The Diamond Age (25 page)

  One entire wall of Dr. X's front room was a mediatron. Cine feeds, or simple stationary graphics, could be digitally posted on such a wall just as posters and handbills had been in olden times. Over time, if not removed, they tended to overlap each other and build up into an animated collage.

  Centered on Dr. X's media wall, partly concealed by newer clips, was a cine clip as ubiquitous in northern China as the face of Mao-Buddha's evil twin-had been in the previous century. Hackworth had never sat and watched it all the way through, but he'd glimpsed it so many times, in Pudong taxicabs and on walls in the Leased Territories, that he knew it by heart. Westerners called it
Zhang at the Shan
g.

  The setting was the front of a luxury hotel, one of the archipelago of Shangri-Las strung up the Kowloon-Guangzhou superhighway. The horseshoe drive was paved with interlocking blocks, brass door handles gleamed, thickets of tropical flowers sprouted from boat-size planters in the lobby. Men in business suits spoke into cellphones and checked their watches, white-gloved bellhops sprinted into the drive, pulled suitcases from the trunks of red taxicabs, wiped them down with clean moist cloths.

  The horseshoe drive was plugged into an eight-lane thoroughfare-not the highway, but a mere frontage road-with a spiked iron fence running down the center to keep pedestrians from crossing in midblock. The pavement, new but already crumbling, was streaked with red dust washed down out of the devastated hills of Guangdong by the latest typhoon.

  Traffic suddenly became thin, and the camera panned upstream: Several lanes had been blocked by a swarm of bicycles. Occasionally a red taxi or Mercedes-Benz would squeeze by along the iron fence and burst free, the driver holding down the horn button so furiously that he might detonate the air bag. Hackworth could not hear the sound of the horn, but as the camera zoomed in on the action, it became possible to see one driver take his hand off the horn and turn back to shake his finger at the mob of bicyclists.

  When he saw who was pedaling the lead bicycle, he turned away nauseous with fear, and his hand collapsed into his lap like a dead quail.

  The leader was a stocky man with white hair, sixtyish but pumping away vigorously on an unexceptional black bicycle, wearing drab worker's clothes. He moved it down the street with deceptive speed and pulled into the horseshoe drive. An embolism of bicycles formed on the street as hundreds tried to crowd in the narrow entrance. And here came another classic moment: The head bellhop skirted his stand-up desk and ran toward the bicyclist, waving him off and hurling abuse in Cantonese-until he got about six feet away and realized he was looking at Zhang Han Hua.

  At this point Zhang had no job title, being nominally retired- an ironical conceit that the Chinese premiers of the late twentieth century and early twenty-first had perhaps borrowed from American Mafia bosses. Perhaps they recognized that job titles were beneath the dignity of the most powerful man on earth. People who had gotten this close to Zhang claimed that they never thought about his temporal power-the armies, the nuclear weapons, the secret police.

  All they could think about was the fact that, during the Great Cultural Revolution, at the age of eighteen, Zhang Han Hua had led his cell of Red Guards into hand-to-hand combat with another cell that they deemed insufficiently fervid, and that, at the conctusion of the battle, Zhang had feasted on the raw flesh of his late adversaries. No one could stand face-to-face with Zhang without imagining the blood streaming down his chin.

  The bellhop collapses to his knees and begins literally kowtowing. Zhang looks disgusted, hooks one of his sandaled feet under the bellhop's collarbone, and prods him back upright, then speaks a few words to him in the hillbilly accent of his native Fujien. The bellhop can hardly bow enough on his way back into the hotel; displeasure registers on Zhang's face-all he wants is some fast service. During the next minute or so, progressively higher-ranking hotel officials cringe out the door and abase themselves in front of Zhang, who simply ignores them, looking bored now. No one really knows whether Zhang is a Confucianist or a Maoist at this point in his life, but at this moment it makes no difference: for in the Confucian view of society, as in the Communist, peasants are the highest class and merchants the lowest. This hotel is not for peasants.

  Finally a man in a black business suit emerges, preceded and pursued by bodyguards. He looks angrier than Zhang, thinking that he must be the victim of some unforgivable practical joke. This is a merchant among merchants: the fourteenth richest man in the world, the third richest in China. He owns most of the real estate within half an hour's drive of this hotel. He does not break his stride as he steps into the drive and recognizes Zhang; he walks straight up to him and asks him what he wants, why the old man has bothered to come down from Beijing and interfere with his business on his foolish bicycle ride.

  Zhang simply steps forward and speaks a few words into the rich man's ear.

  The rich man takes a step back, as if Zhang has punched him in the chest. His mouth is open, revealing flawless white teeth, his eyes are not focused. After a few moments, he takes another two steps back, which gives him enough room for his next maneuver: He stoops, puts one knee down, then the other, bends forward at the waist until he is on all fours, then settles himself down full-length on the nicely interlocked pavingstones. He puts his face on the pavement. He kowtows to Zhang Han Hua.
. . .

 
One by one the Dolbyized voices in the next room signed off until only Dr. X and another gentleman were left, haggling about something desultorily, taking long breaks between volleys of tweeter-busting oratory to stoke pipes, pour tea, or whatever these people did when they were pretending to ignore each other. The discussion petered out rather than building to a violent climax as Hackworth had secretly, mischievously been hoping, and then a young fellow pulled the curtain aside and said, "Dr. X will see you now."

  Dr. X was in a lovely, generous mood probably calculated to convey the impression that he'd always known Hackworth would be back. He rustled to his feet, shook Hackworth's hand warmly, and invited him out to dinner "at a place nearby," he said portentously, "of utmost discretion.',

  It was discreet because one of its cozy private dining rooms was connected directly to one of the back rooms of Dr. X's establishment, so that one could reach it by walking down a sinous inflated Nanobar tube that would have stretched to half a kilometer long if you extricated it from Shanghai, took it to Kansas, and pulled on both ends. Squinting through the translucent walls of the tube as he assisted Dr. X to dinner, Hackworth cloudily glimpsed several dozen people pursuing a range of activities in some half-dozen different buildings, through which Dr. X had apparently procured some kind of right-of-way. Finally it spat them out into a nicely furnished and carpeted dining room, which had been retrofitted with a powered sliding door. The door opened just as they were sitting down, and Hackworth was almost knocked off balance as the tube sneezed nanofiltered wind; a beaming four-foot-tall waitress stood in the doorway, closing her eyes and leaning forward against the anticipated wind-blast. In perfect San Fernando Valley English she said, "Would you like to hear about our specials?"

  Dr. X was at pains to reassure Hackworth that he understood and sympathized with his situation; so much so that Hackworth spent much of the time wondering whether Dr. X had already known about it. "Say no more, it is taken care of," Dr. X finally said, cutting Hackworth off in midexplanation, and after that Hackworth was unable to interest Dr. X in the topic anymore. This was reassuring but unsettling, as he could not avoid the impression that he had just somehow agreed to a deal whose terms had not been negotiated or even thought about. But Dr. X's whole affect seemed to deliver the message that if you were going to sign a Faustian bargain with an ancient and inscrutable Shanghainese organized-crime figure, you could hardly do better than the avuncular Dr. X, who was so generous that he would probably forget about it altogether, or perhaps just stow the favor away in a yellowed box in one of his warrens. By the end of the lengthy meal, Hackworth was so reassured that he had almost forgotten about Lieutenant Chang and the Primer altogether.

  Until, that is, the door slid open again to reveal Lieutenant Chang himself.

  Hackworth hardly recognized him at first, because he was dressed in a much more traditional outfit than usual: baggy indigo pajamas, sandals, and a black leather skullcap that concealed about seventy-five percent of his knotlike skull. Also, he had begun to grow his whiskers out. Most alarmingly, he had a scabbard affixed to his belt, and the scabbard had a sword in it.

  He stepped into the room and bowed perfunctorily to Dr. X, then turned to face Hackworth.

  "Lieutenant Chang?" Hackworth said wealdy.

  "Constable Chang," said the interloper, "of the district tribunal of Shanghai." And then he said the Chinese words that meant Middle Kingdom.

  "I thought you were Coastal Republic."

  "I have followed my master to a new country," Constable Chang said. "I must regretfully place you under arrest now, John Percival Hackworth."

  "On what charge?" Hackworth said, forcing himself to chuckle as if this were all a big practical joke among close friends.

  "That on the - day of -, 21-, you did bring stolen intellectual property into the Celestial Kingdom-specifically, into the hong of Dr. X-and did use that property to compile an illegal copy of a certain device known as the
Young Lady's Illustrated Primer
."

  There was no point in claiming that this was not true. "But I have come here this evening specifically to regain possession of that same device," Hackworth said, "which is in the hands of my distinguished host here. Certainly you are not intending to arrest the distinguished Dr. X for trafficking in stolen property."

  Constable Chang looked expectantly toward Dr. X. The Doctor adjusted his robes and adopted a radiant, grandfatherly smile. "I am sorry to tell you that some reprehensible person has apparently provided you with wrong information," he said. "In fact, I have no idea where the Primer is located."

  The dimensions of this trap were so vast that Hackworth's mind was still reeling through it, bouncing haplessly from one wall to another, when he was hauled before the district magistrate twenty minutes later. They had set up a courtroom in a large, ancient garden in the interior of Old Shanghai. It was an open square paved with flat gray stones. At one end was a raised building open to the square on one side, covered with a sweeping tile roof whose corners curved high into the air and whose ridgeline was adorned with a clay frieze portraying a couple of dragons facing off with a large pearl between them. Hackworth realized, dimly, that this was actually the stage of an open-air theatre, which enhanced the impression that he was the sole spectator at an elaborate play written and staged for his benefit.

  A judge sat before a low, brocade-covered table in the center of the stage, dressed in magnificent robes and an imposing winged hat decorated with a unicorn emblem. Behind him and off to one side stood a small woman wearing what Hackworth assumed were phenomenoscopic spectacles. When Constable Chang had pointed to a spot on the gray flagstones where Hackworth was expected to kneel, he ascended to the stage and took up a position flanking the Judge on the other side. A few other functionaries were arranged on the square, mostly consisting of Dr. X and members of his retinue, arranged in two parallel lines forming a tunnel between Hackworth and the Judge.

  Hackworth's initial surge of terror had worn off. He had now entered into morbid fascination with the incredible dreadfulness of his situation and the magnificent performance staged by Dr. X to celebrate it. He knelt silently and waited in a stunned, hyper-relaxed state, like a pithed frog on the dissection table.

  Formalities were gone through. The Judge was named Fang and evidently came from New York. The charge was repeated, somewhat more elaborately. The woman stepped forward and introduced evidence: a cine record that was played on a large mediatron covering the back wall of the stage. It was a film of the suspect, John Percival Hackworth, slicing a bit of skin from his hand and giving it to (the innocent) Dr. X, who (not knowing that he was being gulled into committing a theft) extracted a terabyte of hot data from a cocklebur-shaped mite, and so on, and so on.

  "The only thing that remains is to prove that this information was, indeed, stolen-though this is strongly implied by the suspect's behavior," Judge Fang said. In support of this assertion, Constable Chang stepped forward and told the story of his visit to Hackworth's flat.

  "Mr. Hackworth," said Judge Fang, "would you like to dispute that this property was stolen? If so, we will hold you here while a copy of the information is supplied to Her Majesty's Police; they can confer with your employer to determine whether you did anything dishonest. Would you like us to do that?"

  "No, Your Honour," Hackworth said.

  "So you are not disputing that the property was stolen, and that you deceived a subject of the Celestial Kingdom into colluding with your criminal behavior?"

  "I am guilty as charged, Your Honour," Hackworth said, "and I throw myself on the mercy of the court."

  "Very well," Judge Fang said, "the defendant is guilty. The sentence is sixteen strokes of the cane and ten years' imprisonment."

  "Goodness gracious!" Hackworth murmured. Inadequate as this was, it was the only thing that came to him.

  "Insofar as the strokes of the cane are concerned, since the defendant was motivated by his filial responsibility to his daughter, I will suspend all but one, on one condition."

  "Your Honour, I shall endeavour to comply with whatever condition you may choose to impose."

  "That you supply Dr. X with the decryption key to the data in question, so that additional copies of the book may be made available to the small children crowding our orphanages."