Chapter 21 QWGHLM HOUSE

Waterhouse 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 [theta]E REFORMASHUN OF ENGLISH OR[theta]OGRAFY

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 Encyclopedia Qwghlmianain 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 generistongue. In fact, the same linguistic hyperspecialization occurs here that supposedly does with the Eskimos and snow or Arabs and sand, and the Encyclopedia Qwghlmiananever 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[9]. 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-off. 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 Encyclopediadescribes as being supremely desirable and for which there is an extensive descriptive vocabulary.

The third theme of the Encyclopedia Qwghlmianais 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 Encyclopediarestates 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 Encyclopediadefines 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 pre

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[10] 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

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, pretending 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 Qwghlin 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 C

"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 rail road tracks like Big Bertha, creeping across a steppe, drawn by harnessed Ukrainians.

"Think U-boats," Waterhouse says delicately.

"Ah!" the duke says explosively. "Ah!" He leans back in his creaky leather chair, examining a whole new picture with his mind's eye. "They... pop up, do they, and send out... wireless?"

"They do."

"And you... eavesdrop."

"If only we could!" Waterhouse says. "No, the Germans have used all of that world-famous mathematical brilliance of theirs to invent ciphers that are totally unbreakable. We don't have the first idea what they are saying. But, by using huffduff, we can figure out where they are saying it from,and route our convoys accordingly."

"Ah."

"So what we propose to do is mount big rotating antennas, or aerials as you call them here, on the castle, and staff the place with huffduff boffins."

The duke frowns. "There will be proper... safeguards for lightning?"

"Naturally."

"And you are aware that you may... anticipate... ice storms as late in the year as August?"

"The Royal Qwghlm Meteorological Station's reports, as a body of work, don't leave a heck of a lot to the imagination."

"Fine, then!" the duke blusters, warming to the concept. "Use the castle, then! And give them... give them hell!"

Chapter 22 ELECTRICAL TILL CORPORATION

As evidence of the allies' slowly developing plan to kill the Axis by smothering them under a mountain of manufactured goods, there's this one pier in Sydney Harbor that is piled high with wooden crates and steel barrels: stuff that has been disgorged from the holds of ships from America, Britain, India and just left to sit there because Australia doesn't know how to digest it yet. It is not the only pier in Sydney that is choked with stuff. But because this pier isn't good for much else, it is mounded higher and the stuff is older, rustier, more infested with rats, more rimed with salt, more thickly frosted and flagrantly streaked with gull shit.

A man is picking his way over the pile, trying not to get any more of that gull shit on his khakis. He is wearing the uniform of a major in the United States Army and is badly encumbered by a briefcase. His name is Comstock.

Inside the briefcase are various identity papers, credentials, and an impressive letter from the office of The General in Brisbane. Comstock has had occasion to show all of the above to the doddering and yet queerly formidable Australian guards who, with their doughboy helmets and rifles, infest the waterfront. These men do not speak any dialect of the English language that the major can recognize and vice versa, but they can all read what is on those papers.

The sun is going down and the rats are waking up. The major has been clambering over docks all day long. He has seen enough of war and the military to know that what he is looking for will be found on the last pier that he searches, which happens to be this one. If he begins searching that pier at the near end, what he is looking for will be at the far end, and vice versa. All the more reason to stay sharp as he works his way along. After casting an eye around to make sure there are no leaking stacks of drums of aviation fuel nearby, he lights up a cigarette. War is hell, but smoking cigarettes makes it all worthwhile.

Sydney Harbor is beautiful at sunset, but he's been looking at it all day and can't really see it anymore. For lack of anything better to do, he opens up his briefcase. There's a paperback novel in there, which he's already read. And there is a clipboard which contains, in yellowed, crackling, sedimentary layers, a fossil record that only an archaeologist could unravel. It is the story of how The General, just after he got out of Corregidor and reached Australia in April, sent out a request for some stuff. How that request got forwarded to America and bounced pinball-like through the cluttered infinitude of America's military and civilian bureaucracies; how the stuff in question was duly manufactured, procured, trucked hither and yon, and caused to be placed on a ship; and finally, some evidence to the effect that said ship was in Sydney Harbor several months ago. There's no evidence that this ship ever unloaded the stuff in question, but unloading stuff is what ships always do when they reach port and so Comstock is going with that assumption for a while.

After Major Comstock finishes his cigarette, he resumes his search. Some of the papers on his clipboard specify certain magic numbers that ought to be stenciled on the outside of the crates in question; at least, that's what he's been assuming since he started this search at daybreak, and if he's wrong, he'll have to go back and search every crate in Sydney Harbor again. Actually getting a look at each crates' numbers means squeezing his body through narrow channels between crate piles and rubbing away the grease and grime that obscures the crucial data. The major is now as filthy as any combat grunt.

When he gets close to the end of the pier, his eye picks out one cluster of crates that appear to be all of the same vintage insofar as their salt encrustations are of similar thickness. Down low where the rain pools, their rough-sawn wood has rotted. Up where it is roasted by the sun, it has warped and split. Somewhere these crates must have numbers stenciled onto them, but something else has caught his eye, something that stirs Comstock's heart, just as the sight of the Stars and Stripes fluttering in the morning sun might do for a beleaguered infantryman. Those crates are proudly marked with the initials of the company that Major Comstock (and most of his comrades-in-arms up in Brisbane) worked for, before they were shunted, en masse, into the Army's Signal Intelligence Service. The letters are faded and grimy, but he would recognize them anywhere in the world: they form the logo, the corporate identity, the masthead, of ETC-the Electrical Till Corporation.

Chapter 23 CRYPT

The terminal is supposed to echo the lines of a row of Malay longhouses jammed together side by side. A freshly painted jetway gropes out like a giant lamprey and slaps its neoprene lips onto the side of the plane. The elderly Nipponese tour group makes no effort to leave the plane, respectfully leaving the aisles clear for the businessmen: You go ahead, the people we're going to visit won't mind waiting.

On his march up the jetway, humidity and jet fuel condense onto Randy's skin in equal measure, and he begins to sweat. Then he's in the terminal, which notwithstanding the Malay longhouses allusion has been engineered specifically to look like any other brand-new airport terminal in the world. The air-conditioning hits like a spike through the head. He puts his bags down on the floor and stands there for a moment, collecting his wits beneath a Leroy Neiman painting the dimensions of a volleyball court, depicting the sultan in action on a polo pony. Trapped in a window seat during a short and choppy flight, he had never made it out to the lavatory, so he goes to one now and pees so hard that the urinal emits a sort of yodeling noise.

As he steps back, perfectly satisfied, he becomes conscious of a man backing away from an adjacent urinal-one of the Nipponese businessmen who just got off the plane. A couple of months ago, the presence of this man would have ruled out Randy's taking a leak at all. Today, he didn't even notice that the guy was there. As a longtime bashful kidney sufferer, Randy is delighted to have stumbled upon the magic remedy: not to convince yourself that you are a dominating Alpha Male, but rather to be too lost in your thoughts to notice other people around you. Bashful kidney is your body's way of telling you that you're thinking too hard, that you need to get off the campus and go get a fucking job.

"You were looking at the Ministry of Information site?" the businessman says. He is in a perfect charcoal-grey pinstripe suit, which he wears just as easily and comfortably as Randy does his souvenir t-shirt from the fifth Hackers Conference, surfer's jams, and Teva sandals.

"Oh!" Randy blurts, annoyed with himself. "I completely forgot to look for it." Both men laugh. The Nipponese man produces a business card with some deft sleight-of-hand. Randy has to rip open his nylon-and-velcro wallet and delve for his. They exchange cards in the traditional Asian two-handed style, which Avi has forced Randy to practice until he gets it nearly right. They bow at each other, triggering howls from the nearest couple of computerized self-flushing urinals. The bath room door swings open and an aged Nip wanders in, a precursor of the silver horde.

Nip is the word used by Sergeant Sean Daniel McGee, U.S. Army, Retired, to refer to Nipponese people in his war memoir about Kinakuta, a photocopy of which document Randy is carrying in his bag. It is a terrible racist slur. On the other hand, people call British people Brits, and Yankees Yanks, all the time. Calling a Nipponese person a Nip is just the same thing, isn't it? Or is it tantamount to calling a Chinese person a Chink? During the hundreds of hours of meetings, and megabytes of encrypted e-mail messages, that Randy, Avi, John Cantrell, Tom Howard, Eberhard F

This particular Nipponese individual is identified, on his card, as GOTO Furudenendu ("Ferdinand Goto"). Randy, who has spent a lot of time recently puzzling over organizational charts of certain important Nipponese corporations, knows already that he is a vice president for special projects (whatever that means) at Goto Engineering. He also knows that organizational charts of Nipponese companies are horseshit and that job titles mean absolutely nothing. That he has the same surname as the guy who founded the company is presumably worth taking note of.

Randy's card says that he is Randall L. WATERHOUSE ("Randy") and that he is vice president for network technology development at Epiphyte Corporation.

Goto and Waterhouse stroll out of the washroom and start to follow the baggage-claim icons that are strung across the terminal like bread-crumbs. "You have jet lag now?" Goto asks brightly-following (Randy assumes) a script from an English textbook. He's a handsome guy with a winning smile. He's probably in his forties, though Nipponese people seem to have a whole different aging algorithm so this might be way off.

"No," Randy answers. Being a nerd, he answers such questions badly, succinctly, and truthfully. He knows that Goto essentially does not care whether Randy has jet lag or not. He is vaguely conscious that Avi, if he were here, would use Goto's question as it was intended-as an opening for cheery social batter. Until he reached thirty, Randy felt bad about the fact that he was not socially deft. Now he doesn't give a damn. Pretty soon he'll probably start being proud of it. In the meantime, just for the sake of the common enterprise, he tries his best. "I've actually been in Manila for several days, so I've had plenty of time to adjust."

"Ah! Did your activities in Manila go well?" Goto fires back.

"Yes, very well, thank you," Randy lies, now that his social skills, such as they are, have had a moment to get unlimbered. "Did you come directly from Tokyo?"

Goto's smile freezes in place for a moment, and he hesitates before saying, "Yes.''

This is, at root, a patronizing reply. Goto Engineering is headquartered in Kobe and they would not fly out of the Tokyo airport. Goto said yes anyway, because, during that moment of hesitation, he realized that he was just dealing with a Yank, who, when he said "Tokyo," really meant "the Nipponese home islands" or "wherever the hell you come from."

"Excuse me," Randy says, "I meant to say Osaka."

Goto grins brilliantly and seems to execute a tiny suggestion of a bow. "Yes! I came from Osaka today."

Goto and Waterhouse drift apart from each other at the luggage claim, exchange grins as they breeze through immigration, and run into each other at the ground transportation section. Kinakutan men in brilliant white quasinaval uniforms with gold braid and white gloves are buttonholing passengers, proffering transportation to the local hotels.

"You are staying at the Foote Mansion also?" Goto says. That being theluxury hotel in Kinakuta. But he knows the answer already-tomorrow's meeting has been planned as exhaustively as a space shuttle launch.

Randy hesitates. The largest Mercedes-Benz he's ever seen has just pulled up to the curb, condensed moisture not merely fogging its windows but running down them in literal streamlines. A driver in Foote Mansion livery has erupted from it to divest Mr. Goto of his luggage, Randy knows that he need only make a subtle move toward that car and he will be whisked to a luxury hotel where he can take a shower, watch TV naked while drinking a hundred-dollar bottle of French wine, go swimming, get a massage.