SNOW CRASH

cars blow out of their frames, spraying into the air like rooster tails behind a speedboat.

As part of Mr. Lee’s good neighbor policy, all Rat Things are programmed never to break the sound barrier in a populated area. But Fido’s in too much of a hurry to worry about the good neighbor policy. Jack the sound barrier. Bring the noise.

66

“Raven,” Hiro says, “let me tell you a story before I kill you.”

“I’ll listen,” Raven says. “It’s a long ride.”

All vehicles in the Metaverse have voice phones on them. Hiro simply called home to the Librarian and had him look up Raven’s number. They are riding in lockstep across the black surface of the imaginary planet now, though Hiro is gaining on Raven, meter by meter.

“My dad was in the Army in World War Two. Lied about his age to get in. They put him in the Pacific doing scut work. Anyway, he got captured by the Nipponese.”

“So?”

“So they took him back to Nippon. Put him in a prison camp. There were a lot of Americans there, plus some Brits and some Chinese. And a couple of guys that they couldn’t place. They looked like Indians. Spoke a little English. But they spoke Russian even better.”

“They were Aleuts,” Raven says. “American citizens. But no one had ever heard of them. Most people don’t know that the Japanese conquered American territory during the war-several islands at the end of the Aleutian chain. Inhabited. By my people. They took the two most important Aleuts and put them in prison camps in Japan. One of them was the mayor of Attu-the most important civil authority. The other was even more important, to us. He was the chief harpooneer of the Aleut nation.”

Hiro says, “The mayor got sick and died. He didn’t have any immunities. But the harpooneer was one tough son of a bitch. He got sick a few times, but he survived. Went out to work in the fields along with the rest of the prisoners, growing food for the