deployed. And yet he has the same feeling of a major sudden life change that one might get after surviving a car crash.
He is a mess. Fortunately his bag's in the backseat, with another shirt. A few minutes later he finally emerges from the fogged-up car and gets a look at his surroundings. He's in a community built on a canted plateau with a few widely spaced, very high coconut palms scattered about. Downslope, which appears to be roughly south, there is a pattern of vegetation that Randy recognizes as a tri-leveled cash-crop thing: pineapples down on the ground, cacao and coffee at about head level, coconuts and bananas above that. The yellowish green leaves of the banana trees are especially appealing, seemingly big enough to stretch out and sunbathe on. To the north, and uphill, a jungle is attempting to tear down a mountain.
This compound that he's in is obviously a recent thing, laid out by actual surveyors, designed by people with educations, subsidized by someone who can afford brand-new sheets of corrugated tin, ABS drainpipe, and proper electrical wiring. It has something in common with a normal Philippine town in that it's built around a church. In this case the church is small-Enoch called it a chapel-but that it was designed by Finnish architecture students would be obvious to Randy even if Root hadn't divulged it. It has a bit of that Bucky Fuller tensegrity thing going for it-lots of exposed, tensioned cables radiating from the ends of tubular struts, all collaborating to support a roof that's not a single surface but a system of curved shards. It looks awfully well designed to Randy, who now judges buildings on the sole criterion of their ability to resist earthquakes. Root told him it was built by the brothers of a missionary order, and by local volunteers, with materials contributed by a Nipponese foundation that is still trying to make amends for the war.
Music is coming out of the church. Randy checks his watch and discovers that it's Sunday morning. He avoids participating in the Mass, on the excuse that it's already underway and he doesn't want to interrupt it, and ambles toward a nearby pavilion-a corrugated roof sheltering a concrete floor slab with some plastic tables-where breakfast is being laid out. He arouses violent controversy among a loose flock of chickens that is straggling across his path, none of whom can seem to figure out how to get out of his way; they're scared of him, but not mentally organized enough to translate that fear into a coherent plan of action. Several miles away, a helicopter is flying in from the sea, shedding altitude as it homes in on a pad somewhere up in the jungle. It is a big and gratuitously loud cargo-carrying chopper with unfamiliar lines, and Randy vaguely suspects that it was built in Russia for Chinese customers and that it is part of Wing's operations.
He recognizes Jackie Woo lounging at one of the tables, drinking tea and reading a bright magazine. Amy's in the adjacent kitchen, embroiled in Tagalog girl-talk with a couple of middle-aged ladies who are handling the preparations for the meal. This place seems pretty safe, and so Randy stops in the open, punches in the digits that only he and Goto Dengo know, and takes a GPS reading. According to the machine, they are no more than 4500 meters away from the main drift of Golgotha. Randy checks the heading and determines that it is uphill from here. Although the jungle blurs the underlying shape of the earth, he thinks that it's going to be up in the valley of a nearby river.
Forty-five hundred meters seems impossibly close, and he's still standing there trying to convince himself that his memory is sound when the ragged voices of the worshippers suddenly spill out across the compound as the chapel's door is pushed open. Enoch Root emerges, wearing (inevitably) what Randy would describe as a wizard's robe. But as he walks across the compound he shucks it off to reveal sensible khakis underneath, and hands the robe to a young Filipino acolyte who scurries back inside with it. The singing trails off and then Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe emerges from the church, followed by John Wayne and several people who appear to be locals. Everyone drifts towards the pavilion. The alertness that comes with being in a new place, combined with the neurological aftermath of that shockingly big and long orgasm, has left Randy's senses sharper, and his mind clearer, than they've ever been, and he's impatient to get going. But he can't dispute the wisdom of getting a good breakfast, so he shakes hands all around and sits down with the others. There is a bit of small talk about how his pamboat voyage went.
'Your friends should have come into the country that way,' says Doug Shaftoe, and then goes on to explain that Avi and both of the Gotos were supposed to be here yesterday, but they were detained at the airport for some hours and eventually had to fly back to Tokyo while some mysterious immigration hassles were ironed out. 'Why didn't they go to Taipei or Hong Kong?' Randy wonders aloud since both those cities are much closer to Manila. Doug stares at him blankly and observes that both of those are Chinese cities, and reminds him that their presumed adversary now is General Wing, who has a lot of pull in places like that.
Several backpacks have already been prepared, laden mostly with bottled water. After everyone's had a chance to digest breakfast, Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe, Jackie Woo, John Wayne, Enoch Root, America Shaftoe, and Randall Lawrence Waterhouse all don packs. They begin to stroll uphill, passing out of the compound and into a transitional zone of big-leaved traveler trees and giant clusters of bamboo: ten-centimeter-thick trunks spraying out and up from central roots, like frozen shell-bursts, to heights of at least ten meters, the poles striped green and brown where the husky leaves are peeling away. The canopy of the jungle looms higher and higher, accentuated by the fact that it's uphill from here, and emits a fantastic whistling noise, like a phaser on overload. As they enter the shade of the canopy the racket of crickets is added to that whistling noise. It sounds as though there must be millions of crickets and millions of whatever's making the whistling noise, but from time to time the sound will suddenly stop and then start up again, so if there are a lot of them, they are all following the same score.
The place is filled with plants that in America are only seen in pots, but that grow to the size of oak trees here, so big that Randy's mind can't recognize them as, for example, the same kind of Diefenbachia that Grandmother Waterhouse used to have growing on the counter in her downstairs bathroom. There is an incredible variety of butterflies, for whom the wind-free environment seems to be congenial, and they weave in and out among huge spiderwebs that call to mind the design of Enoch Root's chapel. But it is clear that the place is ultimately ruled by ants; in fact it makes the most sense to think of the jungle as a living tissue of ants with minor infestations of trees, birds, and humans. Some of them are so small that they are, to other ants, as those ants are to people; they prosecute their ant activities in the same physical space but without interfering, like many signals on different frequencies sharing the same medium. But there are a fair number of ants carrying other ants, and Randy assumed that they are not doing it for altruistic reasons.
Where the jungle's dense it is impassable, but there are a fair number of places where the trees are spaced a few meters apart and the under-growth is only knee-high, and light shines through. By moving from one such place to another they make slow progress in the general direction indicated by Randy's GPS. Jackie Woo and John Nguyen have disappeared, and appear to be moving parallel to them but much more quietly. The jungle is a nice place to visit, but you wouldn't want to live, or even stop moving, there. Just as the beggars in Intramuros see you as a bipedal automatic teller machine, the insects here see you as a big slab of animated but not very well defended food. The ability to move, far from being a deterrent, serves as an unforgeable guarantee of freshness. The canopy's tentpoles are huge trees-'Octomelis sumatrana,' says Enoch Root-with narrow buttress roots splayed out explosively in every direction, as thin and sharp as machetes sunk into the earth. Some of them are almost completely obscured by colossal philodendrons winding up their trunks.
They crest a broad, gentle ridgeline; Randy had forgotten that they were moving uphill. The air suddenly becomes cooler and moisture condenses on their skins. When the whistlers and the crickets pause, it be comes possible to hear the murmur of a stream down below them. The next hour is devoted to slowly working their way down the slope towards it. They cover a total of a hundred meters; at this rate, Randy thinks, it should take them two days, hiking around the clock, to reach Golgotha. But he keeps this observation to himself. As they move downhill he starts to become aware of, and to be taken aback by, the sheer amount of biomass that happens to be above them-forty or fifty meters above them in many cases. He feels as though he's at the bottom of the food chain.
They enter a sunnier zone that consequently is snarled by much heavier undergrowth, and are forced to break out the machetes and hack their way through to the river. Enoch Root explains that this is a place where a small lahar, which had been funneled between the steep walls of the river's gorge farther upstream, spread out and mowed down a few hectares of ancient trees, clearing the path for smaller, opportunistic vegetation. This is fascinating for about ten seconds and then it's back to the machete work. Eventually they reach the edge of the river, all of them sticky and greenish and itching from the sap and juice and pulp of the vegetation they have assaulted in order to get here. The river's bed is shallow and rocky here, with no discernible bank. They sit down and drink water for a while. 'What is the point of all this?' asks Enoch Root suddenly. 'I don't mean to sound discouraged by these physical barriers, because I'm not. But I'm wondering whether you have worked out the goal
