Diamond Age

She ditched her long dress, which would only get in the way, and got down on knees and elbows to peer through the crack under the door. There were two pairs of feet. She could hear them conversing in low, businesslike tones.

Nell opened the door suddenly with one hand, reaching through with the other to shove a fountain pen into the throat of the Fist standing closest to the door. The other one reached for an old automatic rifle slung over his shoulder. This gave Nell more than enough time to kick him in the knee, which may or may not have done permanent damage but certainly threw him off balance. The Fist kept trying to bring his rifle to bear, as Nell kicked him over and over again. In the end she was able to twist the rifle free from his feeble one-handed grasp, whirl it around, and butt him in the head.

The Fist with the pen in his neck was sitting on the floor watching her calmly. She aimed the rifle his way, and he held up one hand and looked down and away. His wound was bleeding, but not all that much; she had ruined his week but not hit anything big.

She reflected that it was probably a healthy thing for him in the long run to be rid of the superstition that he was immune to weapons.

Constable Moore had taught her a thing or two about rifles. She stepped back into her room, locked the door, and devoted a minute or so to familiarizing herself with its controls, checking the magazine (only half full) and firing a single round (into the door, which stopped it) just to make sure it worked.

She was trying to suppress a flashback to the screwdriver incident. This frightened her until she realized that this time around she was much more in control of the situation. Her conversations with the Constable had not been without effect.

Then she made her way down the corridors and stairwells toward the lobby, slowly gathering a retinue of terrified young women along her way. They passed a few clients, mostly male and mostly European, who had been pulled from their scenario rooms and crudely hacked up by the Fists. Three times she had to fire, surprised each time at how complicated it was. Accustomed to the Primer, Nell had to make allowances when functioning in the real world.

She and her followers found Colonel Napier in the lobby, about three-quarters dressed, carrying on a memorable edged-weapons duel with a couple of Fists who had, perhaps, been left there to keep the path of escape open. Nell considered trying to shoot at the Fists but decided against it, because she did not trust her marksmanship and also because she was mesmerized by the entire scene.

Nell would have been dazzled by Colonel Napier if she had not recently seen him strapped to a rack. Still, there was something about this very contradiction that made him, and by extension all Victorian men, fascinating to her. They lived a life of nearly perfect emotional denial-a form of asceticism as extreme as that of a medieval stylite. Yet they did have emotions, the same as anyone else, and only vented them in carefully selected circumstances.

Napier calmly impaled a Fist who had tripped and fallen, then turned his attention to a new antagonist, a formidable character skilled with a real sword. The duel between Western and Eastern martial arts moved back and forth across the lobby floor, the two combatants staring directly into one another's eyes and trying to intuit the other's thoughts and emotional state. The actual thrusts and parries and ripostes, when they came, were too rapid to be understood. The Fist's style was quite beautiful to watch, involving many slow movements that looked like the stretching of large felines at the zoo. Napier's style was almost perfectly boring: He moved about in a crabbed stance, watched his opponent calmly, and apparently did a lot of deep thinking.

Watching Napier at work, watching the medals and braid swinging and glinting on his jacket, Nell realized that it was precisely their emotional repression that made the Victorians the richest and most powerful people in the world. Their ability to submerge their feelings, far from pathological, was rather a kind of mystical art that gave them nearly magical power over Nature and over the more intuitive tribes. Such was also the strength of the Nipponese.

Before the struggle could be resolved, a smart flechette, horsefly-size, trailing a whip ante

"Not very chivalrous," Colonel Napier said distastefully. "I suppose I have some bureaucrat up on New Chusan to thank for that."

A cautious tour of the building turned up several more Fists who had died in the same fashion. Outside, the same old crowd of refugees, beggars, pedestrians, and cargo-carrying bicyclists streamed on, about as undisturbed as the Yangtze.

Colonel Napier did not return to Madame Ping's the next week, but Madame Ping did not blame Nell for the loss of his custom. To the contrary, she praised Nell for having correctly divined Napier's wishes and for improvising so well. "A fine performance," she said.

Nell had not really thought of her work as a performance, and for some reason Madame Ping's choice of words provoked her in a way that kept her awake late that night, staring into the darkness above her bunk.

Since she had been very small, she had made up stories and recited them to the Primer, which were often digested and incorporated into the Primer's stories. It had come naturally to Nell to do the same work for Madame Ping. But now her boss was calling it a performance, and Nell had to admit that it was, in a way.

Her stories were being digested, not by the Primer, but by another human being, becoming a part of that person's mind. That seemed simple enough, but the notion troubled her for a reason that did not become clear until she had lain half-asleep and fretted over it for several hours.

Colonel Napier did not know her and probably never would. All of the intercourse between him and Nell had been mediated through the actress pretending to be Miss Braithwaite, and through various technological systems.

Nonetheless she had touched him deeply. She had penetrated farther into his soul than any lover. If Colonel Napier had chosen to return the following week and Nell had not been present to make up the story for him, would he have missed her? Nell suspected that he would have. From his point of view, some indefinable essence would have been wanting, and he would have departed unsatisfied.

If this could happen to Colonel Napier in his dealings with Madame Ping's, could it happen to Nell in her dealings with the Primer? She had always felt that there was some essence in the book, something that understood her and even loved her, something that forgave her when she did wrong and appreciated what she did right.

When she'd been very young, she hadn't questioned this at all; it had been part of the book's magic. More recently she had understood it as the workings of a parallel computer of enormous size and power, carefully programmed to understand the human mind and give it what it needed.

Now she wasn't so sure. Princess Nell's recent travels through the lands of King Coyote, and the various castles with their increasingly sophisticated computers that were, in the end, nothing more than Turing machines, had caught her up in a bewildering logical circle. In Castle Turing she had learned that a Turing machine could not really understand a human being. But the Primer was, itself, a Turing machine, or so she suspected; so how could it understand Nell?

Could it be that the Primer was just a conduit, a technological system that mediated between Nell and some human being who really loved her? In the end, she knew, this was basically how all ractives worked. The idea was too alarming to consider at first, and so she circled around it cautiously, poking at it from different directions, like a cavewoman discovering fire for the first time. But as she settled in closer, she found that it warmed her and satisfied her, and by the time her mind wandered into sleep, she had become dependent upon it and would not consider going back into the cold and dark place where she had been traveling for so many years.

Carl Hollywood returns to Shanghai;

his forebears in the territory of the Lone Eagles;

Mrs. Kwan's teahouse.

Heavy rains had come rolling into Shanghai from the West, like a harbinger of the Fists of Righteous Harmony and the thundering herald of the coming Celestial Kingdom. Stepping off the airship from London, Carl Hollywood at once felt himself in a different Shanghai from the one he had left; the old city had always been wild, but in a sophisticated urban way, and now it was wild like a frontier town. He sensed this ambience before he even left the Aerodrome; it leaked in from the streets, like ozone before a thunderstorm. Looking out the windows, he could see a heavy rain rushing down, knocking all the nanotech out of the air and down into the gutters, whence it would eventually stain the Huang Pu and then the Yangtze. Whether it was the wild atmosphere or the prospect of being rained upon, he stopped his porters short of the main exit doors so that he could change hats. The hatboxes were stacked on one of the carts; his bowler went into the smallest and topmost box, which was empty, and then he yanked the largest box out from underneath, popping the stack, and took out a ten-gallon Stetson of breathtaking width and sweep, almost like a head-mounted umbrella. Casting an eye into the street, where a rushing brown stream carried litter, road dust, choleraridden sewage, and tons of captive nanotech toward the storm drains, he slipped off his leather shoes and exchanged them for a pair of handtooled cowboy boots, made from hides of gaudy reptiles and avians, the pores of which had been corked with mites that would keep his feet dry even if he chose to wade through the gutters.

Thus reconfigured, Carl Hollywood stepped out into the streets of Shanghai. As he came out the doors of the Aerodrome, his duster billowed in the cold wind of the storm and even the beggars stepped away from him. He paused to light a cigar before proceeding and was not molested; even the refugees, who were starving or at least claimed to be, derived more enjoyment from simply looking at him than they would have from the coins in his pocket. He walked the four blocks to his hotel, pursued doggedly by the porters and by a crowd of youngsters entranced by the sight of a real cowboy.

Carl's grandfather was a Lone Eagle who had ridden out from the crowding and squalor of Silicon Valley in the 1990s and homesteaded a patch of abandoned ranch along a violent cold river on the eastern slope of the Wind River Range. From there he had made a comfortable living as a freelance coder and consultant. His wife had left him for the bright lights and social life of California and been startled when he had managed to persuade a judge that he was better equipped to raise their son than she was. Grandfather had raised Carl Hollywood's father mostly in the out-of-doors, hunting and fishing and chopping wood when he wasn't sitting inside studying his calculus. As the years went by, they had gradually been joined by like-minded sorts with similar stories to tell, so that by the time of the Interregnum they had formed a community of several hundred, loosely spread over a few thousand square miles of nearwilderness but, in the electronic sense, as tightly knit as any small village in the Old West. Their technological prowess, prodigious wealth, and numerous large weapons had made them a dangerous group, and the odd pickup-truck-driving desperadoes who attacked an isolated ranch had found themselves surrounded and outgu