The emperor's soldiers are supposed to feel euphoric and invulnerable all the time, because their indomitable spirit makes them so. That Goto Dengo only feels that way when abovedecks, breathing clean air, makes him ashamed. The other soldiers never doubt, or at least never show it. He wonders where he went astray. Perhaps it was his time in Shanghai, where he was polluted with foreign ideas. Or maybe he was polluted from the very beginning-the ancient family curse.

The troop transports are slow-there is no pretence that they are anything other than boxes of air. They have only the most pathetic armaments. The destroyers escorting them are sounding general quarters.

Goto Dengo stands at the rail and watches the crews of the destroyers scrambling to their positions. Black smoke and blue light sputter from the barrels of their weapons, and much later he hears them opening fire.

The American bombers must be in some kind of distress. He speculates that they are low on fuel, or desperately lost, or have been chased down below the cloud cover by Zeros. Whatever the reason, he knows they have not come here to attack the convoy because American bombers attack by flying overhead at a great altitude, raining down bombs. The bombs always miss because the Americans' bombsights are so poor and the crews so inept. No, the arrival of American planes here is just one of those bizarre accidents of war; the convoy has been shielded under heavy clouds since early yesterday.

The troops all around Goto Dengo are cheering. What good fortune that these lost Americans have blundered straight into the gunsights of their destroyer escort! And it is a good omen for the village of Kulu too, because half of the town's young men just happen to be abovedecks to enjoy the spectacle. They grew up together, went to school together, at the age of twenty took the military physical together, joined the army together and trained together. Now they are on their way to New Guinea together. Together they were mustered up onto the deck of the transport only five minutes ago. Together they will enjoy the sight of the American planes softening into cartwheels of flame.

Goto Dengo, at twenty-six, is one of the old hands here-he came back from Shanghai to be a leader and an example to them-and he watches their faces, these faces he has known since he was a child, never happier than at this moment, glowing like cherry petals in the grey world of cloud, ocean, and painted steel.

Fresh delight ripples across their faces. He turns to look. One of the bombers has apparently decided to lighten its load by dropping a bomb straight into the ocean. The boys of Kulu break into a jeering chant. The American plane, having shed half a ton of useless explosives, peels sharply upward, self-neutered, good for nothing but target practice. The Kulu boys howl at its pilot in contempt. A Nipponese pilot would have crashed his plane into that destroyer at the very least!

Goto Dengo, for some reason, watches the bomb instead of the air plane. It does not tumble from the plane's belly but traces a smooth flat parabola above the waves, like an aerial torpedo. He catches his breath for a moment, afraid that it will never drop into the ocean, that it will skim across the water until it hits the destroyer that stands directly across its path. But once again the fortunes of war smile upon the emperor's forces; the bomb loses its struggle with gravity and splashes into the water. Goto Dengo looks away.

Then he looks back again, chasing a phantom that haunts the edge of his vision. The wings of foam that were thrown up by the bomb are still collapsing into the water, but beyond them, a black mote is speeding away-perhaps it was a second bomb dropped by the same airplane. This time Goto Dengo watches it carefully. It seems to be rising, rather than falling-a mirage perhaps. No, no, he's wrong, it is losing altitude slowly now, and it plows into the water and throws up another pair of wings all right.

And then the bomb rises up out of the water again. Goto Dengo, a student of engineering, implores the laws of physics to take hold of this thing and make it fall and sink, which is what big dumb pieces of metal are supposed to do. Eventually it does fall again-but then it rises up again.

It is skipping across the water like the flat rocks that the boys of Kulu used to throw across the fish pond near the village. Goto Dengo watches it skip several more times, utterly fascinated. Once again, the fortunes of war have provided a bizarre spectacle, seemingly for no other reason than to entertain him. He savors it as if it were a cigarette discovered in the bottom of a pocket. Skip, skip, skip.

Right into the flank of one of the escorting destroyers. A gun turret flies straight up into the air, tumbling over and over. Just as it slows to its apogee, it is completely enveloped in a geyser of flame spurting out of the ship's engine room.

The Kulu boys are still chanting, refusing to accept the evidence of their own eyes. Something flashes in Goto Dengo's peripheral vision; he turns to watch another destroyer being snapped in half like a dry twig as its magazines detonate. Tiny black things are skip, skip, skipping all over the ocean now, like fleas across the rumpled bedsheets of a Shanghai whorehouse. The chant falters. Everyone watches silently.

The Americans have invented a totally new bombing tactic in the middle of a war and implemented it flawlessly. His mind staggers like a drunk in the aisle of a careening train. They saw that they were wrong, they admitted their mistake, they came up with a new idea. The new idea was accepted and embraced all the way up the chain of command. Now they are using it to kill their enemies.

No warrior with any concept of honor would have been so craven. So flexible.What a loss of face it must have been for the officers who had trained their men to bomb from high altitudes. What has become of those men? They must have all killed themselves, or perhaps been thrown into prison.

The American Marines in Shanghai weren't proper warriors either. Constantly changing their ways. Like Shaftoe. Shaftoe tried to fight Nipponese soldiers in the street and failed. Having failed, he decided to learn new tactics-from Goto Dengo. "The Americans are not warriors," everyone kept saying. "Businessmen perhaps. Not warriors."

Belowdecks, the soldiers are cheering and chanting. They have not the faintest idea what is really going on. For just a moment, Goto Dengo tears his eyes away from the sea full of exploding and sinking destroyers. He gets a bearing on a locker full of life preservers.

The airplanes all seem to be gone now. He scans the convoy and finds no destroyers in working order.

"Put on the life jackets!" he shouts. None of the men seem to hear him and so he makes for the locker. "Hey! Put on the life jackets!" He pulls one out and holds it up, in case they can't hear him.

They can hear him just fine. They look at him as if what he's doing is more shocking than anything they've witnessed in the last five minutes. What possible use are life jackets?

"Just in case!" he shouts. "So we can fight for the emperor another day." He says this last part weakly.

One of the men, a boy who lived a few doors away from him when they were children, walks up to him, tears the life jacket out of his hands, and throws it into the ocean. He looks Goto up and down, contemptuously, then turns around and walks away.

Another man shouts and points: the second wave of planes is coming in. Goto Dengo goes to the rail to stand among his comrades, but they sidle away. The American planes charge in unopposed and veer away, leaving behind nothing but more skipping bombs.

Goto Dengo watches a bomb come directly toward him for a few bounces, until he can make out the message painted on its nose: BEND OVER, TOJO!

"This way!" he shouts. He turns his back to the bomb and walks back across the deck to the locker full of life preservers. This time a few of the men follow him. The ones who don't-perhaps five percent of the population of the village of Kulu-are catapulted into the ocean when the bomb explodes beneath their feet. The wooden deck buckles up wards. One of the Kulu boys falls with a four-foot-long splinter driven straight up through his viscera. Goto Dengo and perhaps a dozen others make it to the locker on hands and knees and grab life preservers.

He would not be doing this if he had not already lost the war in his soul. A warrior would stand his ground and die. His men are only following him because he has told them to do it.

Two more bombs burst while they are getting the life preservers on and struggling to the rail. Most of the men below must be dead now. Goto Dengo nearly doesn't make it to the railing because it is rising sharply into the air; he ends up doing a chin-up on it and throwing one leg over the side, which is now nearly horizontal. The ship is rolling over! Four others get a grip on the rail, the rest slide helplessly down the deck and vanish into a pit of smoke. Goto Dengo ignores what his eyes are telling him and tries to listen to his inner ear. He is standing up on the side of the ship now, and looking toward the stern he can see one of the propellers spinning uselessly in the air. He begins running uphill. The four others follow him. An American fighter plane comes over. He doesn't even realize they are being strafed until he turns around and sees that the bullets have essentially cut one man in half and crippled another by exploding his knee, so that the lower leg and foot dangle by a few shreds of gristle. Goto Dengo throws the man over his shoulders like a sack of rice and turns to resume the uphill race, but finds that there is no more uphill to race towards.

He and the other two are standing on the summit of the ship now, a steel bulge that rises for no more than a man's height out of the water. He turns around once, then twice, looking for a place to run and sees nothing but water all around. The water bloops and fizzes angrily as air and smoke jet from the interior of the wrecked hull. Sea rushes in towards them. Goto Dengo looks down at the steel bubble supporting his feet and realizes that he is still, just for a moment, perfectly dry. Then the Bismarck Sea converges on his feet from all directions at once and begins to climb up his legs. A moment later the steel plate, which has been pressing so solidly against the soles of his boots, drops away. The weight of the wounded man on his shoulders shoves him straight down into the ocean. He gulps fuel oil into his sinuses, struggles out from beneath the wounded man, and comes to the surface screaming. His nose, and the cavities of his skull, are filled with oil. He swallows some of it and goes into convulsions as his body tries to eject it from every orifice at once: sneezing, vomiting, hawking it up out of his lungs. Reaching up to his face with one hand he feels the oil coating his skin thickly and knows that he dare not open his eyes. He tries to wipe the oil from his face with his sleeve, but the fabric is saturated with it.

He has to get down in the water and wipe himself clean so that he can see again, but the oil in his clothing makes him float. His lungs are finally clear now and he begins to gasp in air. It smells of oil but at least it's breathable. But the volatile chemicals in the oil have gotten into his blood now and he feels them spread through his body like fire. It feels as though a hot spatula is being shoved between his scalp and his skull. The other men are howling and he realizes that he is too. Some of the Chinese workers in Shanghai used to breathe gasoline to get high, and this was the noise that they made.

One of the men near him screams. He hears a noise approaching, like a sheet being torn in half to make bandages. Radiant heat strikes him in the face like a hot frying pan, just before Goto Dengo dives and kicks downwards. The motion exposes a band of flesh around his calf, between his boot and his trouser leg, and in the moment that it's poking straight up out of the water, it gets seared to a crisp.

He swims blind through an ocean of fuel oil. Then there is a change in the temperature and the viscosity of the fluid streaming over his face. Suddenly the life preserver begins to tug him upwards; he must be in water now. He swims for a few more kicks and begins to wipe at his eyes. The pressure on his ears tells him he's not that deep, maybe a couple of meters beneath the surface. Finally he risks opening his eyes. Ghostly, flickering light is illuminating his hands, making them glow a bright green; the sun must have come out. He rolls over on his back and looks straight up. Above him is a lake of rolling fire.

He rips the life preserver off over his head and lets it go. It shoots straight up and bursts out of the surface, burning like a comet. His oil-soaked clothing is tugging him relentlessly upwards, so he rips his shirt off and lets it tumble up towards the surface. His boots pull down, his oily pants push up, and he reaches some sort of equilibrium.

He grew up in the mines.

Kulu is near the north coast of Hokkaido, on the shore of a freshwater lake where rivers converge from the inland hills and commingle their waters before draining to the Sea of Okhotsk. The hills rise sharply from one end of that lake, looming over a cold silver creek that rushes down out of forest inhabited only by apes and demons. There are small islands in that part of the lake. If you dig down into the islands, or the hills, you will find veins of copper ore, and sometimes you will find zinc and lead and even silver. That is what the men of Kulu have done for many generations. Their monument is a maze of tunnels that snake through the hills, not following straight lines but tracking the richest veins.

Sometimes the tunnels dip below the level of the lake. When the mines were working these tunnels were pumped out, but now that they are exhausted, the water has been allowed to seek its level and has formed sumps. There are cavities and tunnels back in the hills that can only be reached by boys who are brave enough to dive into the cold black water and swim through the darkness for ten, twenty, thirty meters.

Goto Dengo went to all of those places when he was a boy. He even discovered some of them. Big, fat and buoyant, he was a pretty good swimmer. He was not the best swimmer, or the best at holding his breath. He was not even the bravest (the bravest did not put on life preservers, and went to their deaths like warriors).

He went where the others wouldn't because he, alone among all the boys of Kulu, was not afraid of the demons. When he was a boy, his father, a mining engineer, would take him hiking up into the places in the mountains where demons were said to live. They would sleep out under the stars and wake up to find their blankets covered with frost, and sometimes their food stolen by bears. But no demons.

The other boys believed that demons lived in some of those underwater tunnels, and that this explained why some of the boys who swam back there never returned. But Goto Dengo did not fear the demons and so he went back there fearing only the cold and the dark and the water. Which was plenty to fear.

Now he need only pretend that the fire is a stone ceiling. He swims some more. But he did not breathe properly before diving, and he is close to panic now. He looks up again and sees that the water is burning only in patches.

He is quite deep, he realizes, and he can't swim well in trousers and boots. He fumbles at his bootlaces, but they are tied in double knots. He pulls a knife from his belt and slashes through the laces, kicks the boots off, sheds his pants and drawers too. Naked, he forces himself to be calm for ten more seconds, brings his knees to his chest and hugs them. His body's natural buoyancy takes over. He knows that he must be rising slowly toward the surface now, like a bubble. The light is growing brighter. He need only wait. He lets go of the knife, which is only slowing him down.

His back feels cold. He explodes out of the fetal position and thrusts his head up into the air, gasping for breath. A patch of burning oil is almost close enough for him to touch, and the oil is trickling across the top of the ocean as if it were a solid surface. Nearly invisible blue flames seep from it, then turn yellow and boil off curling black smoke. He backstrokes away from a reaching tendril.

A glowing silver apparition passes over him, so close he can feel the warmth of its exhaust and read the English warning labels on its belly. The tips of its wing guns are sparkling, flinging out red streaks.

They are strafing the survivors. Some try to dive, but the oil in their uniforms pops them right back to the surface, legs flailing uselessly in the air. Goto Dengo first makes sure he is nowhere near any burning oil, then treads water, spinning slowly in the water like a radar dish, looking for planes. A P-38 comes in low, gunning for him. He sucks in a breath and dives. It is nice and quiet under the water, and the bullets striking its surface sound like the ticking of a big sewing machine. He sees a few rounds plunging into the water around him, leaving trails of bubbles as the water cavitates in their wake, slowing virtually to a stop in just a meter or two, then turning downwards and sinking like bombs. He swims after one of them and plucks it out of the water. It is still hot from its passage. He would keep it as a souvenir, but his pockets are gone with his clothes and he needs his hands. He stares at the bullet for a moment, greenish-silver in the underwater light, fresh from some factory in America.

How did this bullet come from America to my hand?

We have lost. The war is over.

I must go home and tell everyone.

I must be like my father, a rational man, explaining the facts of the world to the people at home, who are crippled by superstitions.

He lets the bullet go again, watches it drop towards the bottom of the sea, where the ships, and all of the young men of Kulu, are bound.

Chapter 38 MUGS

Hey, it's an immature market.

The rationalizations have not actually begun yet-Randy's still sitting in the sultan's big conference room, and the meeting's just getting up to speed.

Naturally the early adopters are not going to be your regular joes.

Tom Howard has taken the floor to explain his work. Randy doesn't have much to do, so he's imagining tonight's conversation in the Bomb and Grapnel.

It's like the Wild West-a little unruly at first, then in a few years it settles down and you've got Fresno.

Most of the delegations have brought hired guns: engineers and security experts who'll get a bounty if they can find a flaw in Tom's system. One by one, these guys stand up to take their shots.

Ten years from now, widows and paperboys will be banking in cyberspace.

Magnificent isn't the word you would normally use to describe Tom Howard; he's burly and surly, completely lacking in social graces, and doesn't apologize for it. Most of the time he sits silently, wearing an expression of sphinxlike boredom, and so it's easy to forget how good he is.

But during this particular half hour of Tom Howard's life, it is of the essence that he be magnificent. He is going blade-to-blade with the Seven Samurai here: the nerdiest high-octane Ph.D.s and the scariest private-security clicks that Asia can produce. One-by-one they come after him and he cuts their heads off and stacks them on the table like cannon-balls. Several times he has to stop and think for sixty seconds before delivering the deathblow. Once he has to ask Eberhard F

Instead he listens, just in case Tom gets tripped up in the briar patch of plesiosynchronous protocol arcana, whence only Randy can drag him out. This gives him some more time to survey the faces of the other people in the room. But the meeting is a couple of hours old now, and they are all as familiar to him as siblings.

Tom wipes his sword on his pantleg and thwacks his big ass resoundingly into his leather chair. Minions scurry into the room bringing tea and coffee and sugar/fat pods. Dr. Pragasu stands up and introduces John Cantrell.

Sheesh! So far, the agenda is revolving entirely around Epiphyte Corp. What gives?

Dr. Pragasu, having developed a friendly relationship with these California hackers, is pimping them to his big money contacts. That's what gives.

This is very interesting from a business standpoint. But Randy finds it a bit irksome and threatening, this one-way flow of information. By the time they go home, this assemblage of shady gmokes is going to know everything about Epiphyte Corp., but Epiphyte will still be in the dark. No doubt that's exactly how they want it.

It occurs to Randy to look over at the Dentist. Dr. Hubert Kepler is sitting on the same side of the table as he is, and so it's hard to read his face. But it's clear he's not listening to John Cantrell. He's covering his mouth with one hand and staring into space. His Valkyries are furiously passing notes back and forth, like naughty cheerleaders.

Kepler's just as surprised as Randy. He doesn't seem like the kind of guy who delights in surprises.

What can Randy do right now to enhance shareholder value? Intrigue is not his specialty; he'll leave that to Avi. Instead, he tunes out the meeting, opens up his laptop, and begins to hack.

Hacking is an overly glorious word for this. Everyone in Epiphyte Corp. has a laptop with a tiny built-in video camera, so that they can do long-distance videoconferencing. Avi insisted on it. The camera is almost invisible: just an orifice a couple of millimeters across, mounted in the top center of the frame that surrounds the screen. It doesn't have a lens as such-it's a camera in the oldest sense, a camera obscura. One wall contains the pinhole and the opposite wall is a silicon retina.

Randy has the source code-the original program-for the videoconferencing software. It is reasonably clever in its use of bandwidth. It looks at the stream of frames (individual still images) coming from the pinhole camera and notices that, although the total amount of data in those frames is rather large, the difference from one frame to the next is tiny. It would be altogether different if Frame 1 were a talking head and Frame 2, a fraction of a second later, were a postcard shot of a Hawaiian beach and Frame 3 a diagram of a printed circuit and Frame 4 a closeup of a dragonfly's head. But in fact, each frame is a talking head-the same person's head, with minor changes in position and expression. The software can save on precious bandwidth by mathematically subtracting each new frame from the previous one (since, to the computer, each image is just a long number) and then transmitting only the difference.

What it all means is that this software has a lot of built-in capabilities for comparing one image with another, and gauging the magnitude of the difference from one frame to the next. Randy doesn't have to write that stuff. He just has to familiarize himself with these already-existing routines, learn their names and how to use them, which takes about fifteen minutes of clicking around.

Then he writes a little program called Mugshot that will take a snap shot from the pinhole camera every five seconds or so, and compare it to the previous snapshot, and, if the difference is large enough, save it to a file. An encrypted file with a meaningless, random name. Mugshot opens no windows and produces no output of its own, so the only way you can tell it's running is by typing the UNIX command

ps

and hitting the return key. Then the system will spew out a long list of running processes, and Mugshot will show up somewhere in that list.

Just in case someone thinks of this, Randy gives the program a fake name: VirusScanner. He starts it running, then checks its directory and verifies that it has just saved an image file: one mug shot of Randy. As long as he sits fairly still, it won't save any more mug shots; the pattern of light that represents Randy's face striking the far wall of the camera obscura won't change very much.

In the technology world, no meeting is complete without a demo. Cantrell and F

Avi's on his feet, coolly managing the crisis. 'Mhe says, speaking directly to the Chinese guys, "is a better translation."

The Chinese guys look relieved, and a couple of them actually crack smiles when they hear Avi speaking Mandarin. Avi holds up a sheet of paper bearing the Chinese characters[13]:

Painfully aware that he has just dodged a bullet, John Cantrell continues with a thick tongue. "We thought you might want to see the software in action. I'm going to demo it on the screen now, and during the lunch break you should feel free to come around and try it out yourselves."

Randy fires up the software. He's got his laptop plugged into a video jack on the underside of the table so that the sultan's lurking media geeks can project a duplicate of what Randy's seeing onto a large projection screen at the end of the room. It is running the front end to the cash demo, but his mug shot program is still running in the background. Randy slides the computer over to John, who runs through the demo (there should be a mug shot of John Cantrell stored on the hard disk now).

"I can write the best cryptographic code possible, but it's all worthless unless there is a good system for verifying the user's identity," John begins, regaining some poise now. "How does the computer know that you are you? Passwords are too easy to guess, steal, or forget. The computer needs to know something about you that is as unique to you as your fingerprint. Basically it has to look at some part of your body, such as the blood vessels in your retina or the distinctive sound of your voice, and compare it against known values stored in its memory. This kind of technology is called biometrics. Epiphyte Corp. boasts one of the top biometrics experts in the world: Dr. Eberhard F

John runs the demo, and unlike most demos, it actually works and does not crash. He even tries to fake it out by recording his own voice on a pretty good portable digital tape recorder and then playing it back. But the software is not fooled. This actually makes an impression on the Chinese guys, who, up to the point, have looked like the contents of Madame Tussaud's Dumpster after an exhibit on the Cultural Revolution.

Not everyone is such a tough sell. Harvard Li is a committed Cantrell supporter, and the Filipino heavyweight looks like he can hardly wait to deposit his cash reserves in the Crypt.

Lunchtime! Doors are hauled open to reveal a dining room with a buffet along the far wall, redolent of curry, garlic, cayenne, and bergamot. The Dentist makes a point of sitting at the same table with Epiphyte Corp., but doesn't say very much-just sits there with a dreadfully choleric expression on his face, staring and chewing and thinking. When Avi finally asks him what he thinks, Kepler says, levelly: "It's been informative."

The Three Graces cringe epileptically. Informative is evidently an extremely bad word in the Dentist's lexicon. It means that Kepler has learned something at this meeting, which means that he did not know absolutely everything going into it, which would certainly rate as an unforgivable intelligence failure on his scale of values.

There is an agonizing silence. Then Kepler says, "But not devoid of interest."

Deep sighs of relief ventilate the blindingly white, plaque-free dentition of the Hygienists. Randy tries to imagine which is worse: that Kepler suspects that the wool was pulled over his eyes, or that he sees a new opportunity here. Which is more terrible, the paranoia or the avarice of the Dentist? They are about to find out. Randy, with his sappy, romantic instinct for ingratiation, almost says something like, "It's been informative for us, too!"but he holds back, noticing that Avi has notsaid it. Saying it would not enhance shareholder value. Best to play one's cards close to the vest, let Kepler wonder whether Epiphyte Corp. knew the real agenda.

Randy has chosen his seat tactically, so that he can look straight through the door into the conference room and keep an eye on his laptop. One by one, members of the other delegations excuse themselves, go into the room, and run the demo, imprinting their own voices into the computer's memory and then letting it recognize them. Some of the nerds even type commands on Randy's keyboard; probably that ps command, snooping. Despite the fact that Randy's got it set up so it can't be meddled with too much, it bothers him at a deep level to see the fingertips of these strangers prodding away at hiskeyboard.

It gnaws at him all through the afternoon session, which is all about the communications links joining Kinakuta to the wide world. Randy ought to be paying attention to this, since it impinges massively on the Philippines project. But he doesn't. He broods over his keyboard, contaminated by a foreign touch, and then he broods about the fact that he's brooding about it, which demonstrates his unfitness for Biz. It's technically Epiphyte's keyboard-not even his-and if it enhances shareholder value for sinister Eastern nerds to poke around his files, he should be happy to let them do it.

They adjourn. Epiphyte and the Nipponese dine together, but Randy's bored and distracted.