looked a bit unsteady and shifted her feet to maintain her balance; though this might have been the undertow. Carl realized that she had never been addressed in this way before; that, until she had been recognized in this fashion by Victoria, she had never fully realized her position.
'The woman you seek is named Miranda,' he said.
All thoughts of crowns, queens, and armies seemed to vanish from Nell's mind, and she was just a young lady again, looking for-what? Her mother? Her teacher? Her friend? Carl Hollywood spoke to Nell in a low gentle voice, projecting just enough to be heard over the strumming of the waves. He spoke to her of Miranda, and of the book, and of the old stories about the deeds of Princess Nell, which he had watched from the wings, as it were, by looking in on Miranda's feed many years ago at the Parnasse.
Over the next two days many of the refugees on the shore got away on air or surface ships, but a few of these were destroyed in spectacular fashion before they could get out of range of the Celestial Kingdom's weaponry. Three-quarters of the Mouse Army evacuated itself through the technique of stripping naked and walking into the ocean en masse, linked arm-in-arm into a flexible and unsinkable raft that gradually, slowly, exhaustingly paddled across the sea to New Chusan. Rumors spread rapidly up and down the length of the coast; the tribal borders seemed to accelerate rather than hinder this process as interfaces between languages and cultures spawned new variants of each rumor, tailored to the local fears and prejudices. The most popular rumor was that the Celestials planned to give everyone safe passage and that the attacks were being carried out by intelligent mines that had run out of control or, at worst, by a few fanatical commanders who were defying orders and who would soon be brought to heel. There was a second, stranger rumor that gave some people an incentive to remain on the shore and not entrust themselves to the evacuation ships: A young woman with a book and a sword was creating magical tunnels from out of the deep that would carry them all away to safety. Such ideas were naturally met with skepticism among more rational cultures, but on the morning of the sixth day of the siege, the neap tide carried a peculiar omen up onto the sand: a harvest of translucent eggs the size of beach balls. 'When their fragile shells were torn open, they were found to contain sculpted backpacks pierced with a fractal pattern of delicate louvers. A stiff hose extended from the top and connected to a facemask. Under the circumstances, it was not difficult to divine the use of these objects. People strapped the packs onto their backs, slipped on the facemasks, and plunged into the water. The backpacks acted like the gills of a fish and provided a steady supply of oxygen.
The gill packs did not carry any tribal identification; they merely washed up onto the beach, by the thousands, with each high tide, cast up organically by the sea. The Atlantans, Nipponese, and others each assumed that they had come from their own tribes. But many perceived a connection between this and the rumors of Princess Nell and the tunnels beneath the waves. Such people migrated toward the center of the Pudong coast, where the tiny, weak, and flaky tribes had all been concentrated. This contraction of the defensive line became inevitable as the number of defenders was shrunk by the evacuation. Borders between tribes became unstable and finally dissolved, and on the fifth day of the siege the barbarians had all become fungible and formed into a huddle on the uttermost point of the Pudong Peninsula, several tens of thousands of persons packed into an area not exceeding a few city blocks. Beyond that were the Chinese refugees, mostly persons strongly identified with the Coastal Republic who knew that they could never blend into the Celestial Kingdom. These did not dare to invade the camp of the refugees, who were still armed with powerful weapons, but by advancing an inch at a time and never retreating, they insensibly shrank the perimeter so that many barbarians found themselves standing knee-deep in the ocean.
The rumor spread that the woman called Princess Nell had a wizard and adviser named Carl, who had appeared out of nowhere one day knowing nearly everything that Princess Nell did, and a few things she didn't. This man, according to rumor, had in his possession a number of magic keys that gave him and the Princess power to speak with the Drummers who lived beneath the waves.
On the seventh day, Princess Nell walked naked into the sea at dawn, vanished beneath waves turned pink by the sunrise, and did not return. Carl followed her a minute later, though unlike the Princess he took the precaution of wearing a gill pack. Then all of the barbarians stepped into the ocean, leaving their filthy clothes strewn across the beach, relinquishing the last foothold of Chinese soil to the Celestial Kingdom. They all walked into the ocean until their heads disappeared. The rearguard was made up of the last part of the Mouse Army, which charged naked into the surf, linked up into a raft, and made its way slowly out to sea, nudging a few sick and wounded along with them in makeshift rafts. By the time the last girl's foot broke contact with the sandy ocean bottom, the end of the land had already been claimed by a man with a scarlet girdle round his waist, who stood on the shore laughing to think that now the Middle Kingdom was at last a whole country once more.
The last foreign devil to depart from the Middle Kingdom was a blond Victorian gentleman with gray eyes, who stood in the waves for some time looking back over Pudong before he turned around and continued his descent. As the sea rose over him, it lifted the bowler from his head, and the hat continued to bob on the tide for some minutes as the Chinese detonated strings of firecrackers on the shore and tiny shreds of the red paper wrappers drifted over the sea like cherry petals.
On one of her forays into the surf, Nell had encountered a man– a Drummer– who had come swimming out of the deep, naked except for a gill pack. This should have astonished her; instead, she had known he was out there before she saw him, and when he came close, she could feel things happening in her mind that were coming in from outside. There was something in her brain that made her connected to the Drummers.
Nell had drawn up some general plans and given them to her engineers for further elaboration, and they had given them to Carl, who had taken them to a functioning portable M.C. in the New Atlantan camp and compiled a little system for examining and manipulating nanotechnological devices.
In the dark, motes of light sparkled in Nell's flesh, like airplane beacons in the night sky. They scraped one of these away with a scalpel and examined it. They found similar devices circulating in her bloodstream. These things, they realized, must have been put into Nell's blood when she was raped. It was clear that the sparkling lights in Nell's flesh were beacons signaling to others across the gulf that separates each of us from our neighbors.
Carl opened one of the things from Nell's blood and found a rod logic system inside, and a tape drive containing some few gigabytes of data. The data was divided into discrete chunks, each one of which was separately encrypted. Carl tried all of the keys that he had obtained from John Percival Hackworth and found that one of them– Hackworth's key– unlocked some of the chunks. When he examined the decrypted contents, he discovered fragments of a plan for some kind of nanotechnological device.
They drew blood from several volunteers and found that one of them had the same little devices in his blood. When they put two of these devices in close proximity, they locked onto one another using lidar and embraced, exchanging data and performing some sort of computation that threw off waste heat.
The devices lived in the blood of the human race like viruses and passed from one person to the next during sex or any other exchange of bodily fluids; they were smart packets of data, just like the ones traversing the media network, and by mating with one another in the blood, they formed a vast system of communication, parallel to and probably linked with the dry Net of optical lines and copper wires. Like the dry Net, the wet Net could be used for doing computations– for running programs. And it was now clear that John Percival Hackworth was using it for exactly that, running some kind of vast distributed program of his own devising. He was designing something.
'Hackworth is the Alchemist,' Nell said, 'and he is using the wet Net to design the Seed.'
Half a kilometer offshore, the tunnels began. Some of them must have been there for many years, for they were rough as tree trunks, encrusted with barnacles and algae. But it was clear that in the last few days they had forked and split organically, like roots questing for moisture; clean new tubes forced their way out through the encrustation and ran uphill toward the tide line, splitting again and again until many orifices presented themselves to the refugees.
The shoots terminated in lips that grabbed people and drew them in, like the tip of an elephant's trunk, accepting the refugees with a minimum of seawater. The tunnels were lined with mediatronic images urging them forward into the deep; it always seemed as though a warm dry well-lit space awaited them just a bit farther down the line. But the light moved along with the viewer so that they were drawn down the tunnels in a kind of peristalsis. The refugees came to the main tunnel, the old encrusted one, and continued moving on, now packed together in a solid mass, until they were disgorged into a large open cavity far below the surface of the ocean. Here, food and fresh water awaited them and they ate hungrily.
Two people did not eat or drink except from the provisions they had brought with them; these were Nell and Carl. After they had discovered the nanosites in Nell's flesh that made her a part of the Drummers, Nell had stayed up through the night and designed a counternanosite, one that would seek out and destroy the Drummers' devices.
