ts to touch it. He shakes his hand to bring
circulation back, then grasps the thing, yanks it out briskly, and throws it
down on the altar. It bounces once, twice in a seesawing motion, and rings
piercingly as it does the closest thing to a musical sound that has shaken
the air of this chapel in many centuries. It shines gaudily under the
electric lights they have set up around the chancel. The glittering light
catches the eye of Waterhouse, who has been living on grey and cloudy Qwghlm
for weeks, wearing and sleeping in things that are black or khaki or olive
drab. He is mesmerized by this thing, simply because of its brightness and
beauty against the dull and rude basalt, even before his mind identifies it
as a bar of solid gold.
It makes a heck of a paperweight, which is a good thing, because the
chapel is nothing if not drafty, and the important contents of the safe
consist of onionskin pages that fly away in the tiniest breeze. The pages
are ruled with faint horizontal and vertical lines, dividing each one into a
grid, and the grids are filled in with hand printed letters in groups of
five.
"Well, look what you found!" says a quiet voice. Waterhouse looks up
into the unsettlingly calm and placid gaze of Enoch Root.
"Yes. Encrypted messages," Waterhouse says. "Non Enigma."
"No," Root says. "I was referring to the Root of All Evil, here." He
tries to pick up the gold bar, but his fingers merely slip off of it. He
gets a firmer grip and hefts it up off the altar. Something about it catches
his eye, and he turns to bring it under one of the electric lights, frowning
at it with the critical intensity of a diamond cutter.
"It's got Hanzi characters stamped on it," Root says.
"Beg pardon?"
"Chinese or Japanese. No, Chinese there's the chop of a bank in
Shanghai. And here are some figures the fineness and the serial number."
Showing unexpected familiarity with such matters for a missionary priest.
Until this point, the gold bar has signified nothing to Waterhouse it's
just a bulk sample of a chemical element, like a lead weight or a flask of
mercury. But the fact that it might convey information is quite interesting.
He absolutely has to stand up and go look at it. Root is correct: the bar
has been neatly marked with small Oriental characters, applied with a stamp.
The tiny facets of the ideograms glitter under the light, sparks jumping the
gap between the two halves of the Axis.
Root sets the gold bar down on the altar. He saunters over to a table
where they keep stationery, and pulls out a sheet of onionskin and a fresh
pencil. Returning to the altar, he lays the frail page over the top of the
gold bar, then rubs the side of the pencil lead back and forth over it,
turning it all black except for where the stamped numbers and characters are
underneath. Within a few moments he has a perfect little rubbing, showing
the inscription in full detail. He folds the page up and pockets it, then
returns the pencil to the table.
Waterhouse has long since gone back to his examination of the pages
from the safe. The numbers are all written in the same hand. Now, since they
dredged all manner of other paperwork out of the sewage sloshing through the
U boat skipper's cabin, Waterhouse can recognize the captain's hand easily
enough; these sheets were written by someone else.
The format of the messages makes it clear that they were not encrypted
with an Enigma machine. Enigma messages always begin with two groups of
three letters each, which tell the receiving clerk how to set the wheels on
his machine. Those groups are missing on all of these sheets, so some other
cipher system must have been used. Like every other modern nation, the
Germans have a plethora of different cipher systems, some based on books and
some on machines. Bletchley Park has broken most of them.
Still, it looks like an interesting exercise. Now that the rest of
Detachment 2702 has arrived, making further trysts with Margaret
impractical, Waterhouse has nothing to look forward to. Trying to crack the
code used on these sheets will be a perfect puzzle to fill the gaping void
that opened up as soon as Waterhouse broke the combination of the safe. He
steals some paper of his own, sits down at the desk, and busies himself for
an hour or two copying out the ciphertext from the skipper's pages,
double– and triple checking each code group to make sure he's got an
accurate copy.
On the one hand, this is a pain in the ass. On the other, it gives him
a chance to go through the ciphertext by hand, at the very lowest level,
which might be useful later. The ineffable talent for finding patterns in
chaos cannot do its thing unless he immerses himself in the chaos first. If
they do contain patterns, he does not see them just now, in any rational
way. But there may be some subrational part of his mind that can go to work,
now that the letters have passed before his eyes and through his pencil, and
that may suddenly present him with a gift wrapped clue or even a full
solution a few weeks from now while he is shaving or antenna twiddling.
He has been dimly aware, for a while, that Chattan and the others are
awake now. Enlisted men are not allowed into the chancel, but the officers
get to gather round and admire the gold bar.
"Breaking the code, Waterhouse?" Chattan says, ambling over to the
desk, warming his hands with a mug of coffee.
"Making a clean copy," Waterhouse says, and then, because he is not
without a certain cunning, adds: "in case the originals are destroyed in
transit."
"Very prudent," Chattan nods. "Say, you didn't hide a second gold bar
anywhere, did you?"
Waterhouse has been in the military long enough that he does not rise
to the bait. "The pattern of sounds made when we tilted the safe back and
forth indicated that there was only a single heavy object inside, sir."
Chattan chuckles and takes a sip of his coffee. "I shall be interested
to see whether you can break that cipher, Lieutenant Waterhouse. I am
tempted to put money on it."
"I sure appreciate that, but it would be a lousy bet, sir," Waterhouse
replied. "The chances are very good that Bletchley Park has already broken
this cipher, whatever it may be."
"What makes you say that?" Chattan asks absently.
The question is so silly, coming from a man in Chattan's position, that
it leaves Waterhouse disoriented. "Sir, Bletchley Park has broken nearly all
of the German military and governmental codes."
Chattan makes a face of mock disappointment. "Waterhouse! How
unscientific. You are making assumptions."
Waterhouse thinks back and tries to work out the meaning of this. "You
think that this cipher might not be German? Or that it might not be military
or governmental?"
"I am merely cautioning you against making assumptions," Chattan says.
Waterhouse is still thinking this one over as they are approached by
Lieutenant Robson, the commanding officer of the SAS squad. "Sir," he says,
"for the benefit of the fellows down in London, we would like to know the
combination."
"The combination?" Waterhouse asks blankly. This word, devoid of
context, could mean almost anything.
"Yes, sir," Robson says precisely. "To the safe."
"Oh!" Waterhouse says. He is faintly irritated that they would ask him
this question. There seems little point in writing down the combination when
the equipment needed to break into the safe is sitting right there. It is
much more important to have a safe breaking algorithm than to have one
particular solution to a safe breaking problem. "I don't know," he says. "I
forgot."
"You forgot?" Chattan says. He says it on behalf of Robson who appears
to be violently biting his tongue. "Did you perhaps write it down before you
forgot it?"
"No," Waterhouse says. "But I remember that it consists entirely of
prime numbers."
"Well! That narrows it down!" Chattan says cheerfully. Robson does not
seem mollified, though.
"And there are five numbers in all, which is interesting since "
"Since five is itself a prime number!" Chattan says. Once again,
Waterhouse is pleased to see his commanding officer displaying signs of a
tasteful and expensive education.
"Very well," Robson announces through clenched teeth. "I shall inform
the recipients."
Chapter 36 SULTAN
The Grand Wazir of Kinakuta leads them into the offices of his boss,
the sultan, and leaves them alone for a few minutes at one corner of the
conference table, to build which a whole species of tropical hardwoods had
to be extinguished. After that, it is a race among the founders of Epiphyte
Corp. to see who can blurt out the first witticism about the size of the
sultan's home office deduction. They are in the New Palace, three arms of
which wrap around the exotic gardens of the ancient and magnificent Old
Palace. This meeting room has a ten meter high ceiling. The walls facing
onto the garden are made entirely of glass, so the effect is like looking
into a terrarium that contains a model of a sultan's palace. Randy has never
known much about architecture, and his vocabulary fails him abjectly. The
best he could say is that it's sort of like a cross between the Taj Mahal
and Angkor Wat.
To get here, they had to drive down a long boulevard of palm trees,
enter a huge vaulted marble entrance hall, submit to metal detection and
frisking, sit in an anteroom for a while sipping tea, take their shoes off,
have warm rose water poured over their hands by a turbaned servant wielding
an ornate ewer, and then walk across about half a mile of polished marble
and oriental carpets. As soon as the door wafts shut behind the grand
wazir's ass, Avi says, "I smell a con job."
"A con job?" Randy scoffs. "What, you think this is a rear screen
projection? You think this table is made of Formica?"
"It's all real," Avi admits sourly. "But whenever someone gives you the
treatment like this, it's because they're trying to impress you."
"I'm impressed," Randy says. "I admit it. I'm impressed."
"That's just a euphemism for, 'I'm about to do something moronic,'" Avi
says.
"What are we going to do? This isn't the kind of meeting where anything
actually gets done, is it?"
"If you mean, are we going to sign contracts, is money going to change
hands, then no, nothing is going to get done. But plenty is going to
happen."
The door opens again and the grand wazir leads a group of Nipponese men
into the room. Avi lowers his voice. "Just remember that, at the end of the
day, we're back in the hotel, and the sultan is still here, and all of this
is just a memory to us. The fact that the sultan has a big garden has no
relevance to anything."
Randy starts to get irked: this is so obvious it's insulting to mention
it. But part of the reason he's irked is because he knows Avi saw right
through him. Avi's always telling him not to be romantic. But he wouldn't be
here, doing this, if not for the romance.
Which leads to the question: why is Avi doing it? Maybe he has some
romantic delusions of his own, carefully concealed. Maybe that's why he can
see through Randy so damn well. Maybe Avi is cautioning himself as much as
he is the other members of Epiphyte Corp.
Actually this new group is not Nipponese, but Chinese probably from
Taiwan. The grand wazir shows them their assigned seats, which are far
enough away that they could exchange sporadic gunfire with Epiphyte Corp.
but not converse without the aid of bullhorns. They spend a minute or so
pretending to give a shit about the gardens and the Old Palace. Then, a
compact, powerfully built man in his fifties pivots towards Epiphyte Corp.
and strides over to them, dragging out a skein of aides. Randy's reminded of
a computer simulation he saw once of a black hole passing through a galaxy,
entraining a retinue of stars. Randy recognizes the man's face vaguely: it
has been printed in business journals more than once, but not often enough
for Randy to remember his name.
If Randy were something other than a hacker, he'd have to step forward
now and deal with protocol issues. He'd be stressed out and hating it. But,
thank god, all that shit devolves automatically on Avi, who steps up to meet
this Taiwanese guy. They shake hands and go through the rote exchange of
business cards. But the Chinese guy is looking straight through Avi,
checking out the other Epiphyte people. Finding Randy wanting, he moves on
to Eberhard Föhr. "Which one is Cantrell?" he says.
John's leaning against the window, probably trying to figure out what
parametric equation generated the petals on that eight foot tall,
carnivorous plant. He turns around to be introduced. "John Cantrell."
"Harvard Li. Didn't you get my e mail?"
Harvard Li! Now Randy is starting to remember this guy. Founder of
Harvard Computer Company, a medium sized PC clone manufacturer in Taiwan.
John grins. "I received about twenty e mail messages from an unknown
person claiming to be Harvard Li."
"Those were from me! I do not understand what you mean that I am an
unknown person." Harvard Li is extremely brisk, but not exactly pissed off.
He is, Randy realizes, not the kind of man who has to coach himself not to
be romantic before a meeting.
"I hate e mail," John says.
Harvard Li stares him in the eye for a while. "'What do you mean?"
"The concept is good. The execution is poor. People don't observe any
security precautions. A message arrives claiming to be from Harvard Li, they
believe it's really from Harvard Li. But this message is just a pattern of
magnetized spots on a spinning disk somewhere. Anyone could forge it."
"Ah. You use digital signature algorithm."
John considers this carefully. "I do not respond to any e mail that is
not digitally signed. Digital signature algorithm refers to one technique
for signing them. It is a good technique, but it could be better."
Harvard Li begins nodding about halfway through this, acknowledging the
point. "Is there a structural problem? Or are you concerned by the five
hundred and twelve bit key length? Would it be acceptable with a one
thousand twenty four bit key?"
About three sentences later, the conversation between Cantrell and Li
soars over the horizon of Randy's cryptographic knowledge, and his brain
shuts down. Harvard Li is a crypto maniac! He has been studying this shit
personally not just paying minions to read the books and send him notes, but
personally going over the equations, doing the math.
Tom Howard is grinning broadly. Eberhard is looking about as amused as
he ever gets, and Beryl's biting back a grin. Randy is trying desperately to
get the joke. Avi notes the confusion on Randy's face, turns his back to the
Taiwanese, and rubs his thumb and fingers together: money.
Oh, yeah. It had to be something to do with that.
Harvard Li cranked out a few million PC clones in the early nineties
and loaded them all with Windows, Word, and Excel but somehow forgot to
write any checks to Microsoft. About a year ago, Microsoft kicked his ass in
court and won a huge judgment. Harvard claimed bankruptcy: he doesn't have a
penny to his name. Microsoft has been trying to prove he still has the odd
billion or two salted away.
Harvard Li has clearly been thinking very hard about how to put money
where guys like Microsoft can't get it. There are many time honored ways:
the Swiss bank account, the false front corporation, the big real estate
project in deepest, darkest China, bars of gold in a vault somewhere. Those
tricks might work with the average government, but Microsoft is ten times
smarter, a hundred times more aggressive, and bound by no particular rules.
It gives Randy a little frisson just to imagine Harvard Li's situation:
being chased across the planet by Microsoft's state of the art hellhounds.
Harvard Li needs electronic cash. Not the lame stuff that people use to
buy t shirts on the Web without giving away their credit card numbers. He
needs the full on badass kind, based on hard crypto, rooted in an offshore
data haven, and he needs it bad. So nothing's more logical than that he is
sending lots of e mail to John Cantrell.
Tom Howard sidles up to him. "The question is, is it just Harvard Li,
or does he think he's discovered a new market?"
"Probably both," Randy guesses. "He probably knows a few other people
who'd like to have a private bank."
"The missiles," Tom says.
"Yeah." China's been taking potshots at Taiwan with ballistic missiles
lately, sort of like a Wild West villain shooting at the good guy's feet to
make him dance. "There have been bank runs in Taipei."
"In a way," Tom says, "these guys are tons smarter than us, because
they've never had a currency they could depend on." He and Randy look over
at John Cantrell, who has crossed his arms over his chest and is unloading a
disquisition on the Euler totient function while Harvard Li nods intently
and his nerd de camp frantically scrawls notes on a legal pad. Avi stands
far to one side, staring at the Old Palace, as in his mind the ramifications
of this bloom and sprawl and twine about each other like a tropical garden
run riot.
Other delegations file into the room behind the grand wazir and stake
out chunks of the conference table's coastline. The Dentist comes in with
his Norns or Furies or Hygienists or whatever the hell they are. There's a
group of white guys talking in Down Underish accents. Other than that, they
are all Asians. Some of them talk amongst themselves and some pull on their
chins and watch the conversation between Harvard Li and John Cantrell. Randy
watches them in turn: Bad Suit Asians and Good Suit Asians. The former have
grizzled buzz cuts and nicotine tanned skin and look like killers. They are
wearing bad suits, not because they can't afford good ones, but because they
don't give a shit. They are from China. The Good Suit Asians have high
maintenance haircuts, eyeglasses from Paris, clear skin, ready smiles. They
are mostly from Nippon.
"I want to exchange keys, right now, so we can e mail," Li says, and
gestures to an aide, who scurries to the edge of the table and unfolds a
laptop. "Something something Ordo," Li says in Cantonese. The aide points
and clicks.
Cantrell is gazing at the table expressionlessly. He squats down to
look under it. He strolls over and feels under the edge with his hand.
Randy bends and looks too. It's one of these high tech conference
tables with embedded power and communications lines, so that visitors can
plug in their laptops without having to string unsightly cables around and
fight over power outlets. The slab must be riddled with conduits. No visible
wires connect it to the world. The connections must run down hollow legs and
into a hollow floor. John grins, turns to Li, and shakes his head. "Normally
I'd say fine," he says, "but for a client with your level of security needs,
this is not an acceptable place to exchange keys."
"I'm not planning on using the phone," Li says, "we can exchange them
on floppies."
John knocks on wood. "Doesn't matter. Have one of your staff look into
the subject of Van Eck phreaking. That's with a 'p h,' not an 'f,' " he says
to the aide who's writing it down. Then, sensing Li's need for an executive
summary, he says, "They can read the internal state of your computer by
listening to the faint radio emissions coming out of the chips."
"Ahhhhh," Li says, and exchanges hugely significant looks with his
technical aides, as if this explains something that has been puzzling the
shit out of them.
Someone begins hollering wildly at the far end of the room not the end
by which the guests entered, but the other one. It is a chap in a getup
similar to, but not quite as ornate as, the grand wazir's. At some point he
switches to English the same dialect of English spoken by flight attendants
for foreign airlines, who have told passengers to insert the metal tongue
into the buckle so many times that it rushes out in one phlegmy garble.
Small Kinakutan men in good suits begin filing into the room. They take
seats across the head end of the table, which is wide enough for a Last
Supper tableau. In the Jesus position is a really big chair. It is the kind
of thing you'd get if you went to a Finnish designer with a shaved head,
rimless glasses, and twin Ph.D.s in semiotics and civil engineering, wrote
him a blank check, and asked him to design a throne. Behind is a separate
table for minions. All of it is backed up by tons of priceless artwork: an
eroded frieze, amputated from a jungle ruin somewhere.
All the guests gravitate instinctively towards their positions around
the table, and remain standing. The grand wazir glares at each one in turn.
A small man slips into the room, staring vacantly at the floor in front of
him, seemingly unaware that other people are present. His hair is lacquered
down to his skull, his appearance of portliness minimized by Savile Row
legerdemain. He eases into the big chair, which seems like a shocking
violation of etiquette until Randy realizes that this is the sultan.
Suddenly everyone is sitting down. Randy pulls his chair back and falls
into it. The leathery depths swallow his ass like a catcher's mitt accepting
a baseball. He's about to pull his laptop out of its bag, but in this
setting, both the nylon bag and the plastic computer have a strip mall
tawdriness. Besides, he has to resist this sophomoric tendency to take notes
all the time. Avi himself said that nothing was going to happen at this
meeting; all the important stuff is going to be subtextual. Besides, there
is the matter of Van Eck phreaking, which Cantrell probably mentioned just
to make Harvard Li paranoid, but which has Randy a bit rattled too. He opts
for a pad of graph paper the engineer's answer to the legal pad and a fine
point disposable pen.
The sultan has an Oxford English accent with traces of garlic and red
pepper still wedged in its teeth. He speaks for about fifteen minutes.
The room contains a few dozen living human bodies, each one a big sack
of guts and fluids so highly compressed that it will squirt for a few yards
when pierced. Each one is built around an armature of 206 bones connected to
each other by notoriously fault prone joints that are given to obnoxious
creaking, grinding, and popping noises when they are in other than pristine
condition. This structure is draped with throbbing steak, inflated with
clenching air sacks, and pierced by a Gordian sewer filled with burbling
acid and compressed gas and asquirt with vile enzymes and solvents produced
by the many dark, gamy nuggets of genetically programmed meat strung along
its length. Slugs of dissolving food are forced down this sloppy labyrinth
by serialized convulsions, decaying into gas, liquid, and solid matter which
must all be regularly vented to the outside world lest the owner go toxic
and drop dead. Spherical, gel packed cameras swivel in mucus greased ball
joints. Infinite phalanxes of cilia beat back invading particles,
encapsulate them in goo for later disposal. In each body a centrally located
muscle flails away at an eternal, circulating torrent of pressurized gravy.
And yet, despite all of this, not one of these bodies makes a single sound
at any time during the sultan's speech. It is a marvel that can only be
explained by the power of brain over body, and, in turn, by the power of
cultural conditioning over the brain.
Their host is trying to be appropriately sultanic: providing vision and
direction without getting sucked down into the quicksand of management. The
basic vision (or so it seems at first) is that Kinakuta has always been a
crossroads, a meeting place of cultures: the original Malays. Foote and his
dynasty of White Sultans. Filipinos with their Spanish, American and
Nipponese governors to the east. Muslims to the west. Anglos to the south.
Numerous Southeast Asian cultures to the north. Chinese everywhere as usual.
Nipponese whenever they are in one of their adventurous moods, and (for what
it's worth) the neolithic tribesmen who inhabit the interior of the island.
Hence nothing is more natural than that the present day Kinakutans
should run big fat optical fiber cables in every direction, patch into every
major national telco within reach, and become a sort of digital bazaar.
All of the guests nod soberly at the sultan's insight, his masterful
ability to meld the ancient ways of his country with modern technology.
But this is nothing more than a superficial analogy, the sultan
confesses. Everyone nods somewhat more vigorously than they did before:
indeed, everything that the sultan was just saying was, in fact, horseshit.
Several people jot down notes, lest they lose the Sultan's thread.
After all, the sultan says, physical location no longer matters in a
digitized, networked world. Cyberspace knows no boundaries.
Everyone nods vigorously except for, on the one hand, John Cantrell,
and, on the other, the grizzled Chinese guys.
But hey, the sultan continues, that's just dizzy headed cyber
cheerleading! What bullshit! Of course locations and boundaries matter!
At this point the room is plunged into dimness as the light pouring in
through the window wall is throttled by some kind of invisible mechanism
built into the glass: liquid crystal shutters or something. Screens descend
from slots cunningly hidden in the room's ceiling. This diversion saves the
cervical vertebrae of many guests, who are about to whiplash themselves by
nodding even more vigorously at the sultan's latest hairpin turn. Goddamn
it, does location matter in cyberspace or doesn't it? What's the bottom line
here? This isn't some Oxford debating society! Get to the point!
The sultan is whipping some graphics on them: a map of the world in one
of those politically correct projections that makes America and Europe look
like icebound reefs in the high Arctic. A pattern of straight lines is
superimposed on the map, each joining two major cities. The web of lines
gets denser and denser as the sultan talks, nearly obscuring the land
masses, and the oceans as well.
This, the sultan explains, is the conventional understanding of the
Internet: a decentralized web connecting each place with all the other
places, with no bottlenecks or, if you will, choke points.
But it's more bullshit! A new graphic comes up: same map, different
pattern of lines. Now we have webs within countries, sometimes within
continents. But between countries, and especially between continents, there
are only a few lines. It's not weblike at all.
Randy looks at Cantrell, who's nodding slyly.
"Many Net partisans are convinced that the Net is robust because its
lines of communication are spread evenly across the planet. In fact, as you
can see from this graphic, nearly all intercontinental Web traffic passes
through a small number of choke points. Typically these choke points are
controlled and monitored by local governments. Clearly, then, any Internet
application that wants to stand free of governmental interference is
undermined, from the very beginning, by a fundamental structure problem."
free of governmental interference. Randy can't believe he's hearing
this. If the sultan was a scruffy hacker talking to a room full of crypto
anarchists, that'd be one thing. But the sultan is a government, for god's
sake, and the room is full of card carrying Establishment types.
Like those Chinese buzz cuts! Who the hell are they? Don't try to tell
Randy those guys aren't part of the Chinese government, in some sense.
"Bottlenecks are only one of the structural barriers to the creation of
a free, sovereign, location independent cyberspace," the sultan continues
blithely.
Sovereign!?
"Another is the heterogeneous patchwork of laws, and indeed of legal
systems, that address privacy, free speech, and telecoms policy."
Another map graphic appears. Each country is colored, shaded, and
patterned according to a scheme of intimidating complexity. A half assed
stab at explaining it is made by a complex legend underneath. Instant
migraine. That, of course, is the whole point.
"The policy of any given legal system toward privacy issues is
typically the result of incremental changes made over centuries by courts
and legislative bodies," the sultan says. "With all due respect, very little
of it is relevant to modern privacy issues.
The lights come back on, sun waxes through the windows, the screens
disappear silently into the ceiling, and everyone's mildly surprised to see
that the sultan is on his feet. He is approaching a large and (of course)
ornate and expensive looking Go board covered with a complex pattern of
black and white stones. "Perhaps I can make an analogy to Go though chess
would work just as well. Because of our history, we Kinakutans are well
versed in both games. At the beginning of the game, the pieces are arranged
in a pattern that is simple and easy to understand. But the game evolves.
The players make small decisions, one turn at a time, each decision fairly
simple in and of itself, and made for reasons that can be easily understood,
even by a novice. But over the course of many such turns, the pattern
develops such great complexity that only the finest minds or the finest
computers can comprehend it." The sultan is gazing down thoughtfully at the
Go board as he says this. He looks up and starts making eye contact around
the room. "The analogy is clear. Our policies concerning free speech,
telecommunications and cryptography have evolved from a series of simple,
rational decisions. But they are today so complex that no one can understand
them, even in one single country, to say nothing of all countries taken
together."
The sultan pauses and walks broodingly around the Go board. The guests
have mostly given up on the obsequious nodding and jotting by this point. No
one is being tactical now, they are all listening with genuine interest,
wondering what he's going to say next.
But he says nothing. Instead he lays one arm across the board and, with
a sudden violent motion, sweeps all the stones aside. They rain down into
the carpet, skitter across polished stone, clatter onto the tabletop.
There is a silence of at least fifteen seconds. The sultan looks stony.
Then, suddenly, he brightens up.
"Time to start over," he says. "A very difficult thing to do in a large
country, where laws are written by legislative bodies, interpreted by
judges, bound by ancient precedents. But this is the Sultanate of Kinakuta
and I am the sultan and I say that the law here is to be very simple: total
freedom of information. I hereby abdicate all government power over the flow
of data across and within my borders. Under no circumstances will any part
of this government snoop on information flows, or use its power to in any
way restrict such flows. That is the new law of Kinakuta. I invite you
gentlemen to make the most of it. Thank you."
The sultan turns and leaves the room to a dignified ovation. Those are
the ground rules, boys. Now run along and play.
Dr. Mohammed Pragasu, Kinakutan Minister of Information, now rises from
his chair (which is to the right hand of the sultan's throne, naturally) and
takes the conn. His accent is almost as American as the sultan's is British;
he did his undergrad work at Berkeley and got his doctorate at Stanford.
Randy knows several people who worked and studied with him during those
years. According to them, Pragasu rarely showed up for work in anything
other than a t shirt and jeans, and showed just as strong an appetite for
beer and sausage pizza as any non Mohammedan. No one had a clue that he was
a sultan's second cousin, and worth a few hundred million in his own right.
But that was ten years ago. More recently, in his dealings with
Epiphyte Corp., he's been better dressed, better behaved, but studiously
informal: first names only, please. Dr. Pragasu likes to be addressed as
Prag. All of their meetings have started with an uninhibited exchange of the
latest jokes. Then Prag inquires about his old school buddies, most of whom
are working in Silicon Valley now. He delves for tips on the latest and
hottest high tech stocks, reminisces for a few minutes about the wild times
he enjoyed back in California, and then gets down to business.
None of them has ever seen Prag in his true element until now. It's a
bit hard to keep a straight face as if some old school chum of theirs had
rented a suit, forged an ID card, and was now staging a prank at a stuffy
business meeting. But there is a solemnity about Dr. Pragasu's bearing today
that is impressive, verging on oppressive.
Those Chinese guys across the table look like the Maoist Mt. Rushmore;
it is impossible to imagine that any of them has ever smiled in his life.
They are getting a live translation of the proceedings through ear pieces,
connected through the mysterious table to a boiler room full of
interpreters.
Randy's attention wanders. Prag's talk is dull because it is covering
technical ground with which Randy is already painfully familiar, couched in
simple analogies designed to make some kind of sense even after being
translated with Mandarin, Cantonese, Nipponese, or what have you. Randy
begins looking around the table.
There is a delegation of Filipinos. One of them, a fat man in his
fifties, looks awfully familiar. As usual, Randy cannot remember his name.
And there's another guy who shows up late, all by himself, and is ushered to
a solitary chair down at the far end: he might be a Filipino with lots of
Spanish blood, but he's more likely Latin American or Southern European or
just an American whose forebears came from those places. In any case, he has
scarcely settled into his seat before he's pulled out a cellphone and
punched in a very long phone number and begun a hushed, tense conversation.
He keeps sneaking glances up the table, checking out each delegation in
turn, then blurting capsule descriptions into his cellphone. He seems
startled to be here. No one who sees him can avoid noticing his furtiveness.
No one who notices it can avoid speculating on how he acquired it. But at
the same time, the man has a sullen glowering air about him that Randy
doesn't notice until his black eyes turn to stare into Randy's like the twin
barrels of a derringer. Randy stares back, too startled and stupid to avert
his gaze, and some kind of strange information passes from the cellphone man
to him, down the twin shafts of black light coming out of the man's eyes.
Randy realizes that he and the rest of Epiphyte(2) Corp. have fallen in
among thieves.
Chapter 37 SKIPPING
It's a hot cloudy day in the Bismarck Sea when Goto Dengo loses the
war. The American bombers come in low and level. Goto Dengo happens to be
abovedecks on a fresh air and calisthenics drill. To breathe air that does
not smell of shit and vomit makes him feel euphoric and invulnerable.
Everyone else must be feeling the same way, because he watches the airplanes
for a long time before he begins to hear warning klaxons.
The emperor's soldiers are supposed to feel euphoric and invulnerable
all the time, because their indomitable spirit makes them so. That Goto
Dengo only feels that way when abovedecks, breathing clean air, makes him
ashamed. The other soldiers never doubt, or at least never show it. He
wonders where he went astray. Perhaps it was his time in Shanghai, where he
was polluted with foreign ideas. Or maybe he was polluted from the very
beginning the ancient family curse.
The troop transports are slow there is no pretence that they are
anything other than boxes of air. They have only the most pathetic
armaments. The destroyers escorting them are sounding general quarters.
Goto Dengo stands at the rail and watches the crews of the destroyers
scrambling to their positions. Black smoke and blue light sputter from the
barrels of their weapons, and much later he hears them opening fire.
The American bombers must be in some kind of distress. He speculates
that they are low on fuel, or desperately lost, or have been chased down
below the cloud cover by Zeros. Whatever the reason, he knows they have not
come here to attack the convoy because American bombers attack by flying
overhead at a great altitude, raining down bombs. The bombs always miss
because the Americans' bombsights are so poor and the crews so inept. No,
the arrival of American planes here is just one of those bizarre accidents
of war; the convoy has been shielded under heavy clouds since early
yesterday.
The troops all around Goto Dengo are cheering. What good fortune that
these lost Americans have blundered straight into the gunsights of their
destroyer escort! And it is a good omen for the village of Kulu too, because
half of the town's young men just happen to be abovedecks to enjoy the
spectacle. They grew up together, went to school together, at the age of
twenty took the military physical together, joined the army together and
trained together. Now they are on their way to New Guinea together. Together
they were mustered up onto the deck of the transport only five minutes ago.
Together they will enjoy the sight of the American planes softening into
cartwheels of flame.
Goto Dengo, at twenty six, is one of the old hands here he came back
from Shanghai to be a leader and an example to them and he watches their
faces, these faces he has known since he was a child, never happier than at
this moment, glowing like cherry petals in the grey world of cloud, ocean,
and painted steel.
Fresh delight ripples across their faces. He turns to look. One of the
bombers has apparently decided to lighten its load by dropping a bomb
straight into the ocean. The boys of Kulu break into a jeering chant. The
American plane, having shed half a ton of useless explosives, peels sharply
upward, self neutered, good for nothing but target practice. The Kulu boys
howl at its pilot in contempt. A Nipponese pilot would have crashed his
plane into that destroyer at the very least!
Goto Dengo, for some reason, watches the bomb instead of the air plane.
It does not tumble from the plane's belly but traces a smooth flat parabola
above the waves, like an aerial torpedo. He catches his breath for a moment,
afraid that it will never drop into the ocean, that it will skim across the
water until it hits the destroyer that stands directly across its path. But
once again the fortunes of war smile upon the emperor's forces; the bomb
loses its struggle with gravity and splashes into the water. Goto Dengo
looks away.
Then he looks back again, chasing a phantom that haunts the edge of his
vision. The wings of foam that were thrown up by the bomb are still
collapsing into the water, but beyond them, a black mote is speeding away
perhaps it was a second bomb dropped by the same airplane. This time Goto
Dengo watches it carefully. It seems to be rising, rather than falling a
mirage perhaps. No, no, he's wrong, it is losing altitude slowly now, and it
plows into the water and throws up another pair of wings all right.
And then the bomb rises up out of the water again. Goto Dengo, a
student of engineering, implores the laws of physics to take hold of this
thing and make it fall and sink, which