Neal Stephenson - Snow Crash

The stun bunny lands on the street, dead ahead, bounces up in the air, and detonates at an altitude of twenty feet.

The next quarter of a second: There's no bright flash to blind her, and so she can actually see the shock wave spreading outward in a perfect sphere, hard and palpable as a ball of ice. Where the sphere contacts the street, it makes a circular wave front, making pebbles bounce, flipping old McDonald's containers that have long been smashed flat, and coaxing fine, flourlike dust out of all the tiny crevices in the pavement, so that it sweeps across the road toward her like a microscopic blizzard. Above it, the shock wave hangs in the air, rushing toward her at the speed of sound, a lens of air that flattens and refracts everything on the other side. She's passing through it.

As Hiro crests the pass on his motorcycle at five in the morning, the town of Port Sherman, Oregon, is suddenly laid out before him: a flash of yellow loglo wrapped into a vast U-shaped valley that was ground out of the rock, a long time ago, by a big tongue of ice in an epochal period of geological cunnilingus. There is just a light dusting of gold around the edges where it fades into the rain forest, thickening and intensifying as it approaches the harbor - a long narrow fjordlike notch cut into the straight coastline of Oregon, a deep cold trench of black water heading straight out to Japan.

Hiro's back on the Rim again. Feels good after that night ride through the sticks. Too many rednecks, too many mounties.

Even from ten miles away and a mile above, it's not a pretty sight. Farther away from the central harbor district, Hiro can make out a few speckles of red, which is a little better than the yellow. He wishes he could see something in green or blue or purple, but there don't seem to be any neighborhoods done up in those gourmet colors.

But then this isn't exactly a gourmet job.

He rides half a mile off the road, sits down on a flat rock in an open space - ambush-proof, more or less - and goggles into the Metaverse.

"Librarian?"

"Yes, sir?"

"Inanna."

"A figure from Sumerian mythology. Later cultures knew her as Ishtar, or Esther."

"Good goddess or bad goddess?"

"Good. A beloved goddess."

"Did she have any dealings with Enki or Asherah?"

"Mostly with Enki. She and Enki were on good and bad terms at different times. Inanna was known as the queen of all the great me."

"I thought the me belonged to Enki."

"They did. But Inanna went to the Abzu - the watery fortress in the city of Eridu where Enki stored up the me - and got Enki to give her all the me. This is how the me were released into civilization."

"Watery fortress, huh?"

"Yes, sir."

"How did Enki feel about this?"

"He gave them to her willingly, apparently because he was drunk, and besotted with Inanna's physical charms. When he sobered up, he tried to chase her down and get them back, but she outsmarted him."

"Let's get semiotic," Hiro mumbles. "The Raft is L. Bob Rife's watery fortress. That's where he stores up all of his stuff. All of his me. Juanita went to Astoria, which was as close as you could get to the Raft a couple of days ago. I think she's trying to pull an Inanna."

"In another popular Sumerian myth," the Librarian says, "Inanna descends into the nether world."

"Go on," Hiro says.

"She gathers together all of her me and enters the land of no return."

"Great."

"She passes through the nether world and reaches the temple that is ruled over by Ereshkigal, goddess of Death. She is traveling under false pretenses, which are easily penetrated by the all-seeing Ereshkigal. But Ereshkigal allows her to enter the temple. As Inanna enters, her robes and jewels and me are stripped from her and she is brought, stark naked, before Ereshkigal and the seven judges of the underworld. The judges 'fastened their eyes upon her, the eyes of death; at their word, the word which tortures the spirit, Inanna was turned into a corpse, a piece of rotting meat, and was hung from a hook on the wall.' Kramer."

"Wonderful. Why the hell would she do something like that?"

"As Diane Wolkstein puts it, "Inanna gave up … all she had accomplished in life until she was stripped naked, with nothing remaining but her will to be reborn … because of her journey to the underworld, she took on the powers and mysteries of death and rebirth."

"Oh. So I guess there's more to the story?"

"Inanna's messenger waits for three days, and when she fails to return from the netherworld, goes to the gods asking for their help. None of the gods is willing to help except for Enki."

"So our buddy, Enki, the hacker god, has to bail her ass out of Hell."

"Enki creates two people and sends them into the netherworld to rescue Inanna. Through their magic, Inanna is brought back to life. She returns from the netherworld, followed by a host of the dead."

"Juanita went to the Raft three days ago," Hiro says. "It's time to get hacking."

Earth is still where he left it, zoomed in to show a magnified view of the Raft. In the light of last night's chat with Chuck Wrightson, it's not hard to find the hunk of raft that was staked out by the Orthos when the Enterprise swung by TROKK a few weeks back. There's a couple of big-assed Soviet freighters tied together, a swarm of small boats around them. Most of the Raft is dead brown and organic, but this section is all white fiberglass: pleasure craft looted from the comfortable retirees of TROKK. Thousands of them.

Now the Raft is off Port Sherman, so, Hiro figures, that's where the high priests of Asherah are hanging out. In a few days, they'll be in Eureka, then San Francisco, then L.A. - a floating land link, tying the Orthos' operations on the Raft to the closest available point on the mainland.

He turns away from the Raft, skims across the ocean to Port Sherman to do a bit of reconnoitering there.

Down along the waterfront, there's a nice crescent of cheap motels with yellow logos. Hiro rifles through them, looking for Russian names.

That's easy. There's a Spectrum 2000 right in the middle of the waterfront. As the name implies, each one has a whole range of rooms, from human coin lockers in the lobby all the way to luxury suites on the top. And a whole range of rooms has been rented out by a bunch of people with names ending in -off and -ovski and other dead Slavic giveaways. The foot soldiers sleep in the lobby, laid out straight and narrow in coin lockers next to their AK-47s, and the priests and generals live in nice rooms higher up. Hiro pauses to wonder what a Pentecostal Russian Orthodox priest does with a Magic Fingers.

The suite on the very top is being rented out by a gentleman by the name of Gurov. Mr. KGB himself. Too much of a wimp to hang out on the actual Raft, apparently.

How'd he get from the Raft to Port Sherman? If it involves crossing a couple of hundred miles of North Pacific, it must be a decent-sized vessel.

There are half a dozen marinas in Port Sherman. At the moment, most of them are clogged with small brown boats. It looks like a post-typhoon situation, where a few hundred square miles of ocean have been swept clean of sampans that have piled up against the nearest hard place. Except this is slightly more organized than that.

The Refus are coining ashore already. If they're smart and aggressive, they probably know that they can walk to California from here.

That explains why the piers are clogged with trashy little boats. But one of them still looks like a private marina. It's got a dozen or so clean white vessels, lined up neatly in their slips, no riffraff. And the resolution of this image is good enough that Hiro can see the pier speckled with little doughnuts: probably rings of sandbags. That'd be the only way to keep your private moorage private when the Raft was hovering offshore.