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. She and Carl had both put these devices into their bloodstreams, so that Nell was now free of the Drummers' influences and both of them would remain so. Nevertheless they did not press their luck by eating of the Drummers' food, and it was well, because after their meal the refugees became drowsy and lay down on the floor and slept, steam rising from their naked flesh, and before long the sparks of light began to come on, like stars coming out as the sun goes down. After two hours the stars had merged together into a continuous surface of flickering light, bright enough to read by, as if a full moon were shining down upon the bodies of slumbering revelers in a meadow.
The refugees, now Drummers, all slept and dreamed the same dream, and the abstract lights flickering across the mediatronic lining of the cavern began to coalesce and organize themselves into dark memories from deep within their unconscious mind. Nell began to see things from her own life, experiences long since assimilated into the words of the Primer but here shown once more in a raw and terrifying form. She closed her eyes; but the walls made sounds too, from which she could not escape.
Carl Hollywood was monitoring the signals passing through the walls of the tunnels, avoiding the emotional content of these images by reducing them to binary digits and trying to puzzle out their internal codes and protocols.
'We have to go,' Nell said finally, and Carl arose and followed her through a randomly chosen exit. The tunnel forked and forked again, and Nell chose forks by intuition. Sometimes the tunnels would widen into great caverns full of luminescent Drummers, sleeping or fucking or simply pounding on the walls. The caverns always had many outlets, which forked and forked and converged upon other caverns, the web of tunnels so vast and complicated that it seemed to fill the entire ocean, like neural bodies with their dendrites knitting and ramifying to occupy the whole volume of the skull.
A low drumming sound had been skirting the lower limits of perceptibility ever since they had left the cavern where the refugees slumbered. Nell had first taken it for the beat of submarine currents on the walls of the tunnel, but as it grew stronger, she knew that it was the Drummers talking to each other, convened in some central cavern sending messages out across their network. Realizing this, she felt a sense of urgency verging on panic that they find the central assembly, and for some time they ran through the perfectly bewildering three-dimensional maze, trying to locate the epicenter of the drumming.
Carl Hollywood could not run as quickly as the nimble Nell and eventually lost her at a fork in the tunnels. From there he made his own judgments, and after some time had passed— it was impossible to know how long— his tunnel dovetailed with another that was carrying a stream of Drummers downward toward the floor of the ocean. Carl recognized some of these Drummers as former refugees from the beaches at Pudong.
The sound of the drumming did not build gradually but exploded to a deafening, mind-dissolving roar as
