Neal Stephenson - Cryptonomicon

Goto Dengo shakes his head. “I have only been in your Church for a few weeks and already I have many doubts about it. It has been a good thing for me. But to give it so much gold—I am not sure if this is a good idea.”

“Don't look at me as if you expect me to defend the Church's imperfections,” says Enoch Root. “They have kicked me out of the priesthood.”

“Then what shall I do?”

“Perhaps give it to the Church with conditions.”

“What?”

“You can stipulate that it only be used to educate children, if you choose.”

Goto Dengo says, “Educated men created this cemetery.”

“Then choose some other condition.”

“My condition is that if that gold ever comes out of the ground, it should be used so that we do not have any more wars like this one.”

“And how should we accomplish such a thing, Goto Dengo?”

Goto Dengo sighs. “You put a big weight on my shoulders!”

“No. I did not put the weight on your shoulders. It has always been there.” Enoch Root stares mercilessly into Goto Dengo's tormented face. “Jesus takes away the sins of the world, but the world remains: a physical reality on which we are doomed to live until death takes us away from it. You have confessed, and you have been forgiven, and so the greater part of your burden has been taken away by grace. But the gold is still there, in a hole in the ground. Did you think that the gold all turned into dirt when you swallowed the bread and the wine? That is not what we mean by transubstantiation.” Enoch Root turns his back and walks away, leaving Goto Dengo alone in the bright avenues of the city of the dead.

“I SHALL RETURN” wrote Randy in his first e-mail message to Amy after he got to Tokyo. Returning to the Philippines is not a very good idea at all, and probably not the kind of thing that the old mellow Randy would have even considered. But here he is on a beach in the Sultanate of Kinakuta, down below Tom Howard's personal citadel, dipped in sunblock and Dramamined to the gills, getting ready to return. Reckoning that the goatee would make him easy to identify, he has shaved it off, and reckoning that hair is useless where he's headed (the jungle, jail, and Davy Jones's Locker being the three most likely possibilities), has run a buzzer over his head and shorn himself down to about an eighth of an inch all around. This in turn has necessitated finding a hat, to prevent radiation burns of the skull, and the only hat in Tom Howard's house that fits Randy is an outback number that some cephalomegalic Aussie contractor left behind there, evidently because its fragrance had begun to attract nocturnal rodents with a proclivity for aimless gnawing.

A pamboat is drawn up on the beach, and a couple of families' worth of badjao kids are tear-assing around, exactly like kids at a rest area on the interstate who know that in ten minutes they have to get back into the Winnebago. The boat's main hull is carved from a single rainforest tree, fifty feet long if it's an inch, narrow enough at its widest point that Randy could sit in the middle and touch both gunwales with out stretched hands. Most of the hull's shaded under a thatched roof of palm fronds, almost all grey-brown from age and salt-spray, though in one place an older woman is patching it with fresh greens and plastic twine. On each side a narrow bamboo outrigger is connected to the hull by bamboo poles. There's a sort of bridge that sticks way out over the bow, painted with bright red and green and yellow curlicues, like chains of vortices thrown off in the wake of a boat and reflecting the colors of a tropical sunset.

Speaking of which, the sun's going down right now, and they are making preparations to bring the final load, of gold up out of the hull of the pamboat. The land drops so precipitously towards the water that there's no road access to the beach, which is probably a good thing since they want this to be as private as possible. But Tom Howard had a lot of heavy stuff shipped in here when he was constructing his house, and so he already has a short section of narrow-gauge railway in place. This sounds more impressive than it is: a pair of steel I-beams, already rusting, bracketed to half-buried concrete ties, running fifty yards straight up a forty-five-degree slope to a small plateau that's accessible via private road. There he's got a diesel-powered winch that he can use to drag stuff up the rails. It is more than adequate for this evening's job, which is to move a couple of hundred kilograms of bullion—the last of the gold from the sunken submarine—up from the beach and into the vault in his house. Tomorrow, he and the others can truck it into downtown Kinakuta at their leisure, and turn it into strings of bits representing very large numbers with noteworthy cryptological properties.

The badjaos share the same maddening refusal to be exotic that Randy has found everywhere on his travels: the guy who's running the show insists that his name is Leon, and the kids on the beach are forever copping stereotyped martial-arts poses and hollering “hi-yaaa!” which Randy knows is a Power Rangers thing, because Avi's kids did exactly the same thing until their father banned all Power Ranger emulation inside the house. When the first milk crate full of gold bars is dropped off the high bridge of the pamboat by Leon, and half-buries itself in the floury damp sand below, Avi stands over it and tries to utter some kind of solemn prayer for the dead in Hebrew, and gets maybe half a dozen phonemes into it before two of the badjao kids, having pegged him as a permanent stationary object, decide to use him as tactical cover, and take up positions on either side of him madly hi-yaaaing each other. Avi's not so full of himself that he can't see the humor in this, and yet not so sentimental that he doesn't obviously want to strangle them.

John Wayne is patrolling the surf with a cigarette and a pump shotgun. Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe rates the probability of frogman attack rather low because the gold in the pamboat is only worth two and half million dollars, an amount that hardly rates anything as elaborate, and expensive, as a seaborne assault. John Wayne needs to be there in case someone gets the mistaken impression that they've somehow managed to pack ten or twenty times that much gold into the pamboat. This seems improbable from a hydrodynamics standpoint. But Doug says that overestimating the intelligence of the enemy is, if anything, more dangerous than underestimating it. He, Tom Howard, and Jackie Woo are up the hill guarding the roadhead with assault rifles. Tom's been positively strutting. All of his fantasies are coming true in this little tableau.

A large plastic box thuds into the sand, breaks open, and spills out a mess of shattered coral. Randy strolls over to it and sees leaves of gold inside the coral carapace, tiny holes punched into them. To him the holes are more interesting than the gold.

But everyone's reacting differently. Doug Shaftoe's always conspicuously cool and sort of pensive in the presence of a very large amount of gold, like he's always known that it was there, but touching it makes him think about where it came from and what was done to get it there. The sight of a single brick almost made Goto Dengo vomit up his Kobe beef. For Eberhard Föhr, who is out in the cove doing a lazy backstroke, it is the physical incarnation of monetary value, which for him, and the rest of Epiphyte, has mostly been a mathematical abstraction—a practical application of one particular sub-sub-sub-branch of number theory. So it has the same kind of purely intellectual attraction to him as a moon rock or a dinosaur tooth. Tom Howard sees it in the embodiment of some political principles that are almost as pure, and as divorced from human reality, as number theory. Mixed in with that is some sense of personal vindication. For Leon the Sea Gypsy, it's just a cargo to be hauled from point A to point B, for which he'll be compensated with something more useful. For Avi it's an inextricable mixture of the sacred and the satanic. For Randy—and if anyone knew about this, he would be dreadfully embarrassed, and would freely admit to its cloyingness—it is the closest thing he's got right now to a physical link with his beloved, in that she was pulling these bars out of the wreck of the submarine just a few days ago. And that is really the only sense in which he gives a damn about it, anymore. In fact, in the few days since he decided to hire Leon to smuggle him up the Sulu Sea and into southern Luzon, he has had to remind himself over and over again that the nominal purpose of the trip is to open up Golgotha.