“A language that lent itself to Enki’s neurolinguistic hacking.”
“Early linguists, as well as the Kabbalists, believed in a fictional language called the tongue of Eden, the language of Adam. It enabled all men to understand each other, to communicate without misunderstanding. It was the language of the Logos, the moment when God created the world by speaking a word. In the tongue of Eden, naming a thing was the same as creating it. To quote Steiner again, ‘Our speech interposes itself between apprehension and truth like a dusty pane or warped mirror. The tongue of Eden was like a flawless glass; a light of total understanding streamed through it. Thus Babel was a second Fall.’ And Isaac the Blind, an early Kabbalist, said that, to quote Gershom Scholem’s translation, ‘The speech of men is connected with divine speech and all language whether heavenly or human derives from one source: the Divine Name.’ The practical kabbalists, the sorcerers, bore the title Ba’al Shem, meaning ‘master of the divine name.’”
“The machine language of the world,” Hiro says.
“Is this another analogy?”
“Computers speak machine language,” Hiro says. “It’s written in ones and zeroes—binary code. At the lowest level, all computers are programmed with strings of ones and zeroes. When you program in machine language, you are controlling the computer at its brainstem, the root of its existence. It’s the tongue of Eden. But it’s very difficult to work in machine language because you go crazy after a while, working at such a minute level. So a whole Babel of computer languages has been created for programmers: FORTRAN, BASIC, COBOL, LISP, Pascal, C, PROLOG, FORTH. You talk to the computer in one of these languages, and a piece of software called a compiler converts it into machine language. But you never can tell exactly what the compiler is doing. It doesn’t always come out the way you want. Like a dusty pane or warped mirror. A really advanced hacker comes to understand the true inner workings of the machine—he sees through the language he’s working in and glimpses the secret functioning of the binary code—becomes a Ba’al Shem of sorts.”
“Lagos believed that the legends about the tongue of Eden were exaggerated versions of true events,” the Librarian says. “These legends reflected nostalgia for a time when people spoke Sumerian, a tongue that was superior to anything that came afterward.”
“Is Sumerian really that good?”
“Not as far as modern-day linguists can tell,” the Librarian says. “As I mentioned, it is largely impossible for us to grasp. Lagos suspected that words worked differently in those days. If one’s native tongue influences the physical structure of the developing brain, then it is fair to say that the Sumerians—who spoke a language radically different from anything in existence today—had fundamentally different brains from yours. Lagos believed that for this reason, Sumerian was a language ideally suited to the creation and propagation of viruses. That a virus, once released into Sumer, would spread rapidly and virulently, until it had infected everyone.”
“Maybe Enki knew that also,” Hiro says. “Maybe the namshub of Enki wasn’t such a bad thing. Maybe Babel was the best thing that ever happened to us.”
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Y.T.’s mom works in Fedland. She has parked her little car in her own little numbered slot, for which the Feds require her to pay about ten percent of her salary (if she doesn’t like it she can take a taxi or walk) and walked up several levels of a blindingly lit reinforced-concrete helix in which most of the spaces—the good spaces closer to the surface—are reserved for people other than her, but empty. She always walks up the center of the ramp, between the rows of parked cars, so that the EBGOC boys won’t think she’s lurking, loitering, skulking, malingering, or smoking.
Reaching the subterranean entrance of her building, she has taken all metal objects from her pockets and removed what little jewelry she’s wearing and dumped them into a dirty plastic bowl and walked through the detector. Flashed her badge. Signed her name and noted down the digital time. Submitted to a frisking from an EBGOC girl. Annoying, but it sure beats a cavity search. They have a right to do a cavity search if they want. She got cavity-searched every day for a month once, right after she had spoken up at a meeting and suggested that her supervisor might be on the wrong track with a major programming project. It was punitive and vicious, she knew it was, but she always wanted to give something back to her country, and whenever you work for the Feds you just accept the fact that there’s going to be some politicking. And that as a low-level person you’re going to bear the brunt. And later on, you climb the GS ladder, don’t have to put up with as much shit. Far be it from her to quarrel with her supervisor. Her supervisor, Marietta, doesn’t have an especially stellar GS level, but she does have access. She has connections. Marietta knows people who know people. Marietta has attended cocktail parties that were also attended by some people who, well, your eyes would bug out.