NEAL STEPHENSON

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aerodynamic cowling is totally flexible, calculates its own most efficient shape for the current speed and wind conditions, changes its curves accordingly, wraps around you like a nymphomaniacal gymnast.

Scott figures this guy is going to waltz off with this thing for dealer invoice, being a friend and confidant of Mr. Norman. And it’s not an easy thing for any red-blooded salesman to write out a contract to sell a sexy beast like this one at dealer invoice. He hesitates for a minute. Wonders what’s going to happen to him if this is all some kind of mistake.

The guy’s watching him intently, seems to sense his nervousness, almost as if he can hear Scott’s heart beating. So at the last minute he eases up, gets magnanimous-Scott loves these big-spender types-decides to throw in a few hundred Kongbucks over invoice, just so Scott can pull in a meager commission on the deal. A tip, basically.

Then-icing on the cake-the guy goes nuts in the Cycle Shop. Totally berserk. Buys a complete outfit. Everything. Top )f the line. A full black coverall that swaddles everything from toes to neck in breathable, bulletproof fabric, with armorgel pads n all the right places and airbags around the neck. Even safety Fanatics don’t bother with a helmet when they’re wearing one of these babies.

So once he’s figured out how to attach his swords on the Dutside of his coverall, he’s on his way.

“I gotta say this,” Scott says as the guy is sitting on his new bike, getting his swords adjusted, doing something incredi. bly unauthorized to the bios, “you look like one bad motherFucker.”

“Thanks, I guess.” He twists the throttle up once and Scott Feels, but does not hear, the power of the engine. This baby is so efficient it doesn’t waste power by making noise. “Say hi to your brand-new niece,” the guy says, and then lets go the clutch. The spokes flex and gather themselves and the bike springs forward out of the lot, seeming to jump off its electric paws. He cuts right across the parking lot of the neighboring NeoAquarian Temple Franchise and pulls out onto the road. About half a second later, the guy with the swords is a dot on the horizon. Then he’s gone. Northbound.

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Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world. if I moved to a martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. if my.family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to being bad.

Him used to feel that way, too, but then he ran into Raven. In a way, this is liberating. He no longer has to worry about trying to be the baddest motherfucker in the world. The position is taken. The crowning touch, the one thing that really puts true world-class badmotherfuckerdom totally out of reach, of course, is the hydrogen bomb. If it wasn’t for the hydrogen bomb, a man could still aspire. Maybe find Raven’s Achilles’ heel Sneak up, get a drop, slip a mickey, pull a fast one. But Raven’s nuclear umbrella kind of puts the world title out of reach.

Which is okay. Sometimes it’s all right just to be a little bad. To know your limitations. Make do with what you’ve got.

Once he maneuvers his way onto the freeway, aimed up into the mountains, he goggles into his office. Earth is still there, zoomed in tight on the Raft. Hiro contemplates it, superimposed in ghostly hues on his view of the highway, as he rides toward Oregon at a hundred and forty miles per hour.

From a distance, it looks bigger than it really is. Getting closer, he can see that this illusion is caused by an enveloping, self-made slick/cloud of sewage and air pollution, fading out into the ocean and the atmosphere.

It orbits the Pacific clockwise. When they fire up the boilers on the Enterprise, it can control its direction a little bit, but real navigation is a practical impossibility with all the other shit lashed onto it. It mostly has to go where the wind and the Coriolis effect take it. A couple of years ago, it was going by the Philippines, Vietnam, China, Sil,eria, picking up Refus. Then it swung up the Aleutian chain, down the Alaska panhandle, and now it’s