ber '538' might be written down instead of this great ugly [sigma], and
so on.
"Seems pretty close to wanking, now."
"No, no. Because then Gödel sprang the trap! Formulas can act on
numbers, right?"
"Sure. Like 2x."
"Yes. You can substitute any number for x and the formula 2x will
double it. But if another mathematical formula, such as this one right here,
for calculating pi, can be encoded as a number, then you can have another
formula act on it. Formulas acting on formulas!"
"Is that all?"
"No. Then he showed, really through a very simple argument, that if
formulas really can refer to themselves, it's possible to write one down
saying 'this statement cannot be proved.' Which was tremendously startling
to Hilbert and everyone else, who expected the opposite result."
"Have you mentioned this Hilbert guy before?"
"No, he is new to this discussion, Lawrence."
"Who is he?"
"A man who asks difficult questions. He asked a whole list of them
once. Gödel answered one of them."
"And Türing answered another," Rudy said.
"Who's that?"
"It's me," Alan said. "But Rudy's joking. 'Turing' doesn't really have
an umlaut in it."
"He's going to have an umlaut in him later tonight," Rudy said, looking
at Alan in a way that, in retrospect, years later, Lawrence would understand
to have been smoldering.
"Well, don't keep me in suspense. Which one of his questions did you
answer?"
"The Entscheidungsproblem," Rudy said.
"Meaning?"
Alan explained, "Hilbert wanted to know whether any given statement
could, in principle, be found true or false."
"But after Gödel got finished, it changed," Rudy pointed out. "That's
true after Gödel it became 'Can we determine whether any given statement is
provable or non provable?' In other words, is there some sort of mechanical
process we could use to separate the provable statements from the
nonprovable ones?"
'Mechanical process' is supposed to be a metaphor, Alan. . .
"Oh, stop it, Rudy! Lawrence and I are quite comfortable with
machinery."
"I get it," Lawrence said.
"What do you mean, you get it?" Alan said.
"Your machine not the zeta function calculator, but the other one. The
one we've been talking about building "
"It is called Universal Turing Machine," Rudy said.
"The whole point of that gizmo is to separate provable from nonprovable
statements, isn't it?''
"That's why I came up with the basic idea for it," Alan said. "So
Hilbert's question has been answered. Now I just want to actually build one
so that I can beat Rudy at chess."
"You haven't told poor Lawrence the answer yet!" Rudy protested.
"Lawrence can figure it out," Alan said. "It'll give him something to
do."
***
Soon it became clear that Alan really meant: It'll give him something
to do while we're fucking. Lawrence shoved a notebook into the waistband of
his trousers and rode his bicycle a few hundred yards to the fire tower,
then climbed up the stairs to the platform at the top and sat down, back to
the setting sun, notebook propped up on his knees to catch the light.
He could not collect his thoughts, and then he was distracted by a
false sunrise that lit up the clouds off to the northeast. He thought at
first that some low clouds were bouncing fragments of the sunset back to
him, but it was too concentrated and flickering for that. Then he thought it
was lightning. But the color of the light was not blue enough. It fluctuated
sharply, modulated by (one had to assume) great, startling events that were
occulted by the horizon. As the sun went down on the opposite side of the
world, the light on the New Jersey horizon focused to a steady, lambent core
the color of a flashlight when you shine it through the palm of your hand
under the bedsheets.
Lawrence climbed down the stairs and got on his bicycle and rode
through the Pine Barrens. Before long he came to a road that led in the
general direction of the light. Most of the time he could not see anything,
not even the road, but after a couple of hours the glow bouncing off the low
cloud layer lit up flat stones in the road, and turned the barrens'
wandering rivulets into glowing crevices.
The road began to tend in the wrong direction and so Lawrence cut
directly into the woods, because he was very close now, and the light in the
sky was strong enough that he could see it through the sparse carpet of
scrubby pines black sticks that appeared to have been burned, though they
hadn't. The ground had turned into sand, but it was damp and compacted, and
his bicycle had fat tires that rode over it well. At one point he had to
stop and throw the bike over a barbed wire fence. Then he broke out of the
sticks and onto a perfectly flat expanse of white sand, stitched down with
tufts of beach grass, and just then he was dazzled by a low fence of quiet
steady flames that ran across a part of the horizon about as wide as the
harvest moon when it sinks into the sea. Its brightness made it difficult to
see anything else Lawrence kept riding into little ditches and creeks that
meandered across the flats. He learned not to stare directly at the flames.
Looking off to the sides was more interesting anyway: the table land was
marked at wide intervals by the largest buildings he had ever seen, cracker
box structures built by Pharaohs, and in the mile wide plazas between them,
gnomons of triangulated steel were planted in wide stances: the internal
skeletons of pyramids. The largest of these pierced the center of a
perfectly circular railway line a few hundred feet in diameter: two argent
curves scored on the dull ground, interrupted in one place where the tower's
shadow, a stopped sundial, told the time. He rode by a building smaller than
the others, with oval tanks standing next to it. Steam murmured from valves
on the tops of the tanks, but instead of rising into the air it dribbled
down the sides and struck the ground and spread out, coating the sea grass
with jackets of silver.
A thousand sailors in white were standing in a ring around the long
flame. One of them held up his hand and waved Lawrence down. Lawrence came
to a stop next to the sailor and planted one foot on the sand to steady
himself. He and the sailor stared at each other for a moment and then
Lawrence, who could not think of anything else, said, "I am in the Navy
also." Then the sailor seemed to make up his mind about something. He
saluted Lawrence through, and pointed him towards a small building off to
the side of the fire.
The building looked only like a wall glowing in the firelight, but
sometimes a barrage of magnesium blue light made its windowframes jump out
of the darkness, a rectangular lightning bolt that echoed many times across
the night. Lawrence started pedaling again and rode past that building: a
spiraling flock of alert fedoras, prodding at slim terse notebooks with
stately Ticonderogas, crab walking photogs turning their huge chrome
daisies, crisp rows of people sleeping with blankets over their faces, a
sweating man with Brilliantined hair chalking umlauted names on a
blackboard. Finally coming around this building he smelled hot fuel oil,
felt the heat of the flames on his face and saw beach glass curled toward it
and desiccated.
He stared down upon the world's globe, not the globe fleshed with
continents and oceans but only its skeleton: a burst of meridians, curving
backwards to cage an inner dome of orange flame. Against the light of the
burning oil those longitudes were thin and crisp as a draftsman's ink
strokes. But coming closer he saw them resolve into clever works of rings
and struts, hollow as a bird's bones. As they spread away from the pole they
sooner or later began to wander, or split into bent parts, or just broke off
and hung in the fire oscillating like dry stalks. The perfect geometry was
also mottled, here and there, by webs of cable and harnesses of electrical
wiring. Lawrence almost rode over a broken wine bottle and decided he should
now walk, to spare his bicycle's tires, so he laid the bike down, the front
wheel covering an aluminum vase that appeared to have been spun on a lathe,
with a few charred roses hanging out of it. Some sailors had joined their
hands to form a sort of throne, and were bearing along a human shaped piece
of charcoal dressed in a coverall of immaculate asbestos. As they walked the
toes of their shoes caught in vast, ramified snarls of ropes and piano
wires, cables and wires, creative furtive movements in the grass and the
sand dozens of yards every direction. Lawrence began planting his feet very
thoughtfully one in front of the other, trying to measure the greatness of
what he had come and seen. A rocket shaped pod stuck askew from the sand,
supporting an umbrella of bent back propellers. The duralumin struts and cat
walks rambled on above him for miles. There was a suitcase spilled open,
with a pair of women's shoes displayed as if in the window of a down town
store, and a menu that had been charred to an oval glow, and then some
tousled wall slabs, like a whole room that had dropped out of the sky these
were decorated, one with a giant map of the world, great circles arcing away
from Berlin to pounce on cities near and far, and another with a photograph
of a famous, fat German in a uniform, grinning on a flowered platform, the
giant horizon of a new Zeppelin behind him.
After a while he stopped seeing new things. Then he got on his bicycle
and rode back through the Pine Barrens. He got lost in the dark and so
didn't find his way back to the fire tower until dawn. But he didn't mind
being lost because while he rode around in the dark he thought about the
Turing machine. Finally he came back to the shore of the pond where they had
camped. The dawn light shining on the saucer of calm reddish water made it
look like a pool of blood. Alan Mathison Turing and Rudolf von Hacklheber
were lying together like spoons on the shore, still smudged a little bit
from their swim yesterday. Lawrence started a little fire and made some tea
and they woke up eventually.
"Did you solve the problem?" Alan asked him.
"Well you can turn that Universal Turing Machine of yours into any
machine by changing the presets "
"Presets?"
"Sorry, Alan, I think of your U.T.M. as being kind of like a pipe
organ."
"Oh."
"Once you've done that, anyway, you can do any calculation you please,
if the tape is long enough. But gosh, Alan, making a tape that's long
enough, and that you can write symbols on, and erase them, is going to be
sort of tricky Atanasoffs capacitor drum would only work up to a certain
size you'd have to "
"This is a digression," Alan said gently.
"Yeah, okay, well if you had a machine like that, then any given preset
could be represented by a number a string of symbols. And the tape that you
would feed into it to start the calculation would contain another string of
symbols. So it's Gödel's proof all over again if any possible combination of
machine and data can be represented by a string of numbers, then you can
just arrange all of the possible strings of numbers into a big table, and
then it turns into a Cantor diagonal type of argument, and the answer is
that there must be some numbers that cannot be computed."
"And ze Entscheidungsproblem?" Rudy reminded him.
"Proving or disproving a formula once you've encrypted the formula into
numbers, that is is just a calculation on that number. So it means that the
answer to the question is, no! Some formulas cannot be proved or disproved
by any mechanical process! So I guess there's some point in being human
after all!"
Alan looked pleased until Lawrence said this last thing, and then his
face collapsed. "Now there you go making unwarranted assumptions."
"Don't listen to him, Lawrence!" Rudy said. "He's going to tell you
that our brains are Turing machines."
"Thank you, Rudy," Alan said patiently. "Lawrence, I submit that our
brains are Turing machines."
"But you proved that there's a whole lot of formulas that a Turing
machine can't process!"
"And you have proved it too, Lawrence."
"But don't you think that we can do some things that a Turing machine
couldn't?"
"Gödel agrees with you, Lawrence," Rudy put in, "and so does Hardy."
"Give me one example," Alan said.
"Of a noncomputable function that a human can do, and a Turing machine
can't?"
"Yes. And don't give me any sentimental nonsense about creativity. I
believe that a Universal Turing Machine could show behaviors that we would
construe as creative."
"Well, I don't know then . . . I'll try to keep my eye out for that
kind of thing in the future.''
But later, as they were tiding back towards Princeton, he said, "What
about dreams?"
"Like those angels in Virginia?"
"I guess so."
"Just noise in the neurons, Lawrence."
"Also I dreamed last night that a zeppelin was burning."
***
Soon, Alan got his Ph.D. and went back to England. He wrote Lawrence a
couple of letters. The last of these stated, simply, that he would not be
able to write Lawrence any more letters "of substance" and that Lawrence
should not take it personally. Lawrence perceived right away that Alan's
society had put him to work doing something useful probably figuring out how
to keep it from being eaten alive by certain of its neighbors. Lawrence
wondered what use America would find for him .
He went back to Iowa State, considered changing his major to
mathematics, but didn't. It was the consensus of all whom he consulted that
mathematics, like pipe organ restoration, was a fine thing, but that one
needed some way to put bread on the table. He remained in engineering and
did more and more poorly at it until the middle of his senior year, when the
university suggested that he enter a useful line of work, such as roofing.
He walked straight out of college into the waiting arms of the Navy.
They gave him an intelligence test. The first question on the math part
had to do with boats on a river: Port Smith is 100 miles upstream of Port
Jones. The river flows at 5 miles per hour. The boat goes through water at
10 miles per hour. How long does it take to go from Port Smith to Port
Jones? How long to come back?
Lawrence immediately saw that it was a trick question. You would have
to be some kind of idiot to make the facile assumption that the current
would add or subtract 5 miles per hour to or from the speed of the boat.
Clearly, 5 miles per hour was nothing more than the average speed. The
current would be faster in the middle of the river and slower at the banks.
More complicated variations could be expected at bends in the river.
Basically it was a question of hydrodynamics, which could be tackled using
certain well known systems of differential equations. Lawrence dove into the
problem, rapidly (or so he thought) covering both sides of ten sheets of
paper with calculations. Along the way, he realized that one of his
assumptions, in combination with the simplified Navier Stokes equations, had
led him into an exploration of a particularly interesting family of partial
differential equations. Before he knew it, he had proved a new theorem. If
that didn't prove his intelligence, what would?
Then the time bell rang and the papers were collected. Lawrence managed
to hang onto his scratch paper. He took it back to his dorm, typed it up,
and mailed it to one of the more approachable math professors at Princeton,
who promptly arranged for it to be published in a Parisian mathematics
journal.
Lawrence received two free, freshly printed copies of the journal a few
months later, in San Diego, California, during mail call on board a large
ship called the U.S.S. Nevada. The ship had a band, and the Navy had given
Lawrence the job of playing the glockenspiel in it, because their testing
procedures had proven that he was not intelligent enough to do anything
else.
The sack of mail carrying Lawrence's contribution to the mathematical
literature arrived just in the nick of time. Lawrence's ship, and quite a
few of her sisters, had until then been based in California. But at just
this moment, all of them were transferred to some place called Pearl Harbor,
Hawaii, in order to show the Nips who was boss.
Lawrence had never really known what he wanted to do with his life, but
he quickly decided that being glockenspiel player on a battleship in Hawaii
during peacetime was a long way from the worst life you could possibly have.
The harshest part of the job was sometimes having to sit or march in very
warm conditions, and enduring occasional fluffed notes by other band
members. He had abundant free time, which he spent working on a series of
new theorems in the field of information theory. The field had been invented
and pretty much encompassed by his friend Alan, but there was much detail
work to be done. He and Alan and Rudy had sketched out a general plan of
what needed to be proved or disproved. Lawrence tore through the list. He
wondered what Alan and Rudy were up to in Britain and Germany, but he
couldn't write to them and find out, so he kept his work to himself. When he
wasn't playing the glockenspiel or working out theorems, there were bars and
dances to go to. Waterhouse did some penis work of his own, got the clap,
had it cured (1), bought condoms. All of the sailors did this.
They were like three year olds who shove pencils in their ears, discover
that it hurts, and stop doing it. Lawrence's first year went by almost
instantly. Time just blazed by. Nowhere could be sunnier, more relaxing,
than Hawaii.
Chapter 2 NOVUS ORDO SECLORUM
"Filipinos are a warm, gentle, caring, giving people," Avi says, "which
is a good thing since so many of them carry concealed weapons."
Randy is in Tokyo's airport, ambling down a concourse with a slowness
that is infuriating to his fellow travelers. They have all spent the last
half day strapped into bad chairs, stuffed into an aluminum tube aslosh with
jet fuel. Over the safety engineered nubs molded into the jetway floor,
their rolling suitcases drone like fighter planes. They graze the backs of
his knees as they bank around his husky columnar body. Randy is holding his
new GSM phone to the side of his head. Supposedly it works anywhere in the
world, except for the United States. This is his first chance to try it out.
"You sound clear as a bell," Avi says. "How was the flight over?"
"All right," Randy says. "They had one of those animated maps up on the
video screen."
Avi sighs. "All the airlines have those now," he announces
monotonically.
"The only feature between San Francisco and Tokyo was Midway Island."
"So?"
"It kind of hung there for hours. MIDWAY. Mute embarrassment all
around."
Randy reaches the departure gate for Manila, and pauses to admire a
five foot wide high definition TV set bearing the logo of a major Nipponese
consumer electronics company. It is running a video in which a wacky cartoon
professor and his adorable canine sidekick cheerfully tick off the three
transmission routes of the AIDS virus.
"I have a fingerprint for you," Randy says.
"Shoot."
Randy stares at the palm of his hand, on which he has written a string
of numbers and letters in ballpoint pen. "AF 10 06 E9 99 BA 11 07 64 C1 89
E3 40 8C 72 55."
"Got it," Avi says. "That's from Ordo, right?"
"Right. I e mailed you the key from SFO."
"The apartment situation is still resolving," Avi says. "So I just
reserved you a suite at the Manila Hotel."
"What do you mean, it's still resolving?"
"The Philippines is one of those post Spanish countries with no clear
boundaries between business and personal relationships," Avi says. "I don't
think you can secure lodgings there without marrying into a family with a
major street named after it."
Randy takes a seat in the departure area. Perky gate attendants in
jaunty, improbable hats zero in on Filipinos with too many carry ons, and
subject them to a public ritual of filling out little tags and surrendering
their possessions. The Filipinos roll their eyes and stare longingly out the
windows. But most of the waiting passengers are Nipponese some businessmen,
mostly vacationers. They are watching an educational video about how to get
mugged in foreign countries.
"Huh," Randy says, looking out the window, "got another 747 down to
Manila."
"In Asia, no decent airline bothers to dick around anything smaller
than a 747," Avi snaps. "If someone tries to pack you on board a 737 or god
forbid an Airbus, run, don't walk, away from the boarding lounge, and call
me on my Sky Pager and I'll send in a chopper to evacuate you."
Randy laughs.
Avi continues. "Now, listen. This hotel you're going to is very old,
very grand, but it's in the middle of nowhere."
"Why would they build a grand hotel in the middle of nowhere?"
"It used to be a happening place it's on the waterfront, right on the
edge of Intramuros."
Randy's high school Spanish is enough to translate that: Inside the
Walls.
"But Intramuros was annihilated by the Nipponese in 1945," Avi
continues. "Systematically. All of the business hotels and office buildings
are in a new neighborhood called Makati, much closer to the airport."
"So you want to put our office in Intramuros."
"How'd you guess?" Avi says, sounding a little spooked. He prides
himself on unpredictability.
"I'm not an intuitive guy generally," Randy says, "but I've been on a
plane for thirteen hours and my brain has been turned inside out and hung up
to dry."
Avi rattles off canned justifications: office space is much cheaper in
Intramuros. Government ministries are closer. Makati, the gleaming new
business district, is too isolated from the real Philippines. Randy pays no
attention to it.
"You want to work out of Intramuros because it was systematically
annihilated, and because you're obsessed with the Holocaust," Randy finally
says, quietly and without rancor.
"Yeah. So?" Avi says.
***
Randy stares out the window of the Manila bound 747, sipping on a
fluorescent green Nipponese soft drink made from bee extracts (at least, it
has pictures of bees on it) and munching on something that a flight
attendant handed him called Japanese Snack. Sky and ocean are the same
color, a shade of blue that makes his teeth freeze. The plane is so high
that, whether he looks up or down, he sees foreshortened views of boiling
cumulonimbus stacks. The clouds erupt from the hot Pacific as if immense
warships were exploding all over the place. The speed and power of their
growth is alarming, the forms they adopt as bizarre and varied as those of
deep sea organisms, and all of them, he supposes, are as dangerous to an
airplane as punji stakes to a barefoot pedestrian. The red orange meatball
painted on the wingtip startles him when he notices it. He feels like he's
been thrown into an old war film.
He turns on his laptop. Electronic mail from Avi, encrypted to a fare
thee well, has been piling up in his in box. It is a gradual accumulation of
tiny files, thrown at him by Avi whenever a thought popped into his head
over the last three days; it would be obvious, even if Randy didn't know it,
that Avi owns a portable e mail machine that talks to the Internet by radio.
Randy fires up a piece of software that is technically called Novus Ordo
Seclorum but that everyone calls Ordo for short. It is a fairly strained pun
based on the fact that Ordo's job, as a piece of cryptographic software, is
to put a message's bits in a New Order and that it will take Centuries for
nosy governments to decrypt it. A scanned image of a Great Pyramid appears
in the middle of his screen, and a single eye gradually materializes at its
apex.
Ordo can handle this in one of two ways. The obvious way is to decrypt
all of the messages and convert them into plaintext files on his hard disk,
which he can then read any time he wants. The problem with this (if you are
paranoid) is that anyone who gets his hands on Randy's hard disk can then
read the files. For all he knows, the customs officials in Manila will
decide to ransack his computer for child pornography. Or, fogged by jet lag,
he'll leave his laptop in a taxi. So instead he puts Ordo into a streaming
mode where it will decrypt the files just long enough for him to read them
and then, when he closes the windows, expunge the plaintext from the
computer's memory and from its hard drive.
The subject heading of Avi's first message is: "Guideline 1."
We look for places where the math is right. Meaning what? Meaning that
pop. is about to explode we can predict that just by looking at age
histogram and per capita income is about to take off the way it did in
Nippon, Taiwan, Singapore. Multiply those two things together and you get
the kind of exponential growth that should get us all into fuck you money
before we turn forty.
This is an allusion to a Randy/Avi conversation of two years ago
wherein Avi actually calculated a specific numerical value for "fuck you
money." It was not a fixed constant, however, but rather a cell in a
spreadsheet linked to any number of continually fluctuating economic
indicators. Sometimes when Avi is working at his computer he will leave the
spreadsheet running in a tiny window in the corner so that he can see the
current value of "fuck you money" at a glance.
The second message, sent a couple of hours later, is called "Guideline
2."
Two: pick a tech where no one can compete with us. Right now,
that=networking. We're kicking the crap out of everyone else in the world
when it comes to networking. It's not even funny.
The next day, Avi sent a message called, simply, "More." Perhaps he had
lost track of the number of guidelines he'd issued so far.
Another principle: this time we retain control of the corporation. That
means that we keep at least fifty percent of the shares which means little
to no outside investment until we've built up some value.
"You don't have to convince me," Randy mumbles to himself as he reads
this.
This shapes the kinds of businesses we can get into. Forget anything
that requires a big initial investment.
Luzon is green black jungle mountains gouged with rivers that would
appear to be avalanches of silt. As the navy blue ocean verges on its khaki
beaches, the water takes on the shocking iridescent hue of a suburban
swimming pool. Farther south, the mountains are swidden scarred the soil
beneath is bright red and so these parts look like fresh lacerations. But
most is covered with foliage that looks like the nubby green stuff that
model railroaders put over their papier mâché hills, and in vast stretches
of the mountains there are no signs whatsoever that human beings have ever
existed. Closer to Manila, some of the slopes are deforested, sprinkled with
structures, ribboned with power line cuts. Rice paddies line the basins. The
towns are accretions of shanties, nucleated around large cross shaped
churches with good roofs.
The view gets blurry as they belly down into the pall of sweaty smog
above the city. The plane begins to sweat like a giant glass of iced tea.
The water streams off in sheets, collects in crevices, whips off the flaps'
trailing edges.
Suddenly they are banking over Manila Bay, which is marked with endless
streaks of brilliant red some kind of algal bloom. Oil tankers trail long
time delayed rainbows that flourish in their wakes. Every cove is jammed
with long skinny boats with dual outriggers, looking like brightly painted
water skaters.
And then they are down on the runway at NAIA, Ninoy Aquino
International Airport. Guards and cops of various stripes are ambling around
with M 16s or pistol handled pump shotguns, wearing burnooses fashioned from
handkerchiefs clamped to the head with American baseball caps. A man dressed
in a radiant white uniform stands below the ragged maw of the jetway holding
his hands downwards with fluorescent orange sticks in them, like Christ
dispensing mercy on a world of sinners. Sulfurous, fulminating tropical air
begins to leak in through the jumbo's air vents. Everything moistens and
wilts.
He is in Manila. He takes his passport out of his shirt pocket. It
says,
RANDALL LAWRENCE WATERHOUSE.
***
This is how Epiphyte Corporation came into existence:
"I am channeling the bad shit!" Avi said.
The number came through on Randy's pager while he was sitting around a
table in a grubhouse along the coast with his girlfriend's crowd. A place
where, every day, they laser printed fresh menus on 100% recycled imitation
parchment, where oscilloscope tracings of neon colored sauces scribbled
across the plates, and the entrees were towering, architectonic stacks of
rare ingredients carved into gemlike prisms. Randy had spent the entire meal
trying to resist the temptation to invite one of Charlene's friends (any one
of them, it didn't matter) out on the sidewalk for a fistfight.
He glanced at his pager expecting to see the number of the Three
Siblings Computer Center, which was where he worked (technically, still
does). The fell digits of Avi's phone number penetrated the core of his
being in the same way that 666 would a fundamentalist's.
Fifteen seconds later, Randy was out on the sidewalk, swiping his card
through a pay phone like an assassin drawing a single edged razor blade
across the throat of a tubby politician.
"The power is coming down from On High," Avi continued. "Tonight, it
happens to be coming through me you poor bastard."
"What do you want me to do?" Randy asked, adopting a cold, almost
hostile tone to mask sick excitement.
"Buy a ticket to Manila," Avi said.
"I have to talk it over with Charlene first," Randy said.
"You don't even believe that yourself," Avi said.
"Charlene and I have a long standing relationsh "
"It's been ten years. You haven't married her. Fill in the fucking
blanks."
(Seventy two hours later, he would be in Manila, looking at the One
Note Flute.)
"Everyone in Asia is wondering when the Philippines is finally going to
get its shit together," Avi said, "it's the question of the nineties."
(The One Note Flute is the first thing you see when you make it through
Passport Control.)
"I flashed on this when I was standing in line at Passport Control at
Ninoy Aquino International Airport," Avi said, compressing that entire name
into a single, sharply articulated burst. "You know how they have different
lanes?"
"I guess so," Randy said. A parallelpiped of seared tuna did a barrel
roll in his gullet. He felt a perverse craving for a double ice cream cone.
He did not travel as much as Avi, and had only a vague idea of what he meant
by lanes.
"You know. One lane for citizens. One for foreigners. Maybe one for
diplomats."
(Now, standing there waiting to have his passport stamped, Randy can
see it clearly. For once he doesn't mind the wait. He gets in a lane next to
the OCW lane and studies them. They are Epiphyte Corp.'s market. Mostly
young women, many of them fashionably dressed, but still with a kind of
Catholic boarding school demureness. Exhausted from long flights, tired of
the wait, they slump, then suddenly straighten up and elevate their fine
chins, as if an invisible nun were making her way up the line whacking their
manicured knuckles with a ruler.)
But seventy two hours ago he hadn't really understood what Avi meant by
lanes, so he just said, "Yeah, I've seen the lane thing."
"At Manila, they have a whole lane just for returning OCWs!"
"OCWs?"
"Overseas Contract Workers. Filipinos working abroad because the
economy of the Philippines is so lame. As maids and nannies in Saudi. Nurses
and anesthesiologists in the States. Singers in Hong Kong, whores in
Bangkok."
"Whores in Bangkok?" Randy had been there, at least, and his mind
reeled at the concept of exporting prostitutes to Thailand.
"The Filipino women are more beautiful," Avi said quietly, "and have a
ferocity that makes them more interesting, to the innately masochistic
business traveler, than all those grinning Thai bimbos." Both of them knew
that this was complete bullshit; Avi was a family man and had no firsthand
experience whereof he spoke. Randy didn't call him on it, though. As long as
Avi retained this extemporaneous bullshitting ability there was a better
than even chance of all of them making fuck you money.
(Now that he's here, it is tempting to speculate as to which of the
girls in the OCW lane are hustlers. But he can't see that going anywhere but
wrong, so he squares his shoulders and marches toward the yellow line.
The government has set up glass display cases in the concourse leading
from Passport Control to the security barrier. The cases contain artifacts
demonstrating the glories of pre Magellan Filipino culture. The first one of
these contains the pièce de résistance: a rustic hand carved musical
instrument labeled with a long and unreadable name in Tagalog. Underneath
that, in smaller letters, is the English translation: ONE NOTE FLUTE.)
"See? The Philippines is innately hedged," Avi said. 'You know how rare
that is? When you find an innately hedged environment, Randy, you lunge into
it like a rabid ferret going into a pipe full of raw meat."
A word about Avi: his father's people had just barely gotten out of
Prague. As Central European Jews went, they were fairly typical. The only
thing about them that was really anomalous was that they were still alive.
But his mother's people were unbelievably peculiar New Mexican crypto Jews
who had been living on mesas, dodging Jesuits, shooting rattlesnakes and
eating jimsonweed for three hundred years; they looked like Indians and
talked like cowboys. In his relations with other people, therefore, Avi
dithered. Most of the time he was courtly and correct in a way that was
deeply impressive to businesspeople Nipponese ones expecially but there were
these eruptions, from time to time, as if he'd been dipping into the loco
weed. Randy had learned to deal with it, which is why Avi called him at
times like this.
"Oh, calm down!" Randy said. He watched a tanned girl rollerblade past
him, on her way up from the beach. "Innately hedged?"
"As long as the Philippines don't have their shit together, there'll be
plenty of OCWs. They will want to communicate with their families the
Filipinos are incredibly family oriented. They make Jews look like a bunch
of alienated loners."
"Okay. You know more about both groups than I do."
"They are sentimental and affectionate in a way that's very easy for us
to sneer at."
"You don't have to be defensive," Randy said, "I'm not sneering at
them."
"When you hear their song dedications on the radio, you'll sneer," Avi
said. "But frankly, we could take some pointers from the Pinoys on this
front."
"You are so close to being sanctimonious right now "
"I apologize," Avi said, with absolute sincerity. Avi's wife had been
pregnant almost continuously for the four years they'd been married. He was
getting more religiously observant daily and couldn't make it through a
conversation without mentioning the Holocaust. Randy was a bachelor who was
just about to break up with the chick he'd been living with.
"I believe you, Avi," Randy said. "Is it a problem with you if I buy a
business class ticket?"
Avi didn't hear him, so Randy assumed that meant yes. "As long as
that's the case, there will be a big market for Pinoy grams."
"Pinoy grams?"
"For god's sake, don't say it out loud! I'm filling out the trademark
application as we speak," Avi said. Randy could hear a rattling sound in the
background, computer keys impacting so rapidly it sounded like Avi was
simply holding the keyboard between his pale, spindly hands and shaking it
violently up and down. "But if the Filipinos do get their shit together,
then we see explosive growth in telecoms, as in any other Arday."
"Arday?"
"R D A E. Rapidly Developing Asian Economy. Either way, we win."
"I gather you want to do something with telecoms?"
"Bingo." In the background, a baby began to cough and cry. "Gotta go,"
Avi said, "Shlomo's asthma is spiking again. Take down this fingerprint."
"Fingerprint?"
"For my encryption key. For e mail."
"Ordo?"
"Yeah."
Randy took out a ballpoint pen and, finding no paper in his pocket,
poised it over the palm of his hand. "Shoot."
"67 81 A4 AE FF 40 25 9B 43 OE 29 8D 56 60 E3 2F." Then Avi hung up the
phone.
Randy went back into the restaurant. On his way back, he asked the
waiter to bring him a half bottle of good red wine. Charlene heard him, and
glowered. Randy was still thinking about innate ferocity, and did not see it
in her face; only a schoolmarmishness common among all of her friends. My
god! I have to get out of California, he realized.
Chapter 3 SEAWEED
Woman holds baby Eyes pale as a muzzle flash Band chimes frozen tears
The fourth marines is marching downhill to the strains of John Philip
Sousa, which ought to be second nature to a Marine. But the Fourth Marines
have been in Shanghai (which ain't no halls of Montezuma nor shores of
Tripoli) for too long, longer than Marines should ever stay in one place,
and Bobby's already seen his sergeant, one Frick, throw up from opium
withdrawal.
A Marine band is several Shanghai blocks ahead. Bobby's platoon can
hear the thumpity thump of the big drums and the piercing noises from
piccolos and glockenspiels but he can't follow the tune. Corporal Shaftoe is
effectively their leader, because Sergeant Frick is useless.
Shaftoe marches alongside the formation, supposedly to keep an eye on
his men, but mostly he's just staring at Shanghai.
Shanghai stares back, and mostly gives them a standing ovation. Of
course there is a type of young street rowdy who makes it a point of honor
to let the Marines know he isn't scared of them, and they are jeering the
Marines from a safe distance, and setting off strings of fire crackers,
which does nothing to steady anyone's nerves. The Europeans are applauding a
whole chorus line of Russian dancing girls from Delmonte's is showing thigh
and blowing kisses. But most of the Chinese look pretty stonefaced, which
Bobby suspects means they're scared shitless.
The worst thing is the women carrying half white babies. A few of these
women are rabid, hysterical, throwing themselves into formations of massed
Marines, undeterred by rifle butts. But most of them are stoic: they stand
with their light eyed babies and glare, searching the ranks and files for
the guilty party. They've all heard about what happened upriver in Nanjing
when the Nips came there, and they know that when it's all over, the only
trace that they and their babies ever existed may be a really bad memory in
the mind of some American Marine.
It works for Shaftoe: he has hunted deer in Wisconsin and seen them
limping across the snow, bleeding to death. He saw a man die in basic
training at Parris Island. He has seen whole tangles of bodies in the