second rank. A ruby button would have put him at the very highest level. In Western terms this made Dr. X roughly equivalent to a lesser cabinet minister or three-star general. Hackworth supposed that this was the highest rank of Mandarin permitted to converse with barbarians.
Hackworth sat down across the table from Dr. X. A young woman padded out of the kitchen on silk slippers and gave Hackworth his own tumbler full of green tea. Watching her mince away, Hackworth was only mildly shocked to see that her feet were no more than four inches long. There must be better ways to do it now, maybe by regulating the growth of the tarsal bones during adolescence. It probably didn't even hurt.
Realizing this, Hackworth also realized, for the first time, that he had done the right thing ten years ago.
Dr. X was watching him and might as well have been reading his mind. This seemed to put him in a pensive mood. He said nothing for a while, just gazed out the window and occasionally sipped his tea. This was fine with Hackworth, who had had a long ride.
'Have you learned anything from your ten-year sentence?' Dr. X finally said.
'It would seem so. But I have trouble pulling it up,' Hackworth said.
This was a bit too idiomatic for Dr. X. By way of explanation, Hackworth flipped out a ten-year-old card bearing Dr. X's dynamic chop. As the old fisherman hauled the dragon out of the water, Dr. X suddenly got it, and grinned appreciatively. This was showing a lot of emotion– assuming it was genuine– but age and war had made him reckless.
'Have you found the Alchemist?' Dr. X said.
'Yes,' Hackworth said. 'I am the Alchemist.'
'When did you know this?'
'Only very recently,' Hackworth said. 'Then I understood it all in an instant– pulled it up,' he said, pantomiming the act of reeling in a fish. 'The Celestial Kingdom was far behind Nippon and Atlantis in nanotech. The Fists could always have burned the barbarians' Feed lines, but this would only have plunged the peasants into poverty and made the people long for foreign goods. The decision was made to leapfrog the barbarian tribes by developing Seed technology. At first you pursued the project in cooperation with second-tier phyles like Israel, Armenia, and Greater Serbia, but they proved unreliable. Again and again your carefully cultivated networks were scattered by Protocol Enforcement.
'But through these failures you made contact for the first time with CryptNet, whom you doubtless view as just another triad-a contemptible band of conspirators. However, CryptNet was tied in with something much deeper and more interesting-the society of the Drummers. With their flaky and shallow Western perspective, CryptNet didn't grasp the full power of the Drummers' collective mind. But you got it right away.
'All you required to initiate the Seed project was the rational, analytical mind of a nanotechnological engineer. I fit the bill perfectly. You dropped me into the society of the Drummers like a seed into fertile soil, and my knowledge spread through them and permeated their collective mind-as their thoughts spread into my own unconscious. They became like an extension of my own brain. For years I laboured on the problem, twenty-four hours a day.
'Then, before I was able to finish the job, I was pulled out by my superiors at Protocol Enforcement. I was close to being finished. But not finished yet.'
'Your superiors had uncovered our plan?'
'Either they are completely ignorant, or else they know everything and are pretending ignorance,' Hackworth said.
'But surely you have told them everything now,' Dr. X said almost inaudibly.
'If I were to answer that question, you would have no reason not to kill me,' Hackworth said.
Dr. X nodded, not so much to concede the point as to express sympathy with Hackworth's admirably cynical train of thought-as though Hackworth, after a series of seemingly inconclusive moves, had suddenly flipped over a large territory of stones on a go board.
'There are those who would advocate that course, because of what has happened with the girls,' Dr. X said.
Hackworth was so startled to hear this that he became somewhat lightheaded for a moment and too self- conscious to speak
'Have the Primers proved useful?' he finally said, trying not to sound giddy.
Dr. X grinned broadly for a moment. Then the emotion dropped beneath the surface again, like a breaching whale. 'They must have been useful to someone,' he said. 'My opinion is that we made a mistake in saving the girls.'
'How can this act of humanity possibly have been a mistake?'
Dr. X considered it. 'It would be more correct to say that, although it was virtuous to save them, it was mistaken to believe that they could be raised properly. We lacked the resources to raise them individually, and so we raised them with books. But the only proper way to raise a child is within a family. The Master could have told us as much, had we listened to his words.'
'Some of those girls will one day choose to follow in the ways of the Master,' Hackworth said, 'and then the wisdom of your decisions will be demonstrated.'
This seemed to be a genuinely new thought to Dr. X. His gaze returned to the window. Hackworth sensed that the matter of the girls and the Primers had been concluded.
'I will be open and frank,' said Dr. X after some ruminative tea slurping, 'and you will not believe that I am being so, because it is in the heads of those from the Outer Tribes to think that we never speak directly. But perhaps in time you will see the truth of my words.
'The Seed is almost finished. When you left, the building of it slowed down very much– more than we expected. We thought that the Drummers, after ten years, had absorbed your knowledge and could continue the work without you. But there is something in your mind that you have gained through your years of scholarly studies that the Drummers, if they ever had it, have given up and cannot get back unless they come out of the darkness and live their lives in the light again.
'The war against the Coastal Republic reaches a critical moment. We ask you to help us now.'
'I must say that it is nearly inconceivable for me to help you at this point,' Hackworth said, 'unless it would be in the interest of my tribe, which does not strike me as a likely prospect.'
'We need you to help us finish building the Seed,' Dr. X said doggedly.
Only decades of training in emotional repression kept Hackworth from laughing out loud. 'Sir. You are a worldly man and a scholar. Certainly you are aware of the position of Her Majesty's government, and indeed of the Common Economic Protocol itself, on the subject of Seed technologies.'
Dr. X raised one hand a few inches from the tabletop, palm down, and pawed once at the air. Hackworth recognized it as the gesture that well-to-do Chinese used to dismiss beggars, or even to call bullshit on people during meetings. 'They are wrong,' he said.
'They do not understand. They think of the Seed from a Western perspective. Your cultures– and that of the Coastal Republic– are poorly organized. There is no respect for order, no reverence for authority. Order must be enforced from above lest anarchy break out. You are afraid to give the Seed to your people because they can use it to make weapons, viruses, drugs of their own design, and destroy order. You enforce order through control of the Feed. But in the Celestial Kingdom, we are disciplined, we revere authority, we have order within our own minds, and hence the family is orderly, the village is orderly, the state is orderly. In our hands the Seed would be harmless.'
'Why do you need it?' Hackworth said.
'We must have technology to live,' Dr. X said, 'but we must have it with our own.'
Hackworth thought for a moment that Dr. X was referring to the beverage. But the Doctor began to trace characters on the tabletop, his hand moving deftly and gracefully, the brocade sleeve rasping across the plastic surface.
