Diamond Age

Nell's eye was drawn toward the water. Downtown Pudong offered the most spectacular urban nightscape ever devised, but she always found herself looking past it, staring instead at the Huang Pu, or the Yangzte to the north, or to the curvature of the Pacific beyond New Chusan.

She'd been having a dream, she realized. She had awakened not because of any external disturbance but because of what had happened in that dream. She had to remember it; but, of course, she couldn't.

Just a few snatches: a woman's face, a beautiful young woman, perhaps wearing a crown, but seen muddily, as through turbulent water. And something that glittered in her hands. No, dangling beneath her hands. A piece of jewelry on a golden chain.

Could it have been a key? Nell could not bring the image back, but an instinct told her that it was.

Another detail too: a gleaming swath of something that passed in front of her face once, twice, three times. Something yellow, with a repeating pattern woven into it: a crest consisting of a book, a seed, and crossed keys.

Cloth of gold. Long ago the mermaids had brought her to her stepfather, and she had been wrapped in cloth of gold, and from this she had always known that she was a Princess.

The woman in the dream, veiled in swirling water, must have been her mother. The dream was a memory from her lost infancy. And before her mother had given her up to the mermaids, she had given Princess Nell a golden key on a chain.

Nell perched herself on the windowsill, leaned against the pane, opened the Primer, and flipped all the way back to the begi

There, in one of the illustrations, she saw it: her stepfather's lock-box, a humble plank chest bound in rusted iron straps, with a heavy oldfashioned padlock, stored underneath his bed. It was in this chest that he had stored the cloth of gold-and, perhaps, the key as well.

Paging forward through the book, she came across a long-forgotten story of how, following her stepfather's disappearance, her wicked stepmother had taken the lock-box to a high cliff above the sea and flung it into the waves, destroying any evidence that Princess Nell was of royal blood. She had not known that her stepdaughter was watching her from between the branches of a thicket, where she often concealed herself during her stepmother's rages.

Nell flipped to the last page of the Young Lady's Illustrated Primer .

As Princess Nell approached the edge of the cliff, picking her way along carefully through the darkness, taking care not to snag the train of her nightgown on thorny shrubs, she experienced a peculiar feeling that the entire ocean had become dimly luminescent. She had often noticed this phenomenon from the high windows of her library in the tower and reckoned that the waves must be reflecting back the light of the moon and stars. But this was a cloudy night, the sky was like a bowl of carved onyx, allowing no light to pass down from the heavens. The light she saw must emanate from beneath.

Arriving cautiously at the rim of the cliff, she saw that her surmise was true. The ocean-the one constant in all the world— the place from where she had come as an infant, from which the Land Beyond had grown out of King Coyote's seed, and into which it had dissolved— the ocean was alive.

Since the departure of King Coyote, Princess Nell had supposed herself entirely alone in the world. But now she saw cities of light beneath the waves and knew that she was alone only by her own choice.

"'Princess Nell gathered the hem of her nightgown in both hands and raised it over her head, letting the chill wind stream over her body and carry the garment away,' " Nell said. " 'Then, drawing a deep breath and closing her eyes, she bent her legs and sprang forward into space.'

She was reading about the way the illuminated waves rushed up toward her when suddenly the room filled with light. She looked toward the door, thinking that someone had come in and turned the lights on, but she was alone in the room, and the light was flickering against the wall. She turned her head the other way.

The center span of the Causeway had become a ball of white light hurling its marbled shroud of cold dark matter into the night. The sphere expanded until it seemed to occupy most of the interval between New Chusan and the Pudong shoreline, though by this time the color had deepened from white into reddish-orange, and the explosion had punched a sizable crater into the water, which developed into a circular wave of steam and spray that ran effortlessly across the ocean's surface like the arc of light cast by a pocket torch.

Fragments of the giant Feed line that had once constituted most of the Causeway's mass had been pitched into the sky by the explosion and now tumbled end over end through the night sky, the slowness of their motion bespeaking their size, casting yellow sulfurous light over the city as they burned furiously in the wind-blast created by their own movement. The light limned a pair of tremendous pillars of water vapor rising from the ocean north and south of the Causeway; Nell realized that the Fists must have blown the Nipponese and Hindustani Feeds at the same moment. So the Fists of Righteous Harmony had nanotechnological explosives now; they'd come a long way since they'd tried to torch the bridge over the Huang Pu with a few cylinders of hydrogen.

The shock wave rapped at the window, startling several of the girls from sleep. Nell heard them murmuring to one another in the bunk room. She wondered if she should go in and warn them that Pudong was cut off now, that the final assault of the Fists had commenced. But though she could not understand what they were saying, she could understand their tone of voice clearly enough: They were not surprised by this, nor unhappy.

They were all Chinese and could become subjects of the Celestial Kingdom simply by do

But if the news feeds from the interior meant anything, the Fists would kill Nell gradually, with many small cuts and burns, when they grew weary of raping her. In recent days she had often seen the Chinese girls talking in little groups and sneaking glances at her, and the suspicion had grown in her breast that some of them might know of the attack in advance and might make arrangements to turn Nell over to the Fists as a demonstration of their loyalty. She opened the door a crack and saw two of these girls padding toward the bunk room where Nell usually slept, carrying lengths of red polymer ribbon.

As soon as they had stolen into Nell's bunk room, Nell ran down the corridor and got to the elevators. As she awaited the elevator, she was more scared than she had ever been; the sight of the cruel red ribbons in the small hands of the girls had for some reason struck more terror into her heart than the sight of knives in the hands of Fists.

A shrill commotion arose from the bunk room.

The bell for the elevator sounded.

She heard the bunk room door fly open, and someone ru

The elevator door opened.

One of the girls came into the lobby, saw her, and shrieked something to the others in a dolphinlike squeal.

Nell got into the elevator, punched the button for the lobby, and held down the DOOR CLOSE button. The girl thought for a moment, then stepped forward to hold the door. Several more girls were ru

Nell was already in the correct stance to defend herself. If she had to beat each of the girls to death individually, she would do it. But none of them rushed the elevator. Instead, the leader stepped forward and aimed something at Nell. There was a little popping noise, a pinprick in Nell's midsection, and within a few seconds she felt her arms becoming impossibly heavy. Her bottom drooped. Her head bowed. Her knees buckled. She could not keep her eyes open; as they closed, she saw the girls coming toward her, smiling with pleasure, holding up the red ribbons. Nell could not move any part of her body, but she remained perfectly conscious as they tied her up with the ribbon. They did it slowly and methodically and perfectly; they did it every day of their lives.

The tortures of the next few hours were of a purely experimental and preliminary nature. They did not last for long and accomplished no permanent damage. These girls had made a living out of binding and torturing people in a way that didn't leave scars, and that was all they really knew. When the leader came up with the idea of shoving a cigarette into Nell's cheek, it was something entirely novel and left the rest of the girls startled and silent for a few minutes. Nell sensed that most of the girls had no stomach for such things and merely wanted to turn her over to the Fists in exchange for citizenship in the Celestial Kingdom.

The Fists themselves began to arrive some twelve hours later. Some of them wore conservative business suits, some wore the uniforms of the building's security force, others looked as if they'd arrived to take a girl out to a disco.

They all had things to do when they arrived. It was obvious that this suite would act as local headquarters of some sort when the rebellion began in earnest. They began to bring up supplies on the freight elevator and seemed to spend a lot of time on the telephone. More arrived every hour, until Madame Ping's suite was playing host to between one and two dozen. Some of them were very tired and dirty and went to sleep in the bunks immediately.

In a way, Nell wished that they would do whatever they were going to do and get it over with fast. But nothing happened for quite some time. When the first Fists arrived, the girls brought them in to see Nell, who had been shoved under a bed and was now lying there in a puddle of her own urine. The leader shone a light on her face briefly and then turned away, completely uninterested. It seemed that once he'd verified that the girls had done their bit for the revolution, Nell ceased to be relevant.