Cryptonomicon

Randy still has somemoney. He cannot begin to guess how he can convey this fact to these guys without committing some grievous protocol error, so the next time they stop for gas, he asks Amy to convey it to them. He thinks (based on his hazy understanding of the rotation system) that it's his turn to be alone in a car with Amy, but if Amy is going to convey this data about the money to one of the boys, she'll need to spend the next leg with him, because it must be conveyed indirectly, which will take a while, and because of that indirectness, time will then need to be allotted for it to sink in. But three hours later, then, at the gas stop after that, it naturally follows that M.A. and Robin must be placed together in the same car, so that Robin (who now knows and understands, and who gets out of the Impala with a big grin on his face and punches Randy affably on the shoulder) can pass the message on to M.A., whose recent conversational gambits vis-à-vis Randy made no sense at all until Randy figured out that they thought of him as a beggar and that M.A. was trying in a really oblique way to find out if Randy needed to share any of M.A.'s personal toiletry items. At any rate, Randy and Amy get into the Acura and they head north into Oregon, trying to keep up with the hot rod.

"Well, it's nice to have a chance to spend some time with you," Randy says. His back is still a bit sore from where Amy struck him whilst asserting, the other morning, that expressing one's feelings was "the name of the game." So he figures he will express those aspects of his feelings least likely to get him in serious trouble.

"Ah figgered you 'n' ah'ud have plenny a tahm to chew the rag," Amy says, having reverted utterly to the tongue of her ancestors in the last couple of days. "But it has been ages and ages since I saw those two boys, and you've never seen 'em at all."

"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."