His voice phone is ringing. Hiro picks it up.
Pod," Y.T. says, "I was beginning to think you'd never come out of there.
Where are you?" Hiro says.
In Reality or the Metaverse
The Metaverse.
In the Metaverse, I'm on a plusbound monorail train. Just passed by Port 35.
Already? It must be an express.
Good thinking. That Clint you cut the arms off of is two cars ahead of me. I don't think he knows I'm following him.
Where are you in Reality
Public terminal across the street from a Reverend Wayne's," she says.
Oh, yeah? How interesting.
Just made a delivery there.
What kind of delivery
An aluminum suitcase.
He gets the whole story out of her, or what he thinks is the whole story -- there's no real way to tell.
You're sure that the babbling that the people did in the park was the same as the babbling that the woman did at the Reverend Wayne's
Sure," she says. "I know a bunch of people who go there. Or their parents go there and drag them along, you know.
To the Reverend Wayne's Pearly Gates
Yeah. And they all do that speaking in tongues. So I've heard it before.
I'll talk to you later, pod," Hiro says. "I've got some serious research to do.
Later.
The Babel/Infopocalypse card is resting in the middle of his desk. Hiro picks it up. The Librarian comes in.
Hiro is about to ask the Librarian whether he knows that Lagos is dead. But it's a pointless question. The Librarian knows it, but he doesn't. If he wanted to check the Library, he could find out in a few moments. But he wouldn't really retain the information. He doesn't have an independent memory. The Library is his memory, and he only uses small parts of it at once.
What can you tell me about speaking in tongues?" Hiro says.
The technical term is 'glossolalia,'" the Librarian says.
Technical term? Why bother to have a technical term for a religious ritual
The Librarian raises his eyebrows. "Oh, there's a great deal of technical literature on the subject. It is a neurological phenomenon that is merely exploited in religious rituals.
It's a Christian thing, right
Pentecostal Christians think so, but they are deluding themselves. Pagan Greeks did it -- Plato called it theornania. The Oriental cults of the Roman Empire did it. Hudson Bay Eskimos, Chukchi shamans, Lapps, Yakuts, Semang pygmies, the North Borneo cults, the Trhi-speaking priests of Ghana. The Zulu Amandiki cult and the Chinese religious sect of Shang-ti-hui. Spirit mediums of Tonga and the Brazilian Umbanda cult. The Tungus tribesmen of Siberia say that when the shaman goes into his trance and raves incoherent syllables, he learns the entire language of Nature.
The language of Nature.
Yes, sir. The Sukuma people of Africa say that the language is kinatuns, the tongue of the ancestors of all magicians, who are thought to have descended from one particular tribe.
What causes it
If mystical explanations are ruled out, then it seems that glossolalia comes from structures buried deep within the brain, common to all people.
What does it look like? How do these people act
C. W. Shumway observed the Los Angeles revival of 1906 and noted six basic symptoms: complete loss of rational control; dominance of emotion that leads to hysteria; absence of thought or will; automatic functioning of the speech organs; amnesia; and occasional sporadic physical manifestations such as jerking or twitching. Eusebius observed similar phenomena around the year 300, saying that the false prophet begins by a deliberate suppression of conscious thought, and ends in a delirium over which he has no control.
What's the Christian justification for this? Is there anything in the Bible that backs this up
Pentecost.
You mentioned that word earlier -- what is it
From the Greek pentekostos, meaning fiftieth. It refers to the fiftieth day after the Crucifixion.
Juanita just told me that Christianity was hijacked by viral influences when it was only fifty days old. She must have been talking about this. What is it
And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance. Now there were dwelling in Jerusalem Jews, devout men from every nation under heaven. And at this sound the multitude came together, and they were bewildered, because each one heard them speaking in his own language. And they were amazed and wondered, saying, "Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? And how is it that we hear, each of us in his own native language? Parthians and Medes and Elamites and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabians, we hear them telling in our own tongues the mighty works of God." And all were amazed and perplexed, saying to one another, "What does this mean?"' Acts 2:4-12.
Damned if I know," Hiro says. "Sounds like Babel in reverse.
Yes, sir. Many Pentecostal Christians believe that the gift of tongues was given to them so that they could spread their religion to other peoples without having to actually learn their language. The word for that is 'xenoglossy'.
That's what Rife was claiming in that piece of videotape, on top of the Enterprise. He said he could understand what those Bangladeshis were saying.
Yes, sir.
Does that really work
In the sixteenth century, Saint Louis Bertrand allegedly used the gift of tongues to convert somewhere between thirty thousand and three hundred thousand South American Indians to Christianity," the Librarian says.
Wow. Spread through that population even faster than smallpox.
What did the Jews think of this Pentecost thing?" Hiro says. "They were still running the country, right
The Romans were running the country," the Librarian says, "but there were a number of Jewish religious authorities. At this time, there were three groups of Jews: the Pharisees, the Sadducees, and the Essenes.
I remember the Pharisees from Jesus Christ, Superstar. They were the ones with the deep voices who were always hassling Christ.
They were hassling him," the Librarian says, "because they were religiously very strict. They adhered to a strong legalistic version of the religion; to them, the Law was everything. Clearly, Jesus was a threat to them because he was proposing, in effect, to do away with the Law.
He wanted a contract renegotiation with God.
This sounds like an analogy, which I am not very good at -- but even if it is taken literally, it is true.
Who were the other two groups
The Sadducees were materialists.
Meaning what? They drove BMWs
No. Materialists in the philosophical sense. All philosophies are either monist or dualist. Monists believe that the material world is the only world -- hence, materialists. Dualists believe in a binary universe, that there is a spiritual world in addition to the material world.
Well, as a computer geek, I have to believe in the binary universe.
The Librarian raises his eyebrows. "How does that follow
Sorry. It's a joke. A bad pun. See, computers use binary code to represent information. So I was joking that I have to believe in the binary universe, that I have to be a dualist.
How droll," the Librarian says, not sounding very amused. "Your joke may not be without genuine merit, however.
How's that? I was just kidding, really.
Computers rely on the one and the zero to represent all things. This distinction between something and nothing -- this pivotal separation between being and nonbeing -- is quite fundamental and underlies many Creation myths.
Hiro feels his face getting slightly warm, feels himself getting annoyed. He suspects that the Librarian may be pulling his leg, playing him for a fool. But he knows that the Librarian, however convincingly rendered he may be, is just a piece of software and cannot actually do such things.
Even the word 'science' comes from an Indo-European root meaning 'to cut' or 'to separate.' The same root led to the word 'shit,' which of course means to separate living flesh from nonliving waste. The same root gave us 'scythe' and 'scissors' and 'schism,' which have obvious connections to the concept of separation.
How about 'sword
From a root with several meanings. One of those meanings is 'to cut or pierce.' One of them is 'post' or 'rod.' And the other is, simply, 'to speak.
Let's stay on track," Hiro says.
Fine. I can return to this potential conversation fork at a later time, if you desire.
I don't want to get all forked up at this point. Tell me about the third group -- the Essenes.
They lived communally and believed that physical and spiritual cleanliness were intimately connected. They were constantly bathing themselves, lying naked under the sun, purging themselves with enemas, and going to extreme lengths to make sure that their food was pure and uncontaminated. They even had their own version of the Gospels in which Jesus healed possessed people, not with miracles, but by driving parasites, such as tapeworm, out of their body. These parasites are considered to be synonymous with demons.
They sound kind of like hippies.
The connection has been made before, but it is faulty in many ways. The Essenes were strictly religious and would never have taken drugs.
So to them there was no difference between infection with a parasite, like tapeworm, and demonic possession.
Correct.
Interesting. I wonder what they would have thought about computer viruses
Speculation is not in my programming.
Speaking of which -- Lagos was babbling to me about viruses and infection and something called a nam-shub. What does that mean
Nam-shub is a word from Sumerian.
Sumerian
Yes, sir. Used in Mesopotamia until roughly 2000 B.C. The oldest of all written languages.
Oh. So all the other languages are descended from it?" For a moment, the Librarian's eyes glance upward, as if he's thinking about something. This is a visual cue to inform Hiro that he's making a momentary raid on the Library.
Actually, no," the Librarian says. "No languages whatsoever are descended from Sumerian. It is an agglutinative tongue, meaning that it is a collection of morphemes or syllables that are grouped into words -- very unusual.
You are saying," Hiro says, remembering Da5id in the hospital, "that if I could hear someone speaking Sumerian, it would sound like a long stream of short syllables strung together.
Yes, sir.
Would it sound anything like glossolalia
Judgment call. Ask someone real," the Librarian says.
Does it sound like any modern tongue
There is no provable genetic relationship between Sumerian and any tongue that came afterward.
That's odd. My Mesopotamian history is rusty," Hiro says. "What happened to the Sumerians? Genocide
No, sir. They were conquered, but there's no evidence of genocide per se.
Everyone gets conquered sooner or later," Hiro says. "But their languages don't die out. Why did Sumerian disappear
Since I am just a piece of code, I would be on very thin ice to speculate," the Librarian says.
Okay. Does anyone understand Sumerian
Yes, at any given time, it appears that there are roughly ten people in the world who can read it.
Where do they work
One in Israel. One at the British Museum. One in Iraq. One at the University of Chicago. One at the University of Pennsylvania. And five at Rife Bible College in Houston, Texas.
Nice distribution. And have any of these people figured out what the word 'nam-shub' means in Sumerian
Yes. A nam-shub is a speech with magical force. The closest English equivalent would be 'incantation,' but this has a number of incorrect connotations.
Did the Sumerians believe in magic
The Librarian shakes his head minutely. "This is the kind of seemingly precise question that is in fact very profound, and that pieces of software, such as myself, are notoriously clumsy at. Allow me to quote from Kramer, Samuel Noah, and Maier, John R. Myths of Enki, the Crafty God. New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989: 'Religion, magic, and medicine are so completely intertwined in Mesopotamia that separating them is frustrating and perhaps futile work. [Sumerian incantations] demonstrate an intimate connection between the religious, the magical, and the esthetic so complete that any attempt to pull one away from the other will distort the whole.' There is more material in here that might help explain the subject.
In where
In the next room," the Librarian says, gesturing at the wall. He walks over and slides the rice-paper partition out of the way.
A speech with magical force. Nowadays, people don't believe in these kinds of things. Except in the Metaverse, that is, where magic is possible. The Metaverse is a fictional structure made out of code. And code is just a form of speech -- the form that computers understand. The Metaverse in its entirety could be considered a single vast nam-shub, enacting itself on L. Bob Rife's fiber-optic network.
The voice phone rings. "Just a second," Hiro says.
Take your time," the Librarian says, not adding the obvious reminder that he can wait for a million years if need be.
Me again," Y.T. says. "I'm still on the train. Stumps got off at Express Port 127.
Hmm. That's the antipode of Downtown. I mean, it's as far away from Downtown as you can get.
It is
Yeah. One-two-seven is two to the seventh power minus one
Spare me, I take your word for it. It's definitely out in the middle of fucking nowhere," she says.
You didn't get off and follow him
Are you kidding? All the way out there? It's ten thousand miles from the nearest building, Hiro.
She has a point. The Metaverse was built with plenty of room to expand. Almost all of the development is within two or three Express Ports -- five hundred kilometers or so -- of Downtown. Port 127 is twenty thousand miles away.
What is there
A black cube exactly twenty miles on a side.
Totally black
Yeah.
How can you measure a black cube that big
I'm riding along looking at the stars, okay? Suddenly, I can't see them anymore on the right side of the train. I start counting local ports. I count sixteen of them. We get to Express Port 127, and Stumpy climbs off and goes toward the black thing. I count sixteen more local ports and then the stars come out. Then I take thirty-two kilometers and multiply it by point six and I get twenty miles -- you asshole.
That's good," Hiro says. "That's good intel.
Who do you think owns a black cube twenty miles across
Just going on pure, irrational bias, I'm guessing L. Bob Rife. Supposedly, he has a big hunk of real estate out in the middle of nowhere where he keeps all the guts of the Metaverse. Some of us used to smash into it occasionally when we were out racing motorcycles.
Well, gotta go, pod.
Hiro hangs up and walks into the new room. The Librarian follows.
It is about fifty feet on a side. The center of the space is occupied by three large artifacts, or rather three-dimensional renderings of artifacts. In the center is a thick slab of baked clay, hanging in space, about the size of a coffee table, and about a foot thick. Hiro suspects that it is a magnified rendering of a smaller object. The broad surfaces of the slab are entirely covered with angular writing that Hiro recognizes as cuneiform. Around the edges are rounded, parallel depressions that appear to have been made by fingers as they shaped the slab.
To the right of the slab is a wooden pole with branches on top, sort of a stylized tree. To the left of the slab is an eight-foot-high obelisk, also covered with cuneiform, with a bas-relief figure chiseled into the top. The room is filled with a three-dimensional constellation of hypercards, hanging weightlessly in the air. It looks like a highspeed photograph of a blizzard in progress. In some places, the hypercards are placed in precise geometric patterns, like atoms in a crystal. In other places, whole stacks of them are clumped together. Drifts of them have accumulated in the corners, as though Lagos tossed them away when he was finished. Hiro finds that his avatar can walk right through the hypercards without disturbing the arrangement. It is, in fact, the three-dimensional counterpart of a messy desktop, all the trash still remaining wherever Lagos left it. The cloud of hypercards extends to every corner of the 50-by-50-foot space, and from floor level all the way up to about eight feet, which is about as high as Lagos's avatar could reach.
How many hypercards in here
Ten thousand, four hundred and sixty-three," the Librarian says.
I don't really have time to go through them," Hiro says. "Can you give me some idea of what Lagos was working on here
Well, I can read back the names of all the cards if you'd like. Lagos grouped them into four broad categories: Biblical studies, Sumerian studies, neurolinguistic studies, and intel gathered on L. Bob Rife.
Without going into that kind of detail -- what did Lagos have on his mind? What was he getting at
What do I look like, a psychologist?" the Librarian says. "I can't answer those kinds of questions.
Let me try it again. How does this stuff connect, if at all, to the subject of viruses
The connections are elaborate. Summarizing them would require both creativity and discretion. As a mechanical entity, I have neither.
How old is this stuff?" Hiro says, gesturing to the three artifacts.
The clay envelope is Sumerian. It is from the third millennium B.C. It was dug up from the city of Eridu in southern Iraq. The black stele or obelisk is the Code of Hammurabi, which dates from about 1750 B.C. The treelike structure is a Yahwistic cult totem from Palestine. It's called an asherah. It's from about 900 B.C.
Did you call that slab an envelope
Yes. It has a smaller clay slab wrapped up inside of it. This was how the Sumerians made tamper-proof documents.
All these things are in a museum somewhere, I take it
The asherah and the Code of Hammurabi are in museums. The clay envelope is in the personal collection of L. Bob Rife.
L. Bob Rife is obviously interested in this stuff.
Rife Bible College, which he founded, has the richest archaeology department in the world. They have been conducting a dig in Eridu, which was the cult center of a Sumerian god named Enki.
How are these things related to each other
The Librarian raises his eyebrow. "I'm sorry
Well, let's try process of elimination. Do you know why Lagos found Sumerian writings interesting as opposed to, say, Greek or Egyptian
Egypt was a civilization of stone. They made their art and architecture of stone, so it lasts forever. But you can't write on stone. So they invented papyrus and wrote on that. But papyrus is perishable. So even though their art and architecture have survived, their written records -- their data -- have largely disappeared.
What about all those hieroglyphic inscriptions
Bumper stickers, Lagos called them. Corrupt political speech. They had an unfortunate tendency to write inscriptions praising their own military victories before the battles had actually taken place
And Sumer is different
Sumer was a civilization of clay. They made their buildings of it and wrote on it, too. Their statues were of gypsum, which dissolves in water. So the buildings and statues have since fallen apart under the elements. But the clay tablets were either baked or else buried in jars. So all the data of the Sumerians have survived. Egypt left a legacy of art and architecture; Sumer's legacy is its megabytes.
How many megabytes
As many as archaeologists bother to dig up. The Sumerians wrote on everything. When they built a building, they would write in cuneiform on every brick. When the buildings fell down, these bricks would remain, scattered across the desert. In the Koran, the angels who are sent to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah say, We are sent forth to a wicked nation, so that we may bring down on them a shower of clay -- stones marked by your Lord for the destruction of the sinful.' Lagos found this interesting -- this promiscuous dispersal of information, written on a medium that lasts forever. He spoke of pollen blowing in the wind -- I gather that this was some kind of analogy.
It was. Tell me -- has the inscription on this clay envelope been translated
Yes. It is a warning. It says, 'This envelope contains the nam-shub of Enki
I know what a nam-shub is. What is the nam-shub of Enki?" The Librarian stares off into the distance and clears his throat dramatically.
Once upon a time, there was no snake, there was no scorpion, There was no hyena, there was no lion, There was no wild dog, no wolf, There was no fear, no terror, Man had no rival. In those days, the land Shubur-Hamazi, Harmony-tongued Sumer, the great land of the me of princeship, Un, the land having all that is appropriate, The land Martu, resting in security, The whole universe, the people well cared for, To Enlil in one tongue gave speech. Then the lord defiant, the prince defiant, the king defiant, Enki, the lord of abundance, whose commands are trustworthy, The lord of wisdom, who scans the land, The leader of the gods, The lord of Eridu, endowed with wisdom, Changed the speech in their mouths, put contention into it, Into the speech of man that had been one.
That is Kramer's translation.
That's a story," Hiro says. "I thought a nam-shub was an incantation.
The nam-shub of Enki is both a story and an incantation," the Librarian says. "A self-fulfilling fiction. Lagos believed that in its original form, which this translation only hints at, it actually did what it describes.
You mean, changed the speech in men's mouths.
Yes," the Librarian says.
This is a Babel story, isn't it?" Hiro says. "Everyone was speaking the same language, and then Enki changed their speech so that they could no longer understand each other. This must be the basis for the Tower of Babel stuff in the Bible.
This room contains a number of cards tracing that connection," the Librarian says.
You mentioned before that at one point, everyone spoke Sumerian. Then, nobody did. It just vanished, like the dinosaurs. And there's no genocide to explain how that happened. Which is consistent with the Tower of Babel story, and the nam-shub of Enki. Did Lagos think that Babel really happened
He was sure of it. He was quite concerned about the vast number of human languages. He felt there were simply too many of them.
How many
Tens of thousands. In many parts of the world, you will find people of the same ethnic group, living a few miles apart in similar valleys under similar conditions, speaking languages that have absolutely nothing in common with each other. This sort of thing is not an oddity -- it is ubiquitous. Many linguists have tried to understand Babel, the question of why human language tends to fragment, rather than converging on a common tongue?" "Has anyone come up with an answer yet
The question is difficult and profound," the Librarian says. "Lagos had a theory.
Yes
He believed that Babel was an actual historical event. That it happened in a particular time and place, coinciding with the disappearance of the Sumerian language. That prior to Babel Infopocalypse, languages tended to converge. And that afterward, languages have always had an innate tendency to diverge and become mutually incomprehensible -- that this tendency is, as he put it, coiled like a serpent around the human brainstem.
The only thing that could explain that is -- " Hiro stops, not wanting to say it.
Yes?" the Librarian says.
If there was some phenomenon that moved through the population, altering their minds in such a way that they couldn't process the Sumerian language anymore. Kind of in the same way that a virus moves from one computer to another, damaging each computer in the same way. Coiling around the brainstem.
Lagos devoted much time and effort to this idea," the Librarian says. "He felt that the nam-shub of Enki was a neurolinguistic virus.
And that this Enki character was a real personage
Possibly.
And that Enki invented this virus and spread it throughout Sumer, using tablets like this one
A tablet has been discovered containing a letter to Enki, in which the writer complains about it.
A letter to a god
Yes. It is from Sin-samuh, the Scribe. He begins by praising Enki and emphasizing his devotion to him. Then he complains
Like a young ... (line broken) I am paralyzed at the wrist. Like a wagon on the road when its yoke has split, I stand immobile on the road. I lay on a bed called "01 and 0 No!" I let out a wail. My graceful figure is stretched neck to ground, I am paralyzed of foot. My ... has been carried off into the earth. My frame has changed. At night I cannot sleep, my strength has been struck down, my life is ebbing away. The bright day is made a dark day for me. I have slipped into my own grave. I, a writer who knows many things, am made a fool. My hand has stopped writing There is no talk in my mouth.
After more description of his woes, the scribe ends with
My god, it is you I fear. I have written you a letter. Take pity on me. The heart of my god: have it given back to me.