They carry an umbrella from Old Bond Street. They have a book of Sherlock Holmes stories. They play in Victorian ractives, and when they have to spend their natural urges, they come to me, and I provide them with a scripted fantasy that was originally requested by some gentleman who came sneaking across the Causeway from New Atlantis.' Somewhat uncharacteristically, Madame Ping turned two of her claws into walking legs and made them scurry across the tabletop, like a furtive Vicky gent trying to slip into Shanghai without being caught on a monitor. Recognizing her cue, Nell covered her mouth with one gloved hand and tittered.
'This way, Madame Ping does a magic trick– she turns one satisfied client from New Atlantis into a thousand clients from all tribes.'
'I must confess that I am surprised,' Nell ventured. 'Inexperienced as I am in these matters, I had supposed that each tribe would exhibit a different preference.'
'We change the script a little,' Madame Ping said, 'to allow for cultural differences. But the story never changes. There are many people and many tribes, but only so many stories.'
Peculiar practices in the woods;
the Reformed Distributed Republic;
an extraordinary conversation in a log cabin;
CryptNet;
the Hackworths depart.
Half a day's slow eastward ride took them well up into the foothills of the Cascades, where the clouds, flowing in eternally from the Pacific, were forced upward by the swelling terrain and unburdened themselves of their immense stores of moisture. The trees were giants, rising branchless to far above their heads, the trunks aglow with moss. The landscape was a checkerboard of old-growth forest alternating with patches that had been logged in the previous century; Hackworth tried to guide Kidnapper toward the latter, because the scarcity of undergrowth and deadfalls made for a smoother ride. They passed through the remains of an abandoned timber town, half small clapboard buildings and half moss-covered and rust-streaked mobile homes. Through their dirty windows, faded signs were dimly visible, stenciled THIS HOUSEHOLD DEPENDS ON TIMBER MONEY. Ten-foot saplings grew up through cracks in the streets. Narrow hedges of blueberry shrubs and blackberry canes sprouted from the rain gutters of houses, and gigantic old cars, resting askew on flat and cracked tires, had become trellises for morning glories and vine maples. They also passed through an old mining encampment that had been abandoned even longer ago. For the most part, the signs of modern habitation were relatively subtle. The houses up here tended to be of the same unassuming style favored by the software khans closer to Seattle, and from place to place a number of them would cluster around a central square with playground equipment, cafйs, stores, and other amenities. He and Fiona stopped at two such places to exchange ucus for coffee, sandwiches, and cinnamon rolls.
The unmarked, decussating paths would have been confusing to anyone but a native. Hackworth had never been here before. He had gotten the coordinates from the second fortune cookie in Kidnapper's glove compartment, which was much less cryptic than the first had been. He had no way to tell whether he was really going anywhere. His faith did not begin to waver until evening approached, the eternal clouds changed from silver to dark gray, and he noticed that the chevaline was taking them higher and toward less densely populated ground.
Then he saw the rocks and knew he had chosen the right path. A wall of brown granite, dark and damp from the condensing fog, materialized before them. They heard it before they saw it; it made no sound, but its presence changed the acoustics of the forest. The fog was closing in, and they could barely see the silhouettes of scrubby, wind-gnarled mountain trees lined up uncomfortably along the top of the cliff.
Amid those trees was the silhouette of a human being.
'Quiet,' Hackworth mouthed to his daughter, then reined Kidnapper to a stop.
The person had a short haircut and wore a bulky waist-length jacket with stretch pants; they could tell by the curve of the hips that it was a woman. Around those hips she had fastened an arrangement of neon green straps: a climbing harness. She wore no other outdoor paraphernalia, though, no knapsack or helmet, and behind her on the clifftop they could just make out the silhouette of a horse, prodding the ground with its nose. From time to time she checked her wristwatch.
A tenuous neon strand of rope hung down the bulging face of the cliff from where the woman stood. The last several meters dangled loosely in the mist in front of a small cozy pocket sheltered by the overhang.
Hackworth turned around to get Fiona's attention, then pointed something out: a second person, making his way along the base of the cliff, out of sight of the woman above. Moving carefully and quietly, he eventually reached the shelter of the overhang. He gingerly took the dangling end of the rope and tied it to something, apparently a piece of hardware fixed into the rock. Then he left the way he had come, moving silently and staying close to the cliff.
The woman remained still and silent for several minutes, checking her watch more and more frequently.
Finally she backed several paces away from the edge of the cliff, took her hands out of her jacket pockets, seemed to draw a few deep breaths, then ran forward and launched herself into space. She screamed as she did it, a scream to drive out her own fear. The rope ran through a pulley fixed near the top of the cliff.
She fell for a few meters, the rope tightened, the man's knot held, and the rope, which was somewhat elastic, brought her to a firm but not violent stop just above the wicked pile of rubble and snags at the base of the cliff. Swinging at the end of the rope, she grabbed it with one hand and leaned back, baring her throat to the mist, allowing herself to dangle listlessly for a few minutes, basking in relief.
A third person, previously unseen, emerged from the trees. This one was a middle-aged man, and he was wearing a jacket that had a few vaguely official touches such as an armband and an insignia on the breast pocket. He walked beneath the dangling woman and busied himself for a few moments beneath the overhang, eventually releasing the rope and letting her safely to the ground. The woman detached herself from the rope and then the harness and fell into a businesslike discussion with this man, who poured both of them hot drinks from a thermal flask.
'Have you heard of these people? The Reformed Distributed Republic,' Hackworth said to Fiona, still keeping his voice low.
'I am only familiar with the First.'
'The First Distributed Republic doesn't hang together very well– in a way, it was never designed to. It was started by a bunch of people who were very nearly anarchists. As you've probably learned in school, it's become awfully factionalized.'
'I have some friends in the F.D.R.,' Fiona said.
'Your neighbors?'
'Yes.'
'Software khans,' Hackworth said. 'The F.D.R. works for them, because they have something in common-old software money. They're almost like Victorians– a lot of them cross over and take the Oath as they get older. But for the broad middle class, the F.D.R. offers no central religion or ethnic identity.'
'So it becomes balkanized.'
'Precisely. These people,' Hackworth said, pointing to the man and the woman at the base of the cliff, 'are R.D.R., Reformed Distributed Republic. Very similar to F.D.R., with one key difference.'
'The ritual we just witnessed?'
'Ritual is a good description,' Hackworth said. 'Earlier today, that man and that woman were both visited by messengers who gave them a place and time-nothing else. In this case, the woman's job was to jump off that cliff at the given time. The man's job was to tie the end of the rope before she jumped. A very simple job-'
'But if he had failed to do it, she'd be dead,' Fiona said.
'Precisely. The names are pulled out of a hat. The participants have only a few hours' warning. Here, the ritual is done with a cliff and a rope, because there happened to be a cliff in the vicinity. In other R.D.R. nodes, the mechanism might be different. For example, person A might go into a room, take a pistol out of a box, load it with live ammunition, put it back in the box, and then leave the room for ten minutes. During that time, person B is supposed to enter the room and replace the live ammunition with a dummy clip having the same weight. Then person A comes back into the room, puts the gun to his head, and pulls the trigger.'
'But person A has no way of knowing whether person B has done his job?'
'Exactly.'
'What is the role of the third person?'
'A proctor. An official of the R.D.R. who sees to it that the two participants don't try to communicate.'
