matical algorithm for generating
very large numbers that were random, or at least random looking."
"Pseudo random."
"Yeah. You'd have to keep the algorithm secret, of course. But if you
could get it the algorithm, that is around the world to your intended
recipient, then they could, from that day forward, do the calculation
themselves and figure out the one time pad for that particular day, or
whatever."
A shadow passes over Alan's otherwise beaming countenance. "But the
Germans already have Enigma machines all over the place," he says. "Why
should they bother to come up with a new scheme?"
"Maybe," Waterhouse says, "maybe there are some Germans who don't want
the entire German Navy to be able to decipher their messages."
"Ah," Alan says. This seems to eliminate his last objection. Suddenly
he is all determination. "Show me the messages!"
Waterhouse opens up his attache case, splotched and streaked with salt
from his voyages to and from Qwghlm, and draws out two manila envelopes.
"These are the copies I made before I sent the originals down to Bletchley
Park," he says, patting one of them. "They are much more legible than the
originals " he pats the other envelope " which they were kind enough to lend
me this morning, so that I could study them again."
"Show the originals!" Alan says. Waterhouse slides the second envelope,
encrusted with TOP SECRET stamps, across the table.
Alan opens the envelope so hastily that he tears it, and jerks out the
pages. He spreads them out on the table. His mouth drops open in purest
astonishment.
For a moment, Waterhouse is fooled; the expression on Alan's face makes
him think that his friend has, in some Olympian burst of genius, deciphered
the messages in an instant, just by looking at them.
But that's not it at all. Thunderstruck, he finally says, "I recognize
this handwriting."
"You do?" Waterhouse says.
"Yes. I've seen it a thousand times. These pages were written out by
our old bicycling friend, Rudolf von Hacklheber. Rudy wrote those pages."
***
Waterhouse spends much of the next week commuting to London for
meetings at the Broadway Buildings. Whenever civilian authorities are going
to be present at a meeting especially civilians with expensive sounding
accents Colonel Chattan always shows up, and before the meeting starts,
always finds some frightfully cheerful and oblique way to tell Waterhouse to
keep his trap shut unless someone asks a math question. Waterhouse is not
offended. He prefers it, actually, because it leaves his mind free to work
on important things. During their last meeting at the Broadway Buildings,
Waterhouse proved a theorem.
It takes Waterhouse about three days to figure that the meetings
themselves make no sense he reckons that there is no imaginable goal that
could be furthered by what they are discussing. He even makes a few stabs at
proving that this is so, using formal logic, but he is weak in this area and
doesn't know enough of the underlying axioms to reach a Q.E.D.
By the end of the week, though, he has figured out that these meetings
are just one ramification of the Yamamoto assassination. Winston Spencer
Churchill is very fond indeed of Bletchley Park and all its works, and he
places the highest priority on preserving its secrecy, but the interception
of Yamamoto's airplane has blown a gaping hole in the screen of deception.
The Americans responsible for this appalling gaffe are now trying to cover
their asses by spreading a story that native islander spies caught wind of
Yamamoto's trip and radioed the news to Guadalcanal, whence the fatal P 38s
were dispatched. But the P 38s were operating at the extreme limit of their
fuel range and would have had to be sent out at precisely the correct time
in order to make it back to Guadalcanal, so the Japanese would have to have
their heads several feet up their asses to fall for that. Winston Churchill
is pissed off in the extreme, and these meetings represent a prolonged
bureaucratic hissy fit intended to produce some meaningful and enduring
policy shift.
Every evening after the meetings, Waterhouse takes the tube to Euston
and the train to Bletchley, and sits up late working on Rudy's numbers. Alan
has been working on them during the daytime, so the two of them, combining
their efforts, can almost pound away on it round the clock.
Not all of the riddles are mathematical. For example, why the hell do
the Germans have Rudy copying out big long numbers by hand? If the letters
do indeed represent big numbers that would indicate that Dr. Rudolf von
Hacklheber had been assigned to a job as a mere cipher clerk. This would not
be the stupidest move ever made by a bureaucracy, but it seems unlikely. And
what little intelligence they've been able to gather from Germany suggests
that Rudy has in fact been given a rather important job important enough to
keep extremely secret.
Alan's hypothesis is that Waterhouse has been making an understandable
but totally wrong assumption. The numbers are not ciphertext. They are,
rather, one time pads that the skipper of U 553 was supposed to have used to
encrypt certain messages too sensitive to go out over the regular Enigma
channel. These one time pads were, for some reason, drawn up personally by
Rudy himself.
Usually, making one time pads is just as lowly a job as enciphering
messages a job for clerks, who use decks of cards or bingo machines to
choose letters at random. But Alan and Waterhouse are now operating on the
assumption that this encryption scheme is a radical new invention
presumably, an invention of Rudy's in which the pads are generated not at
random but by using some mathematical algorithm.
In other words, there is some calculation, some equation that Rudy has
dreamed up. You give it a value probably the date, and possibly some other
information as well, such as an arbitrary key phrase or number. You crank
through the steps of the calculation, and the result is a number, some nine
hundred digits long, which is three thousand binary digits, which gives you
six hundred letters (enough to cover one sheet of paper) when you convert it
using the Baudot code. The nine hundred digit decimal number, the three
thousand digit binary number, and the six hundred letters are all the same
abstract, pure number, encoded differently.
Meanwhile, your counterpart, probably on the other side of the world,
is going through the same calculation and coming up with the same one time
pad. When you send him a message encrypted using the day's pad, he can
decipher it.
If Turing and Waterhouse can figure out how the calculation works, they
can read all of these messages too.
Chapter 41 PHREAKING
The dentist is gone, the door locked, the phone unplugged. Randall
Lawrence Waterhouse lies naked on the starched, turned down sheets of his
king sized bed. His head is propped up on a pillow so that he can peer
through the vee of his feet at a BBC World Service newscast on the
television. A ten dollar minibar beer is near at hand. It's six in the
morning in America and so rather than a pro basketball game, he has to
settle for this BBC newscast, which is strongly geared to South Asian
happenings. A long and very sober story about a plague of locusts on the
India/Pakistan border follows a piece on a typhoon about to nail Hong Kong.
The king of Thailand is calling in some of his government's more corrupt
officials to literally prostrate themselves before him. Asian news always
has this edge of the fantastic to it, but it's all dead serious, no nods or
winks anywhere. Now he's watching a story about a nervous system disease
that people in New Guinea come down with as a consequence of eating other
people's brains. Just your basic cannibal story. No wonder so many Americans
come here on business and never really go home again it's like stepping into
the pages of Classics Comics.
Someone is knocking on his door. Randy gets up and puts on his plush
white hotel bathrobe. He peers through the peephole, half expecting to see a
pygmy standing there with a blowpipe, though he wouldn't mind a seductive
Oriental courtesan. But it's just Cantrell. Randy opens the door. Cantrell
is already holding up his hands, palms out, in a cheerful "shut up already"
gesture. "Don't worry," Cantrell says, "I'm not here to talk about Biz."
"In that case I won't break this beer bottle over your head," Randy
says. Cantrell must feel exactly the same way Randy does, which is that so
much wild shit happened today that the only way to deal with it is not to
talk about it at all. Most of the brain's work is done while the brain's
owner is ostensibly thinking about something else, so sometimes you have to
deliberately find something else to think and talk about.
"Come to my room," Cantrell says. "Pekka is here."
"The Finn who got blown up?"
"The same."
"Why is he here?"
"Because there's no reason not to be. After he got blown up he adopted
a technomadic lifestyle."
"So it's just a coincidence, or "
"Nah," Cantrell says. "He's helping me win a bet."
"What kind of bet?"
"I was telling Tom Howard about Van Eck phreaking a few weeks ago. Tom
said it sounded like bullshit. He bet me ten shares of Epiphyte stock that I
couldn't make it actually work outside of a laboratory."
"Is Pekka good at that kind of thing?"
By way of saying yes, Cantrell adopts a serious look and says, "Pekka
is writing a whole chapter about it for the Cryptonomicon. Pekka feels that
only by mastering the technologies that might be used against us can we
defend ourselves."
This sounds almost like a call to arms. Randy would have to be some
kind of loser to retreat to his bed after that, so he backs into the room
and steps into his trousers, which are standing there telescoped into the
floor where he dropped them upon his return from the sultan's palace. The
sultan's palace! The television is now broadcasting a news story about
pirates plying the waters of the South China Sea, making freighter crews
walk the plank. "This whole continent is like fucking Disneyland without the
safety precautions," Randy observes. "Am I the only person who finds it
surreal?"
Cantrell grins, but says, "If we begin talking about surreal, we'll end
up talking about today."
"You got that right," Randy says. "Let's go."
***
Before Pekka became known around Silicon Valley as the Finn Who Got
Blown Up, he was known as Cello Guy, because he had a nearly autistic
devotion to his cello and took it with him everywhere, always trying to
stuff it into overhead luggage racks. Not coincidentally, he was an analog
kind of guy from way back whose specialty was radio.
When packet radio started to get big as an alternative to sending data
down wires, Pekka moved to Menlo Park and joined a startup. His company
bought their equipment at used computer stores, and Pekka ended up scoring a
pretty nice nineteen inch high res multisync monitor perfectly adequate for
his adaptable twenty four year old eyes. He hooked it up to a slightly used
Pentium box jammed full of RAM.
He also installed Finux, a free UNIX operating system created by Finns,
almost as a way of proclaiming to the rest of the world "this is how weird
we are," and distributed throughout the world on the Net. Of course Finux
was fantastically powerful and flexible and enabled you, among other things,
to control the machine's video circuitry to the Nth degree and choose many
different scanning frequencies and pixel clocks, if you were into that kind
of thing. Pekka most definitely was into it, and so like a lot of Finux
maniacs he set his machine up so that it could display, if he chose, a whole
lot of tiny little pixels (which displayed a lot of information but was hard
on the eyes) or, alternatively, fewer and larger pixels (which he tended to
use after he had been hacking for twenty four hours straight and lost ocular
muscle tone), or various settings in between. Every time he changed from one
setting to another, the monitor screen would go black for a second and there
would be an audible clunk from inside of it as the resonating crystals
inside locked in on a different range of frequencies.
One night at three A.M., Pekka caused this to happen, and immediately
after the screen went black and made that clunking noise, it exploded in his
face. The front of the picture tube was made of heavy glass (it had to be,
to withstand the internal vacuum) which fragmented and sped into Pekka's
face, neck, and upper body. The very same phosphors that had been glowing
beneath the sweeping electron beam, moments before, conveying information
into Pekka's eyes, were now physically embedded in his flesh. A hunk of
glass took one of his eyes and almost went through into his brain. Another
one gouged out his voicebox, another zinged past the side of his head and
bit a neat triangular hunk out of his left ear.
Pekka, in other words, was the first victim of the Digibomber. He
almost bled to death on the spot, and his fellow Eutropians hovered around
his hospital bed for a few days with tanks of Freon, ready to jump into
action in case he died. But he didn't, and he got even more press because
his startup company lacked health insurance. After a lot of hand wringing in
local newspapers about how this poor innocent from the land of socialized
medicine had not had the presence of mind to buy health insurance, some rich
high tech guys donated money to pay his medical bills and to equip him with
a computer voicebox like Stephen Hawking's.
And now here is Pekka, sitting in Cantrell's hotel room. His cello
stands in the corner, dusty around the bridge from powdered rosin. He is
facing a blank wall to which he has duct taped a bunch of wires in precise
loops and whorls. These lead to some home brewed circuit boards which are in
turn hooked up to his laptop.
"Hello Randy congratulations on your success," says a computer
generated voice as soon as the door is shut behind Randy and Cantrell. This
is a little greeting that Pekka has obviously typed in ahead of time,
anticipating his arrival. None of the foregoing seems particularly odd to
Randy except for the fact that Pekka seems to think that Epiphyte has
already achieved some kind of success.
"How are we doing?" Cantrell asks.
Pekka types in a response. Then he cups one hand to his mutilated ear
while using his other hand to cue the voice generator: "He showers." Indeed,
it's possible now to hear the pipes hissing in the wall. "His laptop
radiates."
"Oh," Randy says, "Tom Howard's room is right next door?"
"Just on the other side of that wall," Cantrell says. "I specifically
requested it, so that I could win this bet. See, his room is a mirror image
of this one, so his computer is only a few inches away, just on the other
side of this wall. Perfect conditions for Van Eck phreaking."
"Pekka, are you receiving signals from his computer right now?" Randy
asks.
Pekka nods, types, and fires back, "I tune. I calibrate." The input
device for his voice generator is a one handed chord board strapped to his
thigh. He puts his right hand on it and makes flopping and groping motions.
Moments later speech emerges, "I require Cantrell."
"Excuse me," Cantrell says, and goes to Pekka's side. Randy watches
over their shoulders for a bit, understanding vaguely what they're doing.
If you lay a sheet of white paper on an old gravestone, and sweep the
tip of a pencil across it, you get one horizontal line, dark in some places
and faint in others, and not very meaningful. If you move downwards on the
page by a small distance, a single pencil line width, and repeat, an image
begins to emerge. The process of working your way down the page in a series
of horizontal sweeps is what a nerd would call raster scanning, or just
rastering. With a conventional video monitor a cathode ray tube the electron
beam physically rasters down the glass something like sixty to eighty times
a second. In the case of a laptop screen like Randy's, there is no physical
scanning; the individual pixels are turned on or off directly. But still a
scanning process is taking place; what's being scanned and made manifest on
the screen is a region of the computer's memory called the screen buffer.
The contents of the screen buffer have to be slapped up onto the screen
sixty to eighty times every second or else (1) the screen flickers and (2)
the images move jerkily.
The way that the computer talks to you is not by controlling the screen
directly but rather by manipulating the bits contained in that buffer,
secure in the knowledge that other subsystems inside the machine handle the
drudge work of pipelining that information onto the actual, physical screen.
Sixty to eighty times a second, the video system says shit! time to refresh
the screen again, and goes to the beginning of the screen buffer which is
just a particular hunk of memory, remember and it reads the first few bytes,
which dictate what color the pixel in the upper left hand corner of the
screen is supposed to be. This information is sent on down the line to
whatever is actually refreshing the screen, whether it's a scanning electron
beam or some laptop style system for directly controlling the pixels. Then
the next few bytes are read, typically for the pixel just to the right of
that first one, and so on all the way to the right edge of the screen. That
draws the first line of the grave rubbing.
Since the right edge of the screen has now been reached, there are no
more pixels off in that direction. It is implicit that the next bytes read
from memory will be for the leftmost pixel in the second raster line down
from the top. If this is a cathode ray tube type of screen, we have a little
timing problem here in that the electron beam is currently at the right edge
of the screen and now it's being asked to draw a pixel at the left edge. It
has to move back. This takes a little while not long, but much longer than
the interval of time between drawing two pixels that are cheek by jowl. This
pause is called the horizontal retrace interval. Another one will occur at
the end of every other line until the rastering has proceeded to the last
pixel at the bottom right hand corner of the screen and completed a single
grave rubbing. But then it's time to begin the process all over again, and
so the electron beam (if there is one) has to jump diagonally all the way up
to the upper left hand pixel. This also takes a little while and is called
the vertical retrace interval.
These issues all stem from inherent physical limitations of sweeping
electron beams through space in a cathode ray tube, and basically disappear
in the case of a laptop screen like the one Tom Howard has set up a few
inches in front of Pekka, on the other side of that wall. But the video
timing of a laptop screen is still patterned after that of a cathode ray
tube screen anyway. (This is simply because the old technology is
universally understood by those who need to understand it, and it works
well, and all kinds of electronic and software technology has been built and
tested to work within that framework, and why mess with success, especially
when your profit margins are so small that they can only be detected by
using techniques from quantum mechanics, and any glitches vis à vis
compatibility with old stuff will send your company straight into the
toilet.)
On Tom's laptop, each second of time is divided into seventy five
perfectly regular slices, during which a full grave rubbing is performed
followed by a vertical retrace interval. Randy can follow Pekka and
Cantrell's conversation well enough to gather that they have already figured
out, from analyzing the signals coming through the wall, that Tom Howard has
his screen set up to give him 768 lines, and 1,024 pixels on each line. For
every pixel, four bytes will be read from the video buffer and sent on down
the line to the screen. (Tom is using the highest possible level of color
definition on his screen, which means that one byte apiece is needed to
represent the intensity of blue, green, and red and another is basically
left over, but kept in there anyway because computers like powers of two,
and computers are so ridiculously fast and powerful now that, even though
all of this is happening on a timetable that would strike a human being as
rather aggressive, the extra bytes just don't make any difference.) Each
byte is eight binary digits or bits and so, 1,024 times a line, 4 x 8 = 32
bits are being read from the screen buffer.
Unbeknownst to Tom, his computer happens to be sitting right next to an
antenna. The wires Pekka taped to the wall can read the electromagnetic
waves that are radiating out of the computer's circuitry at all times.
Tom's laptop is sold as a computer, not as a radio station, and so it
might seem odd that it should be radiating anything at all. It is all a
byproduct of the fact that computers are binary critters, which means that
all chip to chip, subsystem to subsystem communication taking place inside
the machine everything moving down those flat ribbons of wire, and the
little metallic traces on the circuit boards consists of transitions from
zero to one and back again. The way that you represent bits in a computer is
by switching the wire's voltage back and forth between zero and five volts.
In computer textbooks these transitions are always graphed as if they were
perfect square waves, meaning that you have this perfectly flat line at V 0,
representing a binary zero, and then it makes a perfect right angle turn and
jumps vertically to V 5 and then executes another perfect right angle turn
and remains at five volts until it's time to go back to zero again, and so
on.
This is the Platonic ideal of how computer circuitry is supposed to
operate, but engineers have to build actual circuits in the grimy analog
world. The hunks of metal and silicon can't manifest the Platonic behavior
shown in those textbooks. Circuits can jump between zero and five volts
really, really abruptly but if you monitor them on an oscilloscope, you can
see that it's not a perfectly square wave. Instead you get some thing that
looks like this:
The little waves are called ringing; these transitions among binary
digits hit the circuitry like a clapper striking a bell. The voltage jumps,
but after it jumps it oscillates back and forth around the new value for a
little while. Whenever you have an oscillating voltage in a conductor like
this, it means that electromagnetic waves are propagating out into space.
Consequently each wire in a running computer is like a little radio
transmitter. The signals that it broadcasts are completely dependent upon
the details of what's going on inside the machine. Since there are a lot of
wires in there, and the particulars of what they are doing are fairly
unpredictable, it is difficult for anyone monitoring the transmissions to
make head or tail of them. A great deal of what comes out of the machine is
completely irrelevant from a surveillance point of view. But there is one
pattern of signals that is (1) totally predictable and (2) exactly what
Pekka wants to see, and that is the stream of bytes being read from the
screen buffer and sent down the wire to the screen hardware. Amid all the
random noise coming from the machine, the ticks of the horizontal and
vertical retrace intervals will stand out as clearly as the beating of a
drum in a teeming jungle. Now that Pekka has zeroed in on that beat, he
should be able to pick up the radiation emanating from the wire that
connects screen buffer to video hardware, and translate it back into a
sequence of ones and zeroes that can be dumped out onto their own screen.
They will be able to see exactly what Tom Howard sees, through the kind of
surveillance called Van Eck phreaking.
That's what Randy knows. When it comes to the details, Cantrell and
Pekka are way out of his league, so after a few minutes he feels himself
losing interest. He sits down on Cantrell's bed, which is the only place
left to sit, and discovers a little palmtop computer on the bedside table.
It is already up and running, patched into the world over a telephone wire.
Randy's heard of this product. It is supposed to be a first stab at a
network computer, and so it's running a Web browser whenever it is turned
on; the Web browser is the interface.
"May I surf?" Randy asks, and Cantrell says, "Yes," without even
turning around. Randy visits one of the big Web searching sites, which takes
a minute because the machine has to establish a Net connection first. Then
he searches for Web documents containing the terms ((Andy OR Andrew) Loeb)
AND "hive mind." As usual, the search finds tens of thousands of documents.
But it's not hard for Randy to pick out the relevant ones.
WHY RIST 9303 IS A MEMBER IN GOOD STANDING OF THE CALIFORNIA BAR
ASSOCIATION
RIST 11A4 has experienced ambivalent feelings over the fact that RIST
9E03 (insofar as s/he is construed, by atomized society, as an individual
organism) is a lawyer. No doubt the conflicted feelings of RIST 11A4 are
quite normal and natural. Part of RIST 11A4 abhors lawyers, and the legal
system in general, as symptoms of the end stage terminal disease of atomized
society. Another part understands that disease can improve the health of the
meme pool if it slays an organism that is old and unfit for ongoing
propagation of its memotype. Make no mistake about it: the legal system in
its current form is the worst imaginable system for society to resolve its
disputes. It is appallingly expensive in terms of money and in terms of the
intellectual talent that goes to waste pursuing it as a career. But part of
RIST 11A4 feels that the goals of RIST 11A4 may actually be served by
turning the legal system's most toxic features against the rotten body
politic of atomized society and in so doing hasten its downfall.
Randy clicks on RIST 9E03 and gets
RIST 9E03 is the RIST that RIST 11A4 denotes by the arbitrarily chosen
bit pattern that, construed as an integer, is 9E03 (in hexadecimal
notation). Click here for more about the system of bit pattern designators
used by RIST 11A4 to replace the obsolescent nomenclature systems of
"natural languages." Click here if you would like the designator RIST 9E03
to be automatically replaced by a conventional designator (name) as you
browse this web site.
Click.
From now on. the expression RIST 9E03 will be replaced by the
expression Andrew Loeb. Warning: we consider such nomenclature fundamentally
invalid, and do not recommend its use, but have provided it as a service to
first time visitors to this Web site who are not accustomed to thinking in
terms of RISTs.
Click.
You have clicked on Andrew Loeb which is a designator assigned by
atomized society to the memome of RIST 9E03 . .
Click.
memome is the set of all memes that define the physical reality of a
carbon based RIST. Memes can be divided into two broad categories: genetic
and semantic. Genetic memes are simply genes (DNA) and are propagated
through normal biological reproduction. Semantic memes are ideas
(ideologies, religions, fads, etc.) and are propagated by communications.
Click.
The genetic part of the memome of Andrew Loeb shares 99% of its
contents with the data set produced by the Human Genome Project. This should
not be construed as endorsing the concept of speciation (i.e. that the
continuum of carbon based life forms can or should be arbitrarily
partitioned into paradigmatic species) in general, or the theory that there
is a species called "Homo sapiens" in particular.
The semantic part of the memome of Andrew Loeb is still unavoidably
contaminated with many primitive viral memes, but these are being gradually
and steadily supplanted by new semantic memes generated ab initio by
rational processes.
Click.
RIST stands for Relatively Independent Sub Totality. It can be used to
refer to any entity that, from one point of view, seems to possess a clear
boundary separating it from the world (as do cells in a body) but that, in a
deeper sense, is inextricably linked with a larger totality (as are cells in
a body). For example, the biological entities traditionally known as "human
beings" are nothing more than Relatively Independent Sub Totalities of the
social organism in which they are embedded.
A dissertation written under the name Andrew Loeb, who is now
designated RIST 9E03, indicates that even in those parts of RIST 0577 having
temperate climates and abundant food and water, the life of an organism such
as the type designated, in old meme systems, as "Homo sapiens," would have
been primarily occupied with attempting to eat other RISTs. This narrow
focus would inhibit the formation of advanced semantic meme systems (viz,
civilization as that word is traditionally construed). RISTs of this type
can only attain higher levels of functioning insofar as they are embedded in
a larger society, the most logical evolutionary end point of which is a hive
mind.
Click.
A hive mind is a social organization of RISTs that are capable of
processing semantic memes ("thinking"). These could be either carbon based
or silicon based. RISTs who enter a hive mind surrender their independent
identities (which are mere illusions anyway). For purposes of convenience,
the constituents of the hive mind are assigned bit pattern designators.
Click.
A bit pattern designator is a random series of bits used to uniquely
identify a RIST. For example, the organism traditionally designed as Earth
(Terra, Gaia) has been assigned the designator 0577. This Web site is
maintained by 11A4 which is a hive mind. RIST 11A4 assigns bit pattern
designators with a pseudo random number generator. This departs from the
practice used by that soi disant "hive mind" known to itself as the East Bay
Area Hive Mind Project but designated (in the system of RIST 11A4) as RIST
E772. This "hive mind" resulted from the division of "Hive Mind One"
(designated in the system of RIST 11A4 as RIST 4032) into several smaller
"hive minds" (the East Bay Area Hive Mind Project, the San Francisco Hive
Mind, Hive Mind IA, the Reorganized San Francisco Hive Mind, and the
Universal Hive Mind) as the result of an irreconcilable contradiction
between several different semantic memes that competed for mind share. One
of these semantic memes asserted that bit pattern designators should be
assigned in numerical order, so that (for example) Hive Mind One would be
designated RIST 0001 and so on. Another meme asserted that numbers should be
organized in order of importance, so that (for example) the RIST
conventionally known as the planet Earth would be RIST 0001. Another
semantic meme agreed with this one but disagreed as to whether the counting
should begin with 0000 or 0001. Within both the 0000 and 0001 camps, there
was disagreement about what RIST should be assigned the first number: some
asserted that Earth was the first and most important RIST, others that some
larger system (the solar system, the Universe, God) was in some sense more
inclusive and fundamental.
This machine has an e mail interface. Randy uses it.
To: root@eruditorum.org
From: dwarf@siblings.net
Subject: Re(2) Why?
Saw the website. Am willing to stipulate that you are not RIST 9E03.
Suspect that you are the Dentist, who yearns for honest exchange of views.
Anonymous, digitally signed e mail is the only safe vehicle for same.
If you want me to believe you are not the Dentist, provide plausible
explanation for your question regarding why we are building the Crypt.
Yours truly,
– BEGIN ORDO SIGNATURE BLOCK – (etc.)
– END ORDO SIGNATURE BLOCK
"We've got bits," Cantrell says. "Are you in the middle of something?"
"Nothing I'm not eager to get out of," Randy says, putting the palm top
down. He gets off the bed and stands behind Pekka. The screen of Pekka's
computer has a number of windows on it, of which the biggest and frontmost
is the image of another computer's screen. Nested within that are various
other windows and icons: a desktop. It happens to be a Windows NT desktop,
which is noteworthy and (to Randy) bizarre because Pekka's computer isn't
running Windows NT, it's running Finux. A cursor is moving around on that
Windows NT desktop, pulling down menus and clicking on things. But Pekka's
hand is not moving. The cursor zooms over to a Microsoft Word icon, which
changes color and expands to form a large window.
This copy of Microsoft Word is registered to THOMAS HOWARD.
"You did it!" Randy says.
"We see what Tom sees," Pekka says.
A new document window opens up, and words begin to spill across it.
Note to myself: let's see "Letters to Penthouse" print this!
I don't suppose that graduate students of either gender are exactly
sought out by sexual connoisseurs for their great fucking skills. We think
about it too much. Everything has to be verbalized. A person who believes
that fucking is a sexual discourse is simply never going to be any good in
the sack.
I have a thing about stockings. They have to be sheer black stockings,
preferably with seams up the back. When I was thirteen years old I actually
shoplifted some black pantyhose from a grocery store just so that I could
play with them. Walking out of that store with those L'eggs in my backpack,
my heart was pounding, but the excitement of the crime was nothing compared
to opening up the package and pulling them out, rubbing them against my
fuzzy, adolescent cheeks. I even tried pulling them on, but this just looked
grotesque what with my hairy legs and did absolutely nothing for me. I
didn't want to wear them. I wanted someone else to. I masturbated four times
that day.
It disturbed the shit out of me when I thought about it. I was a smart
boy. Smart boys are supposed to be rational. So, when I was in college I
figured out a rationalization for this. There wasn't that many women who
wore sheer black stockings in college, but sometimes I would go into the
city and see the well dressed office workers walking down the street on
their lunch breaks and make scientific observations of their legs. I noticed
that where the stocking stretched itself thin to go over a wide part of the
leg, such as the muscle of the calf, it became paler. just as a colored
balloon becomes paler when it is inflated. Conversely, it was darker in
narrow regions such as the ankle. This made the calf look more shapely and
the ankle look more slender. The legs, as a whole, looked healthier,
implying that just above the place where they joined together, a higher
class of DNA was to be found.
Q.E.D. My thing about black stockings was a highly rational adaptation.
It merely proved how smart I was, how rational even the most irrational
parts of my brain were. Sex held no power over me. It was nothing to fear.
This was quintessentially sophomoric thinking, but nowadays most
educated people hold quintessentially sophomoric opinions well into their
thirties and so this stuck with me for a long time. My wife Virginia
probably had some equally self serving rationalization for her own sexual
needs of which I was not to become aware for many years. So it's no surprise
that our premarital sex life was mediocre. Neither one of us admitted it was
mediocre, of course. If I had admitted it, I would have had to admit that it
was mediocre because Virginia didn't like to wear stockings, and at the time
I was too concerned with being a Sensitive New Age Guy to admit such heresy,
I loved Virginia for her mind. How could I be so shallow, so insensitive, so
perverse as to spurn her because she didn't like to pull filmy tubes of
nylon over her legs? As a pudgy nerd, I was lucky to have her.
Five years into our marriage, I attended the Comdex convention as
president of a small new high tech company. I was a little less pudgy and a
little less nerdy. I met a marketing girl for a big software distribution
chain. She was wearing sheer black stockings. We ended up fucking in my
hotel room. It was the best sex I'd ever had. I went home baffled and
ashamed. After that, my sex life with Virginia was pretty miserable. We had
sex maybe a dozen times over the next couple of years.
Virginia's grandmother died and we went back to upstate New York for
the funeral. Virginia had to wear a dress, which meant she had to shave her
legs and wear stockings something she'd done on only a handful of occasions
since our marriage. I practically fell over when I saw her, and suffered
through the funeral with a big, scratchy erection, trying to figure out how
I could get her alone.
Now, Granny had lived by herself in a big old house on a hill until a
couple of months earlier when she had fallen down and broken her hip, and
been moved into a nursing home. All of her children, grandchildren, and
great grandchildren came together for the funeral, and that house became the
central gathering place. It was a nice place full of good old furniture, but
in her declining years Granny had become something of a compulsive pack rat
and so there were heaps of newspapers and accumulated mail squirreled away
everywhere. In the end we had to haul away several truckloads of junk.
In some other ways, Granny had been pretty well organized and had left
behind a very specific last will and testament. Each one of her descendants
knew exactly which pieces of furniture, dishes, rugs, and curios they were
going to take home. She had a lot of possessions, but she also had a lot of
descendants, and so the loot had to be sliced pretty thin. Virginia ended up
with a black walnut dresser which was stored in an unused bedroom. We went
up there to have a look at it, and I ended up fucking her there. I stood up
with the flimsy trousers of my dark suit collapsed around my ankles while
she sat on top of that dresser with her legs wrapped around me and her
stocking clad heels digging into my butt cheeks. It was the best fuck we'd
ever had, bar none. Fortunately there were a lot of people eating, drinking,
and talking downstairs or they would have heard her moaning and hollering.
I finally came clean to her about the stockings. It felt good. I'd been
reading a lot about how the brain develops and had finally come to accept my
stocking kink. It seems that when you are a certain age, somewhere between
about two and five years, your mind just gels. The part of it that's
responsible for sex becomes set into a pattern that you'll carry with you
for the rest of your life. All of the gay people I've ever discussed it with
have told me that they knew they were gay, or at least different, years
before they even began thinking about sex, and all of them agree that
gayness cannot be converted into straightness, or vice versa, no matter how
hard you might try.
The part of your brain that handles sex frequently gets cross wired
into other, seemingly irrelevant areas at this age. This is when people pick
up an orientation towards sexual dominance or submission, or when a lot of
guys pick up highly specific kinks say, rubber, feathers, or shoes. Some of
them are unfortunate enough to get turned on by little kids, and those guys
are essentially doomed from that point onwards there is nothing to do except
castrate them or lock them up. No therapy will unkink the brain once it has
kinked.
So, all things considered, being turned on by black stockings wasn't
such a bad sexual card to have been dealt. I laid this all out to Virginia
during the trip home. I was surprised by how calmly she accepted it. I was
too big of a jerk to realize that she was thinking about how it all applied
to her.
After we got back home, she gamely went out and bought some stockings
and tried to wear them on occasion. This was not easy. Stockings imply a
whole lifestyle. They look stupid with jeans and sneakers. A woman in
stockings has to wear a dress or a skirt, and not just a blue denim skirt
but something nicer, more formal. She also has to wear the type of shoes
that Virginia didn't own and didn't like to wear. Stockings are not really
compatible with riding a bicycle to work. They were not even really
compatible with our house. During our frugal grad student days we had
accumulated a lot of furniture from Goodwill, or I had hammered it together
myself out of two by fours. This furniture turned out to be riddled with
hidden snags that a person in blue jeans would never notice but that would
destroy a pair of stockings in a moment. Likewise, our half finished house
and our old junker cars had many small sharp edges that were death to
stockings. On the other hand, when we went away for an anniversary trip to
London, getting around in black taxis, staying in a nice hotel, and eating
in good restaurants, we spent a whole week moving in a world that was
perfectly adapted to stockings. It just went to show us how radically we
would have to change our circumstances in order for her to dress that way
routinely.
So, much money was spent on stockings in a fit of good intentions. Some
good sex was had, though I seemed to enjoy it much more than Virginia did.
She never achieved the shocking, animal intensity she had shown at Granny's
house after the funeral . Attrition reduced her supply of stockings very
quickly, sheer inconvenience prevented her from renewing it, and within a
year after the funeral we were back to square one.
Other things were changing, though. I made a lot of money by cashing in
some stock options, and we bought a new house up in the hills. We hired some
movers to come pick up all of our junky furniture and move it into that
house, where it looked much shabbier. Virginia's new job forced her to
commute in a car. I didn't think our old junker was safe, and so I bought
her a nice little Lexus with leather seats and wool carpet, all of it nicely
snag free. Soon, kids came along and I traded in my old beater pickup truck
for a minivan.
Still, I couldn't bring myself to begin spending money on furniture
until my back started going bad on me, and I realized it was because of the
slack, twenty year old Goodwill mattress that Virginia and I were sleeping
on. We had to buy a new bed. Since it was my back at stake, I went out and
did the shopping.
I 'd rather stub out cigarettes on my tongue than go shopping. The idea
of hitting every big furniture store in the area, comparing beds, made me
want to die. All I wanted was to go to one place and buy a bed and have done
with it. But I didn't want a shitty bed that I'd be sick of in a year, or a
cheap mattress that would mess up my back again in five years.
So I went straight down to my local Gomer Bolstrood Home Gallery. I had
heard people talk about Gomer Bolstrood furniture. Women, in particular,
seemed to speak of it in hushed, religious tones. Their factory was said to
be up in some New England town where they had been based for the last three
hundred years. It was said that loose curls of walnut and oak from Gomer
Bolstroods block plane had been used as tinder beneath the pyres of
convicted witches. Gomer Bolstrood was the answer to a question I'd been
ruminating over ever since Granny's funeral, namely: where does all of this
high quality grandma furniture come from? In every family, young people go
to grandma's house for Thanksgiving, or other obligatory visits, and lust
over the nice antique furniture, wondering which pieces they will take home
when the old lady kicks the bucket. Some people lose patience and go to
estate sales or antique stores and buy the stuff.
But if the supply of old, high grade, heirloom quality furniture is
fixed, then where will the grannys of the future come from? I could see a
situation, half a century in the future, when Virginia's and my descendants
would all be squabbling over that one black walnut dresser, while bringing
in Ryder trucks to haul the rest of our stuff straight to the dump. As the
population grows, and the supply of old furniture remains constant, this
kind of thing is inevitable. There must be a source for new granny grade
furniture, or else the Americans of tomorrow will all end up sitting in
vinyl beanbag chairs, leaking little foam beads all over the floor.
The answer is Gomer Bolstrood, and the price is high. Each Gomer
Bolstrood chair and table really ought to come in a little felt lined box,
like a piece of jewelry. But at the time, I was rich and impatient. So I
drove to Gomer Bolstrood and stormed through the door, only to be brought up
short by a receptionist. I felt tacky in my white tennis shoes and jeans.
She had probably seen a lot of high tech millionaires come through those
doors, and took it pretty calmly. Before I knew it a middle aged woman had
emerged from the back of the store and appointed herself my personal design
consultant. Her name was Margaret. "Where are the beds?" I asked. She
stiffened and informed me that this not the kind of place where you could
walk into a Bed Room and see a row of beds lined up like pig's feet at a
butcher shop. A Gomer Bolstrood Home Design Gallery consists of a series of
exquisitely decorated rooms, some of which happen to be bedrooms and to
contain beds. Once we had that all straightened out. Margaret showed me the
bedrooms. As she led me from one room to the next. I couldn't help noticing
that she was wearing black stockings with seams up the back perfectly
straight seams.
My erotic feelings for Margaret made me uncomfortable. For a while, I
had to restrain the impulse to say "just sell me the biggest, most expensive
bed you have." Margaret showed me beds in different styles. The names of the
styles meant nothing to me. Some looked modern and some looked old
fashioned. I pointed to a very large, high four poster that looked like
granny furniture and said. "I'll take one of those."
There was a three month delay while the bed was hand carved by New
England craftsmen working at the same wage as plumbers or psychotherapists.
Then it showed up at our house and was assembled by technicians in white
coveralls, like the guys who work in semiconductor chip fabrication plants.
Virginia came home from work. She was wearing a denim skirt, heavy wool
socks, and Birkenstocks. The kids were still at school. We had sex on the
bed. I performed dutifully enough, I suppose. I could not really sustain an
erection and ended up with my head stuck between her bristly thighs. Even
with my ears blocked by her quadriceps. I could hear her moaning and
screaming. She went into erotic convulsions near the end, and almost snapped
my neck. Her climax must have lasted for two or three full minutes. This was
the moment when I first came to terms with the fact that Virginia could not
achieve orgasm unless she was in close proximity to preferably on top of a
piece of heirloom grade furniture that she owned.
The window containing the image of Tom Howard's desktop vanishes. Pekka
has clicked it into oblivion.
"I could not stand it any more," he says, in his electronically
generated deadpan.
"I predict a ménage à trois Tom, his wife, and Margaret doing it on a
bed at the furniture store, after hours," Cantrell says ruminatively.
"Is it Tom? Or a fictional character of Tom's?" Pekka asks.
"Does this mean you win the bet?" Randy asks.
"If only I can figure out how to collect on it," Cantrell says.
Chapter 42 AFLOAT
A brown miasma has settled across the Bismarck Sea, smelling of oil and
barbecue. American torpedo boats hurtle out of this reeking fog, their fat
hulls barely touching the water, their giant motors curving white scars into
the sea as they line up their targets: the few remaining ships in Goto
Dengo's troop convoy, whose decks are now covered with a dark mat of
soldiers, like moss on an old rock. The torpedos spring into the air like
crossbow bolts, driven by compressed gas from tubes on the boats' decks.
They belly flop into the water, settle to a comfortable depth where the
water is always calm, and draw bubble trails across the sea, heading
directly for the ships. The crowds on the ships' decks fluidize and gush
over the edges. Goto Dengo turns away and hears but doesn't see the
explosions. Hardly any of the Nipponese troops know how to swim.
Later, the airplanes come back to strafe them some more. Swimmers who
have the wit and the ability to dive are invulnerable. Those who don't are
dead very soon. The airplanes leave. Goto Dengo strips a life preserver off
a shattered corpse. He has the worst sunburn of his life and it is only
midafternoon, so he pilfers a uniform blouse, too, and ties it around his
head like a burnoose.
The ones who are still alive, and who can swim, try to converge on each
other. They are in a complicated strait between New Guinea and New Britain,
and tidal currents rushing through it tend to pull them apart. Some men
drift slowly away, calling out to their comrades. Goto Dengo ends up on the
fringes of a dissolving archipelago of maybe a hundred swimmers. Many of
them clutch life preservers or bits of wood to stay afloat. The seas are
considerably higher than their heads and so they can't see very far.
Before sunset, the haze lifts for an hour. Goto Dengo can clearly fix
the sun's position, so for the first time all day he knows west from east,
north from south. Better, he can see peaks rising above the southern
horizon, slathered with blue white glaciers.
"I will swim to New Guinea," he shouts, and begins doing it. There is
no point in trying to discuss it with the others. The ones who are inclined
to follow him, do: maybe a few dozen in all. The timing is right the sea has
become miraculously calm. Goto Dengo settles into a slow, easy sidestroke.
Most of the others are moving in an improvised dogpaddle. If they are making
any progress at all it is totally imperceptible. As the stars begin to come
out, he rolls over into a backstroke and gets a fix on Polaris. As long as
he swims away from that, it is physically impossible for him to miss New
Guinea.
Darkness falls. Dim light is shed by the stars and by a half moon. The
men call to one another, trying to stay bunched together. Some of them get
lost; they can be heard but not seen, and those in the main group can do
nothing but listen to their pleadings dwindle.
It must be around midnight when the sharks come. The first victim is a
man who had lacerated his forehead on a hatch frame when scrambling out of a
sinking ship, and who has been bleeding ever since, drawing a thin pink line
across the sea, leading the sharks straight to them. The sharks do not know
yet what they are dealing with, and so they kill him slowly, worrying him to
death in small bites. When he turns out to be easy prey, they explode into
some kind of berserk rage that is all the more fantastic for being hidden
beneath the black water. Men's voices are cut off in mid cry as they are
jerked straight down. Sometimes a leg or head will suddenly burst free from
the surface. The water splashing into Goto Dengo's mouth begins to taste of
iron.
The attack goes on for several hours. It appears that the noise and
smell have attracted some rival shark packs, because sometimes there is a
lull followed by renewed ferocity. A severed shark tail bumps up against
Goto Dengo's face; he hangs onto it. The sharks are eating them; why
shouldn't he retaliate? In Tokyo restaurants charge a lot of money for shark
sashimi. The skin of the shark tail is tough, but hunks of muscle are
hanging out of the torn edge. He buries his face in the meat and feasts on
it.
When Goto Dengo was young, his father had owned a fedora with English
writing on its ivory silk liner, and a briar pipe, and tobacco that he
bought through the mail from America. He would sit on a rock up in the hills
and snug his fedora down to keep the chilly air from the bald spot on top of
his head and smoke his pipe and just look at the world. "What are you
doing?" Dengo would ask him.
"Observing," father would say.
"But how long can you observe the same thing?"
"Forever. Look over there." Father pointed with the stem of his pipe. A
thread of white smoke piped out of the mouthpiece, like a silk thread being
unwound from a cocoon. "That band of dark rock is mineral bearing. We could
get copper out of there, probably some zinc and lead too. We would run a cog
railway up the valley to that flat spot there, then sink an angle shaft
parallel to the face of the deposit Then Dengo would get into the act and
decide where the workers would live, where the school would be built for
their children, where the playing field would be. By the time they were
finished they would have populated the whole valley with an imaginary city.
Goto Dengo has plenty of time to make observations this night. He
observes that severed body parts almost never get attacked. The men who swim
most violently are always the first to get it. So, when the sharks come in,
he tries to float on his back and not move a muscle, even when the jagged
ends of someone's ribs poke him in the face.
Dawn arrives, one or two hundred hours after the previous sunset. He
has never stayed awake all night long before, and finds it shocking to see
something as big as the sun go down on one side of the planet and come up on
the opposite. He is a virus, a germ living on the surface of unfathomably
giant bodies in violent motion. And, amazingly enough, he is still not
alone: three other men have survived the night of the sharks. They converge
on one another and turn to face the ice covered mountains of New Guinea,
salmon colored in the dawn light.
"They have not gotten any closer," one of the men says.
"They are deep in the interior," Goto Dengo says. "We are not swimming
to the mountains only to the shore much closer. Let's go before we die of
dehydration!" And he plunges forward into a sidestroke.
One of the others, a boy who speaks with an Okinawan accent, is an
excellent swimmer. He and Goto Dengo can easily outdistance the others. For
most of the day, they try to stay together with the other two anyway. The
waves come up and make it difficult even for good swimmers to move.
One of the slower swimmers has been fighting diarrhea since long before
his ship was sunk out from under him and was probably dehydrated to begin
with. Around midday, when the sun is coming straight down on top of them
like a flamethrower, he goes into convulsions, gets some water into his
lungs, and disappears.
The other slow swimmer is from Tokyo. He's in much better physical
condition he simply doesn't know how to swim. "There is no better time or
place to learn," Goto Dengo says. He and the Okinawan spend an hour or so
teaching him the sidestroke and backstroke, and then they resume swimming
southwards.
Around sunset, Goto Dengo catches the Okinawan gulping down mouthful
after mouthful of seawater. It is painful to watch, mostly because he
himself has been wanting to do it. "No! It will make you sick!" he says. His
voice is weak. The effort of filling his lungs, expanding his ribcage
against the relentless pressure of the water, is ruining him; every muscle
in his torso is rigid and tender.
The Okinawan has already started retching by the time Goto Dengo
reaches him. With the help of the Tokyo boy, he sticks his fingers down the
Okinawan's throat and gets him to vomit it all up.
He is very sick anyway, and until late at night cannot do anything
except float on his back and mumble deliriously. But just as Goto Dengo is
about to abandon him, he becomes lucid, asking "Where is Polaris?"
"It is cloudy tonight," Goto Dengo says. "But there is a bright spot in
the clouds that might be the moon."
Based on the position of that bright spot, they guess the position of
New Guinea and resume swimming. Their arms and legs are like sacks of clay,
and all of them are hallucinating.
The sun seems to be coming up. They are in a nebula of vapor, radiant
with peach colored light, as if hurtling through a distant part of the
galaxy.
"I smell something rotten," says one of them. Goto Dengo cannot tell
which.
"Gangrene?" guesses the other.
Goto Dengo fills his nostrils, an act that consumes about half of his
remaining energy reserves. "It is not rotten flesh," he says. "It is
vegetation."
None of them can swim anymore. If they could, they wouldn't know which
direction to choose, because the mist glows uniformly. If they picked a
direction, it wouldn't matter, because the current is taking them where it
will.
Goto Dengo sleeps for a while, or maybe he doesn't.
Something bumps his leg. Thank god; the sharks have come to finish
them.
The waves have grown aggressive. He feels another bump. The burned
flesh on his leg screams. It is something very hard, rough, and sharp.
Something is projecting out of the water just ahead, something bumpy
and white. A coral head.
A wave breaks behind them, picks them up, and flings them forward
across the coral, half flaying them. Goto Dengo breaks a finger and counts
himself lucky. The next breaker takes what little skin he has left and
flings him into a lagoon. Something forces his feet upwards, and because his
body is just a limp sack of shit at this point, doubles him over head first
into the water. His face strikes a bed of sharp coral sand. Then his hands
are in it too. His limbs have forgotten how to do any thing except swim, and
so it takes him a while to plant them in the bottom and lift his head out of
the water. Then he begins to crawl on his hands and knees. The odor of
rotten vegetation is overpowering now, as if a whole division's food
supplies had been left out in the sun for a week.
He finds some sand that is not covered with water, turns around, and
sits down on it. The Okinawan is right behind him, also on hands and knees,
and the Tokyo boy has actually clambered to his feet and is wading ashore,
being knocked this way and that by incoming waves. He is laughing.
The Okinawan boy collapses on the sand next to Goto Dengo, not even
trying to sit up.
A wave knocks the Tokyo boy off balance. Laughing, he collapses
sideways into the surf, throwing out one hand to break his fall.
He stops laughing and jerks back sharply. Something is dangling from
his forearm: a wriggling snake. He snaps it like a whip and it flies off
into the water.
Scared and sober, he splashes the last half dozen steps up onto the
beach and then falls flat on his face. By the time Goto Dengo reaches him,
he is stone dead.
Goto Dengo gathers his forces for some period of time that is difficult
to measure. He may have fallen asleep sitting up. The Okinawan boy is still
lying on the sand, raving. Goto Dengo gets his feet underneath himself and
staggers off in search of fresh water.
This is not a proper beach, merely a sandbar maybe ten meters long and
three wide, with some tall grassy stuff sprouting out of the top. On the
other side of it is a brackish lagoon that meanders between banks, not of
earth, but of living things all tangled together. That tangle is obviously
too thick to penetrate. So, notwithstanding what just happened to the Tokyo
boy, Goto Dengo wades into the lagoon, hoping that it will lead inland to a
freshwater stream.
He wanders for what seems like an hour, but the lagoon takes him back
to the edge of the sea again. He gives up and drinks the water he's wading
in, hoping it will be a little less salty. This leads to a great deal of
vomiting but makes him feel slightly better somehow. Again he wades into the
swamp, trying to keep the sound of the surf behind him, and after an hour or
so he finds a rivulet of water that is actually fresh. When he has finished
drinking from that, he feels strong enough to go back and carry the Okinawan
boy here, if need be.
He gets back to the beach in midafternoon and finds that the Okinawan
is gone. But the sand is all churned up by footprints. The sand is dry and
so the footprints are too indistinct to read. They must have made contact
with a patrol! Surely their comrades must have heard about the attack on the
convoy and are combing beaches for survivors. There must be a bivouac in the
jungle not far away!
Goto Dengo follows the trail into the jungle. After he's proceeded a
mile or so, the track crosses a small, open mud flat where he gets a good
look at the footprints, all made by bare feet with enormous, bizarrely
splayed toes. Footprints of people who have never worn shoes in their lives.
He proceeds more cautiously for another few hundred meters. He can hear
voices now. The Army taught him all about jungle infiltration tactics, how
to creep through the enemy's lines in the middle of the night without making
a sound. Of course, when they practiced it in Nippon they weren't being
eaten alive by ants and mosquitoes the whole time. But it hardly matters to
him now. An hour of patient work gets him to a vantage point from which he
can see into a flat clearing with a stagnant creek wandering through it.
Several long dark houses are built on tree trunk stilts to keep them up out
of the ooze, and roofed with bushy heaps of palm fronds.
Before he finds the Okinawan, Goto Dengo needs to get some food. In the
middle of the clearing, white porridge is steaming in a pot over an open
fire, but it's being tended by several tough looking women, naked except for
short fringes of fibrous stuff tied round their waists and just barely
concealing their genitals.
Smoke is rising from some of the long buildings too. But to get inside
one of them, he would have to clamber up its heavy, slanting ladder and then
worm through what looks like a rather small doorway. A child, standing
inside one of those doorways with a stick, could prevent an intruder from
coming in. Hanging outside some of the doorways are sacks, improvised from
lengths of fabric (so at least they have textiles!) and filled with big
round lumps: coconuts, possibly or some kind of preserved food set up to
keep it away from the ants.
Perhaps seventy people are gathered around something of interest in the
middle of the clearing. As they move around, Goto Dengo gets occasional
momentary glimpses of someone, possibly Nipponese, who is sitting at the
base of a palm tree with his hands behind his back. There's a lot of blood
on his face and he's not moving. Most of these people are men, and they tend
to carry spears. They have those fringes of hairy stuff (sometimes dyed red
or green) concealing their private parts, and some of the bigger and older
ones have decorated themselves by tying strips of fabric around their arms.
Some have painted designs on their skin in pale mud. They have shoved
various objects, some of them quite large, sideways through their nasal
septums.
The bloodied man seems to have captured everyone's attention, and Goto
Dengo reckons that this will be his only chance to steal some food. He picks
the longhouse farthest away from where the villagers have gathered, clambers
up its ladder, and reaches for the bulging sack that hangs by the entrance.
But the fabric is very old and it has rotted from the damp of the swamp, and
maybe from the attacks of the hundreds of flies that buzz around it, and so
when he grasps it his fingers go right through. A long swath of it tears
away and the contents tumble out around Goto Dengo's feet. They are dark and
sort of hairy, like coconuts, but their shape is more complicated, and he
knows intuitively that some thing is wrong even before he recognizes them as
human skulls. Maybe half a dozen of them. Scalp and skin still stuck on.
Some of them are dark skinned with bushy hair, like the natives, and others
look distinctly Nipponese.
Sometime later, he is able to think coherently again. He realizes that
he does not know how long he might have spent up here, in full view of the
villagers, gazing on the skulls. He turns around to look, but all attention
is still focused on the wounded man seated at the base of the tree.
From this vantage point Goto Dengo is able to see that it is indeed the
Okinawan, and that his arms have been tied together behind the tree trunk. A
boy of maybe twelve is standing over him, holding a spear. He steps forward
cautiously and suddenly pokes it into the midsection of the Okinawan, who
comes awake and thrashes from side to side. The boy's obviously startled by
this, and jumps back. Then an older man, his head decorated with a fringe of
cowrie shells, takes a stance behind and beside the boy, showing him how to
hold the spear, guiding him forward again. He adds his own strength to the
youngster's and they shove the spear straight into the Okinawan's heart.
Goto Dengo falls off the house.
The men become very excited and pick the boy up on their shoulders and
parade him around the clearing hollering and leaping and twirling, jabbing
their spears defiantly into the air. They are pursued by all but the very
youngest children. Goto Dengo, bruised but not damaged by the fall onto the
mucky ground, belly crawls into the jungle and looks for a place of
concealment. The women of the village carry pots and knives towards the
Okinawan's body and begin to cut it up with the conspicuous skill of a sushi
chef dismantling a tuna.
One of them is concentrating entirely on his head. Suddenly she jumps
into the air and begins to dance around the clearing, waving something
bright and glittery. "Ulab! Ulab! Ulab!" she cries ecstatically. Some women
and children begin following her around, trying to get a look at whatever it
is she's holding. Finally she stops and centers her hand in a rare shaft of
sunlight coming down through the trees. Resting in the palm of her hand is a
gold tooth.
"Ulab!" say the women and children. One of the kids tries to snatch it
out of her hand and she knocks him flat on his ass. Then one of the big
spear carrying men runs up and she hands the booty over to him.
Several of the men now gather round to marvel at the find.
The women go back to working over the Okinawan boy, and soon his body
parts are stewing in pots over an open fire.
Chapter 43 SHINOLA
Men who believe that they are accomplishing something by speaking speak
in a different way from men who believe that speaking is a waste of time.
Bobby Shaftoe has learned most of his practical knowledge how to fix a car,
butcher a deer, throw a spiral, talk to a lady, kill a Nip from the latter
type of man. For them, trying to do anything by talking is like trying to
pound in a nail with a screwdriver. Sometimes you can even see the
desperation spread over such a man's face as he listens to himself speak.
Men of the other type the ones who use speech as a tool of their work,
who are confident and fluent aren't necessarily more intelligent, or even
more educated. It took Shaftoe a long time to figure that out.
Anyway, everything was neat and tidy in Bobby Shaftoe's mind until he
met two of the men in Detachment 2702: Enoch Root and Lawrence Pritchard
Waterhouse. He can't put his finger on what bugs him about those two. During
the weeks they spent together on Qwghlm, he spent a lot of time listening to
them yammer at each other, and began to suspect that there might be a third
category of man, a kind so rare that Shaftoe never met any of them until
now.
Officers are discouraged from fraternizing with enlisted men and non
coms, which has made it more difficult for Shaftoe to pursue his research
into the matter. Sometimes, though, circumstances jumble all of the ranks
together willy nilly. A prime example would be this Trinidadian tramp
steamer.
Where do they get this stuff? wonders Shaftoe. Does the U.S. government
keep a bunch of Trinidadian tramp steamers riding at anchor at a naval yard
somewhere, just in case one is needed?
He thinks not. This one shows signs of a very recent and hasty change
of ownership. It is a mother lode of yellowed, ragged, multiethnic
pornography, some of it very run of the mill and some so exotic that he
mistook it for medical literature at first. There is a lot of stray
paperwork on the bridge and in certain cabins, most of which Shaftoe only
sees out of the corner of his eye as these areas tend to be the domain of
officers. The heads are still littered with their predecessors' curly black
pubic hairs, and the storage lockers are sparsely stocked with exotic
Caribbean foodstuffs, much of them rapidly going bad. The cargo hold is
filled with bales and bales of coarse brown fibrous material raw material
for life preservers or bran muffins, he supposes.
None of them much cares, because Detachment 2702 has been freezing its
ass off in the Far North ever since they left Italy a few months ago, and
now they are running around shirtless, of all things. One little airplane
ride, that's all it took, and they were in the balmy Azores. They did not
get any R and R there they went straight from the airfield to the
Trinidadian ship, in the dead of night, huddled under tarps in a covered
truck. But even the warm air that streamed in underneath the tarp felt like
an exotic massage in a tropical whorehouse. And once they steamed out of
sight of port, they were allowed to come up abovedecks and take in some sun.
This gives Bobby Shaftoe the opportunity to strike up a few
conversations with Enoch Root, partly just for the hell of it and partly so
that he can try to figure out this whole business about the third category
of men. Progress comes slowly.
"I don't like the word 'addict' because it has terrible connotations,"
Root says one day, as they are sunning themselves on the afterdeck. "Instead
of slapping a label on you, the Germans would describe you as
'Morphiumsüchtig.' The verb suchen means to seek. So that might be
translated, loosely, as 'morphine seeky' or even more loosely as 'morphine
seeking.' I prefer 'seeky' because it means that you have an inclination to
seek morphine."
"What the fuck are you talking about?" Shaftoe says.
"Well, suppose you have a roof with a hole in it. That means it is a
leaky roof. It's leaky all the time even if it's not raining at the moment.
But it's only leaking when it happens to be raining. In the same way,
morphine seeky means that you always have this tendency to look for
morphine, even if you are not looking for it at the moment. But I prefer
both of them to 'addict,' because they are adjectives modifying Bobby
Shaftoe instead of a noun that obliterates Bobby Shaftoe."
"So what's the point?" Shaftoe asks. He asks this because he is
expecting Root to give him an order, which is usually what men of the
talkative sort end up doing after jabbering on for a while. But no order
seems to be forthcoming, because that's not Root's agenda. Root just felt
like talking about words. The SAS blokes refer to this kind of activity as
wanking.
Shaftoe has had little direct contact with that Waterhouse fellow
during their stay on Qwghlm, but he has noticed that men who have just
finished talking to Waterhouse tend to walk away shaking their heads and not
in the slow way of a man saying "no," but in the sudden convulsive way of a
dog who has a horsefly in his middle ear. Waterhouse never gives direct
orders, so men of the first category don't know what to make of him. But
apparently men of the second category fare no better; such men usually talk
like they have an agenda in their heads and they are checking off boxes as
they go, but Waterhouse's conversation doesn't go anywhere in particular. He
speaks, not as a way of telling you a bunch of stuff he's already figured
out, but as a way of making up a bunch of new shit as he goes along. And he
always seems to be hoping that you'll join in. Which no one ever does,
except for Enoch Root.
After they've been out to sea for a day, the captain (Commander Eden
the same poor son of a bitch who got the job of ramming his previous command
into Norway) staggers out of his cabin, making use of every railing or other
handhold that comes within flailing distance. He announces in a slurred
voice that from here on out, according to orders from On High, anyone going
abovedecks must wear black turtle necks, black gloves, and black ski masks
underneath their other clothes. These articles are duly issued to the men.
Shaftoe gets the skipper really pissed off by asking him three times whether
he's sure he has the order worded correctly. One of the reasons Shaftoe is
so highly regarded by the enlisted men is that he knows how to ask these
kinds of questions without technically violating the rules of military
etiquette. The skipper, to his credit, doesn't just pull rank and yell at
him. He takes Shaftoe back to his cabin and shows him a khaki covered Army
manual, printed in black block letters:
TACTICAL NEGRO IMPERSONATION
VOLUME III: NEGROES OF THE CARIBBEAN
It is a pretty interesting order, even by Detachment 2702 standards.
Commander Eden's drunkenness is also kind of disturbing not the fact that he
is drunk, but the particular type of drunk the sort of drunk of say, a Civil
War soldier who knows that the surgeon is about to remove his femur with a
bucksaw.
After Shaftoe has finished getting the turtlenecks, gloves, and ski
masks passed out to the men, and told them to simmer down and do the
lifeboat drills again, Shaftoe finds Root in what passes for the sickbay.
Because he figures it is time to have one of those open ended conversations
in which you try to figure out a bunch of shit, Root is his man.
"I know you're expecting me to ask for morphine, but I'm not gonna,"
Shaftoe says. "I just want to talk."
"Oh," Root says. "Should I put on my chaplain hat, then?"
"I'm a fucking Protestant. I can talk to God myself whenever I god damn
well feel like it."
Root is startled and bewildered by Shaftoe's burst of hostility. "Well,
what do you want to talk about, Sergeant?"
"This mission."
"Oh. I don't know anything about the mission."
"Well, let's try to figure it out, then," Shaftoe says.
"I thought you were just supposed to follow orders," Root says.
"I'll follow 'em, all right."
"I know you will."
"But in the meantime I got a lot of time to kill, so I might as well
use that time to figure out what the fuck is going on. Now, the skipper says
to wear this stuff if we are abovedecks, where we might be seen. But who the
hell is going to see us, out here?"
"An observation plane?"
"Germans don't have no observation planes, not out there."
"Another ship?" Root asks rhetorically, getting into the spirit of the
thing.
"We'll see them at the same time they see us, and that'll give us
plenty of time to put that shit on."
"It would have to be a U boat that the skipper is worried about, then."
"Bingo," Shaftoe says, "because a U boat could look at us through its
periscope, and we'd never know we were being looked at."
But that day, they don't get much further in their attempt to figure
out the deeper question of why their commanding officers want them to make
themselves look like Negroes in the eyes of German U boat captains.
***
The next day, the skipper plants himself on the bridge, where he
evidently means to keep a close eye on things. He seems less drunk but no
happier. He is wearing a colorful short sleeved madras shirt over a long
sleeved black turtleneck, and rope sandals over black socks. Every so often
he puts on his black gloves and ski mask and goes out to scan the horizon
with binoculars.
The ship continues westwards for a few hours after sunrise, then turns
north for a short time, then heads east for an hour, then goes north again,
then turns back to the west. They are running a search pattern, and
Commander Eden does not appear to be looking forward to finding whatever it
is that they are searching for. Shaftoe runs another lifeboat drill, then
checks the lifeboats himself making sure that they are lavishly stocked.
Around noon, a lookout hollers. The ship changes course, headed roughly
northeast. The skipper emerges from the bridge and, with an air of
sepulchral finality, presents Bobby Shaftoe with a crate of dark brown shoe
polish and a sealed envelope containing detailed orders.
Minutes later, the men of Detachment 2702, under orders from Sergeant
Shaftoe, strip to their briefs and begin coating themselves with shoe
polish. They already own black Shinola, which they are ordered to massage
into their hair if it's not already black. Just another example of how the
military screws the little man Shinola ain't free.
"Do I look like a Negro yet?" Shaftoe asks Root.
"I have traveled a bit," Root says, "and you don't look like a Negro to
me. But to a German who has never seen the genuine article, and who's
looking through a periscope what the heck?" Then: "I take it you've figured
out the mission?"
"I read the fucking orders," Shaftoe says guardedly.
They are headed towards a ship. As they get closer, Shaftoe checks it
out with a borrowed spyglass, and is startled, but not really surprised, to
see that it's not one ship but two ships side by side. Both of these ships
have the long fatal lines of U boats, but one of them is fatter, and he
figures it's a milchcow.
Beneath his feet, he feels the engines throttling back to a dim idle.
The sudden quiet, and the palpable loss of momentum and power, are not
reassuring. He gets the usual sick, electric, nauseous, hyperactive feeling
that always makes combat such a stimulatin' experience.
***
The beat up Trinidadian steamer has plied the waters of the Atlantic
without incident throughout the war to date, running back and forth between
African and Caribbean ports, and occasionally venturing as far north as the
Azores. Perhaps it has been sighted, from time to time, by a patrolling U
boat, and judged to be not worth spending a torpedo on. But today its luck
has changed for the worse. They have, by random chance, blundered across a
milchcow a supply U boat of the Kriegsmarine of the Third Reich. The
steamer's normally jaunty crew of shoe brown Negroes has gathered at the
rails to peer across the ocean at this peculiar sight two ships tied
together in the middle of the ocean, going nowhere. But as they draw closer,
they realize that one of those ships is a killer, and that the other is
flying the battle flag of the Kriegsmarine. Too late, they cut their
engines.
There is wild confusion for a minute or so this might be an interesting
spectacle to the lowly, deck swabbing Negroes, but the smart Negroes up on
the bridge know they're in trouble they've seen something they shouldn't
have. They swing her around to the south and make a run for it! For an hour
they dash desperately across the seas. But they are trailed implacably by a
U boat, cutting through the waves like a Bowie knife. The U boat has its
whip aerial up, is monitoring the usual frequencies, and hears the
Trinidadian steamer fire up her radio and send out an SOS. In a short stream
of dits and dahs, the steamer broadcasts her location and that of the
milchcow, and in so doing taps out her own death warrant.
Pesky untermenschen! They've really gone and done it now! It won't be
twenty four hours before the milchcow is located and sunk by the Allies.
There is a good chance that a few U boats will be hounded to their deaths as
part of the bargain. That is not a good way to die being chased across the
ocean for several days, suffering the death of a thousand cuts from
strafings and bombings. Stuff like this really drives home, to the common
ordinary Obertorpedomaat, the wisdom of the Führer's plan to go out and find
all of the people who aren't Germans and kill them.
Meanwhile, our basic Kapitänleutnant has got to be asking himself: what
the hell are the chances that a tramp Trinidadian steamer is going to just
happen upon us and our milchcow, out in the vastness of the Atlantic Ocean?
You could probably work it out, given the right data:
N [sub n] = number of Negroes per square kilometer
N [sub m] = number of milchcows
A [sub a] =Area of the Atlantic Ocean
and so on. But wait a sec, neither Negroes nor milchcows are randomly
distributed, so the calculation becomes immensely more complicated. Far too
complicated for a Kapitänleutnant to mess around with, especially when he's
busy trying to effect a dramatic reduction in N [sub n]
The Trinidadian steamer is brought up short by a shell fired across her
bows from the U boat's deck gun. The Negroes gather on the decks, but they
hesitate, just for a moment, to launch the lifeboats. Perhaps the Germans
are going to give them a break.
Typical, sloppy, sentimental untermenschen thinking. The Germans
brought them up short so they would hold still to be torpedoed. As soon as
they realize this, the Negroes stage an impressive lifeboat drill. It's
remarkable that they even have enough lifeboats to go around, but the calm,
practiced skill with which they launch and board them is truly phenomenal.
It's enough to make a German naval officer reconsider, just for a moment,
his opinions about the shortcomings of darkies.
It is a textbook torpedoing! The torpedo is set to run nice and deep,
and as it passes underneath the ship, the detonation circuit senses a change
in the magnetic field and triggers the explosive, neatly snapping the ship's
keel, breaking its back, and sending it down with incredible speed. For the
next five or ten minutes, bales of brown stuff erupt from the water,
released from the cargo holds as the ship plummets towards the bottom. It
gives the whole scene an unexpectedly festive air.
Some U boat skippers would not be above machine gunning the survivors,
at this point, just to let off a little steam.
But the commander, Kapitänleutnant Günter Bischoff, is not yet a card
carrying member of the Nazi Party and probably never will be.
On the other hand, Bischoff is wrapped in a straightjacket and blasted
half out of his mind on drugs.
Acting commander of the U boat is Oberleutnant zur See Karl Beck. He is
a card carrying National Socialist, and, in other circumstances, he might be
game for a bit of punitive machine gunning, but at the moment he's exhausted
and pretty badly shook up. He is intensely conscious of the fact that he's
probably not going to live very long now that their location has been
reported.
So he doesn't. The Negroes are jumping out of the lifeboats, swimming
to the bales, and clinging to them with just their heads out of the water,
realizing it would take forever to hunt them all down. OL Beck knows the
Liberators and the Catalinas are already airborne and vectored towards him,
so he has to get the hell out of there. Since he has plenty of fuel, he
decides to head south for a while, planning to double back north in a day or
two, when the coast might be a bit clearer. It is the kind of thing that KL
Bischoff would do if he had not gone crazy, and everyone on the boat has
unlimited respect for the old man.
They run on the surface, as they always do when they are not making a
positive effort to sink a convoy, so they can send and receive radio
messages. Beck gives one to Oberfunkmaat Huffer, explaining what has just
happened, and Huffer gives it to one of his Funkmaats, who sits down in
front of U 691 's Enigma machine and encrypts it using the key for the day,
then taps it out on the radio.
An hour later, they get a message back, straight from U boat Command at
Wilhelmshaven, and when the Funkmaat runs it through the Enigma, what he
comes up with is: CAPTURE SURVIVING OFFICERS.
It's a classic example of military commandsmanship: if the order had
come in a more timely fashion it would have been easy to obey, but now that
they are an hour away it will be extremely difficult and dangerous. The
order doesn't make any sense, and no effort is made to clarify it.
Given the time lag, Beck figures he can get away with giving this one a
half assed try. He really should swing round and approach the wreck on the
surface, which would get him there faster, but which would be nearly
suicidal. So instead, he closes the hatches and descends to periscope depth
as he draws closer. This cuts the U boat's speed to a crawling seven knots,
so it takes them about three hours to get back to the atoll of bobbing brown
bales that marks the site.
A damn good thing, too, because another fucking submarine is there,
picking up survivors. It is a Royal Navy submarine.
This is so weird it makes the hairs on the back of Beck's neck stand up
and there's a lot of hair there, because like most submariners, Beck hasn't
shaved in weeks. There's nothing weird, though, that can't be settled with a
single well placed torpedo. Seconds later the submarine explodes like a
bomb; the torpedo must have touched off her munitions. Her crew, and most of
the rescued Negroes, are trapped within, and don't have a chance of getting
out even if they survived the explosions. The submarine drops off the
surface of the ocean like the wreckage of the Hindenberg tumbling down on
New Jersey.
"Gott in Himmel," Beck mumbles, watching this all through the
periscope. He'd been pleased by the success, until he'd remembered that he
had specific orders, and that killing everyone in sight was not one of them.
Will there be any survivors for him to pick up?
He takes the U boat up onto the surface, and climbs up on the conning
tower with his officers. First thing they do is scan the skies for
Catalinas. Finding none, they post lookouts, then begin to nose the U boat
through the sea of bales, which by now has spread out to cover at least a
square kilometer. It is getting dark, and they have to bring up
searchlights.
All looks rather dismal until one searchlight picks out a survivor just
a head, shoulders, and a pair of arms reaching up clenching a rope around a
bale. The survivor does not move or respond as they approach, and not until
a wave rolls the bale over is it revealed that everything below the man's
solar plexus has been bitten off by sharks. The sight sets even this
hardened crew of murderers to gagging. In the quiet that ensues, they hear
low voices echoing across the calm water. With a bit more searching, they
find two men, evidently talkative sorts, sharing a bale.
When the searchlight picks them out, one of the Negroes lets go of the
bale and dives beneath the surface. The other just stares calmly and
expectantly into the light. This Negro's eyes are pale, almost colorless,
and he has a skin condition: parts of him are turning white.
As they draw closer, the pale eyed Negro speaks to them in perfect
German. "My comrade attempts to drown himself," he explains.
"Is that even possible?" asks Kapitänleutnant Beck.
"He and I were just discussing that very question."
Beck checks his wristwatch. "He must want to kill himself very badly,"
he says.
"Sergeant Shaftoe takes his duty very seriously. It's kind of ironic.
His cyanide capsule dissolved in the seawater."
"I am afraid that all irony has become tedious and depressing to me,"
Beck says, as a body breaks the surface nearby. It is Shaftoe, and he seems
to be unconscious.
"You are?" Beck asks.
"Lieutenant Enoch Root."
"I'm only supposed to take officers," Beck says, casting a cold eye in
the direction of Sergeant Shaftoe's back.
"Sergeant Shaftoe has exceptionally broad responsibilities," says
Lieutenant Root calmly, "in some respects exceeding those of a junior
officer."
"Get them both. Fetch the medicine box. Revive the sergeant," Beck
says. "I will talk to you later, Lieutenant Root." And then he turns his
back on the prisoners, and heads for the nearest hatch. He is going to spend
the next week trying very hard to stay alive, in spite of the best efforts
of the Royal and United States Navies. It's going to be quite an interesting
challenge. He should be thinking about his strategy. But he can't get the
image of Sergeant Shaftoe's back out of his mind. His fucking head was still
underneath the water! If they weren't about to fish him out of the ocean, he
would have succeeded in drowning himself. So it was possible. At least for
one person.
Chapter 44 HOSTILITIES
As the vans, taxis, and limousines pull into the parking lot at the
Ministry of Information site, the members of Epiphyte Corp. are greeted by
smiling and bowing Nipponese virgins wearing, and bearing, gleaming white
Goto Engineering helmets. The time is about eight in the morning, and up
here on the mountain the temperature is still tolerable, though humid.
Everyone mills around before the cavern's maw, carrying their hardhats in
their hands, as no one wants to be the first to put his on and look stupid.
Some of the younger Nipponese executives are mugging hilariously with
theirs. Dr. Mohammed Pragasu circulates. He has an authentically used and
battered hardhat which he whirls absentmindedly around one finger as he
strolls from group to group.
"Has anyone simply asked Prag what the fuck is going on?" says Eb. He
rarely uses English profanity, so when he does, it's funny.
The only member of Epiphyte Corp. who does not at least crack a smile
is John Cantrell, who has been looking distant and tense ever since
yesterday. ("It's one thing to write a dissertation about mathematical
techniques in cryptography," he said, on the way up here, when someone asked
him what was bothering him. "And another to gamble billions of dollars'
worth of Other People's Money on it."
"We need a new category," Randy said. "Other, Bad People's Money."
"Speaking of which " Tom began, but Avi cut him off by glaring
significantly at the back of the driver's head.)
To: dwarf@siblings.net
From: root@eruditorum.org
Subject: Re(3) Why?
Randy,
You ask me to justify my interest in why you are building the Crypt.
My interest is a mark of my occupation. This is, in a sense, what I do
for a living.
You continue to assume that I am someone you know. Today you think I'm
the Dentist, yesterday you thought I was Andrew Loeb. This guessing game
will rapidly become tedious for both of us, so please believe me when I tell
you that we have never met.
– BEGIN ORDO SIGNATURE BLOCK – (etc.)
– END ORDO SIGNATURE BLOCK
To: root@eruditorum.org From: dwarf@siblings.net Subject: Re(4) Why?
Damn, after you said you did it for a living. I was going to guess that
you were Geb, or another one of my ex girlfriend's crowd.
Why don't you tell me your name?
– BEGIN ORDO SIGNATURE BLOCK – (etc.)
– END ORDO SIGNATURE BLOCK
To: dwarf@siblings.net From: root@eruditorum.org Subject: Re(5) Why?
Randy, I've already told you my name, and it meant nothing to you. Or
rather, it meant the wrong thing. Names are tricky that way. The best way to
know someone is to have a conversation with them.
Interesting that you assume I'm an academic.
– BEGIN ORDO SIGNATURE BLOCK – (etc.)
– END ORDO SIGNATURE BLOCK
To: root@eruditorum.org From: dwarf@siblings.net Subject: Re(6) Why?
Gotcha!
I didn't specify who Geb was. And yet you knew that he and my ex
girlfriend were academics. If (as you claim) I don't know you, then how do
you know these things about me?
– BEGIN ORDO SIGNATURE BLOCK – (etc.)
– END ORDO SIGNATURE BLOCK
Everyone now turns to look towards Prag, who seems to be having trouble
with his peripheral vision today. "Prag is avoiding us," Avi snaps.
"Which means it will be completely impossible for us to reach him until
after this is all over."
Tom steps towards Avi, drawing the corporate circle in closer. "The
investigator in Hong Kong?"
"Got some IDs, struck out on others," Avi says. "Basically, the heavy
set Filipino gentleman is Marcos's bagman. Responsible for keeping the
famous billions out of the hands of the Philippine government. The Taiwanese
guy not Harvard Li but the other one is a lawyer whose family has deep
connections to Japan, dating back to when Taiwan was part of their empire.
He has held down half a dozen government positions at various times, mostly
in finance and commerce now he's sort of a fixer who does jobs of all sorts
for high ranking Taiwanese officials."
"What about the scary Chinese guy?"
Avi raises his eyebrows and heaves a little sigh before answering.
"He's a general in the People's Liberation Army. Equivalent to a four star
rank. He's been working their investment arm for the last fifteen years."
"Investment arm? The Army!?" Cantrell blurts. Re's been getting
uneasier by the minute, and now looks mildly nauseated.
"The People's Liberation Army is a titanic business empire," Beryl
says. "They control the biggest pharmaceutical company in China. The biggest
hotel chain. A lot of the communications infrastructure. Railways.
Refineries. And, obviously, armaments."
"What about Mr. Cellphone?" Randy asks.
"Still working on him. My man in Hong Kong is sending his mug shot to a
colleague in Panama."
"I think that after what we saw in the lobby, we can make some
assumptions," Beryl says. (1)
To: dwarf@siblings.net
From: root@eruditorum.org
Subject: Re(7) Why?
Randy.
You ask how I know these things about you. There are many things I could
say, but the basic answer is surveillance.
– BEGIN ORDO SIGNATURE BLOCK – (etc.)
– END ORDO SIGNATURE BLOCK
Randy figures there's no better time to ask this question. And because
he's known Avi longer than anyone else, he's the only one who can get away
with asking it. "Do we really want to be involved with these people?" he
says. "Is this what Epiphyte Corp. is for? Is this what we are for?"
Avi heaves a big sigh and thinks about it for a while. Beryl looks at
him searchingly; Eb and John and Tom study their shoes, or search the triple
canopy jungle for exotic avians, while listening intently.
"You know, back in the forty niner days, every gold mining town in
California had a nerd with a scale," Avi says. "The assayer. He sat in an
office all day. Scary looking rednecks came in with pouches of gold dust.
The nerd weighed them, checked them for purity, told them what the stuff was
worth. Basically, the assayer's scale was the exchange point the place where
this mineral, this dirt from the ground, became money that would be
recognized as such in any bank or marketplace in the world, from San
Francisco to London to Beijing. Because of the nerd's special knowledge, he
could put his imprimatur on dirt and make it money. Just like we have the
power to turn bits into money.
"Now, a lot of the people the nerd dealt with were incredibly bad guys.
Peg house habitues. Escaped convicts from all over the world. Psychotic
gunslingers. People who owned slaves and massacred Indians. I'll bet that
the first day, or week, or month, or year, that the nerd moved to the gold
mining town and hung out his shingle, he was probably scared shitless. He
probably had moral qualms too very legitimate ones, perhaps," Avi adds,
giving Randy a sidelong glance. "Some of those pioneering nerds probably
gave up and went back East. But y'know what? In a surprisingly short period
of time, everything became pretty damn civilized, and the towns filled up
with churches and schools and universities, and the sort of howling maniacs
who got there first were all assimilated or driven out or thrown into
prison, and the nerds had boulevards and opera houses named after them. Now,
is the analogy clear?"
"The analogy is clear," Tom Howard says. He is less troubled by this
than any of them, with the possible exception of Avi. But then, his hobby is
collecting and shooting rare automatic weapons.
No one else will say anything; it is Randy's job to be troublesome.
"Uh, how many of those assayers got gunned down in the street after they
pissed off some psychotic gold miner?" he asks.
"I don't have any figures on that," Avi says.
"Well, I am not fully convinced that I really need this," Randy says.
"We all need to decide that question for ourselves," says Avi.
"And then vote, as a corporation whether to stay in or pull out right?"
Randy says.
Avi and Beryl look meaningfully at each other.
"Getting out, at this point, would be, uh, complicated," Beryl says.
Then, seeing a look on Randy's face, she hastens to add: "not for
individuals who might want to leave Epiphyte. That's easy. No problem. But
for Epiphyte to get out of this, uh . . ."
"Situation," Cantrell offers.
"Dilemma," Randy says.
Eb mumbles a word in German.
"Opportunity," Avi counters.
"...would be all but impossible," Beryl says.
"Look," Avi says, "I don't want anyone to feel compelled to stay in a
situation where they have moral qualms."
"Or fear imminent summary execution," Randy adds helpfully.
"Right. Now, we've all put a ton of work into this thing, and that work
ought to be worth something. To be totally above board and explicit, let me
reiterate what is already in the bylaws, which is that anyone can pull out;
we'll buy back your stock. After what's happened here the last couple of
days, I'm pretty confident that we could raise enough money to do so. You'd
make at least as much as if you had stayed home doing a regular salaried
job."
Younger, less experienced high tech entrepreneurs would have scoffed
bitterly at this. But everyone on this crew actually finds it impressive
that Avi can put a company together and keep it alive long enough to make it
worth the work they've put into it.
The black Mercedes cruises up. Dr. Mohammed Pragasu strides over to
meet it, greets the South Americans in fairly decent Spanish, makes a couple
of introduction