“Thank you, all my needs are taken care of,” Ng says.
The door slams shut behind her. Ng makes a yapping sound, and the van pulls out onto the frontage road, headed back toward 405.
“Please excuse my appearance,” he says, after a couple of awkward minutes. “My helicopter caught fire during the evacuation of Saigon in 1974—a stray tracer from ground forces.”
“Whoa. What a drag.”
“I was able to reach an American aircraft carrier off the coast, but you know, the fuel was spraying around quite a bit during the fire.”
“Yeah, I can imagine, uh huh.”
“I tried prostheses for a while—some of them are very good. But nothing is as good as a motorized wheelchair. And then I got to thinking, why do motorized wheelchairs always have to be tiny pathetic things that strain to go up a little teeny ramp? So I bought this—it is an airport firetruck from Germany—and converted it into my new motorized wheelchair.”
“It’s very nice.”
“America is wonderful because you can get anything on a drive-through basis. Oil change, liquor, banking, car wash, funerals, anything you want—drive through! So this vehicle is much better than a tiny pathetic wheelchair. It is an extension of my body.”
“When the geisha rubs your back?”
Ng mumbles something and his pouch begins to throb and undulate around his body. “She is a daemon, of course. As for the massage, my body is suspended in an electrocontractive gel that massages me when I need it. I also have a Swedish girl and an African woman, but those daemons are not as well rendered.”
“And the mint julep?”
“Through a feeding tube. Nonalcoholic, ha ha.”
“So,” Y.T. says at some point, when they are way past LAX, and she figures it’s too late to chicken out, “what’s the plan? Do we have a plan?”
“We go to Long Beach. To the Terminal Island Sacrifice Zone. And we buy some drugs,” Ng says. “Or you do, actually, since I am indisposed.”
“That’s my job? To buy some drugs?”
“Buy them, and throw them up in the air.”
“In a Sacrifice Zone?”
“Yes. And we’ll take care of the rest.”
“Who’s we, dude?”
“There are several more, uh, entities that will help us.”
“What, is the back of the van full of more—people like you?”
“Sort of,” Ng says. “You are close to the truth.”
“Would these be, like, nonhuman systems?”
“That is a sufficiently all-inclusive term, I think.”
Y.T. figures that for a big yes.
“You tired? Want me to drive or anything?”
Ng laughs sharply, like distant ack-ack, and the van almost swerves off the road. Y.T. doesn’t get the sense that he is laughing at the joke; he is laughing at what a jerk Y.T. is.
Chapter Thirty
“Okay, last time we were talking about the clay envelope. But what about this thing? The thing that looks like a tree?” Hiro says, gesturing to one of the artifacts.
“A totem of the goddess Asherah,” the Librarian says crisply.
“Now we’re getting somewhere,” Hiro says. “Lagos said that the Brandy in The Black Sun was a cult prostitute of Asherah. So who is Asherah?”
“She was the consort of El, who is also known as Yahweh,” the Librarian says. “She also was known by other names: Elat, her most common epithet. The Greeks knew her as Dione or Rhea. The Canaanites knew her as Tannit or Hawwa, which is the same thing as Eve.”
“Eve?”
“The etymology of ‘Tannit’ proposed by Cross is: feminine of ‘tannin,’ which would mean ‘the one of the serpent.’ Furthermore, Asherah carried a second epithet in the Bronze Age, ‘dat batni,’ also ‘the one of the serpent.’ The Sumerians knew her as Nintu or Ninhursag. Her symbol is a serpent coiling about a tree or staff: the caduceus.”
“Who worshipped Asherah? A lot of people, I gather.”
“Everyone who lived between India and Spain, from the second millennium BC. up into the Christian era. With the exception of the Hebrews, who only worshipped her until the religious reforms of Hezekiah and, later, Josiah.”
“I thought the Hebrews were monotheists. How could they worship Asherah?”
“Monolatrists. They did not deny the existence of other gods. But they were only supposed to worship Yahweh. Asherah was venerated as the consort of Yahweh.”
“I don’t remember anything about God having a wife in the Bible.”
“The Bible didn’t exist at that point. Judaism was just a loose collection of Yahwistic cults, each with different shrines and practices. The stories about the Exodus hadn’t been formalized into scripture yet. And the later parts of the Bible had not yet happened.”
“Who decided to purge Asherah from Judaism?”
“The deuteronomic school—defined, by convention, as the people who wrote the book of Deuteronomy as well as Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings.”
“And what kind of people were they?”
“Nationalists. Monarchists. Centralists. The forerunners of the Pharisees. At this time, the Assyrian king Sargon II had recently conquered Samaria—northern Israel—forcing a migration of Hebrews southward into Jerusalem. Jerusalem expanded greatly and the Hebrews began to conquer territory to the west, east, and south. It was a time of intense nationalism and patriotic fervor. The deuteronomic school embodied those attitudes in scripture by rewriting and reorganizing the old tales.”