A dissertation written under the name Andrew Loeb, who is now designated RIST 9E03, indicates that even in those parts of RIST 0577 having temperate climates and abundant food and water, the life of an organism such as the type designated, in old meme-systems, as "Homo sapiens," would have been primarily occupied with attempting to eat other RISTs. This narrow focus would inhibit the formation of advanced semantic meme systems (viz, civilization as that word is traditionally construed). RISTs of this type can only attain higher levels of functioning insofar as they are embedded in a larger society, the most logical evolutionary end-point of which is a hive mind.
Click.
A hive mind is a social organization of RISTs that are capable of processing semantic memes ("thinking"). These could be either carbon-based or silicon-based. RISTs who enter a hive mind surrender their independent identities (which are mere illusions anyway). For purposes of convenience, the constituents of the hive mind are assigned bit-pattern designators.
Click.
A bit-pattern designator is a random series of bits used to uniquely identify a RIST. For example, the organism traditionally designed as Earth (Terra, Gaia) has been assigned the designator 0577. This Web site is maintained by 11A4 which is a hive mind. RIST 11A4 assigns bit-pattern designators with a pseudo-random number generator. This departs from the practice used by that soi-disant"hive mind" known to itself as the East Bay Area Hive Mind Project but designated (in the system of RIST 11A4) as RIST E772. This "hive mind" resulted from the division of "Hive Mind One" (designated in the system of RIST 11A4 as RIST 4032) into several smaller "hive minds" (the East Bay Area Hive Mind Project, the San Francisco Hive Mind, Hive Mind IA, the Reorganized San Francisco Hive Mind, and the Universal Hive Mind) as the result of an irreconcilable contradiction between several different semantic memes that competed for mind-share. One of these semantic memes asserted that bit-pattern designators should be assigned in numerical order, so that (for example) Hive Mind One would be designated RIST 0001 and so on. Another meme asserted that numbers should be organized in order of importance, so that (for example) the RIST conventionally known as the planet Earth would be RIST 0001. Another semantic meme agreed with this one but disagreed as to whether the counting should begin with 0000 or 0001. Within both the 0000 and 0001 camps, there was disagreement about what RIST should be assigned the first number: some asserted that Earth was the first and most important RIST, others that some larger system (the solar system, the Universe, God) was in some sense more inclusive and fundamental.
This machine has an e-mail interface. Randy uses it.
To: root@eruditorum.org
From: dwarf@siblings.net
Subject: Re(2) Why?
Saw the website. Am willing to stipulate that you are not RIST 9E03. Suspect that you are the Dentist, who yearns for honest exchange of views. Anonymous, digitally signed e-mail is the only safe vehicle for same.
If you want me to believe you are not the Dentist, provide plausible explanation for your question regarding why we are building the Crypt.
Yours truly,
—BEGIN ORDO SIGNATURE BLOCK— (etc.)
—END ORDO SIGNATURE BLOCK-
"We've got bits," Cantrell says. "Are you in the middle of something?"
"Nothing I'm not eager to get out of," Randy says, putting the palm-top down. He gets off the bed and stands behind Pekka. The screen of Pekka's computer has a number of windows on it, of which the biggest and frontmost is the image of another computer's screen. Nested within that are various other windows and icons: a desktop. It happens to be a Windows NT desktop, which is noteworthy and (to Randy) bizarre because Pekka's computer isn't running Windows NT, it's running Finux. A cursor is moving around on that Windows NT desktop, pulling down menus and clicking on things. But Pekka's hand is not moving. The cursor zooms over to a Microsoft Word icon, which changes color and expands to form a large window.
This copy of Microsoft Word is registered to THOMAS HOWARD.
"You did it!" Randy says.
"We see what Tom sees," Pekka says.
A new document window opens up, and words begin to spill across it.
Note to myself: let's see "Letters to Penthouse" print this!
I don't suppose that graduate students of either gender are exactly sought out by sexual connoisseurs for their great fucking skills. We think about it too much. Everything has to be verbalized. A person who believes that fucking is a sexual discourse is simply never going to be any good in the sack.
I have a thing about stockings. They have to be sheer black stockings, preferably with seams up the back. When I was thirteen years old I actually shoplifted some black pantyhose from a grocery store just so that I could play with them. Walking out of that store with those L'eggs in my backpack, my heart was pounding, but the excitement of the crime was nothing compared to opening up the package and pulling them out, rubbing them against my fuzzy, adolescent cheeks. I even tried pulling them on, but this just looked grotesque-what with my hairy legs-and did absolutely nothing for me. I didn't want to wear them. I wanted someone else to. I masturbated four times that day.
It disturbed the shit out of me when I thought about it. I was a smart boy. Smart boys are supposed to be rational. So, when I was in college I figured out a rationalization for this. There wasn't that many women who wore sheer black stockings in college, but sometimes I would go into the city and see the well-dressed office workers walking down the street on their lunch breaks and make scientific observations of their legs. I noticed that where the stocking stretched itself thin to go over a wide part of the leg, such as the muscle of the calf, it became paler. just as a colored balloon becomes paler when it is inflated. Conversely, it was darker in narrow regions such as the ankle. This made the calf look more shapely and the ankle look more slender. The legs, as a whole, looked healthier, implying that just above the place where they joined together, a higher class of DNA was to be found.
Q.E.D. My thing about black stockings was a highly rational adaptation. It merely proved how smart I was, how rational even the most irrational parts of my brain were. Sex held no power over me. It was nothing to fear.
This was quintessentially sophomoric thinking, but nowadays most educated people hold quintessentially sophomoric opinions well into their thirties and so this stuck with me for a long time. My wife Virginia probably had some equally self-serving rationalization for her own sexual needs-of which I was not to become aware for many years. So it's no surprise that our premarital sex life was mediocre. Neither one of us admittedit was mediocre, of course. If I had admitted it, I would have had to admit that it was mediocre because Virginia didn't like to wear stockings, and at the time I was too concerned with being a Sensitive New Age Guy to admit such heresy, I loved Virginia for her mind. How could I be so shallow, so insensitive, so perverse as to spurn her because she didn't like to pull filmy tubes of nylon over her legs? As a pudgy nerd, I was lucky to have her.
Five years into our marriage, I attended the Comdex convention as president of a small new high-tech company. I was a little less pudgy and a little less nerdy. I met a marketing girl for a big software distribution chain. She was wearing sheer black stockings. We ended up fucking in my hotel room. It was the best sex I'd ever had. I went home baffled and ashamed. After that, my sex life with Virginia was pretty miserable. We had sex maybe a dozen times over the next couple of years.
Virginia's grandmother died and we went back to upstate New York for the funeral. Virginia had to wear a dress, which meant she had to shave her legs and wear stockings-something she'd done on only a handful of occasions since our marriage. I practically fell over when I saw her, and suffered through the funeral with a big, scratchy erection, trying to figure out how I could get her alone.
Now, Granny had lived by herself in a big old house on a hill until a couple of months earlier when she had fallen down and broken her hip, and been moved into a nursing home. All of her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren came together for the funeral, and that house became the central gathering-place. It was a nice place full of good old furniture, but in her declining years Granny had become something of a compulsive pack rat and so there were heaps of newspapers and accumulated mail squirreled away everywhere. In the end we had to haul away several truckloads of junk.
In some other ways, Granny had been pretty well-organized and had left behind a very specific last will and testament. Each one of her descendants knew exactly which pieces of furniture, dishes, rugs, and curios they were going to take home. She had a lot of possessions, but she also had a lot of descendants, and so the loot had to be sliced pretty thin. Virginia ended up with a black walnut dresser which was stored in an unused bedroom. We went up there to have a look at it, and I ended up fucking her there. I stood up with the flimsy trousers of my dark suit collapsed around my ankles while she sat on top of that dresser with her legs wrapped around me and her stocking-clad heels digging into my butt-cheeks. It was the best fuck we'd ever had, bar none. Fortunately there were a lot of people eating, drinking, and talking downstairs or they would have heard her moaning and hollering.
I finally came clean to her about the stockings. It felt good. I'd been reading a lot about how the brain develops and had finally come to accept my stocking kink. It seems that when you are a certain age, somewhere between about two and five years, your mind just gels. The part of it that's responsible for sex becomes set into a pattern that you'll carry with you for the rest of your life. All of the gay people I've ever discussed it with have told me that they knew they were gay, or at least different, years before they even began thinking about sex, and all of them agree that gayness cannot be converted into straightness, or vice versa, no matter how hard you might try.
The part of your brain that handles sex frequently gets cross-wired into other, seemingly irrelevant areas at this age. This is when people pick up an orientation towards sexual dominance or submission, or when a lot of guys pick up highly specific kinks-say, rubber, feathers, or shoes. Some of them are unfortunate enough to get turned on by little kids, and those guys are essentially doomed from that point onwards-there is nothing to do except castrate them or lock them up. No therapy will unkink the brain once it has kinked.
So, all things considered, being turned on by black stockings wasn't such a bad sexual card to have been dealt. I laid this all out to Virginia during the trip home. I was surprised by how calmly she accepted it. I was too big of a jerk to realize that she was thinking about how it all applied to her.
After we got back home, she gamely went out and bought some stockings and tried to wear them on occasion. This was not easy. Stockings imply a whole lifestyle. They look stupid with jeans and sneakers. A woman in stockings has to wear a dress or a skirt, and not just a blue denim skirt but something nicer, more formal. She also has to wear the type of shoes that Virginia didn't own and didn't like to wear. Stockings are not really compatible with riding a bicycle to work. They were not even really compatible with our house. During our frugal grad-student days we had accumulated a lot of furniture from Goodwill, or I had hammered it together myself out of two-by-fours. This furniture turned out to be riddled with hidden snags that a person in blue jeans would never notice but that would destroy a pair of stockings in a moment. Likewise, our half-finished house and our old junker cars had many small sharp edges that were death to stockings. On the other hand, when we went away for an anniversary trip to London, getting around in black taxis, staying in a nice hotel, and eating in good restaurants, we spent a whole week moving in a world that was perfectly adapted to stockings. It just went to show us how radically we would have to change our circumstances in order for her to dress that way routinely.
So, much money was spent on stockings in a fit of good intentions. Some good sex was had, though I seemed to enjoy it much more than Virginia did. She never achieved the shocking, animal intensity she had shown at Granny's house after the funeral . Attrition reduced her supply of stockings very quickly, sheer inconvenience prevented her from renewing it, and within a year after the funeral we were back to square one.
Other things were changing, though. I made a lot of money by cashing in some stock options, and we bought a new house up in the hills. We hired some movers to come pick up all of our junky furniture and move it into that house, where it looked much shabbier. Virginia's new job forced her to commute in a car. I didn't think our old junker was safe, and so I bought her a nice little Lexus with leather seats and wool carpet, all of it nicely snag-free. Soon, kids came along and I traded in my old beater pickup truck for a minivan.
Still, I couldn't bring myself to begin spending money on furniture until my back started going bad on me, and I realized it was because of the slack, twenty-year-old Goodwill mattress that Virginia and I were sleeping on. We had to buy a new bed. Since it was my back at stake, I went out and did the shopping.
I 'd rather stub out cigarettes on my tongue than go shopping. The idea of hitting every big furniture store in the area, comparing beds, made me want to die. All I wanted was to go to one place and buy a bed and have done with it. But I didn't want a shitty bed that I'd be sick of in a year, or a cheap mattress that would mess up my back again in five years.
So I went straight down to my local Gomer Bolstrood Home Gallery. I had heard people talk about Gomer Bolstrood furniture. Women, in particular, seemed to speak of it in hushed, religious tones. Their factory was said to be up in some New England town where they had been based for the last three hundred years. It was said that loose curls of walnut and oak from Gomer Bolstroods block plane had been used as tinder beneath the pyres of convicted witches. Gomer Bolstrood was the answer to a question I'd been ruminating over ever since Granny's funeral, namely: where does all of this high-quality grandma furniture come from? In every family, young people go to grandma's house for Thanksgiving, or other obligatory visits, and lust over the nice antique furniture, wondering which pieces they will take home when the old lady kicks the bucket. Some people lose patience and go to estate sales or antique stores and buy the stuff.
But if the supply of old, high-grade, heirloom-quality furniture is fixed, then where will the grannys of the future come from? I could see a situation, half a century in the future, when Virginia's and my descendants would all be squabbling over that one black walnut dresser, while bringing in Ryder trucks to haul the rest of our stuff straight to the dump. As the population grows, and the supply of old furniture remains constant, this kind of thing is inevitable. There must be a source for new granny-grade furniture, or else the Americans of tomorrow will all end up sitting in vinyl beanbag chairs, leaking little foam beads all over the floor.
The answer is Gomer Bolstrood, and the price is high. Each Gomer Bolstrood chair and table really ought to come in a little felt-lined box, like a piece of jewelry. But at the time, I was rich and impatient. So I drove to Gomer Bolstrood and stormed through the door, only to be brought up short by a receptionist.I felt tacky in my white tennis shoes and jeans. She had probably seen a lot of high-tech millionaires come through those doors, and took it pretty calmly. Before I knew it a middle-aged woman had emerged from the back of the store and appointed herself my personal design consultant. Her name was Margaret. "Where are the beds?" I asked. She stiffened and informed me that this not the kind of place where you could walk into a Bed Room and see a row of beds lined up like pig's feet at a butcher shop. A Gomer Bolstrood Home Design Gallery consists of a series of exquisitely decorated rooms, some of which happen to be bedrooms and to contain beds. Once we had that all straightened out. Margaret showed me the bedrooms. As she led me from one room to the next. I couldn't help noticing that she was wearing black stockings with seams up the back-perfectly straight seams.
My erotic feelings for Margaret made me uncomfortable. For a while, I had to restrain the impulse to say "just sell me the biggest, most expensive bed you have." Margaret showed me beds in different styles. The names of the styles meant nothing to me. Some looked modern and some looked old-fashioned. I pointed to a very large, high four-poster that looked like granny furniture and said. "I'll take one of those."
There was a three-month delay while the bed was hand-carved by New England craftsmen working at the same wage as plumbers or psychotherapists. Then it showed up at our house and was assembled by technicians in white coveralls, like the guys who work in semiconductor chip fabrication plants. Virginia came home from work. She was wearing a denim skirt, heavy wool socks, and Birkenstocks. The kids were still at school. We had sex on the bed. I performed dutifully enough, I suppose. I could not really sustain an erection and ended up with my head stuck between her bristly thighs. Even with my ears blocked by her quadriceps. I could hear her moaning and screaming. She went into erotic convulsions near the end, and almost snapped my neck. Her climax must have lasted for two or three full minutes. This was the moment when I first came to terms with the fact that Virginia could not achieve orgasm unless she was in close proximity to-preferably on top of-a piece of heirloom-grade furniture that she owned.
The window containing the image of Tom Howard's desktop vanishes. Pekka has clicked it into oblivion.
"I could not stand it any more," he says, in his electronically generated deadpan.
"I predict a mtrois-Tom,his wife, and Margaret doing it on a bed at the furniture store, after hours," Cantrell says ruminatively.
"Is it Tom? Or a fictional character of Tom's?" Pekka asks.
"Does this mean you win the bet?" Randy asks.
"If only I can figure out how to collect on it," Cantrell says.
Chapter 42 AFLOAT
A brown miasma has settled across the Bismarck Sea, smelling of oil and barbecue. American torpedo boats hurtle out of this reeking fog, their fat hulls barely touching the water, their giant motors curving white scars into the sea as they line up their targets: the few remaining ships in Goto Dengo's troop convoy, whose decks are now covered with a dark mat of soldiers, like moss on an old rock. The torpedos spring into the air like crossbow bolts, driven by compressed gas from tubes on the boats' decks. They belly-flop into the water, settle to a comfortable depth where the water is always calm, and draw bubble trails across the sea, heading directly for the ships. The crowds on the ships' decks fluidize and gush over the edges. Goto Dengo turns away and hears but doesn't see the explosions. Hardly any of the Nipponese troops know how to swim.
Later, the airplanes come back to strafe them some more. Swimmers who have the wit and the ability to dive are invulnerable. Those who don't are dead very soon. The airplanes leave. Goto Dengo strips a life preserver off a shattered corpse. He has the worst sunburn of his life and it is only midafternoon, so he pilfers a uniform blouse, too, and ties it around his head like a burnoose.
The ones who are still alive, and who can swim, try to converge on each other. They are in a complicated strait between New Guinea and New Britain, and tidal currents rushing through it tend to pull them apart. Some men drift slowly away, calling out to their comrades. Goto Dengo ends up on the fringes of a dissolving archipelago of maybe a hundred swimmers. Many of them clutch life preservers or bits of wood to stay afloat. The seas are considerably higher than their heads and so they can't see very far.
Before sunset, the haze lifts for an hour. Goto Dengo can clearly fix the sun's position, so for the first time all day he knows west from east, north from south. Better, he can see peaks rising above the southern horizon, slathered with blue-white glaciers.
"I will swim to New Guinea," he shouts, and begins doing it. There is no point in trying to discuss it with the others. The ones who are inclined to follow him, do: maybe a few dozen in all. The timing is right-the sea has become miraculously calm. Goto Dengo settles into a slow, easy sidestroke. Most of the others are moving in an improvised dogpaddle. If they are making any progress at all it is totally imperceptible. As the stars begin to come out, he rolls over into a backstroke and gets a fix on Polaris. As long as he swims away from that, it is physically impossible for him to miss New Guinea.
Darkness falls. Dim light is shed by the stars and by a half-moon. The men call to one another, trying to stay bunched together. Some of them get lost; they can be heard but not seen, and those in the main group can do nothing but listen to their pleadings dwindle.
It must be around midnight when the sharks come. The first victim is a man who had lacerated his forehead on a hatch frame when scrambling out of a sinking ship, and who has been bleeding ever since, drawing a thin pink line across the sea, leading the sharks straight to them. The sharks do not know yet what they are dealing with, and so they kill him slowly, worrying him to death in small bites. When he turns out to be easy prey, they explode into some kind of berserk rage that is all the more fantastic for being hidden beneath the black water. Men's voices are cut off in mid-cry as they are jerked straight down. Sometimes a leg or head will suddenly burst free from the surface. The water splashing into Goto Dengo's mouth begins to taste of iron.
The attack goes on for several hours. It appears that the noise and smell have attracted some rival shark packs, because sometimes there is a lull followed by renewed ferocity. A severed shark tail bumps up against Goto Dengo's face; he hangs onto it. The sharks are eating them; why shouldn't he retaliate? In Tokyo restaurants charge a lot of money for shark sashimi. The skin of the shark tail is tough, but hunks of muscle are hanging out of the torn edge. He buries his face in the meat and feasts on it.
When Goto Dengo was young, his father had owned a fedora with English writing on its ivory silk liner, and a briar pipe, and tobacco that he bought through the mail from America. He would sit on a rock up in the hills and snug his fedora down to keep the chilly air from the bald spot on top of his head and smoke his pipe and just look at the world. "What are you doing?" Dengo would ask him.
"Observing," father would say.
"But how long can you observe the same thing?"
"Forever. Look over there." Father pointed with the stem of his pipe. A thread of white smoke piped out of the mouthpiece, like a silk thread being unwound from a cocoon. "That band of dark rock is mineral-bearing. We could get copper out of there, probably some zinc and lead too. We would run a cog railway up the valley to that flat spot there, then sink an angle shaft parallel to the face of the deposit Then Dengo would get into the act and decide where the workers would live, where the school would be built for their children, where the playing field would be. By the time they were finished they would have populated the whole valley with an imaginary city.
Goto Dengo has plenty of time to make observations this night. He observes that severed body parts almost never get attacked. The men who swim most violently are always the first to get it. So, when the sharks come in, he tries to float on his back and not move a muscle, even when the jagged ends of someone's ribs poke him in the face.
Dawn arrives, one or two hundred hours after the previous sunset. He has never stayed awake all night long before, and finds it shocking to see something as big as the sun go down on one side of the planet and come up on the opposite. He is a virus, a germ living on the surface of unfathomably giant bodies in violent motion. And, amazingly enough, he is still not alone: three other men have survived the night of the sharks. They converge on one another and turn to face the ice-covered mountains of New Guinea, salmon-colored in the dawn light.
"They have not gotten any closer," one of the men says.
"They are deep in the interior," Goto Dengo says. "We are not swimming to the mountains-only to the shore-much closer. Let's go before we die of dehydration!" And he plunges forward into a sidestroke.
One of the others, a boy who speaks with an Okinawan accent, is an excellent swimmer. He and Goto Dengo can easily outdistance the others. For most of the day, they try to stay together with the other two anyway. The waves come up and make it difficult even for good swimmers to move.
One of the slower swimmers has been fighting diarrhea since long before his ship was sunk out from under him and was probably dehydrated to begin with. Around midday, when the sun is coming straight down on top of them like a flamethrower, he goes into convulsions, gets some water into his lungs, and disappears.
The other slow swimmer is from Tokyo. He's in much better physical condition-he simply doesn't know how to swim. "There is no better time or place to learn," Goto Dengo says. He and the Okinawan spend an hour or so teaching him the sidestroke and backstroke, and then they resume swimming southwards.
Around sunset, Goto Dengo catches the Okinawan gulping down mouthful after mouthful of seawater. It is painful to watch, mostly because he himself has been wanting to do it. "No! It will make you sick!" he says. His voice is weak. The effort of filling his lungs, expanding his ribcage against the relentless pressure of the water, is ruining him; every muscle in his torso is rigid and tender.
The Okinawan has already started retching by the time Goto Dengo reaches him. With the help of the Tokyo boy, he sticks his fingers down the Okinawan's throat and gets him to vomit it all up.
He is very sick anyway, and until late at night cannot do anything except float on his back and mumble deliriously. But just as Goto Dengo is about to abandon him, he becomes lucid, asking "Where is Polaris?"
"It is cloudy tonight," Goto Dengo says. "But there is a bright spot in the clouds that might be the moon."
Based on the position of that bright spot, they guess the position of New Guinea and resume swimming. Their arms and legs are like sacks of clay, and all of them are hallucinating.
The sun seems to be coming up. They are in a nebula of vapor, radiant with peach-colored light, as if hurtling through a distant part of the galaxy.
"I smell something rotten," says one of them. Goto Dengo cannot tell which.
"Gangrene?" guesses the other.
Goto Dengo fills his nostrils, an act that consumes about half of his remaining energy reserves. "It is not rotten flesh," he says. "It is vegetation."
None of them can swim anymore. If they could, they wouldn't know which direction to choose, because the mist glows uniformly. If they picked a direction, it wouldn't matter, because the current is taking them where it will.
Goto Dengo sleeps for a while, or maybe he doesn't.
Something bumps his leg. Thank god; the sharks have come to finish them.
The waves have grown aggressive. He feels another bump. The burned flesh on his leg screams. It is something very hard, rough, and sharp.
Something is projecting out of the water just ahead, something bumpy and white. A coral head.
A wave breaks behind them, picks them up, and flings them forward across the coral, half-flaying them. Goto Dengo breaks a finger and counts himself lucky. The next breaker takes what little skin he has left and flings him into a lagoon. Something forces his feet upwards, and because his body is just a limp sack of shit at this point, doubles him over head-first into the water. His face strikes a bed of sharp coral sand. Then his hands are in it too. His limbs have forgotten how to do any thing except swim, and so it takes him a while to plant them in the bottom and lift his head out of the water. Then he begins to crawl on his hands and knees. The odor of rotten vegetation is overpowering now, as if a whole division's food supplies had been left out in the sun for a week.
He finds some sand that is not covered with water, turns around, and sits down on it. The Okinawan is right behind him, also on hands and knees, and the Tokyo boy has actually clambered to his feet and is wading ashore, being knocked this way and that by incoming waves. He is laughing.
The Okinawan boy collapses on the sand next to Goto Dengo, not even trying to sit up.
A wave knocks the Tokyo boy off-balance. Laughing, he collapses sideways into the surf, throwing out one hand to break his fall.
He stops laughing and jerks back sharply. Something is dangling from his forearm: a wriggling snake. He snaps it like a whip and it flies off into the water.
Scared and sober, he splashes the last half-dozen steps up onto the beach and then falls flat on his face. By the time Goto Dengo reaches him, he is stone dead.
Goto Dengo gathers his forces for some period of time that is difficult to measure. He may have fallen asleep sitting up. The Okinawan boy is still lying on the sand, raving. Goto Dengo gets his feet underneath himself and staggers off in search of fresh water.
This is not a proper beach, merely a sandbar maybe ten meters long and three wide, with some tall grassy stuff sprouting out of the top. On the other side of it is a brackish lagoon that meanders between banks, not of earth, but of living things all tangled together. That tangle is obviously too thick to penetrate. So, notwithstanding what just happened to the Tokyo boy, Goto Dengo wades into the lagoon, hoping that it will lead inland to a freshwater stream.
He wanders for what seems like an hour, but the lagoon takes him back to the edge of the sea again. He gives up and drinks the water he's wading in, hoping it will be a little less salty. This leads to a great deal of vomiting but makes him feel slightly better somehow. Again he wades into the swamp, trying to keep the sound of the surf behind him, and after an hour or so he finds a rivulet of water that is actually fresh. When he has finished drinking from that, he feels strong enough to go back and carry the Okinawan boy here, if need be.
He gets back to the beach in midafternoon and finds that the Okinawan is gone. But the sand is all churned up by footprints. The sand is dry and so the footprints are too indistinct to read. They must have made contact with a patrol! Surely their comrades must have heard about the attack on the convoy and are combing beaches for survivors. There must be a bivouac in the jungle not far away!
Goto Dengo follows the trail into the jungle. After he's proceeded a mile or so, the track crosses a small, open mud flat where he gets a good look at the footprints, all made by bare feet with enormous, bizarrely splayed toes. Footprints of people who have never worn shoes in their lives.
He proceeds more cautiously for another few hundred meters. He can hear voices now. The Army taught him all about jungle infiltration tactics, how to creep through the enemy's lines in the middle of the night without making a sound. Of course, when they practiced it in Nippon they weren't being eaten alive by ants and mosquitoes the whole time. But it hardly matters to him now. An hour of patient work gets him to a vantage point from which he can see into a flat clearing with a stagnant creek wandering through it. Several long dark houses are built on tree-trunk stilts to keep them up out of the ooze, and roofed with bushy heaps of palm fronds.
Before he finds the Okinawan, Goto Dengo needs to get some food. In the middle of the clearing, white porridge is steaming in a pot over an open fire, but it's being tended by several tough-looking women, naked except for short fringes of fibrous stuff tied round their waists and just barely concealing their genitals.
Smoke is rising from some of the long buildings too. But to get inside one of them, he would have to clamber up its heavy, slanting ladder and then worm through what looks like a rather small doorway. A child, standing inside one of those doorways with a stick, could prevent an intruder from coming in. Hanging outside some of the doorways are sacks, improvised from lengths of fabric (so at least they have textiles!) and filled with big round lumps: coconuts, possibly or some kind of preserved food set up to keep it away from the ants.
Perhaps seventy people are gathered around something of interest in the middle of the clearing. As they move around, Goto Dengo gets occasional momentary glimpses of someone, possibly Nipponese, who is sitting at the base of a palm tree with his hands behind his back. There's a lot of blood on his face and he's not moving. Most of these people are men, and they tend to carry spears. They have those fringes of hairy stuff (sometimes dyed red or green) concealing their private parts, and some of the bigger and older ones have decorated themselves by tying strips of fabric around their arms. Some have painted designs on their skin in pale mud. They have shoved various objects, some of them quite large, sideways through their nasal septums.
The bloodied man seems to have captured everyone's attention, and Goto Dengo reckons that this will be his only chance to steal some food. He picks the longhouse farthest away from where the villagers have gathered, clambers up its ladder, and reaches for the bulging sack that hangs by the entrance. But the fabric is very old and it has rotted from the damp of the swamp, and maybe from the attacks of the hundreds of flies that buzz around it, and so when he grasps it his fingers go right through. A long swath of it tears away and the contents tumble out around Goto Dengo's feet. They are dark and sort of hairy, like coconuts, but their shape is more complicated, and he knows intuitively that some thing is wrong even before he recognizes them as human skulls. Maybe half a dozen of them. Scalp and skin still stuck on. Some of them are dark-skinned with bushy hair, like the natives, and others look distinctly Nipponese.
Sometime later, he is able to think coherently again. He realizes that he does not know how long he might have spent up here, in full view of the villagers, gazing on the skulls. He turns around to look, but all attention is still focused on the wounded man seated at the base of the tree.
From this vantage point Goto Dengo is able to see that it is indeed the Okinawan, and that his arms have been tied together behind the tree trunk. A boy of maybe twelve is standing over him, holding a spear. He steps forward cautiously and suddenly pokes it into the midsection of the Okinawan, who comes awake and thrashes from side to side. The boy's obviously startled by this, and jumps back. Then an older man, his head decorated with a fringe of cowrie shells, takes a stance behind and beside the boy, showing him how to hold the spear, guiding him forward again. He adds his own strength to the youngster's and they shove the spear straight into the Okinawan's heart.
Goto Dengo falls off the house.
The men become very excited and pick the boy up on their shoulders and parade him around the clearing hollering and leaping and twirling, jabbing their spears defiantly into the air. They are pursued by all but the very youngest children. Goto Dengo, bruised but not damaged by the fall onto the mucky ground, belly-crawls into the jungle and looks for a place of concealment. The women of the village carry pots and knives towards the Okinawan's body and begin to cut it up with the conspicuous skill of a sushi chef dismantling a tuna.
One of them is concentrating entirely on his head. Suddenly she jumps into the air and begins to dance around the clearing, waving something bright and glittery. "Ulab! Ulab! Ulab!"she cries ecstatically. Some women and children begin following her around, trying to get a look at whatever it is she's holding. Finally she stops and centers her hand in a rare shaft of sunlight coming down through the trees. Resting in the palm of her hand is a gold tooth.
"Ulab!"say the women and children. One of the kids tries to snatch it out of her hand and she knocks him flat on his ass. Then one of the big spear-carrying men runs up and she hands the booty over to him.
Several of the men now gather round to marvel at the find.
The women go back to working over the Okinawan boy, and soon his body parts are stewing in pots over an open fire.
Chapter 43 SHINOLA
Men who believe that they are accomplishing something by speaking speak in a different way from men who believe that speaking is a waste of time.Bobby Shaftoe has learned most of his practical knowledge-how to fix a car, butcher a deer, throw a spiral, talk to a lady, kill a Nip-from the latter type of man. For them, trying to do anything by talking is like trying to pound in a nail with a screwdriver. Sometimes you can even see the desperation spread over such a man's face as he listens to himself speak.
Men of the other type-the ones who use speech as a tool of their work, who are confident and fluent-aren't necessarily more intelligent, or even more educated. It took Shaftoe a long time to figure that out.
Anyway, everything was neat and tidy in Bobby Shaftoe's mind until he met two of the men in Detachment 2702: Enoch Root and Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse. He can't put his finger on what bugs him about those two. During the weeks they spent together on Qwghlm, he spent a lot of time listening to them yammer at each other, and began to suspect that there might be a third category of man, a kind so rare that Shaftoe never met any of them until now.
Officers are discouraged from fraternizing with enlisted men and non-coms, which has made it more difficult for Shaftoe to pursue his research into the matter. Sometimes, though, circumstances jumble all of the ranks together willy-nilly. A prime example would be this Trinidadian tramp steamer.
Where do they get this stuff?wonders Shaftoe. Does the U.S. government keep a bunch of Trinidadian tramp steamers riding at anchor at a naval yard somewhere, just in case one is needed?
He thinks not. This one shows signs of a very recent and hasty change of ownership. It is a mother lode of yellowed, ragged, multiethnic pornography, some of it very run-of-the-mill and some so exotic that he mistook it for medical literature at first. There is a lot of stray paperwork on the bridge and in certain cabins, most of which Shaftoe only sees out of the corner of his eye as these areas tend to be the domain of officers. The heads are still littered with their predecessors' curly black pubic hairs, and the storage lockers are sparsely stocked with exotic Caribbean foodstuffs, much of them rapidly going bad. The cargo hold is filled with bales and bales of coarse brown fibrous material-raw material for life preservers or bran muffins, he supposes.
None of them much cares, because Detachment 2702 has been freezing its ass off in the Far North ever since they left Italy a few months ago, and now they are running around shirtless, of all things. One little airplane ride, that's all it took, and they were in the balmy Azores. They did not get any R and R there-they went straight from the airfield to the Trinidadian ship, in the dead of night, huddled under tarps in a covered truck. But even the warm air that streamed in underneath the tarp felt like an exotic massage in a tropical whorehouse. And once they steamed out of sight of port, they were allowed to come up abovedecks and take in some sun.
This gives Bobby Shaftoe the opportunity to strike up a few conversations with Enoch Root, partly just for the hell of it and partly so that he can try to figure out this whole business about the third category of men. Progress comes slowly.
"I don't like the word 'addict' because it has terrible connotations," Root says one day, as they are sunning themselves on the afterdeck. "Instead of slapping a label on you, the Germans would describe you as 'MorphiumsThe verb suchenmeans to seek. So that might be translated, loosely, as 'morphine seeky' or even more loosely as 'morphine seeking.' I prefer 'seeky' because it means that you have an inclination to seek morphine."
"What the fuck are you talking about?" Shaftoe says.
"Well, suppose you have a roof with a hole in it. That means it is a leaky roof. It's leaky all the time-even if it's not raining at the moment. But it's only leaking when it happens to be raining. In the same way, morphine-seeky means that you always have this tendency to look for morphine, even if you are not looking for it at the moment. But I prefer both of them to 'addict,' because they are adjectives modifying Bobby Shaftoe instead of a noun that obliterates Bobby Shaftoe."
"So what's the point?" Shaftoe asks. He asks this because he is expecting Root to give him an order, which is usually what men of the talkative sort end up doing after jabbering on for a while. But no order seems to be forthcoming, because that's not Root's agenda. Root just felt like talking about words. The SAS blokes refer to this kind of activity as wanking.
Shaftoe has had little direct contact with that Waterhouse fellow during their stay on Qwghlm, but he has noticed that men who have just finished talking to Waterhouse tend to walk away shaking their heads-and not in the slow way of a man saying "no," but in the sudden convulsive way of a dog who has a horsefly in his middle ear. Waterhouse never gives direct orders, so men of the first category don't know what to make of him. But apparently men of the second category fare no better; such men usually talk like they have an agenda in their heads and they are checking off boxes as they go, but Waterhouse's conversation doesn't go anywhere in particular. He speaks, not as a way of telling you a bunch of stuff he's already figured out, but as a way of making up a bunch of new shit as he goes along. And he always seems to be hoping that you'll join in. Which no one ever does, except for Enoch Root.
After they've been out to sea for a day, the captain (Commander Eden-the same poor son of a bitch who got the job of ramming his previous command into Norway) staggers out of his cabin, making use of every railing or other handhold that comes within flailing distance. He announces in a slurred voice that from here on out, according to orders from On High, anyone going abovedecks must wear black turtle necks, black gloves, and black ski masks underneaththeir other clothes. These articles are duly issued to the men. Shaftoe gets the skipper really pissed off by asking him three times whether he's sure he has the order worded correctly. One of the reasons Shaftoe is so highly regarded by the enlisted men is that he knows how to ask these kinds of questions without technically violating the rules of military etiquette. The skipper, to his credit, doesn't just pull rank and yell at him. He takes Shaftoe back to his cabin and shows him a khaki-covered Army manual, printed in black block letters:
TACTICAL NEGRO IMPERSONATION
VOLUME III: NEGROES OF THE CARIBBEAN
It is a pretty interesting order, even by Detachment 2702 standards. Commander Eden's drunkenness is also kind of disturbing-not the fact that he is drunk, but the particular typeof drunk-the sort of drunk of say, a Civil War soldier who knows that the surgeon is about to remove his femur with a bucksaw.
After Shaftoe has finished getting the turtlenecks, gloves, and ski masks passed out to the men, and told them to simmer down and do the lifeboat drills again, Shaftoe finds Root in what passes for the sickbay. Because he figures it is time to have one of those open-ended conversations in which you try to figure out a bunch of shit, Root is his man.
"I know you're expecting me to ask for morphine, but I'm not gonna," Shaftoe says. "I just want to talk."