Watching Napier at work, watching the medals and braid swinging and glinting on his jacket, Nell realized that it was precisely their emotional repression that made the Victorians the richest and most powerful people in the world. Their ability to submerge their feelings, far from pathological, was rather a kind of mystical art that gave them nearly magical power over Nature and over the more intuitive tribes. Such was also the strength of the Nipponese.
Before the struggle could be resolved, a smart flechette, horsefly-size, trailing a whip antenna as thick as a hair and as long as a finger, hissed in through a broken window and thunked into the back of the Fist's neck. It did not strike very hard but must have shot some poison into his brain. He sat down quickly on the floor, closed his eyes, and died in that position.
'Not very chivalrous,' Colonel Napier said distastefully. 'I suppose I have some bureaucrat up on New Chusan to thank for that.'
A cautious tour of the building turned up several more Fists who had died in the same fashion. Outside, the same old crowd of refugees, beggars, pedestrians, and cargo-carrying bicyclists streamed on, about as undisturbed as the Yangtze.
Colonel Napier did not return to Madame Ping's the next week, but Madame Ping did not blame Nell for the loss of his custom. To the contrary, she praised Nell for having correctly divined Napier's wishes and for improvising so well. 'A fine performance,' she said.
Nell had not really thought of her work as a performance, and for some reason Madame Ping's choice of words provoked her in a way that kept her awake late that night, staring into the darkness above her bunk.
Since she had been very small, she had made up stories and recited them to the Primer, which were often digested and incorporated into the Primer's stories. It had come naturally to Nell to do the same work for Madame Ping. But now her boss was calling it a performance, and Nell had to admit that it was, in a way.
Her stories were being digested, not by the Primer, but by another human being, becoming a part of that person's mind. That seemed simple enough, but the notion troubled her for a reason that did not become clear until she had lain half-asleep and fretted over it for several hours.
Colonel Napier did not know her and probably never would. All of the intercourse between him and Nell had been mediated through the actress pretending to be Miss Braithwaite, and through various technological systems.
Nonetheless she had touched him deeply. She had penetrated farther into his soul than any lover. If Colonel Napier had chosen to return the following week and Nell had not been present to make up the story for him, would he have missed her? Nell suspected that he would have. From his point of view, some indefinable essence would have been wanting, and he would have departed unsatisfied.
If this could happen to Colonel Napier in his dealings with Madame Ping's, could it happen to Nell in her dealings with the Primer? She had always felt that there was some essence in the book, something that understood her and even loved her, something that forgave her when she did wrong and appreciated what she did right.
When she'd been very young, she hadn't questioned this at all; it had been part of the book's magic. More recently she had understood it as the workings of a parallel computer of enormous size and power, carefully programmed to understand the human mind and give it what it needed.
Now she wasn't so sure. Princess Nell's recent travels through the lands of King Coyote, and the various castles with their increasingly sophisticated computers that were, in the end, nothing more than Turing machines, had caught her up in a bewildering logical circle. In Castle Turing she had learned that a Turing machine could not really understand a human being. But the Primer was, itself, a Turing machine, or so she suspected; so how could it understand Nell?
Could it be that the Primer was just a conduit, a technological system that mediated between Nell and some human being who really loved her? In the end, she knew, this was basically how all ractives worked. The idea was too alarming to consider at first, and so she circled around it cautiously, poking at it from different directions, like a cavewoman discovering fire for the first time. But as she settled in closer, she found that it warmed her and satisfied her, and by the time her mind wandered into sleep, she had become dependent upon it and would not consider going back into the cold and dark place where she had been traveling for so many years.
Carl Hollywood returns to Shanghai;
his forebears in the territory of the Lone Eagles;
Mrs. Kwan's teahouse.
Heavy rains had come rolling into Shanghai from the West, like a harbinger of the Fists of Righteous Harmony and the thundering herald of the coming Celestial Kingdom. Stepping off the airship from London, Carl Hollywood at once felt himself in a different Shanghai from the one he had left; the old city had always been wild, but in a sophisticated urban way, and now it was wild like a frontier town. He sensed this ambience before he even left the Aerodrome; it leaked in from the streets, like ozone before a thunderstorm. Looking out the windows, he could see a heavy rain rushing down, knocking all the nanotech out of the air and down into the gutters, whence it would eventually stain the Huang Pu and then the Yangtze. Whether it was the wild atmosphere or the prospect of being rained upon, he stopped his porters short of the main exit doors so that he could change hats. The hatboxes were stacked on one of the carts; his bowler went into the smallest and topmost box, which was empty, and then he yanked the largest box out from underneath, popping the stack, and took out a ten-gallon Stetson of breathtaking width and sweep, almost like a head-mounted umbrella. Casting an eye into the street, where a rushing brown stream carried litter, road dust, choleraridden sewage, and tons of captive nanotech toward the storm drains, he slipped off his leather shoes and exchanged them for a pair of handtooled cowboy boots, made from hides of gaudy reptiles and avians, the pores of which had been corked with mites that would keep his feet dry even if he chose to wade through the gutters.
Thus reconfigured, Carl Hollywood stepped out into the streets of Shanghai. As he came out the doors of the Aerodrome, his duster billowed in the cold wind of the storm and even the beggars stepped away from him. He paused to light a cigar before proceeding and was not molested; even the refugees, who were starving or at least claimed to be, derived more enjoyment from simply looking at him than they would have from the coins in his pocket. He walked the four blocks to his hotel, pursued doggedly by the porters and by a crowd of youngsters entranced by the sight of a real cowboy.
Carl's grandfather was a Lone Eagle who had ridden out from the crowding and squalor of Silicon Valley in the 1990s and homesteaded a patch of abandoned ranch along a violent cold river on the eastern slope of the Wind River Range. From there he had made a comfortable living as a freelance coder and consultant. His wife had left him for the bright lights and social life of California and been startled when he had managed to persuade a judge that he was better equipped to raise their son than she was. Grandfather had raised Carl Hollywood's father mostly in the out-of-doors, hunting and fishing and chopping wood when he wasn't sitting inside studying his calculus. As the years went by, they had gradually been joined by like-minded sorts with similar stories to tell, so that by the time of the Interregnum they had formed a community of several hundred, loosely spread over a few thousand square miles of nearwilderness but, in the electronic sense, as tightly knit as any small village in the Old West. Their technological prowess, prodigious wealth, and numerous large weapons had made them a dangerous group, and the odd pickup-truck-driving desperadoes who attacked an isolated ranch had found themselves surrounded and outgunned with cataclysmic swiftness. Grandfather loved to tell stories of these criminals, how they had tried to excuse their own crimes by pleading that they were economically disadvantaged or infected with the disease of substance abuse, and how the Lone Eagles— many of whom had overcome poverty or addiction themselves-had dispatched them with firing squads and left them posted around the edge of their territory as NO TRESPASSING signs that even the illiterate could read.
The advent of the Common Economic Protocol had settled things down and, in the eyes of the old-timers, begun to soften and ruin the place. There was nothing like getting up at three in the morning and riding the defensive perimeter in subzero cold, with a loaded rifle, to build up one's sense of responsibility and community. Carl Hollywood's clearest and best memories were of going on such rides with his father. But as they squatted on packed snow boiling coffee over a fire, they would listen to the radio and hear stories about the jihad raging across Xinjiang, driving the Han back into the east, and about the first incidents of nanotech terrorism in Eastern Europe.
