The Diamond Age (29 page)

  Nell was a bit startled by this turn of events, and closed the Primer for a while, and sat in the dark listening to Harv wheeze and Burt snore in the next room. She'd been looking forward to the moment when Dinosaur would kill Baron Burt, just as Odysseus had done to the Cyclops. But now it wasn't going to happen. Baron Burt would wake up, realize he'd been tricked, and hurt them worse.

  They'd be stuck in the Dark Castle forever.

  Nell was tired of being in the Dark Castle. She knew it was time to get out. She opened the Primer.

  "Princess Nell knew what she had to do," Nell said. Then she closed the Primer and left it on her pillow.

  Even if she hadn't learned how to read pretty well, she would have had no trouble finding what she wanted just by using the M.C.'s mediaglyphics. It was a thing she'd seen people use in the old passives, a thing she'd seen when Mom's old boyfriend Brad had taken her to visit the horse barn in Dovetail. It was called a screwdriver, and you could have the M.C. make them in all different shapes: long, short, fat, skinny.

  She had it make one that was very long and very skinny. When it was finished, it made the hissing sound that it always made, and she thought she heard Burt stirring on the sofa.

  She peeked into the living room. He was still lying there, his eyes closed, but his arms were moving around. His head turned from side to side once, and she could see a glimmer between his half-opened eyelids.

  He was about to wake up and hurt her some more.

  She held the screwdriver out in front of her like a lance and ran straight toward him.

  At the last instant she faltered. The tool went astray and skidded across his forehead, leaving a trail of red stitches. Nell was so horrified that she dropped it and jumped back Burt was shaking his head violently back and forth.

  He opened his eyes and looked right at Nell. Then he put his hand to his forehead and brought it back all bloody. He sat up on the sofa, still uncomprehending. The screwdriver rolled off and bounced on the floor. He picked it up and found the tip bloody, then fixed his eyes on Nell, who had shrunk into the corner of the room. Nell knew that she had done the wrong thing. Dinosaur had told her to run away, and she had pestered him with questions instead.

  "Harv!" she said. But her voice came out all dry and squeaky, like a mouse's. "We must fly!"

  "Yeah, you're gonna fly all right," Burt said swinging his feet around to the floor. "Right out the fucking window you're gonna fly."

  Harv came out. He was carrying his nunchuks under his injured arm and the Primer in his good hand. The book hung open to an illustration of Princess Nell and Harv running away from the Dark Castle with Baron Burt in pursuit. "Nell, your book talked to me," he said. "It said we should run away." Then he saw Burt rising from the sofa with the bloody screwdriver in his hand.

  Harv didn't bother with the nunchuks. He bolted across the room and dropped the Primer, freeing his good hand to fling the front door open. Nell, who had been frozen in a nearby corner for some time, shot toward the door like a bolt finally loosed from a crossbow, snatching up the Primer as she ran past it. They ran into the hallway with Burt only a few paces behind.

  The lobby with the elevators was some distance away from them. On impulse, Nell stopped and dropped to a crouch in Burt's path. Harv turned toward her, terrified. "Nell!" he cried. Burt's pumping legs struck Nell in the side. He spun forward and landed hard on the hallway floor, skidding for a short distance.

  This brought him to the feet of Harv, who had turned to face him and deployed his nunchuks. Harv went upside Burt's head a few times, but he was panicked and didn't do a very good job of it. Burt groped with one hand and managed to catch the chain that joined the halves of the weapon. Nell had gotten to her feet by this point and ran up Burt's back; she lunged forward and sank her teeth into the fleshy base of Burt's thumb. Something fast and confusing happened, Nell was rolling on the floor, Harv was dragging her back to her feet, she reached back to snatch up the Primer, which she had dropped again. They made it into the emergency stairs and began to skitter down the tunnel of urine, graffiti, and refuse, jumping over the odd slumbering body. Burt entered the stairwell in pursuit, a couple of flights behind them. He tried to make a shortcut by vaulting over the banister as he had seen and done in ractives, but his drunk body didn't do it as well as a media hero, and he tumbled down one flight, cursing and screaming, now rabid with pain and anger. Nell and Harv kept running.

  Burt's pratfall gave them enough of a lead to make it to the ground floor. They ran straight across the lobby and into the street. It was the wee hours of the morning, and there was almost no one out here, which was slightly unusual; normally there would have been decoys and lookouts for drug sellers. But tonight there was only one person on the whole block: a bulky Chinese man with a short beard and close-cropped hair, wearing traditional indigo pajamas and a black leather skullcap, standing in the middle of the street with his hands stuck in his sleeves. He gave Nell and Harv an appraising look as they ran past. Nell did not pay him much attention. She just ran as fast as she could.

  "Nell!" Harv was saying. "Nell! Look"

  She was afraid to look. She kept running.

  "Nell, stop and look." Harv cried. He sounded exultant.

  Finally Nell ran around the corner of a building, stopped, turned, and peeked back cautiously.

  She was looking down the empty street past the building where she had lived her whole life. At the end of the street was a big mediatronic advertising display currently running a big Coca-Cola ad, in the ancient and traditional red used by that company. Silhouetted against it were two men: Burt and the big round-headed Chinese man.

  They were dancing together.

  No, the Chinese man was dancing. Burt was just staggering around like a drunk.

  No, the Chinese man was not dancing, but doing some of the exercises that Dojo had taught Nell about. He moved slowly and beautifully except for some moments when every muscle in his body would join into one explosive movement. Usually these explosions were directed toward Burt.

  Burt fell down, then struggled up to his knees.

  The Chinese man gathered himself together into a black seed, rose into the air, spun around, and unfolded like a blooming flower. One of his feet struck Burt on the point of his chin and seemed to accelerate all the way through Burt's head. Burt's body fell back to the pavement like a few gallons of water sloshed out of a bucket.

  The Chinese man became very still, settled his breathing, adjusted his skullcap and the sash on his robe. Then he turned his back to

  Nell and Harv and walked away down the middle of the street.

  Nell opened her Primer. It was showing a picture of Dinosaur, seen in silhouette through a window in the Dark Castle, standing over the corpse of Baron Burt with a smoking stake in his claws. Nell said, "The little boy and the little girl were running away to the Land Beyond."

Hackworth departs from Shanghai;  his speculations as to the possible motives of Dr. X.

 
Would-be passengers skidded to a halt on the saliva-slickened floor of the Shanghai Aerodrome as the announcer brayed the names of great and ancient Chinese cities into his microphone. They set bags down, shushed children, furrowed brows, cupped hands around ears, and pursed lips in utter bewilderment. None of this was made any easier by the extended family of some two dozen just-arrived Boers, women in bonnets and boys in heavy coarse farmer's pants, who had convened by one of the gates and begun to sing a hymn of thanksgiving in thick hoarse voices.

  When the announcer called out Hackworth's flight (San Diego with stops in Seoul, Vladivostok, Magadan, Anchorage, Juneau, Prince Rupert, Vancouver, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Santa Barbara, and Los Angeles), he apparently decided that it was beneath his dignity, above his abilities, or both to speak Korean, Russian, English, French, Coast Salish, and Spanish in the same sentence, and so he just hummed into the microphone for a while as if, far from being a professional announcer, he were a shy, indifferent vocalist hidden within in a vast choir.

  Hackworth knew perfectly well that hours would pass before he actually found himself on an airship, and that having achieved that milestone, he might have to wait hours more for its actual departure. Nonetheless, he had to say good-bye to his family at some point, and this seemed no worse a time than any other.

  Holding Fiona (so big and solid now!) in the crook of one arm, and holding hands with Gwen, he pushed insistently across a rip tide of travelers, beggars, pickpockets, and entrepreneurs trading in everything from bolts of real silk to stolen intellectual property.

  Finally they reached a corner where a languid eddy had separated itself from the flow of people, and where Fiona could safely be set down.

  He turned first to Gwen. She still looked as stunned and vacant as she had, more or less consistently, since he told her that he had received a new assignment "whose nature I am not at liberty to disclose, save to say that it concerns the future, not merely of my department, nor of John Zaibatsu, but of that phyle into which you had the good fortune to have been born and to which I have sworn undying loyalty," and that he was making a trip "of indefinite duration" to North America. It had been increasingly clear of late that Gwen simply didn't get it. At first, Hackworth had been annoyed by this, viewing it as a symptom of hitherto unevidenced intellectual shortcomings. More recently, he had come to understand that it had more to do with emotional stance. Hackworth was embarking on a quest of sorts here, real Boy's Own Paper stuff, highly romantic. Gwen hadn't been raised on the proper diet of specious adventure yarns and simply found the whole concept unfathomable. She did a bit of rote sniffling and tear-wiping, gave him a quick kiss and a hug, and stepped back, having completed her role in the ceremony with nothing close to enough histrionics. Hackworth, feeling somewhat disgruntled, squatted down to face Fiona.

  His daughter seemed to have a better intuitive grasp of the situation; she had been up several times a night recently, complaining of bad dreams, and on the way to the Aerodrome she had been perfectly quiet. She stared at her father with large red eyes.

  Tears came to Hackworth's eyes, and his nose began to run. He blew his nose plangently, held the handkerchief over his face for a moment, and composed himself.

  Then he reached into the breast pocket of his overcoat and drew out a flat package, wrapped up in mediatronic paper of spring wildflowers bending in a gentle breeze. Fiona brightened up immediately, and Hackworth could not help chudding, not for the first time, at the charming susceptibility of small people to frank bribery. "You will forgive me for ruining the surprise," he said, "by telling you that this is a book, my darling. A magic book. I made it for you, because I love you and could not think of a better way to express that love. And whenever you open its pages, no matter how far away I might be, you will find me here."

  "Thank you ever so much, Father," she said, taking it with both hands, and he could not help himself from sweeping her up in both arms and giving her a great hug and a kiss.    "Good-bye, my best beloved, you will see me in your dreams," he whispered into her tiny, flawless ear, and then he set her free, spun around, and walked away before she could see the tears that had begun to run down his face.

  Hackworth was a free man now, wandering through the Aerodrome in an emotional stupor, and only reached his flight by participating in the same flock instinct that all the natives used to reach theirs. 'Whenever he saw more than one
gwailo
heading purposefully in one direction, he followed them, and then others started following him, and thus did a mob of foreign devils coalesce among a hundred times as many natives, and finally, two hours after their ffight was supposed to leave, they mobbed a gate and climbed aboard the airship
Hanjin Takhoma
-which might or might not have been their assigned vessel, but the passengers now had a sufficient numerical majority to hijack it to America, which was the only thing that really counted in China.

  He had received a summons from the Celestial Kingdom. Now he was on his way to the territory still known vaguely as America. His eyes were red from crying over Gwen and Fiona, and his blood was swarming with nanosites whose functions were known only to Dr. X; Hackworth had lain back, closed his eyes, rolled up his sleeve, and hummed "Rule, Atlantis" while Dr. X's physicians (at least he hoped they were physicians) shoved a fat needle into his arm. The needle was fed by a tube that ran directly into a special fitting on the matter compiler; Hackworth was plugged directly into the Feed, not the regulation Atlantan kind but Dr. X's black-market kiudge. He could only hope that they'd given it the right instructions, as it would be a shame to have a washing machine, a mediatronic chopstick, or a kilo of China 'White materialize in his arm. Since then, he'd had a few attacks of the shivers, suggesting that his immune system was reacting to something Dr. X had put in there. His body would either get used to it or (preferably) destroy the offending nanosites.

  The airship was a dromond, the largest class of noncargo vessel. It was divided into four classes. Hackworth was second from the bottom, in third. Below that was steerage, which was for migrating thetes, and for sky-girls, prostitutes of the air. Even now, these were bribing their way past the conductors and into the third-class lounge, making eyes at Hackworth and at the white-shirted
sararimen
who tended to travel this way. Those gentlemen had grown up in one crowded Dragon or another, where they knew how to generate a sort of artificial privacy field by determinedly ignoring each other. Hackworth had arrived at the point where he frankly didn't care, and so he stared directly at these men, front-line soldiers of their various microstates, as each one primly folded his navy blue suit jacket and elbow-crawled into a coffinlike microcabin like a GI squirming under a roll of concertina wire, accompanied or not by a camp follower.