NEAL STEPHENSON

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.”

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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

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