Snow Crash Part 17

The girl types some stuff into the computer. The customer snaps her Visa card down on the fake wood altar top; it sounds like a rifle shot. The girl pries the card up using her inch-long fingernails, a dicey and complicated operation that makes Y.T. think of insects climbing out of their egg sacs. Then she performs the sacrament, swiping the card through its electromagnetic slot with a carefully modulated sweep of the arm, as though tearing back a veil, handing over the slip, mumbling that she needs a signature and daytime phone number. She might as well have been speaking Latin, but that's okay, since this customer is familiar with the liturgy and signs and numbers it before the words are fully spoken.

Then it just remains for the Word from On High. But computers and communications are awfully good these days, and it usually doesn't take longer than a couple of seconds to perform a charge-card verification. The little machine beeps out its approval code, heavenly tunes sing out from tinny speakers, and a wide pair of pearlescent doors in the back of the room swing majestically open.

"Thank you for your donation," the girl says, slurring the words together into a single syllable.

The customer stomps toward the double doors, drawn in by hypnotic organ strains. The interior of the chapel is weirdly colored, illuminated partly by fluorescent fixtures wedged into the ceiling and partly by large colored light boxes that simulate tamed-gla.s.s windows. The largest of these, shaped like a fattened Gothic arch, is bolted to the back wall, above the altar, and features a blazing trinity: Jesus, Elvis, and the Reverend Wayne. Jesus gets top billing. The wors.h.i.+pper is not half a dozen steps into the place before she thuds down on her knees in the middle of the aisle and begins to speak in tongues: "ar ia an ar is ye na amiriaisa, venaamiriaasaria..."

The doors swing shut again.

"Just a sec," the girl says, looking at Y.T. a little nervously. She goes around the corner and stands in the middle of the toy area, inadvertently getting the hem of her robe caught up in a Ninja Raft Warriors battle module, and knocks on the door to the potty.

"Busy!" says a man's voice from the other side of the door.

"The Kourier's here," the girl says.

"I'll be right out," the man says, more quietly.

And he really is right out. Y.T. does not perceive any waiting time, no zipping up of the fly or was.h.i.+ng of the hands. He is wearing a black suit with a clerical collar, pulling a lightweight black robe on over that as he emerges into the toy area, crus.h.i.+ng little action figures and fighter aircraft beneath his black shoes. His hair is black and well greased, with individual strands of gray, and he wears wire-rimmed bifocals with a subtle brownish tint. He has very large pores.

And by the time he gets close enough that Y.T. can see all of these details, she can also smell him. She smells Old Spice, plus a strong whiff of vomit on his breath. But it's not boozy vomit.

"Gimme that," he says, and yanks the aluminum briefcase from her hand.

Y.T. never lets people do that.

"You have to sign for it," she says. But she knows it's too late. If you don't get them to sign first, you're screwed. You have no power, no leverage. You're just a brat on a skateboard.

Which is why Y.T. never lets people yank deliveries out of her hand. But this guy is a minister, for G.o.d's sake. She just didn't reckon on it. He yanked it out of her hand-and now he runs with it back to his office.

"I can sign for it," the girl says. She looks scared. More than that, she looks sick.

"It has to be him personally," Y.T. says. "Reverend Dale T. Thorpe."

Now she's done being shocked and starting to be p.i.s.sed. So she just follows him right into his office.

"You can't go in there," the girl says, but she says it dreamily, sadly, like this whole thing is already half forgotten. Y.T. opens the door.

The Reverend Dale T. Thorpe sits at his desk. The aluminum briefcase is open in front of him. It is filled with the same complicated bit of business that she saw the other night, after the Raven thing. The Reverend Dale T. Thorpe seems to be leashed by the neck to this device.

No, actually he is wearing something on a string around his neck. He was keeping it under his clothes, the way Y.T. keeps Uncle Enzo's dog tags. He has pulled it out now and shoved it into a slot inside the aluminum case. It appears to be a laminated ID card with a bar code on it.

Now he pulls the card out and lets it dangle down his front. Y.T. cannot tell whether he has noticed her. He is typing on the keyboard, punching away with two fingers, missing letters, doing it again.

Then motors and servos inside the aluminum case whir and shudder. The Reverend Dale T. Thorpe has unsnapped one of the little vials from its place in the lid and inserted it into a socket next to the keyboard. It is slowly drawn down inside the machine.

The vial pops back out again. The red plastic cap is emitting grainy red light. It has little LEDs built into it, and they are spelling out numbers, counting down seconds: 5,4,3,2,1 The Reverend Dale T. Thorpe holds the vial up to his left nostril. When the LED counter gets down to zero, it hisses, like air coming out of a tire valve. At the same time, he inhales deeply, sucking it all into his lungs. Then he shoots the vial expertly into his wastebasket.

"Reverend?" the girl says. Y.T. spins around to see her drifting toward the office. "Would you do mine now, please?"

The Reverend Dale T. Thorpe does not answer. He has slumped back in his leather swivel chair and is staring at a neon-framed blowup of Elvis, in his Army days, holding a rifle.

When he wakes up, it's the middle of the day and he is all dried out from the sun, and birds are circling overhead, trying to decide whether he's dead or alive. Hiro climbs down from the roof of the turret and, throwing caution to the wind, drinks three gla.s.ses of L.A. tap water. He gets some bacon out of Da5id's fridge and throws it in the microwave. Most of General Jim's people have left, and there is only a token guard of soldiers down on the road. Hiro locks all the doors that look out on the hillside, because he can't stop thinking about Raven. Then he sits at the kitchen table and goggles in.

The Black Sun is mostly full of Asians, including a lot of people from the Bombay film industry, glaring at each other, stroking their black mustaches, trying to figure out what kind of hyperviolent action film will play in Persepolis next year. It is nighttime there. Hiro is one of the few Americans in the joint.

Along the back wall of the bar is a row of private rooms, ranging from little tete-a-tetes to big conference rooms where a bunch of avatars can gather and have a meeting. Juanita is waiting for Hiro in one of the smaller ones. Her avatar just looks like Juanita. It is an honest representation, with no effort made to hide the early suggestions of crow's-feet at the corners of her big black eyes. Her glossy hair is so well resolved that Hiro can see individual strands refracting the light into tiny rainbows.

"I'm at Da5id's house. Where are you?" Hiro says.

"In an airplane-so I may break up," Juanita says.

"You on your way here?"

"To Oregon, actually."

"Portland?"

"Astoria."

"Why on earth would you go to Astoria, Oregon, at a time like this?"

Juanita takes a deep breath, lets it out shakily. "If I told you, we'd get into an argument."

"What's the latest word on Da5id?" Hiro says.

"The same."

"Any diagnosis?"

Juanita sighs, looks tired. "There won't be any diagnosis," she says. "It's a software, not a hardware, problem."

"Huh?"

"They're rounding up the usual suspects. CAT scans, NMR scans, PET scans, EEGs. Everything's fine. There's nothing wrong with his brain-his hardware."

"It just happens to be running the wrong program?"

"His software got poisoned. Da5id had a snow crash last night, inside his head."

"Are you trying to say it's a psychological problem?"

"It kind of goes beyond those established categories," Juanita says, "because it's a new phenomenon. A very old one, actually."

"Does this thing just happen spontaneously, or what?"

"You tell me," she says. "You were there last night. Did anything happen after I left?"

"He had a Snow Crash hypercard that he got from Raven outside The Black Sun."

"s.h.i.+t. That b.a.s.t.a.r.d."

"Who's the b.a.s.t.a.r.d? Raven or Da5id?"

"Da5id. I tried to warn him."

"He used it." Hiro goes on to explain the Brandy with the magic scroll. "Then later he had computer trouble and got bounced."

"I heard about that part," she says. "That's why I called the paramedics."

"I don't see the connection between Da5id's computer having a crash, and you calling an ambulance."

"The Brandy's scroll wasn't just showing random static. It was flas.h.i.+ng up a large amount of digital information, in binary form. That digital information was going straight into Da5id's optic nerve. Which is part of the brain, incidentally-if you stare into a person's pupil, you can see the terminal of the brain."

"Da5id's not a computer. He can't read binary code."

"He's a hacker. He messes with binary code for a living. That ability is firm-wired into the deep structures of his brain. So he's susceptible to that form of information. And so are you, home boy."

"What kind of information are we talking about?"

"Bad news. A metavirus," Juanita says. "It's the atomic bomb of informational warfare-a virus that causes any system to infect itself with new viruses."

"And that's what made Da5id sick?"

"Yes."

"Why didn't I get sick?"

"Too far away. Your eyes couldn't resolve the bitmap. It has to be right up in your face."

"I'll think about that one," Hiro says. "But I have another question. Raven also distributes another drug-in Reality-called, among other things, Snow Crash. What is it?"

"It's not a drug," Juanita says. "They make it look like a drug and feel like a drug so that people will want to take it. It's laced with cocaine and some other stuff."

"If it's not a drug, what is it?"

"It's chemically processed blood serum taken from people who are infected with the metavirus," Juanita says. "That is, it's just another way of spreading the infection."

"Who's spreading it?"

"L. Bob Rife's private church. All of those people are infected." Hiro puts his head in his hands. He's not exactly thinking about this; he's letting it ricochet around in his skull, waiting for it to come to rest. "Wait a minute, Juanita. Make up your mind. This Snow Crash thing-is it a virus, a drug, or a religion?"

Juanita shrugs. "What's the difference?"

That Juanita is talking this way does not make it any easier for Hiro to get back on his feet in this conversation. "How can you say that? You're a religious person yourself."

"Don't lump all religion together."

"Sorry."

"All people have religions. It's like we have religion receptors built into our brain cells, or something, and we'll latch onto anything that'll fill that niche for us. Now, religion used to be essentially viral-a piece of information that replicated inside the human mind, jumping from one person to the next. That's the way it used to be, and unfortunately, that's the way it's headed right now. But there have been several efforts to deliver us from the hands of primitive, irrational religion. The first was made by someone named Enki about four thousand years ago. The second was made by Hebrew scholars in the eighth century B.C., driven out of their homeland by the invasion of Sargon II, but eventually it just devolved into empty legalism. Another attempt was made by Jesus-that one was hijacked by viral influences within fifty days of his death. The virus was suppressed by the Catholic Church, but we're in the middle of a big epidemic that started in Kansas in 1900 and has been gathering momentum ever since."

"Do you believe in G.o.d or not?" Hiro says. First things first.

"Definitely."

"Do you believe in Jesus?"

"Yes. But not in the physical, bodily resurrection of Jesus."

"How can you be a Christian without believing in that?"

"I would say," Juanita says, "how can you be a Christian with it? Anyone who takes the trouble to study the gospels can see that the bodily resurrection is a myth that was tacked onto the real story several years after the real histories were written. It's so National Enquirer-esque, don't you think?"

Beyond that, Juanita doesn't have much to say. She doesn't want to get into it now, she says. She doesn't want to prejudice Hiro's thinking "at this point."

"Does that imply that there's going to be some other point? Is this a continuing relations.h.i.+p?" Hiro says.

"Do you want to find the people who infected Da5id?"

"Yes. h.e.l.l, Juanita, even if it weren't for the fact that he is my friend, I'd want to find them before they infect me."

"Look at the Babel stack, Hiro, and then visit me if I get back from Astoria."

"If you get back? What are you doing there?"

"Research."

She's been putting on a businesslike front through this whole talk, spitting out information, telling Hiro the way it is. But she's tired and anxious, and Hiro gets the idea that she's deeply afraid.

"Good luck," he says. He was all ready to do some flirting with her during this meeting, picking up where they left off last night. But something has changed in Juanita's mind between then and now. Flirting is the last thing on her mind.

Juanita's going to do something dangerous in Oregon. She doesn't want Hiro to know about it so that he won't worry.

"There's some good stuff in the Babel stack about someone named Inanna," she says.

"Who's Inanna?"

"A Sumerian G.o.ddess. I'm sort of in love with her. Anyway, you can't understand what I'm about to do until you understand Inanna."

"Well, good luck," Hiro says. "Say hi to Inanna for me."

"Thanks."

"When you get back, I want to spend some time with you."