Cryptonomicon

this place is a great venue for a conversation: the paths between the stalls are so narrow that they have to walk in single file. No one can follow them, or get close to them, here, without being ridiculously blatant. An array of soldering irons bristles wickedly, giving one stall the look of a martial arts store. Coffee-can-sized potentiometers are stacked in pyramids. 'Tell me about wires,' Randy says.

'I don't need to tell you how dependent we are on submarine cables,' Avi says.

' 'We' meaning the Crypt, or society in general?'

'Both. Obviously the Crypt can't even function without communications linkages to the outside world. But the Internet and everything else are just as dependent on cables.'

A pasocon otakuin a trench coat, holding a plastic bowl as shopping cart, hunches over a display of gleaming copper toroidal coils that look to have been hand-polished by the owner. Finger-sized halogen spotlights mounted on an overhead rack emphasize their geometric perfection.

'So?'

'So, cables are vulnerable.'

They wander past a stall that specializes in banana plugs, with a sideline in alligator clips, arranged in colorful rosettes around disks of cardboard.

'Those cables used to be owned by PTAs. Which were basically just branches of governments. Hence they pretty much did what governments told them to. But the new cables going in today are owned and controlled by corporations beholden to no one except their investors. Puts certain governments in a position they don't like very much.'

'Okay,' Randy says, 'they used to have ultimate control over how information flowed between countries in that they ran the PTTs that ran the cables.'

'Yes.'

'Now they don't.'

'That's right. There's been this big transfer of power that has taken place under their noses, without their having foreseen it.' Avi stops in front of a stall that sells LEDs in all manner of bubble-gum colors, packed into tiny boxes like ripe tropical fruits in crates, and standing up from cubes of foam like psychedelic mushrooms. He is making big transfer-of-power gestures with his hands, but to Randy's increasingly warped mind this looks like a man moving heavy gold bars from one pile to another. Across the aisle, they are being stared at by the dead eyes of a hundred miniature video cameras. Avi continues, 'And as we've talked about many times, there are many reasons why different governments might want to control the flow of information. China might want to institute political censorship, whereas the U.S. might want to regulate electronic cash transfers so that they can keep collecting taxes. In the old days they could ultimately do this insofar as they owned the cables.'

'But now they can't,' Randy says.

'Now they can't, and this change happened very fast, or at least it looked fast to government with its retarded intellectual metabolism, and now they are way behind the curve, and scared and pissed off, and starting to lash out.'

'They are?'

'They are.'

'In what way are they lashing out?'

A toggle switch merchant snaps a rag over rows and columns of stainless steel merchandise. The tip of the rag breaks the sound barrier and generates a tiny sonic pop that blasts a dust mote from the top of a switch. Everyone is politely ignoring them. 'Do you have any idea what down time on a state-of-the-art cable costs nowadays?'

'Of course I do,' Randy says. 'It can be hundreds of thousands of dollars a minute.'

'That's right. And it takes at least a couple of days to repair a broken cable. A couple of days. A single break in a cable can cost the companies that own it tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars in lost revenue.'

'But that hasn't been that much of an issue,' Randy says. 'The cables are plowed in so deeply now. They're only exposed in the deep ocean.

'Yes-where only an entity with the naval resources of a major government could sever them.'

'Oh, shit!'

'This is the new balance of power, Randy.'

'You can't seriously be telling me that governments are threatening to-'

'The Chinese have already done it. They cut an older cable-first-generation optical fiber-joining Korea to Nippon. The cable wasn't that important-they only did it as a warning shot. And what's the rule of thumb about governments cutting submarine cables?'

'That it's like nuclear war,' Randy says. 'Easy to start. Devastating in its results. So no one does it.'

'But if the Chinese have cut a cable, then other governments with a vested interest in throttling information flow can say, 'Hey, the Chinese did it, we need to show that we can retaliate in kind.' '

'Is that actually happening?'

'No, no, no!' Avi says. They've stopped in front of the largest display of needlenose pliers Randy has ever seen. 'It's all posturing. It's not aimed at other governments so much as at the entrepreneurs who own and operate the new cables.'

Light dawns in Randy's mind. 'Such as the Dentist.'

'The Dentist has put more money into privately financed submarine cables than just about anyone. He has a minority stake in that cable that the Chinese cut between Korea and Nippon. So he's trapped like a rat. He has no choice-no choice at all-other than to do as he's told.'

'And who's giving the orders?'

'I'm sure that the Chinese are very big in this-they don't have any internal checks and balances in their government, so they are more prone to do something that is grossly irregular like this.'

'And they obviously have the most to lose from unfettered information flow.'

'Yeah. But I'm just cynical enough to suspect that a whole lot of other governments are right behind them.'

'If that's true,' Randy says, 'then everything is completely fucked. Sooner or later a cable-cutting war is going to break out. All the cables will get chopped through. End of story.'

'The world doesn't work that way anymore, Randy. Governments get together and negotiate. Like they did in Brussels just after Christmas. They come up with agreements. War does not break out. Usually.'

'So-there's an agreement in place?'

Avi shrugs. 'As best as I can make out. A balance of power has been struck between the people who own navies-i.e., the people who have the ability to cut cables with impunity-and the people who own and operate cables. Each side is afraid of what the other can do to it. So they have come to a genteel understanding. The bureaucratic incarnation of it is IDTRO.'

'And the Dentist is in on it.'

'Precisely.'

'So maybe the Ordo siege really was ultimately directed by the government.'

'I very much doubt that Comstock ordered it,' Avi says. 'I think it was the Dentist demonstrating his loyalty.'

'How about the Crypt? Is the sultan party to this understanding?'

Avi shrugs. 'Pragasu isn't saying much. I told him what I have just told you. I laid out my theory of what is going on. He looked tolerantly amused. He did not confirm or deny. But he did give me cause to believe that the Crypt is still going to be up and running on schedule.'

'See, I find that hard to believe,' Randy says. 'It seems like the Crypt is their worst nightmare.'

'Whose worst nightmare?'

'Any government that needs to collect taxes.'

'Randy, governments will always find ways to collect taxes. If worse comes to worst, the IRS can just base everything on property taxes-you can't hide real estate in cyberspace. But keep in mind that the U.S. government is only a part of this thing-the Chinese are very big in it, too.'

'Wing!' Randy blurts. He and Avi cringe and look around them. The pasocon otakudon't care. A man selling rainbow-colored wire ribbons eyes them with polite