The Diamond Age (35 page)

  There were seven ships now. The first five had been named after the Master's Five Virtues, and after that they had taken to naming them after major Confucian philosophers. Judge Fang flew out to the one named (as best it could be translated into English)
Generosity of Soul
, personally carrying the M.C. program in the sleeve of his garment. This was the very ship he had visited on the eventful night of his boat ride with Dr. X, and ever since then he had somehow felt closer to these fifty thousand little mice than any of the other quarter-million in the other vessels.

  The program was written to work in a bulk compiler, extruding dozens of Primers each cycle. When the first batch was finished, Judge Fang plucked out one of the new volumes, inspected its cover, which had the appearance of marbled jade, flipped through the pages admiring the illustrations, and cast a critical eye over the calligraphy.

  Then he carried it down a corridor and into a playroom where a few hundred little mice were running around, blowing off steam. He caught the eye of one girl and beckoned her over. She came, reluctantly, chivvied along by an energetic teacher who alternated between smiling to the girl and bowing to Judge Fang.

  He squatted so that he could look her in the eye and handed her the book. She was much more interested in the book than in Judge Fang, but she had been taught the proper formalities and bowed and thanked him. Then she opened it up. Her eyes got wide. The book began to talk to her. To Judge Fang the voice sounded a bit dull, the rhythm of the speech not exactly right. But the girl didn't care. The girl was hooked.

  Judge Fang stood up to find himself surrounded by a hundred little girls, all facing toward the little jade book, standing on tiptoes, mouths open.

  Finally he had been able to do something unambiguously good with his position. In the Coastal Republic it wouldn't have been possible; in the Middle Kingdom, which hewed to the words and spirit of the Master, it was simply part of his duties.

  He turned and left the room; none of the girls noticed, which was just as well, as they might have seen a quiver in his lip and a tear in his eye. As he made his way through the corridors toward the upper deck where his airship awaited him, he reviewed for the thousandth time the Great Learning, the kernel of the Master's thought:
The ancients who wished to demonstrate illustrious virtue throughout the kingdom, first ordered well their own states. Wishing to order well their states, they first regulated their families. Wishing to regulate their families, they first cultivated their persons. Wishing to cultivate their persons, they first rectified their hearts. Wishing to rectify their hearts, they first sought to be sincere in their thoughts. Wishing to be sincere in their thoughts, they first extended to the utmost their knowledge. Such extention of knowledge lay in the investigation of things. . . . From the Son of Heaven down to the mass of the people, all must consider the cultivation of the person the root of everything besides.

Hackworth receives an ambiguous message;  a ride through Vancouver;  tattooed woman and totem poles; he enters the hidden world of the Drummers.

  Kidnapper had a glove compartment of sorts hollowed into the back of its neck. As he was riding across the causeway, Hackworth opened it up because he wanted to see whether it was large enough to contain his bowler without folding, bending, spindling, or mutilating the exquisite hyperboloid of its brim. The answer was that it was just a wee bit too small. But Dr. X had been thoughtful enough to toss in some snacks: a handful of fortune cookies, three of them to be exact. They looked good. Hackworth picked one and snapped it open. The strip of paper bore some kind of gaudily animated geometric pattern, long strands of something tumbling end over end and bouncing against one another. It looked vaguely familiar: These were supposed to be yarrow stalks, which Taoists used for divination. But instead of forming a hexagram of the I Ching, they began falling into place, one after another, in such a way as to form letters in the pseudo-Chinese typeface used in the logos of onestar Chinese restaurants. When the last one had bounced into place, the fortune read:

 
SEEK  THE  ALCHEMIST.

 
"Thanks ever so much, Dr. X," Hackworth snapped. He continued to watch the fortune for a while, hoping that it would turn into something a little more informative, but it was dead, just a piece of litter now and forever.

  Kidnapper slowed to a canter and cruised purposefully through the university, then turned north and crossed a bridge into the peninsula that contained most of Vancouver proper. The chevaline did a perfectly good job of not stepping on anyone, and Hackworth soon learned to stop worrying and trust its instincts. This left his eyes free to wander through the sights of Vancouver, which had not been advisable when he'd come this way on the velocipede. He had not noticed, before, the sheer maddening profusion of the place, each person seemingly an ethnic group of one, each with his or her own costume, dialect, sect, and pedigree. It was as if, sooner or later, every part of the world became India and thus ceased to function in any sense meaningful to straight-arrow Cartesian rationalists like John Percival Hackworth, his family and friends.

  Shortly after passing the Aerodrome they reached Stanley Park, an unruined peninsula several miles around, which had, thank God, been forked over to Protocol and kept much as it had always been, with the same Douglas firs and mossy red cedars that had been growing there forever. Hackworth had been here a few times and had a vague idea of how it was laid out: restaurants here and there, paths along the beach, a zoo and aquarium, public playing fields.

  Kidnapper took him for a nice lope along a pebbly beach and then somewhat abruptly bounded up a slope, for that purpose switching into a gait never used by any real horse. Its legs shortened, and it clawed its way surefootedly up the forty-five-degree surface like a mountain lion. An alarmingly quick zigzag through a stand of firs brought them into an open grassy area. Then Kidnapper slowed to a mere walk, as if it were a real horse that had to be cooled down gradually, and took Hackworth into a semicircle of old totem poles.

  A young woman was here, standing before one of the poles with her hands clasped behind her back, which would have given her an endearingly prim appearance if she had not been stark naked and covered with constantly shifting mediatronic tattoos. Even her hair, which fell loosely to her waist, had been infiltrated with some kind of nanosite so that each strand's color fluctuated from place to place according to a scheme not just now apparent to Hackworth. She was looking intently at the carving of a totem pole and apparently not for the first time, for her tattoos were done in much the same style.

  The woman was looking at a totem pole dominated by a representation of an orca, head down and tail up, dorsal fin projecting horizontally out of the pole and evidently carved from a separate piece of wood. The orca's blowhole had a human face carved around it. The face's mouth and the orca's blowhole were the same thing. This promiscuous denial of boundaries was everywhere on the totem poles and on the woman's tattoo: The staring eyes of a bear were also the faces of some other sort of creature. The woman's navel was also the mouth of a human face, much like the orca's blowhole, and sometimes that face became the mouth of a larger face whose eyes were her nipples and whose goatee was her pubic hair. But as soon as he'd made out one pattern, it would change into something else, because unlike the totem poles the tattoo was dynamic and played with images in time the same way that the totem poles did in space.

  "Hello, John," she said. "It's too bad I loved you because you had to leave."

  Hackworth tried to find her face, which should have been easy, it being the thing in the front of her head; but his eyes kept snagging on all the other little faces that came and went and flowed into one another, time-sharing her eyes, her mouth, even her nostrils. And he was starting to recognize patterns in her hair too, which was more than he could handle. He was pretty sure he had just caught a glimpse of Fiona in there.

  She turned her back on him, her hair spinning out momentarily like a twirling skirt, and for that instant he could see through it and begin to make sense of the image. He was positive that somewhere in there he'd seen Gwen and Fiona walking along a beach.

  He dismounted from Kidnapper and followed her on foot. Kidnapper followed him silently. They walked across the park for half a mile or so, and Hackworth kept his distance because when he got too close to her, the images in her hair bewildered his eyes. She took him to a wild stretch of beach where immense Douglas fir logs lay scattered around. As Hackworth clambered over the logs trying to keep up with the woman, he occasionally caught a handhold that appeared to have been carved by someone long ago.

  The logs were palimpsests. Two of them rose from the water's edge, not quite vertical, stuck like darts into the impermanent sand. Hackworth walked between them, the surf crashing around his knees. He saw weathered intimations of faces and wild beasts living in the wood, ravens, eagles, and wolves tangled into organic skeins. The water was bitterly cold on his legs, and he whooped in a couple of breaths, but the woman kept walking; the water was up past her waist now, and her hair was floating around her so that the translucent images once again became readable. Then she vanished beneath a collapsing wave two meters high.

  The wave knocked Hackworth on his backside and washed him along for a short distance, flailing his arms and legs. When he got his balance back, he sat there for a few moments, letting smaller waves embrace his waist and chest, waiting for the woman to come up for a breath. But she didn't.

  There was something down there. He rolled up onto his feet and tramped straight into the ocean. Just as the waves were coming up into his face, his feet contacted something hard and smooth that gave way beneath him. He was sucked downward as the water plunged into a subterranean void. A hatch slammed shut above his head, and suddenly he was breathing air again. The light was silver.

  He was sitting in water up to his chest, but it rapidly drained away, drawn off by some kind of a pumping system, and then he found himself looking down a long silvery tunnel. The woman was descending it, a stone's throw ahead of him.

  Hackworth had been in a few of these, normally in more industrial settings. The .entrance was dug into the beach, but the rest of it was a floating tunnel, a tube full of air, moored to the bottom. It was a cheap way to make space; the Nipponese used these things as sleeping quarters for foreign guest workers. The walls were made of membranes that drew oxygen from the surrounding seawater and ejected carbon dioxide, so that seen from a fish's point of view, the tunnels steamed like hot pasta on a cold steel plate as they excreted countless microbubbles of polluted CO2. These things extruded themselves into the water like the roots that grew out of improperly stored potatoes, forking from time to time, carrying their own Feeds forward so that they could be extended on command. They were empty and collapsed to begin with, and when they knew they were finished, they inflated themselves with scavenged oxygen and grew rigid.

  Now that the cold water had drained out of Hackworth's ears, he could hear a deep drumming that he'd mistaken at first for the crash of the surf overhead; but this had a steadier beat that invited him forward.

  Down the tunnel Hackworth walked, following the woman, and as he went the light grew dimmer and the tunnel narrower. He suspected that the walls of the tunnel had mediatronic properties because he kept seeing things from the corners of his eyes that were no longer there when he snapped his head around. He'd assumed that he would soon reach a chamber, a swelling in the tunnel where this woman's friends would sit pounding on enormous kettledrums, but before reaching any such thing, he came to a place where the tunnel had gone completely dark, and he had to crouch to his knees and feel his way along. When he touched the taut but yielding wall of the tunnel with his knees and his hands, he felt the drumming in his bones and realized that audio was built into the stuff; the drumming could be anywhere, or it could be recorded. Or maybe it was a lot simpler than that, maybe the tubes happened to transmit sound well, and somewhere else in the tunnel system, people were just pounding on the walls.

  His head contacted the tunnel. He dropped to his belly and began to crawl along. Swarms of tiny sparkling lights kept lunging past his face, and he realized that they were his hands; light-emitting nanosites had become embedded in his flesh. They must have been put there by Dr. X's physician; but they had not come alight until he entered these tunnels.

  If the woman hadn't already come through here, he would have given up at this point, thinking it a dead end, a busted tunnel that had failed to expand. The drumming was now coming into his ears and bones from all sides. He could not see a thing, though from time to time he thought he caught a glimmer of flickering yellow light.

  The tunnel undulated slightly in the deep currents, rivers of bitterly cold water swirling along the floor of the straits. Whenever he allowed his mind to wander, reminding himself that he was deep below the surface of the ocean here, he had to stop and force himself not to panic. Concentrate on the nice airfilled tunnel, not what surrounds it.

  There was definitely light ahead. He found himself in a swelling in the tube, just wide enough to sit up in, and rolled over on his back for a moment to rest. A lamp was burning in here, a bowl filled with some kind of melting hydrocarbon that left no ash or smoke. The mediatronic walls had animated scenes on them, barely visible in the flickering light: animals dancing in the forest.

  He followed the tubes for some period of time that was quite long but difficult to estimate. From time to time he would come to a chamber with a lamp and more paintings. As he crawled through the long perfectly black tunnels, he began to experience visual and auditory hallucinations, vague at first, just random noise knocking around in his neural net, but increasingly well-resolved and realistic.

  The hallucinations had a dreamlike quality in which things he'd actually seen recently, such as Gwen and Fiona, Dr. X, the airship, the boys playing fieldball, were mingled with images so alien he scarcely recognized them. It troubled him that his mind was taking something as dear to him as Fiona and blending her into a farrago of alien sights and ideas.

  He could see the nanosites in his skin. But for all he knew, he might have a million more living in his brain now, piggybacking on axons and dendrites, sending data to one another in flashes of light. A second brain intermingled with his own.

  There was no reason that information could not be relayed from one such nanosite to another, through his body and outward to the nanosites in his skin, and from there across the darkness to others. What would happen when he came close to other people with similar infestations?

  When he finally reached the grand chamber, he could not really tell whether it was reality or another machine-made hallucination. It was shaped like a flattened ice-cream cone, a domed ceiling above a gently sloping conical floor. The ceiling was a vast mediatron, and the floor served as an amphitheatre. Hackworth spilled into the room abruptly as the drumming reached a crescendo. The floor was slick, and he slid down helplessly until he reached the central pit. He rolled onto his back and saw a fiery scene sprawling across the dome above, and in his peripheral vision, covering the floor of the theatre, a thousand living constellations pounding on the floor with their hands.

Bred and born in the Foreign regions beyond, there is much in the administration of the Celestial Dynasty that is not perfectly comprehensible to the Barbarians, and they are continually putting forced constructions on things of which it is difficult to explain to them the real nature. -Qiying

PART THE SECOND

Hackworth has a singular experience; the rite of the Drummers.

  In a cavernous dark space lit by many small fires, a young woman, probably not much more than a girl, stands on a pedestal naked except for an elaborate paint job, or maybe it is a total-body mediatronic tattoo. A crown of leafy branches is twined around her head, and she has thick voluminous hair spreading to her knees. She is clutching a bouquet of roses to her breast, the thorns indenting her flesh. Many people, perhaps thousands, surround her, drumming madly, sometimes chanting and singing.

  Into the space between the girl and the watchers, a couple of dozen men are introduced. Some come running out of their own accord, some look as if they've been pushed, some wander in as if they've been walking down the street (stark naked) and gone in the wrong door. Some are Asian, some European, some African. Some have to be prodded by frenzied celebrants who charge out of the crowd and shove them here and there. Eventually they form a circle around the girl, and then the drumming builds to a deafening crescendo, speeds up until it devolves into a rhythmless hailstorm, and then suddenly, instantly, stops.

  Someone wails something in a high, purposeful, ululating voice. Hackworth can't understand what this person is saying. Then there is a single massive drumbeat. More wailing. Another drumbeat. Again. The third drumbeat establishes a ponderous rhythm. This goes on for a while, the beat slowly speeding up. After a certain point the wailer no longer stops between beats, he begins to weave his rap through the bars in a sort of counterpoint. The ring of men standing around the girl begin to dance in a very simple shuffling motion, one way and then the other way around the girl. Hackworth notes that all of them have erections, sheathed in brightly colored mediatronic condoms-rubbers that actually make their own light so that the bobbing boners look like so many cyalume wands dancing through the air.

  The drumbeats and the dancing speed up very slowly. The erections tell Hackworth why this is taking so long: He's watching foreplay here. After half an hour or so, the excitement, phallic and otherwise, is unbearable. The beat is now a notch faster than your basic pulse rate, lots of other beats and counterrhythms woven through it, and the chanting of the individual singer has become a wild semi-organized choral phenomenon. At some point, after seemingly nothing has happened for half an hour, everything happens at once: The drumming and chanting explode to a new, impossible level of intensity. The dancers reach down, grip the flaccid reservoir tips of their radioactive condoms, stretch them out.

  Someone runs out with a knife and cuts off the tips of the condoms in a freakish parody of circumcision, exposing the glans of each man's penis. The girl moves for the first time, tossing her bouquet up in the air like a bride making her move toward the limo; the roses fountain, spinning end over end, and come down individually among the dancers, who snatch them out of the air, scrabble for them on the floor, whatever. The girl faints, or something, falling backward, arms out, and is caught by several of the dancers, who hoist her body up over their heads and parade her around the circle for a while, like a crucified body just crowbarred off the tree. She ends up flat on her back on the ground, and one of the dancers is between her legs, and in a very few thrusts he has finished. A couple of others grab his arms and yank him out of there before he's even had a chance to tell her he'll still love her in the morning, and another one is in there, and he doesn't take very long either-all this foreplay has got these guys in hair-trigger mode. The dancers manage to rotate through in a few minutes. Hackworth can't see the girl, who's completely hidden, but she's not struggling, as far as he can tell, and they don't seem to be holding her down. Toward the end, smoke or steam or something begins to spiral up from the middle of the orgy. The last participant grimaces even more than the average person who's having an orgasm, and yanks himself back from the woman, grabbing his dick and hopping up and down and hollering in what looks like pain. That's the signal for all of the dancers to jump back away from the woman, who is now kind of hard to make out, just a fuzzy motionless package wrapped in steam.

  Flames erupt from several locations, all over her body, at once, seams of lava splitting open along her veins and the heart itself erupting from her chest like ball lightning. Her body becomes a burning cross spread out on the floor, the bright apex of an inverted cone of turbulent steam and smoke. Hackworth notices that the drumming and chanting have completely stopped. The crowd observes a long moment of silence while the body burns. Then, when the last of the flames have died out, an honor guard of sorts descends from the crowd: four men in black body paint with white skeletons painted on top of that. He notes that the woman was lying on a square sheet of some kind when she burned. Each of the guys grabs a corner of the sheet. Her remains tumble into the center, powdery ash flies, flecks of red-hot coals spark. The skeleton men carry the remains over to a fifty-five-gallon steel drum and dump it in. There is a burst of steam and lots of sizzling noises as the hot coals contact some kind of liquid that was in the drum. One of the skeleton men picks up a long spoon and gives the mix a stir, then dips a cracked and spalled University of Michigan coffee mug into it and takes a long drink.

  The other three skeleton men each drink in their turn. By now, the spectators have formed a long queue. One by one they step forward. The leader of the skeleton men holds the mug for them, gives each one a sip. Then they all wander off, individually or in small, conversing groups. Show's over.

Nell's life at Dovetail;  developments in the Primer;  a trip to the New Atlantis Clave;  she is presented to Miss Matheson;  new lodgings with an "old" acquaintance.

  Nell lived in the Millhouse for several days. They gave her a little bed under the eaves on the top floor, in a cozy place only she was tiny enough to reach. She had her meals with Rita or Brad or one of the other nice people she knew there. During the days she would wander in the meadow or dangle her feet in the river or explore the woods, sometimes going as far as the dog pod grid. She always took the Primer with her. Lately, it had been filled with the doings of Princess Nell and her friends in the city of King Magpie.

  It kept getting more like a ractive and less like a story, and by the end of each chapter she was exhausted from all the cleverness she had expended just to get herself and her friends through another day without falling into the clutches of pirates or of King Magpie himself.

  In time, she and Peter came up with a very tricky plan to sneak into the castle, create a diversion, and seize the magic books that were the source of King Magpie's power. This plan failed the first time, but the next day, Nell turned the page back and tried it again, this time with a few changes. It failed again, but not before Princess Nell and her friends had gotten a little farther into the castle. The sixth or seventh time, the plan worked perfectly-while King Magpie was locked in a battle of riddles with Peter Rabbit (which Peter won), Purple used a magic spell to smash open the door to his secret library, which was filled with books even more magical than the
Young Lady's Illustrated Primer
. Hidden inside one of those books was a jeweled key. Princess Nell took the key, and Purple made off with several of King Magpie's magic books while she was at it.

  They made a breathtaking escape across a river into the next country, where King Magpie could not chase them, and camped in a nice meadow for a few days, resting. During the daytime, when the others were just stuffed animals, Princess Nell would peruse some of the new magic books that Purple had stolen. When she did, its image in the illustration would zoom toward her until it filled the page, and then the Primer itself would become that magical book until she decided to put it away.

  Nell's favorite book was a magical Atlas which she could use to explore any land, real or imaginary. During the nighttime, Purple spent most of her time reading a very large, crusty, worn, stained, burnt tome entitled
PANTECHNICON
. This book had a built-in hasp with a padlock. Whenever Purple wasn't using it, she locked it shut. Nell asked to see it a few times, but Purple told her she was too young to know such things as were written in this Book.

  During this time, Duck as usual made herself busy around the camp, tidying up and fixing their meals, doing laundry on the rocks by the river, and mending their clothes that had become ragged during their wanderings. Peter became restless. He was quick with words, but he had not learned the trick of reading, and so the books from King Magpie's library were of no use to him save as nest-lining material. He got into the habit of exploring the surrounding forests, particularly the ones to the north. At first he would be gone for a few hours at a time, but once he stayed away all night and did not come back until the following noon. Then he began to go on trips for several days at a time.

  Peter vanished into the north woods one day, staggering under a heavy pack, and didn't come back at all.
. . .

 
Nell was in the meadow one day, gathering flowers, when a fine lady- a Vicky- came riding toward her on a horse. When she drew closer, Nell was surprised to see that the horse was Eggshell and the lady was Rita, all dressed up in a long dress like the Vicky ladies wore, with a riding hat on her head, and riding sidesaddle of all things.