s and ephemeral vortices. All of
these things were clearly visible, because all summer the air was full of
dust or smoke, and all winter it was full of windblown snow.
Whitman had dust devils (snow devils in the winter) in the way that
medieval Guangzhou presumably had rats. Randy followed dust devils to school
when he was a kid. Some were small enough that you could almost cup them in
your hand, and some were like small tornadoes, fifty or a hundred feet high,
that would appear on hilltops or atop shopping malls like biblical
prophecies as filtered through the low budget SFX technology and painfully
literal minded eye of a fifties epic film director. They at least scared the
bejesus out of newcomers. When Randy got bored in school, he would look at
the window and watch these things chase each other around the empty
playground. Sometimes a roughly car sized dust devil would glide across the
four square courts and between the swingsets and score a direct hit on the
jungle gym, which was an old fashioned, unpadded, child paralyzing unit
hammered together by some kind of Dark Ages ironmonger and planted in solid
concrete, a real school of hard knocks, survival of the fittest one. The
dust devil would seem to pause as it enveloped the jungle gym. It would
completely lose its form and become a puff of dust that would begin to
settle back down to the ground as all heavier than air things really ought
to. But then suddenly the dust devil would reappear on the other side of the
jungle gym and keep going. Or perhaps two dust devils would spin off in
opposite directions.
Randy spent plenty of time chasing and carrying out impromptu
experiments on dust devils while walking to and from school, to the point of
getting bounced off the grille of a shrieking Buick once when he chased a
roughly shopping cart sized one into the street in an attempt to climb into
the center of it. He knew that they were both fragile and tenacious. You
could stomp down on one of them and sometimes it would just dodge your foot,
or swirl around it, and keep going. Other times, like if you tried to catch
one in your hands, it would vanish but then you'd look up and see another
one just like it twenty feet away, running away from you. The whole concept
of matter spontaneously organizing itself into grotesquely improbable and
yet indisputably self perpetuating and fairly robust systems sort of gave
Randy the willies later on, when he began to learn about physics.
There was no room for dust devils in the laws of physics, as least in
the rigid form in which they were usually taught. There is a kind of
unspoken collusion going on in mainstream science education: you get your
competent but bored, insecure and hence stodgy teacher talking to an
audience divided between engineering students, who are going to be
responsible for making bridges that won't fall down or airplanes that won't
suddenly plunge vertically into the ground at six hundred miles an hour, and
who by definition get sweaty palms and vindictive attitudes when their
teacher suddenly veers off track and begins raving about wild and completely
nonintuitive phenomena; and physics students, who derive much of their self
esteem from knowing that they are smarter and morally purer than the
engineering students, and who by definition don't want to hear about
anything that makes no fucking sense. This collusion results in the
professor saying: (something along the lines of) dust is heavier than air,
therefore it falls until it hits the ground. That's all there is to know
about dust. The engineers love it because they like their issues dead and
crucified like butterflies under glass. The physicists love it because they
want to think they understand everything. No one asks difficult questions.
And outside the windows, the dust devils continue to gambol across the
campus.
Now that Randy's back in Whitman for the first time in several years,
watching (because it's winter) ice devils zigzagging across the Christmas
empty streets, he is inclined to take a longer view of the matter, which
goes a little something like this: these devils, these vortices, are a
consequence of hills and valleys that are probably miles and miles upwind.
Basically, Randy, who has blown in from out of town, is in a mobile frame of
mind, and is seeing things from the wind's frame of reference not the
stationary frame of reference of the little boy who rarely left town. From
the wind's frame of reference, it (the wind) is stationary and the hills and
valleys are moving things that crumple the horizon and then rush towards it
and then interfere with it and go away, leaving the wind to sort out
consequences later on down the line. And some of the consequences are dust
or ice devils. If there was more stuff in the way, like expansive cities
filled with buildings, or forests filled with leaves and branches, then that
would be the end of the story; the wind would become completely deranged and
cease to exist as a unitary thing, and all of the aerodynamic action would
be at the incomprehensible scale of micro vortices around pine needles and
car antennas.
A case in point would be the parking lot of Waterhouse House, which is
normally filled with cars and therefore a complete wind killer. You aren't
going to see dust devils at the downwind edge of a full parking lot, just a
generalized seepage of dead and decayed wind. But it is Christmas break and
there are all of three cars parked in this space, which doubles as football
overflow and hence is about the size of an artillery practice range. The
asphalt is dead monitor screen grey. A volatile gas of ice swirls across it
as freely as a sheen of fuel on warm water, except where it strikes the icy
sarcophagi of these three abandoned vehicles, which have evidently been
sitting in this otherwise empty lot for a couple of weeks now, since all of
the other cars went away on Christmas break. Each car has become the first
cause of a system of wakes and standing vortices that extends downstream for
hundreds of yards. The wind here is a glinting abrasive thing, a perpetual,
face shredding, eyeball poking tendency in the fabric of spacetime,
inhabited by vast platinum blond arcs of fire that are centered on the low
winter sun. Crystalline water is suspended in it all the time, is why:
shards of ice that are smaller than snowflakes probably just individual legs
of snowflakes that have been sheared off and borne into the air as the wind
snapped and rattled over the crests of Canadian snow dunes. Once airborne,
they stay airborne unless they find themselves ducted into some pocket of
dead air: the eye of a vortex or the still boundary layer of a dead car's
parking lot wake. And so over the weeks the vortices and standing waves have
become visible, like three dimensional virtual reality renderings of
themselves.
Waterhouse House rises above this tableau, a high rise dorm that no
person prominent enough to have a dorm named after him would want to have
named after him. Out of its climatically inappropriate acreage of picture
window shines the same embarrassing, greenish light radiated by algae
scummed domestic aquaria. Janitors are going through it with machines the
size of hot dog carts, wrangling these mile long coils of thumb thick orange
power cable, steaming beer vomit and artificial popcorn butter lipids up out
of the thin grey mats that, when Randy was there, seemed not so much like
carpet as references to carpeting or carpet signifiers. When Randy now pulls
into the main vehicle entrance, past the big tombstone that says WATERHOUSE
HOUSE, he cannot but look straight out the windshield and through the dorm's
front windows and straight at a large portrait of his grandfather, Lawrence
Pritchard Waterhouse one of a dozen or so figures, mostly departed now, who
compete for the essentially bogus title of "inventor of the digital
computer." The portrait is securely bolted to the cinderblock wall of the
lobby and imprisoned under a half inch thick slab of Plexiglas that must be
replaced every couple of years, as it fogs from repeated scrubbings and
petty vandalizations. Seen through this milky cataract, Lawrence Pritchard
Waterhouse is grimly resplendent in full doctoral robes. He has one foot up
on something, his elbow planted on the elevated knee, and has tucked his
robes back behind the other arm and planted his fist on his hip. It is meant
to be a sort of dynamic posture, but to Randy, who at the age of five was
present for its unveiling, it has a kind of incredulous what the hell are
those little people doing down there vibe about it.
Other than the three dead cars in their shells of hardened, dust
infused ice, there is nothing in the parking lot save about two dozen items
of antique furniture and a few other treasures such as a complete sterling
silver tea service and a dark, time wracked trunk. As Randy pulls in with
his Uncle Red and his Aunt Nina, he notes that the Shaftoe boys have
discharged the responsibilities for which they will be drawing minimum wage
plus twenty five percent all day long: namely they have moved all of these
items from where Uncle Geoff and Auntie Anne placed them back to the Origin.
In a gesture of companionship and/or uncle esque bonhomie, Uncle Red,
much to the evident resentment of Aunt Nina, has claimed the Acura's
passenger seat, leaving Aunt Nina marooned in the back where she evidently
feels much more psychically isolated than the situation would seem to
warrant. She makes lateral sliding motions trying to center the eyes of
first Randy, then Uncle Red, in the rearview minor. Randy has taken to
relying solely on the outside rearview mirrors during the ten minute drive
over from the hotel, because when he glances at the inside one he keeps
seeing Aunt Nina's dilated pupils aimed down his throat like twin shotgun
barrels. The blast of the heater/defroster forms a pocket of auditory
isolation back there which on top of her already prominent feelings of near
animal rage and stress have left her volatile and obviously dangerous.
Randy heads straight for the Origin, as in the intersection of the X
and Y axes, which is marked by a light pole with its very own multiton
system of wind deposited wakes and vortices.
"Look," says Uncle Red, "all we want to accomplish here is to make sure
that your mother's legacy, if that is the correct term for the possessions
of one who is not actually dead but merely moved into a long term care
facility, is equally divided among her five offspring. Am I right?"
This is not addressed to Randy, but he nods anyway, trying to show a
united front. He has been grinding his teeth for two days straight; the
places where his jaw muscles anchor to his skull have become the foci of
tremendous radiating systems of surging and pulsing pain.
"I think you'd agree that an equal division is all we want," Uncle Red
continues. "Correct?"
After a worrisomely long pause, Aunt Nina nods. Randy manages to
glimpse her face in the rearview as she makes another dramatic lateral move,
and sees there a look of almost nauseous trepidation, as if this equal
division concept might be some Jesuitical snare.
"Now, here's the interesting part," says Uncle Red, who is the chairman
of the mathematics department at Okaley College in Macomb, Illinois. "How do
we define 'equal'? This is what your brothers, and brothers in law, and
Randy and I were debating so late into the night last night. If we were
dividing up a stack of currency, it would be easy, because currency has a
monetary value that is printed right on its face, and the bills are
interchangeable no one gets emotionally attached to a particular dollar
bill."
"This is why we should have an objective appraiser "
"But everyone's going to disagree with what the appraiser says, Nina,
love," says Uncle Red. "Furthermore, the appraiser will totally miss out on
the emotional dimension, which evidently looms very large here, or so it
would seem, based on the, uh, let's say melodramatic character of the, uh,
discussion, if discussion isn't too dignified a term for what some might
perceive as more of a, well, catfight, that you and your sisters were
conducting all day yesterday."
Randy nods almost imperceptibly. He pulls up and parks next to the
furniture that is again clustered around the Origin. At the edge of the
parking lot, near where the Y axis (here denoting perceived emotional value)
meets a retaining wall, the Shaftoes' hot rod sits, all steamed up on the
inside.
"The question reduces," Uncle Red says, "to a mathematical one: how do
you divide up an inhomogeneous set of n objects among m people (or couples
actually); i.e., how do you partition the set into m subsets (S [sub 1],S
[sub 2], ... ,S [sub m]) such that the value of each subset is as close as
possible to being equal?"
"It doesn't seem that hard," Aunt Nina begins weakly. She is a
professor of Qwghlmian linguistics.
"It is actually shockingly difficult," Randy says. "It is closely akin
to the Knapsack Problem, which is so difficult to solve that it has been
used as the basis for cryptographic systems."
"And that's not even taking into account that each of the couples would
appraise the value of each of the n objects differently!" Uncle Red shouts.
By this point, Randy has shut off the car, and the windows have begun to
steam up. Uncle Red pulls off a mitten and begins to draw figures in the fog
on the windshield, using it like a blackboard. "For each of the m people (or
couples) there exists an n element value vector, V, where V [sub 1] is the
value that that particular couple would place on item number 1 (according to
some arbitrary numeration system) and V [sub 2] is the value they would
place on item number 2 and so on all the way up to item number n. These m
vectors, taken together, form a value matrix. Now, we can impose the
condition that each vector must total up to the same amount; i.e., we can
just arbitrarily specify some notional value for the entire collection of
furniture and other goods and impose the condition that
[img file for page 625 is not found (source)]
where [tau] is a constant."
"But we might all have different opinions as to what the total value
is, as well!" says Aunt Nina, gamely.
"That has no impact mathematically," Randy whispers.
"It is just an arbitrary scaling factor!" Uncle Red says witheringly.
"This is why I ended up agreeing with your brother Tom, though I didn't at
first, that we should take a cue from the way he and the other relativistic
physicists do it, and just arbitrarily set [tau] = 1. Which forces us to
deal with fractional values, which I thought some of the ladies, present
company excluded of course, might find confusing, but at least it emphasizes
the arbitrary nature of the scaling factor and helps to eliminate that
source of confusion." Uncle Tom tracks asteroids in Pasadena for the Jet
Propulsion Laboratory.
"There's the Gomer Bolstrood console," Aunt Nina exclaims, rubbing a
hole in the fog on her window, and then continuing to orbitally rub away
with the sleeve of her coat as if she is going to abrade an escape route
through the safety glass. "Just sitting out in the snow!"
"It's not actually precipitating," Uncle Red says, "this is just
blowing snow. It is absolutely bone dry, and if you go out and look at the
console or whatever you call it, you will find that the snow is not melting
on it at all, because it has been sitting out in the U Stor It ever since
your mother moved to the managed care facility and it has equilibrated to
the ambient temperature which I think we can all testify is well below zero
Celsius."
Randy crosses his arms over his abdomen, leans his head back, and
closes his eyes. The tendons in his neck are as stiff as subzero Silly Putty
and resist painfully.
"That console was in my bedroom from the time I was born until I left
for college," Aunt Nina says. "By any decent standard of justice, that
console is mine.
"Well, that brings me to the breakthrough that Randy and Tom and Geoff
and I finally came up with at about two A.M., namely that the perceived
economic value of each item, as complicated as that is in and of itself, viz
the Knapsack Problem, is only one dimension of the issues that have got us
all on such a jagged emotional edge. The other dimension and here I really
do mean dimension in a Euclidean geometry sense is the emotional value of
each item. That is, in theory we could come up with a division of the set of
all pieces of furniture that would give you, Nina, an equal share. But such
a division might leave you, love, just deeply, deeply unsatisfied because
you didn't get that console, which, though it's obviously not as valuable as
say the grand piano, has much greater emotional value to you.
"I don't think it's out of the question that I would commit physical
violence in order to defend my rightful ownership of that console," Aunt
Nina says, suddenly reverting to a kind of dead voiced frigid calm.
"But that's not necessary, Nina, because we have created this whole
setup here just so that you can give your feelings the full expression they
deserve!"
"Okay. What do I do?" Aunt Nina says, bolting from the car. Randy and
Uncle Red hastily gather up their gloves and mittens and hats and follow her
out. She is now hovering over the console, watching the dust of ice swirl
across the dark but limpid, virtually glowing surface of the console in the
turbulent wake of her body, forming little Mandelbrotian epi epi epi
vortices.
"As Geoff and Anne did before us, and the others will do afterwards, we
are going to move each of these items to a specific position, as in (x, y)
coordinates, in the parking lots. The x axis runs this way," Uncle Red says,
facing the Waterhouse House and holding his arms out in a cruciform
attitude, "and the y axis this way." He toddles around ninety degrees so
that one of his hands is now pointing at the Shaftoes' Impala. "Perceived
financial value is measured by x. The farther in that direction it is, the
more valuable you think it is. You might even assign something a negative x
value if you think it has negative value e.g., that over stuffed chair over
there which might cost more to re upholster than it is actually worth.
Likewise, the y axis measures perceived emotional value. Now, we have
established that the console has extreme emotional value to you and so I
think that we can just go right ahead and move it down the line over to
where the Impala is located."
"Can something have negative emotional value?" Aunt Nina says, sourly
and probably rhetorically.
"If you hate it so much that just owning it would cancel out the
emotional benefits of having something like the console, then yes, Uncle Red
says.
Randy hoists the console onto his shoulder and begins to walk in a
positive y direction. The Shaftoe boys are available to hump furniture at a
moment's notice, but Randy needs to mark a bit of territory here, just to
indicate that he is not without some masculine attributes himself and so he
ends up carrying more furniture than he probably needs to. Back at the
Origin, he can hear Red and Nina going at it. "I have a problem with this,"
Nina says. "What's to prevent her from just putting every thing down at the
extreme y axis claiming that everything is terribly emotionally important to
her?" Her in this case can only mean Aunt Rachel, the wife of Tom. Rachel is
a multiethnic East Coast urbanite who is not blessed or afflicted with the
obligatory Waterhousian diffidence and so has always been regarded as a sort
of living incarnation of rapacity, a sucking maw of need. The worst case
scenario here is that Rachel somehow goes home with everything the grand
piano, the silver, the china, the Gomer Bolstrood dining room set. Hence the
need for elaborate rules and rituals, and a booty division system that is
mathematically provable as fair.
"That's where [tau sub e] and [tau sub $] enter into it," Uncle Red
says soothingly.
[img file for page 628 is not found (source)]
"All of our choices will be mathematically scaled so that they add up
to the same total values on both the emotional and financial scales. So if
someone clumped everything together in the extreme corner, then, after
scaling, it'd be as if they never expressed any preferences at all."
Randy nears the steamed up Impala. One of the doors makes a crackling
noise as superannuated weatherstripping peels away from steel. Robin Shaftoe
emerges, breathes into his cupped hands, and takes a parade rest position,
signifying that he is available to discharge any responsibilities out here
on the Cartesian coordinate plane. Randy looks up over the Impala and the
retaining wall and the ice clogged xeriscape above that and into the lobby
of Waterhouse House, where Amy Shaftoe has her feet up on a coffee table and
is looking through some of the extremely sad Cayuse related literature that
Randy bought for Avi. She looks down and smiles at him and just barely, he
thinks, restrains the impulse to reach up and twirl one finger around her
ear.
"That's good, Randy!" shouts Uncle Red from the Origin, "now we need to
give it some x!" Meaning that the console is not devoid of economic value
either. Randy does a right face and begins to walk into the (+x, +y)
quadrant, counting the yellow lines. "Give it about four parking spaces!
That's good!" Randy plonks the console down, then pulls a pad of graph paper
out of his coat, whips back the first sheet, which contains the (x,y)
scatterplot of Uncle Geoff and Auntie Anne, and notes down the coordinates
of the console. Sound carries in the Palouse, and from the Origin he can
hear Aunt Nina saying to Uncle Red, "How much of our [tau sub e] have we
just spent on that console?"
"If we leave everything else down here at y equals zero, a hundred
percent after scaling," Uncle Red says. "Otherwise it depends on how we
distribute these things in the y dimension." Which is of course the correct
answer, albeit totally useless.
If these days in Whitman don't make Amy flee from Randy in terror,
nothing will, and so he's glad in a sick way that she is seeing this. The
subject of his family has not really come up until now. Randy is not given
to talking about his family because he feels there is nothing to report:
small town, good education, shame and self esteem doled out in roughly equal
quantities and usually where warranted. Nothing spectacular along the lines
of grotesque psychopathologies, sexual abuse, massive, shocking trauma, or
Satanic rallies in the backyard. So normally when people are talking about
their families, Randy just shuts up and listens, feeling that he has nothing
to say. His familial anecdotes are so tame, so pedestrian, that it would be
presumptuous even to relate them, especially after someone else has just
divulged something really shocking or horrific.
But standing there and looking at these vortices he starts to wonder.
Some people's insistence that "Today I: smoke/am overweight/have a shitty
attitude/am depressed because: my mom died of cancer/my uncle put his thumb
up my butt/my dad hit me with a razor strop" seems kind of overly
deterministic to Randy; it seems to reflect a kind of lazy or half witted
surrender to bald teleology. Basically, if everyone has a vested interest in
believing that they understand everything, or even that people are capable
in principle of understanding it (either because believing this dampens
their insecurities about the unpredictable world, or makes them feel more
intelligent than others, or both) then you have an environment in which
dopey, reductionist, simple minded, pat, glib thinking can circulate, like
wheelbarrows filled with inflated currency in the marketplaces of Jakarta.
But things like the ability of some student's dead car to spawn
repeating patterns of thimble sized vortices a hundred yards downwind would
seem to argue in favor of a more cautious view of the world, an openness to
the full and true weirdness of the Universe, an admission of our limited
human faculties. And if you've gotten to this point, then you can argue that
growing up in a family devoid of gigantic and obvious primal psychological
forces, and living a life touched by many subtle and even forgotten
influences rather than one or two biggies (e.g., active participation in the
Church of Satan) can lead, far downwind, to consequences that are not
entirely devoid of interest. Randy hopes, but very much doubts, that America
Shaftoe, sitting up there in the algae colored light reading about the
inadvertent extermination of the Cayuse, sees it this way.
Randy rejoins his aunt at the Origin. Uncle Red has been explaining to
her, somewhat condescendingly, that they must pay careful attention to the
distribution of items on the economic scale, and for his troubles he has
been sent on a long, lonely walk down the +x axis carrying the complete
silver tea service. "Why couldn't we just have stayed inside and worked this
all out on paper?" Aunt Nina asks.
"It was felt that there was value in physically moving this stuff
around, giving people a direct physical analog of the value assertions that
they were making," Randy says. "Also that it would be useful to appraise
this stuff literally in the cold light of day." As opposed to ten or twelve
emotionally fraught people clambering around a packed to the ceiling U Stor
It locker with flashlights, sniping at each other from behind the armoires.
"Once we've all made our choices, then what? You sit down and figure it
out on a spreadsheet, or something?"
"It is much too computationally intensive to be solved that way.
Probably a genetic algorithm is called for certainly there won't be a
mathematically exact solution. My father knows a researcher in Geneva who
has done work on problems isomorphic to this one, and sent him e mail last
night. With any luck we will be able to ftp some suitable software and get
it running on the Tera."
"The Terror?"
"Tera. As in Teraflops."
"That does me no good at all. When you say 'as in' you are supposed to
give me something more familiar to relate it to."
"It is one of the ten fastest computers on the planet. Do you see that
red brick building just to the right of the end of the y axis," Randy says,
pointing down the hill, "Just behind the new gym?"
"The one with all the antennas?"
"Yes. The Tera machine is in there. It was made by a company in
Seattle."
"It must have been very expensive."
"My dad talked them out of it."
"Yes!" says Uncle Red cheerfully, returning from high x value
territory. "The man is a legendary donation raiser."
"He must have a persuasive side to him that I have not been perceptive
enough to notice yet," Aunt Nina says, wandering curiously towards some
large cardboard boxes.
"No," Randy says, "it's more like he just goes in and flops around on
the conference table until they become so embarrassed for his sake that they
agree to sign the check."
"You've seen him do this?" Aunt Nina says skeptically, sizing up a box
labeled CONSTITUENTS OF UPSTAIRS LINEN CLOSET.
"Heard about it. High tech is a small town," Randy says.
"He's been able to make great capital of his father's work," Uncle Red
says. "'If my father had patented even one of his computer inventions,
Palouse College would be bigger than Harvard,' and so on."
Aunt Nina has got the box open now. It is almost completely filled by a
single Qwghlmian blanket, in a dark greyish brown on dark brownish grey
plaid. The blanket in question is about an inch thick, and, during
wintertime family reunions, was infamous as a booby prize of sorts among the
Waterhouse grandchildren. The smell of mothballs, mildew, and heavily oiled
wool causes Aunt Nina's nose to wrinkle, as it did Aunt Annie's before her.
Randy remembers bedding down beneath this blanket once at the age of about
nine, and waking up at two in the morning with bronchial spasms,
hyperthermia, and vague memories of a nightmare about being buried alive.
Aunt Nina slams the box flaps shut, turns around, and looks in the direction
of the Impala. Robin Shaftoe is already running towards them. Being not bad
at math himself, he was quick to pick up on this whole concept, and knows
from experience that the blanket box will have to be trundled deep out into
( x, y) territory.
"I guess I'm just worried," Aunt Nina says, "about having my
preferences mediated by this supercomputer. I have tried to make it clear
what I want. But will the computer understand that?" She has paused by the
CERAMICS box in a way that is tantalizing Randy, who badly wants to have a
look inside, but doesn't want to arouse suspicions. He's the referee and is
sworn to objectivity. "Forget the china," she says, "too old ladyish."
Uncle Red wanders over and disappears behind one of the dead cars,
presumably to take a leak. Aunt Nina says, "How about you, Randy? As the
eldest son of the eldest son, you must have some feelings about this."
"No doubt when my parents' time comes, they will pass on some of
Grandma and Grandpa's legacy to me," Randy says.
"Oh, very circumspect. Well done," Aunt Nina says. "But as the only
grandchild who has any memories of your grandfather at all, there must be
something here that you might like to have."
"There'll probably be some odds and ends that nobody wants," Randy
says. Then like an almost perfect moron like an organism genetically
engineered to be a total, stupid idiot Randy glances directly at the Trunk.
Then he tries to hide it, which only makes it more conspicuous. He guesses
that his mostly beardless face must be an open book, and wishes he had never
shaved. A bullet of ice strikes him in the right cornea with a nearly
audible splot. The ballistic impact blinds him and the thermal shock gives
him an ice cream headache. When he recovers enough to see again, Aunt Nina
is walking around the trunk, kind of spiraling in towards it in a rapidly
decaying orbit. "Hmm. What's in here?" She grips the handle at one end and
finds she can barely get it off the ground.
"Old Japanese code books. Bundles of ETC cards."
"Marcus?"
"Yes, ma'am!" says Marcus Aurelius Shaftoe, returning from the double
negative quadrant.
"What is the angle exactly in between the +x and +y axes?" Aunt Nina
asks. "I would ask the referee, here, but I'm beginning to have doubts about
his objectivity."
M.A. glances at Randy and decides he had best interpret this last
comment as good natured familial horsing around. "Would you like that in
radians or degrees, ma'am?"
"Neither. Just demonstrate it for me. Take this great big trunk on that
strong back of yours and just split the middle between +x and +y axes and
keep walking until I say when."
"Yes, ma'am. M.A. hefts the trunk and starts walking, frequently
looking back and forth to verify that he's exactly in the middle. Robin
stands off at a safe distance watching with interest.
Uncle Red, returning from his piss break, watches this in horror.
"Nina! Love! That's not worth the cost of shipping it home! What on earth
are you doing?"
"Making sure I get what I want," Nina says.
***
Randy gets a small part of what he wants two hours later, when his own
mother breaks the seal on the CERAMICS box to verify that the china is in
good condition. At the time, Randy and his father are standing next to the
Trunk. It is rather late in his parent's value plotting work and so pieces
of fine furniture are now widely scattered across the parking lot, looking
like the aftermath of one of those tornadoes that miraculously sets things
down intact after whirling them through the skies for ten miles. Randy is
trying to find a way to talk up the emotional value of this trunk without
violating his oath of objectivity. The chances of anyone other than Nina
ending up with this trunk are actually quite miserable, since she (to Red's
horror) left almost everything clumped around the Origin except for it and
the coveted Console. But if Dad would at least move the thing off dead
center which no one except Nina has done then, if the Tera awards it to him
tomorrow morning, Randy can plausibly argue that it's something other than a
computer error. But Dad is taking most of his cues from Mom and is having
none of it.
Mom has bitten her gloves off and is parting layer after layer of
crumpled newsprint with magenta hands. "Oh, the gravy boat!" she exclaims,
and hoists up something that is more of a heavy cruiser than a boat. Randy
agrees with Aunt Nina that the design is old ladyish in the extreme, but
that's kind of tautological since he has only seen it in the house of his
grandmother, who has been an old lady for as long as he has known her. Randy
walks towards his mother with his hands in his pockets, still trying to play
it cool for some reason. This obsession with secrecy may have gone a bit
far. He has seen this gravy boat maybe twenty times in his life, always at
family reunions, and seeing it now roils up a whole silt cloud of long
settled emotions. He reaches out, and Mom remits it to his mittened hands.
He pretends to admire it from the side, and then flips it over to read the
words glazed on the bottom.
ROYAL ALBERT LAVENDER ROSE.
For a moment he is sweating under a vertical sun, swaying to keep his
balance on a rocking boat, smelling the neoprene of hoses and flippers. Then
he's back in the Palouse. He begins thinking about how to sabotage the
computer program to ensure that Aunt Nina gets what she wants, so that
she'll give him what is rightfully his.
Chapter 71 GOLGOTHA
Lieutenant Ninomiya reaches Bundok about two weeks after Goto Dengo,
accompanied by several bashed and scraped wooden cases. "What is your
specialty?" asks Goto Dengo, and Lieutenant Ninomiya responds by opening up
one of the cases to reveal a surveyor's transit swaddled in clean, oiled
linen. Another case contains an equally perfect sextant. Goto Dengo gawks.
The gleaming perfection of the instruments is a marvel. But even more
marvelous is that they sent him a surveyor only twelve days after he
requested one. Ninomiya grins at the look on his new colleague's face,
revealing that he has lost all of his front teeth except for one, which
happens to be mostly gold.
Before any engineering can be done, all of this wilderness must be
brought into the realm of the known. Detailed maps must be prepared,
watersheds charted, soil sampled. For two weeks Goto Dengo has been going
around with a pipe and a sledgehammer taking core samples of the dirt. He
has identified rocks from the streambeds, estimated the flow rates of the
Yamamoto and Tojo Rivers, counted and catalogued trees. He has trudged
through the jungle and planted flags around the approximate boundaries of
the Special Security Zone. The whole time, he's been worrying about having
to perform the survey himself, using primitive, improvised tools. And all of
a sudden, here is Lieutenant Ninomiya with his instruments.
The three Lieutenants, Goto, Mori and Ninomiya, spend a few days
surveying the flat, semi open land straddling the lower Tojo River. The
year, 1944, is turning out to be dry so far, and Mori does not want to
construct his military barracks on land that will turn into a marsh after
the first big rain. He is not concerned about the comfort of the prisoners,
but he would at least like to ensure that they won't get washed away. The
lay of the land is also important in setting up the interlocking fields of
fire that will be necessary to put down any riots or mass escape attempts.
They put Bundok's few enlisted men to work gathering bamboo stakes, then
drive these in to mark the locations of roads, barracks, barbed wire fences,
guard towers, and a few carefully sited mortar emplacements from which the
guards will be able to fill the atmosphere in any chosen part of the camp
with shrapnel.
When Lieutenant Goto takes Lieutenant Ninomiya up into the jungle,
clambering up the steep valley of the Tojo, Lieutenant Mori must stay behind
in accordance with Captain Noda's orders. This is just as well, since Mori
has his work cut out for him down below. The captain has granted Ninomiya a
special dispensation to see the Special Security Zone.
"Elevations are of supreme importance in this project," Goto Dengo
tells the surveyor on the way up. They are burdened with surveying equipment
and fresh water, but Ninomiya clambers up the rocky gulch of the half
parched river just as ably as Goto Dengo himself. "We will begin by
establishing the level of Lake Yamamoto which does not exist yet and then
work downwards from there."
"I have also been ordered to obtain the precise latitude and
longitude," says Ninomiya.
Goto Dengo grins. "That's hard there is nowhere to see the sun."
"What about the three peaks?"
Goto Dengo turns to see if Ninomiya is joking. But the surveyor is
looking intently up the valley.
"Your dedication sets a good example," Goto Dengo says.
"This place is paradise compared to Rabaul."
"Is that where you were sent from?"
"Yes."
"How did you escape? It is cut off, isn't it?"
"It has been cut off for some time," Ninomiya says curtly. Then, he
adds: "They came and got me in a submarine." His voice is husky and faint.
Goto Dengo is silent for a while.
Ninomiya has a system all worked out in his head, which they put into
effect the next week, after they have done a rough survey of the Special
Security Zone. Early in the morning, they hoist an enlisted man into a tree
with a canteen, a watch, and a mirror. There is nothing special about this
tree except for a bamboo stake recently driven into the ground nearby,
labeled MAIN DRIFT.
Then Lieutenants Ninomiya and Goto climb to the top of the mountain,
which takes them about eight hours. It is dreadfully arduous, and Ninomiya
is shocked that Goto volunteers to go with him. "I want to see this place
from the top of Calvary," Goto Dengo explains. "Only then will I have the
insight to perform my duty well."
On the way up, they compare notes, New Guinea vs. New Britain. It seems
that the latter's only saving grace is the settlement of Rabaul, a formerly
British port complete with a cricket oval, now the linchpin of Nipponese
forces in Southwest Asia. "For a long time it was a great place to be a
surveyor," Ninomiya says, and describes the fortifications that they built
there in preparation for MacArthur's invasion. He has a draftsman's
enthusiasm for detail and at one point talks nonstop for an hour describing
a particular system of bunkers and pillboxes down to the last booby trap and
glory hole.
As the climb gets harder, the two vie with each other in belittling its
difficulty. Goto Dengo tells the tale of climbing over the snow covered
mountain range in New Guinea.
"Nowadays, on New Britain we climb volcanoes all the time," Ninomiya
says offhandedly.
"Why?"
"To collect sulfur."
"Sulfur? Why?"
"To make gunpowder."
After this they don't talk for a while.
Goto Dengo tries to di