The Diamond Age (57 page)

  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.