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 five volts until it's time to go back to zero again, and so
on.
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:
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 to 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 is 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 ab initio 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 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 admitted 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 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 ménage à trois 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.