NEAL STEPHENSON
99
able. Going into The Black Sun would not be practical-it would look and sound terrible, and the other patrons would look at him as if he were some kind of blackand-white person. But there’s no problem with going into his office, because that’s generated within the guts of his computer, which is sitting on his lap; he doesn’t need any communication with the outside world for that
He materializes in his office, in his nice little house in the old hacker neighborhood just off the Street. It is all quite Nipponese:
tatami mats cover the floor. His desk is a great, ruddy slab of rough-sawn mahogany. Silvery cloud-light filters through rice-paper walls. A panel in front of him slides open to reveal a garden, complete with babbling brook and steelhead trout jumping out from time to time to grab flies. Technically speaking, the pond should be full of carp, but Hiro is American enough to think of carp as inedible dinosaurs that sit on the bottom and eat sewage.
There is something new: A globe about the size of a grapefruit, a perfectly detailed rendition of Planet Earth, hanging in space at arm’s length in front of his eyes. Hiro has heard about this but never seen it It is a piece of CIC software called, simply, Earth. It is the user interface that CIC uses to keep track of every bit of spatial information that it owns-all the maps, weather data, architectural plans, and satellite surveillance stuff.
Hiro has been thinking that in a few years, if he does really well in the intel biz, maybe he will make enough money to subscribe to Earth and get this thing in his office. Now it is suddenly here, free of charge. The only explanation he can come up with is that Juanita must have given it to him.
But first things first. The Babel/Infocalypse card is still in his avatar’s pocket. He takes it out.
One of the rice-paper panels that make up the walls of his office slides open. On the other side of it, Hiro can see a large, dimly lit room that wasn’t there before; apparently Juanita came in and made a major addition to his house as well. A man walks into the office.
The Librarian daemon looks like a pleasant, fiftyish, silverhaired, bearded man with bright blue eyes, wearing a V-neck sweater over a work shirt, with a coarsely woven, tweedy-looking wool tie. The tie is loosened, the sleeves pushed up. Even though
100