“Sumerian?”
“Yes, sir. Used in Mesopotamia until roughly 2000 BC. The oldest of all written languages.”
“Oh. So all the other languages are descended from it?”
For a moment, the Librarian’s eyes glance upward, as if he’s thinking about something. This is a visual cue to inform Hiro that he’s making a momentary raid on the Library.
“Actually, no,” the Librarian says. “No languages whatsoever are descended from Sumerian. It is an agglutinative tongue, meaning that it is a collection of morphemes or syllables that are grouped into words—very unusual.”
“You are saying,” Hiro says, remembering Da5id in the hospital, “that if I could hear someone speaking Sumerian, it would sound like a long stream of short syllables strung together.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Would it sound anything like glossolalia?”
“Judgment call. Ask someone real,” the Librarian says.
“Does it sound like any modern tongue?”
“There is no provable genetic relationship between Sumerian and any tongue that came afterward.”
“That’s odd. My Mesopotamian history is rusty,” Hiro says. “What happened to the Sumerians? Genocide?”
“No, sir. They were conquered, but there’s no evidence of genocide per se.”
“Everyone gets conquered sooner or later,” Hiro says. “But their languages don’t die out. Why did Sumerian disappear?”
“Since I am just a piece of code, I would be on very thin ice to speculate,” the Librarian says.
“Okay. Does anyone understand Sumerian?”
“Yes, at any given time, it appears that there are roughly ten people in the world who can read it.”
“Where do they work?”
“One in Israel. One at the British Museum. One in Iraq. One at the University of Chicago. One at the University of Pennsylvania. And five at Rife Bible College in Houston, Texas.”
“Nice distribution. And have any of these people figured out what the word ‘namshub’ means in Sumerian?”
“Yes. A namshub is a speech with magical force. The closest English equivalent would be ‘incantation,’ but this has a number of incorrect connotations.”
“Did the Sumerians believe in magic?”
The Librarian shakes his head minutely. “This is the kind of seemingly precise question that is in fact very profound, and that pieces of software, such as myself, are notoriously clumsy at. Allow me to quote from Kramer, Samuel Noah, and Maier, John R. Myths of Enki, the Crafty God. New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989: ‘Religion, magic, and medicine are so completely intertwined in Mesopotamia that separating them is frustrating and perhaps futile work… [Sumerian incantations] demonstrate an intimate connection between the religious, the magical, and the esthetic so complete that any attempt to pull one away from the other will distort the whole.’ There is more material in here that might help explain the subject.”
“In where?”
“In the next room,” the Librarian says, gesturing at the wall. He walks over and slides the ricepaper partition out of the way.
A speech with magical force. Nowadays, people don’t believe in these kinds of things. Except in the Metaverse, that is, where magic is possible. The Metaverse is a fictional structure made out of code. And code is just a form of speech—the form that computers understand. The Metaverse in its entirety could be considered a single vast namshub, enacting itself on L. Bob Rife’s fiberoptic network.
The voice phone rings. “Just a second,” Hiro says.
“Take your time,” the Librarian says, not adding the obvious reminder that he can wait for a million years if need be.
“Me again,” Y.T. says. “I’m still on the train. Stumps got off at Express Port 127.”
“Hmm. That’s the antipode of Downtown. I mean, it’s as far away from Downtown as you can get.”
“It is?”
“Yeah. One-two-seven is two to the seventh power minus one—”
“Spare me, I take your word for it. It’s definitely out in the middle of fucking nowhere,” she says.
“You didn’t get off and follow him?”
“Are you kidding? All the way out there? It’s ten thousand miles from the nearest building, Hiro.”
She has a point. The Metaverse was built with plenty of room to expand. Almost all of the development is within two or three Express Ports—five hundred kilometers or so—of Downtown. Port 127 is twenty thousand miles away.
“What is there?”
“A black cube exactly twenty miles on a side.”
“Totally black?”
“Yeah.”
“How can you measure a black cube that big?”
“I’m riding along looking at the stars, okay? Suddenly, I can’t see them anymore on the right side of the train. I start counting local ports. I count sixteen of them. We get to Express Port 127, and Stumpy climbs off and goes toward the black thing. I count sixteen more local ports and then the stars come out. Then I take thirty-two kilometers and multiply it by point six and I get twenty miles—you asshole.”
“That’s good,” Hiro says. “That’s good intel.”
“Who do you think owns a black cube twenty miles across?”
“Just going on pure, irrational bias, I’m guessing L. Bob Rife. Supposedly, he has a big hunk of real estate out in the middle of nowhere where he keeps all the guts of the Metaverse. Some of us used to smash into it occasionally when we were out racing motorcycles.”
“Well, gotta go, pod.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight