out.

Hiro sits down across from Sushi K and the programmers, next to the television set, so that he can get a TV's-eye view of the man.

“I'm Hiro Protagonist. You got my message, I take it.”

“Fabu!” Sushi K cries, using the Nipponese abbreviation of the all-purpose Hollywood adjective “fabulous.”

He continues, “Hiro-san, I am deeply indebted to you for this once-in-a-lifetime chance to perform my small works before such an audience.” He says the whole thing in Nipponese except for “once-in-a-lifetime chance.”

“I must humbly apologize for arranging the whole thing so hastily and haphazardly,” Hiro says.

“It pains me deeply that you should feel the need to apologize when you have given me an opportunity that any Nipponese rapper would give anything for—to perform my humble works before actual homeboys from the ghettos of L.A.”

“I am profoundly embarrassed to reveal that these fans are not exactly ghetto homeboys, as I must have carelessly led you to believe. They are thrashers. Skateboarders who like both rap music and heavy metal.”

“Ah. This is fine, then,” Sushi K says. But his tone of voice suggests that it's not really fine at all.

“But there are representatives of the Crips here,” Hiro says, thinking very, very fast even by his standards, “and if your performance is well received, as I'm quite certain it will be, they will spread the word throughout their community.”

Sushi K rolls down the window. The decibel level quintuples in an instant. He stares at the crowd, five thousand potential market shares, young people with funkiness on their minds. They've never heard any music before that wasn't perfect. It's either studio-perfect digital sound from their CD players or performance-perfect fuzz-grunge from the best people in the business, the groups that have come to L.A. to make a name for themselves and have actually survived the gladiatorial combat environment of the clubs. Sushi K's face lights up with a combination of joy and terror. Now he actually has to go up there and do it. In front of the seething biomass.

Hiro goes out and paves the way for him. That's easy enough. Then he bails. He's done his bit. No point in wasting time on this puny Sushi K thing when Raven is out there, representing a much larger source of income. So he wanders back out toward the periphery.

“Yo! Dude with the swords,” someone says.

Hiro turns around, sees a green-jacketed Enforcer motioning to him. It's the short, powerful guy with the headset, the guy in charge of the security detail.

“Squeaky,” he says, extending his hand.

“Hiro,” Hiro says, shaking it, and handing over his business card. No particular reason to be coy with these guys. “What can I do for you, Squeaky?”

Squeaky reads the card. He has a kind of exaggerated politeness that is kind of like a military man. He's calm, mature, role-modelesque, like a high school football coach. “You in charge of this thing?”

“To the extent anyone is.”

“Mr. Protagonist, we got a call a few minutes ago from a friend of yours named Y.T.”

“What's wrong? Is she okay?”

“Oh, yes, sir, she's just fine. But you know that bug you were talking to earlier?”

Hiro's never heard the term “bug” used this way, but he reckons that Squeaky is referring to the gargoyle, Lagos.

“Yeah.”

“Well, there's a situation involving that gentleman that Y.T. sort of tipped us off to. We thought you might want to have a look.”

“What's going on?”

“Uh, why don't you come with me. You know, some things are easier to show than to explain verbally.”

As Squeaky turns, Sushi K's first rap song begins. His voice sounds tight and tense.

I'm Sushi K and I'm here to say
I like to rap in a different way

Look out Number One in every city
Sushi K rap has all most pretty

My special talking of remarkable words
Is not the stereotyped bucktooth nerd

My hair is big as a galaxy
Cause I attain greater technology

Hiro follows Squeaky away from the crowd, into the dimly lit area on the edge of the shantytown. Up above them on the overpass embankment, he can dimly make out phosphorescent shapes—green-jacketed Enforcers orbiting some strange attractor.

“Watch your steep,” Squeaky says as they begin to climb up the embankment. “It's slippery in places.”

I like to rap about sweetened romance
My fond ambition is of your pants

So here is of special remarkable way
Of this fellow raps named Sushi K

The Nipponese talking phenomenon
Like samurai sword his sharpened tongue

Who raps the East Asia and the Pacific
Prosperity Sphere, to be specific

It's a typical loose slope of dirt and stones that looks like it would wash away in the first rainfall. Sage and cactus and tumbleweeds here and there, all looking scraggly and half-dead from air pollution.

It's hard to see anything clearly, because Sushi K is jumping around down below them on the stage, the brilliant orange rays of his sunburst hairdo are sweeping back and forth across the embankment at a speed that seems to be supersonic, washing grainy, gritty light over the weeds and the rocks and throwing everything into weird, discolored, high-contrast freeze frames.

Sarariman on subway listen
For Sushi K like nuclear fission

Fire-breathing lizard Gojiro
He my always big-time hero

His mutant rap burn down whole block
Start investing now Sushi K stock

It on Nikkei stock exchange
Waxes; other rappers wane

Best investment, make my day
Corporation Sushi K

Squeaky is walking straight uphill, paralleling a fresh motorcycle track that has cut deeply into the loose yellow soil. It consists of a deep, wide track with a narrower one that runs parallel, a couple of feet to the right.

The track gets deeper the farther up they go. Deeper and darker. It looks less and less like a motorcycle rut in loose dirt and more like a drainage ditch for some sinister black effluent.

Coming to America now
Rappers trying to start a row

Say “Stay in Japan, please, listen!
We can't handle competition!”

U.S. rappers booing and hissin'
Ask for rap protectionism

They afraid of Sushi K
Cause their audience go away

He got chill financial backin'
Give those U.S. rappers a smackin'