Cryptonomicon (32 page)

W
ATERHOUSE EDDIES UP AND DOWN THE QUIET SIDE
street, squinting at brass plaques on sturdy white row houses:

SOCIETY FOR THE UNIFICATION OF HINDUISM AND ISLAM

ANGLO-LAPP SOLIDARITY SOCIETY

FULMINANTS ASSOCIATION

CHIANG TZSE MUTUAL BENEVOLENT SOCIETY

ROYAL COMMITTEE ON MITIGATION OF MARINE CRANKSHAFT WEAR

BOLGER DAMSELFLY PROPAGATION FOUNDATION

ANTI-WELCH LEAGUE

COMITY FOR QE REFORMASHUN OF ENGLISH ORQOGRAFY

SOCIETY FOR THE PREVENTION OF CRUELTY TO VERMIN

CHURCH OF VEDANTIC ETHICAL QUANTUM CONSCIOUSNESS

IMPERIAL MICA BOARD

At first he mistakes Qwghlm House for the world’s tiniest and most poorly located department store. It has a bow window that looms over the sidewalk like the thrusting ram of a trireme, embarnacled with Victorian foofawfery, and housing a humble display: a headless mannequin dressed in something that appears to have been spun from steel wool (perhaps a tribute to wartime austerity?); a heap of sallow dirt with a shovel in it; and another mannequin (a recent addition shoehorned into one corner) dressed in a Royal Navy uniform and holding a wooden cutout of a rifle.

Waterhouse found a worm-eaten copy of the
Encyclope
dia Qwghlmiana
in a bookshop near the British Museum a week ago and has been carrying it around in his attache case since then, imbibing a page or two at a time, like doses of strong medicine. The overriding Themes of the Encyclopedia are three, and they dominate its every paragraph as totally as the Three Sgrhs dominate the landscape of Outer Qwghlm. Two of these themes are wool and guano, though the Qwghlmians have other names for them, in their ancient,
sui generis
tongue. In fact, the same linguistic hyperspecialization occurs here that supposedly does with the Eskimos and snow or Arabs and sand, and the
Encyclopedia Qwghlmiana
never uses the English words “wool” and “guano” except to slander the inferior versions of these products that are exported by places like Scotland in a perfidious effort to confuse the naive buyers who apparently dominate the world’s commodity markets. Waterhouse had to read the encyclopedia almost cover-to-cover and use all his cryptanalytic skills to figure out, by inference, what these products actually were.

Having learned so much about them, he is fascinated to find them proudly displayed in the heart of the cosmopolitan city: a mound of guano and a woman dressed in wool.
^*
The woman’s outfit is entirely grey, in keeping with Qwghlmian tradition, which scorns pigmentation as a loathsome and whorish innovation of the Scots. The top part of the ensemble is a sweater which appears, at a glance, to be made of felt. A closer look reveals that it is knit like any other sweater. Qwghlmian sheep are the evolutionary product of thousands of years’ massive weather-related die-offs. Their wool is famous for its density, its corkscrewlike fibers, and its immunity to all known chemical straightening processes. It creates a matted effect which the
Encyclopedia
describes as being supremely desirable and for which there is an extensive descriptive vocabulary.

The third theme of the
Encyclopedia Qwghlmiana
is hinted at by the mannequin with the gun.

Propped up against the stonework next to the building’s entrance is a gaffer dressed in an antique variant of the Home Guard uniform, involving knickerbockers. His lower legs are encased in formidable socks made of one of the variants of Qwghlmian wool, and lashed in place, just below the knee, with tourniquets fashioned from thick cords woven together in a vaguely Celtic interlace pattern (on almost every page, the
Encyclopedia
restates that the Qwghlmians are not Celts, but that they did invent the best features of Celtic culture). These garters are the traditional ornament of true Qwghlmians; gentlemen wear them hidden underneath the trousers of their suits. They were traditionally made from the long, slender tails of the Skrrgh, which is the predominant mammal native to the islands, and which the
Encyclopedia
defines as “a small mammal of the order Rodentia and the order Muridae, common in the islands, subsisting primarily on the eggs of sea birds, capable of multiplying with great rapidity when that or any other food is made available to it, admired and even emulated by Qwghlmians for its hardiness and adaptability.”

After Waterhouse has been standing there for a few moments, enjoying a cigarette and examining those garters, this mannequin moves slightly. Waterhouse thinks that it is falling over in a gust of wind, but then he realizes that it is alive, and not exactly falling over, but just shifting its weight from foot to foot.

The gaffer takes note of him, smiles blackly, and utters some word of greeting in his language, which, as has already become plain, is even less suited than English to transcription into the Roman alphabet.

“Howdy,” Waterhouse says.

The gaffer says something longer and more complicated. After a while, Waterhouse (now wearing his cryptanalyst hat, searching for meaning midst apparent randomness, his neural circuits exploiting the redundancies in the signal) realizes that the man is speaking heavily accented English. He concludes that his interlocutor was saying, “What part of the States are you from, then?”

“My family’s done a lot of traveling around,” Waterhouse says. “Let’s say South Dakota.”

“Ahh,” the gaffer says ambiguously whilst flinging himself against the slab of door. After a while it begins to move inwards, hand-hammered iron hinges grinding ominously as they pivot round inch-thick tholes. Finally the door collides with some kind of formidable Stop. The gaffer remains leaning against it, his entire body at a forty-five degree angle to prevent its swinging back and crushing Waterhouse, who scurries past. Inside, a tiny anteroom is dominated by a sculpture: two nymphets in diaphanous veils kicking the crap out of a scurrying hag, entitled
Fortitude and Adaptability Driving Out Adversity.

This operation is repeated a few times with doors that are successively lighter but more richly decorated. The first room, it becomes clear, was actually a preäntepenultimate room, so it is a while before they can be said to be definitely inside Qwghlm House. By that time they seem to be deep in the center of the block, and Waterhouse half expects to see an Underground train screech by. Instead he finds himself in a windowless paneled room with a crystal chandelier that is painfully bright but does not seem to actually illuminate anything. His feet sink so deeply into the gaudy carpet that he nearly blows out a ligament. The far end of the room is guarded by a staunch Desk with a stout Lady behind it. Here and there are large ebony Windsor chairs, with the spindly but dangerous look of aboriginal game snares.

On the walls, diverse oil paintings. At a first glance Waterhouse sorts them into ones that are higher than they are wide, and others. The former category is portraits of gentlemen, all of whom seem to share a grievous genetic flaw that informs the geometry of the skull. The latter category is landscapes or, just as often, seascapes, all in the bleak and rugged category. These Qwghlmian painters are so fond of the locally produced blue-green-grey paint
^*
that they apply it as if with the back of a shovel.

Waterhouse fights through the miring shag of the Carpet until he nears the Desk, where he is greeted by the Lady, who shakes his hand and pinches her face together
in a sort of allusion to a smile. There is a long exchange of polite, perfunctory speech of which all Waterhouse remembers is: “Lord Woadmire will see you shortly,” and: “Tea?”

Waterhouse says yes to the tea because he suspects that this lady (he has forgotten her name) is not really earning her keep. Clearly disgruntled, she ejects herself from her chair and loses herself in deeper and narrower parts of the building. The gaffer has already gone back to his post out front.

A photograph of the king hangs on the wall behind the desk. Waterhouse hadn’t known, until Colonel Chattan discreetly reminded him, that His Majesty’s full title was not simply By the Grace Of God of England King, but B.T.G.O.G. of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, the Isle of Man, Guernsey, Jersey, Outer Qwghlm, and Inner Qwghlm King.

Next to it is a smaller photograph of the man he is about to meet. This fellow and his family are covered rather sketchily by the
Encyclopedia,
which is decades old, and so Waterhouse has had to do some additional background research. The man is related to the Windsors in a way so convoluted that it can only be expressed using advanced genealogical vocabulary.

He was born Graf Heinrich Karl Wilhelm Otto Friedrich von Übersetzenseehafenstadt, but changed his name to Nigel St. John Gloamthorpby, a.k.a. Lord Woadmire, in 1914. In his photograph, he looks every inch a von Übersetzenseehafenstadt, and he is entirely free of the cranial geometry problem so evident in the older portraits. Lord Woadmire is not related to the original ducal line of Qwghlm, the Moore family (Anglicized from the Qwghlmian clan name Mnyhrrgh) which had been terminated in 1888 by a spectacularly improbable combination of schistosomiasis, suicide, long-festering Crimean war wounds, ball lightning, flawed cannon, falls from horses, improperly canned oysters, and rogue waves.

The tea takes some time in coming and Lord Woadmire does not seem to be in any particular hurry to win the war either, so Waterhouse makes a circuit of the room, pretend
ing to care about the paintings. The biggest one depicts a number of bruised and lacerated Romans dragging their sorry asses up onto a rocky and unwelcoming shore as splinters of their invasion fleet wash up around them. Front and center is a particular Roman who looks no less noble for wear and tear. He is seated wearily on a high rock, a broken sword dangling from one enervated hand, gazing longingly across several miles of rough water towards a shining, paradisiacal island. This isle is richly endowed with tall trees and flowering meadows and green pastures, but even so it can be identified as Outer Qwghlm by the Three Sghrs towering above it. The isle is guarded by a forbidding castle or two; its pale, almost Caribbean beaches are lined with the colorful banners of a defending host which (one can only assume) has just given the Roman invaders a bit of rough handling which they will not soon forget. Waterhouse does not bother to bend down and squint at the plaque; he knows that the subject of the painting is Julius Cæsar’s failed and probably apocryphal attempt to add the Qwghlm Archipelago to the Roman Empire, the farthest from Rome he ever got and the least good idea he ever had. To say that the Qwghlmians have not forgotten the event is like saying that Germans can sometimes be a little prickly.

“Where Caesar failed, what hope has Hitler?”

Waterhouse turns towards the voice and discovers Nigel St. John Gloamthorpby a.k.a. Lord Woadmire, a.k.a. the Duke of Qwghlm. He is not a tall man. Waterhouse goose-steps through the carpet to shake his hand. Though Colonel Chattan briefed him on proper forms of address when meeting a duke, Waterhouse can no more remember this than he can diagram the duke’s family tree, so he decides to structure all of his utterances so as to avoid referring to the duke by name or pronoun. This will be a fun game and make the time go faster.

“It is quite a painting,” Waterhouse says, “a heck of a deal.”

“You will find the islands themselves no less extraordinary, and for the same reasons,” the duke says obliquely.

The next time Waterhouse is really aware of what’s going on, he is sitting in the duke’s office. He thinks that there has
been some routine polite conversation along the way, but there is never any point in actually monitoring that kind of thing. Tea is offered to him, and is accepted, for the second or third time, but fails to materialize.

“Colonel Chattan is in the Mediterranean, and I have been sent in his place,” Waterhouse explains, “not to waste time covering logistical details, but to convey our enormous gratitude for the most generous offer made in regards to the castle.” There! No pronouns, no gaffe.

“Not at all!” The duke is taking the whole thing as an affront to his generosity. He speaks in the unhurried, dignified cadences of a man who is mentally thumbing through a German-English dictionary. “Even setting aside my own… patriotic obligations… cheerfully accepted, of course… it has almost become almost… terribly fashionable to have a whole… crew… of… uniformed fellows and whatnot running around in one’s… pantry.”

“Many of the great houses of Britain are doing their bit for the War,” Waterhouse agrees.

“Well… by all means, then… use it!” the duke says. “Don’t be… reticent! Use it… thoroughly! Give it a good… working over! It has… survived… a thousand Qwghlm winters and it will… survive your worst.”

“We hope to have a small detachment in place very soon,” Waterhouse says agreeably.

“May I… know… to satisfy my own… curiosity… what sort of… ?” the duke says, and trails off.

Waterhouse is ready for this. He is so ready that he has to hold back for a moment and try to make a show of discretion. “Huffduff.”

“Huffduff!?”

“HFDF. High-Frequency Direction Finding. A technique for locating distant radio transmitters by triangulating from several points.”

“I should have… thought you knew where all the… German… transmitters were.”

“We do, except for the ones that move.”

“Move!?” The duke furrows his brow tremendously, imagining a giant radio transmitter—building, tower and all—mounted on four parallel railroad tracks like Big
Bertha, creeping across a steppe, drawn by harnessed Ukrainians.