Hiro turns around. It's a big porky white man with wavy1, slicked-back red hair and a beard. He's got a baseball cap perched on top of his head, tilted2 way back to expose the following words, tattooed3 in block letters across his forehead:
MOOD SWINGS
RACIALLY INSENSITIVE
Hiro is looking up at all of this over the curving horizon of the man's flannel-clad belly4.
"What is it?" Hiro says.
"Well, sir, I'm sorry to disturb you in the middle of your conversation with this gentleman here. But me and my friends were just wondering. Are you a lazy shiftless watermelon-eating black-ass5 nigger, or a sneaky little v.d.-infected gook?"
The man reaches up, pulls the brim of his baseball cap downward. Now Hiro can see the Confederate flag printed on the front, the embroidered6 words "New South Africa Franchulate.
Hiro pushes himself up over the table, spins around, and slides backward on his ass toward Chuck, trying to get the table between him and the New South African. Chuck has conveniently vanished, so Hiro ends up standing7 with his back comfortably to the wall, locking out over the bar.
At the same time, a dozen or so other men are standing up from their tables, forming up behind the first one in a grinning, sunburned phalanx of Confederate flags and sideburns.
"Let's see," Hiro says, "is that some kind of a trick question?"
There are a lot of Towne Halls in a lot of Snooze 'n' Cruise franchises9 where you have to check your weapons at the entrance. This is not one of them. Hiro isn't sure if that is bad or good. Without weapons, the New South Africans would just beat the crap out of him. With weapons, Hiro can fight back, but the stakes are higher. Hiro is bulletproof up to his neck, but that just means the New South Africans will all be going for a head shot. And they pride themselves on marksmanship. It is a fetish with them.
"Isn't there an NSA franchise8 down the road?" Hiro says.
"Yeah," says the point man, who has a long, spreading body and short stumpy legs. "It's heaven. It really is. Ain't no place on earth like a New South Africa."
"Well, then if you don't mind my asking," Hiro says, "if it's so damn nice, why don't y'all go back to your egg sac and hang out there?"
"There is one problem with New South Africa," the guy says. "Don't mean to sound unpatriotic, but it's true."
"And what is that problem?" Hiro says.
"There's no niggers, gooks, or kikes there to beat the shit out of."
"Ah. That is a problem," Hiro says. "Thank you."
"For what?"
"For announcing your intentions -- giving me the right to do this."
Then Hiro cuts his head off.
What else can he do? There are at least twelve of them. They have made a point of blocking the only exit. They have just announced their intentions. And presumably they are all carrying heat. Besides, this kind of thing is going to happen to him about every ten seconds when he's on the Raft.
The New South African has no idea what's coming, but he starts to react as Hiro is swinging the katana at his neck, so he is flying backward when the decapitation occurs. That is good, because about half his blood supply comes lofting10 out the top of his neck. Twin jets, one from each carotid. Hiro doesn't get a drop on himself.
In the Metaverse, the blade just passes right through, if you swing it quickly enough. Here in Reality, Hiro's expecting a powerful shock when his blade hits the New South African's neck, like when you hit a baseball the wrong way, but he hardly feels a thing. It just goes right through and almost swings around and buries itself in the wall. He must have gotten lucky and hit a gap between vertebrae. Hiro's training comes back to him, oddly. He forgot to squeeze it off, forgot to stop the blade himself, and that's bad form.
Even though he's expecting it, he's startled for a minute. This sort of thing doesn't happen with avatars. They just fall down. For an astonishingly long time, he just stands there and looks at the guy's body. Meanwhile, the airborne cloud of blood is seeking its level, dripping from the hung ceiling, spattering down from shelves behind the bar. A wino sitting there nursing a double shot of vodka shakes and shivers, staring into his glass at the galactic swirl12 of a trillion red cells dying in the ethanol.
Hiro swaps13 a few long glances with the New South Africans, like everyone in the bar is trying to come to a consensus14 as to what will happen next. Should they laugh? Take a picture? Run away? Call an ambulance?
He makes his way around toward the exit by running across people's tables. It is rude, but other patrons scoot back, some of them are quick enough to snatch their beers out of his way, and no one gives him any hassles. The sight of the bare katana inspires everyone to a practically Nipponese level of politeness. There are a couple more New South Africans blocking Hiro's way out, but not because they want to stop anyone. It's just where they happen to be standing when they go into shock. Hiro decides, reflexively, not to kill them.
And Hiro is off into the lurid15 main avenue of the Towne Hall, a tunnel of flickering16 and pulsating17 loglo through which black creatures sprint18 like benighted19 sperm20 up the old fallopians, sharp angular things clenched21 in their hands. They are The Enforcers. They make the average MetaCop look like Ranger22 Rick.
Gargoyle23 time. Hiro switches everything on: infrared24, millimeter-wave radar25, ambient-sound processing. The infrared doesn't do much in these circumstances, but the radar picks out all the weapons, highlights them in The Enforcers' hands, identifies them by make, model, and ammunition26 type. They're all fully27 automatic.
But The Enforcers and the New South Africans don't need radar to see Hiro's katana with blood and spinal28 fluid running down the blade.
The music of Vitaly Chernobyl and the Meltdowns is blasting through bad speakers all around him. It is their first single to hit the Billboard29 charts, entitled "My Heart Is a Smoking Hole in the Ground." The ambient sound processing cuts it to a more reasonable level, evens out the nasty distortion from the speakers so that he can hear his roommate singing more clearly. Which makes it all particularly surreal. It just goes to show that he's out of his element. Doesn't belong here. Lost in the biomass. If there was any justice, he could jump into those speakers and trace up the wires like a digital sylph, follow the grid30 back to L.A., where he belongs, there on top of the world, where everything comes from, buy Vitaly a drink, crawl into his futon.
He stumbles forward helplessly as something terrible happens to his back. It feels like being massaged31 with a hundred ballpeen hammers. At the same time, a yellow sputtering32 light overrides33 the loglo. A screaming red display flashes up on the goggles34 informing him that the millimeter-wave radar has noticed a stream of bullets headed in his direction and would you like to know where they came from, sir?
Hiro has just been shot in the back with a burst of machine-gun fire. All of the bullets have slapped into his vest and dropped to the floor, but in doing so they have cracked about half of the ribs35 on that side of his body and bruised36 a few internal organs. He turns around, which hurts.
The Enforcer has given up on bullets and whipped out another weapon. It says so right on Hiro's goggles: PACIFIC ENFORCEMENT HARDWARE, INC. MODEL SX-29 RESTRAINT PROJECTION37 DEVICE (LOOGIE GUN). Which is what he should have used in the first place.
You can't just carry a sword around as an empty threat. You shouldn't draw it, or keep it drawn38, unless you intend to kill someone. Hiro runs toward The Enforcer, raising the katana to strike. The Enforcer does the proper thing, namely, gets the hell out of his way. The silver ribbon of the katana shines up above the crowd. It attracts Enforcers and repels39 everyone else, so as Hiro runs down the center of the Towne Hall, he has no one in front of him and many shiny dark creatures behind him.
He turns off all of the techno-shit in his goggles. All it does is confuse him; he stands there reading statistics about his own death even as it's happening to him. Very post-modern. Time to get immersed in Reality, like all the people around him.
Not even Enforcers will fire their big guns in a crowd, unless it's point-blank range, or they're in a really bad mood. A few bogies shoot past Hiro, already so spread out as to be nothing more than an annoyance40, and splat into bystanders, wrapping them in sticky gossamer41 veils.
Somewhere between the 3-D video-game arcade42 and the display window full of terminally bored prostitutes, Hiro's eyes clear up and he sees a miracle: the exit of the inflatable dome43, where the doors exhale44 a breeze of synthetic45 beer breath and atomized body fluids into the cool night air.
Bad things and good things are happening in quick succession. The next bad thing happens when a steel grate falls down to block the doors.
What the hell, it's an inflatable building. Hiro turns on the radar just for a moment and the walls seem to drop away and become invisible; he's seeing through them now, into the forest of steel outside. It doesn't take long to locate the parking lot where he left his bike, supposedly under the protection of some armed attendants.
Hiro fakes toward the whorehouse, then cuts directly toward an exposed section of wall. The fabric46 of the building is tough, but his katana slices a six-foot rent through it with a single gliding47 motion, and then he's outside, spat11 out of the hole on a jet of fetid air.
After that -- after Hiro gets onto his motorcycle, and the New South Africans get into their all-terrain pickups, and The Enforcers get into their slick black Enforcer mobiles, and they all go screaming out onto the highway -- after that it's just a chase scene.
收听单词发音 |
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wavy
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| adj.有波浪的，多浪的，波浪状的，波动的，不稳定的 | |
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tilted
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| v. 倾斜的 | |
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tattooed
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| v.刺青，文身( tattoo的过去式和过去分词 )；连续有节奏地敲击；作连续有节奏的敲击 | |
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belly
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| n.肚子，腹部；(像肚子一样)鼓起的部分，膛 | |
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ass
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| n.驴；傻瓜，蠢笨的人 | |
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embroidered
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| adj．绣花的 | |
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standing
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| n.持续，地位；adj.永久的，不动的，直立的，不流动的 | |
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franchise
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| n.特许，特权，专营权，特许权 | |
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franchises
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| n.（尤指选举议员的）选举权( franchise的名词复数 )；参政权；获特许权的商业机构（或服务）；（公司授予的）特许经销权v.给…以特许权，出售特许权( franchise的第三人称单数 ) | |
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lofting
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| 放样，理论模线的绘制 | |
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spat
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| n.口角，掌击；v.发出呼噜呼噜声 | |
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swirl
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| v.(使)打漩，(使)涡卷；n.漩涡，螺旋形 | |
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swaps
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| 交换( swap的名词复数 )； 交换物，被掉换者 | |
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consensus
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| n.(意见等的)一致，一致同意，共识 | |
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lurid
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| adj.可怕的；血红的；苍白的 | |
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flickering
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| adj.闪烁的，摇曳的，一闪一闪的 | |
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pulsating
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| adj.搏动的，脉冲的v.有节奏地舒张及收缩( pulsate的现在分词 )；跳动；脉动；受（激情）震动 | |
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sprint
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| n.短距离赛跑；vi. 奋力而跑，冲刺；vt.全速跑过 | |
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benighted
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| adj.蒙昧的 | |
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sperm
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| n.精子，精液 | |
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clenched
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| v.紧握，抓紧，咬紧( clench的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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ranger
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| n.国家公园管理员，护林员；骑兵巡逻队员 | |
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gargoyle
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| n.笕嘴 | |
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infrared
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| adj./n.红外线(的) | |
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radar
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| n.雷达，无线电探测器 | |
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ammunition
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| n.军火，弹药 | |
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fully
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| adv.完全地，全部地，彻底地；充分地 | |
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spinal
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| adj.针的，尖刺的，尖刺状突起的；adj.脊骨的，脊髓的 | |
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billboard
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| n.布告板，揭示栏，广告牌 | |
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grid
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| n.高压输电线路网；地图坐标方格；格栅 | |
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massaged
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| 按摩，推拿( massage的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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sputtering
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| n.反应溅射法；飞溅；阴极真空喷镀；喷射v.唾沫飞溅( sputter的现在分词 )；发劈啪声；喷出；飞溅出 | |
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overrides
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| 越控( override的第三人称单数 )； （以权力）否决； 优先于； 比…更重要 | |
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goggles
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| n.护目镜 | |
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ribs
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| n.肋骨( rib的名词复数 )；（船或屋顶等的）肋拱；肋骨状的东西；（织物的）凸条花纹 | |
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bruised
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| [医]青肿的，瘀紫的 | |
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projection
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| n.发射，计划，突出部分 | |
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drawn
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| v.拖，拉，拔出；adj.憔悴的，紧张的 | |
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repels
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| v.击退( repel的第三人称单数 )；使厌恶；排斥；推开 | |
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annoyance
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| n.恼怒，生气，烦恼 | |
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gossamer
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| n.薄纱，游丝 | |
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arcade
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| n.拱廊；(一侧或两侧有商店的)通道 | |
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dome
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| n.圆屋顶，拱顶 | |
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exhale
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| v.呼气，散出，吐出，蒸发 | |
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synthetic
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| adj.合成的，人工的；综合的；n.人工制品 | |
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fabric
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| n.织物，织品，布；构造，结构，组织 | |
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47
gliding
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| v. 滑翔 adj. 滑动的 | |
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