'I find that impossible to believe.'
'So did we. I mean, we'd all received copies of his manifestoes-printed on this grey recycled paper that was like the sheets of fuzz that you peel off a clothes dryer's lint trap.'
'He used some kind of organic, water-based ink that flaked off like black dandruff,' Tom says.
'We used to joke about having Andy-grit all over our desks,' Cantrell says. 'So when this guy called Andy Loeb showed up on the Secret Admirers mailing list, and the Eutropia newsgroup, posting all of these long rants, we refused to believe it was him.'
'We thought that someone had just written really brilliant parodies of his prose style,' Cantrell says.
'But when they kept coming, day after day, and he started getting into these long dialogs with people, it became obvious that it really was him,' Tom grumbles.
'How did he square that with being a Luddite?'
Cantrell: 'He said that he'd always thought of computers as a force that alienated and atomized society.'
Tom: 'But as the result of being the number one Digibomber suspect for a while, he'd been forcibly made aware of the Internet, which changed computers by connecting them.'
'Oh, my god!' Randy says.
'And he'd been mulling over the Internet while he was doing whatever Andrew Loeb does,' Tom continues.
Randy: 'Squatting naked in icy mountain streams strangling muskrats with his bare hands.'
Tom: 'And he'd realized computers could be a tool to unite society.'
Randy: 'And I'll bet he was just the guy to unite it.'
Cantrell: 'Well, that's actually not far away from what he said.'
Randy: 'So, are you about to tell me that he became a Eutropian?'
Cantrell: 'Well, no. It's more like he discovered a schism in the Eutropian movement we didn't know was there, and created his own splinter group.
Randy: 'I think of the Eutropians as being totally hard-core individuals, pure libertarians.'
'Well, yeah!' Cantrell says. 'But the basic premise of Eutropianism is that technology has made us post- human. That Homo sapiens plus technology is effectively a whole new species: immortal, omnipresent because of the Net, and headed towards omnipotence. Now, the first people to talk that way were libertarians.'
Tom says, 'But the idea has attracted all kinds of people-including Andy Loeb. He showed up one day and started yammering about hive minds.'
'And of course he was flamed to a crisp by most of the Eutropians, because that concept was anathema to them,' Cantrell says.
Tom: 'But he kept at it, and after a while, some people started agreeing with him. Turned out there was really a pretty substantial faction within the Eutropians who
'So, now Andy's the leader of that faction?' Randy asks.
'I would suppose so,' Cantrell says. 'They split away and formed their own newsgroup. We haven't heard much from them in the last six months or so.'
'So how did you become aware of a connection between Andy and me?'
'He stills pops into the Secret Admirers newsgroup from time to time,' Tom says. 'And there's been a lot of discussion there about the Crypt lately.'
Cantrell says, 'When he found out that you and Avi were involved, he posted this vast rant-twenty or thirty K of run-on sentences. Not very complimentary.'
'Well, Jesus. What's his beef? He won the case. Completely bankrupted me. You'd think he'd have something better to do than beat this dead horse,' Randy says, thumping himself on the chest. 'Doesn't he have a day job?'
'He's some kind of a lawyer now,' Cantrell says.
'Ha! Figures.'
'He's been denouncing us,' Tom says. 'Capitalist roader. Atomizing society. Making the world safe for drug traffickers and Third-World kleptocrats.'
'Well, at least he got something right,' Randy says. He's delighted to have an answer, finally, to the question of why they're building the Crypt.
Chapter 27 RETROGRADE MANEUVER
Sio is a mud cemetery. Those who have already given their lives for the emperor compete for mire space with those who intend to. Bizarre forktailed American planes dive out of the sun every day to murder them with terrible glowing rains of cannon fire and the mind-crushing detonations of bombs, so they sleep in open-topped graves and only come out at night. But their pits are full of reeking water that chums with hostile life, and when the sun goes down, rain beats them, carrying into their bones the deadly chill of high altitudes. Every man in the 20th Division knows that he will not leave New Guinea alive, so it remains only to choose the method of death: surrender to be tortured, then massacred by the Australians? Put grenades to their heads? Remain where they are to be killed by the airplanes all day, and all night by malaria, dysentery, scrub typhus, starvation, and hypothermia? Or walk two hundred miles over mountains and flooding rivers to Madang, which is tantamount to suicide even when it is peacetime and you have food and medicine...?
But that is what they are ordered to do. General Adachi flies to Sio-it is the first friendly plane they have seen in weeks-and lands on the rutted septic field that they call an airstrip, and orders the evacuation. They are to move inland in four detachments. Regiment by regiment, they bury their dead, pack up what is left of their equipment, hoard what little food is left, wait for dark, and trudge towards the mountains. The later echelons can find their path by smell, following the reek of dysentery and of the corpses dropped behind the pathfinder groups like breadcrumbs.
The top commanders stay to the end, and the radio platoon stays with them; without a powerful radio transmitter, and the cryptographic paraphernalia that goes with it, a general is not a general, a division is not a division. Finally they go off the air, and begin breaking the transmitter down into the smallest pieces they can, which unfortunately are not all that small; a divisional radio transmitter is a powerful beast, made for lighting up the ionosphere. It has an electrical generator, transformers, and other components that cannot be made light. The men of the radio platoon, who would find it difficult to move even the weight of their own skeletons over the mountains and across the surging rivers, will carry the additional burdens of engine blocks, fuel tanks, and transformers.
And the big steel trunk with all of the Army codebooks. These books were heavy as death when they were bone dry; now they are sodden. To carry them out is beyond imagining. The rules dictate that they must therefore be burned.
The men of the 20th Division's radio platoon are not much inclined to humor of any kind at the moment, not even the grim sardonic humor universal among soldiers. If anything in the world is capable of making them laugh at this moment, it is the concept of trying to construct a bonfire out of saturated codebooks in a swamp during a rainstorm. They might be able to burn them if they used a lot of aviation fuel-more than they actually have. Then the fire would produce a towering column of smoke that would draw P-38s as the scent of human flesh draws mosquitoes.
Burning them can't be necessary. New Guinea is a howling maelstrom of decay and destruction; the only things that endure are rocks and wasps. They rip off the covers to bring home as proof that they have been destroyed, then pack the books into their trunk and bury it in the bank of an especially vindictive river.
It's not a very good idea. But they have been getting bombed a lot. Even if the shrapnel misses you, the bomb's shock wave is like a stone wall moving at seven hundred miles an hour. Unlike a stone wall, it passes through your body, like a burst of light through a glass figurine. On its way through your flesh, it rearranges every part of you down to the mitochondrial level, disrupting every process in every cell, including whatever enables your brain to keep track of time and experience the world. A few of these detonations are enough to break the thread of consciousness into a snarl of tangled and chopped filaments. These men are not as human as they were when they
