Cryptonomicon (116 page)

A
TTORNEY
A
LEJANDRO COMES TO SEE
R
ANDY 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 through 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 perfunctory gesture, the subtext being
I wish you’d go away but minimal standards of social decency dictate that I should say something
. The Dentist, no slouch himself in the social ineptness department, comes right back as if it were an actual request for information. “I can only
assume that you have somehow gotten embroiled with someone who has a lot of influence in this country. It appears that someone is trying to send you a—”

“No! Just stop,” Randy says. “Don’t say it.” Hubert Kepler is now looking at him quizzically, so Randy continues. “The message theory doesn’t hold up.”

Kepler looks genuinely baffled for a few moments, then actually does grin a little bit. “Well, it certainly isn’t an attempt to do away with you, because—”

“Obviously,” Randy says.

“Yes. Obviously.”

There is another one of those long pauses; Kepler seems unsure of himself. Randy arches his back and stretches. “The chair in my cell is not what you call ergonomic,” he says. He holds his arms out and wiggles the fingers. “My carpals are going to start acting up again. I can tell.”