This would have been evident even if she hadn't been closing in on Coyote, the twelfth and final Faery King. In the last few weeks, since Nell had entered the domain of King Coyote, the character of the Primer had changed. Formerly, her Night Friends or other characters had acted with minds of their own, even if Nell just went along pa.s.sively. Reading the Primer had always meant racting with other characters in the book while also having to think her way through various interesting situations.

Recently the former element had been almost absent. Castle Turing had been a fair sample of King Coyote's domain: a place with few human beings, albeit filled with fascinating places and situations.

She made her lonesome way across the domain of King Coyote, visiting one castle after another, and encountering a different conundrum in each one. The second castle (after Castle Turing) was built on the slope of a mountain and had an elaborate irrigation system in which water from a bubbling spring was routed through a system of gates. There were many thousands of these gates, and they were connected to each other in small groups, so that one gate's opening or closing would, in some way, affect that of the others in its group. This castle grew its own food and was suffering a terrible famine because the arrangement of gates had in some way become fubared. A dark, mysterious knight had come to visit the place and apparently sneaked out of his bedroom in the middle of the night and fiddled with connections between some gates in such a way that water no longer flowed to the fields. Then he had disappeared, leaving behind a note stating that he would fix the problem in exchange for a large ransom in gold and jewels.

Princess Nell spent some time studying the problem and eventually noticed that the system of gates was actually a very sophisticated version of one of the Duke of Turing's machines. Once she understood that the behavior of the water-gates was orderly and predictable, it was not long before she was able to program their behavior and locate the bugs that the dark knight had introduced into the system. Soon water was flowing through the irrigation system again, and the famine was relieved.

The people who lived in this castle were grateful, which she had expected. But then they put a crown on her head and made her their ruler, which she had not expected.

On some reflection, though, it only made sense. They would die unless their system functioned properly. Princess Nell was the only person who knew how it worked; she held their fate in her hands. They had little choice but to submit to her rule.

So it went, as Princess Nell proceeded from castle to castle, inadvertently finding herself at the helm of a full-fledged rebellion against King Coyote. Each castle depended on some kind of a programmable system that was a little more complicated than the previous one. After the Castle of the Water-gates, she came to a castle with a magnificent organ, powered by air pressure and controlled by a bewildering grid of push-rods, which could play music stored on a roll of paper tape with holes punched through it. A mysterious dark knight had programmed the organ to play a sad, depressing tune, plunging the place into a profound depression so that no one worked or even got out of bed. With some playing around, Princess Nell established that the behavior of the organ could be simulated by an extremely sophisticated arrangement of water-gates, which meant, in turn, that it could just as well be reduced to an unfathomably long and complicated Turing machine program.

When she had the organ working properly and the residents cheered up, she moved on to a castle that functioned according to rules written in a great book, in a peculiar language. Some pages of the book had been ripped out by the mysterious dark knight, and Princess Nell had to reconstruct them, learning the language, which was extremely pithy and made heavy use of parentheses. Along the way, she proved what was a foregone conclusion, namely, that the system for processing this language was essentially a more complex version of the mechanical organ, hence a Turing machine in essence.

Next was a castle divided into many small rooms, with a system for pa.s.sing messages between rooms through a pneumatic tube. In each room was a group of people who responded to the messages by following certain rules laid out in books, which usually entailed sending more messages to other rooms. After familiarizing herself with some of these rule-books and establis.h.i.+ng that the castle was another Turing machine, Princess Nell fixed a problem in the message-delivery system that had been created by the vexatious dark knight, collected another ducal coronet, and moved on to castle number six.

This place was entirely different. It was much bigger. It was much richer. And unlike all of the other castles in the domain of King Coyote, it worked. As she approached the castle, she learned to keep her horse to the edge of the road, for messengers were constantly blowing past her at a full gallop in both directions.

It was a vast open marketplace with thousands of stalls, filled with carts and runners carrying product in all directions. But no vegetables, fish, spices, or fodder were to be seen here; all the product was information written down in books. The books were trundled from place to place on wheelbarrows and carried here and there on great long seedy-looking conveyor belts made of hemp and burlap. Book-carriers b.u.mped into each other, compared notes as to what they were carrying and where they were going, and swapped books for other books. Stacks of books were sold in great, raucous auctions-and paid for not with gold but with other books. Around the edges of the market were stalls where books were exchanged for gold, and beyond that, a few alleys where gold could be exchanged for food.

In the midst of this hubbub, Princess Nell saw a dark knight sitting on a black horse, paging through one of these books. Without further ado, she spurred her horse forward and drew her sword. She slew him in single combat, right there in the middle of the marketplace, and the book-sellers simply backed out of their way and ignored them as Princess Nell and the dark knight hacked and slashed at each other. When the dark knight fell dead and Princess Nell sheathed her sword, the commotion closed in about her again, like the waters of a turbulent river closing over a falling stone.

Nell picked up the book that the dark knight had been reading and found that it contained nothing but gibberish. It was written in some kind of a cipher.

She spent some time reconnoitering, looking for the center of the place, and found no center. One stall was the same as the next. There was no tower, no throne room, no clear system of authority.

Examining the market stalls in more detail, she saw that each one included a man who did nothing but sit at a table and decipher books, writing them out on long sheets of foolscap and handing them over to other people, who would read through the contents, consult rule-books, and dictate responses to the man with the quill pen, who enciphered them and 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 a.s.sumptions. 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 fas.h.i.+on.

All Nell needed was money, which she quickly acc.u.mulated 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; a.s.sault of the Fists of Righteous Harmony; ruminations on the inner workings of ractives.

Like much that was done with nanotechnology, Feed lines were a.s.sembled 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 circ.u.mstances, 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 ma.s.s and bulk. The pa.s.sives 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 inst.i.tuted a pa.s.s system on the bridges to prevent rural refugees from swarming across into the relatively s.p.a.cious 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 knuckle-walking through the crowd, b.u.t.ting at people's knees. The taxi-drivers were stronger and more aggressive than the rurals, though, and had a fearsome reputation that created s.p.a.ce 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 block.

Madame Ping's was still doing a decent business. Its clientele were willing to put up with some inconvenience to get there. It was only a short distance from the bridgehead, and the Madame had put a few truculent taxi-drivers on retainer as personal escorts. The business was startlingly large given the scarcity of real estate in Shanghai; it occupied most of a five-story reinforced-concrete Mao Dynasty apartment block, having started out with just a couple of flats and expanded room by room as the years went on.

The reception area reminded one of a not-bad hotel lobby, except that it had no restaurant or bar; none of the clients wanted to see or be seen by any other. The desk was staffed by concierges whose job was to get the clients out of view as quickly as possible, and they did it so well that an uninitiated pa.s.serby might get the impression that Madame Ping's was some kind of a walk-in kidnapping operation.

One of these functionaries, a tiny woman who seemed oddly prim and as.e.xual considering that she was wearing a black leather miniskirt, briskly took Nell to the top floor, where the large apartments had been built and elaborate scenarios were now realized for Madame Ping's clients.

As the writer, Nell of course never actually entered the same room as the client. The woman in the miniskirt escorted her into a nearby observation room, where a high-res cine feed from the next room covered most of one wall.

If she hadn't known it already, Nell would have seen from the client's uniform that he was a colonel in Her Majesty's Joint Forces. He was wearing a full dress uniform, and the various pins and medals on his coat indicated that he had spent a good deal of his career attached to various Protocol Enforcement units, been wounded in action several times, and displayed exceptional heroism on one occasion. In fact, it was clear that he was a rather important fellow. Reviewing the previous half-hour, Nell saw that, not surprisingly, he had arrived in mufti, carrying the uniform in a leather satchel. Wearing the uniform must be part of the scenario.

At the moment he was seated in a rather typical Victorian parlor, sipping tea from a Royal Albert china cup decorated with a somewhat agonistic briar rose pattern. He looked fidgety; he'd been kept waiting for half an hour, which was also part of the scenario. Madame Ping kept telling her that no one ever complained about having to wait too long for an o.r.g.a.s.m; that men could do that to themselves any time they wanted, and that it was the business leading up to it that they would pay for. The biological readouts seemed to confirm Madame Ping's rule: Perspiration and pulse were rather high, and he was about half erect.

Nell heard the sound of a door opening. Switching to a different angle she saw a parlormaid entering the room. Her uniform was not as overtly s.e.xy as most of the ones in Madame Ping's wardrobe department; the client was sophisticated. The woman was Chinese, but she played the role with the mid-Atlantic accent currently in vogue among neo-Victorians: "Mrs. Braithwaite will see you now."

The client stepped into an adjoining drawing room, where two women awaited him: a heavy Anglo in late middle age and a very attractive Eurasian woman, about thirty. Introductions were performed: The old woman was Mrs. Braithwaite, and the younger woman was her daughter. Mrs. was somewhat addled, and Miss was obviously running the show.

This section of the script never changed, and Nell had been over it a hundred times trying to troubleshoot it. The client went through a little speech in which he informed Mrs. Braithwaite that her son Richard had been killed in action, displaying great heroism in the process, and that he was recommending him for a posthumous Victoria Cross.

Nell had already done the obvious, going back through the Times Times archives to see whether this was a reconstruction of an actual event in the client's life. As far as she could determine, it was more like a composite of many similar events, perhaps with a dollop of fantasy thrown in. archives to see whether this was a reconstruction of an actual event in the client's life. As far as she could determine, it was more like a composite of many similar events, perhaps with a dollop of fantasy thrown in.

At this point, the old lady got a case of the vapors and had to be helped from the room by the parlormaid and other servants, leaving the client alone with Miss Braithwaite, who was taking the whole thing quite stoically. "Your composure is admirable, Miss Braithwaite," said the client, "but please be a.s.sured that no one will blame you for giving vent to your emotions at such a time." When the client spoke this line, there was an audible tremor of excitement in his voice.

"Very well, then," said Miss Braithwaite. She withdrew a small black box from her reticule and pressed a b.u.t.ton. The client grunted and arched his back so violently that he fell out of his chair onto the rug, where he lay paralyzed.

"Mites-you have infected my body with some insidious nanosite," he gasped.

"In the tea."

"But that is impossible-most mites highly susceptible to thermal damage-boiling water would destroy them."

"You underestimate the capabilities of CryptNet, Colonel Napier. Our technology is advanced far beyond your knowledge-as you will discover during the next few days!"

"Whatever your plan is-be a.s.sured that it will fail!"

"Oh, I have no plan in particular," Miss Braithwaite said. "This is not a CryptNet operation. This is personal. You are responsible for the death of my brother Richard-and I will have you show the proper contrition."

"I a.s.sure you that I was as deeply saddened-"

She zapped him again. "I do not want your sadness," she said. "I want you to admit the truth: that you are responsible for his death!"

She pressed another b.u.t.ton, which caused Colonel Napier's body to go limp. She and a maid wrestled him into a dumbwaiter and moved him down to a lower floor, where, after descending via the stairway, they tied him to a rack.

This was where the problem came in. By the time they had finished tying him up, he was sound asleep.

"He did it again," said the woman playing the role of Miss Braithwaite, addressing herself to Nell and anyone else who might be monitoring. "Six weeks in a row now."

When Madame Ping had explained this problem to Nell, Nell wondered what the problem was. Let the man sleep, as long as he kept coming and paid his bill. But Madame Ping knew her clients and feared that Colonel Napier was losing interest and might s.h.i.+ft his business to some other establishment unless they put some variety into the scenario.

"The fighting has been very bad," the actress said. "He's probably exhausted."

"I don't think it's that," Nell said. She had now opened a private voice channel direct to the woman's eardrum. "I think it is a personal change."

"They never change, sweetheart," said the actress. "Once they get the taste, they have it forever."

"Yes, but different situations may trigger those feelings at different times of life," Nell said. "In the past it has been guilt over the deaths of his soldiers. Now he has made his peace. He has accepted his guilt, and so he accepts the punishment. There is no longer a contest of wills, because he has become submissive."

"So what do we do?"

"We must create a genuine contest of wills. We must force him to do something he really doesn't want to do," Nell said, thinking aloud. What would fit that bill?

"Wake him up," Nell said. "Tell him you were lying when you said this wasn't a CryptNet operation. Tell him you want real information. You want military secrets."

Miss Braithwaite sent the maid out for a bucket of cold water and heaved it over Colonel Napier's body. Then she played the role as Nell had suggested, and did it well; Madame Ping hired people who were good at improvisation, and since most of them never actually had to have s.e.x with clients, she had no trouble finding good ones.

Colonel Napier seemed surprised, not unpleasantly so, at the script change. "If you suppose that I will divulge information that might lead to the deaths of more of my soldiers, you are sadly mistaken," he said. But his voice sounded a little bored and disappointed, and the bio readouts coming in from the nanosites in his body did not show the full flush of s.e.xual excitement that, presumably, he was paying for. They still were not meeting their client's needs.

On the private channel to Miss Braithwaite, Nell said, "He still doesn't get it. This isn't a fantasy scenario anymore. This is real. Madame Ping's is actually a CryptNet operation. We've been drawing him in for the last several years. Now he belongs to us, and he's going to give us information, and he's going to keep giving it to us, because he's our slave."

Miss Braithwaite acted the scene as suggested, making up more florid dialogue as she went along. Watching the bio readouts, Nell could see that Colonel Napier was just as scared and excited, now, as he had been on his very first visit to Madame Ping's several years ago (they kept records). They were making him feel young again, and fully alive.

"Are you connected with Dr. X?" Colonel Napier said.

"We'll ask the questions," Nell said.

"I shall do the asking. Lotus, give him twenty for that!" said Miss Braithwaite, and the maid went to work on Colonel Napier with a cane.

The rest of the session almost ran itself, which was good for Nell, because she had been startled by Napier's reference to Dr. X and had gone into a reverie, remembering comments that Harv had made about the same person many years ago.

Miss Braithwaite knew her job and understood Nell's strategy instantly: the scenario did not excite the client unless there was a genuine contest of wills, and the only way for them to create that contest was to force Napier to reveal real cla.s.sified information. Reveal it he did, bit by bit, under the encouragement of Lotus's bamboo and Miss Braithwaite's voice. Most of it had to do with troop movements and other minutiae that he probably thought was terribly interesting. Nell didn't.

"Get more about Dr. X," she said. "Why did he a.s.sume a connection between CryptNet and Dr. X?"

After a few more minutes of whacking and verbal domination, Colonel Napier was ready to spill. "Big operation of ours for many years now-Dr. X is working in collusion with a high-level CryptNet figure, the Alchemist. Working on something they mustn't be allowed to have."

"Don't you dare hold back on me," Miss Braithwaite said.

But before she could extract more information about the Alchemist, the building was jolted by a tremendous force that sent thin cracks racing through the old concrete. In the silence that followed, Nell could hear women screaming all over the building, and a crackling, hissing sound as dust and sand sifted out of a fissure in the ceiling. Then her ears began to resolve another sound: men shouting, "Sha! Sha!" "Sha! Sha!"

"I suggest that someone has just breached the wall of your building with an explosive charge," Colonel Napier said, perfectly calm. "If you would be so good as to terminate the scenario now and release me, I shall try to make myself useful in whatever is to follow."

Whatever is to follow. The shouting meant simply, "Kill! Kill!" and was the battle cry of the Fists of Righteous Harmony. The shouting meant simply, "Kill! Kill!" and was the battle cry of the Fists of Righteous Harmony.

Perhaps they wanted Colonel Napier. But it was more likely that they had decided to attack this place for its symbolic value as a den of barbarian decadence.

Miss Braithwaite and Lotus had already gotten Colonel Napier out of his restraints, and he was pulling on his trousers. "That we are not all dead implies that they are not making use of nanotechnological methods," he said professorially. "Hence this attack may safely be a.s.sumed to originate from a low-level neighborhood cell. The attackers probably believe the Fist doctrine that they are immune from all weapons. It never hurts, in these situations, to give them a reality check of some sort."

The door to Napier's room flew open, splinters of blond naked wood hissing across the floor. Nell watched, as though watching an old movie, as Colonel Napier drew a ridiculously s.h.i.+ny cavalry saber from its scabbard and ran it through the chest of the attacking Fist. This one fell back into another, creating momentary confusion; Napier took advantage of it, methodically planting his feet in a rather prissy-looking stance, squaring his shoulders, calmly reaching out, as if he were using the saber to poke around in a dark closet, and twitching the point beneath the second Fist's chin, incidentally cutting his throat in the process. A third Fist had gotten into the room by this point, this one bearing a long pole with a knife lashed to the end of it with the gray polymer ribbon peasants used for rope. But as he tried to wheel the weapon around, its b.u.t.t end got tangled up in the rack to which Napier had lately been tied. Napier stepped forward cautiously, checking his footing as he went, as if he did not want to get any blood on his boots, parried a belated attack, and stabbed the Fist in the thorax three times in quick succession.

Someone kicked at the door to Nell's room.

"Ah," Colonel Napier sighed, when it seemed clear that there were no more attackers in this party, "it is really very singular that I happen to have brought the full dress uniform, as edged weapons are not a part of our usual kit."

Several kicks had failed to open Nell's door, which unlike the ones in the scenario rooms was made of a modern substance and could not possibly be broken in that way. But Nell could hear voices out in the corridor and suspected that contrary to Napier's speculation, they might have nanotech devices of a very primitive sort-small explosives, say, capable of blowing doors open.

She ditched her long dress, which would only get in the way, and got down on knees and elbows to peer through the crack under the door. There were two pairs of feet. She could hear them conversing in low, businesslike tones.

Nell opened the door suddenly with one hand, reaching through with the other to shove a fountain pen into the throat of the Fist standing closest to the door. The other one reached for an old automatic rifle slung over his shoulder. This gave Nell more than enough time to kick him in the knee, which may or may not have done permanent damage but certainly threw him off balance. The Fist kept trying to bring his rifle to bear, as Nell kicked him over and over again. In the end she was able to twist the rifle free from his feeble one-handed grasp, whirl it around, and b.u.t.t him in the head.

The Fist with the pen in his neck was sitting on the floor watching her calmly. She aimed the rifle his way, and he held up one hand and looked down and away. His wound was bleeding, but not all that much; she had ruined his week but not hit anything big. She reflected that it was probably a healthy thing for him in the long run to be rid of the superst.i.tion that he was immune to weapons.

Constable Moore had taught her a thing or two about rifles. She stepped back into her room, locked the door, and devoted a minute or so to familiarizing herself with its controls, checking the magazine (only half full) and firing a single round (into the door, which stopped it) just to make sure it worked.

She was trying to suppress a flashback to the screwdriver incident. This frightened her until she realized that this time around she was much more in control of the situation. Her conversations with the Constable had not been without effect.

Then she made her way down the corridors and stairwells toward the lobby, slowly gathering a retinue of terrified young women along her way. They pa.s.sed a few clients, mostly male and mostly European, who had been pulled from their scenario rooms and crudely hacked up by the Fists. Three times she had to fire, surprised each time at how complicated it was. Accustomed to the Primer, Nell had to make allowances when functioning in the real world.

She and her followers found Colonel Napier in the lobby, about three-quarters dressed, carrying on a memorable edged-weapons duel with a couple of Fists who had, perhaps, been left there to keep the path of escape open. Nell considered trying to shoot at the Fists but decided against it, because she did not trust her marksmans.h.i.+p and also because she was mesmerized by the entire scene.

Nell would have been dazzled by Colonel Napier if she had not recently seen him strapped to a rack. Still, there was something about this very contradiction that made him, and by extension all Victorian men, fascinating to her. They lived a life of nearly perfect emotional denial-a form of asceticism as extreme as that of a medieval stylite. Yet they did have emotions, the same as anyone else, and only vented them in carefully selected circ.u.mstances.

Napier calmly impaled a Fist who had tripped and fallen, then turned his attention to a new antagonist, a formidable character skilled with a real sword. The duel between Western and Eastern martial arts moved back and forth across the lobby floor, the two combatants staring directly into one another's eyes and trying to intuit the other's thoughts and emotional state. The actual thrusts and parries and ripostes, when they came, were too rapid to be understood. The Fist's style was quite beautiful to watch, involving many slow movements that looked like the stretching of large felines at the zoo. Napier's style was almost perfectly boring: He moved about in a crabbed stance, watched his opponent calmly, and apparently did a lot of deep thinking.

Watching Napier at work, watching the medals and braid swinging and glinting on his jacket, Nell realized that it was precisely their emotional repression that made the Victorians the richest and most powerful people in the world. Their ability to submerge their feelings, far from pathological, was rather a kind of mystical art that gave them nearly magical power over Nature and over the more intuitive tribes. Such was also the strength of the Nipponese.

Before the struggle could be resolved, a smart flechette, horsefly-size, trailing a whip antenna as thick as a hair and as long as a finger, hissed in through a broken window and thunked into the back of the Fist's neck. It did not strike very hard but must have shot some poison into his brain. He sat down quickly on the floor, closed his eyes, and died in that position.

"Not very chivalrous," Colonel Napier said distastefully. "I suppose I have some bureaucrat up on New Chusan to thank for that."

A cautious tour of the building turned up several more Fists who had died in the same fas.h.i.+on. Outside, the same old crowd of refugees, beggars, pedestrians, and cargo-carrying bicyclists streamed on, about as undisturbed as the Yangtze.

Colonel Napier did not return to Madame Ping's the next week, but Madame Ping did not blame Nell for the loss of his custom. To the contrary, she praised Nell for having correctly divined Napier's wishes and for improvising so well. "A fine performance," she said.

Nell had not really thought of her work as a performance, and for some reason Madame Ping's choice of words provoked her in a way that kept her awake late that night, staring into the darkness above her bunk.