interval.  Randy  can  follow  Pekka  and
Cantrell's conversation well enough to gather that they have already figured
out, from analyzing the signals coming through the wall, that Tom Howard has
his screen set up to give him 768 lines, and 1,024 pixels  on each line. For
every  pixel, four bytes will be read from the video buffer and sent on down
the line to the screen.  (Tom is using the highest possible  level  of color
definition on his screen, which  means  that  one byte  apiece is needed  to
represent  the intensity of blue,  green, and red  and another is  basically
left over, but kept in there anyway  because computers like  powers  of two,
and  computers are so ridiculously fast  and powerful  now that, even though
all of this  is happening on a timetable that  would strike a human being as
rather  aggressive,  the extra bytes just don't make  any difference.)  Each
byte is eight binary digits or bits  and so, 1,024 times a line, 4 x 8 =  32
bits are being read from the screen buffer.
     Unbeknownst to Tom, his computer happens to be sitting right next to an
antenna. The wires  Pekka  taped to the  wall  can  read the electromagnetic
waves that are radiating out of the computer's circuitry at all times.
     Tom's  laptop is sold as a  computer, not as a radio station, and so it
might seem  odd  that it should  be radiating  anything at all. It is all  a
byproduct  of the fact that computers are  binary critters, which means that
all chip to  chip, subsystem to subsystem communication  taking place inside
the machine  everything  moving  down those flat ribbons  of  wire, and  the
little  metallic  traces on  the circuit boards consists of transitions from
zero to one and back again. The way that you represent bits in a computer is
by switching the wire's voltage back and forth between zero and five  volts.
In computer textbooks these transitions are  always graphed as if they  were
perfect square waves, meaning that you have this perfectly flat line at V 0,
representing a binary zero, and then it makes a perfect right angle turn and
jumps vertically to V 5  and then executes  another perfect right angle turn
and  remains at <I>five</I> volts until it's  time to go back to zero again, and so
on.
     <IMG   SRC="stephenson_cryptonomicon_html_m32229824.jpg"   ALIGN=BOTTOM
WIDTH=741 HEIGHT=469 BORDER=0>
     This is  the Platonic ideal  of how  computer circuitry  is supposed to
operate,  but engineers  have to build actual circuits  in the  grimy analog
world. The hunks of metal and  silicon can't manifest the  Platonic behavior
shown in those  textbooks.  Circuits can jump  between zero and  five  volts
really, really abruptly but if  you monitor them on an oscilloscope, you can
see  that it's not a perfectly square  wave. Instead you get some thing that
looks like this:
     <IMG   SRC="stephenson_cryptonomicon_html_7935b185.jpg"    ALIGN=BOTTOM
WIDTH=752 HEIGHT=476 BORDER=0>
     The little  waves are  called ringing;  these transitions  among binary
digits hit the circuitry like a clapper  striking a bell. The voltage jumps,
but after it jumps it oscillates back and forth around the  new value  for a
little  while. Whenever you have an oscillating voltage in  a conductor like
this, it means that electromagnetic waves are propagating out into space.
     Consequently each wire in  a running  computer is like a  little  radio
transmitter. The signals  that it  broadcasts are completely dependent  upon
the details of what's going  on inside the machine. Since there are a lot of
wires  in  there,  and  the  particulars  of what they are  doing are fairly
unpredictable, it is  difficult for anyone  monitoring the transmissions  to
make head or tail  of them. A great deal of what comes out of the machine is
completely  irrelevant from a surveillance  point of view. But there is  one
pattern  of  signals  that is (1) totally predictable  and (2) exactly  what
Pekka  wants  to  see,  and that  is the stream of bytes being read from the
screen buffer and sent  down the wire  to the screen hardware. Amid  all the
random  noise coming  from  the  machine, the  ticks of  the  horizontal and
vertical retrace intervals  will  stand  out as clearly  as the beating of a
drum in  a teeming  jungle. Now that  Pekka has zeroed in  on that beat,  he
should be  able to  pick  up  the  radiation emanating  from  the wire  that
connects  screen buffer  to  video hardware,  and translate it  back into  a
sequence  of ones and zeroes that can be dumped  out  onto their own screen.
They  will  be able to see exactly what Tom Howard sees, through the kind of
surveillance called Van Eck phreaking.
     That's what Randy  knows.  When  it comes to  the details, Cantrell and
Pekka  are way  out of his league, so after a few  minutes he feels  himself
losing interest.  He sits down  on Cantrell's  bed, which  is the only place
left  <I>to</I> sit, and  discovers a little palmtop computer on the bedside table.
It is already up and running, patched into the  world over a telephone wire.
Randy's  heard of  this product.  It is supposed to  be  a first stab  at  a
network computer,  and so it's running  a  Web browser whenever it is turned
on; the Web browser <I>is</I> the interface.
     "May I surf?"  Randy  asks,  and  Cantrell says,  "Yes,"  without  even
turning around. Randy visits one of the big Web searching sites, which takes
a minute because the machine has to establish a Net  connection  first. Then
he searches for Web documents  containing the terms ((Andy OR Andrew)  Loeb)
AND "hive mind." As usual, the search finds tens  of thousands of documents.
But it's not hard for Randy to pick out the relevant ones.
     WHY RIST  9303  IS  A  MEMBER  IN GOOD  STANDING OF THE CALIFORNIA  BAR
ASSOCIATION
     RIST 11A4  has experienced ambivalent feelings over the fact  that RIST
9E03  (insofar as s/he  is construed, by atomized society, as  an individual
organism)  is  a lawyer. No doubt the conflicted  feelings of RIST 11A4  are
quite normal and natural.  Part of  RIST 11A4 abhors lawyers, and the  legal
system in general, as symptoms of the end stage terminal disease of atomized
society. Another part understands that disease can improve the health of the
meme  pool  if it  slays  an  organism  that is  old and  unfit for  ongoing
propagation of its memotype.  Make no mistake about it:  the legal system in
its current form is the worst imaginable system for society  to  resolve its
disputes. It is appallingly expensive in  terms of money and in terms of the
intellectual talent that goes to waste pursuing  it as a career. But part of
RIST 11A4  feels that  the goals of  RIST  11A4  may  actually be  served by
turning  the  legal  system's most  toxic features against  the rotten  body
politic of atomized society and in so doing hasten its downfall.
     Randy clicks on RIST 9E03 and gets
     RIST 9E03 is the RIST that  RIST 11A4 denotes by the arbitrarily chosen
bit  pattern  that,  construed  as  an  integer,  is  9E03  (in  hexadecimal
notation). Click  here  for more about the system of bit pattern designators
used  by  RIST 11A4  to  replace the  obsolescent  nomenclature  systems  of
"natural languages." Click here if you would  like  the designator RIST 9E03
to  be automatically  replaced by a  conventional  designator (name) as  you
browse this web site.
     Click.
     From  now  on.  the  expression RIST  9E03  will  be  replaced  by  the
expression Andrew Loeb. Warning: we consider such nomenclature fundamentally
invalid, and do not recommend its  use, but have provided it as a service to
first  time visitors to this Web site who are not accustomed to  thinking in
terms of RISTs.
     Click.
     You  have clicked  on Andrew Loeb which  is a  designator  assigned  by
atomized society to the memome of RIST 9E03 . .
     Click.
     memome is  the set of all  memes that define the physical  reality of a
carbon based RIST.  Memes can be divided into two broad  categories: genetic
and  semantic.  Genetic  memes  are  simply genes (DNA) and  are  propagated
through   normal  biological   reproduction.  Semantic   memes   are   ideas
(ideologies, religions, fads, etc.) and are propagated by communications.
     Click.
     The  genetic part of  the  memome  of Andrew  Loeb  shares 99%  of  its
contents with the data set produced by the Human Genome Project. This should
not be construed as  endorsing  the  concept  of speciation  (i.e.  that the
continuum   of  carbon  based  life  forms  can  or  should  be  arbitrarily
partitioned into paradigmatic  species) in general, or the theory that there
is a species called "Homo sapiens" in particular.
     The  semantic  part of the memome of Andrew Loeb is  still  unavoidably
contaminated with many primitive viral memes, but these are  being gradually
and  steadily  supplanted  by new  semantic  memes  generated  <I>ab  initio</I> by
rational processes.
     Click.
     RIST  stands for Relatively Independent Sub Totality. It can be used to
refer to any entity that, from one point of view, seems to  possess  a clear
boundary separating it from the world (as do cells in a body) but that, in a
deeper sense, is inextricably linked with a larger totality (as are cells in
a body). For example, the biological entities traditionally known as  "human
beings" are  nothing more than  Relatively Independent Sub Totalities of the
social organism in which they are embedded.
     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 <I>soi disant</I> "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,
     &ndash; BEGIN ORDO SIGNATURE BLOCK &ndash; (etc.)
     &ndash; 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 <I>this!</I>

     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 <I>admitted</I> it 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 <I>receptionist.</I> 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 <I>m&eacute;nage</I> &agrave; <I>trois Tom,</I>  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.


     <B>Chapter 42 AFLOAT</B>


     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.