"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 La.s.sie 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 t.e.s.t.i.c.l.e-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 a.s.sisted 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 a.s.shole 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/Infopocalypse 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 f.u.c.ks with your actual DNA. I don"t know what half of this s.h.i.t 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 a.n.a.lyzing 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 a.s.s? 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, a.s.syrian, 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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sed 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."
"Like instructions for programming a VCR."
"There is a great deal of monotonous repet.i.tion. There is also a fair amount of what Lagos described as "Rotary Club Boosterism"-scribes extolling the superior virtue of their city over some other city."
"What makes one Sumerian city better than another one? A bigger ziggurat? A better football team?"
"Better me."
"What are me?"
"Rules or principles that control the operation of society, like a code of laws, but on a more fundamental level."
"I don"t get it."
"That is the point. Sumerian myths are not "readable" or "enjoyable" in the same sense that Greek and Hebrew myths are. They reflect a fundamentally different consciousness from ours."
"I suppose if our culture was based on Sumer, we would find them more interesting," Hiro says.
"Akkadian myths came after the Sumerian and are clearly based on Sumerian myths to a large extent. It is clear that Akkadian redactors went through the Sumerian myths, edited out the (to us) bizarre and incomprehensible parts, and strung them together into longer works, such as the Epic of Gilgamesh. The Akkadians were Semites-cousins of the Hebrews."
"What do the Akkadians have to say about her?"
"She is a G.o.ddess of the erotic and of fertility. She also has a destructive, vindictive side. In one myth, Kirta, a human king, is made grievously ill by Asherah. Only El, king of the G.o.ds, can heal him. El gives certain persons the privilege of nursing at Asherah"s b.r.e.a.s.t.s. El and Asherah often adopt human babies and let them nurse on Asherah-in one text, she is wet nurse to seventy divine sons."
"Spreading that virus," Hiro says. "Mothers with AIDS can spread the disease to their babies by breast-feeding them. But this is the Akkadian version, right?"
"Yes, sir."
"I want to hear some Sumerian stuff, even if it is untranslatable."
"Would you like to hear how Asherah made Enki sick?"
"Sure."
"How this story is translated depends on how it is interpreted. Some see it as a Fall from Paradise story. Some see it as a battle between male and female or water and earth. Some see it as a fertility allegory. This reading is based on the interpretation of Bendt Aister."
"Duly noted."
"To summarize: Enki and Ninhursag-who is Asherah, although in this story she also bears other epithets-live in a place called Dilmun. Dilmun is pure, clean and bright, there is no sickness, people do not grow old, predatory animals do not hunt.
"But there is no water. So Ninhursag pleads with Enki, who is a sort of water-G.o.d, to bring water to Dilmun. He does so by masturbating among the reeds of the ditches and letting flow his life-giving s.e.m.e.n-the "water of the heart," as it is called. At the same time, he p.r.o.nounces a nam-shub forbidding anyone to enter this area-he does not want anyone to come near his s.e.m.e.n."
"Why not?"
"The myth does not say."
"Then," Hiro says, "he must have thought it was valuable, or dangerous, or both."
"Dilmun is now better than it was before. The fields produce abundant crops and so on."