river. Walk to the end of that pier until you are standing on the red part and await further instructions.'
Bud moved tentatively at first, but Judge Fang gestured impatiently, so finally he went out the door and down the stairway and out onto the Bund, the street that ran along the waterfront of the Huang Pu River, and that was lined with big old European-style buildings. A pedestrian tunnel took him under the road to the actual waterfront, which was crowded with Chinese people strolling around, and legless wretches dragging themselves hither and thither.
Some middle-aged Chinese people had set up a sound system playing archaic music and were ballroom- dancing. The music and dance style would have been offensively quaint to Bud at any other point in his life, but now for some reason the sight of these somewhat fleshy, settled-looking people, twirling around gently in one another's arms, made him feel sad.
Eventually he found the right pier. As he strolled out onto it, he had to shoulder his way past some slopes carrying a long bundle wrapped in cloth, who were trying to get onto the pier ahead of him.
The view was nice here; the old buildings of the Bund behind him, the vertiginous neon wall of the Pudong Economic Zone exploding from the opposite bank and serving as backdrop for heavy river traffic— mostly chains of low-lying barges.
The pier did not turn red until the very end, where it began to slope down steeply toward the river. It had been coated with some kind of grippy stuff so his feet wouldn't fly out from under him. He turned around and looked back up at the domed court building, searching for a window where he might make out the face of Judge Fang or one of his gofers. The family of Chinese was following him down the pier, carrying their long bundle, which was draped with garlands of flowers and, as Bud now realized, was probably the corpse of a family member. He had heard about these piers; they were called funeral piers.
Several dozen of the microscopic explosives known as cookie-cutters detonated in his bloodstream.
Nell learns to work the matter compiler;
youthful indiscretions;
all is made better.
Nell had grown too long for her old crib mattress, and so Harv, her big brother, said he would help get a new one. He was big enough, he offhandedly mentioned, to do that sort of thing. Nell followed him into the kitchen, which housed several important boxy entities with prominent doors. Some were warm, some cool, some had windows, some made noises. Nell had frequently seen Harv, or Tequila, or one of Tequila's boyfriends, removing food from them, in one stage or another of doneness.
One of the boxes was called the M.C. It was built into the wall over the counter. Nell dragged a chair and climbed up to watch as Harv worked at it. The front of the M.C. was a mediatron, which meant anything that had pictures moving around on it, or sound coming out of it, or both. As Harv poked it with his fingers and spoke to it, little moving pictures danced around. It reminded her of the ractives she played on the big mediatron in the living room, when it wasn't being used by someone bigger.
'What are those?' Nell said.
'Mediaglyphics,' Harv said coolly. 'Someday you'll learn how to read.'
Nell could already read some of them.
'Red or blue?' Harv asked magnanimously.
'Red.'
Harv gave it an especially dramatic poke, and then a new mediaglyphic came up, a white circle with a narrow green wedge at the top. The wedge got wider and wider. The M.C. played a little tune that meant you were supposed to wait. Harv went to the fridge and got himself a juice box and one for Nell too. He looked at the M.C. disdainfully. 'This takes so long, it's ridiculous,' he said.
'Why?'
''Cause we got a cheap Feed, just a few grams per second. Pathetic.'
'Why do we got a cheap Feed?'
'Because it's a cheap house.'
'Why is it a cheap house?'
'Because that's all we can afford because of the economics,' Harv said. 'Mom's gotta compete with all kinds of Chinese and stuff that don't have any self-respect and so they'll work for nothing. So Mom's gotta work for nothing.' He looked at the M.C. again and shook his head. 'Pathetic. At the Flea Circus they got a Feed that's, like, this big around.' He touched his fingertips together in front of him and made a big circle with his arms. 'But this one's probly like the size of your pinkie.'
He stepped away from the M.C. as if he could no longer stand to share a room with it, sucked powerfully on his juice box, and wandered into the living room to get in a ractive. Nell just watched the green wedge get bigger and bigger until it filled half the circle, and then it began to look like a green circle with a white wedge in it, getting narrower and narrower, and finally the music came to a bouncy conclusion just as the white wedge vanished.
'It's done!' she said.
Harv paused his ractive, swaggered into the kitchen, and poked a mediaglyphic that was an animated picture of a door swinging open. The M.C. took to hissing loudly. Harv watched her scared face and ruffled her hair; she could not fend him off because she had her hands over her ears. 'Got to release the vacuum,' he explained.
The sound ended, and the door popped open. Inside the M.C., folded up neatly, was Nell's new red mattress. 'Give it to me! Give it to me!' Nell shouted, furious to see Harv's hands on it. Harv amused himself for a second playing keep-away, then gave it to her. She ran to the room that she shared with Harv and slammed the door as hard as she could. Dinosaur, Duck, Peter, and Purple were waiting for her. 'I got us a new bed,' she told them. She grabbed her old crib mattress and heaved it into the corner, then unfolded the new one precisely on the floor. It was disappointingly thin, more blanket than mattress. But when she had it all laid out on the floor, it made a whooshing noise— not loud— the sound of her brother's breathing late at night. It thickened as it inhaled, and when it was done, it looked like a real mattress. She gathered Dinosaur and Duck and Peter and Purple up into her arms and then, just to make sure, jumped up and down on it several hundred times.
'You like it?' Harv said. He had opened the door.
'No! Get out!' Nell screamed.
'Nell, it's my room too,' Harv said. 'I gotta deke your old one.'
Later, Harv went out with his buddies, and Nell was alone in the house for a while. She had decided that her kids needed mattresses too, and so she dragged the chair to the counter and climbed up on top, right in front of the M.C., and tried to read the mediaglyphics. A lot of them she didn't recognize. But she remembered that Tequila just used words when she couldn't read something, so she tried talking to it instead.
'Please secure the permission of an adult,' the M.C. said, over and over again.
Now she knew why Harv always poked at things rather than talking to them. She poked at the M.C. for a long time until finally she came to the same mediaglyphics that Harv had used to choose her mattress. One showed a man and woman sleeping in a very large bed. A man and woman in a somewhat smaller bed. A man by himself. A child by herself. A baby.
Nell poked at the baby. The white circle and red wedge appeared, the music played, the M.C. hissed and opened.
She spread it out on the floor and formally presented it to Dinosaur, who was too little to know how to jump up and down on it; so Nell showed him for a while. Then she went back to the M.C. and got mattresses for Duck, Peter, and Purple. Now, much of the room was covered with mattresses, and she thought how fun it would be to have the whole room just be one big mattress, so she made a couple of the very largest size. Then she made a new mattress for Tequila and another new one for her boyfriend Rog.
When Harv came back, his reaction swerved between terror and awe. 'Mom's gonna have Rog beat the shit out of us,' he said. 'We gotta deke all this stuff now.'
Easy come, easy go. Nell explained the situation to her kids and then helped Harv stuff all of the
