Diamond Age

On one of these trips, she saw another member of the cipherer's guild, also taking his break, and noticed that the key hanging around his neck looked familiar: it was one of the eleven keys that Nell and her Night Friends had taken from the Faery Kings and Queens! She concealed her excitement and followed this cipherer back to his stall, making a note of where he worked. Over the next few days, going from stall to stall and examining each cipherer, she was able to locate the rest of the eleven keys. She was able to steal a look at the rule-books that her employers used to respond to the encoded messages. They were written in the same special language used at the previous two castles.

In other words, once Princess Nell had deciphered the messages, her stall functioned like another Turing machine. It would have been easy enough to conclude that this whole castle was, like the others, a Turing machine. But the Primer had taught Nell to be very careful about making unwarranted assumptions. Just because her stall functioned according to Turing rules did not mean that all of the others did. And even if every stall in this castle was, in fact, a Turing machine, she still could not come to any fixed conclusions. She had seen riders carrying books to and from the castle, which meant that cipherers must be at work elsewhere in this kingdom. She could not verify that all of them were Turing machines.

It did not take long for Nell to attain prosperity here. After a few months (which in the Primer were summarized in as many sentences) her employers a

They also obtained a new key for her. This was done by dispatching a special coded message to the Castle of King Coyote himself, which was three days' ride to the north. Seven days later, Nell's key came back to her in a scarlet box bearing the seal of King Coyote himself.

From time to time, someone would come around to her stall and offer to buy her out. She always turned them down but found it interesting that the keys could be bought and sold in this fashion.

All Nell needed was money, which she quickly accumulated through shrewd dealings in the market. Before long, all eleven of the keys were in her possession, and after liquidating her holdings and turning them into jewels, which she sewed into her clothes, she rode her horse out of the sixth castle and turned north, heading for the seventh: the Castle of King Coyote, and the ultimate goal of her lifelong quest.

Nell goes to Madame Ping's Theatre;

rumors of the Fists;

an important client;

assault of the Fists of Righteous Harmony;

ruminations on the i

Like much that was done with nanotechnology, Feed lines were assembled primarily from a few species of small and uncomplicated atoms in the upper right-hand corner of Mendeleev's grid: carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, silicon, phosphorus, sulfur, and chlorine. The Fists of Righteous Harmony had discovered, to their enduring delight, that objects made of these atoms burned rather nicely once you got them going. The flat, low Yangtze Delta country east of Shanghai was a silk district well stocked with mulberry trees, which when felled, stacked, and burned beneath the Feed lines would eventually ignite them like road flares.

The Nipponese Feed was heavy on the phosphorus and burned with a furious white flame that lit up the night sky in several places as seen from the tall buildings in Pudong. One major line led toward Nanjing, one toward Suzhou, one toward Hangzhou: these distant flares inevitably led to rumors, among the hordes of refugees in Shanghai, that those cities were themselves burning.

The New Atlantan Feed had a higher sulfur content that, when burned, produced a plutonic reek that permeated everything for dozens of miles downwind, making the fires seem much closer than they really were. Shanghai was smelling pretty sulfurous as Nell walked into it across one of the bridges linking downtown Pudong with the much lower and older Bund. The Huang Pu had been too wide to bridge easily until nano had come along, so the four downtown bridges were made of the new materials and seemed impossibly fragile compared with the reinforced-concrete behemoths built to the north and south during the previous century.

A few days ago, working on a script in Madame Ping's offices far above, Nell had gazed out the window at a barge making its way down the river, pulled by a rickety old diesel tug, swathed in dun tarps. A few hundred meters upstream of this very bridge she was now crossing, the tarps had begun squirming and boiling, and a dozen young men in white tunics had jumped out from beneath, scarlet bands tied about their waists, scarlet ribbons around their wrists and foreheads. They had swarmed across the top of the barge hacking at ropes with knives, and the tarps had reluctantly and unevenly fallen away to expose a patchy new coat of red paint and, lined up on the top of the barge like a string of enormous firecrackers, several dozen compressed gas tanks, also painted a festive red for the occasion. Under the circumstances, she did not doubt for a moment that the men were Fists and the gas hydrogen or something else that burned well. But before they had been able to reach the bridge, the tanks had been burst and ignited by something too small and fast for Nell to see from her high post. The barge silently turned into a carbuncle of yellow flame that took up half the width of the Huang Pu, and though the diamond window filtered all of the heat out of its radiance, Nell was able to put her hand on the pane and feel the absorbed warmth, not much hotter than a person's skin. The whole operation had been touchingly hapless, in an age when a hand-size battery could contain as much energy as all those cylinders of gas. It had a quaint twentieth-century feel and made Nell oddly nostalgic for the days when dangerousness was a function of mass and bulk. The passives of that era were so fun to watch, with their big, stupid cars and big, stupid guns and big, stupid people.

Up— and downstream of the bridge, the funeral piers were crowded with refugee families heaving corpses into the Huang Pu; the emaciated bodies, rolled up in white sheets, looked like cigarettes. The Coastal Republic authorities had instituted a pass system on the bridges to prevent rural refugees from swarming across into the relatively spacious streets, plazas, atria, and lobbies of Pudong and gumming up the works for the office crowd. By the time Nell made it across, a couple of hundred refugees had already picked her out as a likely alms source and were waiting with ca

The taxi-drivers converged on Nell too, and she picked out the biggest one and haggled with him, holding up fingers and essaying a few words in Shanghainese. When the numbers had climbed into the right range for him, he spun around suddenly to face the crowd. The sudde

Madame Ping's was still doing a decent business. Its clientele were willing to put up with some inconvenience to get there. It was only a short distance from the bridgehead, and the Madame had put a few truculent taxi-drivers on retainer as personal escorts. The business was startlingly large given the scarcity of real estate in Shanghai; it occupied most of a five-story reinforced-concrete Mao Dynasty apartment block, having started out with just a couple of flats and expanded room by room as the years went on.

The reception area reminded one of a not-bad hotel lobby, except that it had no restaurant or bar; none of the clients wanted to see or be seen by any other. The desk was staffed by concierges whose job was to get the clients out of view as quickly as possible, and they did it so well that an uninitiated passerby might get the impression that Madame Ping's was some kind of a walk-in kidnapping operation.

One of these functionaries, a tiny woman who seemed oddly prim and asexual considering that she was wearing a black leather miniskirt, briskly took Nell to the top floor, where the large apartments had been built and elaborate scenarios were now realized for Madame Ping's clients.

As the writer, Nell of course never actually entered the same room as the client. The woman in the miniskirt escorted her into a nearby observation room, where a high-res cine feed from the next room covered most of one wall.

If she hadn't known it already, Nell would have seen from the client's uniform that he was a colonel in Her Majesty's Joint Forces. He was wearing a full dress uniform, and the various pins and medals on his coat indicated that he had spent a good deal of his career attached to various Protocol Enforcement units, been wounded in action several times, and displayed exceptional heroism on one occasion. In fact, it was clear that he was a rather important fellow. Reviewing the previous half-hour, Nell saw that, not surprisingly, he had arrived in mufti, carrying the uniform in a leather satchel. Wearing the uniform must be part of the scenario.

At the moment he was seated in a rather typical Victorian parlor, sipping tea from a Royal Albert china cup decorated with a somewhat agonistic briar rose pattern. He looked fidgety; he'd been kept waiting for half an hour, which was also part of the scenario. Madame Ping kept telling her that no one ever complained about having to wait too long for an orgasm; that men could do that to themselves any time they wanted, and that it was the business leading up to it that they would pay for. The biological readouts seemed to confirm Madame Ping's rule: Perspiration and pulse were rather high, and he was about half erect.

Nell heard the sound of a door opening. Switching to a different angle she saw a parlormaid entering the room. Her uniform was not as overtly sexy as most of the ones in Madame Ping's wardrobe department; the client was sophisticated. The woman was Chinese, but she played the role with the mid-Atlantic accent currently in vogue among neo-Victorians: "Mrs. Braithwaite will see you now."