Stephenson, Neal - Cryptonomicon excerpt

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PROLOGUE
Two tires fly. Two wail.
A bamboo grove, all chopped down
From it, warring songs
....IS THE BEST THAT CORPORAL BOBBY SHAFTOE CAN DO ON short
notice--he's standing on the running board, gripping his Springfield with
one hand and the rearview mirror with the other, so counting the
syllables on his fingers is out of the question. Is ``tires'' one syllable or
two? How about ``wail?'' The truck finally makes up its mind not to tip
over, and thuds back onto four wheels. The wail--and the moment--are
lost. Bobby can still hear the coolies singing, though, and now too
there's the gunlike snicking of the truck's clutch linkage as Private Wiley
downshifts. Could Wiley be losing his nerve? And, in the back, under the
tarps, a ton and a half of file cabinets clanking, code books slaloming,
fuel spanking the tanks of Station Alpha's electrical generator. The
modern world's hell on haiku writers: ``Electrical generator'' is, what,
eight syllables? You couldn't even fit that onto the second line!
"Are we allowed to run over people?'' Private Wiley inquires, and then
mashes the horn button before Bobby Shaftoe can answer. A Sikh
policeman hurdles a night soil cart. Shaftoe's gut reaction is: Sure,
what're they going to do, declare war on us? but as the highest-ranking
man on this truck he's probably supposed to be using his head or
something, so he doesn't blurt it out just yet. He takes stock of the
situation:
Shanghai, 1645 hours, Friday, the 28th of November 1941. Bobby
Shaftoe, and the other half-dozen Marines on his truck, are staring down
the length of Kiukiang Road, onto which they've just made this
careening high-speed turn. Cathedral's going by to the right, so that
means they are, what? two blocks away from the Bund. A Yangtze River
Patrol gunboat is tied up there, waiting for the stuff they've got in the
back of this truck. The only real problem is that those particular two
blocks are inhabited by about five million Chinese people.
Now these Chinese are sophisticated urbanites, not suntanned yokels
who've never seen cars before--they'll get out of your way if you drive
fast and honk your horn. And indeed many of them flee to one side of
the street or the other, producing the illusion that the truck its moving
faster than the forty-three miles an hour shown on its speedometer.
But the bamboo grove in Bobby Shaftoe's haiku has not been added just
to put a little Oriental flavor into the poem and wow the folks back home
in Oconomowoc. There is a lot of heavy bamboo in front of this truck,
dozens of makeshift turnpikes blocking their path to the river, for the
officers of the U.S. Navy's Asiatic Fleet, and of the Fourth Marines, who
dreamed up this little operation forgot to take the Friday Afternoon
factor into account. As Bobby Shaftoe could've explained to them, if only
they'd bothered to ask a poor dumb jarhead, their route took them
through the heart of the banking district. Here you've got the Hong
Kong and Shanghai Bank of course, City Bank, Chase Manhattan, the
Bank of America, and BBME and the Agricultural Bank of China and any
number of crappy little provincial banks, and several of those banks
have contracts with what's left of the Chinese Government to print
currency. It must be a cutthroat business because they slash costs by
printing it on old newspapers, and if you know how to read Chinese, you
can see last year's news stories and polo scores peeking through the
colored numbers and pictures that transform these pieces of paper into
legal tender.
As every chicken-peddler and rickshaw operator in Shanghai knows, the
money-printing contracts stipulate that all of the bills these banks print
have to be backed by such-and-such an amount of silver; i.e., anyone
should be able to walk into one of those banks at the end of Kiukiang
Road and slap down a pile of bills and (provided that those bills were
printed by that same bank) receive actual metallic silver in exchange.
Now if China weren't right in the middle of getting systematically drawn
and quartered by the Empire of Nippon, it would probably send official
bean counters around to keep tabs on how much silver was actually
present in these banks' vaults, and it would all be quiet and orderly. But
as it stands, the only thing keeping these banks honest is the other
banks.
Here's how they do it: during the normal course of business, lots of
paper money will pass over the counters of (say) Chase Manhattan
Bank. They'll take it into a back room and sort it, throwing into money
boxes (a couple of feet square and a yard deep, with ropes on the four
corners) all of the bills that were printed by (say) Bank of America in
one, all of the City Bank bills into another. Then, on Friday afternoon
they will bring in coolies. Each coolie, or pair of coolies, will of course
have his great big long bamboo pole with him--a coolie without his pole
is like a China Marine without his nickel-plated bayonet--and will poke
their pole through the ropes on the corners of the box. Then one coolie
will get underneath each end of the pole, hoisting the box into the air.
They have to move in unison or else the box begins flailing around and
everything gets out of whack. So as they head towards their
destination--whatever bank whose name is printed on the bills in their
box--they sing to each other, and plant their feet on the pavement in
time to the music. The pole's pretty long, so they are that far apart, and
they have to sing loud to hear each other, and of course each pair of
coolies in the street is singing their own particular song, trying to drown
out all of the others so that they don't get out of step.
So ten minutes before closing time on Friday afternoon, the doors of
many banks burst open and numerous pairs of coolies march in singing,
like the curtain-raiser on a fucking Broadway musical, slam their huge
boxes of tattered currency down, and demand silver in exchange. All of
the banks do this to each other. Sometimes, they'll all do it on the same
Friday, particularly at times like 28 November 1941, when even a grunt
like Bobby Shaftoe can understand that it's better to be holding silver
than piles of old cut-up newspaper. And that is why, once the normal
pedestrians and food-cart operators and furious Sikh cops have scurried
out of the way, and plastered themselves up against the clubs and
shops and bordellos on Kiukiang Road, Bobby Shaftoe and the other
Marines on the truck still cannot even see the gunboat that is their
destination, because of this horizontal forest of mighty bamboo poles.
They cannot even hear the honking of their own truck horn because of
the wild throbbing pentatonic cacophony of coolies singing. This ain't
just your regular Friday P.M. Shanghai bank-district money-rush. This is
an ultimate settling of accounts before the whole Eastern Hemisphere
catches fire. The millions of promises printed on those slips of bumwad
will all be kept or broken in the next ten minutes; actual pieces of silver
and gold will move, or they won't. It is some kind of fiduciary Judgment
Day.
``Jesus Christ, I can't--'' Private Wiley hollers.
"The captain said don't stop for any reason whatsofuckinever,'' Shaftoe
reminds him. He's not telling Wiley to run over the coolies, he's
reminding Wiley that if he refrains from running over them, they will
have some explaining to do--which will be complicated by the fact that
the captain's right behind them in a car stuffed with Tommy Gun-toting
China Marines. And from the way the captain's been acting about this
Station Alpha thing, it's pretty clear that he already has a few
preliminary strap marks on his ass, courtesy of some admiral in Pearl
Harbor or even (drumroll) Marine Barracks, Eight and Eye Streets
Southeast, Washington, D.C.
Shaftoe and the other Marines have always known Station Alpha as a
mysterious claque of pencil-necked swabbies who hung out on the roof
of a building in the International Settlement in a shack of knot-pocked
cargo pallet planks with antennas sticking out of it every which way. If
you stood there long enough you could see some of those antennas
moving, zeroing in on something out to sea. Shaftoe even wrote a haiku
about it:
Antenna searches
Retriever's nose in the wind
Ether's far secrets
This was only his second haiku ever--clearly not up to November 1941
standards--and he cringes to remember it.
But in no way did any of the Marines comprehend what a big deal
Station Alpha was until today. Their job had turned out to involve
wrapping a ton of equipment and several tons of paper in tarps and
moving it out of doors. Then they spent Thursday tearing the shack
apart, making it into a bonfire, and burning certain books and papers.
``Sheeeyit!'' Private Wiley hollers. Only a few of the coolies have gotten
out of the way, or even seen them. But then there is this fantastic boom
from the river, like the sound of a mile-thick bamboo pole being
snapped over God's knee. Half a second later there're no coolies in the
street anymore--just a lot of boxes with unmanned bamboo poles
teeter-tottering on them, bonging into the streets like wind-chimes.
Above, a furry mushroom of grey smoke rises from the gunboat. Wiley
shifts up to high gear and floors it. Shaftoe cringes against the truck's
door and lowers his head, hoping that his campy Great War doughboy
helmet will be good for something. Then money-boxes start to rupture
and explode as the truck rams through them. Shaftoe peers up through
a blizzard of notes and sees giant bamboo poles soaring and bounding
and windmilling toward the waterfront.
The leaves of Shanghai:
Pale doorways in a steel sky.
Winter has begun.
BARRENS
Let's set the existence-of-god issue aside for a later volume, and just
stipulate that in some way, self-replicating organisms came into
existence on this planet and immediately began trying to get rid of each
other, either by spamming their environments with rough copies of
themselves, or by more direct means which hardly need to be
belabored. Most of them failed, and their genetic legacy was erased
from the universe forever, but a few found some way to survive and to
propagate. After about three billion years of this sometimes zany,
frequently tedious fugue of carnality and carnage, Godfrey Waterhouse
IV was born, in Murdo, South Dakota, to Blanche, the wife of a
Congregational preacher named Bunyan Waterhouse. Like every other
creature on the face of the earth, Godfrey was, by birthright, a
stupendous badass, albeit in the somewhat narrow technical sense that
he could trace his ancestry back up a long line of slightly less highly
evolved stupendous badasses to that first self-replicating gizmo--which,
given the number and variety of its descendants, might justifiably be
described as the most stupendous badass of all time. Everyone and
everything that wasn't a stupendous badass was dead.
As nightmarishly lethal, memetically programmed death-machines went,
these were the nicest you could ever hope to meet. In the tradition of
his namesake (the Puritan writer John Bunyan, who spent much of his
life in jail, or trying to avoid it) the Rev. Waterhouse did not preach in
any one place for long. The church moved him from one small town in
the Dakotas to another every year or two. It is possible that Godfrey
found the lifestyle more than a little alienating, for, sometime during the
course of his studies at Fargo Congregational College, he bolted from
the fold and, to the enduring agony of his parents, fell into worldy
pursuits, and ended up, somehow, getting a Ph.D. in Classics from a
small private university in Ohio. Academics being no less nomadic than
Congregational preachers, he took work where he could find it. He
became a Professor of Greek and Latin at Bolger Christian College
(enrollment 322) in West Point, Virginia, where the Mattaponi and
Pamunkey Rivers came together to form the estuarial James, and the
loathsome fumes of the big paper mill permeated every drawer, every
closet, even the interior pages of books. Godfrey's young bride, nee
Alice Pritchard, who had grown up following her itinerant-preacher
father across the vastnesses of eastern Montana--where air smelt of
snow and sage--threw up for three months. Six months later she gave
birth to Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse.
The boy had a peculiar relationship with sound. When a fire engine
passed, he was not troubled by the siren's howl or the bell's clang. But
when a hornet got into the house and swung across the ceiling in a
broad Lissajous, droning almost inaudibly, he cried in pain at the noise.
And if he saw or smelled something that scared him, he would clap his
hands over his ears.
One noise that troubled him not at all was the pipe organ in the chapel
at Bolger Christian College. The chapel itself was nothing worth
mentioning, but the organ had been endowed by the paper mill family
and would have sufficed for a church four times the size. It nicely
complemented the organist, a retired high school math teacher who felt
that certain attributes of the Lord (violence and capriciousness in the
Old Testament, majesty and triumph in the New) could be directly
conveyed into the souls of the enpewed sinners through a kind of frontal
sonic impregnation. That he ran the risk of blowing out the stained-glass
windows was of no consequence since no one liked them anyway, and
the paper mill fumes were gnawing at the interstitial lead. But after one
little old lady too many staggered down the aisle after a service, reeling
from tinnitus, and made a barbed comment to the minister about the
exceedingly dramatic music, the organist was replaced.
Nevertheless, he continued to give lessons on the instrument. Students
were not allowed to touch the organ until they were proficient at the
piano, and when this was explained to Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse,
he taught himself, in three weeks, how to play a Bach fugue, and signed
up for organ lessons. Since he was only five years old at the time, he
was unable to reach both the manuals and the pedals, and had to play
standing--or rather strolling, from pedal to pedal.
When Lawrence was twelve, the organ broke down. That paper mill
family had not left any endowment for maintenance, so the math
teacher decided to have a crack at it. He was in poor health and
required a nimble assistant: Lawrence, who helped him open up the
hood of the thing. For the first time in all those years, the boy saw what
had been happening when he had been pressing those keys.
For each stop--each timbre, or type of sound, that the organ could make
(viz. blockflote, trumpet, piccolo)--there was a separate row of pipes,
arranged in a line from long to short. Long pipes made low notes, short
high. The tops of the pipes defined a graph: not a straight line but an
upward-tending curve. The organist/math teacher sat down with a few
loose pipes, a pencil, and paper, and helped Lawrence figure out why.
When Lawrence understood, it was as if the math teacher had suddenly
played the good part of Bach's Fantasia and Fugue in G Minor on a pipe
organ the size of the Spiral Nebula in Andromeda--the part where Uncle
Johann dissects the architecture of the Universe in one merciless
descending ever-mutating chord, as if his foot is thrusting through
skidding layers of garbage until it finally strikes bedrock. In particular,
the final steps of the organist's explanation were like a falcon's dive
through layer after layer of pretense and illusion, thrilling or sickening or
confusing depending on what you were. The heavens were riven open.
Lawrence glimpsed choirs of angels ranking off into geometrical infinity.
The pipes sprouted in parallel ranks from a broad flat box of compressed
air. All of the pipes for a given note--but belonging to different
stops--lined up with each other along one axis. All of the pipes for a
given stop--but tuned at different pitches--lined up with each other
along the other, perpendicular axis. Down there in the flat box of air,
then, was a mechanism that got air to the right pipes at the right times.
When a key or pedal was depressed, all of the pipes capable of sounding
the corresponding note would speak, as long as their stops were pulled
out.
Mechanically, all of this was handled in a fashion that was perfectly
clear, simple, and logical. Lawrence had supposed that the machine
must be at least as complicated as the most intricate fugue that could
be played on it. Now he had learned that a machine, simple in its
design, could produce results of infinite complexity.
Stops were rarely used alone. They tended to be piled on top of each
other in combinations that were designed to take advantage of the
available harmonics (more tasty mathematics here!). Certain
combinations in particular were used over and over again. Lots of
blockflo[autes, in varying lengths, for the quiet Offertory, for example.
The organ included an ingenious mechanism called the preset, which
enabled the organist to select a particular combination of stops--stops
he himself had chosen--instantly. He would punch a button and several
stops would bolt out from the console, driven by pneumatic pressure,
and in that instant the organ would become a different instrument with
entirely new timbres.
The next summer both Lawrence and Alice, his mother, were colonized
by a distant cousin--a stupendous badass of a virus. Lawrence escaped
from it with an almost imperceptible tendency to drag one of his feet.
Alice wound up in an iron lung. Later, unable to cough effectively, she
got pneumonia and died.
Lawrence's father Godfrey freely confessed that he was not equal to the
burdens now laid on his shoulders. He resigned from his position at the
small college in Virginia and moved, with his son, to a small house in
Moorhead, Minnesota, next door to where Bunyan and Blanche had
settled. Later he got a job teaching at a nearby normal school.
At this point, all of the responsible adults in Lawrence's life seemed to
arrive at a tacit agreement that the best way to raise him--certainly the
easiest--was to leave him alone. On the rare occasions when Lawrence
requested adult intervention in his life, he was usually asking questions
that no one could answer. At the age of sixteen, having found nothing in
the local school system to challenge him, Lawrence Pritchard
Waterhouse went off to college. He matriculated at Iowa State College,
which among other things was the site of a Naval ROTC installation in
which he was forcibly enrolled.
The Iowa State Naval ROTC had a band, and was delighted to hear that
Lawrence had an interest in music. Since it was hard to drill on the deck
of a dreadnought while playing a pipe organ, they issued him a
glockenspiel and a couple of little dingers.
When not marching back and forth on the flood plain of the Skunk River
making loud dinging noises, Lawrence was majoring in mechanical
engineering. He ended up doing poorly in this area because he had
fallen in with a Bulgarian professor named John Vincent Atanasoff and
his graduate student, Clifford Berry, who were building a machine that
was intended to automate the solution of some especially tedious
differential equations.
The basic problem for Lawrence was that he was lazy. He had figured
out that everything was much simpler if, like Superman with his X-ray
vision, you just stared through the cosmetic distractions and saw the
underlying mathematical skeleton. Once you found the math in a thing,
you knew everything about it, and you could manipulate it to your
heart's content with nothing more than a pencil and a napkin. He saw it
in the curve of the silver bars on his glockenspiel, saw it in the catenary
arch of a bridge and in the capacitor-studded drum of Atanasoff and
Berry's computing machine. Actually pounding on the glockenspiel,
riveting the bridge together, or trying to figure out why the computing
machine wasn't working were not as interesting to him.
Consequently he got poor grades. From time to time, though, he would
perform some stunt on the blackboard that would leave his professor
weak in the knees and the other students baffled and hostile. Word got
around.
At the same time, his grandmother Blanche was invoking her extensive
Congregational connections, working the angles on Lawrence's behalf,
totally unbeknownst to him. Her efforts culminated in triumph when
Lawrence was awarded an obscure scholarship, endowed by a St. Paul
oat-processing heir, whose purpose was to send Midwestern
Congregationalists to the Ivy League for one year, which (evidently) was
deemed a long enough period of time to raise their IQs by a few crucial
points but not long enough to debauch them. So Lawrence got to be a
sophomore in Princeton.
Now Princeton was an august school and going there was a great honor,
but no one got around to mentioning either of these facts to Lawrence,
who had no way of knowing. This had bad and good consequences. He
accepted the scholarship with a faintness of gratitude that infuriated the
oat lord. On the other hand, he adjusted to Princeton easily because it
was just another place. It reminded him of the nicer bits of Virginia, and
there were some nice pipe organs in town, though he was not all that
happy with his engineering homework of bridge-designing and
sprocket-cutting problems. As always, these eventually came down to
math, most of which he could handle easily. From time to time he would
get stuck, though, which led him to the Fine Hall: the headquarters of
the Math Department.
There was a motley assortment of fellows wandering around in Fine Hall,
many sporting British or European accents. Administratively speaking,
many of these fellows were not members of the Math Department at all,
but a separate thing called IAS, which stood for Institute for Advanced
something-or-other. But they were all in the same building and they all
knew a thing or two about math, so the distinction didn't exist for
Lawrence.
Quite a few of these men would pretend shyness when Lawrence sought
their advice, but others were at least willing to hear him out. For
example: he had come up with a way to solve a difficult sprocket tooth
shape problem that, as normally solved by engineers, would require any
number of perfectly reasonable but aesthetically displeasing
approximations. Lawrence's solution would provide exact results. The
only drawback was that it would require a quintillion slide-rule operators
a quintillion years to solve. Lawrence was working on a radically
different approach that, if it worked, would bring those figures down to a
trillion and a trillion respectively. Unfortunately, Lawrence was unable to
interest anyone at Fine Hall in anything as prosaic as gears, until all of a
sudden he made friends with an energetic British fellow, whose name he
promptly forgot, but who had been doing a lot of literal sprocket-making
himself lately. This fellow was trying to build, of all things, a mechanical
calculating machine--specifically a machine to calculate certain values of
the Riemann Zeta Function.
where s is a complex number.
Lawrence found this zeta function to be no more and no less interesting
than any other math problem until his new friend assured him that it
was frightfully important, and that some of the best mathematicians in
the world had been gnawing on it for decades. The two of them ended
up staying awake until three in the morning working out the solution to
Lawrence's sprocket problem. Lawrence presented the results proudly to
his engineering professor, who snidely rejected it, on grounds of
practicality, and gave him a poor grade for his troubles.
Lawrence finally remembered, after several more contacts, that the
name of the friendly Brit was Al something-or-other. Because Al was a
passionate cyclist, he and Al went on quite a few bicycle rides through
the countryside of the Garden State. As they rode around New Jersey,
they talked about math, and particularly about machines for taking the
dull part of math off their hands.
But Al had been thinking about this subject for longer than Lawrence,
and had figured out that computing machines were much more than just
labor-saving devices. He'd been working on a radically different sort of
computing mechanism that would work out any arithmetic problem
whatsoever, as long as you knew how to write the problem down. From
a pure logic standpoint, he had already figured out everything there was
to know about this (as yet hypothetical) machine, though he had yet to
build one. Lawrence gathered that actually building machinery was
looked on as undignified at Cambridge (England, that is, where this Al
character was based) or for that matter at Fine Hall. Al was thrilled to
have found, in Lawrence, someone who did not share this view.
Al delicately asked him, one day, if Lawrence would terribly mind calling
him by his full and proper name, which was Alan and not Al. Lawrence
apologized and said he would try very hard to keep it in mind.
One day a couple of weeks later, as the two of them sat by a running
stream in the woods above the Delaware Water Gap, Alan made some
kind of an outlandish proposal to Lawrence involving penises. It required
a great deal of methodical explanation, which Alan delivered with lots of
blushing and stuttering. He was ever so polite, and several times
emphasized that he was acutely aware that not everyone in the world
was interested in this sort of thing.
Lawrence decided that he was probably one of those people.
Alan seemed vastly impressed that Lawrence had paused to think about
it at all and apologized for putting him out. They went directly back to a
discussion of computing machines, and their friendship continued
unchanged. But on their next bicycle ride--an overnight camping trip to
the Pine Barrens--they were joined by a new fellow, a German named
Rudy von something-or-other.
Alan and Rudy's relationship seemed closer, or at least more
multilayered, than Alan and Lawrence's. Lawrence concluded that Alan's
penis scheme must have finally found a taker.
It got Lawrence to thinking. From an evolution standpoint, what was the
point of having people around who were not inclined to have offspring?
There must be some good, and fairly subtle, reason for it.
The only thing he could work out was that it was groups of
people--societies--rather than individual creatures, who were now trying
to out-reproduce and/or kill each other, and that, in a society, there was
plenty of room for someone who didn't have kids as long as he was up
to something useful.
Alan and Rudy and Lawrence rode south, anyway, looking for the Pine
Barrens. After a while the towns became very far apart, and the horse
farms gave way to a low stubble of feeble, spiny trees that appeared to
extend all the way to Florida--blocking their view, but not the headwind.
``Where are the Pine Barrens I wonder?'' Lawrence asked a couple of
times. He even stopped at a gas station to ask someone that question.
His companions began to make fun of him.
``Vere are ze Pine Barrens?'' Rudy inquired, looking about quizzically.
``I should look for something rather barren-looking, with numerous
pine trees,'' Alan mused.
There was no other traffic and so they had spread out across the road to
pedal three abreast, with Alan in the middle.
``A forest, as Kafka would imagine it,'' Rudy muttered.
By this point Lawrence had figured out that they were, in fact, in the
Pine Barrens. But he didn't know who Kafka was. ``A mathematician?''
he guessed.
``Zat is a scary sing to sink of,'' Rudy said.
``He is a writer,'' Alan said. ``Lawrence, please don't be offended that I
ask you this, but: do you recognize any other people's names at all?
Other than family and close friends, I mean.''
Lawrence must have looked baffled. ``I'm trying to figure out whether it
all comes from in here,'' Alan said, reaching out to rap his knuckles on
the side of Lawrence's head, ``or do you sometimes take in new ideas
from other human beings?''
``When I was a little boy, I saw angels in a church in Virginia,''
Lawrence said, ``but I think that they came from inside my head.''
``Very well,'' Alan said.
But later Alan had another go at it. They had reached the fire lookout
tower and it had been a thunderous disappointment: just an alienated
staircase leading nowhere, and a small cleared area below that was
glittery with shards of liquor bottles. They pitched their tent by the side
of a pond that turned out to be full of rust-colored algae that stuck to
the hairs on their bodies. Then there was nothing left to do but drink
schnapps and talk about math.
Alan said, ``Look, it's like this: Bertrand Russell and another chap
named Whitehead wrote Principia Mathematica...''
``Now I know you're pulling my leg,'' Waterhouse said. ``Even I know
that Sir Isaac Newton wrote that.''
``Newton wrote a different book, also called Principia Mathematica,
which isn't really about mathematics at all; it's about what we would
today call physics.''
``Then why did he call it Principia Mathematica?''
``Because the distinction between mathematics and physics wasn't
especially clear in Newton's day--''
``Or maybe even in zis day,'' Rudy said.
``--which is directly relevant to what I'm talking about,'' Alan
continued. ``I am talking about Russell's P.M., in which he and
Whitehead started absolutely from scratch, I mean from nothing, and
built it all up--all mathematics--from a small number of first principles.
And why I am telling you this, Lawrence, is that--Lawrence! Pay
attention!''
``Hmmm?''
``Rudy--take this stick, here--that's right--and keep a close eye on
Lawrence, and when he gets that foggy look on his face, poke him with
it!''
``Zis is not an English school, you can't do zese kind of sing.''
``I'm listening,'' Lawrence said.
``What came out of P.M., which was terrifically radical, was the ability
to say that all of math, really, can be expressed as a certain ordering of
symbols.''
摘要：

PROLOGUETwotiresfly.Twowail.Abamboogrove,allchoppeddownFromit,warringsongs....ISTHEBESTTHATCORPORALBOBBYSHAFTOECANDOONshortnotice--he'sstandingontherunningboard,grippinghisSpringfieldwithonehandandtherearviewmirrorwiththeother,socountingthesyllablesonhisfingersisoutofthequestion.Is``tires''onesyllab...

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