Cryptonomicon

The reason I ask is that I am, in fact, a man of the cloth, so naturally I consider it my job to ask "why?" I assumed this would be fairly obvious to you. But I should have taken into account that you are not the churchy type. This is my fault.

It is conventional now to think of clerics simply as presiders over funerals and weddings. Even people who routinely go to church (or synagogue or whatever) sleep through the sermons. That is because the arts of rhetoric and oratory have fallen on hard times, and so the sermons tend not to be very interesting.

But there was a time when places like Oxford and Cambridge existed almost solely to train ministers, and their job was not just to preside over weddings and funerals but also to say something thought-provoking to large numbers of people several times a week. They were the retail outlets of the profession of philosophy.

I still think of this as the priest's highest calling--or at least the most interesting part of the job--hence my question to you, which I cannot fail to notice, remains unanswered.

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"Randy, what is the worst thing that ever happened?"

This is never a difficult question to answer when you are hanging around with Avi. "The Holocaust," Randy says dutifully.

Even if he didn't know Avi, their surroundings would give him a hint. The rest of Epiphyte Corp. have gone back to the Foote Mansion to prepare for hostilities with the Dentist. Randy and Avi are sitting on a black obsidian bench planted atop the mass grave of thousands of Nipponese in downtown Kinakuta, watching the tour buses come and go.

Avi pulls a small GPS receiver out of his attache case, turns it on, and sets it out on a boulder in front of them where it will have a clear view of the sky. "Correct! And what is the highest and best purpose to which we can devote our allotted lifespans?"

"Uh . . . enhancing shareholder value?"

"Very funny." Avi is annoyed. He is baring his soul, which he does rarely. Also, he's in the midst of cataloging another small-h holocaust site, adding it to his archives. It is clear he would appreciate some fucking solemnity here. "I visited Mexico a few weeks ago," Avi continues.

"Looking for a site where the Spanish killed a bunch of Aztecs?" Randy asks.

"This is exactly the kind of thing I'm fighting," Avi says, even more irritated. "No, I was not looking for a place where a bunch of Aztecs were massacred. The Aztecs can go fuck themselves, Randy! Repeat after me: the Aztecs can go fuck themselves,"

"The Aztecs can go fuck themselves," Randy says cheerfully, drawing a baffled look from an approaching Nipponese tour guide.

"To begin with, I was hundreds of miles from Mexico City, the former Aztec capital. I was on the outer fringes of the territory that the Aztecs controlled." Avi scoops his GPS off the boulder and begins to punch keys on its pad, telling it to store the latitude and longitude in its memory. "I was looking," Avi continues, "for the site of a Nahuatl city that was raided by the Aztecs hundreds of years before the Spanish even showed up. You know what those fucking Aztecs did, Randy?"

Randy uses his hands to squeegee away sweat from his face. "Something unspeakable?"

"I hate that word 'unspeakable.' We must speak of it."

"Speak then."

"The Aztecs took twenty-five thousand Nahuatl captives, brought them back to Tenochtitlan, and killed them all in a couple of days."

"Why?"

"Some kind of festival. Super Bowl weekend or something. I don't know. The point is, they did that kind of shit all the time. But now, Randy, when I talk about Holocaust-type stuff happening in Mexico, you give me this shit about the mean nasty old Spaniards! Why? Because history has been distorted, that's why."

"Don't tell me you're about to come down on the side of the Spaniards."

"As the descendant of people who were expelled from Spain by the Inquisition, I have no illusions about them," Avi says, "but, at their worst, the Spaniards were a million times better than the Aztecs. I mean, it really says something about how bad the Aztecswere that, when the Spaniards,showed up and raped the place, things actually got a lot betteraround there."

"Avi?"

"Yes."

"We are sitting here in the Sultanate of Kinakuta, trying to build a data haven while fending off an oral surgeon-turned-hostile-take-over-maven. I have pressing responsibilities in the Philippines. Why are we discussing the Aztecs?"

"I'm giving you a pep talk," Avi says. "You are bored. Dangerously so. The Pinoy-gram thing was cool for a while, but now it's up and running, there's no new technology there."

"True."

"But the Crypt is amazingly cool. Tom and John and Eb are going nuts, and every Secret Admirer in the world is spamming me with resumes. The Crypt is exactly what you would like to be doing right now."

"Again, true."