"So they were morally superior to the Victorians-" Major Napier said, still a bit snowed under. "-even though-in fact, because-they had no morals at all." There was a moment of silent, bewildered head-shaking around the copper table.
"We take a somewhat different view of hypocrisy," Finkle-McGraw continued. "In the late-twentieth-century Weltanschauung, a hypocrite was someone who espoused high moral views as part of a planned campaign of deception-he never held these beliefs sincerely and routinely violated them in privacy. Of course, most hypocrites are not like that. Most of the time it's a spirit-is-willing, flesh-is-weak sort of thing."
"That we occasionally violate our own stated moral code," Major Napier said, working it through, "does not imply that we are insincere in espousing that code."
"Of course not," Finkle-McGraw said. "It's perfectly obvious, really. No one ever said that it was easy to hew to a strict code of conduct. Really, the difficulties involved-the missteps we make along the way-are what make it interesting. The internal, and eternal, struggle, between our base impulses and the rigorous demands of our own moral system is quintessentially human. It is how we conduct ourselves in that struggle that determines how we may in time be judged by a higher power." All three men were quiet for a few moments, chewing mouthfuls of beer or smoke, pondering the matter.
"I cannot help but infer," Hackworth finally said, "that the present lesson in comparative ethics-which I thought was nicely articulated and for which I am grateful-must be thought to pertain, in some way, to my situation."
The other men raised their eyebrows in a not very convincing display of mild astonishment. The Equity Lord turned toward Major Napier, who took the floor briskly and cheerfully.
"We do not know all the particulars of your situation-as you know, Atlantan subjects are entitled to polite treatment from all branches of H.M.'s Joint Forces unless they violate the tribal norms, and that means, in part, that we don't go round putting people under high-res surveillance just because we are curious about their, er, avocations. In an era when everything can be surveiled, all we have left is politeness. However, we do quite naturally monitor comings and goings through the border. And not long ago, our curiosity was piqued by the arrival of one Lieutenant Chang of the District Magistrate's Office. He was also clutching a plastic bag containing a rather battered top hat. Lieutenant Chang proceeded directly to your flat, spent half an hour there, and departed, minus the hat."
The steak sandwiches arrived at the beginning of this bit of exposition. Hackworth began messing about with condiments, as if he could belittle the importance of this conversation by paying equal attention to having just the right goodies on his sandwich. He fussed with his pickle for a while, then began examining the bottles of obscure sauces arrayed in the center of the table, like a sommelier appraising a wine cellar.
"I had been mugged in the Leased Territories," Hackworth said absently, "and Lieutenant Chang recovered my hat, somewhat later, from a ruffian." He had fixed his gaze, for no special reason, on a tall bottle with a paper label printed in an ancient crabbed typeface.
"MCWHORTER'S ORIGINAL CONDIMENT" was written large, and everything else was too small to read. The neck of the bottle was also festooned with black-and-white reproductions of ancient medals awarded by pre-Enlightenment European monarchs at exhibitions in places like Riga. Just a bit of violent shaking and thwacking ejected a few spurts of the ochre slurry from the pore-size orifice at the top of the bottle, which was guarded by a quarter-inch encrustation. Most of it hit his plate, and some impacted on his sandwich.
"Yes," Major Napier said, reaching into his breast pocket and taking out a folded sheet of smart foolscap. He told it to uncrease itself on the table and prodded it with the nib of a silver fountain pen the size of an artillery shell. "Gatehouse records indicate that you do not venture into the L.T. often, Mr. Hackworth, which is certainly understandable and speaks well of your judgment. There have been two forays in recent months. On the first of these, you left in midafternoon and returned late at night bleeding from lacerations that seemed to have been recently incurred, according to the"— Major Napier could not repress a tiny smile-"evocative description logged by the border patrol officer on duty that night. On the second occasion, you again left in the afternoon and returned late, this time with a single deep laceration across the buttocks-not visible, of course, but picked up by surveillance."
Hackworth took a bite of his sandwich, correctly anticipating that the meat would be gristly and that he would have plenty of time to think about his situation while his molars subdued it. He did have plenty of time, as it turned out; but as frequently happened to him in these situations, he could not bring his mind to bear on the subject at hand. All he could think about was the taste of the sauce. If the manifest of ingredients on the bottle had been legible, it would have read something like this: Water, blackstrap molasses, imported habanero peppers, salt, garlic, ginger, tomato puree, axle grease, real hickory smoke, snuff, butts of clove cigarettes, Guinness Stout fermentation dregs, uranium mill tailings, muffler cores, monosodium glutamate, nitrates, nitrites, nitrotes and nitrutes, nutrites, natrotes, powdered pork nose hairs, dynamite, activated charcoal, match-heads, used pipe cleaners, tar, nicotine, singlemalt whiskey, smoked beef lymph nodes, autumn leaves, red fuming nitric acid, bituminous coal, fallout, printer's ink, laundry starch, drain deaner, blue chrysotile asbestos, carrageenan, BHA, BHT, and natural flavorings.
He could not help smiling at his own complete haplessness, both now and on the night in question. "I will concede that my recent trips to the Leased Territories have not left me disposed to make any more." This comment produced just the right sort of clubby, knowing smiles from his interlocutors. Hackworth continued, "I saw no reason to report the mugging to Atlantan authorities-"
"There was no reason," Major Napier said. "Shanghai Police might have been interested, though."
"Ah. Well, I did not report it to them either, simply because of their reputation."
This bit of routine wog-bashing would have elicited naughty laughter from most. Hackworth was struck by the fact that neither Finkle-McGraw nor Napier rose to the bait.
"And yet," Napier said, "Lieutenant Chang belied that reputation, did he not, when he went to the trouble of bringing your hat-now worthless-to you in person, when he was off-duty, rather than simply mailing it or for that matter throwing it away."
"Yes," Hackworth said, "I suppose he did."
"We found it rather singular. While we would not dream of enquiring into the particulars of your conversation with Lieutenant Chang, or of prying into your affairs in any other way, it did occur to some suspicious minds here-ones that have perhaps been exposed to the Oriental milieu for too long-that Lieutenant Chang's intentions might not be entirely honourable, and that he might bear watching. At the same time, for your own protection, we decided to keep a motherly eye on you during any later sojourns beyond the dog pod grid." Napier did some more scrawling on his paper. Hackworth watched his pale blue eyes jumping back and forth as various records materialized on its surface.
"You took one more trip to the Leased Territories-actually, across the Causeway, across Pudong, into the old city of Shanghai," Napier said, "where our surveillance machinery either malfunctioned or was destroyed by countermeasures. You returned several hours later with a chunk taken out of your arse." Napier suddenly slapped the paper down on his desk, looked up at Hackworth for the first time in quite a while, blinking his eyes a couple of times as he refocused, and relaxed against the sadistically designed wooden back of his chair. "Hardly the first time that one of H.M. subjects has gone for a nocturnal prowl on the wild side and come back having suffered a beating-but normally the beatings are much less severe, and normally they are bought and paid for by the victim. My assessment of you, Mr. Hackworth, is that you are not interested in that particular vice."
"Your assessment is correct, sir," Hackworth said, a bit hotly. This self-vindication left him in the position of having to provide some better explanation of the puckered cicatrice running across his buttocks. Actually, he didn't have to explain anything-this was an informal luncheon, not a police interrogation-but it would not do much for his already tatterdemalion credibility if he let it pass without comment. As if to emphasize this fact, both of the other men were now silent for some time.
"Do you have any more recent intelligence about the man named Chang?" Hackworth asked.
"It is singular that you should ask. As it happens, the whilom Lieutenant; his colleague, a woman named Pao; and their superior, a magistrate named Fang, all resigned on the same day, about a month ago. They have resurfaced in the Middle Kingdom."
"You must have been struck by the coincidence-that a judge who is in the habit of caning people enters the service of the Middle Kingdom, and shortly thereafter, a New Atlantan engineer returns from a visit to said clave bearing marks of having been caned."
"Now that you mention it, it is quite striking," Major Napier said.
The Equity Lord said, "It might lead one to conclude that the engineer in question owed some debt to a powerful figure within that clave, and that the judicial system was being used as a sort of collection agency."
Napier was ready for his leg of the relay. "Such an engineer, if one existed, might be surprised to know that John Zaibatsu is intensely curious about the Shanghainese gentleman in question— an honest-to-god Mandarin of the Celestial Kingdom, if he is who we think he is-and that we have been trying for some time, with little success, to obtain more information about his activities. So, if the Shanghainese gentleman were to request that our engineer partake in activities that we would normally consider unethical or even treasonous, we might take an uncharacteristically forgiving stance. Provided, that is, that the engineer kept us well-informed."
"I see. Would that be something like being a double agent, then?" Hackworth said.
Napier winced, as if he were being caned himself. "It is a crashingly unsubtle phrase. But I can forgive your using it in this context."
"Would John Zaibatsu then make some kind of formal commitment to this arrangement?"
"It is not done that way," Major Napier said.
"I was afraid of that," Hackworth said.
"Typically such commitments are superfluous, as in most cases the party has very little choice in the matter."
"Yes," Hackworth said, "I see what you mean."
"The commitment is a moral one, a question of honour," Finkle-McGraw said. "That such an engineer falls into trouble is evidence of mere hypocrisy on his part. We are inclined to overlook this sort of routine caducity. If he goes on to behave treasonously, then that of course is a different matter; but if he plays his role well and provides information of value to Her Majesty's Joint Forces, then he has rather deftly parlayed a small error into a grand act of heroism. You may be aware that it is not unusual for heroes to receive knighthoods, among other more tangible rewards."
For a few moments, Hackworth was too startled to speak. He had expected exile and perhaps deserved it. Mere forgiveness was more than he could have hoped for. But Finkle-McGraw was giving him the opportunity for something much greater: a chance to enter the lower ranks of the nobility. An equity stake in the tribal enterprise. There was only one answer he could make, and he blurted it out before he had time to lose his nerve.
"I thank you for your forbearance," he said, "and I accept your commission. Please consider me to be at Her Majesty's service from this moment forward."
"Waiter! Bring some champagne, please," Major Napier called.
"I believe we have something to celebrate."
From the Primer, the arrival of a sinister Baron;
Burt's disciplinary practices;
the plot againstthe Baron;
practical application of ideas gleaned from the Primer;
flight.
Outside the Dark Castle, Nell's wicked stepmother continued to live as she pleased and to entertain visitors. Every few weeks a ship would sail over the horizon and anchor in the little bay where Nell's father had once kept his fishing boat.
An important fellow would be rowed ashore by his servants and would live in the house with Nell's stepmother for a few days, weeks, or months. In the end, she always got into shouting arguments with her visitors, which Nell and Harv could hear even through the thick walls of the Dark Castle, and when the visitor had gotten sick of it, he would row back out to his ship and sail away, leaving the wicked Queen heartbroken and sobbing on the shore. Princess Nell, who had hated her stepmother at first, came to feel sorry for her in a way and to realize that the Queen was locked into a prison of her own making, even darker and colder than the Dark Castle itself.
One day a barkentine with red sails appeared in the bay, and a red-headed man with a red beard came to shore. Like the other visitors, he moved in with the Queen and lived with her for a time. Unlike the others, he was curious about the Dark Castle and would ride up to its gates every day or two, rattle the door handles, and walk all around it, staring at its high walls and towers.
In the third week of the man's visit, Nell and Harv were astonished to hear the twelve locks on the gate being opened, one by one. In walked the red-headed man. When he saw Nell and Harv, he was just as astonished as they were. "Who are you?" he demanded in a low, gruff voice.
Princess Nell was about to answer, but Harv stopped her.
"You are the visitor here," he said. "Identify yourself."
At this, the man's face turned almost as red as his hair, and he strode forward and struck Harv across the face with his mailed fist. "I am Baron Jack," he said, "and you may consider that my calling card." Then, just for spite, he aimed a kick at Princess Nell; but his foot in its heavy metal armor was too slow, and Princess Nell, remembering the lessons Dinosaur had taught her, dodged it easily. "You must be the two brats the Queen told me about," he said. "You were supposed to be dead by now-eaten up by trolls. Well, tonight you shall be, and tomorrow the castle will be mine!" He seized Harv and began to bind his arms with a stout rope. Princess Nell, forgetting her lessons, tried to stop him, and in a flash he had grabbed her by the hair and tied her up as well. Soon both of them were lying helpless on the ground. "We'll see how well you can fight off the trolls tonight!" Baron Jack said, and giving each of them a slap and a kick just for spite, he strode off through the gate and locked the twelve locks again.
Princess Nell and Harv had a long wait until the sun went down and her Night Friends came to life and untied her and Harv. Princess Nell explained that the evil Queen had a new lover who intended to take the Dark Castle for himself.
"We must fight him," Purple said.
Princess Nell and all the other friends were startled to hear these words, for usually Purple was patient and wise and counseled against fighting. "There are many shades of gray in the world," she explained, "and many times when the hidden way is best; but some things are purely evil and must be fought to the death."
"If he were but a man, I could crush him with one foot," Dinosaur said, "but not during the daytime; and even at night, the Queen is a sorceress, and her friends have mickle powers. We will need a plan."
That night there was hell to pay. Kevin, the boy whom Nell had defeated over tetherball, had learned everything he knew about being a bully from none other than Burt, because Burt had lived with Kevin's mom for a while and might even have been Kevin's dad, so Kevin went to Burt and told him that he'd been beaten up by Harv and Nell acting together. That night, both Harv and Nell got the worst spanking of their lives. It went on so long that finally Mom tried to step in and get Burt to calm down. But Burt slapped Mom across the face and shoved her down on the floor. Finally, Harv and Nell ended up in their room together. Burt was in the living room having a few beers and getting into a Burly Scudd ractive. Mom had run out of the apartment, and they had no idea where she was.
One of Harv's eyes was swollen shut, and one hand was not working. Nell was terribly thirsty, and when she went to pee, it came out red. Also she had burns on her arms from Burt's cigarettes, and the pain just kept getting worse.
They could sense Burt's movements through the wall, and they could hear the Burly Scudd ractive. Harv could tell when Burt had gone to sleep because a single-user ractive eventually went into pause mode if the user stopped racting. When they were sure Burt was sleeping, they stole into the, kitchen to get some medicine from the M.C.
Harv got a bandage for his wrist and a cold-pack for his eye, and he asked the M.C. for something to put on their cuts and burns so they wouldn't get infected. The M.C. displayed a whole menu of mediaglyphs for different kinds of remedies. Some of them were premiums, which you had to pay money for, and there were a few freebies. One of the freebies was a cream that came in a tube, like toothpaste. They took it back to their room and took turns spreading it on each other's cuts and burns.
Nell lay quietly in bed until she could tell that Harv had gone to sleep. Then she got out the Young Lady's Illustrated Primer.
When Baron Jack came back to the castle the following day, he was angry to find the ropes piled on the ground, and no bones cracked and gnawed by trolls. He stormed into the castle with drawn sword, bellowing that he would kill Harv and Princess Nell himself; but entering into the dining room, he stopped in wonderment as he saw a great feast that had been laid out on the table for him: loaves of brown bread, pots of fresh butter, roasted fowl, a suckling pig, grapes, apples, cheese, broth, and wine. Standing next to the table were Harv and Princess Nell, dressed in servants' uniforms.
"Welcome to your castle, Baron Jack," Princess Nell said.
"As you can see, we your new servants have prepared a small snack that we hope will be to your liking." Actually, Duck had prepared all of the food, but as this was the daytime, she had turned back into a little toy along with all the other Night Friends.
Baron Jack's anger subsided as his greedy eyes traveled over the feast. "I will try a few bites," he said, "but if any of the food is not perfect, or if you do not serve me to my liking, I'll have your heads spiked on the gates of the castle like that!" and he snapped his fingers in Harv's face.
Harv looked angry and was about to blurt out something terrible, but Princess Nell remembered the words of Purple, who said that the hidden way was best, and she said in a sweet voice, "For imperfect service we would deserve nothing better."
Baron Jack began to eat, and such was the excellence of Duck's cooking that once he started, he could barely stop himself. He sent Harv and Nell scurrying back to the kitchen again and again to bring him more food, and though he constantly found fault with them and rose from his chair to give them beatings, he had apparently decided that they were worth more to him alive than dead.
"Sometimes he would burn their skin with cigarettes too," Nell whispered. The letters changed on the page of the Primer.
"Princess Nell's pee-pee turned red too," Nell said, "because the Baron was a very bad man. And his real name wasn't Baron Jack. His real name was Burt." As Nell spoke the words, the story changed in the Primer.
"And Harv couldn't use his arm because of the wrist, so he had to carry everything with one hand, and that's because Burt was a bad man and he hurt it really bad," Nell said.
After a long silence, the Primer began to speak again, but the lovely voice of the Vicky woman who told the story sounded thick and hoarse all of a sudden and would stumble in the middle of sentences.
Baron Burt ate all day, until finally the sun went down.
"Bar the doors," said a high squeaking voice, "or the trolls will be after us!"
These words came from a little man in a suit and top hat who had just scurried through the doors and was now eyeing the sunset nervously.
"Who is that pipsqueak interrupting my dinner!?" roared Baron Burt.
"This is our neighbor," Princess Nell said. "He comes to visit us in the evening. Please let him sit by the fire."
Baron Burt looked a bit suspicious, but at this moment Harv set a delicious strawberry cheesecake in front of him, and he forgot about the little man entirely, until a few minutes later, when the high squeaking voice piped up again:
There once was a Baron named Burt
Who was so tough he couldn't be hurt
And could wrestle a bear; but I think
After two or three drinks
Like a child he'd throw up on his shirt.
"Who dares mock the Baron!?" bellowed Baron Burt, and looked down to see the new visitor leaning insouciantly on his walking stick and raising a glass as if to toast his health.
Your Majesty, don't be upset
And please feel free now to get
Into bed; for it's been a long day
And you're in a bad way
And your trousers you're soon going to wet.
"Bring me a cask of ale!" shouted Baron Burt. "And bring another for this upstart, and we'll see who can hold his drink."
Harv rolled two casks of strong ale into the room. Baron Burt raised one to his lips and drained it in single pull. The little man on the floor then did the same.
Two skins of wine were then brought, and once again both Baron Burt and the little man easily finished them. Finally, two bottles of strong liquor were brought, and the Baron and the little man took turns drinking one swallow at a time until the bottles were empty. The Baron was confounded by the small man's ability to drink; but there he stood, upright and sober, while Baron Burt was becoming very drunk.
Finally the little man pulled a small bottle from his pocket and said,
For a young man, ale is fine
While grown-ups much prefer wine
Liquor's a thing
That's fit for a king
But it's kid stuff compared to moonshine.
The little man uncorked the bottle and took a drink, then handed it to Baron Burt. The Baron took one swallow and fell asleep instantly in his chair.
"Mission accomplished," said the little man, sweeping off his top hat with a deep bow, revealing a set of long furry ears-for he was none other than Peter in disguise.
Princess Nell ran back to the kitchen to tell Dinosaur, who was sitting by the fire with a long wooden pole, poking it in the coals and turning it round and round to make the point very sharp. "He's asleep!" she whispered.
Miranda, sitting in her stage at the Parnasse, felt an overwhelming sense of relief as her next line appeared on the prompter. She took a deep breath before she delivered it, closed her eyes, settled her mind, tried to put herself there in the Dark Castle. She looked deep into Princess Nell's eyes and sold the line with every scrap of talent and technique she had.
"Good!" said Dinosaur. "Then the time has come for you and Harv to flee from the Dark Castle! You must be as stealthy as you can. I will come out later and join you."
Please get out of there. Please run away. Get out of thatchamber of horrors where you've been living, Nell, and get to anorphanage or a police station or something, and I will find you. Nomatter where you are, I'll find you.
Miranda had it worked out already: she could compile an extra mattress, put Nell on the floor of her bedroom and Harv in the living room of her flat. If only she could figure out who the hell they were.
Princess Nell hadn't responded. She was thinking, which was the wrong thing to do right now. Get out. Get out.
"Why are you putting that stick in the fire?"
"It is my duty to see that the evil Baron never troubles you again," Miranda said, reading from the prompter.
"But what are you going to do with that stick?"
Please don't do this. It's not the time to ask why. "You must make haste!" Miranda read, trying once again to sell the line as best she could. But Princess Nell had been playing with the Primer for a couple of years now and had gotten in the habit of asking endless questions.
"Why are you making the stick sharper?"
"This is how Odysseus and I took care of the Cyclops," Dinosaur said.
Shit. It's going all wrong.
"What's Cyclops?" Nell said.
A new illustration grew on the next page, facing the illustration of Dinosaur by the fire. It was a picture of a one-eyed giant herding some sheep.
Dinosaur told the story of how Odysseus killed the Cyclops with a pointed stick, just as he was about to do to Baron Burt. Nell insisted on hearing what happened after that. One story led to another. Miranda tried to tell the stories as fast as she could, tried to put a tone of boredom and impatience into her voice, which wasn't easy because she was actually on the verge of panic. She had to get Nell out of that apartment before Burt woke up from his drunk.
The eastern sky was beginning to glow . . .
Shit. Get out of there, Nell!
. . .
Dinosaur was just in the middle of telling Princess Nell about a witch who turned men into swine when suddenly, poof, he turned back into a stuffed animal. The sun had come up.
Nell was a bit startled by this turn of events, and closed the Primer for a while, and sat in the dark listening to Harv wheeze and Burt snore in the next room. She'd been looking forward to the moment when Dinosaur would kill Baron Burt, just as Odysseus had done to the Cyclops. But now it wasn't going to happen. Baron Burt would wake up, realize he'd been tricked, and hurt them worse.
They'd be stuck in the Dark Castle forever.
Nell was tired of being in the Dark Castle. She knew it was time to get out. She opened the Primer.
"Princess Nell knew what she had to do," Nell said. Then she closed the Primer and left it on her pillow.
Even if she hadn't learned how to read pretty well, she would have had no trouble finding what she wanted just by using the M.C.'s mediaglyphics. It was a thing she'd seen people use in the old passives, a thing she'd seen when Mom's old boyfriend Brad had taken her to visit the horse barn in Dovetail. It was called a screwdriver, and you could have the M.C. make them in all different shapes: long, short, fat, skinny.
She had it make one that was very long and very skinny. When it was finished, it made the hissing sound that it always made, and she thought she heard Burt stirring on the sofa.
She peeked into the living room. He was still lying there, his eyes closed, but his arms were moving around. His head turned from side to side once, and she could see a glimmer between his half-opened eyelids.
He was about to wake up and hurt her some more.
She held the screwdriver out in front of her like a lance and ran straight toward him.
At the last instant she faltered. The tool went astray and skidded across his forehead, leaving a trail of red stitches. Nell was so horrified that she dropped it and jumped back Burt was shaking his head violently back and forth.
He opened his eyes and looked right at Nell. Then he put his hand to his forehead and brought it back all bloody. He sat up on the sofa, still uncomprehending. The screwdriver rolled off and bounced on the floor. He picked it up and found the tip bloody, then fixed his eyes on Nell, who had shrunk into the corner of the room. Nell knew that she had done the wrong thing. Dinosaur had told her to run away, and she had pestered him with questions instead.
"Harv!" she said. But her voice came out all dry and squeaky, like a mouse's. "We must fly!"
"Yeah, you're gonna fly all right," Burt said swinging his feet around to the floor. "Right out the fucking window you're gonna fly."
Harv came out. He was carrying his nunchuks under his injured arm and the Primer in his good hand. The book hung open to an illustration of Princess Nell and Harv running away from the Dark Castle with Baron Burt in pursuit. "Nell, your book talked to me," he said. "It said we should run away." Then he saw Burt rising from the sofa with the bloody screwdriver in his hand.
Harv didn't bother with the nunchuks. He bolted across the room and dropped the Primer, freeing his good hand to fling the front door open. Nell, who had been frozen in a nearby corner for some time, shot toward the door like a bolt finally loosed from a crossbow, snatching up the Primer as she ran past it. They ran into the hallway with Burt only a few paces behind.
The lobby with the elevators was some distance away from them. On impulse, Nell stopped and dropped to a crouch in Burt's path. Harv turned toward her, terrified. "Nell!" he cried. Burt's pumping legs struck Nell in the side. He spun forward and landed hard on the hallway floor, skidding for a short distance.
This brought him to the feet of Harv, who had turned to face him and deployed his nunchuks. Harv went upside Burt's head a few times, but he was panicked and didn't do a very good job of it. Burt groped with one hand and managed to catch the chain that joined the halves of the weapon. Nell had gotten to her feet by this point and ran up Burt's back; she lunged forward and sank her teeth into the fleshy base of Burt's thumb. Something fast and confusing happened, Nell was rolling on the floor, Harv was dragging her back to her feet, she reached back to snatch up the Primer, which she had dropped again. They made it into the emergency stairs and began to skitter down the tunnel of urine, graffiti, and refuse, jumping over the odd slumbering body. Burt entered the stairwell in pursuit, a couple of flights behind them. He tried to make a shortcut by vaulting over the banister as he had seen and done in ractives, but his drunk body didn't do it as well as a media hero, and he tumbled down one flight, cursing and screaming, now rabid with pain and anger. Nell and Harv kept running.
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 running.
"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 running a big Coca-Cola ad, in the ancient and traditional red used by that company. Silhouetted against it were two men: Burt and the big round-headed Chinese man.
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 running away to the Land Beyond."
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 announcer brayed the names of great and ancient Chinese cities into his microphone. They set bags down, shushed children, furrowed brows, cupped hands around ears, and pursed lips in utter bewilderment. None of this was made any easier by the extended family of some two dozen just-arrived Boers, women in bonnets and boys in heavy coarse farmer's pants, who had convened by one of the gates and begun to sing a hymn of thanksgiving in thick hoarse voices.
When the announcer called out Hackworth's flight (San Diego with stops in Seoul, Vladivostok, Magadan, Anchorage, Juneau, Prince Rupert, Vancouver, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Santa Barbara, and Los Angeles), he apparently decided that it was beneath his dignity, above his abilities, or both to speak Korean, Russian, English, French, Coast Salish, and Spanish in the same sentence, and so he just hummed into the microphone for a while as if, far from being a professional announcer, he were a shy, indifferent vocalist hidden within in a vast choir.
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 stunned and vacant as she had, more or less consistently, since he told her that he had received a new assignment "whose nature I am not at liberty to disclose, save to say that it concerns the future, not merely of my department, nor of John Zaibatsu, but of that phyle into which you had the good fortune to have been born and to which I have sworn undying loyalty," and that he was making a trip "of indefinite duration" to North America. It had been increasingly clear of late that Gwen simply didn't get it. At first, Hackworth had been annoyed by this, viewing it as a symptom of hitherto unevidenced intellectual shortcomings. More recently, he had come to understand that it had more to do with emotional stance. Hackworth was embarking on a quest of sorts here, real Boy's Own Paper stuff, highly romantic. Gwen hadn't been raised on the proper diet of specious adventure yarns and simply found the whole concept unfathomable. She did a bit of rote sniffling and tear-wiping, gave him a quick kiss and a hug, and stepped back, having completed her role in the ceremony with nothing close to enough histrionics. Hackworth, feeling somewhat disgruntled, squatted down to face Fiona.
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.
When he settled into bed, he heard a small chime, like faery bells. It was coming from the little pen dangling from his watch chain, and it meant that he had mail. Perhaps a thank-you note from Fiona. He couldn't sleep anyway, and so he took out a sheet of mediatronic paper and spoke the commands that transferred the mail from the pen charm onto the page.
He was disappointed to note that it was printed, not handwritten; some kind of official correspondence, and not, unfortunately, a note from Fiona. When he began to read it, he understood that it wasn't even official. It wasn't even from a human. It was a notification sent back to him automatically by a piece of machinery he had set into motion two years ago. The central message was wreathed in pages of technical gibberish, maps, graphs, and diagrams. The message was:
THE YOUNG LADY'S ILLUSTRATED PRIMER HAS BEEN FOUND.
It was accompanied by an animated, three-dimensional map of New Chusan with a red line drawn across it, starting in front of a rather seedy looking high-rise apartment building in the Leased Territory called Enchantment and making its way erratically around the island from there.
Hackworth laughed until his neighbors pounded on the adjoining walls and asked him to shut up.
Nell and Harv at large in the Leased Territories;
encounter with an inhospitable security pod: a revelation about the Primer.
The Leased Territories were too valuable to leave much room for Nature, but the geotects of Imperial Tectonics Limited had heard that trees were useful for cleaning and cooling the air, and so they had built in green belts along the borders between sectors. In the first hour that they lived free in the streets, Nell glimpsed one of those green belts, though it looked black at the time. She broke away from Harv and ran toward it down a street that had developed into a luminescent tunnel of mediatronic billboards. Harv chased her, just barely matching her speed because he had gotten a worse spanking than she had. They were almost the only people on the street, certainly the only ones moving purposefully, and so, as they ran, the messages on the billboards pursued them like starving wolves, making sure they understood that if they used cerrain ractives or took certain drugs, they could rely on being able to have sex with certain unrealistically perfect young persons. Some of the billboards made an even more elemental pitch, selling the sex directly. The mediatrons on this street were exceptionally large because they were made to be seen clearly from the heaths, bluffs, terraces, and courts of the New Atlantis Clave, miles up the mountain.
Unremitting exposure to this kind of thing produced mediatron burnout among the target audience. Instead of turning them off and giving people a break for once, the proprietors had joined in an arms race of sorts, trying to find the magic image that would make people ignore all the other adverts and fix raptly on theirs. The obvious step of making their mediatrons bigger than the others had been taken about as far as it could go. Quite some time ago the content issue had been settled: tits, tires, and explosions were the only things that seemed to draw the notice of their supremely jaded focus groups, though from time to time they would play the juxtaposition card and throw in something incongruous, like a nature scene or a man in a black turtleneck reading poetry. Once all the mediatrons were a hundred feet high and filled with tits, the only competitive strategy that hadn't already been pushed to the redline was technical tricks: painfully bright flashes, jump-cuts, and simulated 3-D phantoms that made bluff charges toward specific viewers who didn't seem to be paying enough attention.