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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?"
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.
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.
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.
"'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."
"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?"
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.
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.
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.
"'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."