t that this was what  he was doing. "It's not exactly like being  a
gargoyle.  Remember when you  gave me  shit about spending all my  money  on
computer stuff?"
     "Yeah."
     "I  decided  I  wasn't spending  enough.  So I got  a beltpack machine.
Smallest ever made. I'm walking down the street  with this thing strapped to
my belly. It's really cool."
     "You're a gargoyle."
     "Yeah, but it's not like having all this clunky shit strapped  all over
your body - "
     "You're a gargoyle. Listen, I talked to one of these wholesalers."
     "Yeah?"
     "She  says  she  used to be a hacker. She saw something strange  on her
computer. Then she got sick for a while and joined this cult and ended up on
the Raft."
     "The Raft. Do tell."
     "On the Enterprise. They take their blood, Hiro. Suck  it  out of their
bodies. They infect people by injecting them with the blood of sick hackers.
And when their  veins  get  all  tracked  out like a junkie's, they cut them
loose and put them to work on the mainland running the wholesale operation."
     "That's good," he says. "That's good stuff."
     "She says she saw some  static on her computer screen  and  it made her
sick. You know anything about that?"
     "Yeah. It's true."
     "It's true?"
     "Yeah. But you don't have to worry about it. It only affects hackers."
     For  a minute she can't  even  speak, she's  so pissed. "My mother is a
programmer for the Feds. You asshole. Why didn't you warn me?"
     Half an hour later, she's there. Doesn't bother to change back into her
WASP disguise  this time,  just  bursts into the  house in basic, bad black.
Drops her plank on  the  floor on the way in.  Grabs one of Mom's curios off
the shelf - it's a  heavy crystal award - clear plastic, actually - that she
got  a couple  years ago for sucking up to her Fed boss  and passing all her
polygraph tests - and goes into the den.
     Mom's there. As  usual. Working on her computer. But  she's not looking
at the screen right now,  she's got some notes  on  her lap that she's going
through.
     Just as Mom is looking up at her, Y.T.  winds up and throws the crystal
award. It goes right  over Mom's shoulder,  glances off the computer  table,
flies right through the picture tube. Awesome results. Y.T. always wanted to
do that. She  pauses  to  admire her  work for a few seconds while  Mom just
flames off all kinds  of weird emotion. What are you  doing in that uniform?
Didn't I tell you not to ride your skateboard on a real  street? You're  not
supposed to throw things in the house. That's my  prized possession. Why did
you break the computer?  Government property. Just what  is  going  on here,
anyway?
     Y.T. can  tell that this is going to  continue for a couple of minutes,
so she goes to the kitchen, splashes some water on her face, gets a glass of
juice, just letting Mom  follow her  around and ventilate over her  shoulder
pads.
     Finally Mom winds down, defeated by Y.T.'s strategy of silence.
     "I just saved your fucking  life, Mom," Y.T. says. "You  could at least
offer me an Oreo."
     "What on earth are you talking about?"
     "It's like, if you - people of  a certain age  - would make some effort
to just stay in touch with sort of basic, modern-day events, then  your kids
wouldn't have to take these drastic measures."

        35

     Earth  materializes,  rotating majestically in front of his face.  Hiro
reaches out and grabs it. He  twists  it  around so  he's looking at Oregon.
Tells it to get rid of the  clouds, and  it does, giving him  a  crystalline
view of the mountains and the seashore.
     Right out there, a couple of  hundred miles off the  Oregon coast, is a
sort of granulated  furuncle growing on the  face of the water. Festering is
not too strong a word. It's a couple of hundred miles south of Astoria  now,
moving south. Which explains  why Juanita went  to Astoria a couple of  days
ago: she wanted to get close to the Raft. Why is anyone's guess.
     Hiro looks up,  focuses his gaze on Earth, zooms  in for a look.  As he
gets closer, the imagery he's looking at shifts from the long-range pictures
coming in from  the geosynchronous satellites to the good stuff being spewed
into the CIC computer from a  whole fleet of  low-flying spy birds. The view
he's looking at is a mosaic of images shot no more than a few hours ago.
     It's  several  miles across.  Its shape constantly  changes, but at the
time these pictures were shot, it had kind of a fat kidney  shape; that  is,
it is trying to be a V, pointed southward like a flock of geese, but there's
so much noise  in the system,  it's so  amorphous  and disorganized,  that a
kidney is the closest it can come.
     At the center  is a pair of enormous vessels: the Enterprise and an oil
tanker, lashed  together side  by side. These two behemoths are walled in by
several other major vessels,  an assortment  of  container  ships and  other
freight carriers. The Core.
     Everything else is pretty tiny. There  is the occasional hijacked yacht
or decommissioned  fishing  trawler. But most  of the boats in  the Raft are
just that: boats. Small pleasure craft, sampans, junks, dhows, dinghys, life
rafts, houseboats,  makeshift structures built  on air-filled oil  drums and
slabs of styrofoam. A  good fifty  percent of it isn't real boat material at
all,  just a  garble of  ropes,  cables, planks, nets, and other debris tied
together on top of whatever kind of flotsam was handy.
     And L. Bob Rife is sitting in the middle of it. Hiro doesn't quite know
what he's doing, and he doesn't know how Juanita is connected. But it's time
to go there and find out.

     Scott Lagerquist  is standing right on the  edge of  Mark Norman's 24/7
Motorcycle  Mall, waiting, when the  man  with the  swords comes into  view,
striding  down  the  sidewalk. A  pedestrian is  a  peculiar sight  in L.A.,
considerably more peculiar than a man with swords. But a welcome one. Anyone
who drives out to a motorcycle  dealership already has a car, by definition,
so it's hard to give them a really hard sell. A pedestrian should be cake.
     "Scott  Wilson  Lagerquist!"  the  guy yells  from fifty feet  away and
closing. "How you doing?"
     "Fabulous!"  Scott says. A little off guard, maybe. Can't remember this
guy's name, which is a problem. Where has he seen this guy before?
     "It's  great  to see you!" Scott says,  running forward and pumping the
guy's hand. "I haven't seen you since, uh - "
     "Is Pinky here today?" the guy says.
     "Pinky?"
     "Yeah. Mark. Mark  Norman.  Pinky was his nickname back  in  college. I
guess  he probably  doesn't like  to be called that now  that he's  running,
what, half a dozen dealerships, three McDonaldses, and a Holiday Inn, huh?"
     "I didn't know that Mr. Norman was into fast food also."
     "Yeah. He's got three  franchises down  around  Long  Beach. Owns  them
through a limited partnership, actually. Is he here today?"
     "No, he's on vacation."
     "Oh, yeah.  In Corsica.  The Ajaccio Hyatt.  Room  543. That's right, I
completely forgot about that."
     "Well, were you just stopping by to say hi, or - "
     "Nah. I was going to buy a motorcycle."
     "Oh. What kind of motorcycle were you looking for?"
     "One of the new Yamahas? With the new generation smartwheels?"
     Scott grins  manfully, trying  to put the  best face on the awful  fact
that he is  about to reveal. "I know exactly the one you mean. But I'm sorry
to tell you that we don't actually have one in stock today."
     "You don't?"
     "We don't. It's a brand-new model. Nobody has them."
     "You sure? Because you ordered one."
     "We did?"
     "Yeah. A month  ago." Suddenly  the  guy cranes his  neck,  looks  over
Scott's  shoulder  down the boulevard. "Well, speak of the  devil.  Here  it
comes."
     A Yamaha semi is pulling into the truck entrance with a new shipment of
motorcycles in the back.
     "It's  on that truck,"  the guy says. "If  you can give me  one of your
cards, I'll jot down the  vehicle  identification number on back  so you can
pull it off the truck for me."
     "This was a special order made by Mr. Norman?"
     "He claimed he was just ordering it as a display  model, you  know. But
it sort of has my name on it."
     "Yes, sir. I understand totally."

     Sure enough, the bike comes off the truck,  just as  the  guy described
it, right  down  to  color  scheme  (black)  and  vehicle ID number. It's  a
beautiful bike. It draws a crowd just sitting on the parking lot - the other
salesmen actually put down  their coffee cups and take their  feet off their
desks to  go outside  and  look at  it. It looks like a  black land torpedo.
Two-wheel drive, natch. The wheels are so advanced they're not even wheels -
they look like giant, heavy-duty versions of the smartwheels that high-speed
skateboards  use, independently telescoping spokes with fat traction pads on
the ends. Dangling out over the front, in the nose  cone of the  motorcycle,
is the sensor package  that monitors road conditions, decides where to place
each spoke as it rolls forward, how much to extend it, and how to rotate the
footpad  for maximum  traction. It's  all controlled by  a bios - a Built-In
Operating System - an onboard  computer with  a flat-panel screen built into
the top of the fuel tank.
     They say that  this baby will do a hundred and twenty miles per hour on
rubble.  The bios patches itself into the CIC weather  net so that it  knows
when it's  about  to run  into precip. The aerodynamic  cowling  is  totally
flexible, calculates its own most efficient shape for the current speed  and
wind conditions,  changes its curves accordingly,  wraps around  you  like a
nymphomaniacal gymnast.
     Scott figures this guy is going to waltz off with this thing for dealer
invoice, being a  friend and confidant  of Mr. Norman. And  it's not an easy
thing for  any redblooded  salesman to write out a contract to sell  a  sexy
beast like this one at dealer  invoice. He hesitates for  a  minute. Wonders
what's going to happen to him if this is all some kind of mistake.
     The guy's watching him intently, seems to sense his nervousness, almost
as if he can hear Scott's heart beating. So at the last minute he eases  up,
gets magnanimous - Scott loves these big-spender types-decides to throw in a
few  hundred Kongbucks over  invoice, just so  Scott can  pull  in  a meager
commission on the deal. A tip, basically.
     Then - icing on the cake - the guy goes nuts in the Cycle Shop. Totally
berserk. Buys a  complete outfit. Everything. Top of the line. A full  black
coverall  that  swaddles  everything   from  toes  to  neck  in  breathable,
bulletproof fabric, with armorgel  pads in all the right places and  airbags
around the  neck.  Even safety fanatics  don't  bother  with  a helmet  when
they're wearing one of these babies.
     So once he's figured out how to attach his swords on the outside of his
coverall, he's on his way.
     "I gotta say this," Scott says as  the guy is sitting on his  new bike,
getting his swords adjusted,  doing something incredibly unauthorized to the
bios, "you look like one bad motherfucker."
     "Thanks, I guess."  He twists the throttle up once and Scott feels, but
does not hear, the power of the engine. This baby is so efficient it doesn't
waste power by making noise. "Say hi to your brand-new niece," the guy says,
and then lets go the clutch. The  spokes flex and  gather themselves and the
bike springs forward out of the  lot, seeming to jump off its electric paws.
He cuts right across the  parking lot of the neighboring NeoAquarian  Temple
franchise  and pulls out  onto the road. About  half a second later, the guy
with the swords is a dot on the horizon, Then he's gone. Northbound.

        36

     Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under
the right  circumstances  he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world.
If I  moved to a  martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard  for
ten  years. If my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore
myself to revenge. If I  got  a fatal disease, had one year to live, devoted
it  to wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to
being bad.
     Hiro used to feel  that way, too, but then he ran into Raven. In a way,
this is liberating. He no longer has to worry about trying to be the baddest
motherfucker in the world. The position is  taken.  The  crowning touch, the
one thing that really  puts true world-class badmotherfuckerdom  totally out
of reach, of  course,  is  the hydrogen bomb. If it  wasn't for the hydrogen
bomb, a man could still aspire. Maybe find Raven's Achilles' heel. Sneak up,
get a  drop, slip a  mickey, pull a fast one.  But Raven's  nuclear umbrella
kind of puts the world title out of reach.
     Which is okay. Sometimes it's  all right  just to  be a little  bad. To
know your limitations. Make do with what you've got.
     Once he  maneuvers  his  way  onto  the  freeway,  aimed  up  into  the
mountains, he goggles into his office. Earth is still there, zoomed in tight
on the Raft. Hiro contemplates it, superimposed in ghostly  hues on his view
of the highway, as he rides toward  Oregon at a hundred and forty  miles per
hour.
     From a distance, it looks bigger than it really is. Getting  closer, he
can see that  this illusion is caused by an enveloping self-made slick/cloud
of sewage and air pollution, fading out into the ocean and the atmosphere.
     It orbits the  Pacific clockwise. When  they fire up the boilers on the
Enterprise,  it can control its direction a little bit,  but real navigation
is a  practical  impossibility  with all  the other  shit lashed onto it. It
mostly has to go where the wind and the Coriolis effect take it. A couple of
years ago, it was going by the Philippines, Vietnam, China, Siberia, picking
up  Refus. Then it swung up the Aleutian chain,  down the Alaska  panhandle,
and now  it's gliding past the small town of Port Sherman,  Oregon, near the
California border.
     As the Raft moves through the Pacific, riding mostly on ocean currents,
it  occasionally  sheds great  hunks of itself. Eventually,  these fragments
wash up in  some place like Santa Barbara, still lashed together, carrying a
payload of skeletons and gnawed bones.
     When  it  gets to California, it will enter  a  new phase of  its  life
cycle.  It will  shed much of its sprawling improvised bulk as a few hundred
thousand Refus cut themselves loose  and paddle to shore. The only Refus who
make it  that far are, by definition, the ones who were agile enough to make
it out to  the Raft in  the first  place, resourceful enough to  survive the
agonizingly  slow passage through the arctic waters, and tough enough not to
get killed by any of the other Refus. Nice  guys, all of them. Just the kind
of people you'd like to have showing up on your private beach in groups of a
few thousand.
     Stripped  down to a  few major  ships, a little more  maneuverable, the
Enterprise then will swing across the South Pacific, heading for  Indonesia,
where it will turn north again and start the next cycle of migration.
     Army ants  cross  mighty rivers  by  climbing on top of each other  and
clustering together into  a little ball  that floats. Many  of them fall off
and sink, and naturally the  ants on the bottom of the ball drown.  The ones
who are  quick and  vigorous enough  to keep clawing their  way  to the  top
survive. A lot of  them make  it across, and that's why you can't stop  army
ants  by  dynamiting the bridges. That's how Refus come  across the Pacific,
even though  they are too  poor  to  book passage on a real ship  or  buy  a
seaworthy boat. A new wave washes up onto the West Coast every five years or
so, when the ocean currents bring the Enterprise back.
     For  the  last couple of  months,  owners  of  beachfront  property  in
California  have  been hiring security people,  putting  up  spotlights  and
antipersonnel fences along  the tide line, mounting  machine  guns  on their
yachts. They  have  all  subscribed to  CIC's twenty-four-hour Raft  Report,
getting the  latest news flash, straight from  the satellite,  on  when  the
latest contingent of twenty-five thousand starving  Eurasians has cut itself
loose  from  the Enterprise and started  dipping its myriad  oars  into  the
Pacific, like ant legs.

     "Time to do more digging,"  he tells the Librarian. "But this is  going
to have to  be totally verbal, because I'm headed up I-5 at  some incredible
speed right now, and I have to watch out for slow-moving bagos and stuff."
     "I'll keep that  in mind,"  the voice  of  the Librarian says  into his
earphones. "Look out  for the  jackknifed truck south of Santa  Clarita. And
there is a large chuckhole in the left lane near the Tulare exit."
     "Thanks. Who  were these  gods  anyway?  Did  Lagos  have an opinion on
that?"
     "Lagos believed that they might have been  magicians  - that is, normal
human beings with special powers - or they might have been aliens."
     "Whoa, whoa,  hold  on. Let's  take these one at a time. What did Lagos
mean when he talked about 'normal human beings with special powers'?"
     "Assume  that the nam-shub of Enki really functioned as a virus. Assume
that someone named  Enki invented it. Then  Enki  must have had some kind of
linguistic power that goes beyond our concept of normal."
     "And how would this power work? What's the mechanism?"
     "I can only give you forward references drawn by Lagos."
     "Okay. Give me some."
     "The  belief in the magical power of  language is not unusual,  both in
mystical and  academic literature.  The  Kabbalists -Jewish mystics of Spain
and Palestine - believed that supernormal insight and power could be derived
from  properly combining the letters  of  the Divine Name. For example,  Abu
Aharon, an  early Kabbalist who emigrated from Baghdad to Italy, was said to
perform miracles through the power of the Sacred Names."
     "What kind of power are we talking about here?"
     "Most Kabbalists  were  theorists who  were  interested  only  in  pure
meditation.  But there were so-called 'practical  Kabbalists'  who  tried to
apply the power of the Kabbalah in everyday life."
     "In other words, sorcerers."
     "Yes.  These  practical   kabbalists  used  a   so-called  'archangelic
alphabet,' derived from first-century Greek and  Aramaic theurgic alphabets,
which  resembled cuneiform. The Kabbalists referred to this alphabet as 'eye
writing,' because the  letters were  composed of  lines  and  small circles,
which resembled eyes."
     "Ones and zeroes."
     "Some Kabbalists  divided up  the letters of the alphabet  according to
where they were produced inside the mouth."
     "Okay. So  as  we would think of it, they  were  drawing  a  connection
between the printed letter on the page and the neural  connections  that had
to be invoked in order to pronounce it."
     "Yes. By analyzing the  spelling of various  words, they  were able  to
draw  what they thought were profound  conclusions  about their  true, inner
meaning and significance."
     "Okay. If you say so."
     "In  the academic realm, the literature is naturally not  as  fanciful.
But  a great deal of  effort has  been devoted  to explaining Babel. Not the
Babel event - which most  people  consider to be a myth - but the  fact that
languages  tend  to  diverge.  A  number  of  linguistic theories have  been
developed in an effort to tie all languages together."
     "Theories Lagos tried to apply to his virus hypothesis."
     "Yes. There are  two schools: relativists and  universalists. As George
Steiner summarizes it, relativists tend to believe that language  is not the
vehicle  of  thought  but its determining  medium. It  is  the framework  of
cognition. Our  perceptions  of everything are  organized  by  the  flux  of
sensations passing over that framework. Hence, the study of the evolution of
language is the study of the evolution of the human mind itself."
     "Okay,  I  can  see   the  significance   of  that.  What   about   the
universalists?"
     "In contrast with the relativists, who believe  that languages need not
have anything  in common with each other, the  universalists believe that if
you can analyze languages enough, you can find that all of them have certain
traits in common. So they analyze languages, looking for such traits."
     "Have they found any?"
     "No. There seems to be an exception to every rule."
     "Which blows universalism out of the water."
     "Not necessarily. They  explain this problem by saying that the  shared
traits are too deeply buried to be analyzable."
     "Which is a cop out."
     "Their point is  that at some level,  language has to happen inside the
human brain. Since all human brains are more or less the same - "
     "The hardware's the same. Not the software."
     "You are using some kind of metaphor that I cannot understand."
     Hiro whips past a big Airstream that is rocking from side to  side in a
dangerous wind coming down the valley.
     "Well,   a  French-speaker's  brain  starts   out   the   same   as  an
English-speaker's brain. As they grow up, they get programmed with different
software-they learn different languages."
     "Yes. Therefore, according  to the universalists,  French and English -
or any other languages - must share certain traits that  have their roots in
the 'deep structures' of the human brain. According to Chomskyan theory, the
deep structures are innate components of the brain that enable it to cam out
certain  formal kinds of  operations  on strings of symbols. Or,  as Steiner
paraphrases Emmon Bach: These deep  structures eventually lead to the actual
patterning  of the cortex with its immensely ramified yet, at the same time,
'programmed' network of electrochemical and neurophysiological channels."
     "But these deep structures are so deep we can't even see them?"
     "The universalists place the active nodes of linguistic life - the deep
structures  - so deep  as to  defy observation and description.  Or  to  use
Steiner's analogy: Try to draw  up the  creature from the depths of the sea,
and it will disintegrate or change form grotesquely."
     "There's that  serpent again. So which theory did Lagos believe in? The
relativist or the universalist?"
     "He did not  seem to think there was  much of a difference. In the end,
they are both somewhat mystical. Lagos believed that both schools of thought
had essentially arrived at the same place by different lines of reasoning."
     "But  it  seems  to me there  is  a key  difference," Hiro  says.  "The
universalists think that we are determined by the prepatterned structure  of
our brains - the pathways in the  cortex. The relativists don't believe that
we have any limits."
     "Lagos modified the strict Chomskyan theory by supposing that  learning
a language  is  like blowing  code  into  PROMS  -an analogy that  I  cannot
interpret."
     "The analogy is clear. PROMS are Programmable  Read-Only Memory chips,"
Hiro says. "When they come from the factory, they have no content. Once  and
only once,  you can  place information into those chips and  then  freeze it
-the information, the software, becomes frozen into the chip -it  transmutes
into hardware. After you have blown the code into the PROMS, you can read it
out,  but you can't  write to them anymore.  So Lagos was trying to say that
the newborn human  brain has no structure - as the relativists would have it
-  and that as the child learns  a language, the developing brain structures
itself  accordingly, the language gets 'blown into' the hardware and becomes
a permanent  part of the brain's deep structure - as the universalists would
have it."
     "Yes. This was his interpretation."
     "Okay. So when he talked  about Enki  being a real person with  magical
powers,  what he  meant  was  that Enki  somehow  understood  the connection
between language and the brain, knew how to manipulate it. The same way that
a hacker,  knowing the  secrets of  a computer  system,  can  write  code to
control it - digital nam-shubs."
     "Lagos said  that Enki  had the ability to ascend  into the universe of
language and  see it before his eyes. Much as humans go  into the Metaverse.
That gave him  power  to create  nam-shubs.  And nam-shubs had the power  to
alter the functioning of the brain and of the body."
     "Why isn't anyone  doing this kind of  thing nowadays? Why aren't there
any nam-shubs in English?"
     "Not all languages are the  same, as Steiner points out. Some languages
are better at metaphor than others. Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, and Chinese lend
themselves  to  word play and  have  achieved  a  lasting grip  on  reality:
Palestine had Qiryat Sefer, the "City  of the Letter," and Syria had Byblos,
the "Town of the Book." By contrast other civilizations seem "speechless" or
at least, as may have been the case in Egypt, not  entirely cognizant of the
creative  and  transformational powers  of  language.  Lagos  believed  that
Sumerian was an extraordinarily powerful language - at least it was in Sumer
five thousand years ago."
     "A language that lent itself to Enki's neurolinguistic hacking."
     "Early  linguists, as well as the Kabbalists, believed  in a  fictional
language called the tongue of Eden, the language of Adam. It enabled all men
to  understand each other, to  communicate  without misunderstanding. It was
the language of the Logos, the moment when God created the world by speaking
a word. In  the tongue of Eden, naming a thing was  the same as creating it.
To quote Steiner again, 'Our speech interposes  itself between  apprehension
and truth like a dusty pane or warped mirror. The tongue of Eden was  like a
flawless glass;  a light of  total understanding  streamed through it.  Thus
Babel was  a  second Fall.' And Isaac  the  Blind, an early Kabbalist,  said
that,  to  quote  Gershom  Scholem's translation,  'The  speech  of  men  is
connected with divine speech  and  all language  whether  heavenly  or human
derives  from  one  source: the  Divine Name.' The practical kabbalists, the
sorcerers, bore the title Ba'al Shem, meaning 'master of the divine name.'"
     "The machine language of the world," Hiro says.
     "Is this another analogy?"
     "Computers  speak  machine language," Hiro says. "It's written in  ones
and zeroes-binary  code. At  the lowest level,  all computers are programmed
with strings of  ones and zeroes. When you program  in machine language, you
are  controlling the computer  at its brainstem,  the root of its existence.
It's the tongue of Eden. But it's very difficult to work in machine language
because you go crazy after  a while, working  at such  a  minute level. So a
whole Babel of computer languages has been created for programmers: FORTRAN,
BASIC, COBOL, LISP,  Pascal, C, PROLOG, FORTH. You talk  to the computer  in
one of these languages,  and a  piece of software called a compiler converts
it into machine language. But you never can  tell exactly what the  compiler
is doing. It doesn't always come out the way you want. Like a  dusty pane or
warped  mirror. A really advanced  hacker comes to understand the true inner
workings of the machine - he sees through the  language he's  working in and
glimpses the secret functioning of the binary code - becomes a Ba'al Shem of
sorts."
     "Lagos  believed  that  the  legends  about  the  tongue  of Eden  were
exaggerated versions  of true events,"  the  Librarian  says. "These legends
reflected nostalgia for a time when people spoke Sumerian, a tongue that was
superior to anything that came afterward."
     "Is Sumerian really that good?"
     "Not as  far as modern-day linguists can tell," the Librarian says. "As
I  mentioned, it is largely impossible for us to grasp. Lagos suspected that
words worked differently in  those days. If one's native  tongue  influences
the physical structure of the developing brain, then  it is fair to say that
the Sumerians  -  who  spoke a language radically different from anything in
existence  today  -  had fundamentally different brains  from  yours.  Lagos
believed that for this reason, Sumerian was a language ideally suited to the
creation and propagation of viruses. That a virus, once released into Sumer,
would spread rapidly and virulently, until it had infected everyone."
     "Maybe Enki knew  that also,"  Hiro says. "Maybe the  nam-shub  of Enki
wasn't such a bad  thing. Maybe Babel was the best  thing that ever happened
to us."

        37

     Y.T.'s mom works  in Fedland. She has parked her little  car in her own
little numbered  slot,  for which  the  Feds  require  her  to pay about ten
percent of  her  salary (if  she  like it  she can take a taxi  or walk) and
walked  up several levels of a blindingly lit  reinforced-concrete helix  in
which most  of the spaces -  the good  spaces closer to  the surface  -  are
reserved  for  people other than  her,  but empty. She  always walks  up the
center of the ramp, between the rows of parked cars, so that the  EBGOC boys
won't think she's lurking, loitering, skulking, malingering, or smoking.
     Reaching the subterranean entrance of  her building, she  has taken all
metal objects from her pockets and removed what little jewelry she's wearing
and dumped them into a dirty plastic bowl and walked through  the  detector.
Flashed  her  badge.  Signed her  name  and  noted  down  the digital  time.
Submitted  to a frisking from an EBGOC girl.  Annoying,  but it sure beats a
cavity search. They have a right to do a cavity search if they want. She got
cavity-searched every day for a month once, right after she had spoken up at
a meeting and suggested that her supervisor might be on the wrong track with
a major programming project. It was  punitive and vicious, she  knew it was,
but she  always wanted to give something  back  to her country, and whenever
you work for the Feds you just accept the fact that there's going to be some
politicking.  And that as a low-level person you're going to bear the brunt.
And later on,  you  climb the  GS ladder,  don't have to put up with as much
shit. Far  be it from  her to  quarrel with  her supervisor. Her supervisor,
Marietta, doesn't  have an especially stellar GS  level, but  she does  have
access. She has connections. Marietta knows people who know people. Marietta
has  attended cocktail parties  that were also attended by  some people who,
well, your eyes would bug out.
     She has passed  the  frisking with  flying collars. Put the metal stuff
back  into her pockets.  Climbed up half a  dozen flights  of stairs to  her
floor. The elevators here still work,  but some very highly placed people in
Fedland  have  let it be known -  nothing  official,  but they have  ways of
letting this stuff out - that  it is a duty to conserve energy. And the Feds
are  real serious about duty.  Duty, loyalty,  responsibility.  The collagen
that binds  us  into the United  States of  America. So the  stairwells  are
filled with sweaty wool and clacking leather.  If you took  the elevator, no
one  would  actually  say  anything, but  it would  be  noticed. Noticed and
written down and taken into account. People would look at you, glance you up
and down,  like, what happened, sprain  your ankle? Taking the stairs  is no
problem.
     Feds don't smoke. Feds generally don't overeat. The health plan is very
specific,  contains major incentives,  get too  heavy or  wheezy and, no one
says  anything about  it  - which  would be rude - but  you feel a  definite
pressure, a sense of not fitting  in, as you walk  across  the sea of desks,
eyes glance up to follow you, estimating the mass  of your saddlebags,  eyes
darting back  and forth  between desks as, by consensus, your co-workers say
to themselves, I wonder how  much he or she is driving up  our  health  plan
premiums?
     So Y.T.'s mom has  clacked  up the stairs  in her  black pumps and gone
into her  office, actually a  large room with  computer workstations  placed
across it in a grid. Used to be divided up by partitions, but the EBGOC boys
didn't like it, said what would happen if there had to be an evacuation? All
those  partitions would impede the free flow of  unhinged panic. So  no more
partitions.  Just  workstations and chairs. Not even  any desktops. Desktops
encourage  the use of paper, which is archaic and reflects  inadequate  team
spirit. What is so special about your work that you have to write it down on
a  piece of  paper that only you  get to see? That you have to  lock it away
inside  a desk? When you're working for the  Feds, everything  you do is the
property of the United States of America. You do  your work on the computer.
The  computer  keeps  a copy of  everything,  so  that  if  you get  sick or
something, it's  all there where  your  co-workers and supervisors  can  get
access to  it. If you  want to write  little  notes or make  phone  doodles,
you're perfectly free to do that at home, in your spare time.
     And  there's the  question  of  interchangeability.  Fed workers,  like
military people,  are intended to be interchangeable  parts. What happens if
your workstation should break down? You're going  to sit  there  and twiddle
your thumbs until it  gets fixed? No siree, you're going to  move to a spare
workstation and get to  work on that. And you don't have that flexibility if
you've  got half  a  ton  of personal stuff cached inside of a  desk, strewn
around a desktop.
     So  there  is  no paper in a Fed office.  All  the workstations are the
same. You come in  in the morning, pick one  at random, sit down, and get to
work.  You could try to  favor  a particular station, try to sit there every
day, but it would be  noticed. Generally you pick the unoccupied workstation
that's closest to the door. That way, whoever came in earliest sits closest,
whoever came  in latest is way in the back, for the  rest of  the  day  it's
obvious  at a glance who's on the ball in this office and  who is - as  they
whisper to each other in the bathrooms - having problems.
     Not that it's any big secret, who comes in first. When you sign on to a
workstation  in  the  morning, it's not  like the  central computer  doesn't
notice that fact. The central computer notices just about everything.  Keeps
track of every key  you hit on the keyboard, all day long, what time you hit
it, down to the microsecond,  whether it was the right key or the wrong key,
how many mistakes you make and when you make  them. You're only  required to
be at your  workstation from eight to five, with a half-hour lunch break and
two ten-minute coffee breaks, but  if you  stuck  to that  schedule it would
definitely  be noticed, which is why Y.T.'s mom is sliding  into  the  first
unoccupied workstation and signing  on to  her machine  at quarter to seven.
Half a dozen other people are already here, signed on to workstations closer
to  the entrance, but this isn't bad. She  can look forward to a  reasonably
stable career if she can keep up this sort of performance.
     The Feds still  operate  in Flatland.  None  of this  three-dimensional
stuff, no goggles, no stereo  sound. The computers are all basic flat-screen
two-dimensional numbers.  Windows appear  on the  desktop, with  little text
documents  inside. All part of the  austerity program.  Soon  to reap  major
benefits.
     She signs  on and checks her mail. No personal  mail, just a  couple of
mass-distributed pronouncements from Marietta.

        NEW TP POOL REGULATIONS
     I've been asked to distribute the new regulations regarding office pool
displays. The  enclosed memo  is  a  new subchapter of  the  EBGOC Procedure
Manual, replacing the old subchapter entitled  PHYSICAL PLANT/CALIFORNIA/LOS
ANGELES/BUILDINGS/OFFICE    AREAS/PHYSICAL    LAYOUT    REGULATIONS/EMPLOYEE
INPUT/GROUP ACTIVITIES.
     The old subchapter was a flat prohibition on the use of office space or
time for "pool" activities  of  any  kind,  whether permanent (e.g.,  coffee
pool) or one-time (e.g., birthday parties).
     This prohibition  still applies, but a single, one-time  exception  has
now been made for any office  that wishes to pursue a  joint bathroom-tissue
strategy.
     By way of introduction, let me just make a few general comments on this
subject. The  problem  of distributing  bathroom tissue to workers  presents
inherent challenges for any  office management  system  due to  the inherent
unpredictability  of   usage  -  not   every   facility  usage   transaction
necessitates  the use of  bathroom tissue,  and  when it is used, the amount
needed (number of squares) may vary quite  widely from person to person and,
for  a given person, from one transaction to  the next.  This does  not even
take   into   account  the   occasional   use   of   bathroom   tissue   for
unpredictable/creative   purposes   such   as  applying/removing  cosmetics,
beverage-spill management,  etc. For  this  reason,  rather than  trying  to
package  bathroom tissue in small one-transaction packets  (as  is done with
premoistened towelettes, for example), which  can  be wasteful in some cases
and limiting in other cases, it has been traditional to package this product
in bulk distribution units whose size exceeds  the maximum amount of squares
that an individual  could conceivably use in a  single  transaction (barring
force  majeure).  This reduces to  a  minimum the  number of transactions in
which  the  distribution unit  is  depleted  (the roll  runs out during  the
transaction, a situation that can  lead to emotional stress for the affected
employee. However,  it does present the manager with some challenges in that
the  distribution unit  is rather  bulky and must  be  repeatedly  used by a
number of different individuals if it is not to be wasted.
     Since  the  implementation  of  Phase  XVII  of the Austerity  Program,
employees have been  allowed  to bring their own  bathroom tissue from home.
This  approach is somewhat  bulky  and redundant,  as every  worker  usually
brings their own roll.
     Some  offices  have attempted  to meet this  challenge  by  instituting
bathroom-tissue pools.
     Without  overgeneralizing,  it  may  be  stated  that  an inherent  and
irreducible feature  of any bathroom-tissue pool implemented at  the  office
level, in an environment  (i.e.,  building) in which  comfort  stations  are
distributed  on a  per-floor basis (i.e., in which  several offices  share a
single facility) is that  provision must be made within the confines  of the
individual  office for temporary stationing  of bathroom tissue distribution
units  (i.e., rolls). This follows  from the fact that if the  BTDUs (rolls)
are  stationed, while inactive, outside  of  the purview of  the controlling
office  (i.e., the office that has collectively purchased  the  BTDU) - that
is, if the  BTDUs are stored,  for example,  in  a lobby area or  within the
facility  in  which  they  are  actually utilized, they will  be  subject to
pilferage  and "shrinkage"  as unauthorized persons  consume them, either as
part of a conscious  effort to pilfer  or out of an honest misunderstanding,
i.e.,  a  belief that  the  BTDUs  are being provided free of charge by  the
operating agency  (in  this case the United  States Government),  or  as the
result of  necessity, as in the case of a beverage spill that is encroaching
on sensitive electronic  equipment and whose  management  will thus brook no
delay.  This fact has led certain offices (which shall go unnamed - you know
who you are, guys) to  establish makeshift BTDU depots  that  also  serve as
pool-contribution collection points. Usually, these depots  take the form of
a table,  near  the  door  closest to the facility, on which  the BTDUs  are
stacked or otherwise deployed, with a bowl or some other receptacle in which
participants  may  place their contributions, and typically with  a  sign or
other  attention-getting  device  (such  as  a  stuffed animal  or  cartoon)
requesting donations. A quick glance at the  current  regulations  will show
that placement  of  such  a  display/depot  violates the  procedure  manual.
However,  in   the   interests   of  employee  hygiene,  morale,  and  group
spiritbudding, my higher-ups have agreed to make a one-time exception in the
regulations for this purpose.
     As with any  part  of  the procedure manual, new or  old,  it  is  your
responsibility  to  be thoroughly  familiar  with  this  material. Estimated
reading  time for  this document is 15.62 minutes (and don't  think we won't
check).  Please  make note of  the  major points made  in this  document, as
follows: