Snow Crash Part 40

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 thras.h.i.+ng the grittier highways and settling into a padded easy chair.

"Had the interior redone," Rife says. "This is a big old Sov guns.h.i.+p 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 p.i.s.sed 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.

"h.e.l.lo, 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 clicking 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, a.s.shole. 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 winds.h.i.+eld 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.

"f.u.c.king Soviet piece of s.h.i.+t! They put all that steel in its belly and then made the winds.h.i.+eld out of gla.s.s?"

"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 f.u.c.ked 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.

For a minute or so, the chopper hovers twenty feet overhead. 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, smas.h.i.+ng 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, antic.i.p.ating 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 s.h.i.+p, 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 urn me en ki me en me lu lu mu me al nu urn mealnuumemememuluealnuumrneduggamumemulu ealnuumme..."

It's three feet straight down to the deck, and he covers the distance in free fall, slamming down on his back, b.u.mping 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 h.e.l.l 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 Da5id?"

"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 a.s.sembly 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.

By the time he's got the plastic wrapper cut away, Juanita is waving to him from the windows on top of the control tower.

He takes all the pieces that look to be part of the envelope and puts them into a separate pile. Then he a.s.sembles the remains of the tablet itself into a coherent group. It's not obvious, yet, how to piece them together, and he doesn't have time for jigsaw puzzles. So he goggles into his office, uses the computer to take an electronic snapshot of the fragments, and calls the Librarian.

"Yes, sir?"

"This hypercard contains a picture of a shattered clay tablet. Do you know of some software that would be good at piecing it back together?"

"One moment, sir," the Librarian says. Then a hypercard appears in his hand. He gives it to Hiro. It contains a picture of an a.s.sembled tablet. "That's how it looks, sir."

"Can you read Sumerian?"

"Yes, sir."

"Can you read this tablet out loud?"

"Yes, sir."

"Get ready to do it. And hold on a second."