The Diamond Age (51 page)

  "Naturally," Hackworth said. "Thank you for retaining them for me."

  "If you will be so good as to withdraw from these premises-"

  "Of course. Good day," Hackworth said, took the roll of papers from Gwen's trembling hand, and let himself out briskly. He was a bit surprised when he heard Amelia calling to him from the doorway.

  "Mr. Hackworth. Miss Lloyd wishes to know whether you have established a new residence, so that your personal effects may be forwarded."

  "None as yet," Hackworth said. "I'm in transit."

  Amelia brightened. "In transit to where?"

  "Oh, I don't really know," Hackworth said. A movement caught his eye and he saw Fiona framed in a second-story window. She was undoing the latches, raising the sash. "I'm on a quest of sorts."

  "A quest for what, Mr. Hackworth?"

  "Can't say precisely. You know, top secret and all that. Something to do with an alchemist. Who knows, maybe there'll be faeries and hobgoblins too, before it's all over. I'll be happy to fill you in when I return. Until then, please ask Miss Lloyd if she would be so understanding as to retain those personal effects for just a bit longer. It can't possibly take more than another ten years or so." And with that, Hackworth prodded Kidnapper forward, moving at an extremely deliberate pace.

  Fiona was on a velocipede with smart wheels that made short work of the cobblestone road. She caught up with her father just short of the security grid. Mother and Amelia had just materialized a block behind them in a half-lane car, and the sudden sensation of danger inspired Fiona to make an impetuous dive from the saddle of her velocipede onto Kidnapper's hindquarters, like a cowboy in a movie switching horses in midgallop. Her skirts, poorly adapted to cowboy maneuvers, got all fouled up around her legs, and she ended up slung over Kidnapper's back like a sack of beans, one hand clutching the vestigial knob where its tail would have been if it were a horse, and the other arm thrown round her father's waist.

  "I love you, Mother!" she shouted, as they rode through the grid and out of the jurisdiction of New Atlantis family law. "Can't say the same for you, Amelia! But I'll be back soon, don't worry about me! Goodbye!" And then the ferns and mist closed behind them, and they were alone in the deep forest.

Carl Hollywood takes the Oath;  stroll along the Thames;  an encounter with Lord Finkle-McGraw.

 
Carl took the Oath at Westminster Abbey on a surprisingly balmy day in April and afterward went for a stride down the river, heading not too directly toward a reception that had been arranged in his honor at the Hopkins Theatre near Leicester Square. Even without a pedomotive, he walked as fast as many people jogged.

  Ever since his first visit to London as a malnourished theatre student, he had preferred walking to any other way of getting around the place. Walking, especially along the Embankment where fellow-pedestrians were relatively few, also gave him freedom to smoke big old authentic cigars or the occasional briar pipe. Just because he was a Victorian didn't mean he had to give up his peculiarities; quite the opposite, in fact. Cruising along past old shrapnel-pocked Cleopatra's Needle in a comet-like corona of his own roiling, viscous smoke, he thought that he might get to like this.

  A gentleman in a top hat was standing on the railing, gazing stolidly across the water, and as Carl drew closer, he could see that it was Lord Alexander Chung-Sik Finkle-McGraw, who, a day or two earlier, had stated during a cinephone conversation that he should like to meet him face-to-face in the near future for a chat.

  Carl Hollywood, remembering his new tribal affiliation, went so far as to doff his hat and bow. Finkle-McGraw acknowledged the greeting somewhat distractedly. "Please accept my sincere congratulations, Mr. Hollywood. Welcome to the phyle."

  "Thank you."

  "I regret that I have not been able to attend any of your productions at the Hopkins- my friends who have could hardly have been more complimentary."

  "Your friends are too kind," said Carl Hollywood. He was still a little unsure of the etiquette. To accept the compliment at face value would have been boastful; to imply that His Grace's friends were incompetent judges of theatre was not much of an improvement; he settled for the less dangerous accusation that these friends had a superfluity of goodness.

  Finkle-McGraw detached himself from the railing and began to walk along the river, keeping a brisk pace for a man of his age. "I daresay that you shall make a prized addition to our phyle, which, as brilliantly as it shines in the fields of commerce and science, wants more artists."

  Not wanting to join in criticism of the tribe he'd just sworn a solemn Oath to uphold, Carl pursed his lips and mulled over some possible responses.

  Finkle-McGraw continued, "Do you suppose that we fail to encourage our own children to pursue the arts, or fail to attract enough men such as yourself, or perhaps both?"

  "With all due respect, Your Grace, I do not necessarily agree with your premise. New Atlantis has many fine artists."

  "Oh, come now. Why do all of them come from outside the tribe, as you did? Really, Mr. Hollywood, would you have taken the Oath at all if your prominence as a theatrical producer had not made it advantageous for you to do so?"

  "I think I will choose to interpret your question as part of a Socratic dialogue for my edification," Carl Hollywood said carefully, "and not as an allegation of insincerity on my part. As a matter of fact, just before I encountered you, I was enjoying my cigar, and looking about at London, and thinking about just how well it all suits me."

  "It suits you well because you are of a certain age now. You are a successful and established artist. The ragged bohemian life holds no charm for you anymore. But would you have reached your current position if you had not lived that life when you were younger?"

  "Now that you put it that way," Carl said, "I agree that we might try to make some provision, in the future, for young bohemians-"

  "It wouldn't work," Finkle-McGraw said. "I've been thinking about this for years. I had the same idea: Set up a sort of young artistic bohemian theme park, sprinkled around in all the major cities, where young New Atlantans who were so inclined could congregate and be subversive when they were in the mood. The whole idea was self-contradictory. Mr. Hollywood, I have devoted much effort, during the last decade or so, to the systematic encouragement of subversiveness."

  "You have? Are you not concerned that our young subversives will migrate to other phyles?"

  If Carl Hollywood could have kicked himself in the arse, he would have done so as soon as finishing that sentence. He had forgotten about Elizabeth Finkle-McGraw's recent and highly publicized defection to CryptNet. But the Duke took it serenely.

  "Some of them will, as the case of my granddaughter demonstrates. But what does it really mean when such a young person moves to another phyle? It means that they have outgrown youthful credulity and no longer wish to belong to a tribe simply because it is the path of least resistance-they have developed principles, they are concerned with their personal integrity. It means, in short, that they are ripe to become members in good standing of New Atlantis-as soon as they develop the wisdom to see that it is, in the end, the best of all possible tribes."

  "Your strategy was much too subtle for me to follow. I thank you for explaining it. You encourage subversiveness because you think that it will have an effect opposite to what one might naively suppose."

  "Yes. And that's the whole point of being an Equity Lord, you know-to look after the interests of the society as a whole instead of flogging one's own company, or whatever. At any rate, this brings us to the subject of the advertisement I placed in the ractives section of the Times and our consequent cinephone conversation."

  "Yes," Carl Hollywood said, "you are looking for ractors who performed in a project called the
Young Lady's Illustrated Primer
."

  "The Primer was my idea. I commissioned it. I paid the racting fees. Of course, owing to the way the media system is organised, I had no way to determine the identity of the ractors to whom I was sending the fees- hence the need for a public advertisement."

  "Your Grace, I should tell you immediately-and would have told you on the cinephone, had you not insisted that we defer all substantive discussion to a face-to-face-that I myself did not ract in the Primer. A friend of mine did. When I saw the advertisement, I undertook to respond on her behalf."

  "I understand that ractors are frequently pursued by overly appreciative members of their audience," said Finkle-McGraw, "and so I suppose I understand why you have chosen to act as intermediary in this case. Let me assure you that my motives are perfectly benign."

  Carl adopted a wounded look "Your Grace! I would never have supposed otherwise. I am arrogating this role to myself, not to protect the young lady in question from any supposed malignity on your part, but simply because her current circumstances make establishing contact with her a somewhat troublesome business."

  "Then pray tell me what you know about the young woman." Carl gave the Equity Lord a brief description of Miranda's relationship with the Primer.

  Finkle-McGraw was keenly interested in how much time Miranda had spent in the Primer each week. "If your estimates are even approximately accurate, this young woman must have singlehandedly done at least nine-tenths of the racting associated with that copy of the Primer."

 
"That
copy? Do you mean to say there were others?"

  Finkle-McGraw walked on silently for a few moments, then resumed in a quieter voice. "There were three copies in all. The first one went to my granddaughter-as you will appreciate, I tell you this in confidence. A second went to Fiona, the daughter of the artifex who created it. The third fell into the hands of Nell, a little thete girl.

  "To make a long story short, the three girls have turned out very differently. Elizabeth is rebellious and high-spirited and lost interest in the Primer several years ago. Fiona is bright but depressed, a classic manic-depressive artist. Nell, on the other hand, is a most promising young lady.

  "I prepared an analysis of the girls' usage habits, which were largely obscured by the inherent secrecy of the media system, but which can be inferred from the bills we paid to hire the ractors. It became clear that, in the case of Elizabeth, the racting was done by hundreds of different performers. In Fiona's case, the bills were strikingly lower because much of the racting was done by someone who did not charge money for his or her services-probably her father. But that's a different story. In Nell's case, virtually all of the racting was done by the same person."

  "It sounds," Carl said, "as if my friend established a relationship with Nell's copy-"

  "And by extension, with Nell," said Lord Finkle-McGraw. Carl said, "May I inquire as to why you wish to contact the ractor?"

  "Because she is a central part of what is going on here," said Lord Finkle-McGraw, "which I did not expect. It was not a part of the original plan that the ractor would be important."

  "She did it," Carl Hollywood said, "by sacrificing her career and much of her life. It is important for you to understand, Your Grace, that she was not merely Nell's tutor. She became Nell's mother."

  These words seemed to strike Lord Finkle-McGraw quite forcefully. His stride faltered, and he ambled along the riverbank for some time, lost in thought.

  "You gave me to believe, several minutes ago, that establishing contact with the ractor in question would not be a trivial process," he said finally, in quieter voice. "Is she no longer associated with your troupe?"

  "She took a leave of absence several years ago in order to concentrate on Nell and the Primer."

  "I see," said the Equity Lord, leaning into the words a little bit and turning it into an exclamation. He was getting excited. "Mr. Hollywood, I hope you will not be offended by my indelicacy in inquiring as to whether this has been a
paid
leave of absence."

  "Had it been necessary, I would have underwritten it. Instead there is another backer."

  "Another backer," repeated Finkle-McGraw. He was obviously fascinated, and slightly alarmed, by the use of financial jargon in this context.

  "The transaction was fairly simple, as I suppose all transactions are
au fond
," said Carl Hollywood. "Miranda wanted to locate Nell. Conventional thinking dictates that this is impossible. There are, however, some unconventional thinkers who would maintain that it can be done through unconscious, nonrational processes. There is a tribe called the Drummers who normally live underwater-"

  "I am familiar with them," said Lord Finkle-McGraw.

  "Miranda joined the Drummers four years ago," Carl said. "She had entered into a partnership. The two other partners were a gentleman of my acquaintance, also in the theatrical business, and a financial backer."

  "What did the backer hope to gain from it?"

  "A leased line to the collective unconscious," said Carl Hollywood. "He thought it would be to the entertainment industry what the philosopher's stone was to alchemy."

  "And the results?"

  "We have all been waiting to hear from Miranda."

  "You have heard nothing at all?"

  "Only in my dreams," Carl Hollywood said.

Nell's passage through Pudong;  she happens upon the offices of Madame Ping;  interview with the same.

 
Shanghai proper could be glimpsed only through vertical apertures between the high buildings of the Pudong Economic Zone as Nell skated westward. Downtown Pudong erupted from the flat paddy-land on the east bank of the Huang Pu. Almost all of the skyscrapers made use of mediatronic building materials. Some bore the streamlined characters of the Japanese writing system, rendered in sophisticated color schemes, but most of them were written in the denser high-resolution characters used by the Chinese, and these tended to be stroked out in fiery red, or in black on a background of that color.

  The Anglo-Americans had their Manhattan, the Japanese had Tokyo. Hong Kong was a nice piece of work, but it was essentially Western. When the Overseas Chinese came back to the homeland to build their monument to enterprise, they had done it here, and they had done it bigger and brighter, and unquestionably redder, than any of those other cities. The nanotechnological trick of making sturdy structures that were lighter than air had come along just at the right time, as all of the last paddies were being replaced by immense concrete foundations, and a canopy of new construction had bloomed above the first-generation undergrowth of seventy- and eighty-story buildings. This new architecture was naturally large and ellipsoidal, typically consisting of a huge neonrimmed ball impaled on a spike, so Pudong was bigger and denser a thousand feet above the ground than it was at street level.

  Seen from the apex of the big arch in the Causeway through several miles of bad air, the view was curiously flattened and faded, as if the whole scene had been woven into a fabulously complex brocade that had been allowed to gather dust for several decades and then been hung in front of Nell, about ten feet away. The sun had gone down not long before and the sky was still a dim orange fading up into purple, divided into irregular segments by half a dozen pillars of smoke spurting straight up out of the horizon and toward the dark polluted vault of the heavens, many miles off to the west, somewhere out in the silk and tea districts between Shanghai and Suzhou.

  As she power-skated down the western slope of the arch and crossed the coastline of China, the thunderhead of neon reached above her head, spread out to embrace her, developed into three dimensions- and she was still several miles away from it. The coastal neighborhoods consisted of block after block of reinforced-concrete apartment buildings, four to five stories high, looking older than the Great Wall though their real age could not have exceeded a few decades, and decorated on the ends facing the street with large cartoonish billboards, some mediatronic, most just painted on. For the first kilometer or so, most of these were targeted at businessmen just coming in from New Chusan, and in particular from the New Atlantis Clave. Glancing at these billboards as she went by them,

  Nell concluded that visitors from New Atlantis played an important role in supporting casinos and bordellos, both the old-fashioned variety and the newer scripted-fantasy emporia, where you could be the star in a little play you wrote yourself. Nell slowed down to examine several of these, memorizing the addresses of ones with especially new or well-executed signs.

  She had no clear plan in mind yet. All she knew was that she had to keep moving purposefully. Then the young men squatting on the curbs talking into their cellphones would keep eyeing her but leave her alone. The moment she stopped or looked the tiniest bit uncertain, they would descend.

  The dense wet air along the Huang Pu was supporting millions of tons of air buoys, and Nell felt every kilogram of their weight pressing upon her ribs and shoulders as she skated up and down the main waterfront thoroughfare, trying to maintain her momentum and her false sense of purposefulness. This was the Coastal Republic, which appeared to have no fixed principles other than that money talked and that it was a good thing to get rich. Every tribe in the world seemed to have its own skyscraper here. Some, like New Atlantis, were not actively recruiting and simply used the size and magnificence of their buildings as a monument to themselves.

  Others, like the Boers, the Parsis, the Jews, went for the understated approach, and in Pudong anything understated was more or less invisible. Still others-the Mormons, the First Distributed Republic, and the Chinese Coastal Republic itself-used every square inch of their mediatronic walls to proselytize.

  The only phyle that didn't seem to appreciate the ecumenical spirit of the place was the Celestial Kingdom itself. Nell stumbled across their territory, half a square block surrounded with a stucco-sheathed masonry wall, circular gates here and there, and an old three-story structure inside, done in high Ming style with eaves that curved way up at the corners and sculpted dragons along the ridgeline of the roof. The place was so tiny compared to the rest of Pudong that it looked as if you might trip over it. The gates were guarded by men in armor, presumably backed up by other, less obvious defensive systems.

  Nell was fairly certain that she was being followed, unobtrusively, by at least three young men who had locked on to her during her initial passage in from the coast, and who were waiting to find out whether she really had somewhere to go or was just faking it. She had already made her way from one end of the waterfront to the other, pretending to be a tourist who just wanted to take in a view of the Bund across the river. She was now heading back into the heart of downtown Pudong, where she had better look as if she were doing something.

  Passing by the grand entrance to one of the skyscrapers-a Coastal Republic edifice, not barbarian turf-she recognized its mediaglyphic logo from one of the signs she had seen on the way into town.

  Nell could at least fill out an application without committing herself. It would allow her to kill an hour in relatively safe and clean surroundings. The important thing, as Dojo had taught her long ago in a different context, was not to stop; without movement she could do nothing.

  Alas, Madame Ping's office suite was closed. A few lights were on in the back, but the doors were locked and no receptionist was on duty. Nell did not know whether to be amused or annoyed; whoever heard of a brothel that closed down after dark? But then these were only the administrative offices.

  She loitered in the lobby for a few minutes, then caught a down elevator. Just as the doors were closing, someone jumped into the lobby and slammed the button, opening them back up again. A young Chinese man with a small, slender body, large head, neatly dressed, carrying some papers. "Pardon me," he said. "Did you require something?"

  "I'm here to apply for a job," Nell said.

  The man's eyes traveled up and down her body in a coolly professional fashion, almost completely devoid of prurience, starting and stopping on her face. "As a performer," he said. The intonation was somewhere between a question and a declaration.

  "As a scriptwriter," she said.

  Unexpectedly, he broke into a grin.

  "I have qualifications that I will explain in detail."

  "We have writers. We contract for them on the network."

  "I'm surprised. How can a contract writer in Minnesota possibly provide your clients with the personalized service they require?"

  "You could almost certainly get a job as a performer," said the young man. "You would start tonight. Good pay."

  "Just by looking at the billboards on the way in, I could see that your customers aren't paying for bodies. They are paying for ideas. That's your value added, right?"

  "Pardon me?" said the young man, grinning again.

  "Your value added. The reason you can charge more than a whorehouse, pardon my language, is that you provide a scripted fantasy scenario tailored to the client's requirements. I can do that for you," Nell said. "I know these people, and I can make you a lot of money."

  "You know what people?"

  "The Vickys. I know them inside and out," Nell said.

  "Please come inside," said the young man, gesturing toward the diamondoid door with MADAME PING'S written on it in red letters. "Would you care for tea?"
. . .

 
"There are only two industries. This has always been true," said Madame Ping, enfolding a lovely porcelain teacup in her withered fingers, the two-inch fingernails interleaving neatly like the pinions of a raptor folding its wings after a long hard day of cruising the thermals. "There is the industry of things, and the industry of entertainment. The industry of things comes first. It keeps us alive. But making things is easy now that we have the Feed. This is not a very interesting business anymore.