"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 says. Y.T. looks back at him for a bit, waiting for him to continue. After a few seconds his attention drifts back to the monitors. "I do most of my work under a large contract with Mr. Lee," he blurts. Y.T. is waiting for the continuation of this sentence: Not "Mr. Lee," but "Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong." Oh, well. If she can drop Uncle Enzo's name, he can drop Mr. Lee's. "The social structure of any nation-state is ultimately determined by its security arrangements," Ng says, "and Mr. Lee understands this." Oh, wow, we're going to be profound now. Ng is suddenly talking just like the old white men on the TV pundit powwows, which Y.T.'s mother watches obsessively. "Instead of hiring a large human security force - which impacts the social environment - you know, lots of minimum-wage earners standing around carrying machine guns - Mr. Lee prefers to use nonhuman systems." Nonhuman systems. Y.T. is about to ask him, what do you know about the Rat Thing. But it is pointless; he won't say. It would get their relationship off on the wrong foot, Y.T. asking Ng for intel, intel that he would never give her, and that would make this whole scene even weirder than it is now, which Y.T. can't even imagine. Ng bursts forth with a long string of twangy noises, pops, and glottal stops. "Fucking bitch," he mumbles. "Excuse me?" "Nothing," he says, "a bimbo box cut me off. None of these people understand that with this vehicle, I could crush them like a potbellied pig under an armored personnel carrier." "A bimbo box - you're driving?" "Yes. I'm coming to pick you up - remember?" "Do you mind?" "No," he sighs, as if he really does. Y.T. gets up and walks around behind his desk to look. Each of the little TV monitors is showing a different view out his van: windshield, left window, right window, rearview. Another one has an electronic map showing his position: inbound on the San Bernardino, not far away. "The van is under voice command," he explains. "I removed the steering-wheel-and-pedal interface because I found verbal commands more convenient. This is why I will sometimes make unfamiliar sounds with my voice - I am controlling the vehicle's systems." Y.T. signs off from the Metaverse for a while, to clear her head and take a leak. When she takes off the goggles she discovers that she has built up quite an audience of truckers and mechanics, who are standing around the terminal booth in a semicircle listening to her jabber at Ng. When she stands up, attention shifts to her butt, naturally. Y.T. hits the bathroom, finishes her pie, and wanders out into the ultraviolet glare of the setting sun to wait for Ng. Recognizing his van is easy enough. It is enormous. It is eight feet high and wider than it is high, which would have made it a wide load in the old days when they had laws. The construction is boxy and angular; it has been welded together out of the type of flat, dimpled steel plate usually used to make manhole lids and stair treads. The tires are huge, like tractor tires with a more subtle tread, and there are six of them: two axles in back and one in front. The engine is so big that, like an evil spaceship in a movie, Y.T. feels its rumbling in her ribs before she can see it; it is kicking out diesel exhaust through a pair of squat vertical red smokestacks that project from the roof, toward the rear. The windshield is a perfectly flat rectangle of glass about three by eight feet, smoked so black that Y.T. can't make out an outline of anything inside. The snout of the van is festooned with every type of high-powered light known to science, like this guy hit a New South Africa franchise on a Saturday night and stole every light off every roll bar, and a grille has been constructed across the front, welded together out of rails torn out of an abandoned railroad somewhere. The grille alone probably weighs more than a small car. The passenger door swings open. Y.T. walks over and climbs into the front seat. "Hi," she is saying. "You need to take a whiz or anything?" Ng isn't there. Or maybe he is. Where the driver's seat ought to be, there is a sort of neoprene pouch about the size of a garbage can suspended from the ceiling by a web of straps, shock cords, tubes, wires, fiber-optic cables, and hydraulic lines. It is swathed in so much stuff that it is hard to make out its actual outlines. At the top of this pouch, Y.T. can see a patch of skin with some black hair around it - the top of a balding man's head. Everything else, from the temples downward, is encased in an enormous goggle/mask/headphone/feeding-tube unit, held onto his head by smart straps that are constantly tightening and loosening themselves to keep the device comfortable and properly positioned. Below this, on either side, where you'd sort of expect to see arms, huge bundles of wires, fiber optics, and tubes run up out of the floor and are seemingly plugged into Ng's shoulder sockets. There is a similar arrangement where his legs are supposed to be attached, and more stuff going into his groin and hooked up to various locations on his torso. The entire thing is swathed in a one-piece coverall, a pouch, larger than his torso ought to be, that is constantly bulging and throbbing as though alive. "Thank you, all my needs are taken care of," Ng says. The door slams shut behind her. Ng makes a yapping sound, and the van pulls out onto the frontage road, headed back toward 405. "Please excuse my appearance," he says, after a couple of awkward minutes. "My helicopter caught fire during the evacuation of Saigon in 1974 - a stray tracer from ground forces." "Whoa. What a drag." "I was able to reach an American aircraft carrier off the coast, but you know, the fuel was spraying around quite a bit during the fire." "Yeah, I can imagine, uh huh." "I tried prostheses for a while - some of them are very good. But nothing is as good as a motorized wheelchair. And then I got to thinking, why do motorized wheelchairs always have to be tiny pathetic things that strain to go up a little teeny ramp? So I bought this - it is an airport firetruck from Germany - and converted it into my new motorized wheelchair." "It's very nice." "America is wonderful because you can get anything on a drive-through basis. Oil change, liquor, banking, car wash, funerals, anything you want - drive through! So this vehicle is much better than a tiny pathetic wheelchair. It is an extension of my body." "When the geisha rubs your back?" Ng mumbles something and his pouch begins to throb and undulate around his body. "She is a daemon, of course. As for the massage, my body is suspended in an electrocontractive gel that massages me when I need it. I also have a Swedish girl and an African woman, but those daemons are not as well rendered." "And the mint julep?" "Through a feeding tube. Nonalcoholic, ha ha." "So," Y.T. says at some point, when they are way past LAX, and she figures it's too late to chicken out, "what's the plan? Do we have a plan?" "We go to Long Beach. To the Terminal Island Sacrifice Zone. And we buy some drugs," Ng says. "Or you do, actually, since I am indisposed." "That's my job? To buy some drugs?" "Buy them, and throw them up in the air." "In a Sacrifice Zone?" "Yes. And we'll take care of the rest." "Who's we, dude?" "There are several more, uh, entities that will help us." "What, is the back of the van full of more - people like you?" "Sort of," Ng says. "You are close to the truth." "Would these be, like, nonhuman systems?" "That is a sufficiently all-inclusive term, I think." Y.T. figures that for a big yes. "You tired? Want me to drive or anything?" Ng laughs sharply, like distant ack-ack, and the van almost swerves off the road. Y.T. doesn't get the sense that he is laughing at the joke; he is laughing at what a jerk Y.T. is. 30 "Okay, last time we were talking about the clay envelope. But what about this thing? The thing that looks like a tree?" Hiro says, gesturing to one of the artifacts. "A totem of the goddess Asherah," the Librarian says crisply. "Now we're getting somewhere," Hiro says. "Lagos said that the Brandy in The Black Sun was a cult prostitute of Asherah. So who is Asherah?" "She was the consort of El, who is also known as Yahweh," the Librarian says. "She also was known by other names: Elat, her most common epithet. The Greeks knew her as Dione or Rhea. The Canaanites knew her as Tannit or Hawwa, which is the same thing as Eve." "Eve?" "The etymology of 'Tannit' proposed by Cross is: feminine of 'tannin,' which would mean 'the one of the serpent.' Furthermore, Asherah carried a second epithet in the Bronze Age, 'dat batni,' also 'the one of the serpent.' The Sumerians knew her as Nintu or Ninhursag. Her symbol is a serpent coiling about a tree or staff. the caduceus." "Who worshipped Asherah? A lot of people, I gather." "Everyone who lived between India and Spain, from the second millennium B.C. up into the Christian era. With the exception of the Hebrews, who only worshipped her until the religious reforms of Hezekiah and, later, Josiah." "I thought the Hebrews were monotheists. How could they worship Asherah?" "Monolatrists. They did not deny the existence of other gods. But they were only supposed to worship Yahweh. Asherah was venerated as the consort of Yahweh." "I don't remember anything about God having a wife in the Bible." "The Bible didn't exist at that point. Judaism was just a loose collection of Yahwistic cults, each with different shrines and practices. The stories about the Exodus hadn't been formalized into scripture yet. And the later parts of the Bible had not yet happened." "Who decided to purge Asherah from Judaism?" "The deuteronomic school - defined, by convention, as the people who wrote the book of Deuteronomy as well as Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings." "And what kind of people were they?" "Nationalists. Monarchists. Centralists. The forerunners of the Pharisees. At this time, the Assyrian king Sargon II had recently conquered Samaria - northern Israel - forcing a migration of Hebrews southward into Jerusalem. Jerusalem expanded greatly and the Hebrews began to conquer territory to the west, east, and south. It was a time of intense nationalism and patriotic fervor. The deuteronomic school embodied those attitudes in scripture by rewriting and reorganizing the old tales." "Rewriting them how?" "Moses and others believed that the River Jordan was the border of Israel, but the deuteronomists believed that Israel included Transjordan, which justified aggression to the east. There are many other examples: the predeuteronomic law said nothing about a monarch. The Law as laid down by the deuteronomic school reflected a monarchist system. The predeuteronomic law was largely concerned with sacred matters, while the deuteronomic law's main concern is the education of the king and his people - secular matters in other words. The deuteronomists insisted on centralizing the religion in the Temple in Jerusalem, destroying the outlying cult centers. And there is another feature that Lagos found significant." "And that is?" "Deuteronomy is the only book of the Pentateuch that refers to a written Torah as comprising the divine will: 'And when he sits on the throne of his kingdom, he shall write for himself in a book a copy of this law, from that which is in charge of the Levitical priests; and it shall be with him, and he shall read in it all the days of his life, that he may learn to fear the LORD his God, by keeping all the words of this law and these statutes, and doing them; that his heart may not be lifted up above his brethren, and that he may not turn aside from the commandment, either to the right hand or to the left; so that he may continue long in his kingdom, he and his children, in Israel.' Deuteronomy 17:18-20." "So the deuteronomists codified the religion. Made it into an organized, self-propagating entity," Hiro says. "I don't want to say virus. But according to what you just quoted me, the Torah is like a virus. It uses the human brain as a host. The host - the human - makes copies of it. And more humans come to synagogue and read it." "I cannot process an analogy. But what you say is correct insofar as this: After the deuteronomists had reformed Judaism, instead of making sacrifices, the Jews went to synagogue and read the Book. If not for the deuteronomists, the world's monotheists would still be sacrificing animals and propagating their beliefs through the oral tradition." "Sharing needles," Hiro says. "When you were going over this stuff with Lagos, did he ever say anything about the Bible being a virus?" "He said it had certain things in common with a virus, but that it was different. He considered it a benign virus. Like that used for vaccinations. He considered the Asherah virus to be more malignant, capable of being spread through exchange of bodily fluids." "So the strict, book-based religion of the deuteronomists inoculated the Hebrews against the Asherah virus." "In combination with strict monogamy and other kosher practices, yes," the Librarian says. "The previous religions, from Sumer up to Deuteronomy, are known as prerational. Judaism was the first of the rational religions. As such, in Lagos's view, it was much less susceptible to viral infection because it was based on fixed, written records. This was the reason for the veneration of the Torah and the exacting care used when making new copies of it - informational hygiene." "What are we living in nowadays? The postrational era?" "Juanita made comments to that effect." "I'll bet she did. She's starting to make more sense to me, Juanita is." "Oh." "She never really made much sense before." "I see." "I think that if I can just spend enough time with you to figure out what's on Juanita's mind - well, wonderful things could happen." "I will try to be of assistance." "Back to work - this is no time for a hard-on. It seems that Asherah was a carrier of a viral infection. The deuteronomists somehow realized this and exterminated her by blocking all the vectors by which she infected new victims." "With reference to viral infections," the Librarian says, "if I may make a fairly blunt, spontaneous crossreference - something I am coded to do at opportune moments - you may wish to examine herpes simplex, a virus that takes up residence in the nervous system and never leaves. It is capable of carrying new genes into existing neurons and genetically reengineering them. Modem gene therapists use it for this purpose. Lagos thought that herpes simplex might be a modern, benign descendant of Asherah." "Not always benign," Hiro says, remembering a friend of his who died of AIDS-related complications; in the last days, he had herpes lesions from his lips all the way down his throat. "It's only benign because we have immunities." "Yes, sir." "So did Lagos think that the Asherah virus actually altered the DNA of brain cells?" "Yes. This was the backbone of his hypothesis that the virus was able to transmute itself from a biologically transmitted string of DNA into a set of behaviors." "What behaviors? What was Asherah worship like? Did they do sacrifices?" "No. But there is evidence of cult prostitutes, both male and female." "Does that mean what I think it does? Religious figures who would hang around the temple and fuck people?" "More or less." "Bingo. Great way to spread a virus. Now, I want to jump back to an earlier fork in the conversation." "As you wish. I can handle nested forkings to a virtually infinite depth." "You made a connection between Asherah and Eve." "Eve - whose Biblical name is Hawwa - is clearly the Hebrew interpretation of an older myth. Hawwa is an ophidian mother goddess." "Ophidian?" "Associated with serpents. Asherah is also an ophidian mother goddess. And both are associated with trees as well." "Eve, as I recall, is considered responsible for getting Adam to eat the forbidden fruit, from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Which is to say, it's not just fruit - it's data." "If you say so, sir." "I wonder if viruses have always been with us, or not. There's sort of an implicit assumption that they have been around forever. But maybe that's not true. Maybe there was a period of history when they were nonexistent or at least unusual. And at a certain point, when the metavirus showed up, the number of different viruses exploded, and people started getting sick a whole lot. That would explain the fact that all cultures seem to have a myth about Paradise, and the Fall from Paradise." "Perhaps." "You told me that the Essenes thought that tapeworms were demons. If they'd known what a virus was, they probably would have thought the same thing. And Lagos told me the other night that, according to the Sumerians, there was no concept of good and evil per se." "Correct. According to Kramer and Maier, there are good demons and bad demons. 'Good ones bring physical and emotional health. Evil ones bring disorientation and a variety of physical and emotional ills.... But these demons can hardly be distinguished from the diseases they personify ... and many of the diseases sound, to modern ears, as though they must be psychosomatic.'" "That's what the doctors said about Da5id, that his disease must be psychosomatic." "I don't know anything about Da5id, except for some rather banal statistics." "It's as though 'good' and 'evil' were invented by the writer of the Adam and Eve legend to explain why people get sick - why they have physical and mental viruses. So when Eve - or Asherah - got Adam to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, she was introducing the concept of good and evil into the world - introducing the metavirus, which creates viruses." "Could be." "So my next question is: Who wrote the Adam and Eve legend?" "This is a source of much scholarly argument." "What did Lagos think? More to the point, what did Juanita think?" "Nicolas Wyatt's radical interpretation of the Adam and Eve story supposes that it was, in fact, written as a political allegory by the deuteronomists." "I thought they wrote the later books, not Genesis." "True. But they were involved in compiling and editing the earlier books as well. For many years, it was assumed that Genesis was written sometime around 900 B.C. or even earlier - long before the advent of the deuteronomists. But more recent analysis of the vocabulary and content suggests that a great deal of editorial work - possibly even authorial work - took place around the time of the Exile, when the deuteronomists held sway." "So they may have rewritten an earlier Adam and Eve myth." "They appear to have had ample opportunity. According to the interpretation of Hvidberg and, later, Wyatt, Adam in his garden is a parable for the king in his sanctuary, specifically King Hosea, who ruled the northern kingdom until it was conquered by Sargon II in 722 B.C." "That's the conquest you mentioned earlier - the one that drove the deuteronomists southward toward Jerusalem." "Exactly. Now 'Eden,' which can be understood simply as the Hebrew word for 'delight,' stands for the happy state in which the king existed prior to the conquest. The expulsion from Eden to the bitter lands to the east is a parable for the massive deportation of Israelites to Assyria following Sargon II's victory. According to this interpretation, the king was enticed away from the path, of righteousness by the cult of El, with its associated worship of Asherah - who is commonly associated with serpents, and whose symbol is a tree." "And his association with Asherah somehow caused him to be conquered - so when the deuteronomists reached Jerusalem, they recast the Adam and Eve story as a warning to the leaders of the southern kingdom." "Yes." "And perhaps, because no one was listening to them, perhaps they invented the concept of good and evil in the process, as a hook." "Hook?" "Industry term. Then what happened? Did Sargon II try to conquer the southern kingdom also?" "His successor, Sennacherib, did. King Hezekiah, who ruled the southern kingdom, prepared for the attack feverishly, making great improvements in the fortifications of Jerusalem, improving its supply of drinking water. He was also responsible for a far-reaching series of religious reforms, which he undertook under the direction of the deuteronomists." "How did it work out?" "The forces of Sennacherib surrounded Jerusalem. 'And that night the angel of the LORD went forth, and slew a hundred and eighty-five thousand in the camp of the Assyrians; and when men arose early in the morning, behold, these were all dead bodies. Then Sennacherib king of Assyria departed...' 2 Kings 19:35-36." "I'll bet he did. So let me get this straight: the deuteronomists, through Hezekiah, impose a policy of informational hygiene on Jerusalem and do some civil-engineering work - you said they worked on the water supply?" "'They stopped all the springs and the brook that flowed through the land, saying, "'Why should the kings of Assyria come and find much water?"' 2 Chronicles 32:4. Then the Hebrews carved a tunnel seventeen hundred feet through solid rock to carry that water inside city walls." "And then as soon as Sennacherib's soldiers came on the scene, they all dropped dead of what can only be understood as an extremely virulent disease, to which the people of Jerusalem were apparently immune. Hmm, interesting - I wonder what got into their water?" 31 Y.T. doesn't get down to Long Beach very much, but when she does, she will do just about anything to avoid the Sacrifice Zone. It's an abandoned shipyard the size of a small town. It sticks out into San Pedro Bay, where the older, nastier Burbclaves of the Basin - unplanned Burbclaves of tiny asbestos-shingled houses patrolled by beetle-browed Kampuchean men with pump shotguns - fade off into the foam-kissed beaches. Most of it's on the appropriately named Terminal Island, and since her plank doesn't run on the water, that means she can only get in or out by one access road. Like all Sacrifice Zones, this one has a fence around it, with yellow metal signs wired to it every few yards. SACRIFICE ZONE WARNING. The National Parks Service has declared this area to be a National Sacrifice Zone. The Sacrifice Zone Program was developed to manage parcels of land whose clean-up cost exceeds their total future economic value. And like all Sacrifice Zone fences, this one has holes in it and is partially torn down in places. Young men blasted out of their minds on natural and artificial male hormones must have some place to do their idiotic coming-of-age rituals. They come in from Burbclaves all over the area in their four-wheel-drive trucks and tear across the open ground, slicing long curling gashes into the clay cap that was placed on the really bad parts to prevent windblown asbestos from blizzarding down over Disneyland. Y.T. is oddly satisfied to know that these boys have never even dreamed of an all-terrain vehicle like Ng's motorized wheelchair. It veers off the paved road with no loss in speed -ride gets a little bumpy - and hits the chain-link fence as if it were a fog bank, plowing a hundred-foot section into the ground. It is a clear night, and so the Sacrifice Zone glitters, an immense carpet of broken glass and shredded asbestos. A hundred feet away, some seagulls are tearing at the belly of a dead German shepherd lying on its back. There is a constant undulation of the ground that makes the shattered glass flash and twinkle; this is caused by vast, sparse migrations of rats. The deep computer-designed imprints of suburban boys' fat knobby tires paint giant runes on the clay, like the mystery figures in Peru that Y.T.'s mom learned about at the NeoAquarian Temple. Through the windows, Y.T. can hear occasional bursts of either firecrackers or gunfire. She can also hear Ng making new, even stranger sounds with his mouth. There is a built-in speaker system in this van - a stereo, though far be it from Ng to actually listen to any tunes. Y.T. can feel it turning on, can sense a nearly inaudible hiss coming from the speakers. The van begins to creep forward across the Zone. The inaudible hiss gathers itself up into a low electronic hum. It's not steady, it wavers up and down, staying pretty low, like Roadkill fooling around with his electric bass. Ng keeps changing the direction of the van, as though he's searching for something, and Y.T. gets the sense that the pitch of the hum is rising. It's definitely rising, building up in the direction of a squeal. Ng snarls a command and the volume is reduced. He's driving very slowly now. "It is possible that you might not have to buy any Snow Crash at all," he mumbles. "We may have found an unprotected stash." "What is this totally irritating noise?" "Bioelectronic sensor. Human cell membranes. Grown in vitro, which means in glass - in a test tube. One side is exposed to outside air, the other side is clean. When a foreign substance penetrates the cell membrane to the clean side, it's detected. The more foreign molecules penetrate, the higher the pitch of the sound." "Like a Geiger counter?" "Very much like a Geiger counter for cell-penetrating compounds," Ng says. Like what? Y.T. wants to ask. But she doesn't. Ng stops the van. He turns on some lights - very dim lights. That's how anal this guy is - he has gone to the trouble to install special dim lights in addition to all the bright ones. They are looking into a sort of bowl, right at the foot of a major drum heap, that is strewn with litter. Most of the litter is empty beer cans. In the middle is a fire pit. Many tire tracks converge here. "Ah, this is good," Ng says. "A place where the young men gather to take drugs." Y.T. rolls her eyes at this display of tubularity. This must be the guy who writes all those antidrug pamphlets they get at school. Like he's not getting a million gallons of drugs every second through all of those gross tubes. "I don't see any signs of booby traps," Ng says. "Why don't you go out and see what kind of drug paraphernalia is out there." She looks at him like, what did you say? "There's a toxics mask hanging on the back of your seat," he says. "What's out there, toxic-wise?" "Discarded asbestos from the shipbuilding industry. Marine antifouling paints that are full of heavy metals. They used PCBs for a lot of things, too." "Great." "I sense your reluctance. But if we can get a sample of Snow Crash from this drug-taking site, it will obviate the rest of our mission." "Well, since you put it that way," Y.T. says, and grabs the mask. It's a big rubber-and-canvas number that covers her whole head and neck. Feels heavy and awkward at first, but whoever designed it had the right idea, all the weight rests in the right places. There's also a pair of heavy gloves that she hauls on. They are way too big. Like the people at the glove factory never dreamed that an actual female could wear gloves. She trudges out onto the glass-and-asbestos soil of the Zone, hoping that Ng isn't going to slam the door shut and drive away and leave her there. Actually, she wishes he would. It would be a cool adventure. Anyway, she goes up to the middle of the "drug-taking site." Is not too surprised to see a little nest of discarded hypodermic needles. And some tiny little empty vials. She picks up a couple of the vials, reads their labels. "What did you find?" Ng says when she gets back into the van, peels off the mask. "Needles. Mostly Hyponarxes. But there's also a couple of Ultra Laminars and some Mosquito twenty-fives." "What does all this mean?" "Hyponarx you can get at any Buy 'n' Fly, people call them rusty nails, they are cheap and dull. Supposedly the needles of poor black diabetics and junkies. Ultra Laminars and Mosquitos; are hip, you get them around fancy Burbclaves, they don't hurt as much when you stick them in, and they have better design. You know, ergonomic plungers, hip color schemes." "What drug were they injecting?" "Checkitout," Y.T. says, and holds up one of the vials toward Ng. Then it occurs to her that he can't exactly turn his head to look. "Where do I hold it so you can see it?" she says. Ng sings a little song. A robot arm unfolds itself from the ceiling of the van, crisply yanks the vial from her hand, swings it around, and holds it in front of a video camera set into the dashboard. The typewritten label stuck onto the vial says, just "Testosterone." "Ha ha, a false alarm," Ng says. The van suddenly rips forward, starts heading right into the middle of the Sacrifice Zone. "Want to tell me what's going on?" Y.T. says, "since I have to actually do the work in this outfit?" "Cell walls," Ng says. "The detector finds any chemical that penetrates cell walls. So we homed in naturally on a source of testosterone. A red herring. How amusing. You see, our biochemists lead sheltered lives, did not anticipate that some people would be so mentally warped as to use hormones like they were some kind of drug. How bizarre." Y.T. smiles to herself. She really likes the idea of living in a world where someone like Ng can get off calling someone else bizarre. "What are you looking for?" "Snow Crash," Ng says. "Instead, we found the Ring of Seventeen." "Snow Crash is the drug that comes in the little tubes," Y.T. says. "I know that. What's the Ring of Seventeen? One of those crazy new rock groups that kids listen to nowadays?" "Snow Crash penetrates the walls of brain cells and goes to the nucleus where the DNA is stored. So for purposes of this mission, we developed a detector that would enable us to find cell wall-penetrating compounds in the air. But we didn't count on heaps of empty testosterone vials being scattered all over the place. All steroids - artificial hormones - share the same basic structure, a ring of seventeen atoms that acts like a magic key that allows them to pass through cell walls. That's why steroids are such powerful substances when they are unleashed in the human body. They can go deep inside the cell, into the nucleus, and actually change the way the cell functions. "To summarize: the detector is useless. A stealthy approach will not work. So we go back to the original plan. You buy some Snow Crash and throw it up in the air." Y.T. doesn't quite understand that last part yet. But she shuts up for a while, because in her opinion, Ng needs to pay more attention to his driving. Once they get out of that really creepy part, most of the Sacrifice Zone turns out to consist of a wilderness of dry brown weeds and large abandoned hunks of metal. There are big heaps of shit rising up from place to place - coal or slag or coke or smelt or something. Every time they come around a corner, they encounter a little plantation of vegetables, tended by Asians or South Americans. Y.T. gets the impression that Ng wants to just run them over, but he always changes his mind at the last instant and swerves around them. Some Spanish-speaking blacks are playing baseball on a broad flat area, using the round lids of fifty-five-gallon drums as bases. They have parked half a dozen old beaters around the edges of the field and turned on their headlights to provide illumination. Nearby is a bar built into a crappy mobile home, marked with a graffiti sign: THE SACRIFICE ZONE. Lines of boxcars are stranded in a yard of rusted-over railway spurs, nopal growing between the ties. One of the boxcars has been turned into a Reverend Wayne's Pearly Gates franchise, and evangelical CentroAmericans are lined up to do their penance and speak in tongues below the neon Elvis. There are no NeoAquarian Temple franchises in the Sacrifice Zone. "The warehouse area is not as dirty as the first place we went," Ng says reassuringly, "so the fact that you can't use the toxics mask won't be so bad. You may smell some Chill fumes." Y.T. does a double take at this new phenomenon: Ng using the street name for a controlled substance. "You mean Freon?" she says. "Yes. The man who is the object of our inquiry is horizontally diversified. That is, he deals in a number of different substances. But he got his start in Freon. He is the biggest Chill wholesaler/retailer on the West Coast." Finally, Y.T. gets it. Ng's van is air-conditioned. Not with one of those shitty ozone-safe air conditioners, but with the real thing, a heavy metal, high-capacity, bonechilling Frigidaire blizzard blaster. It must use an incredible amount of Freon. For all practical purposes, that air conditioner is a part of Ng's body. Y.T.'s driving around with the world's only Freon junkie. "You buy your supply of Chill from this guy?" "Until now, yes. But for the future, I have an arrangement with someone else." Someone else. The Mafia. They are approaching the waterfront. Dozens of long, skinny, single-story warehouses run parallel down toward the water. They all share the same access road at this end. Smaller roads run between them, down toward where the piers used to be. Abandoned tractor-trailers are scattered around from place to place. Ng pulls his van off the access road, into a little nook that is partly concealed between an old red-brick power station and a stack of rusted-out shipping containers. He gets it turned around so it's pointed out of here, kind of like he is expecting to leave rapidly "There's money in the storage compartment in front of you," Ng says. Y.T. opens the glove compartment, as anyone else would call it, and finds a thick bundle of worn-out, dirty, trillion-dollar bills. Ed Meeses. "Jeez, couldn't you get any Gippers? This is kind of bulky." "This is more the kind of thing that a Kourier would pay with." "Because we're all pond scum, right?" "No comment." "What is this, a quadrillion dollars?" "One-and-a-half quadrillion. Inflation, you know." "What do I do?" "Fourth warehouse on the left," Ng says. "When you get the tube, throw it up in the air." "Then what?" "Everything else will be taken care of." Y.T. has her doubts about that. But if she gets in trouble, well, she can always whip out those dog tags. While Y.T. climbs down out of the van with her skateboard, Ng makes new sounds with his mouth. She hears a gliding and clunking noise resonating through the frame of the van, machinery coming to life. Turning back to look, she sees that a steel cocoon on the roof of the van has opened up. There is a miniature helicopter underneath it, all folded up. Its rotor blades spread themselves apart, like a butterfly unfolding. Its name is painted on its side: WHIRLWIND REAPER. 32 It's pretty obvious which warehouse we are looking for here. Fourth one on the left, the road that runs down toward the waterfront is blocked off by several shipping containers - the big steel boxes you see on the backs of eighteen-wheelers. They are arranged in a herringbone pattern, so that in order to get past them you have to slalom back and forth half a dozen times, passing through a narrow mazelike channel between high walls of steel. Guys with guns are perched on top, looking down at Y.T. as she guides her plank through the obstacle course. By the time she makes it out into the clear, she's been heavily checked out. There is the occasional light-bulb-on-a-wire strung around, and even a couple of strings of Christmas-tree lights. These are switched on, just to make her feel a little more welcome. She can't see anything, just lights making colored halos amid a generalized cloud of dust and fog. In front of her, access to the waterfront is blocked off by another maze of shipping containers. One of them has a graffiti sign: THE UKOD SEZ: TRY SOME COUNTDOWN TODAY! "What's the UKOD?" she says, just to break the ice a little. "Undisputed King of the Ozone Destroyers," says a man's voice. He is just in the act of jumping down from the loading dock of the warehouse to her left. Back inside the warehouse, Y.T. can see electric lights and glowing cigarettes. "That's what we call Emilio." "Oh, right," Y.T. says. "The Freon guy. I'm not here for Chill." "Well," says the guy, a tall rangy dude in his forties, much too skinny to be forty years old. He yanks the butt of a cigarette from his mouth and throws it away like a dart. "What'll it be, then?" "What does Snow Crash cost." "One point seven five Gippers," the guy says. "I thought it was one point five," Y.T. says. The guy shakes his head. "Inflation, you know. Still, it's a bargain. Hell, that plank you're on is probably worth a hundred Gippers." "You can't even buy these for dollars," Y.T. says, getting her back up. "Look, all I've got is one-and-a-half quadrillion dollars." She pulls the bundle out of her pocket. The guy laughs, shakes his head, hollers back to his colleagues inside the warehouse. "You guys, we got a chick here who wants to pay in Meeses." "Better get rid of 'em fast, honey," says a sharper, nastier voice, "or get yourself a wheelbarrow." It's an even older guy with a bald head, curly hair on the sides, and a paunch. He's standing up on the loading dock. "If you're not going to take it, just say so," Y.T. says. All of this chatter has nothing to do with business. "We don't get chicks back here very often," the fat bald old guy says. Y.T. knows that this must be the UKOD himself "So we'll give you a discount for being spunky. Turn around." "Fuck you," Y.T. says. She's not going to turn around for this guy. Everyone within earshot laughs. "Okay, do it," the UKOD says. The tall skinny guy goes back over to the loading dock and hauls an aluminum briefcase down, sets it on top of a steel drum in the middle of the road so that it's at about waist height. "Pay first," he says. She hands him the Meeses. He examines the bundle, sneers, throws it back into the warehouse with a sudden backhand motion. All the guys inside laugh some more. He opens up the briefcase, revealing the little computer keyboard. He shoves his ID card into the slot, types on it for a couple of seconds. He unsnaps a tube from the top of the briefcase, places it into the socket in the bottom part. The machine draws it inside, does something, spits it back out. He hands the tube to Y.T. The red numbers on top are counting down from ten. "When it gets down to one, hold it up to your nose and start inhaling," the guy says. She's already backing away from him. "You got a problem, little girl?" he says. "Not yet," she says. Then she throws the tube up in the air as hard as she can. The chop of the rotor blades comes out of nowhere. The Whirlwind Reaper blurs over their heads; everyone crouches for an instant as surprise buckles their knees. The tube does not come back to earth. "You fucking bitch," the skinny guy says. "That was a really cool plan," the UKOD says, "but the part I can't figure out is, why would a nice, smart girl like you participate in a suicide mission?" The sun comes out. About half a dozen suns, actually, all around them up in the air, so that there are no shadows. The faces of the skinny man and the UKOD look flat and featureless under this blinding illumination. Y.T. is the only person who can see worth a damn because her Knight Visions have compensated for it; the men wince and sag beneath the light. Y.T. turns to look behind herself. One of the miniature suns is hanging above the maze of shipping containers, casting light into all its crannies, blinding the gunmen who stand guard there. The scene flashes too light and too dark as her goggles' electronics try to make up their mind. But in the midst of this whole visual tangle she gets one image printed indelibly on her retina: the gunmen going down like a treeline in a hurricane, and for just an instant, a line of dark angular things silhouetted above the maze as they crest it like a cybernetic tsunami. Rat Things. They have evaded the whole maze by leaping over it in long, flat parabolas. Along the way, some of them have slammed right through the bodies of men holding guns, like NFL fullbacks plowing full speed through nerdy sideline photographers. Then, as they land on the road in front of the maze, there is an instant burst of dust with frantic white sparks dancing around at the bottom, and while all this is happening, Y.T. doesn't hear, she feels one of the Rat Things impacting on the body of the tall skinny guy, hears his ribs crackling like a ball of cellophane. Hell is already breaking loose inside the warehouse, but her eyes are trying to follow the action, watching the sparks-and-dust contrails of more Rat Things drawing themselves down the length of the road in an instant and then going airborne to the top of the next barrier. Three seconds have passed since she threw the tube into the air. She is turning back to look inside the warehouse. But someone's on top of the warehouse, catching her eye for a second. It's another gunman, a sniper, stepping out from behind an air-conditioning unit, just getting used to the light, raising his weapon to his shoulder. Y.T. winces as a red laser beam from his rifle sweeps across her eyes once, twice as he zeroes his sights on her forehead. Behind him she sees the Whirlwind Reaper, its rotors making a disk under the brilliant light, a disk that is foreshortened into a narrow ellipse and then into a steady silver line, Then it flies right past the sniper. The chopper pulls up into a hard turn, searching for additional prey, and something falls beneath it in a powerless trajectory, she thinks that it has dropped a bomb. But it's the head of the sniper, spinning rapidly, throwing out a fine pink helix under the light. The little chopper's rotor blade must have caught him in the nape of the neck. One part of her, is dispassionately watching the head bounce and spin in the dust, and the other part of her is screaming her lungs out. She hears a crack, the first loud noise so far. She turns to follow the sound, looking in the direction of a water tower that looms above this area, providing a fine vantage point for a sniper. But then her attention is drawn by the pencil-thin blue-white exhaust of a tiny rocket that lances up into the sky from Ng's van. It doesn't do anything; it just goes up to a certain height and hovers, sitting on its exhaust. She doesn't care, she's kicking her way down the road now on her plank, trying to get something between her and that water tower. There is a second cracking noise. Before this sound even reaches her ears, the rocket darts horizontally like a minnow, makes one or two minor cuts to correct its course, zeroes in on that sniper's perch, up in the water tower's access ladder. There is a great nasty explosion without any flame or light, like the loud pointless booms that you get sometimes at fireworks shows. For a moment, she can hear the clamor of shrapnel ringing through the ironwork of the water tower. Just before she kicks her way back into the maze, a dustline whips past her, snapping rocks and fragments of broken glass into her face. It shoots into the maze. She hears it Ping-Pong all the way through, kicking off the steel walls in order to change direction. It's a Rat Thing clearing the way for her. How sweet! "Smooth move, Ex-Lax," she says, climbing back into Ng's van. Her throat feels thick and swollen. Maybe it's from screaming, maybe it's the toxic waste, maybe she's getting ready to gag. "Didn't you know about the snipers?" she says. If she can keep talking about the details of the job, maybe she can keep her mind off of what the Whirlwind Reaper did. "I didn't know about the one on the water tower," Ng says. "But as soon as he fired a couple of rounds, we plotted the bullets' trajectories on millimeter-wave and back-traced them." He talks to his van and it pulls out of its hiding place, headed for I-405. "Seems like kind of an obvious place to look for a sniper." "He was in an unfortified position, exposed from all sides," Ng says. "He chose to work from a suicidal position. Which is not a typical behavior for drug dealers. Typically, they are more pragmatic. Now, do you have any other criticisms of my performance?" "Well, did it work?" "Yes. The tube was inserted into a sealed chamber inside the helicopter before it discharged its contents. It was then flash-frozen in liquid helium before it could chemically self-destruct. We now have a sample of Snow Crash, something that no one else has been able to get. It is the kind of success on which reputations such as mine are constructed." "How about the Rat Things?" "How about them?" "Are they back in the van now? Back there?" Y.T. jerks her head aft. Ng pauses for a moment. Y.T. reminds herself that he is sitting in his office in Vietnam in 1955 watching all of this on TV. "Three of them are back," Ng says. "Three are on their way back. And three of them I left behind to carry out additional pacification measures." "You're leaving them behind?" "They'll catch up," Ng says. "On a straightaway, they can run at seven hundred miles per hour." "Is it true they have nuke stuff inside of them?" "Radiothermal isotopes." "What happens if one gets busted open? Everyone gets all mutated?" "If you ever find yourself in the presence of a destructive force powerful enough to decapsulate those isotopes," Ng says, "radiation sickness will be the least of your worries." "Will they be able to find their way back to us?" "Didn't you ever watch Lassie Come Home when you were a child?" he asks. "Or rather, more of a child than you are now?" So. She was right. The Rat Things are made from dog parts. "That's cruel," she says. "This brand of sentimentalism is very predictable," Ng says. "To take a dog out of his body - keep him in a hutch all the time." "When the Rat Thing, as you call it, is in his hutch, do you know what he's doing?" "Licking his electric nuts?" "Chasing Frisbees through the surf. Forever. Eating steaks that grow on trees. Lying beside the fire in a hunting lodge. I haven't installed any testicle-licking simulations yet, but now that you have brought it up, I shall consider it." "What about when he's out of the hutch, running around doing errands for you?" "Can't you imagine how liberating it is for a pit bull-terrier to be capable of running seven hundred miles an hour?" Y.T. doesn't answer. She is too busy trying to get her mind around this concept. "Your mistake," Ng says, "is that you think that all mechanically assisted organisms - like me - are pathetic cripples. In fact, we are better than we were before." "Where do you get the pit bulls from?" "An incredible number of them are abandoned every day, in cities all over the place." "You cut up pound puppies?" "We save abandoned dogs from certain extinction and send them to what amounts to dog heaven." "My friend Roadkill and I had a pit bull. Fido. We found it in an alley. Some asshole had shot it in the leg. We had a vet fix it up. We kept it in this empty apartment in Roadkill's building for a few months, played with it every day, brought it food. And then one day we came to play with Fido, and he was gone. Someone broke in and took him away. Probably sold him to a research lab." "Probably," Ng says, "but that's no way to keep a dog." "It's better than the way he was living before." There's a break in the conversation as Ng occupies himself with talking to his van, maneuvering onto the Long Beach Freeway, headed back into town. "Do they remember stuff?" Y.T. says. "To the extent dogs can remember anything," Ng says. "We don't have any way of erasing memories." "So maybe Fido is a Rat Thing somewhere, right now." "I would hope so, for his sake," Ng says. In a Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong franchise in Phoenix, Arizona, Ng Security Industries Semi-Autonomous Guard Unit B-782 comes awake. The factory that put him together thinks of him as a robot named Number B-782. But he thinks of himself as a pit bull-terrier named Fido. In the old days, Fido was a bad little doggie sometimes. But now, Fido lives in a nice little house in a nice little yard. Now he has become a nice little doggie. He likes to lie in his house and listen to the other nice doggies bark. Fido is part of a big pack. Tonight there is a lot of barking from a place far away. When he listens to this barking, Fido knows that a whole pack of nice doggies is very excited about something. A lot of very bad men are trying to hurt a nice girl. This has made the doggies very angry and excited. In order to protect the nice girl, they are hurting some of the bad men. Which is as it should be. Fido does not come out of his house. When he first heard the barking, he became excited. He likes nice girls, and it makes him especially upset when bad men try to hurt them. Once there was a nice girl who loved him. That was before, when he lived in a scary place and he was always hungry and many people were bad to him. But the nice girl loved him and was good to him. Fido loves the nice girl very much. But he can tell from the barking of the other doggies that the nice girl is safe now. So he goes back to sleep. 33 "'Scuse me, pod," Y.T. says, stepping into the Babel/Infocalypse room. "Jeez! This place looks like one of those things full of snow that you shake up." "Hi, Y.T." "Got some more intel for you, pod." "Shoot." "Snow Crash is a roid. Or else it's similar to a roid. Yeah, that's it. It goes into your cell walls, just like a roid. And then it does something to the nucleus of the cell." "You were right," Hiro says to the Librarian, "just like herpes." "This guy I was talking to said that it fucks with your actual DNA. I don't know what half of this shit means, but that's what he said." "Who's this guy you were talking to?" "Ng. Of Ng Security Industries. Don't bother talking to him, he won't give you any intel," she says dismissively. "Why are you hanging out with a guy like Ng?" "Mob job. The Mafia has a sample of the drug for the first time, thanks to me and my pal Ng. Until now, it always self-destructed before they could get to it. So I guess they're analyzing it or something. Trying to make an antidote, maybe." "Or trying to reproduce it." "The Mafia wouldn't do that." "Don't be a sap," Hiro says. "Of course they would." Y.T. seems miffed at Hiro. "Look," he says, "I'm sorry for reminding you of this, but if we still had laws, the Mafia would be a criminal organization." "But we don't have laws," she says, "so it's just another chain." "Fine, all I'm saying is, they may not be doing this for the benefit of humanity." "And why are you in here, holed up with this geeky daemon?" she says, gesturing at the Librarian. "For the benefit of humanity? Or because you're chasing a piece of ass? Whatever her name is." "Okay, okay, let's not talk about the Mafia anymore," Hiro says. "I have work to do." "So do I." Y.T. zaps out again, leaving a hole in the Metaverse that is quickly filled in by Hiro's computer. "I think she may have a crush on me," Hiro explains. "She seemed quite affectionate," the Librarian says. "Okay," Hiro says, "back to work. Where did Asherah come from?" "Originally from Sumerian mythology. Hence, she is also important in Babylonian, Assyrian, Canaanite, Hebrew, and Ugaritic myths, which are all descended from the Sumerian." "Interesting. So the Sumerian language died out, but the Sumerian myths were somehow passed on in the new languages." "Correct. Sumerian was used as the language of religion and scholarship by later civilizations, much as Latin was used in Europe during the Middle Ages. No one spoke it as their native language, but educated people could read it. In this way, Sumerian religion was passed on." "And what did Asherah do in Sumerian myths?" "The accounts are fragmentary. Few tablets have been discovered, and these are broken and scattered. It is thought that L. Bob Rife has excavated many intact tablets, but he refuses to release them. The surviving Sumerian myths exist in fragments and have a bizarre quality. Lagos compared them to the imaginings of a febrile two-year-old. Entire sections of them simply cannot be translated - the characters are legible and well-known, but when put together they do not say anything that leaves an imprint on the modern mind." "Like instructions for programming a VCR." "There is a great deal of monotonous repetition. There is also a fair amount of what Lagos described as 'Rotary Club Boosterism' - scribes extolling the superior virtue of their city over some other city." "What makes one Sumerian city better than another one? A bigger ziggurat? A better football team?" "Better me." "What are me?" "Rules or principles that control the operation of society, like a code of laws, but on a more fundamental level." "I don't get it." "That is the point. Sumerian myths are not 'readable' or 'enjoyable' in the same sense that Greek and Hebrew myths are. They reflect a fundamentally different consciousness from ours." "I suppose if our culture was based on Sumer, we would find them more interesting," Hiro says. "Akkadian myths came after the Sumerian and are clearly based on Sumerian myths to a large extent. It is clear that Akkadian redactors went through the Sumerian myths, edited out the (to us) bizarre and incomprehensible parts, and strung them together into longer works, such as the Epic of Gilgamesh. The Akkadians were Semites - cousins of the Hebrews." "What do the Akkadians have to say about her?" "She is a goddess of the erotic and of fertility. She also has a destructive, vindictive side. In one myth, Kirta, a human king, is made grievously ill by Asherah. Only El, king of the gods, can heal him. El gives certain persons the privilege of nursing at Asherah's breasts. El and Asherah often adopt human babies and let them nurse on Asherah - in one text, she is wet nurse to seventy divine sons." "Spreading that virus," Hiro says. "Mothers with AIDS can spread the disease to their babies by breastfeeding them. But this is the Akkadian version, right?" "Yes, sir." "I want to hear some Sumerian stuff, even if it is untranslatable." "Would you like to hear how Asherah made Enki sick?" "Sure." "How this story is translated depends on how it is interpreted. Some see it as a Fall from Paradise story. Some see it as a battle between male and female or water and earth. Some see it as a fertility allegory. This reading is based on the interpretation of Bendt Alster." "Duly noted." "To summarize: Enki and Ninhursag - who is Asherah, although in this story she also bears other epithets - live in a place called Dilmun. Dilmun is pure, clean and bright, there is no sickness, people do not grow old, predatory animals do not hunt. "But there is no water. So Ninhursag pleads with Enki, who is a sort of water-god, to bring water to Dilmun. He does so by masturbating among the reeds of the ditches and letting flow his life-giving semen - the 'water of the heart,' as it is called. At the same time, he pronounces a nam-shub forbidding anyone to enter this area - he does not want anyone to come near his semen." "Why not?" "The myth does not say." "Then," Hiro says, "he must have thought it was valuable, or dangerous, or both." "Dilmun is now better than it was before. The fields produce abundant crops and so on." "Excuse me, but how did Sumerian agriculture work? Did they use a lot of irrigation?" "They were entirely dependent upon it." "So Enki was responsible, according to this myth, for irrigating the fields with his 'water of the heart.'" "Enki was the water-god, yes." "Okay, go on." "But Ninhursag - Asherah - violates his decree and takes Enki's semen and impregnates herself. After nine days of pregnancy she gives birth, painlessly, to a daughter, Ninmu. Ninmu walks on the riverbank. Enki sees her, becomes inflamed, goes across the river, and has sex with her." "With his own daughter." "Yes. She has another daughter nine days later, named Ninkurra, and the pattern is repeated." "Enki has sex with Ninkurra, too?" "Yes, and she has a daughter named Uttu. Now, by this time, Ninhursag has apparently recognized a pattern in Enki's behavior, and so she advises Uttu to stay in her house, predicting that Enki will then approach her bearing gifts, and try to seduce her." "Does he?" "Enki once again fills the ditches with the 'water of the heart,' which makes things grow. The gardener rejoices and embraces Enki." "Who's the gardener?" "Just some character in the story," the Librarian says. "He provides Enki with grapes and other gifts. Enki disguises himself as the gardener and goes to Uttu and seduces her. But this time, Ninhursag manages to obtain a sample of Enki's semen from Uttu's thighs." "My God. Talk about your mother-in-law from hell." "Ninhursag spreads the semen on the ground, and it causes eight plants to sprout up." "Does Enki have sex with the plants, then?" "No, he eats them - in some sense, he learns their secrets by doing so." "So here we have our Adam and Eve motif." "Ninhursag curses Enki, saying 'Until thou art dead, I shall not look upon thee with the "eye of life."' Then she disappears, and Enki becomes very ill. Eight of his organs become sick, one for each of the plants. Finally, Ninhursag is persuaded to come back. She gives birth to eight deities, one for each part of Enki's body that is sick, and Enki is healed. These deities are the pantheon of Dilmun; i.e., this act breaks the cycle of incest and creates a new race of male and female gods that can reproduce normally." "I'm beginning to see what Lagos meant about the febrile two-year-old." "Alster interprets the myth as 'an exposition of a logical problem: Supposing that originally there was nothing but one creator, how could ordinary binary sexual relations come into being?'" "Ah, there's that word 'binary' again." "You may remember an unexplored fork earlier in our conversation that would have brought us to this same place by another route. This myth can be compared to the Sumerian creati