Now, finally, he gets it: the churches are merely one branch of the ECC. And what they are doing, when they fulminate about sex, is trying to make sure that all the young people fall in line with the ECC's program.
So, what is the end result of the ECC's efforts? Waterhouse stares at the ceiling, which is starting to become fuzzily visible as the sun rises in the west, or the north, or wherever the hell it rises here in the Southern Hemisphere. He takes a quick inventory of the world and finds that basically the ECC is running the entire planet, good countries and bad countries alike. That all successful and respected men are minions of the ECC, or at least are so scared of it that they pretend to be. Non-ECC members live on the fringes of society, like prostitutes, or have been driven deep underground and must waste tremendous amounts of time and energy keeping up a false front. If you knuckle under and become a minion of the ECC, you get to have a career, a family, kids, wealth, house, pot roasts, clean laundry, and the respect of all the other ECC minions. You have to pay dues in the form of chronic nagging sexual irritation which can only be relieved by, and at the discretion and convenience of, one person, the person designated for this role by the ECC: your wife. On the other hand, if you reject the ECC and its works, you can't, by definition, have a family, and your career options are limited to pimp, gangster, and forty-year enlisted sailor.
Hell, it's not even that bad of a conspiracy. They build churches and universities, educate kids, install swingsets in parks. Sometimes they throw a war and kill ten or twenty million people, but it's a drop in the bucket compared to stuff like influenza-which the ECC campaigns against by nagging everyone to wash their hands and cover their mouths when sneezing.
The alarm clock. Rod rolls out of bed like it's a Nip air raid. Waterhouse stares at the ceiling for another few minutes, dithering. But he knows where he's going, and there's no point in wasting any more time. He's going to church, and not exactly because he has renounced Satan and all his works, but because he wants to fuck Mary. He almost can't help flinching when he says (to himself) this terrible-sounding thing. But the weird thing about church is that it provides a special context within which it is perfectly okay to want to fuck Mary. As long as he goes to church, he can want to fuck Mary as much as he wants, he can spend all of his time, in and out of church, thinking about fucking Mary. He can let her know that he wants to fuck her as long as he finds a more oblique way of phrasing it. And if he jumps through certain hoops (hoops of gold) he can even fuck Mary in actuality, and it will all be perfectly acceptable-at no time will he have to feel the slightest trace of shame or guilt.
He rolls out of bed, startling Rod, who (being some sort of jungle commando) is easily startled. 'I'm going to fuck your cousin until the bed collapses into a pile of splinters,' Waterhouse says.
Actually, what he says is 'I'm going to church with you.' But Waterhouse, the cryptologist, is engaging in a bit of secret code work here. He is using a newly invented code, which only he knows. It will be very dangerous if the code is ever broken, but this is impossible since there is only one copy, and it's in Waterhouse's head. Turing might be smart enough to break the code anyway, but he's in England, and he's on Waterhouse's side, so he'd never tell
A few minutes later, Waterhouse and cCmndhd go downstairs, headed for 'church,' which in Waterhouse's secret code, means 'headquarters of the Mary-fucking campaign of 1944.'
As they step out into the cool morning air they can hear Mrs. McTeague bustling into their bedroom to strip their beds and inspect their sheets. Waterhouse smiles, thinking that he has just gotten away with something; the damning and overwhelming evidence found on his bed linens will be neatly cancelled out by the fact that he got up early and went to church.
He is expecting a prayer-group meeting in the basement of a dry-goods store, but it turns out that the Inner Qwghlmians got banished to Australia in droves. Many of them settled in Brisbane. In the downtown they managed to construct a United Ecclesiastical Church out of rough hewn beige sandstone. It would look big, solid, and almost opulent if it were not directly across the street from the Universal Ecclesiastical Church, which is twice as big and made of smooth-faced limestone. Outer Qwghlmians, dressed in dour blacks and greys, and frequently in navy uniforms, shuffle up the wide, time-blackened steps of the Universal Ecclesiastical Church, occasionally turning their heads to throw disapproving looks across the street at the Inner Qwghlmians, who are actually dressed for the season (it is summer in Australia) or in Army uniforms. Waterhouse can see that what really pisses them off is the sound of the music that vents from the United Ecclesiastical Church whenever its red enameled front doors are hauled open. The choir is practicing and the organ is playing. But he can tell from half a block away that something's wrong with the instrument.
The look of the Inner Qwghlmian women in their pastel dresses and bright bonnets is reassuring. These do not look like people who engage in human sacrifice. Waterhouse tries to spring lightly up the steps as if he really wants to be here. Then he remembers that he
The churchgoers are all talking in Qwghlmian, greeting each other and saying nice things to Rod, who is evidently well thought of. Waterhouse has no idea what they are saying, and finds it comforting to know that most of them don't either. He strolls into the central aisle of the church, stares down its vault to the altar, the choir behind it, singing beautifully; Mary is there, in the alto section, exercising those pipes of hers, which are framed attractively by the satin stole of her chorister's uniform. Above and behind the choir, a big old pipe organ spreads its tarnished wings, like a stuffed and mounted eagle that's been sitting in a damp attic for fifty years. It wheezes and hisses asthmatically, and emits bizarre, discordant drones when certain stops are used; this happens when a valve is stuck open, and it is called a cipher. Waterhouse knows all about ciphers.
Notwithstanding the pathetic organ, the choir is spectacular, and builds to a stirring six-part-harmony climax as Waterhouse ambles up the aisle, wondering whether his erection is visible. A shaft of light comes in through the stained-glass rosette above the organ pipes and pinions Waterhouse in its gaudy beam. Or maybe it just feels that way, because Waterhouse has it all figured out now.
Waterhouse is going to fix the church's organ. This project will be sure to have side benefits for his own organ, a single-pipe instrument that needs attention just as badly.
It turns out that, like all ethnic groups that have been consistently screwed for a long time, the Inner Qwghlmians have great music. Not only that, they actually have fun in church. The minister actually has a sense of humor. It's about as tolerable as church could ever be. Waterhouse hardly pays attention because he is doing a lot of staring: first, at Mary, then at the organ (trying to figure out how it is engineered) then back to Mary for a while.
He is outraged and offended, after the service, when the powers that be are reluctant to let him, a total stranger and a Yank to boot, begin ripping off access panels and meddling with the inner workings of the organ. The minister is a good judge of character-a little too good to suit Waterhouse. The organist (and hence ultimate authority on all matters organic) looks to have been shipped over here with the very first load of convicts after having been convicted, in the Old Bailey, of talking too loud, bumping into things, not tying his shoelaces properly, and having dandruff so in excess of Society's unwritten standards as to offend the dignity of the Queen and of the Empire.
It all leads to an unbearably tense and complicated meeting in a Sunday school classroom near the offices of the minister, who is called the Rev. Dr. John Mnrh. He is a stout red-faced chap who clearly would prefer to have his head in a tun of ale but who is putting up with all of this because it's good for his immortal soul.
This meeting essentially becomes a venue within which the organist, Mr. Drkh, can vent his opinions on the sneakiness of the Japanese, why the invention of the well-tempered tuning system was a bad idea and how all music written since has been a shabby compromise, the sterling qualities of the General, the numerological significance of the lengths of various organ pipes, how the excessive libido of American troops might be controlled with certain dietary supplements, how the hauntingly beautiful modes of traditional Qwghlmian music are particularly ill-suited to the well-tempered tuning system, how the king's dodgy Germanic relatives are plotting to take over the Empire and turn it over to Hitler, and, first and foremost, that Johann Sebastian Bach was a bad musician, a worse composer, an evil man, a philanderer, and the figurehead of a worldwide conspiracy, headquartered in Germany, that has been slowly taking over the world for the last several hundred years, using the well-tempered tuning system as a sort of carrier frequency on which its ideas (which originate with the Bavarian illuminati) can be broadcast into the minds of everyone who listens to music-especially the music of Bach. And-by the way-how this conspiracy may best be fought off by playing and listening to traditional Qwghlmian music, which, in case Mr. Drkh didn't make this perfectly clear, is wholly incompatible with well-tempered tuning because of its haunting and beautiful, but numerologically perfect, scale.
'Your thoughts on numerology are most interesting,' Waterhouse says loudly, running Mr. Drkh off the
