The Diamond Age (32 page)

Princess Nell in the city of King Magpie;  hyena trouble; the story of Peter;  Nell deals with a stranger.

 
The city of King Magpie was more frightening to Princess Nell than any wilderness, and she would have sooner trusted her life to the wild beasts of the forest than to many of its people.

  They tried to sleep in a nice glade of trees in the middle of the city, which reminded Princess Nell of the glades on the Enchanted Isle. But before they could even make themselves comfortable, a hissing hyena with red eyes and dripping fangs came and chased them all away.

  "Perhaps we can sneak back into the glade after it gets dark, when the hyena will not see us," Nell suggested.

  "The hyena will always see us, even in the dark, because it can see the infrared light that comes out of our bodies," Purple said.

  Eventually, Nell, Peter, Duck, and Purple found a place to camp in a field where other poor people lived. Duck set up a little camp and lit a fire, and they had some soup before going to bed. But try as she might, Princess Nell could not sleep.

  She saw that Peter Rabbit could not sleep either; he only sat with his back to the fire looking off into the darkness.

  "Why are you looking into the darkness and not into the fire as we do?" Nell asked.

  "Because the darkness is where danger comes from," Peter said, "and from the fire comes only illusion. When I was a little bunny running away from home, that is one of the first lessons I learned."

  Peter went on to tell his own story, just as Dinosaur had earlier in the Primer. It was a story about how he and his brothers had run away from home and fallen afoul of various cats, vultures, weasels, dogs, and humans who tended to see them, not as intrepid little adventurers but as lunch. Peter was the only one of them who had survived, because he was the cleverest of them all.

  I made up my mind that one day I would avenge my brothers," Peter said.

  "Did you?"

  "Well, that's a long story in itself."

  "Tell it to me!" Princess Nell said.

  But before Peter could launch into the next part of his story, they became aware of a stranger who was approaching them. "We should wake up Duck and Purple," Peter said.

  "Oh, let them sleep," Princess Nell said. "They can use the rest, and this stranger doesn't look so bad."

  "What does a bad stranger look like exactly?" Peter said.

  "You know, like a weasel or a vulture," Princess Nell said.

  "Hello, young lady," said the stranger, who was dressed in expensive clothes and jewelry. "I couldn't help noticing that you are new to beautiful Magpie City and down on your luck. I can't sit in my comfortable, warm house eating my big, tasty meals without feeling guilty, knowing that you are out here suffering. Won't you come with me and let me take care of you?"

  "I won't leave my friends behind," said Princess Nell. "Of course not-I wasn't suggesting that," the stranger said. "Too bad they're asleep. Say, I have an idea! You come with me, your rabbit friend stays awake here to keep an eye on your sleeping friends, and I'll show you my place-y'know, prove to you that I'm not some kind of creepy stranger who's trying to take advantage of you, like you see in all those dumb kids' stories that only little babies read. You're not a little baby, are you?"

  "No, I don't think so," Princess Nell said.

  "Then come with me, give me a fair hearing, check me out, and if I turn out to be an okay guy, we'll come back and pick up the rest of your little group. Come on, time's a wasting!"

  Princess Nell found it very hard to say no to the stranger.

  "Don't go with him, Nell!" Peter said. But in the end, Nell went with him anyway. In her heart she knew it was wrong, but her head was foolish, and because she was still just a little girl, she did not feel she could say no to a grownup man.

  At this point the story became very ractive. Nell stayed up for a while in the ractive, trying different things. Sometimes the man gave her a drink, and she fell asleep. But if she refused to take the drink, he would grab her and tie her up. Either way, the man always turned out to be a pirate, or else he would sell Princess Nell to some other pirates who would keep her and not let her go. Nell tried every trick she could think of, but it seemed as though the ractive were made in such a way that, once she'd made the decision to go away with the stranger, nothing she could do would prevent her from becoming a slave to the pirates.

  After the tenth or twelfth iteration she dropped the book into the sand and hunched over it, crying. She cried silently so Harv wouldn't wake up. She cried for a long time, seeing no reason to stop, because she felt that she was trapped now, just like Princess Nell in the book.

  "Hey," said a man's voice, very soft. At first Nell thought it was coming out of the Primer, and she ignored it because she was angry at the Primer.

  "What's wrong, little girl?" said the voice. Nell tried to look up toward the source, but all she saw was fat colored light from the mediatrons filtered through tears. She rubbed her eyes, but her hands had sand on them. She got panicky for a moment, because she had realized there was definitely someone there, a grownup man, and she felt blind and helpless.

  Finally she got a look at him. He was squatting about six feet away from her, a safe enough distance, watching her with his forehead all wrinkled up, looking terribly concerned.

  "There's no reason to be crying," he said. "It can't be that bad."

  "Who are you?" Nell said.

  "I'm just a friend who wants to help you. C'mon," he said, cocking his head down the beach. "I need to talk to you for a second, and I don't want to wake up your friend there."

  "Talk to me about what?"

  "How I can help you out. Now, come on, do you want help or

  not?"

  "Sure," Nell said.

  "Okay. C'mon then," the stranger said, rising to his feet. He took a step toward Nell, bent down, and held out one hand. Nell reached for him with her left and at the last minute flung a handful of sand into his face with her right. "Fuck!" the stranger said. "You little bitch, I'm gonna get you for that."

  The nunchuks were, as always, under Harv's head. Nell yanked them out and turned back toward the stranger, spinning her whole body around and snapping her wrist at the last moment just as Dojo had taught her. The end of the nunchuk struck the stranger's left kneecap like a steel cobra, and she heard something crack. The stranger screamed, astonishingly loud, and toppled into the sand.

  Nell spun the nunchuks around, working them up to a hum, and drew a bead on his temporal bone. But before she could strike, Harv grabbed her wrist. The free end of the weapon spun around out of control and bonked her on the eyebrow, splitting it open and giving her a total-body ice-cream headache. She wanted to throw up.

  "Good one, Nell," he said, "but now's the time to get the hell out of here."

  She snatched up the Primer. The two of them ran off down the beach, jumping over the silver larvae that glittered noisily in the mediatronic light. "The cops are probably gonna be after us now," Harv said. "We gotta go somewhere."

  "Grab one of those blankets," Nell said. "I have an idea."

  They had left their own silvery blanket behind. A discarded one was overflowing from a wastebasket by the seawall, so Harv snatched it as they ran by and crumpled it into a wad.

  Nell led Harv back to the little patch of forest. They found their way to the little cavity where they had stopped earlier. This time, Nell spread the blanket over both of them, and they tucked it in all around themselves to make a bubble. They waited quietly for a minute, then five, then ten. From time to time they heard the thin whine of a pod going by, but they always kept on going, and before they knew it they were asleep.

Mysterious souvenir from Dr. X;  Hackworth's arrival in Vancouver;  the Atlantan quarter of that city; he acquires a new mode of conveyance.

  Dr. X had dispatched a messenger to the Shanghai Aerodrome with instructions to seek out Hackworth. The messenger had sidled up next to him while he was addressing a piss-trough, greeted him cheerfully, and taken a piss himself. Then the two men had exchanged business cards, accepting them with both hands and a slight bow.

  Hackworth's card was about as flashy as he was. It was white, with his name stamped out in rather severe capitals. Like most cards, it was made of smart paper and had lots of memory space left over to store digitized information. This particular copy contained a matter compiler program descended from the one that had created the original
Young Lady's Illustrated Prime
r. This revision used automatic voice generation algorithms instead of relying on professional ractors, and it contained all of the hooks that Dr. X's coders would need to translate the text into Chinese.

  The Doctor's card was more picturesque. It had a few Hanzi characters scrawled across it and also bore Dr. X's chop. Now that paper was smart, chops were dynamic. The stamp infused the paper with a program that caused it to run a little graphics program forever. Dr. X's chop depicted a poxy-looking gaffer with a conical hat slung on his back, squatting on a rock in a river with a bamboo pole, hauling a fish out of the water-no wait, it wasn't a fish, it was a dragon squirming on the end of the line, and just as you realized it, the gaffer turned and smiled at you insolently. This kitschy tableau then freeze-framed and morphed cleverly into the characters representing Dr. X's name. Then it looped back to the beginning.

  On the back of the card were a few mediaglyphs indicating that it was, in fact, a chit: that is to say, a totipotent program for a matter compiler, combined with sufficient ucus to run it. The mediaglyphs indicated that it would run only on a matter compiler of eight cubic meters or larger, which was enormous, and which made it obvious he was not to use it until he reached America.

  He debarked from the
Hanjin Takhoma
at Vancouver, which besides having the most scenic airship moorage in the world, boasted a sizable Adantan clave. Dr. X hadn't given him a specific destination-just the chit and a flight number-so there didn't seem any point in staying aboard all the way to the end of the line. From here he could always bullet-train down the coast if necessary.

  The city itself was a sprawling bazaar of claves. Consequently it was generously supplied with agoras, owned and managed by Protocol, where citizens and subjects of different phyles could convene on neutral ground and trade, negotiate, fornicate, or whatever. Some of the agoras were simply open plazas in the classical tradition, others looked more like convention centers or office buildings. Many of Old Vancouver's pricier and more view-endowed precincts had been acquired by the Hong Kong Mutual Benevolent Society or the Nipponese, and the Confucians owned the tallest office building in the downtown area. East of town in the fertile delta of the Fraser River, the Slays and the Germans were both supposed to have large patches of
Lebensraum
staked out, surrounded by grids of somewhat nastier than usual security pods. Hindustan had a spray of tiny claves all over the metropolitan area.

  The Atlantis clave climbed out of the water half a mile west of the university, to which it was joined by a causeway. Imperial Tectonics had made it look like just another island, as if it had been sitting there for a million years. As Hackworth's rented velocipede took him over the causeway, cool salt air flowing through his stubble, he began to relax, finding himself once again on home territory. On an emerald green playing field above the breakwater, young boys in short pants were knotted into a scrum, playing at fieldball.

  On the opposite side of the road was the girls' school, which had its own playing field of equal size, except that this one was surrounded by a dense twelve-foot hedge so that the girls could run around in very little or skin-tight clothing without giving rise to etiquette problems. He hadn't slept well in his microberth and wouldn't have minded checking into the guest hostel and taking a nap, but it was only eleven in the morning and he couldn't see wasting the day. So he rode his velocipede to the center of town, stopped in at the first pub he saw, and had lunch. The bartender gave him directions to the Royal Post Office, which was just a few blocks away.

  The post office was a big one, sporting a variety of matter compilers, including a ten-cubic-meter model directly adjacent to the loading dock. Hackworth shoved Dr. X's chit into its reader and held his breath. But nothing dramatic happened; the display on the control panel said that this job was going to take a couple of hours.

  Hackworth killed most of the time wandering around the clave. The middle of town was smallish and quickly gave way to leafy neighborhoods filled with magnificent Georgian, Victorian, and Romanesque homes, with the occasional rugged Tudor perched on a rise or nestled into a verdant hollow. Beyond the homes was a belt of gentrified farms mingled with golf courses and parks. He sat down on a bench in one flowery public garden and unfolded the sheet of mediatronic paper that was keeping track of the movements of the original copy of the
Young Lady's Illustrated Prime
r. It seemed to have spent some time in a green belt and then made its way up the hill in the general direction of the New Atlantis Clave.

  Hackworth took out his fountain pen and wrote a short letter addressed to Lord Finkle-McGraw.

  Your Grace,

  Since accepting the trust you have reposed in me, I have endeavoured to be perfectly frank, serving as an open conduit for all information pertaining to the task at hand. In that spirit, I must inform you that two years ago, in my desperate search for the lost copy of the Primer, I initiated a search of the Leased Territories . . . (&c., &c.)

  Please find enclosed a map and other data regarding the recent movements of this book, whose whereabouts were unknown to me until yesterday. I have no way of knowing who possesses it, but given the book's programming, I suspect it to be a young thete girl, probably between the ages of five and seven. The book must have remained indoors for the last two years, or else my systems would have detected it. If these suppositions are correct, and if my invention has not fallen desperately short of intentions, then it is safe to assume that the book has become an important part of the girl's life . . .