Snow Crash, Page 27

  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.

  33

  “'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.”

  “Like instructions for programming a VCR.”

  “There is a great deal of monotonous repetition. 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 goddess 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 gods, can heal him. El gives certain persons the privilege of nursing at Asherah's breasts. 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 Alster.”

  “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-god, to bring water to Dilmun. He does so by masturbating among the reeds of the ditches and letting flow his life-giving semen—the ‘water of the heart,' as it is called. At the same time, he pronounces a nam-shub forbidding anyone to enter this area—he does not want anyone to come near his semen.”

  “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.”

  “Excuse me, but how did Sumerian agriculture work? Did they use a lot of irrigation?”

  “They were entirely dependent upon it.”

  “So Enki was responsible, according to this myth, for irrigating the fields with his ‘water of the heart.' ”

  “Enki was the water-god, yes.”

  “Okay, go on.”

  “But Ninhursag—Asherah—violates his decree and takes Enki's semen and impregnates herself. After nine days of pregnancy she gives birth, painlessly, to a daughter, Ninmu. Ninmu walks on the riverbank. Enki sees her, becomes inflamed, goes across the river, and has sex with her.”

  “With his own daughter.”

  “Yes. She has another daughter nine days later, named Ninkurra, and the pattern is repeated.”

  “Enki has sex with Ninkurra, too?�
��

  “Yes, and she has a daughter named Uttu. Now, by this time, Ninhursag has apparently recognized a pattern in Enki's behavior, and so she advises Uttu to stay in her house, predicting that Enki will then approach her bearing gifts, and try to seduce her.”

  “Does he?”

  “Enki once again fills the ditches with the ‘water of the heart,' which makes things grow. The gardener re-joices and embraces Enki.”

  “Who's the gardener?”

  “Just some character in the story,” the Librarian says. “He provides Enki with grapes and other gifts. Enki disguises himself as the gardener and goes to Uttu and seduces her. But this time, Ninhursag manages to obtain a sample of Enki's semen from Uttu's thighs.”

  “My God. Talk about your mother-in-law from hell.”

  “Ninhursag spreads the semen on the ground, and it causes eight plants to sprout up.”

  “Does Enki have sex with the plants, then?”

  “No, he eats them—in some sense, he learns their secrets by doing so.”

  “So here we have our Adam and Eve motif.”

  “Ninhursag curses Enki, saying ‘Until thou art dead, I shall not look upon thee with the “eye of life.” ' Then she disappears, and Enki becomes very ill. Eight of his organs become sick, one for each of the plants. Finally, Ninhursag is persuaded to come back. She gives birth to eight deities, one for each part of Enki's body that is sick, and Enki is healed. These deities are the pantheon of Dilmun; i.e., this act breaks the cycle of incest and creates a new race of male and female gods that can reproduce normally.”

  “I'm beginning to see what Lagos meant about the febrile two-year-old.”

  “Alster interprets the myth as ‘an exposition of a logical problem: Supposing that originally there was nothing but one creator, how could ordinary binary sexual relations come into being?' ”

  “Ah, there's that word ‘binary' again.”

  “You may remember an unexplored fork earlier in our conversation that would have brought us to this same place by another route. This myth can be compared to the Sumerian creation myth, in which heaven and earth are united to begin with, but the world is not really created until the two are separated. Most Creation myths begin with a ‘paradoxical unity of everything, evaluated either as chaos or as Paradise,' and the world as we know it does not really come into being until this is changed. I should point out here that Enki's original name was En-Kur, Lord of Kur. Kur was a primeval ocean—Chaos—that Enki conquered.”

  “Every hacker can identify with that.”

  “But Asherah has similar connotations. Her name in Ugaritic, ‘atiratu yammi' means ‘she who treads on (the) sea (dragon).' ”

  “Okay, so both Enki and Asherah were figures who had in some sense defeated chaos. And your point is that this defeat of chaos, the separation of the static, unified world into a binary system, is identified with creation.”

  “Correct.”

  “What else can you tell me about Enki?”

  “He was the en of the city of Eridu.”

  “What's an en? Is that like a king?”

  “A priest-king of sorts. The en was the custodian of the local temple, where the me—the rules of the society—were stored on clay tablets.”

  “Okay. Where's Eridu?”

  “Southern Iraq. It has only been excavated within the past few years.”

  “By Rife's people?”

  “Yes. As Kramer has it, Enki is the god of wisdom—but this is a bad translation. His wisdom is not the wisdom of an old man, but rather a knowledge of how to do things, especially occult things. ‘He astonishes even the other gods with shocking solutions to apparently impossible problems.' He is a sympathetic god for the most part, who assists humankind.”

  “Really!”

  “Yes. The most important Sumerian myths center on him. As I mentioned, he is associated with water. He fills the rivers, and the extensive Sumerian canal system, with his life-giving semen. He is said to have created the Tigris in a single epochal act of masturbation. He describes himself as follows: ‘I am lord. I am the one whose word endures. I am eternal.' Others describe him: ‘a word from you—and heaps and piles stack high with grain.' ‘You bring down the stars of heaven, you have computed their number.' He pronounces the name of everything created . . .”

  “‘Pronounces the name of everything created?' ”

  “In many Creation myths, to name a thing is to create it. He is referred to, in various myths, as ‘expert who instituted incantations,' ‘word-rich,' ‘Enki, master of all the right commands,' as Kramer and Maier have it, ‘His word can bring order where there had been only chacs and introduce disorder where there had been harmony.' He devotes a great deal of effort to imparting his knowledge to his son, the god Marduk, chief deity of the Babylonians.”

  “So the Sumerians worshipped Enki, and the Babylonians, who came after the Sumerians, worshipped Marduk, his son.”

  “Yes, sir. And whenever Marduk got stuck, he would ask his father Enki for help. There is a representation of Marduk here on this stele—the Code of Hammurabi. According to Hammurabi, the Code was given to him personally by Marduk.”

  Hiro wanders over to the Code of Hammurabi and has a gander. The cuneiform means nothing to him, but the illustration on top is easy enough to understand. Especially the part in the middle:

  “Why, exactly, is Marduk handing Hammurabi a one and a zero in this picture?” Hiro asks.

  “They were emblems of royal power,” the Librarian says. “Their origin is obscure.”

  “Enki must have been responsible for that one,” Hiro says.

  “Enki's most important role is as the creator and guardian of the me and the gis-hur, the ‘key words' and ‘patterns' that rule the universe.”

  “Tell me more about the me.”

  “To quote Kramer and Maier again, ‘[They believed in] the existence from time primordial of a fundamental, unalterable, comprehensive assortment of powers and duties, norms and standards, rules and regulations, known as me, relating to the cosmos and its components, to gods and humans, to cities and countries, and to the varied aspects of civilized life.' ”

  “Kind of like the Torah.”

  “Yes, but they have a kind of mystical or magical force. And they often deal with banal subjects—not just religion.”

  “Examples?”

  “In one myth, the goddess Inanna goes to Eridu and tricks Enki into giving her ninety-four me and brings them back to her home town of Uruk, where they are greeted with much commotion and rejoicing.”

  “Inanna is the person that Juanita's obsessed with.”

  “Yes, sir. She is hailed as a savior because ‘she brought the perfect execution of the me.' ”

  “Execution? Like executing a computer program?”

  “Yes. Apparently, they are like algorithms for carrying out certain activities essential to the society. Some of them have to do with the workings of priesthood and kingship. Some explain how to carry out religious ceremonies. Some relate to the arts of war and diplomacy. Many of them are about the arts and crafts: music, carpentry, smithing, tanning, building, farming, even such simple tasks as lighting fires.”

  “The operating system of society.”

  “I'm sorry?”

  “When you first turn on a computer, it is an inert collection of circuits that can't really do anything. To start up the machine, you have to infuse those circuits with a collection of rules that tell it how to function. How to be a computer. It sounds as though these me served as the operating system of the society, organizing an inert collection of people into a functioning system.”

  “As you wish. In any case, Enki was the guardian of the me.”

  “So he was a good guy, really.”

  “He was the most beloved of the gods.”

  “He sounds like kind of a hacker. Which makes his nam-shub very difficult to understand. If he was such a nice guy, why did he do the Babel thing?”

  “This is considered
to be one of the mysteries of Enki. As you have noticed, his behavior was not always consistent with modern norms.”

  “I don't buy that. I don't think he actually fucked his sister, daughter, and so on. That story has to be a metaphor for something else. I think it is a metaphor for some kind of recursive informational process. This whole myth stinks of it. To these people, water equals semen. Makes sense, because they probably had no concept of pure water—it was all brown and muddy and full of viruses anyway. But from a modern standpoint, semen is just a carrier of information—both benevolent sperm and malevolent viruses. Enki's water—his semen, his data, his me—flow throughout the country of Sumer and cause it to flourish.”

  “As you may be aware, Sumer existed on the flood-plain between two major rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates. This is where all the clay came from—they took it directly from the riverbeds.”

  “So Enki even provided them with their medium for conveying information—clay. They wrote on wet clay and then they dried it out—got rid of the water. If water got to it later, the information was destroyed. But if they baked it and drove out all the water, sterilized Enki's semen with heat, then the tablet lasted forever, immutable, like the words of the Torah. Do I sound like a maniac?”

  “I don't know,” the Librarian says, “but you do sound a little like Lagos.”

  “I'm thrilled. Next thing you know, I'll turn myself into a gargoyle.”

  34

  Any ped can get into Griffith Park without being noticed. And Y.T. figures that despite the barriers across the road, the Falabala camp isn't too well protected, if you've got off-road capability. For a skate ninja on a brand-new plank in a brand-new pair of Knight Visions (hey, you have to spend money to make money) there will be no problem. Just find a high embankment that ramps down into the canyon, skirt the edge until you see those campfires down below. And then lean down that hill. Trust gravity.

  She realizes halfway down that her blue-and-orange coverall, fly as it may be, is going to be a real attention getter in the middle of the night in the Falabala zone, so she reaches up to her collar, feels a hard disk sewn into the fabric, presses it between thumb and finger until it clicks. Her coverall darkens, the colors shimmer through the electropigment like an oil slick, and then it's black.