The Diamond Age (41 page)

  "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
artist
e," 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.