wrote them out in books that were then tossed out into the marketplace for delivery. The men with the quill pens, she noticed, always wore jeweled keys on chains around their necks; the key was apparently the badge of the cipherers' guild.
This castle proved fiendishly difficult to figure out, and Nell spent a few weeks working on it. Part of the problem was that this was the first castle Princess Nell had visited that was actually functioning as intended; the dark knight had not been able to foul the place up, probably because everything was done in ciphers here, and everything was decentralized. Nell discovered that a smoothly functioning system was much harder to puzzle out than one that was broken.
In the end, Princess Nell had to apprentice herself to a master cipherer and learn everything there was to know about codes and the keys that unlocked them. This done, she was given her own key, as a badge of her office, and found a job in one of the stalls enciphering and deciphering books. As it turned out, the key was more than just a decoration; rolled up inside its shaft was a strip of parchment inscribed with a long number that could be used to decipher a message, if the sender wanted you to decipher it. From time to time she would go to the edge of the market, exchange a book for some gold, then go buy some food and drink.
On one of these trips, she saw another member of the cipherer's guild, also taking his break, and noticed that the key hanging around his neck looked familiar: it was one of the eleven keys that Nell and her Night Friends had taken from the Faery Kings and Queens! She concealed her excitement and followed this cipherer back to his stall, making a note of where he worked. Over the next few days, going from stall to stall and examining each cipherer, she was able to locate the rest of the eleven keys. She was able to steal a look at the rule-books that her employers used to respond to the encoded messages. They were written in the same special language used at the previous two castles.
In other words, once Princess Nell had deciphered the messages, her stall functioned like another Turing machine. It would have been easy enough to conclude that this whole castle was, like the others, a Turing machine. But the Primer had taught Nell to be very careful about making unwarranted assumptions. Just because her stall functioned according to Turing rules did not mean that all of the others did. And even if every stall in this castle was, in fact, a Turing machine, she still could not come to any fixed conclusions. She had seen riders carrying books to and from the castle, which meant that cipherers must be at work elsewhere in this kingdom. She could not verify that all of them were Turing machines.
It did not take long for Nell to attain prosperity here. After a few months (which in the Primer were summarized in as many sentences) her employers announced that they were getting more work than they could handle. They decided to split their operation. They erected a new stall at the edge of the market and gave Nell some of their rule-books.
They also obtained a new key for her. This was done by dispatching a special coded message to the Castle of King Coyote himself, which was three days' ride to the north. Seven days later, Nell's key came back to her in a scarlet box bearing the seal of King Coyote himself.
From time to time, someone would come around to her stall and offer to buy her out. She always turned them down but found it interesting that the keys could be bought and sold in this fashion.
All Nell needed was money, which she quickly accumulated through shrewd dealings in the market. Before long, all eleven of the keys were in her possession, and after liquidating her holdings and turning them into jewels, which she sewed into her clothes, she rode her horse out of the sixth castle and turned north, heading for the seventh: the Castle of King Coyote, and the ultimate goal of her lifelong quest.
Nell goes to Madame Ping's Theatre;
rumors of the Fists;
an important client;
assault of the Fists of Righteous Harmony;
ruminations on the inner workings of ractives.
Like much that was done with nanotechnology, Feed lines were assembled primarily from a few species of small and uncomplicated atoms in the upper right-hand corner of Mendeleev's grid: carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, silicon, phosphorus, sulfur, and chlorine. The Fists of Righteous Harmony had discovered, to their enduring delight, that objects made of these atoms burned rather nicely once you got them going. The flat, low Yangtze Delta country east of Shanghai was a silk district well stocked with mulberry trees, which when felled, stacked, and burned beneath the Feed lines would eventually ignite them like road flares.
The Nipponese Feed was heavy on the phosphorus and burned with a furious white flame that lit up the night sky in several places as seen from the tall buildings in Pudong. One major line led toward Nanjing, one toward Suzhou, one toward Hangzhou: these distant flares inevitably led to rumors, among the hordes of refugees in Shanghai, that those cities were themselves burning.
The New Atlantan Feed had a higher sulfur content that, when burned, produced a plutonic reek that permeated everything for dozens of miles downwind, making the fires seem much closer than they really were. Shanghai was smelling pretty sulfurous as Nell walked into it across one of the bridges linking downtown Pudong with the much lower and older Bund. The Huang Pu had been too wide to bridge easily until nano had come along, so the four downtown bridges were made of the new materials and seemed impossibly fragile compared with the reinforced-concrete behemoths built to the north and south during the previous century.
A few days ago, working on a script in Madame Ping's offices far above, Nell had gazed out the window at a barge making its way down the river, pulled by a rickety old diesel tug, swathed in dun tarps. A few hundred meters upstream of this very bridge she was now crossing, the tarps had begun squirming and boiling, and a dozen young men in white tunics had jumped out from beneath, scarlet bands tied about their waists, scarlet ribbons around their wrists and foreheads. They had swarmed across the top of the barge hacking at ropes with knives, and the tarps had reluctantly and unevenly fallen away to expose a patchy new coat of red paint and, lined up on the top of the barge like a string of enormous firecrackers, several dozen compressed gas tanks, also painted a festive red for the occasion. Under the circumstances, she did not doubt for a moment that the men were Fists and the gas hydrogen or something else that burned well. But before they had been able to reach the bridge, the tanks had been burst and ignited by something too small and fast for Nell to see from her high post. The barge silently turned into a carbuncle of yellow flame that took up half the width of the Huang Pu, and though the diamond window filtered all of the heat out of its radiance, Nell was able to put her hand on the pane and feel the absorbed warmth, not much hotter than a person's skin. The whole operation had been touchingly hapless, in an age when a hand-size battery could contain as much energy as all those cylinders of gas. It had a quaint twentieth-century feel and made Nell oddly nostalgic for the days when dangerousness was a function of mass and bulk. The passives of that era were so fun to watch, with their big, stupid cars and big, stupid guns and big, stupid people.
Up— and downstream of the bridge, the funeral piers were crowded with refugee families heaving corpses into the Huang Pu; the emaciated bodies, rolled up in white sheets, looked like cigarettes. The Coastal Republic authorities had instituted a pass system on the bridges to prevent rural refugees from swarming across into the relatively spacious streets, plazas, atria, and lobbies of Pudong and gumming up the works for the office crowd. By the time Nell made it across, a couple of hundred refugees had already picked her out as a likely alms source and were waiting with canned demonstrations: women holding up their gaunt babies, or older children who were trained to hang comatose in their arms; men with open wounds, and legless gaffers dauntlessly knucklewalking through the crowd, butting at people's knees. The taxi-drivers were stronger and more aggressive than the rurals, though, and had a fearsome reputation that created space around them in the crowd, and that was more valuable than an actual vehicle; a vehicle would always get stuck in traffic, but a taxi-driver's hat generated a magic force field that enabled the wearer to walk faster than anyone else.
The taxi-drivers converged on Nell too, and she picked out the biggest one and haggled with him, holding up fingers and essaying a few words in Shanghainese. When the numbers had climbed into the right range for him, he spun around suddenly to face the crowd. The suddenness of the movement drove people back, and the meter- long bamboo stick in his hand didn't hurt either. He stepped forward and Nell hurried after him, ignoring the myriad tuggings at her long skirts, trying not to wonder which of the beggars was a Fist with a concealed knife. If her clothes hadn't been made of untearable, uncuttable nanostuff, she would have been stripped naked within a
