eons full of silver came from Acapulco. Doug M. Shaftoe has been
playing with blocks, so he zeroes in on the basic concept right away. Dad
carries son up and down the stairway a few times. They stand at the bottom
and look up at it. The block analogy has struck deep. Without any prompting,
Doug M. raises both arms over his head and hollers "Soooo big" and the sound
echoes up and down the stairs. Bobby wants to explain to the boy that this
is how it's done, you pile one thing on top of the next and you keep it up
and keep it up sometimes the galleon sinks in a typhoon, you don't get your
slab of granite that year but you stick with it and eventually you end up
with something sooo big.
He wishes that he could also make some further point about Glory and
how she's been hard at work building her own staircase. Maybe if he was a
word man like Enoch Root he would be able to explain. But he knows that this
is going way over the toddler's head, just as it went over Bobby's head when
Glory first showed him the steps. The only thing that'll stick with Douglas
MacArthur Shaftoe is the memory that his father brought him here and carried
him up and down the staircase, and if he lives long enough and thinks hard
enough maybe he'll come to understand it too, the way Bobby does. That is a
good enough start.
Word has gotten around, among the women in the courtyard, that Bobby
Shaftoe has arrived better late than never! and so he does not have time for
meaningful speeches anyway. The Altamiras send him out on an errand: to find
Carlos, an eleven year old boy who was rounded up a few days ago when the
Nips swept through Malate. Shaftoe finds MacArthur and Goto Dengo first, and
excuses himself. Those two are deeply involved in a discussion of Goto
Dengo's tunnel building acumen, and how it might be put to use during the
rebuilding of Nippon, a project that The General is eager to launch as soon
as he finishes reducing the entire Pacific Rim to rubble.
"You have sins to atone for, Shaftoe," The General says, "and you can't
atone for them by getting down on your knees and saying Hail Marys."
"I understand that, sir," Shaftoe says.
"I have a little job that needs doing precisely the kind of thing for
which a Marine Raider with parachute training would be ideally suited."
"What's the Department of the Navy going to think of that, sir?"
"I have no intention of letting the swabbies know I've found you until
you have carried out this mission. But when you are finished all is
forgiven."
"I'll be right back," Shaftoe says.
"Where are you going, Shaftoe?"
"Got some other people who need to forgive me first."
He heads in the direction of Fort Santiago with a reconstituted, re
armed and beefed up squad of Huks. The old Spanish fort has been liberated,
within the last couple of hours, by the Americans. They have thrown open the
doors to the dungeons and the subterranean caverns along the Pasig River.
Finding eleven year old Carlos Altamira is, then, a problem of sorting
through several thousand corpses. Almost all of the Filipinos who were
herded into this place by the Nips died, either through out and out
execution, or by suffocating in the dungeons, or by drowning when the tide
came up the river and flooded the cells. Bobby Shaftoe doesn't really know
what Carlos looked like, and so the best he can do is cull out the young
looking corpses and present them to members of the Altamira family for
inspection. The benzedrine he took a couple of days ago has worn off, and he
feels half dead himself. He trudges through the Spanish dungeon with a
kerosene lantern, shining the dim yellow light on the faces of the dead,
muttering the words to himself like a prayer.
"Do you reject the glamor of Evil, and refuse to be mastered by it?"
Chapter 86 WISDOM
A few years ago, when Randy became tired of the ceaseless pressure in
his lower jaw, he went out onto the north central Californian oral surgery
market looking for someone to extract his wisdom teeth. His health plan
covered this, so price was not an obstacle. His dentist took one of those
big cinemascopic wraparound X rays of his entire lower head, the kind where
they pack your mouth with half a roll of high speed film and then clamp your
head in a jig and the X ray machine revolves around you spraying radiation
through a slit, as the entire staff of the dentist's office hits the deck
behind a lead wall, resulting in a printed image that is a none too
appetizing distortion of his jaw into a single flat plane. Looking at it,
Randy eschewed cruder analogies like "head of a man run over several times
by steamroller while lying flat on his back" and tried to think of it as a
mapping transformation just one more in mankind's long history of ill
advisedly trying to represent three D stuff on a flat plane. The corners of
this coordinate plane were anchored by the wisdom teeth themselves, which
even to the dentally unsophisticated Randy looked just a little disturbing
in that each one was about the size of his thumb (though maybe this was just
a distortion in the coordinate transform like the famously swollen Greenland
of Mercator) and they were pretty far away from any other teeth, which
(logically) would seem to put them in parts of his body not normally
considered to be within a dentist's purview, and they were at the wrong
angle not just a little crooked, but verging on upside down and backwards.
At first he just chalked all of this up to the Greenland phenomenon. With
his Jaw map in hand, he hit the streets of Three Siblings land looking for
an oral surgeon. It was already beginning to work on him psychologically.
Those were some big ass teeth! Brought into being by the workings of relict
DNA strands from the hunter gatherer epoch. Designed for reducing tree bark
and mammoth gristle to easily digestible paste. Now these boulders of living
enamel were horrifyingly adrift in a gracile cro magnon head that simply did
not have room for them. Think of the sheer extra weight he had been carrying
around. Think of the use that priceless head real estate could have been put
to. When they were gone, what would fill up the four giant molar shaped
voids in his melon? It was moot until he could find someone to get rid of
them. But one oral surgeon after another turned him down. They would put the
X ray up on their light boxes, stare into it and blanch. Maybe it was just
the pale light coming out of the light boxes but Randy could have sworn they
were blanching. Disingenuously as if wisdom teeth normally grew someplace
completely different they all pointed out that the wisdom teeth were buried
deep, deep, deep in Randy's head. The lowers were so far back in his jaw
that removing them would practically break the jawbone in twain
structurally; from there, one false move would send a surgical steel
demolition pick into his middle ear. The uppers were so deep in his skull
that the roots were twined around the parts of his brain responsible for
perceiving the color blue (on one side) and being able to suspend one's
disbelief in bad movies (on the other) and between these teeth and actual
air, light and saliva lay many strata of skin, meat, cartilage, major nerve
cables, brain feeding arteries, bulging caches of lymph nodes, girders and
trusses of bone, rich marrow that was working just fine thank you, a few
glands whose functions were unsettlingly poorly understood, and many of the
other things that made Randy Randy, all of them definitely falling into the
category of sleeping dogs.
Oral surgeons, it seemed, were not comfortable delving more than elbow
deep into a patient's head. They had been living in big houses and driving
to work in Mercedes Benz sedans long before Randy had dragged his sorry ass
into their offices with his horrifying X ray and they had absolutely nothing
to gain by even attempting to remove these not so much wisdom teeth in the
normal sense as apocalyptic portents from the Book of Revelations. The best
way to remove these teeth was with a guillotine. None of these oral surgeons
would even consider undertaking the extraction until Randy had signed a
legal disclaimer too thick to staple, something that almost had to come in a
three ring binder, the general import of which was that one of the normal
consequences of the procedure was for the patient's head to end up floating
in a jug of formaldehyde in a tourist trap just over the Mexican border. In
this manner Randy wandered from one oral surgeon's office to another for a
few weeks, like a teratomic outcast roving across a post nuclear waste land
being driven out of one village after another by the brickbats of wretched,
terrified peasants. Until one day when he walked into an office and the
nurse at the front desk almost seemed to expect him, and led him back into
an exam room for a private consult with the oral surgeon, who was busy doing
something in one of his little rooms that involved putting a lot of bone
dust into the air. The nurse bade him sit down, proffered coffee, then
turned on the light box and took Randy's X rays and stuck them up there. She
took a step back, crossed her arms, and gazed at the pictures in wonder.
"So," she murmured, "these are the famous wisdom teeth!"
That was the last oral surgeon Randy visited for a couple of years. He
still had that relentless 24 Jam pressure in his head, but now his attitude
had changed; instead of thinking of it as an anomalous condition easily
remedied, it became his personal cross to bear, and really not all that bad
compared to what some people had to suffer with. There, as in many other
unexpected situations, his extensive fantasy role playing game experience
came in handy, as while spinning out various epic scenarios he had inhabited
the minds, if not the bodies, of many characters who were missing limbs or
had been burned over some algorithmically determined percentages of their
bodies by dragon's breath or wizard's fireball, and it was part of the
ethics of the game that you had to think pretty hard about what it would
actually be like to live with such injuries and to play your character
accordingly. By those standards, feeling all the time like you had an
automotive jack embedded in your skull, ratcheting up the pressure one click
every few months, was not even worth mentioning. It was lost in the somatic
noise.
So Randy lived that way for several years, as he and Charlene
insensibly crept upwards on the socioeconomic scale and began finding
themselves at parties with people who had arrived in Mercedes Benzes. It was
at one of these parties where Randy overheard a dentist extolling some
brilliant young oral surgeon who had just moved to the area. Randy had to
bite his tongue not to start asking all kinds of questions about just what
"brilliant" meant in an oral surgery context questions that were motivated
solely by curiosity but that the dentist would be likely to take the wrong
way. Among coders it was pretty obvious who was brilliant and who wasn't,
but how could you tell a brilliant oral surgeon apart from a merely
excellent one? It gets you into deep epistemological shit. Each set of
wisdom teeth could only be extracted once. You couldn't have a hundred oral
surgeons extract the same set of wisdom teeth and then compare the results
scientifically. And yet it was obvious from watching the look on this
dentist's face that this one particular oral surgeon, this new guy, was
brilliant. So later Randy sidled up to this dentist and allowed as how he
might have a challenge he might personally embody a challenge that would put
this ineffable quality of oral surgery brilliance to some good use, and
could he have the guy's name please.
A few days later he was talking to this oral surgeon, who was indeed
young and conspicuously bright and had more in common with other brilliant
people Randy had known mostly hackers than he did with other oral surgeons.
He drove a pickup truck and kept fresh copies of TURING MAGAZINE in his
waiting room. He had a beard, and a staff of nurses and other female
acolytes who were all permanently aflutter over his brilliantness and
followed him around steering him away from large obstacles and reminding him
to eat lunch. This guy did not blanch when he saw Randy's Mercato roentgeno
gram on his light box. He actually lifted his chin up off his hand and stood
a little straighter and spake not for several minutes. His head moved
minutely every so often as he animadverted on a different corner of the
coordinate plane, and admired the exquisitely grotesque situation of each
tooth its paleolithic heft and its long gnarled roots trailing off into
parts of his head never charted by anatomists.
When he finally turned to face Randy, he had this priestlike aura about
him, a kind of holy ecstasy, a feeling of cosmic symmetry revealed, as if
Randy's jaw, and his brilliant oral surgery brain, had been carved out by
the architect of the Universe fifteen billion years ago specifically so that
they could run into each other, here and now, in front of this light box. He
did not say anything like, "Randy let me just show you how close the roots
of this one tooth are to the bundle of nerves that distinguishes you from a
marmoset," or "My schedule is incredibly full and I was thinking of going
into the real estate business anyway," or "Just a second while I call my
lawyer." He didn't even say anything like, "Wow, those suckers are really in
deep." The young brilliant oral surgeon just said, "Okay," stood there
awkwardly for a few moments, and then walked out of the room in a display of
social ineptness that totally cemented Randy's faith in him. One of his
minions eventually had Randy sign a legal disclaimer stipulating that it was
perfectly all right if the oral surgeon decided to feed Randy's entire body
into a log chipper, but this, for once, seemed like just a formality and not
the opening round in an inevitable Bleak House like litigational saga.
And so finally the big day came, and Randy took care to enjoy his
breakfast because he knew that, considering the nerve damage he was about to
incur, this might be the last time in his life that he would be able to
taste food, or even chew it. The oral surgeon's minions all looked at Randy
in awe when he actually walked in the door of their office, like My god he
actually showed up! then flew reassuringly into action. Randy sat down in
the chair and they gave him an injection and then the oral surgeon came in
and asked him what, if anything, was the difference between Windows 95 and
Windows NT. "This is one of these conversations the sole purpose of which is
to make it obvious when I have lost consciousness, isn't it?" Randy said.
"Actually, there is a secondary purpose, which is that I am considering
making the jump and wanted to get some of your thoughts about that," the
oral surgeon said.
"Well," said Randy, "I have a lot more experience with UNIX than with
NT, but from what I've seen, it appears that NT is really a decent enough
operating system, and certainly more of a serious effort than Windows." He
paused to draw breath and then noticed that suddenly everything was
different. The oral surgeon and his minions were still there and occupying
roughly the same positions in his field of vision as they had been when he
started to utter this sentence, but now the oral surgeon's glasses were
askew and the lenses misted with blood, and his face was all sweaty, and his
mask flecked with tiny bits of stuff that very much looked like it had come
from pretty far down in Randy's body, and the air in the room was murky with
aerosolized bone, and his nurses were limp and haggard and looked like they
could use makeovers, face lifts, and weeks at the beach. Randy's chest and
lap, and the floor, were littered with bloody wads and hastily torn open
medical supply wrappers. The back of his head was sore from being battered
against the head rest by the recoil of the young brilliant oral surgeon's
cranial jack hammer. When he tried to finish his sentence ("so if you're
willing to pay the premium I think the switch to NT would be very well
advised") he noticed that his mouth was jammed full of something that
prevented speech. The oral surgeon pulled his mask down off his face and
scratched his sweat soaked beard. He was staring not at Randy but at a point
very far away. He heaved a big, slow sigh. His hands were shaking.
"What day is it?" Randy mumbled through cotton.
"As I told you before," the brilliant young oral surgeon said, "we
charge for wisdom tooth extractions on a sliding scale, depending on the
degree of difficulty." He paused for a moment, groping for words. "In your
case I'm afraid that we will be charging you the maximum on all four." Then
he got up and shambled out of the room, weighed down, Randy thought, not so
much by the stress of his job as by the knowledge that no one was ever going
to give him a Nobel prize for what he had just accomplished.
Randy went home and spent, about a week lying on his couch in front of
the TV eating oral narcotics like jellybeans and moaning with pain, and then
he got better. The pressure in his skull was gone. Just totally gone. He
cannot even remember now what it used to feel like.
Now as he rides in the police car to his new private jail cell, he
remembers the whole wisdom tooth extraction saga because of its many points
in common with what he just went through emotionally with young America
Shaftoe. Randy's had a few girlfriends in his life not many but all of them
were like oral surgeons who just couldn't cut the mustard. Amy's the only
one who had the skill and the sheer balls to just look at him and say "okay"
and then tunnel into his skull and come back with the goods. It was probably
exhausting for her. She will extract a high price from him in exchange. And
it will leave Randy lying around moaning with pain for a good long while.
But he can tell already that the internal pressure has been relieved and he
is glad, so glad, that she came into his life, and that he finally had the
good sense and, arguably, guts to do this. He completely forgets, for a few
hours, that he has been marked for death by the Philippine government.
From the fact that he's in a car, he infers that his new, private cell
is in a different building. No one explains anything to him because he is,
after all, a prisoner. Since the bust at NAIA he's been in a jail down
south, a newish concrete block number on the edge of Makati, but now they
are taking him north into older parts of Manila, probably into some more
stylish and gothic prewar facility. Fort Santiago, on the banks of the
Pasig, had cells that were in the intertidal zone, so that prisoners locked
into them at low tide would be dead by high. Now it's a historical site, so
he knows they're not headed there.
The new jail cell is indeed in a big scary old building somewhere in
the torus of major governmental institutions that surrounds the dead hole of
Intramuros. It is not in, but it is right next to, a major court building.
They drive through alleys among these big old stone buildings for a while
and then present credentials at a guardhouse and wait for a big iron gate to
be rolled aside, and then they drive across a paved courtyard that hasn't
been swept out in a while and present more credentials and wait for an
actual portcullis to be winched up, clearing an orifice that ramps them down
beneath the building itself. Then the car stops and they are abruptly
surrounded by men in uniforms.
The process is uncannily like pulling up to the main entrance of an
Asian business hotel, except that the men in the uniforms carry guns and
don't offer to tote Randy's laptop. He has a chain around his waist and
manacles attached to that chain in front, and leg chains that shorten his
stride. The chain between his ankles is supported in the middle by another
chain that goes up to his waist so that it will not scrape the ground as he
walks. He has just enough manual dexterity to grip the laptop and keep it
pressed up against his lower abdomen. He's not just any chained wretch, he
is a digital chained wretch, Marley's Ghost on the Information Superhighway.
That a man in his situation is being allowed to have the laptop is so
grotesquely implausible that it causes him to doubt even his own supremely
cynical assessment of it, namely that Someone presumably the same Someone
who is Sending Him a Message has already discovered that everything on the
hard drive is encrypted, and is now trying to gull him into firing the
machine up and using it so that so that what? Maybe they've rigged up a
camera in his cell and will be peering over his shoulder. But that would be
easy for him to defeat; he just has to not be completely stupid.
The guards lead Randy down a corridor and through some prisoner check
in stuff that doesn't really apply to him since he has already filled out
the forms and turned over his personal effects at another jail. Then the
great big scary metal doors commence, and corridors that don't smell so
good, and he hears the generalized hubbub of a jail. But they take him past
the hubbub and into other corridors that seem to be older and less used, and
finally through an old fashioned jailhouse door of iron bars and into a long
vaulted stone room containing a single row of maybe half a dozen cells, with
a guard's passageway running along past the doors of the iron cages. Like a
theme park simulacrum of a jail. They take him all the way down to the last
cell and put him there. A single iron bedstead awaits him, a thin cotton
mattress with stained but clean sheets and an army blanket folded and
stacked on top of it. An old wooden filing cabinet and folding chair have
been moved into the cell and placed in one corner, right against the stone
wall that is the terminus of this long room. The filing cabinet is evidently
meant to serve as Randy's work table. The drawers are locked shut. This
cabinet has actually been locked into place with a few turns of heavy chain
and a padlock, so it's very clear that he is expected to use the computer
there, in that corner of the cell, and nowhere else. As Attorney Alejandro
promised, an extension cord has been plugged into a wall outlet near the
cellblock entrance and run down the passageway and securely knotted around a
pipe out of Randy's reach and the tail end of it allowed to trail across in
the direction of the filing cabinet. But it does not quite reach into
Randy's cell, so the only way to plug the computer in is to set it up on
that cabinet and stick the power cord into the back and then toss the other
end out through the iron bars to a guard, who can mate it with the extension
cord.
At first this appears to be just one of these maddening control freak
things, an exercise of power for the pure sadistic pleasure of it. But after
Randy's been unchained, and locked in his cell, and left alone for a few
minutes to run through it in his head, he thinks otherwise. Of course
normally Randy could leave the computer on the card table while the
batteries charged and then carry it over to his bed and use it there until
the batteries ran down. But the batteries were removed from the machine
before Attorney Alejandro gave it to him, and there don't seem to be any
ThinkPad battery packs lying around his cell. So he will have to keep it
plugged in all the time, and because of the way they have set up the filing
cabinet and the extension cord, he is forced by certain immutable properties
of three dimensional Euclidean spacetime to use the machine in one and only
one place: right there on top of that damn filing cabinet. He does not think
this is an accident.
He sits down on that filing cabinet and scans the wall and ceiling for
over the shoulder video cameras, but he doesn't look very hard and he
doesn't really expect to see one. To make out text on a screen they would
have to be very high resolution cameras, which would imply big and obvious;
subtle pinhole cameras wouldn't do it. There aren't any big cameras around
here.
Randy becomes almost certain that if he could unlock that filing
cabinet, he would find some electronic gear inside it. Directly underneath
his laptop there is probably an antenna to pick up Van Eck signals emanating
from the screen. Below that, there is some gear to translate those signals
into a digital form and transmit the results to a listening station nearby,
probably right on the other side of one of these walls. Down in the bottom
are probably some batteries to make it all run. He rocks the cabinet back
and forth as much as the chains will allow, and finds that it is indeed
rather bottom heavy, as if there's a car battery sitting in the bottom
drawer. Or maybe it's just his imagination. Maybe they are letting him have
his laptop just because they are nice guys.
So this is it then. This is the setup. This is the deal. It is all very
clean and simple. Randy fires up the laptop just to prove that it still
works. Then he makes his bed and goes and lies down on it, just because it
feels really good to lie down. It is the first time he's had anything like
privacy in at least a week. Notwithstanding Avi's bizarre admonition against
self abuse on the beach in Pacifica, it is high time that Randy took care of
something. He needs to concentrate really hard now, and a certain
distraction must be done away with. Replaying his last conversation with Amy
is enough to give him a good erection. He reaches down into his pants and
then abruptly falls asleep.
He wakes up to the sound of the cellblock door clanging open. A new
prisoner is being led in. Randy tries to sit up and finds that his hand is
still in his pants, having failed to accomplish its mission. He pulls it out
of there reluctantly and sits up. He swings his feet down off the bed and
onto the stone floor. Now he's got his back to the adjacent cell, which is a
mirror image of his; i.e., the beds and the toilets of the two cells are
right next to each other along their shared partition. He stands up and
turns around and watches this other prisoner being led into the cell next to
his. The new guy is a white man, probably in his sixties, maybe even
seventies, though you could make a case for fifties or eighties. Quite
vigorous, anyway. He's wearing a prison coverall just like Randy's, but
accessorized differently: instead of a laptop, he's got a crucifix dangling
from a rosary with great big fat amber beads, and some sort of medallion on
a silver chain, and he's clutching several books to his belly: a Bible, and
something big and in German, and a current bestselling novel.
The guards are treating him with extreme reverence; Randy assumes the
guy is a priest. They are talking to him in Tagalog, asking him questions
being, Randy thinks, solicitous to his needs and desires and the white man
answers them in reassuring tones and even tells a joke. He makes a polite
request; a guard scurries out and returns moments later with a deck of
cards. Finally the guards back out of the cell, practically bowing and
scraping, and lock him in with apologies that start to get a little
monotonous. The white man says something, forgiving them wittily. They laugh
nervously and leave. The white man stands there in the middle of his cell
for a minute, staring at the floor contemplatively, maybe praying or
something. Then he snaps out of it and starts looking around. Randy leans
into the partition and sticks his hand through the bars. "Randy Waterhouse,"
he says.
The white man frisbees his books onto the bed, glides towards him, and
shakes his hand. "Enoch Root," he says. "It's a pleasure to meet you in
person, Randy." His voice is unmistakably that of Pontifex
root@eruditorum.org.
Randy freezes up for a long time, like a man who has just realized that
a colossal practical joke is being played on him, but doesn't know just how
colossal it is, or what to do about it. Enoch Root sees that Randy is
paralyzed, and steps smoothly into the gap. He flexes the deck of cards in
one hand and shoots them across to the other; the queue of airborne cards
just hangs there between his hands for a moment, like an accordion. "Not as
versatile as ETC cards, but surprisingly useful," he muses. "With any luck,
Randy, you and I can make a bridge as long as you are just standing there
pontificating anyway."
"Make a bridge?" Randy echoes, feeling and probably sounding rather
stupid.
"I'm sorry, my English is a bit rusty I meant bridge as in a card game.
Are you familiar with it?"
"Bridge? No. But I thought it took four people."
"I have come up with a version that is played by two. I only hope this
deck is complete the game requires fifty four cards."
"Fifty four," Randy muses. "Is your game anything like Pontifex?"
"One and the same."
"I think I have the rules for Pontifex squirreled away on my hard drive
somewhere," Randy says.
"Then let's play," says Enoch Root.
Chapter 87 FALL
Shaftoe jumps out of the airplane. The air is bracingly cold up here,
and the wind chill factor is something else. It is the first time in a year
that he has not been loathsomely hot and sweaty.
Something jerks mightily on his back: the static line, still attached
to the airplane God forbid that American fighting men should be entrusted to
pull their own ripcords. He can just imagine the staff meeting where they
dreamed up the concept of the static line: "For God's sake, General, they're
just enlisted men! As soon as they jump out of the airplane they'll probably
start daydreaming about their girlfriends, take a few hits from their pocket
flasks, catch forty winks, and before you know it they'll all pile into the
ground at a couple of hundred miles an hour!"
The drogue chute flutters out, catches air, and then eviscerates his
main pack in one jerk. There's a bit of flopping and buffeting as Bobby
Shaftoe's body pulls the disorganized cloud of silk downwards, then it
thunks open and he is left hanging in space, his dark body forming a small
perfect bullseye in the center of the off white canopy for any Nipponese
riflemen down below.
No wonder those paratroopers think they are gods among men: they get
such a nice view of things, so much better than a poor Marine grunt stuck
down on the beach, who is always looking uphill into courses of pillboxes.
All of Luzon stretches out before him. He can see one or two hundred miles
north, across a mat of vegetation as dense as felt, to the mountains in the
far north where General Yamashita, the Lion of Malaya, is holed up with a
hundred thousand troops, each of whom would like nothing better than to
strap lots of explosives to his body, sneak through the lines at night, run
into the middle of a large concentration of American soldiers, and blow
himself up for his emperor. To Shaftoe's starboard is Manila Bay, and even
from this distance, some thirty miles, he can see the jungle suddenly turn
thin and brown as it nears the shore, like a severed leaf that is dying from
the edge inwards that would be what's left of the city of Manila. The fat
twenty mile long tongue of land protruding towards him is Bata'an. Just off
the tip of it is a rocky island shaped like a tadpole with a green head and
a bony brown tail: Corregidor. Smoke jets from many vents on the island,
which has been mostly reconquered by the Americans. Quite a few Nipponese
blew themselves up in their underground bunkers rather than surrender. This
heroic act has given someone in The General's chain of command a nifty idea.
A couple of miles from Corregidor, motionless on the water, is
something that looks like an absurdly squat, asymmetrical battleship, except
much bigger. It is encircled by American gunboats and amphibious landing
forces. From a source on its lid, a long wisp of red smoke trickles
downwind: a smoke bomb dropped out of Shaftoe's plane a few minutes ago, on
a parachute. As Shaftoe descends, and the wind blows him directly towards
it, he can see the grain of the reinforced concrete of which this prodigy is
made. It used to be a dry rock in Manila Bay. The Spanish built a fort
there, the Americans built a chain of gun emplacements on top of that, and
when the Nips showed up they turned the entire thing into a solid reinforced
concrete fortress with walls thirty feet thick, and a couple of double
barreled fourteen inch gun turrets on the top. Those guns have long since
been silenced; Shaftoe can see long cracks in their barrels, and craters,
like frozen splashes in the steel. Even though he is parachuting onto the
roof of an impregnable Nipponese fortress chock full of heavily armed men
who are desperately looking for a picturesque way to die, Shaftoe is
perfectly safe; every time a Nip pokes a rifle barrel or a pair of
binoculars out of a gun slit, half a dozen American antiaircraft gunners
open up on him at point blank range from the nearby ships.
A tremendous racket ensues as a small power boat pops out of a little
cave along the waterline of the island and heads directly towards an
American landing craft. A hundred guns open fire on it simultaneously.
Supersonic bits of metal crash into the water all around the little boat,
ton after ton of them. Each bit makes a splash. All of the splashes combine
into a jagged, volcanic eruption of white water centered on the little boat.
Bobby Shaftoe puts his fingers in his ears. Two thousand pounds of high
explosive packed into the little boat's nose detonate. The shock wave
flashes across the surface of the water, a powdery white ring expanding with
supernatural velocity. It hits Bobby Shaftoe like a baseball to the bridge
of the nose. He neglects to steer his chute for a while, and trusts the
winds to carry him to the right place.
The smoke bomb was dropped as proof of the concept that a man on a
parachute might actually be able to land on the roof of this fortress. Bobby
Shaftoe is, of course, the final and irrefutable test of this proposition.
As he gets closer, and his head clears from the explosion, Shaftoe sees that
the smoke bomb never actually reached the roof: its little chute got tangled
up in the briar patch of antennas growing out of the top of the thing.
All kinds of fucking antennas! Even during his days in Shanghai,
Shaftoe had a weird feeling around antennas. Those Station Alpha pencil
necks, in their little wooden roof shack with all the antennas sprouting
from it those were not soldiers, sailors, or Marines in the normal sense.
Corregidor was covered with antennas before the Nips came and took it. And
everywhere that Shaftoe went during his Detachment 2702 stint, there were
antennas.
He is going to spend the next few moments concentrating very hard on
those antennas, and so he turns his head for a moment to get a bearing on
the American LCM the landing craft that the Nip suicide boat was hoping to
destroy. It is exactly where it is supposed to be halfway between the
encircling force of naval ships and the sheer, forty foot high wall of the
fortress. Even if Shaftoe didn't already know the plan, he would, at a
glance, identify this vessel as a Landing Craft, Mechanized (Mark 3), a
fifty foot long steel shoebox designed to cough a medium sized tank up onto
a beach. It has a couple of fifty caliber machine guns on it which are
pounding away dutifully at various targets on the wall of the fortress which
Shaftoe cannot see. But from his vantage point On High he can see something
that the Nipponese can't: the LCM is not carrying a tank, in the sense of a
vehicle on caterpillar treads with a gun turret. It is carrying, rather, a
tank in the sense of a large steel container with pipes and hoses and stuff
attached to it.
The Nips in the fortress are taking potshots at the approaching LCM,
but the only target at which they have to aim is its front door, a piece of
metal that can flop down to become a ramp, and which was designed,
incredibly enough, on the assumption that doomed Nips would spend a lot of
time trying to blow holes in it with various projectile weapons. So the
defenders are not getting anywhere. Antiaircraft gunners on other ships have
begun raking the walls of the fortress insanely, making it hard for the
Nipponese to poke their heads and their gun barrels out. Shaftoe notes
fragments of antennas skittering and bouncing across the roof of the
fortress, and occasional streaks of tracers, and hopes that the men on those
ships have the presence of mind to hold their fire before he lands on the
fucking thing, which will be in a few seconds.
Shaftoe realizes that his mental concept of what this mission was going
to be like, as he reviewed it with the officers in the LCM, bears no
relationship to the reality. This is only about the five thousandth time
Shaftoe has experienced this phenomenon in the course of the Second World
War; you'd think he would no longer be surprised by it. The antennas, which
looked wispy and inconsequential on the reconnaissance photos, are in fact
sizable engineering works. Or they were until they got de engineered by the
naval gunfire that silenced those big guns. Now they are just wreckage of a
sort that is going to be peculiarly nasty to parachute down on top of. The
antennas were, and the wreckage is, made of all kinds of different shit:
spars of Philippine mahogany, sturdy columns of bamboo, welded steel
trusses. The most common bits are the ones that catch a parachutist's eye:
long metal poky things, and miles and miles of guy wire, snarled into a
briarpatch, some of it taut enough to cut a plummeting Marine's head off and
some of it all loose and tangly with sharp hovering ends.
It dawns on Shaftoe that this pile isn't just a gun emplacement; it's a
Nip intelligence headquarters. "Waterhouse, you fucking son of a bitch!"
Shaftoe hollers. As far as he knows, Waterhouse is still in Europe. But he
realizes, as he's clapping his hands protectively over his eyes and falling
into the nightmare, that Waterhouse must have something to do with this.
Bobby Shaftoe has landed. He tries to move and the wreckage moves with
him; he is one with it.
He opens his eyes carefully. His head is wrapped up in a snarl of heavy
wire a guy wire that broke under tension and whipped around him. Peering
between loops of wire, he sees three lengths of quarter inch metal tubing
projecting out of his torso. Another one has gone through his thigh, and yet
another through his upper arm. He's pretty sure he has a broken leg too.
He lies there for a while, listening to the sound of the guns all
around him.
There is work that needs to be done. All he can think of is the boy. He
gropes for the wire cutter with his free hand and begins to cut himself
loose from the snarl.
The jaws of the wire cutter just barely fit over the metal tubing of
the antenna. He reaches behind himself finds the places where the tubes poke
into his back, and cuts them off, snip, snip, snip. He cuts the tube that
has impaled his arm. He leans forward and cuts the one that goes through his
leg. Then he pulls the tubes out of his flesh and drops them on the
concrete, plink, plink, plink, plink, plink. Lots of blood follows.
He doesn't even try to walk. He just begins to drag himself across the
concrete roof of the fortress. The sun has warmed the concrete and it feels
good. He cannot see the LCM, but he can see the few antennas that stick out
of its top, and he knows it is in position now.
The rope should be there. Shaftoe props himself up on his elbows and
looks. Sure enough, there it is, a manila rope (natch!) tied to a grapnel,
one point of the grapnel lodged in a shell crater near the edge of the roof.
He gets to it eventually, and begins to pull on the rope. He closes his
eyes, but tries not to fall asleep. He keeps pulling, and eventually feels
something big and thick between his hands: the hose.
Almost finished. Lying on his back, hugging the end of the hose to his
chest, he rolls his head from side to side until he can see the air vent
that they picked out on the reconnaissance photos. It used to have a sheet
metal hood on the top of it, but that's long gone now, it's just a hole in
the roof with a few jagged bits of metal at its edges. He crawls over to it
and feeds in the end of the hose.
Someone must be watching him on one of the ships, because the hose
stiffens, like a serpent coming alive, and between his hands Bobby Shaftoe
can feel the fuel oil streaming through it. Ten thousand gallons of the
stuff. Straight down into the fortress. He can hear the Nips down there,
singing hoarse songs. By now they will have figured out what is about to
happen. General MacArthur is giving them exactly what they've been praying
for.
At this point, Bobby Shaftoe is supposed to abseil down a rope into the
LCM, but he knows it isn't going to happen. No one can reach him now, no one
can help him. When the fuel oil stops streaming through the hose, he summons
all the concentration he has left. Pretends, one last time, that he actually
gives a damn. Jerks the safety pin from a white phosphorus grenade, lets the
handle fly off and tinkle merrily across the roof. He can feel it come alive
in his hand, the thrumming animal fizz of its inner fuse. He drops it into
the air shaft: a circular pipe straight down, a black disk centered on a
field of dingy grey, like the ashes of a Nipponese flag.
Then, on an impulse, he dives in there after it.
Semper Fidelis Dawn star flares on disk of night I fall, sun rises
Chapter 88 METIS
The appearance of root@eruditorum.org in the cell right next to Randy's
is like the crowning plot twist in this Punch and Judy show that has been
performed for his benefit ever since his plane landed at NAIA. As with any
puppet show, he knows that there must be a lot of people hidden just outside
the range of his senses, in furious motion, trying to make it all happen.
For all he knows, some significant fraction of the Philippine gross national
product is being devoted to keeping up these pretenses for his benefit.
There is a meal waiting on the floor of Randy's cell, and a rat on top
of the meal. Randy usually reacts pretty badly to the sight of rats; they
rupture the containment system that his upbringing and his education built
around the part of his mind where the collective unconscious stuff dwells,
and send him straight into Hieronymus Bosch territory. But in these
circumstances it doesn't bother him any more than seeing one at the zoo
would. The rat has a surprisingly attractive buckskin colored pelt and a
tail about as thick as a pencil that has evidently run afoul of a farmer's
wife with a carving knife, and woggles stiffly in the air like the blunt
antenna of a cellphone. Randy is hungry, but he doesn't want to eat anything
that a rat has left footprints on, so he just watches it.
His body feels like it slept for a long time. He turns on his computer
and types in a command called "date." The nails of his left hand look funny,
as if they all got bruised. Focusing on them he sees a club drawn in blue
ballpoint pen ink on the nail of the index finger, a diamond on the
forefinger, a heart on the ring finger, a spade on the pinky. Enoch Root
told him that in Pontifex, as in bridge, each card in the deck has a
numerical value: clubs 1 13, diamonds 14 26, hearts 27 39, spades 40 52.
Randy drew the symbols on his nails so he wouldn't forget.
Anyway, "date" tells him that he apparently slept all of yesterday
afternoon and evening, all night, and about half of today. So this rat is
actually eating his lunch.
Randy's computer runs Finux, so when it boots up it gives him a black
screen with big fat white letters scrolling up it one line at a time, a real
circa 1975 type of user interface. Also presumably the easiest possible
thing to read through Van Eck phreaking. Randy types in "startx" and the
screen goes black for a moment and then turns a particular shade of indigo
that Randy happens to like, and beige windows appear on it with much smaller
and crisper black letters. So now he is running the X Windows System, or X
as people like Randy call it, which provides all of the graphical junk that
people expect in a user interface: menus, buttons, scroll bars, and so on.
As with anything else under UNIX (of which Finux is a variant), there are a
million options that only young, lonely, or obsessed people have the time
and patience to explore. Randy has been all three at various times of his
life and knows a lot about these options. For example, the background of his
screen happens to be a uniform indigo at the moment, but it could be an
image. Theoretically you could use a movie, so that all of your windows and
menus and so on would float around on top of, say, Citizen Kane running in
an endless loop. You can, in fact, take any piece of software and make it
into your screen background, and it will purr along happily, doing whatever
it does, and not even known that it's being used as window dressing. This
has given Randy some ideas on how to approach the Van Eck thing.
In its current state, this computer is just as vulnerable to Van Eck
phreaking as it was before Randy started up X. Before it was white letters
on a black background. Now it's black on beige. The letters are a little
smaller and they live in windows, but it makes no difference: the
electronics inside his computer still have to make these transitions between
zero and one, i.e. between high intensity (white or beige) and minimal
(black) as they trace out these patterns of dots on the screen.
Randy fundamentally does not know what the fuck is going on in his life
right now, and probably hasn't for a long time, even back in the days when
he thought that he did know. But his working hypothesis is that the people
who set this whole situation up (prime candidates: the Dentist and his
cohorts in the Bolobolo syndicate) know that he has some cool information on
his hard drive. How should they know this? Well, Pontifex the Wizard Enoch
Root whatever the fuck he's called when he phoned Randy on the plane, knew
that Randy had Arethusa, so God knows who else might know. Someone set up
the fake drug bust at NAIA so that they could nab his laptop and yank the
hard drive and make a copy of its contents. Then they found out that it was
all doubly encrypted. That is, the Arethusa intercepts are encrypted to
begin with in a pretty good World War II cryptosystem, which anyone should
be able to break nowadays, but on top of that they are furthermore encrypted
in a state of the art modern system that no one can break. If they know
what's good for them, they won't even try to break it. The only way for them
to get the information is to get Randy to decrypt it for them, which he can
do by biometrically identifying himself to his laptop (by talking to it) or
by typing in a pass phrase that only he knows. They are hoping that Randy
will decrypt the Arethusa intercept files and, like a moron, display their
contents on the screen. The moment that stuff appears on the screen, the
game is over. The Dentist's (or whoever's) surveillance guys can feed the
intercepts to some kind of a cryptanalytic supercomputer that will break
them open in no time.
That doesn't mean that Randy dare not open those files just that he
daren't display them on the screen. This distinction is crucial. Ordo can
read the encrypted files from the hard drive. It can write them into the
computer's memory. It can decrypt them, and write the results into another
region of the computer's memory, and leave that data there indefinitely, and
the Van Eck phreakers will never be the wiser. But as soon as Randy tells
the computer to show him that information in a window on the screen, the
Arethusa intercepts will belong to the Van Eck phreakers; and whoever they
are, they can probably break them faster than Randy can.
The fun and interesting thing is that Randy doesn't have to actually
see those intercepts in order to work on them. As long as they are sitting
in the computer's memory, he can subject them to every cryptanalystic
technique in the whole Cryptonomicon.
He starts tapping out some lines in a language called Perl. Perl's a
scripting language; useful for controlling your computer's functions and
automating repetitive tasks. A UNIX machine like this one is rooted in a
filesystem that contains tens of thousands of different files, mostly in
straight ASCII text format. There are many different programs for opening
these files, displaying them on the screen, and editing them. Randy intends
to write a Perl script that will roam through the filesystem choosing files
at random, opening each file in a randomly sized and located window, paging
through it for a while, and then closing it again. If you run the script
fast enough, the windows will pop open all over the place in a kind of
rectangularized fireworks burst that will go on forever. If this script is
used as the screen background, in place of solid indigo, then this will go
on underneath the one window on the screen where Randy's actually working.
The people monitoring his work will go crazy trying to track all of this.
Especially if Randy writes a script that will cause the real window to
change its shape and location at random every few seconds.
It would be really stupid to open the Arethusa intercepts in a window
he's not going to do that. But he can use this technique to conceal whatever
else he's doing in the way of decryption work. It occurs to him, however,
when he gets a few lines into writing this Perl script, that if he pulls a
stunt like that so early in his incarceration, the people surveilling him
will know right away that he is on to them. And maybe it's better if he lets
them believe, for a while, that he suspects nothing.
So he saves his Perl script and stops working on it for now. If he
writes it in short bursts, opening it once or twice a day to type in a few
lines and then closing it, it's unlikely that the surveillors will be able
to follow what he is up to, even if they happen to be hackers. Just to be an
asshole, he modifies his X Windows options in such a way that none of the
windows on the screen will have a title bar at the top. That way the
surveillance people won't be able to tell what file he is working on at any
given moment, which will make it a lot harder for them to string a long
series of observations together into a coherent picture of what's in his
Perl script.
Too, he opens up the old message from root@eruditorum.org giving the
Pontifex Transform, expressed as a few lines of Perl code. The steps that
looked so unwieldy when carried out by a computer seem straight forward
easy, even now that he construes them as manipulations of a deck of cards.
"Randy."
"Hmmm?" Randy looks up from the screen and is startled to find that he
is in a jail in the Philippines.
"Dinner is served."
It is Enoch Root, looking at him through the bars. He points at the
floor of Randy's cell where a new tray of food has just been slid in.
"Actually, it was served an hour ago you might want to have at it before the
rats come."
"Thank you," Randy says. Making sure all the windows on his screen have
been closed, he goes over and lifts his dinner up from the spatter of old
rat turds on the floor. It is rice and lechon, a simple and traditional pork
dish. Enoch Root finished eating a long time ago he sits on his bed, next to
Randy, and plays an unusual game of solitaire, pausing occasionally to mark
down a letter. Randy watches the manipulation of the deck carefully,
growingly certain that it is the same set of operations he was just reading
about in the old e mail message.
"So what are you in for?" Randy asks.
Enoch Root finishes counting through the deck, glances at a seven of
spades, closes his eyes for a few moments, and marks down a W on his napkin.
Then he says, "Disorderly conduct. Trespassing. Incitement to riot. I'm
probably guilty of the first two."
"Tell me about it."
"First tell me what you're in for."
"Heroin was found in my bag at the airport. I stand accused of being
the world's stupidest drug smuggler."
"Is someone angry at you?"
"That would make for a much longer story," Randy says, "but I think you
have the drift."
"Well, in my case, it's like this. I have been working at a mission
hospital up in the mountain."
"You're a priest?"
"Not anymore. I'm a lay worker."
"Where's your hospital?"
"South of here. Out in the boondocks," Enoch Root says. "The people
there cultivate pineapple, coffee, coconut, bananas, and a few other cash
crops. But their land is being torn apart by treasure hunters."
Funny that Enoch Root should suddenly be on the subject of buried
treasure. And yet he has been so tight lipped. Randy guesses he's intended
to play stupid. He takes a stab at it: "Is there supposed to be some
treasure down there?"
"The old timers say that many Nipponese trucks went down a particular
road during the last few weeks before MacArthur's return. Past a certain
point it was not possible to know where they went, because the road was
blocked, and minefields set up to discourage the curious."
"Or kill them," Randy says.
Enoch Root takes this in stride. "That road gives way to a rather vast
area in which gold might hypothetically have been hidden. Hundreds of square
miles. Much of it is jungle. Much has difficult topography. Lots of
volcanoes, some extinct, some vomiting up mudflows from time to time. But
some is flat enough to grow tropical crops, and in those places, people have
settled during the decades since the war, and put together the rudiments of
an economy."
"Who owns the land?"
"You've gotten to know the Philippines well," Enoch Root says. "You go
immediately to the central question."
"Around here, asking who owns the land is like complaining about the
weather in the Midwest," Randy muses.
Enoch Root nods. "I could spend a long time answering your question.
The answer is that patterns of ownership changed just after the war, and
then changed again under Marcos, and yet again in the last few years. So we
have several epochs, if you will. First epoch: before the war. Land owned by
certain families."
"Of course."
"Of course. Second epoch: the war. A vast area sealed off by the
Nipponese. Some of the families who owned the land prospered under the
occupation. Others went bankrupt. Third epoch: postwar. The bankrupt
families went away. The prosperous ones expanded their holdings. As did the
church and the government."
"Why?"
"The government made part of the land the jungle into a national park.
And after the eruptions, the church established the mission where I work."
"Eruptions?"
"In the early 1950s, just to make things interesting you know, things
are never interesting enough in the Philippines the volcanoes acted up. A
few lahars came through the area, wiped out some villages, redirected some
rivers, displaced many people. The church set up the hospital to help those
people."
"A hospital doesn't take up very much land," Randy observes.
"We also have farms. We are trying to help the locals become more self
reliant." Enoch Root acts like he basically does not want to talk about
this. "At any rate, things then settled down into a pattern that more or
less endured until the Marcos era, when various people were forced to sell
some of their holdings to Ferdinand and Imelda and various of their cousins,
nephews, cronies, and bootlicks."
"They were looking for Nipponese war gold."
"Certain of the locals have made a business of pretending to remember
where the gold is," Enoch Root says. "Once it was understood just how
remunerative this could be, it spread like a virus. Everyone claims to have
hazy memories of the war now, or of tales that Dad or Granddad told them.
The Marcos era treasure hunters did not display the cautious skepticism that
might have been expected from people with more piercing intellects. Many
holes were dug. No gold was found. Things settled down. Then, in the last
few years, the Chinese came in."
"Filipinos of Chinese ancestry, or "
"Chinese of Chinese ancestry," Enoch Root says. "Northern Chinese.
Robust ones who like spicy food. Not the usual gracile Cantonese speaking
fish eaters."
"These people are from where, then Shanghai?"
Root nods. "Their company is one of these post Maoist monstrosities.
Headed up by an actual Long March veteran. Wily survivor of many purges.
Name of Wing. Mr. Wing or General Wing as he likes to be addressed when he
is feeling nostalgic handled the transition to capitalism rather deftly.
Built hydroelectric projects with slave labor during the Great Leap Forward,
parlayed that into control of a very large government ministry which has now
become a sort of corporation. Mr. Wing has the ability to shut off the
electricity to just about any home or factory or even military base in
China, and by Chinese standards this makes him into a distinguished elder
statesman."
"What does Mr. Wing want there?"
"Land. Land. More land."
"What sort of land?"
"Land in the jungle. Oddly enough."
"Maybe he wants to build a hydroelectric project."
"Yes, and maybe you're a heroin smuggler. Say, Randy, don't think I'm
rude for saying so, but you have sauce in your beard." Enoch Root thrusts a
hand through the bars, proffering a paper napkin. Randy takes it and,
lifting it to his face, notes that the following letters are written on it:
OSKJJ JGTMW. Randy pretends to daub sauce off his beard.
"Now I've gone and done it," says Enoch Root, "given you my whole
supply of bumwad."
"Greater love hath no man," Randy says. "And I see you gave me your
other deck of cards too you are too generous."
"Not at all I thought you might want to play solitaire, just as I did."
"Don't mind if I do," Randy says, setting his dinner tray aside and
reaching for the deck.
The card on top is an eight of spades. Skimming it and a few more cards
out of the way, he finds a joker, with small stars in the corners; according
to hints that Enoch has already dropped, this is the A joker. It's the work
of a moment to slip it beneath the card below, which happens to be a Jack of
clubs. About two thirds of the way down into the pack he finds a big star
joker, and B stands for Big, so he knows that is Joker B; he moves it down
two cards, below the six of clubs and the nine of diamonds. Straightening up
the pack and then smearing though it once more, he sticks various fingers in
as he re finds those jacks, and ends up with a good half of the pack the
full inter Joker span, plus the two Jokers themselves trapped between his
index and forefingers. The thinner stacks above and below he pulls out and
swaps with each other. Enoch watches all of this and seems to approve.
Randy pushes out the bottom most card, now, and it turns out to be a
jack of clubs. On second thought he pulls that jack out and leaves it on his
knee for the time being, so he won't mess the next part up. According to the
mnemonic symbols he's marked on his fingernails, the numerical value of this
jack of clubs is simply 11. So, starting from the top of the deck, he counts
down to the eleventh card, cuts the deck below it, then swaps the two
halves, and finally takes the jack of clubs off his knee and puts it on the
bottom of the deck again.
The card on the top of the deck is now a joker. "What's the numerical
value for a joker?" he asks, and Enoch Root says, "it's fifty three, for
either one of them." So Randy gets a free ride this time; he knows that if
he begins counting down from the top of the deck, when he reaches 53 he'll
be staring at the last card. And that card happens to be the Jack of Clubs,
with a value of 11. Eleven, then is the first number in the keystream.
Now, the first letter in the ciphertext that Enoch Root wrote on the
napkin is O, and (setting the deck of cards down, now, so that he can count
through the alphabet on his fingers) O is letter fifteen. If he subtracts
eleven from that, he gets four, and he doesn't even have to count on his
fingers to know that letter number four is D. He has one letter deciphered.
Randy remarks, "We still haven't gotten to your being arrested."
"Yes! Well, it's like this," says Enoch Root. "Mr. Wing has been
digging some holes of his own up in the jungle lately. A lot of trucks have
been going through. Ruining the roads. Running over stray dogs, which as you
know are an important food source for these people. A boy was hit by one of
these trucks and has been in our hospital ever since. The runoff from Mr.
Wing's operations has been fouling the river that many people rely on for
fresh water. And there are questions of ownership too some feel that Mr.
Wing is encroaching on land that is properly owned by the government. Which
in some extremely attenuated sense, means it is owned by the people."
"Does he have a permit?"
"Ah! Once again your knowledge of local politics is evident. As you
know, the normal procedure is for local officials to approach people who are
digging large holes in the ground, or undertaking any kind of productive or
destructive activity whatsoever, and demand that they obtain a permit, which
simply means that they want a bribe or else they'll raise a stink about it.
Mr. Wing's company has not obtained a permit."
"Has a stink been raised?"
"Yes. But Mr. Wing has forged a very strong relationship with certain
Filipinos of Chinese ancestry who are well placed in the government, and so
the stink has been unavailing."
The second time through, the joker moving part went quickly since one
of the jokers started out on top. The King of Hearts ends up on the bottom,
and hence on Randy's knee. That son of a bitch has a numerical index of 39,
and so Randy has to count most of the way through the deck to reach the card
in the thirty ninth position, which is a ten of diamonds. He splits and
swaps the deck, then puts the King of Hearts back on the bottom. Top card is
now a four of diamonds, which translates to an index of seventeen. Counting
the seventeen top cards into his hand he stops and looks at the eighteenth,
which is a four of hearts. That works out to a value of 26 + 4 = 30. But
everything here is modulo 26, so adding the 26 was a waste of time, because
now he has to subtract it right off again. The result is four. The second
letter in Enoch's ciphertext is S, which is the nineteenth letter in the
alphabet, and subtracting four from that gives him O. So the plaintext, so
far, is "DO."
"I get the picture."
"I was sure that you would, Randy."
Randy doesn't know what to make of the Wing business. It puts him in
mind of Doug Shaftoe's yarns. Maybe Wing is looking for the Primary, and
maybe Enoch Root is too, and maybe the Primary is what Old Man Comstock was
trying to find by decrypting the Arethusa messages. Maybe, in other words,
the location of the Primary is sitting on Randy's hard drive right now, and
Root's worried that Randy, like an idiot, is going to give it away.
How'd he arrange to get into a cell next to Randy's? Presumably the
Church's internal lines of communication are first rate. Root could have
known for a few days that Randy was in the clink. Time enough to hatch a
plan.
"How'd you end up here, then?" Randy asks.
"We decided to raise a bit of a stink ourselves."
"We being the Church?"
"What do you mean by the Church? If you are asking me whether the
Pontifex Maximus and the College of Cardinals put on their pointy bifurcated
hats and sat down together in Rome and drew up plans for a stink, the answer
is no. If by 'church' you mean the local community in my neighborhood,
almost all of whom happen to be devout Catholics, then yes."
"So the community protested, or something, and you were the ring
leader."
"I was an example."
"An example?"
"It frequently does not occur to these people to challenge the powers
that be. When someone actually does, they always find it incredibly novel,
and derive much entertainment from it. That was my role. I had been making a
stink about Mr. Wing for quite some time."
Randy can almost guess what the next two letters are going to be, but
he has to keep working through the algorithm or the deck will get out of
whack. He generates a 23 and then a 47 which, modulo 26, is 21, and
subtracting the 23 and the 21 from the next two ciphertext letters K and J
(again, modulo 26) gives him N and O as expected. So he has "DONO"
deciphered. And continuing to work through it, one letter at a time, the
cards getting a little sweaty in his hands now, he eventually gets DONOTUSEP
and finally loses his place while trying to generate the last keystream
letter. So now the deck is out of whack and completely unrecoverable,
reminding him that he'd better be careful next time. But he can guess that
this message must be: DO NOT USE PC. Enoch is worried that Randy did not
anticipate Van Eck phreaking.
"So. There was a demonstration. You blocked a road or something?"
"We blocked roads, we lay down in front of bulldozers. Some people
slashed a few tires. The locals put their ingenuity to work, and things got
a bit out of hand. Mr. Wing's dear friends in the government took offense
and called out the Army. Seventeen people were arrested. Unreasonably high
bail was set for them as a punitive measure if these people can't get out of
jail they can't make money and their families suffer terribly. I could get
bailed out if I wanted to, but have elected to stay behind bars as a gesture
of solidarity."
It all seems like a plausible enough cover story to Randy. "But I'm
guessing that a lot of people in the government are appalled by the fact
that they have thrown a saint into jail," he says, "and so they have moved
you here, to the high prestige luxury jail with private cells."
"Once again your understanding of the local culture is conspicuous,"
Enoch Root says. He shifts position on the bed and his crucifix swings back
and forth ponderously. He also has a medallion around his neck with
something startling written on it.
"Do you have some occult symbol there?" Randy asks, squinting.
"I beg your pardon?"
"I can make out the word 'occult' on your medallion there."
"It says ignoti et quasi occulti, which means 'unknown and partly
hidden' or words to that effect," says Enoch Root. "It is the motto of a
society to which I belong. You must know that the word 'occult' does not
intrinsically have anything to do with Satanic rituals and drinking blood
and all of that. It "
"I was trained as an astronomer," Randy says. "So I learned all about
occultation the concealment of one body behind another, as during an
eclipse."
"Oh. Well, then, I'll shut up."
"In fact, I know more than you might think about occultation," Randy
says. It might seem like he's beating a dead horse, except that he catches
the eye of Enoch Root while he's saying it, and gives a significant sidelong
glance at his computer. Root processes this for a moment and then nods.
"Who's the lady in the middle? The Virgin Mary?" Randy asks.
Root fingers the medallion without looking at it, and says, "Reasonable
guess. But wrong. It's Athena."
"The Greek goddess?"
"Yes."
"How do you square that with Christianity?"
"When I phoned you the other day, how did you know it was me?"
"I don't know. I just recognized you."
"Recognized me? What does that mean? You didn't recognize my voice."
"Is this some roundabout way of answering my question about Athena
worship v. Christianity?"
"Doesn't it strike you as remarkable that you can look at a stream of
characters on the screen of your computer e mail from someone you've never
seen and later 'recognize' the same person on the phone? How does that work,
Randy?"
"I haven't the faintest idea. The brain can do some weird "
"Some complain that e mail is impersonal that your contact with me,
during the e mail phase of our relationship, was mediated by wires and
screens and cables. Some would say that's not as good as conversing face to
face. And yet our seeing of things is always mediated by corneas, retinas,
optic nerves, and some neural machinery that takes the information from the
optic nerve and propagates it into our minds. So, is looking at words on a
screen so very much inferior? I think not; at least then you are conscious
of the distortions. Whereas, when you see someone with your eyes, you forget
about the distortions and imagine you are experiencing them purely and
immediately."
"So what's your explanation of how I recognized you?"
"I would argue that inside your mind was some pattern of neurological
activity that was not there before you exchanged e mail with me. The Root
Representation. It is not me. I'm this big slug of carbon and oxygen and
some other stuff on this cot right next to you. The Root Rep, by contrast,
is the thing that you'll carry around in your brain for the rest of your
life, barring some kind of major neurological insult, that your mind uses to
represent me. When you think about me, in other words, you're not thinking
about me qua this big slug of carbon, you are thinking about the Root Rep.
Indeed, some day you might get released from jail and run into someone who
would say, 'You know, I was in the Philippines once, running around in the
boondocks, and I ran into this old fart who started talking to me about Root
Reps.' And by exchanging notes (as it were) with this fellow you would be
able to establish beyond a reasonable doubt that the Root Rep in your brain
and the Root Rep in his brain were generated by the same actual slug of
carbon and oxygen and so on: me.
"And this has something to do, again, with Athena?"
"If you think of the Greek gods as real supernatural beings who lived
on Mount Olympus, no. But if you think of them as being in the same class of
entities as the Root Rep, which is to say, patterns of neurological activity
that the mind uses to represent things that it sees, or thinks it sees, in
the outside world, then yes. Suddenly, Greek gods can be just as interesting
and relevant as real people. Why? Because, in the same way as you might one
day encounter another person with his own Root Rep so, if you were to have a
conversation with an ancient Greek person, and he started talking about
Zeus, you might once you got over your initial feelings of superiority
discover that you had some mental representations inside your own mind that,
though you didn't name them Zeus and didn't think of them as a big hairy
thunderbolt hurling son of a Titan, nonetheless had been generated as a
result of interactions with entities in the outside world that are the same
as the ones that cause the Zeus Representation to appear in the Greek's
mind. And here we could talk about the Plato's Cave thing for a while the
Veg O Matic of metaphors it slices! it dices!"
"In which," Randy says, "the actual entities in the real world are the
three dimensional, real things that are casting the shadows, this Greek dude
and I are the wretches chained up looking at the shadows of those things on
the walls, and it's just that the shape of the wall in front of me is
different from the shape of the wall in front of the Grecian "
" so that given a shadow projected on your wall is going to adopt a
different shape from the same shadow projected on his wall, where the
different wall shapes here correspond to let's say your modern scientific
worldview versus his ancient pagan worldview."
"Yeah. That Plato's Cave metaphor."
At this very moment some wag of a prison guard, out in the corridor,
throws a switch and shuts off all of the lights. The only illumination now
is from the screensaver on Randy's laptop, which is running animations of
colliding galaxies.
"I think we can stipulate that the wall in front of you, Randy, is
considerably flatter and smoother, i.e., it generally gives you a much more
accurate shadow than his wall, and yet it's clear that he's still capable of
seeing the same shadows and probably drawing some useful conclusions about
the shapes of the things that cast them."
"Okay. So the Athena that you honor on your medallion isn't a
supernatural being "
" who lives on a mountain in Greece, et cetera, but rather whatever
entity, pattern, trend, or what have you that, when perceived by ancient
Greek people, and filtered through their perceptual machinery and their
pagan worldview, produced the internal mental representation that they
dubbed Athena. The distinction being quite important because Athena the
supernatural chick with the helmet is of course nonexistent, but 'Athena'
the external generator of the internal representation dubbed Athena by the
ancient Greeks must have existed back then, or else the internal
representation never would have been generated, and if she existed back
then, the chances are excellent that she exists now, and if all that is the
case, then whatever ideas the ancient Greeks (who, though utter shitheads in
many ways, were terrifyingly intelligent people) had about her are probably
still quite valid."
"Okay, but why Athena and not Demeter or someone?"
"Well, it's a truism that you can't understand a person without knowing
something about her family background, and so we have to do kind of a quick
Cliff's Notes number on the ancient Greek Theogony here. We start out with
Chaos, which is where all theogonies start, and which I like to think of as
a sea of white noise totally random broadband static. And for reasons that
we don't really understand, certain polarities begin to coalesce from this
Day, Night, Darkness, Light, Earth, Sea. Personally, I like to think of
these as crystals not in the hippy dippy Californian sense, but in the
hardass technical sense of resonators, that received certain channels buried
in the static of Chaos. At some point, out of certain incestuous couplings
among such entities, you get Titans. And it's arguably kind of interesting
to note that the Titans provide really the full complement of basic gods
you've got the sun god, Hyperion, and an ocean god, Oceanus, and so on. But
they all get overthrown in a power struggle called the Titanomachia and
replaced with new gods like Apollo and Poseidon, who end up filling the same
slots in the organizational chart, as it were. Which is kind of interesting
in that it seems to tie in with what I was saying about the same entities or
patterns persisting through time, but casting slightly different shaped
shadows for different people. Anyway, so now we have the Gods of Olympus as
we normally think of them: Zeus, Hera, and so on.
"A couple of basic observations about these: first, they all, with one
exception I'll get to soon, were produced by some kind of sexual coupling,
either Titan Titaness or God Goddess or God Nymph or God Woman or basically
Zeus and whom– or whatever Zeus was fucking on any particular day.
Which brings me to the second basic observation, which is that the Gods of
Olympus are the most squalid and dysfunctional family imaginable. And yet
there is something about the motley asymmetry of this pantheon that makes it
more credible. Like the Periodic Table of the Elements or the family tree of
the elementary particles, or just about any anatomical structure that you
might pull up out of a cadaver, it has enough of a pattern to give our minds
something to work on and yet an irregularity that indicates some kind of
organic provenance you have a sun god and a moon goddess, for example, which
is all clean and symmetrical, and yet over here is Hera, who has no role
whatsoever except to be a literal bitch goddess, and then there is Dionysus
who isn't even fully a god he's half human but gets to be in the Pantheon
anyway and sit on Olympus with the Gods, as if you went to the Supreme Court
and found Bozo the Clown planted among the justices.
"Now what I'm getting to here is that Athena was exceptional in every
way. To begin with she wasn't created through sexual reproduction in any
kind of normal sense; she sprang fully formed from the head of Zeus.
According to some versions of the story, this happened after Zeus fucked
Metis, about whom we'll hear more in due course. Then he was warned that
Metis would later give birth to a son who would dethrone him, and so he ate
her, and later Athena came out of his head. Whether you buy into the Metis
story or not, I think we can still agree that something a little peculiar
was going on with the nativity of Athena. She was also exceptional in that
she did not participate in the moral squalor of Olympus; she was a virgin."
"Aha! I knew that was a picture of a virgin on your medallion."
"Yes, Randy, you do have a keen eye for virgins. Hephaestus leg fucked
her once but did not achieve penetration. She's quite important in the
Odyssey, but there are really very few myths, in the usual sense of that
term, that involve her. The one exception really proves the rule: the story
of Arachne. Arachne was a superb weaver who became arrogant and began taking
credit herself, instead of attributing her talent to the gods. Arachne went
so far as to issue an open challenge to Athena, who was the goddess of
weaving, among other things.
"Now keep in mind that the typical Greek myth goes something like this:
innocent shepherd boy is minding his own business, an overflying god spies
him and gets a hard on, swoops down and rapes him silly; while the victim is
still staggering around in a daze, that god's wife or lover, in a jealous
rage, turns him the helpless, innocent victim, that is into let's say an
immortal turtle and e.g. power staples him to a sheet of plywood with a dish
of turtle food just out of his reach and leaves him out in the sun forever
to be repeatedly disemboweled by army ants and stung by hornets or
something. So if Arachne had dissed anyone else in the Pantheon, she would
have been just a smoking hole in the ground before she knew what hit her.
"But in this case, Athena appeared to her in the guise of an old woman
and recommended that she display the proper humility. Arachne declined her
advice. Finally Athena revealed herself as such and challenged Arachne to a
weaving contest, which you'll have to admit was uncommonly fair minded of
her. And the interesting thing is that the contest turned out to be a draw
Arachne really was just as good as Athena! Only problem was that her weaving
depicted the gods of Olympus at their shepherd raping, interspecies fucking
worst. This weaving was simply a literal and accurate illustration of all of
those other myths, which makes this into a sort of meta myth. Athena flew
off the handle and whacked Arachne with her distaff, which might seem kind
of like poor anger management until you consider that during the struggle
against the Giants, she wasted Enceladus by dropping Sicily on him! The only
effect was to cause Arachne to recognize her own hubris, at which she became
so ashamed that she hanged herself. Athena then brought her back to life in
the form of a spider.
"So anyway, you probably learned in elementary school that Athena wears
a helmet, carries a shield called Aegis, and is the goddess of war and of
wisdom, as well as crafts such as the aforementioned weaving. Kind of an odd
combination, to say the least! Especially since Ares was supposed to be the
god of war and Hestia the goddess of home economics why the redundancy? But
a lot's been screwed up in translation. See, the kind of wisdom that we
associate with old farts like yours truly, and which I'm trying to impart to
you here, Randy Waterhouse, was called dike by the Greeks. That's not what
Athena was the goddess of! She was the goddess of metis, which means cunning
or craftiness, and which you'll recall was the name of her mother in one
version of the story. Interestingly Metis (the personage, not the attribute)
provided young Zeus with the potion that caused Cronus to vomit up all of
the baby gods he'd swallowed, setting the stage for the whole Titanomachia.
So now the connection to crafts becomes obvious crafts are just the
practical application of metis."
"I associate the word 'crafts' with making crappy belts and ashtrays in
summer camp," Randy says. "I mean, who wants to be the fucking goddess of
macrame?"
"It's all bad translation. The word that we use today, to mean the same
thing, is really technology."
"Okay. Now we're getting somewhere."
"Instead of calling Athena the goddess of war, wisdom, and macrame,
then, we should say war and technology. And here again we have the problem
of an overlap with the jurisdiction of Ares, who's supposed to be the god of
war. And let's just say that Ares is a complete asshole. His personal aides
are Fear and Terror and sometimes Strife. He is constantly at odds with
Athena even though maybe because – they are nominally the god and
goddess of the same thing war. Heracles, who is one of Athena's human
proteges, physically wounds Ares on two occasions, and even strips him of
his weapons at one point! You see the fascinating thing about Ares is that
he's completely incompetent. He's chained up by a couple of giants and
imprisoned in a bronze vessel for thirteen months. He's wounded by one of
Odysseus's drinking buddies during the iliad. Athena knocks him out with a
rock at one point. When he's not making a complete idiot of himself in
battle, he's screwing every human female he can get his hands on, and get
this his sons are all what we would today call serial killers. And so it
seems very clear to me that Ares really was a god of war as such an entity
would be recognized by people who were involved in wars all the time, and
had a really clear idea of just how stupid and ugly wars are.
"Whereas Athena is famous for being the backer of Odysseus, who, let's
not forget, is the guy who comes up with the idea for the Trojan Horse.
Athena guides both Odysseus and Heracles through their struggles, and
although both of these guys are excellent fighters, they win most of their
battles through cunning or (less pejoratively) metis. And although both of
them engage in violence pretty freely (Odysseus likes to call himself
'sacker of cities') it's clear that they are being held up in opposition to
the kind of mindless, raging violence associated with Ares and his offspring
Heracles even personally rids the world of a few of Ares's psychopathic
sons. I mean, the records aren't totally clear it's not like you can go to
the Thebes County Courthouse and look up the death certificates on these
guys but it appears that Heracles, backed up by Athena all the way,
personally murders at least half of the Hannibal Lecterish offspring of
Ares.
"So insofar as Athena is a goddess of war, what really do we mean by
that? Note that her most famous weapon is not her sword but her shield
Aegis, and Aegis has a gorgon's head on it, so that anyone who attacks her
is in serious danger of being turned to stone. She's always described as
being calm and majestic, neither of which adjectives anyone ever applied to
Ares."
"I don't know, Enoch. Defensive versus offensive war, maybe?"
"The distinction is overrated. Remember when I said that Athena got leg
fucked by Hephaestus?"
"It generated a clear internal representation in my mind."
"As a myth should! Athena/Hephaestus is sort of an interesting coupling
in that he is another technology god. Metals, metallurgy, and fire were his
specialties the old fashioned Rust Belt stuff. So, no wonder Athena gave him
a hard on! After he ejaculated on Athena's thigh, she's all eeeeeyew! and
she wipes it off and throws the rag on the ground, where it somehow combines
with the earth and generates Erichthonius. You know who Erichthonius was?"
"No."
"One of the first kings of Athens. You know what he was famous for?"
"Tell me."
"Invented the chariot and introduced the use of silver as a currency."
"Oh, Jesus!" Randy clamps his head between his hands and makes moaning
noises, only for a little while.
"Now in many other mythologies you can find gods that have parallels
with Athena. The Sumerians had Enki, the Norse had Loki. Loki was an
inventor god, but psychologically he had more in common with Ares; he was
not only the god of technology but the god of evil too, the closest thing
they had to the Devil. Native Americans had tricksters creatures full of
cunning like Coyote and Raven in their mythologies, but they didn't have
technology yet, and so they hadn't coupled the Trickster with Crafts to
generate this hybrid Technologist god."
"Okay," Randy says, "so obviously where you're going with this is that
there must be some universal pattern of events that when filtered through
the sensory apparatus and the neural rigs of primitive, superstitious people
always gives rise to internal mental representations that they identify as
gods, heroes, etc."
"Yes. And these can be recognized across cultures, in the same way that
two persons with Root Reps in their mind might 'recognize' me by comparing
notes."
"So, Enoch, you want me to believe that these gods which aren't really
gods, but it's a nice concise word all share certain things in common
precisely because the external reality that generated them is consistent and
universal across cultures."
"That is right. And in the case of Trickster gods the pattern is that
cunning people tend to attain power that un cunning people don't. And all
cultures are fascinated by this. Some of them, like many Native Americans,
basically admire it, but never couple it with technological development.
Others, like the Norse, hate it and identify it with the Devil."
"Hence the strange love hate relationship that Americans have with
hackers."
"That's right."
"Hackers are always complaining that journalists cast them as bad guys.
But you think that this ambivalence is deeper seated."
"In some cultures. The Vikings to judge from their mythology would
instinctively hate hackers. But something different happened with the
Greeks. The Greeks liked their geeks. That's how we get Athena."
"I'll buy that but where does the war goddess thing come in?"
"Let's face it, Randy, we've all known guys like Ares. The pattern of
human behavior that caused the internal mental representation known as Ares
to appear in the minds of the ancient Greeks is very much with us today, in
the form of terrorists, serial killers, riots, pogroms, and aggressive
tinhorn dictators who turn out to be military incompetents. And yet for all
their stupidity and incompetence, people like that can conquer and control
large chunks of the world if they are not resisted."
"You must meet my friend Avi."
"Who is going to fight them off, Randy?"
"I'm afraid you're going to say we are."
"Sometimes it might be other Ares worshippers, as when Iran and Iraq
went to war and no one cared who won. But if Ares worshippers aren't going
to end up running the whole world, someone needs to do violence to them.
This isn't very nice, but it's a fact: civilization requires an Aegis. And
the only way to fight the bastards off in the end is through intelligence.
Cunning. Metis."
"Tactical cunning, like Odysseus and the Trojan Horse, or "
"Both that, and technological cunning. From time to time there is a
battle that is out and out won by a new technology like longbows at Crecy.
For most of history those battles happen only every few centuries you have
the chariot, the compound bow, gunpowder, ironclad ships, and so on. But
something happens around, say, the time that the Monitor, which the
Northerners believe to be the only ironclad warship on earth, just happens
to run into the Merrimack, of which the Southerners believe exactly the same
thing, and they pound the hell out of each other for hours and hours. That's
as good a point as any to identify as the moment when a spectacular rise in
military technology takes off it's the elbow in the exponential curve. Now
it takes the world's essentially conservative military establishments a few
decades to really comprehend what has happened, but by the time we're in the
thick of the Second World War, it's accepted by everyone who doesn't have
his head completely up his ass that the war's going to be won by whichever
side has the best technology. So on the German side alone we've got rockets,
jet aircraft, nerve gas, wire guided missiles. And on the Allied side we've
got three vast efforts that put basically every top level hacker, nerd, and
geek to work: the codebreaking thing, which as you know gave rise to the
digital computer; the Manhattan Project, which gave us nuclear weapons; and
the Radiation Lab, which gave us the modern electronics industry. Do you
know why we won the Second World War, Randy?"
"I think you just told me."
"Because we built better stuff than the Germans?"
"Isn't that what you said?"
"But why did we build better stuff, Randy?"
"I guess I'm not competent to answer, Enoch, I haven't studied that
period well enough."
"Well the short answer is that we won because the Germans worshipped
Ares and we worshipped Athena."
"And am I supposed to gather that you, or your organization, had
something to do with all that?"
"Oh, come now, Randy! Let's not allow this to degenerate into
conspiracy theories."
"Sorry. I'm tired."
"So am I. Goodnight."
And then Enoch goes to sleep. Just like that. Randy doesn't.
To the Cryptonomicon!
***
Randy is mounting a known ciphertext attack: the hardest kind. He has
the ciphertext (the Arethusa intercepts) and nothing else. He doesn't even
know the algorithm that was used to encrypt them. In modern cryptanalysis,
this is unusual; normally the algorithms are public knowledge. That is
because algorithms that have been openly discussed and attacked within the
academic community tend to be much stronger than ones that have been kept
secret. People who rely on keeping their algorithms secret are ruined as
soon as that secret gets out. But Arethusa dates from World War II, when
people were much less canny about such things.
This would be a hell of a lot easier if Randy knew some of the
plaintext that is encrypted within these messages. Of course, if he knew all
of the plaintext, he wouldn't even need to decrypt them; breaking Arethusa
in that case would be an academic exercise.
There is a compromise between the two extremes of, on the one hand, not
knowing any of the plaintext at all, and, on the other, knowing all of it.
In the Cryptonomicon that falls under the heading of cribs. A crib is an
educated guess as to what words or phrases might be present in the message.
For example if you were decrypting German messages from World War II, you
might guess that the plaintext included the phrase "HElL HITLER" or "SIEG
HElL." You might pick out a sequence of ten characters at random and say,
"Let's assume that this represented HEIL HITLER. If that is the case, then
what would it imply about the remainder of the message?"
Randy's not expecting to find any HEILHITLERs in the Arethusa messages,
but there might be other predictable words. He's been making a list of cribs
in his head: MANILA, certainly. WATERHOUSE, perhaps. And now he's thinking
GOLD and BULLION. So, in the case of MANILA he could pick out any six
character string from the intercepts and say, "What if these characters are
the encrypted form of MANILA?" and then work from there. If he were working
with an intercept only six characters long, then there would be only one
such six character segment to choose from. A seven character long message
would give him two possibilities: it could be the first six or the last six
characters. The upshot is that for a message intercept that is n characters
long, the number of six character long segments is equal to (n – 5).
In the case of a 105 character long intercept, he will have 100 different
possible locations for the word MANILA. Actually, a hundred and one: because
it's of course possible even likely that MANILA is not in there at all. But
each of these 100 guesses has its own set of ramifications vis à vis all of
the other characters in the message. What those ramifications are, exactly,
depends on what assumptions Randy is making about the underlying algorithm.
As far as that goes: the more he thinks about it, the more he believes
he has some good stuff to go on thanks to Enoch, who (in retrospect) has
been feeding him some useful clues when not spamming him through the bars
with theogonical analysis. Enoch mentioned that when the NSA started
attacking what later turned out to be the fake Arethusa intercepts, they
were going on the assumption that they were somehow related to another
cryptosystem dubbed Azure. And sure enough, Randy learns from the
Cryptonomicon that Azure was an oddball system used by both the Nipponese
and the Germans that employed a mathematical algorithm to generate a
different one time pad every day. This is awfully vague, but it helps Randy
rule out a lot. He knows for example that Arethusa isn't a rotor system like
Enigma. And he knows that if he can find two messages that were sent on the
same day, they will probably use the same one time pad.
What kind of mathematical algorithm was used? The contents of Grandpa's
trunk provide clues. He remembers the photograph of Grandpa with Turing and
von Hacklheber at Princeton, where all three of them were evidently fooling
around with zeta functions. And in the trunk were several monographs on the
same subject. And the Cryptonomicon states that zeta functions are even
today being used in cryptography, as sequence generators which is to say,
machines for spitting out series of pseudo random numbers, which is exactly
what a one time pad is. Everything points to that Azure and Arethusa are
siblings and that both are just implementations of zeta functions.
The big thing standing in his way right now is that he doesn't have any
textbooks on zeta functions sitting around his jail cell. The contents of
Grandpa's trunk would be an excellent resource but they are currently stored
in a room in Chester's house. But on the other hand, Chester's rich, and he
wants to help.
Randy calls for a guard and demands to see Attorney Alejandro. Enoch
Root goes very still for a few moments, and then shunts directly back into
the loping, untroubled sleep of a man who is exactly where he wants to be.
Chapter 89 SLAVES
People smell all kinds of ways before they have burned, but only one
way afterwards. As the Army boys lead Waterhouse down into the darkness, he
sniffs cautiously, hoping he won't smell that smell.
Mostly it smells like oil, diesel, hot steel, the brimstony tang of
burnt rubber and exploded munitions. These smells are overpoweringly strong.
He draws in a lungful of reek, blows it out. And that, of course, is when he
catches a whiff of barbecue and knows that this concrete coated island is,
among other things, a crematorium.
He is following the Army boys down black smudged tunnels bored through
a variegated matrix of concrete, masonry, and solid rock. The caves were
there first, eaten into the stone by rain and waves, then enlarged and
rationalized by Spaniards with chisels, jackhammers, blasting powder. Then
along came the Americans with bricks, and finally the Nipponese with
reinforced concrete.
As they work their way into the maze, they pass down some tunnels that
apparently acted like blowtorches: the walls have been scoured clean as if a
torrent had been running through it for a million years, silver pools lie on
the floor where guns or filing cabinets melted into puddles. Stored heat
still radiates from the walls, adding to the heat of the Philippine climate,
making all of them sweat even more, if that is possible.
Other corridors, other rooms were nothing more than backwaters in the
river of fire. Looking into doorways, Waterhouse can see books that were
charred but not consumed, blackened papers spilling from burst cabinets "One
moment," he says. His escort spins around just in time to see Waterhouse
ducking through a low door into a tiny room, where something has caught his
eye.
It's a heavy wooden cabinet, mostly transmuted into charcoal now, so it
looks like the cabinet's gone but its shadow persists. Someone has already
pulled one of its doors off its hinges, allowing black confetti to flood
into the room. The cabinet was filled with slips of paper, mostly burned
now, but thrusting his hand into the ash heap (slowly! Most of this place is
still hot) Waterhouse pulls out a bundle, nearly intact.
"What kind of money is that?" the Army guy asks.
Waterhouse pulls a bill from the top of the bundle. The top is printed
in Japanese characters and bears an engraved picture of Tojo. He flips it
over. The back is printed in English: TEN POUNDS.
"Australian currency," Waterhouse says.
"Don't look Australian to me," the Army guy says, glowering at Tojo.
"If the Nips had won..." Waterhouse says, and shrugs. He throws the
stack of ten pound notes onto the ash heap of history and carries his single
copy out into the corridor. A necklace of lightbulbs has been strung along
the ceiling. The light glances off what looks like pools of quicksilver on
the floor: the remains of guns, belt buckles, steel cabinets and doorknobs,
melted down into puddles in the holocaust, now congealed.
The fine print on the bill says, IMPERIAL RESERVE BANK, MANILA.
"Sir! You okay?" the Army guy says. Waterhouse realizes he's been
thinking for a while.
"Carry on," he says, and stuffs the bill in his pocket.
He was thinking about whether it was okay to take some of this money
with him. It's okay to take souvenirs, but not to loot. So he can take the
money if it's worthless, but not if it is real money.
Now, someone who was not so inclined to think and ponder everything to
the nth degree would immediately see that the money was worthless, because,
after all, the Japanese did not take Australia and never will. So that
money's just a souvenir, right?
Probably right. Th