Cryptonomicon

Thank you for your oddly defensive note. Very pleased you have a good reason. Never thought otherwise. Of course you should not feel obligated to share it with me.

My having friends in the world of electronic intelligence-gathering is not the big coincidence you make it out to be.

How did you come to be a founder of the Crypt? By being good at science and math.

How did you come to be good at science and math? By standing on the shoulders of the ones who came before you.

Who were those people?

We used to call them natural philosophers.

Likewise, my friends in the surveillance business owe their skills to the practical application of philosophy. They have the wit to understand this, and to give credit where credit is due.

P.S. You forgot to use the "dwarf@siblings.net" front address. I assume this was deliberate?

P.P.S. You say you want an example of a novel cryptosystem that I am working on. This sounds like a test. You and I both know, Randy, that the history of crypto is strewn with the wreckage of cryptosystems invented by arrogant dilettantes and soon demolished by clever codebreakers. You probably suspect that I don't know this--that I'm just another arrogant dilettante. Quite cleverly, you ask me to stick my neck out, so that you and Cantrell and his like-minded friends can cut it off. You are testing me--trying to find my level

Very well. I'll send you another message in a few days. I'd love to have the Secret Admirers take a crack at my scheme anyway.

In a narrow-hulled double-outrigger boat in the South China Sea, America Shaftoe stands astride a thwart, her body pointing straight up at the sun, despite the rollers, as if she is gyroscopically stabilized. She is wearing a sleeveless diving vest that reveals strong, deeply tanned shoulders, the walnut-brown skin etched with a couple of black tattoos and brilliantly jeweled with beads of water. The handle of a big knife projects from a shoulder holster. The blade is that of a regular diving knife but the handle is that of a kris, an ornate traditional weapon of Palawan. A tourist can buy a kris at the duty-free shop at NAIA, but this one appears to be less flashy but better made than the tourist-shop jobs, and worn from use. She has a gold chain around her neck with a gnarled black pearl dangling from it. She has just emerged from the water holding a tiny jeweler's screwdriver between her teeth. Her mouth is open to breathe, displaying crooked, bright white teeth with no fillings. For this brief moment she is in her element, completely absorbed in what she is doing, totally unself-conscious. At this moment Randy thinks he understands her: why she spends most of her time living here, why she didn't bother with going to college, why she left behind her mother's family, who raised her, lovingly, in Chicago, to be in business with her father, the wayward veteran who walked out of the household when America was nine years old.

Then she turns to scan the approaching launch, and sees Randy on it staring at her. She rolls her eyes, and the mask falls down over her face again. She says something to the Filipino men who are squatting in the boat around her and two of them go into action, scampering down the outrigger poles, like balance-beam artists, to stand on the outrigger pontoon. They hold their arms out as shock absorbers to ease the contact between the launch--which Doug Shaftoe has cheerfully christened Mekong Memory–-and the much longer, much narrower pamboat.

One of the other Filipinos plants his bare foot against the top of a small Honda portable generator and pulls on the ripcord, the tendons and wiry muscles popping out of his arm and back for a moment like so many ripcords themselves. The generator starts instantly, with a nearly inaudible purr. It is good stuff, part of the capital improvements that Semper Marine made as part of its contract with Epiphyte and Filitel. Now they are using it, effectively, to defraud the Dentist.

"She lies one hundred and fifty-four meters below that buoy," says Doug Shaftoe, pointing to a gallon plastic milk jug bobbing on the swells. "She was lucky, in a way."

"Lucky?"

Randy clambers off the launch and rests his weight on the outrigger, shoving it down so that the warm water comes up to his knees. Holding out his arms like a tightrope walker, he makes his way down an arm toward the canoe hull in the center.

"Lucky for us," Shaftoe corrects himself. "We're on the flank of a seamount. The Palawan Trough is nearby." He's following Randy, but without all of the teetering and arm-waving. "If she had sunk in that, she'd have gone down so deep that she'd be hard to reach, and the pressure down there would've crushed her. But at two hundred meters, there wouldn't've been such an implosion." Reaching the boat's hull, he makes dramatic crushing motions with his hands.

"Do we care?" Randy asks. "Gold and silver don't implode."

"If her hull is intact, getting the goods out is a hell of a lot easier," says Doug Shaftoe.