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 namshub 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 DaSid?”
“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 namshub 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.
The namshub of Enki is a tablet wrapped up in a clay envelope covered with the cuneiform equivalent of a warning sticker. The entire assembly has shattered into dozens of pieces. Most of them have stayed wrapped up inside the plastic, but some have gone spinning across the flight deck. Hiro gathers them up from the helipad and returns them to the center.
By the time he’s got the plastic wrapper cut away, Juanita is waving to him from the windows on top of the control tower.
He takes all the pieces that look to be part of the envelope and puts them into a separate pile. Then he assembles the remains of the tablet itself into a coherent group. It’s not obvious, yet, how to piece them together, and he doesn’t have time for jigsaw puzzles. So he goggles into his office, uses the computer to take an electronic snapshot of the fragments, and calls the Librarian.
“Yes, sir?”
“This hypercard contains a picture of a shattered clay tablet. Do you know of some software that would be good at piecing it back together?”
“One moment, sir,” the Librarian says. Then a hypercard appears in his hand. He gives it to Hiro. It contains a picture of an assembled tablet. “That’s how it looks, sir.”
“Can you read Sumerian?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Can you read this tablet out loud?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Get ready to do it. And hold on a second.”
Hiro walks over to the base of the control tower. There’s a door there that gives him access to a stairwell. He climbs up to the control room, a strange mixture of Iron Age and high-tech. Juanita’s waiting there, surrounded by peacefully slumbering wireheads. She taps a microphone that is projecting from a communications panel at the end of a flexible gooseneck—the same mike that the en was speaking into.
“Live to the Raft,” she says. “Go for it.”
Hiro puts his computer into speakerphone mode and stands up next to the microphone. “Librarian, read it back,” he says. And a string of syllables pours out of the speaker.
In the middle of it, Hiro glances up at Juanita. She’s standing in the far corner of the room with her fingers stuck in her ears.