Cryptonomicon (79 page)

Alas! The universe is not simple. Far from being orthogonal,
F
_MSp
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
F
_MSp
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
F
_MSp
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 from 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.

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 equi
lateral 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?

The veil parts and a perfect young woman in a severe black-and-white habit is standing in the gap, radiant in the green light coming off the terraces, carrying a bowl of steaming water. She peels back his hospital gown and begins to sponge him off. Goto Dengo motions towards the crucifix and asks about it—perhaps the woman has learned a little Nipponese. If she hears him, she gives no sign. She is probably deaf or crazy or both; the Christians are notorious for the way they dote on defective persons. Her gaze is fixed on Goto Dengo’s body, which she swabs gently but implacably, one postage-stamp-sized bit at a time. Goto Dengo’s mind is still playing tricks with him, and looking down at his naked torso he gets all turned around for a moment and thinks that he is looking at the nailed wreck of Jesus. His ribs are sticking out and his skin is a cluttered map of sores and scars. He cannot possibly be good for anything now; why are they not sending him back to Nippon? Why haven’t they simply killed him? “You speak English?” he says, and her huge brown eyes jump just a bit. She is the most beautiful woman he has ever seen. To her, he must be a loathsome thing, a specimen under a glass slide in a pathology lab. When she leaves the room she will probably go and wash herself meticulously and then do anything to flush the memory of Goto Dengo’s body out of her clean, virginal mind.

He drifts away into a fever, and sees himself from the vantage point of a mosquito trying to find a way in through the netting: a haggard, wracked body splayed, like a slapped insect, on a wooden trestle. The only way you can tell he’s Nipponese is by the strip of white cloth tied around his forehead, but instead of an orange sun painted on it is an inscription: I.N.R.I.

A man in a long black robe is sitting beside him, holding a string of red coral beads in his hand, a tiny crucifix dan
gling from that. He has the big head and heavy brow of those strange people working up on the rice terraces, but his receding hairline and swept-back silver-brown hair are very European, as are his intense eyes. “Iesus Nazarenus Rex Iudaeorum,” he is saying. “It is Latin. Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews.”

“Jew? I thought Jesus was Christian,” said Goto Dengo.

The man in the black robe just stares at him. Goto Dengo tries again: “I didn’t know Jews spoke Latin.”

One day a wheeled chair is pushed into his room; he stares at it with dull curiosity. He has heard of these things—they are used behind high walls to transport shamefully imperfect persons from one room to another. Suddenly these tiny girls have picked him up and dropped him into it! One of them says something about fresh air and the next thing he knows he’s being wheeled out the door and into a corridor! They have buckled him in so he doesn’t fall out, and he twists uneasily in the chair, trying to hide his face. The girl rolls him out to a huge verandah that looks out over the mountains. Mist rises up from the leaves and birds scream. On the wall behind him is a large painting of I.N.R.I. chained naked to a post, shedding blood from hundreds of parallel whip-marks. A centurion stands above him with a scourge. His eyes look strangely Nipponese.

Three other Nipponese men are sitting on the verandah. One of them talks to himself unintelligibly and keeps picking at a sore on his arm that bleeds continuously into a towel on his lap. Another one has had his arms and face burned off, and peers out at the world through a single hole in a blank mask of scar tissue. The third has been tied into his chair with many wide strips of cloth because he flops around all the time like a beached fish and makes unintelligible moaning noises.

Goto Dengo eyes the railing of the verandah, wondering if he can muster the effort to wheel himself over there and fling his body over the edge. Why has he not been allowed to die honorably?

The crew of the submarine treated him and the other evacuees with an unreadable combination of reverence and disgust.

When was he set apart from his race? It happened long before his evacuation from New Guinea. The lieutenant who rescued him from the headhunters treated him as a criminal and sentenced him to execution. Even before then, he was different. Why did the sharks not eat him? Does his flesh smell different? He should have died with his comrades in the Bismarck Sea. He lived, partly because he was lucky, partly because he could swim.

Why could he swim? Partly because his body was good at it—but partly because his father raised him not to believe in demons.

He laughs out loud. The other men on the verandah turn to look at him.

He was raised not to believe in demons, and now he is one.

Black-robe laughs out loud at Goto Dengo during his next visit. “I am not trying to convert you,” he says. “Please do not tell your superiors about your suspicions. We have been strictly forbidden to proselytize, and there would be brutal repercussions.”

“You aren’t trying to convert me with words,” Goto Dento admits, “but just by having me here.” His English does not quite suffice.

Black-robe’s name is Father Ferdinand. He is a Jesuit or something, with enough English to run rings around Goto Dengo. “In what way does merely having you in this place constitute proselytization?” Then, just to break Goto Dengo’s legs out from under him, he says the same thing in half-decent Nipponese.

“I don’t know. The art.”

“If you don’t like our art, close your eyes and think of the emperor.”

“I can’t keep my eyes closed all the time.”

Father Ferdinand laughs snidely. “Really? Most of your countrymen seem to have no difficulty with keeping their eyes tightly shut from cradle to grave.”

“Why don’t you have happy art? Is this a hospital or a morgue?”

“La Pasyon is important here,” says Father Ferdinand.

“La Pasyon?”

“Christ’s suffering. It speaks deeply to the people of the Philippines. Especially now.”

Goto Dengo has another complaint that he is not able to voice until he borrows Father Ferdinand’s Japanese-English dictionary and spends some time working with it.

“Let me see if I understand you,” Father Ferdinand says. “You believe that when we treat you with mercy and dignity, we are implicitly trying to convert you to Roman Catholicism.”

“You bent my words again,” says Goto Dengo.

“You spoke crooked words and I straightened them,” snaps Father Ferdinand.

“You are trying to make me into—one of you.”

“One of us? What do you mean by that?”

“A low person.”

“Why would we want to do that?”

“Because you have a low-person religion. A loser religion. If you make me into a low person, it will make me want to follow that religion.”

“And by treating you decently we are trying to make you into a low person?”

“In Nippon, a sick person would not be treated as well.”

“You needn’t explain that to us,” Father Ferdinand says. “You are in the middle of a country full of women who have been raped by Nipponese soldiers.”

Time to change the subject. “Ignoti et quasi occulti—Societas Eruditorum,” says Goto Dengo, reading the inscription on a medallion that hangs from Father Ferdinand’s neck. “More Latin? What does it mean?”

“It is an organization I belong to. It is ecumenical.”

“What does that mean?”

“Anyone can join it. Even you, after you get better.”

“I will get better,” Goto Dengo says. “No one will know that I was sick.”

“Except for us. Oh, I understand! You mean, no Nipponese people will know. That’s true.”

“But the others here will not get better.”

“It is true. You have the best prognosis of any patient here.”

“You are receiving those sick Nipponese men into your bosoms.”

“Yes. This is more or less dictated by our religion.”

“They are low people now. You want them to join your low-person religion.”

“Only insofar as it is good for them,” says Father Ferdinand. “It’s not like those guys are going to run out and build us a new cathedral or something.”

The next day, Goto Dengo is deemed to be cured. He does not feel cured at all, but he will do anything to get out of this rut: losing one staredown after another with the King of the Jews.

He expects that they will saddle him with a duffel bag and send him down to the bus terminal to fend for himself, but instead a car comes to get him. As if that’s not good enough, the car takes him to an airfield, where a light plane picks him up. It is the first time he has ever flown in a plane, and the excitement revives him more than six weeks in the hospital. The plane takes off between two green mountains and heads south (judging from the sun’s position) and for the first time he understands where he’s been: in the center of Luzon Island, north of Manila.

Half an hour later, he’s above the capital, banking over the Pasig River and then the bay, chockablock with military transports. The corniche is guarded by a picket line of coconut palms. Seen from overhead, their branches writhe in the sea breeze like colossal tarantulas impaled on spikes. Looking over the pilot’s shoulder, he sees a pair of paved airstrips in the flat paddy-land just south of the city, crossing at an acute angle to form a narrow X. The light plane porpoises through gusts. It bounces down the airstrip like an overinflated soccer ball, taxiing past most of the hangars and finally fishtailing to a stop near an isolated guard hut where a man waits on a motorcycle with an empty sidecar. Goto Dengo is directed out of the plane and into the sidecar by means of gestures; no one will speak to him. He is dressed in an Army uniform devoid of rank and insignia.

A pair of goggles rests on the seat, and he puts them on to keep the bugs out of his eyes. He is a little nervous because he does not have papers and he does not have orders. But they are waved out of the airbase and onto the road without any checks.

The motorcycle driver is a young Filipino man who keeps grinning broadly, at the risk of getting insects stuck between his big white teeth. He seems to think that he has the best job in the whole world, and perhaps he does. He turns south onto a road that probably qualifies as a big highway around these parts, and commences weaving through traffic. Most of this is produce carts drawn by carabaos—big oxlike things with imposing crescent-moon-shaped horns. There are a few automobiles, and the occasional military truck.

For the first couple of hours the road is straight, and runs across damp table-land used for growing rice. Goto Dengo catches glimpses of a body of water off to the left, and isn’t sure whether it is a big lake or part of the ocean. “Laguna de Bay,” says the driver, when he catches Goto looking at it. “Very beautiful.”

Then they turn away from the lake onto a road that climbs gently into sugar cane territory. Suddenly, Goto Dengo catches sight of a volcano: a symmetrical cone, black with vegetation, cloaked in mist as though protected by a mosquito net. The sheer density of the air makes it impossible to judge size and distance; it could be a little cinder cone just off the road, or a huge stratovolcano fifty miles away.

Banana trees, coconut palms, oil palms, and date palms begin to appear, sparsely at first, transforming the landscape into a kind of moist savannah. The driver pulls into a shambolic roadside store to buy petrol. Goto Dengo unfolds his jangled body from the sidecar and sits down at a table beneath an umbrella. He wipes a crust of sweat and dirt from his forehead with the clean handkerchief that he found in his pocket this morning, and orders something to drink. They bring him a glass of ice water, a bowl of raw, locally-produced sugar, and a plate of pinball-sized calamansi limes. He squeezes the calamansis into the water, stirs in sugar, and drinks it convulsively.

The driver comes and joins him; he has cadged a free cup of water from the proprietors. He always wears a mischievous grin, as if he and Goto Dengo are sharing a little private joke. He raises an imaginary rifle to his face and makes a scratching motion with his trigger finger. “You soldier?”