For a minute or so, the chopper hovers twenty feet overhead. All the people inside are staring down at the tablet, which has burst out of its wrappings in the middle of the bullseye. The plastic has torn apart around the corners and fragments -- large fragments -- of the tablet have sprayed out for a few feet in either direction.
Hiro stares at it, too, still safe behind the cover of a parked chopper. He stares at it so hard that he forgets to stare at anything else. Then a couple of wireheads land on his back, smashing his face into the flank of the chopper. He slides down and lands on his belly. His gun arm is still free, but a couple more wireheads sit on that. A couple on his legs, too. He can't move at all. He can't see anything but the broken tablet, twenty feet away on the flight deck. The sound and wind of Rife's chopper diminish into a distant puttering noise that takes a long time to go away completely.
He feels a tingling behind his ear, anticipating the scalpel and the drill. These wireheads are operating under remote control from somewhere else. Ng seemed to think that they had an organized Raft defense system. Maybe there's a hacker-in-charge, an en, sitting in the Enterprise's control tower, moving these guys around like an air traffic controller.
In any case, they are not very big on spontaneity. They sit on him for a few minutes before they decide what to do next. Then, many hands reach down and clasp him around the wrists and ankles, elbows and knees. They haul him across the flight deck like pallbearers, face up. Hiro looks up into the control tower and sees a couple of faces looking down at him. One of them -- the en -- is talking into a microphone.
Eventually, they come to a big flat elevator that sinks down into the guts of the ship, out of view of the control tower. It comes to rest on one of the lower decks, apparently a hangar deck where they used to maintain airplanes.
Hiro hears a woman's voice, speaking words gently but clearly: "me lu lu mu al nu urn me en ki me en me lu lu mu me al nu urn mealnuumemememuluealnuumrneduggamumemulu ealnuumme ...
It's three feet straight down to the deck, and he covers the distance in free fall, slamming down on his back, bumping his head. All his limbs bounce loosely on the metal. Around him he sees and hears the wireheads collapsing like wet towels falling off a rack.
He cannot move any part of his body. He has a little control over his eyes. A face comes into view, and he has trouble resolving it, can't quite focus, but he recognizes something in her posture, the way she tosses her hair back over her shoulder when it falls down. It's Juanita. Juanita with an antenna rising out of the base of her skull.
She kneels down beside him, bends down, cups one hand around his ear, and whispers. The hot air tickles his ear, he tries to move away from it but can't. She's whispering another long string of syllables. Then she straightens up and gooses him in the side. He jerks away from her.
Get up, lazybones," she says.
He gets up. He's fine now. But all the wireheads lay around him, perfectly motionless.
Just a little nam-shub I whipped up," she says. "They'll be fine.
Hi," he says.
Hi. It's good to see you, Hiro. I'm going to give you a hug now -- watch out for the antenna.
She does. He hugs her back. The antenna is upside his nose, but that's okay.
Once we get this thing taken off, all the hair and stuff should grow back," she whispers. Finally, she lets him go. "That hug was really more for me than for you. It's been a lonely time here. Lonely and scary.
This is typically paradoxical behavior for Juanita -- getting touchy-feely at a time like this.
Don't get me wrong," Hiro says, "but aren't you one of the bad guys now
Oh, you mean this
Yeah. Don't you work for them
If so, I'm not doing a very good job." She laughs, gesturing at the ring of motionless wireheads. "No. This doesn't work on me. It sort of did, for a while, but there are ways to fight it.
Why? Why doesn't it work on you
I've spent the last several years hanging around with Jesuits," she says. "Look. Your brain has an immune system, just like your body. The more you use it -- the more viruses you get exposed to -- the better your immune system becomes. And I've got a hell of an immune system. Remember, I was an atheist for a while, and then I came back to religion the hard way.
Why didn't they screw you up the way they did Da5id
I came here voluntarily.
Like Inanna.
Yes.
Why would anyone come here voluntarily
Hiro, don't you realize? This is it. This is the nerve center of a religion that is at once brand new and very ancient. Being here is like following Jesus or Mohammed around, getting to observe the birth of a new faith.
But it's terrible. Rife is the Antichrist.
Of course he is. But it's still interesting. And Rife has got something else going for him: Eridu.
The city of Enki.
Exactly. He's got every tablet Enki ever wrote. For a person who's interested in religion and hacking, this is the only place in the world to be. If those tablets were in Arabia, I'd put on a chador and burn my driver's license and go there. But the tablets are here, and so I let them wire me up instead.
So all this time, your goal was to study Enki's tablets.
To get the me, just like Inanna. What else
And have you been studying them
Oh, yes.
And
She points to the fallen wireheads. "And I can do it now. I'm a ba'al shem. I can hack the brainstem.
Okay, look. I'm happy for you, Juanita. But at the time being, we have a little problem. We are surrounded by a million people who want to kill us. Can you paralyze all of them
Yes," she says, "but then they'd die.
You know what we have to do, don't you, Juanita
Release the nam-shub of Enki," she says. "Do the Babel thing.
Let's go get it," Hiro says.
First things first," Juanita says. "The control tower.
Okay, you get ready to grab the tablet, and I'll take out the control tower
How are you going to do that? By cutting people up with swords
Yeah. That's the only thing they're good for.
Let's do it the other way around," Juanita says. She gets up and walks off across the hangar deck.