When Harv came back home, he was walking with all of his weight on one foot. When the light struck the smudges on his face in the right way, Nell could see streaks of red mixed in with the dirt and the toner. He was breathing fast, and he swallowed heavily and often, as though throwing up were much on his mind. But he was not empty-handed. His arms were crossed tightly across his belly. He was carrying things in his jacket.

“I made out, Nell,” he said, seeing his sister's face and knowing that she was too scared to talk first. “Didn't get much, but got some. Got some stuff for the Flea Circus.”

Nell wasn't sure what the Flea Circus was, but she had learned that it was good to have stuff to take there, that Harv usually came back from the Flea Circus with an access code for a new ractive.

Harv shouldered the light switch on and kneeled in the middle of the room before relaxing his arms, lest some small thing fall out and be lost in a corner. Nell sat in front of him and watched.

He took out a piece of jewelry swinging ponderously at the end of a gold chain. It was circular, smooth gold on one side and white on the other. The white side was protected under a flattened glass dome. It had numbers written around the edge, and a couple of slender metal things like daggers, one longer than the other, joined at their hilts in the center. It made a noise like mice trying to eat their way through a wall in the middle of the night.

Before she could ask about it, Harv had taken out other things. He had a few cartridges from his mite trap. Tomorrow Harv would take the cartridge down to the Flea Circus and find out if he'd caught anything, and whether it was worth money.

There were other things like buttons. But Harv saved the biggest thing for last, and he withdrew it with ceremony.

“I had to fight for this, Nell,” he said. “I fought hard because I was afraid the others would break it up for parts. I'm giving it to you.”

It appeared to be a flat decorated box. Nell could tell immediately that it was fine. She had not seen many fine things in her life, but they had a look of their own, dark and rich like chocolate, with glints of gold.

“Both hands,” Harv admonished her, “it's heavy.”

Nell reached out with both hands and took it. Harv was right, it was heavier than it looked. She had to lay it down in her lap or she'd drop it. It was not a box at all. It was a solid thing. The top was printed with golden letters. The left edge was rounded and smooth, made of something that felt warm and soft but strong. The other edges were indented slightly, and they were cream-colored.

Harv could not put up with the wait. “Open it,” he said.

“How?”

Harv leaned toward her, caught the upper-right corner under his finger, and flipped it. The whole lid of the thing bent upward around a hinge on the left side, pulling a flutter of cream-colored leaves after it.

Underneath the cover was a piece of paper with a picture on it and some more letters.

On the first page of the book was a picture of a little girl sitting on a bench. Above the bench was a thing like a ladder, except it was horizontal, supported at each end by posts. Thick vines twisted up the posts and gripped the ladder, where they burst into huge flowers. The girl had her back to Nell; she was looking down a grassy slope sprinkled with little flowers toward a blue pond. On the other side of the pond rose mountains like the ones they supposedly had in the middle of New Chusan, where the fanciest Vickys of all had their æstival houses. The girl had a book open on her lap.

The facing page had a little picture in the upper left, consisting of more vines and flowers wrapped around a giant egg-shaped letter. But the rest of that page was nothing but tiny black letters without decoration. Nell turned it and found two more pages of letters, though a couple of them were big ones with pictures drawn around them. She turned another page and found another picture. In this one, the little girl had set aside her book and was talking to a big black bird that had apparently gotten its foot tangled up in the vines overhead. She flipped another page.

The pages she'd already turned were under her left thumb. They were trying to work their way loose, as if they were alive. She had to press down harder and harder to keep them there. Finally they bulged up in the middle and slid out from underneath her thumb and, flop-flop-flop, returned to the beginning of the story.

“Once upon a time,” said a woman's voice, “there was a little girl named Elizabeth who liked to sit in the bower in her grandfather's garden and read story-books.” The voice was soft, meant just for her, with an expensive Victorian accent.

Nell slammed the book shut and pushed it away. It slid across the floor and came to rest by the sofa.

The next day, Mom's boyfriend Tad came home in a bad mood. He slammed his six-pack down on the kitchen table, pulled out a beer, and headed for the living room. Nell was trying to get out of the way. She picked up Dinosaur, Duck, Peter Rabbit, and Purple, her magic wand, a paper bag that was actually a car her kids could drive around in, and a piece of cardboard that was a sword for killing pirates. Then she ran for the room where she and Harv slept, but Tad had already come in with his beer and begun rooting through the stuff on the sofa with his other hand, trying to find the control pad for the mediatron. He threw a lot of Harv's and Nell's toys on the floor and then stepped on the book with his bare foot.

“Ouch, god damn it!” Tad shouted. He looked down at the book in disbelief. “What the fuck is this?!” He wound up as if to kick it, then thought better of it, remembering he was barefoot. He picked it up and hefted it, looking straight at Nell and getting a fix on her range and azimuth. “Stupid little cunt, how many times do I have to tell you to keep your fucking shit cleaned up?!” Then he turned away from her slightly, wrapping his arm around his body, and snapped the book straight at her head like a Frisbee.

She stood watching it come toward her because it did not occur to her to get out of the way, but at the last moment the covers flew open. The pages spread apart. They all bent like feathers as they hit her in the face, and it didn't hurt at all.

The book fell to the floor at her feet, open to an illustrated page.

The picture was of a big dark man and a little girl in a cluttered room, the man angrily flinging a book at the little girl's head.

“Once upon a time there was a little girl named Cunt,” the book said.

“My name is Nell,” Nell said.

A tiny disturbance propagated through the grid of letters on the facing page.

“Your name's mud if you don't fucking clean this shit up,” Tad said. “But do it later, I want some fucking privacy for once.”

Nell's hands were full, and so she shoved the book down the hallway and into the kids' room with her foot. She dumped all her stuff on her mattress and then ran back and shut the door. She left her magic wand and sword nearby in case she should need them, then set Dinosaur, Duck, Peter, and Purple into bed, all in a neat line, and pulled the blanket up under their chins. “Now you go to bed and you go to bed and you go to bed and you go to bed, and be quiet because you are all being naughty and bothering Tad, and I'll see you in the morning.”

“Nell was putting her children to bed and decided to read them some stories,” said the book's voice.

Nell looked at the book, which had flopped itself open again, this time to an illustration showing a girl who looked much like Nell, except that she was wearing a beautiful flowing dress and had ribbons in her hair. She was sitting next to a miniature bed with four children tucked beneath its flowered coverlet: a dinosaur, a duck, a bunny, and a baby with purple hair. The girl who looked like Nell had a book on her lap. “For some time Nell had been putting them to bed without reading to them,” the book continued, “but now the children were not so tiny anymore, and Nell decided that in order to bring them up properly, they must have bedtime stories.”

Nell picked up the book and set it on her lap.

Nell's first experiences with the Primer.

The book spoke in a lovely contralto, with an accent like the very finest Vickys. The voice was like a real person's—though not like anyone Nell had ever met. It rose and fell like slow surf on a warm beach, and when Nell closed her eyes, it swept her out into an ocean of feelings.

Once upon a time there was a little Princess named Nell who was imprisoned in a tall dark castle on an island in the middle of a great sea, with a little boy named Harv, who was her friend and protector. She also had four special friends named Dinosaur, Duck, Peter Rabbit, and Purple.

Princess Nell and Harv could not leave the Dark Castle, but from time to time a raven would come to visit them …

“What's a raven?” Nell said.

The illustration was a colorful painting of the island seen from up in the sky. The island rotated downward and out of the picture, becoming a view toward the ocean horizon. In the middle was a black dot. The picture zoomed in on the black dot, and it turned out to be a bird. Big letters appeared beneath. “R A V E N,” the book said. “Raven. Now, say it with me.”

“Raven.”

“Very good! Nell, you are a clever girl, and you have much talent with words. Can you spell raven?”

Nell hesitated. She was still blushing from the praise. After a few seconds, the first of the letters began to blink. Nell prodded it.

The letter grew until it had pushed all the other letters and pictures off the edges of the page. The loop on top shrank and became a head, while the lines sticking out the bottom developed into legs and began to scissor. “R is for Run,” the book said. The picture kept on changing until it was a picture of Nell. Then something fuzzy and red appeared beneath her feet. “Nell Runs on the Red Rug,” the book said, and as it spoke, new words appeared.

“Why is she running?”

“Because an Angry Alligator Appeared,” the book said, and panned back quite some distance to show an alligator, waddling along ridiculously, no threat to the fleet Nell. The alligator became frustrated and curled itself into a circle, which became a small letter. “A is for Alligator. The Very Vast alligator Vainly Viewed Nell's Valiant Velocity.”

The little story went on to include an Excited Elf who was Nibbling Noisily on some Nuts. Then the picture of the Raven came back, with the letters beneath. “Raven. Can you spell raven, Nell?” A hand materialized on the page and pointed to the first letter.

“R,” Nell said.

“Very good! You are a clever girl, Nell, and good with letters,” the book said. “What is this letter?” and it pointed to the second one. This one Nell had forgotten. But the book told her a story about an Ape named Albert.

A young hooligan before the court of Judge Fang; the
magistrate confers with his advisers;
Justice is served.

The revolving chain of a nunchuk has a unique radar signature—reminiscent of that of a helicopter blade, but noisier,” Miss Pao said, gazing up at Judge Fang over the half-lenses of her phenomenoscopic spectacles. Her eyes went out of focus, and she winced; she had been lost in some enhanced three-dimensional image, and the adjustment to dull reality was disorienting. “A cluster of such patterns was recognized by one of Shanghai P.D.'s sky-eyes at ten seconds after 2351 hours.”

As Miss Pao worked her way through this summary, images appeared on the big sheet of mediatronic paper that Judge Fang had unrolled across his brocade tablecloth and held down with carved jade paperweights. At the moment, the image was a map of a Leased Territory called Enchantment, with one location, near the Causeway, highlighted. In the corner was another pane containing a standard picture of an anticrime sky-eye, which always looked, to Judge Fang, like an American football as redesigned by fetishists: glossy and black and studded.

Miss Pao continued, “The sky-eye dispatched a flight of eight smaller aerostats equipped with cine cameras.”

The kinky football was replaced by a picture of a teardrop-shaped craft, about the size of an almond, trailing a whip antenna, with an orifice at its nose protected by an incongruously beautiful iris. Judge Fang was not really looking; at least three-quarters of the cases that came before him commenced with a summary almost exactly like this one. It was a credit to Miss Pao's seriousness and diligence that she was able to tell each story afresh. It was a challenge to Judge Fang's professionalism for him to listen to each one in the same spirit.

“Converging on the scene,” Miss Pao said, “they recorded activities.”

The large map image on Judge Fang's scroll was replaced by a cine feed. The figures were far away, flocks of relatively dark pixels nudging their way across a rough gray background like starlings massing before a winter gale. They got bigger and more clearly defined as the aerostat flew closer to the action.

A man was curled on the street with his arms wrapped around his head. The nunchuks had been put away by this point, and hands were busy going through the innumerable pockets that were to be found in a gentleman's suit. At this point the cine went into slow-mo. A watch flashed and oscillated hypnotically at the end of its gold chain. A silver fountain pen glowed like an ascending rocket and vanished into the folds of someone's mite-proof raiment. And then out came something else, harder to resolve: larger, mostly dark, white around the edge. A book, perhaps.

“Heuristic analysis of the cine feeds suggested a probable violent crime in progress,” Miss Pao said.

Judge Fang valued Miss Pao's services for many reasons, but her deadpan delivery was especially precious to him.

“So the sky-eye dispatched another flight of aerostats, specialized for tagging.”

An image of a tagger stat appeared: smaller and narrower than the cinestats, reminiscent of a hornet with the wings stripped off. The nacelles containing the tiny air turbines, which gave such devices the power to propel themselves through the air, were prominent; it was built for speed.

“The suspected assailants adopted countermeasures,” Miss Pao said, again using that deadpan tone. On the cine feed, the criminals were retreating. The cinestat followed them with a nice tracking shot. Judge Fang, who had watched thousands of hours of film of thugs departing from the scenes of their crimes, watched with a discriminating eye. Less sophisticated hoodlums would simply have run away in a panic, but this group was proceeding methodically, two to a bicycle, one person pedaling and steering while the other handled the countermeasures. Two of them were discharging fountains of material into the air from canisters on their bicycles' equipment racks, like fire extinguishers, waving the nozzles in all directions. “Following a pattern that has become familiar to law enforcement,” Miss Pao said, “they dispersed adhesive foam that clogged the intakes of the stats' air turbines, rendering them inoperative.”

The big mediatron had also taken to emitting tremendous flashes of light that caused Judge Fang to close his eyes and pinch the bridge of his nose. After a few of these, the cine feed went dead. “Another suspect used strobe illumination to pick out the locations of the cinestats, then disabled them with pulses of laser light—evidently using a device, designed for this purpose, that has recently become widespread among the criminal element in the L.T.”

The big mediatron cut back to a new camera angle on the original scene of the crime. Across the bottom of the scroll was a bar graph depicting the elapsed time since the start of the incident, and the practiced Judge Fang noted that it had jumped backward by a quarter of a minute or so; the narrative had split, and we were now seeing the other fork of the plot. This feed depicted a solitary gang member who was trying to climb aboard his bicycle even as his comrades were riding away on contrails of sticky foam. But the bike had been mangled somehow and would not function. The youth abandoned it and fled on foot.

Up in the corner, the small diagram of the tagging aerostat zoomed in to a high magnification, revealing some of the device's internal complications, so that it began to look less like a hornet and more like a cutaway view of a starship. Mounted in the nose was a device that spat out tiny darts drawn from an interior magazine. At first these were almost invisibly tiny, but as the view continued to zoom, the hull of the tagging aerostat grew until it resembled the gentle curve of a planet's horizon, and the darts became more clearly visible. They were hexagonal in cross-section, like pencil stubs. When they were shot out of the tag stat's nose, they sprouted cruel barbs at the nose and a simple empennage at the tail.

“The suspect had experienced a ballistic interlude earlier in the evening,” Miss Pao said, “regrettably not filmed, and relieved himself of excess velocity by means of an ablative technique.”

Miss Pao was outdoing herself. Judge Fang raised an eyebrow at her, briefly hitting the pause button. Chang, Judge Fang's other assistant, rotated his enormous, nearly spherical head in the direction of the defendant, who was looking very small as he stood before the court. Chang, in a characteristic gesture, reached up and rubbed the palm of his hand back over the short stubble that covered his head, as if he could not believe he had such a bad haircut. He opened his sleepy, slitlike eyes just a notch, and said to the defendant, “She say you have road rash.”

The defendant, a pale asthmatic boy, had seemed too awed to be scared through most of this. Now the corners of his mouth twitched. Judge Fang noticed with approval that he controlled the impulse to smile.

“Consequently,” Miss Pao said, “there were lapses in his Nanobar integument. An unknown number of tag mites passed through these openings and embedded themselves in his clothing and flesh. He discarded all of his clothing and scrubbed himself vigorously at a public shower before returning to his domicile, but three hundred and fifty tag mites remained in his flesh and were later extracted during the course of our examination. As usual, the tag mites were equipped with inertial navigation systems that recorded all of the suspect's subsequent movements.”

The big cine feed was replaced by a map of the Leased Territories with the suspect's movements traced out with a red line. This boy did a lot of wandering about, even going into Shanghai on occasion, but he always came back to the same apartment.

“After a pattern was established, the tag mites automatically spored,” Miss Pao said.

The image of the barbed dart altered itself, the midsection—which contained a taped record of the dart's movements—breaking free and accelerating into the void.

“Several of the spores found their way to a sky-eye, where their contents were downloaded and their serial numbers checked against police records. It was determined that the suspect spent much of his time in a particular apartment. Surveillance was placed on that apartment. One of the residents clearly matched the suspect seen on the cine feed. The suspect was placed under arrest and additional tag mites found in his body, tending to support our suspicions.”

“Oooh,” Chang blurted, absently, as if he'd just remembered something important.

“What do we know about the victim?” Judge Fang said.

“The cine stat could track him only as far as the gates of New Atlantis,” Miss Pao said. “His face was bloody and swollen, complicating identification. He had also been tagged, naturally—the tagger aerostat cannot make any distinction between victim and perpetrator—but no spores were received; we can assume that all of his tag mites were detected and destroyed by Atlantis/Shanghai's immune system.”

At this point Miss Pao stopped talking and swiveled her eyes in the direction of Chang, who was standing quiescently with his hands clasped behind his back, staring down at the floor as if his thick neck had finally given way under the weight of his head. Miss Pao cleared her throat once, twice, three times, and suddenly Chang came awake. “Excuse me, Your Honor,” he said, bowing to Judge Fang. He rummaged in a large plastic bag and withdrew a gentleman's top hat in poor condition. “This was found at the scene,” he said, finally reverting to his native Shanghainese.

Judge Fang dropped his eyes to the tabletop and then looked up at Chang. Chang stepped forward and placed the hat carefully on the table, giving it a little nudge as if its position were not quite perfect. Judge Fang regarded it for a few moments, then withdrew his hands from the voluminous sleeves of his robe, picked it up, and flipped it over. The words JOHN PERCIVAL HACKWORTH were written in gold script on the hatband.

Judge Fang cast a significant look at Miss Pao, who shook her head. They had not yet contacted the victim. Neither had the victim contacted them, which was interesting; John Percival Hackworth must have something to hide. The neo-Victorians were smart; why did so many of them get mugged in the Leased Territories after an evening of brothel-crawling?

“You have recovered the stolen items?” Judge Fang said.

Chang stepped to the table again and laid out a man's pocket watch. Then he stepped back, hands clasped behind him, bent his neck again, and watched his feet, which could not contain themselves from shuffling back and forth in tiny increments. Miss Pao was glaring at him.

“There was another item? A book, perhaps?” Judge Fang said.

Chang cleared his throat nervously, suppressing the urge to hawk and spit—an activity Judge Fang had barred in his courtroom. He turned sideways and backed up one step, allowing Judge Fang to view one of the spectators: a young girl, perhaps four years old, sitting with her feet up on the chair so that her face was blocked by her knees. Judge Fang heard the sound of a page turning and realized that the girl was reading a book propped up on her thighs. She cocked her head this way and that, talking to the book in a tiny voice.

“I must humbly apologize to the Judge,” Chang said in Shanghainese. “My resignation is hereby proffered.”

Judge Fang took this with due gravity. “Why?”

“I was unable to wrest the evidence from the young one's grasp,” Chang said.

“I have seen you kill adult men with your hands,” Judge Fang reminded him. He had been raised speaking Cantonese, but could make himself understood to Chang by speaking a kind of butchered Mandarin.

“Age has not been kind,” Chang said. He was thirty-six.

“The hour of noon has passed,” said Judge Fang. “Let us go and get some Kentucky Fried Chicken.”

“As you wish, Judge Fang,” said Chang.

“As you wish, Judge Fang,” said Miss Pao.

Judge Fang switched back to English. “Your case is very serious,” he said to the boy. “We will go and consult the ancient authorities. You will remain here until we return.”

“Yes, sir,” said the defendant, abjectly terrified. This was not the abstract fear of a first-time delinquent; he was sweating and shaking. He had been caned before.

The House of the Venerable and Inscrutable Colonel was what they called it when they were speaking Chinese. Venerable because of his goatee, white as the dogwood blossom, a badge of unimpeachable credibility in Confucian eyes. Inscrutable because he had gone to his grave without divulging the Secret of the Eleven Herbs and Spices. It had been the first fast-food franchise established on the Bund, many decades earlier. Judge Fang had what amounted to a private table in the corner. He had once reduced Chang to a state of catalepsis by describing an avenue in Brooklyn that was lined with fried chicken establishments for miles, all of them ripoffs of Kentucky Fried Chicken. Miss Pao, who had grown up in Austin, Texas, was less easily impressed by these legends.

Word of their arrival preceded them; their bucket already rested upon the table. The small plastic cups of gravy, coleslaw, potatoes, and so on had been carefully arranged. As usual, the bucket was placed squarely in front of Chang's seat, for he would be responsible for consumption of most of it. They ate in silence for a few minutes, communicating through eye contact and other subtleties, then spent several minutes exchanging polite formal chatter.

“Something struck a chord in my memory,” Judge Fang said, when the time was right to discuss business. “The name Tequila—the mother of the suspect and of the little girl.”

“The name has come before our court twice before,” Miss Pao said, and refreshed his memory of two previous cases: one, almost five years ago, in which this woman's lover had been executed, and the second, only a few months ago, a case quite similar to this one.

“Ah, yes,” Judge Fang said, “I recall the second case. This boy and his friends beat a man severely. But nothing was stolen. He would not give a justification for his actions. I sentenced him to three strokes of the cane and released him.”

“There is reason to suspect that the victim in that case had molested the boy's sister,” Chang put in, “as he has a previous record of such accomplishments.”

Judge Fang fished a drumstick out of the bucket, arranged it on his napkin, folded his hands, and sighed. “Does the boy have any filial relationships whatsoever?”

“None,” said Miss Pao.

“Would anyone care to advise me?” Judge Fang frequently asked this question; he considered it his duty to teach his subordinates

Miss Pao spoke, using just the right degree of cautiousness. “The Master says, “The superior man bends his attention to what is radical. That being established, all practical courses naturally grow up. Filial piety and fraternal submission!—are they not the root of all benevolent actions?' ”

“How do you apply the Master's wisdom in this instance?”

“The boy has no father—his only possible filial relationship is with the State. You, Judge Fang, are the only representative of the State he is likely to encounter. It is your duty to punish the boy firmly—say, with six strokes of the cane. This will help to establish his filial piety.”

“But the Master also said, “If the people be led by laws, and uniformity sought to be given them by punishments, they will try to avoid the punishments, but have no sense of shame. Whereas, if they be led by virtue, and uniformity sought to be given them by the rules of propriety, they will have the sense of shame, and moreover will become good.' ”

“So you are advocating leniency in this case?” Miss Pao said, somewhat skeptically.

Chang chimed in: “ 'Mang Wu asked what filial piety was. The Master said, “Parents are anxious lest their children should be sick.” ' But the Master said nothing about caning.”

Miss Pao said, “The Master also said, “Rotten wood cannot be carved.' And, “There are only the wise of the highest class, and the stupid of the lowest class, who cannot be changed.' ”

“So the question before us is: Is the boy rotten wood? His father certainly was. I am not certain about the boy, yet.”

“With utmost respect, I would direct your attention to the girl,” said Chang, “who should be the true subject of our discussions. The boy may be lost; the girl can be saved.”

“Who will save her?” Miss Pao said. “We have the power to punish; we are not given the power to raise children.”

“This is the essential dilemma of my position,” Judge Fang said. “The Mao Dynasty lacked a real judicial system. When the Coastal Republic arose, a judicial system was built upon the only model the Middle Kingdom had ever known, that being the Confucian. But such a system cannot truly function in a larger society that does not adhere to Confucian precepts. “From the Son of Heaven down to the mass of the people, all must consider the cultivation of the person the root of everything besides.' Yet how am I to cultivate the persons of the barbarians for whom I have perversely been given responsibility?”

Chang was ready for this opening and exploited it quickly. “The Master stated in his Great Learning that the extension of knowledge was the root of all other virtues.”

“I cannot send the boy to school, Chang.”

“Think instead of the girl,” Chang said, “the girl and her book.”

Judge Fang contemplated this for a few moments, though he could see that Miss Pao badly wanted to say something.

“ 'The superior man is correctly firm, and not firm merely,' ” Judge Fang said. “Since the victim has not contacted the police seeking return of his property, I will allow the girl to keep the book for her own edification—as the Master said, “In teaching there should be no distinction of classes.' I will sentence the boy to six strokes of the cane. But I will suspend all but one of those strokes, since he has displayed the beginnings of fraternal responsibility by giving the book to his sister. This is correctly firm.”

“I have completed a phenomenoscopic survey of the book,” Miss Pao said. “It is not an ordinary book.”

“I had already surmised that it was a ractive of some sort,” Judge Fang said.

“It is considerably more sophisticated than that description implies. I believe that it may embody hot I.P.,” Miss Pao said.

“You think that this book incorporates stolen technology?”

“The victim works in the Bespoke division of Machine-Phase Systems. He is an artifex.”

“Interesting,” Judge Fang said.

“Is it worthy of further investigation?”

Judge Fang thought about it for a moment, carefully wiping his fingertips on a fresh napkin.

“It is,” he said.

Hackworth presents the Primer to
Lord Finkle-McGraw.

“Is the binding and so on what you had in mind?” Hackworth said.

“Oh, yes,” said Lord Finkle-McGraw. “If I found it in an antiquarian bookshop, covered with dust, I shouldn't give it a second glance.”

“Because if you were not happy with any detail,” Hackworth said, “I could recompile it.” He had come in hoping desperately that Finkle-McGraw would object to something; this might give him an opportunity to filch another copy for Fiona. But so far the Equity Lord had been uncharacteristically complacent.

He kept flipping through the book, waiting for something to happen.

“It is unlikely to do anything interesting just now,” Hackworth said. “It won't really activate itself until it bonds.”

“Bonds?”

“As we discussed, it sees and hears everything in its vicinity,” Hackworth said. “At the moment, it's looking for a small female. As soon as a little girl picks it up and opens the front cover for the first time, it will imprint that child's face and voice into its memory—”

“Bonding with her. Yes, I see.”

“And thenceforth it will see all events and persons in relation to that girl, using her as a datum from which to chart a psychological terrain, as it were. Maintenance of that terrain is one of the book's primary processes. Whenever the child uses the book, then, it will perform a sort of dynamic mapping from the database onto her particular terrain.”

“You mean the database of folklore.”

Hackworth hesitated. “Pardon me, but not precisely, sir. Folklore consists of certain universal ideas that have been mapped onto local cultures. For example, many cultures have a Trickster figure, so the Trickster may be deemed a universal; but he appears in different guises, each appropriate to a particular culture's environment. The Indians of the American Southwest called him Coyote, those of the Pacific Coast called him Raven. Europeans called him Reynard the Fox. African-Americans called him Br'er Rabbit. In twentieth-century literature he appears first as Bugs Bunny and then as the Hacker.”

Finkle-McGraw chuckled. “When I was a lad, that word had a double meaning. It could mean a trickster who broke into things—but it could also mean an especially skilled coder.”

“The ambiguity is common in post-Neolithic cultures,” Hackworth said. “As technology became more important, the Trickster underwent a shift in character and became the god of crafts—of technology, if you will—while retaining the underlying roguish qualities. So we have the Sumerian Enki, the Greek Prometheus and Hermes, Norse Loki, and so on.

“In any case,” Hackworth continued, “Trickster/Technologist is just one of the universals. The database is full of them. It's a catalogue of the collective unconscious. In the old days, writers of children's books had to map these universals onto concrete symbols familiar to their audience—like Beatrix Potter mapping the Trickster onto Peter Rabbit. This is a reasonably effective way to do it, especially if the society is homogeneous and static, so that all children share similar experiences.

“What my team and I have done here is to abstract that process and develop systems for mapping the universals onto the unique psychological terrain of one child—even as that terrain changes over time. Hence it is important that you not allow this book to fall into the hands of any other little girl until Elizabeth has the opportunity to open it up.”

“Understood,” said Lord Alexander Chung-Sik Finkle-McGraw. “I'll wrap it up myself, right now. Compiled some nice wrapping paper this morning.” He opened a desk drawer and took out a roll of thick, glossy mediatronic paper bearing animated Christmas scenes: Santa sliding down the chimney, the ballistic reindeer, the three Zoroastrian sovereigns dismounting from their dromedaries in front of the stable. There was a lull while Hackworth and Finkle-McGraw watched the little scenes; one of the hazards of living in a world filled with mediatrons was that conversations were always being interrupted in this way, and that explained why Atlantans tried to keep mediatronic commodities to a minimum. Go into a thete's house, and every object had moving pictures on it, everyone sat around slackjawed, eyes jumping from the bawdy figures cavorting on the mediatronic toilet paper to the big-eyed elves playing tag in the bathroom mirror to …

“Oh, yes,” Finkle-McGraw said. “Can it be written on? I should like to inscribe it to Elizabeth.”

“The paper is a subclass of both input-paper and output-paper, so it possesses all the underlying functionality of the sort of paper you would write on. For the most part these functions are not used—beyond, of course, simply making marks where the nib of the pen has moved across it.”

“You can write on it,” Finkle-McGraw translated with some asperity, “but it doesn't think about what you're writing.”

“Well, my answer to that question must be ambiguous,” Hackworth said. “The Illustrated Primer is an extremely general and powerful system capable of more extensive self-reconfiguration than most. Remember that a fundamental part of its job is to respond to its environment. If the owner were to take up a pen and write on a blank page, this input would be thrown into the hopper along with everything else, so to speak.”

“Can I inscribe it to Elizabeth or not?” Finkle-McGraw demanded.

“Certainly, sir.”

Finkle-McGraw extracted a heavy gold fountain pen from a holder on his desk and wrote in the front of the book for a while.

“That being done, sir, there remains only for you to authorise a standing purchase order for the ractors.”

“Ah, yes, thank you for reminding me,” said Finkle-McGraw, not very sincerely. “I still would have thought that for all the money that went into this project—”

“That we might have solved the voice-generation problem to boot, yes sir,” Hackworth said. “As you know, we took some stabs at it, but none of the results were up to the level of quality you demand. After all of our technology, the pseudo-intelligence algorithms, the vast exception matrices, the portent and content monitors, and everything else, we still can't come close to generating a human voice that sounds as good as what a real, live ractor can give us.”

“Can't say I'm surprised, really,” said Finkle-McGraw. “I just wish it were a completely self-contained system.”

“It might as well be, sir. At any given time there are tens of millions of professional ractors in their stages all over the world, in every time zone, ready to take on this kind of work at an instant's notice. We are planning to authorise payment at a relatively high rate, which should bring in only the best talent. You won't be disappointed with the results.”

Nell's second experience with the Primer; the story
of Princess Nell in a nutshell.

Once upon a time there was a little Princess named Nell who was imprisoned in a tall dark castle on an island in the middle of a great sea, with a little boy named Harv, who was her friend and protector. She also had four special friends named Dinosaur, Duck, Peter Rabbit, and Purple.

Princess Nell and Harv could not leave the Dark Castle, but from time to time a Raven would come to visit them and tell them of the wonderful things over the sea in the Land Beyond. One day the Raven helped Princess Nell escape from the castle, but alas, poor Harv was too big and had to stay locked up behind the castle's great iron door with twelve locks.

Princess Nell loved Harv like a brother and refused to abandon him, so she and her friends, Dinosaur, Duck, Peter, and Purple, traveled over the sea in a little red boat, having many adventures, until they came to the Land Beyond. This was divided into twelve countries each ruled by a Faery King or a Faery Queen. Each King or Queen had a wonderful Castle, and in each Castle was a Treasury containing gold and jewels, and in each Treasury was a jeweled Key that would open one of the twelve locks on the iron door of the Dark Castle.

Princess Nell and her friends had many adventures as they visited each of the twelve kingdoms and collected the twelve keys. Some they got by persuasion, some by cleverness, and some they took in battle. By the end of the quest, some of Nell's four friends had died, and some had gone their separate ways. But Nell was not alone, for she had become a great heroine during her adventures.

In a great ship, accompanied by many soldiers, servants, and elders, Nell traveled back over the sea to the island of the Dark Castle. As she approached the iron door, Harv saw her from the top of a tower and gruffly told her to go away, for Princess Nell had changed so much during her Quest that Harv no longer recognized her. “I have come to set you free,” Princess Nell said. Harv again told her to go away, saying that he had all the freedom he wanted within the walls of the Dark Castle.

Princess Nell put the twelve keys into the twelve locks and began to open them one by one. When the rusty door of the castle finally creaked open, she saw Harv standing with a bow at the ready, and an arrow drawn, pointed straight at her heart. He let fly the arrow, and it struck her in the chest and would have killed her except that she was wearing a locket Harv had given her many years ago, before she left the castle. The arrow struck and shattered the locket. In the same moment, Harv was cut down by an arrow from one of Princess Nell's soldiers. Nell rushed to her fallen brother to comfort him and wept over his body for three days and three nights. When finally she dried her eyes, she saw that the Dark Castle had become glorious; for the river of tears that had flowed from her eyes had watered the grounds, and beautiful gardens and forests had sprung up overnight, and the Dark Castle itself was no longer dark, but a shining beacon filled with delightful things. Princess Nell lived in that castle and ruled over that island for the rest of her days, and every morning she would go for a walk in the garden where Harv had fallen. She had many adventures and became a great Queen, and in time she met and married a Prince, and had many children, and lived happily ever after.

“What's an adventure?” Nell said.

The word was written across the page. Then both pages filled with moving pictures of glorious things: girls in armor fighting dragons with swords, and girls riding white unicorns through the forest, and girls swinging from vines, swimming in the blue ocean, piloting rocket ships through space. Nell spent a long time looking at all of the pictures, and after awhile all of the girls began to look like older versions of herself.

Judge Fang visits his district; Miss Pao arranges a
demonstration; the case of the stolen book
takes on unexpected depth.

As Judge Fang proceeded across the Causeway on his chevaline, accompanied by his assistants, Chang and Miss Pao, he saw the Leased Territories wreathed in a mephitic fog. The emerald highlands of Atlantis/Shanghai floated above the squalor. A host of mirrored aerostats surrounded that lofty territory, protecting it from the larger and more obvious sorts of intruders; from here, miles away, the individual pods were of course not visible, but they could be seen in the aggregate as a subtle gleam in the air, a vast bubble, perfectly transparent, enveloping the sacrosanct territory of the Anglo-Americans, stretching this way and that in the shifting winds but never tearing.

The view was spoiled as they drew closer to the Leased Territories and entered into their eternal fogs. Several times as they rode through the streets of the L.T., Judge Fang made a peculiar gesture: He curled the fingers of his right hand into a cylinder, as though grasping an invisible stalk of bamboo. He cupped his other hand beneath, forming a dark enclosed cavity, and then peeked into it with one eye. When he stared into the pocket of air thus formed, he saw the darkness filled with coruscating light—something like staring into a cavern filled with fireflies, except that these lights came in all colors, and all of the colors were as pure and clear as jewels.

People who lived in the L.T. and who performed this gesture frequently developed a feel for what was going on in the microscopic world. They could tell when something was up. If the gesture was performed during a toner war, the result was spectacular.

Today it was nowhere near toner war levels, but it was fairly intense. Judge Fang suspected that this had something to do with the purpose of this errand, which Miss Pao had declined to explain.

They ended up in a restaurant. Miss Pao insisted on a table out on the terrace, even though it looked like rain. They ended up overlooking the street three stories below. Even at that distance it was difficult to make out faces through the fog.

Miss Pao drew a rectangular package from her bag, wrapped up in Nanobar. She unwrapped it and drew out two objects of roughly the same size and shape: a book and a block of wood. She placed them side by side on the table. Then she ignored them, turning her attention to the menu. She continued to ignore them for several minutes more, as she and Chang and Judge Fang sipped tea, exchanged polite chatter, and began to eat their meals.

“At Your Honor's convenience,” Miss Pao said, “I would invite you to examine the two objects I laid on the table.”

Judge Fang was startled to notice that, while the block's appearance had not changed, the book had become covered in a layer of thick gray dust, as if it had been growing mildew for several decades.

“Oooh,” Chang blurted, sucking a lengthy skein of noodles into his maw and bulging his eyes in the direction of this peculiar exhibit.

Judge Fang rose, walked around the table, and bent down for a closer look. The gray dust was not uniformly distributed; it was much thicker toward the edges of the book cover. He opened the book and was startled to notice that the dust had infiltrated deep between the pages.

“This is dust with a purpose in life,” Judge Fang observed.

Miss Pao glanced significantly at the block of wood. Judge Fang picked it up and examined it on all sides; it was clean.

“This stuff is discriminating too!” Judge Fang said.

“It is Confucian toner,” Chang said, finally choking down his noodles. “It has a passion for books.”

The Judge smiled tolerantly and looked to Miss Pao for an explanation. “You have examined this new species of mite, I take it?”

“It is more interesting than that,” Miss Pao said. “Within the last week, not one but two new species of mite have appeared in the Leased Territories—both programmed to seek out anything that looks like a book.” She reached into her bag again and handed her master a rolled-up piece of mediatronic paper.

A waitress scurried up and helped move the dishes and teacups aside. Judge Fang unrolled the page and anchored it with various small items of faience. The paper was divided into two panes, each containing a magnified view of a microscopic device. Judge Fang could see that both were made to navigate through the air, but beyond that, they could hardly have been more different. One of them looked like a work of nature; it had several bizarre and elaborate arms and sported four enormous, wildly involuted, scooplike devices, arranged ninety degrees apart.

“The ears of a bat!” Chang exclaimed, tracing their impossibly complex whorls with the tip of a chopstick. Judge Fang said nothing but reminded himself that this sort of quick insight was just the sort of thing Chang excelled at.

“It appears to use echolocation, like a bat,” Miss Pao admitted. “The other one, as you can see, is of a radically different design.”

The other mite looked like a spacecraft as envisioned by Jules Verne. It had a streamlined, teardrop shape, a pair of manipulator arms folded neatly against its fuselage, and a deep cylindrical cavity in the nose that Judge Fang took to be its eye. “This one sees light in the ultraviolet range,” Miss Pao said. “Despite their differences, each does the same thing: searches for books. When it finds a book, it lands on the cover and crawls to the edge, then creeps between the pages and examines the internal structure of the paper.”

“What is it looking for?”

“There is no way to tell, short of disassembling its internal computer system and decompiling its program—which is difficult,” Miss Pao said, with characteristic understatement. “When it finds that it has been investigating a normal book made of old-fashioned paper, it deactivates and becomes dust.”

“So there are many dirty books in the Leased Territories now,” Chang said.

“There aren't that many books to begin with,” Judge Fang said. Miss Pao and Chang chuckled, but the Judge showed no sign that he had been making a joke; it was just an observation.

“What conclusions do you draw, Miss Pao?” the Judge said.

“Two different parties are searching the Leased Territories for the same book,” Miss Pao said.

She did not have to state that the target of this search was probably the book stolen from the gentleman named Hackworth.

“Can you speculate as to the identity of these parties?”

Miss Pao said, “Of course, neither device carries a maker's mark. The bat-eared one has Dr. X written all over it; most of its features appear to be evolved, not engineered, and the Doctor's Flea Circus is nothing more than an effort to collect evolved mites with useful features. At a first glance, the other device could have come from any of the engineering works associated with major phyles—Nippon, New Atlantis, Hindustan, the First Distributed Republic being prime suspects. But on deeper examination I find a level of elegance—”

“Elegance?”

“Pardon me, Your Honor, the concept is not easy to explain—there is an ineffable quality to some technology, described by its creators as concinnitous, or technically sweet, or a nice hack—signs that it was made with great care by one who was not merely motivated but inspired. It is the difference between an engineer and a hacker.”

“Or an engineer and an artifex?” Judge Fang said.

A trace of a smile came across Miss Pao's face.

“I fear that I have enmeshed that little girl in a much deeper business than I ever imagined,” Judge Fang said. He rolled up the paper and handed it back to Miss Pao. Chang set the Judge's teacup back in front of him and poured more tea. Without thinking about it, the Judge put his thumb and fingertips together and tapped them lightly against the tabletop several times.

This was an ancient gesture in China. The story was that one of the early Emperors liked to dress as a commoner and travel about the Middle Kingdom to see how the peasants were getting along. Frequently, as he and his staff were sitting about the table in some inn, he would pour tea for everyone. They could not kowtow to their lord without giving away his identity, so they would make this gesture, using their hand to imitate the act of kneeling. Now Chinese people used it to thank each other at the dinner table. From time to time, Judge Fang caught himself doing it, and thought about what a peculiar thing it was to be Chinese in a world without an Emperor.

He sat, hands folded into sleeves, and thought about this and other issues for several minutes, watching the vapor rise from his tea and form into a fog as it condensed round the bodies of micro-aerostats.

“Soon we will obtrude upon Mr. Hackworth and Dr. X and learn more by observing their reactions. I will consider the right way to set about this. In the meantime, let us concern ourselves with the girl. Chang, visit her apartment building and see whether there has been any trouble there—suspicious characters hanging about.”

“Sir, with all respect, everyone who lives in the girl's building is a suspicious character.”

“You know what I mean,” said the Judge with some asperity. “The building should have a system for filtering nanosites from the air. If this system is working properly, and if the girl does not take the book out of her building, then she should go unnoticed by these.” The Judge drew a streak through the dust on the book's cover and smeared the toner between his fingers. “Speak with the landlord of her building, and let him know that his air-filtering system is due for an inspection, and that this is genuine, not just a solicitation for a bribe.”

“Yes, sir,” Chang said. He pushed his chair back, rose, bowed, and strode out of the restaurant, pausing only to extract a toothpick from the dispenser by the exit. It would have been acceptable for him to finish his lunch, but Chang had, in the past, evinced concern for the girl's welfare, and apparently wanted to waste no time.

“Miss Pao, plant recording surveillance devices in the girl's flat. At first we will change and review the tapes every day. If the book is not detected soon, we will begin changing them every week.”

“Yes, sir,” Miss Pao said. She slipped on her phenomenoscopic spectacles. Colored light reflected from the surfaces of her eyes as she lost herself in some kind of interface. Judge Fang refilled his tea, cupped it in the palm of his hand, and went for a stroll round the edge of the terrace. He had much more important things to think about than this girl and her book; but he suspected that from now on he would be thinking about little else.

Description of Old Shanghai; situation of the
Theatre Parnasse; Miranda's occupation.

Before the Europeans got their hooks into it, Shanghai had been a walled village on the Huang Pu River, a few miles south of its confluence with the estuary of the Yangtze. Much of the architecture was very sophisticated Ming Dynasty stuff, private gardens for rich families, a shopping street here and there concealing interior slums, a rickety, vertiginous teahouse rising from an island in the center of a pond. More recently the wall had been torn down and a sort of beltway built on its foundations. The old French concession wrapped around the north side, and in that neighborhood, on a corner looking across the ring road into the old city, the Theatre Parnasse had been constructed during the late 1800s. Miranda had been working there for five years, but the experience had been so intense that it often seemed more like five days.

The Parnasse had been built by Europeans back when they were serious and unapologetic about their Europeanness. The facade was classical: a three-quarter-round portico on the streetcorner, supported by Corinthian columns, all done in white limestone. The portico was belted by a white marquee, circa 1990, outlined by tubes of purple and pink neon. It would have been easy enough to tear it off and replace it with something mediatronic, but they enjoyed hauling the bamboo ladders out from the set shop and snapping the black plastic letters into place, advertising whatever they were doing tonight. Sometimes they would lower the big mediatronic screen and show movies, and Westerners would come from all over Greater Shanghai, dressed up in their tuxedos and evening gowns, and sit in the dark watching Casablanca or Dances With Wolves. And at least twice a month, the Parnasse Company would actually get out on stage and do it: become actors rather than ractors for a night, lights and greasepaint and costumes. The hard part was indoctrinating the audience; unless they were theatre buffs, they always wanted to run up on stage and interact, which upset the whole thing. Live theatre was an ancient and peculiar taste, roughly on par with listening to Gregorian chants, and it didn't pay the bills. They paid the bills with ractives.

The building was tall and narrow, making the most of precious Shanghai real estate, so the proscenium had a nearly square aspect ratio, like an old-fashioned television. Above it was the bust of some forgotten French actress, supported on gilt wings, flanked by angels brandishing trumpets and laurel wreaths. The ceiling was a circular fresco depicting Muses disporting themselves in flimsy robes. A chandelier hung from the center; its incandescent bulbs had been replaced by new things that didn't burn out, and now it cast light evenly onto the rows of tiny, creaking seats closely packed together on the main floor. There were three balconies and three stories of private boxes, two on the left side and two on the right side of each level. The fronts of the boxes and balconies were all painted with tableaux from classical mythology, the predominant color there as elsewhere being a highly French robin's-egg blue. The theatre was crammed with plasterwork, so that the faces of cherubs, overwrought Roman gods, impassioned Trojans, and such were always poking out of columns and soffits and cornices, catching you by surprise. Much of this work was spalled from bullets fired by high-spirited Red Guards during Cultural Revolution times. Other than the bullet holes, the Parnasse was in decent shape, though sometime in the twentieth century great black-iron pipes had been anchored vertically alongside the boxes and horizontally before the balconies so that spotlights could be bolted on. Nowadays the spotlights were coin-size disks—phased-array devices that carried their own batteries—and could be stuck up anywhere and controlled by radio. But the pipes were still there and always required a lot of explaining when tourists came through.

Each of the twelve boxes had its own door, and a curtain rail curving around the front so that the occupants could get some privacy between acts. They'd mothballed the curtains and replaced them with removable soundproof screens, unbolted the seats, and stored them in the basement. Now each box was a private egg-shaped room just the right size to serve as a body stage. These twelve stages generated seventy-five percent of the cash flow of the Theatre Parnasse.

Miranda always checked into her stage half an hour early to run a diagnostic on her tat grid. The 'sites didn't last forever—static electricity or cosmic rays could knock them out, and if you let your instrument go to pot out of sheer laziness, you didn't deserve to call yourself a ractor.

Miranda had decorated the dead walls of her own stage with posters and photos of role models, largely actresses from twentieth-century passives. She had a chair in the corner for roles that involved sitting down. There was also a tiny coffee table where she set down her triple latte, a two-liter bottle of mineral water, and a box of throat lozenges. Then she peeled down to a black leotard and tights, hanging her street clothes on a tree by the door. Another ractor might have gone nude, worn street clothes, or tried to match her costume to the role she'd be playing, if she were lucky enough to know in advance. At the moment, though, Miranda never knew. She had standing bids on Kate in the ractive version of Taming of the Shrew (which was a butcherous kludge, but popular among a certain sort of male user); Scarlett O'Hara in the ractive Gone With the Wind; a double agent named Ilse in an espionage thriller set on a train passing through Nazi Germany; and Rhea, a neo-Victorian damsel in distress in Silk Road, an adventure-comedy-romance ractive set on the wrong side of contemporary Shanghai. She'd created that role. After the good review had come in (“a remarkably Rhea-listic portrayal by newcomer Miranda Redpath!”) she had played little else for a couple of months, even though her bid was so steep that most users opted for one of the understudies or contented themselves with watching passively for one-tenth the price. But the distributor had botched the PR targeting when they tried to take it beyond the Shanghai market, and so now Silk Road was in limbo while various heads rolled.

Four leading roles was about as many as she could keep in her head at once. The prompter made it possible to play any role without having seen it before, if you didn't mind making an ass of yourself. But Miranda had a reputation now and couldn't get away with shoddy work. To fill in the blanks when things got slow, she also had standing bids, under another name, for easier work: mostly narration jobs, plus anything having to do with children's media. She didn't have any kids of her own, but she still corresponded with the ones she'd taken care of during her governess days. She loved racting with children, and besides it was good exercise for the voice, saying those silly little rhymes just right.

“Practice Kate from Shrew,” she said, and the Miranda-shaped constellation was replaced by a dark-haired woman with green, feline eyes, dressed in some costume designer's concept of what a rich woman in the Italian Renaissance would be likely to wear. Miranda had large bunny eyes while Kate had cat eyes, and cat eyes were used differently from bunny eyes, especially when delivering a slashing witticism. Carl Hollywood, the company's founder and dramaturge, who'd been sitting in passively on her Shrews, had suggested that she needed more work in this area. Not many payers enjoyed Shakespeare or even knew who he was, but the ones who did tended to be very high on the income scale and worth catering to. Usually this kind of argument had no effect on Miranda, but she'd been finding that some of these (rich sexist snob asshole) gentlemen were remarkably good ractors. And any professional could tell you that it was a rare pleasure to ract with a payer who knew what he was doing.

         

The Shift comprised the Prime Times for London, the East Coast, and the West Coast. In Greenwich Time, it started around nine P.M., when Londoners were finishing dinner and looking for entertainment, and wound up about seven A.M., when Californians were going to bed. No matter what time zones they actually lived in, all ractors tried to work during those hours. In Shanghai's time zone, The Shift ran from about five A.M. to midafternoon, and Miranda didn't mind doing overtime if some well-heeled Californian wanted to stretch a ractive late into the night. Some of the ractors in her company didn't come in until later in the day, but Miranda still had dreams of living in London and craved attention from that city's sophisticated payers. So she always came to work early.

When she finished her warmups and went on, she found a bid already waiting for her. The casting agent, which was a semiautonomous piece of software, had assembled a company of nine payers, enough to ract all the guest roles in First Class to Geneva, which was about intrigue among rich people on a train in Nazi-occupied France, and which was to ractives what The Mousetrap was to passive theatre. It was an ensemble piece: nine guest roles to be assumed by payers, three somewhat larger and more glamorous host roles to be assumed by payees like Miranda. One of the characters was, unbeknownst to the others, an Allied spy. Another was a secret colonel in the SS, another was secretly Jewish, another was a Cheka agent. Sometimes there was a German trying to defect to the Allied side. But you never knew which was which when the ractive started up; the computer switched all the roles around at random.

It paid well because of the high payer/payee ratio. Miranda provisionally accepted the bid. One of the other host roles hadn't been filled yet, so while she waited, she bid and won a filler job. The computer morphed her into the face of an adorable young woman whose face and hair looked typical of what was current in London at the moment; she wore the uniform of a British Airways ticket agent. “Good evening, Mr. Oremland,” she gushed, reading the prompter. The computer disped it into an even perkier voice and made subtle corrections in her accent.

“Good evening, er, Margaret,” said the jowly Brit staring out of a pane on her mediatron. He was wearing half-glasses, had to squint to make out her nametag. His tie was loose on his chest, a gin and tonic in one hairy fist, and he liked the looks of this Margaret. Which was almost guaranteed, since Margaret had been morphed up by a marketing computer in London that knew more about this gentleman's taste in girlflesh than he would like to think.

“Six months without a vacation!? How boring,” Miranda/Margaret said. “You must be doing something terribly important,” she continued, facetious without being mean, the two of them sharing a little joke.

“Yes, I suppose even making lots of money does become boring after a while,” the man returned, in much the same tone.

Miranda glanced over at the casting sheet for First Class to Geneva. She'd be pissed if this Mr. Oremland got overly talkative and forced her to pass on the bigger role. Though he did seem a reasonably clever sort. “You know, it's a fine time to visit Atlantan West Africa, and the airship Gold Coast is scheduled to depart in two weeks—shall I book a stateroom for you? And a companion perhaps?”

Mr. Oremland seemed iffy. “Call me old-fashioned,” he said, “but when you say Africa, I think AIDS and parasites.”

“Oh, not in West Africa, sir, not in the new colonies. Would you like a quick tour?”

Mr. Oremland gave Miranda/Margaret one long, searching, horny look, sighed, checked his watch, and seemed to remember that she was an imaginary being. “Thank you just the same,” he said, and cut her off.

Just in time too; the playbill for Geneva had just filled up. Miranda only had a few seconds to switch contexts and get herself into the character of Ilse before she found herself sitting in a first-class coach of a mid-twentieth-century passenger train, staring into the mirror at a blond, blue-eyed, high-cheekboned ice queen. Unfolded on her dressing-table was a letter written in Yiddish.

So tonight she was the secret Jew. She tore the letter into tiny pieces and fed them out her window, then did the same with a couple of Stars of David that she rooted out of her jewelry case. This thing was fully ractive, and there was nothing to prevent other characters from breaking into her coach and going through her possessions. Then she finished putting on her makeup and choosing her outfit, and went to the dining car for dinner. Most of the other characters were already in here. The nine amateurs were stiff and stilted as usual, the two other professionals were circulating among them, trying to loosen them up, break through that self-consciousness and get them into their characters.

Geneva ended up dragging on for a good three hours. It was nearly ruined by one of the payers, who had clearly signed up exclusively for the purpose of maneuvering Ilse into bed. He turned out to be the secret SS colonel too; but he was so hell-bent on fucking Ilse that he spent the whole evening out of character. Finally Miranda lured him into the kitchen in the back of the dining car, shoved a foot-long butcher knife into his chest, and left him in the fridge. She had played this role a couple of hundred times and knew the location of every potentially lethal object on the train.

After a ractive it was considered good form to go to the Green Room, a virtual pub where you could chat out-of-character with the other ractors. Miranda skipped it because she knew that the creep would be waiting for her there.

Next was a lull of an hour or so. Primetime in London was over, and New Yorkers were still eating dinner. Miranda went to the bathroom, ate a little snack, and picked up a few kiddy jobs.

Kids on the West Coast were getting back from school and jumping right into the high-priced educational ractives that their parents made available to them. These things created a plethora of extremely short but fun roles; in quick succession, Miranda's face was morphed into a duck, a bunny, a talking tree, the eternally elusive Carmen Sandiego, and the repulsively cloying Doogie the Dinosaur. Each of them got a couple of lines at most:

“That's right! B stands for balloon! I like to play with balloons, don't you, Matthew?”

“Sound it out, Victoria! You can do it!”

“Soldier ants have larger and stronger jaws than their worker counterparts and play a key role in defending the nest from predators.”

“Please don't throw me into that briar patch, Br'er Fox!”

“Hello, Roberta! I've been missing you all day. How was your field trip to Disneyland?”

“Twentieth-century airships were filled with flammable hydrogen, expensive helium, or inefficient hot air, but our modern versions are filled literally with nothing at all. High-strength nanostructures make it possible to pump all the air from an airship's envelope and fill it with a vacuum. Have you ever been on an airship, Thomas?”

Nell's further experiences with the Primer;
the origin of Princess Nell.

“Once upon a time there was a little Princess named Nell who was imprisoned in a tall dark castle on an island—”

“Why?”

“Nell and Harv had been locked up in the Dark Castle by their evil stepmother.”

“Why didn't their father let them out of the Dark Castle?”

“Their father, who had protected them from the whims of the wicked stepmother, had gone sailing over the sea and never come back.”

“Why did he never come back?”

“Their father was a fisherman. He went out on his boat every day. The sea is a vast and dangerous place, filled with monsters, storms, and other dangers. No one knows what fate befell him. Perhaps it was foolish of him to sail into such danger, but Nell knew better than to fret over things she could not change.”

“Why did she have a wicked stepmother?”

“Nell's mother died one night when a monster came out of the sea and entered their cottage to snatch Nell and Harv, who were just babies. She fought with the monster and slew it, but in so doing suffered grievous wounds and died the next day with her adopted children still nestled in her bosom.”

“Why did the monster come from the sea?”

“For many years, Nell's father and mother badly wanted children but were not so blessed until one day, when the father caught a mermaid in his net. The mermaid said that if he let her go, she would grant him a wish, so he wished for two children, a boy and a girl.

“The next day, while he was out fishing, he was approached by a mermaid carrying a basket. In the basket were the two little babies, just as he had requested, wrapped up in cloth of gold. The mermaid cautioned him that he and his wife should not allow the babies to cry at night.”

“Why were they in gold cloth?”

“They were actually a Princess and a Prince who had been in a shipwreck. The ship sank, but the basket containing the two babies bobbed like a cork on the ocean until the mermaids came and found them. They took care of those two babies until they found a good parent for them.

“He took the babies back to the cottage and presented them to his wife, who swooned for joy. They lived happily together for some time, and whenever one of the babies cried, one of the parents would get up and comfort it. But one night father did not come home, because a storm had pushed his little red fishing boat far out to sea. One of the babies began to cry, and the mother got up to comfort it. But when the other began to cry as well, there was nothing she could do, and shortly the monster came calling.

“When the fisherman returned home the next day, he found his wife's body lying beside that of the monster, and both of the babies unharmed. His grief was very great, and he began the difficult task of raising both the children.

“One day, a stranger came to his door. She said that she had been cast out by the cruel Kings and Queens of the Land Beyond and that she needed a place to sleep and would do any kind of work in exchange. At first she slept on the floor and cooked and cleaned for the fisherman all day long, but as Nell and Harv got bigger, she began to give them more and more chores, until by the time their father disappeared, they toiled from dawn until long after nightfall, while their stepmother never lifted a finger.”

“Why didn't the fisherman and his babies live in the castle to protect them from the monster?”

“The castle was a dark forbidding place on the top of a mountain. The fisherman had been told by his father that it had been built many ages ago by trolls, who were still said to live there. And he did not have the twelve keys.”

“Did the wicked stepmother have the twelve keys?”

“She kept them buried in a secret place as long as the fisherman was around, but after he sailed away and did not come back, she had Nell and Harv dig them up again, along with a quantity of jewels and gold that she had brought with her from the Land Beyond. She bedecked herself with the gold and jewels, then opened up the iron gates of the Dark Castle and tricked Nell and Harv into going inside. As soon as they were in, she slammed the gates shut behind them and locked the twelve locks. “When the sun goes down, the trolls will have you for a snack!' she cackled.”

“What's a troll?”

“A scary monster that lives in holes in the ground and comes out after dark.”

Nell started to cry. She slammed the book closed, ran to her bed, gathered her stuffed animals up in her arms, started chewing on her blanket, and cried for a while, considering the question of trolls.

The book made a fluttering sound. Nell saw it opening in the corner of her eye and looked over cautiously, afraid she might see a picture of a troll. But instead, she saw two pictures. One was of Princess Nell, sitting on the grass with four dolls gathered in her arms. Facing it was a picture of Nell surrounded by four creatures: a big dinosaur, a rabbit, a duck, and a woman in a purple dress with purple hair.

The book said, “Would you like to hear the story of how Princess Nell made some friends in the Dark Castle, where she least expected it, and how they killed all of the trolls and made it a safe place to live?”

“Yes!” Nell said, and scooted across the floor until she was poised above the book.

Judge Fang pays a visit to the Celestial Kingdom;
tea served in an ancient setting; a “chance”
encounter with Dr. X.

Judge Fang was not afflicted with the Westerner's inability to pronounce the name of the man known as Dr. X, unless a combined Cantonese/New York accent counted as a speech impediment. In his discussions with his trusted subordinates he had fallen into the habit of calling him Dr. X anyway.

He had never had cause to pronounce the name at all, until recently. Judge Fang was district magistrate for the Leased Territories, which in turn were part of the Chinese Coastal Republic. Dr. X almost never left the boundaries of Old Shanghai, which was part of a separate district; more to the point, he stuck to a small but anfractuous subregion whose tendrils were seemingly ramified through every block and building of the ancient city. On the map, this region looked like the root system of a thousand-year-old dwarf tree; its border must have been a hundred kilometers long, even though it was contained within a couple of square kilometers. This region was not part of the Coastal Republic; it styled itself as the Middle Kingdom, a living vestige of Imperial China, prohibitively the oldest and greatest nation of the world.

The tendrils went even farther than that; Judge Fang had known this for a long time. Many of the gang members running around the Leased Territories with Judge Fang's cane marks across their asses had connections on the mainland that could ultimately be traced back to Dr. X. It was rarely useful to dwell upon this fact; if it hadn't been Dr. X, it would have been someone else. Dr. X was unusually clever at taking advantage of the principle of grith, or right of refuge, which in the modern usage simply meant that Coastal Republic officials like Judge Fang could not enter the Celestial Kingdom and arrest someone like Dr. X. So usually when they bothered to trace a criminal's higher connections at all, they simply drew an arrow up the page to a single character, consisting of a box with a vertical slash drawn down through the middle. The character meant Middle, as in Middle Kingdom, though for Judge Fang it had come to mean, simply, trouble.

At the House of the Venerable and Inscrutable Colonel and other Judge Fang hangouts, the name of Dr. X had been pronounced more frequently in recent weeks. Dr. X had tried to bribe everyone on Judge Fang's hierarchy except for the Judge himself. Of course, the overtures had been made by people whose connection with Dr. X was tenuous in the extreme, and had been so subtle that most of those approached had not even realized what was happening until, days or weeks later, they had suddenly sat up in bed exclaiming, “He was trying to bribe me! I must tell Judge Fang!”

If not for grith, this might have made for a merry and stimulating couple of decades, as Judge Fang matched his wits against those of the Doctor, a worthy adversary at last and a welcome break from smelly, larcenous barbarian whelps. As it was, Dr. X's machinations were of purely abstract interest. But they were no less interesting for that, and many days, as Miss Pao proceeded through the familiar line of patter about sky-eyes, heuristic mugging detection, and tagger aerostats, Judge Fang found his attention wandering across town to the ancient city, to the hong of Dr. X.

It was said that the Doctor frequently took tea in the morning at an old teahouse there, and so it was that one morning Judge Fang happened to drop in on the place. It had been built, centuries ago, in the center of a pond. Swarms of fire-colored fish hung just beneath the surface of the khaki water, glowing like latent coals, as Judge Fang and his assistants, Miss Pao and Chang, crossed the bridge.

There was a Chinese belief that demons liked to travel only in straight lines. Hence the bridge zigzagged no fewer than nine times as it made its way to the center of the pond. The bridge was a demon filter, in other words, and the teahouse demon-free, which seemed of only limited usefulness if it still hosted people like Dr. X. But for Judge Fang, raised in a city of long straight avenues, full of straight talkers, it was useful to be reminded that from the point of view of some people, including Dr. X, all of that straightness was suggestive of demonism; more natural and human was the ever-turning way, where you could never see round the next corner, and the overall plan could be understood only after lengthy meditation.

The teahouse itself was constructed of unfinished wood, aged to a nice gray. It looked rickety but evidently wasn't. It was narrow and tall, two stories high with a proud winglike roof. One entered through a low narrow door, built by and for the chronically undernourished. The interior had the ambience of a rustic cabin on a lake. Judge Fang had been here before, in mufti, but today he had thrown a robe over his charcoal-gray pinstripe suit—a reasonably subtle brocade, funereal by comparison with what people used to wear in China. He also wore a black cap embroidered with a unicorn, which in most company would probably be lumped in with rainbows and elves but here would be understood for what it was, an ancient symbol of acuity. Dr. X could be relied upon to get the message.

The teahouse staff had had plenty of time to realize he was coming as he negotiated the endless turns in the causeway. A manager of sorts and a couple of waitresses were arrayed before the door, bowing deeply as he approached.

Judge Fang had been raised on Cheerios, burgers, and jumbo burritos bulging with beans and meat. He was just a bit less than two meters in height. His beard was unusually thick, and he had been letting it grow out for a couple of years now, and his hair fell down past the tips of his shoulder blades. These elements, plus the hat and robe, and in combination with the power reposed in him by the state, gave him a certain presence of which he was well aware. He tried not to be overly satisfied with himself, as this would have gone against all Confucian precepts. On the other hand, Confucianism was all about hierarchy, and those who were in high positions were supposed to comport themselves with a certain dignity. Judge Fang could turn it on when he needed to. He used it now to get himself situated at the best table on the first floor, off in the corner with a nice view out the tiny old windows into the neighboring Ming-era garden. He was still in the Coastal Republic, in the middle of the twenty-first century. But he could have been in the Middle Kingdom of yore, and for all intents and purposes, he was.

Chang and Miss Pao separated themselves from their master and requested a table on the second floor, up a narrow and alarming stairway, leaving Judge Fang in peace whilst also making their presence forcibly known to Dr. X, who happened to be up there right now, as he always was at this time in the morning, sipping tea and chatting with his venerable homeboys.

When Dr. X made his way down half an hour later, he was nonetheless delighted and surprised to see the moderately famous and widely respected Judge Fang sitting all by his lonesome staring out at the pond, its schools of fish flickering lambently. When he approached the table to tender his respects, Judge Fang invited him to take a seat, and after several minutes of sensitive negotiations over whether this would or would not be an unforgivable intrusion on the magistrate's privacy, Dr. X finally, gratefully, reluctantly, respectfully took a seat.

There was lengthy discourse between the two men on which of them was more honored to be in the company of the other, followed by exhaustive discussion of the relative merits of the different teas offered by the proprietors, whether the leaves were best picked in early or late April, whether the brewing water should be violently boiling as the pathetic gwailos always did it, or limited to eighty degrees Celsius.

Eventually, Dr. X got around to complimenting Judge Fang on his cap, especially on the embroidery work. This meant that he had noticed the unicorn and understood its message, which was that Judge Fang had seen through all of his efforts at bribery.

Not long afterward, Miss Pao came down and regretfully informed the Judge that his presence was urgently required at a crime scene in the Leased Territories. To spare Judge Fang the embarrassment of having to cut short the conversation, Dr. X was approached, moments later, by one of his staff, who whispered something into his ear. The Doctor apologized for having to take his leave, and the two men then got into a very genteel argument over which one of them was being more inexcusably rude, and then over which would precede the other across the bridge. Judge Fang ended up going first, because his duties were deemed more pressing, and thus ended the first meeting between the Judge and Dr. X. The Judge was quite happy; it had all gone just as planned.

Hackworth receives an unexpected visit
from Inspector Chang.

Mrs. Hull had to shake the flour out of her apron to answer the door. Hackworth, working in his study, assumed it was a mere delivery until she appeared in his doorway, harrumphing lightly, holding a salver with a single card centered on it: Lieutenant Chang. His organization was called, in traditional Chinese general-to-specific order, China Coastal Republic Shanghai New Chusan Leased Territories District Magistrate Office.

“What does he want?”

“To give you your hat back.”

“Send him in,” Hackworth said, startled.

Mrs. Hull dawdled significantly. Hackworth glanced into a mirror and saw himself reaching for his throat, checking the knot on his necktie. His smoking jacket was hanging loose, and he wrapped it tight and retied the sash. Then he went to the parlor.

Mrs. Hull led Lieutenant Chang into the parlor. He was a burly, ungainly fellow with a short buzz cut. Hackworth's top hat, looking rather ill-used, could be seen indistinctly through a large plastic bag clenched in his hand. “Lieutenant Chang,” Mrs. Hull announced, and Chang bowed at Hackworth, smiling a bit more than seemed warranted. Hackworth bowed back. “Lieutenant Chang.”

“I will not disturb you for long, I promise,” Chang said in clear but unrefined English. “During an investigation—details not relevant here—we got this from a suspect. It is marked your property. Much the worse for wear—please accept it.”

“Well done, Lieutenant,” said Hackworth, receiving the bag and holding it up to the light. “I did not expect to see it again, even in such a battered condition.”

“Well, these boys do not have respect for a good hat, I am afraid,” said Lieutenant Chang.

Hackworth paused, not knowing what one was supposed to say at this point. Chang just stood there, seeming more at ease in Hackworth's parlor than Hackworth was. The first exchange had been simple, but now the East/West curtain fell between them like a rusty cleaver.

Was this part of some official procedure? Was it a solicitation for a tip? Or just Mr. Chang being a nice guy?

When in doubt, end the visit sooner rather than later. “Well,” said Hackworth, “I don't know and don't care what you arrested him for, but I commend you for having done so.”

Lieutenant Chang did not get the hint and realize it was time to leave. On the contrary, he seemed just a bit perplexed now, where before everything had been so simple.

“I cannot help being curious,” Chang said, “what gave you the idea that anyone had been arrested?”

Hackworth felt a spear pass through his heart.

“You're a police lieutenant holding what appears to be an evidence bag,” he said. “The implication is clear.”

Lieutenant Chang looked at the bag, laboriously perplexed. “Evidence? It is just a shopping bag—to protect your hat from the rain. And I am not here in my official capacity.”

Another spear, at right angles to the first one.

“Though,” Chang continued, “if some criminal activity has taken place of which I was not made aware, perhaps I should recharacterize this visit.”

Spear number three; now Hackworth's pounding heart sat at the origin of a bloody coordinate system plotted by Lieutenant Chang, conveniently pinned and exposed for thorough examination. Chang's English was getting better all the time, and Hackworth was beginning to think that he was one of those Shanghainese who had spent much of his life in Vancouver, New York, or London.

“I had assumed that the gentleman's hat had simply been misplaced or perhaps blown off by a gust of wind. Now you say criminals were involved!” Chang looked as though he had never, to this day, suspected the existence of criminals in the Leased Territories. Then shock was transcended by wonder as he segued, none too subtly, into the next phase of the trap.

“It was not important,” Hackworth said, trying to derail Chang's relentless train of thought, sensing that he and his family were tied to the tracks. Chang ignored him, as if so exhilarated by the workings of his mind that he could not be distracted.

“Mr. Hackworth, you have given me an idea. I have been trying to solve a difficult case—a mugging that took place a few days ago. The victim was an unidentified Atlantan gentleman.”

“Don't you have tag mites for that kind of thing?”

“Oh,” Lieutenant Chang said, sounding rather downhearted, “tag mites are not very reliable. The perpetrators took certain precautions to prevent the mites from attaching. Of course, several mites attached themselves to the victim. But before we could track him, he made his way to New Atlantis Clave, where your superb immune system destroyed those mites. So his identity has remained a mystery.” Chang reached into his breast pocket and pulled out a folded sheet of paper. “Mr. Hackworth, please tell me whether you recognize any of the figures in this clip.”

“I'm actually rather busy—” Hackworth said, but Chang unfolded the paper in front of him and gave it a command in Shanghainese. Initially the page was covered with static Chinese characters. Then a large panel in the middle opened up and began to play back a cine feed.

Watching himself getting mugged was one of the most astonishing things Hackworth had ever seen. He could not stop watching it. The feed went to slow motion, and then out came the book. Tears came to Hackworth's eyes, and he made an effort not to blink lest he dislodge them. Not that it really mattered, since Lieutenant Chang was standing rather close to him and could no doubt see everything.

Chang was shaking his head in wonderment. “So it was you, Mr. Hackworth. I had not made the connection. So many nice things, and such a vicious beating. You have been the victim of a very serious crime!”

Hackworth could not speak and had nothing to say anyway.

“It is striking to me,” Chang continued, “that you did not bother to report this serious crime to the magistrate! For some time now we have been reviewing this tape, wondering why the victim—a respectable gentleman—did not step forward to assist us with our inquiries. So much effort wasted,” Chang fretted. Then he brightened up. “But it's all water under the bridge, I suppose. We have one or two of the gang in custody, on an unrelated crime, and now I can charge them with your mugging as well. Of course, we will require your testimony.”

“Of course.”

“The items that were taken from you?”

“You saw it.”

“Yes. A watch chain with various items, a fountain pen, and—”

“That's it.”

Chang seemed just a bit nonplussed, but more than that he seemed deeply satisfied, suffused by a newly generous spirit. “The book does not even bear mentioning?”

“Not really.”

“It looked like an antique of some sort. Quite valuable, no?”

“A fake. That sort of thing is popular with us. A way to build an impressive-seeming library without going broke.”

“Ah, that explains it,” said Mr. Chang, growing more satisfied by the minute. If Hackworth provided him any more reassurance on the matter of the book, he would no doubt curl up on the sofa and fall asleep. “Still, I should mention the book in my official report—which will be shared with New Atlantis authorities, as the victim in this case belonged to that phyle.”

“Don't,” said Hackworth, finally turning to look Chang in the eye for the first time. “Don't mention it.”

“Ah, I cannot imagine your motive for saying this,” Chang said, “but I have little leeway in the matter. We are closely monitored by our supervisors.”

“Perhaps you could simply explain my feelings to your supervisor.”

Lieutenant Chang received this suggestion with a look of wild surmise. “Mr. Hackworth, you are a very clever fellow— as I already gathered from your demanding and very responsible position—but I am ashamed to tell you that your excellently devious plan may not work. My supervisor is a cruel taskmaster with no regard for human feelings. To be quite frank—and I tell you this in all confidence—he is not entirely without ethical blemishes.”

“Ah,” Hackworth said, “so if I am following you—”

“Oh, no, Mr. Hackworth, it is I who am following you.”

“—the appeal to sympathy won't work, and we will have to sway him using another strategy, perhaps related to this ethical blind spot.”

“That is an approach that had not occurred to me.”

“Perhaps you should do some thinking, or even some research, as to what level and type of inducement might be required,” Hackworth said, suddenly walking toward the exit. Lieutenant Chang followed him.

Hackworth hauled his front door open and allowed Chang to retrieve his own hat and umbrella from the rack. “Then simply get back to me and spell it out as plainly and simply as you can manage. Good night, Lieutenant Chang.”

As he rode his bicycle toward the gate on his way back to the Leased Territories, Chang was exultant over the success of tonight's research. Of course, neither he nor Judge Fang was interested in extracting bribes from this Hackworth; but Hackworth's willingness to pay served as proof that the book did, in fact, embody stolen intellectual property.

But then he bridled his emotions, remembering the words of the philosopher Tsang to Yang Fu upon the latter's appointment to chief criminal judge: “The rulers have failed in their duties, and the people consequently have been disorganized for a long time. When you have found out the truth of any accusation, be grieved for and pity them, and do not feel joy at your own ability.”

Not that Chang's abilities had even been tested this evening; nothing could be easier than getting the New Atlantans to believe that Chinese police were corrupt.

Miranda takes an interest in an anonymous client.

Miranda scanned her balance sheet at the end of one month and discovered that her leading source of income was no longer Silk Road or Taming of the Shrew—it was that storybook about Princess Nell. In a way that was surprising, because kid stuff usually didn't pay well, but in another way it wasn't—because she had been spending an incredible amount of time in that ractive lately.

It had started small: a story, just a few minutes long, involving a dark castle, a wicked stepmother, and a gate with twelve locks. It would have been forgettable, except for two things: It paid much better than most kid work, because they were specifically looking for highly rated actresses, and it was rather dark and weird by the standards of contemporary children's literature. Not many people were into that whole Grimm Brothers scene anymore.

She collected a few ucus for her trouble and forgot about it. But the next day, the same contract number came up on her mediatron again. She accepted the job and found herself reading the same story, except that it was longer and more involved, and it kept backtracking and focusing in on tiny little bits of itself, which then expanded into stories in their own right.

Because of the way that the ractive was hooked up, she didn't get direct feedback from her counterpart on the other end. She assumed it was a little girl. But she couldn't hear the girl's voice. Miranda was presented with screens of text to be read, and she read them. But she could tell that this process of probing and focusing was being directed by the girl. She had seen this during her governess days. She knew that on the other end of this connection was a little girl insatiably asking why. So she put a little gush of enthusiasm into her voice at the beginning of each line, as if she were delighted that the question had been asked.

When the session was over, the usual screen came up telling her how much she'd made, the contract number, and so on. Before she signed off on it, she checked the little box labelled MARK HERE IF YOU WOULD LIKE A CONTINUING RELATIONSHIP WITH THIS CONTRACT.

The relationship box, they called it, and it only came up with higher-quality ractives, where continuity was important. The disping process worked so well that any ractor, male or female, bass or soprano, would sound the same to the end user. But discriminating customers could of course tell ractors apart anyway because of subtle differences in style, and once they had a relationship with one performer, they liked to keep it. Once Miranda checked the box and signed off, she'd get first crack at any more Princess Nell jobs.

Within a week she was teaching this girl how to read. They'd work on letters for a while and then wander off into more stories about Princess Nell, stop in the middle for a quick practical demonstration of basic math, return to the story, and then get sidetracked with an endless chain of “why this?” and “why that?” Miranda had spent a lot of time with kiddie ractives, both as a child and as a governess, and the superiority of this thing was palpable—like hefting an antique silver fork when you'd been eating with plastic utensils for twenty years, or slithering into a tailor-made evening gown when you were used to jeans.

These and other associations came into Miranda's mind on any of the rare moments when she came into contact with something of Quality, and if she didn't make a conscious effort to stop the process, she would end up remembering just about everything that had happened to her during the first years of her life—the Mercedes taking her to private school, the crystal chandelier that would ring like fairy bells when she climbed up on the huge mahogany dinner table to tickle it, her paneled bedroom with the four-poster bed with the silk-and-goosedown duvet. For reasons still unspecified, Mother had moved them far away from all of that, into what passed for poverty these days. Miranda only remembered that, when she had been physically close to Father, Mother had watched them with more vigilance than seemed warranted.

A month or two into the relationship, Miranda groggily signed off from a long Princess Nell session and was astounded to notice that she'd been going for eight hours without a break. Her throat was raw, and she hadn't been to the loo in hours. She had made a lot of money. And the time in New York was something like six in the morning, which made it seem unlikely that the little girl lived there. She must be in a time zone not many hours different from Miranda's, and she must sit there playing with that ractive storybook all day long instead of going to school like a little rich girl should. It was slim evidence to go on, but Miranda never needed much evidence to confirm her belief that rich parents were just as capable of fucking with their children's minds as anyone.

Further experiences with the Primer; Princess Nell
and Harv in the Dark Castle.

Harv was a clever boy who knew about trolls, and so as soon as he knew that they had been locked up inside the Dark Castle by their wicked stepmother, he told Nell that they must go out and gather all the firewood they could find. Rummaging in the Great Hall of the castle, he found a suit of armor holding a battle-axe. “I will chop down some trees with this,” he said, “and you must go out and gather kindling.”

“What's kindling?” Nell asked.

An illustration of the castle appeared. In the center was a tall building with many towers that rose up into the clouds. Around it was an open space where trees and plants grew, and around that was the high wall that held them prisoner.

The illustration zoomed in on an open grassy area and became very detailed. Harv and Nell were trying to build a fire. There was a pile of wet logs Harv had chopped up. Harv also had a rock, which he was striking against the butt of a knife. Sparks flew out and were swallowed up by the wet logs.

“You start the fire, Nell,” Harv said, and left her alone.

Then the picture stopped moving, and Nell realized, after a few minutes, that it was fully ractive now.

She picked up the rock and the knife and began to whack them together (actually she was just moving her empty hands in space, but in the illustration Princess Nell's hands did the same thing). Sparks flew, but there was no fire.

She kept at it for a while, getting more and more frustrated, until tears came to her eyes. But then one of the sparks went awry and landed in some dry grass. A little curl of smoke rose up and died out.

She experimented a bit and learned that dry yellow grass worked better than green grass. Still, the fire never lasted for more than a few seconds.

A gust of wind came up and blew a few dry leaves in her direction. She learned that the fire could spread from dry grass to leaves. The stem of a leaf was basically a small dry twig, so that gave her the idea to explore a little grove of trees and look for some twigs. The grove was densely overgrown, but she found what she was looking for beneath an old dead bush.

“Good!” Harv said, when he came back and found her approaching with an armload of small dry sticks. “You found some kindling. You're a smart girl and a good worker.”

Soon they had built up a roaring bonfire. Harv chopped down enough trees to make sure that they could keep it going until sunrise, and then he and Nell fell asleep, knowing that trolls would not dare approach the fire. Still, Nell did not sleep very well, for she could hear the mutterings of the trolls off in the darkness and see the red sparks of their eyes. She thought she heard another sound too: muffled voices crying for help.

When the sun came up, Nell explored the Dark Castle, looking for the source of the voices, but found nothing. Harv spent the whole day chopping wood. The day before, he had cut down a third of the trees, and this day he cut down another third.

That night, Nell again heard the voices, but this time they seemed to be shouting, “Look in the trees! Look in the trees!” The next morning, she went into the remaining grove of trees and explored it even as Harv was cutting the last of them down. Again she found nothing.

Neither one of them slept well that night, for they knew that they were burning the last of their wood, and that the next night they would have no protection from the trolls. Nell heard the voices again, and this time they seemed to be shouting, “Look under the ground! Look under the ground!”

Later, after the sun came up, she went exploring again and found a cave whose entrance had been shut up by trolls. When she opened the cave, she found four dolls: a dinosaur, a duck, a rabbit, and a woman with long purple hair. But she did not see anything living that could have made the voices.

Nell and Harv went into the Dark Castle itself that night and shut themselves up in a room high in one tower and pushed heavy furniture against the door, hoping that it would keep the trolls at bay. The room had one tiny window, and Nell stood next to it watching the sun go down, wondering if she would see it rise again. Just as the last glimmer of red light disappeared beneath the horizon, she felt a puff of air at her back and turned around to see an astonishing sight: The stuffed animals had turned into real creatures!

There was a great scary dinosaur, a duck, a clever little bunny rabbit, and a woman in a purple gown with purple hair. They explained to Princess Nell that her wicked stepmother was an evil sorceress in the Land Beyond, and that the four of them had long ago sworn to defeat her evil plans. She had placed an enchantment on them, so that they were dolls in the daytime but returned to their normal selves at night. Then she had imprisoned them in this castle, where the trolls had shut them up inside a cave. They thanked Nell for releasing them.

Then Nell told them her own story. When she mentioned how she and Harv had been plucked from the ocean wrapped in cloth of gold, the woman named Purple said, “This means that you are a true Princess, and so we pledge our undying loyalty to you.” And all four of them bent down on one knee and swore an oath to defend Princess Nell to the death.

Dinosaur, who was the fiercest of them all, mounted a campaign to stamp out the trolls, and within a few days they had all been driven away. Thereafter Nell was no longer troubled in her sleep, for she knew that the scary trolls, who had once given her bad dreams, had been replaced by her four night friends.

The torture chamber of Judge Fang; a barbarian is
interrogated; dark events in the interior of China; an
unignorable summons from Dr. X.

Judge Fang didn't torture people frequently. This was for several reasons. Under the new system of Confucian justice, it was no longer necessary for every criminal to sign a confession before a sentence was carried out; all that was needed was for the magistrate to find him guilty on the strength of the evidence. This alone relieved the Judge of having to torture many of the people who came before his bench, though he was often tempted to force confessions from insolent Western thetes who refused to take responsibility for their own actions. Furthermore, modern surveillance equipment made it possible to gather information without having to rely on (sometimes reticent) human witnesses as the magistrates of yore had done.

But the man with the red dreadlocks was a very reluctant witness indeed, and unfortunately the information locked up in his brain was unique. No airborne cine aerostat or microscopic surveillance mite had recorded the data Judge Fang sought. And so the magistrate had decided to revert to the time-honored methods of his venerable predecessors.

Chang strapped the prisoner (who would only identify himself as a Mr. PhyrePhox) to a heavy X-shaped rack that was normally used for canings. This was purely a humanitarian gesture; it would prevent PhyrePhox from thrashing wildly around the room and injuring himself. Chang also stripped the prisoner from the waist down and situated a bucket under his organs of elimination. In so doing he happened to expose the only actual injury that the prisoner would suffer during this entire procedure: a tiny, neat scab in the base of the spine, where the court physician had thrust in the spinal tap the previous afternoon, and introduced a set of nanosites—nanotechnological parasites—under the supervision of Miss Pao. In the ensuing twelve hours, the 'sites had migrated up and down the prisoner's spinal column, drifting lazily through the cerebrospinal fluid, and situated themselves on whatever afferent nerves they happened to bump up against. These nerves, used by the body to transmit information such as (to name only one example) excruciating pain to the brain, had a distinctive texture and appearance that the 'sites were clever enough to recognize. It is probably superfluous to mention that these 'sites had one other key feature, namely the ability to transmit bogus information along those nerves.

That tiny scab, just above the buttocks, always drew Judge Fang's attention when he presided over one of these affairs, which fortunately was not more than a few times a year. PhyrePhox, being a natural redhead, had deathly pale skin.

“Cool!” the prisoner suddenly exclaimed, swiveling his head around in a spray of dreadlocks, trying as best he could to look down and back over his freckled shoulder. “I got this feeling of, like, stroking some, like, really soft fur or something against my left inner thigh. That is so bitching! Do it again, man! Whoa, wait a minute! Now it's the same feeling, but it's like on the sole of my right foot!”

“The attachment of the nanosites to the nerves is an aleatory process—we never know which nanosite will end up where. The sensations you are experiencing now are a way for us to take inventory, as it were. Of course, nothing is actually happening in your thigh or foot; it all takes place within the spinal column, and you would feel it even if your legs had been amputated.”

“That's really weird,” PhyrePhox exclaimed, his pale green eyes going wide with amazement. “So you could even, like, torture a basket case.” His eye and cheek twitched on one side. “Damn! Feels like someone's tickling my face now. Hey, cut it out!” A grin came over his face. “Oh, no! I'll tell you everything! Just don't tickle me! Please!”

Chang was first stunned and then furious at the prisoner's breach of decorum and made a move toward a rack of canes mounted to the wall. Judge Fang steadied his assistant with a firm hand on the shoulder; Chang swallowed his anger and took a deep breath, then bowed apologetically.

“You know, PhyrePhox,” Judge Fang said, “I really appreciate the moments of levity and even childlike wonder that you are injecting into this process. So often when we strap people to the torture rack, they are unpleasantly tense and hardly any fun at all to be around.”

“Hey, man, I'm into new experiences. I get lots of experience points for this, huh?”

“Experience points?”

“It's a joke. From swords-and-sorcery ractives. See, the more experience points your character earns, the more power he gets.”

Judge Fang straightened one hand and snapped it backward past his head, making a whooshing sound like a low-flying fighter plane. “The reference escaped me,” he explained for the benefit of Chang and Miss Pao, who did not recognize the gesture.

“Feels like there's something tickling my right eardrum now,” the prisoner said, snapping his head back and forth.

“Good! That means a nanosite happened to attach itself to the nerve running from your eardrum into your brain. We always consider it an omen of good fortune when this happens,” Judge Fang said, “as pain impulses delivered into this nerve make a particularly deep impression on the subject. Now, I will ask Miss Pao to suspend this process for a few minutes so that I can have your full attention.”

“Cool,” said the prisoner.

“Let's review what we have so far. You are thirty-seven years old. Almost twenty years ago, you co-founded a CryptNet node in Oakland, California. It was a very early node—number 178. Now, of course, there are tens of thousands of nodes.”

A hint of a smile from the prisoner. “You almost got me there,” he said. “No way am I going to tell you how many nodes there are. Of course, no one really knows anyway.”

“Very well,” Judge Fang said. He nodded to Chang, who made a mark on a sheet of paper. “We will save that inquiry for the latter phase of the investigation, which will commence in a few minutes.

“Like all other CryptNet members,” Judge Fang continued, “you started out at the first level and made your way up from there, as the years went by, to your current level of—what?”

PhyrePhox smirked and shook his head knowingly. “I'm sorry, Judge Fang, but we've been through this. I can't deny I started out at level one—I mean, that's, like, obvious—but anything beyond that point is speculation.”

“It's only speculation if you don't tell us,” Judge Fang said, controlling a momentary spark of annoyance. “I suspect you of being at least a twenty-fifth-level member.”

PhyrePhox got a serious look on his face and shook his head, jangling the shiny, colorful fragments of glass and metal worked into his dreadlocks. “That is so bogus. You should know that the highest level is ten. Anything beyond that is, like, a myth. Only conspiracy theorists believe in levels beyond ten. CryptNet is just a simple, innocuous tuple-processing collective, man.”

“That is, of course, the party line, which is only believed by complete idiots,” Judge Fang said. “In any case, returning to your previous statement, we have established that over the next eight years, Node 178 did a prosperous business—as you said, processing tuples. During this time you worked your way up the hierarchy to the tenth level. Then you claim to have severed your connection with CryptNet and gone into business for yourself, as a mediagrapher. Since then, you have specialized in war zones. Your photo, cine, and sound collages from the battlegrounds of China have won prizes and been accessed by hundreds of thousands of media consumers, though your work is so graphic and disturbing that mainstream acceptance has eluded you.”

“That's your opinion, man.”

Chang stepped forward, visibly clenching the many stout muscles that enwreathed his big, bony, close-cropped head. “You will address the magistrate as Your Honor!” he hissed.

“Chill out, man,” PhyrePhox said. “Jeez, who's torturing whom here?”

Judge Fang exchanged a look with Chang. Chang, out of sight of the prisoner, licked one index finger and made an imaginary mark in the air: Score one for PhyrePhox.

“Many of us who are not part of CryptNet find it hard to understand how that organization can survive its extremely high attrition rate. Over and over again, first-level CryptNet novices work their way up the hierarchy to the tenth and supposedly highest level, then drop out and seek other work or simply fade back into the phyles from which they originated.”

PhyrePhox tried to shrug insouciantly but was too effectively restrained to complete the maneuver.

Judge Fang continued, “This pattern has been widely noted and has led to speculation that CryptNet contains many levels beyond the tenth, and that all of the people pretending to be ex-CryptNet members are, in fact, secretly connected to the old network; secretly in communication with all of the other nodes; secretly working their way up to higher and higher levels within CryptNet even while infiltrating the power structures of other phyles and organizations. That CryptNet is a powerful secret society that has spread its tendrils high into every phyle and corporation in the world.”

“That is so paranoid.”

“Normally we do not concern ourselves with these matters, which may be mere paranoid ravings as you aver. There are those who would claim that the Chinese Coastal Republic, of which I am a servant, is riddled with secret CryptNet members. I myself am skeptical of this. Even if it were true, it would only matter to me if they committed crimes within my jurisdiction.”

And it could scarcely make any difference anyway, Judge Fang added to himself, given that the Coastal Republic is completely riddled with corruption and intrigue under the best of circumstances. The darkest and most powerful conspiracy in the world would be chewed up and spat out by the scheming corporate warlords of the Coastal Republic.

Judge Fang realized that everyone was looking at him, waiting for him to continue.

“You were spacing out, Your Honor,” PhyrePhox said.

Judge Fang had been spacing out quite a bit lately, usually while pondering this very subject. Corrupt and incompetent government was hardly a new development in China, and the Master himself had devoted many parts of the Analects to advising his followers in how they should comport themselves while working in the service of corrupt lords. “A superior man indeed is Chu Po-yu! When good government prevails in his state, he is to be found in office. When bad government prevails, he can roll his principles up and keep them in his breast.” One of the great virtues of Confucianism was its suppleness. Western political thought tended to be rather brittle; as soon as the state became corrupt, everything ceased to make sense. Confucianism always retained its equilibrium, like a cork that could float as well in spring water or raw sewage.

Nevertheless, Judge Fang had recently been plagued with doubts as to whether his life made any sense at all in the context of the Coastal Republic, a nation almost completely devoid of virtue.

If the Coastal Republic had believed in the existence of virtue, it could at least have aspired to hypocrisy.

He was getting off the track here. The issue was not whether the Coastal Republic was well-governed. The issue was trafficking in babies.

“Three months ago,” Judge Fang said, “you arrived in Shanghai via airship and, after a short stay, proceeded into the interior via a hovercraft on the Yangtze. Your stated mission was to gather material for a mediagraphic documentary concerning a new criminal gang”—here Judge Fang referred to his notes—“called the Fists of Righteous Harmony.”

“It ain't no small-time triad,” PhyrePhox said, smiling exultantly. “It's the seeds of a dynastic rebellion, man.”

“I've reviewed the media you transmitted back to the outside world on this subject,” Judge Fang said, “and will make my own judgment. The prospects of the Fists are not at issue here.”

PhyrePhox was not at all convinced; he raised his head and opened his mouth to explain to Judge Fang how wrong he was, then thought better of it, shook his head regretfully, and acquiesced.

“Two days ago,” Judge Fang continued, “you returned to Shanghai in a riverboat badly overloaded with several dozen passengers, most of them peasants fleeing from famine and strife in the interior.” He was now reading from a Shanghai Harbormaster document detailing the inspection of the boat in question. “I note that several of the passengers were women carrying female infants under three months of age. The vessel was searched for contraband and admitted into the harbor.” Judge Fang did not need to point out that this meant practically nothing; such inspectors were notoriously unobservant, especially when in the presence of distractions such as envelopes full of money, fresh cartons of cigarettes, or conspicuously amorous young passengers. But the more corrupt a society was, the more apt its officials were to brandish pathetic internal documents such as this one as if they were holy writ, and Judge Fang was no exception to this rule when it served a higher purpose. “All of the passengers, including the infants, were processed in the usual way, records taken of retinal patterns, fingerprints, etc. I regret to say that my esteemed colleagues in the Harbormaster's Office did not examine these records with their wonted diligence, for if they had, they might have noticed large discrepancies between the biological characteristics of the young women and their alleged daughters, suggesting that none of them were actually related to each other. But perhaps more pressing matters prevented them from noticing this.” Judge Fang let the unspoken accusation hang in the air: that the Shanghai authorities were themselves not out of reach of CryptNet influence. PhyrePhox visibly tried to look ingenuous.

“A day later, during a routine investigation of organized crime activity in the Leased Territories, we placed a surveillance device in an allegedly vacant apartment thought to be used for illegal activities and were startled to hear the sound of many small infants. Constables raided the place immediately and found twenty-four female infants, belonging to the Han racial group, being cared for by eight young peasant women, recently arrived from the countryside. Upon interrogation these women said that they had been recruited for this work by a Han gentleman whose identity has not been established, and who has not been found. The infants were examined. Five of them were on your boat, Mr. PhyrePhox—the biological records match perfectly.”

“If there was a baby-smuggling operation associated with that boat,” PhyrePhox said, “I had nothing to do with it.”

“We have interrogated the boat's owner and captain,” Judge Fang said, “and he asserts that this voyage was planned and paid for by you, from beginning to end.”

“I had to get back to Shanghai somehow, so I hired the boat. These women wanted to go to Shanghai, so I was cool about letting them come along.”

“Mr. PhyrePhox, before we start torturing you, let me explain to you my state of mind,” Judge Fang said, coming close to the prisoner so that they could look each other in the eye. “We have examined these babies closely. It appears that they were well cared for—no malnourishment or signs of abuse. Why, then, should I take such an interest in this case?

“The answer has nothing to do, really, with my duties as a district magistrate. It doesn't even relate to Confucian philosophy per se. It is a racial thing, Mr. PhyrePhox. That a European man is smuggling Han babies to the Leased Territories—and thence, I would assume, out to the world beyond—triggers profound, I might even say primal emotions within me and many other Chinese persons.

“During the Boxer Rebellion, the rumor was spread that the orphanages run by European missionaries were in fact abattoirs where white doctors scooped the eyes out of the heads of Han babies to make medicine for European consumption. That many Han believed these rumors accounts for the extreme violence to which the Europeans were subjected during that rebellion. But it also reflects a regrettable predisposition to racial fear and hatred that is latent within the breasts of all human beings of all tribes.

“With your baby-smuggling operation you have stumbled into the same extremely dangerous territory. Perhaps these little girls are destined for comfortable and loving homes in non-Han phyles. That is the best possible outcome for you—you will be punished but you will live. But for all I know, they are being used for organ transplants—in other words, the baseless rumors that incited peasants to storm the orphanages during the Boxer Rebellion may in fact be literally true in your case. Does this help to clarify the purpose of this evening's little get-together?”

At the beginning of this oration, PhyrePhox had been wearing his baseline facial expression—an infuriatingly vacant half-grin, which Judge Fang had decided was not really a smirk, more a posture of detached bemusement. As soon as Judge Fang had mentioned the eyeballs, the prisoner had broken eye contact, lost the smile, and become more and more pensive until, by the end, he was actually nodding in agreement.

He kept on nodding for a minute longer, staring fixedly at the floor. Then he brightened and looked up at the Judge. “Before I give you my answer,” he said, “torture me.”

Judge Fang, by a conscious effort, remained poker-faced. So PhyrePhox twisted his head around until Miss Pao was within his peripheral vision. “Go ahead,” the prisoner said encouragingly, “give me a jolt.”

Judge Fang shrugged and nodded to Miss Pao, who picked up her brush and swept a few quick characters across the mediatronic paper spread out on the writing table before her. As she neared the end of this inscription, she slowed and finally looked up at the Judge, then at PhyrePhox as she drew out the final stroke.

At this point PhyrePhox should have erupted with a scream from deep down in his viscera, convulsed against the restraints, voided himself at both ends, then gone into shock (if he had a weak constitution) or begged for mercy (if strong). Instead he closed his eyes, as if thinking hard about something, tensed every muscle in his body for a few moments, then gradually relaxed, breathing deeply and deliberately. He opened his eyes and looked at Judge Fang. “How's that?” the prisoner said. “Would you like another demonstration?”

“I think I have the general idea,” Judge Fang said. “One of your high-level CryptNet tricks, I suppose. Nanosites embedded in your brain, mediating its interchanges with the peripheral nervous system. It would make sense for you to have advanced telæsthetic systems permanently installed. And a system that could trick your nerves into thinking that they were somewhere else could also trick them into thinking that they were not experiencing pain.”

“What can be installed can be removed,” Miss Pao observed.

“That won't be necessary,” Judge Fang said, and nodded to Chang. Chang stepped toward the prisoner, drawing a short sword. “We'll start with fingers and proceed from there.”

“You're forgetting something,” the prisoner said. “I have already agreed to give you my answer.”

“I'm standing here,” the Judge said, “I'm not hearing an answer. Is there a reason for this delay?”

“The babies aren't being smuggled anywhere,” PhyrePhox said. “They stay right here. The purpose of the operation is to save their lives.”

“What is it, precisely, that endangers their lives?”

“Their own parents,” PhyrePhox said. “Things are bad in the interior, Your Honor. The water table is gone. The practice of infanticide is at an all-time high.”

“Your next goal in life,” Judge Fang said, “will be to prove all of this to my satisfaction.”

The door opened. One of Judge Fang's constables entered the room and bowed deeply to apologize for the interruption, then stepped forward and handed the magistrate a scroll. The Judge examined the seal; it bore the chop of Dr. X.

He carried it to his office and unrolled it on his desk. It was the real thing, written on rice paper in real ink, not the mediatronic stuff.

It occurred to the Judge, before he even read this document, that he could take it to an art dealer on Nanjing Road and sell it for a year's wages. Dr. X, assuming it was really he who had brushed these characters, was the most impressive living calligrapher whose work Judge Fang had ever seen. His hand betrayed a rigorous Confucian grounding—many decades more study than Judge Fang could ever aspire to—but upon this foundation the Doctor had developed a distinctive style, highly expressive without being sloppy. It was the hand of an elder who understood the importance of gravity above all else, and who, having first established his dignity, conveyed most of his message through nuances. Beyond that, the structure of the inscription was exactly right, a perfect balance of large characters and small, hung on the page just so, as if inviting analysis by legions of future graduate students.

Judge Fang knew that Dr. X controlled legions of criminals ranging from spankable delinquents up to international crime lords; that half of the Coastal Republic officials in Shanghai were in his pocket; that within the limited boundaries of the Celestial Kingdom, he was a figure of considerable importance, probably a blue-button Mandarin of the third or fourth rank; that his business connections ran to most of the continents and phyles of the wide world and that he had accumulated tremendous wealth. All of these things paled in comparison with the demonstration of power represented by this scroll. I can pick up a brush at any time, Dr. X was saying, and toss off a work of art that can hang on the wall beside the finest calligraphy of the Ming Dynasty.

By sending the Judge this scroll, Dr. X was laying claim to all of the heritage that Judge Fang most revered. It was like getting a letter from the Master himself. The Doctor was, in effect, pulling rank. And even though Dr. X nominally belonged to a different phyle—the Celestial Kingdom—and, here in the Coastal Republic, was nothing more than a criminal, Judge Fang could not disregard this message from him, written in this way, without abjuring everything he most respected—those principles on which he had rebuilt his own life after his career as a hoodlum in Lower Manhattan had brought him to a dead end. It was like a summons sent down through the ages from his own ancestors.

He spent a few minutes further admiring the calligraphy. Then he rolled the scroll up with great care, locked it in a drawer, and returned to the interrogation room.

“I have received an invitation to dine on Dr. X's boat,” he said. “Take the prisoner back to the holding cell. We are finished for today.”

A domestic scene; Nell's visit to the playroom;
misbehavior of the other children; the Primer
displays new capabilities; Dinosaur tells a story.

In the morning Mom would put on her maid uniform and go to work, and Tad would wake up sometime later and colonize the sofa in front of the big living-room mediatron. Harv would creep around the edges of the apartment, foraging for breakfast, some of which he'd bring back to Nell. Then Harv would usually leave the apartment and not come back until after Tad had departed, typically in late afternoon, to chill with his homeboys. Mom would come home with a little plastic bag of salad that she'd taken from work and a tiny injector; after picking at the salad, she'd put the injector against her arm for a moment and then spend the rest of the evening watching old passives on the mediatron. Harv would drift in and out with some of his friends. Usually he wasn't there when Nell decided to go to sleep, but he was there when she woke up. Tad might come home at any time of the night, and he'd be angry if Mom wasn't awake.

One Saturday, Mom and Tad were both home at the same time and they were on the couch together with their arms around each other and Tad was playing a silly game with Mom that made Mom squeal and wiggle. Nell kept asking Mom to read her a story from her magic book, and Tad kept shoving her away and threatening to give her a whipping, and finally Mom said, “Get out of my fucking hair, Nell!” and shoved Nell out the door, telling her to go to the playroom for a couple of hours.

Nell got lost in the hallways and started crying; but her book told her a story about Princess Nell getting lost in the endless corridors of the Dark Castle, and how she found her way out by using her wits, and this made Nell feel safe—as though she could never be really lost when she had her book with her. Eventually Nell found the playroom. It was on the first floor of the building. As usual, there were lots of kids there and no parents. There was a special space off to the side of the playroom where babies could sit in strollers and crawl around on the floor. Some mommies were in there, but they told her she was too big to play in that room. Nell went back to the big playroom, which was full of kids who were much bigger than Nell.

She knew these kids; they knew how to push and hit and scratch. She went to one corner of the room and sat with her magic book on her lap, waiting for one kid to get off the swing. When he did, she put her book in the corner and climbed onto the swing and started trying to pump her legs like the big kids did, but she couldn't get the swing to go. Then a big kid came and told her that she was not allowed to use the swing because she was too little. When Nell didn't get off right away, the kid shoved her off. Nell tumbled into the sand, scratching her hands and knees, and ran back toward the corner crying.

But a couple of other kids had found her magic book and started kicking it around, making it slide back and forth across the floor like a hockey puck. Nell ran up and tried to pick the book off the floor, but it slid too fast for her to catch it. The two kids began kicking it back and forth between them and finally tossing it through the air. Nell ran back and forth trying to keep up with the book. Soon there were four kids playing keep-away and six others standing around watching and laughing at Nell. Nell couldn't see things though because her eyes were full of tears, snot was running out of her nose, and her ribcage only quivered when she tried to breathe.

Then one of the kids screamed and dropped the book. Quickly another darted in to grab it, and he screamed too. Then a third. Suddenly all the kids were silent and afraid. Nell rubbed the tears out of her eyes and ran over toward the book again, and this time the kids didn't throw it away from her; she picked it up and cradled it against her chest. The kids who'd been playing keep-away were all in the same pose: arms crossed over chests, hands wedged into armpits, jumping up and down like pogo sticks and screaming for their mothers.

Nell sat in the corner, opened the book, and started to read. She did not know all of the words, but she knew a lot of them, and when she got tired, the book would help her sound out the words or even read the whole story to her, or tell it to her with moving pictures just like a cine.

After the trolls had all been driven away, the castle yard was not a pretty sight to see. It had been unkempt and overgrown to begin with. Harv had had no choice except to chop down all the trees, and during Dinosaur's great battle against the trolls, many of the remaining plants had been torn up.

Dinosaur stood and surveyed it in the moonlight. “This place reminds me of the Extinction, when we had to wander for days just to find something to eat,” he said.

DINOSAUR'S TALE

There were four of us traveling through a landscape much like this one, except that instead of stumps, all the trees were burned. The particular part of the world had become dark and cold for a while after the comet struck, so that many of the plants and trees died; and after they died, they dried out, and then it was just a matter of time before lightning caused a great forest fire. The four of us were traveling across this great burned-out country looking for food, and you can guess we were very hungry. Never mind why we were doing it; back then, if things got bad where you were, you just got up and went until things got better.

Besides me there was Utahraptor, who was smaller than me, but very quick, with great curving claws on his feet; with one kick he could cut another dinosaur open like ripe fruit. Then there was Ankylosaurus, who was a slow plant-eater, but dangerous; he was protected all around by a bony shell like a turtle's, and on the end of his tail was a big lump of bone that could dash out the brains of any meat-eating dinosaur that came too close. Finally there was Pteranodon, who could fly. All of us traveled together in a little pack. To be perfectly honest, our band had formerly consisted of a couple of hundred dinosaurs, most of them duck-billed plant-eaters, but Utahraptor and I had been forced to eat most of these—just a few a day, of course, so that they didn't notice at first, as they were not very intelligent.

Finally their number had dwindled to one, a gaunt and gamy fellow named Everett, whom we tried to stretch out for as long as we could. During those last few days, Everett was constantly looking around for his companions. Like all plant-eaters, he had eyes in the side of his head and could see in almost all directions. Everett seemed to think that if he could just swivel his head around in the right direction, a big healthy pack of duck-bills would suddenly rotate into view. At the very end, I think that Everett may have put two and two together; I saw him blink in surprise once, as if the light had finally gone on in his head, and the rest of that day he was very quiet, as if all of his half-dozen or so neurons were busy working out the implications. After that, as we continued across this burned country where Everett had nothing to eat, he became more and more listless and whiny until finally Utahraptor lost his temper, lashed out with one leg, and there was Everett's viscera sitting there on the ground like a sack of groceries. Then there was simply nothing to do except eat him.

I got most of him as usual, though Utahraptor kept darting in around my ankles and snatching up choice bits, and from time to time Pteranodon would swoop in and grab a whorl of intestine. Ankylosaurus stood off to the side and watched. For a long time we'd taken him for an idiot, because he would always just squat there watching us divide up those duck-bills, munching stupidly on the erratic horsetail, never saying much. In retrospect, maybe he was just a taciturn sort. He must have worked out that we would very much like to eat him, if only we could locate some chink in his armor.

If only we had! For many days after Everett had become just another scat on our tracks, Utahraptor and Pteranodon and I trudged across that dead landscape eyeing Ankylosaurus, drooling down our chins as we imagined the unspeakably tender morsels that must lie nestled inside that armored shell. He must have been hungry too, and no doubt his morsels were getting less fat and tender by the day. From time to time we would encounter some sheltered hollow where unfamiliar green plants were poking their shoots through the black and gray debris, and we would encourage Ankylosaurus to stop, take his time, and eat all he wanted. “No, really! We don't mind waiting for you!” He would always fix his tiny little side-mounted eyes on us and look at us balefully as he grazed. “How was your dinner, Anky?” we'd say, and he'd grumble something like, “Tastes like iridium as usual,” and then we'd go another couple of days without exchanging a word.

One day we reached the edge of the sea. The salt water lapped up onto a lifeless beach strewn with the bones of extinct sea creatures, from tiny trilobites all the way up to plesiosaurs. Behind us was the desert we'd just crossed. To the south was a range of mountains that would have been impassable even if half of them hadn't been erupting volcanoes. And north of us we could see snow dusting the tops of the hills, and we all knew what that meant: If we went in that direction, we'd soon freeze to death.

So we were stuck there, the four of us, and though we didn't have mediatrons and cine aerostats in those days, we all pretty much knew what was up: We were the last four dinosaurs on earth. Pretty soon we would be three, and then two, and then one, and then none at all, and the only question left to settle was in what order we'd go. You might think this would be awful and depressing, but it wasn't really that bad; being dinosaurs, we didn't spend a lot of time pondering the imponderables, if you know what I mean, and in a way it was kind of fun waiting to see how it would all work out. There was a general assumption on all hands, I think, that Ankylosaurus would be the first to go, but Utah and I would have killed each other in an instant.

So we all kind of faced off on the beach there, Utahraptor and Ankylosaurus and I in a neat triangle with Pteranodon hovering overhead.

After we had been facing off there for some hours, I noticed out of the corner of my eye that the banks to the north and south seemed to be moving, as if they were alive.

Suddenly there was a thundering and rushing sound in the air all around us, and I couldn't help looking up, though I kept one sharp eye on Utahraptor. The world had been such a quiet and dead place for so long that we were startled by any noise or movement, and now it seemed that the air and ground had come alive once more, just as in the old days before the comet.

The noise in the air was caused by a great flock of teensy-tiny Pteranodons, though instead of smooth reptilian skin their wings were covered with oversize scales, and they had toothless, bony beaks instead of proper mouths. These miserable things— these airborne crumbs—were swarming all around Pteranodon, getting in his eyes, pecking at his wings, and it was all he could do to keep airborne.

As I mentioned, I was keeping one eye on Utahraptor as always, and to my surprise he suddenly turned away and ran up onto the north slope, with an eagerness that could be explained only by the availability of food. I followed him, naturally, but pulled up short. Something was wrong. The ground on the north slope was covered with a moving carpet that swarmed around Utahraptor's feet. Focusing my eyes, which frankly were not very good, I saw that this carpet actually consisted of thousands of tiny dinosaurs whose scales had grown very long and slender and numerous—in short, they were furry. I had been seeing these quadrupedal hors d'oeuvres dodging around under logs and rocks for the last few million years and always taken them for an especially ill-conceived mutation. But suddenly there were thousands of them, and this at a time when there were only four dinosaurs left in the whole world. And they seemed to be working together. They were so tiny that Utahraptor had no way to get them into his mouth, and whenever he stopped moving for an instant, they swarmed onto his legs and tail and nipped at his flesh. A plague of shrews. I was so confounded that I stopped in my tracks.

That was a mistake, for soon I felt a sensation in my legs and tail like millions of pinpricks. Turning around, I saw that the south slope was covered with ants, millions of them, and they had apparently decided to eat me. Meanwhile Ankylosaurus was bellowing and swinging his bony ball around without effect, for the ants were swarming on his body as well.

Well, before long the shrews and the ants and the birds started to run into each other and have skirmishes of their own, and so at that point they called a truce. The King of the Birds, the King of the Shrews, and the Queen of the Ants all got together on top of a rock to parley. In the meantime they left us dinosaurs alone, seeing that we were trapped in any case.

The situation struck me as unfair, so I approached the rock where these despicable micro-monarchs were chattering away, a mile a minute, and spoke: “Yo! Aren't you going to invite the King of the Reptiles?”

They looked at me like I was crazy.

“Reptiles are obsolete,” said the King of the Shrews.

“Reptiles are just retarded birds,” said the King of the Birds, “and so I am your King, thank you very much.”

“There's only zero of you,” said the Queen of the Ants. In ant arithmetic, there are only two numbers: Zero, which means anything less than a million, and Some. “You can't cooperate, so even if you were King, the title would be meaningless.”

“Besides,” said the King of the Shrews, “the purpose of this summit conference is to decide which of our kingdoms shall eat which dinosaur, and we do not suppose that the King of the Dinosaurs, even if there were such a thing, would be able to participate constructively.” Mammals always talked this way to show off their oversize brains—which were basically the same as ours, but burdened with a lot of useless extra business on top—useless, I should say, but darn tasty.

“But there are three kingdoms and four dinosaurs,” I pointed out. Of course this was not true in ant arithmetic, so the Queen of the Ants immediately began to make a fuss. In the end I had to go over among the ants and crush them with my tail until I had killed a few million, which is the only way that you can get an ant to take you seriously.

“Surely three dinosaurs would be enough to give all of your subjects a square meal,” I said. “May I suggest that the birds peck Pteranodon to the bone, the shrews tear Utahraptor limb from limb, and the ants feast on the corpse of Ankylosaurus?”

The three monarchs appeared to be considering this suggestion when Utahraptor sped up in a huff. “Excuse me, Your Royal Highnesses, but who appointed this fellow king? I am just as qualified to be king as he.” In short order, Pteranodon and Ankylosaurus also laid claim to the throne.

The King of the Shrews, the King of the Birds, and the Queen of the Ants told us all to shut up, and then conferred amongst themselves for a few minutes. Finally the King of the Shrews stepped forward. “We have reached a decision,” he said. “Three dinosaurs will be eaten, and one, the King of the Reptiles, will be spared; all that remains is for one of you to demonstrate that you are superior to the other three and deserve to wear the crown.”

“Very well!” I said, and turned on Utahraptor, who began backing away from me, hissing and swiping the air with his giant claws. If I could dispatch Utahraptor with a frontal assault, Pteranodon would swoop down to steal some of the carrion, and I could ambush her then; having fortified myself by eating the other two, I might be strong enough to overcome Ankylosaurus.

“No, no, no!” screamed the King of the Shrews. “This is just the kind of thing I was talking about when I said you reptiles were obsolete. It's not about who is the biggest and baddest anymore.”

“It's about cooperation, organization, regimentation,” said the Queen of the Ants.

“It's about brains,” said the King of the Shrews.

“It's about beauty, glory, dazzling flights of inspiration!” said the King of the Birds.

This precipitated another stridulent dispute among the two Kings and the Queen. Everyone got very short-tempered, and there probably would have been serious trouble if the tide had not come in and washed a few whale carcasses and dead elasmosaurs onto the beach. As you can imagine, we fell upon these gifts with abandon, and while I was eating my fill, I also managed to swallow innumerable birds, shrews, and ants who were feasting on the same pieces of meat as I.

After everyone had filled their bellies and calmed down somewhat, the Kings and the Queen resumed their discussions. Finally the King of the Shrews, who seemed to be the designated spokesmonarch, stepped forward again. “We cannot come to an agreement as to which of you should be the King of the Reptiles, so each of our nations, Birds, Mammals, and Ants, will put each of you to a trial, and then we will gather again and put it to a vote. If the vote results in a tie, we will eat all four of you and bring the Kingdom of Reptiles to an end.”

We drew lots, and I was chosen to go among the ants for the first round of trials. I followed the Queen into the midst of her army, picking my way slowly until the Queen said, “Step lively, lung-breather! Time is food! Don't worry about those ants beneath your feet—you can't possibly kill more than zero!” So from then on, I just walked normally, though my claws became slick with crushed ants.

We traveled south for a day or two and then stopped on a stream bank. “South of here is the territory of the King of the Cockroaches. Your first task is to bring me the head of the King.”

Looking across the river, I could see that the entire countryside was swarming with an infinite number of cockroaches, more than I could ever stomp; and even if I could stomp them all, there must be more below the ground, which was doubtless where the King lived.

I waded across the river and traveled through the Kingdom of the Cockroaches for three days until I crossed another river and entered into the Kingdom of the Bees. This place was greener than any I'd seen for a while, with many wildflowers, and bees swarmed everywhere taking nectar back to their nests, which were as big as houses.

This gave me an idea. I toppled several hollow trees filled with honey, dragged them back to the Kingdom of the Cockroaches, split them open, and made sticky honey trails leading down toward the ocean. The cockroaches followed the trails down to the water's edge, where the waves broke over their heads and drowned them. For three days I kept watch over the beach as the number of cockroaches dwindled, and finally on the third day the King of the Roaches emerged from his throne room to see where everyone had gone. I coaxed him onto a leaf and carried him back north across the river and into the Kingdom of the Ants, much to the amazement of the Queen.

Next I was put into the care of the King of the Birds. He and his chirping, chattering army led me up into the mountains, up above the snowline, and I was sure that I would freeze to death. But as we continued up, it suddenly became warmer, which I did not understand until I realized that we were approaching a live volcano. We finally stopped at the edge of a red-hot lava flow half a mile wide. In the center of the flow, a tall black rock stood out like an island in the middle of a river.

The King of the Birds plucked one golden feather from his tail and gave it to a soldier, who took it in his beak, flew over the lava, and left that feather on the very top of the black rock. By the time that soldier flew back, he was half roasted from the heat radiating from the lava—and don't think my mouth didn't water! “Your job,” said the King, “is to bring me that feather.”

Now, this was clearly unfair, and I protested that the birds were obviously trying to favor Pteranodon. This kind of argument might have worked with ants or even shrews; but the King of the Birds would hear none of it. For them, virtue consisted in being birdlike, and fairness didn't enter into it.

Well, I stood on the edge of that lava flow until my skin smoked, but I couldn't see how to reach that feather. Finally I decided to give up. I was walking away, cutting my feet on the sharp rock, when suddenly it hit me: The rock I'd been standing on, this whole time, was nothing other than lava that had gotten cold and solidified.

This was high in the mountains, where glaciers and snowfields soared above me like palace walls. I climbed up onto a particularly steep slope and began pounding the snow with my tail until I started an avalanche. Millions of tons of ice and snow thundered down onto the lava flow, throwing up a tremendous blast of steam. For three days and nights I could not see the claws in front of my face for all of the steam, but on the third day it finally cleared away, and I saw a bridge of hardened lava running straight to that black rock. I scampered across (to the extent that a dinosaur can scamper), snatched that golden feather, ran back, and stood in the snow for a while cooling my feet off. Then I marched back to the King of the Birds, who was, of course, astonished.

Next I found myself in the care of the mammals, who were almost all shrews. They led me up into the foothills, to the mouth of a great cave. “Your job,” said the King of the Shrews, “is to wait here for Dojo and then defeat him in single combat.” Then all the shrews went away and left me there alone.

I waited in front of that cave for three days and three nights, which gave me plenty of time to scope the place out. At first I was rather cocky about this challenge, for it seemed the easiest of the three; while I had no idea who or what Dojo was, I knew that in all the world I had never met my equal when it came to single combat. But on the first day, sitting there on my tail waiting for Dojo, I noticed a sprinkling of small glittering objects on the ground, and examining them carefully I realized that they were, in fact, scales. To be precise, they were dinosaur scales, which I recognized as belonging to Pteranodon, Ankylosaurus, and Utahraptor, and they appeared to have been jarred loose from their bodies by powerful impacts.

On the second day I prowled around the vicinity and found tremendous gashes in tree trunks, which had undoubtedly been made by Utahraptor as he slashed wildly at Dojo; other trees that had been snapped off entirely by the club at the end of the tail of Ankylosaurus; and long scratches in the earth made by the talons of Pteranodon as she dove again and again at some elusive opponent. At this point, I became concerned. It was clear that all three of my opponents had fought Dojo and lost, so if I lost also (which was inconceivable), I would be even with the others; but the rules of the contest stated that in the event of a tie, all four dinosaurs would be eaten, and the Kingdom of Reptiles would be no more. I spent the night fretting about who or what the terrible Dojo was.

On the third day nothing happened, and I began wondering whether I should go into the cave and look for Dojo. So far the only living thing I had seen around here was a black mouse that occasionally darted out from the rocks at the cave's entrance, foraging for a bit of food. The next time I saw that mouse, I said (speaking softly so as not to scare it), “Say, mouse! Is there anything back inside that cave?”

The black mouse sat up on its haunches, holding a huckleberry between its little hands and nibbling on it. “Nothing special,” he said, “just my little dwelling. A fireplace, some tiny pots and pans, a few dried berries, and the rest is full of skeletons.”

“Skeletons?” I said. “Of other mice?”

“There are a few mouse skeletons, but mostly they are dinosaurs of one kind or another, primarily meat-eaters.”

“Who have become extinct because of the comet,” I suggested.

“Oh, pardon me, sir, but I must respectfully inform you that the deaths of these dinosaurs are unrelated to the comet.”

“How did they die, then?” I asked.

“I regret to say that I killed them all in self-defense.”

“Ah,” I said, not quite believing it, “then you must be …”

“Dojo the Mouse,” he said, “at your service.”

“I am terribly sorry to have bothered you, sir,” I said, using my best manners, for I could see that this Dojo was an unusually polite sort, “but your fame as a warrior has spread far and wide, and I have come here humbly to seek your advice on how I may become a better warrior myself; for it has not escaped my notice that in the postcomet environment, teeth like carving knives and six tons of muscle may be in some sense outmoded.”

What follows is a rather long story, for Dojo had much to teach me and he taught it slowly. Sometime, Nell, I will teach you everything I learned from Dojo; all you need do is ask. But on the third day of my apprenticeship, when I still had not learned anything except humility, good manners, and how to sweep out the cave, I asked Dojo if he would be interested in playing a game of tic-tac-toe. This was a common sport among dinosaurs. We would scratch it out in the mud. (Many paleontologists have been baffled to find tic-tac-toe games littering prehistoric excavations and have chalked it up to the local workers they hire to do their digging and hauling.)

In any case, I explained the rules of the game to Dojo, and he agreed to give it a try. We went down to the nearest mud flat, and there, in plain view of many shrews, I played a game of tic-tac-toe with Dojo and vanquished him, although I will confess it was touch-and-go for a while. It was done; I had defeated Dojo in single combat.

The next morning I excused myself from Dojo's cave and went back down to the beach, where the other three dinosaurs had already gathered, looking much the worse for wear as you can imagine. The King of the Shrews, the King of the Birds, and the Queen of the Ants converged on us with all their armies and crowned me King of the Reptiles, or Tyrannosaurus Rex as we used to say. Then they ate the other three dinosaurs as agreed. Besides me, the only reptiles left were a few snakes, lizards, and turtles, who continue to be my obedient subjects.

I could have lived a luxurious life as King, but by now, Dojo had taught me humility, and so I went back to his cave immediately and spent the next few million years studying his ways. All you need do is ask, Nell, and I will pass his knowledge on to you.

Judge Fang goes for a dinner cruise with a
Mandarin; they visit a mysterious ship; a startling
discovery; a trap is sprung.

Dr. X's boat was not the traditional sort of wallowing pleasure barge that was fit only for the canals and shallow lakes of the Yangtze's sodden delta; it was a real ocean-going yacht built on Western lines. Judging from the delicacies that began to make their way up to the foredeck shortly after Judge Fang came aboard, the vessel's galley had been retrofitted with all the accoutrements of a professional Chinese kitchen: umbrella-size woks, gas burners like howling turbojets, and extensive storage lockers for innumerable species of fungi as well as bird nests, shark fins, chicken feet, fœtal rats, and odds and ends of many other species both rare and ubiquitous. The courses of the meal were small, numerous, and carefully timed, served up in an array of fine porcelain that could have filled several rooms of the Victoria and Albert Museum, delivered with the precision of surgical air strikes by a team of waiters.

Judge Fang got to eat this way only when someone really important was trying to taint him, and though he had never knowingly allowed his judicial judgment to be swayed, he did enjoy the chow.

They began with tea and some preliminary courses on the foredeck of the yacht, as it made its way down the Huang Pu, with the old European buildings of the Bund on the left, lit up eerily by the wash of colored light radiating from the developments of Pudong, which rose precipitously from the bank on the right. At one point, Dr. X had to excuse himself belowdecks for a few moments. Judge Fang strolled to the very bow of the yacht, nestled himself into the acute angle formed by the converging rails, let the wind tug at his beard, and enjoyed the view. The tallest buildings in Pudong were held up by huge aerostats—vacuum-filled ellipsoids hundreds of stories above street level, much wider than the buildings they supported, and usually covered with lights. Some of these extended out over the river itself. Judge Fang rested his elbows carefully on the rail to maintain his balance, then tilted his head back so that he was staring straight up at the underside of one such, pulsing with oversaturated colored light. The trompe l'oeil was enough to make him dizzy, and so he quickly looked down. Something thumped against the hull of the yacht, and he looked into the water to see a human corpse wrapped up in a white sheet, blundering along a foot or two beneath the surface, dimly luminescent in the light from the building overhead.

In time the yacht made its way out into the estuary of the Yangtze, only a few miles from the East China Sea at this point, miles wide, and much colder and rougher. Judge Fang and Dr. X repaired to a dining cabin belowdecks with panoramic windows that mostly just reflected back the light of the candles and lanterns around the table. Not long after they had taken their seats, the yacht accelerated powerfully, first shooting forward and then leaping up out of the water before resuming its steady, level motion. Judge Fang realized that the yacht was actually a hydrofoil, which had been merely idling along on her hull while they had enjoyed the city view but which had now climbed up out of the water.

The conversation so far had consisted almost entirely of formal courtesies. This had eventually led them into a discussion of Confucian philosophy and traditional culture, clearly a subject of interest to both of them. Judge Fang had complimented the Doctor on his sublime calligraphy, and they talked about that art for a while. Then, obligatorily returning the compliment, Dr. X told the Judge how superbly he was executing his duties as magistrate, particularly given the added difficulty of having to deal with barbarians.

“Your handling of the affair of the girl and the book was, in particular, a credit to your abilities,” Dr. X said gravely.

Judge Fang found it interesting that the boy who had actually stolen the book was not mentioned. He supposed that Dr. X was referring not so much to the criminal case as to Judge Fang's subsequent efforts to protect the girl.

“This person is grateful, but all credit should go to the Master,” Judge Fang said. “The prosecution of this case was founded entirely upon his principles, as you might have seen, had you been able to do us the honor of joining our discussion of the matter at the House of the Venerable and Inscrutable Colonel.”

“Ah, it is indeed a misfortune that I could not attend,” the Doctor said, “as it would, no doubt, have helped to improve my own, so imperfect understanding of the Master's principles.”

“I meant no such insinuation—rather, that the Doctor might have guided me and my staff to a more nearly adequate resolution of the affair than we were, in fact, able to devise.”

“Perhaps it would have been good fortune for both of us for me to have been present in the Colonel's house on that day,” Dr. X said, returning neatly to equilibrium. There was silence for a few minutes as a new course was brought out, plum wine poured by the waiter. Then Dr. X continued, “One aspect of the case on which I would have been particularly eager to consult your wisdom would have been the disposition of the book.”

So he was still stuck on that book. Though it had been weeks since Dr. X had released any more of those book-hunting mites into the airspace of the Leased Territories, Judge Fang knew that he was still offering a nice bounty to anyone who could tell him the whereabouts of the book in question. Judge Fang was beginning to wonder whether this obsession with the book might be a symptom of a general decline in the Doctor's mental powers.

“Your advice on the subject would have been of inestimable value to me,” Judge Fang said, “as this aspect of the case was particularly troublesome for a Confucian judge. If the item of stolen property had been anything other than a book, it would have been confiscated. But a book is different—it is not just a material possession but the pathway to an enlightened mind, and thence to a well-ordered society, as the Master stated many times.”

“I see,” said Dr. X, slightly taken aback. He seemed genuinely thoughtful as he stroked his beard and stared into the flame of a candle, which had suddenly begun to flicker and gyrate chaotically. It seemed as though the Judge had raised a novel point here, which deserved careful consideration. “Better to leave the book in the hands of one who could benefit from its wisdom, than to let it remain, inert, in a police warehouse.”

“That was my no doubt less than perfect conclusion, hastily arrived at,” Judge Fang said.

Dr. X continued to ponder the matter for a minute or so. “It does credit to your professional integrity that you are able to focus so clearly upon the case of one small person.”

“As you will no doubt appreciate, being a far more accomplished scholar than I, the interests of the society come first. Beside that, the fate of one little girl is nothing. But other things being equal, it is better for society that the girl is educated than that she remain ignorant.”

Dr. X raised his eyebrows and nodded significantly at this. The subject did not come up again during the rest of the meal. He assumed that the hydrofoil was swinging around in a lazy circle that would eventually take them back to the mouth of the Huang Pu.

But when the engines were throttled back and the craft settled back onto its hull and began to rock with the waves again, Judge Fang could not see any lights outside the windows. They were nowhere near Pudong, nor any other inhabited land as far as he could tell.

Dr. X gestured out the window at nothing and said, “I have taken the liberty of arranging this visit for you. It touches upon a case that has recently come under your purview and also has to do with a subject that seems of particular interest to you and which we have already discussed this evening.”

When Judge Fang followed his host out onto the deck, he was finally able to make out their surroundings. They were on the open ocean, with no land in sight, though the urban glow of Greater Shanghai could clearly be seen to the west. It was a clear night with a nearly full moon that was illuminating the hull of an enormous ship nearby. Even without the moonlight this vessel would have been noticeable for the fact that it blocked out all of the stars in one quadrant of the sky.

Judge Fang knew next to nothing about ships. He had toured an aircraft carrier in his youth, when it docked for a few days at Manhattan. He suspected that this ship was even larger. It was almost entirely dark except for pinpricks of red light here and there, suggesting its size and general shape, and a few horizontal lines of yellow light shining out the windows of its superstructure, many stories above their heads.

Dr. X and Judge Fang were conveyed on board this vessel by a small crew who came out to meet them in a launch. As it drew alongside the Doctor's yacht, the Judge was startled to realize that its crew consisted entirely of young women. Their accents marked them as belonging to an ethnic subgroup, common in the Southeast, that lived almost entirely on the water; but even if they had not spoken, Judge Fang would have inferred this from their nimble handling of the boat.

Within a few minutes, Dr. X and Judge Fang had been conveyed aboard the giant vessel through a hatch set into the hull near the waterline. Judge Fang noted that this was not an old-fashioned steel vessel; it was made of nanotechnological substances, infinitely lighter and stronger. No matter compiler in the world was large enough to compile a ship, so the shipyards in Hong Kong had compiled the pieces one by one, bonded them together, and slid them down the ways into the sea, much as their pre–Diamond Age predecessors had done.

Judge Fang had been expecting that the ship would be some kind of bulk carrier, consisting almost entirely of huge compartments, but the first thing he saw was a long corridor running parallel to the keel, seemingly the length of the entire ship. Young women in white, pink, or occasionally blue dresses and sensible shoes bustled back and forth along this corridor entering into and emerging from its innumerable doors.

There was no formal welcome, no captain or other officers. As soon as the boat girls had assisted them on board, they bowed and took their leave. Dr. X began to amble down the corridor, and Judge Fang followed him. The young women in the white dresses bowed as they approached, then continued on their way, having no time to waste on advanced formalities. Judge Fang had the general sense that they were peasant women, though none of them had the deep tans that were normally a mark of low social status in China. The boat girls had worn blue, so he gathered that this color identified people with nautical or engineering duties. In general, the ones in the pink dresses were younger and slenderer than the ones in the white dresses. The tailoring was different too; the pink dresses closed up the middle of the back, the white ones had two zippers symmetrically placed in the front.

Dr. X chose a door, apparently at random, swung it open, and held it for Judge Fang. Judge Fang bowed slightly and stepped through it into a room about the dimensions of a basketball court, though with a lower ceiling. It was quite warm and humid, and dimly lit. The first thing he saw was more girls in white dresses, bowing to him. Then he realized that the room was otherwise filled with cribs, hundreds of cribs, and that each crib had a perfect little girl baby in it. Young women in pink bustled back and forth with diapers. From place to place, a woman sat beside a crib, the front of her white dress unzipped, breast-feeding a baby.

Judge Fang felt dizzy. He was not willing to acknowledge the reality of what he saw. He had mentally prepared himself for tonight's meeting with Dr. X by reminding himself, over and over, that the Doctor was capable of any trickery, that he could not take anything he saw at face value. But as many first-time fathers had realized in the delivery room, there was something about the sight of an actual baby that focused the mind. In a world of abstractions, nothing was more concrete than a baby.

Judge Fang whirled on his heel and stormed out of the room, brushing rudely past Dr. X. He picked a direction at random and walked, strode, ran down the corridor, past five doors, ten, fifty, then stopped for no particular reason and burst through another door.

It might as well have been the same room.

He felt almost nauseous and had to take stern measures to keep tears from his eyes. He ran out of the room and stormed through the ship for some distance, going up several stairways, past several decks. He stepped into another room, chosen at random, and found the floor covered with cribs, evenly spaced in rows and columns, each one containing a sleeping one-year-old, dressed in fuzzy pink jammies with a hood and a set of mouse ears, each one clutching an identical white security blanket and nestled up with a stuffed animal. Here and there, a young woman in a pink dress sat on the floor on a bamboo mat, reading a book or doing needlework.

One of these women, close to Judge Fang, set her needlework down, rearranged herself into a kneeling position, and bowed to him. Judge Fang gave her a perfunctory bow in return, then padded over to the nearest crib. A little girl with astonishingly thick eyelashes lay there, deeply asleep, breathing regularly, her mouse ears sticking out through the bars of the crib, and as Judge Fang stood and stared at her, he imagined that he could hear the breathing of all the children on this ship at once, combined into a gentle sigh that calmed his heart. All of these children, sleeping so peacefully; everything must be okay. It was going to be fine.

He turned away and saw that the young woman was smiling at him. It was not a flirting smile or a silly girlish smile but a calm and confident smile. Judge Fang supposed that wherever Dr. X was on this ship, he must be smiling in much the same way at this moment.

         

When Dr. X started the cine, Judge Fang recognized it right away: This was the work of the mediagrapher PhyrePhox, who was still, as far as he knew, languishing in a holding cell in downtown Shanghai. The setting was an outcropping of stones amid a dun, dust-scoured vastitude, somewhere in the interior of China. The camera panned across the surrounding waste, and Judge Fang did not have to be told that these had once been fertile fields, before the water table had been drained out from under them.

A couple of people approached, kicking up a plume of dust as they walked, carrying a small bundle. As they drew closer, Judge Fang could see that they were horrifyingly gaunt, dressed in dirty rags. They came to the center of the rocky outcropping and laid the bundle on the ground, then turned and walked away. Judge Fang turned away from the mediatron and dismissed it with a wave of the hand; he did not have to see it to know that the bundle was a baby, probably female.

“This scene could have happened anytime in the history of China,” Dr. X said. They were sitting in a rather spartan wardroom in the vessel's superstructure. “It has always been done with us. The great rebellions of the 1800's were fueled by throngs of angry young men who could not find wives. In the darkest days of the Mao Dynasty's birth control policy, two hundred thousand little ones were exposed in this fashion”—he gestured toward the frozen image on the mediatron—“each year. Recently, with the coming of civil war and the draining of the Celestial Kingdom's aquifers, it has once again become common. The difference is that now the babies are collected. We have been doing it for three years.”

“How many?” Judge Fang said.

“A quarter of a million to date,” Dr. X said. “Fifty thousand on this ship alone.”

Judge Fang had to set his teacup down for a few moments while he grappled with this notion. Fifty thousand lives on this ship alone.

“It won't work,” Judge Fang said finally. “You can raise them this way until they are toddlers, perhaps—but what happens when they are older and bigger, and must be educated and given space to run around and play?”

“It is indeed a formidable challenge,” Dr. X said gravely, “but I trust you will take to heart the words of the Master: “Let every man consider virtue as what devolves on himself. He may not yield the performance of it even to his teacher.' I wish you good fortune, Magistrate.”

This statement had much the same effect as if Dr. X had hit the Judge over the head with a board: startling, yes, but the full impact was somehow delayed.

“I'm not sure if I follow you, Doctor.”

Dr. X crossed his wrists and held them up in the air. “I surrender. You may take me into custody. Torture will not be necessary; I have already prepared a signed confession.”

Judge Fang had not hitherto realized that Dr. X had such a well-developed sense of humor. He decided to play along. “As much as I would like to bring you to justice, Doctor, I am afraid that I cannot accept your surrender, as we are out of my jurisdiction.”

The Doctor nodded to a waiter, who swung the cabin door open to let in a cool breeze—and a view of the gaudy waterfront of the Leased Territories, suddenly no more than a mile away from them.

“As you can see, I have ordered the ships to come into your jurisdiction, Your Honor,” Dr. X said. He gestured invitingly out the door.

Judge Fang stepped out onto an open gangway and looked over the rail to see four other giant ships following in this one's wake.

Dr. X's reedy voice came out through the open door. “You may now take me, and the crew of these ships, to prison for the crime of baby-smuggling. You may also take into custody these ships—and all quarter-million of the little mice on board. I trust you can find qualified caregivers somewhere within your jurisdiction.”

Judge Fang gripped the rail with both hands and bowed his head. He was very close to clinical shock. It would be perfectly suicidal to call the Doctor's bluff. The concept of having personal responsibility for so many lives was terrifying enough in and of itself. But to think of what would eventually become of all of these little girls in the hands of the corrupt officialdom of the Coastal Republic …

Dr. X continued, “I have no doubt that you will find some way to care for them. As you have demonstrated in the case of the book and the girl, you are too wise a magistrate not to understand the importance of proper upbringing of small children. No doubt you will exhibit the same concern for each one of these quarter of a million infants as you did for one little barbarian girl.”

Judge Fang stood up straight, whirled, and strode back through the door. “Shut the door and leave the room,” he said to the waiter.

When he and the Doctor were alone together, Judge Fang faced Dr. X, descended to his knees, bent forward, and knocked his forehead against the deck three times.

“Please, Your Honor!” Dr. X exclaimed, “it is I who should be doing honor to you in this way.”

“For some time I have been contemplating a change of career,” Judge Fang said, rising to an upright kneeling position. He stopped before continuing and thought it through once more. But Dr. X had left him no way out. It would have been uncharacteristic of the Doctor to spring a trap that could be escaped.

As the Master had said, The mechanic, who wishes to do his work well, must first sharpen his tools. When you are living in any state, take service with the most worthy among its great officers, and make friends of the most virtuous among its scholars.

“Actually, I am satisfied with my career, but dissatisfied with my tribal affiliation. I have grown disgusted with the Coastal Republic and have concluded that my true home lies in the Celestial Kingdom. I have often wondered whether the Celestial Kingdom is in need of magistrates, even those as poorly qualified as I.”

“This is a question I will have to take up with my superiors,” Dr. X said. “However, given that the Celestial Kingdom currently has no magistrates whatsoever and therefore no real judicial system, I deem it likely that some role can be found for one with your superb qualifications.”

“I see now why you desired the little girl's book so strongly,” Judge Fang said. “These young ones must all be educated.”

“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.