SNOW CRASH

L. Bob Rife. Programmers and engineers and communications people. Rife’s an important man. Cot a monopoly to run.

“Rife’s here?” she asked him. Putting on an act, of course; she had it figured out by that point.

“Ssh,” he said.

It’s a nice piece of Intel. Hiro should like it, if she can just get it to him. And even that’s going to be easy. She never thought there’d be Metaverse terminals here on the Raft, but on this ship there’s a whole row of them, so that visiting suits can call back to civilization. All she has to do is get to one without waking up Raven. Which could be tricky. It’s too bad she couldn’t drug him with something, like in the Raft movies.

That’s when the realization comes. It swims up out of her subconscious in the same way that a nightmare does. Or when you leave the house and rememker half an hour later that you left a teakettle going on the stove. It’s a cold clammy reality that she can’t do a damn thing about.

She has finally remembered what that nagging thing was that bothered her for a moment, right before the actual moment of fuckin&

It was not birth control. It was not a hygiene thing.

It was her dentata. The last line of personal self-defense. Along with Uncle Enzo’s dog tags, the one piece of stuff that the Orthos didn’t take. They didn’t take it because they don’t believe in cavity searches.

Which means that at the moment Raven entered her, a very small hypodermic needle slipped imperceptibly into the engorged frontal vein of his penis, automatically shooting a cocktail of powerful narcotics and depressants into his bloodstream.

Raven’s been harpooned in the place where he least expected it. Now he’s going to sleep for at least four hours.

And then, boy, is he ever going to be pissed.

53

Hiro remembers Eliot’s warning: Don’t go onto the Raft itself without a local guide. This kid must be a Refu that Bruce Lee recruited from some Filipino neighborhood on the Raft.

The kid’s name is Transubstanciacion. Tranny for short. He

climbs into the zodiac before Hiro tells him to.

“Waita sec,” Him says. “We have to do some packing first.”

Hiro risks turning on a small flashlight, uses it to rummage around the yacht, picking up valuable stuff: a few bottles of (presumably) drinkable water, some food, extra ammunition for his nine. He takes one of the grappling hooks, too, coiling its rope neatly. Seems like the kind of thing that might be useful on the Raft.

He has one other chore to take care of, not something he’s

looking forward to.

Hiro has lived in a lot of places where mice and even rats were a problem. He used to get rid of them using traps. But then he had a run of bad luck with the things. He would hear a trap snap shut in the middle of the night, and then instead of silence he would hear piliable squeaking and thrashing, whacking noises as the stricken rodent tried to drag itself back to safety with a trap snapped over some part of its anatomy, usually its head. When you have gotten up at three in the morning to find a live mouse on your kitchen counter leaving a contrail of brain tissue across the formica, it is hard to get back to sleep, and so he prefers to set out poison now.

Somewhat in the same vein, a severely wounded man-the

last man Hiro shot-is thrashing around on the deck of the yacht, up near the bow, babbling.

More than anything he has ever wanted to do, Hiro wants to get into the zodiac and get away from this person. He knows that in order to go up and help him, or put him out of his misery, he’s going to have to shine the flashlight on him, and when he does that he’s going to see something he’ll never be able to forget.

But he has to do it. He swallows a couple of times because he’s

already gagging and follows his flashlight beam up to the bow.

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