SNOW CRASH

“Take your time,” the Librarian says, not adding the obvious reminder that he can wait for a million years if need be.

“Me~gain,” Y.T. says. “I’m still on the train. Stumps got off at ExpreIs 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 1.7 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.”

28

Him hangs up and walks into the new room. The Librarian follows.

It is about fifty feet on a side. The center of the space is occupied by three large artifacts, or rather three-dimensional renderings of artifacts. In the center is a thick slab of baked clay, hanging in space, about the size of a coffee table, and about a foot thick. Hiro suspects that it is a magnified rendering of a smaller object. The broad surfaces of the slab are entirely covered with angular writing that Hiro recognizes as cuneiform. Around the edges are rounded, parallel depressions that appear to have been made by fingers as they shaped the slab.

To the right of the slab is a wooden pole with branches on top, sort of a stylized tree. To the left of the slab is an eight-foot-high obelisk, also covered with cuneiform, with a bas-relief figure chiseled into the top.

The room is filled with a three-dimensional constellation of hypercards, hanging weightlessly in the air. It looks like a highspeed photograph of a blizzard in progress. In some places, the hypercards are placed in precise geometric patterns, like atoms in a crystal. In other places, whole stacks of them are clumped together. Drifts of them have accumulated in the corners, as though Lagos tossed them away when he was finished. Hiro finds that his avatar can walk right through the hypercards without disturbing the arrangement. It is, in fact, the three-dimensional

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