Diamond Age

Even as the last remnants of the Fists were being hunted down and destroyed in the nooks and corners of the lobby, Nell was being borne on the shoulders of her little sisters out the front doors of the building and into the plaza, where something like a hundred thousand girls— Nell could not count all the regiments and brigades— collapsed to their knees in unison, as though struck down by a divine wind, and presented her their bamboo stakes, pole knives, lead pipes, and nunchuks. The provisional commanders of her divisions stood foremost, as did her provisional ministers of defense, of state, and of research and development, all of them bowing to Nell, not with a Chinese bow or a Victorian one but something they'd come up with that was in between.

Nell should have been tongue-tied and paralyzed with astonishment, but she was not; for the first time in her life she understood why she'd been put on the earth and felt comfortable with her position. One moment, her life had been a meaningless abortion, and the next it all made glorious sense. She began to speak, the words rushing from her mouth as easily as if she had been reading them from the pages of the Primer. She accepted the allegiance of the Mouse Army, complimented them on their great deeds, and swept her arm across the plaza, over the heads of her little sisters, toward the thousands upon thousands of stranded sojourners from New Atlantis, Nippon, Israel, and all of the other Outer Tribes. "Our first duty is to protect these," she said. "Show me the condition of the city and all those in it."

They wanted to carry her, but she jumped to the stones of the plaza and strode away from the building, toward her ranks, which parted to make way for her. The streets of Pudong were filled with hungry and terrified refugees, and through them, in simple peasant clothes streaked with the blood of herself and of others, broken shackles dangling from her wrists, followed by her generals and ministers, walked the barbarian Princess with her book and her sword.

Carl Hollywood takes a stroll to the waterfront.

Carl Hollywood was awakened by a ringing in his ears and a burning in his cheek that turned out to be an inch-long fragment of plate glass driven into his flesh. When he sat up, his bed made clanking and crashing noises, shedding a heavy burden of shattered glass, and a foetid exhalation from the wrecked windows blew over his face. Old hotels had their charms, but disadvantages too-such as windowpanes made out of antique materials.

Fortunately some old Wyoming instinct had caused him to leave his boots next to the bed the night before. He inverted each one and carefully probed it for broken glass before he pulled it on. Only when he had put on all of his clothes and gathered his things together did he go to look out the window.

His hotel was near the Huang Pu waterfront. Looking across the river, he could see that great patches of Pudong had gone black against the indigo sky of predawn. A few buildings, connected to the indigenous Feeds, were still lit up. On this side of the river the situation was not so simple; Shanghai, unlike Pudong, had lived through many wars and was therefore made to be robust: the city was rife with secret power sources, old diesel generators, private Sources and Feeds, water tanks and cisterns. People still raised chickens for food in the shadow of the Hongkong & Shanghai Banking Corporation. Shanghai would weather the onslaught of the Fists much better than Pudong.

But as a white person, Carl Hollywood might not weather it very well at all. It was better to be across the river, in Pudong, with the rest of the Outer Tribes.

From here to the waterfront was about three blocks; but since this was Shanghai, those three blocks were fraught with what in any other city would be three miles' worth of complications. The main problem was going to be Fists; he could already hear the cries of "Sha! Sha!" boiling up from the streets, and shining a pocket torch through the bars of his balcony, he could see many Fists, emboldened by the destruction of the foreign Feeds, running around with their scarlet girdles and headbands exposed to the world.

If he weren't six and a half feet tall and blue-eyed, he'd probably try to disguise himself as Chinese and slink to the waterfront, and it probably wouldn't work. He went through his closet and hauled out his big duster, which swept nearly to his ankles. It was proof against bullets and most nanotech projectiles.

There was a long item of luggage he had thrown up on the closet shelf unopened. Hearing the reports of trouble, he had taken the precaution of bringing these relics with him: an engraved lever-action .44 rifle with low-tech iron sights and, as a last-ditch sort of thing, a Colt revolver. These were unnecessarily glorious weapons, but he had long ago gotten rid of any of his guns that did not have historical or artistic value.

Two gunshots sounded from within the building, very close to him. Moments later, someone knocked at his door. Carl wrapped his duster around him, in case someone decided to fire through the door, and peered out through the peephole. To his surprise, he saw a white-haired Anglo gentleman with a handlebar mustache, gripping a semiautomatic. Carl had met him yesterday in the hotel bar; he was here trying to clear up some kind of business before the fall of Shanghai.

He opened the door. The two men regarded each other briefly.

"One might think we had come for an antique weapons convention," the gentleman said through his mustache. "Say, I'm frightfully sorry to have disturbed you, but I thought you might like to know that there are Fists in the hotel." He gestured down the corridor with his gun. Carl poked his head out and discovered a dead bellboy sprawled out in front of an open door, still clutching a long knife.

"As it happens, I was already up," said Carl Hollywood, "and contemplating a bit of a stroll to the waterfront. Care to join me?"

"Delighted. Colonel Spence, Royal Joint Forces, Retired."

"Carl Hollywood."

On their way down the fire stairs, Spence killed two more hotel employees whom he had, on somewhat ambiguous grounds, identified as Fists. Carl was skeptical in both cases until Spence ripped their shirts open to reveal the scarlet girdles beneath. "It's not that they're really Fists, you see," Spence explained jovially. "Just that when the Fists come, this sort of nonsense becomes terribly fashionable."

After exchanging some more self-consciously dry humor about whether they should settle their bills before departure, and how much you were supposed to tip a bellboy who came after you with a carving knife, they agreed it might be safest to exit through the kitchens. Half a dozen dead Fists littered the floor here, their bodies striped with the marks of cookie-cutters. Arriving at the exit they found two fellow guests, both Israelis, staring at them with the fixed gaze that implies the presence of a skull gun. Seconds later, they were joined by two Zulu management consultants carrying long, telescoping poles with nanoblades affixed to the ends, which they used to destroy all of the light fixtures in their path. It took Carl a minute to appreciate their plan: They were all about to step out into a dark alley, and they would need their night vision.

The door began to shudder in its frame and make tremendous booming noises. Carl stepped forward and peered through the peephole; it was a couple of urban homeboy types having at it with a fire axe. He stepped away from the door, shrugging the rifle from his shoulder, levered in a shell, and fired it through the door, aiming away from the youths. The booming stopped abruptly, and they heard the head of the axe ringing like a bell as it fell to the pavement.

One of the Zulus kicked the door open and leapt into the alley, whirling his blade in a vast, fatal arc like the blade of a helicopter, slicing through a garbage can but not hitting any people. When Carl came piling through the door a few seconds later, he saw several young toughs scattering down the alley, dodging among several dozen refugees, loiterers, and street people who pointed helpfully at their receding backsides, making sure it was understood that their only reason for being in this alley at this time was to act as a sort of block watch on behalf of the gwailo visitors.

Without talking about it much, they fell into an improvised formation there in the alley, where they had a bit of room to maneuver. The Zulus went in front, whirling their poles over their heads and hollering some kind of traditional war-cry that drove a good many of the Chinese out of their path. One of the Jews went behind the Zulus, using his skull gun to pick off any Fists who charged them. Then came Carl Hollywood, who, with his height and his rifle, seemed to have ended up with the job of long-range reconnaissance and defense. Colonel Spence and the other Israeli brought up the rear, walking backward most of the time.

This got them down the alley without much trouble, but that was the easy part; when they reached the street, they were no longer the only focus of action but mere motes in a sandstorm. Colonel Spence discharged most of a clip into the air; the explosions were nearly inaudible in the chaos, but the gouts of light from the weapon's barrel drew some attention, and people in their immediate vicinity actually got out of their way. Carl saw one of the Zulus do something very ugly with his long weapon and looked away; then he reflected that it was the Zulus' job to break trail and his to concentrate on more distant threats. He turned slowly around as he walked, trying to ignore the threat that was just beyond arm's length and to get a view of the larger scene.

They had walked into a completely disorganized street fight between the Coastal Republic forces and the Fists of Righteous Harmony, which was not made any clearer by the fact that many of the Coastals had defected by tying strips of red cloth round the arms of their uniforms, and that many of the Fists were not wearing any markings at all, and that many others who had no affiliation were taking advantage of the situation to loot stores and were being fought off by private guards; many of the looters were themselves being mugged by organized gangs.

They were on Nanjing Road, a broad thoroughfare leading straight to the Bund and the Huang Pu, lined with four— and five-story buildings so that many windows looked out over them, any one of which might have contained a sniper.

A few of them did contain snipers, Carl realized, but many of these were shooting across the street at each other, and the ones who were firing into the street could have been shooting at anyone. Carl saw one fellow with a laser-sighted rifle emptying clip after clip into the street, and he reckoned that this constituted a clear and present danger; so at a moment when their forward progress had stalled momentarily, while the Zulus were waiting for an especially desperate Coastal/Fist melee to resolve itself ahead of them, Carl planted his feet, swung his rifle up to his shoulder, took aim, and fired. In the dim fire— and torch-light rising up from the street, he could see powder explode from the stone window frame just above the sniper's head. The sniper cringed, then began to sweep the street with his laser, looking for the source of the bullet.

Someone jostled Carl from behind. It was Spence, who had been hit with something and lost the use of his leg. A Fist was in the Colonel's face. Carl rammed the butt of the rifle into the man's chin, sending him backward into the melee with his eyes rolled up into their sockets. Then he levered in another shell, raised the weapon to his shoulder again, and tried to find the window with his sniper friend.

He was still there, tracing a ruby-red line patiently across the boiling surface of the crowd. Carl took in a deep breath, released it slowly, prayed that no one would bump into him, and squeezed the trigger. The rifle butted him hard in the shoulder, and at the same moment he saw the sniper's rifle fall out of the window, spinning end over end, the laser beam sweeping through the smoke and steam like the trace on a radar scope.

The whole thing had probably been a bad idea; if any of the other snipers had seen this, they'd be wanting to get rid of him, whatever their affiliation. Carl levered in another shell and then let the rifle dangle from one hand, pointed down at the street, where it wouldn't be so conspicuous. He got the other hand into Spence's armpit and helped him continue down the street. The ends of Spence's mustache wiggled as he continued with his endless and unflappable line of patter; Carl couldn't hear a word but nodded encouragingly. Not even the most literal-minded neo-Victorian could take that stiff-upper-lip thing seriously; Carl realized now that it was all done with a nod and a wink. It was not Colonel Spence's way of saying that he wasn't scared; it was, rather, a code of sorts, a face-saving way for him to admit that he was terrified half out of his wits, and for Carl to admit likewise.

Several Fists rushed them at once; the Zulus got two, the leading Israeli got one, but another came in and bounced his knife from the Israeli's knife-proof jacket. Carl raised the rifle, clamping the stock between his arm and his body, and fired from the hip. The recoil nearly knocked the weapon out of his hand; the Fist practically did a backflip.

He couldn't believe they had not reached the waterfront yet; they had been doing this for hours. Something prodded him hard in the back, causing him to stumble forward; he looked back over his shoulder and saw a man trying to run him through with a bayonet. Another man ran up and tried to wrench the rifle out of Carl's hand.

Carl, too startled to respond for a moment, finally let go of Spence, reached across, and poked him in the eyes. A great explosion sounded in his ear, and he looked over to see that Spence had twisted himself round and shot the attacker who had the bayonet. The Israeli who had been guarding their rear had simply vanished. Carl raised his rifle toward the people who were converging on them from the rear; that and Spence's pistol opened up a gratifying clear space in their wake. But something more powerful and terrifying was driving more people toward them from the side, and as Carl tried to see what it was, he realized that a score of Chinese people were now between him and the Zulus. The looks on their faces were pained and panicky; they were not attacking, they were being attacked.

Suddenly all of the Chinese were gone. Carl and Colonel Spence found themselves commingled with a dozen or so Boers— not just men, but women and children and elders too, a whole laager on the move. All of them surged forward instinctively and reabsorbed the vanguard of Carl's group. They were a block from the waterfront.

The Boer leader, a stout man of about fifty, somehow identified Carl Hollywood as the leader, and they quickly redeployed what forces they had for the final push to the waterfront. The only thing Carl remembered of this conversation was the man saying, "Good. You've got Zulus."

The Boers in the vanguard were carrying some sort of automatic weapons firing tiny nanotech high-explosive rounds, which, indiscriminately used, could have turned the crowd into a rampart of chewed meat; but they fired the weapons in disciplined bursts even when the charging Fists penetrated to within a sword's length. From time to time, one of them would raise his head and sweep a row of windows with continuous automatic fire; riflemen would tumble out of the darkness and spin down into the street like rag dolls. The Boers must be wearing some kind of night vision stuff.

Colonel Spence suddenly felt very heavy on Carl's arm, and he realized that the Colonel was unconscious, or close to it. Carl slung the rifle over his shoulder, bent down, and picked up Spence in a fireman's carry.

They arrived at the waterfront and established a defensive perimeter. The next question was: Were there any boats? But this part of China was half underwater and seemed to have as many boats as bicycles. Most of them seemed to have found their way downstream to Shanghai during the gradual onslaught of the Fists. So when they arrived at the water's edge, they discovered thousands of people with boats, eager to transact some business. But as the Boer leader rightly pointed out, it would be suicide to split up the group among several tiny, unpowered craft; the Fists were paying high bounties for the heads of barbarians. Much safer to wait for one of the larger vessels out in the channel to make its way to shore, where they could cut a deal with the captain and climb on board as a group.

Several vessels, ranging from motor yachts to fishing trawlers, were already vying to be the first to make that deal, shouldering their way inexorably through the organic chaff of small boats crowded along the shore.

A rhythmic beat had begun to resonate in their lungs. At first it sounded like drumbeats, but as it drew closer it developed into the sound of hundreds or thousands of human voices chanting in unison: "Sha! Sha! Sha! Sha!" Nanjing Road began to vomit forth a great crowd of people shoved out onto the Bund like exhaust pushed out by a piston. They cleared out of the way, dispersing up and down the riverfront.

An army of hoplites— professional warriors in battle armor— was marching toward the river, a score abreast, completely filling the width of Nanjing Road. These were not Fists; they were the regular army, the vanguard of the Celestial Kingdom, and Carl Hollywood was appalled to realize that the only thing now standing between them and their three-decade march to the banks of the Huang Pu was Carl Hollywood, his .44, and a handful of lightly armed civilians.

A nice-looking yacht had penetrated to within a few meters of the shore. The remaining Israeli, who was fluent in Mandarin, had already commenced negotiations with its captain.

One of the Boers, a wiry grandmother with a white bun on her head and a black bonnet pinned primly over that, conferred briefly with the Boer leader. He nodded once, then caught her face in his hands and kissed her.

She turned her back on the waterfront and began to march toward the head of the advancing column of Celestials. The few Chinese crazy enough to remain along the waterfront, respecting her age and possible madness, parted to make way for her.

The negotiations over the boat appeared to have hit some kind of snag. Carl Hollywood could see individual hoplites vaulting two and three stories into the air, crashing headfirst into the windows of the Cathay Hotel.

The Boer grandmother doggedly made her way forward until she was standing in the middle of the Bund. The leader of the Celestial column stepped toward her, covering her with some kind of projectile weapon built into one arm of his suit and waving her aside with the other. The Boer woman carefully got down on both knees in the middle of the road, clasped her hands together in prayer, and bowed her head.

Then she became a pearl of white light in the mouth of the dragon. In an instant this pearl grew to the size of an airship. Carl Hollywood had the presence of mind to close his eyes and turn his head away, but he didn't have time to throw himself down; the shock wave did that, slamming him full-length into the granite paving-stones of the waterfront promenade and tearing about half of his clothes from his body.

Some time passed before he was really conscious; he felt it must have been half an hour, though debris was still raining down around him, so five seconds was probably more like it. The hull of the white yacht had been caved in on one side and most of its crew flung into the river. But a minute later, a fishing trawler pulled up and took the barbarians on board with only perfunctory negotiations. Carl nearly forgot about Spence and almost left him there; he found that he no longer had the strength to raise the Colonel's body from the ground, so he dragged him on board with the help of a couple of young Boers— identical twins, he realized, maybe thirteen years old. As they headed across the Huang Pu, Carl Hollywood huddled on a piled-up fishing net, limp and weak as though his bones had all been shattered, staring at the hundred-foot crater in the center of the Bund and looking into the rooms of the Cathay Hotel, which had been neatly cross-sectioned by the bomb in the Boer woman's body.

Within fifteen minutes, they were free on the streets of Pudong. Carl Hollywood found his way to the local New Atlantan encampment, reported for duty, and spent a few minutes composing a letter to Colonel Spence's widow; the Colonel had bled to death from a leg wound during the voyage across the river. Then he spread his pages out on the ground before him and returned to the pursuit that had occupied him in his hotel room for the past few days, namely, the search for Miranda. He had begun this search at the bidding of Lord Finkle-McGraw, pursued it with mounting passion over the last few days as he had begun to understand how much he'd been missing Miranda, and was now pressing the work desperately; for he had realized that in this search might reside the only hope for the salvation of the tens of thousands of Outer Tribesmen now encamped upon the dead streets of the Pudong Economic Zone.

Final onslaught of the Fists;

victory of the Celestial Kingdom;

refugees in the domain of the Drummers;

Miranda.

The Huang Pu stopped the advance of the Celestial Army toward the sea, but having crossed the river farther inland, it continued to move northward up the Pudong Peninsula at a walking pace, driving before it flocks of starving peasants much like the ones who had been their harbingers in Shanghai.

The occupants of Pudong— a mixture of barbarians, Coastal Republic Chinese who feared persecution at the hands of their Celestial cousins, and Nell's little sisters, a third of a million strong and constituting a new phyle unto themselves— were thus caught between the Celestials on the south, the Huang Pu on the west, the Yangtze on the north, and the ocean on the east. All the links to the artificial islands offshore had been cut.

The geotects of Imperial Tectonics, in their Classical and Gothic temples high atop New Chusan, made various efforts to build a temporary bridge between their island and Pudong. It was simple enough to throw a truss or floating bridge across the gap, but the Celestials now had the technology to blow such things up faster than they could be constructed. On the second day of the siege, they caused the island to reach toward Pudong with a narrow pseudopod of smart coral, rooted on the ocean floor. But there were very simple and clear limits to how fast such things could be grown, and as the refugees continued to throng the narrow defiles of downtown Pudong, bearing increasingly dire reports of the Celestials' advance, it became evident to everyone that the land bridge would not be completed in time.

The encampments of the various tribes moved north and east as they were forced out of downtown by the pressure of the refugees and fear of the Celestials, until several miles of shoreline had been claimed and settled by the various groups. The southern end, along the seashore, was anchored by the New Atlantans, who had prepared themselves to fend off any assaults along the beach. The chain of camps extended northward from there, curving along the ocean and then eastward along the banks of the Yangtze to the opposite end, which was anchored by Nippon against any onslaught across the tidal flats. The entire center of the line was guarded against a direct frontal assault by Princess Nell's tribe/army of twelve-year-old girls, who were gradually trading in their pointed sticks for more modern weapons compiled from portable Sources owned by the Nipponese and the New Atlantans.

Carl Hollywood had been assigned to military duty as soon as he reported to the New Atlantan authorities, despite his efforts to convince his superiors that he might be of more use pursuing his own line of research. But then a message came through from the highest levels of Her Majesty's government. The first part of it praised Carl Hollywood for his "heroic" actions in getting the late Colonel Spence out of Shanghai and suggested that a knighthood might be waiting for him if he ever got out of Pudong. The second part of it named him as a special envoy of sorts to Her Royal Highness, Princess Nell.

Reading the message, Carl was momentarily stunned that his Sovereign was according equivalent status to Nell; but upon some reflection he saw that it was simultaneously just and pragmatic.

During his time in the streets of Pudong, he had seen enough of the Mouse Army (as they called themselves, for some reason) to know that they did, in fact, constitute a new ethnic group of sorts, and that Nell was their undisputed leader. Victoria's esteem for the new sovereign was well-founded. At the same time, that the Mouse Army was currently helping to protect many New Atlantans from being taken hostage, or worse, by the Celestial Kingdom made such recognition an eminently pragmatic step.

It fell to Carl Hollywood, who had been a member of his adopted tribe only for a few months, to forward Her Majesty's greetings and felicitations to Princess Nell, a girl about whom he had heard much from Miranda but whom he had never met and could hardly fathom. It did not take very deep reflection to see the hand of Lord Alexander Chung-Sik Finkle-McGraw in all this.

Freed from day-to-day responsibilities, he walked north from the New Atlantan camp on the third day of the siege, following the tideline. Every few yards he came to a tribal border and presented a visa that, under the provisions of the Common Economic Protocol, was supposed to afford him free passage. Some of the tribal zones were only a meter or two wide, but their owners jealously guarded their access to the sea, sitting up all night staring out into the surf, waiting for some unspecified form of salvation. Carl Hollywood strolled through encampments of Ashantis, Kurds, Armenians, Navajos, Tibetans, Senderos, Mormons, Jesuits, Lapps, Pathans, Tutsis, the First Distributed Republic and its innumerable offshoots, Heartlanders, Irish, and one or two local CryptNet cells who had now been flushed into the open. He discovered synthetic phyles he had never heard of, but this did not surprise him.

Finally he came to a generous piece of beach frontage guarded by twelve-year-old Chinese girls. At this point he presented his credentials from Her Majesty Queen Victoria II, which were extremely impressive, so much so that many of the girls gathered around to marvel at them. Carl Hollywood was surprised to hear them all speaking perfect English in a rather high Victorian style. They seemed to prefer it when discussing things in the abstract, but when it came to practical matters they reverted to Mandarin.

He was ushered through the lines into the Mouse Army's encampment, which was mostly an open-air hospice for ragged, sick and injured discards from other phyles. The ones who weren't flat on their backs, being tended to by Mouse Nurses, were sitting on the sand, hugging their knees, staring out across the water in the direction of New Chusan. The slope of the land was quite gentle here, and a person could wade for a good long stone's throw into the waves.

One person had: a young woman whose long hair fell about her shoulders and trailed in the water around her waist. She stood with her back to the shore, holding a book in her hands, and did not move for a long time.

"What is she doing out there?" Carl Hollywood said to his Mouse Army escort, who had five little stars on her lapels. In Pudong, he had figured out their insignia: Five stars meant that she was in charge of (4)5 people, or 1,024. A regimental commander, then.

"She is calling to her mother."

"Her mother?"

"Her mother is beneath the waves," the woman said. "She is a Queen."

"Queen of what?"

"She is the Queen of the Drummers who live beneath the sea."

And then Carl Hollywood knew that Princess Nell was searching for Miranda too. He threw his long coat down on the sand and sloshed out Into the Pacific, accompanied by the officer, and remained at a judicious distance, partly to show due respect, and partly because Nell had a sword in her waistband. Her face was inclined over the pages of her book like a focusing lens, and he half expected the pages to curl and smoke under her gaze.

She looked up from the book after some time. The officer spoke to her in a low voice. Carl Hollywood did not know the protocol when one was up to midthigh in the East China Sea, so he stepped forward, bowed as low as he could under the circumstances, and handed Princess Nell the scroll from Queen Victoria II.

She accepted it wordlessly and read it through, then went back to the top and read it again. Then she handed it to her officer, who rolled it up carefully. Princess Nell stared out over the waves for a while, then looked Carl in the eye and said quietly, "I accept your credentials and request that you convey my warm thanks and regard to Her Majesty, along with my apologies that circumstances prevent me from composing a more formal response to her kind letter, which at any other time would naturally be my highest priority."

"I shall do so at the earliest opportunity, Your Majesty," Carl Hollywood said. Hearing these words, Princess Nell looked a bit unsteady and shifted her feet to maintain her balance; though this might have been the undertow. Carl realized that she had never been addressed in this way before; that, until she had been recognized in this fashion by Victoria, she had never fully realized her position.

"The woman you seek is named Miranda," he said.