Cryptonomicon

'Ah!' she says. 'I am Harriett Qrtt.' She holds out her hand.

'Hugh Hughes,' Waterhouse says, and shakes.

'Pleasure.

'All mine.

'You'll be needing a place to stay, I suppose.' She blushes ostentatiously. 'Forgive me. I just assume you are bound for Outer.' That's Outer, as in Outer Qwghlm. Right now, they are on Inner Qwghlm.

'Quite right, actually,' Waterhouse says.

Like every other place name in the British Isles, Inner and Outer Qwghlm represent a gross misnomer with ancient and probably comical origins. Inner Qwghlm is hardly even an island; it is joined to the main land by a sandbar that used to come and go with the tides, but that has been beefed up with a causeway that carries a road and the railway line. Outer Qwghlm is twenty miles away.

'My husband and I operate a small bed and breakfast,' Mrs. Qrtt says. 'We should be honored to have an Asdic man stay with us.' Asdic is simply the British acronym for what Yanks refer to as sonar, but every time the word is mentioned in the presence of Alan, he gets a naughty look on his face and goes on an unstoppable punning tear.

So he ends up at the Qrtt residence. Waterhouse and Mr. and Mrs. Qrtt spend the evening huddled round the only source of heat: a coal-burning toaster that has been bricked into the socket of an old fireplace. Every so often Mr. Qrtt opens the door and pelts the ashes with a mote of coal. Mrs. Qrtt ferries out the chow and spies on Waterhouse. She notices his slightly asymmetrical walk and manages to ferret out that he had a spot of polio at one point. He plays the organ-they have a pedal powered harmonium in the parlor-and she remarks on that.

* * *

Waterhouse first sees Outer Qwghlm through a scupper. He doesn't even know what a scupper is, except a modality of vomiting. The ferry crew gave him and the other half-dozen passengers detailed vomiting instructions before they fought past the Utter Maurby breakwater, the salient point being that if you leaned over the rail, you would almost certainly be swept overboard. Much better to get down on all fours and aim at a scupper. But half the time when Waterhouse peers down one of these, he sees not water but some distant point on the horizon, or seagulls chasing the ferry, or the distinctive three-pronged silhouette of Outer Qwghlm.

The prongs, called Sghrs, are basaltic columns. This being the middle of the Second World War, and Outer Qwghlm being the part of the British Isles closest to the action of the Battle of the Atlantic, they are now flecked with little white radio shacks and hairy with antennas. There is a fourth sghr, much lower than the others and easily mistaken for a mere hillock, that rises above Outer Qwghlm's only harbor (and, indeed, only settlement, not counting the naval base on the other side). On top of this fourth sghr is the castle that is the nominal home of Nigel St. John Gloamthorpby-Woadmire and that is to be the new headquarters of Detachment 2702.

Five minutes' walk encompasses the whole town. A furious rooster chases a feeble sheep down the main street. There is snow at the higher elevations, but just grey slush down here, which is indistinguishable from the grey cobblestones until you step on it and fall down on your ass. The Encyclopedia Qwghlmianahad made much use of the definite article-the Town, the Castle, the Hotel, the Pub, the Pier. Waterhouse stops in at the Shithouse to deal with some aftershocks of the sea voyage, and then walks up the Street. The Automobile pulls up alongside and offers him a ride; it turns out to be the Taxi, too. It takes him round the Park where he notices the Statue (ancient Qwghlmians thrashing hapless Vikings); this gesture that does not go unnoted by the Taxi Driver, who veers into the Park to give him a better look.

The Statue is the sort that has a great deal to say and covers a correspondingly large expanse of real estate. Its pedestal is a slab of native basalt, covered on at least one side with what Waterhouse recognizes, from the Encyclopedia,as Qwghlmian runes. To an ignorant philistine, these might look like an endless, random series of sans-serif Xs, Is, Vs, hyphens, asterisks, and upside-down Vs. But it is an enduring source of pride to-

'We didn't care for those Romans and that Julius Caesar fellow,' observes the taxi driver, 'and we weren't too taken with their alphabet either.'

Indeed the Encyclopedia Qwghlmianafeatures a lengthy article about the local system of runes. The author of this article has such a chip on his shoulder that the thing is almost physically painful to read. The Qwghlmian practice of eschewing the use of curves and loops, forming all glyphs out of straight lines, far from being crude-as some English scholars have asserted-gives the script a limpid austerity. It is an admirably functional style of writing in a place where (after all the trees were cut down by the English) most of the literate intellectual class suffered from chronic bilateral frostbite.

Waterhouse has rolled down the window so that he can get a clearer view; apparently someone has lost the Squeegee. The chill breeze washing over his face finally begins to clear away his seasickness, to the point where he begins to wonder how he should go about making contact with the Whore.

Then he realizes, with some disappointment, that if the Whore has half a brain in her head, she's across the island at the naval base.

'Who's the wretch?' Waterhouse asks. He points to a corner of the statue, where a scrawny, downtrodden loser, with an iron collar welded around his neck and a chain dangling from that, quivers and quails at the carnage being meted out by the strapping Qwghlmian he-men. Waterhouse already knows the answer, but he can't resist asking.

'Hakh!' blurts the taxi driver, as if he is working up a loogie. 'He is from Inner Qwghlm, I can only suppose.'

'Of course.'

This exchange seems to have put the driver into a foul and vengeful mood that can only be assuaged with some fast driving. There are a dozen or more switchbacks in the road up to the Castle, each one glazed with black ice and fraught with mortal danger. Waterhouse is glad he's not walking it, but the switchbacks and the skating motion of the taxi revive his motion sickness.

'Hakh!' the driver says, when they are about three-quarters of the way up, and nothing has been said for several minutes. 'They practically laid out the welcome mat for the Romans. They spread their legs for the Vikings. There are probably Germans over there now!'

'Speaking of bile,' Waterhouse says, 'I need you to pull over. I'll walk from here.'

The driver is startled and miffed, but he relents when Waterhouse explains that the alternative is a lengthy cleanup job. He even drives Duffel up to the top of the sghr and drops it off.

Detachment 2702 arrives at the Castle some fifteen minutes later in the person of Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse USN, who is serving as the advance party. The walk gives him time to get his story straight, to get himself into character. Chattan has warned him that there will be servants, and that they will notice things, and that they will gossip. It would be much more convenient if the servants could simply be packed off to the mainland for the duration, but this would be a discourtesy to the duke. 'You will,' Chattan said, 'have to work out a modus vivendi.'Once Waterhouse had looked this term up, he agreed heartily.

The castle is a mound of rubble about the size of the Pentagon. The lee corner has been fitted out with a functional roof, electrical wiring, and a few other frills such as doors and windows. In this area, which is all Waterhouse gets to see for that first afternoon and evening, you can forget you are on Outer Qwghlm and pretend that you are in some greener and balmier place such as the Scottish Highlands.

The next morning, accompanied by the butler, Ghnxh, he strikes out into other parts of the building and is delighted to find that you can't even reach them without going outside; the internal connecting passages have been mortared shut to stanch the seasonal migrations of skrrghs (pronounced something like 'skerries'), the frisky, bright-eyed, long-tailed mammals that are the mascot of the islands. This compartmentalization, while inconvenient, will be good for security.

Both Waterhouse and Ghnxh are encased in planklike wrappings of genuine Qwghlm wool, and the latter carries the GALVANICK LUCIPHER. The Galvanick Lucipher is of antique design. Ghnxh, who is about a hundred years old, can only smile in condescension at Waterhouse's U.S. Navy flashlight. In the sotto vocetones one might use to correct an enormous social gaffe, he explains that the galvanick lucipher is of such a superior design as to make any further reference to the Navy model a grating embarrassment for everyone concerned. He leads Waterhouse back to a special room behind the room behind the room behind the