"I do not desire the book itself so much as I desire its designer-the artifex Hackworth," Dr. X said. "As long as the book was somewhere in the Leased Territories, there was some hope that Hackworth could find it-it is the one thing he desires most. If I could have found the book, I could have extinguished that hope, and Hackworth would then have had to approach me, either to get the book back or to compile another copy."
"You desire some service from Hackworth?"
"He is worth a thousand lesser engineers. And because of various hardships over the last few decades, the Celestial Kingdom does not have even that many lesser engineers; they have all been lured away by the promise of riches in the Coastal Republic."
"I will approach Hackworth tomorrow," Judge Fang said. "I will inform him that the man known to the barbarians as Dr. X has found the lost copy of the book."
"Good," Dr. X said, "I shall expect to hear from him."
Hackworth's dilemma;
an unanticipated return to the hong of Dr. X;
hitherto unseen ramifications of Dr. X's premises;
a criminal is brought to justice.
Hackworth had some time to run through the logic of the thing one more time as he waited in the front room of Dr. X's hong, waiting for the old man to free himself up from what sounded like a twelve-way cine conference. On his first visit here he'd been too nervous to see anything, but today he was settled cozily in the cracked leather armchair in the corner, demanding tea from the help and thumbing through Dr. X's books. It was such a relief to have nothing to lose. Since that deeply alarming visit from Chang, Hackworth had been at his wits' end. He had made an immense cock-up of the whole thing. Sooner or later his crime would come out and his family would be disgraced, whether or not he gave money to Chang. Even if he somehow managed to get the Primer back, his life was ruined.
When he had received word that Dr. X had won the race to recover the lost copy of the Primer, the thing had turned from bad to farcical. He had cut a day at work and gone for a long hike in the Royal Ecological Conservatory. By the time he had returned home, sunburned and pleasantly exhausted, he had been in a much better mood. That Dr. X had the Primer actually improved his situation.
In exchange for the Primer, the Doctor would presumably want something from Hackworth. In this case, it was not likely to be a mere bribe, as Chang had hinted; all of the money Hackworth had, or was ever likely to make, could not be of interest to Dr. X. It was much more likely that the Doctor would want some sort of a favor-he might ask Hackworth to design something, to do a little bit of consulting work, as it were. Hackworth wanted so badly to believe this that he had bolstered the hypothesis with much evidence, real and phantasmal, during the latter part of his hike. It was well-known that the Celestial Kingdom was desperately far behind in the nanotechnological arms race; that Dr. X himself devoted his valuable time to rooting through the debris of the New Atlantan immune system proved this. Hackworth's skills could be of measureless value to them.
If this were true, then Hackworth had a way out. He would do some job for the Doctor. In exchange, he would get the Primer back, which was what he wanted more than anything. As part of the deal, Dr. X could no doubt find some way to eliminate Chang from Hackworth's list of things to worry about; Hackworth's crime would never be known to his phyle.
Victorians and Confucians alike had learned new uses for the foyer, anteroom, or whatever it was called, and for the old etiquette of visiting cards. For that matter, all tribes with sophistication in nanotech understood that visitors had to be carefully examined before they could be admitted into one's inner sanctum, and that such examination, carried out by thousands of assiduous reconnaissance mites, took time. So elaborate waiting-room etiquette had flourished, and sophisticated people all over the world understood that when they called upon someone, even a close friend, they could expect to spend some time sipping tea and perusing magazines in a front room infested with unobtrusive surveillance equipment.
One entire wall of Dr. X's front room was a mediatron. Cine feeds, or simple stationary graphics, could be digitally posted on such a wall just as posters and handbills had been in olden times. Over time, if not removed, they tended to overlap each other and build up into an animated collage.
Centered on Dr. X's media wall, partly concealed by newer clips, was a cine clip as ubiquitous in northern China as the face of Mao-Buddha's evil twin-had been in the previous century. Hackworth had never sat and watched it all the way through, but he'd glimpsed it so many times, in Pudong taxicabs and on walls in the Leased Territories, that he knew it by heart. Westerners called it Zhang at the Shang.
The setting was the front of a luxury hotel, one of the archipelago of Shangri-Las strung up the Kowloon-Guangzhou superhighway. The horseshoe drive was paved with interlocking blocks, brass door handles gleamed, thickets of tropical flowers sprouted from boat-size planters in the lobby. Men in business suits spoke into cellphones and checked their watches, white-gloved bellhops sprinted into the drive, pulled suitcases from the trunks of red taxicabs, wiped them down with clean moist cloths.
The horseshoe drive was plugged into an eight-lane thoroughfare-not the highway, but a mere frontage road-with a spiked iron fence running down the center to keep pedestrians from crossing in midblock. The pavement, new but already crumbling, was streaked with red dust washed down out of the devastated hills of Guangdong by the latest typhoon.
Traffic suddenly became thin, and the camera panned upstream: Several lanes had been blocked by a swarm of bicycles. Occasionally a red taxi or Mercedes-Benz would squeeze by along the iron fence and burst free, the driver holding down the horn button so furiously that he might detonate the air bag. Hackworth could not hear the sound of the horn, but as the camera zoomed in on the action, it became possible to see one driver take his hand off the horn and turn back to shake his finger at the mob of bicyclists.
When he saw who was pedaling the lead bicycle, he turned away nauseous with fear, and his hand collapsed into his lap like a dead quail.
The leader was a stocky man with white hair, sixtyish but pumping away vigorously on an unexceptional black bicycle, wearing drab worker's clothes. He moved it down the street with deceptive speed and pulled into the horseshoe drive. An embolism of bicycles formed on the street as hundreds tried to crowd in the narrow entrance. And here came another classic moment: The head bellhop skirted his stand-up desk and ran toward the bicyclist, waving him off and hurling abuse in Cantonese-until he got about six feet away and realized he was looking at Zhang Han Hua.
At this point Zhang had no job title, being nominally retired— an ironical conceit that the Chinese premiers of the late twentieth century and early twenty-first had perhaps borrowed from American Mafia bosses. Perhaps they recognized that job titles were beneath the dignity of the most powerful man on earth. People who had gotten this close to Zhang claimed that they never thought about his temporal power-the armies, the nuclear weapons, the secret police.
All they could think about was the fact that, during the Great Cultural Revolution, at the age of eighteen, Zhang Han Hua had led his cell of Red Guards into hand-to-hand combat with another cell that they deemed insufficiently fervid, and that, at the conctusion of the battle, Zhang had feasted on the raw flesh of his late adversaries. No one could stand face-to-face with Zhang without imagining the blood streaming down his chin.
The bellhop collapses to his knees and begins literally kowtowing. Zhang looks disgusted, hooks one of his sandaled feet under the bellhop's collarbone, and prods him back upright, then speaks a few words to him in the hillbilly accent of his native Fujien. The bellhop can hardly bow enough on his way back into the hotel; displeasure registers on Zhang's face-all he wants is some fast service. During the next minute or so, progressively higher-ranking hotel officials cringe out the door and abase themselves in front of Zhang, who simply ignores them, looking bored now. No one really knows whether Zhang is a Confucianist or a Maoist at this point in his life, but at this moment it makes no difference: for in the Confucian view of society, as in the Communist, peasants are the highest class and merchants the lowest. This hotel is not for peasants.
Finally a man in a black business suit emerges, preceded and pursued by bodyguards. He looks angrier than Zhang, thinking that he must be the victim of some unforgivable practical joke. This is a merchant among merchants: the fourteenth richest man in the world, the third richest in China. He owns most of the real estate within half an hour's drive of this hotel. He does not break his stride as he steps into the drive and recognizes Zhang; he walks straight up to him and asks him what he wants, why the old man has bothered to come down from Beijing and interfere with his business on his foolish bicycle ride.
Zhang simply steps forward and speaks a few words into the rich man's ear.
The rich man takes a step back, as if Zhang has punched him in the chest. His mouth is open, revealing flawless white teeth, his eyes are not focused. After a few moments, he takes another two steps back, which gives him enough room for his next maneuver: He stoops, puts one knee down, then the other, bends forward at the waist until he is on all fours, then settles himself down full-length on the nicely interlocked pavingstones. He puts his face on the pavement. He kowtows to Zhang Han Hua.
One by one the Dolbyized voices in the next room signed off until only Dr. X and another gentleman were left, haggling about something desultorily, taking long breaks between volleys of tweeter-busting oratory to stoke pipes, pour tea, or whatever these people did when they were pretending to ignore each other. The discussion petered out rather than building to a violent climax as Hackworth had secretly, mischievously been hoping, and then a young fellow pulled the curtain aside and said, "Dr. X will see you now."
Dr. X was in a lovely, generous mood probably calculated to convey the impression that he'd always known Hackworth would be back. He rustled to his feet, shook Hackworth's hand warmly, and invited him out to dinner "at a place nearby," he said portentously, "of utmost discretion.',
It was discreet because one of its cozy private dining rooms was connected directly to one of the back rooms of Dr. X's establishment, so that one could reach it by walking down a sinous inflated Nanobar tube that would have stretched to half a kilometer long if you extricated it from Shanghai, took it to Kansas, and pulled on both ends. Squinting through the translucent walls of the tube as he assisted Dr. X to dinner, Hackworth cloudily glimpsed several dozen people pursuing a range of activities in some half-dozen different buildings, through which Dr. X had apparently procured some kind of right-of-way. Finally it spat them out into a nicely furnished and carpeted dining room, which had been retrofitted with a powered sliding door. The door opened just as they were sitting down, and Hackworth was almost knocked off balance as the tube sneezed nanofiltered wind; a beaming four-foot-tall waitress stood in the doorway, closing her eyes and leaning forward against the anticipated wind-blast. In perfect San Fernando Valley English she said, "Would you like to hear about our specials?"
Dr. X was at pains to reassure Hackworth that he understood and sympathized with his situation; so much so that Hackworth spent much of the time wondering whether Dr. X had already known about it. "Say no more, it is taken care of," Dr. X finally said, cutting Hackworth off in midexplanation, and after that Hackworth was unable to interest Dr. X in the topic anymore. This was reassuring but unsettling, as he could not avoid the impression that he had just somehow agreed to a deal whose terms had not been negotiated or even thought about. But Dr. X's whole affect seemed to deliver the message that if you were going to sign a Faustian bargain with an ancient and inscrutable Shanghainese organized-crime figure, you could hardly do better than the avuncular Dr. X, who was so generous that he would probably forget about it altogether, or perhaps just stow the favor away in a yellowed box in one of his warrens. By the end of the lengthy meal, Hackworth was so reassured that he had almost forgotten about Lieutenant Chang and the Primer altogether.
Until, that is, the door slid open again to reveal Lieutenant Chang himself.
Hackworth hardly recognized him at first, because he was dressed in a much more traditional outfit than usual: baggy indigo pajamas, sandals, and a black leather skullcap that concealed about seventy-five percent of his knotlike skull. Also, he had begun to grow his whiskers out. Most alarmingly, he had a scabbard affixed to his belt, and the scabbard had a sword in it.
He stepped into the room and bowed perfunctorily to Dr. X, then turned to face Hackworth.
"Lieutenant Chang?" Hackworth said wealdy.
"Constable Chang," said the interloper, "of the district tribunal of Shanghai." And then he said the Chinese words that meant Middle Kingdom.
"I thought you were Coastal Republic."
"I have followed my master to a new country," Constable Chang said. "I must regretfully place you under arrest now, John Percival Hackworth."
"On what charge?" Hackworth said, forcing himself to chuckle as if this were all a big practical joke among close friends.
"That on the — day of -, 21-, you did bring stolen intellectual property into the Celestial Kingdom-specifically, into the hong of Dr. X-and did use that property to compile an illegal copy of a certain device known as the Young Lady's Illustrated Primer."
There was no point in claiming that this was not true. "But I have come here this evening specifically to regain possession of that same device," Hackworth said, "which is in the hands of my distinguished host here. Certainly you are not intending to arrest the distinguished Dr. X for trafficking in stolen property."
Constable Chang looked expectantly toward Dr. X. The Doctor adjusted his robes and adopted a radiant, grandfatherly smile. "I am sorry to tell you that some reprehensible person has apparently provided you with wrong information," he said. "In fact, I have no idea where the Primer is located."
The dimensions of this trap were so vast that Hackworth's mind was still reeling through it, bouncing haplessly from one wall to another, when he was hauled before the district magistrate twenty minutes later. They had set up a courtroom in a large, ancient garden in the interior of Old Shanghai. It was an open square paved with flat gray stones. At one end was a raised building open to the square on one side, covered with a sweeping tile roof whose corners curved high into the air and whose ridgeline was adorned with a clay frieze portraying a couple of dragons facing off with a large pearl between them. Hackworth realized, dimly, that this was actually the stage of an open-air theatre, which enhanced the impression that he was the sole spectator at an elaborate play written and staged for his benefit.
A judge sat before a low, brocade-covered table in the center of the stage, dressed in magnificent robes and an imposing winged hat decorated with a unicorn emblem. Behind him and off to one side stood a small woman wearing what Hackworth assumed were phenomenoscopic spectacles. When Constable Chang had pointed to a spot on the gray flagstones where Hackworth was expected to kneel, he ascended to the stage and took up a position flanking the Judge on the other side. A few other functionaries were arranged on the square, mostly consisting of Dr. X and members of his retinue, arranged in two parallel lines forming a tunnel between Hackworth and the Judge.
Hackworth's initial surge of terror had worn off. He had now entered into morbid fascination with the incredible dreadfulness of his situation and the magnificent performance staged by Dr. X to celebrate it. He knelt silently and waited in a stunned, hyper-relaxed state, like a pithed frog on the dissection table.
Formalities were gone through. The Judge was named Fang and evidently came from New York. The charge was repeated, somewhat more elaborately. The woman stepped forward and introduced evidence: a cine record that was played on a large mediatron covering the back wall of the stage. It was a film of the suspect, John Percival Hackworth, slicing a bit of skin from his hand and giving it to (the innocent) Dr. X, who (not knowing that he was being gulled into committing a theft) extracted a terabyte of hot data from a cocklebur-shaped mite, and so on, and so on.
"The only thing that remains is to prove that this information was, indeed, stolen-though this is strongly implied by the suspect's behavior," Judge Fang said. In support of this assertion, Constable Chang stepped forward and told the story of his visit to Hackworth's flat.
"Mr. Hackworth," said Judge Fang, "would you like to dispute that this property was stolen? If so, we will hold you here while a copy of the information is supplied to Her Majesty's Police; they can confer with your employer to determine whether you did anything dishonest. Would you like us to do that?"
"No, Your Honour," Hackworth said.
"So you are not disputing that the property was stolen, and that you deceived a subject of the Celestial Kingdom into colluding with your criminal behavior?"
"I am guilty as charged, Your Honour," Hackworth said, "and I throw myself on the mercy of the court."
"Very well," Judge Fang said, "the defendant is guilty. The sentence is sixteen strokes of the cane and ten years' imprisonment."
"Goodness gracious!" Hackworth murmured. Inadequate as this was, it was the only thing that came to him.
"Insofar as the strokes of the cane are concerned, since the defendant was motivated by his filial responsibility to his daughter, I will suspend all but one, on one condition."
"Your Honour, I shall endeavour to comply with whatever condition you may choose to impose."
"That you supply Dr. X with the decryption key to the data in question, so that additional copies of the book may be made available to the small children crowding our orphanages."
"This I will gladly do," Hackworth said, "but there are complications.,,
"I'm waiting," Judge Fang said, not sounding very pleased. Hackworth got the impression that this business about the caning and the Primer was a mere prelude to something bigger, and that the Judge just wanted to get through it.
"In order for me to weigh the seriousness of these complications," Hackworth said, "I will need to know how many copies, approximately, Your Honour intends to make."
"In the range of hundreds of thousands."
Hundreds of thousands! "Please excuse me, but does Your Honour understand that the book is engineered for girls starting around the age of four?"
"Yes."
Hackworth was taken aback. Hundreds of thousands of children of both sexes and all ages would not have been difficult to believe. Hundreds of thousands of four-year-old girls was hard for the mind to grasp. Just one of them was quite a handful. But it was, after all, China.
"The magistrate is waiting," Constable Chang said.
"I must make it clear to Your Honour that the Primer is, in large part, a ractive-that is, it requires the participation of adult ractors. While one or two extra copies might go unnoticed, a large number of them would overwhelm the built-in system provided for paying for such services."
"Then part of your responsibility will be to make alterations in the Primer so that it is suitable for our requirements-we can make do without those parts of the book that depend heavily on outside ractors, and supply our own ractors in some cases," Judge Fang said.
"This should be feasible. I can build in automatic voice-generation capabilities-not as good, but serviceable." At this point, John Percival Hackworth, almost without thinking about it and without appreciating the ramifications of what he was doing, devised a trick and slipped it in under the radar of the Judge and Dr. X and all of the other people in the theatre, who were better at noticing tricks than most other people in the world. "While I'm at it, if it pleases the court, I can also," Hackworth said, most obsequiously, "make changes in the content so that it will be more suitable for the unique cultural requirements of the Han readership. But it will take some time."
"Very well," said Judge Fang, "all but one stroke of the cane are suspended, pending the completion of these alterations. As for the ten years of imprisonment, I am embarrassed to relate that this district, being very small, does not have a prison, and so the suspect will have to be released this evening after the business with the cane is finished. But rest assured, Mr. Hackworth, that your sentence will be served, one way or another."
The revelation that he would be released to his family this very evening hit Hackworth like a deep lungful of opium smoke. The caning went by quickly and efficiently; he did not have time to worry about it, which helped a little. The pain sent him straight into shock. Chang pulled his flaccid body off the rack and bore him over to a hard cot, where he lay semiconscious for a few minutes. They brought him tea-a nice Keemun with distinct lavender notes.
Without further ado he was escorted straight out of the Middle Kingdom and into the streets of the Coastal Republic, which had never been more than a stone's throw away from him during all of these proceedings, but which might as well have been a thousand miles and a thousand years distant. He made his way straight to a public matter compiler, moving in a broad-based gait, with tiny steps, bent over somewhat, and compiled some first-aid supplies— painkillers and some h
Thoughts about the second part of the sentence, and how he might end up serving it, did not come back to him until he was halfway back across the Causeway, borne swiftly on autoskates, the wind keening through the fabric of his trousers and inflaming the laceration placed neatly across his buttocks, like the track of a router. This time, he was surrounded by a flock of hornet-size aerostats flying in an ellipsoidal formation all around him, hissing gently and invisibly through the night and waiting for an excuse to swarm.
This defensive system, which had seemed formidable to him when he compiled it, now seemed like a pathetic gesture. It might stop a youth gang. But he had insensibly transcended the plane of petty delinquents and moved into a new realm, ruled by powers almost entirely hidden from his ken, and knowable to the likes of John Percival Hackworth only insofar as they perturbed the trajectories of the insignificant persons and powers who happened to be in his vicinity. He could do naught but continue falling through the orbit that had been ordained for him. This knowledge relaxed him more than anything he had learned in many years, and when he returned home, he kissed the sleeping Fiona, treated his wounds with more therapeutic technology from the M.C., covered them with pajamas, and slid beneath the covers. Drawn inward by Gwendolyn's dark radiant warmth, he fell asleep before he had even had time to pray.
More tales from the Primer;
the story of Dinosaur and Dojo;
Nell learns a thing or two about the art of self-defense;
Nell's mother gets, and loses, a worthy suitor;
Nell asserts her position against a young bully.
She loved all of her four companions, but her favorite had come to be Dinosaur. At first she'd found him a little scary, but then she'd come to understand that though he could be a terrible warrior, he was on her side and he loved her. She loved to ask him for stories about the old days before the Extinction, and about the time he had spent studying with the mouse Dojo.
There were other students too . . . said the book, speaking in Dinosaur's voice, as Nell sat by herself in the corner of the playroom.
. . . In those days we had no humans, but we did have monkeys, and one day a little girl monkey came to the entrance of our cave looking quite lonely. Dojo welcomed her inside, which surprised me because I thought Dojo only liked warriors. When the little monkey saw me, she froze in terror, but then Dojo flipped me over his shoulder and bounced me off the walls of the cave a few times to demonstrate that I was fully under control. He made her a bowl of soup and asked her why she was wandering around the forest all by herself.
The monkey, whose name was Belle, explained that her mother and her mother's boyfriend had kicked her out of the family tree and told her to go swing on the vines for a couple of hours. But the bigger monkeys hogged all the vines and wouldn't let Belle swing, so Belle wandered off into the forest looking for companionship and got lost, finally stumbling upon the entrance to Dojo's cave.
"You may stay with us for as long as you like," Dojo said.
"All we do here is play games, and you are invited to join our games if it pleases you."
"But I am supposed to be home soon," Belle complained. "My mother's boyfriend will give me a whipping otherwise."
"Then I will show you the way from your family tree to my cave and back," Dojo said, "so that you can come here and play with us whenever your mother sends you out."
Dojo and I helped Belle find her way back through the forest to her family tree. On our way back to the cave, I said,
"Master, I do not understand."
"What seems to be the trouble?" Dojo said.
"You are a great warrior, and I am studying to become a great warrior myself. Is there a place in your cave for a little girl who just wants to play?"
"I'll be the judge of who does and doesn't make a warrior," Dojo said.
"But we are so busy with our drills and exercises," I said. "Do we have time to play games with the child, as you promised?"
"What is a game but a drill that's dressed up in colorful clothing?" Dojo said. "Besides, given that, even without my instruction, you weigh ten tons and have a cavernous mouth filled with teeth like butcher knives, and that all creatures except me flee in abject terror at the mere sound of your footsteps, I do not think that you should begrudge a lonely little girl some play-time."
At this I felt deeply ashamed, and when we got home, I swept out the cave seven times without even being asked. A couple of days later, when Belle came back to our cave looking lonely and forlorn, we both did our best to make her feel welcome. Dojo began playing some special games with her, which Belle enjoyed so much that she kept coming back, and believe it or not, after a couple of years of this had gone by, Belle was able to flip me over her shoulder just as well as Dojo.
Nell laughed to think of a little girl monkey flipping a great dinosaur over her shoulder. She went back one page and reread the last part more carefully:
A couple of days later, when Belle came back to our cave looking lonely and forlorn, we both did our best to make her feel welcome. Dojo made a special meal in his kitchen out of rice, fish, and vegetables and made sure that she ate every scrap. Then he began playing a special game with her called somersaults.
An illustration materialized on the facing page. Nell recognized the open space in front of the entrance to Dojo's cave. Dojo was sitting up on a high rock giving instructions to Dinosaur and Belle. Dinosaur tried to do a somersault, but his tiny front arms could not support the weight of his massive head, and he fell flat on his face. Then Belle gave it a try and did a perfect somersault.
Nell tried it too. It was confusing at first, because the world kept spinning around her while she did it. She looked at the illustration in the book and saw Belle doing exactly what Nell had done, making all of the same mistakes. Dojo scampered down from his rock and explained how Belle could keep her head and body straight. Nell followed the advice as she gave it another try, and this time it felt better. Before her time was up, she was doing perfect somersaults all over the playground. When she went back to the apartment, Mom wouldn't let her in at first, so she did somersaults up and down the hall for a while. Finally Mom let her in, and when she saw that Nell had gotten sand in her hair and shoes down at the playground, she gave her a spanking and sent her to bed without any food.
But the next morning she went to the M.C. and asked it for the special meal Dojo made for Belle. The M.C. said it couldn't really make fish, but it could make nanosurimi, which was kind of like fish. It could make rice too. Vegetables were a problem. Instead it gave her some green paste she could eat with a spoon. Nell told the M.C. that this was her Belle food and that she was going to have it all the time from now on, and after that the M.C. always knew what she wanted.
Nell didn't call it her magic book anymore, she called it by the name printed plain as day on the title page, which she'd only been able to read recently:
YOUNG LADY'S ILLUSTRATED PRIMER a PropPrincess Nelland her various friends, kin, associates, &c.
The Primer didn't speak to her as often as it used to. She had found that she could often read the words more quickly than the book spoke them, and so she usually ordered it to be silent. She often put it under her pillow and had it read her bedtime stories, though, and sometimes she even woke up in the middle of the night and heard it whispering things to her that she had just been dreaming about.
Tad had long since vanished from their home, though not before giving Mom a broken nose. He'd been replaced by Shemp, who had been replaced by Todd, who had given way to Tony. One day the Shanghai Police had come to arrest Tony, and he had plugged one of them right in the living room with his skull gun, blowing a hole in the guy's stomach so that intestines fell out and trailed down between his legs. The other policemen nailed Tony with a Seven Minute Special and then dragged their wounded comrade out into the hallway, while Tony, bellowing like a cornered, rabid animal, ran into the kitchen and grabbed a knife and began hacking at his chest where he thought the Seven Minute Special had gone into his body. By the time the seven minutes had gone by and the policemen burst back into the apartment, he had dug a hole in his pectoral muscle all the way down to his ribs. He menaced the cops with his bloody knife, and the cop in charge punched in some numbers on a little black box in his hand, and Tony buckled and screamed as a single cookie-cutter detonated inside his thigh. He dropped the knife. The cops rushed in and shrink-wrapped him, then stood around his body, mummified in glistening plastic, and kicked him and stomped him for a minute or two, then finally cut a hole in the plastic so Tony could breathe.
They bonded four handles onto the shrink-wrap and then carried him out between them, leaving Nell to clean up the blood in the kitchen and the living room. She wasn't very good at cleaning things up yet and ended up smearing it around. When Mom got home, she screamed and cried for a while and then spanked Nell for making a mess. This made Nell sad, and so she went to her room and picked up the Primer and made up a story of her own, about how the wicked stepmother had made Princess Nell clean up the house and had spanked her for doing it wrong. The Primer made up pictures as she went along. By the time she was finished, she had forgotten about the real things that had happened and remembered only the story she had made up.
After that, Mom swore off men for a while, but after a couple of months she met a guy named Brad who was actually nice. He had a real job as a blacksmith in the New Atlantis Clave, and one day he took Nell to work with him and showed her how he nailed iron shoes onto the hooves of the horses. This was the first time Nell had actually seen a horse, and so she did not pay much attention to Brad and his hammers and nails. Brad's employers had a giant house with vast green fields, and they had four kids, all bigger than Nell, who would come out in fancy clothes and ride those horses.
But Mom broke up with Brad; she didn't like craftsmen, she said, because they were too much like actual Victorians, always spouting all kinds of crap about how one thing was better than another thing, which eventually led, she explained, to the belief that some people were better than others. She took up with a guy named Burt who eventually moved in with them. Burt explained to Nell and Harv that the house needed discipline and that he intended to provide it, and after that he spanked them all the time, sometimes on the butt and sometimes on the face. He spanked Mom a lot too.
Nell was spending much more time at the playground, where it was easier for her to do all of the exercises that Dojo was teaching to Belle. She also played games with the other kids sometimes. One day she was playing tetherball with a friend of hers and kept beating her every time. Then a boy came up, a boy bigger than either Nell or her friend, and insisted that he be allowed to play. Nell's friend gave up her place, and then Nell played against the boy, whose name was Kevin. Kevin was a big solid boy who was proud of his bulk and his strength, and his philosophy of tetherball was winning through intimidation. He would grab the ball, wind up melodramatically, baring his teeth and getting his face bright red, then smash the ball with a windmill punch, complete with sound effects that always showered the ball with spit. The performance was so impressive that many children just stood and watched it in awe, afraid to get in the way of the tetherball, and after that Kevin would just keep smashing the ball faster and faster on each revolution while vomiting profanity at his opponent. Nell knew that Kevin's mom had lived with a lot of the same guys that Nell's mom had lived with; he frequently sported black eyes that he certainly hadn't gotten on the playground.
Nell had always been afraid of Kevin. But today when he wound up for his big serve, he just looked silly; kind of like Dinosaur did sometimes when sparring with Belle. The ball swung toward her, dewy with spit and not really going all that fast. Kevin was shouting things at her, calling her a cunt and other words, but for some reason Nell didn't hear it and didn'tcare, she just lunged toward the ball and punched it hard, putting her whole body behind her knuckles in a straight line, just as Dojo taught. She hit the ball so hard, she didn't even feel it; it shot up in a wide arc that took it behind and above Kevin's head, and after that all she had to do was give it a few more slaps as it whizzed by, and she'd won the game.
"Two out of three," Kevin said, and they played again, with the same result. Now all the kids were laughing at Kevin, and he lost his temper, turned bright red, and charged at Nell.
But Nell had watched Kevin use this tactic on other kids, and she knew that it only worked because usually the kids were too scared to move. Dojo had explained to Belle that the best way to fight Dinosaur was simply to get out of his way and let his own strength defeat him, so that's what Nell did with Kevin: stepped aside at the last minute, made one foot into a hook, and tripped him.
Kevin smashed tremendously into a swingset, gathered himself up, and charged a second time. Nell dodged him and tripped him again.
"Okay," Kevin said, "you win." He approached Nell holding out his right hand to shake. But Nell had seen this one too, and she knew it was a trick. She reached out with her right hand as if she were going to shake. But as Kevin was groping at this bait, every muscle in his arm tense, Nell turned her palm toward the floor and drew her hand down, then back across the middle of her body. She was watching Kevin as she did this and saw that his eyes were tracking her hand, mesmerized. She continued to move her hand around in a long ellipse, turning her palm upward, thrusting it forward, poking her fingers into Kevin's staring eyes.
He put his hands to his face. She kicked him between the legs as hard as she could, taking her time and striking the target precisely. As he bent over, she grabbed his hair and kneed him in the face, then shoved him down on his butt and left him there, too surprised, for the moment, to start bawling.
Hackworth lunches in distinguished company;
a disquisition on hypocrisy;
Hackworth's situation develops new complications.
Hackworth arrived at the pub first. He got a pint of porter at the bar, cask-conditioned stuff from the nearby Dovetail community, and strolled around the place for a few minutes while he waited. He had been fidgeting at his desk all morning and enjoyed the opportunity to stretch his legs. The place was done up like an ancient London publican house circa World War II, complete with fake bomb damage to one corner of the structure and taped X's over each windowpane-which only made Hackworth think of Dr. X. Autographed photos of British and American airmen were stuck up on the walls here and there, along with other miscellany recalling the heyday of Anglo-American cooperation:
SEND
a gun
TO DEFEND
A BRITISH HOME
British civilians, faced with threat of invasion, desperately
need arms for the defense of their homes.
YOU CAN AID
American Committee for Defense of British Homes
Bowler hats hung in clusters from poles and wall hooks all over the room, like great bunches of black grapes. A lot of engineers and artifexes seemed to come to this place. They hunched over pints of beer at the bar and delved into steak-and-kidney pies at the little tables, chatting and chuckling. There was nothing prepossessing about the place or its patrons, but Hackworth knew that the odds and ends of nanotechnological lore collected in the heads of these middle-class artisans was what ultimately kept New Atlantis wealthy and secure. He had to ask himself why he hadn't been satisfied with simply being one of them. John Percival Hackworth projected his thoughts into matter and did it better than anyone else in this place. But he had felt the need to go beyond that-he had wanted to reach beyond mere matter and into someone's soul. Now, whether he wanted to or not, he was going to reach hundreds of thousands of souls.
The men at the tables watched him curiously, then nodded politely and looked away when he caught their eye. Hackworth had noticed a full-lane Rolls-Royce parked in front of the place on his way in. Someone important was here, evidently in a back room. Hackworth and everyone else in the place knew it, and they were all in a heightened state of alertness, wondering what was up.
Major Napier rode up on a standard-issue cavalry chevaline and came in at noon on the dot, pulling off his officer's hat and exchanging a hilarious greeting with the barkeep. Hackworth recognized him because he was a hero, and Napier recognized Hackworth for reasons left provocatively unspecified.
Hackworth translated his pint to the left and exchanged a vigorous handshake with Major Napier in front of the bar. They strolled toward the back of the place, exchanging some hearty, forgettable, balderdashladen banter. Napier stepped nimbly in front of him and pulled open a small door in the back wall. Three steps led down into a little snuggery with mullioned windows on three sides and a single copper-covered table in the middle. A man was sitting by himself at the table, and as Hackworth descended the steps, he realized, that it was Lord Alexander Chung-Sik Finkle-McGraw, who stood up, returned his bow, and greeted him with a warm and hearty handshake, taking such evident measures to put Hackworth at ease that, in some respects, the opposite result was achieved.
More banter, a bit more restrained. A waiter came in; Hackworth ordered a steak sandwich, today's special, and Napier simply nodded to the waiter to indicate his complete agreement, which Hackworth took as a friendly gesture. Finkle-McGraw declined to eat anything.
Hackworth was not really hungry anymore. It was clear that Royal Joint Forces Command had figured out at least some of what had happened, and that Finkle-McGraw knew about it too. They had decided to approach him privately instead of simply lowering the boom on him and drumming him out of the phyle. This should have filled him with boundless relief, but it didn't. Things had seemed so simple after his prosecution in the Celestial Kingdom. Now he suspected they were about to get infinitely more complicated.
"Mr. Hackworth," Finkle-McGraw said after the pleasantries had petered out, speaking in a new tone of voice, a the-meeting-will— come-to-order sort of voice, "please favour me with your opinion of hypocrisy.
"Excuse me. Hypocrisy, Your Grace?"
"Yes. You know."
"It's a vice, I suppose."
"A little one or a big one? Think carefully-much hinges upon the answer."
"I suppose that depends upon the particular circumstances."
"That will never fail to be a safe answer, Mr. Hackworth," the Equity Lord said reproachfully. Major Napier laughed, somewhat artificially, not knowing what to make of this line of inquiry.
"Recent events in my life have renewed my appreciation for the virtues of doing things safely," Hackworth said. Both of the others chuckled knowingly.
"You know, when I was a young man, hypocrisy was deemed the worst of vices," Finkle-McGraw said. "It was all because of moral relativism. You see, in that sort of a climate, you are not allowed to criticise others-after all, if there is no absolute right and wrong, then what grounds is there for criticism?"
Finkle-McGraw paused, knowing that he had the full attention of his audience, and began to withdraw a calabash pipe and various related supplies and implements from his pockets. As he continued, he charged the calabash with a blend of leather-brown tobacco so redolent that it made Hackworth's mouth water. He was tempted to spoon some of it into his mouth.
"Now, this led to a good deal of general frustration, for people are naturally censorious and love nothing better than to criticise others' shortcomings. And so it was that they seized on hypocrisy and elevated it from a ubiquitous peccadillo into the monarch of all vices. For, you see, even if there is no right and wrong, you can find grounds to criticise another person by contrasting what he has espoused with what he has actually done. In this case, you are not making any judgment whatsoever as to the correctness of his views or the morality of his behaviour-you are merely pointing out that he has said one thing and done another. Virtually all political discourse in the days of my youth was devoted to the ferreting out of hypocrisy.
"You wouldn't believe the things they said about the original Victorians. Calling someone a Victorian in those days was almost like calling them a fascist or a Nazi."
Both Hackworth and Major Napier were dumbfounded. "Your Grace!" Napier exdaimed. "I was naturally aware that their moral stance was radically different from ours— but I am astonished to be informed that they actually condemned the first Victorians."
"Of course they did," Finkle-McGraw said.
"Because the first Victorians were hypocrites," Hackworth said, getting it.
Finkle-McGraw beamed upon Hackworth like a master upon his favored pupil. "As you can see, Major Napier, my estimate of Mr. Hackworth's mental acuity was not ill-founded."
"While I would never have supposed otherwise, Your Grace," Major Napier said, "it is nonetheless gratifying to have seen a demonstration." Napier raised his glass in Hackworth's direction.
"Because they were hypocrites," Finkle-McGraw said, after igniting his calabash and shooting a few tremendous fountains of smoke into the air, "the Victorians were despised in the late twentieth century. Many of the persons who held such opinions were, of course, guilty of the most nefandous conduct themselves, and yet saw no paradox in holding such views because they were not hypocrites themselves-they took no moral stances and lived by none."