Cryptonomicon (38 page)

“They used us as leverage to bring in others,” Cantrell says.

“Well… the question is, then, is the cable through the Philippines still needed? Or wanted?”

“Yup,” Cantrell says.

“It is?”

“No. I mean, yup, that’s the question, all right.”

Randy considers it. “Actually, this could be good news for
your
phase of the operation. More pipes into the Crypt means more business in the long run.”

Cantrell raises his eyebrows, a little worried about Randy’s feelings. Randy leans back in his chair and says, “We’ve had debates before about whether it makes sense for Epiphyte to be screwing around with cables and routers in the Philippines.”

Cantrell says, “The business plan has always maintained that it would make economic sense to be running a cable through the Philippines even if there weren’t a Crypt at the end of it.”

“The business plan has to say the Intra-Philippines network could be spun off as an independent business, and still survive,” Randy says, “to justify our doing it.”

Neither one of them needs to say any more. They’ve been concentrating on each other pretty intensely for a while, shutting out the rest of the bar with their postures, and now, spontaneously, both of them lean back, stretch, and begin looking around. The timing’s fortuitous, because Goto Furudenendu has just come in with a posse of what Randy guesses are civil engineers: healthy-looking, clean-cut Nipponese men in their thirties. Randy invites him over with a smile, then flags down their waiter and orders a few of those great big bottles of bitterly cold Nipponese beer.

“This reminds me—the Secret Admirers are really on my case,” Randy says.

Cantrell grins, showing some affection for those crazy Secret Admirers. “Smart, rabidly paranoid people are the backbone of cryptology,” he says, “but they don’t always understand business.”

“Maybe they understand it too well,” Randy says. He is left with some residual annoyance that he came down to the Bomb and Grapnel party in order to answer the question posed by [email protected] (“Why are you doing it?”) and he still doesn’t know. As a matter of fact, he knows less now than he did before.

Then the men from Goto join them, and it just happens that Eberhard Föhr and Tom Howard show up at just the same time. There is a combinatorial explosion of name-card exchanges and introductions. It seems like protocol demands a lot of serious social drinking—now Randy’s inadvertently challenged these guys’ politeness by ordering them beer, and they have to demonstrate that they will not be bested in any such contest. Tables get pushed together and everything gets just unbelievably jovial. Eb has to order some beer for everyone too. Pretty soon things have degenerated into karaoke. Randy gets up and sings “Me and You and a Dog Named Boo.” It’s a good choice because it’s a mellow, laid-back song that doesn’t demand lots of emoting. Or singing ability, for that matter.

At some point Tom Howard puts his beefy arm up on the back of Cantrell’s chair, the better to shout into his ear. Their matched Eutropian bracelets, engraved with “Hello Doctor, please freeze me as follows” messages, are glittery and conspicuous, and Randy’s nervous that the Nipponese guys are going to notice this and ask questions that will be exceedingly difficult to answer. Tom is reminding Cantrell of something (for some reason they always refer to Cantrell in this way; some people are just made to be called by last names). Cantrell nods and shoots Randy a quick and somewhat furtive look. When Randy looks back at him, Cantrell glances down apologetically and takes to chivvying his beer bottle nervously between his hands. Tom just keeps looking at Randy kind of interestedly. All of this motivated glancing finally brings Randy and Tom and Cantrell together at the farthest end of the bar from the karaoke speakers.

“So, you know Andrew Loeb,” Cantrell says. It’s clear he’s basically dismayed by this and yet sort of impressed too, as if he’d just learned that Randy had once beaten a man to death with his bare hands and then just never bothered to mention it.

“It’s true,” Randy says. “As well as anyone can know a guy like that.”

Cantrell is paying undue diligence to the project of picking the label off of his beer bottle and so Tom picks up the thread now. “You were in business together?”

“Not really. Can I ask how you guys are aware of this? I mean, how do you even know that Andrew Loeb exists in the first place? Because of the Digibomber thing?”

“Oh, no—it was after that. Andy became a figure of note in some of the circles where Tom and I both hang out,” Cantrell says.

“The only circles I can imagine that Andy’d be a part of would be primitive survivalists, and people who believe they’ve been Satanically ritually abused.”

Randy says this mindlessly, as if his mouth is a mechanical teletype hammering out a weather forecast. It kind of hangs there.

“That helps fill in a few gaps,” Tom finally says.

“What did you think when the FBI searched his cabin?” Cantrell asks, his grin returned.

“I didn’t know what to think,” Randy says. “I remember watching the videotape on the news—the agents coming out of that shack with boxes of evidence, and thinking my name must be on papers in them. That somehow I’d get mixed up in the case as a result.”

“Did the FBI ever contact you?” Tom asks.

“No. I think that once they searched through all of his stuff, they figured out pretty quickly that he wasn’t the Digibomber, and crossed him off the list.”

“Well, not long after that happened, Andy Loeb showed up on the Net,” Cantrell says.

“I find that impossible to believe.”

“So did we. I mean, we’d all received copies of his manifestoes—printed on this grey recycled paper that was like the sheets of fuzz that you peel off a clothes dryer’s lint trap.”

“He used some kind of organic, water-based ink that flaked off like black dandruff,” Tom says.

“We used to joke about having Andy-grit all over our desks,” Cantrell says. “So when this guy called Andy Loeb showed up on the Secret Admirers mailing list, and the Eutropia newsgroup, posting all of these long rants, we refused to believe it was him.”

“We thought that someone had just written really brilliant parodies of his prose style,” Cantrell says.

“But when they kept coming, day after day, and he started getting into these long dialogs with people, it became obvious that it really was him,” Tom grumbles.

“How did he square that with being a Luddite?”

Cantrell: “He said that he’d always thought of computers as a force that alienated and atomized society.”

Tom: “But as the result of being the number one Digibomber suspect for a while, he’d been forcibly made aware of the Internet, which changed computers by connecting them.”

“Oh, my god!” Randy says.

“And he’d been mulling over the Internet while he was doing whatever Andrew Loeb does,” Tom continues.

Randy: “Squatting naked in icy mountain streams strangling muskrats with his bare hands.”

Tom: “And he’d realized computers could be a tool to unite society.”

Randy: “And I’ll bet he was just the guy to unite it.”

Cantrell: “Well, that’s actually not far away from what he said.”

Randy: “So, are you about to tell me that he became a Eutropian?”

Cantrell: “Well, no. It’s more like he discovered a schism in the Eutropian movement we didn’t know was there, and created his own splinter group.”

Randy: “I think of the Eutropians as being totally hard-core individuals, pure libertarians.”

“Well, yeah!” Cantrell says. “But the basic premise of Eutropianism is that technology has made us post-human. That Homo sapiens plus technology is effectively a whole new species: immortal, omnipresent because of the Net, and
headed towards omnipotence. Now, the first people to talk that way were libertarians.”

Tom says, “But the idea has attracted all kinds of people—including Andy Loeb. He showed up one day and started yammering about hive minds.”

“And of course he was flamed to a crisp by most of the Eutropians, because that concept was anathema to them,” Cantrell says.

Tom: “But he kept at it, and after a while, some people started agreeing with him. Turned out there was really a pretty substantial faction within the Eutropians who
didn’t
especially care for libertarianism and who found the idea of a hive mind attractive.”

“So, now Andy’s the leader of that faction?” Randy asks.

“I would suppose so,” Cantrell says. “They split away and formed their own newsgroup. We haven’t heard much from them in the last six months or so.”

“So how did you become aware of a connection between Andy and me?”

“He stills pops into the Secret Admirers newsgroup from time to time,” Tom says. “And there’s been a lot of discussion there about the Crypt lately.”

Cantrell says, “When he found out that you and Avi were involved, he posted this vast rant—twenty or thirty K of run-on sentences. Not very complimentary.”

“Well, Jesus. What’s his beef? He won the case. Completely bankrupted me. You’d think he’d have something better to do than beat this dead horse,” Randy says, thumping himself on the chest. “Doesn’t he have a day job?”

“He’s some kind of a lawyer now,” Cantrell says.

“Ha! Figures.”

“He’s been denouncing us,” Tom says. “Capitalist roader. Atomizing society. Making the world safe for drug traffickers and Third-World kleptocrats.”

“Well, at least he got something right,” Randy says. He’s delighted to have an answer, finally, to the question of why they’re building the Crypt.

SIO IS A
mud cemetery. Those who have already given their lives for the emperor compete for mire space with those who intend to. Bizarre forktailed American planes dive out of the sun every day to murder them with terrible glowing rains of cannon fire and the mind-crushing detonations of bombs, so they sleep in open-topped graves and only come out at night. But their pits are full of reeking water that churns with hostile life, and when the sun goes down, rain beats them, carrying into their bones the deadly chill of high altitudes. Every man in the 20th Division knows that he will not leave New Guinea alive, so it remains only to choose the method of death: surrender to be tortured, then massacred by the Australians? Put grenades to their heads? Remain where they are to be killed by the airplanes all day, and all night by malaria, dysentery, scrub typhus, starvation, and hypothermia? Or walk two hundred miles over mountains and flooding rivers to Madang, which is tantamount to suicide even when it is peacetime and you have food and medicine… ?

But that is what they are ordered to do. General Adachi flies to Sio—it is the first friendly plane they have seen in weeks—and lands on the rutted septic field that they call an airstrip, and orders the evacuation. They are to move inland in four detachments. Regiment by regiment, they bury their dead, pack up what is left of their equipment, hoard what little food is left, wait for dark, and trudge towards the mountains. The later echelons can find their path by smell, following the reek of dysentery and of the corpses dropped behind the pathfinder groups like breadcrumbs.

The top commanders stay to the end, and the radio platoon stays with them; without a powerful radio transmitter, and the cryptographic paraphernalia that goes with it, a general is not a general, a division is not a division. Finally they go off the air, and begin breaking the transmitter down
into the smallest pieces they can, which unfortunately are not all that small; a divisional radio transmitter is a powerful beast, made for lighting up the ionosphere. It has an electrical generator, transformers, and other components that cannot be made light. The men of the radio platoon, who would find it difficult to move even the weight of their own skeletons over the mountains and across the surging rivers, will carry the additional burdens of engine blocks, fuel tanks, and transformers.

And the big steel trunk with all of the Army codebooks. These books were heavy as death when they were bone dry; now they are sodden. To carry them out is beyond imagining. The rules dictate that they must therefore be burned.

The men of the 20th Division’s radio platoon are not much inclined to humor of any kind at the moment, not even the grim sardonic humor universal among soldiers. If anything in the world is capable of making them laugh at this moment, it is the concept of trying to construct a bonfire out of saturated codebooks in a swamp during a rainstorm. They might be able to burn them if they used a lot of aviation fuel—more than they actually have. Then the fire would produce a towering column of smoke that would draw P-38s as the scent of human flesh draws mosquitoes.

Burning them can’t be necessary. New Guinea is a howling maelstrom of decay and destruction; the only things that endure are rocks and wasps. They rip off the covers to bring home as proof that they have been destroyed, then pack the books into their trunk and bury it in the bank of an especially vindictive river.

It’s not a very good idea. But they have been getting bombed a lot. Even if the shrapnel misses you, the bomb’s shock wave is like a stone wall moving at seven hundred miles an hour. Unlike a stone wall, it passes through your body, like a burst of light through a glass figurine. On its way through your flesh, it rearranges every part of you down to the mitochondrial level, disrupting every process in every cell, including whatever enables your brain to keep track of time and experience the world. A few of these detonations are enough to break the thread of consciousness
into a snarl of tangled and chopped filaments. These men are not as human as they were when they left home; they cannot be expected to think clearly or to do things for good reasons. They throw mud on the trunk not as a sane procedure for getting rid of it but as a kind of ritual, just to demonstrate the proper respect for its lode of strange information.

Then they shoulder their burdens of iron and rice and begin to strain up into the mountains. Their comrades have left a trampled path that is already growing back into jungle. The mileposts are bodies—by now just stinking battlegrounds—disputed by frenzied mobs of microbes, bugs, beasts, and birds never catalogued by scientists.