The Diamond Age (37 page)

  Before she could get a better look, he plucked a shirt from the back of a lawn chair and shrugged it on. Then he subjected the corgis to a minute or so of close-order drill, using a patch of moss-covered flagstones as parade ground, and stringently criticizing their performance in tones loud enough to penetrate through the glass doors. The corgis pretended to listen attentively. At the end of the performance, Constable Moore burst in through the glass doors. "I shall be with you momentarily," he said, and disappeared into a back room for a quarter of an hour. When he returned, he was dressed in a tweed suit and a rough-hewn sweater over a very fine-looking white shirt. The last article looked too thin to prevent the others from being intolerably scratchy, but Constable Moore had reached the age when men can subject their bodies to the worst irritations-whiskey, cigars, woolen clothes, bagpipes-without feeling a thing or, at least, without letting on.

  "Sorry to have burst in on you," Rita said, "but there was no answer when we rang the bell."

  "I don't care," said Constable Moore, not entirely convincingly. "There's a reason why I don't live up there." He pointed upward, vaguely in the direction of the New Atlantis Clave. "Just trying to trace the root system of some infernal vine back to its source. I'm afraid it might be kudzu." The Constable narrowed his eyes as he spoke this word, and Nell, not knowing what kudzu was, supposed that if kudzu were something that could be attacked with a sword, burned, throttled, bludgeoned, or blown up, it would not stand a chance for long in Constable Moore's garden-once, that is, he got round to it.

  "Can I interest you in tea? Or"-this was directed to Nell- "some hot chocolate?"

  "Sounds lovely, but I can't stay," Rita said.

  "Then let me see you to the door," Constable Moore said, standing up. Rita looked a little startled by this abruptness, but in another moment she was gone, riding Eggshell back toward the Millhouse.

  "Nice lady," Constable Moore muttered out in the kitchen.

  "Fine of her to do what she did for you. Really a very decent lady. Perhaps not the sort who deals very well with children. Especially peculiar children."

  "Am I to live here now, sir?" Nell said.

  "Out in the garden house," he said, coming into the room with a steaming tray and nodding through the glass windows and across the garden. "Vacant for some time. Cramped for an adult, perfect for a child. The decor of this house," he said, glancing around the room, "is not really suitable for a young one."

  "Who is the scary man?" Nell said, pointing to the big painting.

  "Guan Di. Emperor Guan. Formerly a soldier named Guan Yu. He was never really an emperor, but later on he became the Chinese god of war, and they gave him the title just to be respectful. Terribly respectful, the Chinese-it's their best and worst feature."

  "How could a man become a god?" Nell asked.

  "By living in an extremely pragmatic society," said Constable Moore after some thought, and provided no further explanation. "Do you have the book, by the way?"

  "Yes, sir."

  "You didn't take it through the border?"

  "No, sir, as per your instructions."

  "That's good. The ability to follow orders is a useful thing, especially if you're living with a chap who's used to giving them." Seeing that Nell had gotten a terribly serious look on her face, the Constable huffed and looked exasperated. "It doesn't really matter, mind you! You have friends in high places. It's just that we are trying to be discreet." Constable Moore brought Nell her cup of cocoa. She needed one hand for the saucer and another for the cup, so she took her hand out of her mouth.

  "What did you do to your hand?"

  "Cut it, sir."

  "Let me see that." The Constable took her hand in his and peeled the thumb away from the palm. "Quite a nice little slash. Looks recent."

  "I got it from your swords."

  "Ah, yes. Swords are that way," the Constable said absently, then screwed up his brow and turned back to Nell. "You did not cry," he said, "and you did not complain."

  "Did you take all of those swords away from burglars?" Nell said.

  "No-that would have been relatively easy," Constable Moore said. He looked at her for a while, pondering. "Nell, you and I will do just fine together," he said. "Let me get my first-aid kit."

Carl Hollywood's activities at the Parnasse;  conversation over a milk shake;  explanation of the media system; Miranda perceives the futility of her quest.

  Miranda found Carl Hollywood sitting fifth row center in the Parnasse, holding a big sheet of smart foolscap on which he had scrawled blocking diagrams for their next live production. He apparently had it crosslinked to a copy of the script, because as she sidestepped her way down the narrow aisle, she could hear voices rather mechanically reading lines, and as she came closer she could see the little X's and 0's representing the actors moving around on the diagram of the stage that Carl had sketched out.

  The diagram also included some little arrows along the periphery, all aimed inward. Miranda realized that the arrows must be the little spotlights mounted to the fronts of the balconies, and that Carl Hollywood was programming them.

  She rolled her head back and forth, trying to loosen up her neck, and looked up at the ceiling. The angels or Muses or whatever they were, were all parading around up there, accompanied by a few cherubs. Miranda thought of Nell. She always thought of Nell.

  The script came to the end of its scene, and Carl paused it.

  "You had a question?" he asked, a bit absently.

  "I've been watching you work from my box."

  "Naughty girl. Should be making money for us."

  "Where'd you learn to do that stuff?"

  "What-directing plays?"

  "No. The technical stuff-programming the lights and so on."

  Carl turned around to look at her. "This may be at odds with your notion of how people learn things," he said, "but I had to teach myself everything. Hardly anyone does live theatre ar;Tmore, so we have to develop our own technology. I invented all of the software I was just using."

  "Did you invent the little spotlights?"

  "No. I'm not as good at the nanostuff. A friend of mine in London came up with those. We swap stuff all the time-my mediaware for his matterware."

  "Well, I want to buy you dinner somewhere," Miranda said, "and I want you to explain to me how it all works."

  "That's a rather tall order," Carl said calmly, "but I accept the invitation.
. . .

 
"Okay, do you want a complete grounding in the whole thing, starting with Turing machines, or what?" Carl said pleasantly- humoring her. Miranda decided not to become indignant. They were in a red vinyl booth at a restaurant near the Bund that supposedly simulated an American diner on the eve of the Kennedy assassination. Chinese hipsters-classic Coastal Republic types in their expensive haircuts and sharp suits-were lined up on the rotating stools along the lunch counter, sucking on their root beer floats and flashing wicked grins at any young women who came in.

  "I guess so," Miranda said.

  Carl Hollywood laughed and shook his head. "I was being facetious. You need to tell me exactly what you want to know. Why are you suddenly taking up an interest in this stuff? Aren't you happy just making a good living from it?"

  Miranda sat very still for a moment, hypnotized by the colorful flashing lights on a vintage jukebox.

  "This is related to Princess Nell, isn't it?" Carl said.

  "Is it that obvious?"

  "Yeah. Now, what do you want?"

  "I want to know who she is," Miranda said. This was the most guarded way she could put it. She didn't suppose that it would help matters to drag Carl down through the full depth of her emotions.

  "You want to backtrace a payer," Carl said. It sounded terrible when he translated it into that kind of language.

  Carl sucked powerfully on his milk shake for a bit, his eyes looking over Miranda's shoulder to the traffic on the Bund. "Princess Nell's a little kid, right?"

  "Yes. I would estimate five to seven years old."

  His eyes swiveled to lock on hers. "You can tell that?"

  "Yes," she said, in tones that warned him not to question it.

  "So she's probably not paying the bill anyway. The payer is someone else. You need to backtrace the payer and then, from there, track down Nell." Carl broke eye contact again, shook his head, and tried unsuccessfully to whistle through frozen lips. "Even the first step is impossible."

  Miranda was startled. "That seems pretty unequivocal. I expected to hear 'difficult' or 'expensive.' But-"

  "Nope. It's impossible. Or maybe"-Carl thought about it for a while-"maybe 'astronomically improbable' is a better way of putting it." Then he looked mildly alarmed as he watched Miranda's expression change. "You can't just trace the connection backward. That's not how media works."

  "How does media work, then?"

  "Look out the window. Not toward the Bund-check out Yan'an Road."

  Miranda swiveled her head around to look out the big window, which was partly painted over with colorful Coke ads and descriptions of blue plate specials. Yan'an Road, like all of the major thoroughfares in Shanghai, was filled, from the shop windows on one side to the shop windows on the other, with people on bicycles and powerskates. In many places the traffic was so dense that greater speed could be attained on foot. A few half-lane vehicles sat motionless, polished boulders in a sluggish brown stream.

  It was so familiar that Miranda didn't really see anything. "What am I looking for?"

  "Notice how no one's empty-handed? They're all carrying something."

  Carl was right. At a minimum, everyone had a small plastic bag with something in it. Many people, such as the bicyclists, carried heavier loads.

  "Now just hold that image in your head for a moment, and think about how to set up a global telecommunications network."

  Miranda laughed. "I don't have any basis for thinking about something like that."

  "Sure you do. Until now, you've been thinking in terms of the telephone system in the old passives. In that system, each transaction had two participants-the two people having the conversation. And they were connected by a wire that ran through a central switchboard. So what are the key features of this system?"

  "I don't know-I'm asking you," said Miranda.

  "Number one, only two people, or entities, can interact.

  Number two, it uses a dedicated connection that is made and then broken for the purposes of that one conversation. Number three, it is inherently centralized-it can't work unless there is a central switchboard."

  "Okay, I think I'm following you so far."

  "Our media system today-the one that you and I make our livings from-is a descendant of the phone system only insofar as we use it for essentially the same purposes, plus many, many more. But the key point to remember is that
it is totally different from the old phone system.
The old phone system-and its technological cousin, the cable TV system- tanked. It crashed and burned decades ago, and we started virtually from scratch."

  "Why? It worked, didn't it?"

  "First of all, we needed to enable interactions between more than one entity. What do I mean by entity? Well, think about the ractives. Think about
First Class to Geneva
. You're on this train- so are a couple of dozen other people. Some of those people are being racted, so in that case the entities happen to be human beings. But others-like the waiters and porters-are just software robots. Furthermore, the train is full of props: jewelry, money, guns, bottles of wine. Each one of those is also a separate piece of software-a separate entity. In the lingo, we call them objects. The train itself is another object, and so is the countryside through which it travels.

  "The countryside is a good example. It happens to be a digital map of France. Where did this map come from? Did the makers of
First Class to Geneva
send out their own team of surveyors to make a new map of France? No, of course they didn't. They used existing data-a digital map of the world that is available to any maker of ractives who needs it, for a price of course. That digital map is a separate object. It resides in the memory of a computer somewhere. Where exactly? I don't know. Neither does the ractive itself.
It doesn't matter.
The data might be in California, it might be in Paris, it might be down at the corner-or it might be distributed among all of those places and many more. It doesn't matter. Because our media system no longer works like the old system- dedicated wires passing through a central switchboard. It works like that." Carl pointed to the traffic on the street again.

  "So each person on the street is like an object?"

  "Possibly. But a better analogy is that the objects are people like us, sitting in various buildings that front on the street. Suppose that we want to send a message to someone over in Pudong. We write the message down on a piece of paper, and we go to the door and hand it to the first person who goes by and say, 'Take this to Mr. Gu in Pudong.' And he skates down the street for a while and runs into someone on a bicycle who looks like he might be headed for Pudong, and says, 'Take this to Mr. Gu.' A minute later, that person gets stuck in traffic and hands it off to a pedestrian who can negotiate the snarl a little better, and so on and so on, until eventually it reaches Mr. Gu. When Mr. Gu wants to respond, he sends us a message in the same way."

  "So there's no way to trace the path taken by a message."

  "Right. And the real situation is even more complicated. The media net was designed from the ground up to provide privacy and security, so that people could use it to transfer money. That's one reason the nationstates collapsed-as soon as the media grid was up and running, financial transactions could no longer be monitored by governments, and the tax collection systems got fubared. So if the old IRS, for example, wasn't able to trace these messages, then there's no way that you'll be able to track down Princess Nell."