The Diamond Age (38 page)

  "Okay, I guess that answers my question," Miranda said.

  "Good!" Carl said brightly. He was obviously pleased that he'd been able to help Miranda, and so she didn't tell him how his words had really made her feel. She treated it as an acting challenge: Could she fool Carl Hollywood, who was sharper about acting than just about anyone, into thinking that she was fine?

  Apparently she did. He escorted her back to her flat, in a hundred story high-rise just across the river in Pudong, and she held it together long enough to bid him good-bye, get out of her clothes, and run a bath. Then she climbed into the hot water and dissolved in awful, wretched, blubbery, self-pitying tears.

  Eventually she got it under control. She had to keep this in perspective. She could still interact with Nell and still did, every day. And if she paid attention, sooner or later she would find some way to penetrate the curtain. Barring that, she was beginning to understand that Nell, whoever she was, had been marked out in some way, and that in time she would become a very important person. Within a few years, Miranda expected to be reading about her in the newspaper. Feeling better, she got out of the bath and climbed into bed, getting a good night's sleep so she'd be ready for her next day of taking care of Nell.

General description of life with the Constable;  his avocations and other peculiarities;  a disturbing sight; Nell learns about his past;  a conversation over dinner.

  The garden house had two rooms, one for sleeping and one for playing. The playing room had a set of double doors, made of many small windows, that opened onto Constable Moore's garden. Nell had been told to be careful with the little windows, because they were made of real glass. The glass was bubbly and uneven, like the surface of a pot of water just before it breaks into a boil, and Nell liked to look at things through it because, even though she knew it was not as strong as a common window, it made her feel safer, as though she were hiding behind something.

  The garden itself was forever trying to draw the little house into it; many vast-growing vines of ivy, wisteria, and briar rose were deeply engaged in the important project of climbing the walls, using the turtleshell-colored copper drainpipes, and the rough surfaces of the brick and mortar, as fingerholds. The slate roof of the cottage was phosphorescent with moss. From time to time, Constable Moore would charge into the breach with a pair of trimmers and cut away some of the vines that so prettily framed the view through Nell's glass doors, lest they imprison her.

  During Nell's second year living in the cottage, she asked the Constable if she might have a bit of garden space of her own, and after an early phase of profound shock and misgivings, the Constable eventually pulled up a few flagstones, exposing a small plot, and caused one of the Dovetail artisans to manufacture some copper window boxes and attach them to the cottage walls. In the plot, Nell planted some carrots, thinking about her friend Peter who had vanished so long ago, and in the window boxes she planted some geraniums. The Primer taught her how to do it and also reminded her to dig up a carrot sprout every few days and examine it so that she could learn how they grew. Nell learned that if she held the Primer above the carrot and stared at a certain page, it would turn into a magic illustration that would grow larger and larger until she could see the tiny little fibers that grew out of the roots, and the one-celled organisms clinging to the fibers, and the mitochondria inside them. The same trick worked on anything, and she spent many days examining flies' eyes, bread mold, and blood cells that she got out of her own body by pricking her finger. She could also go up on hilltops during cold clear nights and use the Primer to see the rings of Saturn and the moons of Jupiter.

  Constable Moore continued to work his daily shift at the gatehouse. When he came home in the evening, he and Nell would often dine together inside his house. At first they got food straight from the M.C., or else the Constable would fry up something simple, like sausage and eggs. During this period, Princess Nell and the other characters in the Primer found themselves eating a lot of sausage and eggs too, until Duck lodged a protest and taught the Princess how to cook healthier food. Nell then got in the habit of cooking a healthy meal with salad and vegetables, several afternoons a week after she got home from school. There was some grumbling from the Constable, but he always cleaned up his plate and sometimes washed the dishes.

  The Constable spent a lot of time reading books. Nell was welcome to be in his house when he was doing this, as long as she was quiet. Frequently he would shoo her out, and then he would get in touch with some old friend of his over the big mediatron on the wall of his library. Usually Nell would just go back to her little cottage during these times, but sometimes, especially if the moon was full, she would wander around in the garden. This seemed larger than it really was by virtue of being divided into many small compartments. On late full-moon nights, her favorite place was a grove of tall green bamboo with some pretty rocks strewn around. She would sit with her back against a rock, read her Primer, and occasionally hear sound emanating from the inside of Constable Moore's house as he talked on the mediatron: mostly deep bellowing laughter and explosions of good-natured profanity. For quite some time she assumed that it was not the Constable who was making these sounds, but rather whomever he was talking to; because in her presence the Constable was always very polite and reserved, albeit somewhat eccentric. But one night she heard loud moaning noises coming from his house, and crept down out of the bamboo grove to see what was happening.

  From her vantage point through the glass doors, she couldn't see the mediatron, which was facing away from her. Its light illuminated the whole room, painting the normally warm and cozy space with lurid flashing colors, and throwing long jagged shadows. Constable Moore had shoved all the furniture and other obstructions to the walls and rolled up the Chinese carpet to expose the floor, which Nell had always assumed was made of oak, like the floor in her cottage; but the floor was, in fact, a large mediatron itself, glowing rather dimly compared to the one on the wall, and displaying a lot of rather high-resolution material: text documents and detailed graphics with the occasional dine feed. The Constable was down on his hands and knees amidst this, bawling like a child, the tears collecting in the shallow saucers of his half-glasses and spattering onto the mediatron, which illuminated them weirdly from below.

  Nell wanted badly to go in and comfort him, but she was too scared. She stood and watched, frozen in indecision, and realized as she did so that the flashes of light coming from the mediatrons reminded her of explosions-or rather pictures of explosions. She backed away and went back into her little house.

  Half an hour later, she heard the unearthly noise of Constable Moore's bagpipes emanating from the bamboo grove. In the past he had occasionally picked them up and made a few squealing noises, but this was the first time she'd heard a formal recital. She was not an expert on the pipes, but she thought he sounded not bad. He was playing a slow number, a coronach, and it was so sad that it almost tore Nell's heart asunder; the sight of the Constable weeping helplessly on his hands and knees was not half so sad as the music he was playing now.

  In time he moved on to a faster and happier pibroch. Nell emerged from her cottage into the garden. The Constable was just a silhouette slashed into a hundred ribbons by the vertical shafts of the bamboo, but when she moved back and forth, some trick of her eye reassembled the image. He was standing in a pool of moonlight. He had changed clothes: now he was wearing his kilt, and a shirt and beret that seemed to belong to some sort of a uniform. When his lungs were empty, he would draw in a great breath, his chest would heave, and an array of silvery pins and insignia would glimmer in the moonlight.

  He had left the doors open. She walked into the house, not bothering to be stealthy because she knew that she could not possibly be heard over the sound of the bagpipe.

  The wall and the floor were both giant mediatrons, and both had been covered with a profusion of media windows, hundreds and hundreds of separate panes, like a wall on a busy city street where posters and bills have been pasted up in such abundance that they have completely covered the substrate. Some of the panes were only as big as the palm of Nell's hand, and some of them were the size of wall posters. Most of the ones on the floor were windows into written documents, grids of numbers, schematic diagrams (lots of organizational trees), or wonderful maps, drawn with breathtaking precision and clarity, with rivers, mountains, and villages labeled in Chinese characters. As Nell surveyed this panorama, she flinched once or twice from the impression that something small was creeping along the floor; but there were no bugs in the room, it was just an illusion created by small fluctuations in the maps and in the rows and columns of numbers. These things were ractive, just like the words in the Primer; but unlike the Primer, they were responding not to what Nell did but, she supposed, to events far away.

  When she finally raised her gaze from the floor to view the mediatrons lining the walls, she saw that most of the panes there were much larger, and most of them carried dine feeds, and most of these had been frozen. The images were very sharp and clear. Some of them were landscapes: a stretch of rural road, a bridge across a dried-up river, a dusty village with flames bubbling from some of the houses. Some of them were pictures of people: talking-head shots of Chinese men wearing dirty uniforms with dark mountains, clouds of dust, or drab green vehicles as backdrops.

  In one of the dine feeds, a man was lying on the ground, his dusty uniform almost the same color as the dirt. Suddenly this image moved; the feed had not been frozen like the others. Someone was walking past the camera: a Chinese man in indigo pajamas, decorated with scarlet ribbons tied round his head and his waist, though these had gone brown with grime. When he had passed out of the frame, Nell focused on the other man, the one who was lying in the dust, and she realized for the first time that he did not have a head.

  Constable Moore must have heard Nell's screaming over the sound of his bagpipes, for he was in the room within a few moments, shouting commands to the mediatrons, which all went black and became mere walls and a floor. The only image remaining in the room now was the big painting of Guan Di, the god of war, who glowered down upon them as always. Constable Moore was extremely ill at ease whenever Nell showed any kind of emotion, but he seemed more comfortable with hysteria than he was with, say, an invitation to play house or an attack of the giggles. He picked Nell up, carried her across the room at arm's length, and set her down in a deep leather chair. He left the room for a moment and came back with a large glass of water, then carefully molded her hands around it. "You must breathe deeply and drink water," he was saying, almost sotto voce; he seemed to have been saying it for a long time.

  She was a little surprised to find that she did not cry forever, though a few aftershocks came along and had to be managed in the same way. She kept trying to say, "I can't stop crying," stabbing the syllables one at a time.

  The tenth or eleventh time she said this, Constable Moore said, "You can't stop drying because you're all fucked up psychologically." He said it in a kind of bored professional tone that might have sounded cruel; but to Nell it was, for some reason, most reassuring.

  "What do you mean?" she said finally, when she èould speak without her throat going all funny.

  "I mean you're a veteran, girl, just like me, and you've got scars"-he suddenly ripped his shirt open, buttons flying and bouncing all over the room, to reveal his particolored torso-"like I do. The difference is, I know I'm a veteran. You persist in thinking you're just a little girl, like those bloody Vickys you go to school with."
. . .

 
From time to time, perhaps once a year, he would turn down the offer of dinner, put that uniform on, climb onto a horse, and ride off in the direction of the New Atlantis Clave. The horse would bring him back in the wee hours of the morning, so drunk he could barely remain in the saddle. Sometimes Nell would help get him into bed, and after he had lapsed into unconsciousness, she could examine his pins and medals and ribbons by candlelight. The ribbons in particular used a fairly elaborate color-coding system.

  But the Primer had some pages in the back that were called the Encyclopædia, and by consulting these, Nell was able to establish that Constable Moore was, or at least had used to be, a brigadier general in the Second Brigade of the Third Division of the First Protocol Enforcement Expeditionary Force. One ribbon implied that he had spent some time as an exchange officer in a Nipponese division, but his home division was apparently the Third. According to the Encyclopædia, the Third was often known as the Junkyard Dogs or, simply, the Mongrels, because it tended to draw its members from the White Diaspora: Uitlanders, Ulster Loyalists, whites from Hong Kong, and rootless sorts from all of the Anglo-American parts of the world.

  One of the pins on the Constable's uniform said that he had graduate-level training in nanotechnological engineering. This was consistent with his belonging to the Second Brigade, which specialized in nanotech warfare. The Encyclopædia said that it had been formed some thirty years ago to tackle some nasty fighting in Eastern Europe where primitive nanotech weapons were being employed.

  A couple of years later, the division had been sent off to South China in a panic. Trouble had been brewing there since Zhang Han Hua had gone on his Long Ride and forced the merchants to kowtow. Zhang had personally liberated several lao gai damps, where slave laborers were hard at work making trinkets for export to the West, smashing computer display screens with the massive dragon's-head grip of his cane, beating the overseers into bloody heaps on the ground. Zhang's "investigations" of various thriving businesses, mostly in the south, had thrown millions of people out of work. They had gone into the streets and raised hell and been joined by sympathetic units of the People's Liberation Army. The rebellion was eventually put down by PLA units from the north, but the leaders had vanished into the "concrete countryside" of the Pearl Delta, and so Zhang had been forced to set up a permanent garrison state in the south. The northern troops had kept order crudely but effectively for a few years, until, one night, an entire division of them, some 15,000 men, was wiped out by an infestation of nanosites.