The Diamond Age (64 page)

  Dr. X considered it. "It would be more correct to say that, although it was virtuous to save them, it was mistaken to believe that they could be raised properly. We lacked the resources to raise them individually, and so we raised them with books. But the only proper way to raise a child is within a family. The Master could have told us as much, had we listened to his words."

  "Some of those girls will one day choose to follow in the ways of the Master," Hackworth said, "and then the wisdom of your decisions will be demonstrated."

  This seemed to be a genuinely new thought to Dr. X. His gaze returned to the window. Hackworth sensed that the matter of the girls and the Primers had been concluded.

  "I will be open and frank," said Dr. X after some ruminative tea slurping, "and you will not believe that I am being so, because it is in the heads of those from the Outer Tribes to think that we never speak directly. But perhaps in time you will see the truth of my words.

  "The Seed is almost finished. When you left, the building of it slowed down very much- more than we expected. We thought that the Drummers, after ten years, had absorbed your knowledge and could continue the work without you. But there is something in your mind that you have gained through your years of scholarly studies that the Drummers, if they ever had it, have given up and cannot get back unless they come out of the darkness and live their lives in the light again.

  "The war against the Coastal Republic reaches a critical moment. We ask you to help us now."

  "I must say that it is nearly inconceivable for me to help you at this point," Hackworth said, "unless it would be in the interest of my tribe, which does not strike me as a likely prospect."

  "We need you to help us finish building the Seed," Dr. X said doggedly.

  Only decades of training in emotional repression kept Hackworth from laughing out loud. "Sir. You are a worldly man and a scholar. Certainly you are aware of the position of Her Majesty's government, and indeed of the Common Economic Protocol itself, on the subject of Seed technologies."

  Dr. X raised one hand a few inches from the tabletop, palm down, and pawed once at the air. Hackworth recognized it as the gesture that well-to-do Chinese used to dismiss beggars, or even to call bullshit on people during meetings. "They are wrong," he said. "They do not understand. They think of the Seed from a Western perspective. Your cultures- and that of the Coastal Republic- are poorly organized. There is no respect for order, no reverence for authority. Order must be enforced from above lest anarchy break out. You are afraid to give the Seed to your people because they can use it to make weapons, viruses, drugs of their own design, and destroy order. You enforce order through control of the Feed. But in the Celestial Kingdom, we are disciplined, we revere authority, we have order within our own minds, and hence the family is orderly, the village is orderly, the state is orderly. In our hands the Seed would be harmless."

  "Why do you need it?" Hackworth said.

  "We must have technology to live," Dr. X said, "but we must have it with our own."

  Hackworth thought for a moment that Dr. X was referring to the beverage. But the Doctor began to trace characters on the tabletop, his hand moving deftly and gracefully, the brocade sleeve rasping across the plastic surface.
"Yong
is the outer manifestation of something. Ti is the underlying essence. Technology is a
yong
associated with a particular ti that is"-the Doctor stumbled here and, through a noticeable effort, refrained from using pejorative terms like
barbarian
or
gwailo
-"that is Western, and completely alien to us. For centuries, since the time of the Opium Wars, we have struggled to absorb the
yong
of technology without importing the Western
t
i. But it has been impossible. Just as our ancestors could not open our ports to the West without accepting the poison of opium, we could not open our lives to Western technology without taking in the Western ideas, which have been as a plague on our society. The result has been centuries of chaos. We ask you to end that by giving as the Seed."

  "I do not understand why the Seed will help you."

  "The Seed is technology rooted in the Chinese
ti
. We have lived by the Seed for five thousand years," Dr. X said. He waved his hand toward the window. "These were rice paddies before they were parking lots. Rice was the basis for our society. Peasants planted the seeds and had highest status in the Confucian hierarchy. As the Master said, 'Let the producers be many and the consumers few.' When the Feed came in from Atlantis, From Nippon, we no longer had to plant, because the rice now came From the matter compiler. It was the destruction of our society. When our society was based upon planting, it could truly be said, as the Master did, 'Virtue is the root; wealth is the result.' But under the Western
t
i, wealth comes not from virtue but from cleverness. So the filial relationships became deranged. Chaos," Dr. X said regretfully, then looked up From his tea and nodded out the window. "Parking lots and chaos."

  Hackworth remained silent for a full minute. Images had come into his mind again, not a fleeting hallucination this time, but a full-fledged vision of a China freed from the yoke of the foreign Feed. It was something he'd seen before, perhaps something he'd even helped create. It showed something no
gwailo
would ever get to see: the Celestial Kingdom during the coming Age of the Seed. Peasants tended their fields and paddies, and even in times of drought and flood, the earth brought forth a rich harvest: food, of course, but many unfamiliar plants too, fruits that :ould be made into medicines, bamboo a thousand times stronger than the natural varieties, trees that produced synthetic rubber and pellets of clean safe fuel. In an orderly procession the suntanned farmers brought their proceeds to great markets in clean cities free of cholera and strife, where all of the young people were respectful and dutiful scholars and all of the elders were honored and cared for. This was a ractive simulation as big as all of China, and Hackworth could have lost himself in it, and perhaps did for he knew not how long. But finally he closed his eyes, blinked it away, sipped some tea to bring his rational mind back into control.

  "Your arguments are not without merit," Hackworth said. "Thank you for helping me to see the matter in a different light. I will ponder these questions on my return to Shanghai."

  Dr. X escorted him to the parking lot of the McDonald's. The heat felt pleasant at first, like a relaxing bath, though Hackworth knew that soon he would feel as if he were drowning in it. Kidnapper ambled over and folded its legs, allowing Hackworth to mount it easily.

  "You have helped us willingly for ten years," Dr. X said. "It is your destiny to make the Seed."

  "Nonsense," Hackworth said, "I did not know the nature of the project."

  Dr. X smiled. "You knew it perfectly well." He freed one hand from the long sleeves of his robe and shook his finger at Hackworth, like an indulgent teacher pretending to scold a clever but mischievous pupil. "You do these things not to serve your Queen but to serve your own nature, John Hackworth, and I understand your nature. For you cleverness is its own end, and once you have seen a clever way to do a thing, you must do it, as water finding a crack in a dike must pass through it and cover the land on the other side."

  "Farewell, Dr. X," Hackworth said. "You will understand that although I hold you in the highest personal esteem, I cannot earnestly wish you good fortune in your current endeavour." He doffed his hat and bowed low to one side, forcing Kidnapper to adjust its stance a bit. Dr. X returned the bow, giving Hackworth another look at that coral button on his cap. Hackworth spurred Kidnapper on to Shanghai.
. . .

 
He followed a more northerly route now, along one of the many radial highways that converged on the metropolis. After he had been riding for some time, he became consciously aware of a sound that had been brushing against the outer fringes of perceptibility for some time: a heavy, distant, and rapid drumbeat, perhaps twice as fast as the beat of his own heart. His first thought, of course, was of the Drummers, and he was tempted to explore one of the nearby canals to see whether their colony had spread its tendrils this far inland. But then he looked northward across the flat land for a couple of miles and saw a long procession making its way down another highway, a dark column of pedestrians marching on Shanghai.

  He saw that his path was converging with theirs, so he spurred Kidnapper forward at a hand-gallop, hoping to reach the intersection of the roads before it was clogged by this column of refugees. Kidnapper outdistanced them easily, but to no avail; when he reached the intersection, he found it had been seized by the column's vanguard which had established a roadblock there and would not let him pass.

  The contingent now controlling the intersection consisted entirely of girls, some eleven or twelve years old. There were several dozen of them, and they had apparently taken the objective by force from a smaller group of Fists, who could now be seen lying in the shade of some mulberry trees, hogtied with plastic rope.

  Probably three-quarters of the girls were on guard duty, mostly armed with sharpened bamboo stakes, though a few guns and blades were in evidence. The remaining quarter were on break, hunkered down in a circle near the intersection, sipping freshly boiled water and concentrating intently on books. Hackworth recognized the books; they were all identical, and they all had marbled jade covers, though all of them had been personalized with stickers, graffiti, and other decorations over the years.

  Hackworth realized that several more girls, organized in groups of four, had been following him down the road on bicycles; these outriders passed by him now and rejoined their group.

  He had no choice but to wait until the column had passed. The drumbeat grew and grew in volume until the pavement shook with each blow, and the shock absorption gear built into Kidnapper's legs went into play, flinching minutely at each beat. Another vanguard passed through: Hackworth easily calculated its size at two hundred and fifty-six. A battalion was four platoons, each of which was four companies of four troops of four girls each. The vanguard consisted of one such battalion, moving at a very brisk double-time, probably going ahead of the main group to fall upon the next major intersection.

  Then, finally, the main column passed through, organized in battalions, each foot hitting the ground in unison with all the others. Each battalion carried a few sedan chairs, which were passed from one four-girl troop to another every few minutes to spread out the work. They were not luxurious palanquins but were improvised from bamboo and plastic rope and upholstered with materials stripped from old plastic cafeteria furniture. Riding in these chairs were girls who did not seem all that different from the others, except that they might have been a year or two older. They did not seem to be officers; they were not giving orders and wore no special insignia. Hackworth did not understand why they were riding in sedan chairs until he got a look at one of them, who had crossed one ankle up on her knee and taken her slipper off. Her foot was defective; it was several inches too short.

  But all of the other sedan chair girls were deeply absorbed in their Primers. Hackworth unclipped a small optical device from his watch chain, a nanotech telescope/microscope that frequently came in handy, and used it to look over one girl's shoulder. She was looking at a diagram of a small nanotechnological device, working her way through a tutorial that Hackworth had written several years ago.

  The column went past much faster than Hackworth had feared; they moved down the highway like a piston. Each battalion carried a banner, a very modest thing improvised from a painted bedsheet. Each banner bore the number of the battalion and a crest that Hackworth knew well, as it played an important role in the Primer. In all, he counted two hundred and fifty-six battalions. Sixty-five thousand girls ran past him, hell-bent on Shanghai.

From the Primer,  Princess Nell's return to the Dark Castle;  the death of Harv;  The Books of the Book and of the Seed;  Princess Nell's quest to find her mother. Destruction of the Causeway;  Nell falls into the hands of Fists;  she escapes into a greater peril;  deliverance.

  Princess Nell could have used all of the powers she had acquired during her great quest to dig Harv's grave or caused the work to be done for her by the Disenchanted Army, but it did not seem fitting, and so instead she found an old rusty shovel hung up in one of the Dark Castle's outbuildings. The ground was dry and stony and veined with the roots of thorn bushes, and more than once the shovel struck ancient bones.

  Princess Nell dug throughout the long day, softening the hard earth with her tears, but did not slacken until the ground was level with her own head. Then she went into the little room in the Dark Castle where Harv had died of a consumption, carefully wrapped his withered body in fine white silk, and bore it out to the grave. She had found lilies growing wild in the overgrown flower-garden by the little fisherman's cottage, so she put a spray of these in the grave with him, along with a little children's story-book that Harv had given her for a present many years ago. Harv could not read, and many nights as they had sat round the fire in the courtyard of the Dark Castle, Nell had read to him from this book, and she supposed that he might like to have it wherever he was going now.

  Filling in the grave went quickly; the loose dirt more than filled the hole. Nell left more lilies atop the long low mound of earth that marked Harv's resting place. Then she turned her back and walked into the Dark Castle. The stain-colored granite walls had picked up some salmon highlights from the western sky, and she suspected that she could see a beautiful sunset from the room in the high tower where she had established her library.