The Diamond Age (30 page)

  Hackworth pointlessly wondered whether he was the only one of this ship's some two thousand passengers who believed that prostitution (or
anything
) was immoral. He did not consider this question in a selfrighteous way, more out of rueful curiosity; some of the sky-girls were quite fetching. But as he dragged his body into his microberth, he suffered another attack of the shivers, reminding him that even if his soul had been willing, his flesh was simply too weak.

  Another possible explanation for the chills was that Dr. X's nanosites were seeking out and destroying the ones that H.M. Joint Forces had put in there, waging a turf war inside his body, and his immune system was doing overtime trying to pick up the carnage.

  Hackworth unexpectedly fell asleep before the dromond had even pulled away from her mooring mast, and had dreams about the murderous implements he had seen magnified on Dr. X's mediatron during his first visit. In the abstract they were frightening enough. Having a few million of them in his veins didn't do much for his peace of mind. In the end it wasn't as bad as knowing your blood was full of spirochetes, which people used to live with for decades. Amazing what a person could get used to.

  When he settled into bed, he heard a small chime, like faery bells. It was coming from the little pen dangling from his watch chain, and it meant that he had mail. Perhaps a thank-you note from Fiona. He couldn't sleep anyway, and so he took out a sheet of mediatronic paper and spoke the commands that transferred the mail from the pen charm onto the page.

  He was disappointed to note that it was printed, not handwritten; some kind of official correspondence, and not, unfortunately, a note from Fiona. When he began to read it, he understood that it wasn't even official. It wasn't even from a human. It was a notification sent back to him automatically by a piece of machinery he had set into motion two years ago. The central message was wreathed in pages of technical gibberish, maps, graphs, and diagrams. The message was:

T H E Y OUNG L ADY'S I L L U S T R A T E D PR I M E R HAS BEEN FOUND.

  It was accompanied by an animated, three-dimensional map of New Chusan with a red line drawn across it, starting in front of a rather seedy looking high-rise apartment building in the Leased Territory called Enchantment and making its way erratically around the island from there.

  Hackworth laughed until his neighbors pounded on the adjoining walls and asked him to shut up.

Nell and Harv at large in the Leased Territories; encounter with an inhospitable security pod: a revelation about the Primer.

  The Leased Territories were too valuable to leave much room for Nature, but the geotects of Imperial Tectonics Limited had heard that trees were useful for cleaning and cooling the air, and so they had built in green belts along the borders between sectors. In the first hour that they lived free in the streets, Nell glimpsed one of those green belts, though it looked black at the time. She broke away from Harv and ran toward it down a street that had developed into a luminescent tunnel of mediatronic billboards. Harv chased her, just barely matching her speed because he had gotten a worse spanking than she had. They were almost the only people on the street, certainly the only ones moving purposefully, and so, as they ran, the messages on the billboards pursued them like starving wolves, making sure they understood that if they used cerrain ractives or took certain drugs, they could rely on being able to have sex with certain unrealistically perfect young persons. Some of the billboards made an even more elemental pitch, selling the sex directly. The mediatrons on this street were exceptionally large because they were made to be seen clearly from the heaths, bluffs, terraces, and courts of the New Atlantis Clave, miles up the mountain.

  Unremitting exposure to this kind of thing produced mediatron burnout among the target audience. Instead of turning them off and giving people a break for once, the proprietors had joined in an arms race of sorts, trying to find the magic image that would make people ignore all the other adverts and fix raptly on theirs. The obvious step of making their mediatrons bigger than the others had been taken about as far as it could go. Quite some time ago the content issue had been settled: tits, tires, and explosions were the only things that seemed to draw the notice of their supremely jaded focus groups, though from time to time they would play the juxtaposition card and throw in something incongruous, like a nature scene or a man in a black turtleneck reading poetry. Once all the mediatrons were a hundred feet high and filled with tits, the only competitive strategy that hadn't already been pushed to the redline was technical tricks: painfully bright flashes, jump-cuts, and simulated 3-D phantoms that made bluff charges toward specific viewers who didn't seem to be paying enough attention.

  It was down a mile-long gallery of these stimuli that Nell made her unexpected breakaway, looking from Harv's increasingly distant point of view like an ant scuttling across a television screen with the intensity and saturation turned all the way up, violently changing course from time to time as she was menaced by a virtual pitch-daemon lunging at her from the false parallax of a moving z-buffer, flaring like a comet against a bogus firmament of video black She knew that they were fake and in most cases didn't even recognize the products they were pitching, but her life had taught her everything about dodging. She couldn't not dodge.

  They hadn't figured out a way to make the adverts come at you headon, and so she maintained a roughly consistent direction down the middle of the street until she vaulted an energy-absorbing barrier at its end and vanished into the forest. Harv followed her a few seconds later, though his arm didn't support vaulting and so he ended up hurtling ignominiously over the top, like a hyped autoskater who hadn't seen the barrier at all, just body-kissed it full tilt. "Nell!" he was already hollering, as he came to rest in a nest of colorful discarded packaging materials. "You can't stay in here! You can't stay in the trees, Nell!"

  Nell had already worked her way deep into the woods, or as deep as you could get in a narrow green belt made to separate one Leased Territory from another. She fell down a couple of times and banged her head on a tree until, with childish adaptivity, she realized that she was on one of those surfaces that wasn't flat like a floor, street, or sidewalk. The ankles would actually have to show some versatility here. It was like one of those places she had read about in the Illustrated Primer, a magical zone where the fractal dimension of the terrain had been allowed to struggle off the pin, bumps supporting smaller copies of themselves, repeat until microscopic, throw dirt over it, and plant some of those creepy new Douglas firs that grow as fast as bamboo. Nell soon encountered a big Doug that had blown down in a recent typhoon, popping its own rootball out of the ground and thereby excavating a handy depression that invited nestling. Nell jumped in.

  For a few minutes she found it strangely hilarious that Harv could not find her. Their flat had only two hiding places, both closets, and so their traditional exploits in the hide-and-go-seek field had provided them with minimal entertainment value and left them wondering what the big deal was anyway about that stupid game.

  But now, here in the dark woods, Nell was beginning to get it. "Do you give up?" she finally said, and then Harv found her.

  He stood at the edge of the rootball pit and demanded that she come out. She refused. Finally he clambered down, though to an eye more critical than Nell's it might have looked as if he were falling. Nell jumped into his lap before he could get up. "We gotta go," he said.

  "I want to stay here. It's nice," Nell said.

  "You ain't the only one who thinks so," Harv said. "That's why they got pods here."

  "Pods?"

  "Aerostats. For security."

  Nell was delighted to hear it and could not fathom why her brother spoke of security with such dread in his voice.

  A soprano turbojet seemed to bear down on them, fading in and out as it tacked through the flora. The creepy apparatus Dopplered down a couple of notes as it came to a stop directly above them. They couldn't see more than the odd glint of colored light, picked up by whatever-itwas from the distant mediatrons. A voice, flawlessly reproduced and just a hair too loud, came out of it: "Visitors are welcome to stroll through this park at any time. We hope you have enjoyed your stay. Please inquire if you need directions, and this unit will assist you."

  "It's nice," Nell said.

  "Not for long," Harv said. "Let's get out of here before it gets pissed."

  "I like it here."

  Bluish light exploded out of the aerostat. They both hollered as their irises convulsed. It was hollering right back at them: "Allow me to light your way to the nearest exit!"

  "We're running away from home," Nell explained. But Harv was scrambling up out of the hole, yanking Nell behind him with his good hand.

  The thing's turbines screeched briefly as it made a bluff charge. In this fashion it herded them briskly toward the nearest street.

  When they had finally climbed over a barrier and gotten their feet back on concreta firma, it snapped off its light and zoomed off without so much as a fare-thee-well.

  "It's okay, Nell, they always do that."

  "Why?"

  "So this place don't fill up with transients."

  "What's that?"

  "That's what we are, now," Harv explained.

  "Let's go stay with your buds!" Nell said. Harv had never introduced Nell to any of his buds before, she knew them only as children of earlier epochs knew Gilgamesh, Roland, or Superman.

  She was under the impression that the streets of the Leased Territories were rife with Harv's buds and that they were more or less all-powerful.

  Harv's face squirmed for a while, and then he said, "We gotta talk about your magic book."

  "The
Young Lady's Illustrated Prime
r?"

  "Yeah, whatever it's called."

  "Why must we talk about it?"

  "Huh?" Harv said in the dopey voice he affected whenever Nell talked fancy.

  "Why do we gotta talk about it?" Nell said patiently.

  "There's something I never told you about that book, but I gotta tell you now," Harv said. "Come on, let's keep moving, or some creep's gonna come hassle us." They headed toward the main street of Lazy Bay Towne, which was the Leased Territory into which the pod had ejected them. The main street curved along the waterfront, separating a beach from a very large number of drinking establishments fronted with lurid, bawdy mediatrons.

  "I don't want to go that way," Nell said, remembering that last gauntlet of electromagnetic pimps. But Harv grabbed her wrist and hobbled downhill, pulling her behind.

  "It's safer than being in the back streets. Now let me tell you about that book. My buds and I pinched it and some other stuff from a Vicky we rolled. Doc told us to roll him."

  "Doc?"

  "This Chinese guy who runs the Flea Circus. He said we should roll him, and make sure we made it good so it'd get picked up on the monitors."

  "What does that mean?"

  "Never mind. He also said he wanted us to lift something from this Vicky- a certain package about yay big." Harv formed right angles with his thumbs and index fingers and defined the vertices of a rectangle, book-size. "Gave us to understand it was valuable. Well, we didn't find any such package. We did find a shitty old book on him, though. I mean, it looked old and fine, but no one reckoned it could be the thing Doc was looking for, since he's got lots of books. So I took it for you.

  "Well, a week or two later, Doc wants to know where is the package, and we told him this story. When he heard about that book, he flipped and told us that the book and the package were one and the same.. By that time, you were already playing with that book all night and all day, Nell, and I couldn't bear to take it away from you, so I lied. I told him I threw the book down on the sidewalk when I saw it was junk, and if it wasn't still there, then someone else must have come along and picked it up. Doc was pissed, but he fell for it.

  "That's why I never brought my buds to the flat. If anyone finds out you still have that book, Doc'll kill me."

  "What should we do?"

  Harv got a look on his face like he'd rather not talk about it. "For starters, let's get some free stuff."

  They took a sneaky and indirect route to the waterfront, staying as far as possible from the clusters of drunks winding through the constellation of incandescent bordellos like cold dark clumps of rock wending their way through a bright nebula of young stars.

  They made their way to a public M.C. on a streetcorner and picked out items from the free menu: boxes of water and nutri-broth, envelopes of sushi made from nanosurimi and rice, candy bars, and packages about the size of Harv's hand, festooned with implausible block letter promises ("REFLECTS 99% OF INFRARED!") that folded out into huge crinkly metallized blankets. Nell had been noticing a lot of rough shapes strewn around on the beach like giant chrome-plated larva. Must be fellow transients wrapped up in these selfsame. As soon as they had scored the goodies, they ran down to the beach and picked out their own spot. Nell wanted one closer to the surf, but Harv made some very well-considered observations about the inadvisability of sleeping below high tide. They trudged along the seawall for a good mile or so before finding a relatively abandoned bit of beach and wrapped themselves up in their blankets there. Harv insisted that one of them had to stay awake at all times to act as a sentry. Nell had learned all about this kind of thing from her virtual adventures in the Primer, and so she volunteered to stay up first.

  Harv went to sleep pretty soon, and Nell opened up her book. At times like this, the paper glowed softly and the letters stood out crisp and black, like tree branches silhouetted against a full moon.

Miranda's reactions to the evening's events;  solace from an unexpected quarter;  from the Primer, the demise of a hero, flight to the Land Beyond,  and the lands of King Magpie.