thunderhead of neon reached above her head, spread out to embrace her, developed into three dimensions— and she was still several miles away from it. The coastal neighborhoods consisted of block after block of reinforced- concrete apartment buildings, four to five stories high, looking older than the Great Wall though their real age could not have exceeded a few decades, and decorated on the ends facing the street with large cartoonish billboards, some mediatronic, most just painted on. For the first kilometer or so, most of these were targeted at businessmen just coming in from New Chusan, and in particular from the New Atlantis Clave. Glancing at these billboards as she went by them,
Nell concluded that visitors from New Atlantis played an important role in supporting casinos and bordellos, both the old-fashioned variety and the newer scripted-fantasy emporia, where you could be the star in a little play you wrote yourself. Nell slowed down to examine several of these, memorizing the addresses of ones with especially new or well-executed signs.
She had no clear plan in mind yet. All she knew was that she had to keep moving purposefully. Then the young men squatting on the curbs talking into their cellphones would keep eyeing her but leave her alone. The moment she stopped or looked the tiniest bit uncertain, they would descend.
The dense wet air along the Huang Pu was supporting millions of tons of air buoys, and Nell felt every kilogram of their weight pressing upon her ribs and shoulders as she skated up and down the main waterfront thoroughfare, trying to maintain her momentum and her false sense of purposefulness. This was the Coastal Republic, which appeared to have no fixed principles other than that money talked and that it was a good thing to get rich. Every tribe in the world seemed to have its own skyscraper here. Some, like New Atlantis, were not actively recruiting and simply used the size and magnificence of their buildings as a monument to themselves.
Others, like the Boers, the Parsis, the Jews, went for the understated approach, and in Pudong anything understated was more or less invisible. Still others-the Mormons, the First Distributed Republic, and the Chinese Coastal Republic itself-used every square inch of their mediatronic walls to proselytize.
The only phyle that didn't seem to appreciate the ecumenical spirit of the place was the Celestial Kingdom itself. Nell stumbled across their territory, half a square block surrounded with a stucco-sheathed masonry wall, circular gates here and there, and an old three-story structure inside, done in high Ming style with eaves that curved way up at the corners and sculpted dragons along the ridgeline of the roof. The place was so tiny compared to the rest of Pudong that it looked as if you might trip over it. The gates were guarded by men in armor, presumably backed up by other, less obvious defensive systems.
Nell was fairly certain that she was being followed, unobtrusively, by at least three young men who had locked on to her during her initial passage in from the coast, and who were waiting to find out whether she really had somewhere to go or was just faking it. She had already made her way from one end of the waterfront to the other, pretending to be a tourist who just wanted to take in a view of the Bund across the river. She was now heading back into the heart of downtown Pudong, where she had better look as if she were doing something.
Passing by the grand entrance to one of the skyscrapers-a Coastal Republic edifice, not barbarian turf-she recognized its mediaglyphic logo from one of the signs she had seen on the way into town.
Nell could at least fill out an application without committing herself. It would allow her to kill an hour in relatively safe and clean surroundings. The important thing, as Dojo had taught her long ago in a different context, was not to stop; without movement she could do nothing.
Alas, Madame Ping's office suite was closed. A few lights were on in the back, but the doors were locked and no receptionist was on duty. Nell did not know whether to be amused or annoyed; whoever heard of a brothel that closed down after dark? But then these were only the administrative offices.
She loitered in the lobby for a few minutes, then caught a down elevator. Just as the doors were closing, someone jumped into the lobby and slammed the button, opening them back up again. A young Chinese man with a small, slender body, large head, neatly dressed, carrying some papers. 'Pardon me,' he said. 'Did you require something?'
'I'm here to apply for a job,' Nell said.
The man's eyes traveled up and down her body in a coolly professional fashion, almost completely devoid of prurience, starting and stopping on her face. 'As a performer,' he said. The intonation was somewhere between a question and a declaration.
'As a scriptwriter,' she said.
Unexpectedly, he broke into a grin.
'I have qualifications that I will explain in detail.'
'We have writers. We contract for them on the network.'
'I'm surprised. How can a contract writer in Minnesota possibly provide your clients with the personalized service they require?'
'You could almost certainly get a job as a performer,' said the young man. 'You would start tonight. Good pay.'
'Just by looking at the billboards on the way in, I could see that your customers aren't paying for bodies. They are paying for ideas. That's your value added, right?'
'Pardon me?' said the young man, grinning again.
'Your value added. The reason you can charge more than a whorehouse, pardon my language, is that you provide a scripted fantasy scenario tailored to the client's requirements. I can do that for you,' Nell said. 'I know these people, and I can make you a lot of money.'
'You know what people?'
'The Vickys. I know them inside and out,' Nell said.
'Please come inside,' said the young man, gesturing toward the diamondoid door with MADAME PING'S written on it in red letters. 'Would you care for tea?'
'There are only two industries. This has always been true,' said Madame Ping, enfolding a lovely porcelain teacup in her withered fingers, the two-inch fingernails interleaving neatly like the pinions of a raptor folding its wings after a long hard day of cruising the thermals. 'There is the industry of things, and the industry of entertainment. The industry of things comes first. It keeps us alive. But making things is easy now that we have the Feed. This is not a very interesting business anymore.
'After people have the things they need to live, everything else is entertainment. Everything. This is Madame Ping's business.'
Madame Ping had an office on the hundred-and-eleventh floor with a nice unobstructed view across the Huang Pu and into downtown Shanghai. When it wasn't foggy, she could even see the facade of her theatre, which was on a side street a couple of blocks in from the Bund, its mediatronic marquee glowing patchily through the dun limbs of an old sycamore tree. She had a telescope mounted in one of her windows, fixed upon the theatre's entrance, and noting Nell's curiosity, she encouraged her to look through it.
Nell had never looked through a real telescope before. It had a tendency to jiggle and go out of focus, it didn't zoom, and panning was tricky. But for all that, the image quality was a lot better than photographic, and she quickly forgot herself and began sweeping it back and forth across the city. She checked out the little Celestial Kingdom Clave in the heart of the old city, where a couple of Mandarins stood on a zigzag bridge across a pond, contemplating a swarm of golden carp, wispy silver beards trailing down over the colorful silk of their lapels, blue sapphire buttons on their caps flashing as they nodded their heads. She looked into a high-rise building farther inland, apparently a foreign concession of some type, where some Euros were holding a cocktail party, some venturing onto the balcony with glasses of wine and doing some eavesdropping of their own. Finally she leveled the 'scope toward the horizon, out past the vast dangerous triad-ridden suburbs, where millions of Shanghai's poor had been forcibly banished to make way for highrises. Beyond that was real agricultural land, a fractal network of canals and creeks glimmering like a golden net as they reflected the lambency of the sunset, and beyond that, as always, a few scattered pillars of smoke in the ultimate distance, where the Fists of Righteous Harmony were burning the foreign devils' Feed lines.
'You are a curious girl,' Madame Ping said. 'That is natural. But you must never let any other person- especially a client-see your curiosity. Never seek information. Sit quietly and let them bring it to you. What they conceal tells you more than what they reveal. Do you understand?'
'Yes, madam,' Nell said, turning toward her interlocutor with a little curtsy. Rather than trying to do Chinese etiquette and making a hash of it, she was taking the Victorian route, which worked just as well. For
