Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson Read Free Book Online Page B

adopting a cold, almost hostile tone to mask sick excitement.
    “Buy a ticket to Manila,” Avi said.
    “I have to talk it over with Charlene first,” Randy said.
    “You don’t even believe that yourself,” Avi said.
    “Charlene and I have a long-standing relationsh—”
    “It’s been ten years. You haven’t married her. Fill in the fucking blanks.”
    (Seventy-two hours later, he would be in Manila, looking at the One-Note Flute.)
    “Everyone in Asia is wondering when the Philippines is finally going to get its shit together,” Avi said, “it’s the question of the nineties.”
    (The One-Note Flute is the first thing you see when you make it through Passport Control.)
    “I flashed on this when I was standing in line at Passport Control at Ninoy Aquino International Airport,” Avi said, compressing that entire name into a single, sharply articulated burst. “You know how they have different lanes?”
    “I guess so,” Randy said. A parallelpiped of seared tuna did a barrel roll in his gullet. He felt a perverse craving for a double ice-cream cone. He did not travel as much as Avi, and had only a vague idea of what he meant by lanes .
    “You know. One lane for citizens. One for foreigners. Maybe one for diplomats.”
    (Now, standing there waiting to have his passport stamped, Randy can see it clearly. For once he doesn’t mind the wait. He gets in a lane next to the OCW lane and studies them. They are Epiphyte Corp.’s market. Mostly youngwomen, many of them fashionably dressed, but still with a kind of Catholic boarding-school demureness. Exhausted from long flights, tired of the wait, they slump, then suddenly straighten up and elevate their fine chins, as if an invisible nun were making her way up the line whacking their manicured knuckles with a ruler.)
    But seventy-two hours ago he hadn’t really understood what Avi meant by lanes, so he just said, “Yeah, I’ve seen the lane thing.”
    “At Manila, they have a whole lane just for returning OCWs!”
    “OCWs?”
    “Overseas Contract Workers. Filipinos working abroad—because the economy of the Philippines is so lame. As maids and nannies in Saudi. Nurses and anesthesiologists in the States. Singers in Hong Kong, whores in Bangkok.”
    “Whores in Bangkok?” Randy had been there, at least, and his mind reeled at the concept of exporting prostitutes to Thailand.
    “The Filipino women are more beautiful,” Avi said quietly, “and have a ferocity that makes them more interesting, to the innately masochistic business traveler, than all those grinning Thai bimbos.” Both of them knew that this was complete bullshit; Avi was a family man and had no firsthand experience whereof he spoke. Randy didn’t call him on it, though. As long as Avi retained this extemporaneous bullshitting ability there was a better than even chance of all of them making fuck-you money.
    (Now that he’s here, it is tempting to speculate as to which of the girls in the OCW lane are hustlers. But he can’t see that going anywhere but wrong, so he squares his shoulders and marches toward the yellow line.
    The government has set up glass display cases in the concourse leading from Passport Control to the security barrier. The cases contain artifacts demonstrating the glories of pre-Magellan Filipino culture. The first one of these contains the pièce de résistance: a rustic hand-carved musical instrument labeled with a long and unreadable name in Tagalog. Underneath that, in smaller letters, is the English translation: ONE-NOTE FLUTE .)
    “See? The Philippines is innately hedged,” Avi said. “You know how rare that is? When you find an innately hedged environment, Randy, you lunge into it like a rabid ferret going into a pipe full of raw meat.”
    A word about Avi: his father’s people had just barely gotten out of Prague. As Central European Jews went, they were fairly typical. The only thing about them that was really anomalous was that they were still alive. But