Cryptonomicon

Let's see Turing explain this one! Because what this proves, beyond all doubt, is that there is a God, and furthermore that He is a personal friend and supporter of Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse. The opening line problem is solved, neat as a theorem. Q. E. D., baby. Waterhouse strides forward confidently, sacrificing another square centimeter of epidermis to his ravenous shoes. As he later reconstructs it, he has, without meaning to, interpolated himself between Mary cCmndhd and her date, and perhaps jostled the latter's elbow and forced him to spill his drink. It is a startling move that quiets the group. Waterhouse opens his mouth and says "Gxnn bhldh sqrd m!"

"Hey, friend!" says Mary's date. Waterhouse turns towards the sound of the voice. The sloppy grin draped across his face serves as a convenient bulls eye, and Mary's date's fist homes in on it unerringly. The bottom half of Waterhouse's head goes numb, his mouth fills with a warm fluid that tastes nutritious. The vast concrete floor somehow takes to the air, spins like a flipped coin, and bounces off the side of his head. All four of Waterhouse's limbs seem to be pinned against the floor by the weight of his torso.

Some sort of commotion is happening up on that remote plane of most people's heads, five to six feet above the floor, where social interaction traditionally takes place. Mary's date is being hustled off to the side by a large powerful fellow--it is hard to recognize faces from this angle, but a good candidate would be Rod. Rod is shouting in Qwghlmian.

Actually, everyone is shouting in Qwghlmian--even the ones who are speaking in English--because Waterhouse's speech-recognition centers have a bad case of jangly ganglia. Best to leave that fancy stuff for later, and concentrate on more basic phylogenesis: it would be nice, for example, to be a vertebrate again. After that quadrupedal locomotion might come in handy.

A perky Qwghlmian-Australian fellow in an RAAF uniform steps up and grabs his right anterior fin, jerking him up the evolutionary ladder before he's ready. He is not doing Waterhouse a favor so much as he is getting Waterhouse's face up where it can be better scrutinized. The RAAF fellow shouts at him (because the music has started again):

"Where'd you learn to talk like that?"

Waterhouse doesn't know where to begin; god forbid he should offend these people again. But he doesn't have to. The RAAF guy screws up his face in disgust, as if he had just noticed a six-foot tapeworm trying to escape from Waterhouse's throat. "Outer Qwghlm?" he asks.

Waterhouse nods. The confused and shocked faces before him collapse into graven masks. Inner Qwghlmians! Of course! The inner islanders are perennially screwed, hence have the best music, the most entertaining personalities, but are constantly being shipped off to Barbados to chop sugar cane, or to Tasmania to chase sheep, or to--well, to the Southwest Pacific to be pursued through the jungle by starving Nips draped with live satchel charges.

The RAAF chap forces himself to smile, chucks Waterhouse gently on the shoulder. Someone in this group is going to have to take the unpleasant job of playing diplomat, smoothing it all over, and with the true Inner Qwghlmian's nose for a shit job, RAAF boy has just volunteered. "With us," he explains brightly, "what you just said isn't a polite greeting."

"Oh," Waterhouse says, "what did I say, then?"

"You said that while you were down at the mill to lodge a complaint about a sack with a weak seam that sprung loose on Thursday, you were led to understand, by the tone of the proprietor's voice, that Mary's great-aunt, a spinster who had a loose reputation as a younger woman, had contracted a fungal infection in her toenails."

There is a long silence. Then everyone speaks at once. Finally a woman's voice breaks through the cacophony: "No, no!" Waterhouse looks; it's Mary. "I understood him to say that it was at the pub, and that he was there to apply for a job catching rats, and that it was my neighbor's dog that had come down with rabies."

"He was at the basilica for confession--the priest--angina--" someone shouts from the back. Then everyone talks at once: "The dockside--Mary's half-sister--leprosy--Wednesday--complaining about a loud party!"

There's a strong arm around Waterhouse's shoulders, turning him away from all for this. He cannot turn his head to see who owns this limb, because his vertebrae have again become unstacked. He figures out that it's Rod, nobly taking his poor addled Yank roommate under his wing. Rod pulls a clean hanky from his pocket and puts it up to Waterhouse's mouth, then takes his hand away. The hanky sticks to his lip, which is now shaped like a barrage balloon.

That's not the only decent thing he does. He even gets Waterhouse a drink, and finds him a chair. "You know about the Navajos?" Rod asks.

"Huh?"