Cryptonomicon

The transposition is an awkward business at first and he hits a few wrong notes, but then it comes naturally and he transitions from the toccata into the fugue with tremendous verve and confidence. Gouts of dust and salvos of mouse droppings explode from the pipes as Waterhouse invokes whole ranks that have not been used in decades. Many of these are big bad loud reed stops that are difficult to tune. Waterhouse senses the pumping machinery straining to keep up with this unprecedented demand for power. The choir loft is suffused with a brilliant glow as the dust flung out of the choked pipes fills the air and catches the light coming through the rose window. Waterhouse muffs a pedal line, spitefully kicks off his terrible shoes and begins to tread the pedals the way he used to back in Virginia, with his bare feet, the trajectory of the bass line traced out across the wooden pedals in lines of blood from his exploded blisters. This baby has some nasty thirty-two-foot reed stops in the pedals, real earthshakers, probably put there specifically to irritate the Outer Qwghlmians across the street. None of the people who go to this church have ever heard these stops called into action, but Waterhouse puts them to good use now, firing off power chords like salvos from the mighty guns of the battleship Iowa.

All during the service, during the sermon and the scripture readings and the prayers, when he wasn't thinking about fucking Mary, he was thinking about how he was going to fix this organ. He was thinking back to the organ he worked on in Virginia, how the stops enabled the flow of air to the different ranks of pipes and how the keys on the keyboards activated all of the pipes that were enabled. He has this whole organ visualized in his head now, and while he is pounding through to the end of the figure, the top of his skull comes off, the filtered red light pours in, he sees the entire machine in his mind, as if in an exploded draftsman's view. Then it transforms itself into a slightly different machine--an organ that runs on electricity, with ranks of vacuum tubes here, and a grid of relays there. He has the answer, now, to Turing's question, the question of how to take a pattern of binary data and bury it into the circuitry of a thinking machine so that it can be later disinterred.

Waterhouse knows how to make electric memory. He must go write a letter to Alan instantly!

"Excuse me," he says, and runs from the church. On his way out, he brushes past a small young woman who has been standing there gaping at his performance. When he is several blocks away, he realizes two things: that he is walking down the street barefoot, and that the young woman was Mary cCmndhd. He will have to circle back later and get his shoes and maybe fuck her. But first things first!

Chapter 65 HOME

Randy opens his eyes from out of a sliding nightmare. He was in his car, driving down the Pacific Coast Highway, when something went wrong with the steering. The car began to wander, first towards the vertical stone cliff on the left and then towards the sheer drop to huge jagged rocks projecting from thrashing waves on the right. Big rocks were rolling nonchalantly across the highway. He could not steer; the only way to stop moving is to open his eyes.

He is lying on a sleeping bag on a polished maple floor that is not level, and that is why he had the sliding dream. The eye/inner ear conflict makes his body spasm, he flails to plant both hands against the plane of the floor.