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"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 creation myth, in which heaven and earth are united
to begin with, but the world is not really created until the two are
separated. Most Creation myths begin with a 'paradoxical unity of
everything, evaluated either as chaos or as Paradise,' and the world as we
know it does not really come into being until this is changed. I should
point out here that Enki's original name was En-Kur, Lord of Kur. Kur was a
primeval ocean - Chaos - that Enki conquered."
"Every hacker can identify with that."
"But Asherah has similar connotations. Her name in Ugaritic, 'atiratu
yammi' means 'she who treads on (the) sea (dragon).' "
"Okay, so both Enki and Asherah were figures who had in some sense
defeated chaos. And your point is that this defeat of chaos, the separation
of the static, unified world into a binary system, is identified with
creation."
"Correct."
"What else can you tell me about Enki?"
"He was the en of the city of Eridu."
"What's an en? Is that like a king?"
"A priest-king of sorts. The en was the custodian of the local temple,
where the me - the rules of the society - were stored on clay tablets."
"Okay. Where's Eridu?"
"Southern Iraq. It has only been excavated within the past few years."
"By Rife's people?"
"Yes. As Kramer has it, Enki is the god of wisdom - but this is a bad
translation. His wisdom is not the wisdom of an old man, but rather a
knowledge of how to do things, especially occult things. 'He astonishes even
the other gods with shocking solutions to apparently impossible problems.'
He is a sympathetic god for the most part, who assists humankind."
"Really!"
"Yes. The most important Sumerian myths center on him. As I mentioned,
he is associated with water. He fills the rivers, and the extensive Sumerian
canal system, with his life-giving semen. He is said to have created the
Tigris in a single epochal act of masturbation. He describes himself as
follows: 'I am lord. I am the one whose word endures. I am eternal.' Others
describe him: 'a word from you - and heaps and piles stack high with grain.'
'You bring down the stars of heaven, you have computed their number.' He
pronounces the name of everything created..."
"'Pronounces the name of everything created?"'
"In many Creation myths, to name a thing is to create it. He is
referred to, in various myths, as 'expert who instituted incantations,'
'word-rich,' 'Enki, master of all the right commands,' as Kramer and Maier
have it, 'His word can bring order where there had been only chaos and
introduce disorder where there had been harmony.' He devotes a great deal of
effort to imparting his knowledge to his son, the god Marduk, chief deity of
the Babylonians."
"So the Sumerians worshipped Enki, and the Babylonians, who came after
the Sumerians, worshipped Marduk, his son."
"Yes, sir. And whenever Marduk got stuck, he would ask his father Enki
for help. There is a representation of Marduk here on this stele - the Code
of Hammurabi. According to Hammurabi, the Code was given to him personally
by Marduk."
Hiro wanders over to the Code of Hammurabi and has a gander. The
cuneiform means nothing to him, but the illustration on top is easy enough
to understand. Especially the part in the middle."
"Why, exactly, is Marduk handing Hammurabi a one and a zero in this
picture?" Hiro asks.
"They were emblems of royal power," the Librarian says. "Their origin
is obscure."
"Enki must have been responsible for that one," Hiro says.
"Enki's most important role is as the creator and guardian of the me
and the gis-hur, the 'key words' and 'patterns' that rule the universe."
"Tell me more about the me."
"To quote Kramer and Maier again, '[They believed in] the existence
from time primordial of a fundamental, unalterable, comprehensive assortment
of powers and duties, norms and standards, rules and regulations, known as
me, relating to the cosmos and its components, to gods and humans, to cities
and countries, and to the varied aspects of civilized life.' "
"Kind of like the Torah."
"Yes, but they have a kind of mystical or magical force. And they often
deal with banal subjects - not just religion."
"Examples?"
"In one myth, the goddess Inanna goes to Eridu and tricks Enki into
giving her ninety-four me and brings them back to her home town of Uruk,
where they are greeted with much commotion and rejoicing."
"Inanna is the person that Juanita's obsessed with."
"Yes, sir. She is hailed as a savior because 'she brought the perfect
execution of the me.'"
"Execution? Like executing a computer program?"
"Yes. Apparently, they are like algorithms for carrying out certain
activities essential to the society. Some of them have to do with the
workings of priesthood and kingship. Some explain how to carry out religious
ceremonies. Some relate to the arts of war and diplomacy. Many of them are
about the arts and crafts: music, carpentry, smithing, tanning, building,
farming, even such simple tasks as lighting fires."
"The operating system of society."
"I'm sorry?"
"When you first turn on a computer, it is an inert collection of
circuits that can't really do anything. To start up the machine, you have to
infuse those circuits with a collection of rules that tell it how to
function. How to be a computer. It sounds as though these me served as the
operating system of the society, organizing an inert collection of people
into a functioning system."
"As you wish. In any case, Enki was the guardian of the me."
"So he was, a good guy, really."
"He was the most beloved of the gods."
"He sounds like kind of a hacker. Which makes his nam-shub very
difficult to understand. If he was such a nice guy, why did he do the Babel
thing?"
"This is considered to be one of the mysteries of Enki. As you have
noticed, his behavior was not always consistent with modern norms."
"I don't buy that. I don't think he actually fucked his sister,
daughter, and so on. That story has to be a metaphor for something else. I
think it is a metaphor for some kind of recursive informational process.
This whole myth stinks of it. To these people, water equals semen. Makes
sense, because they probably had no concept of pure water - it was all brown
and muddy and full of viruses anyway. But from a modern standpoint, semen is
just a carrier of information - both benevolent sperm and malevolent
viruses. Enki's water - his semen, his data, his me - flow throughout the
country of Sumer and cause it to flourish."
"As you may be aware, Sumer existed on the floodplain between two major
rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates. This is where all the clay came from -
they took it directly from the riverbeds."
"So Enki even provided them with their medium for conveying information
- clay. They wrote on wet clay and then they dried it out - got rid of the
water. If water got to it later, the information was destroyed. But if they
baked it and drove out all the water, sterilized Enki's semen with heat,
then the tablet lasted forever, immutable, like the words of the Torah. Do I
sound like a maniac?"
"I don't know," the Librarian says, "but you do sound a little like
Lagos."
"I'm thrilled. Next thing you know, I'll turn myself into a gargoyle."
Any ped can get into Griffith Park without being noticed. And Y.T.
figures that despite the barriers across the road, the Falabala camp isn't
too well protected, if you've got off-road capability. For a skate ninja on
a brand-new plank in a brand-new pair of Knight Visions (hey, you have to
spend money to make money) there will be no problem. Just find a high
embankment that ramps down into the canyon, skirt the edge until you see
those campfires down below. And then lean down that hill. Trust gravity.
She realizes halfway down that her blue-and-orange coverall, fly as it
may be, is going to be a real attention getter in the middle of the night in
the Falabala zone, so she reaches up to her collar, feels a hard disk sewn
into the fabric, presses it between thumb and finger until it clicks. Her
coverall darkens, the colors shimmer through the electropigment like an oil
slick, and then it's black.
On her first visit she didn't check this place out all that carefully
because she hoped she'd never come back. So the embankment turns out to be
taller and steeper than Y.T. remembered. Maybe a little more of a cliff,
drop-off, or abyss than she thought. Only thing that makes her think so is
that she seems to be doing a lot of free-fall work here. Major plummeting.
Big time ballistic styling. That's cool, it's all part of the job, she tells
herself. The smartwheels are good for it. The tree trunks are bluish black,
standing out not so well against a blackish blue background. The only other
thing she can see is the red laser light of the digital speedometer down on
the front of her plank, which is not showing any real information. The
numbers have vibrated themselves into a cloud of gritty red light as the
radar speed sensor tries to lock onto something.
She turns the speedometer off. Running totally black now. Precipitating
her way toward the sweet 'crete of the creek bottom like a black angel who
has just had the shroud lines of her celestial parachute severed by the
Almighty. And when the wheels finally meet the pavement, it just about
drives her knees up through her jawbone. She finishes the whole
gravitational transaction with not much altitude and a nasty head of dark
velocity.
Mental note: Next time just jump off a fucking bridge. That way there's
no question of getting an invisible cholla shoved up your nose.
She whips around a corner, heeled over so far she could lick the yellow
line, and her Knight Visions reveal all in a blaze of multispectral
radiation. On infrared, the Falabala encampment is a turbulating aurora of
pink fog punctuated by the white-hot bursts of campfires. All of it rests on
dim bluish pavement, which means, in the false-color scheme of things, that
it's cold. Behind everything is the jagged horizon line of that funky
improvised barrier technology that the Falabalas are so good at. A barrier
that has been completely spurned, snubbed, and confounded by Y.T., who
dropped out of the sky into the middle of the camp like a Stealth fighter
with an inferiority complex.
Once you're into the actual encampment, people don't really notice or
care who you are. A couple people see her, watch her slide on by, don't get
all hairy about it. They probably get a lot of Kouriers coming through here.
A lot of dippy, gullible, Kool-Aid-drinking couriers. And these people
aren't hip enough to tell Y.T. apart from that breed. But that's okay,
she'll pass for now, as long as they don't check out the detailing on her
new plank.
The campfires provide enough plain old regular visible light to show
this sorry affair for what it is: a bunch of demented Boy Scouts, a jamboree
without merit badges or hygiene. With the IR supered on top of the visible,
she can also see vague, spectral red faces out in the shadows where her
unassisted eyes would only see darkness. These new Knight Visions cost her a
big wad of her Mob drug-running money. Just the kind of thing Mom had in
mind when she insisted Y.T. get a part-time job.
Some of the people who were here last time are gone now, and there's a
few new ones she doesn't recognize.
There's a couple of people actually wearing duct-tape straitjackets.
That's a fashion statement reserved for the ones who are totally out of
control, rolling and thrashing around on the ground. And there's a few more
who are spazzing out, but not as bad, and one or two who are just plain
messed up, like plain old derelicts that you might see at the Snooze 'n'
Cruise.
"Hey, look!" someone says. "It's our friend the Kourier! Welcome,
friend!"
She's got her Liquid Knuckles uncapped, available, and shaken well
before use. She's got high-voltage, high-fashion metallic cuffs around her
wrists in case someone tries to grab her by same. And a bundy stunner up her
sleeve. Only the most tubular throwbacks carry guns. Guns take a long time
to work (you have to wait for the victim to bleed to death), but
paradoxically they end up killing people pretty often. But nobody hassles
you after you've hit them with a bundy stunner. At least that's what the ads
say.
So it's not like she exactly feels vulnerable or anything. But still,
she'd like to pick her target. So she maintains escape velocity until she's
found the woman who seemed friendly - the bald chick in the torn-up Chanel
knockoff - and then zeroes in on her.
"Let's get off into the woods, man," Y.T. says, "I want to talk to you
about what's going on with what's left of your brain."
The woman smiles, struggles to her feet with the good-natured
awkwardness of a retarded person in a good mood. "I like to talk about
that," she says. "Because I believe in it."
Y.T. doesn't stop to do a lot of talking, just grabs the woman by the
hand, starts leading her uphill, into the scrubby little trees, away from
the road. She doesn't see any pink faces lurking up here in the infrared, it
ought to be safe. But there are a couple behind her, just ambling along
pleasantly, not looking directly at her, like they just decided it was time
to go for a stroll in the woods in the middle of the night. One of them is
the High Priest.
The woman's probably in her mid-twenties, she's a tall gangly type,
nice- but not good-looking, probably was a spunky but low-scoring forward on
her high school basketball team. Y.T. sits her down on a rock out in the
darkness.
"Do you have any idea where you are?" Y.T. says.
"In the park," the woman says, "with my friends. We're helping to
spread the Word."
"How'd you get here?"
"From the Enterprise. That's where we go to learn things."
"You mean, like, the Raft? The Enterprise Raft? Is that where you guys
all came from?"
"I don't know where we came from," the woman says. "Sometimes it's hard
to remember stuff. But that's not important."
"Where were you before? You didn't grow up on the Raft, did you?"
"I was a systems programmer for 3verse Systems in Mountain View,
California," the woman says, suddenly whipping off a string of perfect,
normal-sounding English.
'Then how did you get to be on the Raft?"
"I don't know. My old life stopped. My new life started. Now I'm here."
Back to baby talk.
"What's the last thing you remember before your old life stopped?"
"I was working late. My computer was having problems."
"That's it? That's the last normal thing that happened to you?"
"My system crashed," she said. "I saw static. And then I became very
sick. I went to the hospital. And there in the hospital, I met a man who
explained everything to me. He explained that I had been washed in the
blood. That I belonged to the Word now. And suddenly it all made sense. And
then I decided to go to the Raft."
"You decided, or someone decided for you?"
"I just wanted to. That's where we go."
"Who else was on the Raft with you?"
"More people like me."
"Like you how?"
"All programmers. Like me. Who had seen the Word."
"Seen it on their computers?"
"Yes. Or sometimes on TV."
"What did you do on the Raft?"
The woman pushes up one sleeve of her raggedy sweatshirt to expose a
needle-pocked arm.
"You took drugs?"
"No. We gave blood."
"They sucked your blood out?"
"Yes. Sometimes we would do a little coding. But only some of us."
"How long have you been here?"
"I don't know. They move us here when our veins don't work anymore. We
just do things to help spread the Word -drag stuff around, make barricades.
But we don't really spend much time working. Most of the time we sing songs,
pray, and tell other people about the Word."
"You want to leave? I can get you out of here."
"No," the woman says, "I've never been so happy."
"How can you say that? You were a big-time hacker. Now you're kind of a
dip, if I may speak frankly."
"That's okay, it doesn't hurt my feelings. I wasn't really happy when I
was a hacker. I never thought about the important things. God. Heaven. The
things of the spirit. It's hard to think about those things in America. You
just put them aside. But those are really the important things - not
programming computers or making money. Now, that's all I think about."
Y.T. has been keeping an eye on the High Priest and his buddy. They
keep moving closer, one step at a time. Now they're close enough that Y.T.
can smell their dinner. The woman puts her hand on Y.T.'s shoulder pad.
"I want you to stay here with me. Won't you come down and have some
refreshments? You must be thirsty."
"Gotta run," Y.T. says, standing up.
"I really have to object to that," the High Priest says, stepping
forward. He doesn't say it angrily. Now he's trying to be like Y.T.'s dad.
"That's not really the right decision for you."
"What are you, a role model?"
"That's okay. You don't have to agree. But let's go down and sit by the
campfire and talk about it."
"Let's just get the fuck away from Y.T. before she goes into a
self-defense mode," Y.T. says.
All three Falabalas step back away from her. Very cooperative. The High
Priest is holding up his hands, placating her. "I'm sorry if we made you
feel threatened," he says.
"You guys just come on a little weird," Y.T. says, flipping her goggles
back onto infrared.
In the infrared, she can see that the third Falabala, the one who came
up here with the High Priest, is holding a small thing in one hand that is
unusually warm.
She nails him with her penlight, spotlighting his upper body in a
narrow yellow beam. Most of him is dirty and dun colored and reflects little
light. But there is a brilliant glossy red thing, a shaft of ruby.
It's a hypodermic needle. It's full of red fluid. Under infrared, it
shows up warm. It's fresh blood.
And she doesn't exactly get it - why these guys would be walking around
with a syringe full of fresh blood. But she's seen enough.
The Liquid Knuckles shoots out of the can in a long narrow neon-green
stream, and when it nails the needle man in the face, he jerks his head back
like he's just been axed across the bridge of the nose and falls back
without making a sound. Then she gives the High Priest a shot of it for good
measure. The woman just stands there, totally, like, appalled.
Y.T. pumps herself up out of the canyon so fast that when she flies out
into traffic, she's going about as fast as it is. As soon as she gets a
solid poon on a nocturnal lettuce tanker, she gets on the phone to Mom.
"Mom, listen. No, Mom, never mind the roaring noise. Yes, I am riding
my skateboard in traffic. But listen to me for a second, Mom - "
She has to hang up on the old bitch. It's impossible to talk to her.
Then she tries to make a voice linkup with Hiro. That takes a couple of
minutes to go through.
"Hello! Hello! Hello!" she's shouting. Then she hears the honk of a car
horn. Coming out of the telephone.
"Hello?"
"It's Y.T."
"How are you doing?" This guy always seems a little too laid back in
his personal dealings. She doesn't really want to talk about how she's
doing. She hears another honking horn in the background, behind Hiro's
voice.
"Where the hell are you, Hiro?"
"Walking down a street in L.A."
"How can you be goggled in if you're walking down a street?" Then the
terrible reality sinks in: "Oh, my God, you didn't turn into a gargoyle, did
you?"
"Well," Hiro says. He is hesitant, embarrassed, like it hadn't occurred
to him yet that this was what he was doing. "It's not exactly like being a
gargoyle. Remember when you gave me shit about spending all my money on
computer stuff?"
"Yeah."
"I decided I wasn't spending enough. So I got a beltpack machine.
Smallest ever made. I'm walking down the street with this thing strapped to
my belly. It's really cool."
"You're a gargoyle."
"Yeah, but it's not like having all this clunky shit strapped all over
your body - "
"You're a gargoyle. Listen, I talked to one of these wholesalers."
"Yeah?"
"She says she used to be a hacker. She saw something strange on her
computer. Then she got sick for a while and joined this cult and ended up on
the Raft."
"The Raft. Do tell."
"On the Enterprise. They take their blood, Hiro. Suck it out of their
bodies. They infect people by injecting them with the blood of sick hackers.
And when their veins get all tracked out like a junkie's, they cut them
loose and put them to work on the mainland running the wholesale operation."
"That's good," he says. "That's good stuff."
"She says she saw some static on her computer screen and it made her
sick. You know anything about that?"
"Yeah. It's true."
"It's true?"
"Yeah. But you don't have to worry about it. It only affects hackers."
For a minute she can't even speak, she's so pissed. "My mother is a
programmer for the Feds. You asshole. Why didn't you warn me?"
Half an hour later, she's there. Doesn't bother to change back into her
WASP disguise this time, just bursts into the house in basic, bad black.
Drops her plank on the floor on the way in. Grabs one of Mom's curios off
the shelf - it's a heavy crystal award - clear plastic, actually - that she
got a couple years ago for sucking up to her Fed boss and passing all her
polygraph tests - and goes into the den.
Mom's there. As usual. Working on her computer. But she's not looking
at the screen right now, she's got some notes on her lap that she's going
through.
Just as Mom is looking up at her, Y.T. winds up and throws the crystal
award. It goes right over Mom's shoulder, glances off the computer table,
flies right through the picture tube. Awesome results. Y.T. always wanted to
do that. She pauses to admire her work for a few seconds while Mom just
flames off all kinds of weird emotion. What are you doing in that uniform?
Didn't I tell you not to ride your skateboard on a real street? You're not
supposed to throw things in the house. That's my prized possession. Why did
you break the computer? Government property. Just what is going on here,
anyway?
Y.T. can tell that this is going to continue for a couple of minutes,
so she goes to the kitchen, splashes some water on her face, gets a glass of
juice, just letting Mom follow her around and ventilate over her shoulder
pads.
Finally Mom winds down, defeated by Y.T.'s strategy of silence.
"I just saved your fucking life, Mom," Y.T. says. "You could at least
offer me an Oreo."
"What on earth are you talking about?"
"It's like, if you - people of a certain age - would make some effort
to just stay in touch with sort of basic, modern-day events, then your kids
wouldn't have to take these drastic measures."
Earth materializes, rotating majestically in front of his face. Hiro
reaches out and grabs it. He twists it around so he's looking at Oregon.
Tells it to get rid of the clouds, and it does, giving him a crystalline
view of the mountains and the seashore.
Right out there, a couple of hundred miles off the Oregon coast, is a
sort of granulated furuncle growing on the face of the water. Festering is
not too strong a word. It's a couple of hundred miles south of Astoria now,
moving south. Which explains why Juanita went to Astoria a couple of days
ago: she wanted to get close to the Raft. Why is anyone's guess.
Hiro looks up, focuses his gaze on Earth, zooms in for a look. As he
gets closer, the imagery he's looking at shifts from the long-range pictures
coming in from the geosynchronous satellites to the good stuff being spewed
into the CIC computer from a whole fleet of low-flying spy birds. The view
he's looking at is a mosaic of images shot no more than a few hours ago.
It's several miles across. Its shape constantly changes, but at the
time these pictures were shot, it had kind of a fat kidney shape; that is,
it is trying to be a V, pointed southward like a flock of geese, but there's
so much noise in the system, it's so amorphous and disorganized, that a
kidney is the closest it can come.
At the center is a pair of enormous vessels: the Enterprise and an oil
tanker, lashed together side by side. These two behemoths are walled in by
several other major vessels, an assortment of container ships and other
freight carriers. The Core.
Everything else is pretty tiny. There is the occasional hijacked yacht
or decommissioned fishing trawler. But most of the boats in the Raft are
just that: boats. Small pleasure craft, sampans, junks, dhows, dinghys, life
rafts, houseboats, makeshift structures built on air-filled oil drums and
slabs of styrofoam. A good fifty percent of it isn't real boat material at
all, just a garble of ropes, cables, planks, nets, and other debris tied
together on top of whatever kind of flotsam was handy.
And L. Bob Rife is sitting in the middle of it. Hiro doesn't quite know
what he's doing, and he doesn't know how Juanita is connected. But it's time
to go there and find out.
Scott Lagerquist is standing right on the edge of Mark Norman's 24/7
Motorcycle Mall, waiting, when the man with the swords comes into view,
striding down the sidewalk. A pedestrian is a peculiar sight in L.A.,
considerably more peculiar than a man with swords. But a welcome one. Anyone
who drives out to a motorcycle dealership already has a car, by definition,
so it's hard to give them a really hard sell. A pedestrian should be cake.
"Scott Wilson Lagerquist!" the guy yells from fifty feet away and
closing. "How you doing?"
"Fabulous!" Scott says. A little off guard, maybe. Can't remember this
guy's name, which is a problem. Where has he seen this guy before?
"It's great to see you!" Scott says, running forward and pumping the
guy's hand. "I haven't seen you since, uh - "
"Is Pinky here today?" the guy says.
"Pinky?"
"Yeah. Mark. Mark Norman. Pinky was his nickname back in college. I
guess he probably doesn't like to be called that now that he's running,
what, half a dozen dealerships, three McDonaldses, and a Holiday Inn, huh?"
"I didn't know that Mr. Norman was into fast food also."
"Yeah. He's got three franchises down around Long Beach. Owns them
through a limited partnership, actually. Is he here today?"
"No, he's on vacation."
"Oh, yeah. In Corsica. The Ajaccio Hyatt. Room 543. That's right, I
completely forgot about that."
"Well, were you just stopping by to say hi, or - "
"Nah. I was going to buy a motorcycle."
"Oh. What kind of motorcycle were you looking for?"
"One of the new Yamahas? With the new generation smartwheels?"
Scott grins manfully, trying to put the best face on the awful fact
that he is about to reveal. "I know exactly the one you mean. But I'm sorry
to tell you that we don't actually have one in stock today."
"You don't?"
"We don't. It's a brand-new model. Nobody has them."
"You sure? Because you ordered one."
"We did?"
"Yeah. A month ago." Suddenly the guy cranes his neck, looks over
Scott's shoulder down the boulevard. "Well, speak of the devil. Here it
comes."
A Yamaha semi is pulling into the truck entrance with a new shipment of
motorcycles in the back.
"It's on that truck," the guy says. "If you can give me one of your
cards, I'll jot down the vehicle identification number on back so you can
pull it off the truck for me."
"This was a special order made by Mr. Norman?"
"He claimed he was just ordering it as a display model, you know. But
it sort of has my name on it."
"Yes, sir. I understand totally."
Sure enough, the bike comes off the truck, just as the guy described
it, right down to color scheme (black) and vehicle ID number. It's a
beautiful bike. It draws a crowd just sitting on the parking lot - the other
salesmen actually put down their coffee cups and take their feet off their
desks to go outside and look at it. It looks like a black land torpedo.
Two-wheel drive, natch. The wheels are so advanced they're not even wheels -
they look like giant, heavy-duty versions of the smartwheels that high-speed
skateboards use, independently telescoping spokes with fat traction pads on
the ends. Dangling out over the front, in the nose cone of the motorcycle,
is the sensor package that monitors road conditions, decides where to place
each spoke as it rolls forward, how much to extend it, and how to rotate the
footpad for maximum traction. It's all controlled by a bios - a Built-In
Operating System - an onboard computer with a flat-panel screen built into
the top of the fuel tank.
They say that this baby will do a hundred and twenty miles per hour on
rubble. The bios patches itself into the CIC weather net so that it knows
when it's about to run into precip. The aerodynamic cowling is totally
flexible, calculates its own most efficient shape for the current speed and
wind conditions, changes its curves accordingly, wraps around you like a
nymphomaniacal gymnast.
Scott figures this guy is going to waltz off with this thing for dealer
invoice, being a friend and confidant of Mr. Norman. And it's not an easy
thing for any redblooded salesman to write out a contract to sell a sexy
beast like this one at dealer invoice. He hesitates for a minute. Wonders
what's going to happen to him if this is all some kind of mistake.
The guy's watching him intently, seems to sense his nervousness, almost
as if he can hear Scott's heart beating. So at the last minute he eases up,
gets magnanimous - Scott loves these big-spender types-decides to throw in a
few hundred Kongbucks over invoice, just so Scott can pull in a meager
commission on the deal. A tip, basically.
Then - icing on the cake - the guy goes nuts in the Cycle Shop. Totally
berserk. Buys a complete outfit. Everything. Top of the line. A full black
coverall that swaddles everything from toes to neck in breathable,
bulletproof fabric, with armorgel pads in all the right places and airbags
around the neck. Even safety fanatics don't bother with a helmet when
they're wearing one of these babies.
So once he's figured out how to attach his swords on the outside of his
coverall, he's on his way.
"I gotta say this," Scott says as the guy is sitting on his new bike,
getting his swords adjusted, doing something incredibly unauthorized to the
bios, "you look like one bad motherfucker."
"Thanks, I guess." He twists the throttle up once and Scott feels, but
does not hear, the power of the engine. This baby is so efficient it doesn't
waste power by making noise. "Say hi to your brand-new niece," the guy says,
and then lets go the clutch. The spokes flex and gather themselves and the
bike springs forward out of the lot, seeming to jump off its electric paws.
He cuts right across the parking lot of the neighboring NeoAquarian Temple
franchise and pulls out onto the road. About half a second later, the guy
with the swords is a dot on the horizon, Then he's gone. Northbound.
Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under
the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world.
If I moved to a martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard for
ten years. If my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore
myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, devoted
it to wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to
being bad.
Hiro used to feel that way, too, but then he ran into Raven. In a way,
this is liberating. He no longer has to worry about trying to be the baddest
motherfucker in the world. The position is taken. The crowning touch, the
one thing that really puts true world-class badmotherfuckerdom totally out
of reach, of course, is the hydrogen bomb. If it wasn't for the hydrogen
bomb, a man could still aspire. Maybe find Raven's Achilles' heel. Sneak up,
get a drop, slip a mickey, pull a fast one. But Raven's nuclear umbrella
kind of puts the world title out of reach.
Which is okay. Sometimes it's all right just to be a little bad. To
know your limitations. Make do with what you've got.
Once he maneuvers his way onto the freeway, aimed up into the
mountains, he goggles into his office. Earth is still there, zoomed in tight
on the Raft. Hiro contemplates it, superimposed in ghostly hues on his view
of the highway, as he rides toward Oregon at a hundred and forty miles per
hour.
From a distance, it looks bigger than it really is. Getting closer, he
can see that this illusion is caused by an enveloping self-made slick/cloud
of sewage and air pollution, fading out into the ocean and the atmosphere.
It orbits the Pacific clockwise. When they fire up the boilers on the
Enterprise, it can control its direction a little bit, but real navigation
is a practical impossibility with all the other shit lashed onto it. It
mostly has to go where the wind and the Coriolis effect take it. A couple of
years ago, it was going by the Philippines, Vietnam, China, Siberia, picking
up Refus. Then it swung up the Aleutian chain, down the Alaska panhandle,
and now it's gliding past the small town of Port Sherman, Oregon, near the
California border.
As the Raft moves through the Pacific, riding mostly on ocean currents,
it occasionally sheds great hunks of itself. Eventually, these fragments
wash up in some place like Santa Barbara, still lashed together, carrying a
payload of skeletons and gnawed bones.
When it gets to California, it will enter a new phase of its life
cycle. It will shed much of its sprawling improvised bulk as a few hundred
thousand Refus cut themselves loose and paddle to shore. The only Refus who
make it that far are, by definition, the ones who were agile enough to make
it out to the Raft in the first place, resourceful enough to survive the
agonizingly slow passage through the arctic waters, and tough enough not to
get killed by any of the other Refus. Nice guys, all of them. Just the kind
of people you'd like to have showing up on your private beach in groups of a
few thousand.
Stripped down to a few major ships, a little more maneuverable, the
Enterprise then will swing across the South Pacific, heading for Indonesia,
where it will turn north again and start the next cycle of migration.
Army ants cross mighty rivers by climbing on top of each other and
clustering together into a little ball that floats. Many of them fall off
and sink, and naturally the ants on the bottom of the ball drown. The ones
who are quick and vigorous enough to keep clawing their way to the top
survive. A lot of them make it across, and that's why you can't stop army
ants by dynamiting the bridges. That's how Refus come across the Pacific,
even though they are too poor to book passage on a real ship or buy a
seaworthy boat. A new wave washes up onto the West Coast every five years or
so, when the ocean currents bring the Enterprise back.
For the last couple of months, owners of beachfront property in
California have been hiring security people, putting up spotlights and
antipersonnel fences along the tide line, mounting machine guns on their
yachts. They have all subscribed to CIC's twenty-four-hour Raft Report,
getting the latest news flash, straight from the satellite, on when the
latest contingent of twenty-five thousand starving Eurasians has cut itself
loose from the Enterprise and started dipping its myriad oars into the
Pacific, like ant legs.
"Time to do more digging," he tells the Librarian. "But this is going
to have to be totally verbal, because I'm headed up I-5 at some incredible
speed right now, and I have to watch out for slow-moving bagos and stuff."
"I'll keep that in mind," the voice of the Librarian says into his
earphones. "Look out for the jackknifed truck south of Santa Clarita. And
there is a large chuckhole in the left lane near the Tulare exit."
"Thanks. Who were these gods anyway? Did Lagos have an opinion on
that?"
"Lagos believed that they might have been magicians - that is, normal
human beings with special powers - or they might have been aliens."
"Whoa, whoa, hold on. Let's take these one at a time. What did Lagos
mean when he talked about 'normal human beings with special powers'?"
"Assume that the nam-shub of Enki really functioned as a virus. Assume
that someone named Enki invented it. Then Enki must have had some kind of
linguistic power that goes beyond our concept of normal."
"And how would this power work? What's the mechanism?"
"I can only give you forward references drawn by Lagos."
"Okay. Give me some."
"The belief in the magical power of language is not unusual, both in
mystical and academic literature. The Kabbalists -Jewish mystics of Spain
and Palestine - believed that supernormal insight and power could be derived
from properly combining the letters of the Divine Name. For example, Abu
Aharon, an early Kabbalist who emigrated from Baghdad to Italy, was said to
perform miracles through the power of the Sacred Names."
"What kind of power are we talking about here?"
"Most Kabbalists were theorists who were interested only in pure
meditation. But there were so-called 'practical Kabbalists' who tried to
apply the power of the Kabbalah in everyday life."
"In other words, sorcerers."
"Yes. These practical kabbalists used a so-called 'archangelic
alphabet,' derived from first-century Greek and Aramaic theurgic alphabets,
which resembled cuneiform. The Kabbalists referred to this alphabet as 'eye
writing,' because the letters were composed of lines and small circles,
which resembled eyes."
"Ones and zeroes."
"Some Kabbalists divided up the letters of the alphabet according to
where they were produced inside the mouth."
"Okay. So as we would think of it, they were drawing a connection
between the printed letter on the page and the neural connections that had
to be invoked in order to pronounce it."
"Yes. By analyzing the spelling of various words, they were able to
draw what they thought were profound conclusions about their true, inner
meaning and significance."
"Okay. If you say so."
"In the academic realm, the literature is naturally not as fanciful.
"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 creation myth, in which heaven and earth are united
to begin with, but the world is not really created until the two are
separated. Most Creation myths begin with a 'paradoxical unity of
everything, evaluated either as chaos or as Paradise,' and the world as we
know it does not really come into being until this is changed. I should
point out here that Enki's original name was En-Kur, Lord of Kur. Kur was a
primeval ocean - Chaos - that Enki conquered."
"Every hacker can identify with that."
"But Asherah has similar connotations. Her name in Ugaritic, 'atiratu
yammi' means 'she who treads on (the) sea (dragon).' "
"Okay, so both Enki and Asherah were figures who had in some sense
defeated chaos. And your point is that this defeat of chaos, the separation
of the static, unified world into a binary system, is identified with
creation."
"Correct."
"What else can you tell me about Enki?"
"He was the en of the city of Eridu."
"What's an en? Is that like a king?"
"A priest-king of sorts. The en was the custodian of the local temple,
where the me - the rules of the society - were stored on clay tablets."
"Okay. Where's Eridu?"
"Southern Iraq. It has only been excavated within the past few years."
"By Rife's people?"
"Yes. As Kramer has it, Enki is the god of wisdom - but this is a bad
translation. His wisdom is not the wisdom of an old man, but rather a
knowledge of how to do things, especially occult things. 'He astonishes even
the other gods with shocking solutions to apparently impossible problems.'
He is a sympathetic god for the most part, who assists humankind."
"Really!"
"Yes. The most important Sumerian myths center on him. As I mentioned,
he is associated with water. He fills the rivers, and the extensive Sumerian
canal system, with his life-giving semen. He is said to have created the
Tigris in a single epochal act of masturbation. He describes himself as
follows: 'I am lord. I am the one whose word endures. I am eternal.' Others
describe him: 'a word from you - and heaps and piles stack high with grain.'
'You bring down the stars of heaven, you have computed their number.' He
pronounces the name of everything created..."
"'Pronounces the name of everything created?"'
"In many Creation myths, to name a thing is to create it. He is
referred to, in various myths, as 'expert who instituted incantations,'
'word-rich,' 'Enki, master of all the right commands,' as Kramer and Maier
have it, 'His word can bring order where there had been only chaos and
introduce disorder where there had been harmony.' He devotes a great deal of
effort to imparting his knowledge to his son, the god Marduk, chief deity of
the Babylonians."
"So the Sumerians worshipped Enki, and the Babylonians, who came after
the Sumerians, worshipped Marduk, his son."
"Yes, sir. And whenever Marduk got stuck, he would ask his father Enki
for help. There is a representation of Marduk here on this stele - the Code
of Hammurabi. According to Hammurabi, the Code was given to him personally
by Marduk."
Hiro wanders over to the Code of Hammurabi and has a gander. The
cuneiform means nothing to him, but the illustration on top is easy enough
to understand. Especially the part in the middle."
"Why, exactly, is Marduk handing Hammurabi a one and a zero in this
picture?" Hiro asks.
"They were emblems of royal power," the Librarian says. "Their origin
is obscure."
"Enki must have been responsible for that one," Hiro says.
"Enki's most important role is as the creator and guardian of the me
and the gis-hur, the 'key words' and 'patterns' that rule the universe."
"Tell me more about the me."
"To quote Kramer and Maier again, '[They believed in] the existence
from time primordial of a fundamental, unalterable, comprehensive assortment
of powers and duties, norms and standards, rules and regulations, known as
me, relating to the cosmos and its components, to gods and humans, to cities
and countries, and to the varied aspects of civilized life.' "
"Kind of like the Torah."
"Yes, but they have a kind of mystical or magical force. And they often
deal with banal subjects - not just religion."
"Examples?"
"In one myth, the goddess Inanna goes to Eridu and tricks Enki into
giving her ninety-four me and brings them back to her home town of Uruk,
where they are greeted with much commotion and rejoicing."
"Inanna is the person that Juanita's obsessed with."
"Yes, sir. She is hailed as a savior because 'she brought the perfect
execution of the me.'"
"Execution? Like executing a computer program?"
"Yes. Apparently, they are like algorithms for carrying out certain
activities essential to the society. Some of them have to do with the
workings of priesthood and kingship. Some explain how to carry out religious
ceremonies. Some relate to the arts of war and diplomacy. Many of them are
about the arts and crafts: music, carpentry, smithing, tanning, building,
farming, even such simple tasks as lighting fires."
"The operating system of society."
"I'm sorry?"
"When you first turn on a computer, it is an inert collection of
circuits that can't really do anything. To start up the machine, you have to
infuse those circuits with a collection of rules that tell it how to
function. How to be a computer. It sounds as though these me served as the
operating system of the society, organizing an inert collection of people
into a functioning system."
"As you wish. In any case, Enki was the guardian of the me."
"So he was, a good guy, really."
"He was the most beloved of the gods."
"He sounds like kind of a hacker. Which makes his nam-shub very
difficult to understand. If he was such a nice guy, why did he do the Babel
thing?"
"This is considered to be one of the mysteries of Enki. As you have
noticed, his behavior was not always consistent with modern norms."
"I don't buy that. I don't think he actually fucked his sister,
daughter, and so on. That story has to be a metaphor for something else. I
think it is a metaphor for some kind of recursive informational process.
This whole myth stinks of it. To these people, water equals semen. Makes
sense, because they probably had no concept of pure water - it was all brown
and muddy and full of viruses anyway. But from a modern standpoint, semen is
just a carrier of information - both benevolent sperm and malevolent
viruses. Enki's water - his semen, his data, his me - flow throughout the
country of Sumer and cause it to flourish."
"As you may be aware, Sumer existed on the floodplain between two major
rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates. This is where all the clay came from -
they took it directly from the riverbeds."
"So Enki even provided them with their medium for conveying information
- clay. They wrote on wet clay and then they dried it out - got rid of the
water. If water got to it later, the information was destroyed. But if they
baked it and drove out all the water, sterilized Enki's semen with heat,
then the tablet lasted forever, immutable, like the words of the Torah. Do I
sound like a maniac?"
"I don't know," the Librarian says, "but you do sound a little like
Lagos."
"I'm thrilled. Next thing you know, I'll turn myself into a gargoyle."
Any ped can get into Griffith Park without being noticed. And Y.T.
figures that despite the barriers across the road, the Falabala camp isn't
too well protected, if you've got off-road capability. For a skate ninja on
a brand-new plank in a brand-new pair of Knight Visions (hey, you have to
spend money to make money) there will be no problem. Just find a high
embankment that ramps down into the canyon, skirt the edge until you see
those campfires down below. And then lean down that hill. Trust gravity.
She realizes halfway down that her blue-and-orange coverall, fly as it
may be, is going to be a real attention getter in the middle of the night in
the Falabala zone, so she reaches up to her collar, feels a hard disk sewn
into the fabric, presses it between thumb and finger until it clicks. Her
coverall darkens, the colors shimmer through the electropigment like an oil
slick, and then it's black.
On her first visit she didn't check this place out all that carefully
because she hoped she'd never come back. So the embankment turns out to be
taller and steeper than Y.T. remembered. Maybe a little more of a cliff,
drop-off, or abyss than she thought. Only thing that makes her think so is
that she seems to be doing a lot of free-fall work here. Major plummeting.
Big time ballistic styling. That's cool, it's all part of the job, she tells
herself. The smartwheels are good for it. The tree trunks are bluish black,
standing out not so well against a blackish blue background. The only other
thing she can see is the red laser light of the digital speedometer down on
the front of her plank, which is not showing any real information. The
numbers have vibrated themselves into a cloud of gritty red light as the
radar speed sensor tries to lock onto something.
She turns the speedometer off. Running totally black now. Precipitating
her way toward the sweet 'crete of the creek bottom like a black angel who
has just had the shroud lines of her celestial parachute severed by the
Almighty. And when the wheels finally meet the pavement, it just about
drives her knees up through her jawbone. She finishes the whole
gravitational transaction with not much altitude and a nasty head of dark
velocity.
Mental note: Next time just jump off a fucking bridge. That way there's
no question of getting an invisible cholla shoved up your nose.
She whips around a corner, heeled over so far she could lick the yellow
line, and her Knight Visions reveal all in a blaze of multispectral
radiation. On infrared, the Falabala encampment is a turbulating aurora of
pink fog punctuated by the white-hot bursts of campfires. All of it rests on
dim bluish pavement, which means, in the false-color scheme of things, that
it's cold. Behind everything is the jagged horizon line of that funky
improvised barrier technology that the Falabalas are so good at. A barrier
that has been completely spurned, snubbed, and confounded by Y.T., who
dropped out of the sky into the middle of the camp like a Stealth fighter
with an inferiority complex.
Once you're into the actual encampment, people don't really notice or
care who you are. A couple people see her, watch her slide on by, don't get
all hairy about it. They probably get a lot of Kouriers coming through here.
A lot of dippy, gullible, Kool-Aid-drinking couriers. And these people
aren't hip enough to tell Y.T. apart from that breed. But that's okay,
she'll pass for now, as long as they don't check out the detailing on her
new plank.
The campfires provide enough plain old regular visible light to show
this sorry affair for what it is: a bunch of demented Boy Scouts, a jamboree
without merit badges or hygiene. With the IR supered on top of the visible,
she can also see vague, spectral red faces out in the shadows where her
unassisted eyes would only see darkness. These new Knight Visions cost her a
big wad of her Mob drug-running money. Just the kind of thing Mom had in
mind when she insisted Y.T. get a part-time job.
Some of the people who were here last time are gone now, and there's a
few new ones she doesn't recognize.
There's a couple of people actually wearing duct-tape straitjackets.
That's a fashion statement reserved for the ones who are totally out of
control, rolling and thrashing around on the ground. And there's a few more
who are spazzing out, but not as bad, and one or two who are just plain
messed up, like plain old derelicts that you might see at the Snooze 'n'
Cruise.
"Hey, look!" someone says. "It's our friend the Kourier! Welcome,
friend!"
She's got her Liquid Knuckles uncapped, available, and shaken well
before use. She's got high-voltage, high-fashion metallic cuffs around her
wrists in case someone tries to grab her by same. And a bundy stunner up her
sleeve. Only the most tubular throwbacks carry guns. Guns take a long time
to work (you have to wait for the victim to bleed to death), but
paradoxically they end up killing people pretty often. But nobody hassles
you after you've hit them with a bundy stunner. At least that's what the ads
say.
So it's not like she exactly feels vulnerable or anything. But still,
she'd like to pick her target. So she maintains escape velocity until she's
found the woman who seemed friendly - the bald chick in the torn-up Chanel
knockoff - and then zeroes in on her.
"Let's get off into the woods, man," Y.T. says, "I want to talk to you
about what's going on with what's left of your brain."
The woman smiles, struggles to her feet with the good-natured
awkwardness of a retarded person in a good mood. "I like to talk about
that," she says. "Because I believe in it."
Y.T. doesn't stop to do a lot of talking, just grabs the woman by the
hand, starts leading her uphill, into the scrubby little trees, away from
the road. She doesn't see any pink faces lurking up here in the infrared, it
ought to be safe. But there are a couple behind her, just ambling along
pleasantly, not looking directly at her, like they just decided it was time
to go for a stroll in the woods in the middle of the night. One of them is
the High Priest.
The woman's probably in her mid-twenties, she's a tall gangly type,
nice- but not good-looking, probably was a spunky but low-scoring forward on
her high school basketball team. Y.T. sits her down on a rock out in the
darkness.
"Do you have any idea where you are?" Y.T. says.
"In the park," the woman says, "with my friends. We're helping to
spread the Word."
"How'd you get here?"
"From the Enterprise. That's where we go to learn things."
"You mean, like, the Raft? The Enterprise Raft? Is that where you guys
all came from?"
"I don't know where we came from," the woman says. "Sometimes it's hard
to remember stuff. But that's not important."
"Where were you before? You didn't grow up on the Raft, did you?"
"I was a systems programmer for 3verse Systems in Mountain View,
California," the woman says, suddenly whipping off a string of perfect,
normal-sounding English.
'Then how did you get to be on the Raft?"
"I don't know. My old life stopped. My new life started. Now I'm here."
Back to baby talk.
"What's the last thing you remember before your old life stopped?"
"I was working late. My computer was having problems."
"That's it? That's the last normal thing that happened to you?"
"My system crashed," she said. "I saw static. And then I became very
sick. I went to the hospital. And there in the hospital, I met a man who
explained everything to me. He explained that I had been washed in the
blood. That I belonged to the Word now. And suddenly it all made sense. And
then I decided to go to the Raft."
"You decided, or someone decided for you?"
"I just wanted to. That's where we go."
"Who else was on the Raft with you?"
"More people like me."
"Like you how?"
"All programmers. Like me. Who had seen the Word."
"Seen it on their computers?"
"Yes. Or sometimes on TV."
"What did you do on the Raft?"
The woman pushes up one sleeve of her raggedy sweatshirt to expose a
needle-pocked arm.
"You took drugs?"
"No. We gave blood."
"They sucked your blood out?"
"Yes. Sometimes we would do a little coding. But only some of us."
"How long have you been here?"
"I don't know. They move us here when our veins don't work anymore. We
just do things to help spread the Word -drag stuff around, make barricades.
But we don't really spend much time working. Most of the time we sing songs,
pray, and tell other people about the Word."
"You want to leave? I can get you out of here."
"No," the woman says, "I've never been so happy."
"How can you say that? You were a big-time hacker. Now you're kind of a
dip, if I may speak frankly."
"That's okay, it doesn't hurt my feelings. I wasn't really happy when I
was a hacker. I never thought about the important things. God. Heaven. The
things of the spirit. It's hard to think about those things in America. You
just put them aside. But those are really the important things - not
programming computers or making money. Now, that's all I think about."
Y.T. has been keeping an eye on the High Priest and his buddy. They
keep moving closer, one step at a time. Now they're close enough that Y.T.
can smell their dinner. The woman puts her hand on Y.T.'s shoulder pad.
"I want you to stay here with me. Won't you come down and have some
refreshments? You must be thirsty."
"Gotta run," Y.T. says, standing up.
"I really have to object to that," the High Priest says, stepping
forward. He doesn't say it angrily. Now he's trying to be like Y.T.'s dad.
"That's not really the right decision for you."
"What are you, a role model?"
"That's okay. You don't have to agree. But let's go down and sit by the
campfire and talk about it."
"Let's just get the fuck away from Y.T. before she goes into a
self-defense mode," Y.T. says.
All three Falabalas step back away from her. Very cooperative. The High
Priest is holding up his hands, placating her. "I'm sorry if we made you
feel threatened," he says.
"You guys just come on a little weird," Y.T. says, flipping her goggles
back onto infrared.
In the infrared, she can see that the third Falabala, the one who came
up here with the High Priest, is holding a small thing in one hand that is
unusually warm.
She nails him with her penlight, spotlighting his upper body in a
narrow yellow beam. Most of him is dirty and dun colored and reflects little
light. But there is a brilliant glossy red thing, a shaft of ruby.
It's a hypodermic needle. It's full of red fluid. Under infrared, it
shows up warm. It's fresh blood.
And she doesn't exactly get it - why these guys would be walking around
with a syringe full of fresh blood. But she's seen enough.
The Liquid Knuckles shoots out of the can in a long narrow neon-green
stream, and when it nails the needle man in the face, he jerks his head back
like he's just been axed across the bridge of the nose and falls back
without making a sound. Then she gives the High Priest a shot of it for good
measure. The woman just stands there, totally, like, appalled.
Y.T. pumps herself up out of the canyon so fast that when she flies out
into traffic, she's going about as fast as it is. As soon as she gets a
solid poon on a nocturnal lettuce tanker, she gets on the phone to Mom.
"Mom, listen. No, Mom, never mind the roaring noise. Yes, I am riding
my skateboard in traffic. But listen to me for a second, Mom - "
She has to hang up on the old bitch. It's impossible to talk to her.
Then she tries to make a voice linkup with Hiro. That takes a couple of
minutes to go through.
"Hello! Hello! Hello!" she's shouting. Then she hears the honk of a car
horn. Coming out of the telephone.
"Hello?"
"It's Y.T."
"How are you doing?" This guy always seems a little too laid back in
his personal dealings. She doesn't really want to talk about how she's
doing. She hears another honking horn in the background, behind Hiro's
voice.
"Where the hell are you, Hiro?"
"Walking down a street in L.A."
"How can you be goggled in if you're walking down a street?" Then the
terrible reality sinks in: "Oh, my God, you didn't turn into a gargoyle, did
you?"
"Well," Hiro says. He is hesitant, embarrassed, like it hadn't occurred
to him yet that this was what he was doing. "It's not exactly like being a
gargoyle. Remember when you gave me shit about spending all my money on
computer stuff?"
"Yeah."
"I decided I wasn't spending enough. So I got a beltpack machine.
Smallest ever made. I'm walking down the street with this thing strapped to
my belly. It's really cool."
"You're a gargoyle."
"Yeah, but it's not like having all this clunky shit strapped all over
your body - "
"You're a gargoyle. Listen, I talked to one of these wholesalers."
"Yeah?"
"She says she used to be a hacker. She saw something strange on her
computer. Then she got sick for a while and joined this cult and ended up on
the Raft."
"The Raft. Do tell."
"On the Enterprise. They take their blood, Hiro. Suck it out of their
bodies. They infect people by injecting them with the blood of sick hackers.
And when their veins get all tracked out like a junkie's, they cut them
loose and put them to work on the mainland running the wholesale operation."
"That's good," he says. "That's good stuff."
"She says she saw some static on her computer screen and it made her
sick. You know anything about that?"
"Yeah. It's true."
"It's true?"
"Yeah. But you don't have to worry about it. It only affects hackers."
For a minute she can't even speak, she's so pissed. "My mother is a
programmer for the Feds. You asshole. Why didn't you warn me?"
Half an hour later, she's there. Doesn't bother to change back into her
WASP disguise this time, just bursts into the house in basic, bad black.
Drops her plank on the floor on the way in. Grabs one of Mom's curios off
the shelf - it's a heavy crystal award - clear plastic, actually - that she
got a couple years ago for sucking up to her Fed boss and passing all her
polygraph tests - and goes into the den.
Mom's there. As usual. Working on her computer. But she's not looking
at the screen right now, she's got some notes on her lap that she's going
through.
Just as Mom is looking up at her, Y.T. winds up and throws the crystal
award. It goes right over Mom's shoulder, glances off the computer table,
flies right through the picture tube. Awesome results. Y.T. always wanted to
do that. She pauses to admire her work for a few seconds while Mom just
flames off all kinds of weird emotion. What are you doing in that uniform?
Didn't I tell you not to ride your skateboard on a real street? You're not
supposed to throw things in the house. That's my prized possession. Why did
you break the computer? Government property. Just what is going on here,
anyway?
Y.T. can tell that this is going to continue for a couple of minutes,
so she goes to the kitchen, splashes some water on her face, gets a glass of
juice, just letting Mom follow her around and ventilate over her shoulder
pads.
Finally Mom winds down, defeated by Y.T.'s strategy of silence.
"I just saved your fucking life, Mom," Y.T. says. "You could at least
offer me an Oreo."
"What on earth are you talking about?"
"It's like, if you - people of a certain age - would make some effort
to just stay in touch with sort of basic, modern-day events, then your kids
wouldn't have to take these drastic measures."
Earth materializes, rotating majestically in front of his face. Hiro
reaches out and grabs it. He twists it around so he's looking at Oregon.
Tells it to get rid of the clouds, and it does, giving him a crystalline
view of the mountains and the seashore.
Right out there, a couple of hundred miles off the Oregon coast, is a
sort of granulated furuncle growing on the face of the water. Festering is
not too strong a word. It's a couple of hundred miles south of Astoria now,
moving south. Which explains why Juanita went to Astoria a couple of days
ago: she wanted to get close to the Raft. Why is anyone's guess.
Hiro looks up, focuses his gaze on Earth, zooms in for a look. As he
gets closer, the imagery he's looking at shifts from the long-range pictures
coming in from the geosynchronous satellites to the good stuff being spewed
into the CIC computer from a whole fleet of low-flying spy birds. The view
he's looking at is a mosaic of images shot no more than a few hours ago.
It's several miles across. Its shape constantly changes, but at the
time these pictures were shot, it had kind of a fat kidney shape; that is,
it is trying to be a V, pointed southward like a flock of geese, but there's
so much noise in the system, it's so amorphous and disorganized, that a
kidney is the closest it can come.
At the center is a pair of enormous vessels: the Enterprise and an oil
tanker, lashed together side by side. These two behemoths are walled in by
several other major vessels, an assortment of container ships and other
freight carriers. The Core.
Everything else is pretty tiny. There is the occasional hijacked yacht
or decommissioned fishing trawler. But most of the boats in the Raft are
just that: boats. Small pleasure craft, sampans, junks, dhows, dinghys, life
rafts, houseboats, makeshift structures built on air-filled oil drums and
slabs of styrofoam. A good fifty percent of it isn't real boat material at
all, just a garble of ropes, cables, planks, nets, and other debris tied
together on top of whatever kind of flotsam was handy.
And L. Bob Rife is sitting in the middle of it. Hiro doesn't quite know
what he's doing, and he doesn't know how Juanita is connected. But it's time
to go there and find out.
Scott Lagerquist is standing right on the edge of Mark Norman's 24/7
Motorcycle Mall, waiting, when the man with the swords comes into view,
striding down the sidewalk. A pedestrian is a peculiar sight in L.A.,
considerably more peculiar than a man with swords. But a welcome one. Anyone
who drives out to a motorcycle dealership already has a car, by definition,
so it's hard to give them a really hard sell. A pedestrian should be cake.
"Scott Wilson Lagerquist!" the guy yells from fifty feet away and
closing. "How you doing?"
"Fabulous!" Scott says. A little off guard, maybe. Can't remember this
guy's name, which is a problem. Where has he seen this guy before?
"It's great to see you!" Scott says, running forward and pumping the
guy's hand. "I haven't seen you since, uh - "
"Is Pinky here today?" the guy says.
"Pinky?"
"Yeah. Mark. Mark Norman. Pinky was his nickname back in college. I
guess he probably doesn't like to be called that now that he's running,
what, half a dozen dealerships, three McDonaldses, and a Holiday Inn, huh?"
"I didn't know that Mr. Norman was into fast food also."
"Yeah. He's got three franchises down around Long Beach. Owns them
through a limited partnership, actually. Is he here today?"
"No, he's on vacation."
"Oh, yeah. In Corsica. The Ajaccio Hyatt. Room 543. That's right, I
completely forgot about that."
"Well, were you just stopping by to say hi, or - "
"Nah. I was going to buy a motorcycle."
"Oh. What kind of motorcycle were you looking for?"
"One of the new Yamahas? With the new generation smartwheels?"
Scott grins manfully, trying to put the best face on the awful fact
that he is about to reveal. "I know exactly the one you mean. But I'm sorry
to tell you that we don't actually have one in stock today."
"You don't?"
"We don't. It's a brand-new model. Nobody has them."
"You sure? Because you ordered one."
"We did?"
"Yeah. A month ago." Suddenly the guy cranes his neck, looks over
Scott's shoulder down the boulevard. "Well, speak of the devil. Here it
comes."
A Yamaha semi is pulling into the truck entrance with a new shipment of
motorcycles in the back.
"It's on that truck," the guy says. "If you can give me one of your
cards, I'll jot down the vehicle identification number on back so you can
pull it off the truck for me."
"This was a special order made by Mr. Norman?"
"He claimed he was just ordering it as a display model, you know. But
it sort of has my name on it."
"Yes, sir. I understand totally."
Sure enough, the bike comes off the truck, just as the guy described
it, right down to color scheme (black) and vehicle ID number. It's a
beautiful bike. It draws a crowd just sitting on the parking lot - the other
salesmen actually put down their coffee cups and take their feet off their
desks to go outside and look at it. It looks like a black land torpedo.
Two-wheel drive, natch. The wheels are so advanced they're not even wheels -
they look like giant, heavy-duty versions of the smartwheels that high-speed
skateboards use, independently telescoping spokes with fat traction pads on
the ends. Dangling out over the front, in the nose cone of the motorcycle,
is the sensor package that monitors road conditions, decides where to place
each spoke as it rolls forward, how much to extend it, and how to rotate the
footpad for maximum traction. It's all controlled by a bios - a Built-In
Operating System - an onboard computer with a flat-panel screen built into
the top of the fuel tank.
They say that this baby will do a hundred and twenty miles per hour on
rubble. The bios patches itself into the CIC weather net so that it knows
when it's about to run into precip. The aerodynamic cowling is totally
flexible, calculates its own most efficient shape for the current speed and
wind conditions, changes its curves accordingly, wraps around you like a
nymphomaniacal gymnast.
Scott figures this guy is going to waltz off with this thing for dealer
invoice, being a friend and confidant of Mr. Norman. And it's not an easy
thing for any redblooded salesman to write out a contract to sell a sexy
beast like this one at dealer invoice. He hesitates for a minute. Wonders
what's going to happen to him if this is all some kind of mistake.
The guy's watching him intently, seems to sense his nervousness, almost
as if he can hear Scott's heart beating. So at the last minute he eases up,
gets magnanimous - Scott loves these big-spender types-decides to throw in a
few hundred Kongbucks over invoice, just so Scott can pull in a meager
commission on the deal. A tip, basically.
Then - icing on the cake - the guy goes nuts in the Cycle Shop. Totally
berserk. Buys a complete outfit. Everything. Top of the line. A full black
coverall that swaddles everything from toes to neck in breathable,
bulletproof fabric, with armorgel pads in all the right places and airbags
around the neck. Even safety fanatics don't bother with a helmet when
they're wearing one of these babies.
So once he's figured out how to attach his swords on the outside of his
coverall, he's on his way.
"I gotta say this," Scott says as the guy is sitting on his new bike,
getting his swords adjusted, doing something incredibly unauthorized to the
bios, "you look like one bad motherfucker."
"Thanks, I guess." He twists the throttle up once and Scott feels, but
does not hear, the power of the engine. This baby is so efficient it doesn't
waste power by making noise. "Say hi to your brand-new niece," the guy says,
and then lets go the clutch. The spokes flex and gather themselves and the
bike springs forward out of the lot, seeming to jump off its electric paws.
He cuts right across the parking lot of the neighboring NeoAquarian Temple
franchise and pulls out onto the road. About half a second later, the guy
with the swords is a dot on the horizon, Then he's gone. Northbound.
Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under
the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world.
If I moved to a martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard for
ten years. If my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore
myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, devoted
it to wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to
being bad.
Hiro used to feel that way, too, but then he ran into Raven. In a way,
this is liberating. He no longer has to worry about trying to be the baddest
motherfucker in the world. The position is taken. The crowning touch, the
one thing that really puts true world-class badmotherfuckerdom totally out
of reach, of course, is the hydrogen bomb. If it wasn't for the hydrogen
bomb, a man could still aspire. Maybe find Raven's Achilles' heel. Sneak up,
get a drop, slip a mickey, pull a fast one. But Raven's nuclear umbrella
kind of puts the world title out of reach.
Which is okay. Sometimes it's all right just to be a little bad. To
know your limitations. Make do with what you've got.
Once he maneuvers his way onto the freeway, aimed up into the
mountains, he goggles into his office. Earth is still there, zoomed in tight
on the Raft. Hiro contemplates it, superimposed in ghostly hues on his view
of the highway, as he rides toward Oregon at a hundred and forty miles per
hour.
From a distance, it looks bigger than it really is. Getting closer, he
can see that this illusion is caused by an enveloping self-made slick/cloud
of sewage and air pollution, fading out into the ocean and the atmosphere.
It orbits the Pacific clockwise. When they fire up the boilers on the
Enterprise, it can control its direction a little bit, but real navigation
is a practical impossibility with all the other shit lashed onto it. It
mostly has to go where the wind and the Coriolis effect take it. A couple of
years ago, it was going by the Philippines, Vietnam, China, Siberia, picking
up Refus. Then it swung up the Aleutian chain, down the Alaska panhandle,
and now it's gliding past the small town of Port Sherman, Oregon, near the
California border.
As the Raft moves through the Pacific, riding mostly on ocean currents,
it occasionally sheds great hunks of itself. Eventually, these fragments
wash up in some place like Santa Barbara, still lashed together, carrying a
payload of skeletons and gnawed bones.
When it gets to California, it will enter a new phase of its life
cycle. It will shed much of its sprawling improvised bulk as a few hundred
thousand Refus cut themselves loose and paddle to shore. The only Refus who
make it that far are, by definition, the ones who were agile enough to make
it out to the Raft in the first place, resourceful enough to survive the
agonizingly slow passage through the arctic waters, and tough enough not to
get killed by any of the other Refus. Nice guys, all of them. Just the kind
of people you'd like to have showing up on your private beach in groups of a
few thousand.
Stripped down to a few major ships, a little more maneuverable, the
Enterprise then will swing across the South Pacific, heading for Indonesia,
where it will turn north again and start the next cycle of migration.
Army ants cross mighty rivers by climbing on top of each other and
clustering together into a little ball that floats. Many of them fall off
and sink, and naturally the ants on the bottom of the ball drown. The ones
who are quick and vigorous enough to keep clawing their way to the top
survive. A lot of them make it across, and that's why you can't stop army
ants by dynamiting the bridges. That's how Refus come across the Pacific,
even though they are too poor to book passage on a real ship or buy a
seaworthy boat. A new wave washes up onto the West Coast every five years or
so, when the ocean currents bring the Enterprise back.
For the last couple of months, owners of beachfront property in
California have been hiring security people, putting up spotlights and
antipersonnel fences along the tide line, mounting machine guns on their
yachts. They have all subscribed to CIC's twenty-four-hour Raft Report,
getting the latest news flash, straight from the satellite, on when the
latest contingent of twenty-five thousand starving Eurasians has cut itself
loose from the Enterprise and started dipping its myriad oars into the
Pacific, like ant legs.
"Time to do more digging," he tells the Librarian. "But this is going
to have to be totally verbal, because I'm headed up I-5 at some incredible
speed right now, and I have to watch out for slow-moving bagos and stuff."
"I'll keep that in mind," the voice of the Librarian says into his
earphones. "Look out for the jackknifed truck south of Santa Clarita. And
there is a large chuckhole in the left lane near the Tulare exit."
"Thanks. Who were these gods anyway? Did Lagos have an opinion on
that?"
"Lagos believed that they might have been magicians - that is, normal
human beings with special powers - or they might have been aliens."
"Whoa, whoa, hold on. Let's take these one at a time. What did Lagos
mean when he talked about 'normal human beings with special powers'?"
"Assume that the nam-shub of Enki really functioned as a virus. Assume
that someone named Enki invented it. Then Enki must have had some kind of
linguistic power that goes beyond our concept of normal."
"And how would this power work? What's the mechanism?"
"I can only give you forward references drawn by Lagos."
"Okay. Give me some."
"The belief in the magical power of language is not unusual, both in
mystical and academic literature. The Kabbalists -Jewish mystics of Spain
and Palestine - believed that supernormal insight and power could be derived
from properly combining the letters of the Divine Name. For example, Abu
Aharon, an early Kabbalist who emigrated from Baghdad to Italy, was said to
perform miracles through the power of the Sacred Names."
"What kind of power are we talking about here?"
"Most Kabbalists were theorists who were interested only in pure
meditation. But there were so-called 'practical Kabbalists' who tried to
apply the power of the Kabbalah in everyday life."
"In other words, sorcerers."
"Yes. These practical kabbalists used a so-called 'archangelic
alphabet,' derived from first-century Greek and Aramaic theurgic alphabets,
which resembled cuneiform. The Kabbalists referred to this alphabet as 'eye
writing,' because the letters were composed of lines and small circles,
which resembled eyes."
"Ones and zeroes."
"Some Kabbalists divided up the letters of the alphabet according to
where they were produced inside the mouth."
"Okay. So as we would think of it, they were drawing a connection
between the printed letter on the page and the neural connections that had
to be invoked in order to pronounce it."
"Yes. By analyzing the spelling of various words, they were able to
draw what they thought were profound conclusions about their true, inner
meaning and significance."
"Okay. If you say so."
"In the academic realm, the literature is naturally not as fanciful.