Cryptonomicon

Waterhouse House rises above this tableau, a high-rise dorm that no person prominent enough to have a dorm named after him would want to have named after him. Out of its climatically inappropriate acreage of picture window shines the same embarrassing, greenish light radiated by algae-scummed domestic aquaria. Janitors are going through it with machines the size of hot dog carts, wrangling these mile-long coils of thumb-thick orange power cable, steaming beer vomit and artificial popcorn-butter lipids up out of the thin grey mats that, when Randy was there, seemed not so much like carpet as references to carpeting or carpet signifiers. When Randy now pulls into the main vehicle entrance, past the big tombstone that says WATERHOUSE HOUSE, he cannot but look straight out the windshield and through the dorm's front windows and straight at a large portrait of his grandfather, Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse--one of a dozen or so figures, mostly departed now, who compete for the essentially bogus title of "inventor of the digital computer." The portrait is securely bolted to the cinderblock wall of the lobby and imprisoned under a half-inch-thick slab of Plexiglas that must be replaced every couple of years, as it fogs from repeated scrubbings and petty vandalizations. Seen through this milky cataract, Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse is grimly resplendent in full doctoral robes. He has one foot up on something, his elbow planted on the elevated knee, and has tucked his robes back behind the other arm and planted his fist on his hip. It is meant to be a sort of dynamic posture, but to Randy, who at the age of five was present for its unveiling, it has a kind of incredulous what-the-hell-are-those-little-people-doing-down-there vibe about it.

Other than the three dead cars in their shells of hardened, dust-infused ice, there is nothing in the parking lot save about two dozen items of antique furniture and a few other treasures such as a complete sterling silver tea service and a dark, time-wracked trunk. As Randy pulls in with his Uncle Red and his Aunt Nina, he notes that the Shaftoe boys have discharged the responsibilities for which they will be drawing minimum wage plus twenty-five percent all day long: namely they have moved all of these items from where Uncle Geoff and Auntie Anne placed them back to the Origin.

In a gesture of companionship and/or uncle-esque bonhomie, Uncle Red, much to the evident resentment of Aunt Nina, has claimed the Acura's passenger seat, leaving Aunt Nina marooned in the back where she evidently feels much more psychically isolated than the situation would seem to warrant. She makes lateral sliding motions trying to center the eyes of first Randy, then Uncle Red, in the rearview minor. Randy has taken to relying solely on the outside rearview mirrors during the ten-minute drive over from the hotel, because when he glances at the inside one he keeps seeing Aunt Nina's dilated pupils aimed down his throat like twin shotgun barrels. The blast of the heater/defroster forms a pocket of auditory isolation back there which on top of her already prominent feelings of near-animal rage and stress have left her volatile and obviously dangerous.

Randy heads straight for the Origin, as in the intersection of the X and Y axes, which is marked by a light pole with its very own multiton system of wind-deposited wakes and vortices.

"Look," says Uncle Red, "all we want to accomplish here is to make sure that your mother's legacy, if that is the correct term for the possessions of one who is not actually dead but merely moved into a long-term care facility, is equally divided among her five offspring. Am I right?"

This is not addressed to Randy, but he nods anyway, trying to show a united front. He has been grinding his teeth for two days straight; the places where his jaw-muscles anchor to his skull have become the foci of tremendous radiating systems of surging and pulsing pain.

"I think you'd agree that an equal division is all we want," Uncle Red continues. "Correct?"

After a worrisomely long pause, Aunt Nina nods. Randy manages to glimpse her face in the rearview as she makes another dramatic lateral move, and sees there a look of almost nauseous trepidation, as if this equal-division concept might be some Jesuitical snare.

"Now, here's the interesting part," says Uncle Red, who is the chairman of the mathematics department at Okaley College in Macomb, Illinois. "How do we define 'equal'? This is what your brothers, and brothers-in-law, and Randy and I were debating so late into the night last night. If we were dividing up a stack of currency, it would be easy, because currency has a monetary value that is printed right on its face, and the bills are interchangeable--no one gets emotionally attached to a particular dollar bill."

"This is why we should have an objective appraiser--"