SNOW CRASH

into the face of the Filipino cabin boy. The boy blinks, looks a little surprised, but not especially scared. He has been hanging out with pirates, after all. For that matter, all the dead guys on the yacht don’t seem to faze him either.

“I be your guide,” the boy says. “ba Ia zin ka nu pa ra ta…”

52

Y.T. waits so long that she thinks the sun must have come up by now, but she knows it can’t really be more than a couple of hours. In a way, it doesn’t even matter. Nothing ever changes:

the music plays, the cartoon videotape rewinds itself and starts

up again, men come in and drink’and try not to get caught staring at her. She might as well be shackled to the table anyway; there’s no way she could ever find her way back home from here. So she waits.

Suddenly, Raven’s standing -in front of her. He’s wearing different clothes, wet slippery clothing made out of animal skins or something. His face is red and wet from being outside.

“You get your job all done?”

“Sort of,” Raven says. “I did enough.”

“What do you mean, enough?”

“I mean I don’t like being called out of a date to do bullshit work,” Raven says. “So I got things in order out there and my attitude is, let his gnomes worry about the details.”

“Well, I’ve been having a great time here.”

“Sorry, baby. Let’s get out of here,” he says, speaking with the intense, strained tones of a man with an erection.

“Let’s go to the Core,” he says, once they get into the cool air above deck.

“‘What’s there?”

“Everything,” he says. “The people who run this whole place. Most of these people”-he waves his hand out over the Raft- “can’t go there. I can. Want to see it?”

“Sure, why not,” she says, hating herself for sounding like such a sap. But what else is she going to say?

He starts leading her down a long moonlit series of gangplanks,