SNOW CRASH

counterpart of a messy desktop, all the trash still remaining wherever Lagos left it. The cloud of hypercards extends to every corner of the 50-by-50-foot space, and from floor level all the way up to about eight feet, which is about as high as Lagos’s avatar could reach.

“How many hypercards in here?”

“Ten thousand, four hundred and sixty-three,” the Librarian says.

“I don’t really have time to go through them,” Hiro says. “Can you give me some idea of what Lagos was working on here?”

“Well, I can read back the names of all the cards if you’d like. Lagos grouped them into four broad categories: Biblical studies, Sumerian studies, neurolinguistic studies, and intel gathered on L. Bob Rife.”

‘Without going into that kind of detail-what did Lagos have on his mind? What was he getting at?”

“What do I look like, a psychologist?” the Librarian says. “I can’t answer those kinds of questions.”

“Let me try it again. How does this stuff connect, if at all, to the subject of viruses?”

“The connections are elaborate. Summarizing them would require both creativity and discretion. As a mechanical entity, I have neither.”

“How old is this stuff?” Hiro says, gesturing to the three artifacts.

“The clay envelope is Sumerian. It is from the third millennium B.C. It was dug up from the city of Eridu in southern Iraq. The black stele or obelisk is the Code of Hammurabi, which dates from about 1750 B.C. The treelike structure is a Yahwistjc cult totem from Palestine. It’s called an asherah. It’s from about 900

B.C.”

“Did you call that slab an envelope?”

“Yes. It has a smaller clay slab wrapped up inside of it. This was how the Sumerians made tamper-proof documents.”

“All these things are in a museum somewhere, I take it?”

“The asherah and the Code of Hammurabi are in museums. The clay envelope is in the personal collection of L. Bob Rife.”

“L. Bob Rife is obviously interested in this stuff.”