Hiro can see the Clint, way over near the exit, trying to get his avatar aimed out through the door. Hiro runs after him. If the guy reaches the Street, he’s gone—he’ll turn into a translucent ghost. With a fifty-foot head start in a crowd of a million other translucent ghosts, there’s just no way. As usual, there’s a crowd of wannabes gathered on the Street out front. Hiro can see the usual assortment, including a few black-and-white people.
One of those black-and-whites is Y.T. She’s loitering out there waiting for Hiro to come out.
“Y.T.!” he shouts. “Chase that guy with no arms!”
Hiro gets out the door just a few seconds after the Clint does. Both the Clint and Y.T. are already gone.
He turns back into The Black Sun, pulls up a trapdoor, and drops down into the tunnel system, the realm of the Graveyard Daemons. One of them has already picked up the scroll and is trudging in toward the center to throw it on the fire.
“Hey, bud,” Hiro says, “take a right turn at the next tunnel and leave that thing in my office, okay? But do me a favor and roll it up first.”
He follows the Graveyard Daemon down the tunnel, under the Street, until they’re under the neighborhood where Hiro and the other hackers have their houses. Hiro has the Graveyard Daemon deposit the rolled-up scroll in his workshop, down in the basement—the room where Hiro does his hacking. Then Hiro continues upstairs to his office.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
His voice phone is ringing. Hiro picks it up.
“Pod,” Y.T. says, “I was beginning to think you’d never come out of there.”
“Where are you?” Hiro says.
“In Reality or the Metaverse?”
“Both.”
“In the Metaverse, I’m on a plusbound monorail train. Just passed by Port 35.”
“Already? It must be an express.”
“Good thinking. That Clint you cut the arms off of is two cars ahead of me. I don’t think he knows I’m following him.”
“Where are you in Reality?”
“Public terminal across the street from a Reverend Wayne’s,” she says.
“Oh, yeah? How interesting.”
“Just made a delivery there.”
“What kind of delivery?”
“An aluminum suitcase.”
He gets the whole story out of her, or what he thinks is the whole story—there’s no real way to tell.
“You’re sure that the babbling that the people did in the park was the same as the babbling that the woman did at the Reverend Wayne’s?”
“Sure,” she says. “I know a bunch of people who go there. Or their parents go there and drag them along, you know.”
“To the Reverend Wayne’s Pearly Gates?”
“Yeah. And they all do that speaking in tongues. So I’ve heard it before.”
“I’ll talk to you later, pod,” Hiro says. “I’ve got some serious research to do.”
“Later.”
The Babel/Infocalypse card is resting in the middle of his desk. Hiro picks it up. The Librarian comes in.
Hiro is about to ask the Librarian whether he knows that Lagos is dead. But it’s a pointless question. The Librarian knows it, but he doesn’t. If he wanted to check the Library, he could find out in a few moments. But he wouldn’t really retain the information. He doesn’t have an independent memory. The Library is his memory, and he only uses small parts of it at once.
“What can you tell me about speaking in tongues?” Hiro says.
“The technical term is ‘glossolalia,’” the Librarian says.
“Technical term? Why bother to have a technical term for a religious ritual?”
The Librarian raises his eyebrows. “Oh, there’s a great deal of technical literature on the subject. It is a neurological phenomenon that is merely exploited in religious rituals.”
“It’s a Christian thing, right?”
“Pentecostal Christians think so, but they are deluding themselves. Pagan Greeks did it—Plato called it theomania. The Oriental cults of the Roman Empire did it. Hudson Bay Eskimos, Chukchi shamans, Lapps, Yakuts, Semang pygmies, the North Borneo cults, the Trhi-speaking priests of Ghana. The Zulu Amandiki cult and the Chinese religious sect of Shang-ti-hui. Spirit mediums of Tonga and the Brazilian Umbanda cult. The Tungus tribesmen of Siberia say that when the shaman goes into his trance and raves incoherent syllables, he learns the entire language of Nature.”
“The language of Nature.”
“Yes, sir. The Sukuma people of Africa say that the language is kinaturu, the tongue of the ancestors of all magicians, who are thought to have descended from one particular tribe.”
“What causes it?”
“If mystical explanations are ruled out, then it seems that glossolalia comes from structures buried deep within the brain, common to all people.”
“What does it look like? How do these people act?”
“C. W. Shumway observed the Los Angeles revival of 1906 and noted six basic symptoms: complete loss of rational control; dominance of emotion that leads to hysteria; absence of thought or will; automatic functioning of the speech organs; amnesia; and occasional sporadic physical manifestations such as jerking or twitching. Eusebius observed similar phenomena around the year 300, saying that the false prophet begins by a deliberate suppression of conscious thought, and ends in a delirium over which he has no control.”
“What’s the Christian justification for this? Is there anything in the Bible that backs this up?”
“Pentecost.”
“You mentioned that word earlier—what is it?”
“From the Greek pentekostos, meaning fiftieth. It refers to the fiftieth day after the Crucifixion.”