Cryptonomicon

by Neal Stephenson

  “Help me get out of this town,” Shaftoe pleads. “Take me out in a boat on the lake, drop me off in the countryside, then I can move.”

  “Move where?” says the lieutenant, playing stupid.

  “To the high ground! To join those Huks!”

  “You would be killed. The ground is booby-trapped. The Huks are extremely vigilant.”

  “But—”

  “Why don’t you go the other way?” the lieutenant asks. “Go to Manila.”

  “Why would I want to go there?”

  “Your son is there. And that is where you are needed. Soon the big battle will be in Manila.”

  “Okay,” Shaftoe says, “I’ll go to Manila. But first I want to see Glory.”

  “Ah,” the lieutenant says, as if light has finally dawned. “You say you want to see Glory.”

  “I’m not just saying it. I do want to see Glory.”

  The lieutenant exhales a cloud of cigarette smoke and shakes his head. “No you don’t,” he says flatly.

  “What?”

  “You don’t want to see Glory.”

  “How can you say that? Are you fucking out of your mind?”

  The lieutenant’s face goes stony. “Very well,” he says, “I will make inquiries. Perhaps Glory will come here and visit you.”

  “That’s crazy. It’s much too dangerous.”

  The lieutenant laughs. “No, you don’t understand,” he says. “You are a white man in a provincial city in the Philippines occupied by starving, beserk Nips. It is impossible for you to show your face outside. Impossible. Glory, on the other hand, is free to move.”

  “You said they’re inspecting people almost every block.”

  “They will not bother Glory.”

  “Do the Nips ever—you know. Molest women?”

  “Ah. You are worried about Glory being raped.” The lieutenant takes another long draw on his cigarette. “I can assure you that this will not happen.” He rises to his feet, tired of the conversation. “Wait here,” he says. “Gather your strength for the Battle of Manila.”

  He walks out, leaving Shaftoe more frustrated than ever.

  Two days later, the owner of the boathouse, who speaks very little English, shakes Shaftoe awake before sunrise. He beckons Shaftoe into a small boat and rows him out into the lake, then half a mile up the shore toward a sandbar. The dawn is just breaking over the other side of the big lake, illuminating planet-sized cumulus clouds. It’s as if the biggest fuel dump in the whole world is being blown up in a sky diced into vast trapezoids by the linear contrails of American planes on dawn patrol.

  Glory is strolling out on the sandbar. He can’t see her face because she is wrapped in a silk scarf, but he would know the shape of her body anywhere. She walks back and forth along the shore, letting the warm water of the lake lap against her bare feet. She is really loving that sunrise—she keeps her back turned to Shaftoe so that she can enjoy it. What a flirt. Shaftoe gets as hard as an oar. He pats his back pocket, making sure he’s well stocked with I SHALL RETURN condoms. It will be tricky, bedding down with Glory on a sandbar with this old codger here, but maybe he can pay the guy to go out and exercise his back for an hour.

  The guy keeps looking over his shoulder to judge the distance to the sandbar. When they are about a stone’s throw away, he sits up and ships the oars. They coast for a few yards and then come to a stop.

  “What are you doing?” Shaftoe asks. Then he heaves a sigh. “You want money?” He rubs his thumb and fingertips together. “Huh? Like that?”

  But the guy is just staring into his face, with an expression as tough and stony as anything that Shaftoe has seen on a hundred battlefields around the world. He waits for Shaftoe to shut up, then cocks his head and jerks it back in the direction of Glory.

  Shaftoe looks up at Glory, just as she’s turning around to face him. She reaches up with clublike hands, all wrapped up in long strips of cloth like a mummy’s, and paws the scarf away from her face.

  Or what used to be a face. Now it’s just the front of her skull.

  Bobby Shaftoe breathes in deep, and lets out a scream that can probably be heard in downtown Manila.

  The boatman casts an anxious look toward the town, then stands up, blocking Shaftoe’s view as he’s drawing in another breath. One of the oars is in his hands. Shaftoe is just cutting loose with another scream when the oar clocks him in the side of the head.

  THE PRIMARY

  * * *

  THE SUN HAS MADE A LONG, SKIDDING CRASH-LANDING along the Malay Peninsula a few hundred kilometers west, breaking open and spilling its thermonuclear fuel over about half of the horizon, trailing out a wall of salmon and magenta clouds that have blown a gash all the way through the shell of the atmosphere and erupted into space. The mountain containing the Crypt is just a charcoal shard against that backdrop. Randy is annoyed with the sunset for making it difficult to see the construction site. By now the scar in the cloud forest has mostly healed over, or, at least, some kind of green stuff has taken over the bare, lipstick-colored mud. A few GOTO ENGINEERING containers still glower in the color-distorting light of the mercury-vapor lamps around the entrance, but most of them have either moved inside the Crypt or gone back to Nippon. Randy can make out the headlights of one house-sized Goto truck winding down the road, probably filled with debris for another one of the sultan’s land reclamation projects.

  Seated up in the plane’s nose, Randy can actually look forward out his window and see that they are landing on the new runway, built partly on such fill. The buildings of downtown are streaks of blue-green light on either side of the plane, tiny black human figures frozen in them: a man with a phone clamped between his ear and his shoulder, a woman in a skirt hugging a pile of books to her chest but thinking about something far away. The view turns empty and indigo as the plane’s nose tilts up for the landing, and then Randy’s looking out over the Sulu Sea at dusk, where the badjaos’ kite-sailed boats are scuttling into port from a day’s fishing, hung all about with gutted stingrays, flying fresh sharks’ tails like flags. Not long ago it was ridiculously exotic to him, but now he feels more at home here then he did in California.

  For Sultan-Class passengers, everything happens with cinematic, quick-cut speed. The plane lands, a beautiful woman hands you your jacket, and you get off. The planes used by Asian airlines must have special chutes in the tail where flight attendants are ejected into the stratosphere on their twenty-eighth birthdays.

  Usually there’s someone waiting for a Sultan-Class passenger. This evening it’s John Cantrell, still ponytailed but now clean-shaven; eventually the heat has its way with everyone. He’s even taken to shaving the back of his neck, a good trick for shedding a couple of extra BTUs. Cantrell greets Randy with an awkward simultaneous handshake and one-armed hug/body check maneuver.

  “Good to see you, John,” Randy says.

  “You too, Randy,” John says, and each man averts his eyes shyly.

  “Who’s where?”

  “You and I are here in the airport. Avi checked into a hotel in downtown San Francisco for the duration.”

  “Good. I didn’t think he was safe in that house by himself.”

  Cantrell looks provoked. “Any particular reason? Have there been threats?”

  “None that I know of. But it’s hard to ignore the high number of vaguely terrifying people wrapped up in this.”

  “No victim Avi. Beryl’s flying back to S.F. from Amsterdam—actually she’s probably there by now.”

  “I heard she was in Europe. Why?”

  “Strange government shit is going on there. I’ll tell you later.”

  “Where’s Eb?”

  “Eb has been holed up in the Crypt for a week with his team, doing this kind of incredible D-Day-like push to finalize the biometric identification system. We won’t bother him. Tom’s been drifting back and forth between his house and the Crypt, running various kinds of torture tests on the internal Crypt network systems. Probing the inner
trust boundaries. That’s where we’re going now.”

  “To the inner trust boundaries?”

  “No! Sorry. His house.” Cantrell shakes his head. “It’s… well. It’s not the house I would build.”

  “I want to see it.”

  “His paranoia is getting just a little out of hand.”

  “Hey speaking of that…” Randy stops. He was about to tell Cantrell about Pontifex, but they are very close to the halal Dunkin’ Donuts, and people are looking at them. There’s no way of telling who might be listening. “I’ll tell you later.”

  Cantrell looks momentarily baffled and then grins wickedly. “Good one.”

  “We have a car?”

  “I borrowed Tom’s car. His Humvee. Not one of those cushy civilian models. A real military one.”

  “Oh, that’s great,” Randy says. “Does it come complete with big machine gun on the back?”

  “He looked into it—he could certainly get a license to own one in Kinakuta—but his wife drew the line at having an actual heavy machine gun in their domicile.”

  “How about you? Where do you stand on this gun stuff?”

  “I own them and know how to use them, as you are aware,” Cantrell says.

  They are winding their way down a gauntlet of duty-free shops, really more of a duty-free shopping mall. Randy cannot figure out who actually buys all of these large bottles of liquor and expensive belts. What kind of blandly orgiastic lifestyle demands this particular selection of goods?

  In the time that’s thus passed Cantrell has evidently decided that a more thorough answer to Randy’s gun question is merited. “But the more I practiced with them the more scared I got. Or maybe depressed.”

  “What do you mean?” This is Randy in unaccustomed sounding-board mode, psychotherapeutically prompting Cantrell for his feelings. It must have been a weird day for John Cantrell, and no doubt there are some feelings that need to be addressed.

  “Holding one of those things in your hands, cleaning the barrel and shoving the rounds into clips, really brings you face-to-face with what a desperate, last-ditch measure they really are. I mean, if it gets to the point where we are shooting at people and vice versa, then we have completely screwed up. So in the end, they only strengthened my interest in making sure we could do without them.”

  “And hence the Crypt?” Randy asks.

  “My involvement in the Crypt is arguably a direct result of a few very bad dreams that I had about guns.”

  It is wonderfully healthy to be talking like this, but it is a portentous departure from their usual hard-core technical mode. They are wondering about whether it is even worth it for them to be mixed up in this stuff. Heedless certainty sure is easier.

  “Well, what about those Secret Admirers who were hanging around outside Ordo?” Randy asks.

  “What about them? You’re asking me about their state of mind?”

  “Yeah. That is what we are talking about. States of mind.”

  Cantrell shrugs. “I don’t know specifically who they were. I’d guess there are one or two honest-to-god scary fanatics. Setting them aside, maybe a third of them are just too young and immature to understand what’s going on. It was just a lark for them. The other two-thirds probably had very sweaty palms.”

  “They looked like they were trying awfully hard to keep up a cheerful front.”

  “They were probably happy to get out of there, and to go sit in a dark cool room and drink beer afterwards. Certainly a lot of them have been sending me e-mail about the Crypt since then.”

  “As an alternative to violent resistance to the United States Government, I assume and hope you mean.”

  “Exactly. Sure. I mean, that’s what the Crypt is becoming. Right?”

  The question sounds a little querulous to Randy. “Right,” he says. He wonders why he feels so much more settled about this stuff than John Cantrell does, and then recalls that he has nothing left to lose.

  Randy takes one last breath of dry, machine-cooled air and holds it refreshingly in his lungs as they step out into the heat of the evening. He has learned to relax into the climate; you can’t fight it. There is a humming logjam of black Mercedes-Benzes waiting to pick up the Sultan- and Vizier-Class passengers. Very few Wallah-Class passengers get off at Kinakuta; most of them are in transit to India. Because this is the kind of place where everything works just perfectly, Randy and John are in the Humvee about twenty seconds later, and twenty seconds after that driving at a hundred and twenty kilometers per hour down a long horizontal shaft of ghastly blue-green freeway-light.

  “We have been assuming that this Humvee is not bugged,” Cantrell says, “so, if you were holding back on something, you can speak freely now.”

  Randy writes, Let’s stop assuming anything of the kind on a notepad and holds it up. Cantrell raises his eyebrows one notch but of course does not seem especially surprised—he spends all of his time around people trying to outdo each other in paranoia. Randy writes We have been under srv’nce by a former NSA hondo gone private. Then he adds, Prob. Working for 1 or more Crypt clients.

  How do you know? Cantrell mouths.

  Randy sighs, then writes: I was contacted by a Wizard.

  Then, as long as John’s preoccupied with working his way around a left-lane fender bender, he adds, Think of it as due diligence, underworld style.

  Cantrell says out loud, “Tom has been pretty scrupulous about making sure his house is bug-free. I mean, he built the thing, or had it built, from the ground up.” He veers off onto an exit ramp and plunges into the jungle.

  “Good. We can talk there,” Randy says, then writes, Remember the new U.S. Embassy in Moscow—bugs mixed into the concrete by KGB—had to be torn down.

  Cantrell grabs the pad and scribbles blind on the dashboard while maneuvering the Humvee up a curving mountain road into the cloud forest. What do you want to talk about that is so secret? Arethusa? Give me agenda pls.

  Randy: (1) Lawsuit & whether Epiphyte can continue to exist. (2) That NSA tapper, and Wizard, exist. (3) Maybe Arethusa.

  Cantrell grins and writes, I have good news re: Tombstone’s /.

  “/” in this context is UNIX for the root of the file system, which in the case of Tombstone is synonymous with the hard drive that Randy tried to wipe. Randy raises his eyebrows skeptically and Cantrell grins, nods, and draws his thumb across his throat.

  Chez Howard is a flat-roofed concrete structure that from certain angles looks like a very large drainage culvert set vertically in a mound of grout on the top of a foothill. It becomes visible from one of those angles about ten minutes before they actually arrive, because the road must make several switchbacks across the broad slope of that foothill, which has been involuted and fractalized by relentless drainage. Even when it’s not raining here, the mere condensation of moisture from the South Seas breezes gathers on leaves and rains from their drip-tips all the time. Between the rain and the plant life, erosion must be a violent and ravenous force here, which makes Randy a little uneasy about all of these mountains, because mountains could only exist in such an environment if the underlying tectonic forces were thrusting rock into the air at a rate that would make your ears pop standing still. But then again, having just lost a house to a temblor, he is naturally inclined to a conservative view.

  Cantrell is now drawing an elaborate diagram, and has even slowed down, almost to a stop, the better to draw it. It begins with a tall rectangle. Set within that is a parallelogram, the same size, but skewed a little bit downwards, and with a little circle drawn in the middle of one edge. Randy realizes he’s looking at a perspective view of a doorframe with its door hanging slightly ajar, the little circle being its knob. STEEL FRAME, Cantrell writes, hollow metal channels. Quick meandering scribbles suggest the matrix of wall surrounding it, and the floor underneath. Where the uprights of the doorframe are planted in the floor, Cantrell draws small, carefully foreshortened circles. Holes in the floor. Then he encircles the doorframe in a continu
ous hoop, beginning at one of those circles and climbing up one side of the doorframe, across the top, down the other side, through the other hole in the floor, and then horizontally beneath the door, then up through the first hole again, completing the loop. He draws one or two careful iterations of this and then numerous sloppy ones until the whole thing is surrounded in a vague, elongated tornado. Many turns of fine wire. Finally he draws two leads away from this huge door-sized coil and connects them to a sandwich of alternating long and short horizontal lines, which Randy recognizes as the symbol for a battery. The diagram is completed with a huge arrow drawn vigorously through the center of the doorway, like an airborne battering ram, labeled B which means a magnetic field. Ordo computer room door.

  “Wow,” Randy says. Cantrell has drawn a classic elementary-school electromagnet, the kind of thing young Randy made by winding a wire around a nail and hooking it up to a lantern battery. Except that this one is wound around the outside of a doorframe and, Randy guesses, hidden inside the walls and beneath the floor so that no one would know it was there unless they tore the building apart. Magnetic fields are the styli of the modern world, they are what writes bits onto disks, or wipes them away. The read/write heads of Tombstone’s hard drive are exactly the same thing, but a lot smaller. If they are fine-pointed draftsman’s pens, then what Cantrell’s drawn here is a firehose spraying India ink. It probably would have no effect on a disk drive that was a few meters away from it, but anything that was actually carried through that doorway would be wiped clean. Between the pulse-gun fired into the building from outside (destroying every chip within range) and this doorframe hack (losing every bit on every disk) the Ordo raid must have been purely a scrap-hauling run for whoever organized it—Andrew Loeb or (according to the Secret Admirers) Attorney General Comstock’s sinister Fed forces who were using Andy as a cat’s paw. The only thing that would have made it through that doorway intact would have been information stored on CD-ROM or other nonmagnetic media, and Tombstone had none of that.