They say that Yamamoto was killed by a lucky accident when some roving P-38s just happened across an anonymous flight of Nipponese planes and shot them down. Waterhouse knows that Yamamoto's death warrant was hammered out by an Electrical Till Corporation line printer in a Hawaiian cryptanalysis factory, and that the admiral was the victim of a straightforward political assassination.
Even his concept of geography has changed. When he was home, he sat down with his grandparents and they looked at the globe, spinning it around until all they saw was blue, tracing his route across the Pacific, from one lonely volcano to the next godforsaken atoll. Waterhouse knows that those little islands, before the war, had only one economic function: information processing. The dots and dashes traveling along the undersea cable are swallowed up by the earth currents after a few thousand miles, like ripples in heavy surf. The European powers colonized those islands at about the same time as the long cables were being laid, and constructed power stations where the dots and dashes coming down the line were picked up, amplified, and sent on to the next chain of islands.
Some of those cables must plunge into the deep not far from this beach. Waterhouse is about to follow the dots and dashes over the western horizon, where the world ends.
He finds a ramp that leads down to the beach and lets gravity draw him towards sea level, gazing to the south and west. The water is pacific and colorless beneath a hazy sky, the horizon line is barely discernable.
The fine dry sand plumps under his feet in fat circular waves that crest around his ankles, so he has to stop and unlace his hard leather shoes. Sand has become trapped in the matrix of his black socks and he pulls them off too and stuffs them in his pockets. He walks towards the water carrying one shoe in each hand. He sees others who have tied their shoes together through belt loops, leaving their hands free. But the asymmetry of this offends him, so he carries his shoes as if preparing to invert himself and wade on his hands with his head dangling into the water.
The low sun shines flatly across the sand, grazing the chaos and creating a knife-sharp terminator at the crest of each dunelet. The curves flirt and osculate with one another in some pattern that is, Waterhouse guesses, deeply fascinating and significant but too challenging for his tired mind to attack. Some areas have been stomped level by seagulls.
The sand at the surf line has been washed flat. A small child's footprints wander across it, splaying like gardenia blossoms on thin shafts. The sand looks like a geometric plane until a sheet of ocean grazes it. Then small imperfections are betrayed by swirls in the water. Those swirls in turn carve the sand. The ocean is a Turing machine, the sand is its tape; the water reads the marks in the sand and sometimes erases them and some times carves new ones with tiny currents that are themselves a response to the marks. Plodding through the surf, Waterhouse strikes deep craters in the wet sand that are read by the ocean. Eventually the ocean erases them, but in the process its state has been changed, the pattern of its swirls has been altered. Waterhouse imagines that the disturbance might somehow propagate across the Pacific and into some super-secret Nipponese surveillance device made of bamboo tubes and chrysanthemum leaves; Nip listeners would know that Waterhouse had walked that way. In turn, the water swirling around Waterhouse's feet carries information about Nip propeller design and the deployment of their fleets-if only he had the wit to read it. The chaos of the waves, gravid with encrypted data, mocks him.
The land war is over for Waterhouse. Now he is gone, gone to the sea. This is the first time he's taken a good look at it-the sea, that is-since he reached Los Angeles. It looks big to him. Before, when he was at Pearl, it was just a blank, a nothing. Now it looks like an active participant and a vector of information. Fighting a war out on that thing could turn you into some kind of a maniac, make you deranged. What must it be like to be the General? To live for years among volcanoes and alien trees, to forget about oaks and cornfields and snowstorms and football games? To fight the terrible Nipponese in the jungle, burning them out of caves, driving them off cliffs into the sea? To be an oriental potentate-the supreme authority over millions of square miles, hundreds of millions of people. Your only tether to the real world a slender copper fiber rambling across the ocean floor, a faint bleating of dots and dashes in the night? What kind of man would this make you?
Chapter 51 OUTPOST
When their sergeant was aerosolized by the Australian with the tommy gun, Goto Dengo and his surviving comrades were left mapless, and mapless in the jungles of New Guinea during a war is bad, bad, bad.
In another country, they might have been able to keep walking downhill until they reached the ocean, and then follow the coastline to their destination. But travel along the coast is even more nearly impossible than travel in the interior, because the coast is a chain of pestilential headhunter-infested marshes.
In the end, they find a Nipponese outpost by simply following the sound of the explosions. They may not have maps, but the American Fifth Air Force does.
The relentless bombing is reassuring, in a way, to Goto Dengo. After their encounter with the Australians, he entertains an idea that he dare not voice: that by the time they reach their destination, it might already have been overrun by the enemy. That he can even conceive of such a possibility proves beyond all doubt that he is no longer fit to be a soldier of the emperor.
In any case, the drone of the bombers' engines, the tympanic thuds of the explosions, the flashes on the night horizon give them plenty of helpful hints as to where the Nipponese people are located. One of Goto Dengo's comrades is a farmboy from Kyushu who seems to be capable of substituting enthusiasm for food, water, sleep, medicine, and any other bodily needs. As they trudge onwards through the jungle, this boy keeps his spirits up by looking forward to the day when they draw close enough to hear the sound of the antiaircraft batteries and see the American planes, torn open by shellfire, spiraling into the sea.
That day never arrives. As they get closer, though, they can find the outpost with their eyes closed, simply by following the reek of dysentery and decaying flesh. Just as the stench draws close enough to be overpowering, the enthusiastic boy makes an odd grunting sound. Goto Dengo turns to see a peculiar, small, oval-shaped entrance wound in the center of the boy's forehead. The boy falls down and lies on the ground quivering.
'We are Nipponese!' Goto Dengo says.
The tendency of bombs to fall out of the sky and blow up among them whenever then sun is up dictates that bunkers and foxholes be dug. Unfortunately ground coincides with water table. Footprints fill up with water before the foot has even been worried loose from the clutching mud. Bomb craters are neat, circular ponds. Slit trenches are zigzagging canals. There are no wheeled vehicles and no beasts of burden, no livestock, no buildings. Those pieces of charred aluminum must have been parts of airplanes once. There are a few heavy weapons, but their barrels are cracked and warped from explosions, and pocked with small craters. Palm trees are squat stumps crowned with a few jagged splinters radiating away from the site of the most recent explosion. The expanse of red mud is flecked with random clutches of gulls tearing at bits of food; Goto Dengo suspects already what they're eating, and confirms this when he cuts his bare foot on an excerpt of a human jawbone. The sheer volume of high explosive that has detonated here has suffused every molecule of the air, water, and earth with the chemical smell of TNT residue. This smell reminds Goto Dengo of home; the same stuff is good for pulverizing any rock that is standing between you and a vein of ore.
A corporal escorts Goto Dengo and his one surviving comrade from the perimeter to a tent that has been pitched out on the mud, its ropes tied not to stakes but to jagged segments of tree trunks, or heavy fragments of ruined weapons. Inside, the mud is paved with the lids of wooden crates. A shirtless man of perhaps fifty sits crosslegged on top of an empty ammunition box. His eyelids are so heavy and swollen that it is difficult to tell whether he is awake. He breathes erratically. When he inhales, his skin retracts into the interstices between ribs, producing the illusion that his skeleton is trying to burst free from his doomed body. He has not shaved in a long time, but doesn't have enough whiskers to muster a real beard. He is mumbling to a clerk, who squats on his haunches atop a crate lid stenciled MANILA and copies down his words.
Goto Dengo and his comrade stand there for perhaps half an hour, desperately trying to master their disappointment. He expected to be lying in a hospital bed drinking miso soup by now. But these people are in worse
