Diamond Age

"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.