SNOW CRASH

the building just gives her more ramp time. By the time she reaches the sidewalk, she’s easily got enough speed to coast all the way to Mexico.

As she’s swinging out across the broad avenue, aiming her crosshairs at the customs post a quarter mile away, which she is going to have to jump over, something tells her to look up.

Because after all, the building she just escaped from is towering above her, many stories full of Fed creeps, and all the alarms are going off. Most of the windows can’t be opened, all they can do is look out. But there are people on the roof. Mostly the roof is a forest of antennas. If it’s a forest, these guys are the creepy little gnomes who live in the trees. They are ready for action, they have their sunglasses on, they have weapons, they’re all looking at her.

But only one guy’s taking aim. And the thing he’s aiming at her is huge. The barrel is the size of a baseball bat. She can see the muzzle flash poke out of it, wreathed in a sudden doughnut of white imoke. It’s not pointed right at her; it’s aimed in front of her.

The stun bunny lands on the street, dead ahead, bounces up in the air, and detonates at an altitude of twenty feet.

The next quarter of a second: There’s no bright flash to blind her, and so she can actually see the shock wave spreading outward in a perfect sphere, hard and palpable as a ball of ice. Where the sphere contacts the street, it makes a circular wave front, making pebbles bounce, flipping old McDonald’s containers that have long been smashed flat, and coaxing fine, flourlike dust out of all the tiny crevices in the pavement, so that it sweeps across the road toward her like a microscopic blizzard. Above it, the shock wave hangs in the air, rushing toward her at the speed of sound, a lens of air that flattens and refracts everything on the other side. She’s passing through it.

- 42

As Hiro crests the pass on his motorcycle at five in the morning, the town of Port Sherman, Oregon, is suddenly laid out before him: a flash of yellow loglo wrapped into a vast U-shaped valley that was ground out of the rock, a long time ago, by a big tongue of ice in an epochal period of geological cunnilingus. There is just a light dusting of gold around the edges where it fades into the rain forest, thickening and intensifying as it approaches the har. bor-a long narrow fjordlike notch cut into the straight coastline of Oregon, a deep cold trench of black water heading straight out to Japan.

Him’s back on the Rim again. Feels good after that night ride through the sticks. Too many rednecks, too many mounties.

Even from ten miles away and a mile above, it’s not a pretty sight. Farther away from the central harbor district, Him can make out a few speckles of red, which is a little better than the yellow. He wishes he could see something in green or blue or purple, but there don’t seem to be any neighborhoods done up in those gourmet colors.

But then this isn’t exactly a gourmet job.

He rides half a mile off the road, sits down on a flat rock in an open space-ambush-proof, more or less-and goggles into the Metaverse.

“Librarian?”

“Yes, sir?”

“Inanna.”

“A figure from Sumerian mythology. Later cultures knew her as Ishtar, or Esther.”

“Good goddess o~ bad goddess?”

“Good. A beloved goddess.”

“Did she have any dealings with Enki or Asherah?”

“Mostly with Enki. She and Enki were on good and bad terms at different times. manna was known as the queen of all the great me.”

“I thought the me belonged to Enki.”

“They did~ But manna went to the Abzu-the watery fortress

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