Intramuros. A few buildings poke up out of a jumbled
wilderness of strewn stone. Ancient Spanish cannon are sprinkled around the
place, half buried. The rubble fields have been colonized by tropical
vegetation and squatters. Their clothesline poles and television antennas
are all wrapped up in jungle creepers and makeshift electrical wiring.
Utility poles jut into the air at odd angles, like widowmakers in a burned
forest, some of them almost completely obscured by the glass bubbles of
electrical meters. Every dozen yards or so, for no discernable reason, a
pile of rubble smolders.
As he goes by the cathedral, children follow him, whining and begging
piteously until he puts pesos in their hands. Then they beam and sometimes
give him a bright "Thank you!" in perfect American scented shopping mall
English. The beggars in Manila never seem to take their work very seriously,
for even they have been infected by the cultural fungus of irony and always
seem to be fighting back a grin, as if they can't believe they're doing
anything so corny.
They do not understand that he is working. That's okay.
Ideas have always come to Randy faster than he could use them. He spent
the first thirty years of his life pursuing whatever idea appealed to him at
the moment, discarding it when a better one came along.
Now he is working for a company again, and has some kind of
responsibility to use his time productively. Good ideas come to him as fast
and thick as ever, but he has to keep his eye on the ball. If the idea is
not relevant to Epiphyte, he has to jot it down and forget about it for now.
If it is relevant, he has to restrain his urge to dive into it and consider:
has anyone else come up with this idea before him? Is it possible to just go
out and buy the technology? Can he delegate the work to a contract coder in
the States?
He walks slowly, partly because otherwise he will suffer heatstroke and
fall dead in the gutter. Worse yet, he may fall through an open hatch into a
torrent of sewage, or brush against one of the squatters's electrical wires,
which dangle from overhead like patient asps. The constant dangers of sudden
electrocution from above or drowning in liquid shit below keep him looking
up and down as well as side to side. Randy has never felt more trapped
between a capricious and dangerous heaven and a hellish underworld. This
place is as steeped in religion as India, but all of it is Catholic.
At the northern end of Intramuros is a little business district. It is
sandwiched between Manila Cathedral and Fort Santiago, which the Spaniards
constructed to command the outlet of the Pasig River. You can tell it's a
business district because of the phone wires. As in other Rapidly Developing
Asian Economies, it is difficult to tell whether these are pirate wires, or
official ones that have been incredibly badly installed. They are a case
study in why incrementalism is bad. The bundles are so thick in some places
that Randy probably could not wrap both arms around them. Their weight and
tension have begun to pull the phone poles over, especially at curves in the
roads, where the wires go round a corner and exert a net sideways force on
the pole.
All of these buildings are constructed in the least expensive way
conceivable: concrete poured in place in wooden forms, over grids of hand
tied rebar. They are blocky, grey, and completely indistinguishable from one
another. A couple of much taller buildings, twenty or thirty stories, loom
over the district from a big intersection nearby, wind and birds circulating
through their broken windows. They were badly shaken up in an earthquake
during the 1980s and have not been put to rights yet.
He passes by a restaurant with a squat concrete blockhouse in front,
its openings covered with blackened steel grates, rusty exhaust pipes
sticking out the top to vent the diesel generator locked inside. NO BROWN
OUT has been proudly stenciled all over it. Beyond that is a postwar office
building, four stories high, with an especially thick sheaf of telephone
wires running into it. The logo of a bank is bolted to the front of the
building, down low. There is angle parking in front. The two spaces in front
of the main entrance are blocked off with hand painted signs: RESERVED FOR
ARMORED CAR and RESERVED FOR BANK MANAGER. A couple of guards stand in front
of the entrance clutching the fat wooden pistol grips of riot guns, weapons
that have the hulking, cartoonish appearance of action figure accessories.
One of the guards remains behind a bulletproof podium with a sign on it:
PLEASE DEPOSIT GUNS/FIREARMS TO THE GUARD.
Randy exchanges nods with the gunmen and goes into the building's
lobby, which is just as hot as outside. Bypassing the bank, ignoring the
unreliable elevators, he goes through a steel door that takes him into a
narrow stairwell. Today, it is dark. The building's electrical system is a
patchwork several different systems coexisting in the same space, controlled
by different panels, some on generators and some not. So blackouts begin and
end in phases. Somewhere near the top of the stairwell, small birds chirp,
competing with the sound of car alarms being set off outside.
Epiphyte Corp. rents the building's top floor, although he is the only
person working there so far. He keys his way in. Thank god; the air
conditioning has been working. The money they paid for their own generator
was worth it. He disables the alarm systems, goes to the fridge, and gets
two one liter bottles of water. His rule of thumb, after a walk, is to drink
water until he begins to urinate again. Then he can consider other
activities.
He is too sweaty to sit down. He must keep moving so that the cold dry
air will flow around his body. He flicks globes of sweat out of his beard
and does an orbit of the floor, looking out the windows, checking out the
lines of sight. He pulls a ballistic nylon traveler's wallet out of his
trousers and lets it dangle from his belt loop so that the skin underneath
it can breathe. It contains his passport, a virgin credit card, ten crisp
new hundred dollar bills, and a floppy disk with his 4096 bit encryption key
on it.
Northwards he can survey the greens and ramparts of Fort Santiago,
where phalanxes of Nipponese tourists toil, recording their fun with
forensic determination. Beyond that is the Pasig River, choked with floating
debris. Across the river is Quiapo, a built up area: high rise apartment and
office buildings with corporate names emblazoned on their top storeys and
satellite dishes on the roofs.
Unwilling to stop moving just yet, Randy strolls clockwise around the
office. Intramuros is ringed with a belt of green, its former moat. He has
just walked up its western verge. The eastern one is studded with heavy
neoclassical buildings housing various government ministries. The Post and
Telecommunications Authority sits on the Pasig's edge, at a vertex in the
river from which three closely spaced bridges radiate into Quiapo. Beyond
the large new structures above the river, Quiapo and the adjoining
neighborhood of San Miguel are a patchwork of giant institutions: a train
station, an old prison, many universities, and Malacanang Palace, which is
farther up the Pasig.
Back on this side of the river, it is Intramuros in the foreground
(cathedrals and churches surrounded by dormant land), government
institutions, colleges, and universities in the middle ground, and, beyond
that, a seemingly infinite sprawl of low lying, smoky city. Miles to the
south is the gleaming business city of Makati, built around a square where
two big roads intersect at an acute angle, echoing the intersecting runways
at NAIA, a bit farther south. An emerald city of big houses perched on big
lawns spreads away from Makati: it is where the ambassadors and corporate
presidents live. Continuing his clockwise stroll he can follow Roxas
Boulevard coming toward him up the seawall, marked by a picket line of tall
palm trees. Manila Bay is jammed with heavy shipping, big cargo ships
filling the water like logs in a boom. The container port is just below him
to the west: a grid of warehouses on reclaimed land that is about as flat,
and as natural, as a sheet of particle board.
If he looks over the cranes and containers, due west across the bay, he
can barely make out the mountainous silhouette of the Bata'an Peninsula,
some forty miles distant. Following its black skyline southwards tracing the
route taken by the Nipponese in '42 he can almost resolve a lump lying off
its southern tip. That would be the island of Corregidor. This is the first
time he's ever been able to see it; the air is unusually clear today.
A fragment of historical trivia floats to the surface of his melted
brain. The galleon from Acapulco. The signal fire on Corregidor.
He punches in Avi's GSM number. Avi, somewhere in the world, answers
it. He sounds like he is in a taxi, in one of those countries where horn
honking is still an inalienable right. "What's on your mind, Randy?"
"Lines of sight," Randy says.
"Huh!" Avi blurts, as if a medicine ball has just slammed into his
belly. "You figured it out."
Chapter 9 GUADALCANAL
The marine raiders' bodies are no longer pressurized with blood and
breath. The weight of their gear flattens them into the sand. The
accelerating surf has already begun to shovel silt over them; comet trails
of blood fade back into the ocean, red carpets for any sharks who may be
browsing the coastline. Only one of them is a giant lizard. but all have the
same general shape: fat in the middle and tailing off at the ends,
streamlined by the waves.
A little convoy of Nip boats is moving down the slot, towing barges
loaded with supplies packed into steel drums. Shaftoe and his platoon ought
to be lobbing mortars at them right now. When the American planes show up
and begin to kick the shit out of them, the Nips will throw the drums
overboard and run away, and hope that some of them will wash ashore on
Guadalcanal.
The war is over for Bobby Shaftoe, and hardly for the first or last
time. He trudges among the platoon. Waves hit him in the knees, then spread
into magic carpets of foam and vegetable matter that skim along the beach so
that his footing appears to glide out from under him. He keeps twisting
around for no reason and falling on his ass.
Finally he reaches the corpsman's corpse, and divests it of anything
with a red cross on it. He turns his back on the Nip convoy and looks up a
long glacis toward the tideline. It might as well be Mt. Everest as seen
from a low base camp. Shaftoe decides to tackle the challenge on hands and
knees. Every so often, a big wave spanks him on the ass, rushes up between
his legs orgasmically and washes his face. It feels good and also keeps him
from pitching forward and falling asleep below the high tide mark.
The next couple of days are a handful of dirty, faded black and white
snapshots, shuffled and dealt over and over again: the beach under water.
positions of corpses marked by standing waves. The beach empty. The beach
under water again. The beach strewn with black lumps, like a slice of
Grandma Shaftoe's raisin bread. A morphine bottle half buried in the sand.
Small, dark people, mostly naked, moving along the beach at low tide and
looting the corpses.
Hey, wait a sec! Shaftoe is on his feet somehow, clutching his
Springfield. The jungle doesn't want to let go of him; creepers have
actually grown over his limbs in the time he has lain there. As he emerges.
dragging foliage behind him like a float in a ticker tape parade, the sun
floods over him like warm syrup of ipecac. He can see the ground headed his
way. He spins as he falls momentarily glimpsing a big man with a rifle and
then his face is pressed into the cool sand. The surf roars in his skull: a
nice standing ovation from a studio audience of angels, who having all died
themselves, know a good death when they see one.
Little hands roll him over onto his back. One of his eyes is frozen
shut by sand. Peering through the other he sees a big fellow with a rifle
slung over his shoulder standing over him. The fellow has a red beard, which
makes it just a bit less probable that he is a Nipponese soldier. But what
is he?
He prods like a doctor and prays like a priest in Latin, even. Silver
hair buzzed close to a tanned skull. Shaftoe scans the fellow's clothing for
some kind of insignia. He's hoping to see a Semper Fidelis but instead he
reads: Societas Eruditorum and Ignoti et quasi occulti.
"Ignoti et ... what the fuck does that mean?" he asks.
"Hidden and unknown more or less," says the man. He's got a weird
accent, sort of Australian, sort of German. He checks out Shaftoe's insignia
in turn. "What's a Marine Raider? Some kind of new outfit?"
"Like a Marine, only more so," Shaftoe says. Which might sound like
bravado. Indeed it partly is. But this comment is as heavy laden with irony
as Shaftoe's clothes are with sand, because at this particular moment in
history, a Marine isn't just a tough s.o.b. He is a tough S.O.B. stuck out
in the middle of nowhere (Guadalcanal) with no food or weapons (owing, as
every Marine can tell you, to a sinister conspiracy between General
MacArthur and the Nips) totally making everything up as he goes along,
improvising weapons from found objects, addled, half the time, by disease
and the drugs supplied to keep diseases at bay. And in every one of those
senses, a Marine Raider is (as Shaftoe says) like a Marine, only more so.
"Are you some kind of commando or something?" Shaftoe asks,
interrupting Red as he is mumbling.
"No. I live on the mountain."
"Oh, yeah? What do you do up there, Red?"
"I watch. And talk on the radio, in code." Then he goes back to
mumbling.
"Who you talkin' to, Red?"
"Do you mean, just now in Latin, or on the radio in code?"
"Both I reckon."
"On the radio in code, I talk to the good guys.
"Who are the good guys?"
"Long story. If you live, maybe I'll introduce you to some of them,"
says Red.
"How about just now in Latin?"
"Talking to God," Red says. "Last rites, in case you don't live."
This makes him think of the others. He remembers why he made that
insane decision to stand up in the first place. "Hey! Hey!" He tries to sit
up, and finding that impossible, twists around. "Those bastards are looting
the corpses!"
His eyes aren't focusing and he has to rub sand out of the one.
Actually, they are focusing just fine. What looked like steel drums
strewn around the beach turn out to be steel drums strewn around the beach.
The natives are pawing them out of the sucking sand, digging with their
hands like dogs, rolling them up the beach and into the jungle.
Shaftoe blacks out.
When he wakes up there's a row of crosses on the beach sticks lashed
together with vines, draped with jungle flowers. Red is pounding them in
with the butt of his rifle. All the steel drums, and most of the natives,
are gone. Shaftoe needs morphine. He says as much to Red.
"If you think you need it now," Red says, "just wait." He tosses his
rifle to a native, strides up to Shaftoe, and heaves him up over his
shoulders in a fireman's carry. Shaftoe screams. A couple of Zeroes fly
overhead, as they stride into the jungle. "My name is Enoch Root," says Red,
"but you can call me Brother."
Chapter 10 GALLEON
One morning, Randy Waterhouse rises early, takes a long hot shower,
plants himself before the mirror of his Manila Hotel suite, and shaves his
face bloody. He was thinking of farming this work out to a specialist: the
barber in the hotel's lobby. But this is the first time Randy's face will be
visible in ten years, and Randy wants to be the first person to see it. His
heart actually thumps, partly out of primal brute fear of the knife, and
partly from the sheer anticipation. It is like the scene in corny old movies
where the bandages are finally taken off of the patient's face, and a mirror
proffered.
The effect is, first of all, intense deja vu, as if the last ten years
of his life were but a dream, and he now has them to live over again.
Then he begins to notice subtle ways in which his face has been
changing since it was last exposed to air and light. He is mildly astonished
to find that these changes are not entirely bad. Randy has never thought of
himself as especially good looking, and has never especially cared. But the
blood spotted visage in the mirror is, arguably, better looking than the one
that faded into the deepening shade of stubble a decade ago. It looks like a
grownup's face.
***
It has been a week since he and Avi laid out the entire plan for the
high officials of the PTA: the Post and Telecoms Authority. PTA is a generic
term that telecom businessmen slap, like a yellow stickynote, onto what ever
government department handles these matters in whatever country they happen
to be visiting this week. In the Philippines, it is actually called
something else.
Americans brought, or at least accompanied, the Philippines into the
twentieth century and erected the apparatus of its central government.
Intramuros, the dead heart of Manila, is surrounded by a loose ring of giant
neoclassical buildings, very much after the fashion of the District of
Columbia, housing various parts of that apparatus. The PTA is headquartered
in one of those buildings, just south of the Pasig.
Randy and Avi get there early because Randy, accustomed to Manila
traffic, insists that they budget a full hour to cover the one– or two
mile taxi ride from the hotel. But traffic is perversely light and they end
up with a full twenty minutes to kill. They stroll around the side of the
building and up onto the green levee. Avi draws a bead on the Epiphyte Corp.
building, just to reassure himself that their line of sight is clear. Randy
is already satisfied of this, and just stands there with arms crossed,
looking at the river. It is choked, bank to bank, with floating debris: some
plant material but mostly old mattresses, cushions, pieces of plastic
litter, hunks of foam, and, most of all, plastic shopping bags in various
bright colors. The river has the consistency of vomit.
Avi wrinkles his nose. "What's that?"
Randy sniffs the air and smells, among everything else, burnt plastic.
He gestures downstream. "Squatter camp on the other side of Fort Santiago, '
he explains. "They sieve plastic out of the river and burn it for fuel."
"I was in Mexico a couple of weeks ago," Avi says. "They have plastic
forests there!"
"What does that mean?"
"Downwind of the city, the trees sort of comb the plastic shopping bags
out of the air. They get totally covered with them. The trees die because
light and air can't get through to the leaves. But they remain standing,
totally encased in fluttering, ragged plastic, all different colors."
Randy shrugs his blazer off, rolls up his sleeves; Avi does not seem to
notice the heat. "So that's Fort Santiago," Avi says, and starts walking
towards it.
"You've heard of it?" Randy asks, following him, and heaving a sigh.
The air is so hot that when it comes out of your lungs it has actually
cooled down by several degrees.
"It's mentioned in the video," Avi says, holding up a videotape
cassette and wiggling it.
"Oh, yeah."
Soon they are standing before the fort's entrance, which is flanked by
carvings of a pair of guards cut into the foamy volcanic tuff: halberd
brandishing Spaniards in blousy pants and conquistador helmets. They have
been standing here for close to half a millennium, and a hundred thousand
tropical thundershowers have streamed down their bodies and polished them
smooth.
Avi is working on a much shorter time horizon he has eyes only for the
bullet craters that have disfigured these soldiers far worse than time and
water. He puts his hands in them, like doubting Thomas. Then he steps back
and begins to mutter in Hebrew. Two ponytailed German tourists stroll
through the gate in rustic sandals.
"We have five minutes," Randy says.
"Okay, let's come back here later."
***
Charlene wasn't totally wrong. Blood seeps out of tiny, invisible
painless cuts on Randy's face and neck for ten or fifteen minutes after he
has shaved. Moments ago, that blood was accelerating through his ventricles,
or seeping through the parts of his brain that make him a conscious entity.
Now the same stuff is exposed to the air; he can reach up and wipe it off.
The boundary between Randy and his environment has been annihilated.
He gets out a big tube of heavy waterproof sunblock and greases his
face, neck, arms, and the small patch of scalp on the top of his head where
the hair is getting thin. Then he pulls on khakis, boat shoes, and a loose
cotton shirt, and a beltpack containing his GPS receiver and a couple of
other essentials like a wad of toilet paper and a disposable camera. He
drops his key off at the front desk, and the employees all do double takes
and grin. The bellhops seem particularly delighted by his makeover. Or
perhaps it is just that he is wearing leather shoes for once: topsiders,
which he's always thought of as the mark of effete preppies, but which are
actually a reasonable thing for him to wear today. Bellhops make ready to
haul the front door open, but instead, Randy cuts across the lobby towards
the back of the hotel, skirts the swimming pool, and walks through a line of
palm trees to a stone railing along the top of a seawall. Below him is the
hotel's dock, which sticks out into a small cove that opens onto Manila Bay.
His ride isn't here yet, so he stands at the railing for a minute. One
side of the cove is accessible from Rizal Park. A few gnarly Filipino
squatter types are lazing on the benches, staring back at him. Down below
the breakwater, a middle aged man, wearing only boxer shorts, stands in knee
deep water with a pointed stick, staring with feline intensity into the
lapping water. A black helicopter makes slow, banking circles against a
sugar white sky. It is a Vietnam vintage Huey, a wappity wap kind of chopper
that also makes a fierce reptilian hissing noise as it slithers overhead.
A boat materializes from the steam rising off the bay, cuts its
engines, and coasts into the cove, shoving a bow wave in front of it, like a
wrinkle in a heavy rug. A tall, slender woman is poised on the prow like a
living figurehead, holding a coil of heavy rope.
***
The big satellite dishes on the roof of the PTA's building are pointed
almost straight up, like birdbaths, because Manila is so close to the
equator. On its stone walls, spackle is coming loose from the bullet and
shrapnel craters into which it was troweled after the war. Window air
conditioners centered in the building's Roman arches drip water onto the
limestone balusters below, gradually melting them away. The limestone is
blackened with some kind of organic slime, and pitted by the root systems of
little plants that have taken root in them probably grown from seeds
conveyed in the shit of the birds that congregate there to bathe and drink,
the squatters of the aerial realm.
In a paneled conference room, a dozen people are waiting, equally
divided between table sitting big wheels and wall crawling minions. As Randy
and Avi enter a great flurry of hand shaking and card presenting ensues,
though most of the introductions zoom through Randy's short term memory like
a supersonic fighter blowing past shoddy Third World air defense systems. He
is left only with a stack of business cards. He deals them out on his patch
of table like a senescent codger playing Klondike on his meal tray. Avi, of
course, knows all of these people already seems to be on a first name basis
with most of them, knows their children's names and ages, their hobbies,
their blood types, chronic medical conditions, what books they are reading,
whose parties they have been going to. All of them are evidently delighted
by this, and all of them, thank god, completely ignore Randy.
Of the half dozen important people in the room, three are middle aged
Filipino men. One of these is a high ranking official in the PTA. The second
is the president of an upstart telecommunications company called FiliTel,
which is trying to compete against the traditional monopoly. The third is
the vice president of a company called 24 Jam that runs about half of the
convenience stores in the Philippines, as well as quite a few in Malaysia.
Randy has trouble telling these men apart, but by watching them converse
with Avi, and by using inductive logic, he is soon able to match business
card with face.
The other three are easy: two Americans and one Nipponese, and one of
the Americans is a woman. She is wearing lavender pumps color coordinated
with a neat little skirt suit, and matching nails. She looks as if she might
have stepped straight off the set of an infomercial for fake fingernails or
home permanents. Her card identifies her as Mary Ann Carson, and claims that
she is a V.P. with AVCLA, Asia Venture Capital Los Angeles, which Randy
knows dimly as a Los Angeles based firm that invests in Rapidly Developing
Asian Economies. The American man is blond and has a hard jawed quasi
military look about him. He seems alert, disciplined, impassive, which
Charlene's crowd would interpret as hostility born of repression born of
profound underlying mental disorder. He represents the Subic Bay Free Port.
The Nipponese man is the executive vice president of a subsidiary of a
ridiculously colossal consumer electronics company. He is about six feet
tall. He has a small body and a large head shaped like an upside down Bosc
pear, thick hair edged with gray, and wire rimmed glasses. He smiles
frequently, and projects the serene confidence of a man who has memorized a
two thousand page encyclopedia of business etiquette.
Avi wastes little time in starting the videotape, which at the moment
represents about seventy five percent of Epiphyte Corp.'s assets. Avi had it
produced by a hot multimedia startup in San Francisco, and the contract to
produce it accounted for one hundred percent of the startup's revenue this
year. "Pies crumble when you slice them too thin," Avi likes to say.
It starts with footage pilfered from a forgotten made for TV movie of a
Spanish galleon making headway through heavy seas. Superimpose title: SOUTH
CHINA SEA A.D. 1699. The soundtrack has been beefed up and Dolbyized from
its original monaural version. It is quite impressive.
("Half of the investors in AVCLA are into yachting," Avi explained.)
Cut to a shot (produced by the multimedia company, and seamlessly
spliced in) of a mangy, exhausted lookout in a crow's nest, peering through
a brass spyglass, hollering the Spanish equivalent of "Land ho!"
Cut to the galleon's captain, a rugged, bearded character, emerging
from his cabin to stare with Keatsian wild surmise at the horizon.
"Corregidor!" he exclaims.
Cut to a stone tower on the crown of a green tropical island, where a
lookout is sighting the (digitally inserted) galleon on the horizon. The
lookout cups his hands around his mouth and bellows, in Spanish, "It is the
galleon! Light the signal fire!"
("The family of the guy who runs the PTA is really into local history,"
Avi said, "they run the Museum of the Philippines.")
With a lusty cheer, Spaniards (actually, Mexican American actors) in
conquistador helmets plunge firebrands into a huge pile of dry wood which
evolves into a screaming pyramid of flame powerful enough to flash roast an
ox.
Cut to the battlements of Manila's Fort Santiago (foreground: carved
styrofoam; background: digitally generated landscape), where another
conquistador spies a light flaring up on the horizon. "Mira! El galleon!" he
cries.
Cut to a series of shots of Manila townsfolk rushing to the seawall to
adore the signal fire, including an Augustinian monk who clasps his rosary
strewn hands and bursts into clerical Latin on the spot ("the family that
runs FiliTel endowed a chapel at Manila Cathedral") as well as a clean cut
family of Chinese merchants unloading bales of silk from a junk ("24 Jam,
the convenience store chain, is run by Chinese mestizos").
A voiceover begins, deep and authoritative, English with a Filipino
accent ("The actor is the brother of the godfather of the grandson of the
man who runs the PTA"). Subtitles appear on the bottom of the screen in
Tagalog ("the PTA people have a heavy political commitment to the native
language").
"In the heyday of the Spanish Empire, the most important event of the
year was the arrival of the galleon from Acapulco, laden with silver from
the rich mines of America silver to buy the silks and spices of Asia, silver
that made the Philippines into the economic fountainhead of Asia. The
approach of the galleon was heralded by a beacon of light from the island of
Corregidor, at the entrance of Manila Bay."
Cut (finally!) from the beaming, greed lit faces of the Manila
townsfolk to a 3 D graphics rendering of Manila Bay, the Bata'an Peninsula,
and the small islands off the tip of Bata'an, including Corregidor. The
point of view swoops and zooms in on Corregidor where a hokily, badly
rendered fire blazes up. A beam of yellow light, like a phaser blast in Star
Trek, shoots across the bay. Our point of view follows it. It splashes
against the walls of Fort Santiago.
The signal fire was an ancient and simple technology. In the language
of modern science, its light was a form of electromagnetic radiation,
propagating in a straight line across Manila Bay, and carrying a single bit
of information. But, in an age starved for information, that single bit
meant everything to the people of Manila."
Cue that funky music. Cut to shots of teeming modern Manila. Shopping
malls and luxury hotels in Makati. Electronics factories, school children
sitting in front of computer screens. Satellite dishes. Ships unloading at
the big free port of Subic Bay. Lots and lots of grinning and thumbs up
gestures.
"The Philippines of today is an emerging economic dynamo. As its
economy grows, so does its hunger for information not single bits, but
hundreds of billions of them. But the technology for transmitting that
information has not changed as much as you might imagine."
Back to the 3 D rendering of Manila Bay. This time, instead of a
bonfire on Corregidor, there's a microwave horn up on a tower on the isle's
summit, gunning electric blue sine waves at the sprawl of Metro Manila.
"Electromagnetic radiation in this case, microwave beams propagating in
straight lines, over line of sight routes, can transmit vast quantities of
information quickly. Modern cryptographic technology makes the signal safe
from would be eavesdroppers."
Cut back to the galleon and lookout footage. "In the old days,
Corregidor's position at the entrance of Manila Bay made it a natural look
out a place where information about approaching ships could be gathered."
Cut to a shot of a barge in a cove somewhere, feeding thick tarry cable
overboard, divers at work with queues of round orange buoys. "Today,
Corregidor's geographical situation makes it an ideal place to land deep sea
fiberoptic cables. The information coming down these cables from Taiwan,
Hong Kong, Malaysia, Nippon, and the United States can from there be
transmitted directly into the heart of Manila. At the speed of light! "
More 3 D graphics. This time, it's a detailed rendering of the
cityscape of Manila. Randy knows it by heart because he gathered the data
for the damn thing by walking around town with his GPS receiver. The beam of
bits from Corregidor comes straight in off the bay and scores a bullseye on
the rooftop antenna of a nondescript four story office building between Fort
Santiago and the Manila Cathedral. It is Epiphyte's building, and the
antenna is discreetly labeled with the name and logo of Epiphyte Corp. Other
antennas then retransmit information to the PTA building and to other nearby
sites: skyscrapers in Makati, government offices in Quezon City, and an Air
Force base south of town.
***
Hotel staff throw a carpeted gangway across the gap between seawall and
boat. As Randy is walking across it, the woman extends her hand to him. He
reaches out to shake it. "Randy Waterhouse," he says.
She grabs his hand and pulls him on board not so much greeting him as
making sure he doesn't fall overboard. "Hi. Amy Shaftoe," she says. "Welcome
to Glory. "
"Pardon me?"
" Glory. The name of this junk is Glory ," she says. She speaks
forthrightly and with great clarity, as though communicating over a noisy
two way radio. "Actually, it's Glory IV," she continues. Her accent is
largely Midwestern, with a trace of Southern twang, and a little bit of
Filipino, too. If you saw her on the streets of some Midwestern town you
might not notice the traces of Asian ancestry around her eyes. She has dark
brown hair, sun streaked, just long enough to form a secure ponytail, no
longer.
"'Scuse me a sec," she says, pokes her head into the pilot house, and
speaks to the pilot in a mixture of Tagalog and English. The pilot nods,
looks around, and begins to manipulate the controls. The hotel staff pull
the gangway back. "Hey," Amy says quietly, and underhands a pack of
Marlboros across the gap to each one of them. They snatch them out of the
air, grin, and thank her. Glory IV begins to back away from the dock.
Amy spends the next few minutes walking around the deck, going through
some kind of mental checklist. Randy counts four men in addition to Amy and
the pilot two Caucasians and two Filipinos. All of them are fiddling around
with engines or diving gear in a way Randy recognizes, through many cultural
and technological barriers, as debugging. Amy walks past Randy a couple of
times, but avoids looking him in the eye. She's not a shy person. Her body
language is eloquent enough: "I am aware that men are in the habit of
looking at whatever women happen to be nearby, in the hopes of deriving
enjoyment from their physical beauty, their hair, makeup, fragrance, and
clothing. I will ignore this, politely and patiently, until you get over
it." Amy is a long limbed girl in paint stained jeans, a sleeveless t shirt,
and high tech sandals, and she lopes easily around the boat. Finally she
approaches him, meeting his eyes for just a second and then glancing away as
if bored.
"Thanks for giving me the ride," Randy says.
''It's nothing,'' she says.
"I feel embarrassed that I didn't tip the guys at the dock. Can I
reimburse you?"
"You can reimburse me with information," she says without hesitation.
Amy reaches up with one hand to rub the back of her neck. Her elbow pokes up
in the air. He notices about a month's growth of hair in her armpit, then
glimpses the corner of a tattoo poking out from under her shirt. "You're in
the information business, right?" She watches his face, hoping that he'll
take the cue and laugh, or at least grin. But he's too preoccupied to catch
it. She glances away, now with a knowing, sardonic look on her face you
don't understand me, Randy, which is absolutely typical, and I'm fine with
that. She reminds Randy of level headed blue collar lesbians he has known,
drywall hanging urban dykes with cats and cross country ski racks.
She takes him into an air conditioned cabin with a lot of windows and a
coffee maker. It has fake wood veneer paneling like a suburban basement, and
framed exhibits on the walls official documents like licenses and
registrations, and enlarged black and white photographs of people and boats.
It smells like coffee, soap, and oil. There is a boom box held down with
bungee cords, and a shoebox with a couple of dozen CDs in it, mostly albums
by American woman singer songwriters of the offbeat, misunderstood, highly
intelligent but intensely emotional school, getting rich selling music to
consumers who understand what it's like not to be understood (1).
Amy pours two mugs of coffee and sets them down on the cabin's bolted down
table, then fishes in the tight pockets of her jeans, pulls out a waterproof
nylon wallet, extracts two business cards, and shoots them across the table,
one after the other, to Randy. She seems to enjoy doing this a small,
private smile comes onto her lips and then vanishes the moment Randy sees
it. The cards bear the logo of Semper Marine Services and the name America
Shaftoe.
"Your name's America?" Randy asks.
Amy looks out the window, bored, afraid he's going to make a big deal
out of it. "Yeah," she says.
"Where'd you grow up?"
She seems to be fascinated by the view out the window: big cargo ships
strewn around Manila Bay as far as the eye can see, ships hailing from
Athens, Shanghai, Vladivostok, Cape Town, Monrovia. Randy infers that
looking at big rusty boats is more interesting than talking to Randy.
"So, would you mind telling me what's going on?" she asks. She turns to
face him, lifts the mug to her lips, and finally, looks him straight in the
eye.
Randy's a little nonplussed. The question is basically impertinent
coming from America Shaftoe. Her company, Semper Marine Services, is a
contractor at the very lowest level of Avi's virtual corporation only one of
a dozen boats and divers outfits that they could have hired so this is a bit
like being interrogated by one's janitor or taxi driver.
But she's smart and unusual, and, precisely because of all her efforts
not to be, she's cute. As an interesting female, and a fellow American, she
is pulling rank, demanding to be accorded a higher status. Randy tries to be
careful.
"Is there something bothering you?" he asks.
She looks away. She's afraid she's given him the wrong impression. "Not
in particular," she says, "I'm just nosy. I like to hear stories. Divers
always sit around and tell each other stories."
Randy sips his coffee. America continues, "In this business, you never
know where your next job is going to come from. Some people have really
weird reasons for wanting to get stuff done underwater, which I like to
hear." She concludes, "It's fun!" which is clearly all the motivation she
needs.
Randy views all of the above as a fairly professional bullshitting job.
He decides to give Amy press release material only. "All the Filipinos are
in Manila. That's where the information needs to go. It is somewhat awkward,
getting information to Manila, because it has mountains in back of it and
Manila Bay in front. The bay is a nightmare place to run submarine cables "
She's nodding. Of course she would know this already. Randy hits the
fast forward. "Corregidor's a pretty good place. From Corregidor you can
shoot a line of sight microwave transmission across the bay to downtown
Manila."
"So you are extending the North Luzon coastal festoon from Subic Bay
down to Corregidor," she says.
"Uh two things about what you just said," Randy says, and pauses for a
moment to get the answer queued up in his output buffer. "One, you have to
be careful about your pronouns what do you mean wh