oof of the fortress. The sun has warmed the concrete and it feels
good. He cannot see the LCM, but he can see the few antennas that stick out
of its top, and he knows it is in position now.
The rope should be there. Shaftoe props himself up on his elbows and
looks. Sure enough, there it is, a manila rope (natch!) tied to a grapnel,
one point of the grapnel lodged in a shell crater near the edge of the roof.
He gets to it eventually, and begins to pull on the rope. He closes his
eyes, but tries not to fall asleep. He keeps pulling, and eventually feels
something big and thick between his hands: the hose.
Almost finished. Lying on his back, hugging the end of the hose to his
chest, he rolls his head from side to side until he can see the air vent
that they picked out on the reconnaissance photos. It used to have a sheet
metal hood on the top of it, but that's long gone now, it's just a hole in
the roof with a few jagged bits of metal at its edges. He crawls over to it
and feeds in the end of the hose.
Someone must be watching him on one of the ships, because the hose
stiffens, like a serpent coming alive, and between his hands Bobby Shaftoe
can feel the fuel oil streaming through it. Ten thousand gallons of the
stuff. Straight down into the fortress. He can hear the Nips down there,
singing hoarse songs. By now they will have figured out what is about to
happen. General MacArthur is giving them exactly what they've been praying
for.
At this point, Bobby Shaftoe is supposed to abseil down a rope into the
LCM, but he knows it isn't going to happen. No one can reach him now, no one
can help him. When the fuel oil stops streaming through the hose, he summons
all the concentration he has left. Pretends, one last time, that he actually
gives a damn. Jerks the safety pin from a white phosphorus grenade, lets the
handle fly off and tinkle merrily across the roof. He can feel it come alive
in his hand, the thrumming animal fizz of its inner fuse. He drops it into
the air shaft: a circular pipe straight down, a black disk centered on a
field of dingy grey, like the ashes of a Nipponese flag.
Then, on an impulse, he dives in there after it.
Semper Fidelis Dawn star flares on disk of night I fall, sun rises
Chapter 88 METIS
The appearance of root@eruditorum.org in the cell right next to Randy's
is like the crowning plot twist in this Punch and Judy show that has been
performed for his benefit ever since his plane landed at NAIA. As with any
puppet show, he knows that there must be a lot of people hidden just outside
the range of his senses, in furious motion, trying to make it all happen.
For all he knows, some significant fraction of the Philippine gross national
product is being devoted to keeping up these pretenses for his benefit.
There is a meal waiting on the floor of Randy's cell, and a rat on top
of the meal. Randy usually reacts pretty badly to the sight of rats; they
rupture the containment system that his upbringing and his education built
around the part of his mind where the collective unconscious stuff dwells,
and send him straight into Hieronymus Bosch territory. But in these
circumstances it doesn't bother him any more than seeing one at the zoo
would. The rat has a surprisingly attractive buckskin colored pelt and a
tail about as thick as a pencil that has evidently run afoul of a farmer's
wife with a carving knife, and woggles stiffly in the air like the blunt
antenna of a cellphone. Randy is hungry, but he doesn't want to eat anything
that a rat has left footprints on, so he just watches it.
His body feels like it slept for a long time. He turns on his computer
and types in a command called "date." The nails of his left hand look funny,
as if they all got bruised. Focusing on them he sees a club drawn in blue
ballpoint pen ink on the nail of the index finger, a diamond on the
forefinger, a heart on the ring finger, a spade on the pinky. Enoch Root
told him that in Pontifex, as in bridge, each card in the deck has a
numerical value: clubs 1 13, diamonds 14 26, hearts 27 39, spades 40 52.
Randy drew the symbols on his nails so he wouldn't forget.
Anyway, "date" tells him that he apparently slept all of yesterday
afternoon and evening, all night, and about half of today. So this rat is
actually eating his lunch.
Randy's computer runs Finux, so when it boots up it gives him a black
screen with big fat white letters scrolling up it one line at a time, a real
circa 1975 type of user interface. Also presumably the easiest possible
thing to read through Van Eck phreaking. Randy types in "startx" and the
screen goes black for a moment and then turns a particular shade of indigo
that Randy happens to like, and beige windows appear on it with much smaller
and crisper black letters. So now he is running the X Windows System, or X
as people like Randy call it, which provides all of the graphical junk that
people expect in a user interface: menus, buttons, scroll bars, and so on.
As with anything else under UNIX (of which Finux is a variant), there are a
million options that only young, lonely, or obsessed people have the time
and patience to explore. Randy has been all three at various times of his
life and knows a lot about these options. For example, the background of his
screen happens to be a uniform indigo at the moment, but it could be an
image. Theoretically you could use a movie, so that all of your windows and
menus and so on would float around on top of, say, Citizen Kane running in
an endless loop. You can, in fact, take any piece of software and make it
into your screen background, and it will purr along happily, doing whatever
it does, and not even known that it's being used as window dressing. This
has given Randy some ideas on how to approach the Van Eck thing.
In its current state, this computer is just as vulnerable to Van Eck
phreaking as it was before Randy started up X. Before it was white letters
on a black background. Now it's black on beige. The letters are a little
smaller and they live in windows, but it makes no difference: the
electronics inside his computer still have to make these transitions between
zero and one, i.e. between high intensity (white or beige) and minimal
(black) as they trace out these patterns of dots on the screen.
Randy fundamentally does not know what the fuck is going on in his life
right now, and probably hasn't for a long time, even back in the days when
he thought that he did know. But his working hypothesis is that the people
who set this whole situation up (prime candidates: the Dentist and his
cohorts in the Bolobolo syndicate) know that he has some cool information on
his hard drive. How should they know this? Well, Pontifex the Wizard Enoch
Root whatever the fuck he's called when he phoned Randy on the plane, knew
that Randy had Arethusa, so God knows who else might know. Someone set up
the fake drug bust at NAIA so that they could nab his laptop and yank the
hard drive and make a copy of its contents. Then they found out that it was
all doubly encrypted. That is, the Arethusa intercepts are encrypted to
begin with in a pretty good World War II cryptosystem, which anyone should
be able to break nowadays, but on top of that they are furthermore encrypted
in a state of the art modern system that no one can break. If they know
what's good for them, they won't even try to break it. The only way for them
to get the information is to get Randy to decrypt it for them, which he can
do by biometrically identifying himself to his laptop (by talking to it) or
by typing in a pass phrase that only he knows. They are hoping that Randy
will decrypt the Arethusa intercept files and, like a moron, display their
contents on the screen. The moment that stuff appears on the screen, the
game is over. The Dentist's (or whoever's) surveillance guys can feed the
intercepts to some kind of a cryptanalytic supercomputer that will break
them open in no time.
That doesn't mean that Randy dare not open those files just that he
daren't display them on the screen. This distinction is crucial. Ordo can
read the encrypted files from the hard drive. It can write them into the
computer's memory. It can decrypt them, and write the results into another
region of the computer's memory, and leave that data there indefinitely, and
the Van Eck phreakers will never be the wiser. But as soon as Randy tells
the computer to show him that information in a window on the screen, the
Arethusa intercepts will belong to the Van Eck phreakers; and whoever they
are, they can probably break them faster than Randy can.
The fun and interesting thing is that Randy doesn't have to actually
see those intercepts in order to work on them. As long as they are sitting
in the computer's memory, he can subject them to every cryptanalystic
technique in the whole Cryptonomicon.
He starts tapping out some lines in a language called Perl. Perl's a
scripting language; useful for controlling your computer's functions and
automating repetitive tasks. A UNIX machine like this one is rooted in a
filesystem that contains tens of thousands of different files, mostly in
straight ASCII text format. There are many different programs for opening
these files, displaying them on the screen, and editing them. Randy intends
to write a Perl script that will roam through the filesystem choosing files
at random, opening each file in a randomly sized and located window, paging
through it for a while, and then closing it again. If you run the script
fast enough, the windows will pop open all over the place in a kind of
rectangularized fireworks burst that will go on forever. If this script is
used as the screen background, in place of solid indigo, then this will go
on underneath the one window on the screen where Randy's actually working.
The people monitoring his work will go crazy trying to track all of this.
Especially if Randy writes a script that will cause the real window to
change its shape and location at random every few seconds.
It would be really stupid to open the Arethusa intercepts in a window
he's not going to do that. But he can use this technique to conceal whatever
else he's doing in the way of decryption work. It occurs to him, however,
when he gets a few lines into writing this Perl script, that if he pulls a
stunt like that so early in his incarceration, the people surveilling him
will know right away that he is on to them. And maybe it's better if he lets
them believe, for a while, that he suspects nothing.
So he saves his Perl script and stops working on it for now. If he
writes it in short bursts, opening it once or twice a day to type in a few
lines and then closing it, it's unlikely that the surveillors will be able
to follow what he is up to, even if they happen to be hackers. Just to be an
asshole, he modifies his X Windows options in such a way that none of the
windows on the screen will have a title bar at the top. That way the
surveillance people won't be able to tell what file he is working on at any
given moment, which will make it a lot harder for them to string a long
series of observations together into a coherent picture of what's in his
Perl script.
Too, he opens up the old message from root@eruditorum.org giving the
Pontifex Transform, expressed as a few lines of Perl code. The steps that
looked so unwieldy when carried out by a computer seem straight forward
easy, even now that he construes them as manipulations of a deck of cards.
"Randy."
"Hmmm?" Randy looks up from the screen and is startled to find that he
is in a jail in the Philippines.
"Dinner is served."
It is Enoch Root, looking at him through the bars. He points at the
floor of Randy's cell where a new tray of food has just been slid in.
"Actually, it was served an hour ago you might want to have at it before the
rats come."
"Thank you," Randy says. Making sure all the windows on his screen have
been closed, he goes over and lifts his dinner up from the spatter of old
rat turds on the floor. It is rice and lechon, a simple and traditional pork
dish. Enoch Root finished eating a long time ago he sits on his bed, next to
Randy, and plays an unusual game of solitaire, pausing occasionally to mark
down a letter. Randy watches the manipulation of the deck carefully,
growingly certain that it is the same set of operations he was just reading
about in the old e mail message.
"So what are you in for?" Randy asks.
Enoch Root finishes counting through the deck, glances at a seven of
spades, closes his eyes for a few moments, and marks down a W on his napkin.
Then he says, "Disorderly conduct. Trespassing. Incitement to riot. I'm
probably guilty of the first two."
"Tell me about it."
"First tell me what you're in for."
"Heroin was found in my bag at the airport. I stand accused of being
the world's stupidest drug smuggler."
"Is someone angry at you?"
"That would make for a much longer story," Randy says, "but I think you
have the drift."
"Well, in my case, it's like this. I have been working at a mission
hospital up in the mountain."
"You're a priest?"
"Not anymore. I'm a lay worker."
"Where's your hospital?"
"South of here. Out in the boondocks," Enoch Root says. "The people
there cultivate pineapple, coffee, coconut, bananas, and a few other cash
crops. But their land is being torn apart by treasure hunters."
Funny that Enoch Root should suddenly be on the subject of buried
treasure. And yet he has been so tight lipped. Randy guesses he's intended
to play stupid. He takes a stab at it: "Is there supposed to be some
treasure down there?"
"The old timers say that many Nipponese trucks went down a particular
road during the last few weeks before MacArthur's return. Past a certain
point it was not possible to know where they went, because the road was
blocked, and minefields set up to discourage the curious."
"Or kill them," Randy says.
Enoch Root takes this in stride. "That road gives way to a rather vast
area in which gold might hypothetically have been hidden. Hundreds of square
miles. Much of it is jungle. Much has difficult topography. Lots of
volcanoes, some extinct, some vomiting up mudflows from time to time. But
some is flat enough to grow tropical crops, and in those places, people have
settled during the decades since the war, and put together the rudiments of
an economy."
"Who owns the land?"
"You've gotten to know the Philippines well," Enoch Root says. "You go
immediately to the central question."
"Around here, asking who owns the land is like complaining about the
weather in the Midwest," Randy muses.
Enoch Root nods. "I could spend a long time answering your question.
The answer is that patterns of ownership changed just after the war, and
then changed again under Marcos, and yet again in the last few years. So we
have several epochs, if you will. First epoch: before the war. Land owned by
certain families."
"Of course."
"Of course. Second epoch: the war. A vast area sealed off by the
Nipponese. Some of the families who owned the land prospered under the
occupation. Others went bankrupt. Third epoch: postwar. The bankrupt
families went away. The prosperous ones expanded their holdings. As did the
church and the government."
"Why?"
"The government made part of the land the jungle into a national park.
And after the eruptions, the church established the mission where I work."
"Eruptions?"
"In the early 1950s, just to make things interesting you know, things
are never interesting enough in the Philippines the volcanoes acted up. A
few lahars came through the area, wiped out some villages, redirected some
rivers, displaced many people. The church set up the hospital to help those
people."
"A hospital doesn't take up very much land," Randy observes.
"We also have farms. We are trying to help the locals become more self
reliant." Enoch Root acts like he basically does not want to talk about
this. "At any rate, things then settled down into a pattern that more or
less endured until the Marcos era, when various people were forced to sell
some of their holdings to Ferdinand and Imelda and various of their cousins,
nephews, cronies, and bootlicks."
"They were looking for Nipponese war gold."
"Certain of the locals have made a business of pretending to remember
where the gold is," Enoch Root says. "Once it was understood just how
remunerative this could be, it spread like a virus. Everyone claims to have
hazy memories of the war now, or of tales that Dad or Granddad told them.
The Marcos era treasure hunters did not display the cautious skepticism that
might have been expected from people with more piercing intellects. Many
holes were dug. No gold was found. Things settled down. Then, in the last
few years, the Chinese came in."
"Filipinos of Chinese ancestry, or "
"Chinese of Chinese ancestry," Enoch Root says. "Northern Chinese.
Robust ones who like spicy food. Not the usual gracile Cantonese speaking
fish eaters."
"These people are from where, then Shanghai?"
Root nods. "Their company is one of these post Maoist monstrosities.
Headed up by an actual Long March veteran. Wily survivor of many purges.
Name of Wing. Mr. Wing or General Wing as he likes to be addressed when he
is feeling nostalgic handled the transition to capitalism rather deftly.
Built hydroelectric projects with slave labor during the Great Leap Forward,
parlayed that into control of a very large government ministry which has now
become a sort of corporation. Mr. Wing has the ability to shut off the
electricity to just about any home or factory or even military base in
China, and by Chinese standards this makes him into a distinguished elder
statesman."
"What does Mr. Wing want there?"
"Land. Land. More land."
"What sort of land?"
"Land in the jungle. Oddly enough."
"Maybe he wants to build a hydroelectric project."
"Yes, and maybe you're a heroin smuggler. Say, Randy, don't think I'm
rude for saying so, but you have sauce in your beard." Enoch Root thrusts a
hand through the bars, proffering a paper napkin. Randy takes it and,
lifting it to his face, notes that the following letters are written on it:
OSKJJ JGTMW. Randy pretends to daub sauce off his beard.
"Now I've gone and done it," says Enoch Root, "given you my whole
supply of bumwad."
"Greater love hath no man," Randy says. "And I see you gave me your
other deck of cards too you are too generous."
"Not at all I thought you might want to play solitaire, just as I did."
"Don't mind if I do," Randy says, setting his dinner tray aside and
reaching for the deck.
The card on top is an eight of spades. Skimming it and a few more cards
out of the way, he finds a joker, with small stars in the corners; according
to hints that Enoch has already dropped, this is the A joker. It's the work
of a moment to slip it beneath the card below, which happens to be a Jack of
clubs. About two thirds of the way down into the pack he finds a big star
joker, and B stands for Big, so he knows that is Joker B; he moves it down
two cards, below the six of clubs and the nine of diamonds. Straightening up
the pack and then smearing though it once more, he sticks various fingers in
as he re finds those jacks, and ends up with a good half of the pack the
full inter Joker span, plus the two Jokers themselves trapped between his
index and forefingers. The thinner stacks above and below he pulls out and
swaps with each other. Enoch watches all of this and seems to approve.
Randy pushes out the bottom most card, now, and it turns out to be a
jack of clubs. On second thought he pulls that jack out and leaves it on his
knee for the time being, so he won't mess the next part up. According to the
mnemonic symbols he's marked on his fingernails, the numerical value of this
jack of clubs is simply 11. So, starting from the top of the deck, he counts
down to the eleventh card, cuts the deck below it, then swaps the two
halves, and finally takes the jack of clubs off his knee and puts it on the
bottom of the deck again.
The card on the top of the deck is now a joker. "What's the numerical
value for a joker?" he asks, and Enoch Root says, "it's fifty three, for
either one of them." So Randy gets a free ride this time; he knows that if
he begins counting down from the top of the deck, when he reaches 53 he'll
be staring at the last card. And that card happens to be the Jack of Clubs,
with a value of 11. Eleven, then is the first number in the keystream.
Now, the first letter in the ciphertext that Enoch Root wrote on the
napkin is O, and (setting the deck of cards down, now, so that he can count
through the alphabet on his fingers) O is letter fifteen. If he subtracts
eleven from that, he gets four, and he doesn't even have to count on his
fingers to know that letter number four is D. He has one letter deciphered.
Randy remarks, "We still haven't gotten to your being arrested."
"Yes! Well, it's like this," says Enoch Root. "Mr. Wing has been
digging some holes of his own up in the jungle lately. A lot of trucks have
been going through. Ruining the roads. Running over stray dogs, which as you
know are an important food source for these people. A boy was hit by one of
these trucks and has been in our hospital ever since. The runoff from Mr.
Wing's operations has been fouling the river that many people rely on for
fresh water. And there are questions of ownership too some feel that Mr.
Wing is encroaching on land that is properly owned by the government. Which
in some extremely attenuated sense, means it is owned by the people."
"Does he have a permit?"
"Ah! Once again your knowledge of local politics is evident. As you
know, the normal procedure is for local officials to approach people who are
digging large holes in the ground, or undertaking any kind of productive or
destructive activity whatsoever, and demand that they obtain a permit, which
simply means that they want a bribe or else they'll raise a stink about it.
Mr. Wing's company has not obtained a permit."
"Has a stink been raised?"
"Yes. But Mr. Wing has forged a very strong relationship with certain
Filipinos of Chinese ancestry who are well placed in the government, and so
the stink has been unavailing."
The second time through, the joker moving part went quickly since one
of the jokers started out on top. The King of Hearts ends up on the bottom,
and hence on Randy's knee. That son of a bitch has a numerical index of 39,
and so Randy has to count most of the way through the deck to reach the card
in the thirty ninth position, which is a ten of diamonds. He splits and
swaps the deck, then puts the King of Hearts back on the bottom. Top card is
now a four of diamonds, which translates to an index of seventeen. Counting
the seventeen top cards into his hand he stops and looks at the eighteenth,
which is a four of hearts. That works out to a value of 26 + 4 = 30. But
everything here is modulo 26, so adding the 26 was a waste of time, because
now he has to subtract it right off again. The result is four. The second
letter in Enoch's ciphertext is S, which is the nineteenth letter in the
alphabet, and subtracting four from that gives him O. So the plaintext, so
far, is "DO."
"I get the picture."
"I was sure that you would, Randy."
Randy doesn't know what to make of the Wing business. It puts him in
mind of Doug Shaftoe's yarns. Maybe Wing is looking for the Primary, and
maybe Enoch Root is too, and maybe the Primary is what Old Man Comstock was
trying to find by decrypting the Arethusa messages. Maybe, in other words,
the location of the Primary is sitting on Randy's hard drive right now, and
Root's worried that Randy, like an idiot, is going to give it away.
How'd he arrange to get into a cell next to Randy's? Presumably the
Church's internal lines of communication are first rate. Root could have
known for a few days that Randy was in the clink. Time enough to hatch a
plan.
"How'd you end up here, then?" Randy asks.
"We decided to raise a bit of a stink ourselves."
"We being the Church?"
"What do you mean by the Church? If you are asking me whether the
Pontifex Maximus and the College of Cardinals put on their pointy bifurcated
hats and sat down together in Rome and drew up plans for a stink, the answer
is no. If by 'church' you mean the local community in my neighborhood,
almost all of whom happen to be devout Catholics, then yes."
"So the community protested, or something, and you were the ring
leader."
"I was an example."
"An example?"
"It frequently does not occur to these people to challenge the powers
that be. When someone actually does, they always find it incredibly novel,
and derive much entertainment from it. That was my role. I had been making a
stink about Mr. Wing for quite some time."
Randy can almost guess what the next two letters are going to be, but
he has to keep working through the algorithm or the deck will get out of
whack. He generates a 23 and then a 47 which, modulo 26, is 21, and
subtracting the 23 and the 21 from the next two ciphertext letters K and J
(again, modulo 26) gives him N and O as expected. So he has "DONO"
deciphered. And continuing to work through it, one letter at a time, the
cards getting a little sweaty in his hands now, he eventually gets DONOTUSEP
and finally loses his place while trying to generate the last keystream
letter. So now the deck is out of whack and completely unrecoverable,
reminding him that he'd better be careful next time. But he can guess that
this message must be: DO NOT USE PC. Enoch is worried that Randy did not
anticipate Van Eck phreaking.
"So. There was a demonstration. You blocked a road or something?"
"We blocked roads, we lay down in front of bulldozers. Some people
slashed a few tires. The locals put their ingenuity to work, and things got
a bit out of hand. Mr. Wing's dear friends in the government took offense
and called out the Army. Seventeen people were arrested. Unreasonably high
bail was set for them as a punitive measure if these people can't get out of
jail they can't make money and their families suffer terribly. I could get
bailed out if I wanted to, but have elected to stay behind bars as a gesture
of solidarity."
It all seems like a plausible enough cover story to Randy. "But I'm
guessing that a lot of people in the government are appalled by the fact
that they have thrown a saint into jail," he says, "and so they have moved
you here, to the high prestige luxury jail with private cells."
"Once again your understanding of the local culture is conspicuous,"
Enoch Root says. He shifts position on the bed and his crucifix swings back
and forth ponderously. He also has a medallion around his neck with
something startling written on it.
"Do you have some occult symbol there?" Randy asks, squinting.
"I beg your pardon?"
"I can make out the word 'occult' on your medallion there."
"It says ignoti et quasi occulti, which means 'unknown and partly
hidden' or words to that effect," says Enoch Root. "It is the motto of a
society to which I belong. You must know that the word 'occult' does not
intrinsically have anything to do with Satanic rituals and drinking blood
and all of that. It "
"I was trained as an astronomer," Randy says. "So I learned all about
occultation the concealment of one body behind another, as during an
eclipse."
"Oh. Well, then, I'll shut up."
"In fact, I know more than you might think about occultation," Randy
says. It might seem like he's beating a dead horse, except that he catches
the eye of Enoch Root while he's saying it, and gives a significant sidelong
glance at his computer. Root processes this for a moment and then nods.
"Who's the lady in the middle? The Virgin Mary?" Randy asks.
Root fingers the medallion without looking at it, and says, "Reasonable
guess. But wrong. It's Athena."
"The Greek goddess?"
"Yes."
"How do you square that with Christianity?"
"When I phoned you the other day, how did you know it was me?"
"I don't know. I just recognized you."
"Recognized me? What does that mean? You didn't recognize my voice."
"Is this some roundabout way of answering my question about Athena
worship v. Christianity?"
"Doesn't it strike you as remarkable that you can look at a stream of
characters on the screen of your computer e mail from someone you've never
seen and later 'recognize' the same person on the phone? How does that work,
Randy?"
"I haven't the faintest idea. The brain can do some weird "
"Some complain that e mail is impersonal that your contact with me,
during the e mail phase of our relationship, was mediated by wires and
screens and cables. Some would say that's not as good as conversing face to
face. And yet our seeing of things is always mediated by corneas, retinas,
optic nerves, and some neural machinery that takes the information from the
optic nerve and propagates it into our minds. So, is looking at words on a
screen so very much inferior? I think not; at least then you are conscious
of the distortions. Whereas, when you see someone with your eyes, you forget
about the distortions and imagine you are experiencing them purely and
immediately."
"So what's your explanation of how I recognized you?"
"I would argue that inside your mind was some pattern of neurological
activity that was not there before you exchanged e mail with me. The Root
Representation. It is not me. I'm this big slug of carbon and oxygen and
some other stuff on this cot right next to you. The Root Rep, by contrast,
is the thing that you'll carry around in your brain for the rest of your
life, barring some kind of major neurological insult, that your mind uses to
represent me. When you think about me, in other words, you're not thinking
about me qua this big slug of carbon, you are thinking about the Root Rep.
Indeed, some day you might get released from jail and run into someone who
would say, 'You know, I was in the Philippines once, running around in the
boondocks, and I ran into this old fart who started talking to me about Root
Reps.' And by exchanging notes (as it were) with this fellow you would be
able to establish beyond a reasonable doubt that the Root Rep in your brain
and the Root Rep in his brain were generated by the same actual slug of
carbon and oxygen and so on: me.
"And this has something to do, again, with Athena?"
"If you think of the Greek gods as real supernatural beings who lived
on Mount Olympus, no. But if you think of them as being in the same class of
entities as the Root Rep, which is to say, patterns of neurological activity
that the mind uses to represent things that it sees, or thinks it sees, in
the outside world, then yes. Suddenly, Greek gods can be just as interesting
and relevant as real people. Why? Because, in the same way as you might one
day encounter another person with his own Root Rep so, if you were to have a
conversation with an ancient Greek person, and he started talking about
Zeus, you might once you got over your initial feelings of superiority
discover that you had some mental representations inside your own mind that,
though you didn't name them Zeus and didn't think of them as a big hairy
thunderbolt hurling son of a Titan, nonetheless had been generated as a
result of interactions with entities in the outside world that are the same
as the ones that cause the Zeus Representation to appear in the Greek's
mind. And here we could talk about the Plato's Cave thing for a while the
Veg O Matic of metaphors it slices! it dices!"
"In which," Randy says, "the actual entities in the real world are the
three dimensional, real things that are casting the shadows, this Greek dude
and I are the wretches chained up looking at the shadows of those things on
the walls, and it's just that the shape of the wall in front of me is
different from the shape of the wall in front of the Grecian "
" so that given a shadow projected on your wall is going to adopt a
different shape from the same shadow projected on his wall, where the
different wall shapes here correspond to let's say your modern scientific
worldview versus his ancient pagan worldview."
"Yeah. That Plato's Cave metaphor."
At this very moment some wag of a prison guard, out in the corridor,
throws a switch and shuts off all of the lights. The only illumination now
is from the screensaver on Randy's laptop, which is running animations of
colliding galaxies.
"I think we can stipulate that the wall in front of you, Randy, is
considerably flatter and smoother, i.e., it generally gives you a much more
accurate shadow than his wall, and yet it's clear that he's still capable of
seeing the same shadows and probably drawing some useful conclusions about
the shapes of the things that cast them."
"Okay. So the Athena that you honor on your medallion isn't a
supernatural being "
" who lives on a mountain in Greece, et cetera, but rather whatever
entity, pattern, trend, or what have you that, when perceived by ancient
Greek people, and filtered through their perceptual machinery and their
pagan worldview, produced the internal mental representation that they
dubbed Athena. The distinction being quite important because Athena the
supernatural chick with the helmet is of course nonexistent, but 'Athena'
the external generator of the internal representation dubbed Athena by the
ancient Greeks must have existed back then, or else the internal
representation never would have been generated, and if she existed back
then, the chances are excellent that she exists now, and if all that is the
case, then whatever ideas the ancient Greeks (who, though utter shitheads in
many ways, were terrifyingly intelligent people) had about her are probably
still quite valid."
"Okay, but why Athena and not Demeter or someone?"
"Well, it's a truism that you can't understand a person without knowing
something about her family background, and so we have to do kind of a quick
Cliff's Notes number on the ancient Greek Theogony here. We start out with
Chaos, which is where all theogonies start, and which I like to think of as
a sea of white noise totally random broadband static. And for reasons that
we don't really understand, certain polarities begin to coalesce from this
Day, Night, Darkness, Light, Earth, Sea. Personally, I like to think of
these as crystals not in the hippy dippy Californian sense, but in the
hardass technical sense of resonators, that received certain channels buried
in the static of Chaos. At some point, out of certain incestuous couplings
among such entities, you get Titans. And it's arguably kind of interesting
to note that the Titans provide really the full complement of basic gods
you've got the sun god, Hyperion, and an ocean god, Oceanus, and so on. But
they all get overthrown in a power struggle called the Titanomachia and
replaced with new gods like Apollo and Poseidon, who end up filling the same
slots in the organizational chart, as it were. Which is kind of interesting
in that it seems to tie in with what I was saying about the same entities or
patterns persisting through time, but casting slightly different shaped
shadows for different people. Anyway, so now we have the Gods of Olympus as
we normally think of them: Zeus, Hera, and so on.
"A couple of basic observations about these: first, they all, with one
exception I'll get to soon, were produced by some kind of sexual coupling,
either Titan Titaness or God Goddess or God Nymph or God Woman or basically
Zeus and whom– or whatever Zeus was fucking on any particular day.
Which brings me to the second basic observation, which is that the Gods of
Olympus are the most squalid and dysfunctional family imaginable. And yet
there is something about the motley asymmetry of this pantheon that makes it
more credible. Like the Periodic Table of the Elements or the family tree of
the elementary particles, or just about any anatomical structure that you
might pull up out of a cadaver, it has enough of a pattern to give our minds
something to work on and yet an irregularity that indicates some kind of
organic provenance you have a sun god and a moon goddess, for example, which
is all clean and symmetrical, and yet over here is Hera, who has no role
whatsoever except to be a literal bitch goddess, and then there is Dionysus
who isn't even fully a god he's half human but gets to be in the Pantheon
anyway and sit on Olympus with the Gods, as if you went to the Supreme Court
and found Bozo the Clown planted among the justices.
"Now what I'm getting to here is that Athena was exceptional in every
way. To begin with she wasn't created through sexual reproduction in any
kind of normal sense; she sprang fully formed from the head of Zeus.
According to some versions of the story, this happened after Zeus fucked
Metis, about whom we'll hear more in due course. Then he was warned that
Metis would later give birth to a son who would dethrone him, and so he ate
her, and later Athena came out of his head. Whether you buy into the Metis
story or not, I think we can still agree that something a little peculiar
was going on with the nativity of Athena. She was also exceptional in that
she did not participate in the moral squalor of Olympus; she was a virgin."
"Aha! I knew that was a picture of a virgin on your medallion."
"Yes, Randy, you do have a keen eye for virgins. Hephaestus leg fucked
her once but did not achieve penetration. She's quite important in the
Odyssey, but there are really very few myths, in the usual sense of that
term, that involve her. The one exception really proves the rule: the story
of Arachne. Arachne was a superb weaver who became arrogant and began taking
credit herself, instead of attributing her talent to the gods. Arachne went
so far as to issue an open challenge to Athena, who was the goddess of
weaving, among other things.
"Now keep in mind that the typical Greek myth goes something like this:
innocent shepherd boy is minding his own business, an overflying god spies
him and gets a hard on, swoops down and rapes him silly; while the victim is
still staggering around in a daze, that god's wife or lover, in a jealous
rage, turns him the helpless, innocent victim, that is into let's say an
immortal turtle and e.g. power staples him to a sheet of plywood with a dish
of turtle food just out of his reach and leaves him out in the sun forever
to be repeatedly disemboweled by army ants and stung by hornets or
something. So if Arachne had dissed anyone else in the Pantheon, she would
have been just a smoking hole in the ground before she knew what hit her.
"But in this case, Athena appeared to her in the guise of an old woman
and recommended that she display the proper humility. Arachne declined her
advice. Finally Athena revealed herself as such and challenged Arachne to a
weaving contest, which you'll have to admit was uncommonly fair minded of
her. And the interesting thing is that the contest turned out to be a draw
Arachne really was just as good as Athena! Only problem was that her weaving
depicted the gods of Olympus at their shepherd raping, interspecies fucking
worst. This weaving was simply a