The Diamond Age (6 page)

  Finally the bells of St. Mark's chimed six o'clock. Mrs. Hull burst into the kitchen on the first stroke and expressed shame that Hackworth had beaten her to the kitchen and shock that he had defiled it. The matter compiler in the corner of the kitchen came on automatically and began to create a pedomotive for Hackworth to take to work.

  Before the last bell had died away, the rhythmic whack-whack-whack of a big vacuum pump could be heard. The engineers of the Royal Vacuum Utility were already at work expanding the eutactic environment. The pumps sounded big, probably Intrepids, and Hackworth reckoned that they must be preparing to raise a new structure, possibly a wing of the University.

  He sat down at the kitchen table. Mrs. Hull was already marmalading his crumpet. As she laid out plates and silver, Hackworth picked up a large sheet of blank paper. "The usual," he said, and then the paper was no longer blank; now it was the front page of the
Time
s.

  Hackworth got all the news that was appropriate to his station in life, plus a few optional services: the latest from his favorite cartoonists and columnists around the world; clippings on various peculiar crackpot subjects forwarded to him by his father, ever anxious that he had not, even after all this time, sufficiently edified his son; and stories relating to the Uitlanders- a subphyle of New Atlantis, consisting of persons of British ancestry who had fled South Africa several decades previously. Hackworth's mother was an Uitlander, so he subscribed to the service.

  A gentleman of higher rank and more far-reaching responsibilities would probably get different information written in a different way, and the top stratum of New Chusan actually got the
Times
on paper, printed out by a big antique press that did a run of a hundred or so, every morning at about three A.M. That the highest levels of the society received news written with ink on paper said much about the steps New Atlantis had taken to distinguish itself from other phyles.

  Now nanotechnology had made nearly anything possible, and so the cultural role in deciding what
should
be done with it had become far more important than imagining what
could
be done with it. One of the insights of the Victorian Revival was that it was not necessarily a good thing for everyone to read a completely different newspaper in the morning; so the higher one rose in the society, the more similar one's
Times
became to one's peers'.

  Hackworth almost managed to dress without waking Gwendolyn, but she began to stir while he was stringing his watch chain around various tiny buttons and pockets in his waistcoat. In addition to the watch, various other charms dangled from it, such as a snuffbox that helped perk him up now and then, and a golden pen that made a little chime whenever he received mail.

  "Have a good day at work, dear," she mumbled. Then, blinking once or twice, frowning, and focusing on the chintz canopy over the bed: "You finish it today, do you?"

  "Yes," Hackworth said. "I'll be home late. Quite late."

  "I understand."

  "No," he blurted. Then he pulled himself up short. This was it, he realized.

  "Darling?"

  "It's not that-the project should finish itself. But after work, I believe I'll get a surprise for Fiona. Something special."

  "Being home for dinner would be more special than anything you could get her."

  "No, darling. This is different. I promise."

  He kissed her and went to the stand by the front door. Mrs. Hull was awaiting him, holding his hat in one hand and his briefcase in the other. She had already removed the pedomotive from the M.C. and set it by the door for him; it was smart enough to know that it was indoors, and so its long legs were fully collapsed, giving him almost no mechanical advantage. Hackworth stepped onto the tread plates and felt the straps reach out and hug his legs.

  He told himself that he could still back out. But a flash of red caught his eye, and he looked in and saw Fiona creeping down the hallway in her nightie, her flaming hair flying all directions, getting ready to surprise Gwendolyn, and the look in her eyes told him that she had heard everything. He blew her a kiss and walked out the door, resolute.

Bud is prosecuted; noteworthy features of the Confucian judicial system;  he receives an invitation to take a long walk on a short pier.

 
Bud had spent the last several days living in the open, in a prison on the low, smelly delta of the Chang Jiang (as most of his thousands of fellow inmates called it) or, as Bud called it, the Yangtze. The walls of the prison were lines of bamboo stakes, spaced at intervals of a few meters, with strips of orange plastic fluttering gaily from their tops. Yet another device had been mounted on Bud's bones, and it knew where those boundaries were. From place to place one could see a corpse just on the other side of the line, body striped with the lurid marks of cookie-cutters. Bud had mistaken these for suicides until he'd seen a lynching in progress: a prisoner who was thought to have stolen some other fellow's shoes was picked up bodily by the mob, passed from hand to hand overhead like a crowd-surfing rock singer, all the time flailing frantically trying to grab something. When he reached the line of bamboo poles, he was given one last shove and ejected, his body virtually  exploding as he flew through the invisible plane of the perimeter.

  But the ever-present threat of lynching was a minor irritation compared to the mosquitoes. So when Bud heard the voice in his ears telling him to report to the northeast corner of the compound, he didn't waste any time- partly because he wanted to get away from that place and partly because, if he didn't, they could pop him by remote control. They could have just told him to walk directly to the courtroom and take a seat and he would have done it, but for ceremonial purposes they sent a cop to escort him.

  The courtroom was a high-ceilinged room in one of the old buildings along the Bund, not lavishly furnished. At one end was a raised platform, and on that was an old folding table with a red cloth tossed over it. The red cloth had gold threads woven through it to make a design: a unicorn or a dragon or some shit like that. Bud had trouble discriminating among mythical beasts.

  The judge came in and was introduced as Judge Fang by the larger of his two gofers: a bulky, rounded-headed Chinese guy who smelled tantalizingly of menthol cigarettes. The constable who had escorted Bud to the courtroom pointed to the floor, and Bud, knowing his cue, dropped to his knees and touched his forehead to the floor.

  The Judge's other gofer was a tiny little Amerasian woman wearing glasses. Hardly anyone used glasses anymore to correct their vision, and so it was a likely bet that this was actually some kind of phantascope, which let you see things that weren't there, such as ractives. Although, when people used them for purposes other than entertainment, they used a fancier word: phenomenoscope.

  You could get a phantascopic system planted directly on your retinas, just as Bud's sound system lived on his eardrums. You could even get telæsthetics patched into your spinal column at various key vertebrae. But this was said to have its drawbacks: some concerns about long-term nerve damage, plus it was rumored that hackers for big media companies had figured out a way to get through the defenses that were built into such systems, and run junk advertisements in your peripheral vision (or even spang in the fucking middle) all the time-even when your eyes were closed. Bud knew a guy like that who'd somehow gotten infected with a meme that ran advertisements for roach motels, in Hindi, superimposed on the bottom right-hand corner of his visual field, twenty-four hours a day, until the guy whacked himself.

  Judge Fang was surprisingly young, probably not out of his thirties yet. He sat at the red cloth-covered table and started to talk in Chinese. His two gofers stood behind him. A Sikh was here; he stood up and said a few words back to the Judge in Chinese. Bud couldn't figure out why there was a Sikh here, but he'd become accustomed to Sikhs turning up where they were least sought.

  Judge Fang said in a New York City accent, "The representative from Protocol has suggested that we conduct these proceedings in English. Any objections?"

  Also present was the guy he had mugged, who was holding the one arm rather stiffly but seemed otherwise healthy. His wife was with him too.

  "I'm Judge Fang," the Judge continued, looking straight at Bud. "You can address me as Your Honor. Now, Bud, Mr. Kwamina here has accused you of certain activities that are illegal in the Coastal Republic. You are also accused of actionable offenses under the Common Economic Protocol, to which we are a subscriber. These offenses are closely related to the crimes I already mentioned, but slightly different. Are you getting all this?"

  "Not exactly, Your Honor," Bud said.

  "We think you mugged this guy and blew a hole in his arm," Judge Fang said, "which is frowned upon.
Capiche?"

  "Yes, sir."

  Judge Fang nodded at the Sikh, who took the cue. "The CEP code," said the Sikh, "governs all kinds of economic interactions between people and organizations. Theft is one such interaction. Maiming is another, insofar as it affects the victim's ability to fend for himself economically. As Protocol does not aspire to sovereign status, we work in cooperation with the indigenous justice system of CEP signatories in order to pursue such cases."

  "You familiar with the Confucian system of justice, Bud?" said Judge Fang. Bud's head was beginning to get dizzy from snapping back and forth like a spectator at a tennis match. "I'm guessing no. Okay, even though the Chinese Coastal Republic is no longer strictly or even vaguely Confucian, we still run our judicial system that way- we've had it for a few thousand years, and we think it's not half bad. The general idea is that as judge, I actually perform several roles at once: detective, judge, jury, and if need be, executioner."

  Bud snickered at this crack, then noticed that Judge Fang did not appear to be in an especially jocose mood. His New Yorkish ways had initially fooled Bud into thinking that Judge Fang was something of a Regular Guy.

  "So in the first-mentioned role," Judge Fang continued, "I would like for you, Mr. Kwamina, to tell me whether you recognize the suspect."

  "He is the man," said Mr. Kwamina, aiming one index finger at Bud's forehead, "who threatened me, shot me, and stole my money."

  "And Mrs. Kum?" Judge Fang said. Then, as an aside to Bud, he added, "In their culture, the woman does not adopt her husband's family name."

  Mrs. Kum just nodded at Bud and said, "He is the guilty party."

  "Miss Pao, do you have anything to add?"

  The tiny woman in the spectacles looked at Bud and said, in Texan-accented English, "From this man's forehead I removed a voice-activated nanoprojectile launcher, colloquially known as a skull gun, loaded with three types of ammunition, including so-called Crippler rounds of the type used against Mr. Kwamina. Nanopresence examination of the serial numbers on those rounds, and comparison of the same with fragments removed from Mr. Kwamina's wound, indicated that the round used on Mr. Kwamina was fired from the gun embedded in the suspect's forehead."

  "Dang," Bud said.

  "Okay," Judge Fang said, and reached up with one hand to rub his temples for just a moment. Then he turned to Bud. "You're guilty."

  Hey! Don't I get to put up a defense?" Bud said. "I object!"

  "Don't be an asshole," Judge Fang said.

  The Sikh said, "As the offender has no significant assets, and as the value of his labor would not be sufficient to compensate the victim for his injury, Protocol terminates its interest in this case."

  "Got it," Judge Fang said. "Okay, Bud, my man, do you have any dependents?"

  "I got a girlfriend," Bud said. "She's got a son named Harv who is my boy, unless we counted wrong. And I heard she's pregnant."

  "You think she is, or you know she is?"

  "She was last time I checked- a couple months ago."

  "What's her name?"

  "Tequila."

  A muffled snort came from one of the Protocol trainees- the young woman- who put one hand over her mouth. The Sikh appeared to be biting his lip.

  "Tequila?" Judge Fang said, incredulous. It was becoming clear that Judge Fang tried a lot of these cases and relished the odd scrap of entertainment value.

  "There are nineteen women named Tequila in the Leased Territories," said Miss Pao, reading something out of her phenomenoscope, "one of whom delivered a baby girl named Nellodee three days ago. She also has a five-year-old boy named Harvard."

  "Oh, wow," Bud said.

  "Congratulations, Bud, you're a pa," Judge Fang said. "I gather from your reaction that this comes as something of a surprise. It seems evident that your relationship with this Tequila is tenuous, and so I do not find that there are any mitigating circumstances I should take into account in sentencing. That being the case, I would like you to go out that door over there"- Judge Fang pointed to a door in the corner of the courtroom-" and all the way down the steps. Leave through the exit door and cross the street, and you will find a pier sticking out into the river. Walk to the end of that pier until you are standing on the red part and await further instructions."

  Bud moved tentatively at first, but Judge Fang gestured impatiently, so finally he went out the door and down the stairway and out onto the Bund, the street that ran along the waterfront of the Huang Pu River, and that was lined with big old European-style buildings. A pedestrian tunnel took him under the road to the actual waterfront, which was crowded with Chinese people strolling around, and legless wretches dragging  themselves hither and thither.

  Some middle-aged Chinese people had set up a sound system playing archaic music and were ballroom-dancing. The music and dance style would have been offensively quaint to Bud at any other point in his life, but now for some reason the sight of these somewhat fleshy, settled-looking people, twirling around gently in one another's arms, made him feel sad.