Cryptonomicon

by Neal Stephenson

σother, an inequality to which Waterhouse’s notable successes in breaking certain Nip naval codes at Station Hypo were directly attributable, in that the many convenient whorehouses nearby made it possible for him to go somewhat longer between ejaculations.

  Note the twelve-day period [above], 19–30 May 1942, with only one brief interruption in productivity—during which Waterhouse (some might argue) personally won the Battle of Midway.

  If he had thought about this, it would have bothered him, because sigmaself > sigmaother has troubling implications—particularly if the values of these quantities w.r.t. the all-important sigmac are not fixed. If it weren’t for this inequality, then Waterhouse could function as a totally self-contained and independent unit. But sigmaself > sigmaother implies that he is, in the long run, dependent on other human beings for his mental clarity and, therefore, his happiness. What a pain in the ass!

  Perhaps he has avoided thinking about this precisely because it is so troubling. The week after he meets Mary Smith, he realizes that he is going to have to think about it a lot more.

  Something about the arrival of Mary Smith on the scene has completely fouled up the whole system of equations. Now, when he has an ejaculation, his clarity of mind does not take the upwards jump that it should. He goes right back to thinking about Mary. So much for winning the war!

  He goes out in search of whorehouses, hoping that good old reliable sigmaother will save his bacon. This is troublesome. When he was at Pearl, it was easy, and uncontroversial. But Mrs. McTeague’s boardinghouse is in a residential neighborhood, which, if it contains whorehouses, at least bothers to hide them. So Waterhouse has to travel downtown, which is not that easy in a place where internal-combustion vehicles are fueled by barbecues in the trunk. Furthermore, Mrs. McTeague is keeping her eye on him. She knows his habits. If he starts coming back from work four hours late, or going out after dinner, he’ll have some explaining to do. And it had better be convincing, because she appears to have taken Mary Smith under one quivering gelatinous wing and is in a position to poison the sweet girl’s mind against Waterhouse. Not only that, he has to do much of his excuse-making in public, at the dinner table, which he shares with Mary’s cousin (whose first name turns out to be Rod).

  But hey, Doolittle bombed Tokyo, didn’t he? Waterhouse should at least be able to sneak out to a whorehouse. It takes a week of preparations (during which he is completely unable to accomplish meaningful work because of the soaring sigma level), but he manages it.

  It helps a little, but only on the sigma management level. Until recently, that was the only level and so it would have been fine. But now (as Waterhouse realizes through long contemplation during the hours when he should be breaking codes) a new factor has entered the system of equations that governs his behavior; he will have to write to Alan and tell him that some new instructions will have to be added to the Waterhouse-simulation Turing machine. This new factor is FMSp, the Factor of Mary Smith Proximity.

  In a simpler universe, FMSp, would be orthogonal to sigma, which is to say that the two factors would be entirely independent of each other. If it were thus, Waterhouse could continue the usual sawtooth-wave ejaculation management program with no changes. In addition, he would have to arrange to have frequent conversations with Mary Smith so that FMSp would remain as high as possible.

  Alas! The universe is not simple. Far from being orthogonal, FMSp and sigma are involved, as elaborately as the contrails of dogfighting airplanes. The old sigma management scheme doesn’t work anymore. And a platonic relationship will ac tually make FMSp worse, not better. His life, which used to be a straightforward set of basically linear equations, has become a differential equation.

  It is the visit to the whorehouse that makes him realize this. In the Navy, going to a whorehouse is about as controversial as pissing down the scuppers when you are on the high seas—the worst you can say about it is that, in other circumstances, it might seem uncouth. So Waterhouse has been doing it for years without feeling troubled in the slightest.

  But he loathes himself during, and after, his first post-Mary-Smith whorehouse visit. He no longer sees himself through his own eyes but through hers—and, by extension, those of her cousin Rod and of Mrs. McTeague and of the whole society of decent God-fearing folk to whom he has never paid the slightest bit of attention until now.

  It seems that the intrusion of FMSp into his happiness equation is just the thin edge of a wedge which leaves Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse at the mercy of a vast number of uncontrollable factors, and requiring him to cope with normal human society. Horrifyingly, he now finds himself getting ready to go to a dance.

  The dance is being organized by an Australian volunteer organization—he doesn’t know or care about the details. Mrs. McTeague evidently feels that the rent she collects from her boarders obligates her to find them wives as well as feeding and housing them, so she badgers all of them to go, and to bring dates if possible. Rod finally shuts her up by announcing that he will be attending with a large group, to include his country cousin Mary. Rod is about eight feet tall, and so it will be easy to pick him out across a crowded dance floor. With any luck, then, the diminutive Mary will be in his vicinity.

  So Waterhouse goes to the dance, ransacking his mind for opening lines that he can use with Mary. He comes up with several possibilities:

  “Do you realize that Nipponese industry is only capable of producing forty bulldozers per year?” To be followed up with: “No wonder they use slave labor to build their revetments!”

  Or, “Because of antenna configuration limitations inherent in their design, Nipponese naval radar systems have a blind spot to the rear—you always want to come in from dead astern.”

  Or, “The Nip Army’s minor, low-level codes are actually harder to break than the important high-level ones! Isn’t that ironic?”

  Or, “So, you’re from the outback… do you can a lot of your own food? It might interest you to know that a close relative of the bacterium that makes canned soup go bad is responsible for gas gangrene.”

  Or, “Nip battleships have started to blow up spontaneously, because the high-explosive shells in their magazines become chemically unstable over time.”

  Or, “Dr. Turing of Cambridge says that the soul is an illusion and that all that defines us as human beings can be reduced to a series of mechanical operations.”

  And much more in this vein. So far he has not hit on anything that is absolutely guaranteed to sweep her off her feet. He doesn’t, in fact, have the first idea what the fuck he’s going to do. Which is how it’s always been with Waterhouse and women, which is why he has never really had a girlfriend before.

  But this is different. This is desperation.

  What is there to say about the dance? Big room. Men in uniforms, mostly looking smarter than they have a right to. Mostly looking smarter, in fact, than Waterhouse. Women in dresses and hairdos. Lipstick, pearls, a big band, white gloves, fist fights, a little bit o’ kissin’ and a wee bit o’ vomitin’. Waterhouse gets there late—that transportation thing again. All the gasoline is being used to hurl enormous bombers through the atmosphere so that high explosives can be showered on Nips. Moving the wad of flesh called Waterhouse across Brisbane so he can try to deflower a maiden is way down the priority list. He has to do a lot of walking in his stiff, shiny leather shoes, which become less shiny. By the time he gets there, he is pretty sure that they are functioning only as tourniquets preventing uncontrollable arterial bleeding from the wounds they’ve induced.

  Rather late into the dance he finally picks out Rod on the dance floor and stalks him, over the course of several numbers (Rod having no shortage of dance partners), to a corner of the room where everyone seems to know each other, and all of them seem to be having a perfectly fine time without the intervention of a Waterhouse.

  But finally he identifies Mary Smith’s neck, which looks just as unspeakably erotic seen from behind through thirty yards of dense cigarette smoke as it did seen fro
m the side in Mrs. McTeague’s parlor. She is wearing a dress, and a string of pearls that adorn the neck’s architecture quite nicely. Waterhouse sets his direction of march towards her and plods onward, like a Marine covering the last few yards to a Nip pillbox where he knows full well he’s going to die. Can you get a posthumous decoration for being shot down in flames at a dance?

  He’s just a few paces away, still forging along woozily towards that white column of neck, when suddenly the tune comes to an end, and he can hear Mary’s voice, and the voices of her friends. They are chattering away happily. But they are not speaking English.

  Finally, Waterhouse places that accent. Not only that: he solves another mystery, having to do with some incoming mail he has seen at Mrs. McTeague’s house, addressed to someone named cCmndhd.

  It’s like this: Rod and Mary are Qwghlmian! And their family name is not Smith—it just sounds vaguely like Smith. It’s really cCmndhd. Rod grew up in Manchester—in some Qwghlmian ghetto, no doubt—and Mary’s from a branch of the family that got into trouble (probably sedition) a couple of generations back and got Transported to the Great Sandy Desert.

  Let’s see Turing explain this one! Because what this proves, beyond all doubt, is that there is a God, and furthermore that He is a personal friend and supporter of Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse. The opening line problem is solved, neat as a theorem. Q. E. D., baby. Waterhouse strides forward confidently, sacrificing another square centimeter of epidermis to his ravenous shoes. As he later reconstructs it, he has, without meaning to, interpolated himself between Mary cCmndhd and her date, and perhaps jostled the latter’s elbow and forced him to spill his drink. It is a startling move that quiets the group. Waterhouse opens his mouth and says “Gxnn bhldh sqrd m!”

  “Hey, friend!” says Mary’s date. Waterhouse turns towards the sound of the voice. The sloppy grin draped across his face serves as a convenient bulls eye, and Mary’s date’s fist homes in on it unerringly. The bottom half of Waterhouse’s head goes numb, his mouth fills with a warm fluid that tastes nutritious. The vast concrete floor somehow takes to the air, spins like a flipped coin, and bounces off the side of his head. All four of Waterhouse’s limbs seem to be pinned against the floor by the weight of his torso.

  Some sort of commotion is happening up on that remote plane of most people’s heads, five to six feet above the floor, where social interaction traditionally takes place. Mary’s date is being hustled off to the side by a large powerful fellow—it is hard to recognize faces from this angle, but a good candidate would be Rod. Rod is shouting in Qwghlmian. Actually, everyone is shouting in Qwghlmian—even the ones who are speaking in English—because Waterhouse’s speech-recognition centers have a bad case of jangly ganglia. Best to leave that fancy stuff for later, and concentrate on more basic phylogenesis: it would be nice, for example, to be a vertebrate again. After that quadrupedal locomotion might come in handy.

  A perky Qwghlmian-Australian fellow in an RAAF uniform steps up and grabs his right anterior fin, jerking him up the evolutionary ladder before he’s ready. He is not doing Waterhouse a favor so much as he is getting Waterhouse’s face up where it can be better scrutinized. The RAAF fellow shouts at him (because the music has started again): “Where’d you learn to talk like that?”

  Waterhouse doesn’t know where to begin; god forbid he should offend these people again. But he doesn’t have to. The RAAF guy screws up his face in disgust, as if he had just noticed a six-foot tapeworm trying to escape from Waterhouse’s throat. “Outer Qwghlm?” he asks.

  Waterhouse nods. The confused and shocked faces before him collapse into graven masks. Inner Qwghlmians! Of course! The inner islanders are perennially screwed, hence have the best music, the most entertaining personalities, but are constantly being shipped off to Barbados to chop sugar cane, or to Tasmania to chase sheep, or to—well, to the Southwest Pacific to be pursued through the jungle by starving Nips draped with live satchel charges.

  The RAAF chap forces himself to smile, chucks Waterhouse gently on the shoulder. Someone in this group is going to have to take the unpleasant job of playing diplomat, smoothing it all over, and with the true Inner Qwghlmian’s nose for a shit job, RAAF boy has just volunteered. “With us,” he explains brightly, “what you just said isn’t a polite greeting.”

  “Oh,” Waterhouse says, “what did I say, then?”

  “You said that while you were down at the mill to lodge a complaint about a sack with a weak seam that sprung loose on Thursday, you were led to understand, by the tone of the proprietor’s voice, that Mary’s great-aunt, a spinster who had a loose reputation as a younger woman, had contracted a fungal infection in her toenails.”

  There is a long silence. Then everyone speaks at once. Finally a woman’s voice breaks through the cacophony: “No, no!” Waterhouse looks; it’s Mary. “I understood him to say that it was at the pub, and that he was there to apply for a job catching rats, and that it was my neighbor’s dog that had come down with rabies.”

  “He was at the basilica for confession—the priest—angina—” someone shouts from the back. Then everyone talks at once: “The dockside—Mary’s half-sister—leprosy—Wednesday—complaining about a loud party!”

  There’s a strong arm around Waterhouse’s shoulders, turning him away from all for this. He cannot turn his head to see who owns this limb, because his vertebrae have again become unstacked. He figures out that it’s Rod, nobly taking his poor addled Yank roommate under his wing. Rod pulls a clean hanky from his pocket and puts it up to Waterhouse’s mouth, then takes his hand away. The hanky sticks to his lip, which is now shaped like a barrage balloon.

  That’s not the only decent thing he does. He even gets Waterhouse a drink, and finds him a chair. “You know about the Navajos?” Rod asks.

  “Huh?”

  “Your marines use Navajo Indians as radio operators—they can speak to each other in their own language and the Nips have no idea what the fuck they’re saying.”

  “Oh. Yeah. Heard about that,” Waterhouse says.

  “Winnie Churchill heard about those Navajos. Liked the idea. Wanted His Majesty’s forces to do likewise. We don’t have Navajos. But—”

  “You have Qwghlmians,” Waterhouse says.

  “There are two different programs underway,” Rod says. “Royal Navy is using Outer Qwghlmians. Army and Air Force are using Inner.”

  “How’s it working out?”

  Rod shrugs. “So-so. Qwghlmian is a very pithy language. Bears no relationship to English or Celtic—its closest relatives are !Qnd, which is spoken by a tribe of pygmies in Madagascar, and Aleut. Anyway, the pithier, the better, right?”

  “By all means,” Waterhouse says. “Less redundancy—harder to break the code.”

  “Problem is, if it’s not exactly a dead language, then it’s lying on a litter with a priest standing over it making the sign of the cross. You know?”

  Waterhouse nods.

  “So everyone hears it a little differently. Like just now—they heard your Outer Qwghlmian accent, and assumed you were delivering an insult. But I could tell you were saying that you believed, based on a rumor you heard last Tuesday in the meat market, that Mary was convalescing normally and would be back on her feet within a week.”

  “I was trying to say that she looked beautiful,” Waterhouse protests.

  “Ah!” Rod says. “Then you should have said, ‘Gxnn bhldh sqrd m!’ ”

  “That’s what I said!”

  “No, you confused the mid-glottal with the frontal glottal,” Rod says.

  “Honestly,” Waterhouse says, “can you tell them apart over a noisy radio?”

  “No,” Rod says. “On the radio, we stick to the basics: ‘Get in there and take that pillbox or I’ll fucking kill you.’ And that sort of thing.”

  Before much longer, the band has finished its last set and the party’s over. “Well,” Waterhouse says, “would you tell Mary what I really did mean to say?”

  “Oh, I’
m sure there’s no need,” Rod says confidently. “Mary is a good judge of character. I’m sure she knows what you meant. Qwghlmians excel at nonverbal communication.”

  Waterhouse just barely restrains himself from saying I guess you’d have to, which would probably just earn him another slug in the face. Rod shakes his hand and departs. Waterhouse, marooned by his shoes, hobbles out.

  I.N.R.I.

  * * *

  GOTO DENGO LIES on a cot of woven rushes for six weeks, under a white cone of mosquito netting that stirs in the breezes from the windows. When there is a typhoon, the nurses clasp mother-of-pearl shutters over the windows, but mostly they are left open day and night. Outside the window, an immense stairway has been hand-carved up the side of a green mountain. When the sun shines, the new rice on those terraces fluoresces; green light boils into the room like flames. He can see small gnarled people in colorful clothes transplanting rice seedlings and tinkering with the irrigation system. The wall of his room is plain, cream-colored plaster spanned with forking deltas of cracks, like the blood vessels on the surface of an eyeball. It is decorated only with a crucifix carved out of napa wood in maniacal detail. Jesus’s eyes are smooth orbs without pupil or iris, as in Roman statues. He hangs askew on the crucifix, arms stretched out, the ligaments probably pulled loose from their moorings now, the crooked legs, broken by the butt of a Roman spear, unable to support the body. A pitted, rusty iron nail transfixes each palm, and a third suffices for both feet. Goto Dengo notices after a while that the sculptor has arranged the three nails in a perfect equilateral triangle. He and Jesus spend many hours and days staring at each other through the white veil that hangs around the bed; when it shifts in the mountain breezes, Jesus seems to writhe. An open scroll is fixed to the top of the crucifix; it says I.N.R.I. Goto Dengo spends a long time trying to fathom this. I Need Rapid something? Initiate Nail Removal Immediately?