literal and accurate illustration of all of
those other myths, which makes this into a sort of meta myth. Athena flew
off the handle and whacked Arachne with her distaff, which might seem kind
of like poor anger management until you consider that during the struggle
against the Giants, she wasted Enceladus by dropping Sicily on him! The only
effect was to cause Arachne to recognize her own hubris, at which she became
so ashamed that she hanged herself. Athena then brought her back to life in
the form of a spider.
"So anyway, you probably learned in elementary school that Athena wears
a helmet, carries a shield called Aegis, and is the goddess of war and of
wisdom, as well as crafts such as the aforementioned weaving. Kind of an odd
combination, to say the least! Especially since Ares was supposed to be the
god of war and Hestia the goddess of home economics why the redundancy? But
a lot's been screwed up in translation. See, the kind of wisdom that we
associate with old farts like yours truly, and which I'm trying to impart to
you here, Randy Waterhouse, was called dike by the Greeks. That's not what
Athena was the goddess of! She was the goddess of metis, which means cunning
or craftiness, and which you'll recall was the name of her mother in one
version of the story. Interestingly Metis (the personage, not the attribute)
provided young Zeus with the potion that caused Cronus to vomit up all of
the baby gods he'd swallowed, setting the stage for the whole Titanomachia.
So now the connection to crafts becomes obvious crafts are just the
practical application of metis."
"I associate the word 'crafts' with making crappy belts and ashtrays in
summer camp," Randy says. "I mean, who wants to be the fucking goddess of
macrame?"
"It's all bad translation. The word that we use today, to mean the same
thing, is really technology."
"Okay. Now we're getting somewhere."
"Instead of calling Athena the goddess of war, wisdom, and macrame,
then, we should say war and technology. And here again we have the problem
of an overlap with the jurisdiction of Ares, who's supposed to be the god of
war. And let's just say that Ares is a complete asshole. His personal aides
are Fear and Terror and sometimes Strife. He is constantly at odds with
Athena even though maybe because – they are nominally the god and
goddess of the same thing war. Heracles, who is one of Athena's human
proteges, physically wounds Ares on two occasions, and even strips him of
his weapons at one point! You see the fascinating thing about Ares is that
he's completely incompetent. He's chained up by a couple of giants and
imprisoned in a bronze vessel for thirteen months. He's wounded by one of
Odysseus's drinking buddies during the iliad. Athena knocks him out with a
rock at one point. When he's not making a complete idiot of himself in
battle, he's screwing every human female he can get his hands on, and get
this his sons are all what we would today call serial killers. And so it
seems very clear to me that Ares really was a god of war as such an entity
would be recognized by people who were involved in wars all the time, and
had a really clear idea of just how stupid and ugly wars are.
"Whereas Athena is famous for being the backer of Odysseus, who, let's
not forget, is the guy who comes up with the idea for the Trojan Horse.
Athena guides both Odysseus and Heracles through their struggles, and
although both of these guys are excellent fighters, they win most of their
battles through cunning or (less pejoratively) metis. And although both of
them engage in violence pretty freely (Odysseus likes to call himself
'sacker of cities') it's clear that they are being held up in opposition to
the kind of mindless, raging violence associated with Ares and his offspring
Heracles even personally rids the world of a few of Ares's psychopathic
sons. I mean, the records aren't totally clear it's not like you can go to
the Thebes County Courthouse and look up the death certificates on these
guys but it appears that Heracles, backed up by Athena all the way,
personally murders at least half of the Hannibal Lecterish offspring of
Ares.
"So insofar as Athena is a goddess of war, what really do we mean by
that? Note that her most famous weapon is not her sword but her shield
Aegis, and Aegis has a gorgon's head on it, so that anyone who attacks her
is in serious danger of being turned to stone. She's always described as
being calm and majestic, neither of which adjectives anyone ever applied to
Ares."
"I don't know, Enoch. Defensive versus offensive war, maybe?"
"The distinction is overrated. Remember when I said that Athena got leg
fucked by Hephaestus?"
"It generated a clear internal representation in my mind."
"As a myth should! Athena/Hephaestus is sort of an interesting coupling
in that he is another technology god. Metals, metallurgy, and fire were his
specialties the old fashioned Rust Belt stuff. So, no wonder Athena gave him
a hard on! After he ejaculated on Athena's thigh, she's all eeeeeyew! and
she wipes it off and throws the rag on the ground, where it somehow combines
with the earth and generates Erichthonius. You know who Erichthonius was?"
"No."
"One of the first kings of Athens. You know what he was famous for?"
"Tell me."
"Invented the chariot and introduced the use of silver as a currency."
"Oh, Jesus!" Randy clamps his head between his hands and makes moaning
noises, only for a little while.
"Now in many other mythologies you can find gods that have parallels
with Athena. The Sumerians had Enki, the Norse had Loki. Loki was an
inventor god, but psychologically he had more in common with Ares; he was
not only the god of technology but the god of evil too, the closest thing
they had to the Devil. Native Americans had tricksters creatures full of
cunning like Coyote and Raven in their mythologies, but they didn't have
technology yet, and so they hadn't coupled the Trickster with Crafts to
generate this hybrid Technologist god."
"Okay," Randy says, "so obviously where you're going with this is that
there must be some universal pattern of events that when filtered through
the sensory apparatus and the neural rigs of primitive, superstitious people
always gives rise to internal mental representations that they identify as
gods, heroes, etc."
"Yes. And these can be recognized across cultures, in the same way that
two persons with Root Reps in their mind might 'recognize' me by comparing
notes."
"So, Enoch, you want me to believe that these gods which aren't really
gods, but it's a nice concise word all share certain things in common
precisely because the external reality that generated them is consistent and
universal across cultures."
"That is right. And in the case of Trickster gods the pattern is that
cunning people tend to attain power that un cunning people don't. And all
cultures are fascinated by this. Some of them, like many Native Americans,
basically admire it, but never couple it with technological development.
Others, like the Norse, hate it and identify it with the Devil."
"Hence the strange love hate relationship that Americans have with
hackers."
"That's right."
"Hackers are always complaining that journalists cast them as bad guys.
But you think that this ambivalence is deeper seated."
"In some cultures. The Vikings to judge from their mythology would
instinctively hate hackers. But something different happened with the
Greeks. The Greeks liked their geeks. That's how we get Athena."
"I'll buy that but where does the war goddess thing come in?"
"Let's face it, Randy, we've all known guys like Ares. The pattern of
human behavior that caused the internal mental representation known as Ares
to appear in the minds of the ancient Greeks is very much with us today, in
the form of terrorists, serial killers, riots, pogroms, and aggressive
tinhorn dictators who turn out to be military incompetents. And yet for all
their stupidity and incompetence, people like that can conquer and control
large chunks of the world if they are not resisted."
"You must meet my friend Avi."
"Who is going to fight them off, Randy?"
"I'm afraid you're going to say we are."
"Sometimes it might be other Ares worshippers, as when Iran and Iraq
went to war and no one cared who won. But if Ares worshippers aren't going
to end up running the whole world, someone needs to do violence to them.
This isn't very nice, but it's a fact: civilization requires an Aegis. And
the only way to fight the bastards off in the end is through intelligence.
Cunning. Metis."
"Tactical cunning, like Odysseus and the Trojan Horse, or "
"Both that, and technological cunning. From time to time there is a
battle that is out and out won by a new technology like longbows at Crecy.
For most of history those battles happen only every few centuries you have
the chariot, the compound bow, gunpowder, ironclad ships, and so on. But
something happens around, say, the time that the Monitor, which the
Northerners believe to be the only ironclad warship on earth, just happens
to run into the Merrimack, of which the Southerners believe exactly the same
thing, and they pound the hell out of each other for hours and hours. That's
as good a point as any to identify as the moment when a spectacular rise in
military technology takes off it's the elbow in the exponential curve. Now
it takes the world's essentially conservative military establishments a few
decades to really comprehend what has happened, but by the time we're in the
thick of the Second World War, it's accepted by everyone who doesn't have
his head completely up his ass that the war's going to be won by whichever
side has the best technology. So on the German side alone we've got rockets,
jet aircraft, nerve gas, wire guided missiles. And on the Allied side we've
got three vast efforts that put basically every top level hacker, nerd, and
geek to work: the codebreaking thing, which as you know gave rise to the
digital computer; the Manhattan Project, which gave us nuclear weapons; and
the Radiation Lab, which gave us the modern electronics industry. Do you
know why we won the Second World War, Randy?"
"I think you just told me."
"Because we built better stuff than the Germans?"
"Isn't that what you said?"
"But why did we build better stuff, Randy?"
"I guess I'm not competent to answer, Enoch, I haven't studied that
period well enough."
"Well the short answer is that we won because the Germans worshipped
Ares and we worshipped Athena."
"And am I supposed to gather that you, or your organization, had
something to do with all that?"
"Oh, come now, Randy! Let's not allow this to degenerate into
conspiracy theories."
"Sorry. I'm tired."
"So am I. Goodnight."
And then Enoch goes to sleep. Just like that. Randy doesn't.
To the Cryptonomicon!
***
Randy is mounting a known ciphertext attack: the hardest kind. He has
the ciphertext (the Arethusa intercepts) and nothing else. He doesn't even
know the algorithm that was used to encrypt them. In modern cryptanalysis,
this is unusual; normally the algorithms are public knowledge. That is
because algorithms that have been openly discussed and attacked within the
academic community tend to be much stronger than ones that have been kept
secret. People who rely on keeping their algorithms secret are ruined as
soon as that secret gets out. But Arethusa dates from World War II, when
people were much less canny about such things.
This would be a hell of a lot easier if Randy knew some of the
plaintext that is encrypted within these messages. Of course, if he knew all
of the plaintext, he wouldn't even need to decrypt them; breaking Arethusa
in that case would be an academic exercise.
There is a compromise between the two extremes of, on the one hand, not
knowing any of the plaintext at all, and, on the other, knowing all of it.
In the Cryptonomicon that falls under the heading of cribs. A crib is an
educated guess as to what words or phrases might be present in the message.
For example if you were decrypting German messages from World War II, you
might guess that the plaintext included the phrase "HElL HITLER" or "SIEG
HElL." You might pick out a sequence of ten characters at random and say,
"Let's assume that this represented HEIL HITLER. If that is the case, then
what would it imply about the remainder of the message?"
Randy's not expecting to find any HEILHITLERs in the Arethusa messages,
but there might be other predictable words. He's been making a list of cribs
in his head: MANILA, certainly. WATERHOUSE, perhaps. And now he's thinking
GOLD and BULLION. So, in the case of MANILA he could pick out any six
character string from the intercepts and say, "What if these characters are
the encrypted form of MANILA?" and then work from there. If he were working
with an intercept only six characters long, then there would be only one
such six character segment to choose from. A seven character long message
would give him two possibilities: it could be the first six or the last six
characters. The upshot is that for a message intercept that is n characters
long, the number of six character long segments is equal to (n – 5).
In the case of a 105 character long intercept, he will have 100 different
possible locations for the word MANILA. Actually, a hundred and one: because
it's of course possible even likely that MANILA is not in there at all. But
each of these 100 guesses has its own set of ramifications vis à vis all of
the other characters in the message. What those ramifications are, exactly,
depends on what assumptions Randy is making about the underlying algorithm.
As far as that goes: the more he thinks about it, the more he believes
he has some good stuff to go on thanks to Enoch, who (in retrospect) has
been feeding him some useful clues when not spamming him through the bars
with theogonical analysis. Enoch mentioned that when the NSA started
attacking what later turned out to be the fake Arethusa intercepts, they
were going on the assumption that they were somehow related to another
cryptosystem dubbed Azure. And sure enough, Randy learns from the
Cryptonomicon that Azure was an oddball system used by both the Nipponese
and the Germans that employed a mathematical algorithm to generate a
different one time pad every day. This is awfully vague, but it helps Randy
rule out a lot. He knows for example that Arethusa isn't a rotor system like
Enigma. And he knows that if he can find two messages that were sent on the
same day, they will probably use the same one time pad.
What kind of mathematical algorithm was used? The contents of Grandpa's
trunk provide clues. He remembers the photograph of Grandpa with Turing and
von Hacklheber at Princeton, where all three of them were evidently fooling
around with zeta functions. And in the trunk were several monographs on the
same subject. And the Cryptonomicon states that zeta functions are even
today being used in cryptography, as sequence generators which is to say,
machines for spitting out series of pseudo random numbers, which is exactly
what a one time pad is. Everything points to that Azure and Arethusa are
siblings and that both are just implementations of zeta functions.
The big thing standing in his way right now is that he doesn't have any
textbooks on zeta functions sitting around his jail cell. The contents of
Grandpa's trunk would be an excellent resource but they are currently stored
in a room in Chester's house. But on the other hand, Chester's rich, and he
wants to help.
Randy calls for a guard and demands to see Attorney Alejandro. Enoch
Root goes very still for a few moments, and then shunts directly back into
the loping, untroubled sleep of a man who is exactly where he wants to be.
Chapter 89 SLAVES
People smell all kinds of ways before they have burned, but only one
way afterwards. As the Army boys lead Waterhouse down into the darkness, he
sniffs cautiously, hoping he won't smell that smell.
Mostly it smells like oil, diesel, hot steel, the brimstony tang of
burnt rubber and exploded munitions. These smells are overpoweringly strong.
He draws in a lungful of reek, blows it out. And that, of course, is when he
catches a whiff of barbecue and knows that this concrete coated island is,
among other things, a crematorium.
He is following the Army boys down black smudged tunnels bored through
a variegated matrix of concrete, masonry, and solid rock. The caves were
there first, eaten into the stone by rain and waves, then enlarged and
rationalized by Spaniards with chisels, jackhammers, blasting powder. Then
along came the Americans with bricks, and finally the Nipponese with
reinforced concrete.
As they work their way into the maze, they pass down some tunnels that
apparently acted like blowtorches: the walls have been scoured clean as if a
torrent had been running through it for a million years, silver pools lie on
the floor where guns or filing cabinets melted into puddles. Stored heat
still radiates from the walls, adding to the heat of the Philippine climate,
making all of them sweat even more, if that is possible.
Other corridors, other rooms were nothing more than backwaters in the
river of fire. Looking into doorways, Waterhouse can see books that were
charred but not consumed, blackened papers spilling from burst cabinets "One
moment," he says. His escort spins around just in time to see Waterhouse
ducking through a low door into a tiny room, where something has caught his
eye.
It's a heavy wooden cabinet, mostly transmuted into charcoal now, so it
looks like the cabinet's gone but its shadow persists. Someone has already
pulled one of its doors off its hinges, allowing black confetti to flood
into the room. The cabinet was filled with slips of paper, mostly burned
now, but thrusting his hand into the ash heap (slowly! Most of this place is
still hot) Waterhouse pulls out a bundle, nearly intact.
"What kind of money is that?" the Army guy asks.
Waterhouse pulls a bill from the top of the bundle. The top is printed
in Japanese characters and bears an engraved picture of Tojo. He flips it
over. The back is printed in English: TEN POUNDS.
"Australian currency," Waterhouse says.
"Don't look Australian to me," the Army guy says, glowering at Tojo.
"If the Nips had won..." Waterhouse says, and shrugs. He throws the
stack of ten pound notes onto the ash heap of history and carries his single
copy out into the corridor. A necklace of lightbulbs has been strung along
the ceiling. The light glances off what looks like pools of quicksilver on
the floor: the remains of guns, belt buckles, steel cabinets and doorknobs,
melted down into puddles in the holocaust, now congealed.
The fine print on the bill says, IMPERIAL RESERVE BANK, MANILA.
"Sir! You okay?" the Army guy says. Waterhouse realizes he's been
thinking for a while.
"Carry on," he says, and stuffs the bill in his pocket.
He was thinking about whether it was okay to take some of this money
with him. It's okay to take souvenirs, but not to loot. So he can take the
money if it's worthless, but not if it is real money.
Now, someone who was not so inclined to think and ponder everything to
the nth degree would immediately see that the money was worthless, because,
after all, the Japanese did not take Australia and never will. So that
money's just a souvenir, right?
Probably right. The money is effectively worthless. But if Waterhouse
were to find a real Australian ten pound note and read the fine print, it
would also probably bear the imprimatur of a reserve bank somewhere.
Two pieces of paper, each claiming to be worth ten pounds, each very
official looking, each bearing the name of a bank. One of them a worthless
souvenir and one legal tender for all debts public and private. What gives?
What it comes down to is that people trust the claims printed on one of
those pieces of paper but don't trust the other. They believe that you could
take the real Australian note to a bank in Melbourne, slide it over the
counter, and get silver or gold or something at least in exchange for it.
Trust goes a long way, but at some point, if you're going to sponsor a
stable currency, you must put up or shut up. Somewhere, you have to actually
have a shitload of gold in the basement. Around the time of the evacuation
from Dunkirk, when the Brits were looking at an imminent invasion of their
islands by the Germans, they took all of their gold reserves, loaded them on
board some battleships and passenger liners, and squirted them across the
Atlantic to banks in Toronto and Montreal. This would have enabled them to
keep their currency afloat even if the Germans had overrun London.
But the Japanese have to play by the same rules as everyone else. Oh,
sure, you can get a kind of submission from a conquered people by scaring
the shit out of them, but it doesn't work very well to hold a knife to
someone's throat and say, "I want you to believe that this piece of paper is
worth ten pounds sterling." They might say that they believe it, but they
won't really believe it. They won't act as if they believe it. And if they
don't act that way, then there is no currency, workers don't get paid (you
can enslave them, but you still have to pay the slavedrivers), the economy
doesn't work, you can't extract the natural resources that prompted you to
conquer the country in the first place. Basically, if you're going to run an
economy you have to have a currency. When someone walks into a bank with one
of your notes you have to be able to give them gold in exchange for it.
The Nipponese are maniacs for planning things out. Waterhouse knows
this; he has been reading their decrypted messages twelve, eighteen hours a
day for a couple of years now, he knows their minds. He knows, as surely as
he knows how to play a D major scale, that the Nipponese must have given
thought to this problem of backing their imperial currency not just for
Australia but New Zealand, New Guinea, the Philippines, Hong Kong, China,
Indochina, Korea, Manchuria.
How much gold and silver would you need in order to convince that many
human beings that your paper currency was actually worth some thing? Where
would you put it?
The escort takes him down a couple of levels and finally to a
surprisingly large room, deep down. If they are in the bowels of the island,
then this must be the vermiform appendix or something. It is glob shaped,
walls smooth and ripply in most places, chisel gnawed where men have seen
fit to enlarge it. The walls are still cool and so is the air.
There are long tables in this room, and at least three dozen empty
chairs so Waterhouse nips in tiny whiffs of air at first, terrified that he
will smell dead people. But he doesn't.
It figures. They're in the center of the rock. There's only one way
into the room. No way to get a good draft through this place no blowtorch
effect no burning at all, apparently. This room was bypassed. The air is as
thick as cold gravy.
"Found forty dead in this room," the escort says.
"Dead of what?"
"Asphyxiation."
"Officers?"
"One Japanese captain. The rest were slaves."
Before the war started, the term "slave" was, to Lawrence Waterhouse,
as obsolete as "cooper" or "chandler." Now that the Nazis and the Nipponese
have revived the practice, he hears it all the time. War's weird.
His eyes have been adjusting to the dim light ever since they stepped
into the chamber. There's a single 25 watt bulb for the whole cavern and the
walls absorb nearly all of the light.
He can see squarish things on the tables, one in front of each chair.
When he first came in he assumed that these were sheets of paper indeed,
some of them are. But as his vision gets better he can see that most of them
are hollow frames, sprinkled with abstract patterns of round dots.
He fumbles for his flashlight and nails the switch. Mostly all it does
is create a fuzzy yellow cone of oily smoke, swirling fatly and lazily in
front of him. He steps forward shooing the smoke out of his way, and bends
over the table.
It's an abacus, its beads still frozen in the middle of some
calculation. Two feet down the table is another. Then another.
He turns to face the Army guy. "What's the plural of abacus?"
"Beg pardon, sir?"
"Shall we say abaci?"
"Whatever you say, sir."
"Were any of these abaci touched by any of your men?"
There is a flurry of discussion. The Army guy has to confer with
several enlisted men, dispatch gofers to interview people, and make a couple
of phone calls. This is a good sign; there are a lot of men who would just
say "no, sir," or whatever they thought Waterhouse wanted to hear, and then
he would never know whether they were telling the truth. This guy seems to
understand that it's important for Waterhouse to get an honest answer.
Waterhouse walks up and down the rows of tables with his hands clasped
carefully behind his back, looking at the abaci. Next to most of them is a
sheet of paper, or a whole notebook, with a pencil handy. These are all
covered with numbers. From place to place, he sees a Chinese character.
"Did any of you see the bodies of these slaves?" he says to an enlisted
man.
"Yes, sir. I helped carry 'em out."
"Did they look like Filipinos?"
"No, sir. They looked like regular Asiatics."
"Chinese, Korean, something like that?"
"Yes, sir."
After a few minutes, the answer comes back: no one will admit to having
touched an abacus. This chamber was the last part of the fortress to be
reached by Americans. The bodies of the slaves were mostly found piled up
near the door. The body of the Nipponese officer was on the bottom of the
pile. The door had been locked from the inside. It is a metal door, and has
a slight outward bulge, as the fire upstairs apparently sucked all the air
out of the room in a big hurry.
"Okay," Waterhouse says, "I am going to go upstairs and report back to
Brisbane. I am personally going to take this room apart like an
archaeologist. Make sure that nothing is touched. Especially the abaci."
Chapter 90 ARETHUSA
Attorney Alejandro comes to see Randy the next day and they swap small
talk about the weather and the Philippine Basketball Association whilst
exchanging handwritten slips of paper across the table. Randy gives his
lawyer a note saying, "Give this note to Chester" and then another note
asking Chester to go though that trunk and find any old documents on the
subject of zeta functions and get them to Randy somehow. Attorney Alejandro
gives Randy a somewhat defensive and yet self congratulatory note itemizing
his recent efforts on Randy's behalf, which is probably meant to be
encouraging but which Randy finds to be unsettlingly vague. He had rather
expected some specific results by this point. He reads it and looks askance
at Attorney Alejandro, who grimaces and taps himself on the jaw, which is
code for "the Dentist" and which Randy interprets to mean that said
billionaire is interfering with whatever Attorney Alejandro is trying to
accomplish. Randy hands Attorney Alejandro another note saying, "Give this
note to Avi" and then yet another note asking Avi to find out whether
General Wing is one of the Crypt's clients.
Then nothing happens for a week. Since Randy lacks the information that
he needs about zeta functions, he can't do any actual codebreaking work
during this week. But he can lay the groundwork for the work he'll do later.
The Cryptonomicon contains numerous hunks of C code intended to perform
certain basic cryptanalytical operations, but a lot of it is folk code
(poorly written) and anyway needs to be translated into the more modern C++
language. So Randy does that. The Cryptonomicon also describes various
algorithms that will probably come in handy, and Randy implements those in
C++ too. It is scut work, but he has nothing else to do, and one of the good
things about this particular kind of scut work is that it acquaints you with
every little detail of the mathematics; if you don't understand the math you
can't write the code. As the days go by, his mind turns into some
approximation of a cryptanalyst's. This transformation is indexed by the
slow accretion of code in his code breaking library.
He and Enoch Root get into the habit of having conversations during and
after their meals. Both of them seem to have rather involved inner lives
that require lots of maintenance and so the rest of the day they ignore each
other. Anecdote by anecdote, Randy plots the trajectory of his life to date.
Likewise Enoch speaks vaguely of some wartime events, then about what it was
like to live in postwar England, and then in the U.S. in the fifties.
Apparently he was a Catholic priest for a while but got kicked out of the
Church for some reason; he doesn't say why, and Randy doesn't ask. After
that all is vague. He mentions that he began spending large amounts of time
in the Philippines during the Vietnam War, which fits in with Randy's
general hypothesis: if it's true that Old Man Comstock had U.S. troops
combing the Philippine boondocks for the Primary, then Enoch would have
wanted to be around, to interfere or at least keep an eye on them. Enoch
claims he's also been gadding about trying to bring Internet stuff to China,
but to Randy this just sounds like a cover story for something else.
It is hard not to get the idea that Enoch Root and General Wing may
have other reasons to be pissed off at each other.
"Like, if I can just play Plato's advocate here, what do you mean
exactly when you talk about defending civilization?"
"Oh, Randy, you know what I mean."
"Yeah, but China is civilized, right? Has been for a while."
"Yes."
"So maybe you and General Wing are actually on the same team."
"If the Chinese are so civilized, how come they never invent anything?"
"What paper, gunpowder "
"Anything in the last millennium I mean.
"Beats me. What do you think, Enoch?"
"It's like the Germans in the Second World War."
"I know that all the bright lights fled Germany in the thirties
Einstein, Born "
"And Schrödinger, and von Neumann, and others but do you know why they
fled?"
"Well, because they didn't like the Nazis, of course!"
"But do you know specifically why the Nazis didn't like them?"
"A lot of them were Jews."
"It goes deeper than mere anti Semitism. Hilbert, Russell, Whitehead,
Gödel, all of them were engaged in a monumental act of tearing mathematics
down and beginning from scratch. But the Nazis believed that mathematics was
a heroic science whose purpose was to reduce chaos to order just as National
Socialism was supposed to do in the political sphere."
"Okay," Randy says, "but what the Nazis didn't understand was that if
you tore it down and rebuilt it, it was even more heroic than before."
"Indeed. It led to a renaissance," Root says, "like in the seventeenth
century, when the Puritans tore everything to rubble and then slowly built
it back up from scratch. Over and over again we see the pattern of the
Titanomachia repeated the old gods are thrown down, chaos returns, but out
of the chaos, the same patterns reemerge."
"Okay. So again you were talking about civilization?"
"Ares always reemerges from the chaos. It will never go away. Athenian
civilization defends itself from the forces of Ares with metis, or
technology. Technology is built on science. Science is like the alchemists'
uroburos, continually eating its own tail. The process of science doesn't
work unless young scientists have the freedom to attack and tear down old
dogmas, to engage in an ongoing Titanomachia. Science flourishes where art
and free speech flourish."
"Sounds teleological, Enoch. Free countries get better science, hence
superior military power, hence get to defend their freedoms. You're
proclaiming a sort of Manifest Destiny here."
"Well, someone's got to do it."
"Aren't we beyond that sort of thing now?"
"I know you're just saying that to infuriate me. Sometimes, Randy, Ares
gets chained up in a barrel for a few years, but he never goes away. The
next time he emerges, Randy, the conflict is going to revolve around bio ,
micro , and nanotechnology. Who's going to win?"
"I don't know."
"Are you not just a bit unsettled by not knowing?"
"Look, Enoch, I'm trying my best here I really am but I'm broke, and
I'm locked up in this fucking cage, all right?"
"Oh, stop whining."
"What about you? Suppose you go back to your yam farm, or whatever, and
one day your shovel hits something that rings, and you suddenly dig up a few
kilotons of gold? You'd invest it all in high tech weapons?"
Root, not surprisingly, has an answer: the gold was stolen from all of
Asia by the Nipponese, who intended to use it as backing for a currency that
would become the legal tender of the Greater East Asia Co Prosperity Sphere,
and that while it goes without saying that those particular Nips were among
the most egregious buttheads in planetary history, some aspects of their
plan weren't such a shitty idea. That to the extent life still sucks for
many Asians, things would get a lot better, for a lot of people, if the
continent's economy could get jerked into the twenty first, or at least the
twentieth, century and hopefully stay there for a while instead of
collapsing whenever some dictator's nephew in charge of a central bank loses
control of his sphincters and wipes out a major currency. So maybe
stabilizing the currency situation would be a good thing to accomplish with
a shitload of gold, and that's the only moral thing to do with it anyway
considering whom it was stolen from you can't just go out and spend it.
Randy finds this answer appropriately sophisticated and Jesuitical and
eerily in sync with what Avi has written into the latest edition of the
Epiphyte(2) Business Plan.
After a decent number of days has gone by, Enoch Root comes right back
and asks Randy what he'd do with a few kilotons of gold, and Randy mentions
the Holocaust Education and Avoidance Pod. Turns out that Enoch Root already
knows about the HEAP, has already downloaded various revisions of it over
the gleaming new communications network that Randy and the Dentist strung
through the islands, thinks it's right in line with his ideas vis à vis
Athena, Aegis, etc., but has any number of difficult questions and trenchant
criticisms.
Shortly thereafter, Avi himself comes in for a visit and says very
little, but does let Randy know that, yes, General Wing is one of the
Crypt's clients. The grizzled Chinese gentlemen who sat around the table
with them in Kinakuta, and whose mugs were secretly captured by the pinhole
camera on Randy's laptop, are among Wing's chief lieutenants. Avi also lets
him know that the legal pressure has eased; the Dentist has suddenly reined
in Andrew Loeb and allowed any number of legal deadlines to be extended. The
fact that Avi says nothing at all about the sunken submarine would seem to
imply that the salvage operation is going well, or at least going.
Randy's still processing these pieces of news when he receives a visit
from none other than the Dentist himself.
"I assume that you think I had you framed," says Dr. Hubert Kepler.
He and Randy are alone in a room together, but Randy is conscious of
many aides, bodyguards, lawyers, and Furies or Harpies or whatever just on
the other side of the nearest door. The Dentist seems ever so slightly
amused, but Randy gradually collects that he is actually quite serious. The
Dentist's upper lip is permanently arched, or shorter than it ought to be,
or both, with the result that his glacier white incisors are always slightly
exposed, and depending on how the light is hitting his face he looks either
vaguely beaverish or else as if he's none too effectively fighting back a
sneering grin. Even a gentle soul like Randy cannot gaze upon such a face
without thinking how much better it would look with the application of some
knuckles. From the perfection of Hubert Kepler's dentition it is possible to
infer that he had a sheltered upbringing (full time bodyguards from the time
his adult teeth erupted from the gumline) or that his choice of careers was
motivated by a very personal interest in reconstructive oral surgery. "And I
know that you're probably not going to believe me. But I'm here to say that
I had nothing to do with what happened at the airport."
The Dentist now stops and gazes at Randy for a while, by no means one
of those guys who feels any need to nervously fill in gaps in conversation.
And so it is during the ensuing, lengthy pause that Randy figures out that
the Dentist isn't grinning at all, that his face is simply in its state of
natural repose. Randy shudders a bit just to think of what it must be like
to never be able to lose this alternatively beaverish and sneering look. For
your lover to gaze on you while you're sleeping and see this. Of course, if
the stories are to be believed, Victoria Vigo has her own ways of exacting
retribution, and so maybe Hubert Kepler really is suffering the abuse and
humiliation that his face seems to be asking for. Randy heaves a little sigh
when he thinks of this, sensing some trace of cosmic symmetry revealed.
Kepler is certainly correct in saying that Randy is not inclined to
believe a single word he says. The only way for Kepler to gain any
credibility is for him to show up in person at this jail and utter the words
face to face, which given all of the other things that he could be doing,
for fun or profit or both, at this moment, gives a lot of weight to what
he's saying. It is implicit that if the Dentist wanted to lie, badly and
baldly, to Randy, he could send his lawyers around to do it for him, or just
send him a fucking telegram, for that matter. So either he's telling the
truth, or else he's lying but it's very important to him that Randy should
believe in his lies. Randy cannot work out why on earth the Dentist should
give a flying fuck whether Randy believes in his lies or not, which pushes
him in the direction of thinking that maybe he really is telling the truth.
"Who framed me, then?" Randy asks, kind of rhetorically. He was just in
the middle of doing some pretty cool C++ coding when he got yanked out of
his cell to have this surprise encounter with the Dentist, and is surprising
himself with just how bored and irritated he is. He has reverted, in other
words, back into a pure balls to the wall nerdism rivaled only by his early
game coding days back in Seattle. The sheer depth and involution of the
current nerdism binge would be hard to convey to anyone. Intellectually, he
is juggling half a dozen lit torches, Ming vases, live puppies, and running
chainsaws. In this frame of mind he cannot bring himself to give a shit
about the fact that this incredibly powerful billionaire has gone to a lot
of trouble to come and F2F with him. And so he asks the above question as
nothing more than a p