Cryptonomicon

From time to time the village elders pound on a hollow log for a while, then stand around listening to other hollow logs being pounded in other villages. One day there is an especially long episode of pounding, and it would seem that the villagers are pleased by what they have heard. The next day, they have visitors: four men and a child who speak a completely different language; their word for gold is gabitisa.The child whom they have brought with them is about six years old, and obviously retarded. There is a negotiation. Some of the gold that Goto Dengo has panned out of the stream is exchanged for the retarded child. The four visitors disappear into the jungle with their gabitisa.Within a few hours, the retarded child has been tied to a tree and the twelve-year-old boy has stabbed it to death and become a man. After some parading around and dancing, the older men sit on top of the younger man and cut long complicated gashes into his skin and pack dirt into them so that they will heal as decorative welts.

Goto Dengo cannot do very much except gape in numb astonishment. Every time he begins to think beyond the next fifteen minutes, tries to formulate a plan of action, the malaria comes back, flattens him for a week or two, scrambles his brain and forces him to start again from scratch. Despite all of this he manages to extract a few hundred grams of gold dust from that stream. From time to time the village is visited by relatively light-skinned traders who move up and down the coast in outrigger canoes and who speak yet another different language. These traders begin to come more frequently, as the village elders start trading the gold dust for betel nuts, which they chew because it makes them feel good, and for the occasional bottle of rum.

One day, Goto Dengo is on his way back from the river, carrying a teaspoon of gold dust in the wok, when he hears voices from the village--voices speaking in a cadence that used to be familiar.

All of the men of the village, some twenty in all, are standing up with their backs to coconut trees, their arms secured behind the trees with ropes. Several of these men are dead, with their intestines spilling down onto the ground, already black with flies. The ones who are not dead yet are being used for bayonet practice by a few dozen gaunt, raving Nipponese soldiers. The women ought to be standing around screaming, but he doesn't see them. They must be inside the huts.

A man in a lieutenant's uniform swaggers out of a hut, smiling broadly, wiping blood off of his penis with a rag, and almost trips over a dead child.

Goto Dengo drops the wok and puts his hands up in the air. "I am Nipponese!" he shouts, even though all he wants to say at this moment is I am not Nipponese.

The soldiers are startled, and several of them try to swing their rifles around in his direction. But the Nipponese rifle is an awful thing, nearly as long as the average soldier is tall, too heavy to maneuver even when its owner is in perfect health. Luckily all of these men are clearly starving to death and half-crippled by malaria and bloody flux, and their minds work quicker than their bodies. The lieutenant bellows, "Hold your fire!"before anyone can get off a shot in the direction of Goto Dengo.

There follows a long interrogation in one of the huts. The lieutenant has many questions, and asks most of them more than once. When he repeats a question for the fifth or thirteenth time, he adopts a grand magnanimity, as if giving Goto Dengo the opportunity to retract his earlier lies. Goto Dengo tries to ignore the screams of the bayoneted men and the raped women, and concentrate on giving the same answer each time without variation.

"You surrendered to these savages?"

"I was incapacitated and helpless. They found me in this condition."

"What efforts did you make to escape?"

"I have been building my strength and learning from them how to survive in the jungle--what foods I can eat.

"For six months?"

"Pardon me, sir?" He hasn't heard this question before.

"Your convoy was sunk six months ago."

"Impossible."

The lieutenant steps forward and slaps him across the face. Goto Dengo feels nothing but tries to cringe anyway, so as not to humiliate the man.

"Your convoy was coming to reinforce our division!" bellows the lieutenant. "You dare to question me?"

"I humbly apologize, sir!"

"Your failure to arrive forced us to make a retrograde maneuver! (18) We are marching overland to rendezvous with our forces at Wewak!"

"So, you are--the advance guard for the division?" Goto Dengo has seen perhaps two dozen men, a couple of squads at most.

"We are the division," the lieutenant says matter-of-factly. "So, again, you surrendered to these savages?"

***

When they march out the following morning, no one remains alive in the village; all of them have been used for bayonet practice or shot while trying to run away.