Diamond Age or a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer Read online

  “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 highlevel 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 tha
n 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 retros
pect, 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.