"Do you believe in Jesus?"
"Yes. But not in the physical, bodily resurrection of Jesus."
"How can you be a Christian without believing in that?"
"I would say," Juanita says, "how can you be a Christian with it?
Anyone who takes the trouble to study the gospels can see that the bodily
resurrection is a myth that was tacked onto the real story several years
after the real histories were written. It's so National Enquirer-esque,
don't you think?"
Beyond that, Juanita doesn't have much to say. She doesn't want to get
into it now, she says. She doesn't want to prejudice Hiro's thinking "at
this point."
"Does that imply that there's going to be some other point? Is this a
continuing relationship?" Hiro says.
"Do you want to find the people who infected Da5id?"
"Yes. Hell, Juanita, even if it weren't for the fact that he is my
friend, I'd want to find them before they infect me."
"Look at the Babel stack, Hiro, and then visit me if I get back from
Astoria."
"If you get back? What are you doing there?"
"Research."
She's been putting on a businesslike front through this whole talk,
spitting out information, telling Hiro the way it is. But she's tired and
anxious, and Hiro gets the idea that she's deeply afraid.
"Good luck," he says. He was all ready to do some flirting with her
during this meeting, picking up where they left off last night. But
something has changed in Juanita's mind between then and now. Flirting is
the last thing on her mind.
Juanita's going to do something dangerous in Oregon. She doesn't want
Hiro to know about it so that he won't worry.
"There's some good stuff in the Babel stack about someone named
Inanna," she says.
"Who's Inanna?"
"A Sumerian goddess. I'm sort of in love with her. Anyway, you can't
understand what I'm about to do until you understand Inanna."
"Well, good luck," Hiro says. "Say hi to Inanna for me."
"Thanks."
"When you get back, I want to spend some time with you."
"The feeling is mutual," she says. "But we have to get out of this
first."
"Oh. I didn't realize I was in something."
"Don't be a sap. We're all in it."
Hiro leaves, exiting into The Black Sun.
There is one guy wandering around the Hacker Quadrant who really stands
out. His avatar doesn't look so hot. And he's having trouble controlling it.
He looks like a guy who's just goggled into the Metaverse for the first time
and doesn't know how to move around. He keeps bumping into tables, and when
he wants to turn around, he spins around several times, not knowing how to
stop himself.
Hiro walks toward him, because his face seems a little familiar. When
the guy finally stops moving long enough for Hiro to resolve him clearly, he
recognizes the avatar. It's a Clint. Most often seen in the company of a
Brandy.
The Clint recognizes Hiro, and his surprised face comes on for a
second, is then replaced by his usual stern, stiff-lipped, craggy
appearance. He holds up his hands together in front of him, and Hiro sees
that he is holding a scroll, just like Brandy's.
Hiro reaches for his katana, but the scroll is already up in his face,
spreading open to reveal the blue glare of the bitmap inside. He sidesteps,
gets over to one side of the Clint, raising the katana overhead, snaps the
katana straight down and cuts the Clint's arms off.
As the scroll falls, it spreads open even wider. Hiro doesn't dare look
at it now. The Clint has turned around and is awkwardly trying to escape
from The Black Sun, bouncing from table to table like a pinball.
If Hiro could kill the guy - cut his head off - then his avatar would
stay in The Black Sun, be carried away by the Graveyard Daemons. Hiro could
do some hacking and maybe figure out who he is, where he's coming in from.
But a few dozen hackers are lounging around the bar, watching all of
this, and if they come over and look at the scroll, they'll all end up like
Da5id.
Hiro squats down, looking away from the scroll, and pulls up one of the
hidden trapdoors that lead down into the tunnel system. He's the one who
coded those tunnels into The Black Sun to begin with; he's the only person
in the whole bar who can use them. He sweeps the scroll into the tunnel with
one hand, then closes the door.
Hiro can see the Clint, way over near the exit, trying to get his
avatar aimed out through the door. Hiro runs after him. If the guy reaches
the Street, he's gone - he'll turn into a translucent ghost. With a
fifty-foot head start in a crowd of a million other translucent ghosts,
there's just no way. As usual, there's a crowd of wannabes gathered on the
Street out front. Hiro can see the usual assortment, including a few
black-and-white people.
One of those black-and-whites is Y.T. She's loitering out there waiting
for Hiro to come out.
"Y.T.!" he shouts. "Chase that guy with no arms!"
Hiro gets out the door just a few seconds after the Clint does. Both
the Clint and Y.T. are already gone.
He turns back into The Black Sun, pulls up a trapdoor, and drops down
into the tunnel system, the realm of the Graveyard Daemons. One of them has
already picked up the scroll and is trudging in toward the center to throw
it on the fire.
"Hey, bud," Hiro says, "take a right turn at the next tunnel and leave
that thing in my office, okay? But do me a favor and roll it up first."
He follows the Graveyard Daemon down the tunnel, under the Street,
until they're under the neighborhood where Hiro and the other hackers have
their houses. Hiro has the Graveyard Daemon deposit the rolled-up scroll in
his workshop, down in the basement - the room where Hiro does his hacking.
Then Hiro continues upstairs to his office.
27
His voice phone is ringing. Hiro picks it up.
"Pod," Y.T. says, "I was beginning to think you'd never come out of
there."
"Where are you?" Hiro says.
"In Reality or the Metaverse?"
"Both."
"In the Metaverse, I'm on a plusbound monorail train. Just passed by
Port 35."
"Already? It must be an express."
"Good thinking. That Clint you cut the arms off of is two cars ahead of
me. I don't think he knows I'm following him."
"Where are you in Reality?"
"Public terminal across the street from a Reverend Wayne's," she says.
"Oh, yeah? How interesting."
"Just made a delivery there."
"What kind of delivery?"
"An aluminum suitcase."
He gets the whole story out of her, or what he thinks is the whole
story - there's no real way to tell.
"You're sure that the babbling that the people did in the park was the
same as the babbling that the woman did at the Reverend Wayne's?"
"Sure," she says. "I know a bunch of people who go there. Or their
parents go there and drag them along, you know."
"To the Reverend Wayne's Pearly Gates?"
"Yeah. And they all do that speaking in tongues. So I've heard it
before."
"I'll talk to you later, pod," Hiro says. "I've got some serious
research to do."
"Later."
The Babel/Infocalypse card is resting in the middle of his desk. Hiro
picks it up. The Librarian comes in.
Hiro is about to ask the Librarian whether he knows that Lagos is dead.
But it's a pointless question. The Librarian knows it, but he doesn't. If he
wanted to check the Library, he could find out in a few moments. But he
wouldn't really retain the information. He doesn't have an independent
memory. The Library is his memory, and he only uses small parts of it at
once.
"What can you tell me about speaking in tongues?" Hiro says.
"The technical term is 'glossolalia,'" the Librarian says.
"Technical term? Why bother to have a technical term for a religious
ritual?"
The Librarian raises his eyebrows. "Oh, there's a great deal of
technical literature on the subject. It is a neurological phenomenon that is
merely exploited in religious rituals."
"It's a Christian thing, right?"
"Pentecostal Christians think so, but they are deluding themselves.
Pagan Greeks did it - Plato called it theomania. The Oriental cults of the
Roman Empire did it. Hudson Bay Eskimos, Chukchi shamans, Lapps, Yakuts,
Semang pygmies, the North Borneo cults, the Trhi-speaking priests of Ghana.
The Zulu Amandiki cult and the Chinese religious sect of Shang-ti-hui.
Spirit mediums of Tonga and the Brazilian Umbanda cult. The Tungus tribesmen
of Siberia say that when the shaman goes into his trance and raves
incoherent syllables, he learns the entire language of Nature."
'The language of Nature."
"Yes, sir. The Sukuma people of Africa say that the language is
kinaturu, the tongue of the ancestors of all magicians, who are thought to
have descended from one particular tribe."
"What causes it?"
"If mystical explanations are ruled out, then it seems that glossolalia
comes from structures buried deep within the brain, common to all people."
"What does it look like? How do these people act?"
"C. W. Shumway observed the Los Angeles revival of 1906 and noted six
basic symptoms: complete loss of rational control; dominance of emotion that
leads to hysteria; absence of thought or will; automatic functioning of the
speech organs; amnesia; and occasional sporadic physical manifestations such
as jerking or twitching. Eusebius observed similar phenomena around the year
300, saying that the false prophet begins by a deliberate suppression of
conscious thought, and ends in a delirium over which he has no control."
"What's the Christian justification for this? Is there anything in the
Bible that backs this up?"
"Pentecost."
'You mentioned that word earlier - what is it?"
"From the Greek pentekostos, meaning fiftieth. It refers to the
fiftieth day after the Crucifixion."
"Juanita just told me that Christianity was hijacked by viral
influences when it was only fifty days old. She must have been talking about
this. What is it?"
"'And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in
other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance. Now there were dwelling in
Jerusalem Jews, devout men from every nation under heaven. And at this sound
the multitude came together, and they were bewildered, because each one
heard them speaking in his own language. And they were amazed and wondered,
saying, "Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? And how is it that we
hear, each of us in his own native language? Parthians and Medes and
Elamites and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and
Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to
Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and
Arabians, we hear them telling in our own tongues the mighty works of God."
And all were amazed and perplexed, saying to one another, "What does this
mean?"' Acts 2:4-12"
"Damned if I know," Hiro says. "Sounds like Babel in reverse."
"Yes, sir. Many Pentecostal Christians believe that the gift of tongues
was given to them so that they could spread their religion to other peoples
without having to actually learn their language. The word for that is
'xenoglossy.'"
"That's what Rife was claiming in that piece of videotape, on top of
the Enterprise. He said he could understand what those Bangladeshis were
saying."
"Yes, sir."
"Does that really work?"
"In the sixteenth century, Saint Louis Bertrand allegedly used the gift
of tongues to convert somewhere between thirty thousand and three hundred
thousand South American Indians to Christianity," the Librarian says.
"Wow. Spread through that population even faster than smallpox."
"What did the Jews think of this Pentecost thing?" Hiro says. "They
were still running the country, right?"
"The Romans were running the country," the Librarian says, "but there
were a number of Jewish religious authorities. At this time, there were
three groups of Jews: the Pharisees, the Sadducees, and the Essenes."
"I remember the Pharisees from Jesus Christ, Superstar. They were the
ones with the deep voices who were always hassling Christ."
"They were hassling him," the Librarian says, "because they were
religiously very strict. They adhered to a strong legalistic version of the
religion; to them, the Law was everything. Clearly, Jesus was a threat to
them because he was proposing, in effect, to do away with the Law."
"He wanted a contract renegotiation with God."
"This sounds like an analogy, which I am not very good at - but even if
it is taken literally, it is true."
"Who were the other two groups?"
"The Sadducees were materialists."
"Meaning what? They drove BMWs?"
"No. Materialists in the philosophical sense. All philosophies are
either monist or dualist. Monists believe that the material world is the
only world - hence, materialists. Dualists believe in a binary universe,
that there is a spiritual world in addition to the material world."
"Well, as a computer geek, I have to believe in the binary universe."
The Librarian raises his eyebrows. "How does that follow?"
"Sorry. It's a joke. A bad pun. See, computers use binary code to
represent information. So I was joking that I have to believe in the binary
universe, that I have to be a dualist."
"How droll," the Librarian says, not sounding very amused. "Your joke
may not be without genuine merit, however."
"How's that? I was just kidding, really."
"Computers rely on the one and the zero to represent all things. This
distinction between something and nothing - this pivotal separation between
being and non-being - is quite fundamental and underlies many Creation
myths."
Hiro feels his face getting slightly warm, feels himself getting
annoyed. He suspects that the Librarian may be pulling his leg, playing him
for a fool. But he knows that the Librarian, however convincingly rendered
he may be, is just a piece of software and cannot actually do such things.
"Even the word 'science' comes from an Indo-European root meaning 'to
cut' or 'to separate.' The same root led to the word 'shit,' which of course
means to separate living flesh from nonliving waste. The same root gave us
'scythe' and 'scissors' and 'schism,' which have obvious connections to the
concept of separation."
"How about 'sword'?"
"From a root with several meanings. One of those meanings is 'to cut or
pierce.' One of them is 'post' or 'rod.' And the other is, simply, 'to
speak.'"
"Let's stay on track," Hiro says.
"Fine. I can return to this potential conversation fork at a later
time, if you desire."
"I don't want to get all forked up at this point. Tell me about the
third group - the Essenes."
"They lived communally and believed that physical and spiritual
cleanliness were intimately connected. They were constantly bathing
themselves, lying naked under the sun, purging themselves with enemas, and
going to extreme lengths to make sure that their food was pure and
uncontaminated. They even had their own version of the Gospels in which
Jesus healed possessed people, not with miracles, but by driving parasites,
such as tapeworm, out of their body. These parasites are considered to be
synonymous with demons."
"They sound kind of like hippies."
"The connection has been made before, but it is faulty in many ways.
The Essenes were strictly religious and would never have taken drugs."
"So to them there was no difference between infection with a parasite,
like tapeworm, and demonic possession."
"Correct."
"Interesting. I wonder what they would have thought about computer
viruses?"
"Speculation is not in my ambit."
"Speaking of which - Lagos was babbling to me about viruses and
infection and something called a nam-shub. What does that mean?"
"Nam-shub is a word from Sumerian."
"Sumerian?"
"Yes, sir. Used in Mesopotamia until roughly 2000 B.C. The oldest of
all written languages."
"Oh. So all the other languages are descended from it?"
For a moment, the Librarian's eyes glance upward, as if he's thinking
about something. This is a visual cue to inform Hiro that he's making a
momentary raid on the Library.
"Actually, no," the Librarian says. "No languages whatsoever are
descended from Sumerian. It is an agglutinative tongue, meaning that it is a
collection of morphemes or syllables that are grouped into words - very
unusual."
"You are saying," Hiro says, remembering Da5id in the hospital, "that
if I could hear someone speaking Sumerian, it would sound like a long stream
of short syllables strung together."
"Yes, sir."
"Would it sound anything like glossolalia?"
"Judgment call. Ask someone real," the Librarian says.
"Does it sound like any modern tongue?"
"There is no provable genetic relationship between Sumerian and any
tongue that came afterward."
"That's odd. My Mesopotamian history is rusty," Hiro says. "What
happened to the Sumerians? Genocide?"
"No, sir. They were conquered, but there's no evidence of genocide per
se."
"Everyone gets conquered sooner or later," Hiro says. "But their
languages don't die out. Why did Sumerian disappear?"
"Since I am just a piece of code, I would be on very thin ice to
speculate," the Librarian says.
"Okay. Does anyone understand Sumerian?"
"Yes, at any given time, it appears that there are roughly ten people
in the world who can read it."
"Where do they work?"
"One in Israel. One at the British Museum. One in Iraq. One at the
University of Chicago. One at the University of Pennsylvania. And five at
Rife Bible College in Houston, Texas."
"Nice distribution. And have any of these people figured out what the
word 'nam-shub' means in Sumerian?"
"Yes. A nam-shub is a speech with magical force. The closest English
equivalent would be 'incantation,' but this has a number of incorrect
connotations."
"Did the Sumerians believe in magic?"
The Librarian shakes his head minutely. "This is the kind of seemingly
precise question that is in fact very profound, and that pieces of software,
such as myself, are notoriously clumsy at. Allow me to quote from Kramer,
Samuel Noah, and Maier, John R. Myths of Enki, the Crafty God. New York,
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989: 'Religion, magic, and medicine are so
completely intertwined in Mesopotamia that separating them is frustrating
and perhaps futile work.... [Sumerian incantations] demonstrate an intimate
connection between the religious, the magical, and the esthetic so complete
that any attempt to pull one away from the other will distort the whole.'
There is more material in here that might help explain the subject."
"In where?"
"In the next room," the Librarian says, gesturing at the wall. He walks
over and slides the rice-paper partition out of the way.
A speech with magical force. Nowadays, people don't believe in these
kinds of things. Except in the Metaverse, that is, where magic is possible.
The Metaverse is a fictional structure made out of code. And code is just a
form of speech - the form that computers understand. The Metaverse in its
entirety could be considered a single vast nam-shub, enacting itself on L.
Bob Rife's fiber-optic network.
The voice phone rings. "Just a second," Hiro says.
"Take your time," the Librarian says, not adding the obvious reminder
that he can wait for a million years if need be.
"Me again," Y.T. says. "I'm still on the train. Stumps got off at
Express Port 127."
"Hmm. That's the antipode of Downtown. I mean, it's as far away from
Downtown as you can get."
"It is?"
"Yeah. One-two-seven is two to the seventh power minus one - "
"Spare me, I take your word for it. It's definitely out in the middle
of fucking nowhere," she says.
"You didn't get off and follow him?"
"Are you kidding? All the way out there? It's ten thousand miles from
the nearest building, Hiro."
She has a point. The Metaverse was built with plenty of room to expand.
Almost all of the development is within two or three Express Ports - five
hundred kilometers or so - of Downtown. Port 127 is twenty thousand miles
away.
"What is there?"
"A black cube exactly twenty miles on a side."
"Totally black?"
"Yeah."
"How can you measure a black cube that big?"
"I'm riding along looking at the stars, okay? Suddenly, I can't see
them anymore on the right side of the train. I start counting local ports. I
count sixteen of them. We get to Express Port 127, and Stumpy climbs off and
goes toward the black thing. I count sixteen more local ports and then the
stars come out. Then I take thirty-two kilometers and multiply it by point
six and I get twenty miles - you asshole."
"That's good," Hiro says. "That's good intel."
"Who do you think owns a black cube twenty miles across?"
"Just going on pure, irrational bias, I'm guessing L. Bob Rife.
Supposedly, he has a big hunk of real estate out in the middle of nowhere
where he keeps all the guts of the Metaverse. Some of us used to smash into
it occasionally when we were out racing motorcycles."
"Well, gotta go, pod."
28
Hiro hangs up and walks into the new room. The Librarian follows.
It is about fifty feet on a side. The center of the space is occupied
by three large artifacts, or rather three-dimensional renderings of
artifacts. In the center is a thick slab of baked clay, hanging in space,
about the size of a coffee table, and about a foot thick. Hiro suspects that
it is a magnified rendering of a smaller object. The broad surfaces of the
slab are entirely covered with angular writing that Hiro recognizes as
cuneiform. Around the edges are rounded, parallel depressions that appear to
have been made by fingers as they shaped the slab.
To the right of the slab is a wooden pole with branches on top, sort of
a stylized tree. To the left of the slab is an eight-foot-high obelisk, also
covered with cuneiform, with a bas-relief figure chiseled into the top.
The room is filled. with a three-dimensional constellation of
hypercards, hanging weightlessly in the air. It looks like a high-speed
photograph of a blizzard in progress. In some places, the hypercards are
placed in precise geometric patterns, like atoms in a crystal. In other
places, whole stacks of them are clumped together. Drifts of them have
accumulated in the corners, as though Lagos tossed them away when he was
finished. Hiro finds that his avatar can walk right through the hypercards
without disturbing the arrangement. It is, in fact, the three-dimensional
counterpart of a messy desktop, all the trash still remaining wherever Lagos
left it. The cloud of hypercards extends to every corner of the
50-by-50-foot space, and from floor level all the way up to about eight
feet, which is about as high as Lagos's avatar could reach.
"How many hypercards in here?"
"Ten thousand, four hundred and sixty-three," the Librarian says.
"I don't really have time to go through them," Hiro says. "Can you give
me some idea of what Lagos was working on here?"
"Well, I can read back the names of all the cards if you'd like. Lagos
grouped them into four broad categories: Biblical studies, Sumerian studies,
neurolinguistic studies, and intel gathered on L. Bob Rife."
"Without going into that kind of detail - what did Lagos have on his
mind? What was he getting at?"
"What do I look like, a psychologist?" the Librarian says. "I can't
answer those kinds of questions."
"Let me try it again. How does this stuff connect, if at all, to the
subject of viruses?"
"The connections are elaborate. Summarizing them would require both
creativity and discretion. As a mechanical entity, I have neither."
"How old is this stuff?" Hiro says, gesturing to the three artifacts.
"The clay envelope is Sumerian. It is from the third millennium B.C. It
was dug up from the city of Eridu in southern Iraq. The black stele or
obelisk is the Code of Hammurabi, which dates from about 1750 B.C. The
treelike structure is a Yahwistic cult totem from Palestine. It's called an
asherah. It's from about 900 B.C."
"Did you call that slab an envelope?"
"Yes. It has a smaller clay slab wrapped up inside of it. This was how
the Sumerians made tamper-proof documents."
"All these things are in a museum somewhere, I take it?"
"The asherah and the Code of Hammurabi are in museums. The clay
envelope is in the personal collection of L. Bob Rife."
"L. Bob Rife is obviously interested in this stuff."
"Rife Bible College, which he founded, has the richest archaeology
department in the world. They have been conducting a dig in Eridu, which was
the cult center of a Sumerian god named Enki."
"How are these things related to each other?"
The Librarian raises his eyebrows. "I'm sorry?"
"Well, let's try process of elimination. Do you know why Lagos found
Sumerian writings interesting as opposed to, say, Greek or Egyptian?"
"Egypt was a civilization of stone. They made their art and
architecture of stone, so it lasts forever. But you can't write on stone. So
they invented papyrus and wrote on that. But papyrus is perishable. So even
though their art and architecture have survived, their written records -
their data - have largely disappeared."
"What about all those hieroglyphic inscriptions?"
"Bumper stickers, Lagos called them. Corrupt political speech. They had
an unfortunate tendency to write inscriptions praising their own military
victories before the battles had actually taken place."
"And Sumer is different?"
"Sumer was a civilization of clay. They made their buildings of it and
wrote on it, too. Their statues were of gypsum, which dissolves in water. So
the buildings and statues have since fallen apart under the elements. But
the clay tablets were either baked or else buried in jars. So all the data
of the Sumerians have survived. Egypt left a legacy of art and architecture;
Sumer's legacy is its megabytes."
"How many megabytes?"
"As many as archaeologists bother to dig up. The Sumerians wrote on
everything. When they built a building, they would write in cuneiform on
every brick. When the buildings fell down, these bricks would remain,
scattered across the desert. In the Koran, the angels who are sent to
destroy Sodom and Gomorrah say, 'We are sent forth to a wicked nation, so
that we may bring down on them a shower of clay-stones marked by your Lord
for the destruction of the sinful.' Lagos found this interesting - this
promiscuous dispersal of information, written on a medium that lasts
forever. He spoke of pollen blowing in the wind - I gather that this was
some kind of analogy."
"It was. Tell me - has the inscription on this clay envelope been
translated?"
"Yes. It is a warning. It says, 'This envelope contains the nam-shub of
Enki.'"
"I know what a nam-shub is. What is the nam-shub of Enki?"
The Librarian stares off into the distance and clears his throat
dramatically.
"Once upon a time, there was no snake, there was no scorpion,
There was no hyena, there was no lion,
There was no wild dog, no wolf,
There was no fear, no terror,
Man had no rival.
In those days, the land Shubur-Hamazi,
Harmony-tongued Sumer, the great land of the me of princeship,
Uri, the land having all that is appropriate,
The land Martu, resting in security,
The whole universe, the people well cared for,
To Enlil in one tongue gave speech.
Then the lord defiant, the prince defiant, the king defiant,
Enki, the lord of abundance, whose commands are trustworthy,
The lord of wisdom, who scans the land,
The leader of the gods,
The lord of Eridu, endowed with wisdom,
Changed the speech in their mouths, put contention into it,
Into the speech of man that had been one.
That is Kramer's translation."
"That's a story," Hiro says. "I thought a nam-shub was an incantation."
"The nam-shub of Enki is both a story and an incantation," the
Librarian says. "A self-fulfilling fiction. Lagos believed that in its
original form, which this translation only hints at, it actually did what it
describes."
"You mean, changed the speech in men's mouths."
"Yes," the Librarian says.
"This is a Babel story, isn't it?" Hiro says. "Everyone was speaking
the same language, and then Enki changed their speech so that they could no
longer understand each other. This must be the basis for the Tower of Babel
stuff in the Bible."
"This room contains a number of cards tracing that connection," the
Librarian says.
"You mentioned before that at one point, everyone spoke Sumerian. Then,
nobody did. It just vanished, like the dinosaurs. And there's no genocide to
explain how that happened. Which is consistent with the Tower of Babel
story, and the nam-shub of Enki. Did Lagos think that Babel really
happened?"
"He was sure of it. He was quite concerned about the vast number of
human languages. He felt there were simply too many of them."
"How many?"
"Tens of thousands. In many parts of the world, you will find people of
the same ethnic group, living a few miles apart in similar valleys under
similar conditions, speaking languages that have absolutely nothing in
common with each other. This sort of thing is not an oddity - it is
ubiquitous. Many linguists have tried to understand Babel, the question of
why human language tends to fragment, rather than converging on a common
tongue."
"Has anyone come up with an answer yet?"
"The question is difficult and profound," the Librarian says. "Lagos
had a theory."
"Yes?"
"He believed that Babel was an actual historical event. That it
happened in a particular time and place, coinciding with the disappearance
of the Sumerian language. That prior to Babel/Infocalypse, languages tended
to converge. And that afterward, languages have always had an innate
tendency to diverge and become mutually incomprehensible - that this
tendency is, as he put it, coiled like a serpent around the human
brainstem."
"The only thing that could explain that is - "
Hiro stops, not wanting to say it.
"Yes?" the Librarian says.
"If there was some phenomenon that moved through the population,
altering their minds in such a way that they couldn't process the Sumerian
language anymore. Kind of in the same way that a virus moves from one
computer to another, damaging each computer in the same way. Coiling around
the brainstem."
"Lagos devoted much time and effort to this idea," the Librarian says.
"He felt that the nam-shub of Enki was a neurolinguistic virus."
"And that this Enki character was a real personage?"
"Possibly."
"And that Enki invented this virus and spread it throughout Sumer,
using tablets like this one?"
"Yes. A tablet has been discovered containing a letter to Enki, in
which the writer complains about it."
"A letter to a god?"
"Yes. It is from Sin-samuh, the Scribe. He begins by praising Enki and
emphasizing his devotion to him. Then he complains:
'Like a young ... (line broken)
I am paralyzed at the wrist.
Like a wagon on the road when its yoke has split,
I stand immobile on the road.
I lay on a bed called "O! and O No!"
I let out a wail.
My graceful figure is stretched neck to ground,
I am paralyzed of foot.
My ... has been carried off into the earth.
My frame has changed.
At night I cannot sleep,
my strength has been struck down,
my life is ebbing away.
The bright day is made a dark day for me.
I have slipped into my own grave.
I, a writer who knows many things, am made a fool.
My hand has stopped writing
There is no talk in my mouth.'
"After more description of his woes, the scribe ends with,
'My god, it is you I fear.
I have written you a letter.
Take pity on me.
The heart of my god: have it given back to me.'"
29
Y.T. is maxing at a Mom's Truck Stop on 405, waiting for her ride. Not
that she would ever be caught dead at a Mom's Truck Stop. If, like, a semi
ran her over with all eighteen of its wheels in front of a Mom's Truck Stop,
she would drag herself down the shoulder of the highway using her eyelid
muscles until she reached a Snooze 'n' Cruise full of horny derelicts rather
than go into a Mom's Truck Stop. But sometimes when you're a professional,
they give you a job that you don't like, and you just have to be very cool
and put up with it.
For purposes of this evening's job, the man with the glass eye has
already supplied her with a "driver and security person," as he put it. A
totally unknown quantity. Y.T. isn't sure she likes putting up with some
mystery guy. She has this image in her mind that he's going to be like the
wrestling coach at the high school. That would be so grotendous. Anyway,
this is where she's supposed to meet him.
Y.T. orders a coffee and a slice of cherry pie A la mode. She carries
them over to the public Street terminal back in the corner. It is sort of a
wraparound stainless steel booth stuck between a phone booth, which has a
homesick truck driver poured into it, and a pinball machine, which features
a chick with big boobs that light up when you shoot the ball up the magic
Fallopians.
She's not that good at the Metaverse, but she knows her way around, and
she's got an address. And finding an address in the Metaverse shouldn't be
any more difficult than doing it in Reality, at least if you're not a
totally retarded ped.
As soon as she steps out into the Street, people start giving her these
looks. The same kind of looks that people give her when she walks through
the worsted-wool desolation of the Westlake Corporate Park in her dynamic
blue-and-orange Kourier gear. She knows that the people in the Street are
giving her dirty looks because she's just coming in from a shitty public
terminal. She's a trashy black-and-white person.
The built-up part of the Street, around Port Zero, forms a luminescent
thunderhead off to her right. She puts her back to it and climbs onto the
monorail. She'd like to go into town, but that's an expensive part of the
Street to visit, and she'd be dumping money into the coin slot about every
one-tenth of a millisecond.
The guy's name is Ng. In Reality, he is somewhere in Southern
California. Y.T. isn't sure exactly what he is driving; some kind of a van
full of what the man with the glass eye described as "Stuff, really
incredible stuff that you don't need to know about." In the Metaverse, he
lives outside of town, around Port 2, where things really start to spread
out.
Ng's Metaverse home is a French colonial villa in the prewar village of
My Tho in the Mekong Delta. Visiting him is like going to Vietnam in about
1955, except that you don't have to get all sweaty. In order to make room
for this creation, he has laid claim to a patch of Metaverse space a couple
of miles off the Street. There's no monorail service in this low-rent
development, so Y.T.'s avatar has to walk the entire way.
He has a large office with French doors and a balcony looking out over
endless rice paddies where little Vietnamese people work. Clearly, this guy
is a fairly hardcore techie, because Y.T. counts hundreds of people out in
his rice paddies, plus dozens more running around the village, all of them
fairly well rendered and all of them doing different things. She's not a
bithead, but she knows that this guy is throwing a lot of computer time into
the task of creating a realistic view out his office window. And the fact
that it's Vietnam makes it twisted and spooky. Y.T. can't wait to tell
Roadkill about this place. She wonders if it has bombings and strafings and
napalm drops. That would be the best.
Ng himself, or at least, Ng's avatar, is a small, very dapper
Vietnamese man in his fifties, hair plastered to his head, wearing
military-style khakis. At the time Y.T. comes into his office, he is leaning
forward in his chair, getting his shoulders rubbed by a geisha.
A geisha in Vietnam?
Y.T.'s grandpa, who was there for a while, told her that the Nipponese
took over Vietnam during the war and treated it with the cruelty that was
their trademark before we nuked them and they discovered that they were
pacifists. The Vietnamese, like most other Asians, hate the Japanese. And
apparently this Ng character gets a kick out of the idea of having a
Japanese geisha around to rub his back.
But it is a very strange thing to do, for one reason: The geisha is
just a picture on Ng's goggles, and on Y.T.'s. And you can't get a massage
from a picture. So why bother?
When Y.T. comes in, Ng stands up and bows. This is how hardcore Street
wackos greet each other. They don't like to shake hands because you can't
actually feel the contact and it reminds you that you're not even really
there.
"Yeah, hi," Y.T. says.
Ng sits back down and the geisha goes right back to it. Ng's desk is a
nice French antique with a row of small television monitors along the back
edge, facing toward him. He spends most of his time watching the monitors,
even when he is talking.
"They told me a little bit about you," Ng says.
"Shouldn't listen to nasty rumors," Y.T. says.
Ng picks up a glass from his desk and takes a drink from it. It looks
like a mint julep. Globes of condensation form on its surface, break loose,
and trickle down the side. The rendering is so perfect that Y.T. can see a
miniaturized reflection of the office windows in each drop of condensation.
It's just totally ostentatious. What a bithead.
He is looking at her with a totally emotionless face, but Y.T. imagines
that it is a face of hate and disgust. To spend all this money on the
coolest house in the Metaverse and then have some skater come in done up in
grainy black-and-white. It must be a real kick in the metaphorical nuts.
Somewhere in this house a radio is going, playing a mix of Vietnamese
loungy type stuff and Yank wheelchair rock.
"Are you a Nova Sicilia citizen?" Ng says.
"No. I just chill sometimes with Uncle Enzo and the other Mafia dudes."
"Ah. Very unusual."
Ng is not a man in a hurry. He has soaked up the languid pace of the
Mekong Delta and is content to sit there and watch his TV sets and fire off
a sentence every few minutes.
Another thing: He apparently has Tourette's syndrome or some other
brain woes because from time to time, for no apparent reason, he makes
strange noises with his mouth. They have the twangy sound that you always
hear from Vietnamese when they are in the back rooms of stores and
restaurants carrying on family disputes in the mother tongue, but as far as
Y.T. can tell, they aren't real words, just sound effects.
"Do you work a lot for these guys?" Y.T. asks.
"Occasional small security jobs. Unlike most large corporations, the
Mafia has a strong tradition of handling its own security arrangements. But
when something especially technical is called for - "
He pauses in the middle of this sentence to make an incredible zooming
sound in his nose.
"Is that your thing? Security?"
Ng scans all of his TV sets. He snaps his fingers and the geisha
scurries out of the room. He folds his hands together on his desk and leans
forward. He stares at Y.T. "Yes," he sa