“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 through 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 t
hat, 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 ringleader.”
“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 n
ot 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!”