Diamond Age

Burt's pratfall gave them enough of a lead to make it to the ground floor. They ran straight across the lobby and into the street. It was the wee hours of the morning, and there was almost no one out here, which was slightly unusual; normally there would have been decoys and lookouts for drug sellers. But tonight there was only one person on the whole block: a bulky Chinese man with a short beard and close-cropped hair, wearing traditional indigo pajamas and a black leather skullcap, standing in the middle of the street with his hands stuck in his sleeves. He gave Nell and Harv an appraising look as they ran past. Nell did not pay him much attention. She just ran as fast as she could.

"Nell!" Harv was saying. "Nell! Look!"

She was afraid to look. She kept ru

"Nell, stop and look." Harv cried. He sounded exultant.

Finally Nell ran around the corner of a building, stopped, turned, and peeked back cautiously.

She was looking down the empty street past the building where she had lived her whole life. At the end of the street was a big mediatronic advertising display currently ru

They were dancing together.

No, the Chinese man was dancing. Burt was just staggering around like a drunk.

No, the Chinese man was not dancing, but doing some of the exercises that Dojo had taught Nell about. He moved slowly and beautifully except for some moments when every muscle in his body would join into one explosive movement. Usually these explosions were directed toward Burt.

Burt fell down, then struggled up to his knees.

The Chinese man gathered himself together into a black seed, rose into the air, spun around, and unfolded like a blooming flower. One of his feet struck Burt on the point of his chin and seemed to accelerate all the way through Burt's head. Burt's body fell back to the pavement like a few gallons of water sloshed out of a bucket.

The Chinese man became very still, settled his breathing, adjusted his skullcap and the sash on his robe. Then he turned his back to Nell and Harv and walked away down the middle of the street.

Nell opened her Primer. It was showing a picture of Dinosaur, seen in silhouette through a window in the Dark Castle, standing over the corpse of Baron Burt with a smoking stake in his claws. Nell said, "The little boy and the little girl were ru

Hackworth departs from Shanghai;

his speculations as to the possible motives of Dr. X.

Would-be passengers skidded to a halt on the saliva-slickened floor of the Shanghai Aerodrome as the a

When the a

Hackworth knew perfectly well that hours would pass before he actually found himself on an airship, and that having achieved that milestone, he might have to wait hours more for its actual departure. Nonetheless, he had to say good-bye to his family at some point, and this seemed no worse a time than any other.

Holding Fiona (so big and solid now!) in the crook of one arm, and holding hands with Gwen, he pushed insistently across a rip tide of travelers, beggars, pickpockets, and entrepreneurs trading in everything from bolts of real silk to stolen intellectual property.

Finally they reached a corner where a languid eddy had separated itself from the flow of people, and where Fiona could safely be set down.

He turned first to Gwen. She still looked as stu

His daughter seemed to have a better intuitive grasp of the situation; she had been up several times a night recently, complaining of bad dreams, and on the way to the Aerodrome she had been perfectly quiet. She stared at her father with large red eyes.

Tears came to Hackworth's eyes, and his nose began to run. He blew his nose plangently, held the handkerchief over his face for a moment, and composed himself.

Then he reached into the breast pocket of his overcoat and drew out a flat package, wrapped up in mediatronic paper of spring wildflowers bending in a gentle breeze. Fiona brightened up immediately, and Hackworth could not help chudding, not for the first time, at the charming susceptibility of small people to frank bribery. "You will forgive me for ruining the surprise," he said, "by telling you that this is a book, my darling. A magic book. I made it for you, because I love you and could not think of a better way to express that love. And whenever you open its pages, no matter how far away I might be, you will find me here."

"Thank you ever so much, Father," she said, taking it with both hands, and he could not help himself from sweeping her up in both arms and giving her a great hug and a kiss. "Good-bye, my best beloved, you will see me in your dreams," he whispered into her tiny, flawless ear, and then he set her free, spun around, and walked away before she could see the tears that had begun to run down his face.

Hackworth was a free man now, wandering through the Aerodrome in an emotional stupor, and only reached his flight by participating in the same flock instinct that all the natives used to reach theirs. 'Whenever he saw more than one gwailo heading purposefully in one direction, he followed them, and then others started following him, and thus did a mob of foreign devils coalesce among a hundred times as many natives, and finally, two hours after their ffight was supposed to leave, they mobbed a gate and climbed aboard the airship Hanjin Takhoma —which might or might not have been their assigned vessel, but the passengers now had a sufficient numerical majority to hijack it to America, which was the only thing that really counted in China.

He had received a summons from the Celestial Kingdom. Now he was on his way to the territory still known vaguely as America. His eyes were red from crying over Gwen and Fiona, and his blood was swarming with nanosites whose functions were known only to Dr. X; Hackworth had lain back, closed his eyes, rolled up his sleeve, and hummed "Rule, Atlantis" while Dr. X's physicians (at least he hoped they were physicians) shoved a fat needle into his arm. The needle was fed by a tube that ran directly into a special fitting on the matter compiler; Hackworth was plugged directly into the Feed, not the regulation Atlantan kind but Dr. X's black-market kludge. He could only hope that they'd given it the right instructions, as it would be a shame to have a washing machine, a mediatronic chopstick, or a kilo of China 'White materialize in his arm. Since then, he'd had a few attacks of the shivers, suggesting that his immune system was reacting to something Dr. X had put in there. His body would either get used to it or (preferably) destroy the offending nanosites.

The airship was a dromond, the largest class of noncargo vessel. It was divided into four classes. Hackworth was second from the bottom, in third. Below that was steerage, which was for migrating thetes, and for sky-girls, prostitutes of the air. Even now, these were bribing their way past the conductors and into the third-class lounge, making eyes at Hackworth and at the white-shirted sararimen who tended to travel this way. Those gentlemen had grown up in one crowded Dragon or another, where they knew how to generate a sort of artificial privacy field by determinedly ignoring each other. Hackworth had arrived at the point where he frankly didn't care, and so he stared directly at these men, front-line soldiers of their various microstates, as each one primly folded his navy blue suit jacket and elbow-crawled into a coffinlike microcabin like a GI squirming under a roll of concertina wire, accompanied or not by a camp follower.

Hackworth pointlessly wondered whether he was the only one of this ship's some two thousand passengers who believed that prostitution (or anything ) was immoral. He did not consider this question in a selfrighteous way, more out of rueful curiosity; some of the sky-girls were quite fetching. But as he dragged his body into his microberth, he suffered another attack of the shivers, reminding him that even if his soul had been willing, his flesh was simply too weak.

Another possible explanation for the chills was that Dr. X's nanosites were seeking out and destroying the ones that H.M. Joint Forces had put in there, waging a turf war inside his body, and his immune system was doing overtime trying to pick up the carnage.

Hackworth unexpectedly fell asleep before the dromond had even pulled away from her mooring mast, and had dreams about the murderous implements he had seen magnified on Dr. X's mediatron during his first visit. In the abstract they were frightening enough. Having a few million of them in his veins didn't do much for his peace of mind. In the end it wasn't as bad as knowing your blood was full of spirochetes, which people used to live with for decades. Amazing what a person could get used to.