“You’re kidding!”
“So we’re sitting there on his fucking patio over the beach and he’s going, like, whoom! whoom! imitating this goddamn bazooka. He’s thrilled by the idea. I mean, this is a man who wants to put a bazooka in a movie. So I think I talked him out of it.”
“Nice scene. But you’re right. A bazooka doesn’t do the same thing as a dumpster.”
Hiro pauses long enough to get this down, then keeps walking. He mumbles “Bigboard” again, recalls the magic map, pinpoints his own location, and then reads off the name of this nearby screenwriter. Later on, he can do a search of industry publications to find out what script this guy is working on, hence the name of this mystery director with a fetish for bazookas. Since this whole conversation has come to him via his computer, he’s just taken an audio tape of the whole thing. Later, he can process it to disguise the voices, then upload it to the Library, cross-referenced under the director’s name. A hundred struggling screenwriters will call this conversation up, listen to it over and over until they’ve got it memorized, paying Hiro for the privilege, and within a few weeks, bazooka scripts will flood the director’s office. Whoom!
The Rock Star Quadrant is almost too bright to look at. Rock star avatars have the hairdos that rock stars can only wear in their dreams. Hiro scans it briefly to see if any of his friends are in there, but it’s mostly parasites and has-beens. Most of the people Hiro knows are willbes or wannabes.
The Movie Star Quadrant is easier to look at. Actors love to come here because in The Black Sun, they always look as good as they do in the movies. And unlike a bar or club in Reality, they can get into this place without physically having to leave their mansion, hotel suite, ski lodge, private airline cabin, or whatever. They can strut their stuff and visit with their friends without any exposure to kidnappers, paparazzi, script-flingers, assassins, exspouses, autograph brokers, process servers, psycho fans, marriage proposals, or gossip columnists.
He gets up off the bar stool and resumes his slow orbit, scanning the Nipponese Quadrant. It’s a lot of guys in suits, as usual. Some of them are talking to gringos from the Industry. And a large part of the quadrant, in the back corner, has been screened off by a temporary partition.
Bigboard again. Hiro figures out which tables are behind the partition, starts reading off the names. The only one he recognizes immediately is an American: L. Bob Rife, the cable-television monopolist. A very big name to the Industry, though he’s rarely seen. He seems to be meeting with a whole raft of big Nipponese honchos. Hiro has his computer memorize their names so that, later, he can check them against the CIC database and find out who they are. It has the look of a big and important meeting.
“Secret Agent Hiro! How are you doing?”
Hiro turns around. Juanita is right behind him, standing out in her black-and-white avatar, looking good anyway. “How are you?” she asks.
“Fine. How are you?”
“Great. I hope you don’t mind talking to me in this ugly fax-of-life avatar.”
“Juanita, I would rather look at a fax of you than most other women in the flesh.”
“Thanks, you sly bastard. It’s been a long time since we’ve talked!” she observes, as though there’s something remarkable about this.
Something’s going on.
“I hope you’re not going to mess around with Snow Crash,” she says. “Da5id won’t listen to me.”
“What am I, a model of self-restraint? I’m exactly the kind of guy who would mess around with it.”
“I know you better than that. You’re impulsive. But you’re very clever. You have those sword-fighting reflexes.”
“What does that have to do with drug abuse?”
“It means you can see bad things coming and deflect them. It’s an instinct, not a learned thing. As soon as you turned around and saw me, that look came over your face, like, what’s going on? What the hell is Juanita up to?”
“I didn’t think you talked to people in the Metaverse.”
“I do if I want to get through to someone in a hurry,” she says. “And I’ll always talk to you.”
“Why me?”
“You know. Because of us. Remember? Because of our relationship—when I was writing this thing—you and 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.”