Cryptonomicon

Chapter 89 SLAVES

People smell all kinds of ways before they have burned, but only one way afterwards. As the Army boys lead Waterhouse down into the darkness, he sniffs cautiously, hoping he won't smell that smell.

Mostly it smells like oil, diesel, hot steel, the brimstony tang of burnt rubber and exploded munitions. These smells are overpoweringly strong. He draws in a lungful of reek, blows it out. And that, of course, is when he catches a whiff of barbecue and knows that this concrete-coated island is, among other things, a crematorium.

He is following the Army boys down black-smudged tunnels bored through a variegated matrix of concrete, masonry, and solid rock. The caves were there first, eaten into the stone by rain and waves, then enlarged and rationalized by Spaniards with chisels, jackhammers, blasting powder. Then along came the Americans with bricks, and finally the Nipponese with reinforced concrete.

As they work their way into the maze, they pass down some tunnels that apparently acted like blowtorches: the walls have been scoured clean as if a torrent had been running through it for a million years, silver pools lie on the floor where guns or filing cabinets melted into puddles. Stored heat still radiates from the walls, adding to the heat of the Philippine climate, making all of them sweat even more, if that is possible.

Other corridors, other rooms were nothing more than backwaters in the river of fire. Looking into doorways, Waterhouse can see books that were charred but not consumed, blackened papers spilling from burst cabinets—“One moment,” he says. His escort spins around just in time to see Waterhouse ducking through a low door into a tiny room, where something has caught his eye.

It's a heavy wooden cabinet, mostly transmuted into charcoal now, so it looks like the cabinet's gone but its shadow persists. Someone has already pulled one of its doors off its hinges, allowing black confetti to flood into the room. The cabinet was filled with slips of paper, mostly burned now, but thrusting his hand into the ash-heap (slowly! Most of this place is still hot) Waterhouse pulls out a bundle, nearly intact.

“What kind of money is that?” the Army guy asks.

Waterhouse pulls a bill from the top of the bundle. The top is printed in Japanese characters and bears an engraved picture of Tojo. He flips it over. The back is printed in English: TEN POUNDS.

“Australian currency,” Waterhouse says.

“Don't look Australian to me,” the Army guy says, glowering at Tojo.

“If the Nips had won…” Waterhouse says, and shrugs. He throws the stack of ten-pound notes onto the ash-heap of history and carries his single copy out into the corridor. A necklace of lightbulbs has been strung along the ceiling. The light glances off what looks like pools of quicksilver on the floor: the remains of guns, belt buckles, steel cabinets and doorknobs, melted down into puddles in the holocaust, now congealed.

The fine print on the bill says, IMPERIAL RESERVE BANK, MANILA.

“Sir! You okay?” the Army guy says. Waterhouse realizes he's been thinking for a while.

“Carry on,” he says, and stuffs the bill in his pocket.

He was thinking about whether it was okay to take some of this money with him. It's okay to take souvenirs, but not to loot. So he can take the money if it's worthless, but not if it is real money.

Now, someone who was not so inclined to think and ponder everything to the nth degree would immediately see that the money was worthless, because, after all, the Japanese did not take Australia and never will. So that money's just a souvenir, right?

Probably right. The money is effectively worthless. But if Waterhouse were to find a real Australian ten-pound note and read the fine print, it would also probably bear the imprimatur of a reserve bank somewhere.

Two pieces of paper, each claiming to be worth ten pounds, each very official-looking, each bearing the name of a bank. One of them a worthless souvenir and one legal tender for all debts public and private. What gives?

What it comes down to is that people trust the claims printed on one of those pieces of paper but don't trust the other. They believe that you could take the real Australian note to a bank in Melbourne, slide it over the counter, and get silver or gold—or something at least—in exchange for it.

Trust goes a long way, but at some point, if you're going to sponsor a stable currency, you must put up or shut up. Somewhere, you have to actually have a shitload of gold in the basement. Around the time of the evacuation from Dunkirk, when the Brits were looking at an imminent invasion of their islands by the Germans, they took all of their gold reserves, loaded them on board some battleships and passenger liners, and squirted them across the Atlantic to banks in Toronto and Montreal. This would have enabled them to keep their currency afloat even if the Germans had overrun London.

But the Japanese have to play by the same rules as everyone else. Oh, sure, you can get a kind of submission from a conquered people by scaring the shit out of them, but it doesn't work very well to hold a knife to someone's throat and say, “I want you to believe that this piece of paper is worth ten pounds sterling.” They might say that they believe it, but they won't really believe it. They won't act as if they believe it. And if they don't act that way, then there is no currency, workers don't get paid (you can enslave them, but you still have to pay the slavedrivers), the economy doesn't work, you can't extract the natural resources that prompted you to conquer the country in the first place. Basically, if you're going to run an economy you have to have a currency. When someone walks into a bank with one of your notes you have to be able to give them gold in exchange for it.

The Nipponese are maniacs for planning things out. Waterhouse knows this; he has been reading their decrypted messages twelve, eighteen hours a day for a couple of years now, he knows their minds. He knows, as surely as he knows how to play a D major scale, that the Nipponese must have given thought to this problem of backing their imperial currency—not just for Australia but New Zealand, New Guinea, the Philippines, Hong Kong, China, Indochina, Korea, Manchuria.

How much gold and silver would you need in order to convince that many human beings that your paper currency was actually worth something? Where would you put it?

The escort takes him down a couple of levels and finally to a surprisingly large room, deep down. If they are in the bowels of the island, then this must be the vermiform appendix or something. It is glob shaped, walls smooth and ripply in most places, chisel-gnawed where men have seen fit to enlarge it. The walls are still cool and so is the air.

There are long tables in this room, and at least three dozen empty chairs—so Waterhouse nips in tiny whiffs of air at first, terrified that he will smell dead people. But he doesn't.

It figures. They're in the center of the rock. There's only one way into the room. No way to get a good draft through this place—no blowtorch effect—no burning at all, apparently. This room was bypassed. The air is as thick as cold gravy.

“Found forty dead in this room,” the escort says.

“Dead of what?”

“Asphyxiation.”

“Officers?”

“One Japanese captain. The rest were slaves.”

Before the war started, the term “slave” was, to Lawrence Waterhouse, as obsolete as “cooper” or “chandler.” Now that the Nazis and the Nipponese have revived the practice, he hears it all the time. War's weird.

His eyes have been adjusting to the dim light ever since they stepped into the chamber. There's a single 25-watt bulb for the whole cavern and the walls absorb nearly all of the light.

He can see squarish things on the tables, one in front of each chair. When he first came in he assumed that these were sheets of paper—indeed, some of them are. But as his vision gets better he can see that most of them are hollow frames, sprinkled with abstract patterns of round dots.

He fumbles for his flashlight and nails the switch. Mostly all it does is create a fuzzy yellow cone of oily smoke, swirling fatly and lazily in front of him. He steps forward shooing the smoke out of his way, and bends over the table.

It's an abacus, its beads still frozen in the middle of some calculation. Two feet down the table is another. Then another.

He turns to face the Army guy. “What's the plural of abacus?”

“Beg pardon, sir?”

“Shall we say abaci?”

“Whatever you say, sir.”

“Were any of these abaci touched by any of your men?”

There is a flurry of discussion. The Army guy has to confer with several enlisted men, dispatch gofers to interview people, and make a couple of phone calls. This is a good sign; there are a lot of men who would just say “no, sir,” or whatever they thought Waterhouse wanted to hear, and then he would never know whether they were telling the truth. This guy seems to understand that it's important for Waterhouse to get an honest answer.

Waterhouse walks up and down the rows of tables with his hands clasped carefully behind his back, looking at the abaci. Next to most of them is a sheet of paper, or a whole notebook, with a pencil handy. These are all covered with numbers. From place to place, he sees a Chinese character.

“Did any of you see the bodies of these slaves?” he says to an enlisted man.

“Yes, sir. I helped carry 'em out.”

“Did they look like Filipinos?”

“No, sir. They looked like regular Asiatics.”

“Chinese, Korean, something like that?”

“Yes, sir.”

After a few minutes, the answer comes back: no one will admit to having touched an abacus. This chamber was the last part of the fortress to be reached by Americans. The bodies of the slaves were mostly found piled up near the door. The body of the Nipponese officer was on the bottom of the pile. The door had been locked from the inside. It is a metal door, and has a slight outward bulge, as the fire upstairs apparently sucked all the air out of the room in a big hurry.

“Okay,” Waterhouse says, “I am going to go upstairs and report back to Brisbane. I am personally going to take this room apart like an archaeologist. Make sure that nothing is touched. Especially the abaci.”