SNOW CRASH

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.

“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.’ Further—