Cryptonomicon

Chapter 46 HEAP

“Randy, what is the worst thing that ever happened?”

This is never a difficult question to answer when you are hanging around with Avi. “The Holocaust,” Randy says dutifully.

Even if he didn't know Avi, their surroundings would give him a hint. The rest of Epiphyte Corp. have gone back to the Foote Mansion to prepare for hostilities with the Dentist. Randy and Avi are sitting on a black obsidian bench planted atop the mass grave of thousands of Nipponese in downtown Kinakuta, watching the tour buses come and go.

Avi pulls a small GPS receiver out of his attache case, turns it on, and sets it out on a boulder in front of them where it will have a clear view of the sky. “Correct! And what is the highest and best purpose to which we can devote our allotted lifespans?”

“Uh… enhancing shareholder value?”

“Very funny.” Avi is annoyed. He is baring his soul, which he does rarely. Also, he's in the midst of cataloging another small-h holocaust site, adding it to his archives. It is clear he would appreciate some fucking solemnity here. “I visited Mexico a few weeks ago,” Avi continues.

“Looking for a site where the Spanish killed a bunch of Aztecs?” Randy asks.

“This is exactly the kind of thing I'm fighting,” Avi says, even more irritated. “No, I was not looking for a place where a bunch of Aztecs were massacred. The Aztecs can go fuck themselves, Randy! Repeat after me: the Aztecs can go fuck themselves,”

“The Aztecs can go fuck themselves,” Randy says cheerfully, drawing a baffled look from an approaching Nipponese tour guide.

“To begin with, I was hundreds of miles from Mexico City, the former Aztec capital. I was on the outer fringes of the territory that the Aztecs controlled.” Avi scoops his GPS off the boulder and begins to punch keys on its pad, telling it to store the latitude and longitude in its memory. “I was looking,” Avi continues, “for the site of a Nahuatl city that was raided by the Aztecs hundreds of years before the Spanish even showed up. You know what those fucking Aztecs did, Randy?”

Randy uses his hands to squeegee away sweat from his face. “Something unspeakable?”

“I hate that word 'unspeakable.' We must speak of it.”

“Speak then.”

“The Aztecs took twenty-five thousand Nahuatl captives, brought them back to Tenochtitlan, and killed them all in a couple of days.”

“Why?”

“Some kind of festival. Super Bowl weekend or something. I don't know. The point is, they did that kind of shit all the time. But now, Randy, when I talk about Holocaust-type stuff happening in Mexico, you give me this shit about the mean nasty old Spaniards! Why? Because history has been distorted, that's why.”

“Don't tell me you're about to come down on the side of the Spaniards.”

“As the descendant of people who were expelled from Spain by the Inquisition, I have no illusions about them,” Avi says, “but, at their worst, the Spaniards were a million times better than the Aztecs. I mean, it really says something about how bad the Aztecs were that, when the Spaniards, showed up and raped the place, things actually got a lot better around there.”

“Avi?”

“Yes.”

“We are sitting here in the Sultanate of Kinakuta, trying to build a data haven while fending off an oral surgeon-turned-hostile-take-over-maven. I have pressing responsibilities in the Philippines. Why are we discussing the Aztecs?”

“I'm giving you a pep talk,” Avi says. “You are bored. Dangerously so. The Pinoy-gram thing was cool for a while, but now it's up and running, there's no new technology there.”

“True.”

“But the Crypt is amazingly cool. Tom and John and Eb are going nuts, and every Secret Admirer in the world is spamming me with resumes. The Crypt is exactly what you would like to be doing right now.”

“Again, true.”

“Even if you were working on the Crypt, though, philosophical issues would be gnawing at you—issues based on the types of people who you see getting involved, who may be our first customers.”

“I cannot deny that I have philosophical issues,” Randy says. Suddenly he has come up with a new hypothesis: Avi is actually root@eruditorum.org.

“Instead, you are laying cable in the Philippines. This is a job that—because of changes we just became aware of yesterday—is basically irrelevant to our corporate mission. But it's a lingering contractual obligation, and if we put anyone less important than you on it, the Dentist will be able to prove to the most half-witted jury of tofu-brained Californians that we are malingering.”

“Well, thank you for making it so clear why I should be miserable,” Randy says forbearingly.

“So,” Avi continues, “I wanted to let you know that you aren't necessarily just making license plates here. And furthermore that the Crypt is not a morally bankrupt endeavor. Actually, you are playing a big role in the most important thing in the world.”

Randy says, “You asked me earlier what is the highest and best purpose to which we could dedicate our lives. And the obvious answer is 'to prevent future Holocausts.'”

Avi laughs darkly. “I'm glad it's obvious to you, my friend. I was beginning to think I was the only one.”

“What!? Get over yourself, Avi. People are commemorating the Holocaust all the time.”

“Commemorating the Holocaust is not, not not not not not, the same thing as fighting to prevent future holocausts. Most of the commemorationists are just whiners. They think that if everyone feels bad about past holocausts, human nature will magically transform, and no one will want to commit genocide in the future.”

“I take it you do not share this view, Avi?”

“Look at Bosnia!” Avi scoffs. “Human nature doesn't change, Randy. Education is hopeless. The most educated people in the world can turn into Aztecs or Nazis just like that.” He snaps his fingers.

“So what hope is there?”

“Instead of trying to educate the potential perpetrators of holocausts, we try to educate the potential victims. They will at least pay some fucking attention.”

“Educate them in what way?”

Avi closes his eyes and shakes his head. “Oh, shit, Randy, I could go on for hours—I have drawn up a whole curriculum.”

“Okay, we'll get into that later.”

“Definitely later. For now, the key point is that the Crypt is all-important. I can take all of my ideas and put them into a single pod of information, but almost every government in the world would prevent distribution to its citizens. It is essential to build the Crypt so that the HEAP can be freely distributed throughout the world.”

“HEAP?”

“Holocaust Education and Avoidance Pod.”

“Oh, Jesus Christ!”

“This is the true meaning of what you are working on,” Avi says, “and so I urge you not to lose heart. Whenever you are about to get bored stamping out those license plates in the Philippines, think of the HEAP. Think of what those Nahuatl villagers could have done to those fucking Aztecs if they'd had a holocaust prevention manual—a handbook on guerilla warfare tactics.”

Randy sits and ponders for a while. “We have to go and buy some water,” he finally says. “I've sweated away a few liters just sitting here.”

“We can just go back to the hotel,” Avi says, “I'm basically finished.”

“You're finished. I haven't even started,” Randy says.

“Started what?”

“Telling you why there's no chance I'm going to be bored in the Philippines.”

Avi blinks. “You met a girl?”

“No!” Randy says testily, meaning Yes, of course. “Come on, let's go.”

They go to a nearby 24 Jam and purchase bluish plastic bottles of water the size of cinderblocks. Then they wander around through streets crowded with unbearably savory-smelling food carts, guzzling the water.

“I got e-mail from Doug Shaftoe a few days ago,” Randy says. “From his boat, via satellite phone.”

“In the clear?”

“Yeah. I keep bothering him to get Ordo and encrypt his e-mail, but he won't.”

“That is really unprofessional,” Avi grumbles. “He needs to be more paranoid.”

“He's so paranoid that he doesn't even trust Ordo.” Avi's scowl eases. “Oh. That's okay then.”

“His e-mail contained a stupid joke about Imelda Marcos.”

“You took me on this walk to tell me a joke?”

“No, no, no,” Randy says. “The joke was a prearranged signal. Doug told me that he would send me e-mail containing an Imelda joke if a certain thing happened.”

“What certain thing?”

Randy takes a big swig of water, draws a deep breath, and composes himself. “More than a year ago, I had a conversation with Doug Shaftoe during that big party that the Dentist threw on board the Rui Faleiro. He wanted us to hire his company, Semper Marine Services, to do the survey work on all future cable lays. In return he offered to cut us in on any sunken treasure he found while performing the survey.”

Avi skids to a stop and clutches his water bottle in both hands as if he's afraid he might drop it. “Sunken treasure, like, yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum? Pieces of six? That kind of thing?”

“Pieces of eight. Same basic idea,” Randy says. “The Shaftoes are treasure hunters. Doug is obsessed with the idea that there are vast hoards of treasure in and around the Philippines.”

“From where? Those Spanish galleons?”

“No. Well, yes, actually. But that's not what Doug's after.” He and Avi have begun walking again. “Most of it is either much older than that—pottery from sunken Chinese junks—or much more recent—Japanese war gold.”

As Randy had expected, the mention of Japanese war gold makes a huge impact on Avi. Randy keeps talking. “Rumor has it that the Nipponese left a lot of gold in the area. Supposedly, Marcos recovered a big stash buried in a tunnel somewhere—that's where he got all his money. Most people think Marcos was worth something like five, six billion dollars, but a lot of people in the Philippines think he recovered more like sixty billion.”

“Sixty billion!” Avi's spine stiffens. “Impossible.”

“Look, you can believe the rumors or not, I don't care,” Randy says. “But since it looks like one of Marcos's bag men is going to be a founding depositor in the Crypt, it is the kind of thing you should know.”

“Keep talking,” Avi says, suddenly ravenous for data.

“Okay. So people have been running all over the Philippines ever since the war, digging holes and dredging the seafloor, trying to find the legendary Nipponese war gold. Doug Shaftoe is one of those people. Problem is, making a thorough sidescan sonar survey of the whole area is quite expensive—you can't just go out and do it on spec. He saw an opportunity when we came along.”

“I see. Very smart,” Avi says approvingly. “He would do the survey work that we needed anyway, in order to lay the cables.”

“Perhaps a bit more than was strictly necessary, as long as he was out there.”

“Right. Now I remember some angry mail from the Dentist's due diligence harpies because the survey was costing too much and taking too long. They felt we could have hired a different company and gotten the same results quicker and cheaper.”

“They were probably right,” Randy admits. “Anyway, Doug wanted to cut a deal that gave us ten percent of whatever he found. More, if we wanted to underwrite recovery operations.”

All of a sudden Avi's eyes go wide and he swallows a big gulp of air. “Oh, shit,” he says. “He wanted to keep the whole thing a secret from the Dentist.”

“Exactly. Because the Dentist would end up taking all of it. And because of the Dentist's peculiar domestic situation, that means that the Bolobolos would know everything about it too. These guys would happily kill to get their hands on gold.”

“Wow!” Avi says, shaking his head. “Y'know, I don't want to seem like one of those hackneyed Jews that you see in heartwarming movies. But at times like this, all I can say is 'Oy, gevalt!' ”

“I never told you about this deal, Avi, for two reasons. One of them is just our general policy of not blabbing about things. The other reason is that we decided to hire Semper Marine Services anyway—just on their own merits—so Doug Shaftoe's proposition was irrelevant.”

Avi thinks this one over. “Correction. It was irrelevant, as long as Doug Shaftoe didn't find any sunken treasure.”

“Right. And I assumed that he wouldn't.”

“You assumed wrong.”

“I assumed wrong,” Randy admits. “Shaftoe has found the remains of an old Nipponese submarine.”

“How do you know that?”

“If he found a Chinese junk he was going to send me a joke about Ferdinand Marcos. If he found World War II stuff, it was going to be Imelda. If it was a surface ship, it was going to be about Imelda's shoes. If it was a submarine, her sexual habits. He sent me a joke about Imelda's sexual habits.”

“Now, did you ever formally respond to Doug Shaftoe's proposition?” Avi says.

“No. Like I said, it wasn't relevant, we were going to hire him any way. But then, after the contracts were all signed and we were drawing up the survey schedule, he told me about this code involving the Marcos jokes. I realized then he believed that by hiring him, we had implicitly said yes to his proposition.”

“It's a funny way to do business,” Avi says, wrinkling his nose. “You'd think he would have been more explicit.”

“He is the kind of guy who does deals on a handshake. On personal honor,” Randy says. “Once he had made the proposition, he would never withdraw it.”

“The problem with those honorable men,” Avi says, “is that they expect everyone else to be honorable in the same way.”

“It is true.”

“So he believes, now, that we are accomplices in this plan to hide the existence of this sunken treasure from the Dentist and the Bolobolos,” Avi says.

“Unless we come clean to them right away.”

“In which case we are betraying Doug Shaftoe,” Avi says.

“Cravenly backstabbing the ex-SEAL who served six years of combat duty in Vietnam, and who has scary and well-connected friends all over the world,” Randy adds.

“Damn, Randy! I thought I was going to freak you out by telling you about the HEAP.”

“You did.”

“And then you spring this on me!”

“Life's rich pageant. And all that,” Randy says.

Avi thinks for a minute. “Well, I guess it comes down to whom would we rather have on our side in a bar fight.”

“The answer can only be Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe,” Randy says. “But that doesn't mean we'll make it out of the bar alive.”