"A tablet has been discovered containing a letter to Enki, in which the writer complains about it."
"A letter to a G.o.d?"
"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 "Oh and O No!" I let out a wail. My graceful figure is stretched neck to ground, I am paralyzed of foot. My...has been carried off into the earth. My frame has changed. At night I cannot sleep, my strength has been struck down, my life is ebbing away. The bright day is made a dark day for me. I have slipped into my own grave. I, a writer who knows many things, am made a fool. My hand has stopped writing There is no talk in my mouth."
"After more description of his woes, the scribe ends with, "My G.o.d, it is you I fear. I have written you a letter. Take pity on me. The heart of my G.o.d: have it given back to me.""
Y.T. is relaxing at a Mom"s Truck Stop on 405, waiting for her ride. Not that she would ever be caught dead at a Mom"s Truck Stop. If, like, a semi ran her over with all eighteen of its wheels in front of a Mom"s Truck Stop, she would drag herself down the shoulder of the highway using her eyelid muscles until she reached a Snooze "n" Cruise full of h.o.r.n.y derelicts rather than go into a Mom"s Truck Stop. But sometimes when you"re a professional, they give you a job that you don"t like, and you just have to be very cool and put up with it.
For purposes of this evening"s job, the man with the gla.s.s eye has already supplied her with a "driver and security person," as he put it. A totally unknown quant.i.ty. Y.T. isn"t sure she likes putting up with some mystery guy. She has this image in her mind that he"s going to be like the wrestling coach at the high school. That would be so grotendous. Anyway, this is where she"s supposed to meet him.
Y.T. orders a coffee and a slice of cherry pie a la mode. She carries them over to the public Street terminal back in the corner. It is sort of a wraparound stainless steel booth stuck between a phone booth, which has a homesick truck driver poured into it, and a pinball machine, which features a chick with big b.o.o.bs that light up when you shoot the ball up the magic Fallopians.
She"s not that good at the Metaverse, but she knows her way around, and she"s got an address. And finding an address in the Metaverse shouldn"t be any more difficult than doing it in Reality, at least if you"re not a totally r.e.t.a.r.ded ped.
As soon as she steps out into the Street, people start giving her these looks. The same kind of looks that people give her when she walks through the worsted-wool desolation of the Westlake Corporate Park in her dynamic blue-and-orange Kourier gear. She knows that the people in the Street are giving her dirty looks because she"s just coming in from a s.h.i.tty public terminal. She"s a trashy black-and-white person.
The built-up part of the Street, around Port Zero, forms a luminescent thunderhead off to her right. She puts her back to it and climbs onto the monorail. She"d like to go into town, but that"s an expensive part of the Street to visit, and she"d be dumping money into the coin slot about every one-tenth of a millisecond.
The guy"s name is Ng. In Reality, he is somewhere in Southern California. Y.T. isn"t sure exactly what he is driving, some kind of a van full of what the man with the gla.s.s eye described as "stuff, really incredible stuff that you don"t need to know about." In the Metaverse, he lives outside of town, around Port 2, where things really start to spread out.
Ng"s Metaverse home is a French colonial villa in the prewar village of My Tho in the Mekong Delta. Visiting him is like going to Vietnam in about 1955, except that you don"t have to get all sweaty. In order to make room for this creation, he has laid claim to a patch of Metaverse s.p.a.ce a couple of miles off the Street. There"s no monorail service in this low-rent development, so Y.T."s avatar has to walk the entire way.
He has a large office with French doors and a balcony looking out over endless rice paddies where little Vietnamese people work. Clearly, this guy is a fairly hardcore techie, because Y.T. counts hundreds of people out in his rice paddies, plus dozens more running around the village, all of them fairly well rendered and all of them doing different things. She"s not a bithead, but she knows that this guy is throwing a lot of computer time into the task of creating a realistic view out his office window. And the fact that it"s Vietnam makes it twisted and spooky. Y.T. can"t wait to tell Roadkill about this place. She wonders if it has bombings and strafings and napalm drops. That would be the best.
Ng himself, or at least, Ng"s avatar, is a small, very dapper Vietnamese man in his fifties, hair plastered to his head, wearing military-style khakis. At the time Y.T. comes into his office, he is leaning forward in his chair, getting his shoulders rubbed by a geisha.
A geisha in Vietnam?
Y.T."s grandpa, who was there for a while, told her that the Nipponese took over Vietnam during the war and treated it with the cruelty that was their trademark before we nuked them and they discovered that they were pacifists. The Vietnamese, like most other Asians, hate the j.a.panese. And apparently this Ng character gets a kick out of the idea of having a j.a.panese geisha around to rub his back.
But it is a very strange thing to do, for one reason: The geisha is just a picture on Ng"s goggles, and on Y.T."s. And you can"t get a ma.s.sage from a picture. So why bother?
When Y.T. comes in, Ng stands up and bows. This is how hardcore Street wackos greet each other. They don"t like to shake hands because you can"t actually feel the contact and it reminds you that you"re not even really there.
"Yeah, hi," Y.T. says.
Ng sits back down and the geisha goes right back to it. Ng"s desk is a nice French antique with a row of small television monitors along the back edge, facing toward him. He spends most of his time watching the monitors, even when he is talking "They told me a little bit about you," Ng says.
"Shouldn"t listen to nasty rumors," Y.T. says.
Ng picks up a gla.s.s from his desk and takes a drink from it. It looks like a mint julep. Globes of condensation form on its surface, break loose, and trickle down the side. The rendering is so perfect that Y.T. can see a miniaturized reflection of the office windows in each drop of condensation. It"s just totally ostentatious. What a bithead.
He is looking at her with a totally emotionless face, but Y.T. imagines that it is a face of hate and disgust. To spend all this money on the coolest house in the Metaverse and then have some skater come in done up in grainy black-and-white. It must be a real kick in the metaphorical nuts. Somewhere in this house a radio is going, playing a mix of Vietnamese loungy type stuff and Yank wheelchair rock.
"Are you a Nova Sicilia citizen?" Ng says.
"No. I just chill sometimes with Uncle Enzo and the other Mafia dudes."
"Ah. Very unusual."
Ng is not a man in a hurry. He has soaked up the languid pace of the Mekong Delta and is content to sit there and watch his TV sets and fire off a sentence every few minutes.
Another thing: He apparently has Tourette"s syndrome or some other brain woes because from time to time, for no apparent reason, he makes strange noises with his mouth. They have the tw.a.n.gy sound that you always hear from Vietnamese when they are in the back rooms of stores and restaurants carrying on family disputes in the mother tongue, but as far as Y.T. can tell, they aren"t real words, just sound effects.
"Do you work a lot for these guys?" Y.T. asks.
"Occasional small security jobs. Unlike most large corporations, the Mafia has a strong tradition of handling its own security arrangements. But when something especially technical is called for-"
He pauses in the middle of this sentence to make an incredible zooming sound in his nose.
"Is that your thing? Security?"
Ng scans all of his TV sets. He snaps his fingers and the geisha scurries out of the room. He folds his hands together on his desk and leans forward. He stares at Y.T. "Yes," he says.
Y.T. looks back at him for a bit, waiting for him to continue. After a few seconds his attention drifts back to the monitors.
"I do most of my work under a large contract with Mr. Lee," he blurts.
Y.T. is waiting for the continuation of this sentence: Not "Mr. Lee," but "Mr. Lee"s Greater Hong Kong."
Oh, well. If she can drop Uncle Enzo"s name, he can drop Mr. Lee"s.
"The social structure of any nation-state is ultimately determined by its security arrangements," Ng says, "and Mr. Lee understands this."
Oh, wow, we"re going to be profound now. Ng is suddenly talking just like the old white men on the TV pundit powwows, which Y.T."s mother watches obsessively.
"Instead of hiring a large human security force-which impacts the social environment-you know, lots of minimum-wage earners standing around carrying machine guns-Mr. Lee prefers to use nonhuman systems."
Nonhuman systems. Y.T. is about to ask him, what do you know about the Rat Thing. But it is pointless; he won"t say. It would get their relationship off on the wrong foot, Y.T. asking Ng for intel, Intel that he would never give her, and that would make this whole scene even weirder than it is now, which Y.T. can"t even imagine.
Ng bursts forth with a long string of tw.a.n.gy noises, pops, and glottal stops.
"f.u.c.king b.i.t.c.h," he mumbles.
"Excuse me?"
"Nothing," he says, "a bimbo box cut me off. None of these people understand that with this vehicle, I could crush them like a potbellied pig under an armored personnel carrier."
"A bimbo box-you"re driving?"
"Yes. I"m coming to pick you up-remember?"
"Do you mind?"
"No," he sighs, as if he really does.
Y.T. gets up and walks around behind his desk to look.
Each of the little TV monitors is showing a different view out his van: windshield, left window, right window, rearview. Another one has an electronic map showing his position: inbound on the San Bernardino, not far away.
"The van is under voice command," he explains. "I removed the steering-wheel-and-pedal interface because I found verbal commands more convenient. This is why I will sometimes make unfamiliar sounds with my voice-I am controlling the vehicle"s systems."
Y.T. signs off from the Metaverse for a while, to clear her head and take a leak. When she takes off the goggles she discovers that she has built up quite an audience of truckers and mechanics, who are standing around the terminal booth in a semicircle listening to her jabber at Ng. When she stands up, attention shifts to her b.u.t.t, naturally.
Y.T. hits the bathroom, finishes her pie, and wanders out into the ultraviolet glare of the setting sun to wait for Ng.
Recognizing his van is easy enough. It is enormous. It is eight feet high and wider than it is high, which would have made it a wide load in the old days when they had laws. The construction is boxy and angular. it has been welded together out of the type of flat, dimpled steel plate usually used to make manhole lids and stair treads. The tires are huge, like tractor tires with a more subtle tread, and there are six of them: two axles in back and one in front. The engine is so big that, like an evil s.p.a.ceship in a movie, Y.T. feels its rumbling in her ribs before she can see it; it is kicking out diesel exhaust through a pair of squat vertical red smokestacks that project from the roof, toward the rear. The windshield is a perfectly flat rectangle of gla.s.s about three by eight feet, smoked so black that Y.T. can"t make out an outline of anything inside. The snout of the van is festooned with every type of high-powered light known to science, like this guy hit a New South Africa franchise on a Sat.u.r.day night and stole every light off every roll bar, and a grille has been constructed across the front, welded together out of rails torn out of an abandoned railroad somewhere. The grille alone probably weighs more than a small car.
The pa.s.senger door swings open. Y.T. walks over and climbs into the front seat. "Hi," she is saying. "You need to take a whiz or anything?"
Ng isn"t there.
Or maybe he is.
Where the driver"s seat ought to be, there is a sort of neoprene pouch about the size of a garbage can suspended from the ceiling by a web of straps, shock cords, tubes, wires, fiber-optic cables, and hydraulic lines. It is swathed in so much stuff that it is hard to make out its actual outlines.
At the top of this pouch, Y.T. can see a patch of skin with some black hair around it-the top of a balding man"s head. Everything else, from the temples downward, is encased in an enormous goggle/mask/headphone/feeding-tube unit, held on. to his head by smart straps that are constantly tightening and loosening themselves to keep the device comfortable and properly positioned. Below this, on either side, where you"d sort of expect to see arms, huge bundles of wires, fiber optics, and tubes run up out of the floor and are seemingly plugged into Ng"s shoulder sockets. There is a similar arrangement where his legs are supposed to be attached, and more stuff going into his groin and hooked up to various locations on his torso. The entire thing is swathed in a one-piece coverall, a pouch, larger than his torso ought to be, that is constantly bulging and throbbing as though alive.
"Thank you, all my needs are taken care of," Ng says.
The door slams shut behind her. Ng makes a yapping sound, and the van pulls out onto the frontage road, headed back toward "Please excuse my appearance," he says, after a couple of awkward minutes. "My helicopter caught fire during the evacuation of Saigon in 1974-a stray tracer from ground forces."
"Whoa. What a drag."
"I was able to reach an American aircraft carrier off the coast, but you know, the fuel was spraying around quite a bit during the fire."
"Yeah, I can imagine, uh huh."
"I tried prostheses for a while-some of them are very good. But nothing is as good as a motorized wheelchair. And then I got to thinking, why do motorized wheelchairs always have to be tiny pathetic things that strain to go up a little teeny ramp? So I bought this-it is an airport firetruck from Germany-and converted it into my new motorized wheelchair."
"It"s very nice."
"America is wonderful because you can get anything on a drive-through basis. Oil change, liquor, banking, car wash, funerals, anything you want-drive through! So this vehicle is much better than a tiny pathetic wheelchair. It is an extension of my body."
"When the geisha rubs your back?"
Ng mumbles something and his pouch begins to throb and undulate around his body. "She is a daemon, of course. As for the ma.s.sage, my body is suspended in an electrocontractive gel that ma.s.sages me when I need it. I also have a Swedish girl and an African woman, but those daemons are not as well rendered."
"And the mint julep?"
"Through a feeding tube. Nonalcoholic, ha ha."
"So," Y.T. says at some point, when they are way past LAX, and she figures it"s too late to chicken out, "what"s the plan? Do we have a plan?"
"We go to Long Beach. To the Terminal Island Sacrifice Zone. And we buy some drugs," Ng says. "Or you do, actually, since I am indisposed."
"That"s my job? To buy some drugs?"
"Buy them, and throw them up in the air."
"In a Sacrifice Zone?"
"Yes. And we"ll take care of the rest."
"Who"s we, dude?"
"There are several more, uh, ent.i.ties that will help us."
"What, is the back of the van full of more-people like you?"
"Sort of," Ng says. "You are close to the truth."
"Would these be, like, nonhuman systems?"
"That is a sufficiently all-inclusive term, I think."
Y.T. figures that for a big yes.
"You tired? Want me to drive or anything?"
Ng laughs sharply, like distant ack-ack, and the van almost swerves off the road. Y.T. doesn"t get the sense that he is laughing at the joke; he is laughing at what a jerk Y.T. is.
"Okay, last time we were talking about the clay envelope. But what about this thing? The thing that looks like a tree?" Hiro says, gesturing to one of the artifacts.
"A totem of the G.o.ddess Asherah," the Librarian says crisply.
"Now we"re getting somewhere," Hiro says. "Lagos said that the Brandy in The Black Sun was a cult prost.i.tute of Asherah. So who is Asherah?"
"She was the consort of El, who is also known as Yahweh," the Librarian says. "She also was known by other names: Elat, her most common epithet. The Greeks knew her as Dione or Rhea. The Canaanites knew her as Tannit or Hawwa, which is the same thing as Eve."
"Eve?"
"The etymology of "Tannit" proposed by Cross is: feminine of "tannin," which would mean "the one of the serpent." Furthermore, Asherah carried a second epithet in the Bronze Age, "dat batni," also "the one of the serpent." The Sumerians knew her as Ninth or Ninhursag. Her symbol is a serpent coiling about a tree or staff-the caduceus."
"Who worshipped Asherah? A lot of people, I gather."
"Everyone who lived between India and Spain, from the second millennium B.C. up into the Christian era. With the exception of the Hebrews, who only worshipped her until the religious reforms of Hezekiah and, later, Josiah."
"I thought the Hebrews were monotheists. How could they worship Asherah?"