Cryptonomicon

"It goes deeper than mere anti-Semitism. Hilbert, Russell, Whitehead, Gödel, all of them were engaged in a monumental act of tearing mathematics down and beginning from scratch. But the Nazis believed that mathematics was a heroic science whose purpose was to reduce chaos to order--just as National Socialism was supposed to do in the political sphere."

"Okay," Randy says, "but what the Nazis didn't understand was that if you tore it down and rebuilt it, it was even more heroic than before."

"Indeed. It led to a renaissance," Root says, "like in the seventeenth century, when the Puritans tore everything to rubble and then slowly built it back up from scratch. Over and over again we see the pattern of the Titanomachia repeated--the old gods are thrown down, chaos returns, but out of the chaos, the same patterns reemerge."

"Okay. So--again--you were talking about civilization?"

"Ares always reemerges from the chaos. It will never go away. Athenian civilization defends itself from the forces of Ares with metis,or technology. Technology is built on science. Science is like the alchemists' uroburos, continually eating its own tail. The processof science doesn't work unless young scientists have the freedom to attack and tear down old dogmas, to engage in an ongoing Titanomachia. Science flourishes where art and free speech flourish."

"Sounds teleological, Enoch. Free countries get better science, hence superior military power, hence get to defend their freedoms. You're proclaiming a sort of Manifest Destiny here."

"Well, someone'sgot to do it."

"Aren't we beyond that sort of thing now?"

"I know you're just saying that to infuriate me. Sometimes, Randy, Ares gets chained up in a barrel for a few years, but he never goes away. The next time he emerges, Randy, the conflict is going to revolve around bio-, micro-, and nanotechnology. Who's going to win?"

"I don't know."

"Are you not just a bit unsettled by not knowing?"

"Look, Enoch, I'm trying my best here--I really am--but I'm broke, and I'm locked up in this fucking cage, all right?"

"Oh, stop whining."

"What about you? Suppose you go back to your yam farm, or whatever, and one day your shovel hits something that rings, and you suddenly dig up a few kilotons of gold? You'd invest it all in high-tech weapons?"

Root, not surprisingly, has an answer: the gold was stolen from all of Asia by the Nipponese, who intended to use it as backing for a currency that would become the legal tender of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, and that while it goes without saying that those particular Nips were among the most egregious buttheads in planetary history, some aspects of their plan weren't such a shitty idea. That to the extent life still sucks for many Asians, things would get a lot better, for a lot of people, if the continent's economy could get jerked into the twenty-first, or at least the twentieth, century and hopefully stay therefor a while instead of collapsing whenever some dictator's-nephew-in-charge-of-a-central-bank loses control of his sphincters and wipes out a major currency. So maybe stabilizing the currency situation would be a good thing to accomplish with a shitload of gold, and that's the only moral thing to do with it anyway considering whom it was stolen from--you can't just go out and spendit. Randy finds this answer appropriately sophisticated and Jesuitical and eerily in sync with what Avi has written into the latest edition of the Epiphyte(2) Business Plan.

After a decent number of days has gone by, Enoch Root comes right back and asks Randy what he'd do with a few kilotons of gold, and Randy mentions the Holocaust Education and Avoidance Pod. Turns out that Enoch Root already knows about the HEAP, has already downloaded various revisions of it over the gleaming new communications network that Randy and the Dentist strung through the islands, thinks it's right in line with his ideas vis-à-vis Athena, Aegis, etc., but has any number of difficult questions and trenchant criticisms.

Shortly thereafter, Avi himself comes in for a visit and says very little, but does let Randy know that, yes, General Wing is one of the Crypt's clients. The grizzled Chinese gentlemen who sat around the table with them in Kinakuta, and whose mugs were secretly captured by the pinhole camera on Randy's laptop, are among Wing's chief lieutenants. Avi also lets him know that the legal pressure has eased; the Dentist has suddenly reined in Andrew Loeb and allowed any number of legal deadlines to be extended. The fact that Avi says nothing at all about the sunken submarine would seem to imply that the salvage operation is going well, or at least going.

Randy's still processing these pieces of news when he receives a visit from none other than the Dentist himself.

"I assume that you think I had you framed," says Dr. Hubert Kepler.