Нил Стивенсон. Криптономикон (engl)
Neal Stephenson. Cryptonomicon
Neal Stephenson,
CRYPTONOMICON
"There is a remarkably close parallel between the problems of the physicist
and those of the cryptographer. The system on which a message is enciphered
corresponds to the laws of the universe, the intercepted messages to the
evidence available, the keys for a day or a message to important constants
which have to be determined. The correspondence is very close, but the
subject matter of cryptography is very easily dealt with by discrete
machinery, physics not so easily."
Alan Turing
This morning [Imelda Marcos] offered the latest in a series of explanations
of the billions of dollars that she and her husband, who died in 1989, are
believed to have stolen during his presidency.
"It so coincided that Marcos had money," she said. "After the Bretton Woods
agreement he started buying gold from Fort Knox. Three thousand tons, then
4,000 tons. I have documents for these: 7,000 tons. Marcos was so smart. He
had it all. It's funny; America didn't understand him."
The New York Times, Monday, 4 March, 1996
Prologue
Two tires fly. Two wail.
A bamboo grove, all chopped down
From it, warring songs.
...is the best that Corporal Bobby Shaftoe can do on short notice he's
standing on the running board, gripping his Springfield with one hand and
the rearview mirror with the other, so counting the syllables on his fingers
is out of the question. Is "tires" one syllable or two? How about "wail?"
The truck finally makes up its mind not to tip over, and thuds back onto
four wheels. The wail and the moment are lost. Bobby can still hear the
coolies singing, though, and now too there's the gunlike snicking of the
truck's clutch linkage as Private Wiley downshifts. Could Wiley be losing
his nerve? And, in the back, under the tarps, a ton and a half of file
cabinets clanking, code books slaloming, fuel spanking the tanks of Station
Alpha's electrical generator. The modern world's hell on haiku writers:
"Electrical generator" is, what, eight syllables? You couldn't even fit that
onto the second line!
"Are we allowed to run over people?" Private Wiley inquires, and then
mashes the horn button before Bobby Shaftoe can answer. A Sikh policeman
hurdles a night soil cart. Shaftoe's gut reaction is: Sure, what're they
going to do, declare war on us? but as the highest ranking man on this truck
he's probably supposed to be using his head or something, so he doesn't
blurt it out just yet. He takes stock of the situation:
Shanghai, 1645 hours, Friday, the 28th of November 1941. Bobby Shaftoe,
and the other half dozen Marines on his truck, are staring down the length
of Kiukiang Road, onto which they've just made this careening high speed
turn. Cathedral's going by to the right, so that means they are, what? two
blocks away from the Bund. A Yangtze River Patrol gunboat is tied up there,
waiting for the stuff they've got in the back of this truck. The only real
problem is that those particular two blocks are inhabited by about five
million Chinese people.
Now these Chinese are sophisticated urbanites, not suntanned yokels
who've never seen cars before they'll get out of your way if you drive fast
and honk your horn. And indeed many of them flee to one side of the street
or the other, producing the illusion that the truck is moving faster than
the forty three miles an hour shown on its speedometer.
But the bamboo grove in Bobby Shaftoe's haiku has not been added just
to put a little Oriental flavor into the poem and wow the folks back home in
Oconomowoc. There is a lot of heavy bamboo in front of this truck, dozens of
makeshift turnpikes blocking their path to the river, for the officers of
the U.S. Navy's Asiatic Fleet, and of the Fourth Marines, who dreamed up
this little operation forgot to take the Friday Afternoon factor into
account. As Bobby Shaftoe could've explained to them, if only they'd
bothered to ask a poor dumb jarhead, their route took them through the heart
of the banking district. Here you've got the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank of
course, City Bank, Chase Manhattan, the Bank of America, and BBME and the
Agricultural Bank of China and any number of crappy little provincial banks,
and several of those banks have contracts with what's left of the Chinese
Government to print currency. It must be a cutthroat business because they
slash costs by printing it on old newspapers, and if you know how to read
Chinese, you can see last year's news stories and polo scores peeking
through the colored numbers and pictures that transform these pieces of
paper into legal tender.
As every chicken peddler and rickshaw operator in Shanghai knows, the
money printing contracts stipulate that all of the bills these banks print
have to be backed by such and such an amount of silver; i.e., anyone should
be able to walk into one of those banks at the end of Kiukiang Road and slap
down a pile of bills and (provided that those bills were printed by that
same bank) receive actual metallic silver in exchange.
Now if China weren't right in the middle of getting systematically
drawn and quartered by the Empire of Nippon, it would probably send official
bean counters around to keep tabs on how much silver was actually present in
these banks' vaults, and it would all be quiet and orderly. But as it
stands, the only thing keeping these banks honest is the other banks.
Here's how they do it: during the normal course of business, lots of
paper money will pass over the counters of (say) Chase Manhattan Bank.
They'll take it into a back room and sort it, throwing into money boxes (a
couple of feet square and a yard deep, with ropes on the four corners) all
of the bills that were printed by (say) Bank of America in one, all of the
City Bank bills into another. Then, on Friday afternoon they will bring in
coolies. Each coolie, or pair of coolies, will of course have his great big
long bamboo pole with him a coolie without his pole is like a China Marine
without his nickel plated bayonet and will poke their pole through the ropes
on the corners of the box. Then one coolie will get underneath each end of
the pole, hoisting the box into the air. They have to move in unison or else
the box begins flailing around and everything gets out of whack. So as they
head towards their destination whatever bank whose name is printed on the
bills in their box they sing to each other, and plant their feet on the
pavement in time to the music. The pole's pretty long, so they are that far
apart, and they have to sing loud to hear each other, and of course each
pair of coolies in the street is singing their own particular song, trying
to drown out all of the others so that they don't get out of step.
So ten minutes before closing time on Friday afternoon, the doors of
many banks burst open and numerous pairs of coolies march in singing, like
the curtain raiser on a fucking Broadway musical, slam their huge boxes of
tattered currency down, and demand silver in exchange. All of the banks do
this to each other. Sometimes, they'll all do it on the same Friday,
particularly at times like 28 November 1941, when even a grunt like Bobby
Shaftoe can understand that it's better to be holding silver than piles of
old cut up newspaper. And that is why, once the normal pedestrians and food
cart operators and furious Sikh cops have scurried out of the way, and
plastered themselves up against the clubs and shops and bordellos on
Kiukiang Road, Bobby Shaftoe and the other Marines on the truck still cannot
even see the gunboat that is their destination, because of this horizontal
forest of mighty bamboo poles. They cannot even hear the honking of their
own truck horn because of the wild throbbing pentatonic cacophony of coolies
singing. This ain't just your regular Friday P.M. Shanghai bank district
money rush. This is an ultimate settling of accounts before the whole
Eastern Hemisphere catches fire. The millions of promises printed on those
slips of bumwad will all be kept or broken in the next ten minutes; actual
pieces of silver and gold will move, or they won't. It is some kind of
fiduciary Judgment Day.
"Jesus Christ, I can't " Private Wiley hollers.
"The captain said don't stop for any reason whatsofuckinever," Shaftoe
reminds him. He's not telling Wiley to run over the coolies, he's reminding
Wiley that if he refrains from running over them, they will have some
explaining to do which will be complicated by the fact that the captain's
right behind them in a car stuffed with Tommy Gun toting China Marines. And
from the way the captain's been acting about this Station Alpha thing, it's
pretty clear that he already has a few preliminary strap marks on his ass,
courtesy of some admiral in Pearl Harbor or even (drumroll) Marine Barracks,
Eight and Eye Streets Southeast, Washington, D.C.
***
Shaftoe and the other Marines have always known Station Alpha as a
mysterious claque of pencil necked swabbies who hung out on the roof of a
building in the International Settlement in a shack of knot pocked cargo
pallet planks with antennas sticking out of it every which way. If you stood
there long enough you could see some of those antennas moving, zeroing in on
something out to sea. Shaftoe even wrote a haiku about it:
Antenna searches
Retriever's nose in the wind
Ether's far secrets
This was only his second haiku ever clearly not up to November 1941
standards and he cringes to remember it.
But in no way did any of the Marines comprehend what a big deal Station
Alpha was until today. Their job had turned out to involve wrapping a ton of
equipment and several tons of paper in tarps and moving it out of doors.
Then they spent Thursday tearing the shack apart, making it into a bonfire,
and burning certain books and papers.
"Sheeeyit!" Private Wiley hollers. Only a few of the coolies have
gotten out of the way, or even seen them. But then there is this fantastic
boom from the river, like the sound of a mile thick bamboo pole being
snapped over God's knee. Half a second later there're no coolies in the
street anymore just a lot of boxes with unmanned bamboo poles teeter
tottering on them, bonging into the streets like wind chimes. Above, a furry
mushroom of grey smoke rises from the gunboat. Wiley shifts up to high gear
and floors it. Shaftoe cringes against the truck's door and lowers his head,
hoping that his campy Great War doughboy helmet will be good for something.
Then money boxes start to rupture and explode as the truck rams through
them. Shaftoe peers up through a blizzard of notes and sees giant bamboo
poles soaring and bounding and windmilling toward the waterfront.
The leaves of Shanghai:
Pale doorways in a steel sky.
Winter has begun.
Chapter 1 BARRENS
Let's set the existence of God issue aside for a later volume, and just
stipulate that in some way, self replicating organisms came into existence
on this planet and immediately began trying to get rid of each other, either
by spamming their environments with rough copies of themselves, or by more
direct means which hardly need to be belabored. Most of them failed, and
their genetic legacy was erased from the universe forever, but a few found
some way to survive and to propagate. After about three billion years of
this sometimes zany, frequently tedious fugue of carnality and carnage,
Godfrey Waterhouse IV was born, in Murdo, South Dakota, to Blanche, the wife
of a Congregational preacher named Bunyan Waterhouse. Like every other
creature on the face of the earth, Godfrey was, by birthright, a stupendous
badass, albeit in the somewhat narrow technical sense that he could trace
his ancestry back up a long line of slightly less highly evolved stupendous
badasses to that first self replicating gizmo which, given the number and
variety of its descendants, might justifiably be described as the most
stupendous badass of all time. Everyone and everything that wasn't a
stupendous badass was dead.
As nightmarishly lethal, memetically programmed death machines went,
these were the nicest you could ever hope to meet. In the tradition of his
namesake (the Puritan writer John Bunyan, who spent much of his life in
jail, or trying to avoid it) the Rev. Waterhouse did not preach in any one
place for long. The church moved him from one small town in the Dakotas to
another every year or two. It is possible that Godfrey found the lifestyle
more than a little alienating, for, sometime during the course of his
studies at Fargo Congregational College, he bolted from the fold and, to the
enduring agony of his parents, fell into worldly pursuits, and ended up,
somehow, getting a Ph.D. in Classics from a small private university in
Ohio. Academics being no less nomadic than Congregational preachers, he took
work where he could find it. He became a Professor of Greek and Latin at
Bolger Christian College (enrollment 322) in West Point, Virginia, where the
Mattaponi and Pamunkey Rivers came together to form the estuarial James, and
the loathsome fumes of the big paper mill permeated every drawer, every
closet, even the interior pages of books. Godfrey's young bride, nee Alice
Pritchard, who had grown up following her itinerant preacher father across
the vastnesses of eastern Montana where air smelt of snow and sage threw up
for three months. Six months later she gave birth to Lawrence Pritchard
Waterhouse.
The boy had a peculiar relationship with sound. When a fire engine
passed, he was not troubled by the siren's howl or the bell's clang. But
when a hornet got into the house and swung across the ceiling in a broad
Lissajous, droning almost inaudibly, he cried in pain at the noise. And if
he saw or smelled something that scared him, he would clap his hands over
his ears.
One noise that troubled him not at all was the pipe organ in the chapel
at Bolger Christian College. The chapel itself was nothing worth mentioning,
but the organ had been endowed by the paper mill family and would have
sufficed for a church four times the size. It nicely complemented the
organist, a retired high school math teacher who felt that certain
attributes of the Lord (violence and capriciousness in the Old Testament,
majesty and triumph in the New) could be directly conveyed into the souls of
the enpewed sinners through a kind of frontal sonic impregnation. That he
ran the risk of blowing out the stained glass windows was of no consequence
since no one liked them anyway, and the paper mill fumes were gnawing at the
interstitial lead. But after one little old lady too many staggered down the
aisle after a service, reeling from tinnitus, and made a barbed comment to
the minister about the exceedingly dramatic music, the organist was
replaced.
Nevertheless, he continued to give lessons on the instrument. Students
were not allowed to touch the organ until they were proficient at the piano,
and when this was explained to Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse, he taught
himself in three weeks, how to play a Bach fugue, and signed up for organ
lessons. Since he was only five years old at the time, he was unable to
reach both the manuals and the pedals, and had to play standing or rather
strolling, from pedal to pedal.
When Lawrence was twelve, the organ broke down. That paper mill family
had not left any endowment for maintenance, so the math teacher decided to
have a crack at it. He was in poor health and required a nimble assistant:
Lawrence, who helped him open up the hood of the thing. For the first time
in all those years, the boy saw what had been happening when he had been
pressing those keys.
For each stop each timbre, or type of sound, that the organ could make
(viz. blockflöte, trumpet, piccolo) there was a separate row of pipes,
arranged in a line from long to short. Long pipes made low notes, short
high. The tops of the pipes defined a graph: not a straight line but an
upward tending curve. The organist/math teacher sat down with a few loose
pipes, a pencil, and paper, and helped Lawrence figure out why. When
Lawrence understood, it was as if the math teacher had suddenly played the
good part of Bach's Fantasia and Fugue in G Minor on a pipe organ the size
of the Spiral Nebula in Andromeda the part where Uncle Johann dissects the
architecture of the Universe in one merciless descending ever mutating
chord, as if his foot is thrusting through skidding layers of garbage until
it finally strikes bedrock. In particular, the final steps of the organist's
explanation were like a falcon's dive through layer after layer of pretense
and illusion, thrilling or sickening or confusing depending on what you
were. The heavens were riven open. Lawrence glimpsed choirs of angels
ranking off into geometrical infinity.
The pipes sprouted in parallel ranks from a broad flat box of
compressed air. All of the pipes for a given note but belonging to different
stops lined up with each other along one axis. All of the pipes for a given
stop but tuned at different pitches lined up with each other along the
other, perpendicular axis. Down there in the flat box of air, then, was a
mechanism that got air to the right pipes at the right times. When a key or
pedal was depressed, all of the pipes capable of sounding the corresponding
note would speak, as long as their stops were pulled out.
Mechanically, all of this was handled in a fashion that was perfectly
clear, simple, and logical. Lawrence had supposed that the machine must be
at least as complicated as the most intricate fugue that could be played on
it. Now he had learned that a machine, simple in its design, could produce
results of infinite complexity.
Stops were rarely used alone. They tended to be piled on top of each
other in combinations that were designed to take advantage of the available
harmonics (more tasty mathematics here!). Certain combinations in particular
were used over and over again. Lots of blockflötes, in varying lengths, for
the quiet Offertory, for example. The organ included an ingenious mechanism
called the preset, which enabled the organist to select a particular
combination of stops stops he himself had chosen instantly. He would punch a
button and several stops would bolt out from the console, driven by
pneumatic pressure, and in that instant the organ would become a different
instrument with entirely new timbres.
The next summer both Lawrence and Alice, his mother, were colonized by
a distant cousin a stupendous badass of a virus. Lawrence escaped from it
with an almost imperceptible tendency to drag one of his feet. Alice wound
up in an iron lung. Later, unable to cough effectively, she got pneumonia
and died.
Lawrence's father, Godfrey, freely confessed that he was not equal to
the burdens now laid on his shoulders. He resigned from his position at the
small college in Virginia and moved, with his son, to a small house in
Moorhead, Minnesota, next door to where Bunyan and Blanche had settled.
Later he got a job teaching at a nearby normal school.
At this point, all of the responsible adults in Lawrence's life seemed
to arrive at a tacit agreement that the best way to raise him certainly the
easiest was to leave him alone. On the rare occasions when Lawrence
requested adult intervention in his life, he was usually asking questions
that no one could answer. At the age of sixteen, having found nothing in the
local school system to challenge him, Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse went off
to college. He matriculated at Iowa State College, which among other things
was the site of a Naval ROTC installation in which he was forcibly enrolled.
The Iowa State Naval ROTC had a band, and was delighted to hear that
Lawrence had an interest in music. Since it was hard to drill on the deck of
a dreadnought while playing a pipe organ, they issued him a glockenspiel and
a couple of little dingers.
When not marching back and forth on the flood plain of the Skunk River
making loud dinging noises, Lawrence was majoring in mechanical engineering.
He ended up doing poorly in this area because he had fallen in with a
Bulgarian professor named John Vincent Atanasoff and his graduate student,
Clifford Berry, who were building a machine that was intended to automate
the solution of some especially tedious differential equations.
The basic problem for Lawrence was that he was lazy. He had figured out
that everything was much simpler if, like Superman with his X ray vision,
you just stared through the cosmetic distractions and saw the underlying
mathematical skeleton. Once you found the math in a thing, you knew
everything about it, and you could manipulate it to your heart's content
with nothing more than a pencil and a napkin. He saw it in the curve of the
silver bars on his glockenspiel, saw it in the catenary arch of a bridge and
in the capacitor studded drum of Atanasoff and Berry's computing machine.
Actually pounding on the glockenspiel, riveting the bridge together, or
trying to figure out why the computing machine wasn't working were not as
interesting to him.
Consequently he got poor grades. From time to time, though, he would
perform some stunt on the blackboard that would leave his professor weak in
the knees and the other students baffled and hostile. Word got around.
At the same time, his grandmother Blanche was invoking her extensive
Congregational connections, working the angles on Lawrence's behalf, totally
unbeknownst to him. Her efforts culminated in triumph when Lawrence was
awarded an obscure scholarship, endowed by a St. Paul oat processing heir,
whose purpose was to send Midwestern Congregationalists to the Ivy League
for one year, which (evidently) was deemed a long enough period of time to
raise their IQs by a few crucial points but not long enough to debauch them.
So Lawrence got to be a sophomore in Princeton.
Now Princeton was an august school and going there was a great honor,
but no one got around to mentioning either of these facts to Lawrence, who
had no way of knowing. This had bad and good consequences. He accepted the
scholarship with a faintness of gratitude that infuriated the oat lord. On
the other hand, he adjusted to Princeton easily because it was just another
place . It reminded him of the nicer bits of Virginia, and there were some
nice pipe organs in town, though he was not all that happy with his
engineering homework of bridge designing and sprocket cutting problems. As
always, these eventually came down to math, most of which he could handle
easily. From time to time he would get stuck, though, which led him to the
Fine Hall: the headquarters of the Math Department.
There was a motley assortment of fellows wandering around in Fine Hall,
many sporting British or European accents. Administratively speaking, many
of these fellows were not members of the Math Department at all, but a
separate thing called IAS, which stood for Institute for Advanced something
or other. But they were all in the same building and they all knew a thing
or two about math, so the distinction didn't exist for Lawrence.
Quite a few of these men would pretend shyness when Lawrence sought
their advice, but others were at least willing to hear him out. For example:
he had come up with a way to solve a difficult sprocket tooth shape problem
that, as normally solved by engineers, would require any number of perfectly
reasonable but aesthetically displeasing approximations. Lawrence's solution
would provide exact results. The only draw back was that it would require a
quintillion slide rule operators a quintillion years to solve. Lawrence was
working on a radically different approach that, if it worked, would bring
those figures down to a trillion and a trillion respectively. Unfortunately,
Lawrence was unable to interest anyone at Fine Hall in anything as prosaic
as gears, until all of a sudden he made friends with an energetic British
fellow, whose name he promptly forgot, but who had been doing a lot of
literal sprocket making himself lately. This fellow was trying to build, of
all things, a mechanical calculating machine specifically a machine to
calculate certain values of the Riemann Zeta Function
where s is a complex number.
Lawrence found this zeta function to be no more and no less interesting
than any other math problem until his new friend assured him that it was
frightfully important, and that some of the best mathematicians in the world
had been gnawing on it for decades. The two of them ended up staying awake
until three in the morning working out the solution to Lawrence's sprocket
problem. Lawrence presented the results proudly to his engineering
professor, who snidely rejected it, on grounds of practicality, and gave him
a poor grade for his troubles.
Lawrence finally remembered, after several more contacts, that the name
of the friendly Brit was Al something or other. Because Al was a passionate
cyclist, he and Al went on quite a few bicycle rides through the countryside
of the Garden State. As they rode around New Jersey, they talked about math,
and particularly about machines for taking the dull part of math off their
hands.
But Al had been thinking about this subject for longer than Lawrence,
and had figured out that computing machines were much more than just labor
saving devices. He'd been working on a radically different sort of computing
mechanism that would work out any arithmetic problem whatsoever, as long as
you knew how to write the problem down. From a pure logic standpoint, he had
already figured out everything there was to know about this (as yet
hypothetical) machine, though he had yet to build one. Lawrence gathered
that actually building machinery was looked on as undignified at Cambridge
(England, that is, where this Al character was based) or for that matter at
Fine Hall. Al was thrilled to have found, in Lawrence, someone who did not
share this view.
Al delicately asked him, one day, if Lawrence would terribly mind
calling him by his full and proper name, which was Alan and not Al. Lawrence
apologized and said he would try very hard to keep it in mind.
One day a couple of weeks later, as the two of them sat by a running
stream in the woods above the Delaware Water Gap, Alan made some kind of an
outlandish proposal to Lawrence involving penises. It required a great deal
of methodical explanation, which Alan delivered with lots of blushing and
stuttering. He was ever so polite, and several times emphasized that he was
acutely aware that not everyone in the world was interested in this sort of
thing.
Lawrence decided that he was probably one of those people.
Alan seemed vastly impressed that Lawrence had paused to think about it
at all and apologized for putting him out. They went directly back to a
discussion of computing machines, and their friendship continued unchanged.
But on their next bicycle ride an overnight camping trip to the Pine Barrens
they were joined by a new fellow, a German named Rudy von something or
other.
Alan and Rudy's relationship seemed closer, or at least more
multilayered, than Alan and Lawrence's. Lawrence concluded that Alan's penis
scheme must have finally found a taker.
It got Lawrence to thinking. From an evolution standpoint, what was the
point of having people around who were not inclined to have offspring? There
must be some good, and fairly subtle, reason for it.
The only thing he could work out was that it was groups of people
societies rather than individual creatures, who were now trying to out
reproduce and/or kill each other, and that, in a society, there was plenty
of room for someone who didn't have kids as long as he was up to something
useful.
Alan and Rudy and Lawrence rode south, anyway, looking for the Pine
Barrens. After a while the towns became very far apart, and the horse farms
gave way to a low stubble of feeble, spiny trees that appeared to extend all
the way to Florida blocking their view, but not the head wind. "Where are
the Pine Barrens I wonder?" Lawrence asked a couple of times. He even
stopped at a gas station to ask someone that question. His companions began
to make fun of him.
"Vere are ze Pine Barrens?" Rudy inquired, looking about quizzically.
"I should look for something rather barren looking, with numerous pine
trees," Alan mused.
There was no other traffic and so they had spread out across the road
to pedal three abreast, with Alan in the middle.
"A forest, as Kafka would imagine it," Rudy muttered.
By this point Lawrence had figured out that they were, in fact, in the
Pine Barrens. But he didn't know who Kafka was. "A mathematician?" he
guessed.
"Zat is a scary sing to sink of," Rudy said.
"He is a writer," Alan said. "Lawrence, please don't be offended that I
ask you this, but: do you recognize any other people's names at all? Other
than family and close friends, I mean."
Lawrence must have looked baffled. "I'm trying to figure out whether it
all comes from in here," Alan said, reaching out to rap his knuckles on the
side of Lawrence's head, "or do you sometimes take in new ideas from other
human beings?"
"When I was a little boy, I saw angels in a church in Virginia,"
Lawrence said, "but I think that they came from inside my head."
"Very well," Alan said.
But later Alan had another go at it. They had reached the fire lookout
tower and it had been a thunderous disappointment: just an alienated
staircase leading nowhere, and a small cleared area below that was glittery
with shards of liquor bottles. They pitched their tent by the side of a pond
that turned out to be full of rust colored algae that stuck to the hairs on
their bodies. Then there was nothing left to do but drink schnapps and talk
about math.
Alan said, "Look, it's like this: Bertrand Russell and another chap
named Whitehead wrote Principia Mathematica .
"Now I know you're pulling my leg," Waterhouse said. "Even I know that
Sir Isaac Newton wrote that ."
"Newton wrote a different book, also called Principia Mathematica ,
which isn't really about mathematics at all; it's about what we would today
call physics."
"Then why did he call it Principia Mathematica?"
"Because the distinction between mathematics and physics wasn't
especially clear in Newton's day "
"Or maybe even in zis day," Rudy said.
" which is directly relevant to what I'm talking about," Alan
continued. "I am talking about Russell's P.M., in which he and Whitehead
started absolutely from scratch, I mean from nothing, and built it all up
all mathematics from a small number of first principles. And why I am
telling you this, Lawrence, is that Lawrence! Pay attention!"
"Hmmm?"
"Rudy take this stick, here that's right and keep a close eye on
Lawrence, and when he gets that foggy look on his face, poke him with it!"
"Zis is not an English school, you can't do zese kind of sing."
"I'm listening," Lawrence said.
"What came out of P.M., which was terrifically radical, was the ability
to say that all of math, really, can be expressed as a certain ordering of
symbols."
"Leibniz said it a long time before zen!" protested Rudy.
"Er, Leibniz invented the notation we use for calculus, but "
"I'm not talking about zat!"
"And he invented matrices, but "
"I'm not talking about zat eezer!"
"And he did some work with binary arithmetic, but "
"Zat is completely different!"
"Well, what the hell are you talking about, then, Rudy?"
"Leibniz invented ze basic alphabet wrote down a set of symbols, for
expressing statements about logic."
"Well, I wasn't aware that Herr Leibniz counted formal logic among his
interests, but "
"Of course! He wanted to do what Russell and Whitehead did, except not
just with mathematics, but with everything in ze whole world!"
"Well, from the fact that you are the only man on the planet, Rudy, who
seems to know about this undertaking of Leibniz's, can we assume that he
failed?"
"You can assume anything that pleases your fancy, Alan," Rudy
responded, "but I am a mathematician and I do not assume anything."
Alan sighed woundedly, and gave Rudy a Significant Look which
Waterhouse assumed meant that there would be trouble later. "If I may just
make some headway, here," he said, "all I'm really trying to get you to
agree on, is that mathematics can be expressed as a series of symbols," (he
snatched the Lawrence poking stick and began drawing things like + = 3)
[square root of 1][pi] in the dirt) "and frankly I could not care less
whether they happen to be Leibniz's symbols, or Russell's, or the hexagrams
of the I Ching...."
"Leibniz was fascinated by the I Ching!" Rudy began.
"Shut up about Leibniz for a moment, Rudy, because look here: You Rudy
and I are on a train, as it were, sitting in the dining car, having a nice
conversation, and that train is being pulled along at a terrific clip by
certain locomotives named The Bertrand Russell and Riemann and Euler and
others. And our friend Lawrence is running alongside the train, trying to
keep up with us it's not that we're smarter than he is, necessarily, but
that he's a farmer who didn't get a ticket. And I, Rudy, am simply reaching
out through the open window here, trying to pull him onto the fucking train
with us so that the three of us can have a nice little chat about
mathematics without having to listen to him panting and gasping for breath
the whole way."
"All right, Alan."
"Won't take a minute if you will just stop interrupting."
"But there is a locomotive too named Leibniz."
"Is it that you don't think I give enough credit to Germans? Because I
am about to mention a fellow with an umlaut."
"Oh, would it be Herr Türing?" Rudy said slyly.
"Herr Türing comes later. I was actually thinking of Gödel."
"But he's not German! He's Austrian!"
"I'm afraid that it's all the same now, isn't it?"
"Ze Anschluss wasn't my idea, you don't have to look at me that way, I
think Hitler is appalling."
"I've heard of Gödel," Waterhouse put in helpfully. "But could we back
up just a sec?"
"Of course Lawrence."
"Why bother? Why did Russell do it? Was there something wrong with
math? I mean, two plus two equals four, right?"
Alan picked up two bottlecaps and set them down on the ground. "Two.
One two. Plus " He set down two more. "Another two. One two. Equals four.
One two three four."
"What's so bad about that?" Lawrence said.
"But Lawrence when you really do math, in an abstract way, you're not
counting bottlecaps, are you?"
"I'm not counting anything. "
Rudy broke the following news: "Zat is a very modern position for you
to take."
"It is?"
Alan said, "There was this implicit belief, for a long time, that math
was a sort of physics of bottlecaps. That any mathematical operation you
could do on paper, no matter how complicated, could be reduced in theory,
anyway to messing about with actual physical counters, such as bottlecaps,
in the real world."
"But you can't have two point one bottlecaps."
"All right, all right, say we use bottlecaps for integers, and for real
numbers like two point one, we use physical measurements, like the length of
this stick." Alan tossed the stick down next to the bottlecaps.
"Well what about pi, then? You can't have a stick that's exactly pi
inches long."
"Pi is from geometry ze same story," Rudy put in.
"Yes, it was believed that Euclid's geometry was really a kind of
physics, that his lines and so on represented properties of the physical
world. But you know Einstein?"
"I'm not very good with names."
"That white haired chap with the big mustache?"
"Oh, yeah," Lawrence said dimly, "I tried to ask him my sprocket
question. He claimed he was late for an appointment or something."
"That fellow has come up with a general relativity theory, which is
sort of a practical application, not of Euclid's, but of Riemann's geometry
"
"The same Riemann of your zeta function?"
"Same Riemann, different subject. Now let's not get sidetracked here
Lawrence "
"Riemann showed you could have many many different geometries that were
not the geometry of Euclid but that still made sense internally," Rudy
explained.
"All right, so back to P.M. then," Lawrence said.
"Yes! Russell and Whitehead. It's like this: when mathematicians began
fooling around with things like the square root of negative one, and
quaternions, then they were no longer dealing with things that you could
translate into sticks and bottlecaps. And yet they were still getting sound
results."
"Or at least internally consistent results," Rudy said.
"Okay. Meaning that math was more than a physics of bottlecaps."
"It appeared that way, Lawrence, but this raised the question of was
mathematics really true or was it just a game played with symbols? In other
words are we discovering Truth, or just wanking?"
"It has to be true because if you do physics with it, it all works out!
I've heard of that general relativity thing, and I know they did experiments
and figured out it was true."
"Ze great majority of mathematics does not lend itself to experimental
testing," Rudy said.
"The whole idea of this project is to sever the ties to physics," Alan
said.
"And yet not to be yanking ourselves."
"That's what P.M. was trying to do?"
"Russell and Whitehead broke all mathematical concepts down into
brutally simple things like sets. From there they got to integers, and so
on.
"But how can you break something like pi down into a set?"
"You can't," Alan said, "but you can express it as a long string of
digits. Three point one four one five nine, and so on."
"And digits are integers," Rudy said.
"But no fair! Pi itself is not an integer!"
"But you can calculate the digits of pi, one at a time, by using
certain formulas. And you can write down the formulas like so!" Alan
scratched this in the dirt:
"I have used the Leibniz series in order to placate our friend. See,
Lawrence? It is a string of symbols."
"Okay. I see the string of symbols," Lawrence said reluctantly.
"Can we move on? Gödel said, just a few years ago, 'Say! If you buy
into this business about mathematics being just strings of symbols, guess
what?' And he pointed out that any string of symbols such as this very
formula, here can be translated into integers."
"How?"
"Nothing fancy, Lawrence it's just simple encryption. Arbitrary. The
number '538' might be written down instead of this great ugly [sigma], and
so on.
"Seems pretty close to wanking, now."
"No, no. Because then Gödel sprang the trap! Formulas can act on
numbers, right?"
"Sure. Like 2x."
"Yes. You can substitute any number for x and the formula 2x will
double it. But if another mathematical formula, such as this one right here,
for calculating pi, can be encoded as a number, then you can have another
formula act on it. Formulas acting on formulas!"
"Is that all?"
"No. Then he showed, really through a very simple argument, that if
formulas really can refer to themselves, it's possible to write one down
saying 'this statement cannot be proved.' Which was tremendously startling
to Hilbert and everyone else, who expected the opposite result."
"Have you mentioned this Hilbert guy before?"
"No, he is new to this discussion, Lawrence."
"Who is he?"
"A man who asks difficult questions. He asked a whole list of them
once. Gödel answered one of them."
"And Türing answered another," Rudy said.
"Who's that?"
"It's me," Alan said. "But Rudy's joking. 'Turing' doesn't really have
an umlaut in it."
"He's going to have an umlaut in him later tonight," Rudy said, looking
at Alan in a way that, in retrospect, years later, Lawrence would understand
to have been smoldering.
"Well, don't keep me in suspense. Which one of his questions did you
answer?"
"The Entscheidungsproblem," Rudy said.
"Meaning?"
Alan explained, "Hilbert wanted to know whether any given statement
could, in principle, be found true or false."
"But after Gödel got finished, it changed," Rudy pointed out. "That's
true after Gödel it became 'Can we determine whether any given statement is
provable or non provable?' In other words, is there some sort of mechanical
process we could use to separate the provable statements from the
nonprovable ones?"
'Mechanical process' is supposed to be a metaphor, Alan. . .
"Oh, stop it, Rudy! Lawrence and I are quite comfortable with
machinery."
"I get it," Lawrence said.
"What do you mean, you get it?" Alan said.
"Your machine not the zeta function calculator, but the other one. The
one we've been talking about building "
"It is called Universal Turing Machine," Rudy said.
"The whole point of that gizmo is to separate provable from nonprovable
statements, isn't it?''
"That's why I came up with the basic idea for it," Alan said. "So
Hilbert's question has been answered. Now I just want to actually build one
so that I can beat Rudy at chess."
"You haven't told poor Lawrence the answer yet!" Rudy protested.
"Lawrence can figure it out," Alan said. "It'll give him something to
do."
***
Soon it became clear that Alan really meant: It'll give him something
to do while we're fucking. Lawrence shoved a notebook into the waistband of
his trousers and rode his bicycle a few hundred yards to the fire tower,
then climbed up the stairs to the platform at the top and sat down, back to
the setting sun, notebook propped up on his knees to catch the light.
He could not collect his thoughts, and then he was distracted by a
false sunrise that lit up the clouds off to the northeast. He thought at
first that some low clouds were bouncing fragments of the sunset back to
him, but it was too concentrated and flickering for that. Then he thought it
was lightning. But the color of the light was not blue enough. It fluctuated
sharply, modulated by (one had to assume) great, startling events that were
occulted by the horizon. As the sun went down on the opposite side of the
world, the light on the New Jersey horizon focused to a steady, lambent core
the color of a flashlight when you shine it through the palm of your hand
under the bedsheets.
Lawrence climbed down the stairs and got on his bicycle and rode
through the Pine Barrens. Before long he came to a road that led in the
general direction of the light. Most of the time he could not see anything,
not even the road, but after a couple of hours the glow bouncing off the low
cloud layer lit up flat stones in the road, and turned the barrens'
wandering rivulets into glowing crevices.
The road began to tend in the wrong direction and so Lawrence cut
directly into the woods, because he was very close now, and the light in the
sky was strong enough that he could see it through the sparse carpet of
scrubby pines black sticks that appeared to have been burned, though they
hadn't. The ground had turned into sand, but it was damp and compacted, and
his bicycle had fat tires that rode over it well. At one point he had to
stop and throw the bike over a barbed wire fence. Then he broke out of the
sticks and onto a perfectly flat expanse of white sand, stitched down with
tufts of beach grass, and just then he was dazzled by a low fence of quiet
steady flames that ran across a part of the horizon about as wide as the
harvest moon when it sinks into the sea. Its brightness made it difficult to
see anything else Lawrence kept riding into little ditches and creeks that
meandered across the flats. He learned not to stare directly at the flames.
Looking off to the sides was more interesting anyway: the table land was
marked at wide intervals by the largest buildings he had ever seen, cracker
box structures built by Pharaohs, and in the mile wide plazas between them,
gnomons of triangulated steel were planted in wide stances: the internal
skeletons of pyramids. The largest of these pierced the center of a
perfectly circular railway line a few hundred feet in diameter: two argent
curves scored on the dull ground, interrupted in one place where the tower's
shadow, a stopped sundial, told the time. He rode by a building smaller than
the others, with oval tanks standing next to it. Steam murmured from valves
on the tops of the tanks, but instead of rising into the air it dribbled
down the sides and struck the ground and spread out, coating the sea grass
with jackets of silver.
A thousand sailors in white were standing in a ring around the long
flame. One of them held up his hand and waved Lawrence down. Lawrence came
to a stop next to the sailor and planted one foot on the sand to steady
himself. He and the sailor stared at each other for a moment and then
Lawrence, who could not think of anything else, said, "I am in the Navy
also." Then the sailor seemed to make up his mind about something. He
saluted Lawrence through, and pointed him towards a small building off to
the side of the fire.
The building looked only like a wall glowing in the firelight, but
sometimes a barrage of magnesium blue light made its windowframes jump out
of the darkness, a rectangular lightning bolt that echoed many times across
the night. Lawrence started pedaling again and rode past that building: a
spiraling flock of alert fedoras, prodding at slim terse notebooks with
stately Ticonderogas, crab walking photogs turning their huge chrome
daisies, crisp rows of people sleeping with blankets over their faces, a
sweating man with Brilliantined hair chalking umlauted names on a
blackboard. Finally coming around this building he smelled hot fuel oil,
felt the heat of the flames on his face and saw beach glass curled toward it
and desiccated.
He stared down upon the world's globe, not the globe fleshed with
continents and oceans but only its skeleton: a burst of meridians, curving
backwards to cage an inner dome of orange flame. Against the light of the
burning oil those longitudes were thin and crisp as a draftsman's ink
strokes. But coming closer he saw them resolve into clever works of rings
and struts, hollow as a bird's bones. As they spread away from the pole they
sooner or later began to wander, or split into bent parts, or just broke off
and hung in the fire oscillating like dry stalks. The perfect geometry was
also mottled, here and there, by webs of cable and harnesses of electrical
wiring. Lawrence almost rode over a broken wine bottle and decided he should
now walk, to spare his bicycle's tires, so he laid the bike down, the front
wheel covering an aluminum vase that appeared to have been spun on a lathe,
with a few charred roses hanging out of it. Some sailors had joined their
hands to form a sort of throne, and were bearing along a human shaped piece
of charcoal dressed in a coverall of immaculate asbestos. As they walked the
toes of their shoes caught in vast, ramified snarls of ropes and piano
wires, cables and wires, creative furtive movements in the grass and the
sand dozens of yards every direction. Lawrence began planting his feet very
thoughtfully one in front of the other, trying to measure the greatness of
what he had come and seen. A rocket shaped pod stuck askew from the sand,
supporting an umbrella of bent back propellers. The duralumin struts and cat
walks rambled on above him for miles. There was a suitcase spilled open,
with a pair of women's shoes displayed as if in the window of a down town
store, and a menu that had been charred to an oval glow, and then some
tousled wall slabs, like a whole room that had dropped out of the sky these
were decorated, one with a giant map of the world, great circles arcing away
from Berlin to pounce on cities near and far, and another with a photograph
of a famous, fat German in a uniform, grinning on a flowered platform, the
giant horizon of a new Zeppelin behind him.
After a while he stopped seeing new things. Then he got on his bicycle
and rode back through the Pine Barrens. He got lost in the dark and so
didn't find his way back to the fire tower until dawn. But he didn't mind
being lost because while he rode around in the dark he thought about the
Turing machine. Finally he came back to the shore of the pond where they had
camped. The dawn light shining on the saucer of calm reddish water made it
look like a pool of blood. Alan Mathison Turing and Rudolf von Hacklheber
were lying together like spoons on the shore, still smudged a little bit
from their swim yesterday. Lawrence started a little fire and made some tea
and they woke up eventually.
"Did you solve the problem?" Alan asked him.
"Well you can turn that Universal Turing Machine of yours into any
machine by changing the presets "
"Presets?"
"Sorry, Alan, I think of your U.T.M. as being kind of like a pipe
organ."
"Oh."
"Once you've done that, anyway, you can do any calculation you please,
if the tape is long enough. But gosh, Alan, making a tape that's long
enough, and that you can write symbols on, and erase them, is going to be
sort of tricky Atanasoffs capacitor drum would only work up to a certain
size you'd have to "
"This is a digression," Alan said gently.
"Yeah, okay, well if you had a machine like that, then any given preset
could be represented by a number a string of symbols. And the tape that you
would feed into it to start the calculation would contain another string of
symbols. So it's Gödel's proof all over again if any possible combination of
machine and data can be represented by a string of numbers, then you can
just arrange all of the possible strings of numbers into a big table, and
then it turns into a Cantor diagonal type of argument, and the answer is
that there must be some numbers that cannot be computed."
"And ze Entscheidungsproblem?" Rudy reminded him.
"Proving or disproving a formula once you've encrypted the formula into
numbers, that is is just a calculation on that number. So it means that the
answer to the question is, no! Some formulas cannot be proved or disproved
by any mechanical process! So I guess there's some point in being human
after all!"
Alan looked pleased until Lawrence said this last thing, and then his
face collapsed. "Now there you go making unwarranted assumptions."
"Don't listen to him, Lawrence!" Rudy said. "He's going to tell you
that our brains are Turing machines."
"Thank you, Rudy," Alan said patiently. "Lawrence, I submit that our
brains are Turing machines."
"But you proved that there's a whole lot of formulas that a Turing
machine can't process!"
"And you have proved it too, Lawrence."
"But don't you think that we can do some things that a Turing machine
couldn't?"
"Gödel agrees with you, Lawrence," Rudy put in, "and so does Hardy."
"Give me one example," Alan said.
"Of a noncomputable function that a human can do, and a Turing machine
can't?"
"Yes. And don't give me any sentimental nonsense about creativity. I
believe that a Universal Turing Machine could show behaviors that we would
construe as creative."
"Well, I don't know then . . . I'll try to keep my eye out for that
kind of thing in the future.''
But later, as they were tiding back towards Princeton, he said, "What
about dreams?"
"Like those angels in Virginia?"
"I guess so."
"Just noise in the neurons, Lawrence."
"Also I dreamed last night that a zeppelin was burning."
***
Soon, Alan got his Ph.D. and went back to England. He wrote Lawrence a
couple of letters. The last of these stated, simply, that he would not be
able to write Lawrence any more letters "of substance" and that Lawrence
should not take it personally. Lawrence perceived right away that Alan's
society had put him to work doing something useful probably figuring out how
to keep it from being eaten alive by certain of its neighbors. Lawrence
wondered what use America would find for him .
He went back to Iowa State, considered changing his major to
mathematics, but didn't. It was the consensus of all whom he consulted that
mathematics, like pipe organ restoration, was a fine thing, but that one
needed some way to put bread on the table. He remained in engineering and
did more and more poorly at it until the middle of his senior year, when the
university suggested that he enter a useful line of work, such as roofing.
He walked straight out of college into the waiting arms of the Navy.
They gave him an intelligence test. The first question on the math part
had to do with boats on a river: Port Smith is 100 miles upstream of Port
Jones. The river flows at 5 miles per hour. The boat goes through water at
10 miles per hour. How long does it take to go from Port Smith to Port
Jones? How long to come back?
Lawrence immediately saw that it was a trick question. You would have
to be some kind of idiot to make the facile assumption that the current
would add or subtract 5 miles per hour to or from the speed of the boat.
Clearly, 5 miles per hour was nothing more than the average speed. The
current would be faster in the middle of the river and slower at the banks.
More complicated variations could be expected at bends in the river.
Basically it was a question of hydrodynamics, which could be tackled using
certain well known systems of differential equations. Lawrence dove into the
problem, rapidly (or so he thought) covering both sides of ten sheets of
paper with calculations. Along the way, he realized that one of his
assumptions, in combination with the simplified Navier Stokes equations, had
led him into an exploration of a particularly interesting family of partial
differential equations. Before he knew it, he had proved a new theorem. If
that didn't prove his intelligence, what would?
Then the time bell rang and the papers were collected. Lawrence managed
to hang onto his scratch paper. He took it back to his dorm, typed it up,
and mailed it to one of the more approachable math professors at Princeton,
who promptly arranged for it to be published in a Parisian mathematics
journal.
Lawrence received two free, freshly printed copies of the journal a few
months later, in San Diego, California, during mail call on board a large
ship called the U.S.S. Nevada. The ship had a band, and the Navy had given
Lawrence the job of playing the glockenspiel in it, because their testing
procedures had proven that he was not intelligent enough to do anything
else.
The sack of mail carrying Lawrence's contribution to the mathematical
literature arrived just in the nick of time. Lawrence's ship, and quite a
few of her sisters, had until then been based in California. But at just
this moment, all of them were transferred to some place called Pearl Harbor,
Hawaii, in order to show the Nips who was boss.
Lawrence had never really known what he wanted to do with his life, but
he quickly decided that being glockenspiel player on a battleship in Hawaii
during peacetime was a long way from the worst life you could possibly have.
The harshest part of the job was sometimes having to sit or march in very
warm conditions, and enduring occasional fluffed notes by other band
members. He had abundant free time, which he spent working on a series of
new theorems in the field of information theory. The field had been invented
and pretty much encompassed by his friend Alan, but there was much detail
work to be done. He and Alan and Rudy had sketched out a general plan of
what needed to be proved or disproved. Lawrence tore through the list. He
wondered what Alan and Rudy were up to in Britain and Germany, but he
couldn't write to them and find out, so he kept his work to himself. When he
wasn't playing the glockenspiel or working out theorems, there were bars and
dances to go to. Waterhouse did some penis work of his own, got the clap,
had it cured (1), bought condoms. All of the sailors did this.
They were like three year olds who shove pencils in their ears, discover
that it hurts, and stop doing it. Lawrence's first year went by almost
instantly. Time just blazed by. Nowhere could be sunnier, more relaxing,
than Hawaii.
Chapter 2 NOVUS ORDO SECLORUM
"Filipinos are a warm, gentle, caring, giving people," Avi says, "which
is a good thing since so many of them carry concealed weapons."
Randy is in Tokyo's airport, ambling down a concourse with a slowness
that is infuriating to his fellow travelers. They have all spent the last
half day strapped into bad chairs, stuffed into an aluminum tube aslosh with
jet fuel. Over the safety engineered nubs molded into the jetway floor,
their rolling suitcases drone like fighter planes. They graze the backs of
his knees as they bank around his husky columnar body. Randy is holding his
new GSM phone to the side of his head. Supposedly it works anywhere in the
world, except for the United States. This is his first chance to try it out.
"You sound clear as a bell," Avi says. "How was the flight over?"
"All right," Randy says. "They had one of those animated maps up on the
video screen."
Avi sighs. "All the airlines have those now," he announces
monotonically.
"The only feature between San Francisco and Tokyo was Midway Island."
"So?"
"It kind of hung there for hours. MIDWAY. Mute embarrassment all
around."
Randy reaches the departure gate for Manila, and pauses to admire a
five foot wide high definition TV set bearing the logo of a major Nipponese
consumer electronics company. It is running a video in which a wacky cartoon
professor and his adorable canine sidekick cheerfully tick off the three
transmission routes of the AIDS virus.
"I have a fingerprint for you," Randy says.
"Shoot."
Randy stares at the palm of his hand, on which he has written a string
of numbers and letters in ballpoint pen. "AF 10 06 E9 99 BA 11 07 64 C1 89
E3 40 8C 72 55."
"Got it," Avi says. "That's from Ordo, right?"
"Right. I e mailed you the key from SFO."
"The apartment situation is still resolving," Avi says. "So I just
reserved you a suite at the Manila Hotel."
"What do you mean, it's still resolving?"
"The Philippines is one of those post Spanish countries with no clear
boundaries between business and personal relationships," Avi says. "I don't
think you can secure lodgings there without marrying into a family with a
major street named after it."
Randy takes a seat in the departure area. Perky gate attendants in
jaunty, improbable hats zero in on Filipinos with too many carry ons, and
subject them to a public ritual of filling out little tags and surrendering
their possessions. The Filipinos roll their eyes and stare longingly out the
windows. But most of the waiting passengers are Nipponese some businessmen,
mostly vacationers. They are watching an educational video about how to get
mugged in foreign countries.
"Huh," Randy says, looking out the window, "got another 747 down to
Manila."
"In Asia, no decent airline bothers to dick around anything smaller
than a 747," Avi snaps. "If someone tries to pack you on board a 737 or god
forbid an Airbus, run, don't walk, away from the boarding lounge, and call
me on my Sky Pager and I'll send in a chopper to evacuate you."
Randy laughs.
Avi continues. "Now, listen. This hotel you're going to is very old,
very grand, but it's in the middle of nowhere."
"Why would they build a grand hotel in the middle of nowhere?"
"It used to be a happening place it's on the waterfront, right on the
edge of Intramuros."
Randy's high school Spanish is enough to translate that: Inside the
Walls.
"But Intramuros was annihilated by the Nipponese in 1945," Avi
continues. "Systematically. All of the business hotels and office buildings
are in a new neighborhood called Makati, much closer to the airport."
"So you want to put our office in Intramuros."
"How'd you guess?" Avi says, sounding a little spooked. He prides
himself on unpredictability.
"I'm not an intuitive guy generally," Randy says, "but I've been on a
plane for thirteen hours and my brain has been turned inside out and hung up
to dry."
Avi rattles off canned justifications: office space is much cheaper in
Intramuros. Government ministries are closer. Makati, the gleaming new
business district, is too isolated from the real Philippines. Randy pays no
attention to it.
"You want to work out of Intramuros because it was systematically
annihilated, and because you're obsessed with the Holocaust," Randy finally
says, quietly and without rancor.
"Yeah. So?" Avi says.
***
Randy stares out the window of the Manila bound 747, sipping on a
fluorescent green Nipponese soft drink made from bee extracts (at least, it
has pictures of bees on it) and munching on something that a flight
attendant handed him called Japanese Snack. Sky and ocean are the same
color, a shade of blue that makes his teeth freeze. The plane is so high
that, whether he looks up or down, he sees foreshortened views of boiling
cumulonimbus stacks. The clouds erupt from the hot Pacific as if immense
warships were exploding all over the place. The speed and power of their
growth is alarming, the forms they adopt as bizarre and varied as those of
deep sea organisms, and all of them, he supposes, are as dangerous to an
airplane as punji stakes to a barefoot pedestrian. The red orange meatball
painted on the wingtip startles him when he notices it. He feels like he's
been thrown into an old war film.
He turns on his laptop. Electronic mail from Avi, encrypted to a fare
thee well, has been piling up in his in box. It is a gradual accumulation of
tiny files, thrown at him by Avi whenever a thought popped into his head
over the last three days; it would be obvious, even if Randy didn't know it,
that Avi owns a portable e mail machine that talks to the Internet by radio.
Randy fires up a piece of software that is technically called Novus Ordo
Seclorum but that everyone calls Ordo for short. It is a fairly strained pun
based on the fact that Ordo's job, as a piece of cryptographic software, is
to put a message's bits in a New Order and that it will take Centuries for
nosy governments to decrypt it. A scanned image of a Great Pyramid appears
in the middle of his screen, and a single eye gradually materializes at its
apex.
Ordo can handle this in one of two ways. The obvious way is to decrypt
all of the messages and convert them into plaintext files on his hard disk,
which he can then read any time he wants. The problem with this (if you are
paranoid) is that anyone who gets his hands on Randy's hard disk can then
read the files. For all he knows, the customs officials in Manila will
decide to ransack his computer for child pornography. Or, fogged by jet lag,
he'll leave his laptop in a taxi. So instead he puts Ordo into a streaming
mode where it will decrypt the files just long enough for him to read them
and then, when he closes the windows, expunge the plaintext from the
computer's memory and from its hard drive.
The subject heading of Avi's first message is: "Guideline 1."
We look for places where the math is right. Meaning what? Meaning that
pop. is about to explode we can predict that just by looking at age
histogram and per capita income is about to take off the way it did in
Nippon, Taiwan, Singapore. Multiply those two things together and you get
the kind of exponential growth that should get us all into fuck you money
before we turn forty.
This is an allusion to a Randy/Avi conversation of two years ago
wherein Avi actually calculated a specific numerical value for "fuck you
money." It was not a fixed constant, however, but rather a cell in a
spreadsheet linked to any number of continually fluctuating economic
indicators. Sometimes when Avi is working at his computer he will leave the
spreadsheet running in a tiny window in the corner so that he can see the
current value of "fuck you money" at a glance.
The second message, sent a couple of hours later, is called "Guideline
2."
Two: pick a tech where no one can compete with us. Right now,
that=networking. We're kicking the crap out of everyone else in the world
when it comes to networking. It's not even funny.
The next day, Avi sent a message called, simply, "More." Perhaps he had
lost track of the number of guidelines he'd issued so far.
Another principle: this time we retain control of the corporation. That
means that we keep at least fifty percent of the shares which means little
to no outside investment until we've built up some value.
"You don't have to convince me," Randy mumbles to himself as he reads
this.
This shapes the kinds of businesses we can get into. Forget anything
that requires a big initial investment.
Luzon is green black jungle mountains gouged with rivers that would
appear to be avalanches of silt. As the navy blue ocean verges on its khaki
beaches, the water takes on the shocking iridescent hue of a suburban
swimming pool. Farther south, the mountains are swidden scarred the soil
beneath is bright red and so these parts look like fresh lacerations. But
most is covered with foliage that looks like the nubby green stuff that
model railroaders put over their papier mâché hills, and in vast stretches
of the mountains there are no signs whatsoever that human beings have ever
existed. Closer to Manila, some of the slopes are deforested, sprinkled with
structures, ribboned with power line cuts. Rice paddies line the basins. The
towns are accretions of shanties, nucleated around large cross shaped
churches with good roofs.
The view gets blurry as they belly down into the pall of sweaty smog
above the city. The plane begins to sweat like a giant glass of iced tea.
The water streams off in sheets, collects in crevices, whips off the flaps'
trailing edges.
Suddenly they are banking over Manila Bay, which is marked with endless
streaks of brilliant red some kind of algal bloom. Oil tankers trail long
time delayed rainbows that flourish in their wakes. Every cove is jammed
with long skinny boats with dual outriggers, looking like brightly painted
water skaters.
And then they are down on the runway at NAIA, Ninoy Aquino
International Airport. Guards and cops of various stripes are ambling around
with M 16s or pistol handled pump shotguns, wearing burnooses fashioned from
handkerchiefs clamped to the head with American baseball caps. A man dressed
in a radiant white uniform stands below the ragged maw of the jetway holding
his hands downwards with fluorescent orange sticks in them, like Christ
dispensing mercy on a world of sinners. Sulfurous, fulminating tropical air
begins to leak in through the jumbo's air vents. Everything moistens and
wilts.
He is in Manila. He takes his passport out of his shirt pocket. It
says,
RANDALL LAWRENCE WATERHOUSE.
***
This is how Epiphyte Corporation came into existence:
"I am channeling the bad shit!" Avi said.
The number came through on Randy's pager while he was sitting around a
table in a grubhouse along the coast with his girlfriend's crowd. A place
where, every day, they laser printed fresh menus on 100% recycled imitation
parchment, where oscilloscope tracings of neon colored sauces scribbled
across the plates, and the entrees were towering, architectonic stacks of
rare ingredients carved into gemlike prisms. Randy had spent the entire meal
trying to resist the temptation to invite one of Charlene's friends (any one
of them, it didn't matter) out on the sidewalk for a fistfight.
He glanced at his pager expecting to see the number of the Three
Siblings Computer Center, which was where he worked (technically, still
does). The fell digits of Avi's phone number penetrated the core of his
being in the same way that 666 would a fundamentalist's.
Fifteen seconds later, Randy was out on the sidewalk, swiping his card
through a pay phone like an assassin drawing a single edged razor blade
across the throat of a tubby politician.
"The power is coming down from On High," Avi continued. "Tonight, it
happens to be coming through me you poor bastard."
"What do you want me to do?" Randy asked, adopting a cold, almost
hostile tone to mask sick excitement.
"Buy a ticket to Manila," Avi said.
"I have to talk it over with Charlene first," Randy said.
"You don't even believe that yourself," Avi said.
"Charlene and I have a long standing relationsh "
"It's been ten years. You haven't married her. Fill in the fucking
blanks."
(Seventy two hours later, he would be in Manila, looking at the One
Note Flute.)
"Everyone in Asia is wondering when the Philippines is finally going to
get its shit together," Avi said, "it's the question of the nineties."
(The One Note Flute is the first thing you see when you make it through
Passport Control.)
"I flashed on this when I was standing in line at Passport Control at
Ninoy Aquino International Airport," Avi said, compressing that entire name
into a single, sharply articulated burst. "You know how they have different
lanes?"
"I guess so," Randy said. A parallelpiped of seared tuna did a barrel
roll in his gullet. He felt a perverse craving for a double ice cream cone.
He did not travel as much as Avi, and had only a vague idea of what he meant
by lanes.
"You know. One lane for citizens. One for foreigners. Maybe one for
diplomats."
(Now, standing there waiting to have his passport stamped, Randy can
see it clearly. For once he doesn't mind the wait. He gets in a lane next to
the OCW lane and studies them. They are Epiphyte Corp.'s market. Mostly
young women, many of them fashionably dressed, but still with a kind of
Catholic boarding school demureness. Exhausted from long flights, tired of
the wait, they slump, then suddenly straighten up and elevate their fine
chins, as if an invisible nun were making her way up the line whacking their
manicured knuckles with a ruler.)
But seventy two hours ago he hadn't really understood what Avi meant by
lanes, so he just said, "Yeah, I've seen the lane thing."
"At Manila, they have a whole lane just for returning OCWs!"
"OCWs?"
"Overseas Contract Workers. Filipinos working abroad because the
economy of the Philippines is so lame. As maids and nannies in Saudi. Nurses
and anesthesiologists in the States. Singers in Hong Kong, whores in
Bangkok."
"Whores in Bangkok?" Randy had been there, at least, and his mind
reeled at the concept of exporting prostitutes to Thailand.
"The Filipino women are more beautiful," Avi said quietly, "and have a
ferocity that makes them more interesting, to the innately masochistic
business traveler, than all those grinning Thai bimbos." Both of them knew
that this was complete bullshit; Avi was a family man and had no firsthand
experience whereof he spoke. Randy didn't call him on it, though. As long as
Avi retained this extemporaneous bullshitting ability there was a better
than even chance of all of them making fuck you money.
(Now that he's here, it is tempting to speculate as to which of the
girls in the OCW lane are hustlers. But he can't see that going anywhere but
wrong, so he squares his shoulders and marches toward the yellow line.
The government has set up glass display cases in the concourse leading
from Passport Control to the security barrier. The cases contain artifacts
demonstrating the glories of pre Magellan Filipino culture. The first one of
these contains the pièce de résistance: a rustic hand carved musical
instrument labeled with a long and unreadable name in Tagalog. Underneath
that, in smaller letters, is the English translation: ONE NOTE FLUTE.)
"See? The Philippines is innately hedged," Avi said. 'You know how rare
that is? When you find an innately hedged environment, Randy, you lunge into
it like a rabid ferret going into a pipe full of raw meat."
A word about Avi: his father's people had just barely gotten out of
Prague. As Central European Jews went, they were fairly typical. The only
thing about them that was really anomalous was that they were still alive.
But his mother's people were unbelievably peculiar New Mexican crypto Jews
who had been living on mesas, dodging Jesuits, shooting rattlesnakes and
eating jimsonweed for three hundred years; they looked like Indians and
talked like cowboys. In his relations with other people, therefore, Avi
dithered. Most of the time he was courtly and correct in a way that was
deeply impressive to businesspeople Nipponese ones expecially but there were
these eruptions, from time to time, as if he'd been dipping into the loco
weed. Randy had learned to deal with it, which is why Avi called him at
times like this.
"Oh, calm down!" Randy said. He watched a tanned girl rollerblade past
him, on her way up from the beach. "Innately hedged?"
"As long as the Philippines don't have their shit together, there'll be
plenty of OCWs. They will want to communicate with their families the
Filipinos are incredibly family oriented. They make Jews look like a bunch
of alienated loners."
"Okay. You know more about both groups than I do."
"They are sentimental and affectionate in a way that's very easy for us
to sneer at."
"You don't have to be defensive," Randy said, "I'm not sneering at
them."
"When you hear their song dedications on the radio, you'll sneer," Avi
said. "But frankly, we could take some pointers from the Pinoys on this
front."
"You are so close to being sanctimonious right now "
"I apologize," Avi said, with absolute sincerity. Avi's wife had been
pregnant almost continuously for the four years they'd been married. He was
getting more religiously observant daily and couldn't make it through a
conversation without mentioning the Holocaust. Randy was a bachelor who was
just about to break up with the chick he'd been living with.
"I believe you, Avi," Randy said. "Is it a problem with you if I buy a
business class ticket?"
Avi didn't hear him, so Randy assumed that meant yes. "As long as
that's the case, there will be a big market for Pinoy grams."
"Pinoy grams?"
"For god's sake, don't say it out loud! I'm filling out the trademark
application as we speak," Avi said. Randy could hear a rattling sound in the
background, computer keys impacting so rapidly it sounded like Avi was
simply holding the keyboard between his pale, spindly hands and shaking it
violently up and down. "But if the Filipinos do get their shit together,
then we see explosive growth in telecoms, as in any other Arday."
"Arday?"
"R D A E. Rapidly Developing Asian Economy. Either way, we win."
"I gather you want to do something with telecoms?"
"Bingo." In the background, a baby began to cough and cry. "Gotta go,"
Avi said, "Shlomo's asthma is spiking again. Take down this fingerprint."
"Fingerprint?"
"For my encryption key. For e mail."
"Ordo?"
"Yeah."
Randy took out a ballpoint pen and, finding no paper in his pocket,
poised it over the palm of his hand. "Shoot."
"67 81 A4 AE FF 40 25 9B 43 OE 29 8D 56 60 E3 2F." Then Avi hung up the
phone.
Randy went back into the restaurant. On his way back, he asked the
waiter to bring him a half bottle of good red wine. Charlene heard him, and
glowered. Randy was still thinking about innate ferocity, and did not see it
in her face; only a schoolmarmishness common among all of her friends. My
god! I have to get out of California, he realized.
Chapter 3 SEAWEED
Woman holds baby Eyes pale as a muzzle flash Band chimes frozen tears
The fourth marines is marching downhill to the strains of John Philip
Sousa, which ought to be second nature to a Marine. But the Fourth Marines
have been in Shanghai (which ain't no halls of Montezuma nor shores of
Tripoli) for too long, longer than Marines should ever stay in one place,
and Bobby's already seen his sergeant, one Frick, throw up from opium
withdrawal.
A Marine band is several Shanghai blocks ahead. Bobby's platoon can
hear the thumpity thump of the big drums and the piercing noises from
piccolos and glockenspiels but he can't follow the tune. Corporal Shaftoe is
effectively their leader, because Sergeant Frick is useless.
Shaftoe marches alongside the formation, supposedly to keep an eye on
his men, but mostly he's just staring at Shanghai.
Shanghai stares back, and mostly gives them a standing ovation. Of
course there is a type of young street rowdy who makes it a point of honor
to let the Marines know he isn't scared of them, and they are jeering the
Marines from a safe distance, and setting off strings of fire crackers,
which does nothing to steady anyone's nerves. The Europeans are applauding a
whole chorus line of Russian dancing girls from Delmonte's is showing thigh
and blowing kisses. But most of the Chinese look pretty stonefaced, which
Bobby suspects means they're scared shitless.
The worst thing is the women carrying half white babies. A few of these
women are rabid, hysterical, throwing themselves into formations of massed
Marines, undeterred by rifle butts. But most of them are stoic: they stand
with their light eyed babies and glare, searching the ranks and files for
the guilty party. They've all heard about what happened upriver in Nanjing
when the Nips came there, and they know that when it's all over, the only
trace that they and their babies ever existed may be a really bad memory in
the mind of some American Marine.
It works for Shaftoe: he has hunted deer in Wisconsin and seen them
limping across the snow, bleeding to death. He saw a man die in basic
training at Parris Island. He has seen whole tangles of bodies in the
Yangtze, downstream of where the Nipponese were prosecuting the China
Incident, and he has seen refugees from places like Nanjing starve to death
in the gutters of Shanghai. He has himself killed people who were trying to
storm the riverboats it was his duty to protect. He thinks that he has never
seen, and will never see, anything as terrible as those stone faced Chinese
women holding their white babies, not even blinking as the firecrackers
explode all around them.
Until, that is, he looks into the faces of certain Marines who stare
into that crowd and see their own faces looking back at them, pudgy with
baby fat and streaked with tears. Some of them seem to think it's all a
joke. But many of the Marines who march out of their empty barracks that
morning sane and solid men, have, by the time they reach the gunboats
waiting for them at the Bund, gone mad. They don't show it. But Shaftoe can
see in their eyes that something has given way inside.
The very best men in the regiment are in a foul mood. The ones like
Shaftoe, who didn't get involved with the Chinese women, are still leaving
plenty behind: houses with maids and shoeshine boys and coolies, with women
and opium for almost nothing. They don't know where they are being shipped
off to, but it's safe to say that their twenty one dollars a month won't go
as far. They'll be in barracks and they'll have to learn to polish their own
boots again. When the gangplanks are drawn in from the stone edge of the
Bund, they are cut off from a whole world that they'll never see again, a
world where they were kings. Now they are Marines again, It's okay with
Shaftoe, who wants to be a Marine. But many of the men have become middle
aged here, and don't.
The guilty men duck belowdecks. Shaftoe remains on the deck of the
gunboat, which casts off from the Bund, headed for the cruiser Augusta,
which awaits in mid channel.
The Bund is jammed with onlookers in a riot of differently colored
clothing, so one patch of uniform drab catches his eye: a group of Nip
soldiers who've come down to bid their Yank counterparts a sarcastic
farewell. Shaftoe scans the group looking for someone tall and bulky, and
picks him out easily. Goto Dengo's waving to him.
Shaftoe takes his helmet off and waves back. Then, on impulse, just for
the hell of it, he winds up and flings the helmet directly at Goto Dengo's
head. The throw goes awry and Goto Dengo has to knock down about a dozen of
his comrades in order to catch it. All of them seem to think that it is a
high honor, as well as tremendously amusing, to be knocked down by Goto
Dengo.
Twenty seconds later, a comet sails up out of the flesh cosmos of the
Bund and bounces on the wooden deck of the gunboat a hell of a throw. Goto
Dengo is showing off his follow through. The projectile is a rock with a
white streamer wrapped around it. Shaftoe runs over and snatches it. The
streamer is one of those thousand stitch headbands (supposedly; he's taken a
few off of unconscious Nips, but he's never bothered to count the stitches)
that they tie around their heads as a good luck charm; it has a meatball in
the center and some Nip writing to either side. He unties it from around the
rock. In so doing he realizes, suddenly, that it's not a rock after all; it
is a hand grenade! But good old Goto Dengo was just joking he didn't pull
the pin. A nice souvenir for Bobby Shaftoe.
***
Shaftoe's first haiku (December 1940) was a quick and dirty adaptation
of the Marine Creed:
This is my rifle
There are many like it but
This rifle is mine.
He wrote it under the following circumstances: Shaftoe and the rest of
Fourth Marines were stationed in Shanghai so that they could guard the
International Settlement and work as muscle on the gunboats of the Yangtze
River Patrol. His platoon had just come back from the Last Patrol: a
thousand mile reconnaissance in force all the way up past what was left of
Nanjing, to Hankow, and back. Marines had been doing this ever since the
Boxer Rebellion, through civil wars and everything else. But towards the end
of 1940, what with the Nips (1) basically running all of
northeast China now, the politicians back in D.C. had finally thrown in the
towel and told the China Marines not to steam up the Yangtze any more.
Now, the Old Breed Marines like Frick claimed they could tell the
difference between organized brigands; armed mobs of starving peasants;
rogue Nationalists; Communist guerrillas; and the irregular forces in the
pay of warlords. But to Bobby Shaftoe they were all just crazy, armed slopes
who wanted a piece of the Yangtze River Patrol. The Last Patrol had been a
wild trip. But it was over and they were back in Shanghai now, the safest
place you could be in China, and about a hundred times more dangerous than
the most dangerous place you could be in America. They had climbed off the
gunboat six hours ago, gone to a bar, and not come out until just now, when
they had decided it was high time they went to a whorehouse. On their way,
they happened to pass this Nip restaurant.
Bobby Shaftoe had looked in the windows of the place before, and
watched the man with the knife, trying to figure out what the hell he was
doing. It looked a hell of a lot like he was cutting up uncooked fish and
putting the raw meat on bullets of rice and handing it over to the Nips on
the other side of the counter, who were wolfing it down.
It had to be some kind of optical illusion. The fish must have been
precooked in the back room.
This had been nagging at Shaftoe for about a year. As he and the other
horny drunk Marines went by the place, he slowed down to peer through the
window, trying to gather more evidence. He could swear that some of that
fish looked ruby red, which it wouldn't have been if it were cooked.
One of his buddies, Rhodes from Shreveport, noticed him looking. He
dared Shaftoe to go in there and sit down at that bar. Then another private,
Gowicki from Pittsburgh, double dared him!
Shaftoe sucked his teeth and considered the matter. He had already made
up his mind that he was going to do it. He was a sniper scout, and it was in
his nature to do crazy shit like this; but it was also part of his training
to scan the terrain carefully before venturing in.
The restaurant was three quarters full, and everyone in the place was a
uniformed member of the Nipponese military. At the bar where the man was
cutting up the apparently raw fish, there was a marked concentration of
officers; if you only had one grenade, that's where you'd throw it. Most of
the place was filled with long tables where enlisted men sat, drinking
noodle soup from steaming urns. Shaftoe paid particular attention to these,
because they were the ones who were going to be beating the shit out of him
in about sixty seconds. Some were there alone, with reading material. A
cluster of them, back in one corner, were paying attention to one fellow who
was apparently telling a joke or story.
The longer Shaftoe spent reconnoitering the place, the more convinced
Rhodes and Gowicki became that he was actually going to do it. They became
excited and called for the other Marines, who had gone ahead of them down
the block, headed for that whorehouse.
Shaftoe saw the others coming back his tactical reserve. "What the
fuck," he said, and went into the restaurant. Behind him, he could hear the
others shouting excitedly; they couldn't believe he was doing it. When
Shaftoe stepped over the threshold of that Nip restaurant, he passed into
the realm of legend.
All the Nips looked up at him when he came in the door. If they were
surprised, they didn't show it. The chef behind the counter began to holler
out some kind of ritual greeting, which faltered and trailed off as he got a
look at what had just come in. The fellow in the back of the room a husky,
pink cheeked Nip continued telling his joke or story or whatever it was.
Shaftoe nodded to no one in particular, then stepped to the nearest
empty chair at the bar and sat down.
Other Marines would have waited until the whole squad had assembled.
Then they would have invaded the restaurant en masse, knocked over a few
chairs, spilled some soup. But Shaftoe had seized the initiative before the
others could do any such thing and gone in by himself as a sniper scout was
supposed to do. It was not just because be was a sniper scout, though. It
was also because he was Bobby Shaftoe, and he was sincerely curious about
this place, and if he could, he wanted to spend a few calm minutes in here
and learn a few things about it before the fun started.
It helped, of course, that Shaftoe was a quiet and contemplative drunk,
not a dangerous explosive drunk. He must have reeked of beer (those Krauts
in Tsingtao cranked out a brew whose taste took him right back to Wisconsin,
and he was homesick). But he wasn't hollering or knocking things over.
The chef was busy crafting one of his little morsels and pretended to
ignore Shaftoe. The other men at the counter stared coldly at Shaftoe for a
while, then turned their attentions back to their food. Shaftoe looked at
the array of raw fish laid out on shaved ice behind the bar, then looked
around the room. The guy back in the corner was talking in short bursts,
reading from a notebook. He would speak maybe ten or twenty words, and then
his little audience would turn to one another and grin, or grimace, or
sometimes even make a patter of applause. He wasn't delivering his material
like a dirty joke. He spoke precisely and expressively.
Fuck! He was reading poetry! Shaftoe had no idea what he was saying,
but he could tell, by the sound of it, that it must be poetry. Didn't rhyme
though. But the Nips did everything queerly.
He noticed that the chef was glaring at him. He cleared his throat,
which was useless since he couldn't speak Nip. He looked at some of that
ruby red fish behind the bar, pointed to it, held up two fingers.
Everyone was startled that the American had actually placed an order.
The tension was broken, only a little. The chef went to work and produced
two morsels, which he served up on a wooden pedestal.
Shaftoe had been trained to eat insects, and to bite the heads off
chickens, so he figured he could handle this. He picked the morsels up in
his fingers, just like the Nips were doing, and ate them. They were good. He
ordered two more, of another variety. The guy in the corner kept reading
poetry. Shaftoe ate his morsels and then ordered some more. For perhaps ten
seconds, between the taste of the fish and the sound of the poetry, he
actually felt comfortable here, and forgot that he was merely instigating a
vicious racial brawl.
The third order looked different: laid over the top of the raw fish
were thin translucent sheets of some kind of moist, glistening material. It
looked sort of like butcher paper soaked in oil. Shaftoe gawked at it for a
while, trying to identify it, but it looked like no foodstuff he knew of. He
glanced left and right, hoping that one of the Nips had ordered the same
stuff, so that he could watch and learn the right way to eat it. No luck.
Hell, they were officers. Maybe one of them spoke a little English. "
'Scuse me. What's this?" Shaftoe said, peeling up one corner of the eerie
membrane.
The chef looked up at him nervously, then scanned the bar, polling the
customers. Discussion ensued. Finally, a Nip officer at the end of the bar,
a naval lieutenant, stood up and spoke to Bobby Shaftoe.
"Seaweed."
Shaftoe did not particularly like the lieutenant's tone of voice
hostile and sullen. This, combined with the look on his face, seemed to say,
You'll never understand it, you farmer, so why don't you just think of it as
seaweed.
Shaftoe folded his hands primly in his lap, regarded the seaweed for a
few moments, and then looked up at the lieutenant, who was still gazing at
him expressionlessly. "What kind of seaweed, sir?" he said.
Significant glances began flying around the restaurant, like semaphores
before a naval engagement. The poetry reading seemed to have stopped, and a
migration of enlisted men had begun from the back of the room. Meanwhile the
lieutenant translated Shaftoe's inquiry to the others, who discussed it in
some detail, as if it were a major policy initiative from Franklin Delano
Roosevelt.
The lieutenant and the chef exchanged words. Then the lieutenant looked
at Shaftoe again. "He say, you pay now." The chef held up one hand and
rubbed his fingers and thumb together.
A year of working the Yangtze River Patrol had given Bobby Shaftoe
nerves of titanium, and unlimited faith in his comrades, and so he resisted
the impulse to turn his head and look out the window. He already knew
exactly what he would see: Marines, shoulder to shoulder, ready to die for
him. He scratched the new tattoo on his forearm: a dragon. His dirty
fingernails, passing over the fresh scabs, made a rasping sound in the
utterly silent restaurant.
"You didn't answer my question," Shaftoe said, pronouncing the words
with a drunk's precision.
The lieutenant translated this into Nipponese. More discussion. But
this time it was curt and decisive. Shaftoe could tell that they were about
to bounce him. He squared his shoulders.
The Nips were good; they mounted an organized charge out the door, onto
the sidewalk, and engaged the Marines, before anyone actually laid a hand on
Shaftoe. This spoiling attack prevented the Marines from invading the
restaurant proper, which would have disturbed the officers' meal and, with
any luck, led to untold property damage. Shaftoe then felt himself being
grabbed from behind by at least three people and hoisted into the air. He
made eye contact with the lieutenant while this was happening, and shouted:
"Are you bullshitting me about the seaweed?"
As brawls went, the only remarkable part of this one was the way he was
carried out to the street before he could actually get started. Then it was
like all the other street fights he'd been in with Nip soldiers in Shanghai.
These all came down to American brawn (you didn't get picked for the Fourth
Regiment unless you were an impressive looking six footer) versus that
Nipponese chop socky.
Shaftoe wasn't a boxer. He was a wrestler. This was to his advantage.
The other Marines would put up their dukes and try to fight it out Marquis
of Queensberry style no match for chop socky. Shaftoe had no illusions about
his boxing, so he would just put his head down and charge like a bull, take
a few blows to the face on his way in, but usually get a solid hold on his
opponent and slam him into the cobblestones. Usually that shook the Nip up
enough that Shaftoe could get him in a full nelson or a hammerlock and get
him to cry uncle.
The guys who were carrying him out of the restaurant got jumped by
Marines as soon as they were in the open. Shaftoe found himself going up
against an opponent who was at least as tall as he was, which was unusual.
This one had a solid build, too. Not like a sumo wrestler. More like a
football player a lineman, with a bit of a gut. He was a strong S.O.B. and
Shaftoe knew right away that he was in for a real scrape. The guy had a
different style of wrestling from the American, which (as Shaftoe learned
the hard way) included some illegal maneuvers: partial strangulation and
powerful, short punches to major nerve centers. The gulf between Shaftoe's
mind and body, already wedged open by alcohol, was yanked open to a chasm by
these techniques. He ended up lying on the sidewalk, helpless and paralyzed,
staring up into the chubby face of his opponent. This was (he realized) the
same guy who'd been sitting in the corner of the restaurant reading poetry.
He was a good wrestler for a poet. Or maybe vice versa.
" It is not seaweed ," said the big Nip. He had a look on his face like
a naughty schoolkid getting away with something. "The English word is maybe
calabash? " Then he turned and walked back into the restaurant.
So much for legend. What none of the other Marines knows is that this
was not the last encounter between Bobby Shaftoe and Goto Dengo. The
incident left Shaftoe with any number of nagging questions about subjects as
diverse as seaweed, poetry, and chop socky. He sought out Goto Dengo after
that, which was not that hard he just paid some Chinese boys to follow the
conspicuous Nip around town and file daily reports. From this he learned
that Goto Dengo and some of his comrades gathered every morning in a certain
park to practice their chop socky. After making sure that his will was in
order and writing a last letter to his parents and siblings in Oconomowoc.
Shaftoe went to that park one morning, reintroduced himself to the surprised
Goto Dengo, and made arrangements to serve as human punching bag. They found
his self defense skills hilariously primitive but admired his resilience,
and so, for the small cost of a few broken ribs and digits, Bobby Shaftoe
got a preliminary course in the particular type of chop socky favored by
Goto Dengo, which is called judo. Over time, this even led to a few social
engagements in bars, and restaurants, where Shaftoe learned to recognize
four types of seaweed, three types of fish eggs, and several flavors of Nip
poetry. Of course he had no idea what the fuck they were saying, but he
could count syllables, which, as far as he could tell, is about all there is
to Nip poetry appreciation.
Not that this or any other knowledge of their culture is going to do
him any good now that it will soon be his job to kill them.
In return, Shaftoe taught Goto Dengo how not to throw like a girl. A
lot of the Nips are good at baseball and so it was hilarious, even to them,
to see their burly friend pushing ineffectually at a baseball. But it was
Shaftoe who taught Goto Dengo to stand sideways, to rotate his shoulders,
and to follow through. He's paid a lot of attention to the big Nip's
throwing form during the last year, and maybe that's why the image of Goto
Dengo planting his feet on the ashlars of the Bund, winding up, throwing the
streamer wrapped grenade, and following through almost daintily on one
combat booted foot stays in Shaftoe's mind all the way to Manila and beyond.
***
A couple of days into the voyage it becomes apparent that Sergeant
Frick has forgotten how to shine his boots. Every night he puts them on the
deck beside his bunk, like he's expecting a coolie to come around and shine
them up during the night. Every morning he wakes up and finds them in a
sorrier state than before. After a few days he starts to draw reprimands
from On High, starts to get a lot of potato peeling duty.
Now in and of itself this is forgivable. Frick started out his career
chasing bandolier draped desperadoes away from mail trains on the High
Chaparral, for God's sake. In '27 he got shipped off to Shanghai on very
short notice, and no doubt had to display some adaptability. Fine. And now
he's on this miserable pre Great War cruiser and it's a little hard on him.
Fine. But he does not take all of this with the dignity that is demanded of
Marines by Marines. He whines about it. He lets himself get humiliated. He
gets angry. A lot of the other old China Marines see things his way.
One day Bobby Shaftoe is up on the deck of the destroyer tossing the
old horsehide around with a couple of the other young Marines when he sees a
few of these older guys accumulating into a sort of human booger on the
afterdeck. He can tell by the looks on their faces and by their gestures
that they are bellyaching.
Shaftoe hears a couple of the ship's crew tal