Diamond Age
or
A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer
Neil Stephenson
Bred and born in the Foreign regions beyond, there is much in the administration of the Celestial Dynasty that is not perfectly comprehensible to the Barbarians, and they are continually putting forced constructions on things of which it is difficult to explain to them the real nature.
-Qiying
PART THE SECOND
Hackworth has a singular experience;
the rite of the Drummers.
In a cavernous dark space lit by many small fires, a young
woman, probably not much more than a girl, stands on a pedestal
naked except for an elaborate paint job, or maybe it is a total-body
mediatronic tattoo. A crown of leafy branches is twined around her
head, and she has thick voluminous hair spreading to her knees. She
is clutching a bouquet of roses to her breast, the thorns indenting her
flesh. Many people, perhaps thousands, surround her, drumming
madly, sometimes chanting and singing.
Into the space between the girl and the watchers, a couple of
dozen men are introduced. Some come running out of their own
accord, some look as if they've been pushed, some wander in as if
they've been walking down the street (stark naked) and gone in the
wrong door. Some are Asian, some European, some African. Some
have to be prodded by frenzied celebrants who charge out of the
crowd and shove them here and there. Eventually they form a circle
around the girl, and then the drumming builds to a deafening
crescendo, speeds up until it devolves into a rhythmless hailstorm,
and then suddenly, instantly, stops.
Someone wails something in a high, purposeful, ululating
voice. Hackworth can't understand what this person is saying. Then
there is a single massive drumbeat. More wailing. Another
drumbeat. Again. The third drumbeat establishes a ponderous
rhythm. This goes on for a while, the beat slowly speeding up. After
a certain point the wailer no longer stops between beats, he begins
to weave his rap through the bars in a sort of counterpoint. The ring
of men standing around the girl begin to dance in a very simple
shuffling motion, one way and then the other way around the girl.
Hackworth notes that all of them have erections, sheathed in
brightly colored mediatronic condoms-rubbers that actually make their own light so that the bobbing boners look like so many
cyalume wands dancing through the air.
The drumbeats and the dancing speed up very slowly. The
erections tell Hackworth why this is taking so long: He's watching
foreplay here. After half an hour or so, the excitement, phallic and
otherwise, is unbearable. The beat is now a notch faster than your
basic pulse rate, lots of other beats and counterrhythms woven
through it, and the chanting of the individual singer has become a
wild semi-organized choral phenomenon. At some point, after
seemingly nothing has happened for half an hour, everything
happens at once: The drumming and chanting explode to a new,
impossible level of intensity. The dancers reach down, grip the
flaccid reservoir tips of their radioactive condoms, stretch them out.
Someone runs out with a knife and cuts off the tips of the condoms
in a freakish parody of circumcision, exposing the glans of each
man's penis. The girl moves for the first time, tossing her bouquet
up in the air like a bride making her move toward the limo; the roses
fountain, spinning end over end, and come down individually
among the dancers, who snatch them out of the air, scrabble for
them on the floor, whatever. The girl faints, or something, falling
backward, arms out, and is caught by several of the dancers, who
hoist her body up over their heads and parade her around the circle
for a while, like a crucified body just crowbarred off the tree. She
ends up flat on her back on the ground, and one of the dancers is
between her legs, and in a very few thrusts he has finished. A couple
of others grab his arms and yank him out of there before he's even
had a chance to tell her he'll still love her in the morning, and
another one is in there, and he doesn't take very long either-all this
foreplay has got these guys in hair-trigger mode. The dancers
manage to rotate through in a few minutes. Hackworth can't see the
girl, who's completely hidden, but she's not struggling, as far as he
can tell, and they don't seem to be holding her down. Toward the
end, smoke or steam or something begins to spiral up from the
middle of the orgy. The last participant grimaces even more than the
average person who's having an orgasm, and yanks himself back
from the woman, grabbing his dick and hopping up and down and
hollering in what looks like pain. That's the signal for all of the
dancers to jump back away from the woman, who is now kind of
hard to make out, just a fuzzy motionless package wrapped in
steam.
Flames erupt from several locations, all over her body, at once,
seams of lava splitting open along her veins and the heart itself
erupting from her chest like ball lightning. Her body becomes a
burning cross spread out on the floor, the bright apex of an inverted
cone of turbulent steam and smoke. Hackworth notices that the
drumming and chanting have completely stopped. The crowd
observes a long moment of silence while the body burns. Then,
when the last of the flames have died out, an honor guard of sorts
descends from the crowd: four men in black body paint with white
skeletons painted on top of that. He notes that the woman was lying
on a square sheet of some kind when she burned. Each of the guys
grabs a corner of the sheet. Her remains tumble into the center,
powdery ash flies, flecks of red-hot coals spark. The skeleton men
carry the remains over to a fifty-five-gallon steel drum and dump it
in. There is a burst of steam and lots of sizzling noises as the hot
coals contact some kind of liquid that was in the drum. One of the
skeleton men picks up a long spoon and gives the mix a stir, then
dips a cracked and spalled University of Michigan coffee mug into
it and takes a long drink.
The other three skeleton men each drink in their turn. By now,
the spectators have formed a long queue. One by one they step
forward. The leader of the skeleton men holds the mug for them,
gives each one a sip. Then they all wander off, individually or in
small, conversing groups. Show's over.
Nell's life at Dovetail;
developments in the Primer;
a trip to the New Atlantis Clave;
she is presented to Miss Matheson;
new lodgings with an "old" acquaintance.
Nell lived in the Millhouse for several days. They gave her a
little bed under the eaves on the top floor, in a cozy place only she
was tiny enough to reach. She had her meals with Rita or Brad or
one of the other nice people she knew there. During the days she
would wander in the meadow or dangle her feet in the river or
explore the woods, sometimes going as far as the dog pod grid. She
always took the Primer with her. Lately, it had been filled with the
doings of Princess Nell and her friends in the city of King Magpie.
It kept getting more like a ractive and less like a story, and by the end of each chapter she was exhausted from all the cleverness she had expended just to get herself and her friends through another day without falling into the clutches of pirates or of King Magpie himself.
In time, she and Peter came up with a very tricky plan to sneak
into the castle, create a diversion, and seize the magic books that
were the source of King Magpie's power. This plan failed the first
time, but the next day, Nell turned the page back and tried it again,
this time with a few changes. It failed again, but not before Princess
Nell and her friends had gotten a little farther into the castle. The
sixth or seventh time, the plan worked perfectly-while King
Magpie was locked in a battle of riddles with Peter Rabbit (which
Peter won), Purple used a magic spell to smash open the door to his
secret library, which was filled with books even more magical than
the Young Lady's Illustrated Primer. Hidden inside one of those
books was a jeweled key. Princess Nell took the key, and Purple
made off with several of King Magpie's magic books while she was at it.
They made a breathtaking escape across a river into the next
country, where King Magpie could not chase them, and camped in a
nice meadow for a few days, resting. During the daytime, when the
others were just stuffed animals, Princess Nell would peruse some
of the new magic books that Purple had stolen. When she did, its
image in the illustration would zoom toward her until it filled the
page, and then the Primer itself would become that magical book
until she decided to put it away.
Nell's favorite book was a magical Atlas which she could use
to explore any land, real or imaginary. During the nighttime, Purple
spent most of her time reading a very large, crusty, worn, stained,
burnt tome entitled PANTECHNICON. This book had a built-in
hasp with a padlock. Whenever Purple wasn't using it, she locked it
shut. Nell asked to see it a few times, but Purple told her she was
too young to know such things as were written in this Book.
During this time, Duck as usual made herself busy around the
camp, tidying up and fixing their meals, doing laundry on the rocks
by the river, and mending their clothes that had become ragged
during their wanderings. Peter became restless. He was quick with
words, but he had not learned the trick of reading, and so the books
from King Magpie's library were of no use to him save as nest-lining
material. He got into the habit of exploring the surrounding
forests, particularly the ones to the north. At first he would be gone
for a few hours at a time, but once he stayed away all night and did not come back until the following noon. Then he began to go on trips for several days at a time.
Peter vanished into the north woods one day, staggering under a heavy pack, and didn't come back at all.
. . .
Nell was in the meadow one day, gathering flowers, when a fine lady- a Vicky- came riding toward her on a horse. When she drew closer, Nell was surprised to see that the horse was Eggshell and the lady was Rita, all dressed up in a long dress like the Vicky ladies wore, with a riding hat on her head, and riding sidesaddle of all things.
"You look pretty," Nell said.
"Thank you, Nell," Rita said. "Would you like to look like this too, for a little while? I have a surprise for you."
One of the ladies who lived in the Millhouse was a milliner,
and she had made Nell a dress, sewing it all together by hand. Rita
had brought this dress with her, and she helped Nell change into it,
right there in the middle of the meadow. Then she braided Nell's
hair and even tucked some tiny wildflowers into it. Finally she
helped Nell climb up on top of Eggshell with her and began riding
back toward the Millhouse.
"You will have to leave your book here today," Rita said.
"Why?"
"I'm taking you through the grid, into New Atlantis Clave,"
Rita said. "Constable Moore told me that I should not on any
account allow you to carry your book through the grid. He said it
would only stir things up. I know you're about to ask me why, Nell,
but I don't have an answer."
Nell ran upstairs, tripping over her long skirts a couple of
times, and left the Primer in her little nook. Then she climbed back
on Eggshell with Rita. They rode over a little stone bridge above the
water-wheel and through the woods, until Nell could hear the faint
afflatus of the security aerostats. Eggshell slowed to a walk and
pushed gingerly through the field of shiny hovering teardrops. Nell
even reached out and touched one, then snapped her hand back,
even though it hadn't done anything except push back. The
reflection of her face slithered backward across the surface of this
pod as they went by.
They rode across the territory of New Atlantis for some time
without seeing anything other than trees, wildflowers, brooks, the
occasional squirrel, or deer.
"Why do the Vickys have such a big clave?" Nell asked.
"Don't ever call them Vickys," Rita said.
"Why?"
"It's a word that people who don't like them use to describe
them in kind of a bad, unfriendly way," Rita said.
"Like a pejorative term?" Nell said.
Rita laughed, more nervous than amused. "Exactly."
"Why do the Atlantans have such a big clave?"
"Well, each phyle has a different way, and some ways are better suited to making money than others, so some have a lot of territory and others don't."
"What do you mean, a different way?"
"To make money you have to work hard-to live your life in a
certain way. The Atlantans all live that way, it's part of their culture.
The Nipponese too. So the Nipponese and the Atlantans have as
much money as all the other phyles put together."
"Why aren't you an Atlantan?"
"Because I don't want to live that way. All the people in
Dovetail like to make beautiful things. To us, the things that the
Atlantans do- dressing up in these kinds of clothes, spending years
and years in school-are irrelevant. Those pursuits wouldn't help us
make beautiful things, you see. I'd rather just wear my blue jeans
and make paper."
"But the M.C. can make paper," Nell said.
"Not the kind that the Atlantans like."
"But you make money from your paper only because the
Atlantans make money from working hard," Nell said.
Rita's face turned red and she said nothing for a little while.
Then, in a tight voice, she said, "Nell, you should ask your book the
meaning of the word discretion."
They came across a riding-trail dotted with great mounds of
horse manure, and began following it uphill. Soon the trail was
hemmed in between dry stone walls, which Rita said that one of her
friends in Dovetail had made. Forest gave way to pastures, then
lawns like jade glaciers, and great houses on hilltops, surrounded by
geometric hedges and ramparts of flowers. The trail became a
cobblestone road that adopted new lanes from time to time as they
rode into town. The mountain kept rising up above them for some distance, and on its green summit, half veiled behind a thin cloud layer, Nell could see Source Victoria.
From down in the Leased Territories, the New Atlantis Clave
had always looked clean and beautiful, and it was certainly those
things. But Nell was surprised at how cool the weather was here
compared to the L.T. Rita explained that the Atlantans came from
northern countries and didn't care for hot weather, so they put their
city high up in the air to make it cooler.
Rita turned down a boulevard with a great flowery park
running down the middle. It was lined with red stone row-houses
with turrets and gargoyles and beveled glass everywhere. Men in
top hats and women in long dresses strolled, pushed perambulators,
rode horses or chevalines. Shiny dark green robots, like refrigerators
tipped over on their sides, hummed down the streets at a toddler's
walking pace, squatting over piles of manure and inhaling them.
From place to place there was a messenger on a bicycle or an
especially fancy personage in a black, full-lane car.
Rita stopped Eggshell in front of a house and paid a little boy
to hold the reins. From the saddlebags she took a sheaf of new
paper, all wrapped up in special wrapping-paper that she'd also
made. She carried it up the steps and rang the bell. The house had a
round tower on the front, lined with bow windows with stained-glass
inserts above them, and through the windows and the lace
curtains Nell could see, on different stories, crystal chandeliers and
fine plates and dark brown wooden bookcases lined with thousands
and thousands of books.
A parlormaid let Rita in the door. Through the window, Nell
could see Rita putting a calling-card on a silver tray held out by the
maid-a salver, they called it. The maid carried it back, then
emerged a couple of minutes later and directed Rita into the back of
the house.
Rita didn't come back for half an hour. Nell wished she had the
Primer to keep her company. She talked to the little boy for a bit; his
name was Sam, he lived in the Leased Territories, and he put on a
suit and took the bus here every morning so that he could hang
around on the street holding people's horses and doing other small
errands.
Nell wondered whether Tequila worked in any of these houses,
and whether they might run into her by accident. Her chest always
got a tight feeling when she thought of her mother.
Rita came out of the house. "Sorry," she said, "I got out as fast
as I could, but I had to stay and socialize. Protocol, you know."
"Explain protocol," Nell said. This was how she always talked
to the Primer.
"At the place we're going, you need to watch your manners.
Don't say 'explain this' or 'explain that.'
"Would it impose on your time unduly to provide me with a
concise explanation of the term protocol?" Nell said.
Again Rita made that nervous laugh and looked at Nell with an
expression that looked like poorly concealed alarm. As they rode
down the street, Rita talked about protocol for a little bit, but Nell
wasn't really listening because she was trying to figure out why it
was that, all of a sudden, she was capable of scaring grownups like
Rita.
They rode through the most built-up part of town, where the
buildings and gardens and statues were all magnificent, and none of
the streets were the same: Some were crescents, some were courts,
or circles or ovals, or squares surrounding patches of greenery, and
even the long streets turned this way and that. They passed from
there into a less built-up area with many parks and playing fields
and finally pulled up in front of a fancy building with ornate towers,
surrounded by a wrought-iron fence and a hedge. Over the door it
said MISS MATHESON'S ACADEMY OF THE THREE
GRACES.
Miss Matheson received them in a cozy little room. She was
between eight hundred and nine hundred years of age, Nell
estimated, and drank tea from fancy thimble-size cups with pictures
painted on them. Nell tried to sit up straight and be attentive,
emulating certain proper young girls she had read about in the
Primer, but her eye kept wandering to the contents of the
bookshelves, the pictures painted on the tea service and the painting
on the wall above Miss Matheson's head, which depicted three
ladies prancing about in a grove in diaphanous attire.
"Our rolls are filled, the term has already begun, and you have
none of the prerequisites. But you come with compelling
recommendations," Miss Matheson said after she had peered
lengthily at her small visitor.
"Pardon me, madam, but I do not understand," Nell said.
Miss Matheson smiled, her face blooming into a sunburst of
radiating wrinkles. "It is not important. Let us only say that we have
made room for you. This institution makes it a practice to accept a small number of students who are not New Atlantan subjects. The propagation of Atlantan memes is central to our mission, as a school
and as a society. Unlike some phyles, which propagate through
conversion or through indiscriminate exploitation of the natural
biological capacity that is shared, for better or worse, by all persons,
we appeal to the rational faculties. All children are born with
rational faculties, which want only development. Our academy has
recently welcomed several young ladies of extra-Atlantan
extraction, and it is our expectation that all will go on to take the
Oath in due time."
"Pardon me, madam, but which one is Aglaia?" Nell said,
looking over Miss Matheson's shoulder at the painting.
"I beg your pardon?" Miss Matheson said, and initiated the
procedure of turning her head around to look, which at her age was
a civil-engineering challenge of daunting complexity and duration.
"As the name of your school is the Three Graces, I have
ventured to assume that yonder painting depicts the same subject,"
Nell said, "since they look more like Graces than Furies or Fates. I
wonder if you would be so kind as to inform me which of the ladies
represents Aglaia, or brilliance."
"And the other two are?" Miss Matheson said, speaking out of
the side of her mouth as she had almost got herself turned around by
this point.
"Euphrosyne, or joy, and Thalia, or bloom," Nell said.
"Would you care to venture an opinion?" Miss Matheson said.
"The one on the right is carrying flowers, so perhaps she is Thalia."
"I would call that a sound assumption."
"The one in the middle looks so happy that she must be
Euphrosyne, and the one on the left is lit up with rays of sunlight, so
perhaps she is Aglaia."
"Well, as you can see, none of them is wearing a nametag, and
so we must satisfy ourselves with conjecture," Miss Matheson said.
"But I fail to see any gaps in your reasoning. And no, I don't
suppose they are Fates or Furies."
. . .
"It's a boarding school, which means many of the pupils live
there. But you won't live there," Rita said, "because it isn't proper."
They were riding Eggshell home through the woods.
"Why isn't it proper?"
"Because you ran away from home, which raises legal problems."
"Was it illegal for me to run away?"
"In some tribes, children are regarded as an economic asset of
their parents. So if one phyle shelters runaways from another phyle,
it has a possible economic impact which is covered under the CEP."
Rita looked back at Nell, appraising her coolly. "You have a
sponsor of sorts in New Atlantis. I don't know who. I don't know
why. But it seems that this person cannot take the risk of being the
target of CEP legal action. Hence arrangements have been made for
you to stay in Dovetail for now.
"Now, we know that some of your mother's boyfriends treated
you badly, and so there is sentiment in Dovetail to take you in. But
we can't keep you at the Millstone community, because if we got
into a fracas with Protocol, it could sour our relations with our New
Atlantis clients. So it's been decided that you will stay with the one
person in Dovetail who doesn't have any clients here."
"Who's that?"
"You've met him," Rita said.
Constable Moore's house was dimly lit and so full of old stuff
that even Nell had to walk sideways in some places. Long strips of
yellowed rice paper, splashed with large Chinese characters and
pimpled with red chop marks, hung from a molding that ran around
the living room a foot or two beneath the ceiling. Nell followed Rita
around a corner into an even smaller, darker, and more crowded
room, whose main decoration was a large painting of a furious chap
with a Fu Manchu mustache, goatee, and tufts of whiskers sprouting
in front of his ears and trailing down below his armpits, wearing
elaborate armor and chain mail decorated with lion's faces. Nell
stepped away from this fierce picture despite herself, tripped over
the drone of a large bagpipe splayed across the floor, and crashed
into a large beaten-copper bucket of sorts, which made tremendous
smashing noises. Blood welled quietly from a smooth cut on the ball
of her thumb, and she realized that the bucket was being used as a
repository for a collection of old rusty swords of various
descriptions.
"You all right?" Rita said. She was backlit with blue light
coming in through a pair of glass doors. Nell put her thumb in her
mouth and picked herself up.
The glass doors looked out on Constable Moore's garden, a riot
of geraniums, foxtails, wisteria, and corgi droppings. On the other
side of a small khaki-colored pool rose a small garden house. Like
this one, it was built from blocks of reddish-brown stone and roofed
with rough-edged slabs of green-gray slate. Constable Moore
himself could be descried behind a screen of somewhat leggy
rhododendrons, hard at work with a shovel, continually harassed by
the ankle-biting corgis.
He was not wearing a shirt, but he was wearing a skirt: a red
plaid number. Nell hardly noticed this incongruity because the
corgis heard Rita turning the latch on the glass doors and rushed
toward them yapping, and this drew out the Constable himself, who
approached them squinting through the dark glass, and once he was
out from behind the rhodies, Nell could see that there was
something amiss with the flesh of his body. Overall he was well
proportioned, muscular, rather thick around the middle, and
evidently in decent health. But his skin came in two colors, which
gave him something of a marbled look. It was as though worms had
eaten through his torso, carving out a network of internal
passageways that had later been backfilled with something that
didn't quite match.
Before she could get a better look, he plucked a shirt from the
back of a lawn chair and shrugged it on. Then he subjected the
corgis to a minute or so of close-order drill, using a patch of moss-covered
flagstones as parade ground, and stringently criticizing their
performance in tones loud enough to penetrate through the glass
doors. The corgis pretended to listen attentively. At the end of the
performance, Constable Moore burst in through the glass doors. "I
shall be with you momentarily," he said, and disappeared into a
back room for a quarter of an hour. When he returned, he was
dressed in a tweed suit and a rough-hewn sweater over a very fine-looking
white shirt. The last article looked too thin to prevent the
others from being intolerably scratchy, but Constable Moore had
reached the age when men can subject their bodies to the worst
irritations-whiskey, cigars, woolen clothes, bagpipes-without
feeling a thing or, at least, without letting on.
"Sorry to have burst in on you," Rita said, "but there was no
answer when we rang the bell."
"I don't care," said Constable Moore, not entirely
convincingly. "There's a reason why I don't live up there." He
pointed upward, vaguely in the direction of the New Atlantis Clave.
"Just trying to trace the root system of some infernal vine back to its
source. I'm afraid it might be kudzu." The Constable narrowed his
eyes as he spoke this word, and Nell, not knowing what kudzu was,
supposed that if kudzu were something that could be attacked with a
sword, burned, throttled, bludgeoned, or blown up, it would not
stand a chance for long in Constable Moore's garden-once, that is,
he got round to it.
"Can I interest you in tea? Or"-this was directed to Nell-
"some hot chocolate?"
"Sounds lovely, but I can't stay," Rita said.
"Then let me see you to the door," Constable Moore said,
standing up. Rita looked a little startled by this abruptness, but in
another moment she was gone, riding Eggshell back toward the
Millhouse.
"Nice lady," Constable Moore muttered out in the kitchen.
"Fine of her to do what she did for you. Really a very decent lady.
Perhaps not the sort who deals very well with children. Especially
peculiar children."
"Am I to live here now, sir?" Nell said.
"Out in the garden house," he said, coming into the room with
a steaming tray and nodding through the glass windows and across
the garden. "Vacant for some time. Cramped for an adult, perfect for
a child. The decor of this house," he said, glancing around the room,
"is not really suitable for a young one."
"Who is the scary man?" Nell said, pointing to the big painting.
"Guan Di. Emperor Guan. Formerly a soldier named Guan Yu.
He was never really an emperor, but later on he became the Chinese
god of war, and they gave him the title just to be respectful. Terribly
respectful, the Chinese-it's their best and worst feature."
"How could a man become a god?" Nell asked.
"By living in an extremely pragmatic society," said Constable
Moore after some thought, and provided no further explanation. "Do
you have the book, by the way?"
"Yes, sir."
"You didn't take it through the border?"
"No, sir, as per your instructions."
"That's good. The ability to follow orders is a useful thing,
especially if you're living with a chap who's used to giving them."
Seeing that Nell had gotten a terribly serious look on her face, the
Constable huffed and looked exasperated. "It doesn't really matter,
mind you! You have friends in high places. It's just that we are trying to be discreet." Constable Moore brought Nell her cup of
cocoa. She needed one hand for the saucer and another for the cup,
so she took her hand out of her mouth.
"What did you do to your hand?"
"Cut it, sir."
"Let me see that." The Constable took her hand in his and
peeled the thumb away from the palm. "Quite a nice little slash.
Looks recent."
"I got it from your swords."
"Ah, yes. Swords are that way," the Constable said absently,
then screwed up his brow and turned back to Nell. "You did not
cry," he said, "and you did not complain."
"Did you take all of those swords away from burglars?" Nell said.
"No-that would have been relatively easy," Constable Moore
said. He looked at her for a while, pondering. "Nell, you and I will
do just fine together," he said. "Let me get my first-aid kit."
Carl Hollywood's activities at the Parnasse;
conversation over a milk shake;
explanation of the media system;
Miranda perceives the futility of her quest.
Miranda found Carl Hollywood sitting fifth row center in the
Parnasse, holding a big sheet of smart foolscap on which he had
scrawled blocking diagrams for their next live production. He
apparently had it crosslinked to a copy of the script, because as she
sidestepped her way down the narrow aisle, she could hear voices
rather mechanically reading lines, and as she came closer she could
see the little X's and 0's representing the actors moving around on
the diagram of the stage that Carl had sketched out.
The diagram also included some little arrows along the
periphery, all aimed inward. Miranda realized that the arrows must
be the little spotlights mounted to the fronts of the balconies, and
that Carl Hollywood was programming them.
She rolled her head back and forth, trying to loosen up her
neck, and looked up at the ceiling. The angels or Muses or whatever
they were, were all parading around up there, accompanied by a few
cherubs. Miranda thought of Nell. She always thought of Nell.
The script came to the end of its scene, and Carl paused it.
"You had a question?" he asked, a bit absently.
"I've been watching you work from my box."
"Naughty girl. Should be making money for us."
"Where'd you learn to do that stuff?"
"What-directing plays?"
"No. The technical stuff-programming the lights and so on."
Carl turned around to look at her. "This may be at odds with
your notion of how people learn things," he said, "but I had to teach
myself everything. Hardly anyone does live theatre ar;Tmore, so we
have to develop our own technology. I invented all of the software I
was just using."
"Did you invent the little spotlights?"
"No. I'm not as good at the nanostuff. A friend of mine in
London came up with those. We swap stuff all the time-my
mediaware for his matterware."
"Well, I want to buy you dinner somewhere," Miranda said, "and I want you to explain to me how it all works."
"That's a rather tall order," Carl said calmly, "but I accept the
invitation.
. . .
"Okay, do you want a complete grounding in the whole thing,
starting with Turing machines, or what?" Carl said pleasantly-
humoring her. Miranda decided not to become indignant. They were
in a red vinyl booth at a restaurant near the Bund that supposedly
simulated an American diner on the eve of the Kennedy
assassination. Chinese hipsters-classic Coastal Republic types in
their expensive haircuts and sharp suits-were lined up on the
rotating stools along the lunch counter, sucking on their root beer
floats and flashing wicked grins at any young women who came in.
"I guess so," Miranda said.
Carl Hollywood laughed and shook his head. "I was being
facetious. You need to tell me exactly what you want to know. Why
are you suddenly taking up an interest in this stuff? Aren't you
happy just making a good living from it?"
Miranda sat very still for a moment, hypnotized by the colorful
flashing lights on a vintage jukebox.
"This is related to Princess Nell, isn't it?" Carl said.
"Is it that obvious?"
"Yeah. Now, what do you want?"
"I want to know who she is," Miranda said. This was the most
guarded way she could put it. She didn't suppose that it would help
matters to drag Carl down through the full depth of her emotions.
"You want to backtrace a payer," Carl said. It sounded terrible when he translated it into that kind of
language.
Carl sucked powerfully on his milk shake for a bit, his eyes looking over Miranda's shoulder to the traffic on the Bund. "Princess Nell's a little kid, right?"
"Yes. I would estimate five to seven years old."
His eyes swiveled to lock on hers. "You can tell that?"
"Yes," she said, in tones that warned him not to question it.
"So she's probably not paying the bill anyway. The payer is
someone else. You need to backtrace the payer and then, from there,
track down Nell." Carl broke eye contact again, shook his head, and
tried unsuccessfully to whistle through frozen lips. "Even the first
step is impossible."
Miranda was startled. "That seems pretty unequivocal. I
expected to hear 'difficult' or 'expensive.' But-"
"Nope. It's impossible. Or maybe"-Carl thought about it for a
while-"maybe 'astronomically improbable' is a better way of
putting it." Then he looked mildly alarmed as he watched Miranda's
expression change. "You can't just trace the connection backward.
That's not how media works."
"How does media work, then?"
"Look out the window. Not toward the Bund-check out Yan'an Road."
Miranda swiveled her head around to look out the big window,
which was partly painted over with colorful Coke ads and
descriptions of blue plate specials. Yan'an Road, like all of the
major thoroughfares in Shanghai, was filled, from the shop windows
on one side to the shop windows on the other, with people on
bicycles and powerskates. In many places the traffic was so dense
that greater speed could be attained on foot. A few half-lane
vehicles sat motionless, polished boulders in a sluggish brown
stream.
It was so familiar that Miranda didn't really see anything. "What am I looking for?"
"Notice how no one's empty-handed? They're all carrying something."
Carl was right. At a minimum, everyone had a small plastic bag
with something in it. Many people, such as the bicyclists, carried
heavier loads.
"Now just hold that image in your head for a moment, and
think about how to set up a global telecommunications network."
Miranda laughed. "I don't have any basis for thinking about
something like that."
"Sure you do. Until now, you've been thinking in terms of the
telephone system in the old passives. In that system, each
transaction had two participants-the two people having the
conversation. And they were connected by a wire that ran through a
central switchboard. So what are the key features of this system?"
"I don't know-I'm asking you," said Miranda.
"Number one, only two people, or entities, can interact.
Number two, it uses a dedicated connection that is made and then
broken for the purposes of that one conversation. Number three, it is
inherently centralized-it can't work unless there is a central
switchboard."
"Okay, I think I'm following you so far."
"Our media system today-the one that you and I make our
livings from-is a descendant of the phone system only insofar as
we use it for essentially the same purposes, plus many, many more.
But the key point to remember is that it is totally different from the
old phone system. The old phone system-and its technological
cousin, the cable TV system- tanked. It crashed and burned
decades ago, and we started virtually from scratch."
"Why? It worked, didn't it?"
"First of all, we needed to enable interactions between more
than one entity. What do I mean by entity? Well, think about the
ractives. Think about First Class to Geneva. You're on this train-
so are a couple of dozen other people. Some of those people are
being racted, so in that case the entities happen to be human beings.
But others-like the waiters and porters-are just software robots.
Furthermore, the train is full of props:
jewelry, money, guns, bottles of wine. Each one of those is also
a separate piece of software-a separate entity. In the lingo, we call
them objects. The train itself is another object, and so is the
countryside through which it travels.
"The countryside is a good example. It happens to be a digital
map of France. Where did this map come from? Did the makers of
First Class to Geneva send out their own team of surveyors to make a new map of France? No, of course they didn't. They used existing
data-a digital map of the world that is available to any maker of
ractives who needs it, for a price of course. That digital map is a
separate object. It resides in the memory of a computer somewhere.
Where exactly? I don't know. Neither does the ractive itself. It
doesn't matter. The data might be in California, it might be in Paris,
it might be down at the corner-or it might be distributed among all
of those places and many more. It doesn't matter. Because our
media system no longer works like the old system- dedicated
wires passing through a central switchboard. It works like that."
Carl pointed to the traffic on the street again.
"So each person on the street is like an object?"
"Possibly. But a better analogy is that the objects are people
like us, sitting in various buildings that front on the street. Suppose
that we want to send a message to someone over in Pudong. We
write the message down on a piece of paper, and we go to the door
and hand it to the first person who goes by and say, 'Take this to
Mr. Gu in Pudong.' And he skates down the street for a while and
runs into someone on a bicycle who looks like he might be headed
for Pudong, and says, 'Take this to Mr. Gu.' A minute later, that
person gets stuck in traffic and hands it off to a pedestrian who can
negotiate the snarl a little better, and so on and so on, until
eventually it reaches Mr. Gu. When Mr. Gu wants to respond, he
sends us a message in the same way."
"So there's no way to trace the path taken by a message."
"Right. And the real situation is even more complicated. The
media net was designed from the ground up to provide privacy and
security, so that people could use it to transfer money. That's one
reason the nationstates collapsed-as soon as the media grid was up
and running, financial transactions could no longer be monitored by
governments, and the tax collection systems got fubared. So if the
old IRS, for example, wasn't able to trace these messages, then
there's no way that you'll be able to track down Princess Nell."
"Okay, I guess that answers my question," Miranda said.
"Good!" Carl said brightly. He was obviously pleased that he'd
been able to help Miranda, and so she didn't tell him how his words
had really made her feel. She treated it as an acting challenge: Could
she fool Carl Hollywood, who was sharper about acting than just
about anyone, into thinking that she was fine?
Apparently she did. He escorted her back to her flat, in a
hundred story high-rise just across the river in Pudong, and she held it together long enough to bid him good-bye, get out of her clothes,
and run a bath. Then she climbed into the hot water and dissolved in
awful, wretched, blubbery, self-pitying tears.
Eventually she got it under control. She had to keep this in
perspective. She could still interact with Nell and still did, every
day. And if she paid attention, sooner or later she would find some
way to penetrate the curtain. Barring that, she was beginning to
understand that Nell, whoever she was, had been marked out in
some way, and that in time she would become a very important
person. Within a few years, Miranda expected to be reading about
her in the newspaper. Feeling better, she got out of the bath and
climbed into bed, getting a good night's sleep so she'd be ready for
her next day of taking care of Nell.
General description of life with the Constable;
his avocations and other peculiarities;
a disturbing sight;
Nell learns about his past;
a conversation over dinner.
The garden house had two rooms, one for sleeping and one for
playing. The playing room had a set of double doors, made of many
small windows, that opened onto Constable Moore's garden. Nell
had been told to be careful with the little windows, because they
were made of real glass. The glass was bubbly and uneven, like the
surface of a pot of water just before it breaks into a boil, and Nell
liked to look at things through it because, even though she knew it
was not as strong as a common window, it made her feel safer, as
though she were hiding behind something.
The garden itself was forever trying to draw the little house
into it; many vast-growing vines of ivy, wisteria, and briar rose were
deeply engaged in the important project of climbing the walls, using
the turtleshell-colored copper drainpipes, and the rough surfaces of
the brick and mortar, as fingerholds. The slate roof of the cottage
was phosphorescent with moss. From time to time, Constable
Moore would charge into the breach with a pair of trimmers and cut
away some of the vines that so prettily framed the view through
Nell's glass doors, lest they imprison her.
During Nell's second year living in the cottage, she asked the
Constable if she might have a bit of garden space of her own, and
after an early phase of profound shock and misgivings, the Constable eventually pulled up a few flagstones, exposing a small plot, and caused one of the Dovetail artisans to manufacture some
copper window boxes and attach them to the cottage walls. In the
plot, Nell planted some carrots, thinking about her friend Peter who
had vanished so long ago, and in the window boxes she planted
some geraniums. The Primer taught her how to do it and also
reminded her to dig up a carrot sprout every few days and examine
it so that she could learn how they grew. Nell learned that if she
held the Primer above the carrot and stared at a certain page, it
would turn into a magic illustration that would grow larger and
larger until she could see the tiny little fibers that grew out of the
roots, and the one-celled organisms clinging to the fibers, and the
mitochondria inside them. The same trick worked on anything, and
she spent many days examining flies' eyes, bread mold, and blood
cells that she got out of her own body by pricking her finger. She
could also go up on hilltops during cold clear nights and use the
Primer to see the rings of Saturn and the moons of Jupiter.
Constable Moore continued to work his daily shift at the
gatehouse. When he came home in the evening, he and Nell would
often dine together inside his house. At first they got food straight
from the M.C., or else the Constable would fry up something
simple, like sausage and eggs. During this period, Princess Nell and
the other characters in the Primer found themselves eating a lot of
sausage and eggs too, until Duck lodged a protest and taught the
Princess how to cook healthier food. Nell then got in the habit of
cooking a healthy meal with salad and vegetables, several
afternoons a week after she got home from school. There was some
grumbling from the Constable, but he always cleaned up his plate
and sometimes washed the dishes.
The Constable spent a lot of time reading books. Nell was
welcome to be in his house when he was doing this, as long as she
was quiet. Frequently he would shoo her out, and then he would get
in touch with some old friend of his over the big mediatron on the
wall of his library. Usually Nell would just go back to her little
cottage during these times, but sometimes, especially if the moon
was full, she would wander around in the garden. This seemed
larger than it really was by virtue of being divided into many small
compartments. On late full-moon nights, her favorite place was a
grove of tall green bamboo with some pretty rocks strewn around.
She would sit with her back against a rock, read her Primer, and
occasionally hear sound emanating from the inside of Constable Moore's house as he talked on the mediatron: mostly deep
bellowing laughter and explosions of good-natured profanity. For
quite some time she assumed that it was not the Constable who was
making these sounds, but rather whomever he was talking to;
because in her presence the Constable was always very polite and
reserved, albeit somewhat eccentric. But one night she heard loud
moaning noises coming from his house, and crept down out of the
bamboo grove to see what was happening.
From her vantage point through the glass doors, she couldn't
see the mediatron, which was facing away from her. Its light
illuminated the whole room, painting the normally warm and cozy
space with lurid flashing colors, and throwing long jagged shadows.
Constable Moore had shoved all the furniture and other obstructions
to the walls and rolled up the Chinese carpet to expose the floor,
which Nell had always assumed was made of oak, like the floor in
her cottage; but the floor was, in fact, a large mediatron itself,
glowing rather dimly compared to the one on the wall, and
displaying a lot of rather high-resolution material: text documents
and detailed graphics with the occasional dine feed. The Constable
was down on his hands and knees amidst this, bawling like a child,
the tears collecting in the shallow saucers of his half-glasses and
spattering onto the mediatron, which illuminated them weirdly from
below.
Nell wanted badly to go in and comfort him, but she was too
scared. She stood and watched, frozen in indecision, and realized as
she did so that the flashes of light coming from the mediatrons
reminded her of explosions-or rather pictures of explosions. She
backed away and went back into her little house.
Half an hour later, she heard the unearthly noise of Constable
Moore's bagpipes emanating from the bamboo grove. In the past he
had occasionally picked them up and made a few squealing noises,
but this was the first time she'd heard a formal recital. She was not
an expert on the pipes, but she thought he sounded not bad. He was
playing a slow number, a coronach, and it was so sad that it almost
tore Nell's heart asunder; the sight of the Constable weeping
helplessly on his hands and knees was not half so sad as the music
he was playing now.
In time he moved on to a faster and happier pibroch. Nell
emerged from her cottage into the garden. The Constable was just a
silhouette slashed into a hundred ribbons by the vertical shafts of the
bamboo, but when she moved back and forth, some trick of her eye reassembled the image. He was standing in a pool of moonlight. He
had changed clothes:
now he was wearing his kilt, and a shirt and beret that seemed
to belong to some sort of a uniform. When his lungs were empty, he
would draw in a great breath, his chest would heave, and an array of
silvery pins and insignia would glimmer in the moonlight.
He had left the doors open. She walked into the house, not
bothering to be stealthy because she knew that she could not
possibly be heard over the sound of the bagpipe.
The wall and the floor were both giant mediatrons, and both
had been covered with a profusion of media windows, hundreds and
hundreds of separate panes, like a wall on a busy city street where
posters and bills have been pasted up in such abundance that they
have completely covered the substrate. Some of the panes were only
as big as the palm of Nell's hand, and some of them were the size of
wall posters. Most of the ones on the floor were windows into
written documents, grids of numbers, schematic diagrams (lots of
organizational trees), or wonderful maps, drawn with breathtaking
precision and clarity, with rivers, mountains, and villages labeled in
Chinese characters. As Nell surveyed this panorama, she flinched
once or twice from the impression that something small was
creeping along the floor; but there were no bugs in the room, it was
just an illusion created by small fluctuations in the maps and in the
rows and columns of numbers. These things were ractive, just like
the words in the Primer; but unlike the Primer, they were
responding not to what Nell did but, she supposed, to events far
away.
When she finally raised her gaze from the floor to view the
mediatrons lining the walls, she saw that most of the panes there
were much larger, and most of them carried dine feeds, and most of
these had been frozen. The images were very sharp and clear. Some
of them were landscapes: a stretch of rural road, a bridge across a
dried-up river, a dusty village with flames bubbling from some of
the houses. Some of them were pictures of people: talking-head
shots of Chinese men wearing dirty uniforms with dark mountains,
clouds of dust, or drab green vehicles as backdrops.
In one of the dine feeds, a man was lying on the ground, his
dusty uniform almost the same color as the dirt. Suddenly this
image moved; the feed had not been frozen like the others. Someone
was walking past the camera: a Chinese man in indigo pajamas,
decorated with scarlet ribbons tied round his head and his waist, though these had gone brown with grime. When he had passed out of the frame, Nell focused on the other man, the one who was lying
in the dust, and she realized for the first time that he did not have a head.
Constable Moore must have heard Nell's screaming over the
sound of his bagpipes, for he was in the room within a few
moments, shouting commands to the mediatrons, which all went
black and became mere walls and a floor. The only image remaining
in the room now was the big painting of Guan Di, the god of war,
who glowered down upon them as always. Constable Moore was
extremely ill at ease whenever Nell showed any kind of emotion,
but he seemed more comfortable with hysteria than he was with,
say, an invitation to play house or an attack of the giggles. He
picked Nell up, carried her across the room at arm's length, and set
her down in a deep leather chair. He left the room for a moment and
came back with a large glass of water, then carefully molded her
hands around it. "You must breathe deeply and drink water," he was
saying, almost sotto voce; he seemed to have been saying it for a
long time.
She was a little surprised to find that she did not cry forever,
though a few aftershocks came along and had to be managed in the
same way. She kept trying to say, "I can't stop crying," stabbing the
syllables one at a time.
The tenth or eleventh time she said this, Constable Moore said,
"You can't stop drying because you're all fucked up
psychologically." He said it in a kind of bored professional tone that
might have sounded cruel; but to Nell it was, for some reason, most
reassuring.
"What do you mean?" she said finally, when she èould speak
without her throat going all funny.
"I mean you're a veteran, girl, just like me, and you've got
scars"-he suddenly ripped his shirt open, buttons flying and
bouncing all over the room, to reveal his particolored torso-"like I
do. The difference is, I know I'm a veteran. You persist in thinking
you're just a little girl, like those bloody Vickys you go to school
with."
. . .
From time to time, perhaps once a year, he would turn down
the offer of dinner, put that uniform on, climb onto a horse, and ride off in the direction of the New Atlantis Clave. The horse would
bring him back in the wee hours of the morning, so drunk he could
barely remain in the saddle. Sometimes Nell would help get him
into bed, and after he had lapsed into unconsciousness, she could
examine his pins and medals and ribbons by candlelight. The
ribbons in particular used a fairly elaborate color-coding system.
But the Primer had some pages in the back that were called the
Encyclopædia, and by consulting these, Nell was able to establish
that Constable Moore was, or at least had used to be, a brigadier
general in the Second Brigade of the Third Division of the First
Protocol Enforcement Expeditionary Force. One ribbon implied that
he had spent some time as an exchange officer in a Nipponese
division, but his home division was apparently the Third. According
to the Encyclopædia, the Third was often known as the Junkyard
Dogs or, simply, the Mongrels, because it tended to draw its
members from the White Diaspora: Uitlanders, Ulster Loyalists,
whites from Hong Kong, and rootless sorts from all of the Anglo-American
parts of the world.
One of the pins on the Constable's uniform said that he had
graduate-level training in nanotechnological engineering. This was
consistent with his belonging to the Second Brigade, which
specialized in nanotech warfare. The Encyclopædia said that it had
been formed some thirty years ago to tackle some nasty fighting in
Eastern Europe where primitive nanotech weapons were being
employed.
A couple of years later, the division had been sent off to South
China in a panic. Trouble had been brewing there since Zhang Han
Hua had gone on his Long Ride and forced the merchants to
kowtow. Zhang had personally liberated several lao gai damps,
where slave laborers were hard at work making trinkets for export to
the West, smashing computer display screens with the massive
dragon's-head grip of his cane, beating the overseers into bloody
heaps on the ground. Zhang's "investigations" of various thriving
businesses, mostly in the south, had thrown millions of people out
of work. They had gone into the streets and raised hell and been
joined by sympathetic units of the People's Liberation Army. The
rebellion was eventually put down by PLA units from the north, but
the leaders had vanished into the "concrete countryside" of the Pearl
Delta, and so Zhang had been forced to set up a permanent garrison
state in the south. The northern troops had kept order crudely but
effectively for a few years, until, one night, an entire division of them, some 15,000 men, was wiped out by an infestation of
nanosites.
The leaders of the rebellion emerged from their hiding places,
proclaimed the Coastal Republic, and called for Protocol
Enforcement troops to come in and protect them. Colonel Arthur
Hornsby Moore, a veteran of the fighting in Eastern Europe, was
brought in to command. He had been born in Hong Kong, left as a
small child when the Chinese took it over, spent much of his youth
wandering around Asia with his parents, and eventually settled in
the British Isles. He was picked for the job because he was fluent in
Cantonese and not half bad in Mandarin. Looking at the old cine
clips in the Encyclopædia, Nell could see a younger Constable
Moore, the same man with more hair and fewer doubts.
The Chinese Civil War began in earnest three years later, when
the Northerns, who didn't have access to nanotech, started lobbing
nukes. Not long afterward, the Muslim nations had finally gotten
their act together and overrun much of Xinjiang Province, killing
some of the Han Chinese population and driving the rest eastward
into the maw of the civil war. Colonel Moore suffered an extremely
dire infestation of primitive nanosites and was removed from the
action and put on extended convalescent leave. By that time, the
truce line between the Celestial Kingdom and the Coastal Republic
had been established.
Since then, as Nell knew from her studies at the Academy, Lau
Ge had succeeded Zhang as the northern leader-the leader of the
Celestial Kingdom. After a decent interval had passed, he had
thoroughly purged all remaining traces of Communist ideology,
denouncing it as a Western imperialist plot, and proclaimed himself
Chamberlain to the Throneless King. The Throneless King was
Confucius, and Lau Ge was now the highest-ranking of all the
mandarins.
The Encyclopædia did not say much more about Colonel
Arthur Hornsby Moore, except that he'd resurfaced as an adviser a
few years later during some outbreaks of nanotech terrorism in
Germany, and later retired and became a security consultant. In this
latter capacity he had helped to promulgate the concept of defense
in depth, around which all modern cities, including
Atlantis/Shanghai, were built.
. . .
Nell cooked the Constable an especially nice dinner one
Saturday, and when they were finished with dessert, she began to
tell him about Harv and Tequila, and Harv's tales of the
incomparable Bud, their dear departed father. Suddenly it was about
three hours later, and Nell was still telling the Constable stories
about Mom's boyfriends, and the Constable was continuing to
listen, reaching up occasionally to fiddle with his white beard but
otherwise displaying an extremely grave and thoughtful
countenance. Finally she got to the part about Burt, and how Nell
had tried to kill him with the screwdriver, and how he had chased
them down the stairs and apparently met his demise at the hands of
the mysterious round-headed Chinese gentleman. The Constable
found this extremely interesting and asked many questions, first
about the detailed tactical development of the screwdriver assault
and then about the style of dancing used by the Chinese gentleman,
and what he was wearing.
"I have been angry at my Primer ever since that night," Nell
said.
"Why?" said the Constable, looking surprised, though he was
hardly more surprised than Nell herself. Nell had said a remarkable
number of things this evening without having ever, to her memory,
thought them first; or at least she didn't believe she had ever thought
them before.
"I cannot help but feel that it misled me. It made me suppose
that killing Burt would be a simple matter, and that it would
improve my life; but when I tried to put these ideas into practice . .
." She could not think of what to say next.
". . . the rest of your life happened," the Constable said. "Girl,
you must admit that your life with Burt dead has been an
improvement on your life with Burt alive."
"Yes."
"So the Primer was correct on that point. Now, as to the fact
that killing people is a more complicated business in practice than in
theory, I will certainly concede your point. But I think it is not likely
to be the only instance in which real life turns out to be more
complicated than what you have seen in the book. This is the Lesson
of the Screwdriver, and you would do well to remember it. All it
amounts to is that you must be ready to learn from sources other
than your magic book."
"But of what use is the book then?"
"I suspect it is very useful. You want only the knack of
translating its lessons into the real world. For example," the
Constable said, plucking his napkin from his lap and crushing it into
the tabletop, "let us take something very concrete, such as beating
the bejesus out of people." He stood up and tromped out into the
garden. Nell ran after him. "I have seen you doing your martial-arts
exercises," he said, switching to a peremptory outdoor voice, an
addressing-the-troops voice. "Martial arts means beating the bejesus
out of people. Now, let us see you try your luck with me."
Negotiations ensued as Nell endeavored to establish whether
the Constable was serious. This being accomplished, she sat down
on the flagstones and began getting her shoes off. The Constable
watched her with raised eyebrows.
"Oh, that's very formidable," he said. "All evildoers had best
be on the lookout for little Nell-unless she happens to be wearing
her bloody shoes."
Nell did a couple of stretching exercises, ignoring more
derisive commentary from the Constable. She bowed to him, and he
waved his hand at her dismissively. She got set into the stance that
Dojo had taught her. In response, the Constable moved his feet
about an inch farther apart than they had been, and pooched his
belly out, which was apparently the chosen stance of some
mysterious Scottish fighting technique.
Nothing happened for a long time except for a lot of dancing
around. Nell danced, that is, and the Constable blundered around
desultorily. "What's this?" he said. "All you know is defense?"
"Mostly, sir," Nell said. "I do not suppose it was the Primer's
intention to teach me how to assault people."
"Oh, what good is that?" the Constable sneered, and suddenly
he reached out and grabbed Nell by the hair- not hard enough to
hurt. He held her for a few moments, and then let her go. "Thus
endeth the first lesson," he said.
"You think that I should cut my hair off?"
The Constable looked terribly disappointed. "Oh, no," he said,
"never, ever, ever cut your hair off. If I grabbed you by your
wrist"- and he did- "would you cut your arm off?"
"No, sir."
"Did the Primer teach you that people would pull your hair?"
"No, sir."
"Did it teach you that your mother's boyfriends would beat you
up, and your mother not protect you?"
"No, sir, except insofar as it told me stories about people who
did evil."
"People doing evil is a good lesson. What you saw in there a
few weeks ago"-and by this Nell knew he was referring to the
headless soldier on the mediatron-"is one application of that
lesson, but it's too obvious to be of any good. Ah, but your mother
not protecting you from boyfriends-that has some subtlety, doesn't
it?
"Nell," the Constable continued, indicating through his tone of
voice that the lesson was concluding, "the difference between
ignorant and educated people is that the latter know more facts. But
that has nothing to do with whether they are stupid or intelligent.
The difference between stupid and intelligent people-and this is
true whether or not they are well-educated-is that intelligent
people can handle subtlety. They are not baffled by ambiguous or
even contradictory situations-in fact, they expect them and are apt
to become suspicious when things seem overly straightforward.
"In your Primer you have a resource that will make you highly
educated, but it will never make you intelligent. That comes from
life. Your life up to this point has given you all of the experience
you need to be intelligent, but you have to think about those
experiences. If you don't think about them, you'll be
psychologically unwell. If you do think about them, you will
become not merely educated but intelligent, and then, a few years
down the road, you will probably give me cause to wish I were
several decades younger."
The Constable turned and walked back into his house, leaving
Nell alone in the garden, pondering the meaning of that last
statement. She supposed it was the sort of thing she might
understand later, when she had become intelligent.
Carl Hollywood returns from abroad;
he and Miranda discuss the status and future of her racting career.
Carl Hollywood came back from a month-long trip to London,
where he'd been visiting old friends, catching some live theatre, and
making face-to-face contacts with some of the big ractive
developers, hoping to swing some contracts in their direction. When
he got back, the whole company threw a party for him in the
theatre's little bar. Miranda thought she handled it pretty well.
But the next day he cornered her backstage. "What's up?" he
said. "And I don't mean that in the usual offhanded way. I want to
know what's going on with you. Why have you switched to the
evening shift during my absence? And why were you acting so
weird at the party?"
"Well, Nell and I have had an interesting few months."
Carl looked startled, stepped back half a pace, then sighed and
rolled his eyes.
"Of course, her altercation with Burt was traumatic, but she
seems to have dealt with it well."
"Who's Burt?"
"I have no idea. Someone who was physically abusing her.
Apparently she managed to find some kind of new living situation
in short order, probably with the assistance of her brother Harv, who
has, however, not stayed with her-he's stuck in the same old bad
situation, while Nell has moved on to something better."
"She has? That's good news," said Carl, only half sarcastically.
Miranda smiled at him. "See? That's exactly the kind of
feedback I need. I don't talk about this stuff to anyone because I'm
afraid they'll think I'm mad. Thank you. Keep it up."
"What is Nell's new situation?" Carl Hollywood asked
contritely.
"I think she's in school somewhere. She appears to be learning
new material that isn't explicitly covered in the Primer, and she's
developing more sophisticated forms of social interaction,
suggesting that she's spending more time around a higher class of
people."
"Excellent."
"She's not as concerned with immediate issues of physical self-defense,
so I gather that she's in a safe living situation. However, her new guardian must be an emotionally distant sort, because she frequently seeks solace under the wings of Duck."
Carl looked funny. "Duck?"
"One of four personages who accompanies and advises
Princess Nell. Duck embodies domestic, maternal virtues. Actually,
Peter and Dinosaur are now gone- both male figures who embodied
survival skills."
"Who's the fourth one?"
"Purple. I think she'll become a lot more relevant to Nell's life
around puberty."
"Puberty? You said Nell was between five and seven."
"So?"
"You think you'll still be doing this-" Carl's voice wound
down to a stop as he worked out the implications.
"-for at least six or eight years. Oh yes, I should certainly
think so. It's a very serious commitment, raising a child."
"Oh, god!" Carl Hollywood said, and collapsed into a big,
tatty, overstuffed chair they kept backstage for such purposes.
"That's why I've switched to the evening shift. Ever since Nell
started going to school, she's started using the Primer exclusively in
the evening. Apparently she's in a time zone within one or two
hours of this one."
"Good," Carl muttered, "that narrows it down to about half of
the world's population."
"What's the problem here?" Miranda said. "It's not like I'm not
getting paid for this."
Carl gave her a good, dispassionate, searching look. "Yes. It brings in adequate revenue."
Three girls go exploring;
a conversation between Lord Finkle-McGraw and Mrs. Hackworth;
afternoon at the estate.
Three girls moved across the billiard-table lawn of a great
manor house, circling and swarming about a common center of
gravity like gamboling sparrows. Sometimes they would stop, turn
inward to face one another, and engage in animated discussion.
Then they would suddenly take off running, seemingly free from the
constraints of inertia, like petals struck by a gust of spring wind.
They wore long heavy wool coats over their dresses to protect them
from the cool damp air of New Chusan's high central plateau. They
seemed to be making their way toward an expanse of broken ground
some half-mile distant, separated from the great house's formal
gardens by a gray stone wall splashed with bits of lime green and
lavender where moss and lichen had taken hold. The terrain beyond
the wall was a muted hazel color, like a bolt of Harris tweed that has
tumbled from the back of a wagon and come undone, though the
incipient blooming of the heather had flung a pale violet mist across
it, nearly transparent but startlingly vivid in those places where the
observer's line of sight grazed the natural slope of the terrain-if the
word natural could properly be applied to any feature of this island.
Otherwise as light and free as birds, the girls were each weighed
down by a small burden that seemed incongruous in the present
setting, for the efforts of the adults to persuade them to leave their
books behind had, as ever, been unavailing.
One of the observers had eyes only for the little girl with long
flamecolored hair. Her connexion to that child was suggested by her
auburn hair and eyebrows. She was dressed in a hand-sewn frock of
woven cotton, whose crispness betrayed its recent provenance in a
milliner's atelier in Dovetail. If the gathering had included more
veterans of that elongated state of low-intensity warfare known as
Society, this observation would have been keenly made by those
soi-disant sentries who stood upon the battlements, keeping vigil
against bounders who would struggle their way up the vast glacis
separating wage slaves from Equity Participants. It would have been
duly noted and set forth in the oral tradition that Gwendolyn
Hackworth, though attractive, hard-waisted, and poised, lacked the
confidence to visit Lord Finkle-McGraw's house in anything other
than a new dress made for the occasion.
The gray light suffusing the drawing room through its high
windows was as gentle as mist. As Mrs. Hackworth stood enveloped
in that light, sipping beige tea from a cup of translucent bone china,
her face let down its guard and betrayed some evidence of her true
state of mind. Her host, Lord Finkle-McGraw, thought that she
looked drawn and troubled, though her vivacious comportment
during the first hour of their interview had led him to suppose
otherwise.
Sensing that his gaze had lingered on her face for longer than
was strictly proper, he looked to the three little girls ambling across
the garden. One of the girls had raven hair that betrayed her partly Korean heritage; but having established her whereabouts as a sort of
reference point, he shifted his attention to the third girl, whose hair
was about halfway through a natural and gradual transition from
blond to brown. This girl was the tallest of the three, though all were
of about the same age; and though she participated freely in all of
their lighthearted games, she rarely initiated them and, when left to
her own devices, tended toward a grave mien that made her seem
years older than her playmates. As the Equity Lord watched the
trio's progress, he sensed that even the style of her movement was
different from the others'; she was lithe and carefully balanced,
while they bounded unpredictably like rubber balls on rough-hewn
stone.
The difference was (as he realized, watching them more
keenly) that Nell always knew where she was going. Elizabeth and
Fiona never did. This was a question not of native intelligence (Miss
Matheson's tests and observations proved that much) but of
emotional stance. Something in the girl's past had taught her, most
forcefully, the importance of thinking things through.
"I ask you for a prediction, Mrs. Hackworth. Which one shall
reach the moor first?"
At the sound of his voice, Mrs. Hackworth recomposed her
face. "This sounds like a letter to the etiquette columnist of the
Times. If I try to flatter you by guessing that it will be your
granddaughter, am I implicitly accusing her of impulsiveness?"
The Equity Lord smiled tolerantly. "Let us set aside etiquette-
a social convention not relevant to this enquiry-and be scientific."
"Ah. If only my John were here."
He is here, Lord Finkle-McGraw thought, in each one of those
books. But he didn't say it. "Very well, I will expose myself to the
risk of humiliation by predicting that Elizabeth reaches the wall
first; that Nell finds the secret way through; but that your daughter
is the first one to venture through it."
"I'm sure you could never be humiliated in my presence, Your
Grace," Mrs. Hackworth said. It was something she had to say, and
he did not really hear it.
They turned back to the windows. When the girls had reached
to within a stone's throw of the wall, they began to move toward it
more purposefully. Elizabeth broke free from the group, ran
forward, and was the first to touch the cool stones, followed a few
paces later by Fiona. Nell was far behind, not having altered her
steady stride.
"Elizabeth is a Duke's granddaughter, accustomed to having
her way, and has no natural reticence; she surges to the fore and
claims the goal as her birthright," Finkle-McGraw explained. "But
she has not really thought about what she is doing."
Elizabeth and Fiona both had their hands on the wall now, as if
it were Home in a game of tag. But Nell had stopped and was
turning her head from side to side, surveying the length of the wall
as it clambered and tumbled over the increasingly rough shape of
the land. After some time she held out one hand, pointing at a
section of the wall a short distance away, and began to move toward it.
"Nell stands above the fray and thinks," Finkle-McGraw said.
"To the other girls, the wall is a decorative feature, no? A pretty
thing to run to and explore. But not to Nell. Nell knows what a wall
is. It is a knowledge that went into her early, knowledge she doesn't
have to think about. Nell is more interested in gates than in walls.
Secret hidden gates are particularly interesting."
Fiona and Elizabeth moved uncertainly, trailing their tiny pink
hands across the damp stone, unable to see where Nell was leading
them. Nell strode across the grass until she had reached a small
declivity. She almost disappeared into it as she clambered down
toward the foundation of the wall.
"An opening for drainage," Finkle-McGraw explained. "Please
do not be concerned. I happened to ride that way this morning. The
current is only ankle-deep, and the diameter of the culvert just right
for eight-yearold girls. The passage is several meters long-more
promising than threatening, I should hope."
Fiona and Elizabeth moved cautiously, startled by Nell's
discovery. All three of the girls disappeared into the cleft. A few
moments later, a blaze of fiery red could be descried bouncing
rapidly across the moor beyond the wall. Fiona clambered up a
small outcropping of rocks that marked the beginning of the moor,
and beckoned excitedly to her companions.
"The secret passage is found by Nell, but she is cautious and
patient. Elizabeth is taken aback by her early impulsiveness-she
feels foolish and perhaps even a bit sullen. Fiona-"
"Fiona sees a magical gateway to an enchanted kingdom, no
doubt," Mrs. Hackworth said, "and even now is crestfallen to find
that you have not stocked the premises with unicorns and dragons.
She would not hesitate for a moment to fly down that tunnel. This
world is not where my Fiona wants to live, Your Grace. She wants another world, where magic is everywhere, and stories come to life, and ..."
Her voice trailed away, and she cleared her throat
uncomfortably. Lord Finkle-McGraw glanced at her and saw pain in
her face, quickly masked. He understood the rest of her sentence
without hearing it: . . . and my husband is here with us.
A pair of riders, a man and a woman, trotted up a gravel path
that ran along the edge of the gardens, through a pair of wrought-iron
gates in the stone wall, which opened for them. The man was
Lord Finkle-McGraw's son Colin, the woman was his wife, and
they had ridden out onto the moor to keep an eye on their daughter
and her two little friends. Seeing that their supervision was no
longer required, Lord Finkle-McGraw and Mrs. Hackworth turned
away from the window and drew instinctively closer to a fire
burning in a stone fireplace the size of a garage.
Mrs. Hackworth sat down in a small rocker, and the Equity
Lord chose an old and incongruously battered leather wing chair. A
servant poured more tea. Mrs. Hackworth set the saucer and cup in
her lap, guarding it with her hands, and collected herself.
"I have been desirous of making certain enquiries regarding my
husband's whereabouts and activities, which have been a mystery to
me almost since the moment he departed," she said, "and yet I was
led to believe, from the very general and guarded statements he
made to me, that the nature of those activities is secret, and that, if
Your Grace has any knowledge of them-and that you do, is of
course merely a convenient supposition on my part-you must treat
that knowledge with flawless discretion. It goes without saying, I
trust, that I would not use even my feeble powers of persuasion to
induce you to violate the trust reposed in you by a higher power."
"Let us take it as a given that both of us will do what is
honourable," Finkle-McGraw said with a reassuringly casual smile.
"Thank you. My husband continues to write me letters, every
week or so, but they are extremely general, nonspecific, and
perfunctory. But in recent months, these letters have become full of
strange images and emotions. They are-bizarre. I have begun to
fear for my husband's mental stability, and for the prospects of any
undertaking that relies upon his good judgment. And while I would
not hesitate to tolerate his absence for as long as is necessary for
him to carry out his duties, the uncertainty has become most trying
for me."
"I am not wholly ignorant of the matter, and I do not think I am
violating any trust when I say that you are not the only person who
has been surprised by the duration of his absence," Lord Finkle-McGraw
said. "Unless I am very much mistaken, those who
conceived of his mission never imagined that it would last for so
long. It may ease your suffering in some small degree to know that
he is not thought to be in danger."
Mrs. Hackworth smiled dutifully, and not for very long.
"Little Fiona seems to handle her father's absence well."
"Oh, but to Fiona, he has never been gone," Mrs. Hackworth
said. "It is the book, you see, that ractive book. When John gave it
to her, just before he departed, he said that it was magic, and that he
would talk to her through it. I know it's nonsense, of course, but she
really believes that whenever she opens that book, her father reads
her a story and even plays with her in an imaginary world, so that
she hasn't really missed him at all. I haven't the heart to tell her that
it's nothing more than a computerized media programme."
"I am inclined to believe that, in this case, keeping her in
ignorance is a very wise policy," Finkle-McGraw said.
"It has served her well thus far. But as time goes on, she is
more and more flighty and less disposed to concentrate on her
schoolwork. She lives in a fantasy and is happy there. But when she
learns that the fantasy is just that, I fear it will not go well for her."
"She is hardly the first young lady to display signs of a vivid
imagination," the Equity Lord said. "Sooner or later they seem to
turn out all right."
The three little explorers, and their two adult outriders, returned
to the great house shortly. Lord Finkle-McGraw's desolate private
moor was as alienated from the tastes of little girls as single malt
whiskey, Gothic architecture, muted colors, and Bruckner
symphonies. Once they had reached it and found that it was not
equipped with pink unicorns, cotton candy vendors, teen idol bands,
or fluorescent green water slides, they lost interest and began to
gravitate toward the house-which in and of itself was far from
Disneyland, but in which a practiced and assertive user like
Elizabeth could find a few consolatory nuggets, such as a full-time
kitchen staff, trained in (among many other, completely useless
skills) the preparation of hot chocolate.
Having come as close to the subject of John Percival Hackworth's disappearance as they dared, and careened past it with no damage except some hot faces and watery eyes, Lord Finkle-McGraw and Mrs. Hackworth had withdrawn, by mutual consent, to cooler subjects. The girls would come inside to drink some hot
chocolate, and then it would be time for the guests to repair to the quarters assigned them for the day, where they could freshen up and
dress for the main event: dinner.
"I should be pleased to look after the other little girl-Nell--
until the dinner hour," Mrs. Hackworth said. "I noticed that the
gentleman who brought her round this morning has not returned
from the hunt."
The Equity Lord chuckled as he imagined General Moore
trying to help a little girl dress for dinner. He was graceful enough
to know his limits, and so he was spending the day shooting on the
remoter stretches of the estate. "Little Nell has a talent for looking
after herself and may not need or wish to accept your most generous
offer. But she might enjoy spending the interim with Fiona."
"Forgive me, Your Grace, but I am startled that you would
consider leaving a child of her age unattended for most of the
afternoon."
"She would not view it in that way, I assure you, for the same
reason that little Fiona does not think of her father as ever having
left your house."
The expression that passed over Mrs. Hackworth's face as she
heard this statement suggested less than perfect comprehension. But
before she could explain to her host the error of his ways, they were
interrupted by the sound of a shrill and bitter conflict making its
way down the hall toward them. The door swung open halfway, and
Colin Finkle-McGraw appeared. His face was still ruddy from the
wind on the moor, and it bore a forced grin that was not terribly
distant from a smirk; though his brow knit up periodically as
Elizabeth emitted an especially piercing shriek of anger. In one hand
he held a copy of the Young Lady's Illustrated Primer. Behind him,
Mrs. Finkle-McGraw could be seen holding Elizabeth by the wrist
in a grip that recalled the blacksmith's tongs holding a dangerously
hot ingot ready for smiting; and the radiant glow of the little girl's
face perfected that analogy. She had bent down so that her face was
level with Elizabeth's and was hissing something to her in a low and
reproaching tone.
"Sorry, Father," the younger Finkle-McGraw said in a voice
slathered with not very convincing synthetic good humor. "Nap
time, obviously." He nodded to the other. "Mrs. Hackworth." Then
his eyes returned to his father's face and followed the Equity Lord's gaze downward to the book. "She was rude to the servants, Father,
and so we have confiscated the book for the rest of the afternoon.
It's the only punishment that seems to sink in-we employ it with
some frequency."
"Then perhaps it is not sinking in as well as you suppose,"
Lord Finkle-McGraw said, looking sad and sounding bemused.
Colin Finkle-McGraw chose to interpret this remark as a
witticism targeted primarily at Elizabeth-but then, parents of small
children must perforce have an entirely different sense of irony than
unimpaired humankind.
"We can't let her spend her life between the covers of your
magical book, Father, It is like a little interactive empire, with
Elizabeth the empress, issuing all sorts of perfectly bloodcurdling
decrees to her obedient subjects. It's important to bring her back to
reality from time to time, so that she can get some perspective."
"Perspective. Very well, I shall look forward to seeing you and
Elizabeth, with her new perspective, at dinner."
"Good afternoon, Father. Mrs. Hackworth," the younger man
said, and closed the door, a heavy masterpiece of the woodcarver's
art and a fairly effective decibel absorbant.
Gwendolyn Hackworth now saw something in Lord Finkle-McGraw's
face that made her want to leave the room. After
speeding through the obligatory pleasantries, she did. She collected
Fiona from the chimneycorner where she was cherishing the dregs
of her hot chocolate. Nell was there too, reading her copy of the
Primer, and Gwendolyn was startled to see that she had not touched
her drink at all.
"What is this?" she exclaimed in what she took to be an appropriately sugary voice. "A little girl who doesn't like hot chocolate?"
Nell was deeply absorbed in her book, and for a moment
Gwendolyn thought that her words had gone unheard. But a few
beats later it became evident that the child was merely postponing
her response until she reached the end of a chapter. Then she raised
her eyes slowly from the page of the book. Nell was a reasonably
attractive girl in the way that almost all girls are before immoderate
tides of hormones start to make different parts of their faces grow
out of proportion to others; she had light brown eyes, glowing
orange in the light of the fire, with a kind of feral slant to them.
Gwendolyn found it difficult to break her gaze; she felt like a captured butterfly staring up through a magnifying lens into the
calm, keen eye of the naturalist.
"Chocolate is fine," Nell said. "The question is, do I need it."
There was a rather long pause in the conversation as
Gwendolyn groped for something to say. Nell did not seem to be
awaiting a response; she had delivered her opinion and was done
with it.
"Well," Gwendolyn finally said, "if you should decide that
there is anything you do need, please know that I would be happy to
assist you."
"Your offer is most kind. I am in your debt, Mrs. Hackworth,"
Nell said. She said it perfectly, like a princess in a book.
"Very well. Good afternoon," Gwendolyn said. She took
Fiona's hand and led her upstairs. Fiona dawdled in a way that was
almost perfectly calculated to annoy, and responded to her mother's
questions only with nods and shakes of the head, because, as
always, her mind was elsewhere. Once they had reached their
temporary quarters in the guest wing, Gwendolyn got Fiona settled
into bed for a nap, then sat down at an escritoire to work her way
through some pending correspondence. But now Mrs. Hackworth
found that her own mind was elsewhere, as she pondered these three
very strange girls-the three smartest little girls in Miss Matheson's
Academy-each with her very strange relationship with her Primer.
Her gaze drifted away from the sheets of mediatronic paper
scattered about the escritoire, out the window, and across the moor,
where a gentle shower had begun to fall. She devoted the better part
of an hour to worrying about girls and Primers.
Then she remembered an assertion that her host had made that
afternoon, which she had not fully appreciated at the time: These
girls weren't any stranger than any other girls, and to blame their
behavior on the Primers was to miss the point entirely.
Greatly reassured, she took out her silver pen and began to
write a letter to her missing husband, who had never seemed so far
away.
Miranda receives an unusual ractive message;
a drive through the streets of Shanghai;
the Cathay Hotel;
a sophisticated soirée;
Carl Hollywood introduces her to two unusual characters.
It was a few minutes before midnight, and Miranda was about
to sign off from the evening shift and clear out of her body stage.
This was a Friday night. Nell had apparently decided not to pull an
all-nighter this time.
On school nights, Nell reliably went to bed between ten-thirty
and eleven, but Friday was her night to immerse herself in the
Primer the way she had as a small child, six or seven years ago,
when all of this had started. Right now, Nell was stuck in a part of
the story that must have been frustrating for her, namely, trying to
puzzle out the social rituals of a rather bizarre cult of faeries that
had thrown her into an underground labyrinth. She'd figure it out
eventually-she always did-but not tonight.
Miranda stayed onstage for an extra hour and a half, playing a
role in a samurai ractive fairly popular in Japan, in which she was a
platinum blond missionary's daughter abducted from Nagasaki by
ronin. All she had to do was squeal a lot and eventually be rescued
by a good samurai. It was a pity she didn't speak Nipponese and
(beyond that) wasn't familiar with the theatrical style of that nation,
because supposedly they were doing some radical and interesting
things with karamaku-"empty screen" or "empty act." Eight years
ago, she would have taken the onehour airship ride to Nippon and
learned the language. Four years ago, she at least would have been
disgusted with herself for playing this stupid role. But tonight she
spoke her lines on cue, squealed and wriggled at the right times, and
took her money, along with a hefty tip and the inevitable mash note
from the payer-a middle-management type in Osaka who wanted
to get to know her better. Of course, the same technology that made
it impossible for Miranda to find Nell, made it impossible for this
creep to find Miranda.
An urgent job offer flashed over her screen just as she was
putting her stuff together. She checked the ENQUIRY screen; the
job didn't pay that much, but it was of very short duration. So she
accepted it. She wondered who was sending her urgent job offers;
six years ago it had happened frequently, but since she'd gone into
her habit of working the evening shift she had, in general, become just another interchangeable Western bimbo with an
unpronounceable name.
It looked like some kind of weird bohemian art piece, some
ractors'workshop project from her distant past: a surreal landscape
of abstract colored geometric forms with faces occasionally rising
out of flat surfaces to speak lines. The faces were texture-mapped,
as if wearing elaborately painted makeup, or were sculpted to the
texture of orange peels, alligator hide, or durian fruit.
"We miss her," said one of the faces, the voice a little familiar,
but disped into a weird ghostly echoing moan.
"Where is she?" said another face, rather familiar in its shape.
"Why has she abandoned us?" said a third face, and even
through the texture-mapping and the voice disping, Miranda
recognized Carl Hollywood.
"If only she would come to our party!" cried another one,
whom Miranda recognized as a member of the Parnasse Company
named Christine something-or-other.
The prompter gave her a line: Sorry, guys, but I'm working late
again tonight.
"Okay, okay," Miranda said, "I'm going to ad lib. Where are
you?"
"The cast party, dummy!" said Carl. "There's a cab waiting for
you outside-we sprung for a half-laner!"
Miranda pulled out of the ractive, finished tidying up the body
stage, and left it open so that some other member of the company
could come in a few hours later and work the gold shift. She ran
down the helical gauntlet of plaster cherubs, muses, and Trojans,
across the lobby where a couple of bleary-eyed apprentice ractors
were cleaning up the debris from this evening's live performance,
and out the front doors. There in the street, illuminated by the
queasy pink-and-purple neon of the marquee, was a half-lane cab
with its lights on.
She was dully surprised when the driver headed toward the
Bund, not toward the midrise districts in Pudong, where tribeless,
lower-income Westerners typically had their flats. Cast parties
usually happened in someone's living room.
Then she reminded herself that the Parnasse was a successful
theatre company nowadays, that they had a whole building
somewhere full of developers coming up with new ractives, that the
current production of Macbeth had cost a lot of money. Carl had
flown to Tokyo and Shenzhen and San Francisco seeking investors and had not come back emptyhanded. The first month of
performances was sold out.
But tonight, there had been a lot of empty seats in the house,
because most of the opening-night crowd was non-Chinese, and
non-Chinese were nervous about going out on the streets because of
rumors about the Fists of Righteous Harmony.
Miranda was nervous too, though she wouldn't admit it. The
taxi turned a corner, and its headlights swept across a knot of young
Chinese men gathered in a doorway, and as one of them lifted a
cigarette to his mouth, she caught a glimpse of a scarlet ribbon
knotted around his wrist. Her chest clenched up, her heart fluttered,
and she had to swallow hard a few times. But the young men could
not see into the silvered windows of the cab. They did not converge
on her, brandishing weapons and crying "Sha! Sha!"
The Cathay Hotel stood in the middle of the Bund, at the
intersection with Nanjing Road, the Rodeo Drive of the Far East. As
far as Miranda could see-all the way to Nanjing, maybe-it was
lined with Western and Nipponese boutiques and department stores,
and the airspace above the street was besprent with almond-size
aerostats, each with its own cine camera and pattern-recognition
ware to watch for suspicious-looking congregations of young men
who might be Fist cells.
Like all of the other big Western buildings on the waterfront,
the Cathay was outlined in white light, which was probably a good
thing because otherwise it wouldn't have looked like much. The
exterior was bleak and dingy in the daytime.
She played a little game of chicken with the doorman. She
strode toward the entrance, confident that he'd haul the door open
for her, but he stood there with his hands clasped behind his back,
staring back at her sullenly. Finally he gave way and hauled the
door open, though she had to break her stride so as not to smash into it.
George Bernard Shaw had stayed here; Noel Coward had
written a play here. The lobby was high and narrow, Beaux Arts
marble, glorious ironwork chandeliers, white light from the Bund
buildings filtering in through stained-glass arches. An ancient jazz
band was playing in the bar, slap bass over trashcan drums. Miranda
stood on tiptoe in the entrance, looking for the party, and saw
nothing except middle-aged Caucasian airship tourists slow-dancing
and the usual lineup of sharp young Chinese men along the bar,
hoping she'd come in.
Eventually she found her way up to the eighth floor, where all
the fancy restaurants were. The big banquet room had been rented
out by some kind of garishly wealthy organization and was full of
men wearing intimidatingly sophisticated suits, women wearing
even more intimidating dresses, and the odd sprinkling of Victorians
wearing far more conservative-but still dapper and expensive-
stuff. The music was fairly restrained, just one tuxedoed Chinese
man playing jazz on a grand piano, but on a stage at one end of the
room, a larger band was setting up its equipment.
She was just cringing away, wondering in what back room the
scruffy actors' bash might be found, when she heard someone
calling her name from inside.
Carl Hollywood was approaching, striding across the middle of
the banquet hall like he owned the place, resplendent in hand-tooled
cowboy boots made of many supple and exotic bird and reptile
skins, wearing a vast raiment, sort of a cross between a cape and a
Western duster, that nearly brushed the floor, and that made him
look seven feet tall rather than a mere six and a half. His long blond
hair was brushed back away from his forehead, his King Tut beard
was sharp and straight as a hoe. He was gorgeous and he knew it,
and his blue eyes were piercing right through Miranda, holding her
there in front of the open elevator doors, through which she'd
almost escaped.
He gave her a big hug and whirled her around. She shrank
against him, shielded from the crowd in the banquet hall by his
enveloping cloak. "I look like shit," she said. "Why didn't you tell
me it was going to be this kind of a party?"
"Why didn't you know?" Carl said. As a director, one of his
talents was to ask the most difficult imaginable questions.
"I would have worn something different. I look like-"
"You look like a young bohemian artiste," Carl said, stepping
back to examine her typically form-fitting black bodysuit, "who
doesn't give a shit about pretentious clothes, who makes everyone
else in the room feel overdressed, and who can get away with it
because she's got that special something."
"You silver-tongued dog," she said, "you know that's bullshit."
"A few years ago you would have sailed into that room with
that lovely chin of yours held up like a battering ram, and everyone
would have stepped back to look at you. Why not now?"
"I don't know," Miranda said. "I think with this Nell thing, I've
incurred all the disadvantages of parenthood without actually
getting to have a child."
Carl relaxed and softened, and Miranda knew she'd spoken the
words he was looking for. "C'mere," he said. "I want you to meet
someone."
"If you're going to try to fix me up with some wealthy son of a
bitch-"
"Wouldn't dream of it."
"I'm not going to become a housewife who acts in her spare
time."
"I realize that," Carl said. "Now calm yourself for a minute."
Miranda was forcibly ignoring the fact that they were walking
through the middle of the room now. Carl Hollywood was drawing
all of the attention, which suited her. She exchanged smiles with a
couple of ractors who had appeared in the interactive invitation that
had summoned her here; both of them were having what looked like
very enjoyable conversations with fine-looking people, probably
investors.
"Who are you taking me to meet?"
"A guy named Beck. An old acquaintance of mine."
"But not a friend?"
Carl adopted an uncomfortable grin and shrugged. "We've
been friends sometimes. We've also been collaborators. Business
partners. This is how life works, Miranda: After a while, you build
up a network of people. You pass them bits of data they might be
interested in and vice versa. To me, he's one of those guys."
"I can't help wondering why you want me to meet him."
"I believe," Carl said very quietly, but using some actor's trick
so that she could hear every word, "that this gentleman can help you
find Nell. And that you can help him find something he wants."
And he stepped aside with a swirl of cloak, pulling out a chair
for her. They were in the corner of the banquet hall. Sitting on the
opposite side of the table, his back to a large marble-silled window,
the illuminated Bund and the mediatronic cacophony of Pudong
spilling bloody light across the glossy shoulder-pads of his suit, was
a young African man in dreadlocks, wearing dark glasses with
minuscule circular lenses held in some kind of ostentatiously
complex metallic space grid. Sitting next to him, but hardly noticed
by Miranda, was a Nipponese businessman wearing a dark formal kimono and smoking what smelled like an old-fashioned, fully carcinogenic cigar.
"Miranda, this is Mr. Beck and Mr. Oda, both privateers.
Gentlemen, Ms. Miranda Redpath."
Both men nodded in a pathetic vestige of a bow, but neither
made a move to shake hands, which was just as well- nowadays
some amazing things could be transferred through skin-to-skin
contact. Miranda didn't even nod back to them; she just sat down
and let Carl scoot her in. She didn't like people who described
themselves as privateers. It was just a pretentious word for a thete-
someone who didn't have a tribe.
Either that, or they really did belong to tribes-from the looks
of them, probably some weird synthetic phyle she'd never heard
of-and, for some reason, were pretending not to.
Carl said, "I have explained to the gentlemen, without getting
into any details, that you would like to do the impossible. Can I get
you something to drink, Miranda?"
After Carl Hollywood left, there was a rather long silence
during which Mr. Beck presumably stared at Miranda, though she
could not tell because of the dark glasses. Mr. Oda's primary
function appeared to be that of nervous spectator, as if he had
wagered half of his net worth on whether Miranda or Mr. Beck
would speak first.
A stratagem occurred to Mr. Oda. He pointed in the direction
of the bandstand and nodded significantly. "You like this band?"
Miranda looked over at the band, half a dozen men and women
in an assortment of races. Mr. Oda's question was difficult to
answer because they had not yet made any music. She looked back
at Mr. Oda, who pointed significantly at himself.
"Oh. You're the backer?" Miranda said.
Mr. Oda withdrew a small glittering object from his pocket and
slid it across the table toward Miranda. It was a cloisonné pin
shaped like a dragonfly. She had noticed similar ones adorning
several partygoers. She picked it up cautiously. Mr. Oda tapped
himself on the lapel and nodded, encouraging her to put it on.
She left it sitting there on the table for the time being.
"I'm not seeing anything," Mr. Beck finally said, apparently
for Mr. Oda's benefit. "To a first approximation, she is clean."
Miranda realized that Mr. Beck had been checking her out using
some kind of display in his phenomenoscopic glasses.
Miranda was still trying to work out some kind of unpleasant
response when Mr. Oda leaned forward into his own cloud of cigar
smoke. "It is our understanding," he said, "that you wish to make a
connection. Your wish is very strong."
Privateers. The word also implied that these gentlemen, at least
in their own minds, had some kind of an angle, some way of making
money off of their own lack of tribal affiliation.
"I've been told that such things are impossible."
"It's more correct to speak in probabilistic terms," said Mr.
Beck. His accent was more Oxford than anything else, with a
Jamaican lilt, and a crispness that owed something to India.
"Astronomically improbable, then," Miranda said.
"There you go," said Mr. Beck.
Now, somehow, the ball had found its way into Miranda's
court. "If you guys think you've found a way to beat probability,
why don't you go into the Vegas ractives and make a fortune?"
Misters Beck and Oda were actually more amused by that
crack than she had expected them to be. They were capable of irony.
That was one good sign in the almost overwhelming barrage of
negative signals she'd been getting from them so far.
The band started up, playing dance music with a good beat.
The lights came down, and the party began to glitter as light flashed
from the dragonfly pins.
"It wouldn't work," Mr. Beck said, "because Vegas is a game
of pure numbers with no human meaning to it. The mind doesn't
interface to pure numbers."
"But probability is probability," Miranda said.
"What if you have a dream one night that your sister is in a
crash, and you contact her the next day and learn that she broke up
with her boyfriend?"
"It could be a coincidence."
"Yes. But not a very probable one. You see, maybe it's
possible to beat probability, when the heart as well as the mind is
involved."
Miranda supposed that neither Mr. Beck nor Mr. Oda
understood the essential cruelty of what they were saying. It was
much better not to have any hope at all. "Are you guys involved in
some kind of religious thing?" she said.
Misters Beck and Oda looked at each other significantly. Mr.
Oda went into some peculiar routine of tooth-sucking and throat-clearing
that would probably convey a torrent of information to another Nipponese person but meant nothing to Miranda, other than
giving her a general hint that the situation was rather complicated.
Mr. Beck produced an antique silver snufibox, or a replica of one,
took out a pinch of nanosite dust, and hoovered it up into one of his
great circular nostrils, then nervously scratched the underside of his
nose. He slid his glasses way down, exposing his big brown eyes,
and stared distractedly over Miranda's shoulder into the thick of the
party, watching the band and the dancers' reaction to it. He was
wearing a dragonfly pin, which had begun to glow and to flash
gorgeous colored lights, like a fleet of police cars and firetrucks
gathered round a burning house.
The band segued into a peculiar, tuneless, beatless miasma of
noise, spawning lazy convection currents in the crowd.
"How do you guys know Carl?" Miranda said, hoping to break
the ice a bit.
Mr. Oda shook his head apologetically. "I have not had the
pleasure of making his acquaintance until recently."
"Used to do thyuh-tuh with him in London."
"You're a ractor?"
Mr. Beck snorted ironically. A variegated silk hankie
flourished in his hand, and he blew his nose quickly and cleanly like
a practiced snufftaker. "I am a technical boy," he said.
"You program ractives?"
"That is a subset of my activities."
"You do lights and sets? Or digital stuff? Or nanotech?"
"Invidious distinctions do not interest me. I am interested in
one thing," said Mr. Beck, holding up his index finger, topped with
a very large but perfectly manicured claw of a fingernail, "and that
is use of tech to convey meaning."
"That covers a lot of areas nowadays."
"Yes, but it shouldn't. That is to say that the distinctions
between those areas are bogus."
"What's wrong with just programming ractives?"
"Nothing at all," said Mr. Beck, "just as nothing is wrong with
traditional live theatre, or for that matter, sitting round a campfire
telling stories, like I used to enjoy on the beach when I was a lad.
But as long as there are new ways to be found, it is my job, as a
technical boy, to find them. Your art, lady, is racting. Searching for
the new tech is mine."
The noise coming from the band had begun to pulse irregularly.
As they talked, the pulses gathered themselves into beats and became steadier. Miranda turned around to look at the people on the
dance floor. They were all standing around with faraway looks on
their faces, concentrating on something. Their dragonfly pins were
flashing wildly now, joining in a coherent pulse of pure white on
each beat. Miranda realized that the pins were somehow patched
into the wearers' nervous systems and that they were talking to each
other, creating the music collectively. A guitarist began to weave an
improvised melodic line through the gradually coalescing pattern of
sound, and the sound condensed around it as all of the dancers heard
the tune. They had a feedback loop going. A young woman began to
chant out some kind of tuneless rap that sounded improvised. As she
went on, she broke into melody. The music was still weird and
formless, but it was beginning to approach something you might
hear on a professional recording.
Miranda turned back to face Mr. Beck. "You think you've
invented a new way to convey meaning with technology-"
"Medium."
"A new medium, and that it can help me get what I want.
Because when meaning is involved, the laws of probability can be
broken."
"There are two misconceptions in your statement. One: I did
not invent the medium. Others did, perhaps for different purposes,
and I have stumbled across it, or actually just heard intimations.
"As far as the laws of probability, my lady, these cannot be
broken, any more than any other mathematical principle. But laws
of physics and mathematics are like a coordinate system that runs in
only one dimension. Perhaps there is another dimension
perpendicular to it, invisible to those laws of physics, describing the
same things with different rules, and those rules are written in our
hearts, in a deep place where we cannot go and read them except in
our dreams."
Miranda looked to Mr. Oda, hoping he'd wink or something,
but he was staring into the dance floor with a terribly serious
expression, as though enfolded in deep thoughts himself, nodding
slightly. Miranda drew a deep breath and sighed.
When she looked up at Mr. Beck again, he was watching her,
noting her curiosity about Mr. Oda. He turned one hand palm up
and rubbed the ball of his thumb over his fingertips.
So Beck was the hacker and Oda was the backer. The oldest
and most troublesome relationship in the technological world.
"We require a third participant," Mr. Beck said, dovetailing
into her thoughts.
"To do what?" Miranda said, evasive and defensive at the same
time.
"All technomedia ventures have the same structure," said Mr.
Oda, bestirring himself for the first time in a while. By now a nice
synergy had developed between band and crowd, and a lot of
dancing was going on-some intimidatingly sophisticated stuff, and
also some primal moshing. "Three-legged tripod." Oda held up a
fist and began to extend fingers as he enumerated the same. Miranda
noted that his fingers were gnarly and bent, as if they'd all been
broken frequently. Mr. Oda was, perhaps, a veteran practitioner of
certain martial arts now disdained by most Nipponese because of
their lower-class provenance. "Leg number one: new technological
idea. Mr. Beck. Leg number two: adequate financial backing. Mr.
Oda. Leg number three: the artist."
Misters Beck and Oda looked significantly at Miranda. She
threw back her head and managed a nice solid laugh, hitting that
sweet spot down in her diaphragm. It felt good. She shook her head,
letting her hair swing back and forth across her shoulders. Then she
leaned forward across the table, shouting to be heard above the
band. "You guys must be desperate. I'm old hat, guys. There's half
a dozen ractors in this room with better prospects than me. Didn't
Carl fill you in? I've been holed up in a body stage for six years
doing kid stuff. I'm not a star."
"Star means a master of conventional ractives, which are
precisely the technology we are trying to move beyond," said Mr.
Beck, a bit scornful that she wasn't getting it.
Mr. Oda pointed to the band. "None of these people were
professional musicians-some not even amateurs. Musician skills
are not relevant for this-these people were new kinds of artists
born too early."
"Almost too early," Mr. Beck said.
"Oh, my god," Miranda said, starting to get it. For the first
time, she believed that what Beck and Oda were talking about-
whatever the hell it was-was a real possibility. Which meant that
she was ninety percent convinced-though only Beck and Oda
understood that.
It was too loud to talk. A mosher backed into Miranda's chair
and nearly fell over her. Beck stood up, came round the table, and
extended one hand, asking her to dance. Miranda looked into the Dionysian revel filling the floor and understood that the only way to
be safe was to join it. She plucked her dragonfly pin from the
tabletop and followed Beck into the midst of the dance. As she
pinned it on, it began to flash, and she thought she heard a new
strain woven into the song.
From the Primer,
Princess Nell enters into the lands of King Coyote.
All that hot afternoon Nell toiled up the numberless
switchbacks, occasionally reaching into the bag that dangled
at her waist, drawing out a handful of Purple's ashes and
scattering them behind her like seeds. Whenever she stopped
to rest, she could look out across the burnt desert she had
just crossed: a tawny plain scabbed with reddish-brown
volcanic rock, patches of aromatic greenish-gray shrubs
clinging like bread mold to any parts that were sheltered from
the eternal wind. She had hoped that when she climbed the
face of this mountain, she would rise up above the dust, but it
had followed her, coating her lips and her toes. When she
drew a breath through her nose, it only stung her parched
nostrils, and so she had given up trying to smell anything. But
late in the afternoon a cool moist draft spilled down the
mountain and over her face. She drew in a breath of it, hoping
to catch some of the cold air before it trickled down into the
desert. It smelled of evergreens.
As she climbed the switchbacks, she forded those
delightful currents of air over and over, so that as she
rounded each hairpin turn in the trail, she had an incentive to
climb toward the next one. The little shrubs that clutched
rocks and cowered in cracks became bigger and more
numerous, and flowers began to appear, first tiny little white
ones like handfuls of salt strewn over the rocks, then larger
blossoms, blue and magenta and brilliant orange, brimming
with scented nectar that attracted bees all fuzzy and yellow
with stolen pollen. Gnarled oaks and short dense evergreens
cast tiny shadows across the path. The skyline grew closer,
and the turns in the path became wider as the mountain
became less steep. Nell rejoiced when the switchbacks ended and the trail took off straight across an undulating
mountaintop meadow thick with purple-flowered heather and
marked with occasional stands of tall firs. For a moment she
was afraid that this meadow was nothing more than a ledge,
and that she had more mountains to ascend; but then the
path turned downhill, and treading heavily as new muscles
caught her descending weight, she half-ran across a vast
boulder, pocked with tiny pools of clear water and occasional
lozenges of wet snow, until she reached a point where it fell
away from under her and she skidded to a precarious stop,
looking down like a peregrine falcon over an immense country
of blue lakes and green mountains, shrouded in a whirling
storm of silver mist.
Nell turned the page and saw it, just as the book said. This was
a twopage illustration-a color painting, she reckoned. Any one part
of it looked just as real as a cine feed. But the geometry of the thing
was funny, borrowing some suprarealistic tricks from classical
Chinese landscape painting; the mountains were too steep, and they
marched away forever into the distance, and if Nell stared, she could
see tall castles clinging to their impossibly precipitous slopes,
colorful banners waving from their flagpoles bearing heraldic
devices that were dynamic: The gryphons crouched, the lions
roared, and she could see all of these details, even though the castles
should have been miles away; whenever she looked at something it
got bigger and turned into a different picture, and when her attention
wavered-when she blinked and shook her head-it snapped back
to the first view again.
She spent a long time doing that, because there were dozens of
castles at the very least, and she got the feeling that if she kept
looking and counting she might look forever. But it wasn't all
castles: there were mountains, cities, rivers, lakes, birds and beasts,
caravans, and travelers of all kinds.
She spent a while staring at a group of travelers who had drawn
their wagons into a roadside meadow and set up a camp, clapping
hands round a bonfire while one of them played a reel on some
small bellowspowered bagpipes, barely audible these many miles
away. Then she realized that the book hadn't said anything for a
long time. "What happened then?" she said.
The Young Lady's Illustrated Primer said nothing.
"Nell looked for a safe way down," Nell essayed.
Her vantage point began to move. A patch of snow swung into
view. "No, wait!" she said, "Nell stuffed some clean snow into her
water bottles."
In the painting, Nell could see her bare pink hands scooping up
snow and packing it bit by bit into the neck of her bottle. When it
was full, she put the cork back in (Nell didn't have to specifr that)
and began moving around on the rock, looking for a place that
wasn't so steep. Nell didn't have to explain that in detail either; in
the ractive, she searched the rock in a fairly rational way and in a
few minutes found a stairway chiseled into the rock, winding down
the mountain endlessly until it pierced a cloud layer far below.
Princess Nell began descending the steps, one at a time.
After a while, Nell tried an experiment: "Princess Nell
descended the stairs for many hours."
This triggered a series of dissolves like she'd seen on old
passives: Her current view dissolved into a closeup of her feet,
trudging down a couple of steps, which dissolved into a view from
considerably farther down the mountain, followed by a closeup of
Princess Nell unscrewing her water bottle and drinking melted
snow; another view from farther down; Nell sitting down for a rest;
a soaring eagle; the approaching cloud layer; big trees; descending
through the mist; and finally, Nell tramping wearily down the last
ten steps, which left her in a clearing in a dark coniferous forest,
carpeted with rust-colored pine needles. It was twilight, and the
wolves were beginning to howl. Nell made the usual arrangements
for the night, lit a fire, and curled up to sleep.
Having reached a good stopping-place, Nell started to close the
book. She'd have to continue this later.
She had just entered the land of the oldest and most powerful
of all the Faery Kings. The many castles on the mountains belonged
to all of his Dukes and Earls, and she suspected she would have to
visit them all before she had gotten what she'd come for. It was not
a quick adventure for an early Saturday morning. But just as she
was clasping the book together, new words and an illustration
appeared on the page she'd been reading, and something about the
illustration made her open the book back up. It showed a crow
perched on a tree branch above Princess Nell, holding a necklace in
its beak. It was eleven jeweled keys strung on a golden chain.
Princess Nell had been wearing it around her neck; apparently the
next event in the story was that this bird stole it while she was sleeping. Beneath the picture was a poem, spoken by the crow from
his perch:
Castles, gardens, gold, and jewels
Contentment signify, for fools
Like Princess Nell; but those
Who cultivate their wit
Like King Coyote and his crows
Compile their power bit by bit
And hide it places no one knows.
Nell closed up the book This was too upsetting to think about
just now. She had been collecting those keys for most of her life.
The first she'd taken from King Magpie just after she and Harv had
arrived at Dovetail. She had picked up the other ten one at a time
during the years since then. She had done this by traveling to the
lands of the Faery Kings and Queens who owned those keys and
using the tricks she had learned from her Night Friends. Each key
had come to her in a different way.
One of the hardest keys to get had belonged to an old Faery
Queen who had seen through every trick that Nell could think up
and fought off every assault. Finally, in desperation, Princess Nell
had thrown herself on the mercy of that Queen and told her the sad
story of Harv locked up in the Dark Castle. The Queen had fed Nell
a nice bowl of chicken soup and handed over the key with a smile.
Not much later, Duck had encountered a nice young mallard on
the road and flown away with him to start a family. Purple and
Princess Nell then traveled together for several years, and on many a
dark night, sitting around the campfire under a full moon, Purple
had taught Nell secret things from her magic books and from the
ancient lore she kept in her head.
Recently they had traveled for a thousand miles on camelback
across a great desert full of djinns, demons, sultans, and caliphs and
finally reached the great onion-domed palace of the local Faery
King- himself a djinn of great power-who ruled over all the
desert lands. Princess Nell had devised a complicated plan to trick
their way into the djinn's treasury. To carry it out, she and Purple
had to live in the city around the palace for a couple of years and
make many treks into the desert in search of magic lanterns, rings,
secret caverns, and the like.
Finally, Princess Nell and Purple had penetrated to the djinn
king's treasury and found the eleventh key. But they had been
surprised by the djinn himself, who attacked them in the guise of a
fire-breathing serpent. Purple had transformed herself into a giant
eagle with metallic wings and talons that could not be burned-
much to the surprise of Princess Nell, who had never imagined that
her companion possessed such power.
The battle between Purple and the djinn raged for a day and a
night, both combatants transforming themselves into any number of
fantastical creatures and hurling all manner of devastating spells at
each other, until finally the mighty castle lay in ruins, the desert was
scorched and blasted for many miles around, and Purple and the
djinn king both lay dead on the floor of what had been the treasury.
Nell had picked up the eleventh key from the floor, put it on
her chain, cremated Purple's body, and scattered her ashes across
the desert as she walked, for many days, toward the mountains and
the green land, where the eleven keys had now been stolen away
from her.
Nell's experiences at school;
a confrontation with Miss Stricken;
the rigors of Supplementary Curriculum;
Miss Matheson's philosophy of education;
three friends go separate ways.
AGLAIA BRILLIANCE
EUPHROSYNE JOY
THALIA BLOOM
The names of the three graces, and diverse artists' conceptions
of the ladies themselves, were chiseled, painted, and sculpted freely
about the interior and exterior of Miss Matheson's Academy. Nell
could hardly look anywhere without seeing one of them prancing
across a field of wildflowers, distributing laurel wreaths to the
worthy, jointly thrusting a torch toward heaven, or shedding
lambent effulgence upon the receptive pupils.
Nell's favorite part of the curriculum was Thalia, which was
scheduled for an hour in the morning and an hour in the afternoon.
When Miss Matheson hauled once on the old bellrope dangling
down from the belfry, belting a single dolorous clang across the campus, Nell and the other girls in her section would arise, curtsy to
their teacher, walk in single file down the corridor to the
courtyard-then break into a chaotic run until they reached the Hall
of Physical Culture, where they would strip out of their heavy,
scratchy complicated uniforms and climb into lighter, looser,
scratchy complicated uniforms with more freedom of movement.
The Bloom curriculum was taught by Miss Ramanujan or one
of her assistants. Usually they did something vigorous in the
morning, like field hockey, and something graceful in the afternoon,
like ballroom dance, or peculiar, giggle-inducing exercises in how
to walk, stand, and sit like a Lady.
Brilliance was Miss Matheson's department, though she mostly
left it to her assistants, occasionally wheeling in and out of various
classrooms in an old wood-and-wicker wheelchair. During the
Aglaia period, the girls would get together in groups of half a dozen
or so to answer questions or solve problems put to them by the
teachers: For example, they counted how many species of plants and
animals could be found in one square foot of the forest behind the
school. They put on a scene from a play in Greek. They used a
ractive simulation to model the domestic economy of a Lakota band
before and after the introduction of horses. They designed simple
machines with a nanopresence rig and tried to compile them in the
M.C. and make them work They wove brocades and made porcelain
as Chinese ladies used to do. And there was an ocean of history to
be learned: first biblical, Greek, and Roman, and then the history of
many other peoples around the world that essentially served as
backdrop for History of the English-Speaking Peoples.
The latter subject was, curiously, not part of the Brilliance
curriculum; it was left firmly in the hands of Miss Stricken, who
was mistress of Joy.
In addition to two one-hour periods each day, Miss Stricken
had the attention of the entire assembled student body once in the
morning, once at noon, and once in the evening. During these times
her basic function was to call the students to order; publicly upbraid
those sheep who had prominently strayed since the last such
assembly; disgorge any random meditations that had been
occupying her mind of late; and finally, in reverential tones,
introduce Father Cox, the local vicar, who would lead the students
in prayer. Miss Stricken also had the students all to herself for two
hours on Sunday morning and could optionally command their attention for up to eight hours on Saturdays if she came round to the
opinion that they wanted supplementary guidance.
The first time Nell sat down in one of Miss Stricken's
classrooms, she found that her desk had perversely been left directly
behind another girl's, so that she was unable to see anything except
for the bow in that girl's hair. She got up, tried to skooch the desk,
and found that it was fixed to the floor. All the desks, in fact, were
arranged in a perfectly regular grid, facing in the same direction-
which is to say, toward Miss Stricken or one of her two assistants,
Miss Bowlware and Mrs. Disher.
Miss Bowlware taught them History of the English-Speaking
Peoples, starting with the Romans at Londinium and careening
through the Norman Conquest, Magna Carta, Wars of the Roses,
Renaissance, and Civil War; but she didn't really hit her stride until
she got to the Georgian period, at which point she worked herself up
into a froth explaining the shortcomings of that syphilitic monarch,
which had inspired the rightthinking Americans to break away in
disgust. They studied the most ghastly parts of Dickens, which Miss
Bowlware carefully explained was called Victorian literature
because it was written during the reign of Victoria I, but was
actually about pre-Victorian times, and that the mores of the
original Victorians-the ones who built the old British Empire-
were actually a reaction against the sort of bad behavior engaged in
by their parents and grandparents and so convincingly detailed by
Dickens, their most popular novelist.
The girls actually got to sit at their desks and play a few
ractives showing what it was like to live during this time: generally
not very nice, even if you selected the option that turned off all the
diseases. At this point, Mrs. Disher stepped in to say, if you thought
that was scary, look at how poor people lived in the late twentieth
century. Indeed, after ractives told them about the life of an inner-city
Washington, D.C., child during the 1990s, most students had to
agree they'd take a workhouse in pre-Victorian England over that
any day.
All of the foregoing set the stage for a three-pronged, parallel
examination of the British Empire; pre-Vietnam America; and the
modern and ongoing history of New Atlantis. In general, Mrs.
Disher handled the more modern stuff and anything pertaining to America.
Miss Stricken handled the big payoff at the end of each period
and at the end of each unit. She stormed in to explain what conclusion they were being led to and to make sure that all of them
got it. She also had a way of lunging predatorily into the classroom
and rapping the knuckles of any girl who had been whispering,
making faces at the teachers, passing notes, doodling,
woolgathering, fidgeting, scratching, nose-picking, sighing, or
slumping.
Clearly, she was sitting in her closetlike office next door
watching them with cine monitors. Once, Nell was sitting in Joy
diligently absorbing a lecture about the Lend-Lease Program. When
she heard the squeaky door from Miss Stricken's office swing open
behind her, like all the other girls she suppressed the panicky urge to
look around. She heard Miss Stricken's heels popping up her aisle,
heard the whir of the ruler, and then suddenly felt her knuckles
explode.
"Hairdressing is a private, not a public activity, Nell," Miss
Stricken said. "The other girls know this; now you do too."
Nell's face burned, and she wrapped her good hand around her
damaged one like a bandage. She did not understand anything until
one of the other girls caught her eye and made a corkscrewing
motion with her index finger up near one temple: Apparently Nell
had been twisting her hair around her finger, which she often did
when she was reading the Primer or thinking hard about any one
thing.
The ruler was such a pissant form of discipline, compared to a
real beating, that she could not take it seriously at first and actually
found it funny the first few times. As the months went by, though, it
seemed to get more painful. Either Nell was becoming soft, or-
more likely-the full dimensions of the punishment were beginning
to sink in. She had been such an outsider at first that nothing
mattered. But as she began to excel in the other classes and to gain
the respect of teachers and students alike, she found herself with
pride to lose. Part of her wanted to rebel, to throw everything away
so that it could not be used against her. But she enjoyed the other
classes so much that she couldn't bear to think further of the
possibility.
One day Miss Stricken decided to concentrate all her attentions
on Nell. There was nothing unusual about that-it was standard to
randomly single out particular scholars for intensive enforcement.
With twenty minutes left in the hour, Miss Stricken had already
gotten Nell on the right hand for hair-twisting and on the left for
nail-biting, when, to her horror, Nell realized that she was scratching her nose and that Miss Stricken was standing in the aisle
glaring at her like a falcon. Both of Nell's hands shot into her lap,
beneath the desk.
Miss Stricken walked up to her deliberately, pop pop pop.
"Your right hand, Nell," she said, "just about here." And she
indicated with the end of the ruler an altitude that would be a
convenient place for the assault- rather high above the desk, so
that everyone in the room could see it.
Nell hesitated for a moment, then held her hand up.
"A bit higher, Nell," Miss Stricken said.
Nell moved her hand a bit higher.
"Another inch should do it, I think," Miss Stricken said,
appraising the hand as if it were carved in marble and recently
excavated from a Greek temple.
Nell could not bring herself to raise the hand any higher.
"Raise it one more inch, Nell," Miss Stricken said, "so that the
other girls can observe and learn along with you."
Nell raised her hand just a bit.
"That was rather less than an inch, I should think," Miss
Stricken said.
Other girls in the class began to titter-their faces were all
turned back toward Nell, and she could see their exultation, and
somehow Miss Stricken and the ruler became irrelevant compared
to the other girls. Nell raised her hand a whole inch, saw the windup
out of the corner of her eye, heard the whir. At the last moment, on
an impulse, she flipped her hand over, caught the ruler on her palm,
grabbed it, and twisted in a way that Dojo had taught her, bending it
against the grain of Miss Stricken's fingers so that she was forced to
let go. Now Nell had the ruler, and Miss Stricken was disarmed.
Her opponent was a bulging sort of woman, taller than average,
rather topheavy on those heels, the sort of teacher whose very
fleshiness becomes the object of morbid awe among her gamine
pupils, whose personal toilet practices-the penchant for dandruff,
the habitually worn-out lipstick, the little wad of congealed saliva at
the corner of the mouth-loom larger in her students' minds than
the Great Pyramids or the Lewis and Clark Expedition. Like all
other women, Miss Stricken benefited from a lack of external
genitalia that would make it more difficult for Nell to incapacitate
her, but nevertheless, Nell could think of half a dozen ways to leave
her a bloody knot on the floor and not waste more than a quarter of
a minute in the process. During her time with Constable Moore, noting her benefactor's interest in war and weapons, she had taken
up a renewed interest in martial arts, had paged back in the Primer
to the Dinosaur's Tale and been pleased but hardly surprised to
discover that Dojo was still holding lessons there, picking up just
where he and Belle the Monkey had left off.
Thinking of her friend Dinosaur and her sensei, Dojo the
Mouse, she suddenly felt shame far deeper than anything Miss
Stricken or her sniggering classmates could inflict. Miss Stricken
was a stupid hag, and her classmates were snot-nosed clowns, but
Dojo was her friend and her teacher, he had always respected her
and given her his full attention, and he had carefully taught her the
ways of humility and self-discipline. Now she had perverted his
teachings by using her skill to take Miss Stricken's ruler. She could
not have been more ashamed.
She handed the ruler back, raised her hand high in the air, and
heard but did not feel the impacts of the ruler, some ten in all. "I
shall expect you in my office after evening prayers, Nell," Miss
Stricken said when she was finished.
"Yes, Miss Stricken," Nell said.
"What are you girls looking at?" blurted Mrs. Disher, who was
running the class today. "Turn around and pay attention!" And with
that it was all over. Nell sat in her desk for the rest of the hour as if
carved from a solid block of gypsum.
Her interview with Miss Stricken at the end of the day was
short and businesslike, no violence or even histrionics. Nell was
informed that her performance in the Joy phase of the curriculum
was so deficient that it placed her in danger of failing and being
expelled from the school altogether, and that her only hope was to
come in each Saturday for eight hours of supplementary study.
Nell wished more than anything that she could refuse. Saturday
was the only day of the week when she did not have to attend school
at all. She always spent the day reading the Primer, exploring the
fields and forests around Dovetail, or visiting Harv down in the
Leased Territories.
She felt that, through her own mistakes, she had ruined her life
at Miss Matheson's Academy. Until recently, Miss Stricken's
classes had been nothing more than a routine annoyance-an ordeal
that she had to sit through in order to experience the fun parts of the
curriculum. She could look back on a time only a couple of months
ago when she would come home with her mind aglow from all the
things she had learned in Brilliance, and when the Joy part was just an indistinct smudge around the edge. But in recent weeks, Miss
Stricken had, for some reason, loomed larger and larger in her view
of the place. And somehow, Miss Stricken had read Nell's mind and
had chosen just the right moment to step up her campaign of
harassment. She had timed today's events perfectly. She had
brought Nell's most deeply hidden feelings out into the open, like a
master butcher exposing the innards with one or two deft strokes of
the knife. And now everything was ruined. Now Miss Matheson's
Academy had vanished and become Miss Stricken's House of Pain,
and there was no way for Nell to escape from that house without
giving up, which her friends in the Primer had taught her she must
never do.
Nell's name went up on a board at the front of the classroom
labeled, in heavy brass letters, SUPPLEMENTARY CURRICULUM
STUDENTS. Within a few days, her name had been joined by two
others: Fiona Hackworth and Elizabeth Finkle-McGraw. Nell's
disarming of the fearsome Miss Stricken had already become the
stuff of oral legend, and her two friends had been so inspired by the
act of defiance that they had gone to elaborate lengths to get
themselves in trouble too. Now, the three best students of Miss
Matheson's Academy were all doomed to Supplementary
Curriculum.
Each Saturday, Nell, Fiona, and Elizabeth would arrive at the
school at seven o'clock, enter the room, and sit down in the front
row in adjacent desks. This was part of Miss Stricken's fiendish
plan. A less subtle tormentor would have placed the girls as far apart
as possible to prevent them from talking to each other, but Miss
Stricken wanted them right next to each other so that they would be
more tempted to visit and pass notes.
There was no teacher in the room at any time. They assumed
that they were being monitored, but they never really knew. When
they entered, each one of them had a pile of books on her desk-old
books bound in chafed leather. Their job was to copy the books out
by hand and leave the pages neatly stacked on Miss Stricken's desk
before they went home. Usually, the books were transcripts of
debates from the House of Lords, from the nineteenth century.
During their seventh Saturday in Supplementary Curriculum,
Elizabeth Finkle-McGraw suddenly dropped her pen, slammed her
book shut, and threw it against the wall.
Nell and Fiona could not keep themselves from laughing. But
Elizabeth did not convey the impression of being in a very lighthearted mood. The old book had scarcely come to rest on the
floor before Elizabeth had run over to it and begun kicking at it.
With each blow a furious grunt escaped from her gorge. The book
absorbed this violence impassively, driving Elizabeth into a higher
rage; she dropped to her knees, flung the cover open, and began to
rip out pages by the fistful.
Nell and Fiona looked at each other, suddenly serious. The
kicking had been funny, but something about the tearing of pages
disturbed them both. "Elizabeth! Stop it!" Nell said, but Elizabeth
gave no signs of having heard her. Nell ran up to Elizabeth and
hugged her from behind. Fiona scurried in a moment later and
picked up the book.
"God damn it!" Elizabeth bellowed, "I don't care about any of
the goddamn books, and I don't care about the Primer either!"
The door banged open. Miss Stricken stomped in, dislodged
Nell with a simple body check, got both arms around Elizabeth's
shoulders, and manhandled her out the door.
A few days later, Elizabeth left on a lengthy vacation with her
parents, jumping from one New Atlantis clave to another in the
family's private airship, working their way across the Pacific and
North America and finally to London itself, where they settled in for
several months. In the first few days, Nell received one letter from
her, and Fiona received two. After that they received no response to
their letters and eventually stopped trying. Elizabeth's name was
removed from the Supplementary Curriculum plaque.
Nell and Fiona soldiered on. Nell had reached the point where
she could transcribe the old books all day long without actually
absorbing a single word. During her first weeks in Supplementary
Curriculum she had been frightened; in fact, she had been surprised
at the level of her own fear and had come to realize that Authority,
even when it refrained from violence, could be as disturbing a
specter as anything she had seen in her earlier years. After the
incident with Elizabeth, she became bored for many months, then
furious for quite a while until she realized, in conversations with
Duck and Purple, that her anger was eating her up inside. So with a
conscious effort, she went back to being bored again.
The reason she'd been furious was that copying out those
books was such an unforgivably stupid waste of time. There was no
end to what she could have learned reading the Primer for those
eight hours. For that matter, the normal curriculum at Miss Matheson's Academy would have been perfectly fine as well. She was tormented by the irrationality of this place.
One day, when she returned from a trip to the washroom, she
was startled to notice that Fiona had hardly copied out a single page,
though they had been there for hours.
After this, Nell made it a practice to look at Fiona from time to
time. She noticed that Fiona never stopped writing, but she was not
paying attention to the old books. As she finished each page, she
folded it up and placed it in her reticule. From time to time, she
would stop and stare dreamily out the window for a few minutes,
and then resume; or she might place both hands over her face and
rock back and forth silently in her chair for a while before giving
herself over to a long burst of ardent writing that might cover
several pages in as many minutes.
Miss Stricken cruised into the room late one afternoon, took the
stack of completed pages from Nell's desk, flipped through them,
and allowed her chin to decline by a few minutes of arc. This nearly
imperceptible vestige of a nod was her way of saying that Nell was
dismissed for the day. Nell had come to understand that one way for
Miss Stricken to emphasize her power over the girls was for her to
make her wishes known through the subtlest possible signs, so that
her charges were forced to watch her anxiously at all times.
Nell took her leave; but after proceeding a few steps down the
corri dor, she turned and stole back to the door and peeked through
the window into the classroom.
Miss Stricken had gotten the folded-up pages out of Fiona's
bag and was perusing them, strolling back and forth across the front
of the room like the slow swing of a pendulum, a devastatingly
ponderous motion. Fiona sat in her chair, her head bowed and her
shoulders drawn together protectively.
After reading the papers for an eternity or two, Miss Stricken
dropped them on her desk and made some kind of brief statement,
shaking her head in hopeless disbelief. Then she turned and walked
out of the room.
When Nell reached her, Fiona's shoulders were still shaking
silently. Nell put her arms around Fiona, who finally began to draw
in sobbing breaths. During the next few minutes she gradually
moved on to that stage of crying where the body seems to swell up
and poach in its own fluids.
Nell suppressed the urge to be impatient. She well knew, as did
all of the other girls, that Fiona's father had disappeared several years ago and never come back. He was rumored to be on an honorable and official mission; but as years went by this belief was
gradually supplanted by the suspicion that something disgraceful
had taken place. It would be easy enough for Nell to make the point
that she had been through much worse. But seeing the depth of
Fiona's unhappiness, she had to consider the possibility that Fiona
was in a worse situation now.
When Fiona's mother came by in a little half-lane car to pick
her up, and saw her daughter's red and ruinous face, an expression
of black rage came over her own visage and she drove Fiona away
without so much as a glance at Nell. Fiona showed up for church the
next day as if nothing had happened and said nothing of it to Nell
during the next week at school. In fact, Fiona hardly said a word to
anyone, as she spent all of her time now daydreaming.
When Nell and Fiona showed up at seven o'clock the next
Saturday morning, they were astonished to find Miss Matheson
waiting for them at the front of the classroom, sitting in her wood-and-
wicker wheelchair, wrapped up in a thermogenic comforter.
The stacks of books, paper, and fountain pens were not there, and
their names had been removed from the plaque at the front of the
room. "It's a lovely spring day," Miss Matheson said. "Let's gather
some foxgloves."
They went across the playing fields to the meadow where the
wildflowers grew, the two girls walking and Miss Matheson's
wheelchair carrying her along on its many-spoked smart wheels.
"Chiselled Spam," Miss Matheson said, sort of mumbling it to herself.
"Pardon me, Miss Matheson?" Nell said.
"I was just watching the smart wheels and remembering an
advertisement from my youth," Miss Matheson said. "I used to be a
thrasher, you know. I used to ride skateboards through the streets.
Now I'm still on wheels, but a different kind. Got a few too many
bumps and bruises during my earlier career, I'm afraid."
. . .
"It's a wonderful thing to be clever, and you should never think
otherwise, and you should never stop being that way. But what you
learn, as you get older, is that there are a few billion other people in
the world all trying to be clever at the same time, and whatever you
do with your life will certainly be lost-swallowed up in the ocean-unless you are doing it along with like-minded people who
will remember your contributions and carry them forward. That is
why the world is divided into tribes. There are many Lesser phyles
and three Great ones. "What are the Great ones?"
"New Atlantis," Nell began.
"Nippon," said Fiona.
"Han," they concluded together.
"That is correct," Miss Matheson said. "We traditionally
include Han in the list because of its immense size and age-even
though it has lately been crippled by intestine discord. And some
would include Hindustan, while others would view it as a riotously
diverse collection of microtribes sintered together according to some
formula we don't get.
"Now, there was a time when we believed that what a human
mind could accomplish was determined by genetic factors. Piffle, of
course, but it looked convincing for many years, because
distinctions between tribes were so evident. Now we understand that
it's all cultural. That, after all, is what a culture is-a group of
people who share in common certain acquired traits.
"Information technology has freed cultures from the necessity
of owning particular bits of land in order to propagate; now we can
live anywhere. The Common Economic Protocol specifies how this
is to be arranged.
"Some cultures are prosperous; some are not. Some value
rational discourse and the scientific method; some do not. Some
encourage freedom of expression, and some discourage it. The only
thing they have in common is that if they do not propagate, they will
be swallowed up by others. All they have built up will be torn
down; all they have accomplished will be forgotten; all they have
learned and written will be scattered to the wind. In the old days it
was easy to remember this because of the constant necessity of
border defence. Nowadays, it is all too easily forgotten.
"New Atlantis, like many tribes, propagates itself largely
through education. That is the raison d'être of this Academy. Here
you develop your bodies through exercise and dance, and your
minds by doing projects. And then you go to Miss Stricken's class.
'What is the point of Miss Stricken's class? Anyone? Please speak
up. You can't get in trouble, no matter what you say."
Nell said, after some dithering, "I'm not sure that it has any
point." Fiona just watched her saying it and smiled sadly.
Miss Matheson smiled. "You are not far off the mark. Miss
Stricken's phase of the curriculum comes perilously close to being
without any real substance. Why do we bother with it, then?"
"I can't imagine," Nell said.
"When I was a child, I took a karate class," Miss Matheson
said, astonishingly. "Dropped out after a few weeks. Couldn't stand
it. I thought that the sensei would teach me how to defend myself
when I was out on my skateboard. But the first thing he did was
have me sweep the floor. Then he told me that if I wanted to defend
myself, I should buy a gun. I came back the next week and he had
me sweep the floor again. All I ever did was sweep. Now, what was
the point of that?"
"To teach you humility and self-discipline," Nell said. She had
learned this from Dojo long ago.
"Precisely. Which are moral qualities. It is upon moral qualities
that a society is ultimately founded. All the prosperity and
technological sophistication in the world is of no use without that
foundation-we learned this in the late twentieth century, when it
became unfashionable to teach these things."
"But how can you say it's moral?" said Fiona. "Miss Stricken
isn't moral. She's so cruel."
"Miss Stricken is not someone I would invite to dinner at my
house. I would not hire her as a governess for my children. Her
methods are not my methods. But people like her are indispensable.
"It is the hardest thing in the world to make educated
Westerners pull together," Miss Matheson went on. "That is the job
of people like Miss Stricken. We must forgive them their
imperfections. She is like an avatar-do you children know about
avatars? She is the physical embodiment of a principle. That
principle is that outside the comfortable and welldefended borders
of our phyle is a hard world that will come and hurt us if we are not
careful. It is not an easy job to have. We must all feel sorry for Miss
Stricken."
They brought sheaves of foxgloves, violet and magenta, back
to the school and set them in vases in each classroom, leaving an
especially large bouquet in Miss Stricken's office. Then they took
tea with Miss Matheson, and then they each went home.
Nell could not bring herself to agree with what Miss Matheson
had said; but she found that, after this conversation, everything
became easy. She had the neo-Victorians all figured out now. The
society had miraculously transmutated into an orderly system, like the simple computers they programmed in the school. Now that Nell
knew all of the rules, she could make it do anything she wanted.
"Joy" returned to its former position as a minor annoyance on
the fringes of a wonderful schoolday. Miss Stricken got her with the
ruler from time to time, but not nearly so often, even when she was,
in fact, scratching or slumping.
Fiona Hackworth had a harder time of it, and within a couple of months she was back on the Supplementary Curriculum list. A few months after that, she stopped coming to school entirely. It was announced that she and her mother had moved to Atlantis/Seattle, and her address was posted in the hall for those who wished to write her letters.
But Nell heard rumors about Fiona from the other girls, who
had picked up snatches from their parents. After Fiona had been
gone for a year or so, word got out that Fiona's mother had obtained
a divorce- which, in their tribe, only happened in cases of adultery
or abuse. Nell wrote Fiona a long letter saying she was terribly sorry
if her father had been abusive, and offering her support in that case.
A few days later she got back a curt note in which Fiona defended
her father from all charges. Nell wrote back a letter of apology but
didn't hear from Fiona Hackworth again.
It was about two years later that the news feeds filled up with
astonishing tales of the young heiress Elizabeth Finkle-McGraw,
who had vanished from her family's estate outside of London and
was rumored to have been sighted in London, Los Angeles, Hong
Kong, Miami, and many other places, in the presence of people
suspected of being highranking members of CryptNet.
Hackworth awakes from a dream;
retreat from the world of the Drummers;
chronological discrepancies.
Hackworth woke from a dream of unsustainable pleasure and
realized it wasn't a dream; his penis was inside someone else, and
he was steaming like a runaway locomotive toward ejaculation. He
had no idea what was going on; but couldn't he be forgiven for
doing the wrong thing? With a wiggle here and a thrust there, he
finally nudged himself over the threshold, the smooth muscles of the
tract in question executing their spinal algorithm.
Just a few deep breaths into the refractory period, and he had
already disengaged, yelping a little from the electric spark of
withdrawal, and levered himself up on one arm to see whom he'd
just violated. The firelight was enough to tell him what he already
knew: Whoever this woman was, it wasn't Gwen. Hackworth had
violated the most important promise he'd ever made, and he didn't
even know the other party.
But he knew it wasn't the first time. Far from it. He'd had sex with a lot of people in the past few years- he'd even been buggered.
There was, for example, the woman-
Never mind, there was the man who-
Strange to say, he could not think of any specific examples. But
he knew he was guilty. It was precisely like waking up from a
dream and having a clear train of thought in your mind, something
you were working on just a few seconds ago, but being unable to
remember it, consciousness peeled away from cognition. Like a
three-year-old who has a talent for vanishing into crowds whenever
you turn your back, Hackworth's memories had fled to the same
place as words that are on the tip of your tongue, precedents for déjà
vu, last night's dreams.
He knew he was in big trouble with Gwen, but that Fiona still
loved him- Fiona, taller than Gwen now, so self-conscious about
her still linear figure, still devoid of the second derivatives that add
spice to life.
Taller than Gwen? How's that?
Better get out of this place before he had sex with someone else he didn't know.
He wasn't in the central chamber anymore, rather in one of the
tunnel's aneurysms with some twenty other people, all just as naked
as he was. He knew which tunnel led to the exit (why?) and began
to crawl down it, rather stiffly as it seemed that he was stiff and
laden with cricks and cramps. Must not have been very athletic
sex- more in the Tantric mode.
Sometimes they had sex for days.
How did he know that?
The hallucinations were gone, which was fine with him. He
crawled through the tunnels for a long time. If he tried to think
about where he was going, he got lost and eventually circled back to
where he started. Only when his mind began to wander did he make
his way on some kind of autopilot to a long chamber filled with silvery light, sloping upward. This was beginning to look familiar, he had seen this when he was still a young man. He followed it
upward until he reached the end, where something unusually stony
was under his feet. A hatch opened above him, and several tons of
cold seawater landed on his head.
He staggered up onto dry land and found himself in Stanley
Park again, gray floor aft, green wall fore. The ferns rustled, and out
stepped Kidnapper, who looked fuzzy and green. He also looked
unusually dapper for a robotic horse, as Hackworth's bowler hat
was perched on top of his head.
Hackworth reached up to feel himself and was astounded to
feel his face covered with hair. Several months' growth of beard
was there. But even stranger, his chest was much hairier than it had
been before. Some of the chest hair was gray, the only gray hairs he
had ever seen coming out of his own follicles.
Kidnapper was fuzzy and green because moss had been
growing on him. The bowler looked terrible and had moss on it too.
Hackworth reached out instinctively and put it on his head. His arm
was thicker and hairier than it used to be, a not altogether
unpleasing change, and even the hat felt a little tight.
From the Primer,
Princess Nell crosses the trail of the enigmatic Mouse Army;
a visit to an invalid.
The clearing dimly visible through the trees ahead was a
welcome sight, for the forests of King Coyote were
surpassingly deep and forever shrouded in cool mists.
Fingers of sunlight had begun to thrust between the clouds,
and so Princess Nell decided to rest in the open space and,
with any luck, bask in the sunlight. But when she reached the
clearing, she found that it was not the flowerstrewn
greensward she had expected; it was rather a swath that had
been carved through the forest by the passage of some titanic
force, which had flattened trees and churned up the soil as it
progressed. When Princess Nell had recovered from her
astonishment and mastered her fear, she resolved to make
use of the tracking skills she had learned during her many
adventures, so as to learn something about the nature of this
unknown creature.
As she soon discovered, the skills of an advanced tracker
were not necessary in this case. The merest glance at the
trampled soil revealed not (as she had anticipated) a few
enormous footprints, but millions of tiny ones, superimposed
upon one another in such numbers that no scrap of ground
was unmarked by the impressions of tiny claws and footpads.
A torrent of cats had passed this way; even had Princess Nell
not recognized the footprints, the balls of loose hair and tiny
scats, strewn everywhere, would have told the story.
Cats moving in a herd! It was most unfeline behavior. Nell
followed their track for some time, hoping to divine the cause
of this prodigy. After a few miles the road widened into an
abandoned camp freckled with the remains of innumerable
small campfires. Nell combed this area for more clues, not
without success: she found many mouse droppings here, and
mouse footprints around the fires. The pattern of footprints
made it clear that the cats had been concentrated in a few
small areas, while the mice had apparently had the run of the
place.
The final piece of the puzzle was a tiny scrap of twisted
rawhide that Nell found abandoned near one of the little
campfires. Turning it around in her fingers, Nell realized that it
was much like a horse's bridle- except sized to fit around the
head of a cat.
She was standing on the trail of a vast army of mice, who
rode on the backs of cats in the way that knights ride on
horses.
She had heard tales of the Mouse Army in other parts of
the Land Beyond and dismissed them as ancient
superstitions.
But once, several years ago, in an inn high in the
mountains, where Princess Nell had stayed for the night, she
had been awakened early in the morning by the sound of a
mouse rooting through her pack. .
Princess Nell uttered a light-making spell that Purple had
taught her, kindling a ball of luminance that hung in the air in
the center of the room. The words of the spell had been
concealed in the howl of the mountain winds through the
rickety structure of the old inn, and so the mouse was caught
entirely by surprise, blinded by the sudden light. Nell was
startled to see that the mouse was not gnawing its way into her supply of food, as any mouse should have done, but
rather was going through some of her papers. And this was
not the usual destructive search for nesting material-this
mouse knew how to read and was looking for information.
Princess Nell trapped the mouse spy under her hands.
"What are you looking for? Tell me, and I shall let you
escape!" she said. Her adventures had taught her to be on
the lookout for tricks of all kinds, and it was important that she
learn who had dispatched this tiny, but effective, spy.
"I am but a harmless mouse!" the spy squealed. "I do not
even desire your food- information only!"
"I will give you a big piece of cheese, all to yourself, if you
give me some information," Princess Nell said. She caught
the mouse's tail and lifted him up into the air so that they
could talk face-to-face. Meanwhile, with her other hand, she
loosened the drawstring of her bag and drew out a nice piece
of blue-veined Stilton.
"We are seeking our lost Queen," the mouse said.
"I can assure you that none of my papers have any
information about a missing mouse monarch," Princess Nell
said.
"What is your name?" the mouse said.
"That is none of your business, spy!" Princess Nell said. "I
will ask the questions."
"But it is very important that I know your name," the
mouse said.
"Why? I am not a mouse. I have not seen any little mice
with crowns on their heads."
The mouse spy said nothing. He was staring carefully at
Princess Nell with his little beady eyes. "Did you, by any
chance, come from an enchanted island?"
"You have been listening to too many fairy tales,"
Princess Nell said, barely concealing her astonishment. "You
have been most uncooperative and so do not deserve any
cheese- but I admire your pluck and so will give you some
anyway. Enjoy yourself!" She set the mouse down on the floor
and took out her knife to cut off a bit of the cheese; but by the
time she was finished, the mouse had disappeared. She just
caught sight of his pink tail disappearing under the door.
The next morning, she found him dead on the hallway
floor. The innkeeper's cat had caught him. .
So the Mouse Army did exist! Princess Nell wondered
whether they had ever located their lost Queen. She followed
their trail for another day or two, as it went in approximately
the right direction and was almost as convenient as a road.
She passed through a few more campsites. At one of them,
she even found a little gravesite, marked with a tiny
headstone carved from a chip of soapstone.
The carvings on this tiny monument were much too small
to see. But Princess Nell carried with her a magnifying glass
that she had pilfered from the treasury of one of the Faery
Kings, and so now she removed it from its padded box and its
velvet bag and used it to examine the inscription.
At the top of the stone was a little bas-relief of a mouse
knight, dressed in armor, with a sword in one hand, bowing
before an empty throne. The inscription read,
Here lies Clover, tail and all
Her virtues far outweighed her flaws
She from the saddle took a fall
And perished 'neath her charger's paws.
We know not if her final ride
Hath led her into Heaven or Hell
Wherever she doth now abide
She's loyal yet to Princess Nell.
Princess Nell examined the remains of the fires, and the
surfaces of the wood that the Mouse Army had cut, and the
state of their droppings, and estimated that they had passed
by here many weeks previously. One day she would
rendezvous with them and find out why they had formed such
an attachment to her; but for now, she had more pressing
considerations.
. . .
She'd have to see about the Mouse Army later. Today was
Saturday, and on Saturday morning she always went down to the
Leased Territories to visit her brother. She opened up the wardrobe
in the corner of her sleeping room and took out her traveling dress.
Sensing her intentions, the chaperone flew out of its niche in the
back and whined over to the door.
Even at her still-tender age, just a few years past the threshold
of womanhood, Nell had already had cause to be grateful for the
presence of the droning chaperone pod that followed her
everywhere when she ventured from home alone. Maturity had
given her any number of features that would draw the attention of
the opposite sex, and of women so inclined. Commentators rarely
failed to mention her eyes, which were said to have a vaguely exotic
appearance. There was nothing particularly unusual about their
shape or size, and their color-a tweedy blend of green and light
brown flecked with gold-did not make them stand out in a
predominantly Anglo-Saxon culture. But Nell's eyes had an
appearance of feral alertness that seized the attention of anyone who
met her. Neo-Victorian society produced many young women who,
though highly educated and well-read, were still blank slates at
Nell's age. But Nell's eyes told a different story. When she had
been presented to society a few months ago, along with several
other External Propagation girls at Miss Matheson's Academy, she
had not been the prettiest girl at the dance, and certainly not the best
dressed or most socially prominent. She had attracted a crowd of
young men anyway. They did not do anything so obvious as mill
around her; instead they tried to keep the distance between
themselves and Nell below a certain maximum, so that wherever she
went in the ballroom, the local density of young men in her area
became unusually high.
In particular she had excited the interest of a boy who was the
nephew of an Equity Lord in Atlantis/Toronto. He had written her
several ardent letters. She had responded saying that she did not
wish to continue the relationship, and he had, perhaps with the help
of a hidden monitor, encountered her and her chaperone pod one
morning as she had been riding to Miss Matheson's Academy. She
had reminded him of the recent termination of their relationship by
declining to recognize him, but he had persisted anyway, and by the
time she had reached the gates of the Academy, the chaperone pod
had gathered enough evidence to support a formal sexual
harassment accusation should Nell have wished to bring one.
Of course she did not, because this would have created a cloud
of opprobrium that would have blighted the young man's career.
Instead, she excerpted one five-second piece of the cine record from
the chaperone pod: the one in which, approached by the young man,
Nell said, "I'm sorry, but I'm afraid you have me at a
disadvantage," and the young man, failing to appreciate the ramifications, pressed on as if he had not heard. Nell placed this
information into a smart visiting card and arranged to have it
dropped by the young man's family home. A formal apology was
not long in coming, and she did not hear again from the young man.
Now that she had been introduced to society, her preparations
for a visit to the Leased Territories were just as elaborate as for any
New Atlantis lady. Outside of New Atlantis, she and her chevaline
were surrounded everywhere by a shell of hovering security pods
serving as a first line of personal defense. A modern lady's
chevaline was designed with a sort of Y-shaped body that made it
unnecessary to ride sidesaddle, so Nell was able to wear a fairly
normal-looking sort of dress: a bodice that took advantage of her
fashionably narrow waist, so carefully honed on the Academy's
exercise machines that it might have been turned on a lathe from
walnut. Beyond that, her skirts, sleeves, collar, and hat saw to it that
none of the young ruffians of the Leased Territories would have the
opportunity to invade her body space with their eyes, and lest her
distinctive face prove too much of a temptation, she wore a veil too.
The veil was a field of microscopic, umbrellalike aerostats
programmed to fly in a sheet formation a few inches in front of
Nell's face. The umbrellas were all pointed away from her.
Normally they were furled, which made them nearly invisible; they
looked like the merest shadow before her face, though viewed
sideways they created a subtle wall of shimmer in the air. At a
command from Nell they would open to some degree. When fully
open, they nearly touched each other. The outside-facing surfaces
were reflective, the inner ones matte black, so Nell could see out as
if she were looking through a piece of smoked glass. But others saw
only the shimmering veil. The umbrellas could be programmed to
dangle in different ways-always maintaining the same collective
shape, like a fencing mask, or rippling like a sheet of fine silk,
depending on the current mode.
The veil offered Nell protection from unwanted scrutiny. Many
New Atlantis career women also used the veil as a way of meeting
the world on their own terms, ensuring that they were judged on
their own merits and not on their appearance. It served a protective
function as well, bouncing back the harmful rays of the sun and
intercepting many deleterious nanosites that might otherwise slip
unhindered into the nose and mouth.
The latter function was of particular concern to Constable
Moore on this morning. "It's been nasty of late," he said. "The fighting has been very bad." Nell had already inferred this from
certain peculiarities of the Constable's behavior: he had been
staying up late at night recently, managing some complicated
enterprise spread out across his mediatronic floor, and she suspected
that it was something along the lines of a battle or even a war.
As she rode her chevaline across Dovetail, she came to a
height-of-land that afforded a fine view across the Leased
Territories, Pudong, and Shanghai on a clear day. But the humidity
had congealed into drifts of clouds forming a seamless layer about a
thousand feet below their level, so that this high territory at the top
of New Chusan seemed to be an island, the only land in all the
world except for the snowcapped cone of the Nippon Clave a few
miles up the coast.
She departed through the main gate and rode down the hill. She
kept approaching the cloud layer but never quite reached it; the
lower she went, the softer the light became, and after a few minutes
she could no longer see the rambling settlements of Dovetail when
she turned around, nor the spires of St. Mark's and Source Victoria
above it. After another few minutes' descent the fog became so
thick that she could not see more than a few meters, and she smelled
the elemental reek of the ocean. She passed the former site of the
Sendero Clave. The Senderos had been bloodily uprooted when
Protocol Enforcement figured out that they were working in concert
with the New Taiping Rebels, a fanatical cult opposed to both the
Fists and the Coastal Republic. This patch of real estate had since
passed into the hands of the Dong, an ethnic minority tribe from
southwestern China, driven out of their homeland by the civil war.
They had torn down the high wall and thrown up one of their
distinctive many-layered pagodas.
Other than that, the L.T. didn't look all that different. The
operators of the big wall-size mediatrons that had so terrified Nell
on her first night in the Leased Territories had turned the brightness
all the way up, trying to compensate for the fog.
Down by the waterfront, not far from the Aerodrome, the
compilers of New Chusan had, as a charitable gesture, made some
space available to the Vatican. In the early years it had contained
nothing more than a twostory mission for thetes who had followed
their lifestyle to its logical conclusion and found themselves
homeless, addicted, hounded by debtors, or on the run from the law
or abusive members of their own families.
More recently those had become secondary functions, and the
Vatican had programmed the building's foundation to extrude many
more stories. The Vatican had a number of serious ethical concerns
about nanotech but had eventually decided that it was okay as long
as it didn't mess about with DNA or create direct interfaces with the
human brain. Using nanotech to extrude buildings was fine, and that
was fortunate, because Vatican/Shanghai needed to add a couple of
floors to the Free Phthisis Sanatorium every year. Now it loomed
high above any of the other waterfront buildings.
As with any other extruded building, the design was drab in the
extreme, each floor exactly alike. The walls were of an
unexceptional beige material that had been used to construct many
of the buildings in the L.T., which was unfortunate, because it had
an almost magnetic attraction for the cineritious corpses of airborne
mites. Like all the other buildings so constituted, the Free Phthisis
Sanatorium had, over the years, turned black, and not evenly but in
vertical rain-streaks. It was a cliché to joke that the outside of the
Sanatorium looked much like the inside of its tenants' lungs. The
Fists of Righteous Harmony had, however, done their best to pretty
it up by slapping red posters over it in the dead of night.
Harv was lying on the top of a three-layer bunkbed on the
twentieth floor, sharing a small room and a supply of purified air
with a dozen other chronic asthma sufferers. His face was goggled
into a phantascope, and his lips were wrapped around a thick tube
plugged into a nebulizer socket on the wall. Vaporized drugs,
straight from the matter compiler, were flowing down that tube and
into his lungs, working to keep his bronchi from spasming shut.
Nell stopped for a moment before breaking him out of his
ractive. Some weeks he looked better than others; this week he did
not look good. His body was bloated, his face round and heavy, his
fingers swollen to puffy cylinders; they had been giving him heavy
steroid treatments. But she would have known he'd had a bad week
anyway, because usually Harv didn't go in for immersive ractives.
He liked the kind you held in your lap on a sheet of smart paper.
Nell tried to send Harv a letter every day, simply written in
mediaglyphics, and for a while he had tried to respond in kind. Last
year he had even given up on this, though she wrote him faithfully
anyway.
"Nell!" he said when he had peeled the goggles away from his
eyes. "Sorry, I was chasing some rich Vickys."
"You were?"
"Yeah. Or Burly Scudd was, I mean. In the ractive. See,
Burly's bitch gets pregnant, and she's got to buy herself a Freedom
Machine to get rid of it, so she gets a job as a maid-of-all-work for
some snotty Vickys and rips off some of their nice old stuff,
figuring that's a faster way to get the money. So the bitch is running
away and they're chasing her on their chevs, and then Burly Scudd
shows up in his big truck and turns the tables and starts chasing
them. If you do it right, you can get the Vickys to fall into a big pit
of manure! It's great! You should try it," Harv said, then, exhausted
by this effort, grabbed his oxygen tube and pulled on it for a while.
"It sounds entertaining," Nell said.
Harv, temporarily gagged by the oxygen tube, watched her face
carefully and was not convinced. "Sorry," he blurted between
breaths, "forgot you don't care for my kind of ractive. Don't they
have Burly Scudd in that Primer of yours?"
Nell made herself smile at the joke, which Harv had been
making every week. She handed him the basket of cookies and fresh
fruit that she had brought down from Dovetail and sat with him for
an hour, talking about the things he enjoyed talking about, until she
could see his attention wandering back toward the goggles. Then
she said good-bye until next week and kissed him good-bye.
She turned her veil to its highest level of opacity and made her
way toward the door. Harv impulsively grabbed his oxygen tube and
sucked on it mightily a few times, then called her name just as she
was about to leave.
"Yes?" she said, turning toward him.
"Nell, I want to tell you how fine you look," he said, "just like
the finest Vicky lady in all of Atlantis. I can't believe you're my
same Nell that I used to bring things to in the old flat-remember
those days? I know that you and I have gone different ways, ever
since that morning in Dovetail, and I know it's got a iot to do with
that Primer. I just want to tell you, sister, that even though I say bad
stuff about Vickys sometimes, I'm as proud of you as I could be,
and I hope when you read that Primer-so full of stuff I could never
understand or even read-you'll think back on your brother Harv,
who saw it lying in the gutter years ago and took it into -his mind to
bring it to his kid sister. Will you remember that, Nell?" With that
he plugged the oxygen tube back into his mouth, and his ribs began
to heave.
"Of course I will, Harv," Nell said, her eyes filling with tears,
and blundered her way back across the room until she could sweep Harv's bloated body up in her strong arms. The veil swirled like a
sheet of water thrown into Harv's face, all the little umbrellas
drawing themselves out of the way as she brought his face up to
hers and planted a kiss on his cheek.
The veil congealed again as he sank back down onto the foam
mattress- just like the mattresses he had taught her to get from the
M.C., long ago-and she turned and ran out of the room sobbing.
Hackworth is brought up-to-date by the great Napier.
"Have you had the opportunity to speak with your family?"
Colonel Napier said, speaking out of a mediatronic sabletop from
his office in Atlantis/Shanghai. Hackworth was sitting in a pub in
Atlantis/Vancouver.
Napier looked good now that he was deeper into middle age-
somewhat more imposing. He'd been working on his bearing.
Hackworth had been temporarily impressed when Napier's image
had first materialized on the mediatron, then he remembered his
own image in the mirror. Once he'd gotten himself cleaned up and
trimmed his beard, which he'd decided to keep, he realized that he
had a new bearing of his own. Even if he was desperately confused
about how he got it.
"Thought I'd find out what the hell happened first. Besides-"
He stopped talking for a while. He was having trouble getting his
conversational rhythm back.
"Yes?" Napier said in a labored display of patience.
"I just spoke to Fiona this morning."
"After you left the tunnels?"
"No. Before. Before I-woke up, or whatever."
Napier was slightly taken aback and only popped his jaw
muscles a couple of times, reached for his tea, looked irrelevantly
out the window at whatever view he had out his office window in
New Chusan. Hackworth, on the other side of the Pacific, contented
himself with staring into the inky depths of a pint of stout.
A dream-image surfaced in Hackworth's mind, like a piece of
debris rising to the surface after a shipwreck, inexorably muscling
tons of green murk out of its path. He saw a glistening blue
projectile shoot into the Doctor's beige-gloved hands, trailing a
thick cord, watched it unfold, nay bloom into a baby.
"Why did I think of that?" he said.
Napier seemed puzzled by this remark. "Fiona and Gwendolyn
are in Atlantis/Seattle now-half an hour from your present location
by tube," he said.
"Of course! They live- we live- in Seattle now. I knew that."
He was remembering Fiona hiking around in the caldera of some
snow-covered volcano.
"If you are under the impression that you've been in contact
with her recently-which is quite out of the question, I'm afraid-
then it must have been mediated through the Primer. We were not
able to break the encryption on the signals passing out of the
Drummers' cave, but traffic analysis suggests that you've spent a lot
of time racting in the last ten years."
"Ten years!?"
"Yes. But surely you must have suspected that, from
evidence."
"It feels like ten years. I sense that ten years of things have
happened to me. But the engineer hemisphere has a bit of trouble
coming to grips."
"We are at a loss to understand why Dr. X would choose to
have you serve out your sentence among the Drummers," Napier
said. "It would seem to us that your engineer hemisphere, as you put
it, is your most desirable feature as far as he is concerned-you
know that the Celestials are still terribly short of engineers."
"I've been working on something," Hackworth said. Images of
a nanotechnological system, something admirably compact and
elegant, were flashing over his mind's eye. It seemed to be very nice
work, the kind of thing he could produce only when he was
concentrating very hard for a long time. As, for example, a prisoner
might do.
"What sort of thing exactly?" Napier asked, suddenly sounding
rather tense.
"Can't get a grip on it," Hackworth finally said, shaking his
head helplessly. The detailed images of atoms and bonds had been
replaced, in his mind's eye, by a fat brown seed hanging in space,
like something in a Magritte painting. A lush bifurcated curve on
one end, like buttocks, converging to a nipplelike point on the other.
"What the hell happened?"
"Before you left Shanghai, Dr. X hooked you up to a matter
compiler, no?"
"Yes."
"Did he tell you what he was putting into your system?"
"I guessed it was hæmocules of some description."
"We took blood samples before you left Shanghai."
"You did?"
"We have ways," Colonel Napier said. "We also did a full
workup on one of your friends from the cave and found several
million nanosites in her brain."
"Several million?"
"Very small ones," Napier said reassuringly. "They are
introduced through the blood, of course-the hæmocules circulate
through the bloodstream until they find themselves passing through
capillaries in the brain, at which point they cut through the
blood/brain barrier and fasten themselves to a nearby axon. They
can monitor activity in the axon or trigger it. These 'sites all talk to
each other with visible light."
"So when I was on my own, my 'sites just talked to
themselves," Hackworth said, "but when I came into close
proximity with other people who had these things in their brains-"
"It didn't matter which brain a 'site was in. They all talked to
one another indiscriminately, forming a network. Get some
Drummers together in a dark room, and they become a gestalt
society."
"But the interface between these nanosites and the brain
itself-"
"Yes, I admit that a few million of these things piggybacking
on randomly chosen neurons is only a feeble interface to something
as complicated as the human brain," Napier said. "We're not
claiming that you shared one brain with these people."
"So what did I share with them exactly?" Hackworth said.
"Food. Air. Companionship. Body fluids. Perhaps emotions or
general emotional states. Probably more."
"That's all I did for ten years?"
"You did a iot of things," Napier said, "but you did them in a
sort of unconscious, dreamlike state. You were sleepwalking. When
we figured that out-after doing the biopsy on your fellow-troglodyte-
we realised that in some sense you were no longer
acting of your own free will, and we engineered a hunter-killer that
would seek out and destroy the nanosites in your brain. We
introduced it, in a dormant mode, into this female Drummer's
system, then reintroduced her to your colony. When you had sex
with her-well, you can work out the rest for yourself."
"You have given me information, Colonel Napier, and I am
grateful, but it has only made me more confused. What do you
suppose the Celestial Kingdom wanted with me?"
"Did Dr. X ask anything of you?"
"To seek the Alchemist."
Colonel Napier looked startled. "He asked that of you ten years
ago?"
"Yes. In as many words."
"That is very singular," Napier said, after a prolonged interlude
of mustache-twiddling. "We have only been aware of this shadowy
figure for some five years and know virtually nothing about him-
other than that he is a wizardly artifex who is conspiring with Dr.
X."
"Is there any other information-"
"Nothing that I can reveal," Napier said brusquely, perhaps
having revealed too much already. "Do let us know if you find him,
though. Er, Hackworth, there is no tactful way to broach this
subject. Are you aware that your wife has divorced you?"
"Oh, yes," Hackworth said quietly. "I suppose I did know
that." But he hadn't been conscious of it until now.
"She was remarkably understanding about your long absence,"
Napier said, "but at some point it became evident that, like all the
Drummers, you had become sexually promiscuous in the extreme."
"How did she know?"
"We warned her."
"Pardon me?"
"I mentioned earlier that we found things in your blood. These
hæmocules were designed specifically to be spread through
exchange of bodily fluids."
"How do you know that?"
Napier seemed impatient for the first time. "For god's sake,
man, we know what we are doing. These particles had two
functions: spread through exchange of bodily fluids, and interact
with each other. Once we saw that, we had no ethical choice but to
inform your wife."
"Of course. That's only right. As a matter of fact, I thank you
for it," Hackworth said. "And it's not hard to understand Gwen's
feelings about sharing bodily fluids with thousands of Drummers."
"You shouldn't beat yourself up," Napier said. "We've sent
explorers down there."
"Really?"
"Yes. The Drummers don't mind. The explorers relate that the
Drummers behave much the way people do in dreams. 'Poorly
defined ego boundaries' was the phrase, as I recall. In any event,
your behaviour down there wasn't necessarily a moral transgression
as such-your mind wasn't your own."
"You said that these particles interact with each other?"
"Each one is a container for some rod logic and some
memory," Napier said. "When one particle encounters another either
in vivo or in vitro, they dock and seem to exchange data for a few
moments. Most of the time they disengage and drift apart.
Sometimes they stay docked for a while, and computation takes
place-we can tell because the rod logic throws off heat. Then they
disconnect. Sometimes both particles go their separate ways,
sometimes one of them goes dead. But one of them always keeps
going."
The implications of that last sentence were not lost on
Hackworth. "Do the Drummers only have sex with one another,
or-"
"That was our first question too," Napier said. "The answer is
no. They have a very good deal of sex with many, many other
people. They actually run bordellos in Vancouver. They cater
especially to the Aerodrome-and-tube-station crowd. A few years
ago they came into conflict with the established bordellos because
they were hardly charging any money at all for their services. They
raised their prices just to be diplomatic. But they don't want the
money- what on earth would they do with it?"
From the Primer,
a visit to Castle Turing;
a final chat with Miss Matheson;
speculation as to Nell's destiny;
farewell;
conversation with a grizzled hoplite;
Nell goes forth to seek her fortune.
The new territory into which Princess Nell had crossed was by
far the largest and most complex of all the Faery Kingdoms in the
Primer. Paging back to the first panoramic illustration, she counted
seven major castles perched on the mountaintops, and she knew
perfectly well that she would have to visit all of them, and do
something difficult in each one, in order to retrieve the eleven keys
that had been stolen from her and the one key that remained.
She made herself some tea and sandwiches and carried them in
a basket to a meadow, where she liked to sit among the wildflowers
and read. Constable Moore's house was a melancholy place without
the Constable in it, and it had been several weeks since she had seen
him. During the last two years he had been called away on business
with increasing 3 frequency, vanishing (as she supposed) into the
interior of China for days, then weeks at a time, coming back
depressed and exhausted to find solace in whiskey, which he
consumed in surprisingly moderate quantities but with fierce
concentration, and in midnight bagpipe recitals that woke up
everyone in Dovetail and a few sensitive sleepers in the New
Atlantis Clave.
During her trip from the campsite of the Mouse Army to the
first of the castles, Nell had to use all the wilderness skills she had
learned in years of traveling around the Land Beyond: She fought
with a mountain lion, avoided a bear, forded streams, lit fires, built
shelters. By the time Nell had maneuvered Princess Nell to the
ancient moss-covered gates of the first castle, the sun was shining
horizontally across the meadow and the air was becoming a bit
chilly. Nell wrapped herself up in a thermogenic shawl and set the
thermostat for something a little on the cool side of comfortable; she
had found that her wits became dull if she got too cozy. The basket
had a thermos of hot tea with milk, and the sandwiches would hold
out for a while.
The highest of the castle's many towers was surmounted by a great four-sailed windmill that turned steadily, even though only a mild breeze could be noticed at Princess Nell's altitude, hundreds of feet below.
Set into the main gate was a judas gate, and set into the
judas was a small hatch. Below the hatch was a great bronze
knocker made in the shape of a letter T, though its shape had
become indistinct from an encrustation of moss and lichens.
Princess Nell operated the knocker only with some effort and,
given its decrepit state, did not expect a response; but hardly
had the first knock sounded than the hatch opened up, and
she was confronted by a helmet: For the gatekeeper on the
other side was dressed from head to toe in a rusty and moss-covered
suit of battle armor. But the gatekeeper said nothing,
simply stared at Princess Nell; or so she assumed, as she
could not see his face through the helmet's narrow vision-slits.
"Good afternoon," said Princess Nell. "I beg your pardon,
but I am a traveler in these parts, and I wonder if you would
be so good as to give me a place to stay for the night."
Without a word, the gatekeeper slammed the hatch
closed. Nell could hear the creaking and clanking of his armor
as he slowly marched away.
Some minutes later, she heard him coming toward her
again, though this time the noise was redoubled. The rusty
locks on the judas gate grumbled and shrieked. The gate door
swung open, and Princess Nell stepped back from it as rust
flakes, fragments of lichens, and divots of moss showered
down around her. Two men in armor now stood there,
beckoning her forward.
Nell stepped through the gate and into the dark streets of
the castle. The gate slammed behind her. An iron vise
clamped around each of Princess Nell's upper arms; the men
had seized her with their gauntlets. They lifted her into the air
and carried her for some minutes through the streets, stairs,
and corridors of the castle. These were completely deserted.
She did not see so much as a mouse or a rat. No smoke rose
from the chimneys, no light came from any window, and in the
long hallway leading to the throne room, the torches hung
cold and blackened in their sconces. From place to place
Princess Nell saw another armored soldier standing at
attention, but, as none of them moved, she did not know
whether these were empty suits of armor or real men.
Nowhere did she see the usual signs of commerce and
human activity: horse manure, orange peels, barking dogs,
running sewers. Somewhat to her alarm, she did see an
inordinate number of chains. The chains were all of the same,
somewhat peculiar design, and she saw them everywhere:
piled up in heaps on streetcorners, overflowing from metal
baskets, dangling from rooftops, strung between towers.
The clanking and squeaking of the men who bore her
along made it difficult for her to hear anything else; but as
they proceeded higher and deeper into the castle, she slowly
became conscious of a deep grinding, growling noise that
pervaded the very ashlars. This noise crescendoed as they
hustled down the long final hallway, and became nearly earth-shaking
as they finally entered the vaulted throne room at the
very heart of the castle.
The room was dark and cold, though some light was
admitted by clerestory windows high up in the vaults. The
walls were lined with men in armor, standing stock-still. Sitting
in the middle of the room, on a throne twice as high as a man,
was a giant, dressed in a suit of armor that gleamed like a
looking-glass. Standing below him was a man in armor
holding a rag and a wire brush, vigorously buffing one of the
lord's greaves.
"Welcome to Castle Turing," said the lord in a metallic voice.
By this time, Princess Nell's eyes had adjusted to the
dimness, and she could see something else behind the
throne: a tremendous Shaft, as thick as the mainmast of a
dromond, made of the trunk of a great tree bound and
reinforced with brass plates and bands. The Shaft turned
steadily, and Princess Nell realized that it must be
transmitting the power of the giant windmill far above them.
Enormous gears, black and sticky with grease, were attached
to the Shaft and transferred its power to other, smaller shafts
that ran off horizontally in every direction and disappeared
through holes in the walls. The turning and grinding of all
these shafts and gears made the omnipresent noise she had
noted earlier.
One horizontal shaft ran along each wall of the throne room at about the height of a man's chest. This shaft passed through a gearbox at short, regular intervals. A stubby, square shaft projected from each gearbox at a right angle, sticking straight out of the wall. These gearboxes tended to coincide with the locations of the soldiers.
The soldier who was polishing the lord's armor worked
his way around to one of the lord's spiked knee protectors
and, in so doing, turned his back on Princess Nell. She was
startled to see a large square hole in the middle of his back.
Nell knew, vaguely, that the name Castle Turing was a hint;
she'd learned a bit about Turing at Miss Matheson's Academy. He
had something to do with computers. She could have turned to the
Encyclopædia pages and looked it right up, but she had learned to
let the Primer tell the story its own way. Clearly the soldiers were
not men in armor, but simply wind-up men, and the same was
probably true of the Duke of Turing himself.
After a short and not very interesting conversation, during
which Princess Nell tried unsuccessfully to establish whether the
Duke was or was not human, he announced, unemotionally, that he
was throwing her into the dungeon forever.
This sort of thing no longer surprised or upset Nell because it
had happened hundreds of times during her relationship with the
Primer. Besides, she had known, from the very first day Harv had
given her the book, how the story would come out in the end. It was
just that the story was anfractuous; it developed more ramifications
the more closely she read it.
One of the soldiers detached himself from his gearbox on
the wall, stomped into the corner, and picked up a metal
basket filled with one of those peculiar chains Princess Nell
had seen everywhere. He carried it to the throne, fished
through it until he found the end, and fed the end into a hole
on the side of the throne. In the meantime, a second soldier
had also detached himself from the wall and taken up a
position on the opposite side of the throne. This soldier flipped
his visor open to expose some sort of mechanical device in
the space where his head ought to have been.
A tremendous chattering noise arose from inside the
throne. The second soldier caught the end of the chain as it
was emerging from his side and fed it into the opening in his
visor. A moment later it popped out of a hatch on his chest. In
this fashion, the entire length of the chain, some twenty or thirty feet in all, was slowly and noisily drawn out of the
basket, into the noisy mechanism hidden beneath the throne,
down the second soldier's throat, out the hatch in his chest,
and down to the floor, where it gradually accumulated into a
greasy heap. The process went on for much longer than
Princess Nell first anticipated, because the chain frequently
changed direction; more than once, when the basket was
nearly empty, the chain began to spew back into it until it was
nearly full again. But on the whole it was more apt to go
forward than backward, and eventually the last link lifted free
from the basket and disappeared into the throne. A few
seconds later, the din from the throne stopped; now Nell could
only hear a somewhat lesser chattering from the second
soldier. Finally that stopped as well, and the chain fell from his
chest. The soldier scooped it up in his arms and deposited it
in an empty basket that was sitting handily nearby. Then he
strode toward Nell, bent forward at the waist, put his hard cold
shoulder rather uncomfortably into the pit of her stomach, and
picked her up off the floor like a sack of corn. He carried her
for some minutes through the castle, most of that time spent
descending endless stone staircases, and finally brought her
to a very deep, dark, and cold dungeon, where he deposited
her in a small and perfectly dark cell.
Nell said, "Princess Nell used one of the magic spells Purple
had taught her to make light."
Princess Nell could see that the room was about two by
three paces, with a stone bench on one wall to serve as a
bed, and a hole in the floor for a toilet. A tiny barred window in
the back wall led to an air shaft. Evidently this was quite deep
and narrow, and Nell was close to the very bottom, because
no light came through it. The soldier walked out of the cell and
pulled the door shut behind him; as he did, she saw that the
lock was extraordinarily large, about the size of an iron
breadbox mounted to the door, full of clockwork and with a
large crank dangling from its center.
The door was equipped with a small peephole. Peering
out through it, Nell could see that the soldier did not have a
key as such. Instead, he took a short length of chain, about as
long as his arm, from a peg near the door and fed it into the giant lock. Then he began to turn the crank. The clockwork clicked, the chain clanked, and eventually the bolt shot out
and engaged the jamb, locking Princess Nell into the
dungeon. Immediately the chain crashed out of the lock and
landed on the floor. The soldier picked it up and hung it back
on the wall. Then he clanked away and did not come back
until several hours later, when he brought her some bread
and water, shoving it through a little hatch in the middle of the
door, just above the mechanical lock.
It did not take Princess Nell long to explore the limited
confines of her cell. In one corner, buried under dust and
debris, she found something hard and cold and pulled it out
for a better look: It was a fragment of chain, quite rusty, but
clearly recognizable as the same sort of chain that she saw all
over Castle Turing.
The chain was flat. Each link had a toggle: a movable bit
of metal in the center, capable of rotating about and snapping
into place in either of two positions, either parallel or
perpendicular to the chain.
During her first night in the cell, Nell discovered two other
things. First, the latch on the little door through which her food
was delivered was partly accessible from her side, and with a
little effort she was able to jam it so that it no longer locked
properly. After that, she was able to stick her head out of the
hatch and examine her surroundings, including the
mechanical lock. Or she could reach out with one arm and
feel the lock, spin the crank, and so on.
The second discovery came in the middle of the night,
when she was awakened by a metallic clanking sound coming
through the tiny window on the air shaft. Reaching out with
one hand, she felt the end of a chain dangling there. She
pulled on it, and after initial resistance, it came freely. In short
order she was able to pull many yards of chain into her cell
and pile it up on the floor.
Nell had a pretty good idea what to do with the chain.
Starting with the end, she examined the toggles and began to mark
their positions down (the Primer always gave her scratch pages
when she needed them). She made a horizontal mark for toggles
parallel to the chain and a vertical mark for those that were
perpendicular, and came up with this:
||||||||-
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||||||||||||-
||||||||||||-
|||||||||||||||-
-
|||||||||-
-
|-
|||||||||||||-
-
-
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|||||||||||-|||||-
-
-
-
-
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If she counted the vertical marks and replaced them with numbers, this amounted to 8-5-12-12-15- -9- -1-13- - -4-21-11-5- - - - -20-21-18-9-14-7- and if the numbers stood for letters of the alphabet, horizontal marks divided the letters, and double horizontals were spaces, this was HELLO I AM- - -DUKE- - - - -TURING
Perhaps the multiple horizontals were codes for commonly used words:
- - - the
- - - - (not used; possibly alan?)
- - - - - of
If that was right, then the message was HELLO I AM THE DUKE OF TURING, which was interesting, since the giant fellow in the armor had previously identified himself as such, and she deemed it unlikely that he would be sending her a message by this route. This must have come from someone else calling himself the
Duke of Turing- perhaps a real, living human being.
A few years ago Nell could have relied on it. But in recent
years the Primer had become much subtler than it used to be, full of
hidden traps, and she could no longer make comfortable and easy
assumptions. It was just as likely that this chain had descended
straight from the throne room itself, and that the mechanical Duke
was, for some unfathomable reason, trying to dupe her. So while she
was happy to respond to this message in kind, she intended to take a
guarded approach until she had established whether the sender was
human or mechanical.
The next part of the message was GIVE- - -CHAIN- - - -TUG-- - - - -ANSWER. Assuming that four horizontal marks stood for alan and six stood for to, this was GIVE THE CHAIN A TUG TO ANSWER.
Nell began to flip the toggles on the chain, erasing the message
from this personage calling himself the Duke and replacing it with I
AM PRINCESS NELL WHY DID YOU IMPRISON ME. Then she
gave the chain a tug, and after a moment it began to withdraw from
her cell. A few minutes later, back came the message:
WELCOME PRINCESS NELL LET US DEVISE A MORE
EFFICIENT MEANS OF COMMUNICATION
followed by instructions on how to use a more compact system
of toggles to represent numbers, and how to convert the numbers
into letters and punctuation marks. Once this was settled, the Duke
said
I AM THE REAL DUKE. I CREATED THESE MACHINES,
AND THEY IMPRISONED ME IN A HIGH TOWER FAR
ABOVE YOU. THE MACHINE CALLING HIMSELF THE
DUKE IS MERELY THE LARGEST AND MOST
SOPHISTICATED OF MY CREATIONS.
Nell responded, THIS CHAIN WEIGHS HUNDREDS OF
POUNDS. YOU MUST BE STRONG FOR A HUMAN.
The Duke responded YOU ARE A SHARP ONE PRINCESS
NELL! THE FULL WEIGHT OF THE CHAIN IS ACTUALLY
SEVERAL THOUSAND POUNDS, AND I MANAGE IT BY
MEANS OF A WINCH LOCATED IN MY ROOM AND
DERIVING ITS MOTIVE POWER FROM THE CENTRAL
SHAFT.
Night had long since fallen on the meadow. Nell closed the
Primer, packed up her basket, and returned home.
She stayed up late into the night with the Primer, just as she
had when she was a small child, and as a result was late for church
the next morning. They said a special prayer for Miss Matheson,
who was at home and said to be feeling poorly. Nell called on her
for a few minutes after the service, then went straight back home
and dove into the Primer again.
She was attacking two problems at once. First, she needed to
figure out how the lock on the door worked. Second, she needed to
find out whether the person sending her the message was human or
mechanical. If she could be confident that he was a human, she
could ask him for assistance in opening the lock, but until she had
settled this issue, she had to keep her activities a secret.
The lock only had a few parts that she could observe: the crank,
the bolt, and a pair of brass drums set into the top with digits from 0
to 9 engraved in them, so that by spinning different ways, they could display all the integers from 00 to 99. These drums were in
almost constant motion whenever the crank was turning.
Nell had managed to detach several yards of chain from the one
that she was using to converse with the Duke, and so she was able to
feed different messages into the lock and see what result they had.
The number on the top changed with every link that went into
the machine, and it seemed to determine, in a limited way, what the
machine would do next; for example, she had learned that the
number happened to be 09, and if the next link in the chain was in
the vertical position (which the Duke referred to as a one), the
drums would spin around and change the number to 23. But if the
next link was, instead, a zero (as the Duke referred to links with
horizontal toggles), the number drums would change to 03. But that
wasn't all: In this case, the machine would, for some reason, reverse
the direction in which the chain was moving through the machine,
and also flick the toggle from zero to one. That is, the machine
could write on the chain as well as read from it.
From idle chitchat with the Duke she learned that the numbers
on the drums were referred to as states. At first she did not know
which states led to other states, and so she wandered aimlessly from
one state to the next, recording the connections on scratch paper.
This soon grew to a table listing some thirty-two different states and
how the lock would respond to a one or a zero when it was in each
of those states. It took a while for Nell to fill out all the blank spaces
in the table, because some of the states were hard to get to-they
could be reached only by getting the machine to write a certain
series of ones and zeros on the chain.
She would have gone crazy with ones and zeros were it not for
the frequent interruptions from the Duke, who evidently had nothing
better to do than to send her messages. These two parallel courses of
inquiry occupied all of Nell's free time for a couple of weeks, and
she made slow but steady progress.
"You must learn how to operate the lock on your door," the
Duke said. "This will enable you to effect an escape and to come
and rescue me. I will instruct you."
All he wanted to talk about was technology, which wouldn't
help Nell in figuring out whether he was a human or a machine.
"Why don't you pick your own lock," she responded, "and come
and rescue me? I am just a poor helpless young thing all alone in the
world, and so scared and lonely, and you seem so brave and heroic; your story really is quite romantic, and I cannot wait to see how it
all comes out now that our fates have become intertwined."
"The machines placed a special lock on my door, not a Turing
machine," responded the Duke.
"Describe yourself," Nell wrote.
"Nothing special, - I'm afraid," wrote the Duke. "How about
yourself?"
"Slightly taller than average, flashing green eyes, raven hair
falling in luxuriant waves to my waist unless I pin it up to
emphasize my high cheekbones and full lips. Narrow waist, pert
breasts, long legs, alabaster skin that flushes vividly when I am
passionate about something, which is frequently."
"Your description is reminiscent of my late wife, God rest her soul."
"Tell me about your wife."
"The subject fills me with such unutterable sadness that I
cannot bear to write about it. Now, let's buckle down to work on the
Turing machine."
Since the prurient approach had dead-ended, Nell tried a
different tack: playing stupid. Sooner or later, the Duke would
become a little testy. But he was always terribly patient with her,
even after the twentieth repetition of "Could you explain it again
with different words? I still don't get it." Of course, for all she
knew, he was upstairs punching the walls until his knuckles were
bloody and simply pretending to be patient with her. A man who'd
been locked up in a tower for years would learn to be extremely
patient.
She tried sending him poetry. He sent back glowing reviews
but declined to send her any of his own, saying it wasn't good
enough to be committed to metal.
On her twentieth day in the dungeon, Princess Nell finally got
the lock open. Rather than making an immediate escape, she locked
herself back in and sat down to ponder her next move.
If the Duke was human, she should notify him so that they
could plan their escape. If he was a machine, doing so would lead to
disaster. She had to figure out the Duke's identity before she made
another move.She sent him another poem.
For the Greek's love she gave away her heart
Her father, crown and homeland.
They stopped to rest on Naxos
She woke up alone upon the strand
The sails of her lover's ship descending
Round the slow curve of the earth. Ariadne
Fell into a swoon on the churned sand
And dreamed of home. Minos did not forgive her
And holding diamonds in the pouches of his eyes
Had her flung into the Labyrinth.
She was alone this time. Through a wilderness
Of blackness wandered Ariadne many days
Until she tripped on the memory.
It was still wound all through the place.
She spun it round her fingers
Lifted it from the floor
Knotted it into lace
Erased it.
The lace made a gift for him who had imprisoned her.
Blind with tears, he read it with his fingers
And opened his arms.
The answer came back much too quickly, and it was the same
answer as always: "I do so envy your skill with words. Now, if you
do not object, let us turn our attention to the inner workings of the
Turing machine."
She had made it as obvious as she dared, and the Duke still
hadn't gotten the message. He must be a machine.
Why the deception?
Clearly, the mechanical Duke desired for her to learn about the
Turing machines. That is, if a machine could ever be said to desire
something.
There must be something wrong with the Duke's programming.
He knew there was something wrong with it, and he needed a
human to fix it.
Once Nell had figured these things out, the rest of the
Castle Turing story resolved itself quickly and neatly. She slipped
out of her cell and stealthily explored the castle. The soldiers rarely
noticed her, and when they did, they could not improvise; they had
to go back to the Duke to be reprogrammed. Eventually, Princess
Nell found her way into a room beneath the windmill that contained
a sort of clutch mechanism. By disengaging the clutch, she was able
to stop the Shaft. Within a few hours, the springs inside the soldiers'
back had all run down, and they had all stopped in their tracks. The
whole castle was frozen, as if she had cast an enchantment over it.
Now roaming freely, she opened up the Duke's throne and
found a Turing machine beneath it. On either side of the machine
was a narrow hole descending straight through the floor and into the
earth for as far as her torch light could illuminate it. The chain
containing the Duke's program dangled on either side into these
holes. Nell tried throwing stones into the holes and never heard
them hit bottom; the chain must be unfathomably long.
High up in one of the castle's towers, Princess Nell found a
skeleton in a chair, slumped over a table piled high with books.
Mice, bugs, and birds had nibbled away all of the flesh, but traces of
gray hair and whiskers were still scattered around the table, and
around the cervical vertebrae was a golden chain bearing a seal with
the T insignia.
She spent some time going through the Duke's books. Most of
them were notebooks where he would sketch the inventions he
hadn't had time to build yet. He had plans for whole armies of
Turing machines made to run in parallel, and for chains with links
that could be set in more than two positions, and for machines that
would read and write on two-dimensional sheets of chain mail
instead of one-dimensional chains, and for a three-dimensional
Turing grid a mile on a side, through which a mobile Turing
machine would climb about, computing as it went.
No matter how complicated his designs became, the Duke
always found a way to simulate their behavior by putting a
sufficiently long chain into one of the traditional Turing machines.
That is to say that while the parallel and multidimensional machines
worked more quickly than the original model, they didn't really do
anything different.
One afternoon, Nell was sitting in her favorite meadow, reading about these things in the Primer, when a riderless chevaline emerged from the woods and galloped directly toward her. This was not highly unusual, in and of itself; chevalines were smart enough to be sent out in search of specific persons. People rarely sent them in search of Nell, though.
The chevaline galloped at her full-tilt until it was just a few feet
away, and then planted its hooves and stopped instantly- a trick it
could easily do when it wasn't carrying a human. It was carrying a
note written in Miss Stricken's hand: "Nell, please come
immediately. Miss Matheson has requested your presence, and time
is short."
Nell didn't hesitate. She gathered her things, stuffed them into
the mount's small luggage compartment, and climbed on. "Go!" she
said. Then, getting herself well situated and clenching the hand-grips,
she added, "Unlimited speed." Within moments the chevaline
was threading gaps between trees at something close to a cheetah's
sprint velocity, clawing its way up the hill toward the dog pod grid.
From the way the tubes ran, Nell guessed that Miss Matheson
was plugged into the Feed in two or three different ways, though
everything had been discreetly hidden under many afghans, piled up
on top of her body like the airy layers of a French pastry. Only her
face and hands were visible, and looking at them Nell remembered
for the first time since their introduction just how old Miss
Matheson was. The force of her personality had blinded Nell and all
the girls to the blunt evidence of her true age.
"Please let us be, Miss Stricken," Miss Matheson said, and
Miss Stricken backed out warily, strewing reluctant and reproving
glances along her trail.
Nell sat on the edge of the bed and carefully lifted one of Miss
Matheson's hands from the coverlet, as if it were the desiccated leaf
of some rare tree. "Nell," Miss Matheson said, "do not waste my
few remaining moments with pleasantries."
"Oh, Miss Matheson-" Nell began, but the old lady's eyes
widened and she gave Nell a certain look, practiced through many
decades in the classroom, that still had not lost its power to silence.
"I have requested that you come here because you are my
favorite student. No! Do not say a word," Miss Matheson
admonished her, as Nell leaned her face closer, eyes filling with
tears. "Teachers are not supposed to have favorites, but I am
approaching that time when I must confess all my sins, so there it is.
"I know that you have a secret, Nell, though I cannot imagine
what it is, and I know that your secret has made you different from
any other girl I have ever taught. I wonder what you suppose you will do with your life when you leave this Academy, as you must soon, and go out into the world?"
"Take the Oath, of course, as soon as I reach the age of
eligibility. And I suppose that I should like to study the art of
programming, and how ractives are made. Someday, of course, after
I have become one of Her Majesty's subjects, I should like to find a
nice husband and perhaps raise children- "
"Oh, stop it," Miss Matheson said. "You are a young woman-
of course you think about whether you shall have children- every
young woman does. I haven't much time left, Nell, and we must
dispense with what makes you like all the other girls and
concentrate on what makes you different."
At this point, the old lady gripped Nell's hand with surprising
force and raised her head just a bit off the pillow. The tremendous
wrinkles and furrows on her brow deepened, and her hooded eyes
took on an intense burning appearance. "Your destiny is marked in
some way, Nell. I have known it since the day Lord Finkle-McGraw
came to me and asked me to admit you- a ragged little thete girl-
into my Academy.
"You can try to act the same- we have tried to make you the
same- you can pretend it in the future if you insist, and you can
even take the Oath- but it's all a lie. You are different."
These words struck Nell like a sudden cold wind of pure
mountain air and stripped away the soporific cloud of
sentimentality. Now she stood exposed and utterly vulnerable. But
not unpleasantly so.
"Are you suggesting that I leave the bosom of the adopted tribe
that has nurtured me?"
"I am suggesting that you are one of those rare people who
transcends tribes, and you certainly don't need a bosom any more,"
Miss Matheson said. "You will find, in time, that this tribe is as
good as any other- better than most, really." Miss Matheson
exhaled deeply and seemed to dissolve into her blankets. "Now, I
haven't long. So give us a kiss, and then be on your way, girl."
Nell leaned forward and pressed her lips against Miss Matheson's cheek, which looked leathery but was surprisingly soft. Then, unwilling to leave so abruptly, she turned her head and rested it on Miss Matheson's chest for a few moments. Miss Matheson stroked feebly at her hair and tut-tutted.
"Farewell, Miss Matheson," Nell said. "I will never forget you."
"Nor I you," Miss Matheson whispered, "though admittedly that is not saying much."
. . .
A very large chevaline stood stolidly in front of Constable
Moore's house, somewhere between a Percheron and a small
elephant in size and bulk It was the dirtiest object Nell had ever seen
in her life-its encrustations alone must have weighed hundreds of
pounds and were redolent with the scent of night soil and stagnant
water. A fragment of a mulberry branch, still bearing leaves and
even a couple of actual berries, had gotten wedged into a flexing
joint between two adjoining armor plates, and long ropes of milfoil
trailed from its ankles.
The Constable was sitting in the middle of his bamboo grove,
enveloped in a suit of hoplite armor, similarly filthy and scarred,
that was twice as big as he was, and that made his bare head look
absurdly small. He had ripped the helmet off and dropped it into his
fish pond, where it floated around like the eviscerated hull of a
scuttled dreadnought. He looked very gaunt and was staring
vacantly, without blinking, at some kudzu that was slowly but
inexorably conquering the wisteria. As soon as Nell saw the look on
his face, she made him some tea and brought it to him. The
Constable reached for the tiny alabaster teacup with armored hands
that could have crumbled stones like loaves of stale bread. The thick
barrels of the guns built into the arms of his suit were scorched on
the inside. He plucked the cup from Nell's hands with the precision
of a surgical robot, but did not lift it to his lips, perhaps afraid that
he might, in his exhaustion, get the distance a bit wrong and
inadvertently crush the porcelain into his jaw, or even decapitate
himself. Merely holding the cup, watching the steam rise from its
surface, seemed to calm him. His nostrils dilated once, then again.
"Darjeeling," he said. "Well chosen. Always thought of India as a
more civilised place than China. Have to throw out all of the oolong
now, all the keemun, the lung jang, the lapsang souchong. Time to
switch over to Ceylon, pekoe, assam." He chuckled.
White trails of dried salt ran back from the corners of the
Constable's eyes and disappeared into his hairline. He had been
riding fast with his helmet off. Nell wished that she had been able to
see the Constable thundering across China on his war chevaline.
"I've retired for the last time," he explained. He nodded in the
direction of China. "Been doing a bit of consulting work for a
gentleman there. Complicated fellow. Dead now. Had many facets,
but now he'll go down in history as just another damn Chinese
warlord who didn't make the grade. It is remarkable, love," he said,
looking at Nell for the first time, "how much money you can make
shovelling back the tide. In the end you need to get out while the
getting is good. Not very honourable, I suppose, but then, there is no
honour among consultants."
Nell did not imagine that Constable Moore wanted to get into a
detailed discussion of recent events, so she changed the subject. "I
think I have finally worked out what you were trying to tell me,
years ago, about being intelligent," she said.
The Constable brightened all at once. "Pleased to hear it."
"The Vickys have an elaborate code of morals and conduct. It
grew out of the moral squalor of an earlier generation, just as the
original Victorians were preceded by the Georgians and the
Regency. The old guard believe in that code because they came to it
the hard way. They raise their children to believe in that code- but
their children believe it for entirely different reasons."
"They believe it," the Constable said, "because they have been indoctrinated to believe it."
"Yes. Some of them never challenge it- they grow up to be
smallminded people, who can tell you what they believe but not
why they believe it. Others become disillusioned by the hypocrisy
of the society and rebel- as did Elizabeth Finkle-McGraw."
"Which path do you intend to take, Nell?" said the Constable,
sounding very interested. "Conformity or rebellion?"
"Neither one. Both ways are simple-minded- they are only for
people who cannot cope with contradiction and ambiguity."
"Ah! Excellent!" the Constable exclaimed. As punctuation, he
slapped the ground with his free hand, sending up a shower of
sparks and transmitting a powerful shock through the ground to
Nell's feet.
"I suspect that Lord Finkle-McGraw, being an intelligent man,
sees through all of the hypocrisy in his society, but upholds its
principles anyway, because that is what is best in the long run. And
I suspect that he has been worrying about how best to inculcate this
stance in young people who cannot understand, as he does, its
historical antecedents- which might explain why he has taken an interest in me. The Primer may have been Finkle-McGraw's idea to
begin with-a first attempt to go about this systematically."
"The Duke plays his cards close," Constable Moore said, "and
so I cannot say whether your suppositions are correct. But I will
admit it hangs together nicely."
"Thank you."
"What do you intend to do with yourself, now that you have
pieced all of this together? A few more years' education and
polishing will place you in a position to take the Oath."
"I am, of course, aware that I have favorable prospects in the
Atlantan phyle," Nell said, "but I do not think that it would be
fitting for me to take the straight and narrow path. I am going to
China now to seek my fortune."
"Well," Constable Moore said, "look out for the Fists." His
gaze wandered over his battered and filthy armor and came to rest
on the floating helmet. "They are coming now."
The best explorers, like Burton, made every effort to blend in.
In this spirit, Nell stopped at a public M.C., doffed her long dress,
and compiled a new set of clothes- a navy blue skin-tight coverall
emblazoned with SHIT HAPPENS in pulsating orange letters. She
swapped her old clothes for a pair of powered skates on the
waterfront, and then headed straight for the Causeway. It rose gently
into the air for a few miles, and then the Pudong Economic Zone
came into view at her feet, and Shanghai beyond that, and she
suddenly began to pick up speed and had to cut the skates' power
assist. She'd passed over the watershed now. Nell was alone in
China.
The Hackworths have a family reunion;
Hackworth strikes out on his quest;
an unexpected companion.
Atlantis/Seattle was designed small and to the point; the
narrow, convoluted straits of Puget Sound, already so full of natural
islands, did not leave much room for artificial ones. So they had
made it rather long and slender, parallel to the currents and the
shipping lanes, and been rather stingy when it came to the parks,
meadows, heaths, gentleman farms, and country estates. Much of
the Seattle area was still sufficiently rich, civilized, and polite that
New Atlantans did not object to living there, and little Victorian mini-claves were scattered about the place, particularly east of the
lake, around the misty forest domains of the software khans. Gwen
and Fiona had taken a townhouse in one of these areas.
These tiny bits of New Atlantis stood out from the surrounding
forest in the same way that a vicar in morning coat and wing collar
would have in the cave of the Drummers. The prevailing
architecture here, among those who had not adopted neo-Victorian
precepts, was distinctly subterranean; as if these people were
somehow ashamed of their own humanity and could not bear to fell
even a handful of the immense Douglas firs that marched
monotonously up the tumbling slopes toward the frozen, sodden
ridge of the Cascades. Even when it was half buried, a house wasn't
even a proper house; it was an association of modules, scattered
about here and there and connected by breezeways or tunnels. Stuck
together properly and built on a rise, these modules might have
added up to a house of substance, even grandeur; but to Hackworth,
riding through the territory on his way to visit his family, it was all
depressing and confusing. Ten years among the Drummers had not
affected his Victorian aesthetics. He could not tell where one house
left off and the next one began, the houses were all intertangled with
one another like neurons in the brain.
His mind's eye again seemed to seize control of his visual
cortex; he could not see the firs anymore, just axons and dendrites
hanging in black three-dimensional space, packets of rod logic
maneuvering among them like space probes, meeting and copulating
among the nerve fibers.
It was a bit too aggressive to be a reverie and too abstract to be
a hallucination. It didn't really clear away until a gust of cold mist
hit him in his face, he opened his eyes, and realized that Kidnapper
had stopped after emerging from the trees at the crest of a mossy
ridgeline. Below him was a rocky bowl with a few cobblestone
streets sketched out in a grid, a green park lined with red geraniums,
a church with a white steeple, whitewashed four-story Georgian
buildings surrounded by black wrought-iron fences. The security
grid was tenuous and feeble; the software khans were at least as
good at that kind of thing as Her Majesty's specialists, and so a New
Atlantis clave in this area could rely on the neighbors to shoulder
much of that burden.
Kidnapper picked its way carefully down the steep declivity as
Hackworth looked out over the tiny clave, musing at how familiar it
seemed. Since leaving the Drummers, he hadn't gone more than ten minutes without being seized by a feeling of déjà vu, and now it was
especially strong. Perhaps this was because, to some degree, all
New Atlantis settlements looked alike. But he suspected that he had
seen this place, somehow, in his communications with Fiona over
the years.
A bell clanged once or twice, and teenaged girls, dressed in
plaid uniform skirts, began to emerge from a domed school.
Hackworth knew that it was Fiona's school, and that she was not
entirely happy there. After the crush of girls had gone out of the
place, he rode Kidnapper into the school yard and sauntered once
around the building, gazing in the windows. Without much trouble
he saw his daughter, sitting at a table in the library, hunched over a
book, evidently as part of some disciplinary action.
He wanted so badly to go in and put his arms around her,
because he knew that she had spent many hours suffering like
punishments, and that she was a lonely girl. But he was in New
Atlantis, and there were proprieties to be observed. First things first.
Gwendolyn's townhouse was only a few blocks away.
Hackworth rang the bell, determined to observe all of the formalities
now that he was a stranger in the house.
"May I ask what your visit is regarding?" asked the
parlourmaid, as Hackworth spun his card onto the salver.
Hackworth didn't like this woman, who was named Amelia,
because Fiona didn't like her, and Fiona didn't like her because
Gwen had given her some disciplinary authority in the household,
and Amelia was the sort who relished having it.
He tried not to confuse himself by wondering how he could
possibly know all of these things.
"Business," Hackworth said pleasantly. "Family business."
Amelia was halfiway up the stairs when her eyes finally
focused on Hackworth's card. She nearly dropped the salver and
had to clutch at the banister with one hand in order to keep her
balance. She froze there for a few moments, trying to resist the
temptation to turn around, and finally surrendered to it. The
expression on her face was one of perfect loathing mixed with
fascination.
"Please carry out your duties," Hackworth said, "and dispense
with the vulgar theatrics."
Amelia, looking crestfallen, stormed up the stairs with the
tainted card. There followed a good deal of muffled commotion
upstairs. After a few minutes, Amelia ventured as far down as the landing and encouraged Hackworth to make himself comfortable in
the parlor. He did so, noting that in his absence, Gwendolyn had
been able to consummate all of the long-term furniture-buying
strategies she had spent so much time plotting during the early years
of their marriage. Wives and widows of secret agents in Protocol
Enforcement could rely on being well cared for, and Gwen had not
allowed his salary to sit around collecting dust.
His ex-wife descended the stairway cautiously, stood outside
the beveled-glass parlor doors for a minute peering at him through
the gauze curtains, and finally slipped into the room without
meeting his gaze and took a seat rather far away from him. "Hello,
Mr. Hackworth," she said.
"Mrs. Hackworth. Or is it back to Miss Lloyd?"
"It is."
"Ah, that's hard." When Hackworth heard the name Miss
Lloyd, he thought of their courtship.
They sat there for a minute or so, not saying anything, just
listening to the ponderous ratcheting of the grandfather clock.
"All right," Hackworth said, "I won't trouble you talking about
extenuating circumstances, as I don't ask for your forgiveness, and
in all honesty I'm not sure that I deserve it."
"Thank you for that consideration."
"I would like you to know, Miss Lloyd, that I am sympathetic
to the step you have taken in securing a divorce and harbour no
bitterness on that account."
"That is reassuring to know."
"You should also know that whatever behaviour I engaged in,
as inexcusable as it was, was not motivated by rejection of you or of
our marriage. It was not, in fact, a reflection upon you at all, but
rather a reflection upon myself."
"Thank you for clarifying that point."
"I realize that any hope I might harbour in my breast of
rekindling our former relationship, sincere as it might be, is futile,
and so I will not trouble you after today."
"I cannot tell you how relieved I am to hear that you
understand the situation so completely."
"However, I would like to be of service to you and Fiona in
helping to resolve any loose ends."
"You are very kind. I shall give you my lawyer's card."
"And, of course, I look forward to reestablishing some sort of
contact with my daughter."
The conversation, which had been running as smoothly as a
machine to this point, now veered off track and crashed. Gwendolyn
reddened and stiffened.
"You- you bastard."
The front door opened. Fiona stepped into the foyer carrying
her schoolbooks. Amelia was there immediately, maneuvering
around with her back to the foyer doors, blocking Fiona's view,
talking to her in low angry tones.
Hackworth heard his daughter's voice. It was a lovely voice, a
husky alto, and he would have recognized it anywhere. "Don't lie to
me, I recognised his chevaline!" she said, and finally shouldered
Amelia out of the way, burst into the parlor, all lanky and awkward
and beautiful, an incarnation of joy. She took two steps across the
oriental rug and then launched herself full-length across the settee
into her father's arms, where she lay for some minutes alternately
weeping and laughing.
Gwen had to be escorted from the room by Amelia, who came
back immediately and stationed herself nearby, hands clasped
behind back like a military sentry, observing Hackworth's every
move. Hackworth couldn't imagine what they suspected he might
be capable of-incest in the parlor? But there was no point in
spoiling the moment by thinking of galling things, and so he shut
Amelia out of his mind.
Father and daughter were allowed to converse for a quarter of
an hour, really just queuing up subjects for future conversation. By
that time, Gwen had recovered her composure enough to reenter the
room, and she and Amelia stood shoulder-to-shoulder, quivering in
sympathetic resonance, until Gwen interrupted.
"Fiona, your-father-and I were in the midst of a very serious
discussion when you burst in on us. Please leave us alone for a few
minutes."
Fiona did, reluctantly. Gwen resumed her former position, and
Amelia backed out of the room. Hackworth noticed that Gwen had
fetched some documents, bound up in red tape.
"These are papers setting out the terms of our divorce,
including all conditions relating to Fiona," she said. "You are
already in violation, I'm afraid. Of course, this can be forgiven, as
your lack of a forwarding address as such made it impossible for us
to acquaint you with this information. Needless to say, it is
imperative for you to familiarise yourself with these documents
before darkening my door again."
"Naturally," Hackworth said. "Thank you for retaining them
for me."
"If you will be so good as to withdraw from these premises-"
"Of course. Good day," Hackworth said, took the roll of papers
from Gwen's trembling hand, and let himself out briskly. He was a
bit surprised when he heard Amelia calling to him from the
doorway.
"Mr. Hackworth. Miss Lloyd wishes to know whether you have
established a new residence, so that your personal effects may be
forwarded."
"None as yet," Hackworth said. "I'm in transit."
Amelia brightened. "In transit to where?"
"Oh, I don't really know," Hackworth said. A movement
caught his eye and he saw Fiona framed in a second-story window.
She was undoing the latches, raising the sash. "I'm on a quest of
sorts."
"A quest for what, Mr. Hackworth?"
"Can't say precisely. You know, top secret and all that.
Something to do with an alchemist. Who knows, maybe there'll be
faeries and hobgoblins too, before it's all over. I'll be happy to fill
you in when I return. Until then, please ask Miss Lloyd if she would
be so understanding as to retain those personal effects for just a bit
longer. It can't possibly take more than another ten years or so."
And with that, Hackworth prodded Kidnapper forward, moving
at an extremely deliberate pace.
Fiona was on a velocipede with smart wheels that made short
work of the cobblestone road. She caught up with her father just
short of the security grid. Mother and Amelia had just materialized a
block behind them in a half-lane car, and the sudden sensation of
danger inspired Fiona to make an impetuous dive from the saddle of
her velocipede onto Kidnapper's hindquarters, like a cowboy in a
movie switching horses in midgallop. Her skirts, poorly adapted to
cowboy maneuvers, got all fouled up around her legs, and she ended
up slung over Kidnapper's back like a sack of beans, one hand
clutching the vestigial knob where its tail would have been if it were
a horse, and the other arm thrown round her father's waist.
"I love you, Mother!" she shouted, as they rode through the
grid and out of the jurisdiction of New Atlantis family law. "Can't
say the same for you, Amelia! But I'll be back soon, don't worry
about me! Goodbye!" And then the ferns and mist closed behind
them, and they were alone in the deep forest.
Carl Hollywood takes the Oath;
stroll along the Thames;
an encounter with Lord Finkle-McGraw.
Carl took the Oath at Westminster Abbey on a surprisingly
balmy day in April and afterward went for a stride down the river,
heading not too directly toward a reception that had been arranged
in his honor at the Hopkins Theatre near Leicester Square. Even
without a pedomotive, he walked as fast as many people jogged.
Ever since his first visit to London as a malnourished theatre
student, he had preferred walking to any other way of getting
around the place. Walking, especially along the Embankment where
fellow-pedestrians were relatively few, also gave him freedom to
smoke big old authentic cigars or the occasional briar pipe. Just
because he was a Victorian didn't mean he had to give up his
peculiarities; quite the opposite, in fact. Cruising along past old
shrapnel-pocked Cleopatra's Needle in a comet-like corona of his
own roiling, viscous smoke, he thought that he might get to like this.
A gentleman in a top hat was standing on the railing, gazing
stolidly across the water, and as Carl drew closer, he could see that
it was Lord Alexander Chung-Sik Finkle-McGraw, who, a day or
two earlier, had stated during a cinephone conversation that he
should like to meet him face-to-face in the near future for a chat.
Carl Hollywood, remembering his new tribal affiliation, went
so far as to doff his hat and bow. Finkle-McGraw acknowledged the
greeting somewhat distractedly. "Please accept my sincere
congratulations, Mr. Hollywood. Welcome to the phyle."
"Thank you."
"I regret that I have not been able to attend any of your
productions at the Hopkins- my friends who have could hardly
have been more complimentary."
"Your friends are too kind," said Carl Hollywood. He was still
a little unsure of the etiquette. To accept the compliment at face
value would have been boastful; to imply that His Grace's friends
were incompetent judges of theatre was not much of an
improvement; he settled for the less dangerous accusation that these
friends had a superfluity of goodness.
Finkle-McGraw detached himself from the railing and began to
walk along the river, keeping a brisk pace for a man of his age.
"I daresay that you shall make a prized addition to our phyle,
which, as brilliantly as it shines in the fields of commerce and
science, wants more artists."
Not wanting to join in criticism of the tribe he'd just sworn a
solemn Oath to uphold, Carl pursed his lips and mulled over some
possible responses.
Finkle-McGraw continued, "Do you suppose that we fail to
encourage our own children to pursue the arts, or fail to attract
enough men such as yourself, or perhaps both?"
"With all due respect, Your Grace, I do not necessarily agree
with your premise. New Atlantis has many fine artists."
"Oh, come now. Why do all of them come from outside the
tribe, as you did? Really, Mr. Hollywood, would you have taken the
Oath at all if your prominence as a theatrical producer had not made
it advantageous for you to do so?"
"I think I will choose to interpret your question as part of a
Socratic dialogue for my edification," Carl Hollywood said
carefully, "and not as an allegation of insincerity on my part. As a
matter of fact, just before I encountered you, I was enjoying my
cigar, and looking about at London, and thinking about just how
well it all suits me."
"It suits you well because you are of a certain age now. You
are a successful and established artist. The ragged bohemian life
holds no charm for you anymore. But would you have reached your
current position if you had not lived that life when you were
younger?"
"Now that you put it that way," Carl said, "I agree that we
might try to make some provision, in the future, for young
bohemians-"
"It wouldn't work," Finkle-McGraw said. "I've been thinking
about this for years. I had the same idea: Set up a sort of young
artistic bohemian theme park, sprinkled around in all the major
cities, where young New Atlantans who were so inclined could
congregate and be subversive when they were in the mood. The
whole idea was self-contradictory. Mr. Hollywood, I have devoted
much effort, during the last decade or so, to the systematic
encouragement of subversiveness."
"You have? Are you not concerned that our young subversives
will migrate to other phyles?"
If Carl Hollywood could have kicked himself in the arse, he would have done so as soon as finishing that sentence. He had forgotten about Elizabeth Finkle-McGraw's recent and highly publicized defection to CryptNet. But the Duke took it serenely.
"Some of them will, as the case of my granddaughter
demonstrates. But what does it really mean when such a young
person moves to another phyle? It means that they have outgrown
youthful credulity and no longer wish to belong to a tribe simply
because it is the path of least resistance-they have developed
principles, they are concerned with their personal integrity. It
means, in short, that they are ripe to become members in good
standing of New Atlantis-as soon as they develop the wisdom to
see that it is, in the end, the best of all possible tribes."
"Your strategy was much too subtle for me to follow. I thank
you for explaining it. You encourage subversiveness because you
think that it will have an effect opposite to what one might naively
suppose."
"Yes. And that's the whole point of being an Equity Lord, you
know-to look after the interests of the society as a whole instead of
flogging one's own company, or whatever. At any rate, this brings
us to the subject of the advertisement I placed in the ractives section
of the Times and our consequent cinephone conversation."
"Yes," Carl Hollywood said, "you are looking for ractors who
performed in a project called the Young Lady's Illustrated Primer."
"The Primer was my idea. I commissioned it. I paid the racting
fees. Of course, owing to the way the media system is organised, I
had no way to determine the identity of the ractors to whom I was
sending the fees- hence the need for a public advertisement."
"Your Grace, I should tell you immediately-and would have
told you on the cinephone, had you not insisted that we defer all
substantive discussion to a face-to-face-that I myself did not ract
in the Primer. A friend of mine did. When I saw the advertisement, I
undertook to respond on her behalf."
"I understand that ractors are frequently pursued by overly
appreciative members of their audience," said Finkle-McGraw, "and
so I suppose I understand why you have chosen to act as
intermediary in this case. Let me assure you that my motives are
perfectly benign."
Carl adopted a wounded look "Your Grace! I would never have
supposed otherwise. I am arrogating this role to myself, not to
protect the young lady in question from any supposed malignity on
your part, but simply because her current circumstances make
establishing contact with her a somewhat troublesome business."
"Then pray tell me what you know about the young woman."
Carl gave the Equity Lord a brief description of Miranda's
relationship with the Primer.
Finkle-McGraw was keenly interested in how much time
Miranda had spent in the Primer each week. "If your estimates are
even approximately accurate, this young woman must have
singlehandedly done at least nine-tenths of the racting associated
with that copy of the Primer."
"That copy? Do you mean to say there were others?"
Finkle-McGraw walked on silently for a few moments, then
resumed in a quieter voice. "There were three copies in all. The first
one went to my granddaughter-as you will appreciate, I tell you
this in confidence. A second went to Fiona, the daughter of the
artifex who created it. The third fell into the hands of Nell, a little
thete girl.
"To make a long story short, the three girls have turned out
very differently. Elizabeth is rebellious and high-spirited and lost
interest in the Primer several years ago. Fiona is bright but
depressed, a classic manic-depressive artist. Nell, on the other hand,
is a most promising young lady.
"I prepared an analysis of the girls' usage habits, which were
largely obscured by the inherent secrecy of the media system, but
which can be inferred from the bills we paid to hire the ractors. It
became clear that, in the case of Elizabeth, the racting was done by
hundreds of different performers. In Fiona's case, the bills were
strikingly lower because much of the racting was done by someone
who did not charge money for his or her services-probably her
father. But that's a different story. In Nell's case, virtually all of the
racting was done by the same person."
"It sounds," Carl said, "as if my friend established a
relationship with Nell's copy-"
"And by extension, with Nell," said Lord Finkle-McGraw.
Carl said, "May I inquire as to why you wish to contact the
ractor?"
"Because she is a central part of what is going on here," said
Lord Finkle-McGraw, "which I did not expect. It was not a part of
the original plan that the ractor would be important."
"She did it," Carl Hollywood said, "by sacrificing her career
and much of her life. It is important for you to understand, Your
Grace, that she was not merely Nell's tutor. She became Nell's
mother."
These words seemed to strike Lord Finkle-McGraw quite
forcefully. His stride faltered, and he ambled along the riverbank for
some time, lost in thought.
"You gave me to believe, several minutes ago, that establishing
contact with the ractor in question would not be a trivial process,"
he said finally, in quieter voice. "Is she no longer associated with
your troupe?"
"She took a leave of absence several years ago in order to
concentrate on Nell and the Primer."
"I see," said the Equity Lord, leaning into the words a little bit
and turning it into an exclamation. He was getting excited. "Mr.
Hollywood, I hope you will not be offended by my indelicacy in
inquiring as to whether this has been a paid leave of absence."
"Had it been necessary, I would have underwritten it. Instead
there is another backer."
"Another backer," repeated Finkle-McGraw. He was obviously
fascinated, and slightly alarmed, by the use of financial jargon in
this context.
"The transaction was fairly simple, as I suppose all transactions
are au fond," said Carl Hollywood. "Miranda wanted to locate Nell.
Conventional thinking dictates that this is impossible. There are,
however, some unconventional thinkers who would maintain that it
can be done through unconscious, nonrational processes. There is a
tribe called the Drummers who normally live underwater-"
"I am familiar with them," said Lord Finkle-McGraw.
"Miranda joined the Drummers four years ago," Carl said. "She
had entered into a partnership. The two other partners were a
gentleman of my acquaintance, also in the theatrical business, and a
financial backer."
"What did the backer hope to gain from it?"
"A leased line to the collective unconscious," said Carl Hollywood. "He thought it would be to the entertainment industry what the philosopher's stone was to alchemy."
"And the results?"
"We have all been waiting to hear from Miranda."
"You have heard nothing at all?"
"Only in my dreams," Carl Hollywood said.
Nell's passage through Pudong;
she happens upon the offices of Madame Ping;
interview with the same.
Shanghai proper could be glimpsed only through vertical
apertures between the high buildings of the Pudong Economic Zone
as Nell skated westward. Downtown Pudong erupted from the flat
paddy-land on the east bank of the Huang Pu. Almost all of the
skyscrapers made use of mediatronic building materials. Some bore
the streamlined characters of the Japanese writing system, rendered
in sophisticated color schemes, but most of them were written in the
denser high-resolution characters used by the Chinese, and these
tended to be stroked out in fiery red, or in black on a background of
that color.
The Anglo-Americans had their Manhattan, the Japanese had
Tokyo. Hong Kong was a nice piece of work, but it was essentially
Western. When the Overseas Chinese came back to the homeland to
build their monument to enterprise, they had done it here, and they
had done it bigger and brighter, and unquestionably redder, than any
of those other cities. The nanotechnological trick of making sturdy
structures that were lighter than air had come along just at the right
time, as all of the last paddies were being replaced by immense
concrete foundations, and a canopy of new construction had
bloomed above the first-generation undergrowth of seventy- and
eighty-story buildings. This new architecture was naturally large
and ellipsoidal, typically consisting of a huge neonrimmed ball
impaled on a spike, so Pudong was bigger and denser a thousand
feet above the ground than it was at street level.
Seen from the apex of the big arch in the Causeway through
several miles of bad air, the view was curiously flattened and faded,
as if the whole scene had been woven into a fabulously complex
brocade that had been allowed to gather dust for several decades and
then been hung in front of Nell, about ten feet away. The sun had
gone down not long before and the sky was still a dim orange fading
up into purple, divided into irregular segments by half a dozen
pillars of smoke spurting straight up out of the horizon and toward
the dark polluted vault of the heavens, many miles off to the west,
somewhere out in the silk and tea districts between Shanghai and
Suzhou.
As she power-skated down the western slope of the arch and
crossed the coastline of China, the thunderhead of neon reached above her head, spread out to embrace her, developed into three dimensions- and she was still several miles away from it. The
coastal neighborhoods consisted of block after block of reinforced-concrete
apartment buildings, four to five stories high, looking older
than the Great Wall though their real age could not have exceeded a
few decades, and decorated on the ends facing the street with large
cartoonish billboards, some mediatronic, most just painted on. For
the first kilometer or so, most of these were targeted at businessmen
just coming in from New Chusan, and in particular from the New
Atlantis Clave. Glancing at these billboards as she went by them,
Nell concluded that visitors from New Atlantis played an important
role in supporting casinos and bordellos, both the old-fashioned
variety and the newer scripted-fantasy emporia, where you could be
the star in a little play you wrote yourself. Nell slowed down to
examine several of these, memorizing the addresses of ones with
especially new or well-executed signs.
She had no clear plan in mind yet. All she knew was that she
had to keep moving purposefully. Then the young men squatting on
the curbs talking into their cellphones would keep eyeing her but
leave her alone. The moment she stopped or looked the tiniest bit
uncertain, they would descend.
The dense wet air along the Huang Pu was supporting millions
of tons of air buoys, and Nell felt every kilogram of their weight
pressing upon her ribs and shoulders as she skated up and down the
main waterfront thoroughfare, trying to maintain her momentum
and her false sense of purposefulness. This was the Coastal
Republic, which appeared to have no fixed principles other than that
money talked and that it was a good thing to get rich. Every tribe in
the world seemed to have its own skyscraper here. Some, like New
Atlantis, were not actively recruiting and simply used the size and
magnificence of their buildings as a monument to themselves.
Others, like the Boers, the Parsis, the Jews, went for the understated
approach, and in Pudong anything understated was more or less
invisible. Still others-the Mormons, the First Distributed Republic,
and the Chinese Coastal Republic itself-used every square inch of
their mediatronic walls to proselytize.
The only phyle that didn't seem to appreciate the ecumenical
spirit of the place was the Celestial Kingdom itself. Nell stumbled
across their territory, half a square block surrounded with a stucco-sheathed
masonry wall, circular gates here and there, and an old
three-story structure inside, done in high Ming style with eaves that curved way up at the corners and sculpted dragons along the
ridgeline of the roof. The place was so tiny compared to the rest of
Pudong that it looked as if you might trip over it. The gates were
guarded by men in armor, presumably backed up by other, less
obvious defensive systems.
Nell was fairly certain that she was being followed,
unobtrusively, by at least three young men who had locked on to her
during her initial passage in from the coast, and who were waiting to
find out whether she really had somewhere to go or was just faking
it. She had already made her way from one end of the waterfront to
the other, pretending to be a tourist who just wanted to take in a
view of the Bund across the river. She was now heading back into
the heart of downtown Pudong, where she had better look as if she
were doing something.
Passing by the grand entrance to one of the skyscrapers-a
Coastal Republic edifice, not barbarian turf-she recognized its
mediaglyphic logo from one of the signs she had seen on the way
into town.
Nell could at least fill out an application without committing
herself. It would allow her to kill an hour in relatively safe and clean
surroundings. The important thing, as Dojo had taught her long ago
in a different context, was not to stop; without movement she could
do nothing.
Alas, Madame Ping's office suite was closed. A few lights
were on in the back, but the doors were locked and no receptionist
was on duty. Nell did not know whether to be amused or annoyed;
whoever heard of a brothel that closed down after dark? But then
these were only the administrative offices.
She loitered in the lobby for a few minutes, then caught a down
elevator. Just as the doors were closing, someone jumped into the
lobby and slammed the button, opening them back up again. A
young Chinese man with a small, slender body, large head, neatly
dressed, carrying some papers. "Pardon me," he said. "Did you
require something?"
"I'm here to apply for a job," Nell said.
The man's eyes traveled up and down her body in a coolly
professional fashion, almost completely devoid of prurience,
starting and stopping on her face. "As a performer," he said. The
intonation was somewhere between a question and a declaration.
"As a scriptwriter," she said.
Unexpectedly, he broke into a grin.
"I have qualifications that I will explain in detail."
"We have writers. We contract for them on the network."
"I'm surprised. How can a contract writer in Minnesota
possibly provide your clients with the personalized service they
require?"
"You could almost certainly get a job as a performer," said the
young man. "You would start tonight. Good pay."
"Just by looking at the billboards on the way in, I could see that
your customers aren't paying for bodies. They are paying for ideas.
That's your value added, right?"
"Pardon me?" said the young man, grinning again.
"Your value added. The reason you can charge more than a
whorehouse, pardon my language, is that you provide a scripted
fantasy scenario tailored to the client's requirements. I can do that
for you," Nell said. "I know these people, and I can make you a lot
of money."
"You know what people?"
"The Vickys. I know them inside and out," Nell said.
"Please come inside," said the young man, gesturing toward the
diamondoid door with MADAME PING'S written on it in red
letters. "Would you care for tea?"
. . .
"There are only two industries. This has always been true,"
said Madame Ping, enfolding a lovely porcelain teacup in her
withered fingers, the two-inch fingernails interleaving neatly like
the pinions of a raptor folding its wings after a long hard day of
cruising the thermals. "There is the industry of things, and the
industry of entertainment. The industry of things comes first. It
keeps us alive. But making things is easy now that we have the
Feed. This is not a very interesting business anymore.
"After people have the things they need to live, everything else
is entertainment. Everything. This is Madame Ping's business."
Madame Ping had an office on the hundred-and-eleventh floor
with a nice unobstructed view across the Huang Pu and into
downtown Shanghai. When it wasn't foggy, she could even see the
facade of her theatre, which was on a side street a couple of blocks
in from the Bund, its mediatronic marquee glowing patchily through
the dun limbs of an old sycamore tree. She had a telescope mounted in one of her windows, fixed upon the theatre's entrance, and noting Nell's curiosity, she encouraged her to look through it.
Nell had never looked through a real telescope before. It had a
tendency to jiggle and go out of focus, it didn't zoom, and panning
was tricky. But for all that, the image quality was a lot better than
photographic, and she quickly forgot herself and began sweeping it
back and forth across the city. She checked out the little Celestial
Kingdom Clave in the heart of the old city, where a couple of
Mandarins stood on a zigzag bridge across a pond, contemplating a
swarm of golden carp, wispy silver beards trailing down over the
colorful silk of their lapels, blue sapphire buttons on their caps
flashing as they nodded their heads. She looked into a high-rise
building farther inland, apparently a foreign concession of some
type, where some Euros were holding a cocktail party, some
venturing onto the balcony with glasses of wine and doing some
eavesdropping of their own. Finally she leveled the 'scope toward
the horizon, out past the vast dangerous triad-ridden suburbs, where
millions of Shanghai's poor had been forcibly banished to make
way for highrises. Beyond that was real agricultural land, a fractal
network of canals and creeks glimmering like a golden net as they
reflected the lambency of the sunset, and beyond that, as always, a
few scattered pillars of smoke in the ultimate distance, where the
Fists of Righteous Harmony were burning the foreign devils' Feed
lines.
"You are a curious girl," Madame Ping said. "That is natural.
But you must never let any other person-especially a client-see
your curiosity. Never seek information. Sit quietly and let them
bring it to you. What they conceal tells you more than what they
reveal. Do you understand?"
"Yes, madam," Nell said, turning toward her interlocutor with
a little curtsy. Rather than trying to do Chinese etiquette and making
a hash of it, she was taking the Victorian route, which worked just
as well. For purposes of this interview, Henry (the young man who
had offered her tea) had advanced her a few hard ucus, which she
had used to compile a reasonably decent full-length dress, hat,
gloves, and reticule. She had gone in nervous and realized within a
few minutes that the decision to hire her had already been made,
somehow, and that this little get-together was actually more along
the lines of an orientation session.
"Why is the Victorian market important to us?" Madame Ping
asked, and fixed Nell with an incisive glare.
"Because New Atlantis is one of the three first-tier phyles."
"Not correct. The wealth of New Atlantis is great, yes. But its
population is just a few percent. The successful New Atlantis man is
busy and has just a bit of time for scripted fantasies. He has much
money, you understand, but little opportunity to spend it. No, this
market is important because everyone else-the men of all other
phyles, including many of Nippon- want to be like Victorian
gentlemen. Look at the Ashantis- the Jews- the Coastal Republic.
Do they wear traditional costume? Sometimes. Usually though, they
wear a suit on the Victorian pattern. They carry an umbrella from
Old Bond Street. They have a book of Sherlock Holmes stories.
They play in Victorian ractives, and when they have to spend their
natural urges, they come to me, and I provide them with a scripted
fantasy that was originally requested by some gentleman who came
sneaking across the Causeway from New Atlantis." Somewhat
uncharacteristically, Madame Ping turned two of her claws into
walking legs and made them scurry across the tabletop, like a
furtive Vicky gent trying to slip into Shanghai without being caught
on a monitor. Recognizing her cue, Nell covered her mouth with
one gloved hand and tittered.
"This way, Madame Ping does a magic trick- she turns one
satisfied client from New Atlantis into a thousand clients from all
tribes."
"I must confess that I am surprised," Nell ventured.
"Inexperienced as I am in these matters, I had supposed that each
tribe would exhibit a different preference."
"We change the script a little," Madame Ping said, "to allow
for cultural differences. But the story never changes. There are
many people and many tribes, but only so many stories."
Peculiar practices in the woods;
the Reformed Distributed Republic;
an extraordinary conversation in a log cabin;
CryptNet;
the Hackworths depart.
Half a day's slow eastward ride took them well up into the
foothills of the Cascades, where the clouds, flowing in eternally
from the Pacific, were forced upward by the swelling terrain and
unburdened themselves of their immense stores of moisture. The
trees were giants, rising branchless to far above their heads, the trunks aglow with moss. The landscape was a checkerboard of old-growth
forest alternating with patches that had been logged in the
previous century; Hackworth tried to guide Kidnapper toward the
latter, because the scarcity of undergrowth and deadfalls made for a
smoother ride. They passed through the remains of an abandoned
timber town, half small clapboard buildings and half moss-covered
and rust-streaked mobile homes. Through their dirty windows,
faded signs were dimly visible, stenciled THIS HOUSEHOLD
DEPENDS ON TIMBER MONEY. Ten-foot saplings grew up
through cracks in the streets. Narrow hedges of blueberry shrubs
and blackberry canes sprouted from the rain gutters of houses, and
gigantic old cars, resting askew on flat and cracked tires, had
become trellises for morning glories and vine maples. They also
passed through an old mining encampment that had been abandoned
even longer ago. For the most part, the signs of modern habitation
were relatively subtle. The houses up here tended to be of the same
unassuming style favored by the software khans closer to Seattle,
and from place to place a number of them would cluster around a
central square with playground equipment, cafés, stores, and other
amenities. He and Fiona stopped at two such places to exchange
ucus for coffee, sandwiches, and cinnamon rolls.
The unmarked, decussating paths would have been confusing
to anyone but a native. Hackworth had never been here before. He
had gotten the coordinates from the second fortune cookie in
Kidnapper's glove compartment, which was much less cryptic than
the first had been. He had no way to tell whether he was really
going anywhere. His faith did not begin to waver until evening
approached, the eternal clouds changed from silver to dark gray, and
he noticed that the chevaline was taking them higher and toward
less densely populated ground.
Then he saw the rocks and knew he had chosen the right path.
A wall of brown granite, dark and damp from the condensing fog,
materialized before them. They heard it before they saw it; it made
no sound, but its presence changed the acoustics of the forest. The
fog was closing in, and they could barely see the silhouettes of
scrubby, wind-gnarled mountain trees lined up uncomfortably along
the top of the cliff.
Amid those trees was the silhouette of a human being.
"Quiet," Hackworth mouthed to his daughter, then reined
Kidnapper to a stop.
The person had a short haircut and wore a bulky waist-length
jacket with stretch pants; they could tell by the curve of the hips that
it was a woman. Around those hips she had fastened an arrangement
of neon green straps: a climbing harness. She wore no other outdoor
paraphernalia, though, no knapsack or helmet, and behind her on the
clifftop they could just make out the silhouette of a horse, prodding
the ground with its nose. From time to time she checked her
wristwatch.
A tenuous neon strand of rope hung down the bulging face of
the cliff from where the woman stood. The last several meters
dangled loosely in the mist in front of a small cozy pocket sheltered
by the overhang.
Hackworth turned around to get Fiona's attention, then pointed
something out: a second person, making his way along the base of
the cliff, out of sight of the woman above. Moving carefully and
quietly, he eventually reached the shelter of the overhang. He
gingerly took the dangling end of the rope and tied it to something,
apparently a piece of hardware fixed into the rock. Then he left the
way he had come, moving silently and staying close to the cliff.
The woman remained still and silent for several minutes,
checking her watch more and more frequently.
Finally she backed several paces away from the edge of the
cliff, took her hands out of her jacket pockets, seemed to draw a few
deep breaths, then ran forward and launched herself into space. She
screamed as she did it, a scream to drive out her own fear.
The rope ran through a pulley fixed near the top of the cliff.
She fell for a few meters, the rope tightened, the man's knot held,
and the rope, which was somewhat elastic, brought her to a firm but
not violent stop just above the wicked pile of rubble and snags at the
base of the cliff. Swinging at the end of the rope, she grabbed it with
one hand and leaned back, baring her throat to the mist, allowing
herself to dangle listlessly for a few minutes, basking in relief.
A third person, previously unseen, emerged from the trees.
This one was a middle-aged man, and he was wearing a jacket that
had a few vaguely official touches such as an armband and an
insignia on the breast pocket. He walked beneath the dangling
woman and busied himself for a few moments beneath the
overhang, eventually releasing the rope and letting her safely to the
ground. The woman detached herself from the rope and then the
harness and fell into a businesslike discussion with this man, who
poured both of them hot drinks from a thermal flask.
"Have you heard of these people? The Reformed Distributed
Republic," Hackworth said to Fiona, still keeping his voice low.
"I am only familiar with the First."
"The First Distributed Republic doesn't hang together very
well- in a way, it was never designed to. It was started by a bunch
of people who were very nearly anarchists. As you've probably
learned in school, it's become awfully factionalized."
"I have some friends in the F.D.R.," Fiona said.
"Your neighbors?"
"Yes."
"Software khans," Hackworth said. "The F.D.R. works for
them, because they have something in common-old software
money. They're almost like Victorians- a lot of them cross over
and take the Oath as they get older. But for the broad middle class,
the F.D.R. offers no central religion or ethnic identity."
"So it becomes balkanized."
"Precisely. These people," Hackworth said, pointing to the man
and the woman at the base of the cliff, "are R.D.R., Reformed
Distributed Republic. Very similar to F.D.R., with one key
difference."
"The ritual we just witnessed?"
"Ritual is a good description," Hackworth said. "Earlier today,
that man and that woman were both visited by messengers who gave
them a place and time-nothing else. In this case, the woman's job
was to jump off that cliff at the given time. The man's job was to tie
the end of the rope before she jumped. A very simple job-"
"But if he had failed to do it, she'd be dead," Fiona said.
"Precisely. The names are pulled out of a hat. The participants
have only a few hours' warning. Here, the ritual is done with a cliff
and a rope, because there happened to be a cliff in the vicinity. In
other R.D.R. nodes, the mechanism might be different. For example,
person A might go into a room, take a pistol out of a box, load it
with live ammunition, put it back in the box, and then leave the
room for ten minutes. During that time, person B is supposed to
enter the room and replace the live ammunition with a dummy clip
having the same weight. Then person A comes back into the room,
puts the gun to his head, and pulls the trigger."
"But person A has no way of knowing whether person B has
done his job?"
"Exactly."
"What is the role of the third person?"
"A proctor. An official of the R.D.R. who sees to it that the two
participants don't try to communicate."
"How frequently must they undergo this ritual?"
"As frequently as their name comes up at random, perhaps
once every couple of years," Hackworth said. "It's a way of creating
mutual dependency. These people know they can trust each other. In
a tribe such as the F.D.R., whose view of the universe contains no
absolutes, this ritual creates an artificial absolute."
The woman finished her hot drink, shook hands with the
proctor, then began to ascend a polymer ladder, fixed to the rock,
that took her back toward her horse. Hackworth spurred Kidnapper
into movement, following a path that ran parallel to the base of the
cliff, and rode for half a kilometer or so until it was joined by
another path angling down from above. A few minutes later, the
woman approached, riding her horse, an old-fashioned biological
model.
She was a healthy, open-faced, apple-cheeked woman, still
invigorated by her leap into the unknown, and she greeted them
from some distance away, without any of the reserve of neo-Victorians.
"How do you do," Hackworth said, removing his bowler.
The woman barely glanced at Fiona. She reined her horse to a
gentle stop, eyes fixed on Hackworth's face. She was wearing a
distracted look. "I know you," she said. "But I don't know your
name."
"Hackworth, John Percival, at your service. This is my daughter Fiona."
"I'm sure I've never heard that name," the woman said.
"I'm sure I've never heard yours," Hackworth said cheerfully.
"Maggie," the woman said. "This is driving me crazy. Where have we met?"
"This may sound rather odd," Hackworth said gently, "but if
you and I could both remember all of our dreams-which we can't,
of course- and if we compared notes long enough, we would
probably find that we had shared a few over the years."
"A lot of people have similar dreams," Maggie said.
"Excuse me, but that's not what I mean," Hackworth said. "I
refer to a situation in which each of us would retain his or her own
personal point of view. I would see you. You would see me. We
might then share certain experiences together-each of us seeing it
from our own perspective.
"Like a ractive?"
"Yes," Hackworth said, "but you don't have to pay for it. Not with money, anyway."
. . .
The local climate lent itself to hot drinks. Maggie did not even
take off her jacket before going into her kitchen and putting a kettle
on to boil. The place was a log cabin, airier than it looked from the
outside, and Maggie apparently shared it with several other people
who were not there at the moment. Fiona, walking to and from the
bathroom, was fascinated to see evidence of men and women living
and sleeping and bathing together.
As they sat around having their tea, Hackworth persuaded
Maggie to poke her finger into a thimble-size device. When he took
this object from his pocket, Fiona was struck by a powerful sense of
déjà vu. She had seen it before, and it was significant. She knew that
her father had designed it; it bore all the earmarks of his style.
Then they all sat around making small talk for a few minutes;
Fiona had many questions about the workings of the R.D.R., which
Maggie, a true believer, was pleased to answer. Hackworth had
spread a sheet of blank paper out on the table, and as the minutes
went by, words and pictures began to appear on it and to scroll up
the page after it had filled itself up. The thimble, he explained, had
placed some reconnaissance mites into Maggie's bloodstream,
which had been gathering information, flying out through her pores
when their tape drives were full, and offloading the data into the
paper.
"It seems that you and I have a mutual acquaintance, Maggie,"
he said after a few minutes. "We are carrying many of the same
tuples in our bloodstreams. They can only be spread through certain
forms of contact."
"You mean, like, exchange of bodily fluids?" Maggie said blankly.
Fiona thought briefly of old-fashioned transfusions and
probably would not have worked out the real meaning of this phrase
had her father not flushed and glanced at her momentarily.
"I believe we understand each other, yes," Hackworth said.
Maggie thought about it for a moment and seemed to get irked,
or as irked as someone with her generous and contented nature was
ever likely to get. She addressed Hackworth but watched Fiona as she tried to construct her next sentence. "Despite what you Atlantans might think of us, I don't sleep ... I mean, I don't have s ... I don't have that many partners."
"I am sorry to have given you the mistaken impression that I
had formed any untoward preconceptions about your moral
standards," Hackworth said. "Please be assured that I do not regard
myself as being in any position to judge others in this regard.
However, if you could be so forthcoming as to tell me who, or with
whom, in the last year or so . . ."
"Just one," Maggie said. "It's been a slow year." Then she set
her tea mug down on the table (Fiona had been startled by the
unavailability of saucers) and leaned back in her chair, looking at
Hackworth alertly. "Funny that I'm telling you this stuff- you, a
stranger."
"Please allow me to recommend that you trust your instincts and treat me not as a stranger."
"I had a fling. Months and months ago. That's been it."
"Where?"
"London." A trace of a smile came onto Maggie's face. "You'd
think living here, I'd go someplace warm and sunny. But I went to
London. I guess there's a little Victorian in all of us.
"It was a guy," Maggie went on. "I had gone to London with a
couple of girlfriends of mine. One of them was another R.D.R.
citizen and the other, Trish, left the R.D.R. about three years ago
and co-founded a local CryptNet node. They've got a little point of
presence down in Seattle, near the market."
"Please pardon me for interrupting," Fiona said, "but would
you be so kind as to explain the nature of CryptNet? One of my old
school friends seems to have joined it."
"A synthetic phyle. Elusive in the extreme," Hackworth said.
"Each node is independent and self-governing," Maggie said.
"You could found a node tomorrow if you wanted. Nodes are
defined by contracts. You sign a contract in which you agree to
provide certain services when called upon to do so."
"What sorts of services?"
"Typically, data is delivered into your system. You process the
data and pass it on to other nodes. It seemed like a natural to Trish
because she was a coder, like me and my housemates and most
other people around here."
"Nodes have computers then?"
"The people themselves have computers, typically embedded
systems," Maggie said, unconsciously rubbing the mastoid bone
behind her ear.
"Is the node synonymous with the person, then?"
"In many cases," Maggie said, "but sometimes it's several
persons with embedded systems that are contained within the same
trust boundary."
"May I ask what level your friend Trish's node has attained?" Hackworth said.
Maggie looked uncertain. "Eight or nine, maybe. Anyway, we
went to London. While we were there, we decided to take in some
shows. I wanted to see the big productions. Those were nice-we
saw a nice Doctor Faustus at the Olivier."
"Marlowe's?"
"Yes. But Trish had a knack for finding all of these little,
scruffy, out-of-the-way theatres that I never would have found in a
million years- they weren't marked, and they didn't really
advertise, as far as I could tell. We saw some radical stuff- really
radical."
"I don't imagine you are using that adjective in a political sense," Hackworth said.
"No, I mean how they were staged. In one of them, we walked
into this bombed-out old building in Whitechapel, full of people
milling around, and all this weird stuff started happening, and after a
while I realized that some of the people were actors and some were
audience and that all of us were both, in a way. It was cool- I
suppose you can get stuff like that on the net anytime, in a ractive,
but it was so much better to be there with real, warm bodies around.
I felt happy. Anyway, this guy was going to the bar for a pint, and
he offered to get me one. We started talking. One thing led to
another. He was really intelligent, really sexy. An African guy who
knew a lot about the theatre. This place had back rooms. Some of
them had beds."
"After you were finished," Hackworth said, "did you
experience any unusual sensations?"
Maggie threw back her head and laughed, thinking that this
was a bit of wry humor on Hackworth's part. But he was serious.
"After we were finished?" she said.
"Yes. Let us say, several minutes afterward."
Suddenly Maggie became disconcerted. "Yeah, actually," she said. "I got hot. Really hot. We had to leave, 'cause I thought I had a flu or something. We went back to the hotel, and I took my clothes off and stood out on the balcony. My temperature was a hundred and four. But the next morning I felt fine. And I've felt fine ever
since."
"Thank you, Maggie," Hackworth said, rising to his feet and pocketing the sheet of paper. Fiona rose too, following her father's cue. "Prior to your London visit, had your social life been an active one?"
Maggie got a little pinker. "Relatively active for a few years, yes."
"What sort of crowd? CryptNet types? People who spent a lot of time near the water?"
Maggie shook her head. "The water? I don't understand."
"Ask yourself why you have been so inactive, Maggie, since your liaison with Mr.-"
"Beck. Mr. Beck."
"With Mr. Beck. Could it be that you found the experience just a bit alarming? Exchange of bodily fluids followed by a violent rise in core temperature?"
Maggie was poker-faced.
"I recommend that you look into the subject of spontaneous
combustion," Hackworth said. And without further ceremony, he
reclaimed his bowler and umbrella from the entryway and led Fiona
back out into the forest.
Hackworth said, "Maggie did not tell you everything about
CryptNet. To begin with, it is believed to have numerous unsavoury
connexions and is a perennial focus of Protocol Enforcement's
investigations. And"- Hackworth laughed ruefully- "it is patently
untrue that ten is the highest level."
"What is the goal of this organisation?" Fiona asked.
"It represents itself as a simple, moderately successful data-processing
collective. But its actual goals can only be known by
those privileged to be included within the trust boundary of the
thirty-third level," Hackworth said, his voice slowing down as he
tried to remember why he knew all of these things. "It is rumoured
that, within that select circle, any member can kill any other simply
by thinking of the deed."
Fiona leaned forward and wrapped her arms snugly around her
father's body, nestled her head between his shoulder blades, and
held tight. She thought that the subject of CryptNet was closed; but
a quarter of an hour later, as Kidnapper carried them swiftly through the trees down toward Seattle, her father spoke again, picking up the sentence where he had left it, as if he had merely paused for breath.
His voice was slow and distant and almost trancelike, the memories percolating outward from deep storage with little participation from his conscious mind. "CryptNet's true desire is the Seed- a technology that, in their diabolical scheme, will one day supplant the Feed, upon which our society and many others are founded. Protocol, to us, has brought prosperity and peace- to CryptNet, however, it is a contemptible system of oppression. They believe that information has an almost mystical power of free flow and self-replication, as water seeks its own level or sparks fly upward- and lacking any moral code, they confuse inevitability with Right. It is
their view that one day, instead of Feeds terminating in matter compilers, we will have Seeds that, sown on the earth, will sprout up into houses, hamburgers, spaceships, and books- that the Seed will develop inevitably from the Feed, and that upon it will be founded a more highly evolved society."
He stopped for a moment, took a deep breath, and seemed to stir awake; when he spoke again, it was in a clearer and stronger
voice. "Of course, it can't be allowed- the Feed is not a system of
control and oppression, as CryptNet would maintain. It is the only
way order can be maintained in modern society- if everyone
possessed a Seed, anyone could produce weapons whose destructive
power rivalled that of Elizabethan nuclear weapons. This is why
Protocol Enforcement takes such a dim view of CryptNet's
activities."
The trees parted to reveal a long blue lake below them.
Kidnapper found its way to a road, and Hackworth spurred it on to a
hand-gallop. Within a few hours, father and daughter were settling
into bunkbeds in a second-class cabin of the airship Falkland
Islands, bound for London.
From the Primer,
Princess Nell's activities as Duchess of Turing;
the Castle of the Water-gates;
other castles; the Cipherers' Market;
Nell prepares for her final journey.
Princess Nell remained in Castle Turing for several
months. During her quest for the twelve keys, she had
entered many castles, outwitted their sentries, picked their
locks, and rifled their treasuries; but Castle Turing was an
altogether different place, a place that ran on rules and
programs that were devised by men and that could be
rewritten by one who was adept in the language of the ones
and zeroes. She need not content herself with sneaking in,
seizing a trinket, and fleeing. Castle Turing she made her
own. Its demesne became Princess Nell's kingdom.
First she gave the Duke of Turing a decent burial. Then
she studied his books until she had mastered them. She
acquainted herself with the states by which the soldiers, and
the mechanical Duke, could be programmed. She entered a
new master program Into the Duke and then restarted the
turning of the mighty Shaft that powered the castle. Her first
efforts were unsuccessful, as her program contained many
errors. The original Duke himself had not been above this; he
called them bugs, in reference to a large beetle that had
become entangled in one of his chains during an early
experiment and brought the first Turing machine to a violent
halt. But with steadfast patience, Princess Nell resolved these
bugs and made the mechanical Duke into her devoted
servant. The Duke in turn had the knack of putting simple
programs into all of the soldiers, so that an order given him by
Nell was rapidly disseminated into the entire force.
For the first time in her life, the Princess had an army and
servants. But it was not a conquering sort of army, because
the springs in the soldiers' backs unwound rapidly, and they
did not have the adaptability of human soldiers. Still, it was an
effective force behind the walls of the castle and made her
secure from any conceivable aggressor. Following
maintenance schedules that had been laid down by the
original Duke, Princess Nell set the soldiers to work greasing
the gears, repairing cracked shafts and worn bearings, and
building new soldiers out of stockpiled parts.
She was heartened by her success. But Castle Turing
was only one of seven ducal seats in this kingdom, and she
knew she had much work to do.
The territory around the castle was deeply forested, but
grassy ridges rose several miles away, and standing on the
castle walls with the original Duke's spyglass, Nell was able to
see wild horses grazing there. Purple had taught her the
secrets of mastering wild horses, and Duck had taught her
how to win their affection, and so Nell mounted an expedition
to these grasslands and returned a week later with two
beautiful mustangs, Coffee and Cream. She equipped them
with fine tack from the Duke's stables, marked with the T
crest-for the crest was hers now, and she could with
justifIcation call herself the Duchess of Turing. She also
brought a plain, unmarked saddle so that she could pass for a
commoner if need be-though Princess Nell had become so
beautiful over the years and had developed such a fine
bearing that few people would mistake her for a commoner
now, even if she were dressed in rags and walking barefoot.
Lying in her bunkbed in Madame Ping's dormitory, reading
these words from a softly glowing page in the middle of the night,
Nell wondered at that. Princesses were not genetically different
from commoners.
On the other side of a fairly thin wall she could hear water
running in half a dozen sinks as young women performed their
crepuscular ablutions. Nell was the only scripter staying in Madame
Ping's dormitory; the others were performers and were just coming
back from a long vigorous shift, rubbing liniment on their shoulders,
sore from wielding paddles against clients' bottoms, or snorting up
great nostril-loads of mites programmed to seek out their inflamed
buttocks and help to repair damaged capillaries overnight. And of
course, many more traditional activities were going on, such as
douching, makeup removal, moisturizing, and the like. The girls
went through these motions briskly, with the unselfconscious
efficiency that the Chinese all seemed to share, discussing the day's
events in the dry Shanghainese dialect. Nell had been living among
these girls for a month and was just starting to pick up a few words.
They all spoke English anyway.
She stayed up late reading the Primer in the dark. The
dormitory was a good place for this; Madame Ping's girls were professionals, and after a few minutes of whispering, giggling, and
scandalized communal shushing, they always went to sleep.
Nell sensed that she was coming close to the end of the Primer.
This would have been evident even if she hadn't been closing
in on Coyote, the twelfth and final Faery King. In the last few
weeks, since Nell had entered the domain of King Coyote, the
character of the Primer had changed. Formerly, her Night Friends or
other characters had acted with minds of their own, even if Nell just
went along passively. Reading the Primer had always meant racting
with other characters in the book while also having to think her way
through various interesting situations.
Recently the former element had been almost absent. Castle
Turing had been a fair sample of King Coyote's domain: a place
with few human beings, albeit filled with fascinating places and
situations.
She made her lonesome way across the domain of King
Coyote, visiting one castle after another, and encountering a
different conundrum in each one. The second castle (after Castle
Turing) was built on the slope of a mountain and had an elaborate
irrigation system in which water from a bubbling spring was routed
through a system of gates. There were many thousands of these
gates, and they were connected to each other in small groups, so that
one gate's opening or closing would, in some way, affect that of the
others in its group. This castle grew its own food and was suffering
a terrible famine because the arrangement of gates had in some way
become fubared. A dark, mysterious knight had come to visit the
place and apparently sneaked out of his bedroom in the middle of
the night and fiddled with connections between some gates in such a
way that water no longer flowed to the fields. Then he had
disappeared, leaving behind a note stating that he would fix the
problem in exchange for a large ransom in gold and jewels.
Princess Nell spent some time studying the problem and
eventually noticed that the system of gates was actually a very
sophisticated version of one of the Duke of Turing's machines.
Once she understood that the behavior of the water-gates was
orderly and predictable, it was not long before she was able to
program their behavior and locate the bugs that the dark knight had
introduced into the system. Soon water was flowing through the
irrigation system again, and the famine was relieved.
The people who lived in this castle were grateful, which she
had expected. But then they put a crown on her head and made her
their ruler, which she had not expected.
On some reflection, though, it only made sense. They would
die unless their system functioned properly. Princess Nell was the
only person who knew how it worked; she held their fate in her
hands. They had little choice but to submit to her rule.
So it went, as Princess Nell proceeded from castle to castle,
inadvertently finding herself at the helm of a full-fledged rebellion
against King Coyote. Each castle depended on some kind of a
programmable system that was a little more complicated than the
previous one. After the Castle of the Water-gates, she came to a
castle with a magnificent organ, powered by air pressure and
controlled by a bewildering grid of push-rods, which could play
music stored on a roll of paper tape with holes punched through it.
A mysterious dark knight had programmed the organ to play a sad,
depressing tune, plunging the place into a profound depression so
that no one worked or even got out of bed. With some playing
around, Princess Nell established that the behavior of the organ
could be simulated by an extremely sophisticated arrangement of
water-gates, which meant, in turn, that it could just as well be
reduced to an unfathomably long and complicated Turing machine
program.
When she had the organ working properly and the residents
cheered up, she moved on to a castle that functioned according to
rules written in a great book, in a peculiar language. Some pages of
the book had been ripped out by the mysterious dark knight, and
Princess Nell had to reconstruct them, learning the language, which
was extremely pithy and made heavy use of parentheses. Along the
way, she proved what was a foregone conclusion, namely, that the
system for processing this language was essentially a more complex
version of the mechanical organ, hence a Turing machine in essence.
Next was a castle divided into many small rooms, with a
system for passing messages between rooms through a pneumatic
tube. In each room was a group of people who responded to the
messages by following certain rules laid out in books, which usually
entailed sending more messages to other rooms. After familiarizing
herself with some of these rule-books and establishing that the
castle was another Turing machine, Princess Nell fixed a problem in
the message-delivery system that had been created by the vexatious dark knight, collected another ducal coronet, and moved on to castle number six.
This place was entirely different. It was much bigger. It was
much richer. And unlike all of the other castles in the domain of
King Coyote, it worked. As she approached the castle, she learned
to keep her horse to the edge of the road, for messengers were
constantly blowing past her at a full gallop in both directions.
It was a vast open marketplace with thousands of stalls, filled
with carts and runners carrying product in all directions. But no
vegetables, fish, spices, or fodder were to be seen here; all the
product was information written down in books. The books were
trundled from place to place on wheelbarrows and carried here and
there on great long seedylooking conveyor belts made of hemp and
burlap. Book-carriers bumped into each other, compared notes as to
what they were carrying and where they were going, and swapped
books for other books. Stacks of books were sold in great, raucous
auctions-and paid for not with gold but with other books. Around
the edges of the market were stalls where books were exchanged for
gold, and beyond that, a few alleys where gold could be exchanged
for food.
In the midst of this hubbub, Princess Nell saw a dark knight
sitting on a black horse, paging through one of these books. Without
further ado, she spurred her horse forward and drew her sword. She
slew him in single combat, right there in the middle of the
marketplace, and the book-sellers simply backed out of their way
and ignored them as Princess Nell and the dark knight hacked and
slashed at each other. When the dark knight fell dead and Princess
Nell sheathed her sword, the commotion closed in about her again,
like the waters of a turbulent river closing over a falling stone.
Nell picked up the book that the dark knight had been reading
and found that it contained nothing but gibberish. It was written in
some kind of a cipher.
She spent some time reconnoitering, looking for the center of
the place, and found no center. One stall was the same as the next.
There was no tower, no throne room, no clear system of authority.
Examining the market stalls in more detail, she saw that each
one included a man who did nothing but sit at a table and decipher
books, writing them out on long sheets of foolscap and handing
them over to other people, who would read through the contents,
consult rule-books, and dictate responses to the man with the quill
pen, who enciphered them and wrote them out in books that were then tossed out into the marketplace for delivery. The men with the quill pens, she noticed, always wore jeweled keys on chains around
their necks; the key was apparently the badge of the cipherers'
guild.
This castle proved fiendishly difficult to figure out, and Nell
spent a few weeks working on it. Part of the problem was that this
was the first castle Princess Nell had visited that was actually
functioning as intended; the dark knight had not been able to foul
the place up, probably because everything was done in ciphers here,
and everything was decentralized. Nell discovered that a smoothly
functioning system was much harder to puzzle out than one that was broken.
In the end, Princess Nell had to apprentice herself to a master
cipherer and learn everything there was to know about codes and the
keys that unlocked them. This done, she was given her own key, as
a badge of her office, and found a job in one of the stalls
enciphering and deciphering books. As it turned out, the key was
more than just a decoration; rolled up inside its shaft was a strip of
parchment inscribed with a long number that could be used to
decipher a message, if the sender wanted you to decipher it.
From time to time she would go to the edge of the market,
exchange a book for some gold, then go buy some food and drink.
On one of these trips, she saw another member of the
cipherer's guild, also taking his break, and noticed that the key
hanging around his neck looked familiar: it was one of the eleven
keys that Nell and her Night Friends had taken from the Faery
Kings and Queens! She concealed her excitement and followed this
cipherer back to his stall, making a note of where he worked. Over
the next few days, going from stall to stall and examining each
cipherer, she was able to locate the rest of the eleven keys.
She was able to steal a look at the rule-books that her
employers used to respond to the encoded messages. They were
written in the same special language used at the previous two
castles.
In other words, once Princess Nell had deciphered the
messages, her stall functioned like another Turing machine.
It would have been easy enough to conclude that this whole
castle was, like the others, a Turing machine. But the Primer had
taught Nell to be very careful about making unwarranted
assumptions. Just because her stall functioned according to Turing
rules did not mean that all of the others did. And even if every stall in this castle was, in fact, a Turing machine, she still could not come to any fixed conclusions. She had seen riders carrying books to and
from the castle, which meant that cipherers must be at work
elsewhere in this kingdom. She could not verify that all of them
were Turing machines.
It did not take long for Nell to attain prosperity here. After a
few months (which in the Primer were summarized in as many
sentences) her employers announced that they were getting more
work than they could handle. They decided to split their operation.
They erected a new stall at the edge of the market and gave Nell
some of their rule-books.
They also obtained a new key for her. This was done by
dispatching a special coded message to the Castle of King Coyote
himself, which was three days' ride to the north. Seven days later,
Nell's key came back to her in a scarlet box bearing the seal of King
Coyote himself.
From time to time, someone would come around to her stall
and offer to buy her out. She always turned them down but found it
interesting that the keys could be bought and sold in this fashion.
All Nell needed was money, which she quickly accumulated
through shrewd dealings in the market. Before long, all eleven of
the keys were in her possession, and after liquidating her holdings
and turning them into jewels, which she sewed into her clothes, she
rode her horse out of the sixth castle and turned north, heading for
the seventh: the Castle of King Coyote, and the ultimate goal of her
lifelong quest.
Nell goes to Madame Ping's Theatre;
rumors of the Fists;
an important client;
assault of the Fists of Righteous Harmony;
ruminations on the inner workings of ractives.
Like much that was done with nanotechnology, Feed lines were
assembled primarily from a few species of small and uncomplicated
atoms in the upper right-hand corner of Mendeleev's grid: carbon,
nitrogen, oxygen, silicon, phosphorus, sulfur, and chlorine. The
Fists of Righteous Harmony had discovered, to their enduring
delight, that objects made of these atoms burned rather nicely once
you got them going. The flat, low Yangtze Delta country east of Shanghai was a silk district well stocked with mulberry trees, which when felled, stacked, and burned beneath the Feed lines would
eventually ignite them like road flares.
The Nipponese Feed was heavy on the phosphorus and burned
with a furious white flame that lit up the night sky in several places
as seen from the tall buildings in Pudong. One major line led toward
Nanjing, one toward Suzhou, one toward Hangzhou: these distant
flares inevitably led to rumors, among the hordes of refugees in
Shanghai, that those cities were themselves burning.
The New Atlantan Feed had a higher sulfur content that, when
burned, produced a plutonic reek that permeated everything for
dozens of miles downwind, making the fires seem much closer than
they really were. Shanghai was smelling pretty sulfurous as Nell
walked into it across one of the bridges linking downtown Pudong
with the much lower and older Bund. The Huang Pu had been too
wide to bridge easily until nano had come along, so the four
downtown bridges were made of the new materials and seemed
impossibly fragile compared with the reinforced-concrete
behemoths built to the north and south during the previous century.
A few days ago, working on a script in Madame Ping's offices far above, Nell had gazed out the window at a barge making its way down the river, pulled by a rickety old diesel tug, swathed in dun tarps. A few hundred meters upstream of this very bridge she was now crossing, the tarps had begun squirming and boiling, and a dozen young men in white tunics had jumped out from beneath, scarlet bands tied about their waists, scarlet ribbons around their wrists and foreheads. They had swarmed across the top of the barge hacking at ropes with knives, and the tarps had reluctantly and unevenly fallen away to expose a patchy new coat of red paint and, lined up on the top of the barge like a string of enormous firecrackers, several dozen compressed gas tanks, also painted a festive red for the occasion. Under the circumstances, she did not doubt for a moment that the men were Fists and the gas hydrogen or something else that burned well. But before they had been able to reach the bridge, the tanks had been burst and ignited by something too small and fast for Nell to see from her high post. The barge silently turned into a carbuncle of yellow flame that took up half the width of the Huang Pu, and though the diamond window filtered all of the heat out of its radiance, Nell was able to put her hand on the
pane and feel the absorbed warmth, not much hotter than a person's skin. The whole operation had been touchingly hapless, in an age when a hand-size battery could contain as much energy as all those cylinders of gas. It had a quaint twentieth-century feel and made Nell oddly nostalgic for the days when dangerousness was a
function of mass and bulk. The passives of that era were so fun to watch, with their big, stupid cars and big, stupid guns and big, stupid people.
Up- and downstream of the bridge, the funeral piers were crowded with refugee families heaving corpses into the Huang Pu; the emaciated bodies, rolled up in white sheets, looked like cigarettes. The Coastal Republic authorities had instituted a pass system on the bridges to prevent rural refugees from swarming across into the relatively spacious streets, plazas, atria, and lobbies of Pudong and gumming up the works for the office crowd. By the time Nell made it across, a couple of hundred refugees had already picked her out as a likely alms source and were waiting with canned demonstrations: women holding up their gaunt babies, or older children who were trained to hang comatose in their arms; men with open wounds, and legless gaffers dauntlessly knucklewalking
through the crowd, butting at people's knees. The taxi-drivers were stronger and more aggressive than the rurals, though, and had a fearsome reputation that created space around them in the crowd, and that was more valuable than an actual vehicle; a vehicle would always get stuck in traffic, but a taxi-driver's hat generated a magic force field that enabled the wearer to walk faster than anyone else.
The taxi-drivers converged on Nell too, and she picked out the biggest one and haggled with him, holding up fingers and essaying a
few words in Shanghainese. When the numbers had climbed into the
right range for him, he spun around suddenly to face the crowd. The
suddenness of the movement drove people back, and the meter-long
bamboo stick in his hand didn't hurt either. He stepped forward and
Nell hurried after him, ignoring the myriad tuggings at her long
skirts, trying not to wonder which of the beggars was a Fist with a
concealed knife. If her clothes hadn't been made of untearable,
uncuttable nanostuff, she would have been stripped naked within a
block.
Madame Ping's was still doing a decent business. Its clientele
were willing to put up with some inconvenience to get there. It was
only a short distance from the bridgehead, and the Madame had put
a few truculent taxi-drivers on retainer as personal escorts. The
business was startlingly large given the scarcity of real estate in
Shanghai; it occupied most of a five-story reinforced-concrete Mao Dynasty apartment block, having started out with just a couple of
flats and expanded room by room as the years went on.
The reception area reminded one of a not-bad hotel lobby,
except that it had no restaurant or bar; none of the clients wanted to
see or be seen by any other. The desk was staffed by concierges
whose job was to get the clients out of view as quickly as possible,
and they did it so well that an uninitiated passerby might get the
impression that Madame Ping's was some kind of a walk-in
kidnapping operation.
One of these functionaries, a tiny woman who seemed oddly
prim and asexual considering that she was wearing a black leather
miniskirt, briskly took Nell to the top floor, where the large
apartments had been built and elaborate scenarios were now realized
for Madame Ping's clients.
As the writer, Nell of course never actually entered the same
room as the client. The woman in the miniskirt escorted her into a
nearby observation room, where a high-res cine feed from the next
room covered most of one wall.
If she hadn't known it already, Nell would have seen from the
client's uniform that he was a colonel in Her Majesty's Joint Forces.
He was wearing a full dress uniform, and the various pins and
medals on his coat indicated that he had spent a good deal of his
career attached to various Protocol Enforcement units, been
wounded in action several times, and displayed exceptional heroism
on one occasion. In fact, it was clear that he was a rather important
fellow. Reviewing the previous half-hour, Nell saw that, not
surprisingly, he had arrived in mufti, carrying the uniform in a
leather satchel. Wearing the uniform must be part of the scenario.
At the moment he was seated in a rather typical Victorian
parlor, sipping tea from a Royal Albert china cup decorated with a
somewhat agonistic briar rose pattern. He looked fidgety; he'd been
kept waiting for half an hour, which was also part of the scenario.
Madame Ping kept telling her that no one ever complained about
having to wait too long for an orgasm; that men could do that to
themselves any time they wanted, and that it was the business
leading up to it that they would pay for. The biological readouts
seemed to confirm Madame Ping's rule: Perspiration and pulse were
rather high, and he was about half erect.
Nell heard the sound of a door opening. Switching to a different angle she saw a parlormaid entering the room. Her uniform was not as overtly sexy as most of the ones in Madame Ping's wardrobe department; the client was sophisticated. The woman was Chinese, but she played the role with the mid-Atlantic accent currently in vogue among neo-Victorians: "Mrs. Braithwaite will see you now."
The client stepped into an adjoining drawing room, where two
women awaited him: a heavy Anglo in late middle age and a very
attractive Eurasian woman, about thirty. Introductions were
performed: The old woman was Mrs. Braithwaite, and the younger
woman was her daughter. Mrs. was somewhat addled, and Miss was
obviously running the show.
This section of the script never changed, and Nell had been
over it a hundred times trying to troubleshoot it. The client went
through a little speech in which he informed Mrs. Braithwaite that
her son Richard had been killed in action, displaying great heroism
in the process, and that he was recommending him for a posthumous
Victoria Cross.
Nell had already done the obvious, going back through the
Times archives to see whether this was a reconstruction of an actual
event in the client's life. As far as she could determine, it was more
like a composite of many similar events, perhaps with a dollop of
fantasy thrown in.
At this point, the old lady got a case of the vapors and had to be
helped from the room by the parlormaid and other servants, leaving
the client alone with Miss Braithwaite, who was taking the whole
thing quite stoically. "Your composure is admirable, Miss
Braithwaite," said the client, "but please be assured that no one will
blame you for giving vent to your emotions at such a time." When
the client spoke this line, there was an audible tremor of excitement
in his voice.
"Very well, then," said Miss Braithwaite. She withdrew a small black box from her reticule and pressed a button. The client grunted and arched his back so violently that he fell out of his chair onto the rug, where he lay paralyzed.
"Mites- you have infected my body with some insidious nanosite," he gasped. "in the tea."
"But that is impossible- most mites highly susceptible to thermal damage- boiling water would destroy them."
"You underestimate the capabilities of CryptNet, Colonel Napier. Our technology is advanced far beyond your knowledge- as you will discover during the next few days!"
"Whatever your plan is- be assured that it will fail!"
"Oh, I have no plan in particular," Miss Braithwaite said. "This is not a CryptNet operation. This is personal. You are responsible for the death of my brother Richard- and I will have you show the proper contrition."
"I assure you that I was as deeply saddened-"
She zapped him again. "I do not want your sadness," she said. "I want you to admit the truth: that you are responsible for his death!"
She pressed another button, which caused Colonel Napier's body to go limp. She and a maid wrestled him into a dumbwaiter and moved him down to a lower floor, where, after descending via the stairway, they tied him to a rack.
This was where the problem came in. By the time they had finished tying him up, he was sound asleep.
"He did it again," said the woman playing the role of Miss Braithwaite, addressing herself to Nell and anyone else who might be monitoring. "Six weeks in a row now."
When Madame Ping had explained this problem to Nell, Nell wondered what the problem was. Let the man sleep, as long as he kept coming and paid his bill. But Madame Ping knew her clients and feared that Colonel Napier was losing interest and might shift his business to some other establishment unless they put some
variety into the scenario.
"The fighting has been very bad," the actress said. "He's probably exhausted."
"I don't think it's that," Nell said. She had now opened a private voice channel direct to the woman's eardrum. "I think it is a personal change."
"They never change, sweetheart," said the actress. "Once they get the taste, they have it forever."
"Yes, but different situations may trigger those feelings at different times of life," Nell said. "In the past it has been guilt over the deaths of his soldiers. Now he has made his peace. He has accepted his guilt, and so he accepts the punishment. There is no longer a contest of wills, because he has become submissive."
"So what do we do?"
"We must create a genuine contest of wills. We must force him to do something he really doesn't want to do," Nell said, thinking aloud. What would fit that bill?
"Wake him up," Nell said. "Tell him you were lying when you said this wasn't a CryptNet operation. Tell him you want real information. You want military secrets."
Miss Braithwaite sent the maid out for a bucket of cold water and heaved it over Colonel Napier's body. Then she played the role as Nell had suggested, and did it well; Madame Ping hired people who were good at improvisation, and since most of them never actually had to have sex with clients, she had no trouble finding
good ones.
Colonel Napier seemed surprised, not unpleasantly so, at the script change. "If you suppose that I will divulge information that might lead to the deaths of more of my soldiers, you are sadly mistaken," he said. But his voice sounded a little bored and disappointed, and the bio readouts coming in from the nanosites in his body did not show the full flush of sexual excitement that, presumably, he was paying for. They still were not meeting their
client's needs.
On the private channel to Miss Braithwaite, Nell said, "He still doesn't get it. This isn't a fantasy scenario anymore. This is real. Madame Ping's is actually a CryptNet operation. We've been drawing him in for the last several years. Now he belongs to us, and he's going to give us information, and he's going to keep giving it
to us, because he's our slave."
Miss Braithwaite acted the scene as suggested, making up more florid dialogue as she went along. Watching the bio readouts, Nell could see that Colonel Napier was just as scared and excited, now, as he had been on his very first visit to Madame Ping's several years ago (they kept records). They were making him feel young again, and fully alive.
"Are you connected with Dr. X?" Colonel Napier said.
"We'll ask the questions," Nell said.
"I shall do the asking. Lotus, give him twenty for that!" said Miss Braithwajte, and the maid went to work on Colonel Napier with a cane.
The rest of the session almost ran itself, which was good for Nell, because she had been startled by Napier's reference to Dr. X and had gone into a reverie, remembering comments that Harv had made about the same person many years ago.
Miss Braithwaite knew her job and understood Nell's strategy instantly: the scenario did not excite the client unless there was a genuine contest of wills, and the only way for them to create that contest was to force Napier to reveal real classified information.
Reveal it he did, bit by bit, under the encouragement of Lotus's bamboo and Miss Braithwaite's voice. Most of it had to do with troop movements and other minutiae that he probably thought was terribly interesting. Nell didn't.
"Get more about Dr. X," she said. "Why did he assume a connection between CryptNet and Dr. X?"
After a few more minutes of whacking and verbal domination, Colonel Napier was ready to spill. "Big operation of ours for many years now-Dr. X is working in collusion with a high-level CryptNet figure, the Alchemist. Working on something they mustn't be allowed to have."
"Don't you dare hold back on me," Miss Braithwaite said.
But before she could extract more information about the Alchemist, the building was jolted by a tremendous force that sent thin cracks racing through the old concrete. In the silence that followed, Nell could hear women screaming all over the building, and a crackling, hissing sound as dust and sand sifted out of a
fissure in the ceiling. Then her ears began to resolve another sound: men shouting, "Sha! Sha!"
"I suggest that someone has just breached the wall of your building with an explosive charge," Colonel Napier said, perfectly calm. "If you would be so good as to terminate the scenario now and release me, I shall try to make myself useful in whatever is to follow."
Whatever is to follow. The shouting meant simply, "Kill! Kill!" and was the battle cry of the Fists of Righteous Harmony.
Perhaps they wanted Colonel Napier. But it was more likely that they had decided to attack this place for its symbolic value as a den of barbarian decadence.
Miss Braithwaite and Lotus had already gotten Colonel Napier out of his restraints, and he was pulling on his trousers. "That we are not all dead implies that they are not making use of nanotechnological methods," he said professorially. "Hence this attack may safely be assumed to originate from a low-level neighborhood cell. The attackers probably believe the Fist doctrine that they are immune from all weapons. It never hurts, in these
situations, to give them a reality check of some sort."
The door to Napier's room flew open, splinters of blond naked wood hissing across the floor. Nell watched, as though watching an old movie, as Colonel Napier drew a ridiculously shiny cavalry saber from its scabbard and ran it through the chest of the attacking Fist. This one fell back into another, creating momentary confusion; Napier took advantage of it, methodically planting his feet in a rather prissy-looking stance, squaring his shoulders, calmly reaching out, as if he were using the saber to poke around in a dark closet, and twitching the point beneath the second Fist's chin, incidentally cutting his throat in the process. A third Fist had gotten into the
room by this point, this one bearing a long pole with a knife lashed to the end of it with the gray polymer ribbon peasants used for rope.
But as he tried to wheel the weapon around, its butt end got tangled up in the rack to which Napier had lately been tied. Napier stepped forward cautiously, checking his footing as he went, as if he did not want to get any blood on his boots, parried a belated attack, and stabbed the Fist in the thorax three times in quick succession.
Someone kicked at the door to Nell's room.
"Ah," Colonel Napier sighed, when it seemed clear that there were no more attackers in this party, "it is really very singular that I happen to have brought the full dress uniform, as edged weapons are not a part of our usual kit."
Several kicks had failed to open Nell's door, which unlike the ones in the scenario rooms was made of a modern substance and could not possibly be broken in that way. But Nell could hear voices out in the corridor and suspected that contrary to Napier's speculation, they might have nanotech devices of a very primitive sort- small explosives, say, capable of blowing doors open.
She ditched her long dress, which would only get in the way, and got down on knees and elbows to peer through the crack under the door. There were two pairs of feet. She could hear them conversing in low, businesslike tones.
Nell opened the door suddenly with one hand, reaching through with the other to shove a fountain pen into the throat of the Fist standing closest to the door. The other one reached for an old automatic rifle slung over his shoulder. This gave Nell more than enough time to kick him in the knee, which may or may not have done permanent damage but certainly threw him off balance. The Fist kept trying to bring his rifle to bear, as Nell kicked him over and over again. In the end she was able to twist the rifle free from his feeble one-handed grasp, whirl it around, and butt him in the head.
The Fist with the pen in his neck was sitting on the floor watching her calmly. She aimed the rifle his way, and he held up one hand and looked down and away. His wound was bleeding, but not all that much; she had ruined his week but not hit anything big.
She reflected that it was probably a healthy thing for hini in the long run to be rid of the superstition that he was immune to weapons.
Constable Moore had taught her a thing or two about rifles. She stepped back into her room, locked the door, and devoted a minute or so to familiarizing herself with its controls, checking the magazine (only half full) and firing a single round (into the door, which stopped it) just to make sure it worked.
She was trying to suppress a flashback to the screwdriver incident. This frightened her until she realized that this time around she was much more in control of the situation. Her conversations with the Constable had not been without effect.
Then she made her way down the corridors and stairwells toward the lobby, slowly gathering a retinue of terrified young women along her way. They passed a few clients, mostly male and mostly European, who had been pulled from their scenario rooms and crudely hacked up by the Fists. Three times she had to fire, surprised each time at how complicated it was. Accustomed to the Primer, Nell had to make allowances when functioning in the real world.
She and her followers found Colonel Napier in the lobby, about three-quarters dressed, carrying on a memorable edged-weapons duel with a couple of Fists who had, perhaps, been left there to keep the path of escape open. Nell considered trying to shoot at the Fists but decided against it, because she did not trust her marksmanship and also because she was mesmerized by the entire scene.
Nell would have been dazzled by Colonel Napier if she had not recently seen him strapped to a rack. Still, there was something about this very contradiction that made him, and by extension all Victorian men, fascinating to her. They lived a life of nearly perfect emotional denial-a form of asceticism as extreme as that of a medieval stylite. Yet they did have emotions, the same as anyone else, and only vented them in carefully selected circumstances.
Napier calmly impaled a Fist who had tripped and fallen, then turned his attention to a new antagonist, a formidable character skilled with a real sword. The duel between Western and Eastern martial arts moved back and forth across the lobby floor, the two combatants staring directly into one another's eyes and trying to
intuit the other's thoughts and emotional state. The actual thrusts and parries and ripostes, when they came, were too rapid to be understood. The Fist's style was quite beautiful to watch, involving many slow movements that looked like the stretching of large felines at the zoo. Napier's style was almost perfectly boring: He moved about in a crabbed stance, watched his opponent calmly, and apparently did a lot of deep thinking.
Watching Napier at work, watching the medals and braid swinging and glinting on his jacket, Nell realized that it was precisely their emotional repression that made the Victorians the richest and most powerful people in the world. Their ability to submerge their feelings, far from pathological, was rather a kind of mystical art that gave them nearly magical power over Nature and over the more intuitive tribes. Such was also the strength of the
Nipponese.
Before the struggle could be resolved, a smart flechette, horsefly-size, trailing a whip antenna as thick as a hair and as long as a finger, hissed in through a broken window and thunked into the back of the Fist's neck. It did not strike very hard but must have shot some poison into his brain. He sat down quickly on the floor, closed his eyes, and died in that position.
"Not very chivalrous," Colonel Napier said distastefully. "I suppose I have some bureaucrat up on New Chusan to thank for that."
A cautious tour of the building turned up several more Fists
who had died in the same fashion. Outside, the same old crowd of
refugees, beggars, pedestrians, and cargo-carrying bicyclists
streamed on, about as undisturbed as the Yangtze.
Colonel Napier did not return to Madame Ping's the next week,
but Madame Ping did not blame Nell for the loss of his custom. To
the contrary, she praised Nell for having correctly divined Napier's
wishes and for improvising so well. "A fine performance," she said.
Nell had not really thought of her work as a performance, and
for some reason Madame Ping's choice of words provoked her in a
way that kept her awake late that night, staring into the darkness
above her bunk.
Since she had been very small, she had made up stories and
recited them to the Primer, which were often digested and
incorporated into the Primer's stories. It had come naturally to Nell
to do the same work for Madame Ping. But now her boss was
calling it a performance, and Nell had to admit that it was, in a way.
Her stories were being digested, not by the Primer, but by another
human being, becoming a part of that person's mind.
That seemed simple enough, but the notion troubled her for a
reason that did not become clear until she had lain half-asleep and
fretted over it for several hours.
Colonel Napier did not know her and probably never would.
All of the intercourse between him and Nell had been mediated
through the actress pretending to be Miss Braithwaite, and through
various technological systems.
Nonetheless she had touched him deeply. She had penetrated
farther into his soul than any lover. If Colonel Napier had chosen to
return the following week and Nell had not been present to make up
the story for him, would he have missed her? Nell suspected that he
would have. From his point of view, some indefinable essence
would have been wanting, and he would have departed unsatisfied.
If this could happen to Colonel Napier in his dealings with
Madame Ping's, could it happen to Nell in her dealings with the
Primer? She had always felt that there was some essence in the
book, something that understood her and even loved her, something
that forgave her when she did wrong and appreciated what she did
right.
When she'd been very young, she hadn't questioned this at all;
it had been part of the book's magic. More recently she had
understood it as the workings of a parallel computer of enormous
size and power, carefully programmed to understand the human
mind and give it what it needed.
Now she wasn't so sure. Princess Nell's recent travels through
the lands of King Coyote, and the various castles with their
increasingly sophisticated computers that were, in the end, nothing
more than Turing machines, had caught her up in a bewildering
logical circle. In Castle Turing she had learned that a Turing
machine could not really understand a human being. But the Primer
was, itself, a Turing machine, or so she suspected; so how could it
understand Nell?
Could it be that the Primer was just a conduit, a technological
system that mediated between Nell and some human being who
really loved her? In the end, she knew, this was basically how all
ractives worked. The idea was too alarming to consider at first, and
so she circled around it cautiously, poking at it from different
directions, like a cavewoman discovering fire for the first time. But
as she settled in closer, she found that it warmed her and satisfied
her, and by the time her mind wandered into sleep, she had become dependent upon it and would not consider going back into the cold and dark place where she had been traveling for so many years.
Carl Hollywood returns to Shanghai;
his forebears in the territory of the Lone Eagles;
Mrs. Kwan's teahouse.
Heavy rains had come rolling into Shanghai from the West,
like a harbinger of the Fists of Righteous Harmony and the
thundering herald of the coming Celestial Kingdom. Stepping off
the airship from London, Carl Hollywood at once felt himself in a
different Shanghai from the one he had left; the old city had always
been wild, but in a sophisticated urban way, and now it was wild
like a frontier town. He sensed this ambience before he even left the
Aerodrome; it leaked in from the streets, like ozone before a
thunderstorm. Looking out the windows, he could see a heavy rain
rushing down, knocking all the nanotech out of the air and down
into the gutters, whence it would eventually stain the Huang Pu and
then the Yangtze. Whether it was the wild atmosphere or the
prospect of being rained upon, he stopped his porters short of the
main exit doors so that he could change hats. The hatboxes were
stacked on one of the carts; his bowler went into the smallest and
topmost box, which was empty, and then he yanked the largest box
out from underneath, popping the stack, and took out a ten-gallon
Stetson of breathtaking width and sweep, almost like a head-mounted
umbrella. Casting an eye into the street, where a rushing
brown stream carried litter, road dust, choleraridden sewage, and
tons of captive nanotech toward the storm drains, he slipped off his
leather shoes and exchanged them for a pair of handtooled cowboy
boots, made from hides of gaudy reptiles and avians, the pores of
which had been corked with mites that would keep his feet dry even
if he chose to wade through the gutters.
Thus reconfigured, Carl Hollywood stepped out into the streets
of Shanghai. As he came out the doors of the Aerodrome, his duster
billowed in the cold wind of the storm and even the beggars stepped
away from him. He paused to light a cigar before proceeding and
was not molested; even the refugees, who were starving or at least
claimed to be, derived more enjoyment from simply looking at him
than they would have from the coins in his pocket. He walked the four blocks to his hotel, pursued doggedly by the porters and by a
crowd of youngsters entranced by the sight of a real cowboy.
Carl's grandfather was a Lone Eagle who had ridden out from
the crowding and squalor of Silicon Valley in the 1990s and
homesteaded a patch of abandoned ranch along a violent cold river
on the eastern slope of the Wind River Range. From there he had
made a comfortable living as a freelance coder and consultant. His
wife had left him for the bright lights and social life of California
and been startled when he had managed to persuade a judge that he
was better equipped to raise their son than she was. Grandfather had
raised Carl Hollywood's father mostly in the out-of-doors, hunting
and fishing and chopping wood when he wasn't sitting inside
studying his calculus. As the years went by, they had gradually been
joined by like-minded sorts with similar stories to tell, so that by the
time of the Interregnum they had formed a community of several
hundred, loosely spread over a few thousand square miles of
nearwilderness but, in the electronic sense, as tightly knit as any
small village in the Old West. Their technological prowess,
prodigious wealth, and numerous large weapons had made them a
dangerous group, and the odd pickup-truck-driving desperadoes
who attacked an isolated ranch had found themselves surrounded
and outgunned with cataclysmic swiftness. Grandfather loved to tell
stories of these criminals, how they had tried to excuse their own
crimes by pleading that they were economically disadvantaged or
infected with the disease of substance abuse, and how the Lone
Eagles- many of whom had overcome poverty or addiction
themselves-had dispatched them with firing squads and left them
posted around the edge of their territory as NO TRESPASSING
signs that even the illiterate could read.
The advent of the Common Economic Protocol had settled
things down and, in the eyes of the old-timers, begun to soften and
ruin the place. There was nothing like getting up at three in the
morning and riding the defensive perimeter in subzero cold, with a
loaded rifle, to build up one's sense of responsibility and
community. Carl Hollywood's clearest and best memories were of
going on such rides with his father. But as they squatted on packed
snow boiling coffee over a fire, they would listen to the radio and
hear stories about the jihad raging across Xinjiang, driving the Han
back into the east, and about the first incidents of nanotech terrorism
in Eastern Europe. Carl's father didn't have to tell him that their
community was rapidly acquiring the character of a historical theme park, and that before long they would have to give up the mounted patrols for more modern defensive systems.
Even after those innovations had been made and the
community had mostly joined up with the First Distributed
Republic, Carl and his father and grandfather had continued to do
things in the old way, hunting elk and heating their houses with
wood-burning stoves and sitting behind their computer screens in
dark rooms late into the night hand-tooling code in assembly
language. It was a purely male household (Carl's mother had died
when he was nine years old, in a rafting accident), and Carl had fled
the place as soon as he'd found a way, going to San Francisco, then
New York, then London, and making himself useful in theatrical
productions. But the older he got, the more he understood in how
many ways he was rooted in the place where he grew up, and he
never felt it more purely than he did striding down a crowded street
in a Shanghai thunderstorm, puffing on a thick cigar and watching
the rain dribble from the rim of his hat. The most intense and clear
sensations of his life had flooded into his young and defenseless
mind during his first dawn patrol, knowing the desperadoes were
out there somewhere. He kept returning to these memories in later
life, trying to recapture the same purity and intensity of sensation, or
trying to get his ractors to feel it. Now for the first time in thirty
years he felt the same thing, this time on the streets of Shanghai, hot
and pulsing on the edge of a dynastic rebellion, like the arteries of
an old man about to have his first orgasm in years.
He merely touched base at his hotel, where he stuffed the
pockets of his coat with a sheaf of foolscap, a fountain pen, a silver
box loaded with cigars like rounds in an ammo clip, and some tiny
containers of nanosnuff that he could use to adjust the functioning
of his brain and body. He also hefted a heavy walking-stick, a real
wizard's staff loaded with security aerostats that would shepherd
him back to the hotel in the event of a riot. Then he returned once
more to the streets, shouldering for a mile through the crowd until
he reached a teahouse where he had passed many long nights during
his tenure at the Parnasse. Old Mrs. Kwan welcomed him warmly,
bowing many times and showing him to his favorite corner table
where he could look out on the intersection of Nanjing Road and a
narrow side street jammed with tiny market stalls. All he could see
now were the backs and buttocks of people in the street, jammed up
against the glass by the pressure of the crowd. He ordered a big pot
of his favorite green tea, the most expensive kind, picked in April when the leaves were tender and young, and spread out his sheets of foolscap across the table. This teahouse was fully integrated into the
worldwide media network, and so the pages automatically jacked
themselves in. Under Carl Hollywood's murmured commands they
began to fill themselves with columns of animated text and
windows bearing images and cine feeds. He took his first sip of
tea-always the best one- withdrew his big fountain pen from his
pocket, removed the lid, and touched it to the paper. He began to
inscribe commands onto the page, in words and drawings. As he
finished the words, they were enacted before him, and as he drew
the lines between the boxes and circles, links were made and
information flowed.
At the bottom of the page he wrote the word MIRANDA and
drew a circle around it. It was not connected to anything else in the
diagram yet. He hoped that before long it would be. Carl Hollywood
worked on his papers late into the night, and Mrs. Kwan continued
to replenish his teapot and to bring him little sweets and decorated
the edge of his table with candles as night fell and the teahouse
darkened, for she remembered that he liked to work by candlelight.
The Chinese people outside, separated from him by half an inch of
crosslinked diamond, watched with their noses making white
ellipses against the pane, their faces glowing in the candlelight like
ripe peaches hanging in dark lush foliage.
The Hackworths in transit, and in London;
the East End;
a remarkable boatride;
Dramatis Personae;
a night at the theatre.
Smooth, fine-grained arctic clouds undulated slowly like snow
drifts into the distance, a thousand miles looking like the width of a
front yard, lit but not warmed by a low apricot sun that never quite
went down. Fiona lay on her stomach on the top bunk, looking out
the window, watching her breath condense on the pane and then
evaporate in the parched air.
"Father?" she said, very softly, to see if he was awake.
He wasn't, but he woke up quickly, as if he'd been in one of
those dreams that just skims beneath the surface of consciousness,
like an airship clipping a few cloud-tops. "Yes?"
"Who is the Alchemist? Why are you looking for him?"
"I would rather not explain why I'm looking for him. Let us
say that I have incurred obligations that want settling." Her father
seemed more preoccupied with the second part of the question than
she'd expected, and his voice was steeped in regret.
"Who is he?" she insisted gently.
"Oh. Well, my darling, if I knew that, I'd have found him."
"Father!"
"What sort of a person is he? I haven't been afforded many
clues, unfortunately. I've tried to draw some deductions from the
sorts of people who are looking for him, and the sort of person I
am."
"Pardon me, Father, but what bearing does your own nature
have on that of the Alchemist?"
"More than one knowledgeable sort has arrived at the
conclusion that I'm just the right man to find this fellow, even
though I know nothing of criminals and espionage and so forth. I'm
just a nanotechnological engineer."
"That's not true, Father! You're ever so much more than that.
You know so many stories-you told me so many, when you were
gone, remember?"
"I suppose so," he allowed, strangely diffident.
"And I read it every night. And though the stories were about
faeries and pirates and djinns and such, I could always sense that
you were behind them. Like the puppeteer pulling the strings and
imbuing them with voices and personalities. So I think you're more
than an engineer. It's just that you need a magic book to bring it
out."
"Well . . . that's a point I had not considered," her father said,
his voice suddenly emotional. She fought the temptation to peer
over the edge of the bed and look at his face, which would have
embarrassed him. Instead she curled up in her bed and closed her
eyes.
"Whatever you may think of me, Fiona- and I must say I am
pleasantly surprised that you think of me so favourably- to those
who despatched me on this errand, I am an engineer. Without being
arrogant, I might add that I have advanced rapidly in that field and
attained a position of not inconsiderable responsibility. As this is the
only characteristic that distinguishes me from other men, it can be
the only reason I was chosen to find the Alchemist. From this I infer
that the Alchemist is himself a nanotechnological researcher of some sophistication, and that he is thought to be developing a
product that is of interest to more than one of the Powers."
"Are you talking about the Seed, Father?"
He was silent for a few moments. When he spoke again, his
voice was high and tight. "The Seed. How did you know about the
Seed?"
"You told me about it, Father. You told me it was a dangerous
thing, and that Protocol Enforcement mustn't allow it to be created.
And besides . . .
"Besides what?"
She was on the verge of reminding him that her dreams had
been filled with seeds for the last several years, and that every story
she had seen in her Primer had been replete with them: seeds that
grew up into castles; dragon's teeth that grew up into soldiers; seeds
that sprouted into giant beanstalks leading to alternate universes in
the clouds; and seeds, given to hospitable, barren couples by
itinerant crones, that grew up into plants with bulging pods that
contained happy, kicking babies.
But she sensed that if she mentioned this directly, he would
slam the steel door in her face- a door that was tantalizingly
cracked open at the moment.
"Why do you think that Seeds are so interesting?" she essayed.
"They are interesting inasmuch as a beaker of nitroglycerin is
interesting," he said. "They are subversive technology. You are not
to speak of Seeds again, Fiona- CryptNet agents could be
anywhere, listening to our conversation."
Fiona sighed. When her father spoke freely, she could sense the
man who had told her the stories. When certain subjects were
broached, he drew down his veil and became just another Victorian
gentleman. It was irksome. But she could sense how the same
characteristic, in a man who was not her father, could be
provocative. It was such an obvious weakness that neither she nor
any woman could resist the temptation to exploit it-a mischievous
and hence tantalizing notion that was to occupy much of Fiona's
thinking for the next few days, as they encountered other members
of their tribe in London.
. . .
After a simple dinner of beer and pasties in a pub on the fringes
of the City, they rode south across the Tower Bridge, pierced a shallow layer of posh development along the right bank of the river,
and entered into Southwark. As in other Atlantan districts of
London, Feed lines had been worked into the sinews of the place,
coursing through utility tunnels, clinging to the clammy undersides
of bridges, and sneaking into buildings through small holes bored in
the foundations. The tiny old houses and flats of this once
impoverished quarter had mostly been refurbished into toeholds for
young Atlantans from all around the Anglosphere, poor in equity
but rich in expectations, who had come to the great city to incubate
their careers. The businesses on the ground floors tended to be pubs,
coffeehouses, and music halls. As father and daughter worked their
way east, generally paralleling the river, the lustre that was so
evident near the approaches to the bridge began to wear thin in
places, and the ancient character of the neighborhood began to
assert itself, as the bones of the knuckles reveal their shape beneath
the stretched skin of a fist. Wide gaps developed between the
waterfront developments, allowing them to look across the river into
a district whose blanket of evening fog was already stained with the
carcinogenic candy-colored hues of big mediatrons.
Fiona Hackworth noticed a glow in the air, which resolved into
a constellation when she blinked and focused. A pinprick of green
light, an infinitesimal chip of emerald, touched the surface of her
eye, expanding into a cloud of light. She blinked twice, and it was
gone. Sooner or later it and many others would make their way to
the corners of her eyes, giving her a grotesque appearance. She drew
a handkerchief from her sleeve and wiped her eyes. The presence of
so many lidar-emitting mites prompted her to realize that they had
been infiltrating a great expanse of fog for some minutes without
really being aware of it; moisture from the river was condensing
around the microscopic guardians of the border. Colored light
flashed vaguely across the screen of fog before them, silhouetting a
stone column planted in the center of the road: wings of a gryphon,
horn of a unicorn, crisp and black against a lurid cosmos. A
constable stood beside the pediment, symbolically guarding the bar.
He nodded to the Hackworths and mumbled something gruff but
polite through his chinstrap as father and daughter rode out of New
Atlantis and into a gaudy dave full of loutish thetes scrumming and
chanting before the entrances of pubs. Fiona caught sight of an old
Union Jack, then did a double-take and realized that the limbs of the
St. Andrew's Cross had been enhanced with stars, like the Confederate Battle Flag. She gave her chevaline a nudge and pulled
up nearly abreast with her father.
Then the city became darker and quieter, though no less
crowded, and for a few blocks they saw only dark-haired men with
mustaches and women who were nothing more than columns of
black fabric. Then Fiona smelled anise and garlic, and they passed
into Vietnamese territory for a short time. She would have enjoyed
stopping at one of the sidewalk cafés for a bowl of pho, but her
father rode on, pursuing the tide that was ebbing down the Thames,
and in a few more minutes they had come once again to the bank. It
was lined with ancient masonry warehouses-a category of
structure now so obsolete as to defy explanation-which had been
converted into offices.
A pier rode on the surface of the river, riding up and down on
the tide, linked to the rim of the granite embankment by a hinged
gangway. A shaggy black vessel was tied up to the pier, but it was
completely unlit, visible only by its black shadow against the
charcoal-gray water. After the chevalines had planted themselves
and the Hackworths had dismounted, they were able to hear low
voices coming from below.
John Hackworth withdrew some tickets from his breast pocket
and asked them to illuminate themselves; but they were printed on
old-fashioned paper that did not contain its own energy source, and
so he finally had to use the microtorch dangling from his watch
chain. Apparently satisfied that they had arrived at the right place,
he offered Fiona his arm and escorted her down the gangway to the
pier. A tiny flickering light bobbed toward them and resolved into
an Afro-Caribbean man, wearing rimless glasses and carrying an
antique hurricane lamp. Fiona watched his face as his enormous
eyes, yellowed like antique ivory billiard balls, scanned their tickets.
His skin was rich and warm and glowing in the light of the candle,
and he smelled faintly of citrus combined with something darker
and less ingratiating. When he was finished, he looked up, not at the
Hackworths but off into the distance, turned his back, and ambled
away. John Hackworth stood there for a few moments, awaiting
instructions, then straightened, squared his shoulders, and led Fiona
across the pier to the boat.
It was eight or ten meters long. There was no gangway, and
persons already on board had to reach out and clutch their arms and
pull them in, a breach of formality that happened so quickly that
they had no time to become uncomfortable.
The boat was basically a large flat open tub, not much more
than a liferaft, with some controls in the bow and some sort of
modern and hence negligibly small propulsion system built into the
stern. As their eyes adjusted to the dim light scattering through the
fog, they could see perhaps a dozen other passengers around the
edge of the boat, seated so that wakes from passing vessels would
not upset them. Seeing wisdom in this, John led Fiona to the only
remaining open space, and they sat down between two other groups:
a trio of young Nipponese men forcing cigarettes on one another,
and a man and woman in bohemian-but-expensive clothes, sipping
lager from cans and conversing in Canadian accents.
The man from the pier cast off the painters and vaulted aboard.
Another functionary had taken the controls and gently accelerated
into the current, cutting the throttle at one point and swinging her
about into an oncoming wake. When the boat entered the main
channel and came up to speed, it very quickly became chilly, and all
the passengers murmured, demanding more warmth from their
thermogenic clothing. The AfroCaribbean man made a circuit
lugging a heavy chest stocked with cans of lager and splits of pinot
noir. Conversation stopped for several minutes as the passengers, all
driven by the same primal impulses, turned their faces into the cool
wind and relaxed into the gentle thumping of hull against waves.
The trip took the better part of an hour. After several minutes,
conversation resumed, most of the passengers remaining within
their little groups. The refreshment chest made a few more circuits.
John Hackworth began to realize, from a few subtleties, that one of
the Nipponese youths was much more intoxicated than he was
letting on and had probably spent a few hours in a dockside pub
before reaching the pier. He took a drink from the chest every time
it came by, and half an hour into the ride, he rose unsteadily to his
feet, leaned over the edge, and threw up. John turned to smirk at his
daughter. The boat struck an unseen wave, rolling sideways into the
trough. Hackworth clutched first at the railing and then at his
daughter's arm.
Fiona screamed. She was staring over John's shoulder at the
Nipponese youths. John turned around to see that there were only
two of them now; the sick one was gone, and the other two had
flung their bellies across the gunwhale and stretched out their arms,
fingers like white rays shining into the black water. John felt
Fiona's arm pull free from his grasp, and as he turned toward her, he
just saw her vaulting over the rail.
It was over before he had an opportunity to get really scared.
The crew dealt with the matter with a practiced efficiency that
suggested to Hackworth that the Nipponese man was really an actor,
the entire incident part of the production. The Afro-Caribbean man
cursed and shouted for them to hang on, his voice pure and powerful
as a Stradivarius cello, a stage voice. He inverted the cooler,
dumping out all the beer and wine, then snapped it shut and flung it
over the stern as a life preserver. Meanwhile the pilot was swinging
the boat round. Several passengers, including Hackworth, had
turned on microtorches and focused their beams on Fiona, whose
skirts had inflated as she'd jumped in feet-first and now surrounded
her like a raft of flowers. With one hand she was clutching the
Nipponese man's collar, and with the other, the handle of the ice
chest. She did not have the strength or buoyancy to hold the drunken
man out of the water, and so both of them were swamped by the
estuary's rolling waves.
The man with the dreadlocks hauled Fiona out first and handed
her off to her father. The fabricules making up her clothing-
countless mites linked elbow-to-elbow in a two-dimensional array-
went to work pumping away the water trapped in the interstices.
Fiona was wreathed in a sinuous veil of mist that burned with the
captured light of the torches. Her thick red hair had been freed from
the confines of her hat, which had been torn away by the waves and
now fell about her in a cape of fire.
She was looking defiantly at Hackworth, whose adrenal glands
had finally jumped into the endocrinological fray. When he saw his
daughter in this way, it felt as though someone were inexorably
sliding a hundred pound block of ice up the length of his spine.
When the sensation reached his medulla, he staggered and nearly
had to sit down. She had somehow flung herself through an
unknown and unmarked barrier and become supernatural, a naiad
rising from the waves cloaked in fire and steam. In some rational
compartment of his mind that had now become irrelevant,
Hackworth wondered whether Dramatis Personae (for this was the
name of the troupe that was running this show) had got some
nanosites into his system, and if so what exactly they were doing to
his mind.
Water streamed from Fiona's skirts and ran between the
floorboards, and then she was dry, except for her face and hair. She
wiped her face on her sleeves, ignoring her father's proffered
handkerchief. No words passed between them, and they did not embrace, as if Fiona were conscious now of the impact she was
having upon her father and all the others-a faculty that, Hackworth
supposed, must be highly acute in sixteen-year-old girls. By now the
Nipponese man was just about finished coughing water out of his
lungs and gasping piteously for air. As soon as he had the airways
up and running, he spoke hoarsely and lengthily. One of his
companions translated. "He says that we are not alone-that the
water is filled with spirits-that they spoke to him. He followed
them beneath the waves. But feeling his spirit about to leave his
body, he felt fear and swam to the surface and was saved by the
young woman. He says that the spirits are talking to all of us, and
we must listen to them!"
This was, needless to say, embarrassing, and so all of the
passengers doused their torches and turned their backs on the
stricken passenger. But when Hackworth's eyes had adjusted, he
took another look at this man and saw that the exposed portions of
his flesh had begun to radiate colored light.
He looked at Fiona and saw that a band of white light encircled
her head like a tiara, bright enough that it shone red through her
hair, with a jewel centered upon her forehead. Hackworth marveled
at this sight from a distance, knowing that she wanted to be free of
him for now.
Fat lights hung low above the water, describing the envelopes
of great ships, sliding past each other as their parallax shifted with
the steady progress of the boat. They had come to a place near the
mouth of the estuary but not on the usual shipping lanes, where
ships lay at anchor awaiting shifts in tides, winds, or markets. One
constellation of lights did not move but only grew larger as they
drew toward it. Experimenting with shadows and examining the
pattern of light cast upon the water from this vessel, Hackworth
concluded that the lights were being deliberately shone into their
faces so that they could not make any judgments about the nature of
the source.
The fog slowly congealed into a wall of rust, so vast and
featureless that it might have been ten or a hundred feet distant. The
helmsman waited until they were about to ram it, then cut the
engines. The raft lost speed instantly and nuzzled the hull of the big
ship. Chains, slimy and dripping, descended from the firmament,
diverging in Hackworth's view like radiance emanating from some
heavy-industrial demigod, clanking harbingers of iron that the crew,
heads thrown back ecstatically, throats bared to this kinky revelation, received into their bosoms. They snapped the chains onto
metal loops fixed into the floor of the boat. Shackled, the boat rose
free of the water and began to ascend the wall of rust, which soared
vaguely into the infinite fog. Suddenly there was a railing, an open
deck beyond it, pools of light here and there, a few red cigar-coals
reciprocating through space. The deck swung under and rose to
shove at the hull of the little boat. As they disembarked, they could
see similar boats scattered about.
"Dodgy" did not begin to describe the reputation of Dramatis
Personae in the New Atlantan parts of London, but that was the
adjective they always used anyway, delivered in a near-whisper,
with brows raised nearly into the hairline and eyes glancing
significantly over the shoulder. It had quickly become clear to
Hackworth that a man could get a bad reputation simply for having
known that Dramatis Personae existed-at the same time, it was
clear that almost everyone had heard about it. Rather than being
spattered with any more opprobrium, he had sought the tickets
among other tribes.
After all this it did not surprise him in the least to see that most
of the attendees were fellow Victorians, and not just young
bachelors having a night out, but ostensibly respectable couples,
strolling the decks in their top hats and veils.
Fiona vaulted out of the boat before it even touched the deck of
the ship and vanished. She had repatterned her dress, ditching the
chintzy flowered pattern for basic white, and skipped off into the
darkness, her integral tiara glowing like a halo. Hackworth took a
slow turn around the deck, watching his fellow-tribesmen trying to
solve the following problem: get close enough to another couple to
recognize them without getting so close that they can recognize you.
From time to time, couples recognized each other simultaneously
and had to say something: the women tittered wickedly, and the
men laughed from their bellies and called each other scoundrels, the
words glancing off the deckplates and burying themselves in the fog
like arrows fired into a bale of cotton.
Some kind of amplified music emanated from compartments
below; atonal power chords came up through the deck like seismic
disturbances. She was a bulk cargo carrier, now empty and bobbing,
surprisingly jittery for something so big.
Hackworth was alone and separate from all humanity, a feeling
he had grown up with, like a childhood friend living next door. He
had found Gwen by some miracle and lost touch with that old friend for a few years, but now he and solitude were back together, out for
a stroll, familiar and comfortable. A makeshift bar amidships had
drawn a dozen or so congregants, but Hackworth knew that he could
not join in with them. He had been born without the ability to blend
and socialize as some are born without hands.
"Standing above it all?" said a voice. "Or standing aside
perhaps?"
It was a man in a clown outfit. Hackworth recognized it,
vaguely, as an advertising fetish for an old American fast-food
chain. But the costume was conspicuously ill-used, as if it were the
sole garment of a refugee. It had been patched all over with
swatches of chintz, Chinese silk, studded black leather, charcoal-gray
pinstripe, and jungle camo. The clown wore integral makeup-
his face glowed like an injection-molded plastic toy from the
previous century with a light bulb stuck inside the head. It was
disturbing to see him talk, like watching one of those animated CAT
scans of a man swallowing.
"Are you of it? Or just in it?" the Clown said, and looked at
Hackworth expectantly.
As soon as Hackworth had realized, quite some time ago, that
this Dramatis Personae thing was going to be some kind of
participatory theatre, he had been dreading this moment: his first
cue. "Please excuse me," he said in a tense and not altogether steady
voice, "this is not my milieu."
"That's for damn fucking sure," said the Clown. "Put these
on," he continued, taking something out of his pocket. He reached
out to Hackworth, who was two or three meters away from him-
but shockingly, his hand detached itself from his arm and flew
through the air, the smutty white glove like a dirty ball of ice
tumbling elliptically through the inner planets. It shoved something
into Hackworth's breast pocket and then withdrew; but because
Hackworth was watching, it described a smooth sudden figure-eight
pattern in space before reattaching itself to the stump of the forearm.
Hackworth realized that the clown was mechanical. "Put 'em on and
be yourself, mister alienated loner steppenwolf bemused distant
meta-izing technocrat rationalist fucking shithead." The Clown spun
on his heel to leave; his floppy clown shoes were built around some
kind of trick heel with a swivel built in, so that when he spun on his
heel he really did spin on his heel, performing several complete
rotations before stopping with his back turned to Hackworth and
storming away. "Revolutionary, ain't it?" he snapped.
The thing in Hackworth's pocket was a pair of dark sunglasses:
wraparounds with a glimmering rainbow finish, the sort of thing
that, decades ago, would have been worn by a Magnum-slinging
rebel cop in a prematurely canceled television series. Hackworth
unfolded them and slid the polished ends of the bows cautiously
over his temples. As the lenses approached, he could see light
coming from them; they were phenomenoscopes. Though in this
context, the word phantascope might have been more appropriate.
The image grew to fill his sight but would not focus until he put
them all the way on, so he reluctantly plummeted into the
hallucination until it resolved, and just then the bows behind his ears
came alive, stretched, and grew around the back of his skull like a
rubber band snapping in reverse, joining in the back to form an
unbreakable band. "Release," Hackworth said, and then ran through
a litany of other standard yuvree commands. The spectacles would
not release his head. Finally, a cone of light pierced space from
somewhere above and behind him and splashed across a stage.
Footlights came up, and a man in a top hat emerged from behind a
curtain. "Welcome to your show," he said. "You can remove the
glasses at any time by securing a standing ovation from not less than
ninety percent of the audience." Then the lights and curtain
vanished, and Hackworth was left with what he had seen before,
namely, a cybernetically enhanced night-vision rendering of the
deck of the ship.
He tried a few more commands. Most phenomenoscopes had a
transparent mode, or at least translucent, that allowed the wearer to
view what was really there. But these ones were doggedly opaque
and would only show him a mediatronic rendering of the scene. The
strolling and chatting theatregoers were represented by
preposterously oversimplified wireframes, a display technology
unused these eighty years or so, clearly intended to irritate
Hackworth. Each figure had a large placard strapped to its chest:
JARED MASON GRIFFIN III, aged 35
(too Late to become an interesting character like you!)
Nephew of an earl-level Equity Lord
(don't you envy him?)
Married to that sunken bitch on his right
They go on these little escapades to escape their own crzppled
lives.
(why are you here?)
Hackworth looked down and tried to read the placard on
his own chest but couldn't focus on it.
When he walked around the deck, his viewpoint changed
correspondingly. There was also a standard interface that enabled
him to "fly" around the ship; Hackworth himself remained in one
fixed location, of course, but his viewpoint in the spectacles became
unlinked to his real coordinates. Whenever he used this mode, the
following legend was superimposed on his view in giant flashing
red block letters:
JOHN PERCIVAL HACKWORTH'S GODLIKE PERSPECTIVE
sometimes accompanied by a cartoon of a wizardly sort of
fellow sitting atop a mountain peering down into a village of squalid
midgets. Because of this annoyance, Hackworth did not use this
feature very frequently. But on his initial reconnaissance, he
discovered a few items of interest.
For one thing, the Nipponese fellow who had got pissed and
fallen overboard had encountered a group of several other people
who had, by a remarkable coincidence, also fallen out of their boats
on the way here, and who upon being rescued had all begun to emit
colored light and see visions that they insisted on recounting to
anyone in the vicinity. These people convened into a poorly
organized chorus, all shouting at once and articulating visions that
seemed to be linked in an approximate way-as if they had all just
now awakened from the same dream and were all doing an equally
bad job describing it. They stuck together despite their differences,
drawn together by the same mysterious attractive force that causes
streetcorner crackpots to set up their soapboxes right next to each
other. Shortly after Hackworth zoomed toward them in his
phenomenoscopic view, they began to hallucinate something along
the lines of a giant eyeball peering at them from the heavens, the
black skin of its eyelids studded with stars.
Hackworth skulked away and focused in on another large
gathering: a couple of dozen older people of the trim, fit, and active
style, tennis sweaters draped over their shoulders and sensible
walking shoes firmly but not too tightly laced to their feet, piling off
a small airship that had just moored on the old helicopter pad near
the ship's stern. The airship had many windows and was festooned
with mediatronic advertisements for aerial tours of London. As the
tourists climbed off, they tended to stop in their tracks, so that a severe bottleneck was forever forming. They had to be goaded into
the outer darkness by their tour guide, a young actress dressed in a
cheesy devil outfit, complete with flashing red horns and a trident.
"Is this Whitechapel?" one of them said to the fog, speaking in
an American accent. These people were obviously members of the
Heartland tribe, a prosperous phyle closely allied with New Atlantis
that had absorbed many responsible, sane, educated, white,
Midwestern, middleclass types. Listening in on their furtive
conversations, Hackworth divined that these tourists had been
brought in from a Holiday Inn in Kensington, under the ruse that
they were going to take the Jack the Ripper tour in Whitechapel. As
Hackworth listened, the diabolical tour guide explained that their
drunken airship pilot had accidentally flown them to a floating
theatre, and they were welcome to enjoy the show, which would be
starting shortly; a free (to them) performance of Cats, the longest-running
musical of all time, which most of them had already seen on
their first night in London.
Hackworth, still peering through the mocking red letters, did a
quick scan belowdecks. There were a dozen cavernous
compartments down there. Four of them had been consolidated into
a capacious theatre; four more served as the stage and backstage.
Hackworth located his daughter there. She was seated on a throne of
light, rehearsing some lines. Apparently she'd already been cast in a
major role.
"I don't want you to watch me like that," she said, and
vanished from Hackworth's display in a burst of light.
The ship's foghorn sounded. The sound continued to echo
sporadically from other ships in the area. Hackworth returned to his
natural view of the deck just in time to see a blazing figment rushing
toward him: the Clown again, who apparently possessed the special
power of moving through Hackworth's display like a phantasm.
"Going to stay up here all night, guessing the distance to the other
ships by timing the echoes? Or may I show you to your seat?"
Hackworth decided that the best thing was not to be ruffled.
"Please," he said.
"Well, there it is then," said the Clown, gesturing with one
maculated glove toward a plain wooden chair right before them on
the deck. Hackworth did not believe it was really there, because he
hadn't seen it before now. But the spectacles allowed him no way to
tell.
He stepped forward like a man making his way to the toilet in a
dark and unfamiliar room, knees bent, hands outstretched, moving
his feet gingerly so as not to bark shins or toes on anything. The
Clown had drawn to one side and was watching him scornfully. "Is
this what you call getting into your role? Think you can get away
with scientific rationalism all night? What's going to happen the
first time you actually start believing what you see?"
Hackworth found his seat exactly where the display told him it
would be, but it wasn't a simple wooden chair; it was foam-covered
and it had arms. It was like a seat in a theatre, but when he groped to
either side, he did not find any others. So he depressed the seat and
fell into it.
"You'll be needing this," the Clown said, and snapped a
tubular object into the palm of Hackworth's hand. Hackworth was
just recognizing it as some kind of torch when something loud and
violent happened just below him. His feet, which had been resting
on the deckplates, were now dangling in air. In fact, all of him was
dangling. A trap door had flown open beneath him, and he was in
free fall. "Enjoy the show," the Clown said, tipping his hat and
peering down at him through a rapidly diminishing square hole.
"And while you're accelerating toward the center of the earth at
nine point eight meters per second squared, riddle me this:
We can fake sounds, we can fake images, we can even fake the
wind blowing over your face, but how do we fake the sensation of
free fall?"
Pseudopods had sprouted from the chair's foam and wrapped
around Hackworth's waist and upper thighs. This was fortunate as
he had gone into a slow backward spin and soon found himself
falling face-first, passing through great amorphous clouds of light: a
collection of old chandeliers that Dramatis Personae had scavenged
from condemned buildings. The Clown was right: Hackworth was
definitely in free fall, a sensation that could not be faked with
spectacles. If his eyes and ears were to be believed, he was plunging
toward the floor of the big theatre he had reconnoitered earlier. But
it was not grooved with neat rows of seats like an ordinary theatre.
The seats were present but scattered about randomly. And some of
them were moving.
The floor continued to accelerate toward him until he got really
scared and started to scream. Then he felt gravity again as some
force began to slow him down. The chair spun around so that
Hackworth was looking up into the irregular constellation of chandeliers, and the acceleration shot up to several gees. Then back
to normal. The chair rotated so that he was on the level once more,
and the phenomenoscope went brilliant, blinding white. The
earpieces were pumping white noise at him; but as it began to
diminish, he realized it was actually the sound of applause.
Hackworth was not able to see anything until he fiddled with
the interface and got back to a more schematic view of the theatre.
Then he determined that the place was about half full of
theatregoers, moving about independently on their chairs, which
were somehow motorized, and that several dozen of them were
aiming their torches toward him, which accounted for the blinding
light. He was on center stage, the main attraction. He wondered if he
was supposed to say something. A line was written across his
spectacles: Thanks very much, Ladies and gentlemen, for letting me
drop in. We have a great show for you tonight. . . .
Hackworth wondered if he was somehow obligated to read this
line. But soon the torches turned away from him, as more audience
members began to rain down through the astral plane of the
chandeliers. Watching them fall, Hackworth realized that he'd seen
something like it before at amusement parks: This was nothing more
than bungee-jumping. It's just that the spectacles had declined to
show Hackworth his own bungee cord, just to add an extra frisson to
the whole experience.
The armrest of Hackworth's chair included some controls that
enabled him to move it around the floor of the house, which was
coneshaped, sloping sharply in toward the center. A pedestrian
would have found difficult footing, but the chair had powerful
nanotech motors and compensated for the slope.
It was a round theatre, Globe-style. The conical floor was
encompassed by a circular wall, pierced here and there by openings
of different sizes. Some appeared to be ventilation shafts, some were
the apertures of private boxes or technical control rooms, and by far
the largest was a proscenium that occupied a quarter of the
circumference, and that was currently closed off by a curtain.
Hackworth noted that the lowest and innermost part of the
house floor was not occupied. He motored down the slope and was
shocked to realize that he was suddenly up to his waist in painfully
chilly water. He threw the chair into reverse, but it did not respond
to the controls. "Dead in the water!" cried the Clown triumphantly,
sounding as if he were standing right there, though Hackworth
couldn't see him. He found a way to release the chair's built-in restraints and struggled up the raked floor, his legs stiff from the
cold and reeking of seawater. Evidently the central third of the floor
actually plunged beneath the waterline and was open to the sea-
another fact that Hackworth's spectacles had not bothered to reveal.
Again, dozens of lights were on him. The audience was
laughing, and there was even some sarcastic applause. Come on in,
folks, the water 's fine! suggested the spectacles, but once again
Hackworth declined to read the line. Apparently these were nothing
more than suggestions tossed out by Dramatis Personae's writers,
which faded from the display as they lost their currency.
The events of the last few minutes-the phenomenoscopes that
couldn't be taken off, the unexpected bungee jump, the plunge into
cold seawater-had left Hackworth in a state of shock. He felt a
strong need to hole up somewhere and shake off the disorientation.
He clambered up toward the perimeter of the house, dodging the
occasional moving chair, and tracked by a few spotlight beams from
fellow audience members who had taken a particular interest in his
personal story. An aperture was above him, glowing with warm
light, and passing through it, Hackworth found himself in a cozy
little bar with a curving window that afforded an excellent view of
the theatre. It was a refuge in more ways than one; he could see
normally through the spectacles here, they seemed to be giving him
an untampered view of reality. He ordered a pint of stout from the
barman and took a seat at the counter along the window.
Somewhere around his third or fourth gulp of stout, he realized that
he had already submitted to the Clown's imperative. The plunge
into the water had taught him that he had no choice but to believe in
what the spectades showed his eyes and ears- even though he knew
it to be false- and to accept the consequences. A pint of stout went
some distance toward warming up his legs, and toward relaxing his
mind. He had come here for a show, and he was getting one, and
there was no reason to fight it; Dramatis Personae might have a
dodgy reputation, but no one had ever accused them of killing a
member of the audience.
The chandeliers dimmed. The torch-wielding audience went
into motion like sparks stirred by a gust of wind, some motoring
toward the high ground and others preferring the water's edge. As
the house lights faded to black, they amused themselves playing
their torches back and forth across the walls and the curtain, creating
an apocalyptic sky torn by hundreds of comets. A tongue of
clammy, algae-colored light shone beneath the water, resolving itself into a long narrow thrust stage as it rose toward the surface,
like Atlantis resurgent. The audience noticed it and bounced their
spotlights off the surface, catching a few dark motes in the crossfire:
the heads of a dozen or so performers, slowly rising out of the
water. They began to speak in something like unison, and
Hackworth realized that they were the chorus of lunatics he had
seen earlier.
"Set me up, Nick," said a woman's voice behind him.
"Tucked 'em in, did you?" said the barkeep.
"Ninnies."
Hackworth turned and saw that it was the young woman in the
devil costume who had acted as tour guide for the Heartlanders. She
was very petite, dressed in a long black skirt slit all the way to the
hipbone, and she had nice hair, very thick and black and glossy. She
carried a glass of wheat beer over to the counter, primly swept her
devil's tail out of the way in a gesture that Hackworth found
hopelessly fetching, and took a seat. Then she let out an explosive
sigh and put her head down on her arms for a few moments, her
blinking red horns reflecting in the curved window like the taillights
of a full-laner. Hackworth laced his fingers together around his pint
and smelled her perfume. Down below, the chorus had gotten out of
hand and was trying to pull off a rather ambitious Busby Berkeley
dance number. They showed an uncanny ability to act in unison-
something to do with the 'sites that had burrowed into their brains-
but their bodies were stiff, weak, and badly coordinated. What they
did, they did with absolute conviction, which made it good anyway.
"Did they buy it?" Hackworth said.
"Pardon me?" said the woman, looking up alertly like a bird, as
if she hadn't known Hackworth was here.
"Do those Heartlanders really believe that story about the
drunken pilot?"
"Oh. Who cares?" the woman said.
Hackworth laughed, pleased that a member of Dramatis
Personae was affording him this confidence.
"It's off the point, isn't it," the woman said in a lower voice,
getting a bit philosophical now. She squeezed a wedge of lemon
into her wheat beer and took a sip. "Belief isn't a binary state, not
here at least. Does anyone believe anything one hundred percent?
Do you believe everything you see through those goggles?"
"No," Hackworth said, "the only thing I believe at the moment
is that my legs are wet, this stout is good, and I like your perfume."
She looked a bit surprised, not unpleasantly so, but she wasn't
nearly that easy. "So why are you here? Which show did you come
to see?"
"What do you mean? I suppose I came to see this one."
"But there is no this one. It's a whole family of shows.
Interlaced." She parked her beer and executed Phase 1 of the here-is-
the-church maneuver. "Which show you see depends on which
feed you're viewing."
"I don't seem to have any control over what I see."
"Ah, then you're a performer."
"So far I have felt like a very inept slapstick performer."
"Inept slapstick? Isn't that a bit redundant?"
It wasn't that funny, but she said it wittily, and Hackworth
chuckled politely.
"It sounds as though you've been singled out to be a
performer."
"You don't say."
"Now, I don't normally reveal our trade secrets," the woman
continued in a lower voice, "but usually when someone is singled
out as a performer, it's because they have come here for some
purpose other than pure, passive entertainment."
Hackworth stuttered and fumbled for words a bit. "Does that-
is that done?"
"Oh, yes!" the woman said. She rose from her stool and moved
to the one right next to Hackworth. "Theatre's not just a few people
clowning about on a stage, being watched by this herd of oxen. I
mean, sometimes it's that. But it can be ever so much more-really
it can be any sort of interaction between people and people, or
people and information." The woman had become quite passionate
now, forgotten herself completely. Hackworth got boundless
pleasure just from watching her. When she'd first entered the bar,
he'd thought she had a sort of nondescript face, but as she let her
guard down and spoke without any self-consciousness, she seemed
to become prettier and prettier. "We are tied in to everything here-
plugged into the whole universe of information. Really, it's a virtual
theatre. Instead of being hard-wired, the stage, sets, cast, and script
are all soft-they can be reconfigured simply by shifting bits
about."
"Oh. So the show-or interlaced set of shows-can be
different each night?"
"No, you're still not getting it," she said, becoming very
excited. She reached out and gripped his forearm just below the
elbow and leaned toward him, desperate to make sure he got this.
"It's not that we do a set show, reconfigure, and a different one next
night. The changes are dynamic and take place in real time. The
show reconfigures itself dynamically depending upon what happens
moment to moment-and mind you, not just what happens here, but
what is happening in the world at large. It is a smart play-an
intelligent organism."
"So, if, for example, a battle between the Fists of Righteous
Harmony and the Coastal Republic were taking place in the interior
of China at this moment, then shifts in the battle might in some way-"
"Might change the color of a spotlight or a line of dialogue-
not necessarily in any simple and deterministic fashion, mind you-"
"I think I understand," Hackworth said. "The internal variables
of the play depend on the total universe of information outside-"
The woman nodded vigorously, quite pleased with him, her
huge black eyes shining.
Hackworth continued, "As, for example, a person's state of
mind at any given moment might depend on the relative
concentrations of innumerable chemical compounds circulating
through his bloodstream."
"Yes," the woman said, "like if you're in a pub being chatted
up by a fetching young gentleman, the words coming out of your
mouth are affected by the amount of alcohol you've put into your
system, and, of course, by concentrations of natural hormones-
again, not in a simple deterministic way-these things are all
inputs."
"I think I'm beginning to get your meaning," Hackworth said.
"Substitute tonight's show for the brain, and the information
flowing across the net for molecules flowing through the
bloodstream, and you have it," the woman said.
Hackworth was a bit disappointed that she had chosen to pull
back from the pub metaphor, which he had found more immediately
interesting.
The woman continued, "That lack of determinism causes some
to dismiss the whole process as wanking. But in fact it's an
incredibly powerful tool. Some people understand that."
"I believe I do," Hackworth said, desperately wanting her to
believe that he did.
"And so some people come here because they are on a quest of
some sort-trying to find a lost lover, let's say, or to understand
why something terrible happened in their lives, or why there is
cruelty in the world, or why they aren't satisfied with their career.
Society has never been good at answering these questions-the sorts
of questions you can't just look up in a reference database."
"But the dynamic theatre allows one to interface with the
universe of data in a more intuitive way," Hackworth said.
"That is precisely it," the woman said. "I'm so pleased that you
get this."
"When I was working with information, it frequently occurred
to me, in a vague and general way, that such a thing might be
desirable," Hackworth said. "But this is beyond my imagination."
"Where did you hear of us?"
"I was referred here by a friend who has been associated with
you in the past, in some vague way."
"Oh? May I ask who? Perhaps we have a mutual friend," the
woman said, as if that would be a fine thing.
Hackworth felt himself reddening and let out a deep breath.
"All right," he said, "I lied. It wasn't really a friend of mine. It was
someone I was led to."
"Ah, now we're getting into it," the woman said. "I knew there
was something mysterious going on with you."
Hackworth was abashed and did not know what to say. He
looked into his beer. The woman was staring at him, and he could
feel her eqes on his face like the warmth of a follow spot.
"So you did come here in search of something. Didn't you?
Something you couldn't find by looking it up in a database."
"I'm seeking a fellow called the Alchemist," Hackworth said.
Suddenly, things got bright. The side of the woman's face that
was toward the window was brilliantly illuminated, like a probe in
space lit on one side by the directional light of the sun. Hackworth
sensed, somehow, that this was not a new development. Looking out
over the audience, he saw that nearly all of them were aiming their
spotlights into the bar, and that everyone in the place had been
watching and listening to his entire conversation with the woman.
The spectacles had deceived him by adjusting the apparent light
levels. The woman looked different too; her face had reverted to the
way it looked when she came in, and Hackworth now understood that her image in his spectacles had been gradually evolving during
their conversation, getting feedback from whatever part of his brain
buzzed when he saw a beautiful woman.
The curtain parted to reveal a large electric sign descending
from the fly space: JOHN HACKWORTH in QUEST FOR THE
ALCHEMIST starring JOHN HACKWORTH as HIMSELF.
The Chorus sang:
He's such a stiff John Hackworth is
Can't show emotion to save his life
With nasty repercussions, viz
He lost his job and lost his wife
So now he's on a goshdarn Quest
Wandering all o'er the world
Hunting down that Alchemist
'Cept when he stops to pick up girls.
Maybe he'll clean up his act
And do the job tonight
A fabulous adventure packed
With marvelous sounds and sights
Let's get it on, oh Hacker John
Let's get it on, on, on.
Something jerked violently at Hackworth's neck. The woman
had tossed a noose around him while he'd been staring out the
window, and now she was hauling him out the door of the bar like a
recalcitrant dog. As soon as she cleared the doorway, her cape
inflated like a time-lapse explosion, and she shot twelve feet into the
air, propelled on jets of air built into her clothing somehow-she
payed out the leash so that Hackworth wasn't hanged in the process.
F lying above the audience like the cone of fire from a rocket engine,
she led the stumbling Hackworth down the sloping floor and to the
edge of the water. The thrust stage was linked to the water's edge by
a couple of narrow bridges, and Hackworth negotiated one of these,
feeling hundreds of lights on his shoulders, seemingly hot enough to
ignite his clothing. She led him straight back through the center of
the Chorus, beneath the electric sign, through the backstage area,
and through a doorway, which clanged shut behind him. Then she
vanished.
Hackworth was surrounded on three sides by softly glowing
blue walls. He reached out to touch one and received a mild shock for his troubles. Stepping forward, he tripped over something that
skittered across the floor: a dry bone, big and heavy, larger than a
human femur.
He stepped forward through the only gap available to him and
found more walls. He had been deposited into the heart of a
labyrinth.
It took him an hour or so to realize that escape through normal
means was hopeless. He didn't even try to figure out the labyrinth's
floor plan; instead, realizing that it couldn't possibly be larger than
the ship, he followed the foolproof expedient of turning right at
every corner, which as all clever boys knew must always lead to an
exit. But it didn't, and he did not understand why until once, in the
corner of his eye, he saw a wall segment shift sideways, closing up
an old gap and creating a new one. It was a dynamic labyrinth.
He found a rusty bolt on the floor, picked it up, and threw it at
a wall. It did not bounce off but passed through and clattered onto
the floor beyond. So the walls did not exist except as figments in his
spectacles. The labyrinth was constructed of information. In order to
escape, he would have to hack it.
He sat down on the floor. Nick the barman appeared, walking
unhindered through walls, bearing a tray with another stout on it,
and handed it to him along with a bowl of salty peanuts. As the
evening went on, other people passed through his area, dancing or
singing or dueling or arguing or making love. None of these had
anything to do, particularly, with Hackworth's Quest, and they
appeared to have nothing to do with each other. Apparently
Hackworth's Quest was (as the devil-woman herself had told him)
just one of several concurrent stories being acted out tonight,
coexisting in the same space.
So what did any of this have to do with the life of John
Hackworth? And how was Fiona mixed up in it?
As Hackworth thought about Fiona, a panel in front of him slid
to the side, exposing several yards of corridor. During the next
couple of hours he noted the same thing several times: An idea
would occur to him, and a wall would move.
In this way he moved in fits and starts through the maze, as his
mind moved from one idea to the next. The floor was definitely
sloping downward, which would obviously bring him below the
waterline at some point; and indeed he had begun to sense a heavy
drumming noise coming up through the deckplates, which might
have been the pounding of mighty engines except that this ship, as far as he knew, wasn't going anywhere. He smelled seawater before
him and saw dim lights shining through its surface, broken by the
waves, and knew that in the flooded ballast tanks of this ship lay a
network of underwater tunnels, and that in those tunnels were
Drummers. For all he knew, the whole show was just a figment
being enacted in the mind of the Drummers. Probably not the main
event either; it was probably just an epiphenomenon of whatever
deep processes the Drummers were running down there in their
collective mind.
A wall panel slid aside and gave him a clear path to the water.
Hackworth squatted at the water's edge for a few minutes, listening
to the drums, then stood up and began to undo his necktie.
. . .
He was terribly hot and sweaty, and bright light was in his
eyes, and none of these things were consistent with being
underwater. He awoke to see a bright blue sky overhead, pawed at
his face, and found that the spectacles were gone. Fiona was there in
her white dress, watching him with a rueful smile. The floor was
pounding Hackworth on the buttocks and evidently had been for
some time, as the bony parts of his backside were bruised and raw.
He realized that they were on the raft, heading back toward the
London docks; that he was naked and that Fiona had covered him
with a sheet of plastic to protect his skin from the sun. A few other
theatergoers were scattered about, slumped against one another,
utterly passive, like refugees, or people who've just had the greatest
sex of their lives, or people who are tremendously hung over.
"You were quite a hit," Fiona said. And suddenly Hackworth
remembered himself being paraded naked and dripping down the
thrust stage, waves of applause rolling over him from the standing
audience.
"The Quest is finished," he blurted. "We're going to Shanghai."
"You're going to Shanghai," Fiona said. "I'll see you off at the dock. Then I'll be going back." She cocked her head over the stern.
"Back to the ship?"
"I was a bigger hit than you were," she said. "I've found my calling in life, Father. I've accepted an invitation to join Dramatis Personae."
Carl Hollywood's hack.
Carl Hollywood leaned back against the hard lacquered back of
his corner seat for the first time in many hours and rubbed his face
with both hands, scratching himself with his own whiskers. He had
been sitting in the teahouse for almost twenty-four hours, consumed
twelve pots of tea, and twice called in masseuses to unknot his back.
The afternoon light coming in the windows behind him flickered as
the crowd outside began to break up. They had been treated to a
remarkable free media show, watching over his shoulders for hours
as the dramaturgical exploits of John Percival Hackworth had
played themselves out, in several different camera angles, on
floating cine windows on Carl Hollywood's pages. None of them
could read English, and so they had been unable to follow the story
of Princess Nell's adventures in the land of King Coyote, which had
been streaming across the pages at the same time, the storyline
fluctuating and curling in upon itself like a cloud of smoke spun and
torn by invisible currents.
Now the pages were blank and empty. Carl reached out lazily
with one hand and began to stack the sheets on top of each other,
just for something to occupy his hands while his mind worked-
though it wasn't working, at this point, so much as stumbling
blindly through a dark labyrinth a Ia John Percival Hackworth.
Carl Hollywood had long suspected that, among other things,
the network of the Drummers was a giant system for breaking
codes. The cryptographic systems that made the media network run
securely, and that made it capable of securely transferring money,
were based on the use of immense prime numbers as magic keys.
The keys could theoretically be broken by throwing enough
computing power at the problem. But at any given level of
computing power, code-making was always much easier than code-breaking,
so as long as the system kept moving to larger and larger
prime numbers as computers got faster, the code-makers could stay
far ahead of the code-breakers forever.
But the human mind didn't work like a digital computer and
was capable of doing some funny things. Carl Hollywood
remembered one of the Lone Eagles, an older man who could add
huge columns of numbers in his head as quickly as they were called
out. That, in and of itself, was merely a duplication of something
that a digital computer could do. But this man could also do numerical tricks that could not easily be programmed into a computer.
If many minds were gathered together in the network of the
Drummers, perhaps they could somehow see through the storm of
encrypted data that roared continuously through media space, cause
the seemingly random bits to coalesce into meaning. The men who
had come to talk to Miranda, who had persuaded her to enter the
world of the Drummers, had implied that this was possible; that
through them, Miranda could find Nell.
Superficially, this would be disastrous, because it would
destroy the system used for financial transactions. It would be as if,
in a world where commerce was based upon the exchange of gold,
some person had figured out how to change lead into gold. An
Alchemist.
But Carl Hollywood wondered if it really made a difference.
The Drummers could only do such things by subsuming themselves
into a gestalt society. As the case of Hackworth demonstrated, as
soon as a Drummer removed himself from that gestalt, he lost touch
with it completely. All communication between the Drummers and
normal human society took place unconsciously, through their
influence upon the Net, in patterns that appeared subliminally in the
ractives that everyone played with in their homes and saw playing
across the walls of buildings. The Drummers could break the code,
but they couldn't take advantage of it in an obvious way, or perhaps
they simply did not want to. They could make gold, but they were
no longer interested in having it.
John Hackworth, somehow, was better than anyone else at
making the transition between the society of Drummers and the
Victorian tribe, and each time he crossed the boundary, he seemed
to bring something with him, clinging to his garments like traces of
scent. These faint echoes of forbidden data entrained in his wake
caused tangled and unpredictable repercussions, on both sides of the
boundary, that Hackworth himself might not even be aware of. Carl
Hollywood had known little of Hackworth until several hours ago,
when, alerted by a friend in Dramatis Personae, he had joined his
story in progress on the black decks of the show boat. Now he
seemed to know a great deal: that Hackworth was the progenitor of
the Young Lady's Illustrated Primer, and that he had a deep
relationship with the Drummers that went far beyond anything as
simple-minded as captivity. He had not just been eating lotuses and
getting his rocks off during his years beneath the waves.
Hackworth had brought something back with him this time,
when he had emerged naked and streaming with cold seawater from
the warren of Drummers in the ballast tanks of the ship. He had
emerged with a set of numerical keys that were used to identify
certain entities: the Primer, Nell, Miranda, and someone else who
went by the name of Dr. X. Before he had fully reentered his
conscious state, he had supplied those keys to the Clown, who had
been there to haul his gasping and shivering body out of the water.
The Clown was a mechanical device, but Dramatis Personae had
been good enough to allow Carl Hollywood to control it- and to
improvise much of Hackworth's personal script and storyline- for
the duration of the show.
Now Carl had the keys and, for the purposes of the Net, was
indistinguishable from Miranda or Nell or Dr. X or even Hackworth
himself. They were written out across the surface of a page, long
columns of digits grouped in bunches of four. Carl Hollywood told
this sheet to fold itself and then tucked it into his breast pocket. He
could use them to untangle this whole business, but that would be
another night's hack. Snuff and caffeine had done as much as they
could. It was time to go back to the hotel, soak in a bath, get some
sleep, and prepare for the final act.
From the Primer,
Princess Nell's ride to the Castle of King Coyote;
description of the castle;
an audience with a Wizard;
her final triumph over King Coyote;
an enchanted army.
Princess Nell rode north into an explosive thunderstorm.
The horses were driven nearly mad with terror by the
cannonlike explosions of the thunder and the unearthly blue
flashes of the lightning, but with a firm hand and a soothing
voice in the ear, Nell urged them forward. The cairns of bones
strewn along the roadside were evidence that this mountain
pass was no place to dawdle, and the poor animals would be
no less terrified huddling under a rock. For all she knew, the
great King Coyote was capable of controlling even the
weather itself and had prepared this reception to try Princess
Nell's will.
Finally she crested the pass, and none too soon, as the
horses' hooves had begun to slip on a thick layer of ice, and
ice had begun thickly to coat the reins and to weigh down the
animals' manes and tails. Working her way down the
switchbacks, she left the high fury of the storm behind and
pushed into masses of rain as dense as any jungle. It was
well that she had paused for a few days at the foot of the
mountains to review all of Purple's magic books, for on this
night ride through the mountains she used every spell Purple
had taught her: spells for casting light, for choosing the right
fork in the road, for calming animals and warming chilled
bodies, for bolstering her own failing courage, for sensing the
approach of any monsters foolish enough to venture out in
such weather, and for defeating those desperate enough to
attack. This night ride was, perhaps, a rash act, but Princess
Nell proved equal to the challenge. King Coyote would not
expect her to make such a crossing. Tomorrow when the
storm on high had cleared, he would send his raven sentinels
winging through the pass and down into the plain below to
spy on her, as he had for the last several days, and they
would return with dismaying news: The Princess had
vanished! Even King Coyote's best trackers would not be able
to follow her path from yesterday's campsite, so craftily had
she covered her real tracks and laid false ones.
Dawn found her in the heart of a great forest. King
Coyote's castle was built on a high woodland plateau
surrounded by mountains; she estimated she was several
hours' ride away. Staying well clear of the high road taken by
the messengers from the Cipherers' Market, she made camp
under an overhanging rock along a river, sheltered from the
chill wet wind and safe from the eyes of the raven sentinels,
and lit a tiny fire where she made some tea and porridge.
She napped until the middle of the afternoon, then rose,
bathed in the bitter water of the stream, and untied the oilcloth
packet she had brought with her. It contained one of the
costumes worn by the messengers who galloped to and from
the Cipherers' Market. It also contained a few books
containing enciphered messages- authentic ones
dispatched from various stalls in the market addressed to
King Coyote's castle.
As she made her way through the woods toward the high
road, she heard massed hoofbeats rolling by and knew that
the first contingent of messengers had just come over the
pass after waiting for the storm to pass. She waited a few
minutes and then followed them. Turning onto the high road
out of the dense woods, she reined in her horse and sat for a
moment, astonished by her first sight of the Castle of King
Coyote.
She had never seen its like in all of her travels through
the Land Beyond. Its base was as wide as a mountain, and its
waIls rose sheer and straight into the clouds. Galactic clouds
of lights shone from its myriad windows. It was guarded by
mighty stockades, each of them a great castle unto itself, but
built not on stony foundations, but upon the very clouds
themselves; for King Coyote, in his cleverness, had devised a
way to make buildings that floated on the air.
Princess Nell spurred her horse forward, for even in her
numbness she sensed that someone might be watching the
high road from a window high in one of the castle's glittering
oriels. As she galloped toward the castle, she was torn
between a sense of her own foolishness in daring to assault
such a mighty fortress and admiration for King Coyote's work.
Faint clouds of diaphanous black oozed between the towers
and stockades, and as Princess Nell drew closer, she saw
that they were actually regiments of ravens going through
their military drills. They were the closest thing King Coyote
had to an army; for as one of the ravens had told her, after he
had stolen the eleven keys from around her neck,
Castles, gardens, gold, and jewels
Contentment signify, for fools
Like Princess Nell; but those
Who cultivate their wit
Like King Coyote and his crows
Compile their power bit by bit
And hide it places no one knows.
King Coyote did not preserve his power by armed might
but by cleverness, and sentinels were the only army he
needed, information his only weapon.
As she galloped the final miles to the gate, wondering
whether her legs and back would hold out, a thin steam of
black issued from a narrow portal high in one of the floating
stockades, thickened into a transparent ball, and dove toward
her like a plunging comet. She could not help flinching from
the illusion of mass and momentum, but, a stone's throw
above her head the cloud of ravens parted into several
contingents that whirled around and struck from several
directions, converging on her, passing around her so closely
that the wind from their rattling wings blew her hair back,
finally reforming into a disciplined group that returned to its
stockade without a look back. Apparently she had passed the
inspection. When she reached the mighty gate, it was
standing open for her, and no one was guarding it. Princess
Nell rode into the broad streets of King Coyote's castle.
It was the finest place she had ever seen. Here gold and
crystal were not hidden away in the King's treasury but were
used as building materials. Green and growing things were
everywhere, for King Coyote was fascinated by the secrets of
nature and had sent his agents to the farthest reaches of the
world to bring back exotic seeds. The wide boulevards of King
Coyote's city were lined with trees whose arching limbs
closed over the ashlars to form a rustling vault. The
undersides of the leaves were silver and seemed to cast a
gentle light, and the branches were filled with violet and
magenta bromeliads the size of kettles, making a sweet sharp
smell, aswarm with ruby-throated hummingbirds and filled
with water where tiny fluorescent frogs and beetles lived.
The Messenger's Route was marked with polished brass
plates set among the paving-stones. Princess Nell followed it
down the grand boulevard, into a park that encircled the city,
and then onto a rising street that spiraled around the central
promontory. As the horse took her toward the clouds, her ears
popped again and again, and from each curve in the road she
enjoyed a sweeping view over the lower city and into the
constellation of floating stockades where the raven sentinels
soared, coming and going in flights and squadrons, bringing
news from every corner of the empire.
She rode by a place where King Coyote was adding on to
the castle; but instead of an army of stonemasons and
carpenters, the builder was a single man, a portly gray-bearded fellow puffing at a long slender pipe, carrying a
leather bag on his belt. Arriving at the center of the building
site, he reached into his bag and drew out a great seed the
size of an apple and pitched it into the soil. By the time this
man had walked back to the spiral road, a tall shaft of
gleaming crystal had arisen from the soil and grown far above
their heads, gleaming in the sunlight, and branched out like a
tree. By the time Princess Nell lost sight of it around the
corner, the builder was puffing contentedly and looking at a
crystalline vault that nearly covered the lot.
This and many other wonders Princess Nell saw during
her long ride up the spiral road. The clouds cleared away, and
Nell found that she could see great distances in every
direction. King Coyote's domain was in the very heart of the
Land Beyond, and his castle was built on a high plateau in the
center of his domain, so that from his windows he could see
all the way to the shining ocean in every direction. Nell kept a
sharp eye on the horizon as she climbed toward the King's
inner keep, hoping she might get a glimpse of the faraway
island where Harv languished in the Dark Castle; but there
were many islands in the distant sea, and it was hard to tell
the Dark Castle's towers from mountain crags.
Finally the road became level and turned inward to pierce
another unguarded gate in another high wall, and Princess
Nell found herself in a green, flowery court before the King's
keep-a high palace that appeared to have been hewn from a
single diamond the size of an iceberg. By now the sun was
sinking low in the west, and its orange rays ignited the walls
of the keep and cast tiny rainbows everywhere like shards
from a shattered crystal bowl. A dozen or so messengers
stood in a queue before the doors of the keep. They had left
their horses in a corner of the yard where a watering-trough
and manger were available. Princess Nell did likewise and
joined the queue.
"I have never had the honor of carrying a message to
King Coyote," Princess Nell said to the messenger preceding
her in the queue.
"It is an experience you will never forget," said the
messenger, a cocky young man with black hair and a goatee.
"Why must we wait in this queue? In the stalls at the
Cipherers' Market, we leave the books on the table and
continue on our way."
Several of the messengers turned and looked back at
Princess Nell disdainfully. The messenger with the goatee
made a visible effort to control his amusement and said, "King
Coyote is no small-timer sitting in a stall at the Cipherers'
Market! This you will soon see for yourself."
"But doesn't he make his decisions the same way as all
the others-by consulting rules in a book?"
At this the other messengers made no effort to control
their amusement. The one with the goatee took on a distinctly
sneering tone. "What would be the point of having a King in
that case?" he said. "He does not take his decisions from any
book. King Coyote has built a mighty thinking machine,
Wizard 0.2, containing all the wisdom in the world. When we
bring a book to this place, his acolytes decipher it and consult
with Wizard 0.2. Sometimes it takes hours for Wizard to reach
its decision. I would advise you to wait respectfully and quietly
in the presence of the great machine!"
"That I will certainly do," said Princess Nell, amused
rather than angered by this lowly messenger's impertinence.
The queue moved along steadily, and as darkness fell
and the orange rays of the sun died away, Princess Nell
became aware of colored lights streaming out from within the
keep. The lights seemed to be quite brilliant whenever Wizard
0.2 was cogitating and dropped to a low flicker the rest of the
time. Princess Nell tried to make out other details of what was
going on inside the keep, but the countless facets broke up
the light and bent it into all directions so that she could get
only hints and fragments; trying to see into King Coyote's
inner sanctum was like trying to remember the details of a
forgotten dream.
Finally the messenger with the goatee emerged, gave
Princess Nell a final smirk, and reminded her to display
proper respect.
"Next," intoned the acolyte in a chanting voice, and Princess Nell entered the keep.
Five acolytes sat in the anteroom, each one at a desk
piled high with dusty old books and long reels of paper tape.
Nell had brought thirteen books from the Cipherers' Market, and at their direction, she distributed these books among the acolytes for decipherment. The acolytes were neither young
nor old but in the middle of their lives, all dressed in white
coats decorated, in golden thread, with the crest of King
Coyote. Each also had a key around his neck. As Princess
Nell waited, they deciphered the contents of the books she
had brought and punched the results onto strips of paper tape
using little machines built into their tables.
Then, with great ceremony, the thirteen paper tapes were
coiled up and placed on a tremendous silver platter carried by
a young altar boy. A pair of large doors was swung open, and
the acolytes, the altar boy, and Princess Nell formed into a
procession of sorts, which marched into the Chamber of the
Wizard, a vast vaulted room, and down its long central aisle.
At the far end of the chamber was-nothing. A sort of
large empty space surrounded by elaborate machinery and
clockwork, with a small altar at the front. It reminded Princess
Nell of a stage, empty of curtains and scenery. Standing next
to the stage was a high priest, older and wearing a more
impressive white robe.
When they reached the head of the aisle, the priest went
through a perfunctory ceremony, praising the Wizard's
excellent features and asking for its cooperation. As he said
these words, lights began to come on and the machinery
began to whir. Princess Nell saw that this vault was, in fact,
nothing more than an anteroom for a much vaster space
within, and that this space was filled with machinery:
countless narrow shining rods, scarcely larger than pencil
leads, laid in a fine gridwork, sliding back and forth under the
impetus of geared power shafts running throughout the place.
All of the machinery threw off heat as it ran, and the room was
quite warm despite a vigorous draught of cold mountain air
being pumped through it by windmill-size fans.
The priest took the first of the thirteen rolls of paper tape
from the platter and fed it into a slot on the top of the altar. At
this point, Wizard 0.2 really went into action, and Princess
Nell saw that all the whirring and humming she'd seen to this
point had been nothing more than a low idle. Each of its
million pushrods was tiny, but the force needed to move all of
them at once was seismic, and she could sense the tremendous strains on the power shafts and gear boxes
thundering through the sturdy floor of the keep.
Lights came on around the stage, some of them built into
the surface of the stage itself and some hidden in the
machinery around it. To Princess Nell's surprise, a seemingly
three-dimensional shape of light began to coalesce in the
center of the empty stage. It gradually formed itself into a
head, which took on additional details as the machinery
thundered and hissed away: it was an old bald man with a
long white beard, his face deeply furrowed in thought. After a
few moments, the beard exploded into a flock of white birds
and the head turned into a craggy mountain, the white birds
swarming about it, and then the mountain erupted in orange
lava that gradually filled up the entire volume of the stage until
it was a solid glowing cube of orange light. In this fashion did
one image merge into another, most astonishingly, for several
minutes, and all the time the machinery was screaming away
and making Princess Nell most anxious, and she suspected
that if she had not seen less sophisticated machines at work
at Castle Turing, she might have turned around and fled.
Finally, though, the images died away, the stage became
empty again, and the altar spat out a length of paper tape,
which the priest carefully folded up and handed to one of the
acolytes. After a brief prayer of thanks, the priest fed the
second tape into the altar, and the whole process started up
again, this time with different but equally remarkable images.
So it went with one tape after another. When Princess
Nell became accustomed to the noise and vibration of the
Wizard, she began to enjoy the images, which seemed quite
artistic to her- like something a human would come up with,
and not machinelike at all.
But the Wizard was undoubtedly a machine. She had not
yet had the opportunity to study it in detail, but after her
experiences in all of King Coyote's other castles, she
suspected that it, too, was just another Turing machine.
Her study of the Cipherers' Market, and particularly of the
rulebooks used by the cipherers to respond to messages, had
taught her that for all its complexity, it too was nothing more
than another Turing machine. She had come here to the
Castle of King Coyote to see whether the King answered his
messages according to Turing-like rules. For if he did, then the entire system- the entire kingdom- the entire Land
Beyond-was nothing more than a vast Turing machine. And
as she had established when she'd been locked up in the
dungeon at Castle Turing, communicating with the mysterious
Duke by sending messages on a chain, a Turing machine, no
matter how complex, was not human. It had no soul. It could
not do what a human did.
The thirteenth tape was fed into the altar, and the
machinery began to whine, then to whir, and then to rumble.
The images appearing above the stage flourished into wilder
and more exotic forms than any they had seen yet, and
watching the faces of the priest and the acolytes, Princess
Nell could see that even they were surprised; they had never
seen anything of the like before. As the minutes wore on, the
images became fragmented and bizarre, mere incarnations of
mathematical ideas, and finally the stage went entirely dark
except for occasional random flashes of color. The Wizard
had worked itself up to such a pitch that all of them felt
trapped within the bowels of a mighty machine that could tear
them to shreds in a moment. The little altar boy finally broke
away and fled down the aisle. Within a minute or so, the
acolytes, one by one, did the same, backing slowly away from
the Wizard until they were about halfway down the aisle and
then turning away and running. Finally even the high priest
turned and fled. The rumbling of the machinery had now
reached such a pitch that it felt as though an epochal
earthquake were in progress, and Nell had to steady herself
with a hand on the altar. The heat coming from back in the
machine was like that from a forge, and Nell could see a dim
red light from deep inside as some of the pushrods became
hot enough to glow.
Finally it all stopped. The silence was astonishing. Nell
realized she had been cringing and stood up straight. The red
glow from inside the Wizard began to die away.
White light poured in from all around. Princess Nell could
tell that it was coming in from outside the diamond walls of the
keep. A few minutes ago it had been nighttime. Now there
was light, but not daylight; it came from all directions and was
cool and colorless.
She ran down the aisle and opened the door to the
anteroom, but it wasn't there. Nothing was there. The anteroom was gone. The flowery garden beyond it was gone,
and the horses, the wall, the spiral road, the City of King
Coyote, and the Land Beyond. Instead there was nothing but
gentle white light.
She turned around. The Chamber of the Wizard was still there.
At the head of the aisle she could see a man sitting atop
the altar, looking at her. He was wearing a crown. Around his
neck was a key-the twelfth key to the Dark Castle.
Princess Nell walked down the aisle toward King Coyote.
He was a middle-aged man, sandy hair losing its color, gray
eyes, and a beard, somewhat darker than his hair and not
especially well trimmed. As Princess Nell approached, he
seemed to become conscious of the crown around his head.
He reached up, lifted it from his head, and tossed it carelessly
onto the top of the altar.
"Very funny," he said. "You snuck a zero divide past all of
my defenses."
Princess Nell refused to be drawn by his studied
informality. She stopped several paces away. "As there is no
one here to make introductions, I shall take the liberty of
doing so myself. I am Princess Nell, Duchess of Turing," she
said, and held out her hand.
King Coyote looked slightly embarrassed. He jumped
down from the altar, approached Princess Nell, and kissed
her hand. "King Coyote at your service."
"Pleased to make your acquaintance."
"The pleasure is mine. Sorry! I should have known that
the Primer would have taught you better manners."
"I am not acquainted with the Primer to which you refer,"
Princess Nell said. "I am simply a Princess on a quest: to
obtain the twelve keys to the Dark Castle. I note you have one
of them in your possession."
King Coyote held up his hands, palms facing toward her.
"Say no more," he said. "Single combat will not be necessary.
You are already the victor." He removed the twelfth key from
his neck and held it out to Princess Nell. She took it from him
with a little curtsy; but as the chain was sliding through his
fingers, he tightened his grip suddenly, so that both of them
were joined by the chain. "Now that your quest is over," he
said, "can we drop the pretense?"
"I'm sure I don't take your meaning, Your Majesty."
He bore a controlled look of exasperation. "What was your purpose in coming here?"
"To obtain the twelfth key."
"Anything else?"
"To learn about Wizard 0.2."
"Ah."
"To discover whether it was, in fact, a Turing machine."
"Well, you have your answer. Wizard 0.2 is most certainly
a Turing machine-the most powerful ever built."
"And the Land Beyond?"
"All grown from seeds. Seeds that I invented."
"And it is also a Turing machine, then? All controlled by
Wizard 0.2?"
"No," said King Coyote. "Managed by Wizard. Controlled
by me."
"But the messages in the Cipherers' Market control all the
events in the Land Beyond, do they not?"
"You are most perceptive, Princess Nell."
"Those messages came to Wizard-just another Turing
machine."
"Open the altar," said King Coyote, pointing to a large
brass plate with a keyhole in the middle.
Princess Nell used her key to open the lock, and King
Coyote flipped back the lid of the altar. Inside were two small
machines, one for reading tapes and one for writing them.
"Follow me," said King Coyote, and opened a trap door
set into the floor behind the altar.
Princess Nell followed him down a spiral staircase into a
small room. The connecting rods from the altar came down
into this room and terminated at a small console.
"Wizard is not even connected to the altar! It does
nothing," Princess Nell said.
"Oh, Wizard does a great deal. It helps me keep track of
things, does calculations, and so on. But all of that business
up there on the stage is just for show- just to impress the
commoners. When a message comes here from the
Cipherers' Market, I read it myself, and answer it myself.
"So as you can see, Princess Nell, the Land Beyond is
not really a Turing machine at all. It's actually a person- a
few people, to be precise. Now it's all yours."
King Coyote led Princess Nell back into the heart of his
keep and gave her a tour of the place. The best part was the
library. He showed her the books containing the rules for
programming Wizard 0.2, and other books explaining how to
make atoms build themselves into machines, buildings, and
whole worlds.
"You see, Princess Nell, you have conquered this world
today, and now that you have conquered it, you'll find it a
rather boring place. Now it's your responsibility to make new
worlds for other people to explore and conquer." King Coyote
waved his hand out the window into the vast, empty white
space where once had stood the Land Beyond. "There's
plenty of empty space out there."
"What will you do, King Coyote?"
"Call me John, Your Royal Highness. As of today, I no longer have a kingdom."
"John, what will you do?"
"I have a quest of my own."
"What is your quest?"
"To find the Alchemist, whoever he may be."
"And is there . . ."
Nell stopped reading the Primer for a moment. Her eyes had
filled up with tears.
"Is there what?" said John's voice from the book.
"Is there another? Another who has been with me during my quest?"
"Yes, there is," John said quietly, after a short pause. "At least I have always sensed that she is here."
"Is she here now?"
"Only if you build a place for her," John said. "Read the books, and they will show you how."
With that, John, the former King Coyote and Emperor of
the Land Beyond, vanished in a flash of light, leaving Princess
Nell alone in her great dusty library. Princess Nell put her
head down on an old leather-bound book and smelled its rich
fragrance. One tear of joy ran from each eye. But she
mastered the impulse to cry and reached for the book instead.
They were magic books, and they drew Princess Nell into
them so deeply that, for many hours, perhaps even days, she was not aware of her surroundings; which scarcely mattered as nothing remained of the Land Beyond. But at some length,
she realized that something was tickling her foot. She
reached down absently and scratched it. Moments later the
tickling sensation returned. This time she looked down and
was astonished to see that the floor of the library was covered
with a thick gray-brown carpet, flecked here and there with
splotches of white and black.
It was a living, moving carpet. It was, in fact, the Mouse
Army. All of the other buildings, places, and creatures
Princess Nell had seen in the Land Beyond had been
figments produced by Wizard 0.2; but apparently the mice
were an exception and existed independently of King
Coyote's machinations. When the Land Beyond had
disappeared, all of the obstructions and impedimenta that had
kept the Mouse Army away from Princess Nell had
disappeared with it, and in short order they had been able to
fix her whereabouts and to converge upon their long-sought Queen.
"What would you have me do?" Princess Nell said. She had never been a Queen before and did not know the protocol.
A chorus of excited squeaking came from the mice as
commands were relayed and issued. The carpet went into
violent but highly organized motion as the mice drew
themselves up into platoons, companies, battalions, and
regiments, each of them commanded by an officer. One
mouse clambered up the leg of Princess Nell's table, bowed
low to her, and then began to squeak commands from on
high. The mice executed a close-order drill, withdrew to the
edges of the room, and arrayed themselves in an empty box
shape, leaving a large open rectangle in the middle of the floor.
The mouse up on the table, whom Nell had dubbed the
Generalissima, issued a lengthy series of orders, running to
each of the four edges of the table to address different
contingents of the Mouse Army. When the Generalissima was
finished, very high piping music could be heard as the mouse
pipers played their bagpipes and the drummers beat their drums.
Small groups of mice began to encroach on the empty
space, each group moving toward a different spot. Once each
group had reached its assigned position, the individual mice
arranged themselves in such a way that the group as a whole
described a letter. In this way, the following message was
written across the floor of the library:
| |
|
WE ARE ENCHANTED |
| |
|
REQUEST ASSISTANCE |
| |
|
REFER TO BOOKS |
"I shall bend all my efforts toward your disenchantment,"
Princess Nell said, and a tremendous, earsplitting scream of
gratitude rose from the tiny throats of the Mouse Army.
Finding the required book did not take long. The Mouse
Army split itself up into small detachments, each of which
wrestled a different book from the shelf, opened it up on the
floor, and scampered through it one page at a time, looking
for relevant spells. Within the hour, Princess Nell noted that a
broad open corridor had developed in the Mouse Army, and
that a book was making its way toward her, seeming to float
an inch above the floor.
She lifted the book carefully from the backs of the mice
who were bearing it and flipped through it until she found a
spell for the disenchantment of mice. "Very well then," she
said, and began to read the spell; but suddenly, excited
squeaking filled the air and all the mice were running away in
a panic. The Generalissima climbed up onto the page,
jumping up and down in a state of extreme agitation and
waving her forelegs back and forth over her head.
"I understand," Princess Nell said. She picked up the book
and walked out of the library, taking care not to step on any of
her subjects, and followed them out to the vast empty space
beyond.
Once again the Mouse Army put on a dazzling display of
close order drill, drawing itself up across the empty, colorless
plain by platoons, companies, battalions, regiments, and
brigades; but this time the parade took up a much larger
space, because this time the mice took care to space
themselves as far apart as the length of a human arm. Some
of the platoons had to march what was, for them, a distance of many leagues in order to reach the edges of the formation.
Princess Nell took advantage of the time to wander about and
inspect the ranks, and to rehearse the spell.
Finally the Generalissima approached, bowed deeply,
and gave her the thumbs-up, though Princess Nell had to pick
the tiny leader up and squint to see this gesture.
She went to the place that had been left for her at the
head of the formation, opened up the book, and spoke the
magic spell.
There was a violent thunderclap, and a rush of wind that
knocked Princess Nell flat on her back. She looked up, dazed,
to see that she was surrounded by a vast army of some
hundreds of thousands of girls, only a few years younger than
she was. A wild cheer rose up, and all of the girls fell to their
knees as one and, in a scene of riotous jubilation, proclaimed
their fealty to Queen Nell.
Hackworth in China;
depredations of the Fists;
a meeting with Dr. X;
an unusual procession.
They said that the Chinese had great respect for madmen, and
that during the days of the Boxer Rebellion, certain Western
missionaries, probably unstable characters to begin with, who had
been trapped behind walls of rubble for weeks, scurrying through
the sniper fire of the encircling Boxers and Imperial troops and
listening to the cries of their flock being burned and tortured in the
streets of Beijing, had become deranged and had walked unharmed
into the ranks of their besiegers and been given food and treated
with deference.
Now John Percival Hackworth, having checked into a suite on
the top floor of the Shangri-La in Pudong (or Shong-a-lee-lah as the
taxi drivers sang it), put on a fresh shirt; his best waistcoat, girded
with the gold chain, adangle with his chop, snuffboxes, fob, and
watchphone; a long coat with a swallowtail for riding; boots, the
black leather and brass spurs hand-shined in the lobby of the Shong-a-
lee-lah by a coolie who was so servile that he was insolent, and
Hackworth suspected him of being a Fist; new kid gloves; and his
bowler, de-mossed and otherwise spruced up a bit, but obviously a
veteran of many travels in rough territory.
As he crossed the western bank of the Huang Pu, the usual
crowd of starving peasants and professional amputees washed
around him like a wave running up a flat beach because, though
riding here was dangerous, it was not crazy, and they did not know
him for a madman. He kept his gray eyes fixed upon the picket of
burning Feed lines that demarcated the shrinking border of the
Coastal Republic, and let their hands tug at his coattails, but he took
no notice of them. At different times, three very rural young men,
identifiable as much by their deep tans as their ignorance of modern
security technology, made the mistake of reaching for his watch
chain and received warning shocks for their trouble. One of them
refused to let go until the smell of burned flesh rose from his palm,
and then he peeled his hand away slowly and calmly, staring up at
Hackworth to show that he didn't mind a little pain, and said
something clearly and loudly that caused a titter to run through the
crowd.
The ride down Nanjing Road took him through the heart of
Shanghai's shopping district, now an endless gauntlet of tanned
beggars squatting on their heels gripping the brightly colored plastic
bags that served as their suitcases, carefully passing the butts of
cigarettes back and forth. In the shop windows above their heads,
animated mannikins strutted and posed in the latest Coastal
Republic styles. Hackworth noticed that these were much more
conservative than they had been ten years ago, during his last trip
down Nanjing Road. The female mannikins weren't wearing slit
skirts anymore. Many weren't wearing skirts at all, but silk pants
instead, or long robes that were even less revealing. One display
was centered upon a patriarchal figure who reclined on a dais,
wearing a round cap with a blue button on the top: a Mandarin. A
young scholar was bowing to him. Around the dais, four groups of
mannikins were demonstrating the other four filial relationships.
So it was chic to be Confucian now, or at least it was politic.
This was one of the few shop windows that didn't have red Fist
posters pasted all over it.
Hackworth rode past marble villas built by Iraqi Jews in
previous centuries, past the hotel where Nixon had once stayed, past
the high-rise enclaves that Western businessmen had used as the
beachheads of the post-Communist development that had led to the
squalid affluence of the Coastal Republic. He rode past nightclubs
the size of stadiums; jaialai pits where stunned refugees gaped at the
jostling of the bettors; side streets filled with boutiques, one street for fine goods made from alligators, another for furs, another for leathers; a nanotech district consisting of tiny businesses that did
bespoke engineering; fruit and vegetable stands; a cul-de-sac where
peddlers sold antiques from little carts, one specializing in cinnabar
boxes, another in Maoist kitsch. Each time the density began to
wane and he thought he must be reaching the edge of the city, he
would come to another edge city of miniature three-story strip malls
and it would begin again.
But as the day went on, he truly did approach the limit of the
city and kept riding anyway toward the west, and it became evident
then that he was a madman and the people in the streets looked at
him with awe and got out of his way. Bicycles and pedestrians
became less common, replaced by heavier and faster military traffic.
Hackworth did not like riding on the shoulder of highways, and so
he directed Kidnapper to find a less direct route to Suzhou, one that
used smaller roads. This was fiat Yangtze Delta territory only inches
above the waterline, where canals, for transport, irrigation, and
drainage, were more numerous than roads. The canals ramified
through the black, stinky ground like blood vessels branching into
the tissues of the brain. The plain was interrupted frequently by
small tumuli containing the coffins of someone's ancestors, just
high enough to stay above the most routine floods. Farther to the
west, steep hills rose from the paddies, black with vegetation. The
Coastal Republic checkpoints at the intersections of the roads were
gray and fuzzy, like house-size clots of bread mold, so dense was
the fractal defense grid, and staring through the cloud of macro- and
microscopic aerostats, Hackworth could barely make out the
hoplites in the center, heat waves rising from the radiators on their
backs and stirring the airborne soup. They let him pass through
without incident. Hackworth expected to see more checkpoints as he
continued toward Fist territory, but the first one was the last; the
Coastal Republic did not have the strength for defense in depth and
could muster only a one-dimensional picket line.
A mile past the checkpoint, at another small intersection,
Hackworth found a pair of very makeshift crucifixes fashioned from
freshly cut mulberry trees, green leaves still fluttering from their
twigs. Two young white men had been bound to the crucifixes with
gray plastic ties, burned in many places and incrementally
disemboweled. From the looks of their haircuts and the somber
black neckties that had been ironically left around their necks,
Hackworth guessed they were Mormons. A long skein of intestine trailed from one of their bellies down into the dirt, where a gaunt pig was tugging on it stubbornly.
He did not see much more death, but he smelled it everywhere
in the hot wet air. He thought that he might be seeing a network of
nanotech defense barriers until he realized that it was a natural
phenomenon: Each waterway supported a linear black nimbus of fat,
drowsy flies. From this he lmew that if he tugged a bit on this or
that rein and guided Kidnapper to the bank of the canal, he would
find it filled with ballooning corpses.
Ten minutes after passing the Coastal Republic checkpoint, he
rode through the center of a Fist encampment. As he looked neither
right nor left, he could not really estimate its size; they had taken
over a village of low brick-and-stucco buildings. A long straight
smudge running across the earth marked the location of a burned
Feed line, and as he crossed it, Hackworth fantasized that it was a
meridian engraved on the living globe by an astral cartographer.
Most of the Fists were shirtless, wearing indigo trousers, scarlet
girdles knotted at the waist, sometimes scarlet ribbons tied round
necks, foreheads, or upper arms. The ones who weren't sleeping or
smoking were practicing martial arts. Hackworth rode slowly
through their midst, and they pretended not to notice him, except for
one man who came running out of a house with a knife, shouting
"Sha! Sha!" and had to be tackled by three comrades.
As he rode the forty miles to Suzhou, nothing changed about
the landscape except that creeks became rivers and ponds became
lakes. The Fist encampments became somewhat larger and closer
together. When the thick air infrequently roused itself to a breeze,
he could smell the clammy metallic reek of stagnant water and knew
he was close to the great lake of Tai Wu, or Taifu as the
Shanghainese pronounced it. A grayscale dome rose from the
paddies some miles away, casting a film of shadow before a cluster
of tall buildings, and Hackworth knew it must be Suzhou, now a
stronghold of the Celestial Kingdom, veiled in its airborne shield
like a courtesan behind a translucent sheen of Suzhou silk.
Nearing the shore of the great lake he found his way onto an
important road that ran south toward Hangzhou. He set Kidnapper
ambling northward. Suzhou had thrown out tendrils of development
along its major roads, and so as he drew closer he saw strip malls
and franchises, now destroyed, deserted, or colonized by refugees.
Most of these places catered to truck drivers: lots of motels, casinos,
teahouses, and fast-food places. But no trucks ran on the highway now, and Hackworth rode down the center of a lane, sweating uncontrollably in his dark clothes and drinking frequently from a
refrigerated bottle in Kidnapper's glove compartment.
A McDonald's sign lay toppled across the highway like a giant
turnpike; something had burned through the single pillar that thrust
it into the air. A couple of young men were standing in front of it
smoking cigarettes and, as Hackworth realized, waiting for him. As
Hackworth drew closer, they ground out their cigarettes, stepped
forward, and bowed. Hackworth tipped his bowler. One of them
took Kidnapper's reins, which was a purely ceremonial gesture in
the case of a robot horse, and the other invited Hackworth to
dismount. Both of the men were wearing heavy but flexible
coveralls with cables and tubes running through the fabric: the inner
layer of armor suits. They could turn themselves into battle-ready
hoplites by slapping on the harder and heavier outer bits, which
were presumably stashed somewhere handy. Their scarlet
headbands identified them as Fists. Hackworth was one of the few
members of the Outer Tribes ever to find himself in the presence of
a Fist who was not running toward him with a weapon screaming
"Kill! Kill!" and found it interesting to see them in a more indulgent
mood. They were dignified, formal, and controlled, like military
men, with none of the leering and snickering that were fashionable
among Coastal Republic boys of the same age.
Hackworth walked across the parking lot toward the
McDonald's, followed at a respectful distance by one of the
soldiers. Another soldier opened the door for him, and Hackworth
sighed with delight as cold dry air flowed over his face and began to
chase the muggy stuff through the weave of his clothing. The place
had been lightly sacked. He could smell a cold, almost clinical
greasy smell wafting from behind the counter, where containers of
fat had spilled onto the floor and congealed like snow. Much of this
had been scooped up by looters; Hackworth could see the parallel
tracks of women's fingers. The place was decorated in a Silk Road
motif, transpicuous mediatronic panels portraying wondrous sights
between here and the route's ancient terminus in Cadiz.
Dr. X was seated in the corner booth, his face radiant in the
cool, UV-filtered sunlight. He was wearing a Mandarin cap with
dragons embroidered in gold thread and a magnificent brocade robe.
The robe was loose at the neck and had short sleeves so that
Hackworth could see the inner garment of a hoplite suit underneath.
Dr. X was at war, and had emerged from the safe perimeter of Suzhou, and needed to be prepared for an attack. He was sipping green tea from a jumbo McDonald's cup, made in the local style,
great clouds of big green leaves swirling around in a tumbler of hot
water. Hackworth doffed his hat and bowed in the Victorian style,
which was proper under the circumstances. Dr. X returned the bow,
and as his head tilted forward, Hackworth could see the button on
the top of his cap. It was red, the color of the highest ranks, but it
was made of coral, marking him as second rank. A ruby button
would have put him at the very highest level. In Western terms this
made Dr. X roughly equivalent to a lesser cabinet minister or three-star
general. Hackworth supposed that this was the highest rank of
Mandarin permitted to converse with barbarians.
Hackworth sat down across the table from Dr. X. A young
woman padded out of the kitchen on silk slippers and gave
Hackworth his own tumbler full of green tea. Watching her mince
away, Hackworth was only mildly shocked to see that her feet were
no more than four inches long. There must be better ways to do it
now, maybe by regulating the growth of the tarsal bones during
adolescence. It probably didn't even hurt.
Realizing this, Hackworth also realized, for the first time, that
he had done the right thing ten years ago.
Dr. X was watching him and might as well have been reading
his mind. This seemed to put him in a pensive mood. He said
nothing for a while, just gazed out the window and occasionally
sipped his tea. This was fine with Hackworth, who had had a long
ride.
"Have you learned anything from your ten-year sentence?" Dr.
X finally said.
"It would seem so. But I have trouble pulling it up," Hackworth said.
This was a bit too idiomatic for Dr. X. By way of explanation,
Hackworth flipped out a ten-year-old card bearing Dr. X's dynamic
chop. As the old fisherman hauled the dragon out of the water, Dr.
X suddenly got it, and grinned appreciatively. This was showing a
lot of emotion- assuming it was genuine- but age and war had
made him reckless.
Have you found the Alchemist?" Dr. X said.
Yes," Hackworth said. "I am the Alchemist."
When did you know this?"
Only very recently," Hackworth said. "Then I understood it all
in an instant- pulled it up," he said, pantomiming the act of reeling in a fish. "The Celestial Kingdom was far behind Nippon and Atlantis in nanotech. The Fists could always have burned the
barbarians' Feed lines, but this would only have plunged the
peasants into poverty and made the people long for foreign goods.
The decision was made to leapfrog the barbarian tribes by
developing Seed technology. At first you pursued the project in
cooperation with second-tier phyles like Israel, Armenia, and
Greater Serbia, but they proved unreliable. Again and again your
carefully cultivated networks were scattered by Protocol
Enforcement.
"But through these failures you made contact for the first time
with CryptNet, whom you doubtless view as just another triad-a
contemptible band of conspirators. However, CryptNet was tied in
with something much deeper and more interesting-the society of
the Drummers. With their flaky and shallow Western perspective,
CryptNet didn't grasp the full power of the Drummers' collective
mind. But you got it right away.
"All you required to initiate the Seed project was the rational,
analytical mind of a nanotechnological engineer. I fit the bill
perfectly. You dropped me into the society of the Drummers like a
seed into fertile soil, and my knowledge spread through them and
permeated their collective mind-as their thoughts spread into my
own unconscious. They became like an extension of my own brain.
For years I laboured on the problem, twenty-four hours a day.
"Then, before I was able to finish the job, I was pulled out by
my superiors at Protocol Enforcement. I was close to being finished.
But not finished yet."
"Your superiors had uncovered our plan?"
"Either they are completely ignorant, or else they know
everything and are pretending ignorance," Hackworth said.
"But surely you have told them everything now," Dr. X said almost inaudibly.
"If I were to answer that question, you would have no reason not to kill me," Hackworth said.
Dr. X nodded, not so much to concede the point as to express
sympathy with Hackworth's admirably cynical train of thought-as
though Hackworth, after a series of seemingly inconclusive moves,
had suddenly flipped over a large territory of stones on a go board.
"There are those who would advocate that course, because of
what has happened with the girls," Dr. X said.
Hackworth was so startled to hear this that he became
somewhat lightheaded for a moment and too self-conscious to speak
"Have the Primers proved useful?" he finally said, trying not to
sound giddy.
Dr. X grinned broadly for a moment. Then the emotion
dropped beneath the surface again, like a breaching whale. "They
must have been useful to someone," he said. "My opinion is that we
made a mistake in saving the girls."
"How can this act of humanity possibly have been a mistake?"
Dr. X considered it. "It would be more correct to say that,
although it was virtuous to save them, it was mistaken to believe
that they could be raised properly. We lacked the resources to raise
them individually, and so we raised them with books. But the only
proper way to raise a child is within a family. The Master could
have told us as much, had we listened to his words."
"Some of those girls will one day choose to follow in the ways
of the Master," Hackworth said, "and then the wisdom of your
decisions will be demonstrated."
This seemed to be a genuinely new thought to Dr. X. His gaze
returned to the window. Hackworth sensed that the matter of the
girls and the Primers had been concluded.
"I will be open and frank," said Dr. X after some ruminative
tea slurping, "and you will not believe that I am being so, because it
is in the heads of those from the Outer Tribes to think that we never
speak directly. But perhaps in time you will see the truth of my
words.
"The Seed is almost finished. When you left, the building of it
slowed down very much- more than we expected. We thought that
the Drummers, after ten years, had absorbed your knowledge and
could continue the work without you. But there is something in your
mind that you have gained through your years of scholarly studies
that the Drummers, if they ever had it, have given up and cannot get
back unless they come out of the darkness and live their lives in the
light again.
"The war against the Coastal Republic reaches a critical
moment. We ask you to help us now."
"I must say that it is nearly inconceivable for me to help you at
this point," Hackworth said, "unless it would be in the interest of
my tribe, which does not strike me as a likely prospect."
"We need you to help us finish building the Seed," Dr. X said
doggedly.
Only decades of training in emotional repression kept
Hackworth from laughing out loud. "Sir. You are a worldly man and
a scholar. Certainly you are aware of the position of Her Majesty's
government, and indeed of the Common Economic Protocol itself,
on the subject of Seed technologies."
Dr. X raised one hand a few inches from the tabletop, palm
down, and pawed once at the air. Hackworth recognized it as the
gesture that well-to-do Chinese used to dismiss beggars, or even to
call bullshit on people during meetings. "They are wrong," he said.
"They do not understand. They think of the Seed from a Western
perspective. Your cultures- and that of the Coastal Republic- are
poorly organized. There is no respect for order, no reverence for
authority. Order must be enforced from above lest anarchy break
out. You are afraid to give the Seed to your people because they can
use it to make weapons, viruses, drugs of their own design, and
destroy order. You enforce order through control of the Feed. But in
the Celestial Kingdom, we are disciplined, we revere authority, we
have order within our own minds, and hence the family is orderly,
the village is orderly, the state is orderly. In our hands the Seed
would be harmless."
"Why do you need it?" Hackworth said.
"We must have technology to live," Dr. X said, "but we must
have it with our own."
Hackworth thought for a moment that Dr. X was referring to
the beverage. But the Doctor began to trace characters on the
tabletop, his hand moving deftly and gracefully, the brocade sleeve
rasping across the plastic surface. "Yong is the outer manifestation
of something. Ti is the underlying essence. Technology is a yong
associated with a particular ti that is"-the Doctor stumbled here
and, through a noticeable effort, refrained from using pejorative
terms like barbarian or gwailo-"that is Western, and completely
alien to us. For centuries, since the time of the Opium Wars, we
have struggled to absorb the yong of technology without importing
the Western ti. But it has been impossible. Just as our ancestors
could not open our ports to the West without accepting the poison of
opium, we could not open our lives to Western technology without
taking in the Western ideas, which have been as a plague on our
society. The result has been centuries of chaos. We ask you to end
that by giving as the Seed."
"I do not understand why the Seed will help you."
"The Seed is technology rooted in the Chinese ti. We have
lived by the Seed for five thousand years," Dr. X said. He waved his
hand toward the window. "These were rice paddies before they were
parking lots. Rice was the basis for our society. Peasants planted the
seeds and had highest status in the Confucian hierarchy. As the
Master said, 'Let the producers be many and the consumers few.'
When the Feed came in from Atlantis, From Nippon, we no longer
had to plant, because the rice now came From the matter compiler.
It was the destruction of our society. When our society was based
upon planting, it could truly be said, as the Master did, 'Virtue is the
root; wealth is the result.' But under the Western ti, wealth comes
not from virtue but from cleverness. So the filial relationships
became deranged. Chaos," Dr. X said regretfully, then looked up
From his tea and nodded out the window. "Parking lots and chaos."
Hackworth remained silent for a full minute. Images had come
into his mind again, not a fleeting hallucination this time, but a full-fledged
vision of a China freed from the yoke of the foreign Feed. It
was something he'd seen before, perhaps something he'd even
helped create. It showed something no gwailo would ever get to see:
the Celestial Kingdom during the coming Age of the Seed. Peasants
tended their fields and paddies, and even in times of drought and
flood, the earth brought forth a rich harvest: food, of course, but
many unfamiliar plants too, fruits that :ould be made into medicines,
bamboo a thousand times stronger than the natural varieties, trees
that produced synthetic rubber and pellets of clean safe fuel. In an
orderly procession the suntanned farmers brought their proceeds to
great markets in clean cities free of cholera and strife, where all of
the young people were respectful and dutiful scholars and all of the
elders were honored and cared for. This was a ractive simulation as
big as all of China, and Hackworth could have lost himself in it, and
perhaps did for he knew not how long. But finally he closed his
eyes, blinked it away, sipped some tea to bring his rational mind
back into control.
"Your arguments are not without merit," Hackworth said.
"Thank you for helping me to see the matter in a different light. I
will ponder these questions on my return to Shanghai."
Dr. X escorted him to the parking lot of the McDonald's. The
heat felt pleasant at first, like a relaxing bath, though Hackworth
knew that soon he would feel as if he were drowning in it.
Kidnapper ambled over and folded its legs, allowing Hackworth to
mount it easily.
"You have helped us willingly for ten years," Dr. X said. "It is
your destiny to make the Seed."
"Nonsense," Hackworth said, "I did not know the nature of the
project."
Dr. X smiled. "You knew it perfectly well." He freed one hand
from the long sleeves of his robe and shook his finger at Hackworth,
like an indulgent teacher pretending to scold a clever but
mischievous pupil. "You do these things not to serve your Queen
but to serve your own nature, John Hackworth, and I understand
your nature. For you cleverness is its own end, and once you have
seen a clever way to do a thing, you must do it, as water finding a
crack in a dike must pass through it and cover the land on the other
side."
"Farewell, Dr. X," Hackworth said. "You will understand that
although I hold you in the highest personal esteem, I cannot
earnestly wish you good fortune in your current endeavour." He
doffed his hat and bowed low to one side, forcing Kidnapper to
adjust its stance a bit. Dr. X returned the bow, giving Hackworth
another look at that coral button on his cap. Hackworth spurred
Kidnapper on to Shanghai.
. . .
He followed a more northerly route now, along one of the
many radial highways that converged on the metropolis. After he
had been riding for some time, he became consciously aware of a
sound that had been brushing against the outer fringes of
perceptibility for some time: a heavy, distant, and rapid drumbeat,
perhaps twice as fast as the beat of his own heart. His first thought,
of course, was of the Drummers, and he was tempted to explore one
of the nearby canals to see whether their colony had spread its
tendrils this far inland. But then he looked northward across the flat
land for a couple of miles and saw a long procession making its way
down another highway, a dark column of pedestrians marching on
Shanghai.
He saw that his path was converging with theirs, so he spurred
Kidnapper forward at a hand-gallop, hoping to reach the intersection
of the roads before it was clogged by this column of refugees.
Kidnapper outdistanced them easily, but to no avail; when he
reached the intersection, he found it had been seized by the column's vanguard which had established a roadblock there and would not let him pass.
The contingent now controlling the intersection consisted
entirely of girls, some eleven or twelve years old. There were
several dozen of them, and they had apparently taken the objective
by force from a smaller group of Fists, who could now be seen lying
in the shade of some mulberry trees, hogtied with plastic rope.
Probably three-quarters of the girls were on guard duty, mostly
armed with sharpened bamboo stakes, though a few guns and blades
were in evidence. The remaining quarter were on break, hunkered
down in a circle near the intersection, sipping freshly boiled water
and concentrating intently on books. Hackworth recognized the
books; they were all identical, and they all had marbled jade covers,
though all of them had been personalized with stickers, graffiti, and
other decorations over the years.
Hackworth realized that several more girls, organized in groups
of four, had been following him down the road on bicycles; these
outriders passed by him now and rejoined their group.
He had no choice but to wait until the column had passed. The
drumbeat grew and grew in volume until the pavement shook with
each blow, and the shock absorption gear built into Kidnapper's legs
went into play, flinching minutely at each beat. Another vanguard
passed through: Hackworth easily calculated its size at two hundred
and fifty-six. A battalion was four platoons, each of which was four
companies of four troops of four girls each. The vanguard consisted
of one such battalion, moving at a very brisk double-time, probably
going ahead of the main group to fall upon the next major
intersection.
Then, finally, the main column passed through, organized in
battalions, each foot hitting the ground in unison with all the others.
Each battalion carried a few sedan chairs, which were passed from
one four-girl troop to another every few minutes to spread out the
work. They were not luxurious palanquins but were improvised
from bamboo and plastic rope and upholstered with materials
stripped from old plastic cafeteria furniture. Riding in these chairs
were girls who did not seem all that different from the others, except
that they might have been a year or two older. They did not seem to
be officers; they were not giving orders and wore no special
insignia. Hackworth did not understand why they were riding in
sedan chairs until he got a look at one of them, who had crossed one ankle up on her knee and taken her slipper off. Her foot was defective; it was several inches too short.
But all of the other sedan chair girls were deeply absorbed in
their Primers. Hackworth unclipped a small optical device from his
watch chain, a nanotech telescope/microscope that frequently came
in handy, and used it to look over one girl's shoulder. She was
looking at a diagram of a small nanotechnological device, working
her way through a tutorial that Hackworth had written several years
ago.
The column went past much faster than Hackworth had feared;
they moved down the highway like a piston. Each battalion carried a
banner, a very modest thing improvised from a painted bedsheet.
Each banner bore the number of the battalion and a crest that
Hackworth knew well, as it played an important role in the Primer.
In all, he counted two hundred and fifty-six battalions. Sixty-five
thousand girls ran past him, hell-bent on Shanghai.
From the Primer,
Princess Nell's return to the Dark Castle;
the death of Harv;
The Books of the Book and of the Seed;
Princess Nell's quest to find her mother.
Destruction of the Causeway;
Nell falls into the hands of Fists;
she escapes into a greater peril;
deliverance.
Princess Nell could have used all of the powers she had
acquired during her great quest to dig Harv's grave or caused
the work to be done for her by the Disenchanted Army, but it
did not seem fitting, and so instead she found an old rusty
shovel hung up in one of the Dark Castle's outbuildings. The
ground was dry and stony and veined with the roots of thorn
bushes, and more than once the shovel struck ancient bones.
Princess Nell dug throughout the long day, softening the hard
earth with her tears, but did not slacken until the ground was
level with her own head. Then she went into the little room in
the Dark Castle where Harv had died of a consumption,
carefully wrapped his withered body in fine white silk, and
bore it out to the grave. She had found lilies growing wild in
the overgrown flower-garden by the little fisherman's cottage,
so she put a spray of these in the grave with him, along with a
little children's story-book that Harv had given her for a present many years ago. Harv could not read, and many
nights as they had sat round the fire in the courtyard of the
Dark Castle, Nell had read to him from this book, and she
supposed that he might like to have it wherever he was going
now.
Filling in the grave went quickly; the loose dirt more than
filled the hole. Nell left more lilies atop the long low mound of
earth that marked Harv's resting place. Then she turned her
back and walked into the Dark Castle. The stain-colored
granite walls had picked up some salmon highlights from the
western sky, and she suspected that she could see a
beautiful sunset from the room in the high tower where she
had established her library.
It was a long climb up a dank and mildewy staircase that
wound up the inside of the Dark Castle's highest tower. In the
circular room at the top, which was built with mullioned
windows looking out in all directions, Nell had placed all of the
books she had gathered during her quest: books given her as
presents by Purple, books from the library of King Magpie, the
first Faery King that she had vanquished, and more from the
palace of the djinn, and Castle Turing, and many other hidden
libraries and treasuries that she had discovered or pillaged on
her way. And, of course, there was the entire library of King
Coyote, which contained so many books that she had not
even had time to look at them yet.
There was so much work to be done. Copies of all of
these books had to be made for all of the girls in the
Disenchanted Army. The Land Beyond had vanished, and
Princess Nell wanted to make it anew. She wanted to write
down her own story in a great book that young girls could
read. And she had one remaining quest that had been
pressing on her mind of late, during her long voyage across
the empty sea back to the island of the Dark Castle: she
wanted to solve the mystery of her own origins. She wanted
to find her mother. Even after the destruction of the Land
Beyond, she had sensed the presence of another in the
world, one who had always been there. King Coyote himself
had confirmed it. Long ago, her stepfather, the kindly
fisherman, had received her from mermaids; whence had the
mermaids gotten her?
She suspected that the answer could not be found
without the wisdom contained in her library. She began by
causing a catalog to be made, starting with the first books she
had gotten on her early adventures with her Night Friends. At
the same time she established a Scriptorium in the great hall
of the castle, where thousands of girls sat at long tables
making exact copies of all of the books.
Most of King Coyote's books had to do with the secrets of
atoms and how to put them together to make machines.
Naturally, all of them were magic books; the pictures moved,
and you could ask them questions and get answers. Some of
them were primers and workbooks for novices, and Princess
Nell spent a few days studying this art, putting atoms together
to make simple machines and then watching them run.
Next came a very large set of matched volumes
containing reference materials: One contained designs for
thousands of sleeve bearings, another for computers made of
rods, still another for energy storage devices, and all of them
were ractive so that she could use them to design such things
to her own specifications. Then there were more books on the
general principles of putting such things together into
systems.
Finally, King Coyote's library included some books
inscribed in the King's own hand, containing designs for his
greatest masterpieces. Of these, the two very finest were the
Book of the Book and the Book of the Seed. They were
magnificent folio-size volumes, as thick as Princess Nell's
hand was broad, bound in rich leather illuminated with hair-thin
gilt lines in an elaborate interlace pattern, and closed with
heavy brass hasps and locks.
The lock on the Book of the Book yielded to the same key
that Princess Nell had taken from King Coyote. She had
discovered this very early in her exploration of the library but
was unable to comprehend the contents of this volume until
she had studied the others and learnt the secrets of these
machines. The Book of the Book contained a complete set of
plans for a magical book that would tell stories to a young
person, tailoring them for the child's needs and interests-
even teaching them how to read if need be. It was a
fearsomely complicated work, and Princess Nell only skimmed it at first, recognizing that to understand the
particulars might take years of study.
The lock on the Book of the Seed would not yield to King
Coyote's key or to any other key in Princess Nell's
possession, and because this book had been built atom by
atom, it was stronger than any mortal substance and could
not possibly be broken open. Princess Nell did not know what
this book was about; but the cover bore an inlaid illustration of
a striped seed, like the apple-sized seed that she had seen
used in King Coyote's city to build a crystal pavilion, and this
foreshadowed the book's purpose clearly enough.
Nell opened her eyes and propped herself up on one elbow.
The Primer fell shut and slid off her belly onto the mattress. She had
fallen asleep reading it.
The girls on their bunkbeds lay all around her, breathing
quietly and smelling of soap. It made her want to lie back down and
sleep too. But for some reason she was up on one elbow. Some
instinct had told her she had to be up.
She sat up and drew her knees up to her chest, freeing the hem
of her nightgown from between the sheets, then spun around and
dropped to the floor soundlessly. Her bare feet took her silently
between the rows of bunks and into the little lounge in the corner of
the floor where the girls sat together, had tea, brushed their hair,
watched old passives. It was empty now, the lights were off, the
corner windows exposing a vast panorama: to the northeast, the
lights of New Chusan and of the Nipponese and Hindustani
concessions standing a few kilometers offshore, and the outlying
parts of Pudong. Downtown Pudong was all around, its floating,
mediatronic skyscrapers like biblical pillars of fire. To the northwest
lay the Huang Pu River, Shanghai, its suburbs, and the ravaged silk
and tea districts beyond. No fires burned there now; the Feed lines
had been burned all the way to the edge of the city, and the Fists had
stopped at the outskirts and hunkered down as they sought a way to
penetrate the tattered remains of the security grid.
Nell's eye was drawn toward the water. Downtown Pudong
offered the most spectacular urban nightscape ever devised, but she
always found herself looking past it, staring instead at the Huang
Pu, or the Yangzte to the north, or to the curvature of the Pacific
beyond New Chusan.
She'd been having a dream, she realized. She had awakened
not because of any external disturbance but because of what had
happened in that dream. She had to remember it; but, of course, she
couldn't.
Just a few snatches: a woman's face, a beautiful young woman,
perhaps wearing a crown, but seen muddily, as through turbulent
water. And something that glittered in her hands.
No, dangling beneath her hands. A piece of jewelry on a golden
chain.
Could it have been a key? Nell could not bring the image back,
but an instinct told her that it was.
Another detail too: a gleaming swath of something that passed
in front of her face once, twice, three times. Something yellow, with
a repeating pattern woven into it: a crest consisting of a book, a
seed, and crossed keys.
Cloth of gold. Long ago the mermaids had brought her to her
stepfather, and she had been wrapped in cloth of gold, and from this
she had always known that she was a Princess.
The woman in the dream, veiled in swirling water, must have
been her mother. The dream was a memory from her lost infancy.
And before her mother had given her up to the mermaids, she had
given Princess Nell a golden key on a chain.
Nell perched herself on the windowsill, leaned against the
pane, opened the Primer, and flipped all the way back to the
beginning. It started with the same old story, as ever, but told now
in more mature prose. She read the story of how her stepfather had
gotten her from the mermaids, and read it again, drawing out more
details, asking it questions, calling up detailed illustrations.
There, in one of the illustrations, she saw it: her stepfather's
lock-box, a humble plank chest bound in rusted iron straps, with a
heavy oldfashioned padlock, stored underneath his bed. It was in
this chest that he had stored the cloth of gold-and, perhaps, the key
as well.
Paging forward through the book, she came across a long-forgotten
story of how, following her stepfather's disappearance, her
wicked stepmother had taken the lock-box to a high cliff above the
sea and flung it into the waves, destroying any evidence that
Princess Nell was of royal blood. She had not known that her
stepdaughter was watching her from between the branches of a
thicket, where she often concealed herself during her stepmother's rages.
Nell flipped to the last page of the Young Lady's Illustrated Primer.
As Princess Nell approached the edge of the cliff, picking
her way along carefully through the darkness, taking care not
to snag the train of her nightgown on thorny shrubs, she
experienced a peculiar feeling that the entire ocean had
become dimly luminescent. She had often noticed this
phenomenon from the high windows of her library in the tower
and reckoned that the waves must be reflecting back the light
of the moon and stars. But this was a cloudy night, the sky
was like a bowl of carved onyx, allowing no light to pass down
from the heavens. The light she saw must emanate from
beneath.
Arriving cautiously at the rim of the cliff, she saw that her
surmise was true. The ocean-the one constant in all the
world- the place from where she had come as an infant,
from which the Land Beyond had grown out of King Coyote's
seed, and into which it had dissolved- the ocean was alive.
Since the departure of King Coyote, Princess Nell had
supposed herself entirely alone in the world. But now she saw
cities of light beneath the waves and knew that she was alone
only by her own choice.
"'Princess Nell gathered the hem of her nightgown in both
hands and raised it over her head, letting the chill wind stream over
her body and carry the garment away,' " Nell said. " 'Then, drawing
a deep breath and closing her eyes, she bent her legs and sprang
forward into space.'
She was reading about the way the illuminated waves rushed
up toward her when suddenly the room filled with light. She looked
toward the door, thinking that someone had come in and turned the
lights on, but she was alone in the room, and the light was flickering
against the wall. She turned her head the other way.
The center span of the Causeway had become a ball of white
light hurling its marbled shroud of cold dark matter into the night.
The sphere expanded until it seemed to occupy most of the interval
between New Chusan and the Pudong shoreline, though by this time
the color had deepened from white into reddish-orange, and the
explosion had punched a sizable crater into the water, which
developed into a circular wave of steam and spray that ran effortlessly across the ocean's surface like the arc of light cast by a
pocket torch.
Fragments of the giant Feed line that had once constituted most
of the Causeway's mass had been pitched into the sky by the
explosion and now tumbled end over end through the night sky, the
slowness of their motion bespeaking their size, casting yellow
sulfurous light over the city as they burned furiously in the wind-blast
created by their own movement. The light limned a pair of
tremendous pillars of water vapor rising from the ocean north and
south of the Causeway; Nell realized that the Fists must have blown
the Nipponese and Hindustani Feeds at the same moment. So the
Fists of Righteous Harmony had nanotechnological explosives now;
they'd come a long way since they'd tried to torch the bridge over
the Huang Pu with a few cylinders of hydrogen.
The shock wave rapped at the window, startling several of the
girls from sleep. Nell heard them murmuring to one another in the
bunk room. She wondered if she should go in and warn them that
Pudong was cut off now, that the final assault of the Fists had
commenced. But though she could not understand what they were
saying, she could understand their tone of voice clearly enough:
They were not surprised by this, nor unhappy.
They were all Chinese and could become subjects of the
Celestial Kingdom simply by donning the conservative garb of that
tribe and showing due deference to any Mandarins who happened
by. No doubt this was exactly what they would do as soon as the
Fists came to Pudong. Some of them might suffer deprivation,
imprisonment, or rape, but within a year they would all be
integrated into the C.K., as if the Coastal Republic had never
existed.
But if the news feeds from the interior meant anything, the
Fists would kill Nell gradually, with many small cuts and burns,
when they grew weary of raping her. In recent days she had often
seen the Chinese girls talking in little groups and sneaking glances
at her, and the suspicion had grown in her breast that some of them
might know of the attack in advance and might make arrangements
to turn Nell over to the Fists as a demonstration of their loyalty.
She opened the door a crack and saw two of these girls padding
toward the bunk room where Nell usually slept, carrying lengths of
red polymer ribbon.
As soon as they had stolen into Nell's bunk room, Nell ran
down the corridor and got to the elevators. As she awaited the elevator, she was more scared than she had ever been; the sight of the cruel red ribbons in the small hands of the girls had for some
reason struck more terror into her heart than the sight of knives in
the hands of Fists.
A shrill commotion arose from the bunk room.
The bell for the elevator sounded.
She heard the bunk room door fly open, and someone running
down the hall.
The elevator door opened.
One of the girls came into the lobby, saw her, and shrieked
something to the others in a dolphinlike squeal.
Nell got into the elevator, punched the button for the lobby, and
held down the DOOR CLOSE button. The girl thought for a
moment, then stepped forward to hold the door. Several more girls
were running down the hall. Nell kicked the girl in the face, and she
spun away in a helix of blood. The elevator door began to close. Just
as the two doors were meeting in the center, through the narrowing
slit she saw one of the other girls diving toward the wall button. The
doors closed. There was a brief pause, and then they slid open again.
Nell was already in the correct stance to defend herself. If she
had to beat each of the girls to death individually, she would do it.
But none of them rushed the elevator. Instead, the leader stepped
forward and aimed something at Nell. There was a little popping
noise, a pinprick in Nell's midsection, and within a few seconds she
felt her arms becoming impossibly heavy. Her bottom drooped. Her
head bowed. Her knees buckled. She could not keep her eyes open;
as they closed, she saw the girls coming toward her, smiling with
pleasure, holding up the red ribbons. Nell could not move any part
of her body, but she remained perfectly conscious as they tied her
up with the ribbon. They did it slowly and methodically and
perfectly; they did it every day of their lives.
The tortures of the next few hours were of a purely
experimental and preliminary nature. They did not last for long and
accomplished no permanent damage. These girls had made a living
out of binding and torturing people in a way that didn't leave scars,
and that was all they really knew. When the leader came up with the
idea of shoving a cigarette into Nell's cheek, it was something
entirely novel and left the rest of the girls startled and silent for a
few minutes. Nell sensed that most of the girls had no stomach for
such things and merely wanted to turn her over to the Fists in
exchange for citizenship in the Celestial Kingdom.
The Fists themselves began to arrive some twelve hours later.
Some of them wore conservative business suits, some wore the
uniforms of the building's security force, others looked as if they'd
arrived to take a girl out to a disco.
They all had things to do when they arrived. It was obvious that
this suite would act as local headquarters of some sort when the
rebellion began in earnest. They began to bring up supplies on the
freight elevator and seemed to spend a lot of time on the telephone.
More arrived every hour, until Madame Ping's suite was playing
host to between one and two dozen. Some of them were very tired
and dirty and went to sleep in the bunks immediately.
In a way, Nell wished that they would do whatever they were
going to do and get it over with fast. But nothing happened for quite
some time. When the first Fists arrived, the girls brought them in to
see Nell, who had been shoved under a bed and was now lying there
in a puddle of her own urine. The leader shone a light on her face
briefly and then turned away, completely uninterested. It seemed
that once he'd verified that the girls had done their bit for the
revolution, Nell ceased to be relevant.
She supposed it was inevitable that, in due time, these men
would take those liberties with her that have ever been claimed as
angary by irregular fighting men, who have willfully severed
themselves from the softening feminine influence of civilized
society, with those women who have had the misfortune to become
their captives. To make this prospect less attractive, she took the
desperate measure of allowing her person to become tainted with the
noisome issue of her natural internal processes. But most of the
Fists were too busy, and when some of the grungy foot-soldier types
arrived, Madame Ping's girls were eager to make themselves useful
in this regard. Nell reflected that a bunch of soldiers who found
themselves billeted in a bawdy-house would naturally arrive with
certain expectations, and that the inmates would be unwise to
disappoint them.
Nell had gone into the world to seek her fortune and this was
what she had found. She understood more forcibly than ever the
wisdom of Miss Matheson's remarks about the hostility of the world
and the importance of belonging to a powerful tribe; all of Nell's
intellect, her vast knowledge and skills, accumulated over a lifetime
of intensive training, meant nothing at all when she was confronted
with a handful of organized peasants. She could not really sleep in
her current position but drifted in and out of consciousness, visited occasionally by hallucinatory waking dreams. More than once she dreamed that the Constable had come in his hoplite suit to rescue
her; and the pain she felt when she returned to full consciousness
and realized that her mind had been lying to her, was worse than any
tortures others might inflict.
Eventually they got tired of the stink under the bed and dragged
her out of there on a smear of half-dried body fluids. It had been at
least thirty-six hours since her capture. The leader of the girls, the
one who had put out the cigarette on Nell's face, cut the red ribbon
away and cut off Nell's filthy nightgown with it. Nell's limbs
bounced on the floor. The leader had brought a whip that they
sometimes used on clients and beat Nell with it until circulation
returned. This spectacle drew quite a crowd of Fist soldiers, who
crowded into the bunk room to watch.
The girl drove Nell on hands and knees to a maintenance closet
and made her get out a bucket and mop. Then she made Nell clean
up the mess under the bed, frequently inspecting the results and
beating her, apparently acting out a parody of a rich Westerner
bossing around some poor running dog. It became clear after the
third or fourth scrubbing of the floor that this was being done as
much for the entertainment of the soldiers as for hygienic reasons.
Then it was back to the maintenance closet, where Nell was
bound again, this time with lightweight police shackles, and left
there on the floor in the dark, naked and filthy. A few minutes later,
her possessions- some clothes that the girls didn't like and a book
they couldn't read- were thrown in there with her.
When she was sure that the girl with the whip had gone, she
spoke to her Primer and told it to make light.
She could see a big matter compiler on the floor in the back of
the closet; the girls used it to manufacture larger items when they
were needed. This building was apparently hooked up to the Coastal
Republic's Pudong Feed, because it hadn't lost Feed services when
the Causeway had blown up; and indeed the Fists probably would
not have bothered to establish their base here if the place had been
cut off.
Once every couple of hours or so, a Fist would come into this
closet and order the M.C. to create something, usually a simple bulk
substance like rations. On two of these occasions, Nell was outraged
in the manner she had long suspected was inevitable. She closed her
eyes during the commission of these atrocities, knowing that
whatever might be done to the mere vessel of her soul by the likes of these, her soul itself was as serene, as remote from their grasp, as
is the full moon from the furious incantations of an aboriginal
shaman. She tried to think about the machine that she was designing
in her head, with the help of the Primer, about how the gears
meshed and the bearings spun, how the rod logic was programmed
and where the energy was stored.
On her second night in the closet, after most of the Fists had
gone to bed and use of the matter compiler had apparently ceased
for the night, she instructed the Primer to load her design into the
M.C.'s memory, then crept forward and pressed the START button
with her tongue.
Ten minutes later, the machine released its vacuum with a
shriek. Nell tongued the door open. A knife and a sword rested on
the floor of the M.C. She turned herself around, moving in small,
cautious increments and breathing deeply so that she would not
whimper from the pain emanating from those parts of her that were
most tender and vulnerable and yet had been most viciously
depredated by her captors. She reached backward with her shackled
hands and gripped the handle of the knife.
Footsteps were approaching down the hallway. Someone must
have heard the hiss of the M.C. and thought it was dinner time. But
Nell couldn't rush this; she had to be careful.
The door opened. It was one of the ranking Fists, perhaps the
rough equivalent of a sergeant. He shone a torch in her face, then
chuckled and turned on the overhead light.
Nell's body blocked his view of the M.C., but it was obvious
that she was reaching for something. He probably assumed it was
only food.
He stepped forward and kicked her casually in the ribs, then
grabbed her upper arm and jerked her away from the M.C., causing
such pain in her wrists that tears spurted down her face. But she
held on to the knife.
The Fist was staring into the M.C. He was startled and would
be for several moments. Nell maneuvered the knife so that the blade
was touching nothing but the link between the shackles, then hit the
ON switch. It worked; the edge of the blade came to life like a
nanotech chainsaw and zipped through the link in a moment, like
clipping a fingernail. Nell brought it around her body in the same
motion and buried it in the base of the Fist's spine.
He fell to the ground without speaking- he wasn't feeling any
pain from that wound or from anything below his waist. Before he could assess matters any further, she plunged the knife into the base of his skull.
He was wearing simple peasant stuff: indigo trousers and a
tank-top. She put them on. Then she tied her hair up behind her head
using strings cut from a mop and devoted a precious minute or two
to stretching her arms and legs.
And then it was out into the hallway with her knife in her
waistband and her sword in her hands. Going round a corner, she
cut a man in half as he emerged from the bathroom; the sword kept
going of its own momentum and carved a long gash in the wall.
This assault released a prodigious amount of blood, which Nell put
behind her as quickly as possible. Another man was on guard in the
elevator lobby, and as he came to investigate the sounds, she ran
him through several times quickly, taking a page from Napier's
book this time.
The elevators were now under some kind of central control and
probably subject to surveillance; rather than press the button in the
lobby, she cut a hole in the doors, sheathed her sword, and
clambered out onto a ladder that ran down the shaft.
She forced herself to descend slowly and carefully, pressing
herself flat against the rungs whenever the car went by. By the time
she had descended perhaps fifty or sixty floors, the building had
come awake; all of the cars were in constant motion, and when they
went past her, she could hear men talking excitedly inside them.
Light flooded into the shaft several floors below. The doors had
been forced open. A couple of Fists thrust their heads out carefully
into the shaft and began looking up and down, shining torches here
and there. Several floors below them, more Fists pried another door
open; but they had to pull their heads in rapidly as the ascending car
nearly decapitated them.
She had imagined that Madame Ping's was playing host to an
isolated cell of Fists, but it was now clear that most if not all of the
building had been taken over. For that matter, all of Pudong might
now be a part of the Celestial Kingdom. Nell was much more
profoundly isolated than she had feared.
The skin of her arms glowed yellow-pink in the beam of a
torch shone up from below. She did not make the mistake of looking
down into the dazzling light and did not have to; the excited voice
of the Fist below her told her that she had been discovered. A
moment later, the light vanished as the ascending elevator
interposed itself between Nell and the Fists who had seen her.
She recalled Harv and his buds elevator-surfing in their old
building and reckoned that this would be a good time to take up the
practice. As the car rose toward her, she jumped off the ladder,
trying to give herself enough upward thrust to match its velocity.
She landed hard on the roof, for it was moving far more rapidly than
she could jump. The roof knocked her feet out from under her, and
she fell backward, slamming her arms out as Dojo had taught her so
that she absorbed the impact with her fists and forearms, not her
back.
More excited talking from inside the car. The access panel on
the roof suddenly flew into the air, driven out of its frame by a well-delivered
kick from below. A head popped out of the open hatch;
Nell skewered it on her knife. The man tumbled down into the car.
There was no point in waiting now; the situation had gone into
violent motion, which Nell was obliged to use. She rolled onto her
belly and kicked both feet downward into the hatch, spun down into
the car, landed badly on the corpse, and staggered to one knee. She
had barked the point of her chin on the edge of the hatch as she fell
tjirough and bitten her tongue, so she was slightly dazed. A gaunt
man in a black leather skullcap was standing directly in front of her,
reaching for a gun, and while she was shoving her knife up through
the center of his thorax, she bumped into someone behind her. She
jumped to her feet and spun around, terrified, readying the knife for
another blow, and discovered a much more terrified man in a blue
coverall, standing by the elevator's control panel, holding his arms
up in front of his face and screaming.
Nell stepped back and lowered the point of the knife. The man
was wearing the uniform of a building services worker and had
obviously been yanked away from whatever he had been doing and
put in charge of the elevator's controls. The man whom Nell had
just killed, the one in the black leather skullcap, was some sort of
low-level official in the rebellion and could not be expected to
demean himself by punching the buttons himself.
"Keep going! Up! Up!" she said, pointing at the ceiling. The
last thing she wanted was for him to stop the elevator at Madame
Ping's.
The man bowed several times in quick succession and did
something with the controls, then turned and smiled ingratiatingly at
Nell.
As a Coastal Republic citizen working in services, he knew a
few words of English, and Nell knew a few of Chinese. "Down
below- Fists?" she said.
"Many Fist."
"Ground floor-Fists?"
"Yes, many Fist ground floor."
"Street- Fists?"
"Fist, army have fight in street."
"Around this building?"
"Fist around this building all over."
Nell looked at the elevator's control panel: four columns of
tightly spaced buttons, color-coded according to each floor's
function: green for shopping, yellow for residential, red for offices,
and blue for utility floors. Most of the blue floors were below
ground level, but one of them was fifth from the top.
"Building office?" she said, pointing to it.
"Yes."
"Fists there?"
"No, Fist all down below. But Fist on roof!"
"Go there."
When the elevator reached the fifth floor from the top, Nell had
the man freeze it there, then climbed on top and trashed its motors
so that it would remain there. She dropped back into the car, trying
not to look at the bodies or smell the reek of blood and other body
fluids that had gotten all over it, and that were now draining out the
open doors and dripping down the shaft. It would not take long for
any of this to be discovered.
She had some time, though; all she had to do was decide how
to make use of it. The maintenance closet had a matter compiler,
just like the one Nell had used to make her weapons, and she knew
that she could use it to compile explosives and booby-trap the
lobby. But the Fists had explosives of their own and could just as
well blow the top floors of the building to kingdom come.
For that matter, they were probably down in some basement
control room watching traffic on the building's Feed network. Use
of the M.C. would simply announce her location; they would shut
off the Feed and then come after her slowly and carefully.
She took a quick tour of the offices, sizing up her resources.
Looking out the panoramic windows of the finest office suite, she
saw a new state of affairs in the streets of Pudong. Many of the
skyscrapers had been rooted in lines from the foreign Feeds and were now dark, though in some places flames vented from broken windows, casting primitive illumination over the streets a thousand
feet below. These buildings had mostly been evacuated, and so the
streets were crowded with far more people than they could really
handle. The plaza immediately surrounding this particular building
had been staked out by a picket line of Fists and was relatively uncrowded.
She found a windowless room with mediatronic walls that bore
a bewildering collage of images: flowers, details of European
cathedrals and Shinto temples, Chinese landscape art, magnified
images of insects and pollen grains, many-armed Indian goddesses,
planets and moons of the solar system, abstract patterns from the
Islamic world, graphs of mathematical equations, head shots of
models male and female. Other than that, the room was empty
except for a model of the building that stood in the center of the
room, about Nell's height. The model's skin was mediatronic, just
like the skin of the building itself, and it was currently echoing (as
she supposed) whatever images were being displayed on the outside
of the building: mostly advertising panels, though some Fists had
apparently come in here and scrawled graffiti across them.
On top of the model rested a stylus- just a black stick pointed
on one end-and a palette, covered with a color wheel and other
controls. Nell picked them up, touched the tip of the stylus to a
green area on the palette's color wheel, and drew it across the
surface of the model. A glowing green line appeared along the track
of the stylus, disfiguring an ad panel for an airship line.
Whatever other steps Nell might take in the time she had left,
there was one thing she could do quickly and easily here. She was
not entirely sure why she did it, but some intuition told her that it
might be useful; or perhaps it was an artistic urge to make
something that would live longer than she would, even if only by a
few minutes. She began by erasing all of the big advertising panels
on the upper levels of the skyscraper. Then she sketched out a
simple line drawing in primary colors: an escutcheon in blue, and within it, a crest depicting a book
drawn in red and white; crossed keys in gold; and a seed in brown.
She caused this image to be displayed on all sides of the skyscraper,
between the hundredth and two-hundredth floors.
Then she tried to think of a way out of this place. Perhaps there
were airships on the roof. There would certainly be Fist guards up
there, but perhaps through a combination of stealth and suddenness she could overcome them. She used the emergency stairs to make her way up to the next floor, then the next, and then the next. Two
flights above, she could hear Fist guards posted at the roof, talking
to each other and playing mah-jongg. Many flights below, she could
hear more Fists making their way up the stairs one flight at a time,
looking for her.
She was pondering her next move when the guards above her
were rudely interrupted by orders squawking from their radios.
Several Fists came charging down the stairway, shouting excitedly.
Nell, trapped in the stairwell, made herself ready to ambush them as
they came toward her, but instead they ran into the top floor and
made for the elevator lobby. Within a minute or two, an elevator had
arrived and carried them away. Nell waited for a while, listening,
and could no longer hear the contingent approaching from below.
She climbed up the last flights of stairs and emerged onto the
building's roof, exhilarated as much by the fresh air as by the
discovery that it was completely deserted. She walked to the edge of
the roof and peered down almost half a mile to the street. In the
black windows of a dead skyscraper across the way, she could see
the mirror image of Princess Nell's crest.
After a minute or two, she noticed that something akin to a
shock wave was making its way down the street far below, moving
in slow motion, covering a city block every couple of minutes.
Details were difficult to make out at this distance: it was a highly
organized group of pedestrians, all wearing the same generally dark
clothing, ramming its way through the mob of refugees, forcing the
panicked barbarians toward the picket line of the Fists or sideways
into the lobbies of the dead buildings.
Nell was transfixed for several minutes by this sight. Then she
happened to glance down a different street and saw the same
phenomenon there.
She made a quick circuit of the building's roof. All in all,
several columns were advancing inexorably on the foundations of
the building where Nell stood.
In time, one of these columns broke through the last of the
obstructing refugees and reached the edge of the broad open plaza
that surrounded the foot of Nell's building, where it faced off
against the Fist defenses. The column stopped abruptly at this point
and waited for a few minutes, collecting itself and waiting for the
other columns to catch up.
Nell had supposed at first that these columns might be Fist
reinforcements converging on this building, which was clearly
intended to be the headquarters of their final assault on the Coastal
Republic. But it soon became evident that these newcomers had
arrived for other purposes. After a few minutes of unbearable
tension had gone by in nearly perfect silence, the columns suddenly,
on the same unheard signal, erupted into the plaza. As they
debouched from the narrow streets, they spread out into many-pronged
formations, arranging themselves with the precision of a
professional drill team, and then charged forward into the suddenly
panicked and disorganized Fists, throwing up a tremendous battle-cry.
When that sound echoed up two hundred stories to Nell's ears,
she felt her hair standing on end, because it was not the deep lusty
roar of grown men but the fierce thrill of thousands of young girls,
sharp and penetrating as the skirl of massed bagpipes.
It was Nell's tribe, and they had come for their leader. Nell
spun on her heel and made for the stairway.
By the time she had reached ground level and burst out,
somewhat unwisely, into the building's lobby, the girls had
breached the walls of the building in several places and rushed in
upon the remaining defenders. They moved in groups of four. One
girl (the largest) would rush toward an opponent, holding a pointed
bamboo stick aimed at his heart. While his attention was thus fixed,
two other girls (the smallest) would converge on him from the sides.
Each girl would hug one of his legs and, acting together, they would
lift him off the ground. The fourth girl (the fastest) would by this
point have circled all the way round and would come in from
behind, driving a knife or other weapon into the victim's back.
During the half-dozen or so applications of this technique that Nell
witnessed, it never failed, and none of the girls ever suffered more
than the odd bruise or scrape.
Suddenly she felt a moment of wild panic as she thought they
were doing the same to her; but after she had been lifted into the air,
no attack came from front or back, though many girls rushed in
from all sides, each adding her small strength to the paramount goal
of hoisting Nell high into the air. Even as the last remnants of the
Fists were being hunted down and destroyed in the nooks and
corners of the lobby, Nell was being borne on the shoulders of her
little sisters out the front doors of the building and into the plaza,
where something like a hundred thousand girls- Nell could not
count all the regiments and brigades- collapsed to their knees in unison, as though struck down by a divine wind, and presented her their bamboo stakes, pole knives, lead pipes, and nunchuks. The
provisional commanders of her divisions stood foremost, as did her
provisional ministers of defense, of state, and of research and
development, all of them bowing to Nell, not with a Chinese bow or
a Victorian one but something they'd come up with that was in
between.
Nell should have been tongue-tied and paralyzed with
astonishment, but she was not; for the first time in her life she
understood why she'd been put on the earth and felt comfortable
with her position. One moment, her life had been a meaningless
abortion, and the next it all made glorious sense. She began to
speak, the words rushing from her mouth as easily as if she had
been reading them from the pages of the Primer. She accepted the
allegiance of the Mouse Army, complimented them on their great
deeds, and swept her arm across the plaza, over the heads of her
little sisters, toward the thousands upon thousands of stranded
sojourners from New Atlantis, Nippon, Israel, and all of the other
Outer Tribes. "Our first duty is to protect these," she said. "Show
me the condition of the city and all those in it."
They wanted to carry her, but she jumped to the stones of the
plaza and strode away from the building, toward her ranks, which
parted to make way for her. The streets of Pudong were filled with
hungry and terrified refugees, and through them, in simple peasant
clothes streaked with the blood of herself and of others, broken
shackles dangling from her wrists, followed by her generals and
ministers, walked the barbarian Princess with her book and her
sword.
Carl Hollywood takes a stroll to the waterfront.
Carl Hollywood was awakened by a ringing in his ears and a
burning in his cheek that turned out to be an inch-long fragment of
plate glass driven into his flesh. When he sat up, his bed made
clanking and crashing noises, shedding a heavy burden of shattered
glass, and a foetid exhalation from the wrecked windows blew over
his face. Old hotels had their charms, but disadvantages too-such
as windowpanes made out of antique materials.
Fortunately some old Wyoming instinct had caused him to
leave his boots next to the bed the night before. He inverted each
one and carefully probed it for broken glass before he pulled it on.
Only when he had put on all of his clothes and gathered his things
together did he go to look out the window.
His hotel was near the Huang Pu waterfront. Looking across
the river, he could see that great patches of Pudong had gone black
against the indigo sky of predawn. A few buildings, connected to
the indigenous Feeds, were still lit up. On this side of the river the
situation was not so simple; Shanghai, unlike Pudong, had lived
through many wars and was therefore made to be robust: the city
was rife with secret power sources, old diesel generators, private
Sources and Feeds, water tanks and cisterns. People still raised
chickens for food in the shadow of the Hongkong & Shanghai
Banking Corporation. Shanghai would weather the onslaught of the
Fists much better than Pudong.
But as a white person, Carl Hollywood might not weather it
very well at all. It was better to be across the river, in Pudong, with
the rest of the Outer Tribes.
From here to the waterfront was about three blocks; but since
this was Shanghai, those three blocks were fraught with what in any
other city would be three miles' worth of complications. The main
problem was going to be Fists; he could already hear the cries of
"Sha! Sha!" boiling up from the streets, and shining a pocket torch
through the bars of his balcony, he could see many Fists,
emboldened by the destruction of the foreign Feeds, running around
with their scarlet girdles and headbands exposed to the world.
If he weren't six and a half feet tall and blue-eyed, he'd
probably try to disguise himself as Chinese and slink to the
waterfront, and it probably wouldn't work. He went through his
closet and hauled out his big duster, which swept nearly to his
ankles. It was proof against bullets and most nanotech projectiles.
There was a long item of luggage he had thrown up on the
closet shelf unopened. Hearing the reports of trouble, he had taken
the precaution of bringing these relics with him: an engraved lever-action
.44 rifle with low-tech iron sights and, as a last-ditch sort of
thing, a Colt revolver. These were unnecessarily glorious weapons,
but he had long ago gotten rid of any of his guns that did not have
historical or artistic value.
Two gunshots sounded from within the building, very close to him. Moments later, someone knocked at his door. Carl wrapped his duster around him, in case someone decided to fire through the door, and peered out through the peephole. To his surprise, he saw a white-haired Anglo gentleman with a handlebar mustache, gripping a semiautomatic. Carl had met him yesterday in the hotel bar; he was here trying to clear up some kind of business before the fall of Shanghai.
He opened the door. The two men regarded each other briefly.
"One might think we had come for an antique weapons convention,"
the gentleman said through his mustache. "Say, I'm frightfully sorry
to have disturbed you, but I thought you might like to know that
there are Fists in the hotel." He gestured down the corridor with his
gun. Carl poked his head out and discovered a dead bellboy
sprawled out in front of an open door, still clutching a long knife.
"As it happens, I was already up," said Carl Hollywood, "and
contemplating a bit of a stroll to the waterfront. Care to join me?"
"Delighted. Colonel Spence, Royal Joint Forces, Retired."
"Carl Hollywood."
On their way down the fire stairs, Spence killed two more hotel
employees whom he had, on somewhat ambiguous grounds,
identified as Fists. Carl was skeptical in both cases until Spence
ripped their shirts open to reveal the scarlet girdles beneath. "It's not
that they're really Fists, you see," Spence explained jovially. "Just
that when the Fists come, this sort of nonsense becomes terribly
fashionable."
After exchanging some more self-consciously dry humor about
whether they should settle their bills before departure, and how
much you were supposed to tip a bellboy who came after you with a
carving knife, they agreed it might be safest to exit through the
kitchens. Half a dozen dead Fists littered the floor here, their bodies
striped with the marks of cookie-cutters. Arriving at the exit they
found two fellow guests, both Israelis, staring at them with the fixed
gaze that implies the presence of a skull gun. Seconds later, they
were joined by two Zulu management consultants carrying long,
telescoping poles with nanoblades affixed to the ends, which they
used to destroy all of the light fixtures in their path. It took Carl a
minute to appreciate their plan: They were all about to step out into
a dark alley, and they would need their night vision.
The door began to shudder in its frame and make tremendous booming noises. Carl stepped forward and peered through the peephole; it was a couple of urban homeboy types having at it with a fire axe. He stepped away from the door, shrugging the rifle from his shoulder, levered in a shell, and fired it through the door, aiming away from the youths. The booming stopped abruptly, and they heard the head of the axe ringing like a bell as it fell to the pavement.
One of the Zulus kicked the door open and leapt into the alley,
whirling his blade in a vast, fatal arc like the blade of a helicopter,
slicing through a garbage can but not hitting any people. When Carl
came piling through the door a few seconds later, he saw several
young toughs scattering down the alley, dodging among several
dozen refugees, loiterers, and street people who pointed helpfully at
their receding backsides, making sure it was understood that their
only reason for being in this alley at this time was to act as a sort of
block watch on behalf of the gwailo visitors.
Without talking about it much, they fell into an improvised
formation there in the alley, where they had a bit of room to
maneuver. The Zulus went in front, whirling their poles over their
heads and hollering some kind of traditional war-cry that drove a
good many of the Chinese out of their path. One of the Jews went
behind the Zulus, using his skull gun to pick off any Fists who
charged them. Then came Carl Hollywood, who, with his height and
his rifle, seemed to have ended up with the job of long-range
reconnaissance and defense. Colonel Spence and the other Israeli
brought up the rear, walking backward most of the time.
This got them down the alley without much trouble, but that
was the easy part; when they reached the street, they were no longer
the only focus of action but mere motes in a sandstorm. Colonel
Spence discharged most of a clip into the air; the explosions were
nearly inaudible in the chaos, but the gouts of light from the
weapon's barrel drew some attention, and people in their immediate
vicinity actually got out of their way. Carl saw one of the Zulus do
something very ugly with his long weapon and looked away; then
he reflected that it was the Zulus' job to break trail and his to
concentrate on more distant threats. He turned slowly around as he
walked, trying to ignore the threat that was just beyond arm's length
and to get a view of the larger scene.
They had walked into a completely disorganized street fight
between the Coastal Republic forces and the Fists of Righteous
Harmony, which was not made any clearer by the fact that many of
the Coastals had defected by tying strips of red cloth round the arms
of their uniforms, and that many of the Fists were not wearing any
markings at all, and that many others who had no affiliation were taking advantage of the situation to loot stores and were being fought off by private guards; many of the looters were themselves being mugged by organized gangs.
They were on Nanjing Road, a broad thoroughfare leading
straight to the Bund and the Huang Pu, lined with four- and five-story
buildings so that many windows looked out over them, any
one of which might have contained a sniper.
A few of them did contain snipers, Carl realized, but many of
these were shooting across the street at each other, and the ones who
were firing into the street could have been shooting at anyone. Carl
saw one fellow with a laser-sighted rifle emptying clip after clip into
the street, and he reckoned that this constituted a clear and present
danger; so at a moment when their forward progress had stalled
momentarily, while the Zulus were waiting for an especially
desperate Coastal/Fist melee to resolve itself ahead of them, Carl
planted his feet, swung his rifle up to his shoulder, took aim, and
fired. In the dim fire- and torch-light rising up from the street, he
could see powder explode from the stone window frame just above
the sniper's head. The sniper cringed, then began to sweep the street
with his laser, looking for the source of the bullet.
Someone jostled Carl from behind. It was Spence, who had
been hit with something and lost the use of his leg. A Fist was in the
Colonel's face. Carl rammed the butt of the rifle into the man's
chin, sending him backward into the melee with his eyes rolled up
into their sockets. Then he levered in another shell, raised the
weapon to his shoulder again, and tried to find the window with his
sniper friend.
He was still there, tracing a ruby-red line patiently across the
boiling surface of the crowd. Carl took in a deep breath, released it
slowly, prayed that no one would bump into him, and squeezed the
trigger. The rifle butted him hard in the shoulder, and at the same
moment he saw the sniper's rifle fall out of the window, spinning
end over end, the laser beam sweeping through the smoke and steam
like the trace on a radar scope.
The whole thing had probably been a bad idea; if any of the
other snipers had seen this, they'd be wanting to get rid of him,
whatever their affiliation. Carl levered in another shell and then let
the rifle dangle from one hand, pointed down at the street, where it
wouldn't be so conspicuous. He got the other hand into Spence's
armpit and helped him continue down the street. The ends of
Spence's mustache wiggled as he continued with his endless and unflappable line of patter; Carl couldn't hear a word but nodded encouragingly. Not even the most literal-minded neo-Victorian
could take that stiff-upper-lip thing seriously; Carl realized now that
it was all done with a nod and a wink. It was not Colonel Spence's
way of saying that he wasn't scared; it was, rather, a code of sorts, a
face-saving way for him to admit that he was terrified half out of his
wits, and for Carl to admit likewise.
Several Fists rushed them at once; the Zulus got two, the
leading Israeli got one, but another came in and bounced his knife
from the Israeli's knife-proof jacket. Carl raised the rifle, clamping
the stock between his arm and his body, and fired from the hip. The
recoil nearly knocked the weapon out of his hand; the Fist
practically did a backflip.
He couldn't believe they had not reached the waterfront yet;
they had been doing this for hours. Something prodded him hard in
the back, causing him to stumble forward; he looked back over his
shoulder and saw a man trying to run him through with a bayonet.
Another man ran up and tried to wrench the rifle out of Carl's hand.
Carl, too startled to respond for a moment, finally let go of Spence,
reached across, and poked him in the eyes. A great explosion
sounded in his ear, and he looked over to see that Spence had
twisted himself round and shot the attacker who had the bayonet.
The Israeli who had been guarding their rear had simply vanished.
Carl raised his rifle toward the people who were converging on
them from the rear; that and Spence's pistol opened up a gratifying
clear space in their wake. But something more powerful and
terrifying was driving more people toward them from the side, and
as Carl tried to see what it was, he realized that a score of Chinese
people were now between him and the Zulus. The looks on their
faces were pained and panicky; they were not attacking, they were
being attacked.
Suddenly all of the Chinese were gone. Carl and Colonel
Spence found themselves commingled with a dozen or so Boers-
not just men, but women and children and elders too, a whole laager
on the move. All of them surged forward instinctively and
reabsorbed the vanguard of Carl's group. They were a block from
the waterfront.
The Boer leader, a stout man of about fifty, somehow identified Carl Hollywood as the leader, and they quickly redeployed what forces they had for the final push to the waterfront. The only thing Carl remembered of this conversation was the man saying, "Good. You've got Zulus."
The Boers in the vanguard were carrying some
sort of automatic weapons firing tiny nanotech high-explosive
rounds, which, indiscriminately used, could have turned the crowd
into a rampart of chewed meat; but they fired the weapons in
disciplined bursts even when the charging Fists penetrated to within
a sword's length. From time to time, one of them would raise his
head and sweep a row of windows with continuous automatic fire;
riflemen would tumble out of the darkness and spin down into the
street like rag dolls. The Boers must be wearing some kind of night
vision stuff.
Colonel Spence suddenly felt very heavy on Carl's arm,
and he realized that the Colonel was unconscious, or close to it. Carl
slung the rifle over his shoulder, bent down, and picked up Spence
in a fireman's carry.
They arrived at the waterfront and established a defensive
perimeter. The next question was: Were there any boats? But this
part of China was half underwater and seemed to have as many
boats as bicycles. Most of them seemed to have found their way
downstream to Shanghai during the gradual onslaught of the Fists.
So when they arrived at the water's edge, they discovered thousands
of people with boats, eager to transact some business. But as the
Boer leader rightly pointed out, it would be suicide to split up the
group among several tiny, unpowered craft; the Fists were paying
high bounties for the heads of barbarians. Much safer to wait for one
of the larger vessels out in the channel to make its way to shore,
where they could cut a deal with the captain and climb on board as a
group.
Several vessels, ranging from motor yachts to fishing trawlers,
were already vying to be the first to make that deal, shouldering
their way inexorably through the organic chaff of small boats
crowded along the shore.
A rhythmic beat had begun to resonate in their lungs. At first it
sounded like drumbeats, but as it drew closer it developed into the
sound of hundreds or thousands of human voices chanting in
unison: "Sha! Sha! Sha! Sha!" Nanjing Road began to vomit forth a
great crowd of people shoved out onto the Bund like exhaust pushed
out by a piston. They cleared out of the way, dispersing up and
down the riverfront.
An army of hoplites- professional warriors in battle armor-
was marching toward the river, a score abreast, completely filling
the width of Nanjing Road. These were not Fists; they were the
regular army, the vanguard of the Celestial Kingdom, and Carl Hollywood was appalled to realize that the only thing now standing between them and their three-decade march to the banks of the
Huang Pu was Carl Hollywood, his .44, and a handful of lightly
armed civilians.
A nice-looking yacht had penetrated to within a few meters of
the shore. The remaining Israeli, who was fluent in Mandarin, had
already commenced negotiations with its captain.
One of the Boers, a wiry grandmother with a white bun on her
head and a black bonnet pinned primly over that, conferred briefly
with the Boer leader. He nodded once, then caught her face in his
hands and kissed her.
She turned her back on the waterfront and began to march
toward the head of the advancing column of Celestials. The few
Chinese crazy enough to remain along the waterfront, respecting her
age and possible madness, parted to make way for her.
The negotiations over the boat appeared to have hit some kind
of snag. Carl Hollywood could see individual hoplites vaulting two
and three stories into the air, crashing headfirst into the windows of
the Cathay Hotel.
The Boer grandmother doggedly made her way forward until
she was standing in the middle of the Bund. The leader of the
Celestial column stepped toward her, covering her with some kind
of projectile weapon built into one arm of his suit and waving her
aside with the other. The Boer woman carefully got down on both
knees in the middle of the road, clasped her hands together in
prayer, and bowed her head.
Then she became a pearl of white light in the mouth of the
dragon. In an instant this pearl grew to the size of an airship. Carl
Hollywood had the presence of mind to close his eyes and turn his
head away, but he didn't have time to throw himself down; the
shock wave did that, slamming him full-length into the granite
paving-stones of the waterfront promenade and tearing about half of
his clothes from his body.
Some time passed before he was really conscious; he felt it must have been half an hour, though debris was still raining down around him, so five seconds was probably more like it. The hull of the white yacht had been caved in on one side and most of its crew flung into the river. But a minute later, a fishing trawler pulled up
and took the barbarians on board with only perfunctory negotiations. Carl nearly forgot about Spence and almost left him there; he found that he no longer had the strength to raise the Colonel's body from the ground, so he dragged him on board with the help of a couple of young Boers- identical twins, he realized, maybe thirteen years old. As they headed across the Huang Pu, Carl Hollywood huddled on a piled-up fishing net, limp and weak as
though his bones had all been shattered, staring at the hundred-foot crater in the center of the Bund and looking into the rooms of the Cathay Hotel, which had been neatly cross-sectioned by the bomb in the Boer woman's body.
Within fifteen minutes, they were free on the streets of Pudong. Carl Hollywood found his way to the local New Atlantan encampment, reported for duty, and spent a few minutes composing a letter to Colonel Spence's widow; the Colonel had bled to death from a leg wound during the voyage across the river. Then he spread his pages out on the ground before him and returned to the pursuit that had occupied him in his hotel room for
the past few days, namely, the search for Miranda. He had begun this search at the bidding of Lord Finkle-McGraw, pursued it with mounting passion over the last few days as he had begun to understand how much he'd been missing Miranda, and was now pressing the work desperately; for he had realized that in this search might reside the only hope for the salvation of the tens of thousands of Outer Tribesmen now encamped upon the dead streets of the Pudong Economic Zone.
Final onslaught of the Fists;
victory of the Celestial Kingdom;
refugees in the domain of the Drummers;
Miranda.
The Huang Pu stopped the advance of the Celestial Army
toward the sea, but having crossed the river farther inland, it
continued to move northward up the Pudong Peninsula at a walking
pace, driving before it flocks of starving peasants much like the
ones who had been their harbingers in Shanghai.
The occupants of Pudong- a mixture of barbarians, Coastal
Republic Chinese who feared persecution at the hands of their
Celestial cousins, and Nell's little sisters, a third of a million strong
and constituting a new phyle unto themselves- were thus caught
between the Celestials on the south, the Huang Pu on the west, the Yangtze on the north, and the ocean on the east. All the links to the artificial islands offshore had been cut.
The geotects of Imperial Tectonics, in their Classical and
Gothic temples high atop New Chusan, made various efforts to
build a temporary bridge between their island and Pudong. It was
simple enough to throw a truss or floating bridge across the gap, but
the Celestials now had the technology to blow such things up faster
than they could be constructed. On the second day of the siege, they
caused the island to reach toward Pudong with a narrow pseudopod
of smart coral, rooted on the ocean floor. But there were very simple
and clear limits to how fast such things could be grown, and as the
refugees continued to throng the narrow defiles of downtown
Pudong, bearing increasingly dire reports of the Celestials' advance,
it became evident to everyone that the land bridge would not be
completed in time.
The encampments of the various tribes moved north and east as
they were forced out of downtown by the pressure of the refugees
and fear of the Celestials, until several miles of shoreline had been
claimed and settled by the various groups. The southern end, along
the seashore, was anchored by the New Atlantans, who had prepared
themselves to fend off any assaults along the beach. The chain of
camps extended northward from there, curving along the ocean and
then eastward along the banks of the Yangtze to the opposite end,
which was anchored by Nippon against any onslaught across the
tidal flats. The entire center of the line was guarded against a direct
frontal assault by Princess Nell's tribe/army of twelve-year-old
girls, who were gradually trading in their pointed sticks for more
modern weapons compiled from portable Sources owned by the
Nipponese and the New Atlantans.
Carl Hollywood had been assigned to military duty as soon as
he reported to the New Atlantan authorities, despite his efforts to
convince his superiors that he might be of more use pursuing his
own line of research. But then a message came through from the
highest levels of Her Majesty's government. The first part of it
praised Carl Hollywood for his "heroic" actions in getting the late
Colonel Spence out of Shanghai and suggested that a knighthood
might be waiting for him if he ever got out of Pudong. The second
part of it named him as a special envoy of sorts to Her Royal
Highness, Princess Nell.
Reading the message, Carl was momentarily stunned that his Sovereign was according equivalent status to Nell; but upon some reflection he saw that it was simultaneously just and pragmatic.
During his time in the streets of Pudong, he had seen enough of the
Mouse Army (as they called themselves, for some reason) to know
that they did, in fact, constitute a new ethnic group of sorts, and that
Nell was their undisputed leader. Victoria's esteem for the new
sovereign was well-founded. At the same time, that the Mouse
Army was currently helping to protect many New Atlantans from
being taken hostage, or worse, by the Celestial Kingdom made such
recognition an eminently pragmatic step.
It fell to Carl Hollywood, who had been a member of his
adopted tribe only for a few months, to forward Her Majesty's
greetings and felicitations to Princess Nell, a girl about whom he
had heard much from Miranda but whom he had never met and
could hardly fathom. It did not take very deep reflection to see the
hand of Lord Alexander Chung-Sik Finkle-McGraw in all this.
Freed from day-to-day responsibilities, he walked north from
the New Atlantan camp on the third day of the siege, following the
tideline. Every few yards he came to a tribal border and presented a
visa that, under the provisions of the Common Economic Protocol,
was supposed to afford him free passage. Some of the tribal zones
were only a meter or two wide, but their owners jealously guarded
their access to the sea, sitting up all night staring out into the surf,
waiting for some unspecified form of salvation. Carl Hollywood
strolled through encampments of Ashantis, Kurds, Armenians,
Navajos, Tibetans, Senderos, Mormons, Jesuits, Lapps, Pathans,
Tutsis, the First Distributed Republic and its innumerable offshoots,
Heartlanders, Irish, and one or two local CryptNet cells who had
now been flushed into the open. He discovered synthetic phyles he
had never heard of, but this did not surprise him.
Finally he came to a generous piece of beach frontage guarded
by twelve-year-old Chinese girls. At this point he presented his
credentials from Her Majesty Queen Victoria II, which were
extremely impressive, so much so that many of the girls gathered
around to marvel at them. Carl Hollywood was surprised to hear
them all speaking perfect English in a rather high Victorian style.
They seemed to prefer it when discussing things in the abstract, but
when it came to practical matters they reverted to Mandarin.
He was ushered through the lines into the Mouse Army's
encampment, which was mostly an open-air hospice for ragged, sick
and injured discards from other phyles. The ones who weren't flat
on their backs, being tended to by Mouse Nurses, were sitting on the sand, hugging their knees, staring out across the water in the direction of New Chusan. The slope of the land was quite gentle
here, and a person could wade for a good long stone's throw into the
waves.
One person had: a young woman whose long hair fell about her shoulders and trailed in the water around her waist. She stood with her back to the shore, holding a book in her hands, and did not move for a long time.
"What is she doing out there?" Carl Hollywood said to his Mouse Army escort, who had five little stars on her lapels. In Pudong, he had figured out their insignia: Five stars meant that she was in charge of (4)5
people, or 1,024. A regimental commander, then.
"She is calling to her mother."
"Her mother?"
"Her mother is beneath the waves," the woman said. "She is a Queen."
"Queen of what?"
"She is the Queen of the Drummers who live beneath the sea."
And then Carl Hollywood knew that Princess Nell was searching for Miranda too. He threw his long coat down on the sand and sloshed out Into the Pacific, accompanied by the officer, and remained at a judicious distance, partly to show due respect, and partly because Nell had a sword in her waistband. Her face was
inclined over the pages of her book like a focusing lens, and he half expected the pages to curl and smoke under her gaze.
She looked up from the book after some time. The officer spoke to her in a low voice. Carl Hollywood did not know the protocol when one was up to midthigh in the East China Sea, so he stepped forward, bowed as low as he could under the circumstances, and handed Princess Nell the scroll from Queen Victoria II.
She accepted it wordlessly and read it through, then went back to the top and read it again. Then she handed it to her officer, who rolled it up carefully. Princess Nell stared out over the waves for a while, then looked Carl in the eye and said quietly, "I accept your credentials and request that you convey my warm thanks and regard to Her Majesty, along with my apologies that circumstances prevent me from composing a more formal response to her kind letter, which at any other time would naturally be my highest priority."
"I shall do so at the earliest opportunity, Your Majesty," Carl Hollywood said. Hearing these words, Princess Nell looked a bit unsteady and shifted her feet to maintain her balance; though this might have been the undertow. Carl realized that she had never been addressed in this way before; that, until she had been recognized in this fashion by Victoria, she had never fully realized her position.
"The woman you seek is named Miranda," he said.
All thoughts of crowns, queens, and armies seemed to vanish from Nell's mind, and she was just a young lady again, looking for-what? Her mother? Her teacher? Her friend? Carl Hollywood spoke to Nell in a low gentle voice, projecting just enough to be heard over the strumming of the waves. He spoke to her of Miranda, and of the book, and of the old stories about the deeds of Princess Nell, which he had watched from the wings, as it were, by looking in on Miranda's feed many years ago at the Parnasse.
Over the next two days many of the refugees on the shore got away on air or surface ships, but a few of these were destroyed in spectacular fashion before they could get out of range of the Celestial Kingdom's weaponry. Three-quarters of the Mouse Army evacuated itself through the technique of stripping naked and
walking into the ocean en masse, linked arm-in-arm into a flexible and unsinkable raft that gradually, slowly, exhaustingly paddled across the sea to New Chusan. Rumors spread rapidly up and down the length of the coast; the tribal borders seemed to accelerate rather than hinder this process as interfaces between languages and
cultures spawned new variants of each rumor, tailored to the local fears and prejudices. The most popular rumor was that the Celestials planned to give everyone safe passage and that the attacks were being carried out by intelligent mines that had run out of control or, at worst, by a few fanatical commanders who were defying orders
and who would soon be brought to heel. There was a second, stranger rumor that gave some people an incentive to remain on the shore and not entrust themselves to the evacuation ships: A young woman with a book and a sword was creating magical tunnels from out of the deep that would carry them all away to safety. Such ideas
were naturally met with skepticism among more rational cultures, but on the morning of the sixth day of the siege, the neap tide carried a peculiar omen up onto the sand: a harvest of translucent eggs the size of beach balls. 'When their fragile shells were torn open, they were found to contain sculpted backpacks pierced with a fractal pattern of delicate louvers. A stiff hose extended from the top and connected to a facemask. Under the circumstances, it was not difficult to divine the use of these objects. People strapped the packs onto their backs, slipped on the facemasks, and plunged into the water. The backpacks acted like the gills of a fish and provided a
steady supply of oxygen.
The gill packs did not carry any tribal identification; they merely washed up onto the beach, by the thousands, with each high tide, cast up organically by the sea. The Atlantans, Nipponese, and others each assumed that they had come from their own tribes. But many perceived a connection between this and the rumors of Princess Nell and the tunnels beneath the waves. Such people migrated toward the center of the Pudong coast, where the tiny, weak, and flaky tribes had all been concentrated. This contraction of the defensive line became inevitable as the number of defenders was shrunk by the evacuation. Borders between tribes became unstable
and finally dissolved, and on the fifth day of the siege the barbarians had all become fungible and formed into a huddle on the uttermost point of the Pudong Peninsula, several tens of thousands of persons packed into an area not exceeding a few city blocks. Beyond that were the Chinese refugees, mostly persons strongly identified with
the Coastal Republic who knew that they could never blend into the Celestial Kingdom. These did not dare to invade the camp of the refugees, who were still armed with powerful weapons, but by advancing an inch at a time and never retreating, they insensibly shrank the perimeter so that many barbarians found themselves
standing knee-deep in the ocean.
The rumor spread that the woman called Princess Nell had a wizard and adviser named Carl, who had appeared out of nowhere one day knowing nearly everything that Princess Nell did, and a few things she didn't. This man, according to rumor, had in his possession a number of magic keys that gave him and the Princess
power to speak with the Drummers who lived beneath the waves.
On the seventh day, Princess Nell walked naked into the sea at dawn, vanished beneath waves turned pink by the sunrise, and did not return. Carl followed her a minute later, though unlike the Princess he took the precaution of wearing a gill pack. Then all of the barbarians stepped into the ocean, leaving their filthy clothes
strewn across the beach, relinquishing the last foothold of Chinese soil to the Celestial Kingdom. They all walked into the ocean until their heads disappeared. The rearguard was made up of the last part of the Mouse Army, which charged naked into the surf, linked up into a raft, and made its way slowly out to sea, nudging a few sick
and wounded along with them in makeshift rafts. By the time the last girl's foot broke contact with the sandy ocean bottom, the end of the land had already been claimed by a man with a scarlet girdle round his waist, who stood on the shore laughing to think that now the Middle Kingdom was at last a whole country once more.
The last foreign devil to depart from the Middle Kingdom was a blond Victorian gentleman with gray eyes, who stood in the waves for some time looking back over Pudong before he turned around and continued his descent. As the sea rose over him, it lifted the bowler from his head, and the hat continued to bob on the tide for
some minutes as the Chinese detonated strings of firecrackers on the shore and tiny shreds of the red paper wrappers drifted over the sea like cherry petals.
. . .
On one of her forays into the surf, Nell had encountered a man- a Drummer- who had come swimming out of the deep, naked except for a gill pack. This should have astonished her; instead, she had known he was out there before she saw him, and when he came close, she could feel things happening in her mind that were coming in from outside. There was something in her brain that made her connected to the Drummers.
Nell had drawn up some general plans and given them to her
engineers for further elaboration, and they had given them to Carl,
who had taken them to a functioning portable M.C. in the New
Atlantan camp and compiled a little system for examining and
manipulating nanotechnological devices.
In the dark, motes of light sparkled in Nell's flesh, like airplane
beacons in the night sky. They scraped one of these away with a
scalpel and examined it. They found similar devices circulating in
her bloodstream. These things, they realized, must have been put
into Nell's blood when she was raped. It was clear that the sparkling
lights in Nell's flesh were beacons signaling to others across the
gulf that separates each of us from our neighbors.
Carl opened one of the things from Nell's blood and found a
rod logic system inside, and a tape drive containing some few
gigabytes of data. The data was divided into discrete chunks, each
one of which was separately encrypted. Carl tried all of the keys that
he had obtained from John Percival Hackworth and found that one
of them- Hackworth's key- unlocked some of the chunks. When
he examined the decrypted contents, he discovered fragments of a
plan for some kind of nanotechnological device.
They drew blood from several volunteers and found that one of
them had the same little devices in his blood. When they put two of
these devices in close proximity, they locked onto one another using
lidar and embraced, exchanging data and performing some sort of
computation that threw off waste heat.
The devices lived in the blood of the human race like viruses
and passed from one person to the next during sex or any other
exchange of bodily fluids; they were smart packets of data, just like
the ones traversing the media network, and by mating with one
another in the blood, they formed a vast system of communication,
parallel to and probably linked with the dry Net of optical lines and
copper wires. Like the dry Net, the wet Net could be used for doing
computations- for running programs. And it was now clear that
John Percival Hackworth was using it for exactly that, running some
kind of vast distributed program of his own devising. He was
designing something.
"Hackworth is the Alchemist," Nell said, "and he is using the wet Net to design the Seed."
. . .
Half a kilometer offshore, the tunnels began. Some of them
must have been there for many years, for they were rough as tree
trunks, encrusted with barnacles and algae. But it was clear that in
the last few days they had forked and split organically, like roots
questing for moisture; clean new tubes forced their way out through
the encrustation and ran uphill toward the tide line, splitting again
and again until many orifices presented themselves to the refugees.
The shoots terminated in lips that grabbed people and drew them in,
like the tip of an elephant's trunk, accepting the refugees with a
minimum of seawater. The tunnels were lined with mediatronic
images urging them forward into the deep; it always seemed as
though a warm dry well-lit space awaited them just a bit farther
down the line. But the light moved along with the viewer so that
they were drawn down the tunnels in a kind of peristalsis. The
refugees came to the main tunnel, the old encrusted one, and
continued moving on, now packed together in a solid mass, until
they were disgorged into a large open cavity far below the surface of
the ocean. Here, food and fresh water awaited them and they ate
hungrily.
Two people did not eat or drink except from the provisions
they had brought with them; these were Nell and Carl.
After they had discovered the nanosites in Nell's flesh that
made her a part of the Drummers, Nell had stayed up through
the night and designed a counternanosite, one that would seek out
and destroy the Drummers' devices. She and Carl had both put these
devices into their bloodstreams, so that Nell was now free of the
Drummers' influences and both of them would remain so.
Nevertheless they did not press their luck by eating of the
Drummers' food, and it was well, because after their meal the
refugees became drowsy and lay down on the floor and slept, steam
rising from their naked flesh, and before long the sparks of light
began to come on, like stars coming out as the sun goes down. After
two hours the stars had merged together into a continuous surface of
flickering light, bright enough to read by, as if a full moon were
shining down upon the bodies of slumbering revelers in a meadow.
The refugees, now Drummers, all slept and dreamed the same
dream, and the abstract lights flickering across the mediatronic
lining of the cavern began to coalesce and organize themselves into
dark memories from deep within their unconscious mind. Nell
began to see things from her own life, experiences long since
assimilated into the words of the Primer but here shown once more
in a raw and terrifying form. She closed her eyes; but the walls
made sounds too, from which she could not escape.
Carl Hollywood was monitoring the signals passing through
the walls of the tunnels, avoiding the emotional content of these
images by reducing them to binary digits and trying to puzzle out
their internal codes and protocols.
"We have to go," Nell said finally, and Carl arose and followed
her through a randomly chosen exit. The tunnel forked and forked
again, and Nell chose forks by intuition. Sometimes the tunnels
would widen into great caverns full of luminescent Drummers,
sleeping or fucking or simply pounding on the walls. The caverns
always had many outlets, which forked and forked and converged
upon other caverns, the web of tunnels so vast and complicated that
it seemed to fill the entire ocean, like neural bodies with their
dendrites knitting and ramifying to occupy the whole volume of the skull.
A low drumming sound had been skirting the lower limits of
perceptibility ever since they had left the cavern where the refugees
slumbered. Nell had first taken it for the beat of submarine currents on the walls of the tunnel, but as it grew stronger, she knew that it was the Drummers talking to each other, convened in some central
cavern sending messages out across their network. Realizing this,
she felt a sense of urgency verging on panic that they find the
central assembly, and for some time they ran through the perfectly
bewildering three-dimensional maze, trying to locate the epicenter
of the drumming.
Carl Hollywood could not run as quickly as the nimble Nell
and eventually lost her at a fork in the tunnels. From there he made
his own judgments, and after some time had passed- it was
impossible to know how long- his tunnel dovetailed with another
that was carrying a stream of Drummers downward toward the floor
of the ocean. Carl recognized some of these Drummers as former
refugees from the beaches at Pudong.
The sound of the drumming did not build gradually but
exploded to a deafening, mind-dissolving roar as Carl emerged into
a vast cavern, a conical amphitheatre that must have been a
kilometer wide, roofed with a storm of mediatronic images that
played across a vast dome. The Drummers, visible by the flickering
light of the overhead media storm and by their own internal light,
moved up and down the slopes of the cone in a kind of convection
pattern. Caught up in an eddy, Carl was transported down toward
the center and found that an orgy of fantastic dimensions was
underway. The steam of vaporized sweat rose from the center of the
pit in a cloud. The bodies pressing against Carl's naked skin were so
hot that they almost burned him, as if everyone were running a high
fever, and in some logical abstract compartment of his mind that
was, somehow, continuing to run along its own reasonable course,
he realized why: They were exchanging packets of data with their
bodily fluids, the packets were mating in their blood, the rod logic
throwing off heat that drove up their core temperature.
The orgy went on for hours, but the pattern of convection gradually slowed down and condensed into a stable arrangement, like a circulating crowd in a theatre that settles into its assigned seats as curtain time approaches A broad open space had formed at the center of the pit and the innermost ring of spectators consisted of men as if these were in some sense the winners of the enormous fornication tournament that was nearing its final round. A lone Drummer circulated around this innermost ring, handing something out; the something turned out to be mediatronic condoms that glowed bright colors when they were stripped onto the men's erect phalluses.
A lone woman entered the ring. The floor at the absolute center of the pit rose up beneath her feet, shoving her into the air as on an altar. The drumming built to an unbearable crescendo and then stopped. Then it began again a very slow steady beat and the men in the inner circle began to dance around her. Carl Hollywood saw that the woman in the center was Miranda.
He saw it all now: that the refugees had been gathered into the realm of the Drummers for the harvest of fresh data running in their bloodstreams, that this data had been infused into the wet Net in the course of the great orgy, and that all of it was now going to be dumped into Miranda, whose body would play host to the climax of some computation that would certainly burn her alive in the process.
It was Hackworth's doing; this was the culmination of his effort to design the Seed, and in so doing to dissolve the foundations of New Atlantis and Nippon and all of the societies that had grown up around the concept of a centralized, hierarchical Feed.
A lone figure, remarkable because her skin did not emit any light, was fighting her way in toward the center. She burst into the inner circle, knocking down a dancer who got in her way, and climbed up onto the central altar where Miranda lay on her back, arms outstretched as if crucified, her skin a galaxy of colored lights.
Nell cradled Miranda's head in her arms, bent down, and kissed her, not a soft brush of the lips but a savage kiss with open mouth, and she bit down hard as she did it, biting through her own lips and Miranda's so that their blood mingled. The light shining from Miranda's body diminished and slowly went out as the nanosites were hunted down and destroyed by the hunter-killers that had crossed into her blood from Nell's. Miranda came awake and arose, her arms draped weakly around Nell's neck.
The drumming had stopped; the Drummers all sat impassively, clearly content to wait- for years if necessary-for a woman who could take Miranda's place. The light from their flesh had diminished, and the overhead mediatron had gone dim and vague.
Carl Hollywood, seeing at last a role for himself, stepped into the center, got one arm under Miranda's knees and another beneath her shoulders, and lifted her into the air. Nell turned around and led them up out of the cavern, holding her sword out before her; but none of the Drummers moved to stop them.
They passed up through many tunnels, always taking the uphill fork until they saw sunlight shining down from above through the waves, casting lines of white light on the translucent roof. Nell severed the tunnel behind them, wielding her sword like the sweep of a clock's hand. The warm water rushed in on them. Nell swam up toward the light. Miranda was not swimming strongly, and Carl was torn between a panicky desire to reach the surface and his duty to Miranda. Then he saw shadows descending from above, dozens of naked girls swimming downward, garlands of silver bubbles streaming from their mouths, their almond eyes excited and mischievous. Carl and Miranda were gripped by many gentle hands and borne upward into the light.
New Chusan rose above them, a short swim away, and up on the mountain they could hear the bells of the cathedral ringing.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Neal Stephenson is the author of
The Diamond Age, Snow Crash,
Zodiac, and The Big U
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Jeremy Bornstein
Douglas (Carl Hollywood) Crockford
K. Eric Drexier
Wayne "Hank" Hansen
Steve Horst
Steve Johnson
Marco Kakofen
Sachiko Emma Kashiwaya
Kevin Kelly
Alan Moores
Chris Peterson
Rattana Schicketanz
Dean Tribble