The Diamond Age (24 page)

  Judge Fang had been expecting that the ship would be some kind of bulk carrier, consisting almost entirely of huge compartments, but the first thing he saw was a long corridor running parallel to the keel, seemingly the length of the entire ship. Young women in white, pink, or occasionally blue dresses and sensible shoes bustled back and forth along this corridor entering into and emerging from its innumerable doors.

  There was no formal welcome, no captain or other officers. As soon as the boat girls had assisted them on board, they bowed and took their leave. Dr. X began to amble down the corridor, and Judge Fang followed him. The young women in the white dresses bowed as they approached, then continued on their way, having no time to waste on advanced formalities. Judge Fang had the general sense that they were peasant women, though none of them had the deep tans that were normally a mark of low social status in China. The boat girls had worn blue, so he gathered that this color identified people with nautical or engineering duties. In general, the ones in the pink dresses were younger and slenderer than the ones in the white dresses. The tailoring was different too; the pink dresses closed up the middle of the back, the white ones had two zippers symmetrically placed in the front.

  Dr. X chose a door, apparently at random, swung it open, and held it for Judge Fang. Judge Fang bowed slightly and stepped through it into a room about the dimensions of a basketball court, though with a lower ceiling. It was quite warm and humid, and dimly lit. The first thing he saw was more girls in white dresses, bowing to him. Then he realized that the room was otherwise filled with cribs, hundreds of cribs, and that each crib had a perfect little girl baby in it. Young women in pink bustled back and forth with diapers. From place to place, a woman sat beside a crib, the front of her white dress unzipped, breast-feeding a baby.

  Judge Fang felt dizzy. He was not willing to acknowledge the reality of what he saw. He had mentally prepared himself for tonight's meeting with Dr. X by reminding himself, over and over, that the Doctor was capable of any trickery, that he could not take anything he saw at face value. But as many first-time fathers had realized in the delivery room, there was something about the sight of an actual baby that focused the mind. In a world of abstractions, nothing was more concrete than a baby.

  Judge Fang whirled on his heel and stormed out of the room, brushing rudely past Dr. X. He picked a direction at random and walked, strode, ran down the corridor, past five doors, ten, fifty, then stopped for no particular reason and burst through another door.

  It might as well have been the same room.

  He felt almost nauseous and had to take stern measures to keep tears from his eyes. He ran out of the room and stormed through the ship for some distance, going up several stairways, past several decks. He stepped into another room, chosen at random, and found the floor covered with cribs, evenly spaced in rows and columns, each one containing a sleeping one-year-old, dressed in fuzzy pink jammies with a hood and a set of mouse ears, each one clutching an identical white security blanket and nestled up with a stuffed animal. Here and there, a young woman in a pink dress sat on the floor on a bamboo mat, reading a book or doing needlework.

  One of these women, close to Judge Fang, set her needlework down, rearranged herself into a kneeling position, and bowed to him. Judge Fang gave her a perfunctory bow in return, then padded over to the nearest crib. A little girl with astonishingly thick eyelashes lay there, deeply asleep, breathing regularly, her mouse ears sticking out through the bars of the crib, and as Judge Fang stood and stared at her, he imagined that he could hear the breathing of all the children on this ship at once, combined into a gentle sigh that calmed his heart. All of these children, sleeping so peacefully; everything must be okay. It was going to be fine.

  He turned away and saw that the young woman was smiling at him. It was not a flirting smile or a silly girlish smile but a calm and confident smile. Judge Fang supposed that wherever Dr. X was on this ship, he must be smiling in much the same way at this moment.
. . .

 
When Dr. X started the cine, Judge Fang recognized it right away: This was the work of the mediagrapher PhyrePhox, who was still, as far as he knew, languishing in a holding cell in downtown Shanghai.

  The setting was an outcropping of stones amid a dun, dust-scoured vastitude, somewhere in the interior of China. The camera panned across the surrounding waste, and Judge Fang did not have to be told that these had once been fertile fields, before the water table had been drained out from under them.

  A couple of people approached, kicking up a plume of dust as they walked, carrying a small bundle. As they drew closer, Judge Fang could see that they were horrifyingly gaunt, dressed in dirty rags. They came to the center of the rocky outcropping and laid the bundle on the ground, then turned and walked away. Judge Fang turned away from the mediatron and dismissed it with a wave of the hand; he did not have to see it to know that the bundle was a baby, probably female.

  "This scene could have happened anytime in the history of China," Dr. X said. They were sitting in a rather spartan wardroom in the vessel's superstructure. "It has always been done with us. The great rebellions of the 1800's were fueled by throngs of angry young men who could not find wives. In the darkest days of the Mao Dynasty's birth control policy, two hundred thousand little ones were exposed in this fashion"-he gestured toward the frozen image on the mediatron-"each year. Recently, with the coming of civil war and the draining of the Celestial Kingdom's aquifers, it has once again become common. The difference is that now the babies are collected. We have been doing it for three years."

  "How many?" Judge Fang said.

  "A quarter of a million to date," Dr. X said. "Fifty thousand on this ship alone."

  Judge Fang had to set his teacup down for a few moments while he grappled with this notion. Fifty thousand lives on this ship alone.

  "It won't work," Judge Fang said finally. "You can raise them this way until they are toddlers, perhaps-but what happens when they are older and bigger, and must be educated and given space to run around and play?"

  "It is indeed a formidable challenge," Dr. X said gravely, "but I trust you will take to heart the words of the Master: 'Let every man consider virtue as what devolves on himself. He may not yield the performance of it even to his teacher.' I wish you good fortune, Magistrate."

  This statement had much the same effect as if Dr. X had hit the Judge over the head with a board: startling, yes, but the full impact was somehow delayed.

  "I'm not sure if I follow you, Doctor."

  Dr. X crossed his wrists and held them up in the air. "I surrender. You may take me into custody. Torture will not be necessary; I have already prepared a signed confession."

  Judge Fang had not hitherto realized that Dr. X had such a well-developed sense of humor. He decided to play along. "As much as I would like to bring you to justice, Doctor, I am afraid that I cannot accept your surrender, as we are out of my jurisdiction."

  The Doctor nodded to a waiter, who swung the cabin door open to let in a cool breeze-and a view of the gaudy waterfront of the Leased Territories, suddenly no more than a mile away from them. "As you can see, I have ordered the ships to come into your jurisdiction, Your Honor," Dr. X said. He gestured invitingly out the door.

  Judge Fang stepped out onto an open gangway and looked over the rail to see four other giant ships following in this one's wake. Dr. X's reedy voice came out through the open door. "You may now take me, and the crew of these ships, to prison for the crime of baby-smuggling. You may also take into custody these ships-and all quarter-million of the little mice on board. I trust you can find qualified caregivers somewhere within your jurisdiction."

  Judge Fang gripped the rail with both hands and bowed his head. He was very close to clinical shock. It would be perfectly suicidal to call the Doctor's bluff. The concept of having personal responsibility for so many lives was terrifying enough in and of itself. But to think of what would eventually become of all of these little girls in the hands of the corrupt officialdom of the Coastal Republic.

  Dr. X continued, "I have no doubt that you will find some way to care for them. As you have demonstrated in the case of the book and the girl, you are too wise a magistrate not to understand the importance of proper upbringing of small children. No doubt you will exhibit the same concern for each one of these quarter of a million infants as you did for one little barbarian girl."

  Judge Fang stood up straight, whirled, and strode back through the door. "Shut the door and leave the room," he said to the waiter. When he and the Doctor were alone together, Judge Fang faced Dr. X, descended to his knees, bent forward, and knocked his forehead against the deck three times.

  "Please, Your Honor!" Dr. X exclaimed, "it is I who should be doing honor to you in this way."

  "For some time I have been contemplating a change of career," Judge Fang said, rising to an upright kneeling position. He stopped before continuing and thought it through once more. But Dr. X had left him no way out. It would have been uncharacteristic of the Doctor to spring a trap that could be escaped.

  As the Master had said,
The mechanic, who wishes to do his work well, must first sharpen his tools. When you are living in any state, take service with the most worthy among its great officers, and make friends of the most virtuous among its scholars.

 
"Actually, I am satisfied with my career, but dissatisfied with my tribal affiliation. I have grown disgusted with the Coastal Republic and have concluded that my true home lies in the Celestial Kingdom. I have often wondered whether the Celestial Kingdom is in need of magistrates, even those as poorly qualified as I."

  "This is a question I will have to take up with my superiors," Dr. X said. "However, given that the Celestial Kingdom currently has no magistrates whatsoever and therefore no real judicial system, I deem it likely that some role can be found for one with your superb qualifications."

  "I see now why you desired the little girl's book so strongly," Judge Fang said. "These young ones must all be educated."

  "I do not desire the book itself so much as I desire its designer-the artifex Hackworth," Dr. X said. "As long as the book was somewhere in the Leased Territories, there was some hope that Hackworth could find it-it is the one thing he desires most. If I could have found the book, I could have extinguished that hope, and Hackworth would then have had to approach me, either to get the book back or to compile another copy."

  "You desire some service from Hackworth?"

  "He is worth a thousand lesser engineers. And because of various hardships over the last few decades, the Celestial Kingdom does not have even that many lesser engineers; they have all been lured away by the promise of riches in the Coastal Republic."

  "I will approach Hackworth tomorrow," Judge Fang said. "I will inform him that the man known to the barbarians as Dr. X has found the lost copy of the book."

  "Good," Dr. X said, "I shall expect to hear from him."

Hackworth's dilemma;  an unanticipated return to the hong of Dr. X; hitherto unseen ramifications of Dr. X's premises;  a criminal is brought to justice.

  Hackworth had some time to run through the logic of the thing one more time as he waited in the front room of Dr. X's hong, waiting for the old man to free himself up from what sounded like a twelve-way cine conference. On his first visit here he'd been too nervous to see anything, but today he was settled cozily in the cracked leather armchair in the corner, demanding tea from the help and thumbing through Dr. X's books. It was such a relief to have nothing to lose. Since that deeply alarming visit from Chang, Hackworth had been at his wits' end. He had made an immense cock-up of the whole thing. Sooner or later his crime would come out and his family would be disgraced, whether or not he gave money to Chang. Even if he somehow managed to get the Primer back, his life was ruined.

  When he had received word that Dr. X had won the race to recover the lost copy of the Primer, the thing had turned from bad to farcical. He had cut a day at work and gone for a long hike in the Royal Ecological Conservatory. By the time he had returned home, sunburned and pleasantly exhausted, he had been in a much better mood. That Dr. X had the Primer actually improved his situation.

  In exchange for the Primer, the Doctor would presumably want something from Hackworth. In this case, it was not likely to be a mere bribe, as Chang had hinted; all of the money Hackworth had, or was ever likely to make, could not be of interest to Dr. X. It was much more likely that the Doctor would want some sort of a favor-he might ask Hackworth to design something, to do a little bit of consulting work, as it were. Hackworth wanted so badly to believe this that he had bolstered the hypothesis with much evidence, real and phantasmal, during the latter part of his hike. It was well-known that the Celestial Kingdom was desperately far behind in the nanotechnological arms race; that Dr. X himself devoted his valuable time to rooting through the debris of the New Atlantan immune system proved this. Hackworth's skills could be of measureless value to them.

  If this were true, then Hackworth had a way out. He would do some job for the Doctor. In exchange, he would get the Primer back, which was what he wanted more than anything. As part of the deal, Dr. X could no doubt find some way to eliminate Chang from Hackworth's list of things to worry about; Hackworth's crime would never be known to his phyle.
. . .

 
Victorians and Confucians alike had learned new uses for the foyer, anteroom, or whatever it was called, and for the old etiquette of visiting cards. For that matter, all tribes with sophistication in nanotech understood that visitors had to be carefully examined before they could be admitted into one's inner sanctum, and that such examination, carried out by thousands of assiduous reconnaissance mites, took time. So elaborate waiting-room etiquette had flourished, and sophisticated people all over the world understood that when they called upon someone, even a close friend, they could expect to spend some time sipping tea and perusing magazines in a front room infested with unobtrusive surveillance equipment.