Cryptonomicon

'Ages and ages? Really?'

'Yeah.'

'How long?'

'Well, last time I saw Robin he was just starting kindergarten. And I saw M.A. more recently-he was probably eight or ten.'

'And you are related to them how, one more time?'

'I think Robin is my second cousin. And I could explain M.A.'s relationship to me, but you'd start shifting around and heaving great big sighs before I got more'n halfway through it.'

'So, to these guys, you are a shirttail relative they glimpsed once or twice when they were tiny little boys.'

Amy shrugs. 'Yeah.'

'So, like what possessed them to come out here?'

Amy looks blank.

'I mean,' Randy says, 'from the general attitude they copped, when they fishtailed to a stop in the middle of my front yard and leapt out of their red-hot, bug-encrusted vehicle, fresh from Tennessee, obviously the number one mission objective was to ensure that the flower of Shaftoe womanhood was being treated with all of the respect, decency, worshipfulness, et cetera, properly owed it.'

'Oh. That's not really the vibe that I got.'

'Oh, it wasn't?Really?'

'No. Randy, my family sticks together. Just 'cause we haven't seen each other for a while doesn't mean our obligations have lapsed.'

'Well, you are making an implied comparison to my family here which I'm not that crazy about and maybe we should talk about later. But as far as those family obligations go, I do certainlythink that one of those obligations is to preserve your notional virginity.'

'Who says it's notional?'

'It's gotto be notional to thembecause they haven't seen you for most of your life. That's all I mean.'

'I think you are blowing the perceived sexual aspect of this thing way out of proportion,' Amy says. 'Which is perfectly normal, for a guy, and I don't think less of you for it.'

'Amy, Amy. Have you done the math on this thing?'

'Math?'

'Counting the trip through Manila traffic to NAIA, the check-in procedure, and formalities at SFO, my entire journey from Manila to San Francisco took me something like eighteen hours. Twenty for you. Another four hours to get down to my house. Then eight hours after we got to my house, in the middle of the night, Robin and Marcus Aurelius showed up. Now, if we assume that the Shaftoe family grapevine functions at the speed of light, it means that these guys, shooting hoops in front of their trailer in Tennessee, received a news flash that a female Shaftoe was in some kind of guy-related personal distress at about the time you jumped off of Glory IVand hopped in a taxi in Manila.'

'I sent e-mail from Glory,'Amy says.

'To whom?'

'The Shaftoe mailing list.'

'God!' Randy says, slapping himself in the face. 'What did this e-mail say?'

'Can't remember,' Amy says. 'That I was headed for California. I might have made some kind of backhanded remark about a young man I wanted to talk to. I was kinda upset at the time and I can't remember exactly what I have said.'

'I think you said something like 'I am going to California where Randall Lawrence Waterhouse, who has AIDS, is going to forcibly sodomize me upon arrival.' '

'No, it was nothing of the kind.'

'Well, I think that someone read it between the lines. So, anyway, Ma or Auntie Em or someone emerges from the side door, shaking flour out of her gingham apron-I'm imagining this.'

'I can tell.'

'And she says, 'Boys, your umpteenth cousin thrice removed America Shaftoe has sent us e-mail from Uncle Doug's boat in the South China Sea stating that she is having some kind of dispute with a young man and it's not out of the question that she might need someone around to lend her a hand. In California. Would you swing by and look in on her?' And they put away their basketball and say, 'Yes ma'am, what city and address?' and she says, 'Never you mind, just get on Interstate 40 and drive west not failing to maintain an average speed of between one hundred and a hundred and twenty percent of the legal speed limit and call me collect from a Texaco somewhere and I will supply you with specific target coordinates later,' and they say, 'Yes ma'am' and thirty seconds later they are laying a patch in the driveway as they pull five gees backing out of the garage and thirty hours subsequently they are in my front yard, shining their twenty-five-D-cell flashlights into my eyes and asking me a lot of pointed questions. Do you have any idea how far the drive is?'

'I have no idea.'

'Well, according to M.A.'s Rand McNally Road Atlas, it is an even twenty-one hundred miles.'

'So?'

'So that means that they maintained an average speed of seventy miles an hour for a day and a half'

'A day and a quarter,' Amy says.

'Do you have any idea how difficult that is to do?'

'Randy, you push on the gas pedal and keep it between the lines. How hard is that?'

'I'm not saying it's an intellectual challenge. I'm saying that this willingness to, e.g., urinate into empty McDonald's cups rather than stop the car, suggests a kind of urgency. Passion, even. And being a guy, and having had the experience of being a guy of the age of M.A. and Robin, I can tell you that one of the few things that gets your blood boiling to that extent is this notion of some female you love being done wrong by a strange male.'

'Well, what if they did?' Amy says. 'Now they think you're okay.'

'They do? Really?'

'Yeah. The financial disaster aspect makes you more human. More approachable. And it excuses a lot.'

'Do I need an excuse for something?'

'Not in my book.'

'But to the extent they thought I was a rapist, it kind of palliates my image problems.'

A brief lull in the conversation ensues. Then Amy pipes up.

'So tell me about your family, Randy.'

'In the next couple of days, you're going to learn a great deal more than I would like you to about my family. And so am I. So let's talk about something else.'

'Okay. Let's talk about business.'

'Okay. You go first.'

'We got a German television producer coming out next week to have a look at the U-boat. They might do a documentary about it. We have already hosted several German print journalists.'

'You have?'

'It has caused a sensation in Germany.'

'Why?'

'Because no one can figure out how it got there. Now, your turn.'

'We are going to launch our own currency.' By saying this, Randy is divulging proprietary information to someone not authorized to hear it. But he does it anyway, because opening himself up to Amy in this way, making himself vulnerable to her, gives him a hard-on.

'How do you go about that? Don't you have to be a government?'

'No. You have to be a bank. Why do you think they're called bank notes?' Randy is fully aware of the insanity of divulging secret business information to a woman solely for purposes of sexual self-titillation but it is in the nature of things, right now, that he doesn't especially care.

'Okay but still, usually it's done by governmentbanks, right?'