The Diamond Age (47 page)

  "Yes?" she said, turning toward him.

  "Nell, I want to tell you how fine you look," he said, "just like the finest Vicky lady in all of Atlantis. I can't believe you're my same Nell that I used to bring things to in the old flat-remember those days? I know that you and I have gone different ways, ever since that morning in Dovetail, and I know it's got a iot to do with that Primer. I just want to tell you, sister, that even though I say bad stuff about Vickys sometimes, I'm as proud of you as I could be, and I hope when you read that Primer-so full of stuff I could never understand or even read-you'll think back on your brother Harv, who saw it lying in the gutter years ago and took it into -his mind to bring it to his kid sister. Will you remember that, Nell?" With that he plugged the oxygen tube back into his mouth, and his ribs began to heave.

  "Of course I will, Harv," Nell said, her eyes filling with tears, and blundered her way back across the room until she could sweep Harv's bloated body up in her strong arms.          The veil swirled like a sheet of water thrown into Harv's face, all the little umbrellas drawing themselves out of the way as she brought his face up to hers and planted a kiss on his cheek.

  The veil congealed again as he sank back down onto the foam mattress- just like the mattresses he had taught her to get from the M.C., long ago-and she turned and ran out of the room sobbing.

Hackworth is brought up-to-date by the great Napier.

  "Have you had the opportunity to speak with your family?" Colonel Napier said, speaking out of a mediatronic sabletop from his office in Atlantis/Shanghai. Hackworth was sitting in a pub in Atlantis/Vancouver.

  Napier looked good now that he was deeper into middle age- somewhat more imposing. He'd been working on his bearing.

  Hackworth had been temporarily impressed when Napier's image had first materialized on the mediatron, then he remembered his own image in the mirror. Once he'd gotten himself cleaned up and trimmed his beard, which he'd decided to keep, he realized that he had a new bearing of his own. Even if he was desperately confused about how he got it.

  "Thought I'd find out what the hell happened first. Besides-" He stopped talking for a while. He was having trouble getting his conversational rhythm back.

  "Yes?" Napier said in a labored display of patience.

  "I just spoke to Fiona this morning."

  "After you left the tunnels?"

  "No. Before. Before I-woke up, or whatever."

  Napier was slightly taken aback and only popped his jaw muscles a couple of times, reached for his tea, looked irrelevantly out the window at whatever view he had out his office window in New Chusan. Hackworth, on the other side of the Pacific, contented himself with staring into the inky depths of a pint of stout.

  A dream-image surfaced in Hackworth's mind, like a piece of debris rising to the surface after a shipwreck, inexorably muscling tons of green murk out of its path. He saw a glistening blue projectile shoot into the Doctor's beige-gloved hands, trailing a thick cord, watched it unfold, nay bloom into a baby.

  "Why did I think of that?" he said.

  Napier seemed puzzled by this remark. "Fiona and Gwendolyn are in Atlantis/Seattle now-half an hour from your present location by tube," he said.

  "Of course! They live- we live- in Seattle now. I knew that." He was remembering Fiona hiking around in the caldera of some snow-covered volcano.

  "If you are under the impression that you've been in contact with her recently-which is quite out of the question, I'm afraid- then it must have been mediated through the Primer. We were not able to break the encryption on the signals passing out of the Drummers' cave, but traffic analysis suggests that you've spent a lot of time racting in the last ten years."

 
"Ten years!?"

 
"Yes. But surely you must have suspected that, from evidence."

  "It feels like ten years. I sense that ten years of things have happened to me. But the engineer hemisphere has a bit of trouble coming to grips."

  "We are at a loss to understand why Dr. X would choose to have you serve out your sentence among the Drummers," Napier said. "It would seem to us that your engineer hemisphere, as you put it, is your most desirable feature as far as he is concerned-you know that the Celestials are still terribly short of engineers."

  "I've been working on something," Hackworth said. Images of a nanotechnological system, something admirably compact and elegant, were flashing over his mind's eye. It seemed to be very nice work, the kind of thing he could produce only when he was concentrating very hard for a long time. As, for example, a prisoner might do.

  "What sort of thing exactly?" Napier asked, suddenly sounding rather tense.

  "Can't get a grip on it," Hackworth finally said, shaking his head helplessly. The detailed images of atoms and bonds had been replaced, in his mind's eye, by a fat brown seed hanging in space, like something in a Magritte painting. A lush bifurcated curve on one end, like buttocks, converging to a nipplelike point on the other.

  "What the hell happened?"

  "Before you left Shanghai, Dr. X hooked you up to a matter compiler, no?"

  "Yes."

  "Did he tell you what he was putting into your system?"

  "I guessed it was hæmocules of some description."

  "We took blood samples before you left Shanghai."

  "You did?"

  "We have ways," Colonel Napier said. "We also did a full workup on one of your friends from the cave and found several million nanosites in her brain."

  "Several million?"

  "Very small ones," Napier said reassuringly. "They are introduced through the blood, of course-the hæmocules circulate through the bloodstream until they find themselves passing through capillaries in the brain, at which point they cut through the blood/brain barrier and fasten themselves to a nearby axon. They can monitor activity in the axon or trigger it. These 'sites all talk to each other with visible light."

  "So when I was on my own, my 'sites just talked to themselves," Hackworth said, "but when I came into close proximity with other people who had these things in their brains-"

  "It didn't matter which brain a 'site was in. They
all
talked to one another indiscriminately, forming a network. Get some Drummers together in a dark room, and they become a gestalt society."

  "But the interface between these nanosites and the brain itself-"

  "Yes, I admit that a few million of these things piggybacking on randomly chosen neurons is only a feeble interface to something as complicated as the human brain," Napier said. "We're not claiming that you shared one brain with these people."

  "So what did I share with them exactly?" Hackworth said.

  "Food. Air. Companionship. Body fluids. Perhaps emotions or general emotional states. Probably more."

  "That's all I did for ten years?"

  "You did a iot of things," Napier said, "but you did them in a sort of unconscious, dreamlike state. You were sleepwalking. When we figured that out-after doing the biopsy on your fellow-troglodyte- we realised that in some sense you were no longer acting of your own free will, and we engineered a hunter-killer that would seek out and destroy the nanosites in your brain. We introduced it, in a dormant mode, into this female Drummer's system, then reintroduced her to your colony. When you had sex with her-well, you can work out the rest for yourself."

  "You have given me information, Colonel Napier, and I am grateful, but it has only made me more confused. What do you suppose the Celestial Kingdom wanted with me?"

  "Did Dr. X ask anything of you?"

  "To seek the Alchemist."

  Colonel Napier looked startled. "He asked that of you ten years ago?"

  "Yes. In as many words."

  "That is very singular," Napier said, after a prolonged interlude of mustache-twiddling. "We have only been aware of this shadowy figure for some five years and know virtually nothing about him- other than that he is a wizardly artifex who is conspiring with Dr. X."

  "Is there any other information-"

  "Nothing that I can reveal," Napier said brusquely, perhaps having revealed too much already. "Do let us know if you find him, though. Er, Hackworth, there is no tactful way to broach this subject. Are you aware that your wife has divorced you?"

  "Oh, yes," Hackworth said quietly. "I suppose I did know that." But he hadn't been conscious of it until now.

  "She was remarkably understanding about your long absence," Napier said, "but at some point it became evident that, like all the Drummers, you had become sexually promiscuous in the extreme."

  "How did she know?"

  "We warned her."

  "Pardon me?"

  "I mentioned earlier that we found things in your blood. These hæmocules were designed specifically to be spread through exchange of bodily fluids."

  "How do you know that?"

  Napier seemed impatient for the first time. "For god's sake, man, we know what we are doing. These particles had two functions: spread through exchange of bodily fluids, and interact with each other. Once we saw that, we had no ethical choice but to inform your wife."

  "Of course. That's only right. As a matter of fact, I thank you for it," Hackworth said. "And it's not hard to understand Gwen's feelings about sharing bodily fluids with thousands of Drummers."

  "You shouldn't beat yourself up," Napier said. "We've sent explorers down there."

  "Really?"

  "Yes. The Drummers don't mind. The explorers relate that the Drummers behave much the way people do in dreams. 'Poorly defined ego boundaries' was the phrase, as I recall. In any event, your behaviour down there wasn't necessarily a moral transgression as such-your mind wasn't your own."

  "You said that these particles interact with each other?"

  "Each one is a container for some rod logic and some memory," Napier said. "When one particle encounters another either
in vivo
or
in vitr
o, they dock and seem to exchange data for a few moments. Most of the time they disengage and drift apart. Sometimes they stay docked for a while, and computation takes place-we can tell because the rod logic throws off heat. Then they disconnect. Sometimes both particles go their separate ways, sometimes one of them goes dead. But one of them always keeps going."

  The implications of that last sentence were not lost on Hackworth. "Do the Drummers only have sex with one another, or-"

  "That was our first question too," Napier said. "The answer is no. They have a very good deal of sex with many, many other people. They actually run bordellos in Vancouver. They cater especially to the Aerodrome-and-tube-station crowd. A few years ago they came into conflict with the established bordellos because they were hardly charging any money at all for their services. They raised their prices just to be diplomatic. But they don't want the money- what on earth would they do with it?"

From the Primer,  a visit to Castle Turing;  a final chat with Miss Matheson;  speculation as to Nell's destiny; farewell;  conversation with a grizzled hoplite;  Nell goes forth to seek her fortune.

  The new territory into which Princess Nell had crossed was by far the largest and most complex of all the Faery Kingdoms in the Primer. Paging back to the first panoramic illustration, she counted seven major castles perched on the mountaintops, and she knew perfectly well that she would have to visit all of them, and do something difficult in each one, in order to retrieve the eleven keys that had been stolen from her and the one key that remained.

  She made herself some tea and sandwiches and carried them in a basket to a meadow, where she liked to sit among the wildflowers and read. Constable Moore's house was a melancholy place without the Constable in it, and it had been several weeks since she had seen him. During the last two years he had been called away on business with increasing 3 frequency, vanishing (as she supposed) into the interior of China for days, then weeks at a time, coming back depressed and exhausted to find solace in whiskey, which he consumed in surprisingly moderate quantities but with fierce concentration, and in midnight bagpipe recitals that woke up everyone in Dovetail and a few sensitive sleepers in the New Atlantis Clave.

  During her trip from the campsite of the Mouse Army to the first of the castles, Nell had to use all the wilderness skills she had learned in years of traveling around the Land Beyond: She fought with a mountain lion, avoided a bear, forded streams, lit fires, built shelters. By the time Nell had maneuvered Princess Nell to the ancient moss-covered gates of the first castle, the sun was shining horizontally across the meadow and the air was becoming a bit chilly. Nell wrapped herself up in a thermogenic shawl and set the thermostat for something a little on the cool side of comfortable; she had found that her wits became dull if she got too cozy. The basket had a thermos of hot tea with milk, and the sandwiches would hold out for a while.

  The highest of the castle's many towers was surmounted by a great four-sailed windmill that turned steadily, even though only a mild breeze could be noticed at Princess Nell's altitude, hundreds of feet below.

  Set into the main gate was a judas gate, and set into the judas was a small hatch. Below the hatch was a great bronze knocker made in the shape of a letter T, though its shape had become indistinct from an encrustation of moss and lichens. Princess Nell operated the knocker only with some effort and, given its decrepit state, did not expect a response; but hardly had the first knock sounded than the hatch opened up, and she was confronted by a helmet: For the gatekeeper on the other side was dressed from head to toe in a rusty and moss-covered suit of battle armor. But the gatekeeper said nothing, simply stared at Princess Nell; or so she assumed, as she could not see his face through the helmet's narrow vision-slits.

  "Good afternoon," said Princess Nell. "I beg your pardon, but I am a traveler in these parts, and I wonder if you would be so good as to give me a place to stay for the night."