The Diamond Age (33 page)

  He went on to write that the book should not be taken from the girl if this were the case; but thinking about it a bit more carefully, he scribbled out that part of the letter and it vanished from the page. It was not Hackworth's role to tell Finkle-McGraw how to manage affairs. He signed the letter and dispatched it.

  Half an hour letter, his pen chimed again and he checked his mail.

  Hackworth,

  Message received. Better late than never. Can't wait to meet the girl.

  Yours &c.

  Finkle-McGraw

  When Hackworth got back to the post office and looked through the window of the big matter compiler, he saw a large machine taking shape in the dim red light. Its body had already been finished and was now rising slowly as its four legs were compiled underneath. Dr. X had provided Hackworth with a chevaline.

  Hackworth noted, not without approval, that this one's engineers had put a high priority on the virtues of simplicity and strength and a low priority on comfort and style. Very Chinese. No effort was made to disguise it as a real animal. Much of the mechanical business in the legs was exposed so that you could see how the joints and pushrods worked, a little like staring at the wheels of an old steam locomotive. The body looked gaunt and skeletal. It was made of star-shaped connectors where five or six cigarette-size rods would come together, the rods and connectors forming into an irregular web that wrapped around into a geodesic space frame. The rods could change their length. Hackworth knew from seeing the same construction elsewhere that the web could change its size and shape to an amazing degree while providing whatever combination of stiffness and flexibility the controlling system needed at the moment. Inside the space frame Hackworth could see aluminum-plated spheres and ellipsoids, no doubt vacuum-filled, containing the mount's machinephase guts: basically some rod logic and an energy source.

  The legs compiled quickly, the complicated feet took a little longer. When it was finished, Hackworth released the vacuum and opened the door. "Fold," he said. The chevaline's legs buckled, and it lay down on the floor of the M.C. Its space frame contracted as much as it could, and its neck shortened. Hackworth bent down, laced his fingers through the space frame, and lifted the chevaline with one hand. He carried it through the lobby of the post office, past bemused customers, and out the door onto the street.

  "Mount," he said. The chevaline rose into a crouch. Hackworth threw one leg over its saddle, which was padded with some kind of elastomeric stuff, and immediately felt it shoving him into the air.

  His feet left the ground and flailed around until they found the stirrups. A lumbar support pressed thoughtfully on his kidneys, and then the chevaline trotted into the street and began heading back toward the causeway.

  It wasn't supposed to do that. Hackworth was about to tell it to stop. Then he figured out why he'd gotten the chit at the last minute:

  Dr. X's engineers had been programming something into this mount's brain, telling it where to take him.

  "Name?" Hackworth said.

  "Unnamed," the chevaline said.

  "Rename Kidnapper," Hackworth said.

  "Name Kidnapper," said Kidnapper; and sensing that it was reaching the edge of the business district, it started to canter. Within a few minutes they were blasting across the causeway at a tantivy. Hackworth turned back toward Atlantis and looked for pursuing aerostats; but if Napier was tracking him, he was doing so with some subtlety.

A morning stroll through the Leased Territories; Dovetail;  a congenial Constable.

  High up the mountain before them, they could see St. Mark's Cathedral and hear its bells ringing changes, mostly just tuneless sequences of notes, but sometimes a pretty melody would tumble out, like an unexpected gem from the permutations of the
I Chin
g.

  The Diamond Palace of Source Victoria glittered peach and amber as it caught the sunrise, which was still hidden behind the mountain. Nell and Harv had slept surprisingly well under the silver blanket, but they had not by any means slept late. The martial reveille from the Sendero Clave had woken them, and by the time they hit the streets again, Sendero's burly Korean and Incan evangelists were already pouring out of their gate into the common byways of the Leased Territories, humping their folding mediatrons and heavy crates of little red books. "We could go in there, Nell," Harv said, and Nell thought he must be joking. "Always plenty to eat and a warm cot in Sendero."

  "They wouldn't let me keep my book," Nell said.

  Harv looked at her, mildly startled. "How do you know? Oh, don't tell me, you learned it from the Primer."

  "They only have one book in Sendero, and it tells them to burn all the other books."

  As they climbed toward the green belt, the way got steeper and Harv started wheezing. From time to time he would stop with his hands on his knees and cough in high hoarse bursts like the bark of a seal. But the air was cleaner up here, they could tell by the way it felt going down their throats, and it was colder too, which helped.

  A band of forest surrounded the high central plateau of New Chusan. The clave called Dovetail backed right up against this green belt and was no less densely wooded, though from a distance it had a finer texture-more and smaller trees, and many flowers.

  Dovetail was surrounded by a fence made of iron bars and painted black. Harv took one look at it and said it was a joke if that was all the security they had. Then he got to noticing that the fence was lined with a greensward about a stone's throw in width, smooth enough for championship croquet. He raised his eyebrows significantly at Nell, implying that any unauthorized personnel who tried to walk across it would be impaled on hydraulic stainless-steel spikes or shot through with cookiecutters or rent by robot dogs.

  The gates to Dovetail stood wide open, which deeply alarmed Harv. He got in front of Nell lest she try to run through them. At the boundary line, the pavement changed from the usual hard-but-flexible, smoothbut-high-traction nanostuff to an irregular mosaic of granite blocks.

  The only human in evidence was a white-haired Constable whose belly had created a visible divergence between his two rows of brass buttons. He was bent over using a trowel to extract a steaming turd from the emerald grass. Circumstances suggested that it had come from one of two corgis who were even now slamming their preposterous bodies into each other not far away, trying to roll each other over, which runs contrary to the laws of mechanics even in the case of corgis that are lean and trim, which these were not.

  This struggle, which appeared to be only one skirmish in a conflict of epochal standing, had driven all lesser considerations, such as guarding the gate, from the combatants' sphere of attention, and so it was the Constable who first noticed Nell and Harv. "Away with you!" he hollered cheerfully enough, waving his redolent trowel down the hill. "We've no work for such as you today! And the free matter compilers are all down by the waterfront."

  The effect of this news on Harv was contrary to what the Constable had intended, for it implied that sometimes there
was
work for such as him. He stepped forward alertly. Nell took advantage of this to run out from behind him. "Pardon me, sir," she called, "we're not here for work or to get free things, but to find someone who belongs to this phyle."

  The Constable straightened his tunic and squared his shoulders at the appearance of this little girl, who looked like a thete but talked like a Vicky. Suspicion gave way to benevolence, and he ambled toward them after shouting a few imprecations at his dogs, who evidently suffered from advanced hearing loss. "Very well," he said. "Who is it that you're looking for?"

  "A man by the name of Brad. A blacksmith. He works at a stable in the New Atlantis Clave, taking care of horses."

  "I know him well," the Constable said. "I'd be glad to ring him for you. You're a . . . friend of his, then?"

  "We should like to think that he remembers us favorably," Nell said. Harv turned around and made a face at her for talking this way, but the Constable was eating it up.

  "It's a brisk morning," the Constable said. "Why don't you join me inside the gatehouse, where it's nice and cozy, and I'll get you some tea."

  On either side of the main gate, the fence terminated in a small stone tower with narrow diamond-paned windows set deeply into its walls. The Constable entered one of these from his side of the fence and then opened a heavy wooden door with huge wrought-iron hinges, letting Nell and Harv in from their side. The tiny octagonal room was cluttered with fine furniture made of dark wood, a shelf of old books, and a small cast-iron stove with a red enamel kettle on top, pocked like an asteroid from ancient impacts, piping out a tenuous column of steam. The Constable directed them into a pair of wooden chairs. Trying to scoot them back from the table, they discovered that each was ten times the weight of any other chair they'd seen, being made of actual wood, and thick pieces of it too.

  They were not especially comfortable, but Nell liked sitting in hers nevertheless, as something about its size and weight gave her a feeling of security. The windows on the Dovetail side of the gatehouse were larger, and she could see the two corgi dogs outside, peering in through the lead latticework, flabbergasted that they had, through some enormous lacuna in procedure, been left on the outside, wagging their tails somewhat uncertainly, as if, in a world that allowed such mistakes, nothing could be counted on.

  The Constable found a wooden tray and carried it about the room, cautiously assembling a collection of cups, saucers, spoons, tongs, and other tea-related armaments. When all the necessary tools were properly laid out, he manufactured the beverage, hewing closely to the ancient procedure, and set it before them.

  Resting on a counter by the window was an outlandishly shaped black object that Nell recognized as a telephone, only because she had seen them on the old passives that her mother liked to watch- where they seemed to take on a talismanic significance out of proportion to what they actually did. The Constable picked up a piece of paper on which many names and strings and digits had been hand-written. He turned his back to the nearest window, then leaned backward over the counter so as to bring most of him closer to its illumination. He tilted the paper into the light and then adjusted the elevation of his own chin through a rather sweeping arc, converging on a position that placed the lenses of his reading spectacles between pupil and page. Having maneuvered all of these elements into the optimal geometry, he let out a little sigh, as though the arrangement suited him, and peered up over his glasses at Nell and Harv for a moment, as if to suggest that they could learn some valuable tricks by keeping a sharp eye on him. Nell watched him, fascinated not least because she rarely saw people in spectacles.

  The Constable returned his attention to the piece of paper and scanned it with a furrowed brow for a few minutes before suddenly calling out a series of several numbers, which sounded random to his visitors but seemed both deeply significant and perfectly obvious to the Constable.

  The black telephone sported a metal disk with finger-size holes bored around its edge. The Constable hooked the phone's handset over his epaulet and then began to insert his finger into various of these holes, using them to torque the disk around against the countervailing force of a spring. A brief but exceedingly cheerful conversation ensued. Then he hung up the telephone and clasped his hands over his belly, as if he had accomplished his assigned tasks so completely that said extremities were now superfluous decorations.

  "It'll be a minute," he said. "Please take your time, and don't scald yourselves on that tea. Care for some shortbread?"

  Nell was not familiar with this delight. "No thank you, sir," she said, but Harv, ever pragmatic, allowed as he might enjoy some.

  Suddenly the Constable's hands found a new reason for existence and began to busy themselves exploring the darker corners of old wooden cupboards here and there around the little room. "By the way," he said absent-mindedly, as he pursued this quest, "if you had in mind actually passing
through
the gate, that is to say, if you wanted to
visit
Dovetail, as you would be abundantly welcome to do, then you should know a few things about our rules. He stood up and turned toward them, displaying a tin box labeled SHORTBREAD.

  "To be specific, the young gentleman's chocky sticks and switchblade will have to come out of his trousers and lodge here, in the loving care of me and my colleagues, and I will have to have a good long look at that monstrous chunk of rod logic, batteries, sensor arrays, and what-haveyou that the young lady is carrying in her little knapsack, concealed, unless I am mistaken, in the guise of a book. Hmmm?" And the Constable turned toward them with his eyebrows raised very high on his forehead, shaking the plaid box.

  Constable Moore, as he introduced himself, examined Harv's weapons with more care than really seemed warranted, as if they were relics freshly exhumed from a pyramid. He took care to compliment Harv on their presumed effectiveness, and to meditate aloud on the grave foolishness of anyone's messing about with a young fellow like Harv. The weapons went into one of the cupboards, which Constable Moore locked by talking to it. "And now the book, young lady," he said to Nell, pleasantly enough.

  She didn't want to let the Primer out of her hands, but she remembered the kids at the playroom who had tried to take it from her and been shocked, or something, for their trouble. So she handed it over. Constable Moore took it very carefully in both hands, and a tiny little moan of appreciation escaped his lips. "I should inform you that sometimes it does rather nasty things to people who, as it supposes, are trying to steal it from me," Nell said, then bit her lip, hoping she hadn't implied that Constable Moore was a thief.

  "Young lady, I should be crestfallen if it didn't."