NEAL STEPHENSON

419

“My father saw your father’s skeleton kneeling in front of him. That was the last thing he ever saw.”

“My father was facing away from Nagasaki,” Him says. “He was temporarily blinded by the light, he fell forward and pressed his face into the ground to get the terrible light out of his eyes. Then everything was back to normal again.”

“Except my father was blind,” Raven says. “He could only listen to your father fighting the lieutenant.”

“It was a half-blind, one-legged samurai with a katana versus a big strong healthy man with his arms tied behind his back,” Hiro says. “A pretty interesting fight. A pretty fair one. My father won. And that was the end of the war. The occupation troops got there a couple of weeks later. My father went home and kicked around for a while and finally had a kid during the seventies. So did yours.”

Raven says, “Ainchitka, 1972. My father got nuked twice by you bastards.”

“I understand the depth of your feelings,” Him says. “But don’t you think you’ve had enough revenge?”

“There’s no such thing as enough,” Raven says.

Him guns his motorcycle forward and closes on Raven, swinging his katana. But Raven reaches back-watching him in the rearview mirror-nd blocks the blow, he’s carrying a big long knife in one hand. Then Raven cuts his speed down to almost nothing and dives in between a couple of the stanchions. Him overshoots him, slows down too much, and gets a glimpse of Raven screaming past him on the other side of the monorail; by the time he’s accelerated and cut through another gap, Raven has already slalomed over to the other side.

And soit goes. They run down the length of the Street in an interlacing zigzag pattern, cutting back and forth under the monorail. The game is a simple one. All Raven has to do is make Hiro run into a stanchion. Hiro will come to a stop for a moment. By that time Raven will be gone, out of visual range, and Hiro will have no way to track him.

It’s an easier game for Raven than for Hiro. But Him’s better at this kind of thing than Raven is. That makes it a pretty even match. They slalom down the monorail track at speeds from sixty to sixty thousand miles per hour; all around them, low-slung