Cryptonomicon (123 page)

Bright light is streaming into the car and he thinks: roadblock, cops, spotlights. The light’s blocked by a silhouette. There’s a rapping noise on the window. Randy looks over and sees the driver’s seat empty, no keys in the ignition. The car’s cool and dormant. He sits up and rubs his face, partly because it needs to be rubbed and partly because it’s probably smart to keep one’s hands in plain sight. More rapping on the windshield, growingly impatient. The windows are fogged and he can only see shapes. The light’s reddish. He’s
got a completely inappropriate erection. Randy gropes for a window control, but the car’s got power windows and they don’t work when it’s not running. He gropes around on the door until he’s figured out how to unlock it, and almost instantly it flies open and someone’s coming inside to join him.

She ends up on Randy’s lap, lying sideways on top of him, her head on his chest. “Close the door,” Amy says, and Randy does. Then she squirms around until she’s face to face with him, her pelvic center of gravity grinding mercilessly against the huge generalized region between navel and thigh that has, in recent months, become one big sex organ for him. She brackets his neck between her forearms and grabs the carotid supports of the whiplash arrestor. He’s busted. The obvious thing now would be a kiss, and she feints in that direction, but then reconsiders, as it seems like some serious looking is in order at this time. So they look at each other for probably a good minute. It’s not a moony kind of look that they share, not a starry-eyed thing by any means, more like a
what the fuck have we gotten ourselves into
thing. As if it’s really important to both of them that they mutually appreciate how serious everything is. Emotionally, yes, but also from a legal and, for lack of a better term, military standpoint. But once Amy is satisfied that her boy does indeed get it, on all of these fronts, she permits herself a vaguely incredulous-looking sneer that blossoms into a real grin, and then a chuckle that in a less heavily armed woman might be characterized as a giggle, and then, just to shut herself up, she pulls hard on the stainless steel goalposts of the whiplash arrestor and nuzzles her face up to Randy’s and, after ten heartbeats’ worth of exploratory sniffling and nuzzling, kisses him. It’s a chaste kiss that takes a long time to open up, which is totally consistent with Amy’s cautious, sardonic approach to everything, as well as with the hypothesis, alluded to once while they were driving to Whitman, that she is in fact a virgin.

Randy’s life is essentially complete at the moment. He has come to understand during all of this that the light shining in through the windows is in fact the light of dawn, and he tries to fight back the thought that
it’s a good day to die
because it’s clear to him that although he might go on from this point to make a lot of money, become famous, or whatever, nothing’s ever going to top this. Amy knows it too, and she makes the kiss last for a very long time before finally breaking away with a little gasp for air, and bowing her head so that her brow is supported on Randy’s breastbone, the curve of her head following that of his throat, like the coastlines of South America and Africa. Randy almost can’t take the pressure of her on his groin. He braces his feet against the floorboards of the sport-utility vehicle and squirms.

She moves suddenly and decisively, grabbing the hem of the left leg of his baggy shorts and yanking it almost up to his navel, taking his boxer shorts along with. Randy pops free and takes aim at her, straining upwards, bobbing slightly with each beat of his heart, glowing healthily (he thinks modestly) in the dawn light. Amy’s in a sort of light wraparound skirt, which she suddenly flings over him, producing a momentary tent-pole effect. But she’s on the move, reaching up beneath to pull her underwear out of the way, and then before he can even believe it’s happening she sits down on him, hard, producing a nearly electrical shock. Then she stops moving—daring him.

Randy’s toe knuckles pop audibly. He lifts himself and Amy into the air, experiences some kind of synaesthetic hallucination very much like the famous “jump into hyperspace” scene from
Star Wars
. Or perhaps the air bag has accidentally detonated? Then he pumps something like an Imperial pint of semen—it’s a seemingly open-ended series of ejaculations, each coupled to the next by nothing more than a leap of faith that another one is coming—and in the end, like all schemes built on faith and hope, it lapses, and then Randy sits utterly still until his body realizes it has not drawn breath in quite a while. He fills his lungs all the way, stretching them out, which feels almost as good as the orgasm, and then he opens his eyes—she’s staring down at him in bemusement, but (thank god!) not horror or disgust. He settles back into the bucket seat, which squeezes his butt in a not-unpleasant gesture of light harassment. Between that, and Amy’s thighs, and other penetrations, he is not going anywhere for a while, and he’s moderately afraid of
what Amy’s going to say—she has a lengthy menu of possible responses to all of this, most of them at Randy’s expense. She plants a knee, levers herself up, grabs the tail of his Hawaiian shirt and cleans herself off a bit. Then she shoves the door open, pats him twice on his whiskery cheek, says “Shave,” and exits stage left. Randy can now see that the air bag has not, in fact, deployed. And yet he has the same feeling of a major sudden life change that one might get after surviving a car crash.

He is a mess. Fortunately his bag’s in the backseat, with another shirt.

A few minutes later he finally emerges from the fogged-up car and gets a look at his surroundings. He’s in a community built on a canted plateau with a few widely spaced, very high coconut palms scattered about. Downslope, which appears to be roughly south, there is a pattern of vegetation that Randy recognizes as a tri-leveled cash-crop thing: pineapples down on the ground, cacao and coffee at about head level, coconuts and bananas above that. The yellowish green leaves of the banana trees are especially appealing, seemingly big enough to stretch out and sunbathe on. To the north, and uphill, a jungle is attempting to tear down a mountain.

This compound that he’s in is obviously a recent thing, laid out by actual surveyors, designed by people with educations, subsidized by someone who can afford brand-new sheets of corrugated tin, ABS drainpipe, and proper electrical wiring. It has something in common with a normal Philippine town in that it’s built around a church. In this case the church is small—Enoch called it a chapel—but that it was designed by Finnish architecture students would be obvious to Randy even if Root hadn’t divulged it. It has a bit of that Bucky Fuller tensegrity thing going for it—lots of exposed, tensioned cables radiating from the ends of tubular struts, all collaborating to support a roof that’s not a single surface but a system of curved shards. It looks awfully well designed to Randy, who now judges buildings on the sole criterion of their ability to resist earthquakes. Root told him it was built by the brothers of a missionary order, and by local volunteers, with materials contributed by a
Nipponese foundation that is still trying to make amends for the war.

Music is coming out of the church. Randy checks his watch and discovers that it’s Sunday morning. He avoids participating in the Mass, on the excuse that it’s already underway and he doesn’t want to interrupt it, and ambles toward a nearby pavilion—a corrugated roof sheltering a concrete floor slab with some plastic tables—where breakfast is being laid out. He arouses violent controversy among a loose flock of chickens that is straggling across his path, none of whom can seem to figure out how to get out of his way; they’re scared of him, but not mentally organized enough to translate that fear into a coherent plan of action. Several miles away, a helicopter is flying in from the sea, shedding altitude as it homes in on a pad somewhere up in the jungle. It is a big and gratuitously loud cargo-carrying chopper with unfamiliar lines, and Randy vaguely suspects that it was built in Russia for Chinese customers and that it is part of Wing’s operations.

He recognizes Jackie Woo lounging at one of the tables, drinking tea and reading a bright magazine. Amy’s in the adjacent kitchen, embroiled in Tagalog girl-talk with a couple of middle-aged ladies who are handling the preparations for the meal. This place seems pretty safe, and so Randy stops in the open, punches in the digits that only he and Goto Dengo know, and takes a GPS reading. According to the machine, they are no more than 4500 meters away from the main drift of Golgotha. Randy checks the heading and determines that it is uphill from here. Although the jungle blurs the underlying shape of the earth, he thinks that it’s going to be up in the valley of a nearby river.

Forty-five hundred meters seems impossibly close, and he’s still standing there trying to convince himself that his memory is sound when the ragged voices of the worshippers suddenly spill out across the compound as the chapel’s door is pushed open. Enoch Root emerges, wearing (inevitably) what Randy would describe as a wizard’s robe. But as he walks across the compound he shucks it off to reveal sensible khakis underneath, and hands the robe to a young Filipino acolyte who scurries back inside with it. The
singing trails off and then Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe emerges from the church, followed by John Wayne and several people who appear to be locals. Everyone drifts towards the pavilion. The alertness that comes with being in a new place, combined with the neurological aftermath of that shockingly big and long orgasm, has left Randy’s senses sharper, and his mind clearer, than they’ve ever been, and he’s impatient to get going. But he can’t dispute the wisdom of getting a good breakfast, so he shakes hands all around and sits down with the others. There is a bit of small talk about how his pamboat voyage went. “Your friends should have come into the country that way,” says Doug Shaftoe, and then goes on to explain that Avi and both of the Gotos were supposed to be here yesterday, but they were detained at the airport for some hours and eventually had to fly back to Tokyo while some mysterious immigration hassles were ironed out. “Why didn’t they go to Taipei or Hong Kong?” Randy wonders aloud since both those cities are much closer to Manila. Doug stares at him blankly and observes that both of those are Chinese cities, and reminds him that their presumed adversary now is General Wing, who has a lot of pull in places like that.

Several backpacks have already been prepared, laden mostly with bottled water. After everyone’s had a chance to digest breakfast, Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe, Jackie Woo, John Wayne, Enoch Root, America Shaftoe, and Randall Lawrence Waterhouse all don packs. They begin to stroll uphill, passing out of the compound and into a transitional zone of big-leaved traveler trees and giant clusters of bamboo: ten-centimeter-thick trunks spraying out and up from central roots, like frozen shellbursts, to heights of at least ten meters, the poles striped green and brown where the husky leaves are peeling away. The canopy of the jungle looms higher and higher, accentuated by the fact that it’s uphill from here, and emits a fantastic whistling noise, like a phaser on overload. As they enter the shade of the canopy the racket of crickets is added to that whistling noise. It sounds as though there must be millions of crickets and millions of whatever’s making the whistling noise, but from time to time the sound will suddenly stop and then start up again,
so if there are a lot of them, they are all following the same score.

The place is filled with plants that in America are only seen in pots, but that grow to the size of oak trees here, so big that Randy’s mind can’t recognize them as, for example, the same kind of Diefenbachia that Grandmother Waterhouse used to have growing on the counter in her downstairs bathroom. There is an incredible variety of butterflies, for whom the wind-free environment seems to be congenial, and they weave in and out among huge spiderwebs that call to mind the design of Enoch Root’s chapel. But it is clear that the place is ultimately ruled by ants; in fact it makes the most sense to think of the jungle as a living tissue of ants with minor infestations of trees, birds, and humans. Some of them are so small that they are, to other ants, as those ants are to people; they prosecute their ant activities in the same physical space but without interfering, like many signals on different frequencies sharing the same medium. But there are a fair number of ants carrying other ants, and Randy assumed that they are not doing it for altruistic reasons.

Where the jungle’s dense it is impassable, but there are a fair number of places where the trees are spaced a few meters apart and the undergrowth is only knee-high, and light shines through. By moving from one such place to another they make slow progress in the general direction indicated by Randy’s GPS. Jackie Woo and John Nguyen have disappeared, and appear to be moving parallel to them but much more quietly. The jungle is a nice place to visit, but you wouldn’t want to live, or even stop moving, there. Just as the beggars in Intramuros see you as a bipedal automatic teller machine, the insects here see you as a big slab of animated but not very well defended food. The ability to move, far from being a deterrent, serves as an unforgeable guarantee of freshness. The canopy’s tentpoles are huge trees—“Octomelis sumatrana,” says Enoch Root—with narrow buttress roots splayed out explosively in every direction, as thin and sharp as machetes sunk into the earth. Some of them are almost completely obscured by colossal philodendrons winding up their trunks.

They crest a broad, gentle ridgeline; Randy had
forgotten that they were moving uphill. The air suddenly becomes cooler and moisture condenses on their skins. When the whistlers and the crickets pause, it becomes possible to hear the murmur of a stream down below them. The next hour is devoted to slowly working their way down the slope towards it. They cover a total of a hundred meters; at this rate, Randy thinks, it should take them two days, hiking around the clock, to reach Golgotha. But he keeps this observation to himself. As they move downhill he starts to become aware of, and to be taken aback by, the sheer amount of biomass that happens to be above them—forty or fifty meters above them in many cases. He feels as though he’s at the bottom of the food chain.