I are the only two people who can ever have an honest conversation in the Metaverse.'
'You're just the same mystical crank you always were,' he says, smiling so as to make this a charming statement.
'You can't imagine how mystical and cranky I am now, Hiro.'
'How mystical and cranky are you?'
She eyes him warily. Exactly the same way she did when he came into her office years ago.
It comes into his mind to wonder why she is always so alert in his presence. In college, he used to think that she was afraid of his intellect, but he's known for years that this is the last of her worries. At Black Sun Systems, he figured that it was just typical female guardedness - Juanita was afraid he was trying to get her into the sack. But this, too, is pretty much out of the question.
At this late date in his romantic career, he is just canny enough to come up with a new theory: She's being careful because she likes him. She likes him in spite of herself. He is exactly the kind of tempting but utterly wrong romantic choice that a smart girl like Juanita must learn to avoid.
That's definitely it. There's something to be said for getting older.
By way of answering his question, she says, 'I have an associate I'd like you to meet. A gentleman and a scholar named Lagos. He's a fascinating guy to talk to.'
'Is he your boyfriend?'
She thinks this one over rather than lashing out instantaneously. 'My behavior at The Black Sun to the contrary, I don't fuck every male I work with. And even if I did, Lagos is out of the question.'
'Not your type?'
'Not by a long shot.'
'What is your type, anyway?'
'Old, rich, unimaginative blonds with steady careers.'
This one almost slips by him. Then he catches it. 'Well, I could dye my hair. And I'll get old eventually.'
She actually laughs. It's a tension-releasing kind of outburst. 'Believe me, Hiro, I'm the last person you want to be involved with at this point.'
'Is this part of your church thing?' he asks. Juanita has been using her excess money to start her own branch of the Catholic church - she considers herself a missionary to the intelligent atheists of the world.
'Don't be condescending,' she says. 'That's exactly the attitude I'm fighting. Religion is not for simpletons.'
'Sorry. This is unfair, you know - you can read every expression on my face, and I'm looking at you through a fucking blizzard.'
'It's definitely related to religion,' she says. 'But this is so complex, and your background in that area is so deficient, I don't know where to begin.'
'Hey, I went to church every week in high school. I sang in the choir.'
'I know. That's exactly the problem. Ninety-nine percent of everything that goes on in most Christian churches has nothing whatsoever to do with the actual religion. Intelligent people all notice this sooner or later, and they conclude that the entire one hundred percent is bullshit, which is why atheism is connected with being intelligent in people's minds.'
'So none of that stuff I learned in church has anything to do with what you're talking about?'
Juanita thinks for a while, eyeing him. Then she pulls a hypercard out of her pocket. 'Here. Take this.'
As Hiro pulls it from her hand, the hypercard changes from a jittery two-dimensional figment into a realistic, cream-colored, finely textured piece of stationery. Printed across its face in glossy black ink is a pair of words B A B E L
(I n f o c a l y p s e)
9
The world freezes and grows dim for a second. The Black Sun loses its smooth animation and begins to move in fuzzy stop-action. Clearly, his computer has just taken a major hit; all of its circuits are busy processing a huge bolus of data - the contents of the hypercard - and don't have time to redraw the image of The Black Sun in its full, breathtaking fidelity.
'Holy shit!' he says, when The Black Sun pops back into full animation again. 'What the hell is in this card? You must have half of the Library in here!'
'And a librarian to boot,' Juanita says, 'to help you sort through it. And lots of videotapes of L. Bob Rife - which accounts for most of the bytes.'
'Well, I'll try to have a look at it,' he says dubiously.
'Do. Unlike Da5id, you're just smart enough to benefit from this. And in the meantime, stay away from Raven. And stay away from Snow Crash. Okay?'
'Who's Raven?' he asks. But Juanita is already on her way out the door. The fancy avatars all turn around to watch her as she goes past them; the movie stars give her drop-dead looks, and the hackers purse their lips and stare reverently.
Hiro orbits back around to the Hacker Quadrant. Da5id's shuffling hypercards around on his table - business stats on The Black Sun, film and video clips, hunks of software, scrawled telephone numbers.
'There's a little blip in the operating system that hits me right in the gut every time you come in the door,' Da5id says. 'I always have this premonition that The Black Sun is headed for a crash.'
'Must be Bigboard,' Hiro says. 'It has one routine that patches some of the traps in low memory, for a moment.'
'Ah, that's it. Please, please throw that thing away,' Da5id says.
'What, Bigboard?'
'Yeah. It was totally rad at one point, but now it's like trying to work on a fusion reactor with a stone ax.'
'Thanks.'
'I'll give you all the headers you need if you want to update it to something a little less dangerous,' Da5id says. 'I wasn't impugning your abilities. I'm just saying you need to keep up with the times.'
'It's fucking hard,' Hiro says. 'There's no place for a freelance hacker anymore. You have to have a big corporation behind you.'
'I'm aware of that. And I'm aware that you can't stand to work for a big corporation. That's why I'm saying, I'll give you the stuff you need. You're always a part of The Black Sun to me, Hiro, even since we parted ways.'
It is classic Da5id. He's talking with his heart again, bypassing his head. If Da5id weren't a hacker, Hiro would despair of his ever having enough brains to do anything.
'Let's talk about something else,' Hiro says. 'Was I just hallucinating, or are you and Juanita on speaking terms again?'
Da5id gives him an indulgent smile. He has been very kind to Hiro ever since The Conversation, several years back. It was a conversation that started out as a friendly chat over beer and oysters between a couple of longtime comrades-in-arms. It was not until three-quarters of the way through The Conversation that it dawned on Hiro that he was, in fact, being fired, at this very moment. Since The Conversation, Da5id has been known to feed Hiro useful bits of intel and gossip from time to time.
'Fishing for something useful?' Da5id asks knowingly. Like many bitheads, Da5id is utterly guileless, but at times like this, he thinks he's the reincarnation of Machiavelli.
'I got news for you, man,' Hiro says. 'Most of the stuff you give me, I never put into the Library.'
'Why not? Hell, I give you all my best gossip. I thought you were making money off that stuff.'
'I just can't stand it,' Hiro says, 'taking parts of my private conversations and whoring them out. Why do you think I'm broke?'
There's another thing he doesn't mention, which is that he's always considered himself to be Da5id's equal, and he can't stand the idea of feeding off Da5id's little crumbs and tidbits, like a dog curled up under his
