"I see," said Dr. X, slightly taken aback. He seemed genuinely thoughtful as he stroked his beard and stared into the flame of a candle, which had suddenly begun to flicker and gyrate chaotically. It seemed as though the Judge had raised a novel point here, which deserved careful consideration. "Better to leave the book in the hands of one who could benefit from its wisdom, than to let it remain, inert, in a police warehouse."

"That was my no doubt less than perfect conclusion, hastily arrived at," Judge Fang said.

Dr. X continued to ponder the matter for a minute or so. "It does credit to your professional integrity that you are able to focus so clearly upon the case of one small person."

"As you will no doubt appreciate, being a far more accomplished scholar than I, the interests of the society come first. Beside that, the fate of one little girl is nothing. But other things being equal, it is better for society that the girl is educated than that she remain ignorant."

Dr. X raised his eyebrows and nodded significantly at this. The subject did not come up again during the rest of the meal. He a.s.sumed that the hydrofoil was swinging around in a lazy circle that would eventually take them back to the mouth of the Huang Pu.

But when the engines were throttled back and the craft settled back onto its hull and began to rock with the waves again, Judge Fang could not see any lights outside the windows. They were nowhere near Pudong, nor any other inhabited land as far as he could tell.

Dr. X gestured out the window at nothing and said, "I have taken the liberty of arranging this visit for you. It touches upon a case that has recently come under your purview and also has to do with a subject that seems of particular interest to you and which we have already discussed this evening."

When Judge Fang followed his host out onto the deck, he was finally able to make out their surroundings. They were on the open ocean, with no land in sight, though the urban glow of Greater Shanghai could clearly be seen to the west. It was a clear night with a nearly full moon that was illuminating the hull of an enormous s.h.i.+p nearby. Even without the moonlight this vessel would have been noticeable for the fact that it blocked out all of the stars in one quadrant of the sky.

Judge Fang knew next to nothing about s.h.i.+ps. He had toured an aircraft carrier in his youth, when it docked for a few days at Manhattan. He suspected that this s.h.i.+p was even larger. It was almost entirely dark except for pinp.r.i.c.ks of red light here and there, suggesting its size and general shape, and a few horizontal lines of yellow light s.h.i.+ning out the windows of its superstructure, many stories above their heads.

Dr. X and Judge Fang were conveyed on board this vessel by a small crew who came out to meet them in a launch. As it drew alongside the Doctor's yacht, the Judge was startled to realize that its crew consisted entirely of young women. Their accents marked them as belonging to an ethnic subgroup, common in the Southeast, that lived almost entirely on the water; but even if they had not spoken, Judge Fang would have inferred this from their nimble handling of the boat.

Within a few minutes, Dr. X and Judge Fang had been conveyed aboard the giant vessel through a hatch set into the hull near the waterline. Judge Fang noted that this was not an old-fas.h.i.+oned steel vessel; it was made of nanotechnological substances, infinitely lighter and stronger. No matter compiler in the world was large enough to compile a s.h.i.+p, so the s.h.i.+pyards in Hong Kong had compiled the pieces one by one, bonded them together, and slid them down the ways into the sea, much as their preDiamond Age predecessors had done.

Judge Fang had been expecting that the s.h.i.+p would be some kind of bulk carrier, consisting almost entirely of huge compartments, but the first thing he saw was a long corridor running parallel to the keel, seemingly the length of the entire s.h.i.+p. Young women in white, pink, or occasionally blue dresses and sensible shoes bustled back and forth along this corridor entering into and emerging from its innumerable doors.

There was no formal welcome, no captain or other officers. As soon as the boat girls had a.s.sisted them on board, they bowed and took their leave. Dr. X began to amble down the corridor, and Judge Fang followed him. The young women in the white dresses bowed as they approached, then continued on their way, having no time to waste on advanced formalities. Judge Fang had the general sense that they were peasant women, though none of them had the deep tans that were normally a mark of low social status in China. The boat girls had worn blue, so he gathered that this color identified people with nautical or engineering duties. In general, the ones in the pink dresses were younger and slenderer than the ones in the white dresses. The tailoring was different too; the pink dresses closed up the middle of the back, the white ones had two zippers symmetrically placed in the front.

Dr. X chose a door, apparently at random, swung it open, and held it for Judge Fang. Judge Fang bowed slightly and stepped through it into a room about the dimensions of a basketball court, though with a lower ceiling. It was quite warm and humid, and dimly lit. The first thing he saw was more girls in white dresses, bowing to him. Then he realized that the room was otherwise filled with cribs, hundreds of cribs, and that each crib had a perfect little girl baby in it. Young women in pink bustled back and forth with diapers. From place to place, a woman sat beside a crib, the front of her white dress unzipped, breast-feeding a baby.

Judge Fang felt dizzy. He was not willing to acknowledge the reality of what he saw. He had mentally prepared himself for tonight's meeting with Dr. X by reminding himself, over and over, that the Doctor was capable of any trickery, that he could not take anything he saw at face value. But as many first-time fathers had realized in the delivery room, there was something about the sight of an actual baby that focused the mind. In a world of abstractions, nothing was more concrete than a baby.

Judge Fang whirled on his heel and stormed out of the room, brus.h.i.+ng rudely past Dr. X. He picked a direction at random and walked, strode, ran down the corridor, past five doors, ten, fifty, then stopped for no particular reason and burst through another door.

It might as well have been the same room.

He felt almost nauseous and had to take stern measures to keep tears from his eyes. He ran out of the room and stormed through the s.h.i.+p for some distance, going up several stairways, past several decks. He stepped into another room, chosen at random, and found the floor covered with cribs, evenly s.p.a.ced in rows and columns, each one containing a sleeping one-year-old, dressed in fuzzy pink jammies with a hood and a set of mouse ears, each one clutching an identical white security blanket and nestled up with a stuffed animal. Here and there, a young woman in a pink dress sat on the floor on a bamboo mat, reading a book or doing needlework.

One of these women, close to Judge Fang, set her needlework down, rearranged herself into a kneeling position, and bowed to him. Judge Fang gave her a perfunctory bow in return, then padded over to the nearest crib. A little girl with astonis.h.i.+ngly thick eyelashes lay there, deeply asleep, breathing regularly, her mouse ears sticking out through the bars of the crib, and as Judge Fang stood and stared at her, he imagined that he could hear the breathing of all the children on this s.h.i.+p at once, combined into a gentle sigh that calmed his heart. All of these children, sleeping so peacefully; everything must be okay. It was going to be fine.

He turned away and saw that the young woman was smiling at him. It was not a flirting smile or a silly girlish smile but a calm and confident smile. Judge Fang supposed that wherever Dr. X was on this s.h.i.+p, he must be smiling in much the same way at this moment.

When Dr. X started the cine, Judge Fang recognized it right away: This was the work of the mediagrapher PhyrePhox, who was still, as far as he knew, languis.h.i.+ng in a holding cell in downtown Shanghai. The setting was an outcropping of stones amid a dun, dust-scoured vast.i.tude, somewhere in the interior of China. The camera panned across the surrounding waste, and Judge Fang did not have to be told that these had once been fertile fields, before the water table had been drained out from under them.

A couple of people approached, kicking up a plume of dust as they walked, carrying a small bundle. As they drew closer, Judge Fang could see that they were horrifyingly gaunt, dressed in dirty rags. They came to the center of the rocky outcropping and laid the bundle on the ground, then turned and walked away. Judge Fang turned away from the mediatron and dismissed it with a wave of the hand; he did not have to see it to know that the bundle was a baby, probably female.

"This scene could have happened anytime in the history of China," Dr. X said. They were sitting in a rather spartan wardroom in the vessel's superstructure. "It has always been done with us. The great rebellions of the 1800's were fueled by throngs of angry young men who could not find wives. In the darkest days of the Mao Dynasty's birth control policy, two hundred thousand little ones were exposed in this fas.h.i.+on"-he gestured toward the frozen image on the mediatron-"each year. Recently, with the coming of civil war and the draining of the Celestial Kingdom's aquifers, it has once again become common. The difference is that now the babies are collected. We have been doing it for three years."

"How many?" Judge Fang said.

"A quarter of a million to date," Dr. X said. "Fifty thousand on this s.h.i.+p alone."

Judge Fang had to set his teacup down for a few moments while he grappled with this notion. Fifty thousand lives on this s.h.i.+p alone.

"It won't work," Judge Fang said finally. "You can raise them this way until they are toddlers, perhaps-but what happens when they are older and bigger, and must be educated and given s.p.a.ce to run around and play?"

"It is indeed a formidable challenge," Dr. X said gravely, "but I trust you will take to heart the words of the Master: "Let every man consider virtue as what devolves on himself. He may not yield the performance of it even to his teacher.' I wish you good fortune, Magistrate."

This statement had much the same effect as if Dr. X had hit the Judge over the head with a board: startling, yes, but the full impact was somehow delayed.

"I'm not sure if I follow you, Doctor."

Dr. X crossed his wrists and held them up in the air. "I surrender. You may take me into custody. Torture will not be necessary; I have already prepared a signed confession."

Judge Fang had not hitherto realized that Dr. X had such a well-developed sense of humor. He decided to play along. "As much as I would like to bring you to justice, Doctor, I am afraid that I cannot accept your surrender, as we are out of my jurisdiction."

The Doctor nodded to a waiter, who swung the cabin door open to let in a cool breeze-and a view of the gaudy waterfront of the Leased Territories, suddenly no more than a mile away from them.

"As you can see, I have ordered the s.h.i.+ps to come into your jurisdiction, Your Honor," Dr. X said. He gestured invitingly out the door.

Judge Fang stepped out onto an open gangway and looked over the rail to see four other giant s.h.i.+ps following in this one's wake.

Dr. X's reedy voice came out through the open door. "You may now take me, and the crew of these s.h.i.+ps, to prison for the crime of baby-smuggling. You may also take into custody these s.h.i.+ps-and all quarter-million of the little mice on board. I trust you can find qualified caregivers somewhere within your jurisdiction."

Judge Fang gripped the rail with both hands and bowed his head. He was very close to clinical shock. It would be perfectly suicidal to call the Doctor's bluff. The concept of having personal responsibility for so many lives was terrifying enough in and of itself. But to think of what would eventually become of all of these little girls in the hands of the corrupt officialdom of the Coastal Republic ...

Dr. X continued, "I have no doubt that you will find some way to care for them. As you have demonstrated in the case of the book and the girl, you are too wise a magistrate not to understand the importance of proper upbringing of small children. No doubt you will exhibit the same concern for each one of these quarter of a million infants as you did for one little barbarian girl."

Judge Fang stood up straight, whirled, and strode back through the door. "Shut the door and leave the room," he said to the waiter.

When he and the Doctor were alone together, Judge Fang faced Dr. X, descended to his knees, bent forward, and knocked his forehead against the deck three times.

"Please, Your Honor!" Dr. X exclaimed, "it is I who should be doing honor to you in this way."

"For some time I have been contemplating a change of career," Judge Fang said, rising to an upright kneeling position. He stopped before continuing and thought it through once more. But Dr. X had left him no way out. It would have been uncharacteristic of the Doctor to spring a trap that could be escaped.

As the Master had said, The mechanic, who wishes to do his work well, must first sharpen his tools. When you are living in any state, take service with the most worthy among its great officers, and make friends of the most virtuous among its scholars. The mechanic, who wishes to do his work well, must first sharpen his tools. When you are living in any state, take service with the most worthy among its great officers, and make friends of the most virtuous among its scholars.

"Actually, I am satisfied with my career, but dissatisfied with my tribal affiliation. I have grown disgusted with the Coastal Republic and have concluded that my true home lies in the Celestial Kingdom. I have often wondered whether the Celestial Kingdom is in need of magistrates, even those as poorly qualified as I."

"This is a question I will have to take up with my superiors," Dr. X said. "However, given that the Celestial Kingdom currently has no magistrates whatsoever and therefore no real judicial system, I deem it likely that some role can be found for one with your superb qualifications."

"I see now why you desired the little girl's book so strongly," Judge Fang said. "These young ones must all be educated."

"I do not desire the book itself so much as I desire its designer-the artifex Hackworth," Dr. X said. "As long as the book was somewhere in the Leased Territories, there was some hope that Hackworth could find it-it is the one thing he desires most. If I could have found the book, I could have extinguished that hope, and Hackworth would then have had to approach me, either to get the book back or to compile another copy."

"You desire some service from Hackworth?"

"He is worth a thousand lesser engineers. And because of various hards.h.i.+ps over the last few decades, the Celestial Kingdom does not have even that many lesser engineers; they have all been lured away by the promise of riches in the Coastal Republic."

"I will approach Hackworth tomorrow," Judge Fang said. "I will inform him that the man known to the barbarians as Dr. X has found the lost copy of the book."

"Good," Dr. X said, "I shall expect to hear from him."

Hackworth's dilemma; an unantic.i.p.ated return to the hong of Dr. X; hitherto unseen ramifications of Dr. X's premises; a criminal is brought to justice.

Hackworth had some time to run through the logic of the thing one more time as he waited in the front room of Dr. X's hong, waiting for the old man to free himself up from what sounded like a twelve-way cine conference. On his first visit here he'd been too nervous to see anything, but today he was settled cozily in the cracked leather armchair in the corner, demanding tea from the help and thumbing through Dr. X's books. It was such a relief to have nothing to lose.

Since that deeply alarming visit from Chang, Hackworth had been at his wits' end. He had made an immense c.o.c.k-up of the whole thing. Sooner or later his crime would come out and his family would be disgraced, whether or not he gave money to Chang. Even if he somehow managed to get the Primer back, his life was ruined.

When he had received word that Dr. X had won the race to recover the lost copy of the Primer, the thing had turned from bad to farcical. He had cut a day at work and gone for a long hike in the Royal Ecological Conservatory. By the time he had returned home, sunburned and pleasantly exhausted, he had been in a much better mood. That Dr. X had the Primer actually improved his situation.

In exchange for the Primer, the Doctor would presumably want something from Hackworth. In this case, it was not likely to be a mere bribe, as Chang had hinted; all of the money Hackworth had, or was ever likely to make, could not be of interest to Dr. X. It was much more likely that the Doctor would want some sort of a favor-he might ask Hackworth to design something, to do a little bit of consulting work, as it were. Hackworth wanted so badly to believe this that he had bolstered the hypothesis with much evidence, real and phantasmal, during the latter part of his hike. It was well-known that the Celestial Kingdom was desperately far behind in the nanotechnological arms race; that Dr. X himself devoted his valuable time to rooting through the debris of the New Atlantan immune system proved this. Hackworth's skills could be of measureless value to them.

If this were true, then Hackworth had a way out. He would do some job for the Doctor. In exchange, he would get the Primer back, which was what he wanted more than anything. As part of the deal, Dr. X could no doubt find some way to eliminate Chang from Hackworth's list of things to worry about; Hackworth's crime would never be known to his phyle.

Victorians and Confucians alike had learned new uses for the foyer, anteroom, or whatever it was called, and for the old etiquette of visiting cards. For that matter, all tribes with sophistication in nanotech understood that visitors had to be carefully examined before they could be admitted into one's inner sanctum, and that such examination, carried out by thousands of a.s.siduous reconnaissance mites, took time. So elaborate waiting-room etiquette had flourished, and sophisticated people all over the world understood that when they called upon someone, even a close friend, they could expect to spend some time sipping tea and perusing magazines in a front room infested with un.o.btrusive surveillance equipment.

One entire wall of Dr. X's front room was a mediatron. Cine feeds, or simple stationary graphics, could be digitally posted on such a wall just as posters and handbills had been in olden times. Over time, if not removed, they tended to overlap each other and build up into an animated collage.

Centered on Dr. X's media wall, partly concealed by newer clips, was a cine clip as ubiquitous in northern China as the face of Mao-Buddha's evil twin-had been in the previous century. Hackworth had never sat and watched it all the way through, but he'd glimpsed it so many times, in Pudong taxicabs and on walls in the Leased Territories, that he knew it by heart. Westerners called it Zhang at the Shang. Zhang at the Shang.

The setting was the front of a luxury hotel, one of the archipelago of Shangri-Las strung up the Kowloon-Guangzhou superhighway. The horseshoe drive was paved with interlocking blocks, bra.s.s door handles gleamed, thickets of tropical flowers sprouted from boat-size planters in the lobby. Men in business suits spoke into cellphones and checked their watches, white-gloved bellhops sprinted into the drive, pulled suitcases from the trunks of red taxicabs, wiped them down with clean moist cloths.

The horseshoe drive was plugged into an eight-lane thoroughfare-not the highway, but a mere frontage road-with a spiked iron fence running down the center to keep pedestrians from crossing in midblock. The pavement, new but already crumbling, was streaked with red dust washed down out of the devastated hills of Guangdong by the latest typhoon.

Traffic suddenly became thin, and the camera panned upstream: Several lanes had been blocked by a swarm of bicycles. Occasionally a red taxi or Mercedes-Benz would squeeze by along the iron fence and burst free, the driver holding down the horn b.u.t.ton so furiously that he might detonate the air bag. Hackworth could not hear the sound of the horn, but as the camera zoomed in on the action, it became possible to see one driver take his hand off the horn and turn back to shake his finger at the mob of bicyclists.

When he saw who was pedaling the lead bicycle, he turned away nauseous with fear, and his hand collapsed into his lap like a dead quail.

The leader was a stocky man with white hair, sixtyish but pumping away vigorously on an unexceptional black bicycle, wearing drab worker's clothes. He moved it down the street with deceptive speed and pulled into the horseshoe drive. An embolism of bicycles formed on the street as hundreds tried to crowd in the narrow entrance. And here came another cla.s.sic moment: The head bellhop skirted his stand-up desk and ran toward the bicyclist, waving him off and hurling abuse in Cantonese-until he got about six feet away and realized he was looking at Zhang Han Hua.

At this point Zhang had no job t.i.tle, being nominally retired-an ironical conceit that the Chinese premiers of the late twentieth century and early twenty-first had perhaps borrowed from American Mafia bosses. Perhaps they recognized that job t.i.tles were beneath the dignity of the most powerful man on earth. People who had gotten this close to Zhang claimed that they never thought about his temporal power-the armies, the nuclear weapons, the secret police. All they could think about was the fact that, during the Great Cultural Revolution, at the age of eighteen, Zhang Han Hua had led his cell of Red Guards into hand-to-hand combat with another cell that they deemed insufficiently fervid, and that, at the conclusion of the battle, Zhang had feasted on the raw flesh of his late adversaries. No one could stand face-to-face with Zhang without imagining the blood streaming down his chin.

The bellhop collapses to his knees and begins literally kowtowing. Zhang looks disgusted, hooks one of his sandaled feet under the bellhop's collarbone, and prods him back upright, then speaks a few words to him in the hillbilly accent of his native Fujien. The bellhop can hardly bow enough on his way back into the hotel; displeasure registers on Zhang's face-all he wants is some fast service. During the next minute or so, progressively higher-ranking hotel officials cringe out the door and abase themselves in front of Zhang, who simply ignores them, looking bored now. No one really knows whether Zhang is a Confucianist or a Maoist at this point in his life, but at this moment it makes no difference: for in the Confucian view of society, as in the Communist, peasants are the highest cla.s.s and merchants the lowest. This hotel is not for peasants.

Finally a man in a black business suit emerges, preceded and pursued by bodyguards. He looks angrier than Zhang, thinking that he must be the victim of some unforgivable practical joke. This is a merchant among merchants: the fourteenth richest man in the world, the third richest in China. He owns most of the real estate within half an hour's drive of this hotel. He does not break his stride as he steps into the drive and recognizes Zhang; he walks straight up to him and asks him what he wants, why the old man has bothered to come down from Beijing and interfere with his business on his foolish bicycle ride.

Zhang simply steps forward and speaks a few words into the rich man's ear.

The rich man takes a step back, as if Zhang has punched him in the chest. His mouth is open, revealing flawless white teeth, his eyes are not focused. After a few moments, he takes another two steps back, which gives him enough room for his next maneuver: He stoops, puts one knee down, then the other, bends forward at the waist until he is on all fours, then settles himself down full-length on the nicely interlocked paving-stones. He puts his face on the pavement. He kowtows to Zhang Han Hua.

One by one the Dolbyized voices in the next room signed off until only Dr. X and another gentleman were left, haggling about something desultorily, taking long breaks between volleys of tweeter-busting oratory to stoke pipes, pour tea, or whatever these people did when they were pretending to ignore each other. The discussion petered out rather than building to a violent climax as Hackworth had secretly, mischievously been hoping, and then a young fellow pulled the curtain aside and said, "Dr. X will see you now."

Dr. X was in a lovely, generous mood probably calculated to convey the impression that he'd always known Hackworth would be back. He rustled to his feet, shook Hackworth's hand warmly, and invited him out to dinner "at a place nearby," he said portentously, "of utmost discretion."

It was discreet because one of its cozy private dining rooms was connected directly to one of the back rooms of Dr. X's establishment, so that one could reach it by walking down a sinous inflated Nan.o.bar tube that would have stretched to half a kilometer long if you extricated it from Shanghai, took it to Kansas, and pulled on both ends. Squinting through the translucent walls of the tube as he a.s.sisted Dr. X to dinner, Hackworth cloudily glimpsed several dozen people pursuing a range of activities in some half-dozen different buildings, through which Dr. X had apparently procured some kind of right-of-way. Finally it spat them out into a nicely furnished and carpeted dining room, which had been retrofitted with a powered sliding door. The door opened just as they were sitting down, and Hackworth was almost knocked off balance as the tube sneezed nanofiltered wind; a beaming four-foot-tall waitress stood in the doorway, closing her eyes and leaning forward against the antic.i.p.ated wind-blast. In perfect San Fernando Valley English she said, "Would you like to hear about our specials?"

Dr. X was at pains to rea.s.sure Hackworth that he understood and sympathized with his situation; so much so that Hackworth spent much of the time wondering whether Dr. X had already known about it. "Say no more, it is taken care of," Dr. X finally said, cutting Hackworth off in midexplanation, and after that Hackworth was unable to interest Dr. X in the topic anymore. This was rea.s.suring but unsettling, as he could not avoid the impression that he had just somehow agreed to a deal whose terms had not been negotiated or even thought about. But Dr. X's whole affect seemed to deliver the message that if you were going to sign a Faustian bargain with an ancient and inscrutable Shanghainese organized-crime figure, you could hardly do better than the avuncular Dr. X, who was so generous that he would probably forget about it altogether, or perhaps just stow the favor away in a yellowed box in one of his warrens. By the end of the lengthy meal, Hackworth was so rea.s.sured that he had almost forgotten about Lieutenant Chang and the Primer altogether.

Until, that is, the door slid open again to reveal Lieutenant Chang himself.

Hackworth hardly recognized him at first, because he was dressed in a much more traditional outfit than usual: baggy indigo pajamas, sandals, and a black leather skullcap that concealed about seventy-five percent of his knotlike skull. Also, he had begun to grow his whiskers out. Most alarmingly, he had a scabbard affixed to his belt, and the scabbard had a sword in it.

He stepped into the room and bowed perfunctorily to Dr. X, then turned to face Hackworth.

"Lieutenant Chang?" Hackworth said weakly.

"Constable Chang," said the interloper, "of the district tribunal of Shanghai." And then he said the Chinese words that meant Middle Kingdom.

"I thought you were Coastal Republic."

"I have followed my master to a new country," Constable Chang said. "I must regretfully place you under arrest now, John Percival Hackworth."

"On what charge?" Hackworth said, forcing himself to chuckle as if this were all a big practical joke among close friends.

"That on the - day of -, 21-, you did bring stolen intellectual property into the Celestial Kingdom- specifically, into the hong of Dr. X-and did use that property to compile an illegal copy of a certain device known as the Young Lady's Ill.u.s.trated Primer. Young Lady's Ill.u.s.trated Primer."

There was no point in claiming that this was not true. "But I have come here this evening specifically to regain possession of that same device," Hackworth said, "which is in the hands of my distinguished host here. Certainly you are not intending to arrest the distinguished Dr. X for trafficking in stolen property."

Constable Chang looked expectantly toward Dr. X. The Doctor adjusted his robes and adopted a radiant, grandfatherly smile. "I am sorry to tell you that some reprehensible person has apparently provided you with wrong information," he said. "In fact, I have no idea where the Primer is located."

The dimensions of this trap were so vast that Hackworth's mind was still reeling through it, bouncing haplessly from one wall to another, when he was hauled before the district magistrate twenty minutes later. They had set up a courtroom in a large, ancient garden in the interior of Old Shanghai. It was an open square paved with flat gray stones. At one end was a raised building open to the square on one side, covered with a sweeping tile roof whose corners curved high into the air and whose ridgeline was adorned with a clay frieze portraying a couple of dragons facing off with a large pearl between them. Hackworth realized, dimly, that this was actually the stage of an open-air theatre, which enhanced the impression that he was the sole spectator at an elaborate play written and staged for his benefit. A judge sat before a low, brocade-covered table in the center of the stage, dressed in magnificent robes and an imposing winged hat decorated with a unicorn emblem. Behind him and off to one side stood a small woman wearing what Hackworth a.s.sumed were phenomenoscopic spectacles. When Constable Chang had pointed to a spot on the gray flagstones where Hackworth was expected to kneel, he ascended to the stage and took up a position flanking the Judge on the other side. A few other functionaries were arranged on the square, mostly consisting of Dr. X and members of his retinue, arranged in two parallel lines forming a tunnel between Hackworth and the Judge.

Hackworth's initial surge of terror had worn off. He had now entered into morbid fascination with the incredible dreadfulness of his situation and the magnificent performance staged by Dr. X to celebrate it. He knelt silently and waited in a stunned, hyper-relaxed state, like a pithed frog on the dissection table.

Formalities were gone through. The Judge was named Fang and evidently came from New York. The charge was repeated, somewhat more elaborately. The woman stepped forward and introduced evidence: a cine record that was played on a large mediatron covering the back wall of the stage. It was a film of the suspect, John Percival Hackworth, slicing a bit of skin from his hand and giving it to (the innocent) Dr. X, who (not knowing that he was being gulled into committing a theft) extracted a terabyte of hot data from a c.o.c.klebur-shaped mite, and so on, and so on.

"The only thing that remains is to prove that this information was, indeed, stolen-though this is strongly implied by the suspect's behavior," Judge Fang said. In support of this a.s.sertion, Constable Chang stepped forward and told the story of his visit to Hackworth's flat.

"Mr. Hackworth," said Judge Fang, "would you like to dispute that this property was stolen? If so, we will hold you here while a copy of the information is supplied to Her Majesty's Police; they can confer with your employer to determine whether you did anything dishonest. Would you like us to do that?"

"No, Your Honour," Hackworth said.

"So you are not disputing that the property was stolen, and that you deceived a subject of the Celestial Kingdom into colluding with your criminal behavior?"

"I am guilty as charged, Your Honour," Hackworth said, "and I throw myself on the mercy of the court."

"Very well," Judge Fang said, "the defendant is guilty. The sentence is sixteen strokes of the cane and ten years' imprisonment."

"Goodness gracious!" Hackworth murmured. Inadequate as this was, it was the only thing that came to him.

"Insofar as the strokes of the cane are concerned, since the defendant was motivated by his filial responsibility to his daughter, I will suspend all but one, on one condition."