SNOW CRASH

302

the middle of nowhere, pulling up to the most distant pump island so that no one was near them. And they never stopped driving. They just got relayed from one driver to the next.

Finally, they got to a coast. Y.T. could smell it. They spent a few minutes waiting, engine idling, and then the van bumped over some kind of a threshold, climbed a few ramps, stopped, set its parking brake. The driver got out and left them all alone in the van for the first time. Y.T. felt glad that the trip was over.

Then everything started to rumble, like an engine noise but a lot bigger. She didn’t feel any movement until a few minutes later, when she realized that everything was rocking gently. The van was parked on a ship, and the ship was headed out to sea.

__________ It’s a real ocean-going ship. An ok~ shifty, rusty one that probably cost about five bucks at the ship junkyard. But it carries cars, and it goes through the water, and it doesn’t sink.

The ship is just like the van, except bigger, with more people. But they eat the same stuff, sing the same songs, and sleep just as rarely as ever. By now, Y.T. finds it perversely comforting. She knows that she’s with a lot of other people like her, and that she’s safe. She knows the routine. She knows where she belongs.

And so finally they come to the Raft No one has told YT. this is where they’re going, but by now it’s obvious. She ought to be scared. But they wouldn’t be going to the Raft if it was as bad as everyone says.

When it starts coming into view, she half expects them to converge on her with gaffer’s tape again. But then she figures out it’s not necessary. She hasn’t been causing trouble. She’s been accepted here, they trust her. It gives her a feeling of pride, in a way.

And she won’t cause trouble on the Raft because all she can do is escape from their part of it onto the Raft per se. As such. The real Raft. The Raft of a hundred Hong Kong B-movies and blood-. soaked Nipponese comic books. It doesn’t take much imagination to think of what happens to lone fifteen-year-old blond American girls on the Raft, and these people know it.

Sometimes, she worries about her mother, then she hardens her heart and thinks maybe the whole thing will be good for her.