Cryptonomicon

"Father John snaps awake, and Mr. Drkh looks as if he's just taken a fifty caliber round in the small of his back. Clearly, Mr. Drkh has had a long career of being the weirdest person in any given room, but he's about to go down in flames."

"In general, Waterhouse isn't good at just winging it, but he's tired and pissed off and horny, and this is a fucking war, and sometimes you have to. He mounts the podium, dives for a round of chalk, and starts hammering equations onto the blackboard like an ack-ack gun."

"Many of the females wouldn’t talk to him it all, or would come near him only the better to fix him with frosty glares and appraise his presumed new girlfriend. This only stands to reason, since, before she left for Yale, Charlene had the better part of a year to popularize her version of events. She has been able to structure the discourse to her advantage, just like a dead white male."

"Weirdly, the ones who adopted the sternest and most terrible Old Testament moral tone were the Modern Language Association types who believed that everything was relative and that, for example, polygamy was as valid as monogamy. The friendliest and most sincere welcome he’d gotten was from Scott, a chemistry professor, and Laura, a pediatrician, who… had one day divulged to Randy, in strict confidence, that they had been spiriting their three children off to church every Sunday morning, and even had them all baptized…Even if they thought he had done something evil, they at least had a framework, a sort of procedure manual, for dealing with transgressions."

"The hot rod's trunk is a ferrous, oily chasm all a'bang with tire chains, battered ammo boxes, and, unless Randy's eyes are playing tricks on him, a pair of samurai swords."

"M.A. is a pretty straightforward by the book type, the kind who'll get good grades and fit well into any kind of hierarchical organization. Robin, on the other hand, is more of a wild card. He has the makings of either a total loser or a successful entrepreneur. Randy has spilled a hell of a lot of information to Robin, in just a couple of days, about digital currency and the new global economy. Randy's mental state is such that he is prone to babbling aimlessly for hours at a time. Robin has hoovered it all up.""

""I mean," Randy says, "from the general attitude they copped, when they fishtailed to a stop in the middle of my front yard…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…my family sticks together. Just 'cause we haven't seen each other for a while doesn't mean our obligations have lapsed.”"

""'Scuse me, General, Bobby Shaftoe reporting for duty, sir!" "And who the hell might you be, Bobby Shaftoe?" says this general, hardly batting an eye. This guy actually has a German accent! "I've killed more Nips than seismic activity…I know Manila like the back of my hand. My wife and child are there. And I'm kinda at loose ends. Sir!" In London, in D.C., he'd never have gotten this close, and if he had, he'd have been shot or arrested. But this is SOWESPAC, and so the next morning he's on a B-17 bound for Hollandia, wearing Army green, no rank."

""Oh, the gravy boat!" Randy’s mom exclaims, and hoists up something that is more of a heavy cruiser than a boat…He pretends to admire it from the side, and then flips it over to read the words glazed on the bottom. ROYAL ALBERT LAVENDER ROSE."

"Aunt Nina says, "How about you, Randy? As the eldest son of the eldest son, you must have some feelings about this." "No doubt when my parents' time comes, they will pass on some of Grandma and Grandpa's legacy to me," Randy says. "Oh, very circumspect. Well done," Aunt Nina says. "But as the only grandchild who has any memories of your grandfather at all, there must be something here that you might like to have." "There'll probably be some odds and ends that nobody wants," Randy says. Then like an almost perfect moron — like an organism genetically engineered to be a total, stupid idiot — Randy glances directly at the Trunk. Then he tries to hide it, which only makes it more conspicuous. Aunt Nina is walking around the trunk, kind of spiraling in towards it in a rapidly decaying orbit. "Hmm. What's in here?""

"Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse's widow and five children agree that Dad did something in the war, and that's about all. There is not even agreement on whether he was in the Army or the Navy, which seems like a pretty fundamental plot point to Randy. Was he in Europe or Asia? Opinions differ."

"Until she had gotten too old to drive, Grandmother had continued to tool around Whitman in the 1965 Lincoln Continental, which was the last vehicle her husband had purchased, from Whitman's Patterson Lincoln Mercury, before his untimely death. Whenever any of her offspring came to visit, someone would discreetly slip out to the garage to yank the dipstick, which would always be mysteriously topped up with clear amber colored 10W40. It eventually turned out that her late husband had summoned the entire living male lineage of the Patterson family — four generations of them — into his hospital room and wrought some kind of unspecified pact with them… So ever since, guerilla mechanic teams had been swiping her Lincoln from the church parking lot on Sunday mornings and taking it down to Patterson's for sub rosa oil changes. The ability of the Lincoln to run flawlessly for a quarter of a century without maintenance — without even putting gasoline in the tank — had only confirmed Grandmother's opinions about the amusing superfluity of male pursuits."

"One of the most frightening things about your true nerd, for many people, is not that he's socially inept — because everybody's been there— but rather his complete lack of embarrassment about it." "Which is still kind of pathetic." "It was pathetic when they were in high school," Randy says. "Now it's something else."

"Chester's eyebrows go up. Amy glances out the window; her hair, skin, and clothes take on a pronounced reddish tinge from Doppler effect as she drops out of the conversation at relativistic velocity."

"Your younger nerd takes offense quickly when someone near him begins to utter declarative sentences, because he reads into it an assertion that he, the nerd, does not already know the information being imparted. But your older nerd has more self-confidence, and understands that people need to think out loud."

"I don't even know when they got married," Randy says. "Isn't that horrible?" "September of 1945," Amy says. "I dragged it out of her." "Wow." "Girl talk." "I didn't know you were even rigged for girl talk." "We can all do it."

"Grandmother has always had this knack for telling people the obvious in a way that is scrupulously polite but that makes the recipient feel like a butthead for having wasted her time. "It is, uh, I think, kind of unusual," Randy says, "for a man to be in both the Army and the Navy during the same war. Usually it's one or the other.” "Lawrence had both an Army uniform and a Navy uniform," Grandmother says, in the same tone she'd used to say he had both a small intestine and a large intestine, "and he would wear whichever one was appropriate.” "Of course he would," Randy says."

"They have been in suspended animation for more than fifty years, stored on a dead medium, and now Randy is going to breathe life into them again. If they flourish, it should make Randy's life a little more interesting. Not that it's devoid of interest now, but it is easier to introduce new complications than to resolve the old ones."

"He has the mysterious physical strength that seems to be common among bald men, and he has a kind of mesmerizing leadership power over the other Chinese. He somehow manages to get them excited about moving the boulder."

"That time in Seattle was a fucking nightmare. I came out of it dead broke, without anything except a girlfriend and a knowledge of UNIX." "Well, that's something," Avi says. "Normally those two are mutually exclusive."

"I think it's better to aspire to having Amy than to actually have Charlene," Avi says. "Sometimes wanting is better than having."

"It is so disorienting to have one's phone ring on an airplane that Randy doesn't know what to make of it for a while. When he finally has the thing turned on and at his ear, a voice says, "You call that subtle? You think that you and Doug Shaftoe are the only two people in the world who know that Sultan Class passengers can receive incoming phone calls?" Randy is certain he's never heard this voice before. It is the voice of an old man. Not a voice worn out or cracking with age, but a voice that's been slowly worn smooth, like the steps of a cathedral."

""You should be a billionaire, Randy. Thank god you're not.” "Why do you say that?” "Oh, because then you'd be a highly intelligent man who never has to make difficult choices, who never has to exert his mind.”"

"Randy hangs up and the phone rings again almost immediately. "Who the fuck are you?" Doug Shaftoe says, "I call you on the airplane, and I get a busy signal.""

"According to their family lore, the first Shaftoes to come to America worked as indentured servants in tobacco and cotton fields. As soon as they could get away, they did, and headed uphill. The mountains of Luzon beckon Shaftoe in the same way away from the malarial lowlands, up towards Glory."

""Jesus! Can't you recognize bullshit? Don't you think it would be a useful item to add to your intellectual toolkits to be capable of saying, when a ton of wet steaming bullshit lands on your head, 'My goodness, this appears to be bullshit'?"'"

""You know something?" fires back Doug. "During the Vietnam war, which was Old Man Comstock's brainchild, the American military presence in the Philippines was huge. That son of a bitch had soldiers and marines crawling over Luzon, supposedly on training missions. But I think they were looking for something. I think they were looking for the Primary.”"

"Another thing he did this morning was to download the current version of the Cryptonomicon from the ftp server where it lives in San Francisco. Randy's never looked at it in detail, but he has heard it contains samples of code, or at least algorithms, that he could use to attack Arethusa. With luck, the very latest public code breaking techniques in the Cryptonomicon might match up to the classified technology that Pontifex and his colleagues were employing at the NSA thirty years ago."

"The sample messages used [in the Cryptonomicon] are like ONE PLANE REPORTED LOST AT SEA and TROOPS HAVING DIFFICULTY MAINTAINING CONNECTION WITH FORTY FIFTH INFANTRY STOP which Randy finds kind of hokey until he remembers that the book was written by people who probably didn't know what "hokey" meant, who lived in some radically different pre-hokiness era where planes really did get lost at sea and the people in those planes never came back to see their families… Randy feels like a little shit when he thinks about this stuff."

"Someone is trying to send you a message," Attorney Alejandro says, scant minutes into his first interview with his new client. Randy's ready for it. "Why does everyone here have these incredibly cumbersome ways of sending me messages? Don't you people have e-mail?"

"You know what this is? It's one of those men-are-from-Mars, women-are-from-Venus things." "I have not heard of this phrase but I understand immediately what you are saying." "It's one of those American books where once you're heard the title you don't even need to read it," Randy says. "Then I won't."

"The General continues, as if he were reading this from a script. "And now, when I least expect it, I encounter you, here, many leagues distant from your assigned post, out of uniform, in a disheveled condition, accompanied by a Nipponese officer, violating the sanctity of a ladies' powder room! Shaftoe, have you no sense whatsoever of military honor? Do you not respect decorum?""

"Who's the lady in the middle? The Virgin Mary?" Randy asks. Root fingers the medallion without looking at it, and says, "Reasonable guess. But wrong. It's Athena.” "The Greek goddess? How do you square that with Christianity?" "When I phoned you the other day, how did you know it was me?" "I don't know. I just recognized you." "Recognized me? What does that mean? You didn't recognize my voice." "Is this some roundabout way of answering my question?"

"And then there is Dionysus, who isn't even fully a god — he's half human, but gets to be in the Pantheon anyway and sit on Olympus with the Gods, as if you went to the Supreme Court and found Bozo the Clown planted among the justices."

"Now in many other mythologies you can find gods that have parallels with Athena,” Enoch says. “The Sumerians had Enki, the Norse had Loki. Loki was an inventor god, but psychologically he had more in common with Ares…Native Americans had tricksters — creatures full of cunning like Coyote and Raven — in their mythologies, but they didn't have technology yet, and so they hadn't coupled the Trickster with Crafts to generate this hybrid Technologist god…Cunning people tend to attain power that uncunning people don't. And all cultures are fascinated by this. Some of them admire it… Others, like the Norse, hate it and identify it with the Devil." "Hence the strange love-hate relationship that Americans have with hackers," Randy says. "That's right. But something different happened with the Greeks. The Greeks liked their geeks. That's how we get Athena."

"People smell all kinds of ways before they have burned, but only one way afterwards."

"Goto Dengo inquires about how Randy and Avi got into their current lines of work, and how they formed their partnership. This is a reasonable question, but it forces them to explain the entire concept of fantasy role-playing games. If Randy had known this would happen, he would have thrown himself bodily through a window instead of taking a seat. But Goto Dengo instantly cross-correlates it to developments in the Nipponese game industry…By the time he's finished, Goto makes them feel like geniuses who were ten years ahead of their time. His English started out minimal and is getting better and better…as if he is slowly dusting off substantial banks of memory and processing power, nursing them on-line like tube amplifiers."

"Gold is the corpse of value," says Goto Dengo. "I don't understand." "If you want to understand, look out the Window!" says the patriarch, and sweeps his cane around in an arc that encompasses half of Tokyo. "Fifty years ago, it was flames. Now it is lights! Do you understand? The leaders of Nippon were stupid. They took all the gold out of Tokyo and buried it in holes in the ground in the Philippines! Because they thought that The General would march into Tokyo and steal it. But The General didn't care about the gold. He understood that the real gold is here—" he points to his head "—in the intelligence of the people, and in the work that they do. Getting rid of our gold was the best thing that ever happened to Nippon. It made us rich. Receiving that gold was the worst thing that happened to the Philippines. It made them poor."

"But before this war, all of this gold was out here, in the sunlight. In the world. Yet look what happened." Goto Dengo shudders. "Wealth that is stored up in gold is dead. It rots and stinks. True wealth is made every day by men getting up out of bed and going to work. By schoolchildren doing their lessons, improving their minds. Tell those men that if they want wealth, they should come to Nippon with me after the war. We will start businesses and build things."

"An idea springs out of his forehead fully formed, with no warning. This is how all the best ideas arrive. Ideas that he patiently cultivates from tiny seeds always fail to germinate or else grow up into monstrosities. Good ideas are just there all of a sudden, like angels in the Bible. You cannot ignore them just because they are ridiculous."

"Enoch Root spends some time alone with Amy and suddenly her leg gets a lot better. He explains that he applied a local folk remedy, but Amy refuses to say anything about it."

"Someone arrives from the outside world and convinces Randy he's on the cover of both Time and Newsweek. Randy doesn't consider it to be good news…It did not enter his calculations that being on the cover of newsweeklies, and people standing in the jungle holding banners with his name on them, would in any way characterize his life. Now he never wants to leave the jungle."