moisture not merely fogging its windows but running down them in literal streamlines. A driver in Foote Mansion livery has erupted from it to divest Mr. Goto of his luggage, Randy knows that he need only make a subtle move toward that car and he will be whisked to a luxury hotel where he can take a shower, watch TV naked while drinking a hundred-dollar bottle of French wine, go swimming, get a massage.
Which is precisely the problem. He can already feel himself wilting in the equatorial heat. It's too early to go soft. He's only been awake for six or seven hours. There's work to be done. He forces himself to stand up at attention, and the effort makes him break a sweat so palpably that he almost expects to moisten everything within a radius of several meters. 'I would enjoy sharing a ride to the hotel with you,' he says, 'but I have one or two errands to run first.'
Goto understands. 'Perhaps drinks this evening.'
'Leave me a message,' Randy says. Then Goto's waving at him through the smoked glass of the Mercedes as it pulls seven gees away from the curb. Randy does a one-eighty, goes back inside to the halal Dunkin' Donuts, which accepts eight currencies, and sates himself. Then he reemerges and turns imperceptibly toward a line of taxis. A driver hurls himself bodily towards Randy and tears his garment bag loose from his shoulder. 'Ministry of Information,' Randy says.
In the long run, it may, or may not, be a good idea for the Sultanate of Kinakuta to have a gigantic earthquake-, volcano-, tsunami-, and thermonuclear-weapon-proof Ministry of Information with a cavernous sub- sub-basement crammed with high-powered computers and data switches. But the sultan has decided that it would be sort of cool. He has hired some alarming Germans to design it, and Goto Engineering to build it. No one, of course, is more familiar with staggering natural disasters than the Nipponese, with the possible exception of some peoples who are now extinct and therefore unable to bid on jobs like this. They also know a thing or two about having the shit bombed out of them, as do the Germans.
There are subcontractors, of course, and a plethora of consultants. Through some miraculous feat of fast talking, Avi managed to land one of the biggest consulting contracts: Epiphyte(2) Corporation is doing 'systems integration' work, which means plugging together a bunch of junk made by other people, and overseeing the installation of all the computers, switches, and data lines.
The drive to the site is surprisingly short. Kinakuta City isn't that big, hemmed in as it is by steep mountain ranges, and the sultan has endowed it with plenty of eight-lane superhighways. The taxi blasts across the plain of reclaimed land on which the airport is built, swings wide around the stump of Eliza Peak, ignoring two exits for Technology City, then turns off at an unmarked exit. Suddenly they are stuck in a queue of empty dump trucks- Nipponese behemoths emblazoned with the word GOTO in fat macho block letters. Coming towards them is a stream of other trucks that are identical except that these are fully laden with stony rubble. The taxi driver pulls onto the right shoulder and zooms past trucks for about half a mile. They're heading up-Randy's ears pop once. This road is built on the floor of a ravine that climbs up into one of the mountain ranges. Soon they are hemmed in by vertiginous walls of green, which act like a sponge, trapping an eternal cloud of mist, through which sparks of brilliant color are sometimes visible. Randy can't tell whether they are birds or flowers. The contrast between the cloud forest's lush vegetation and the dirt road, battered by the house-sized tires of the heavy trucks, is disorienting.
The taxi stops. The driver turns and looks at him expectantly. Randy thinks for a moment that the driver has gotten lost and is looking to Randy for instructions. The road terminates here, in a parking lot mysteriously placed in the middle of the cloud forest. Randy sees half a dozen big air-conditioned trailers bearing the logos of various Nipponese, German, and American firms; a couple of dozen cars; as many buses. All the accoutrements of a major construction site are here, plus a few extras, like two monkeys with giant stiff penises fighting over some booty from a Dumpster, but there is no construction site. Just a wall of green at the end of the road, green so dark it's almost black.
The empty trucks are disappearing into that darkness. Full ones come out, their headlights emerging from the mist and gloom first, followed by the colorful displays that the drivers have built onto the radiator grilles, followed by the highlights on their chrome and glass, and finally the trucks themselves. Randy's eyes adjust, and he can see now that he is staring into a cavern, lit up by mercury-vapor lamps.
'You want me to wait?' the driver asks.
Randy glances at the meter, does a quick conversion, and figures out that the ride to this point has cost him a dime. 'Yes,' he says, and gets out of the taxi. Satisfied, the driver kicks back and lights up a cigarette.
Randy stands there and gapes into the cavern for a minute, partly because it's a hell of a thing to look at and partly because a river of cool air is draining out of it, which feels good. Then he trudges across the lot and goes to the trailer marked 'Epiphyte.'
It is staffed by three tiny Kinakutan women who know exactly who he is, though they've never met him before, and who give every indication of being delighted to see him. They wear long, loose wraps of brilliantly colored fabric on top of Eddie Bauer turtlenecks to ward off the nordic chill of the air conditioners. They are all fearsomely efficient and poised. Everywhere Randy goes in Southeast Asia he runs into women who ought to be running General Motors or something. Before long they have sent out word of his arrival via walkie-talkie and cell- phone, and presented him with a pair of thick knee-high boots, a hard hat, and a cellular phone, all carefully labeled with his name. After a couple of minutes, a young Kinakutan man in hard hat and muddy boots opens the trailer's door, introduces himself as 'Steve,' and leads Randy into the entrance of the cavern. They follow a narrow pedestrian board walk illuminated by a string of caged lightbulbs.
For the first hundred meters or so, the cave is just a straight passage barely wide enough to admit two Goto trucks and the pedestrian lane. Randy trails his hand along the wall. The stone is rough and dusty, not smooth like the surface of a natural cavern, and he can see fresh gouges wrought by jackhammers and drills.
He can tell by the echo that something's about to change. Steve leads him out into the cavern proper. It is, well,
Steve goes off in search of something and leaves Randy alone for a few minutes, which is useful since it takes a long time for him to get his bearings.
Some of the cavern wall is smooth and natural; the rest of it is rough, marking the enlargements conceived by the engineers and executed by the contractor. Likewise, some of the floor is smooth, and not quite level. Some places it has been drilled and blasted to bring it down, others it has been filled in to bring it up.
This, the main chamber, looks to be about finished. The offices of the Ministry of Information will be here. There are two other, smaller chambers, deeper inside the mountain, still being enlarged. One will contain the engineering plant (power generators and so forth) and the other will be the systems unit.
A burly blond man in a white hard hat emerges from a hole in the chamber wall: Tom Howard, Epiphyte Corporation's vice president for systems technology. He takes his hard hat off and waves to Randy, then beckons him over.
The passageway that leads to the systems chamber is big enough that you could drive a delivery van down it, but it's not as straight or as level as the main entryway. It is mostly occupied by a conveyor system of terrifying power and speed, which is carrying tons of dripping grey muck out towards the main chamber to be dumped into the Goto trucks. In terms of apparent cost and sophistication, it beats the same relationship to a normal conveyor belt as an F-15 does to a Sopwith Camel. It is possible to speak but impossible to be heard when you are near it, and so Tom and Randy and the Kinakutan who calls himself Steve trudge silently down the passage for another hundred or so meters until they reach the next cavern.
This one is only large enough to contain a modest one-story house. The conveyor passes right through the middle of it and disappears down another hole; the muck is coming from deeper yet in the mountain. It's still too loud in here to talk. The floor has been leveled by pouring in concrete, and conduits rise from it every few meters with orange cables dangling from their open tops: optical fiber lines.
Tom walks towards another opening in the wall. It appears that several subsidiary caverns branch away from this one. Tom leads Randy through the opening, then turns to put a hand on his arm and steady him: they are at the top of a steep wooden staircase that has been built down a nearly vertical shaft that descends a good five meters or so.
'What you just saw is the main switch room,' Tom says. 'That'll be the largest router in the world when
