Cryptonomicon

John knocks on wood. "Doesn't matter. Have one of your staff look into the subject of Van Eck phreaking. That's with a 'p-h,' not an 'f,' " he says to the aide who's writing it down. Then, sensing Li's need for an executive summary, he says, "They can read the internal state of your computer by listening to the faint radio emissions coming out of the chips."

"Ahhhhh," Li says, and exchanges hugely significant looks with his technical aides, as if this explains something that has been puzzling the shit out of them.

Someone begins hollering wildly at the far end of the room--not the end by which the guests entered, but the other one. It is a chap in a getup similar to, but not quite as ornate as, the grand wazir's. At some point he switches to English--the same dialect of English spoken by flight attendants for foreign airlines, who have told passengers to insert the metal tongue into the buckle so many times that it rushes out in one phlegmy garble. Small Kinakutan men in good suits begin filing into the room. They take seats across the head end of the table, which is wide enough for a Last Supper tableau. In the Jesus position is a really big chair. It is the kind of thing you'd get if you went to a Finnish designer with a shaved head, rimless glasses, and twin Ph.D.s in semiotics and civil engineering, wrote him a blank check, and asked him to design a throne. Behind is a separate table for minions. All of it is backed up by tons of priceless artwork: an eroded frieze, amputated from a jungle ruin somewhere.

All the guests gravitate instinctively towards their positions around the table, and remain standing. The grand wazir glares at each one in turn. A small man slips into the room, staring vacantly at the floor in front of him, seemingly unaware that other people are present. His hair is lacquered down to his skull, his appearance of portliness minimized by Savile Row legerdemain. He eases into the big chair, which seems like a shocking violation of etiquette until Randy realizes that this is the sultan.

Suddenly everyone is sitting down. Randy pulls his chair back and falls into it. The leathery depths swallow his ass like a catcher's mitt accepting a baseball. He's about to pull his laptop out of its bag, but in this setting, both the nylon bag and the plastic computer have a strip-mall tawdriness. Besides, he has to resist this sophomoric tendency to take notes all the time. Avi himself said that nothing was going to happen at this meeting; all the important stuff is going to be subtextual. Besides, there is the matter of Van Eck phreaking, which Cantrell probably mentioned just to make Harvard Li paranoid, but which has Randy a bit rattled too. He opts for a pad of graph paper--the engineer's answer to the legal pad--and a fine-point disposable pen.

The sultan has an Oxford English accent with traces of garlic and red pepper still wedged in its teeth. He speaks for about fifteen minutes.

The room contains a few dozen living human bodies, each one a big sack of guts and fluids so highly compressed that it will squirt for a few yards when pierced. Each one is built around an armature of 206 bones connected to each other by notoriously fault-prone joints that are given to obnoxious creaking, grinding, and popping noises when they are in other than pristine condition. This structure is draped with throbbing steak, inflated with clenching air sacks, and pierced by a Gordian sewer filled with burbling acid and compressed gas and asquirt with vile enzymes and solvents produced by the many dark, gamy nuggets of genetically programmed meat strung along its length. Slugs of dissolving food are forced down this sloppy labyrinth by serialized convulsions, decaying into gas, liquid, and solid matter which must all be regularly vented to the outside world lest the owner go toxic and drop dead. Spherical, gel-packed cameras swivel in mucus-greased ball joints. Infinite phalanxes of cilia beat back invading particles, encapsulate them in goo for later disposal. In each body a centrally located muscle flails away at an eternal, circulating torrent of pressurized gravy. And yet, despite all of this, not one of these bodies makes a single sound at any time during the sultan's speech. It is a marvel that can only be explained by the power of brain over body, and, in turn, by the power of cultural conditioning over the brain.