The Hackworths have a family reunion;
Hackworth strikes out on his quest;
an unexpected companion.

   Atlantis/Seattle was designed small and to the point; the narrow, convoluted straits of Puget Sound, already so full of natural islands, did not leave much room for artificial ones. So they had made it rather long and slender, parallel to the currents and the shipping lanes, and been rather stingy when it came to the parks, meadows, heaths, gentleman farms, and country estates. Much of the Seattle area was still sufficiently rich, civilized, and polite that New Atlantans did not object to living there, and little Victorian mini-claves were scattered about the place, particularly east of the lake, around the misty forest domains of the software khans. Gwen and Fiona had taken a townhouse in one of these areas.
   These tiny bits of New Atlantis stood out from the surrounding forest in the same way that a vicar in morning coat and wing collar would have in the cave of the Drummers. The prevailing architecture here, among those who had not adopted neo-Victorian precepts, was distinctly subterranean; as if these people were somehow ashamed of their own humanity and could not bear to fell even a handful of the immense Douglas firs that marched monotonously up the tumbling slopes toward the frozen, sodden ridge of the Cascades. Even when it was half buried, a house wasn't even a proper house; it was an association of modules, scattered about here and there and connected by breezeways or tunnels. Stuck together properly and built on a rise, these modules might have added up to a house of substance, even grandeur; but to Hackworth, riding through the territory on his way to visit his family, it was all depressing and confusing. Ten years among the Drummers had not affected his Victorian aesthetics. He could not tell where one house left off and the next one began, the houses were all intertangled with one another like neurons in the brain.
   His mind's eye again seemed to seize control of his visual cortex; he could not see the firs anymore, just axons and dendrites hanging in black three-dimensional space, packets of rod logic maneuvering among them like space probes, meeting and copulating among the nerve fibers.
   It was a bit too aggressive to be a reverie and too abstract to be a hallucination. It didn't really clear away until a gust of cold mist hit him in his face, he opened his eyes, and realized that Kidnapper had stopped after emerging from the trees at the crest of a mossy ridgeline. Below him was a rocky bowl with a few cobblestone streets sketched out in a grid, a green park lined with red geraniums, a church with a white steeple, whitewashed four-story Georgian buildings surrounded by black wrought-iron fences. The security grid was tenuous and feeble; the software khans were at least as good at that kind of thing as Her Majesty's specialists, and so a New Atlantis clave in this area could rely on the neighbors to shoulder much of that burden.
   Kidnapper picked its way carefully down the steep declivity as Hackworth looked out over the tiny clave, musing at how familiar it seemed. Since leaving the Drummers, he hadn't gone more than ten minutes without being seized by a feeling of déjà vu, and now it was especially strong. Perhaps this was because, to some degree, all New Atlantis settlements looked alike. But he suspected that he had seen this place, somehow, in his communications with Fiona over the years.
   A bell clanged once or twice, and teenaged girls, dressed in plaid uniform skirts, began to emerge from a domed school. Hackworth knew that it was Fiona's school, and that she was not entirely happy there. After the crush of girls had gone out of the place, he rode Kidnapper into the school yard and sauntered once around the building, gazing in the windows. Without much trouble he saw his daughter, sitting at a table in the library, hunched over a book, evidently as part of some disciplinary action.
   He wanted so badly to go in and put his arms around her, because he knew that she had spent many hours suffering like punishments, and that she was a lonely girl. But he was in New Atlantis, and there were proprieties to be observed. First things first. Gwendolyn's townhouse was only a few blocks away. Hackworth rang the bell, determined to observe all of the formalities now that he was a stranger in the house.
   "May I ask what your visit is regarding?" asked the parlourmaid, as Hackworth spun his card onto the salver. Hackworth didn't like this woman, who was named Amelia, because Fiona didn't like her, and Fiona didn't like her because Gwen had given her some disciplinary authority in the household, and Amelia was the sort who relished having it. He tried not to confuse himself by wondering how he could possibly know all of these things.
   "Business," Hackworth said pleasantly. "Family business."
   Amelia was halfiway up the stairs when her eyes finally focused on Hackworth's card. She nearly dropped the salver and had to clutch at the banister with one hand in order to keep her balance. She froze there for a few moments, trying to resist the temptation to turn around, and finally surrendered to it. The expression on her face was one of perfect loathing mixed with fascination.
   "Please carry out your duties," Hackworth said, "and dispense with the vulgar theatrics."
   Amelia, looking crestfallen, stormed up the stairs with the tainted card. There followed a good deal of muffled commotion upstairs. After a few minutes, Amelia ventured as far down as the landing and encouraged Hackworth to make himself comfortable in the parlor. He did so, noting that in his absence, Gwendolyn had been able to consummate all of the long-term furniture-buying strategies she had spent so much time plotting during the early years of their marriage. Wives and widows of secret agents in Protocol Enforcement could rely on being well cared for, and Gwen had not allowed his salary to sit around collecting dust.
   His ex-wife descended the stairway cautiously, stood outside the beveled-glass parlor doors for a minute peering at him through the gauze curtains, and finally slipped into the room without meeting his gaze and took a seat rather far away from him. "Hello, Mr. Hackworth," she said.
   "Mrs. Hackworth. Or is it back to Miss Lloyd?"
   "It is."
   "Ah, that's hard." When Hackworth heard the name Miss Lloyd, he thought of their courtship.
   They sat there for a minute or so, not saying anything, just listening to the ponderous ratcheting of the grandfather clock.
   "All right," Hackworth said, "I won't trouble you talking about extenuating circumstances, as I don't ask for your forgiveness, and in all honesty I'm not sure that I deserve it."
   "Thank you for that consideration."
   "I would like you to know, Miss Lloyd, that I am sympathetic to the step you have taken in securing a divorce and harbour no bitterness on that account."
   "That is reassuring to know."
   "You should also know that whatever behaviour I engaged in, as inexcusable as it was, was not motivated by rejection of you or of our marriage. It was not, in fact, a reflection upon you at all, but rather a reflection upon myself."
   "Thank you for clarifying that point."
   "I realize that any hope I might harbour in my breast of rekindling our former relationship, sincere as it might be, is futile, and so I will not trouble you after today."
   "I cannot tell you how relieved I am to hear that you understand the situation so completely."
   "However, I would like to be of service to you and Fiona in helping to resolve any loose ends."
   "You are very kind. I shall give you my lawyer's card."
   "And, of course, I look forward to reestablishing some sort of contact with my daughter."
   The conversation, which had been running as smoothly as a machine to this point, now veered off track and crashed. Gwendolyn reddened and stiffened.
   "You– you bastard."
   The front door opened. Fiona stepped into the foyer carrying her schoolbooks. Amelia was there immediately, maneuvering around with her back to the foyer doors, blocking Fiona's view, talking to her in low angry tones.
   Hackworth heard his daughter's voice. It was a lovely voice, a husky alto, and he would have recognized it anywhere. "Don't lie to me, I recognised his chevaline!" she said, and finally shouldered Amelia out of the way, burst into the parlor, all lanky and awkward and beautiful, an incarnation of joy. She took two steps across the oriental rug and then launched herself full-length across the settee into her father's arms, where she lay for some minutes alternately weeping and laughing.
   Gwen had to be escorted from the room by Amelia, who came back immediately and stationed herself nearby, hands clasped behind back like a military sentry, observing Hackworth's every move. Hackworth couldn't imagine what they suspected he might be capable of-incest in the parlor? But there was no point in spoiling the moment by thinking of galling things, and so he shut Amelia out of his mind.
   Father and daughter were allowed to converse for a quarter of an hour, really just queuing up subjects for future conversation. By that time, Gwen had recovered her composure enough to reenter the room, and she and Amelia stood shoulder-to-shoulder, quivering in sympathetic resonance, until Gwen interrupted.
   "Fiona, your-father–and I were in the midst of a very serious discussion when you burst in on us. Please leave us alone for a few minutes."
   Fiona did, reluctantly. Gwen resumed her former position, and Amelia backed out of the room. Hackworth noticed that Gwen had fetched some documents, bound up in red tape.
   "These are papers setting out the terms of our divorce, including all conditions relating to Fiona," she said. "You are already in violation, I'm afraid. Of course, this can be forgiven, as your lack of a forwarding address as such made it impossible for us to acquaint you with this information. Needless to say, it is imperative for you to familiarise yourself with these documents before darkening my door again."
   "Naturally," Hackworth said. "Thank you for retaining them for me."
   "If you will be so good as to withdraw from these premises-"
   "Of course. Good day," Hackworth said, took the roll of papers from Gwen's trembling hand, and let himself out briskly. He was a bit surprised when he heard Amelia calling to him from the doorway.
   "Mr. Hackworth. Miss Lloyd wishes to know whether you have established a new residence, so that your personal effects may be forwarded."
   "None as yet," Hackworth said. "I'm in transit."
   Amelia brightened. "In transit to where?"
   "Oh, I don't really know," Hackworth said. A movement caught his eye and he saw Fiona framed in a second-story window. She was undoing the latches, raising the sash. "I'm on a quest of sorts."
   "A quest for what, Mr. Hackworth?"
   "Can't say precisely. You know, top secret and all that. Something to do with an alchemist. Who knows, maybe there'll be faeries and hobgoblins too, before it's all over. I'll be happy to fill you in when I return. Until then, please ask Miss Lloyd if she would be so understanding as to retain those personal effects for just a bit longer. It can't possibly take more than another ten years or so." And with that, Hackworth prodded Kidnapper forward, moving at an extremely deliberate pace.
   Fiona was on a velocipede with smart wheels that made short work of the cobblestone road. She caught up with her father just short of the security grid. Mother and Amelia had just materialized a block behind them in a half-lane car, and the sudden sensation of danger inspired Fiona to make an impetuous dive from the saddle of her velocipede onto Kidnapper's hindquarters, like a cowboy in a movie switching horses in midgallop. Her skirts, poorly adapted to cowboy maneuvers, got all fouled up around her legs, and she ended up slung over Kidnapper's back like a sack of beans, one hand clutching the vestigial knob where its tail would have been if it were a horse, and the other arm thrown round her father's waist.
   "I love you, Mother!" she shouted, as they rode through the grid and out of the jurisdiction of New Atlantis family law. "Can't say the same for you, Amelia! But I'll be back soon, don't worry about me! Goodbye!" And then the ferns and mist closed behind them, and they were alone in the deep forest.

Carl Hollywood takes the Oath;
stroll along the Thames;
an encounter with Lord Finkle-McGraw.

   Carl took the Oath at Westminster Abbey on a surprisingly balmy day in April and afterward went for a stride down the river, heading not too directly toward a reception that had been arranged in his honor at the Hopkins Theatre near Leicester Square. Even without a pedomotive, he walked as fast as many people jogged.
   Ever since his first visit to London as a malnourished theatre student, he had preferred walking to any other way of getting around the place. Walking, especially along the Embankment where fellow-pedestrians were relatively few, also gave him freedom to smoke big old authentic cigars or the occasional briar pipe. Just because he was a Victorian didn't mean he had to give up his peculiarities; quite the opposite, in fact. Cruising along past old shrapnel-pocked Cleopatra's Needle in a comet-like corona of his own roiling, viscous smoke, he thought that he might get to like this.
   A gentleman in a top hat was standing on the railing, gazing stolidly across the water, and as Carl drew closer, he could see that it was Lord Alexander Chung-Sik Finkle-McGraw, who, a day or two earlier, had stated during a cinephone conversation that he should like to meet him face-to-face in the near future for a chat.
   Carl Hollywood, remembering his new tribal affiliation, went so far as to doff his hat and bow. Finkle-McGraw acknowledged the greeting somewhat distractedly. "Please accept my sincere congratulations, Mr. Hollywood. Welcome to the phyle."
   "Thank you."
   "I regret that I have not been able to attend any of your productions at the Hopkins– my friends who have could hardly have been more complimentary."
   "Your friends are too kind," said Carl Hollywood. He was still a little unsure of the etiquette. To accept the compliment at face value would have been boastful; to imply that His Grace's friends were incompetent judges of theatre was not much of an improvement; he settled for the less dangerous accusation that these friends had a superfluity of goodness.
   Finkle-McGraw detached himself from the railing and began to walk along the river, keeping a brisk pace for a man of his age.
   "I daresay that you shall make a prized addition to our phyle, which, as brilliantly as it shines in the fields of commerce and science, wants more artists."
   Not wanting to join in criticism of the tribe he'd just sworn a solemn Oath to uphold, Carl pursed his lips and mulled over some possible responses.
   Finkle-McGraw continued, "Do you suppose that we fail to encourage our own children to pursue the arts, or fail to attract enough men such as yourself, or perhaps both?"
   "With all due respect, Your Grace, I do not necessarily agree with your premise. New Atlantis has many fine artists."
   "Oh, come now. Why do all of them come from outside the tribe, as you did? Really, Mr. Hollywood, would you have taken the Oath at all if your prominence as a theatrical producer had not made it advantageous for you to do so?"
   "I think I will choose to interpret your question as part of a Socratic dialogue for my edification," Carl Hollywood said carefully, "and not as an allegation of insincerity on my part. As a matter of fact, just before I encountered you, I was enjoying my cigar, and looking about at London, and thinking about just how well it all suits me."
   "It suits you well because you are of a certain age now. You are a successful and established artist. The ragged bohemian life holds no charm for you anymore. But would you have reached your current position if you had not lived that life when you were younger?"
   "Now that you put it that way," Carl said, "I agree that we might try to make some provision, in the future, for young bohemians-"
   "It wouldn't work," Finkle-McGraw said. "I've been thinking about this for years. I had the same idea: Set up a sort of young artistic bohemian theme park, sprinkled around in all the major cities, where young New Atlantans who were so inclined could congregate and be subversive when they were in the mood. The whole idea was self-contradictory. Mr. Hollywood, I have devoted much effort, during the last decade or so, to the systematic encouragement of subversiveness."
   "You have? Are you not concerned that our young subversives will migrate to other phyles?"
   If Carl Hollywood could have kicked himself in the arse, he would have done so as soon as finishing that sentence. He had forgotten about Elizabeth Finkle-McGraw's recent and highly publicized defection to CryptNet. But the Duke took it serenely.
   "Some of them will, as the case of my granddaughter demonstrates. But what does it really mean when such a young person moves to another phyle? It means that they have outgrown youthful credulity and no longer wish to belong to a tribe simply because it is the path of least resistance-they have developed principles, they are concerned with their personal integrity. It means, in short, that they are ripe to become members in good standing of New Atlantis-as soon as they develop the wisdom to see that it is, in the end, the best of all possible tribes."
   "Your strategy was much too subtle for me to follow. I thank you for explaining it. You encourage subversiveness because you think that it will have an effect opposite to what one might naively suppose."
   "Yes. And that's the whole point of being an Equity Lord, you know-to look after the interests of the society as a whole instead of flogging one's own company, or whatever. At any rate, this brings us to the subject of the advertisement I placed in the ractives section of the Times and our consequent cinephone conversation."
   "Yes," Carl Hollywood said, "you are looking for ractors who performed in a project called the Young Lady's Illustrated Primer."
   "The Primer was my idea. I commissioned it. I paid the racting fees. Of course, owing to the way the media system is organised, I had no way to determine the identity of the ractors to whom I was sending the fees– hence the need for a public advertisement."
   "Your Grace, I should tell you immediately-and would have told you on the cinephone, had you not insisted that we defer all substantive discussion to a face-to-face-that I myself did not ract in the Primer. A friend of mine did. When I saw the advertisement, I undertook to respond on her behalf."
   "I understand that ractors are frequently pursued by overly appreciative members of their audience," said Finkle-McGraw, "and so I suppose I understand why you have chosen to act as intermediary in this case. Let me assure you that my motives are perfectly benign."
   Carl adopted a wounded look "Your Grace! I would never have supposed otherwise. I am arrogating this role to myself, not to protect the young lady in question from any supposed malignity on your part, but simply because her current circumstances make establishing contact with her a somewhat troublesome business."
   "Then pray tell me what you know about the young woman." Carl gave the Equity Lord a brief description of Miranda's relationship with the Primer.
   Finkle-McGraw was keenly interested in how much time Miranda had spent in the Primer each week. "If your estimates are even approximately accurate, this young woman must have singlehandedly done at least nine-tenths of the racting associated with that copy of the Primer."
   "That copy? Do you mean to say there were others?"
   Finkle-McGraw walked on silently for a few moments, then resumed in a quieter voice. "There were three copies in all. The first one went to my granddaughter-as you will appreciate, I tell you this in confidence. A second went to Fiona, the daughter of the artifex who created it. The third fell into the hands of Nell, a little thete girl.
   "To make a long story short, the three girls have turned out very differently. Elizabeth is rebellious and high-spirited and lost interest in the Primer several years ago. Fiona is bright but depressed, a classic manic-depressive artist. Nell, on the other hand, is a most promising young lady.
   "I prepared an analysis of the girls' usage habits, which were largely obscured by the inherent secrecy of the media system, but which can be inferred from the bills we paid to hire the ractors. It became clear that, in the case of Elizabeth, the racting was done by hundreds of different performers. In Fiona's case, the bills were strikingly lower because much of the racting was done by someone who did not charge money for his or her services-probably her father. But that's a different story. In Nell's case, virtually all of the racting was done by the same person."
   "It sounds," Carl said, "as if my friend established a relationship with Nell's copy-"
   "And by extension, with Nell," said Lord Finkle-McGraw.
   Carl said, "May I inquire as to why you wish to contact the ractor?"
   "Because she is a central part of what is going on here," said Lord Finkle-McGraw, "which I did not expect. It was not a part of the original plan that the ractor would be important."
   "She did it," Carl Hollywood said, "by sacrificing her career and much of her life. It is important for you to understand, Your Grace, that she was not merely Nell's tutor. She became Nell's mother."
   These words seemed to strike Lord Finkle-McGraw quite forcefully. His stride faltered, and he ambled along the riverbank for some time, lost in thought.
   "You gave me to believe, several minutes ago, that establishing contact with the ractor in question would not be a trivial process," he said finally, in quieter voice. "Is she no longer associated with your troupe?"
   "She took a leave of absence several years ago in order to concentrate on Nell and the Primer."
   "I see," said the Equity Lord, leaning into the words a little bit and turning it into an exclamation. He was getting excited. "Mr. Hollywood, I hope you will not be offended by my indelicacy in inquiring as to whether this has been a paid leave of absence."
   "Had it been necessary, I would have underwritten it. Instead there is another backer."
   "Another backer," repeated Finkle-McGraw. He was obviously fascinated, and slightly alarmed, by the use of financial jargon in this context.
   "The transaction was fairly simple, as I suppose all transactions are au fond," said Carl Hollywood. "Miranda wanted to locate Nell. Conventional thinking dictates that this is impossible. There are, however, some unconventional thinkers who would maintain that it can be done through unconscious, nonrational processes. There is a tribe called the Drummers who normally live underwater-"
   "I am familiar with them," said Lord Finkle-McGraw.
   "Miranda joined the Drummers four years ago," Carl said. "She had entered into a partnership. The two other partners were a gentleman of my acquaintance, also in the theatrical business, and a financial backer."
   "What did the backer hope to gain from it?"
   "A leased line to the collective unconscious," said Carl Hollywood. "He thought it would be to the entertainment industry what the philosopher's stone was to alchemy."
   "And the results?"
   "We have all been waiting to hear from Miranda."
   "You have heard nothing at all?"
   "Only in my dreams," Carl Hollywood said.

Nell's passage through Pudong;
she happens upon the offices of Madame Ping;
interview with the same.

   Shanghai proper could be glimpsed only through vertical apertures between the high buildings of the Pudong Economic Zone as Nell skated westward. Downtown Pudong erupted from the flat paddy-land on the east bank of the Huang Pu. Almost all of the skyscrapers made use of mediatronic building materials. Some bore the streamlined characters of the Japanese writing system, rendered in sophisticated color schemes, but most of them were written in the denser high-resolution characters used by the Chinese, and these tended to be stroked out in fiery red, or in black on a background of that color.
   The Anglo-Americans had their Manhattan, the Japanese had Tokyo. Hong Kong was a nice piece of work, but it was essentially Western. When the Overseas Chinese came back to the homeland to build their monument to enterprise, they had done it here, and they had done it bigger and brighter, and unquestionably redder, than any of those other cities. The nanotechnological trick of making sturdy structures that were lighter than air had come along just at the right time, as all of the last paddies were being replaced by immense concrete foundations, and a canopy of new construction had bloomed above the first-generation undergrowth of seventy– and eighty-story buildings. This new architecture was naturally large and ellipsoidal, typically consisting of a huge neonrimmed ball impaled on a spike, so Pudong was bigger and denser a thousand feet above the ground than it was at street level.
   Seen from the apex of the big arch in the Causeway through several miles of bad air, the view was curiously flattened and faded, as if the whole scene had been woven into a fabulously complex brocade that had been allowed to gather dust for several decades and then been hung in front of Nell, about ten feet away. The sun had gone down not long before and the sky was still a dim orange fading up into purple, divided into irregular segments by half a dozen pillars of smoke spurting straight up out of the horizon and toward the dark polluted vault of the heavens, many miles off to the west, somewhere out in the silk and tea districts between Shanghai and Suzhou.
   As she power-skated down the western slope of the arch and crossed the coastline of China, the thunderhead of neon reached above her head, spread out to embrace her, developed into three dimensions– and she was still several miles away from it. The coastal neighborhoods consisted of block after block of reinforced-concrete apartment buildings, four to five stories high, looking older than the Great Wall though their real age could not have exceeded a few decades, and decorated on the ends facing the street with large cartoonish billboards, some mediatronic, most just painted on. For the first kilometer or so, most of these were targeted at businessmen just coming in from New Chusan, and in particular from the New Atlantis Clave. Glancing at these billboards as she went by them,
   Nell concluded that visitors from New Atlantis played an important role in supporting casinos and bordellos, both the old-fashioned variety and the newer scripted-fantasy emporia, where you could be the star in a little play you wrote yourself. Nell slowed down to examine several of these, memorizing the addresses of ones with especially new or well-executed signs.
   She had no clear plan in mind yet. All she knew was that she had to keep moving purposefully. Then the young men squatting on the curbs talking into their cellphones would keep eyeing her but leave her alone. The moment she stopped or looked the tiniest bit uncertain, they would descend.
   The dense wet air along the Huang Pu was supporting millions of tons of air buoys, and Nell felt every kilogram of their weight pressing upon her ribs and shoulders as she skated up and down the main waterfront thoroughfare, trying to maintain her momentum and her false sense of purposefulness. This was the Coastal Republic, which appeared to have no fixed principles other than that money talked and that it was a good thing to get rich. Every tribe in the world seemed to have its own skyscraper here. Some, like New Atlantis, were not actively recruiting and simply used the size and magnificence of their buildings as a monument to themselves.
   Others, like the Boers, the Parsis, the Jews, went for the understated approach, and in Pudong anything understated was more or less invisible. Still others-the Mormons, the First Distributed Republic, and the Chinese Coastal Republic itself-used every square inch of their mediatronic walls to proselytize.
   The only phyle that didn't seem to appreciate the ecumenical spirit of the place was the Celestial Kingdom itself. Nell stumbled across their territory, half a square block surrounded with a stucco-sheathed masonry wall, circular gates here and there, and an old three-story structure inside, done in high Ming style with eaves that curved way up at the corners and sculpted dragons along the ridgeline of the roof. The place was so tiny compared to the rest of Pudong that it looked as if you might trip over it. The gates were guarded by men in armor, presumably backed up by other, less obvious defensive systems.
   Nell was fairly certain that she was being followed, unobtrusively, by at least three young men who had locked on to her during her initial passage in from the coast, and who were waiting to find out whether she really had somewhere to go or was just faking it. She had already made her way from one end of the waterfront to the other, pretending to be a tourist who just wanted to take in a view of the Bund across the river. She was now heading back into the heart of downtown Pudong, where she had better look as if she were doing something.
   Passing by the grand entrance to one of the skyscrapers-a Coastal Republic edifice, not barbarian turf-she recognized its mediaglyphic logo from one of the signs she had seen on the way into town.
   Nell could at least fill out an application without committing herself. It would allow her to kill an hour in relatively safe and clean surroundings. The important thing, as Dojo had taught her long ago in a different context, was not to stop; without movement she could do nothing.
   Alas, Madame Ping's office suite was closed. A few lights were on in the back, but the doors were locked and no receptionist was on duty. Nell did not know whether to be amused or annoyed; whoever heard of a brothel that closed down after dark? But then these were only the administrative offices.
   She loitered in the lobby for a few minutes, then caught a down elevator. Just as the doors were closing, someone jumped into the lobby and slammed the button, opening them back up again. A young Chinese man with a small, slender body, large head, neatly dressed, carrying some papers. "Pardon me," he said. "Did you require something?"
   "I'm here to apply for a job," Nell said.
   The man's eyes traveled up and down her body in a coolly professional fashion, almost completely devoid of prurience, starting and stopping on her face. "As a performer," he said. The intonation was somewhere between a question and a declaration.
   "As a scriptwriter," she said.
   Unexpectedly, he broke into a grin.
   "I have qualifications that I will explain in detail."
   "We have writers. We contract for them on the network."
   "I'm surprised. How can a contract writer in Minnesota possibly provide your clients with the personalized service they require?"
   "You could almost certainly get a job as a performer," said the young man. "You would start tonight. Good pay."
   "Just by looking at the billboards on the way in, I could see that your customers aren't paying for bodies. They are paying for ideas. That's your value added, right?"
   "Pardon me?" said the young man, grinning again.
   "Your value added. The reason you can charge more than a whorehouse, pardon my language, is that you provide a scripted fantasy scenario tailored to the client's requirements. I can do that for you," Nell said. "I know these people, and I can make you a lot of money."
   "You know what people?"
   "The Vickys. I know them inside and out," Nell said.
   "Please come inside," said the young man, gesturing toward the diamondoid door with MADAME PING'S written on it in red letters. "Would you care for tea?"

. . .
   "There are only two industries. This has always been true," said Madame Ping, enfolding a lovely porcelain teacup in her withered fingers, the two-inch fingernails interleaving neatly like the pinions of a raptor folding its wings after a long hard day of cruising the thermals. "There is the industry of things, and the industry of entertainment. The industry of things comes first. It keeps us alive. But making things is easy now that we have the Feed. This is not a very interesting business anymore.
   "After people have the things they need to live, everything else is entertainment. Everything. This is Madame Ping's business."
   Madame Ping had an office on the hundred-and-eleventh floor with a nice unobstructed view across the Huang Pu and into downtown Shanghai. When it wasn't foggy, she could even see the facade of her theatre, which was on a side street a couple of blocks in from the Bund, its mediatronic marquee glowing patchily through the dun limbs of an old sycamore tree. She had a telescope mounted in one of her windows, fixed upon the theatre's entrance, and noting Nell's curiosity, she encouraged her to look through it.
   Nell had never looked through a real telescope before. It had a tendency to jiggle and go out of focus, it didn't zoom, and panning was tricky. But for all that, the image quality was a lot better than photographic, and she quickly forgot herself and began sweeping it back and forth across the city. She checked out the little Celestial Kingdom Clave in the heart of the old city, where a couple of Mandarins stood on a zigzag bridge across a pond, contemplating a swarm of golden carp, wispy silver beards trailing down over the colorful silk of their lapels, blue sapphire buttons on their caps flashing as they nodded their heads. She looked into a high-rise building farther inland, apparently a foreign concession of some type, where some Euros were holding a cocktail party, some venturing onto the balcony with glasses of wine and doing some eavesdropping of their own. Finally she leveled the 'scope toward the horizon, out past the vast dangerous triad-ridden suburbs, where millions of Shanghai's poor had been forcibly banished to make way for highrises. Beyond that was real agricultural land, a fractal network of canals and creeks glimmering like a golden net as they reflected the lambency of the sunset, and beyond that, as always, a few scattered pillars of smoke in the ultimate distance, where the Fists of Righteous Harmony were burning the foreign devils' Feed lines.
   "You are a curious girl," Madame Ping said. "That is natural. But you must never let any other person-especially a client-see your curiosity. Never seek information. Sit quietly and let them bring it to you. What they conceal tells you more than what they reveal. Do you understand?"
   "Yes, madam," Nell said, turning toward her interlocutor with a little curtsy. Rather than trying to do Chinese etiquette and making a hash of it, she was taking the Victorian route, which worked just as well. For purposes of this interview, Henry (the young man who had offered her tea) had advanced her a few hard ucus, which she had used to compile a reasonably decent full-length dress, hat, gloves, and reticule. She had gone in nervous and realized within a few minutes that the decision to hire her had already been made, somehow, and that this little get-together was actually more along the lines of an orientation session.
   "Why is the Victorian market important to us?" Madame Ping asked, and fixed Nell with an incisive glare.
   "Because New Atlantis is one of the three first-tier phyles."
   "Not correct. The wealth of New Atlantis is great, yes. But its population is just a few percent. The successful New Atlantis man is busy and has just a bit of time for scripted fantasies. He has much money, you understand, but little opportunity to spend it. No, this market is important because everyone else-the men of all other phyles, including many of Nippon– want to be like Victorian gentlemen. Look at the Ashantis– the Jews– the Coastal Republic. Do they wear traditional costume? Sometimes. Usually though, they wear a suit on the Victorian pattern. They carry an umbrella from Old Bond Street. They have a book of Sherlock Holmes stories. They play in Victorian ractives, and when they have to spend their natural urges, they come to me, and I provide them with a scripted fantasy that was originally requested by some gentleman who came sneaking across the Causeway from New Atlantis." Somewhat uncharacteristically, Madame Ping turned two of her claws into walking legs and made them scurry across the tabletop, like a furtive Vicky gent trying to slip into Shanghai without being caught on a monitor. Recognizing her cue, Nell covered her mouth with one gloved hand and tittered.
   "This way, Madame Ping does a magic trick– she turns one satisfied client from New Atlantis into a thousand clients from all tribes."
   "I must confess that I am surprised," Nell ventured. "Inexperienced as I am in these matters, I had supposed that each tribe would exhibit a different preference."
   "We change the script a little," Madame Ping said, "to allow for cultural differences. But the story never changes. There are many people and many tribes, but only so many stories."

Peculiar practices in the woods;
the Reformed Distributed Republic;
an extraordinary conversation in a log cabin;
CryptNet;
the Hackworths depart.

   Half a day's slow eastward ride took them well up into the foothills of the Cascades, where the clouds, flowing in eternally from the Pacific, were forced upward by the swelling terrain and unburdened themselves of their immense stores of moisture. The trees were giants, rising branchless to far above their heads, the trunks aglow with moss. The landscape was a checkerboard of old-growth forest alternating with patches that had been logged in the previous century; Hackworth tried to guide Kidnapper toward the latter, because the scarcity of undergrowth and deadfalls made for a smoother ride. They passed through the remains of an abandoned timber town, half small clapboard buildings and half moss-covered and rust-streaked mobile homes. Through their dirty windows, faded signs were dimly visible, stenciled THIS HOUSEHOLD DEPENDS ON TIMBER MONEY. Ten-foot saplings grew up through cracks in the streets. Narrow hedges of blueberry shrubs and blackberry canes sprouted from the rain gutters of houses, and gigantic old cars, resting askew on flat and cracked tires, had become trellises for morning glories and vine maples. They also passed through an old mining encampment that had been abandoned even longer ago. For the most part, the signs of modern habitation were relatively subtle. The houses up here tended to be of the same unassuming style favored by the software khans closer to Seattle, and from place to place a number of them would cluster around a central square with playground equipment, cafés, stores, and other amenities. He and Fiona stopped at two such places to exchange ucus for coffee, sandwiches, and cinnamon rolls.
   The unmarked, decussating paths would have been confusing to anyone but a native. Hackworth had never been here before. He had gotten the coordinates from the second fortune cookie in Kidnapper's glove compartment, which was much less cryptic than the first had been. He had no way to tell whether he was really going anywhere. His faith did not begin to waver until evening approached, the eternal clouds changed from silver to dark gray, and he noticed that the chevaline was taking them higher and toward less densely populated ground.
   Then he saw the rocks and knew he had chosen the right path. A wall of brown granite, dark and damp from the condensing fog, materialized before them. They heard it before they saw it; it made no sound, but its presence changed the acoustics of the forest. The fog was closing in, and they could barely see the silhouettes of scrubby, wind-gnarled mountain trees lined up uncomfortably along the top of the cliff.
   Amid those trees was the silhouette of a human being.
   "Quiet," Hackworth mouthed to his daughter, then reined Kidnapper to a stop.
   The person had a short haircut and wore a bulky waist-length jacket with stretch pants; they could tell by the curve of the hips that it was a woman. Around those hips she had fastened an arrangement of neon green straps: a climbing harness. She wore no other outdoor paraphernalia, though, no knapsack or helmet, and behind her on the clifftop they could just make out the silhouette of a horse, prodding the ground with its nose. From time to time she checked her wristwatch.
   A tenuous neon strand of rope hung down the bulging face of the cliff from where the woman stood. The last several meters dangled loosely in the mist in front of a small cozy pocket sheltered by the overhang.
   Hackworth turned around to get Fiona's attention, then pointed something out: a second person, making his way along the base of the cliff, out of sight of the woman above. Moving carefully and quietly, he eventually reached the shelter of the overhang. He gingerly took the dangling end of the rope and tied it to something, apparently a piece of hardware fixed into the rock. Then he left the way he had come, moving silently and staying close to the cliff.
   The woman remained still and silent for several minutes, checking her watch more and more frequently.
   Finally she backed several paces away from the edge of the cliff, took her hands out of her jacket pockets, seemed to draw a few deep breaths, then ran forward and launched herself into space. She screamed as she did it, a scream to drive out her own fear. The rope ran through a pulley fixed near the top of the cliff.
   She fell for a few meters, the rope tightened, the man's knot held, and the rope, which was somewhat elastic, brought her to a firm but not violent stop just above the wicked pile of rubble and snags at the base of the cliff. Swinging at the end of the rope, she grabbed it with one hand and leaned back, baring her throat to the mist, allowing herself to dangle listlessly for a few minutes, basking in relief.
   A third person, previously unseen, emerged from the trees. This one was a middle-aged man, and he was wearing a jacket that had a few vaguely official touches such as an armband and an insignia on the breast pocket. He walked beneath the dangling woman and busied himself for a few moments beneath the overhang, eventually releasing the rope and letting her safely to the ground. The woman detached herself from the rope and then the harness and fell into a businesslike discussion with this man, who poured both of them hot drinks from a thermal flask.
   "Have you heard of these people? The Reformed Distributed Republic," Hackworth said to Fiona, still keeping his voice low.
   "I am only familiar with the First."
   "The First Distributed Republic doesn't hang together very well– in a way, it was never designed to. It was started by a bunch of people who were very nearly anarchists. As you've probably learned in school, it's become awfully factionalized."
   "I have some friends in the F.D.R.," Fiona said.
   "Your neighbors?"
   "Yes."
   "Software khans," Hackworth said. "The F.D.R. works for them, because they have something in common-old software money. They're almost like Victorians– a lot of them cross over and take the Oath as they get older. But for the broad middle class, the F.D.R. offers no central religion or ethnic identity."
   "So it becomes balkanized."
   "Precisely. These people," Hackworth said, pointing to the man and the woman at the base of the cliff, "are R.D.R., Reformed Distributed Republic. Very similar to F.D.R., with one key difference."
   "The ritual we just witnessed?"
   "Ritual is a good description," Hackworth said. "Earlier today, that man and that woman were both visited by messengers who gave them a place and time-nothing else. In this case, the woman's job was to jump off that cliff at the given time. The man's job was to tie the end of the rope before she jumped. A very simple job-"
   "But if he had failed to do it, she'd be dead," Fiona said.
   "Precisely. The names are pulled out of a hat. The participants have only a few hours' warning. Here, the ritual is done with a cliff and a rope, because there happened to be a cliff in the vicinity. In other R.D.R. nodes, the mechanism might be different. For example, person A might go into a room, take a pistol out of a box, load it with live ammunition, put it back in the box, and then leave the room for ten minutes. During that time, person B is supposed to enter the room and replace the live ammunition with a dummy clip having the same weight. Then person A comes back into the room, puts the gun to his head, and pulls the trigger."
   "But person A has no way of knowing whether person B has done his job?"
   "Exactly."
   "What is the role of the third person?"
   "A proctor. An official of the R.D.R. who sees to it that the two participants don't try to communicate."
   "How frequently must they undergo this ritual?"
   "As frequently as their name comes up at random, perhaps once every couple of years," Hackworth said. "It's a way of creating mutual dependency. These people know they can trust each other. In a tribe such as the F.D.R., whose view of the universe contains no absolutes, this ritual creates an artificial absolute."
   The woman finished her hot drink, shook hands with the proctor, then began to ascend a polymer ladder, fixed to the rock, that took her back toward her horse. Hackworth spurred Kidnapper into movement, following a path that ran parallel to the base of the cliff, and rode for half a kilometer or so until it was joined by another path angling down from above. A few minutes later, the woman approached, riding her horse, an old-fashioned biological model.
   She was a healthy, open-faced, apple-cheeked woman, still invigorated by her leap into the unknown, and she greeted them from some distance away, without any of the reserve of neo-Victorians.
   "How do you do," Hackworth said, removing his bowler.
   The woman barely glanced at Fiona. She reined her horse to a gentle stop, eyes fixed on Hackworth's face. She was wearing a distracted look. "I know you," she said. "But I don't know your name."
   "Hackworth, John Percival, at your service. This is my daughter Fiona."
   "I'm sure I've never heard that name," the woman said.
   "I'm sure I've never heard yours," Hackworth said cheerfully.
   "Maggie," the woman said. "This is driving me crazy. Where have we met?"
   "This may sound rather odd," Hackworth said gently, "but if you and I could both remember all of our dreams-which we can't, of course– and if we compared notes long enough, we would probably find that we had shared a few over the years."
   "A lot of people have similar dreams," Maggie said.
   "Excuse me, but that's not what I mean," Hackworth said. "I refer to a situation in which each of us would retain his or her own personal point of view. I would see you. You would see me. We might then share certain experiences together-each of us seeing it from our own perspective.
   "Like a ractive?"
   "Yes," Hackworth said, "but you don't have to pay for it. Not with money, anyway."

. . .
   The local climate lent itself to hot drinks. Maggie did not even take off her jacket before going into her kitchen and putting a kettle on to boil. The place was a log cabin, airier than it looked from the outside, and Maggie apparently shared it with several other people who were not there at the moment. Fiona, walking to and from the bathroom, was fascinated to see evidence of men and women living and sleeping and bathing together.
   As they sat around having their tea, Hackworth persuaded Maggie to poke her finger into a thimble-size device. When he took this object from his pocket, Fiona was struck by a powerful sense of déjà vu. She had seen it before, and it was significant. She knew that her father had designed it; it bore all the earmarks of his style. Then they all sat around making small talk for a few minutes; Fiona had many questions about the workings of the R.D.R., which Maggie, a true believer, was pleased to answer. Hackworth had spread a sheet of blank paper out on the table, and as the minutes went by, words and pictures began to appear on it and to scroll up the page after it had filled itself up. The thimble, he explained, had placed some reconnaissance mites into Maggie's bloodstream, which had been gathering information, flying out through her pores when their tape drives were full, and offloading the data into the paper.
   "It seems that you and I have a mutual acquaintance, Maggie," he said after a few minutes. "We are carrying many of the same tuples in our bloodstreams. They can only be spread through certain forms of contact."
   "You mean, like, exchange of bodily fluids?" Maggie said blankly.
   Fiona thought briefly of old-fashioned transfusions and probably would not have worked out the real meaning of this phrase had her father not flushed and glanced at her momentarily.
   "I believe we understand each other, yes," Hackworth said.
   Maggie thought about it for a moment and seemed to get irked, or as irked as someone with her generous and contented nature was ever likely to get. She addressed Hackworth but watched Fiona as she tried to construct her next sentence. "Despite what you Atlantans might think of us, I don't sleep ... I mean, I don't have s ... I don't have that many partners."
   "I am sorry to have given you the mistaken impression that I had formed any untoward preconceptions about your moral standards," Hackworth said. "Please be assured that I do not regard myself as being in any position to judge others in this regard. However, if you could be so forthcoming as to tell me who, or with whom, in the last year or so . . ."
   "Just one," Maggie said. "It's been a slow year." Then she set her tea mug down on the table (Fiona had been startled by the unavailability of saucers) and leaned back in her chair, looking at Hackworth alertly. "Funny that I'm telling you this stuff– you, a stranger."
   "Please allow me to recommend that you trust your instincts and treat me not as a stranger."
   "I had a fling. Months and months ago. That's been it."
   "Where?"
   "London." A trace of a smile came onto Maggie's face. "You'd think living here, I'd go someplace warm and sunny. But I went to London. I guess there's a little Victorian in all of us.
   "It was a guy," Maggie went on. "I had gone to London with a couple of girlfriends of mine. One of them was another R.D.R. citizen and the other, Trish, left the R.D.R. about three years ago and co-founded a local CryptNet node. They've got a little point of presence down in Seattle, near the market."
   "Please pardon me for interrupting," Fiona said, "but would you be so kind as to explain the nature of CryptNet? One of my old school friends seems to have joined it."
   "A synthetic phyle. Elusive in the extreme," Hackworth said.
   "Each node is independent and self-governing," Maggie said.
   "You could found a node tomorrow if you wanted. Nodes are defined by contracts. You sign a contract in which you agree to provide certain services when called upon to do so."
   "What sorts of services?"
   "Typically, data is delivered into your system. You process the data and pass it on to other nodes. It seemed like a natural to Trish because she was a coder, like me and my housemates and most other people around here."
   "Nodes have computers then?"
   "The people themselves have computers, typically embedded systems," Maggie said, unconsciously rubbing the mastoid bone behind her ear.
   "Is the node synonymous with the person, then?"
   "In many cases," Maggie said, "but sometimes it's several persons with embedded systems that are contained within the same trust boundary."
   "May I ask what level your friend Trish's node has attained?" Hackworth said.
   Maggie looked uncertain. "Eight or nine, maybe. Anyway, we went to London. While we were there, we decided to take in some shows. I wanted to see the big productions. Those were nice-we saw a nice Doctor Faustus at the Olivier."
   "Marlowe's?"
   "Yes. But Trish had a knack for finding all of these little, scruffy, out-of-the-way theatres that I never would have found in a million years– they weren't marked, and they didn't really advertise, as far as I could tell. We saw some radical stuff– really radical."
   "I don't imagine you are using that adjective in a political sense," Hackworth said.
   "No, I mean how they were staged. In one of them, we walked into this bombed-out old building in Whitechapel, full of people milling around, and all this weird stuff started happening, and after a while I realized that some of the people were actors and some were audience and that all of us were both, in a way. It was cool– I suppose you can get stuff like that on the net anytime, in a ractive, but it was so much better to be there with real, warm bodies around. I felt happy. Anyway, this guy was going to the bar for a pint, and he offered to get me one. We started talking. One thing led to another. He was really intelligent, really sexy. An African guy who knew a lot about the theatre. This place had back rooms. Some of them had beds."
   "After you were finished," Hackworth said, "did you experience any unusual sensations?"
   Maggie threw back her head and laughed, thinking that this was a bit of wry humor on Hackworth's part. But he was serious.
   "After we were finished?" she said.
   "Yes. Let us say, several minutes afterward."
   Suddenly Maggie became disconcerted. "Yeah, actually," she said. "I got hot. Really hot. We had to leave, 'cause I thought I had a flu or something. We went back to the hotel, and I took my clothes off and stood out on the balcony. My temperature was a hundred and four. But the next morning I felt fine. And I've felt fine ever since."
   "Thank you, Maggie," Hackworth said, rising to his feet and pocketing the sheet of paper. Fiona rose too, following her father's cue. "Prior to your London visit, had your social life been an active one?"
   Maggie got a little pinker. "Relatively active for a few years, yes."
   "What sort of crowd? CryptNet types? People who spent a lot of time near the water?"
   Maggie shook her head. "The water? I don't understand."
   "Ask yourself why you have been so inactive, Maggie, since your liaison with Mr.-"
   "Beck. Mr. Beck."
   "With Mr. Beck. Could it be that you found the experience just a bit alarming? Exchange of bodily fluids followed by a violent rise in core temperature?"
   Maggie was poker-faced.
   "I recommend that you look into the subject of spontaneous combustion," Hackworth said. And without further ceremony, he reclaimed his bowler and umbrella from the entryway and led Fiona back out into the forest.
   Hackworth said, "Maggie did not tell you everything about CryptNet. To begin with, it is believed to have numerous unsavoury connexions and is a perennial focus of Protocol Enforcement's investigations. And"– Hackworth laughed ruefully– "it is patently untrue that ten is the highest level."
   "What is the goal of this organisation?" Fiona asked.
   "It represents itself as a simple, moderately successful data-processing collective. But its actual goals can only be known by those privileged to be included within the trust boundary of the thirty-third level," Hackworth said, his voice slowing down as he tried to remember why he knew all of these things. "It is rumoured that, within that select circle, any member can kill any other simply by thinking of the deed."
   Fiona leaned forward and wrapped her arms snugly around her father's body, nestled her head between his shoulder blades, and held tight. She thought that the subject of CryptNet was closed; but a quarter of an hour later, as Kidnapper carried them swiftly through the trees down toward Seattle, her father spoke again, picking up the sentence where he had left it, as if he had merely paused for breath.
   His voice was slow and distant and almost trancelike, the memories percolating outward from deep storage with little participation from his conscious mind. "CryptNet's true desire is the Seed– a technology that, in their diabolical scheme, will one day supplant the Feed, upon which our society and many others are founded. Protocol, to us, has brought prosperity and peace– to CryptNet, however, it is a contemptible system of oppression. They believe that information has an almost mystical power of free flow and self-replication, as water seeks its own level or sparks fly upward– and lacking any moral code, they confuse inevitability with Right. It is their view that one day, instead of Feeds terminating in matter compilers, we will have Seeds that, sown on the earth, will sprout up into houses, hamburgers, spaceships, and books– that the Seed will develop inevitably from the Feed, and that upon it will be founded a more highly evolved society."
   He stopped for a moment, took a deep breath, and seemed to stir awake; when he spoke again, it was in a clearer and stronger voice. "Of course, it can't be allowed– the Feed is not a system of control and oppression, as CryptNet would maintain. It is the only way order can be maintained in modern society– if everyone possessed a Seed, anyone could produce weapons whose destructive power rivalled that of Elizabethan nuclear weapons. This is why Protocol Enforcement takes such a dim view of CryptNet's activities."
   The trees parted to reveal a long blue lake below them. Kidnapper found its way to a road, and Hackworth spurred it on to a hand-gallop. Within a few hours, father and daughter were settling into bunkbeds in a second-class cabin of the airship Falkland Islands, bound for London.

From the Primer, Princess Nell's activities as Duchess of Turing;
the Castle of the Water-gates;
other castles;
the Cipherers' Market;
Nell prepares for her final journey.

   Princess Nell remained in Castle Turing for several months. During her quest for the twelve keys, she had entered many castles, outwitted their sentries, picked their locks, and rifled their treasuries; but Castle Turing was an altogether different place, a place that ran on rules and programs that were devised by men and that could be rewritten by one who was adept in the language of the ones and zeroes. She need not content herself with sneaking in, seizing a trinket, and fleeing. Castle Turing she made her own. Its demesne became Princess Nell's kingdom.
   First she gave the Duke of Turing a decent burial. Then she studied his books until she had mastered them. She acquainted herself with the states by which the soldiers, and the mechanical Duke, could be programmed. She entered a new master program Into the Duke and then restarted the turning of the mighty Shaft that powered the castle. Her first efforts were unsuccessful, as her program contained many errors. The original Duke himself had not been above this; he called them bugs, in reference to a large beetle that had become entangled in one of his chains during an early experiment and brought the first Turing machine to a violent halt. But with steadfast patience, Princess Nell resolved these bugs and made the mechanical Duke into her devoted servant. The Duke in turn had the knack of putting simple programs into all of the soldiers, so that an order given him by Nell was rapidly disseminated into the entire force.
   For the first time in her life, the Princess had an army and servants. But it was not a conquering sort of army, because the springs in the soldiers' backs unwound rapidly, and they did not have the adaptability of human soldiers. Still, it was an effective force behind the walls of the castle and made her secure from any conceivable aggressor. Following maintenance schedules that had been laid down by the original Duke, Princess Nell set the soldiers to work greasing the gears, repairing cracked shafts and worn bearings, and building new soldiers out of stockpiled parts.
   She was heartened by her success. But Castle Turing was only one of seven ducal seats in this kingdom, and she knew she had much work to do.
   The territory around the castle was deeply forested, but grassy ridges rose several miles away, and standing on the castle walls with the original Duke's spyglass, Nell was able to see wild horses grazing there. Purple had taught her the secrets of mastering wild horses, and Duck had taught her how to win their affection, and so Nell mounted an expedition to these grasslands and returned a week later with two beautiful mustangs, Coffee and Cream. She equipped them with fine tack from the Duke's stables, marked with the T crest-for the crest was hers now, and she could with justification call herself the Duchess of Turing. She also brought a plain, unmarked saddle so that she could pass for a commoner if need be-though Princess Nell had become so beautiful over the years and had developed such a fine bearing that few people would mistake her for a commoner now, even if she were dressed in rags and walking barefoot.
   Lying in her bunkbed in Madame Ping's dormitory, reading these words from a softly glowing page in the middle of the night, Nell wondered at that. Princesses were not genetically different from commoners.
   On the other side of a fairly thin wall she could hear water running in half a dozen sinks as young women performed their crepuscular ablutions. Nell was the only scripter staying in Madame Ping's dormitory; the others were performers and were just coming back from a long vigorous shift, rubbing liniment on their shoulders, sore from wielding paddles against clients' bottoms, or snorting up great nostril-loads of mites programmed to seek out their inflamed buttocks and help to repair damaged capillaries overnight. And of course, many more traditional activities were going on, such as douching, makeup removal, moisturizing, and the like. The girls went through these motions briskly, with the unselfconscious efficiency that the Chinese all seemed to share, discussing the day's events in the dry Shanghainese dialect. Nell had been living among these girls for a month and was just starting to pick up a few words. They all spoke English anyway.
   She stayed up late reading the Primer in the dark. The dormitory was a good place for this; Madame Ping's girls were professionals, and after a few minutes of whispering, giggling, and scandalized communal shushing, they always went to sleep.
   Nell sensed that she was coming close to the end of the Primer. 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 passively. 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 passing 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 establishing 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 seedylooking conveyor belts made of hemp and burlap. Book-carriers bumped 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 assumptions. Just because her stall functioned according to Turing rules did not mean that all of the others did. And even if every stall in this castle was, in fact, a Turing machine, she still could not come to any fixed conclusions. She had seen riders carrying books to and from the castle, which meant that cipherers must be at work elsewhere in this kingdom. She could not verify that all of them were Turing machines.
   It did not take long for Nell to attain prosperity here. After a few months (which in the Primer were summarized in as many sentences) her employers announced that they were getting more work than they could handle. They decided to split their operation. They erected a new stall at the edge of the market and gave Nell some of their rule-books.
   They also obtained a new key for her. This was done by dispatching a special coded message to the Castle of King Coyote himself, which was three days' ride to the north. Seven days later, Nell's key came back to her in a scarlet box bearing the seal of King Coyote himself.
   From time to time, someone would come around to her stall and offer to buy her out. She always turned them down but found it interesting that the keys could be bought and sold in this fashion.
   All Nell needed was money, which she quickly accumulated through shrewd dealings in the market. Before long, all eleven of the keys were in her possession, and after liquidating her holdings and turning them into jewels, which she sewed into her clothes, she rode her horse out of the sixth castle and turned north, heading for the seventh: the Castle of King Coyote, and the ultimate goal of her lifelong quest.

Nell goes to Madame Ping's Theatre;
rumors of the Fists;
an important client;
assault of the Fists of Righteous Harmony;
ruminations on the inner workings of ractives.

   Like much that was done with nanotechnology, Feed lines were assembled primarily from a few species of small and uncomplicated atoms in the upper right-hand corner of Mendeleev's grid: carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, silicon, phosphorus, sulfur, and chlorine. The Fists of Righteous Harmony had discovered, to their enduring delight, that objects made of these atoms burned rather nicely once you got them going. The flat, low Yangtze Delta country east of Shanghai was a silk district well stocked with mulberry trees, which when felled, stacked, and burned beneath the Feed lines would eventually ignite them like road flares.
   The Nipponese Feed was heavy on the phosphorus and burned with a furious white flame that lit up the night sky in several places as seen from the tall buildings in Pudong. One major line led toward Nanjing, one toward Suzhou, one toward Hangzhou: these distant flares inevitably led to rumors, among the hordes of refugees in Shanghai, that those cities were themselves burning.
   The New Atlantan Feed had a higher sulfur content that, when burned, produced a plutonic reek that permeated everything for dozens of miles downwind, making the fires seem much closer than they really were. Shanghai was smelling pretty sulfurous as Nell walked into it across one of the bridges linking downtown Pudong with the much lower and older Bund. The Huang Pu had been too wide to bridge easily until nano had come along, so the four downtown bridges were made of the new materials and seemed impossibly fragile compared with the reinforced-concrete behemoths built to the north and south during the previous century.
   A few days ago, working on a script in Madame Ping's offices far above, Nell had gazed out the window at a barge making its way down the river, pulled by a rickety old diesel tug, swathed in dun tarps. A few hundred meters upstream of this very bridge she was now crossing, the tarps had begun squirming and boiling, and a dozen young men in white tunics had jumped out from beneath, scarlet bands tied about their waists, scarlet ribbons around their wrists and foreheads. They had swarmed across the top of the barge hacking at ropes with knives, and the tarps had reluctantly and unevenly fallen away to expose a patchy new coat of red paint and, lined up on the top of the barge like a string of enormous firecrackers, several dozen compressed gas tanks, also painted a festive red for the occasion. Under the circumstances, she did not doubt for a moment that the men were Fists and the gas hydrogen or something else that burned well. But before they had been able to reach the bridge, the tanks had been burst and ignited by something too small and fast for Nell to see from her high post. The barge silently turned into a carbuncle of yellow flame that took up half the width of the Huang Pu, and though the diamond window filtered all of the heat out of its radiance, Nell was able to put her hand on the pane and feel the absorbed warmth, not much hotter than a person's skin. The whole operation had been touchingly hapless, in an age when a hand-size battery could contain as much energy as all those cylinders of gas. It had a quaint twentieth-century feel and made Nell oddly nostalgic for the days when dangerousness was a function of mass and bulk. The passives of that era were so fun to watch, with their big, stupid cars and big, stupid guns and big, stupid people.
   Up– and downstream of the bridge, the funeral piers were crowded with refugee families heaving corpses into the Huang Pu; the emaciated bodies, rolled up in white sheets, looked like cigarettes. The Coastal Republic authorities had instituted a pass system on the bridges to prevent rural refugees from swarming across into the relatively spacious streets, plazas, atria, and lobbies of Pudong and gumming up the works for the office crowd. By the time Nell made it across, a couple of hundred refugees had already picked her out as a likely alms source and were waiting with canned demonstrations: women holding up their gaunt babies, or older children who were trained to hang comatose in their arms; men with open wounds, and legless gaffers dauntlessly knucklewalking through the crowd, butting at people's knees. The taxi-drivers were stronger and more aggressive than the rurals, though, and had a fearsome reputation that created space around them in the crowd, and that was more valuable than an actual vehicle; a vehicle would always get stuck in traffic, but a taxi-driver's hat generated a magic force field that enabled the wearer to walk faster than anyone else.
   The taxi-drivers converged on Nell too, and she picked out the biggest one and haggled with him, holding up fingers and essaying a few words in Shanghainese. When the numbers had climbed into the right range for him, he spun around suddenly to face the crowd. The suddenness of the movement drove people back, and the meter-long bamboo stick in his hand didn't hurt either. He stepped forward and Nell hurried after him, ignoring the myriad tuggings at her long skirts, trying not to wonder which of the beggars was a Fist with a concealed knife. If her clothes hadn't been made of untearable, uncuttable nanostuff, she would have been stripped naked within a 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 passerby 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 asexual 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 orgasm; 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 sexy 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 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 assured 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 button. 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 assured 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 assure 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 button, 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 shift 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 sex 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 sexual 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 Braithwajte, 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 classified 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 assume 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!"
   "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.
   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 assumed 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 shiny 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 butt 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 butt 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 superstition 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 passed 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 marksmanship 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 circumstances.
   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 fashion. 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.
   Since she had been very small, she had made up stories and recited them to the Primer, which were often digested and incorporated into the Primer's stories. It had come naturally to Nell to do the same work for Madame Ping. But now her boss was calling it a performance, and Nell had to admit that it was, in a way.
   Her stories were being digested, not by the Primer, but by another human being, becoming a part of that person's mind. That seemed simple enough, but the notion troubled her for a reason that did not become clear until she had lain half-asleep and fretted over it for several hours.
   Colonel Napier did not know her and probably never would. All of the intercourse between him and Nell had been mediated through the actress pretending to be Miss Braithwaite, and through various technological systems.
   Nonetheless she had touched him deeply. She had penetrated farther into his soul than any lover. If Colonel Napier had chosen to return the following week and Nell had not been present to make up the story for him, would he have missed her? Nell suspected that he would have. From his point of view, some indefinable essence would have been wanting, and he would have departed unsatisfied.
   If this could happen to Colonel Napier in his dealings with Madame Ping's, could it happen to Nell in her dealings with the Primer? She had always felt that there was some essence in the book, something that understood her and even loved her, something that forgave her when she did wrong and appreciated what she did right.
   When she'd been very young, she hadn't questioned this at all; it had been part of the book's magic. More recently she had understood it as the workings of a parallel computer of enormous size and power, carefully programmed to understand the human mind and give it what it needed.
   Now she wasn't so sure. Princess Nell's recent travels through the lands of King Coyote, and the various castles with their increasingly sophisticated computers that were, in the end, nothing more than Turing machines, had caught her up in a bewildering logical circle. In Castle Turing she had learned that a Turing machine could not really understand a human being. But the Primer was, itself, a Turing machine, or so she suspected; so how could it understand Nell?
   Could it be that the Primer was just a conduit, a technological system that mediated between Nell and some human being who really loved her? In the end, she knew, this was basically how all ractives worked. The idea was too alarming to consider at first, and so she circled around it cautiously, poking at it from different directions, like a cavewoman discovering fire for the first time. But as she settled in closer, she found that it warmed her and satisfied her, and by the time her mind wandered into sleep, she had become dependent upon it and would not consider going back into the cold and dark place where she had been traveling for so many years.

Carl Hollywood returns to Shanghai;
his forebears in the territory of the Lone Eagles;
Mrs. Kwan's teahouse.

   Heavy rains had come rolling into Shanghai from the West, like a harbinger of the Fists of Righteous Harmony and the thundering herald of the coming Celestial Kingdom. Stepping off the airship from London, Carl Hollywood at once felt himself in a different Shanghai from the one he had left; the old city had always been wild, but in a sophisticated urban way, and now it was wild like a frontier town. He sensed this ambience before he even left the Aerodrome; it leaked in from the streets, like ozone before a thunderstorm. Looking out the windows, he could see a heavy rain rushing down, knocking all the nanotech out of the air and down into the gutters, whence it would eventually stain the Huang Pu and then the Yangtze. Whether it was the wild atmosphere or the prospect of being rained upon, he stopped his porters short of the main exit doors so that he could change hats. The hatboxes were stacked on one of the carts; his bowler went into the smallest and topmost box, which was empty, and then he yanked the largest box out from underneath, popping the stack, and took out a ten-gallon Stetson of breathtaking width and sweep, almost like a head-mounted umbrella. Casting an eye into the street, where a rushing brown stream carried litter, road dust, choleraridden sewage, and tons of captive nanotech toward the storm drains, he slipped off his leather shoes and exchanged them for a pair of handtooled cowboy boots, made from hides of gaudy reptiles and avians, the pores of which had been corked with mites that would keep his feet dry even if he chose to wade through the gutters.
   Thus reconfigured, Carl Hollywood stepped out into the streets of Shanghai. As he came out the doors of the Aerodrome, his duster billowed in the cold wind of the storm and even the beggars stepped away from him. He paused to light a cigar before proceeding and was not molested; even the refugees, who were starving or at least claimed to be, derived more enjoyment from simply looking at him than they would have from the coins in his pocket. He walked the four blocks to his hotel, pursued doggedly by the porters and by a crowd of youngsters entranced by the sight of a real cowboy.
   Carl's grandfather was a Lone Eagle who had ridden out from the crowding and squalor of Silicon Valley in the 1990s and homesteaded a patch of abandoned ranch along a violent cold river on the eastern slope of the Wind River Range. From there he had made a comfortable living as a freelance coder and consultant. His wife had left him for the bright lights and social life of California and been startled when he had managed to persuade a judge that he was better equipped to raise their son than she was. Grandfather had raised Carl Hollywood's father mostly in the out-of-doors, hunting and fishing and chopping wood when he wasn't sitting inside studying his calculus. As the years went by, they had gradually been joined by like-minded sorts with similar stories to tell, so that by the time of the Interregnum they had formed a community of several hundred, loosely spread over a few thousand square miles of nearwilderness but, in the electronic sense, as tightly knit as any small village in the Old West. Their technological prowess, prodigious wealth, and numerous large weapons had made them a dangerous group, and the odd pickup-truck-driving desperadoes who attacked an isolated ranch had found themselves surrounded and outgunned with cataclysmic swiftness. Grandfather loved to tell stories of these criminals, how they had tried to excuse their own crimes by pleading that they were economically disadvantaged or infected with the disease of substance abuse, and how the Lone Eagles– many of whom had overcome poverty or addiction themselves-had dispatched them with firing squads and left them posted around the edge of their territory as NO TRESPASSING signs that even the illiterate could read.
   The advent of the Common Economic Protocol had settled things down and, in the eyes of the old-timers, begun to soften and ruin the place. There was nothing like getting up at three in the morning and riding the defensive perimeter in subzero cold, with a loaded rifle, to build up one's sense of responsibility and community. Carl Hollywood's clearest and best memories were of going on such rides with his father. But as they squatted on packed snow boiling coffee over a fire, they would listen to the radio and hear stories about the jihad raging across Xinjiang, driving the Han back into the east, and about the first incidents of nanotech terrorism in Eastern Europe. Carl's father didn't have to tell him that their community was rapidly acquiring the character of a historical theme park, and that before long they would have to give up the mounted patrols for more modern defensive systems.
   Even after those innovations had been made and the community had mostly joined up with the First Distributed Republic, Carl and his father and grandfather had continued to do things in the old way, hunting elk and heating their houses with wood-burning stoves and sitting behind their computer screens in dark rooms late into the night hand-tooling code in assembly language. It was a purely male household (Carl's mother had died when he was nine years old, in a rafting accident), and Carl had fled the place as soon as he'd found a way, going to San Francisco, then New York, then London, and making himself useful in theatrical productions. But the older he got, the more he understood in how many ways he was rooted in the place where he grew up, and he never felt it more purely than he did striding down a crowded street in a Shanghai thunderstorm, puffing on a thick cigar and watching the rain dribble from the rim of his hat. The most intense and clear sensations of his life had flooded into his young and defenseless mind during his first dawn patrol, knowing the desperadoes were out there somewhere. He kept returning to these memories in later life, trying to recapture the same purity and intensity of sensation, or trying to get his ractors to feel it. Now for the first time in thirty years he felt the same thing, this time on the streets of Shanghai, hot and pulsing on the edge of a dynastic rebellion, like the arteries of an old man about to have his first orgasm in years.
   He merely touched base at his hotel, where he stuffed the pockets of his coat with a sheaf of foolscap, a fountain pen, a silver box loaded with cigars like rounds in an ammo clip, and some tiny containers of nanosnuff that he could use to adjust the functioning of his brain and body. He also hefted a heavy walking-stick, a real wizard's staff loaded with security aerostats that would shepherd him back to the hotel in the event of a riot. Then he returned once more to the streets, shouldering for a mile through the crowd until he reached a teahouse where he had passed many long nights during his tenure at the Parnasse. Old Mrs. Kwan welcomed him warmly, bowing many times and showing him to his favorite corner table where he could look out on the intersection of Nanjing Road and a narrow side street jammed with tiny market stalls. All he could see now were the backs and buttocks of people in the street, jammed up against the glass by the pressure of the crowd. He ordered a big pot of his favorite green tea, the most expensive kind, picked in April when the leaves were tender and young, and spread out his sheets of foolscap across the table. This teahouse was fully integrated into the worldwide media network, and so the pages automatically jacked themselves in. Under Carl Hollywood's murmured commands they began to fill themselves with columns of animated text and windows bearing images and cine feeds. He took his first sip of tea-always the best one– withdrew his big fountain pen from his pocket, removed the lid, and touched it to the paper. He began to inscribe commands onto the page, in words and drawings. As he finished the words, they were enacted before him, and as he drew the lines between the boxes and circles, links were made and information flowed.
   At the bottom of the page he wrote the word MIRANDA and drew a circle around it. It was not connected to anything else in the diagram yet. He hoped that before long it would be. Carl Hollywood worked on his papers late into the night, and Mrs. Kwan continued to replenish his teapot and to bring him little sweets and decorated the edge of his table with candles as night fell and the teahouse darkened, for she remembered that he liked to work by candlelight.
   The Chinese people outside, separated from him by half an inch of crosslinked diamond, watched with their noses making white ellipses against the pane, their faces glowing in the candlelight like ripe peaches hanging in dark lush foliage.

The Hackworths in transit, and in London;
the East End;
a remarkable boatride;
Dramatis Personae;
a night at the theatre.

   Smooth, fine-grained arctic clouds undulated slowly like snow drifts into the distance, a thousand miles looking like the width of a front yard, lit but not warmed by a low apricot sun that never quite went down. Fiona lay on her stomach on the top bunk, looking out the window, watching her breath condense on the pane and then evaporate in the parched air.
   "Father?" she said, very softly, to see if he was awake.
   He wasn't, but he woke up quickly, as if he'd been in one of those dreams that just skims beneath the surface of consciousness, like an airship clipping a few cloud-tops. "Yes?"
   "Who is the Alchemist? Why are you looking for him?"
   "I would rather not explain why I'm looking for him. Let us say that I have incurred obligations that want settling." Her father seemed more preoccupied with the second part of the question than she'd expected, and his voice was steeped in regret.
   "Who is he?" she insisted gently.
   "Oh. Well, my darling, if I knew that, I'd have found him."
   "Father!"
   "What sort of a person is he? I haven't been afforded many clues, unfortunately. I've tried to draw some deductions from the sorts of people who are looking for him, and the sort of person I am."
   "Pardon me, Father, but what bearing does your own nature have on that of the Alchemist?"
   "More than one knowledgeable sort has arrived at the conclusion that I'm just the right man to find this fellow, even though I know nothing of criminals and espionage and so forth. I'm just a nanotechnological engineer."
   "That's not true, Father! You're ever so much more than that. You know so many stories-you told me so many, when you were gone, remember?"
   "I suppose so," he allowed, strangely diffident.
   "And I read it every night. And though the stories were about faeries and pirates and djinns and such, I could always sense that you were behind them. Like the puppeteer pulling the strings and imbuing them with voices and personalities. So I think you're more than an engineer. It's just that you need a magic book to bring it out."
   "Well . . . that's a point I had not considered," her father said, his voice suddenly emotional. She fought the temptation to peer over the edge of the bed and look at his face, which would have embarrassed him. Instead she curled up in her bed and closed her eyes.
   "Whatever you may think of me, Fiona– and I must say I am pleasantly surprised that you think of me so favourably– to those who despatched me on this errand, I am an engineer. Without being arrogant, I might add that I have advanced rapidly in that field and attained a position of not inconsiderable responsibility. As this is the only characteristic that distinguishes me from other men, it can be the only reason I was chosen to find the Alchemist. From this I infer that the Alchemist is himself a nanotechnological researcher of some sophistication, and that he is thought to be developing a product that is of interest to more than one of the Powers."
   "Are you talking about the Seed, Father?"
   He was silent for a few moments. When he spoke again, his voice was high and tight. "The Seed. How did you know about the Seed?"
   "You told me about it, Father. You told me it was a dangerous thing, and that Protocol Enforcement mustn't allow it to be created. And besides . . .
   "Besides what?"
   She was on the verge of reminding him that her dreams had been filled with seeds for the last several years, and that every story she had seen in her Primer had been replete with them: seeds that grew up into castles; dragon's teeth that grew up into soldiers; seeds that sprouted into giant beanstalks leading to alternate universes in the clouds; and seeds, given to hospitable, barren couples by itinerant crones, that grew up into plants with bulging pods that contained happy, kicking babies.
   But she sensed that if she mentioned this directly, he would slam the steel door in her face– a door that was tantalizingly cracked open at the moment.
   "Why do you think that Seeds are so interesting?" she essayed.
   "They are interesting inasmuch as a beaker of nitroglycerin is interesting," he said. "They are subversive technology. You are not to speak of Seeds again, Fiona– CryptNet agents could be anywhere, listening to our conversation."
   Fiona sighed. When her father spoke freely, she could sense the man who had told her the stories. When certain subjects were broached, he drew down his veil and became just another Victorian gentleman. It was irksome. But she could sense how the same characteristic, in a man who was not her father, could be provocative. It was such an obvious weakness that neither she nor any woman could resist the temptation to exploit it-a mischievous and hence tantalizing notion that was to occupy much of Fiona's thinking for the next few days, as they encountered other members of their tribe in London.

. . .
   After a simple dinner of beer and pasties in a pub on the fringes of the City, they rode south across the Tower Bridge, pierced a shallow layer of posh development along the right bank of the river, and entered into Southwark. As in other Atlantan districts of London, Feed lines had been worked into the sinews of the place, coursing through utility tunnels, clinging to the clammy undersides of bridges, and sneaking into buildings through small holes bored in the foundations. The tiny old houses and flats of this once impoverished quarter had mostly been refurbished into toeholds for young Atlantans from all around the Anglosphere, poor in equity but rich in expectations, who had come to the great city to incubate their careers. The businesses on the ground floors tended to be pubs, coffeehouses, and music halls. As father and daughter worked their way east, generally paralleling the river, the lustre that was so evident near the approaches to the bridge began to wear thin in places, and the ancient character of the neighborhood began to assert itself, as the bones of the knuckles reveal their shape beneath the stretched skin of a fist. Wide gaps developed between the waterfront developments, allowing them to look across the river into a district whose blanket of evening fog was already stained with the carcinogenic candy-colored hues of big mediatrons.
   Fiona Hackworth noticed a glow in the air, which resolved into a constellation when she blinked and focused. A pinprick of green light, an infinitesimal chip of emerald, touched the surface of her eye, expanding into a cloud of light. She blinked twice, and it was gone. Sooner or later it and many others would make their way to the corners of her eyes, giving her a grotesque appearance. She drew a handkerchief from her sleeve and wiped her eyes. The presence of so many lidar-emitting mites prompted her to realize that they had been infiltrating a great expanse of fog for some minutes without really being aware of it; moisture from the river was condensing around the microscopic guardians of the border. Colored light flashed vaguely across the screen of fog before them, silhouetting a stone column planted in the center of the road: wings of a gryphon, horn of a unicorn, crisp and black against a lurid cosmos. A constable stood beside the pediment, symbolically guarding the bar. He nodded to the Hackworths and mumbled something gruff but polite through his chinstrap as father and daughter rode out of New Atlantis and into a gaudy dave full of loutish thetes scrumming and chanting before the entrances of pubs. Fiona caught sight of an old Union Jack, then did a double-take and realized that the limbs of the St. Andrew's Cross had been enhanced with stars, like the Confederate Battle Flag. She gave her chevaline a nudge and pulled up nearly abreast with her father.
   Then the city became darker and quieter, though no less crowded, and for a few blocks they saw only dark-haired men with mustaches and women who were nothing more than columns of black fabric. Then Fiona smelled anise and garlic, and they passed into Vietnamese territory for a short time. She would have enjoyed stopping at one of the sidewalk cafés for a bowl of pho, but her father rode on, pursuing the tide that was ebbing down the Thames, and in a few more minutes they had come once again to the bank. It was lined with ancient masonry warehouses-a category of structure now so obsolete as to defy explanation-which had been converted into offices.
   A pier rode on the surface of the river, riding up and down on the tide, linked to the rim of the granite embankment by a hinged gangway. A shaggy black vessel was tied up to the pier, but it was completely unlit, visible only by its black shadow against the charcoal-gray water. After the chevalines had planted themselves and the Hackworths had dismounted, they were able to hear low voices coming from below.
   John Hackworth withdrew some tickets from his breast pocket and asked them to illuminate themselves; but they were printed on old-fashioned paper that did not contain its own energy source, and so he finally had to use the microtorch dangling from his watch chain. Apparently satisfied that they had arrived at the right place, he offered Fiona his arm and escorted her down the gangway to the pier. A tiny flickering light bobbed toward them and resolved into an Afro-Caribbean man, wearing rimless glasses and carrying an antique hurricane lamp. Fiona watched his face as his enormous eyes, yellowed like antique ivory billiard balls, scanned their tickets. His skin was rich and warm and glowing in the light of the candle, and he smelled faintly of citrus combined with something darker and less ingratiating. When he was finished, he looked up, not at the Hackworths but off into the distance, turned his back, and ambled away. John Hackworth stood there for a few moments, awaiting instructions, then straightened, squared his shoulders, and led Fiona across the pier to the boat.
   It was eight or ten meters long. There was no gangway, and persons already on board had to reach out and clutch their arms and pull them in, a breach of formality that happened so quickly that they had no time to become uncomfortable.
   The boat was basically a large flat open tub, not much more than a liferaft, with some controls in the bow and some sort of modern and hence negligibly small propulsion system built into the stern. As their eyes adjusted to the dim light scattering through the fog, they could see perhaps a dozen other passengers around the edge of the boat, seated so that wakes from passing vessels would not upset them. Seeing wisdom in this, John led Fiona to the only remaining open space, and they sat down between two other groups: a trio of young Nipponese men forcing cigarettes on one another, and a man and woman in bohemian-but-expensive clothes, sipping lager from cans and conversing in Canadian accents.
   The man from the pier cast off the painters and vaulted aboard. Another functionary had taken the controls and gently accelerated into the current, cutting the throttle at one point and swinging her about into an oncoming wake. When the boat entered the main channel and came up to speed, it very quickly became chilly, and all the passengers murmured, demanding more warmth from their thermogenic clothing. The AfroCaribbean man made a circuit lugging a heavy chest stocked with cans of lager and splits of pinot noir. Conversation stopped for several minutes as the passengers, all driven by the same primal impulses, turned their faces into the cool wind and relaxed into the gentle thumping of hull against waves.
   The trip took the better part of an hour. After several minutes, conversation resumed, most of the passengers remaining within their little groups. The refreshment chest made a few more circuits. John Hackworth began to realize, from a few subtleties, that one of the Nipponese youths was much more intoxicated than he was letting on and had probably spent a few hours in a dockside pub before reaching the pier. He took a drink from the chest every time it came by, and half an hour into the ride, he rose unsteadily to his feet, leaned over the edge, and threw up. John turned to smirk at his daughter. The boat struck an unseen wave, rolling sideways into the trough. Hackworth clutched first at the railing and then at his daughter's arm.
   Fiona screamed. She was staring over John's shoulder at the Nipponese youths. John turned around to see that there were only two of them now; the sick one was gone, and the other two had flung their bellies across the gunwhale and stretched out their arms, fingers like white rays shining into the black water. John felt Fiona's arm pull free from his grasp, and as he turned toward her, he just saw her vaulting over the rail.
   It was over before he had an opportunity to get really scared. The crew dealt with the matter with a practiced efficiency that suggested to Hackworth that the Nipponese man was really an actor, the entire incident part of the production. The Afro-Caribbean man cursed and shouted for them to hang on, his voice pure and powerful as a Stradivarius cello, a stage voice. He inverted the cooler, dumping out all the beer and wine, then snapped it shut and flung it over the stern as a life preserver. Meanwhile the pilot was swinging the boat round. Several passengers, including Hackworth, had turned on microtorches and focused their beams on Fiona, whose skirts had inflated as she'd jumped in feet-first and now surrounded her like a raft of flowers. With one hand she was clutching the Nipponese man's collar, and with the other, the handle of the ice chest. She did not have the strength or buoyancy to hold the drunken man out of the water, and so both of them were swamped by the estuary's rolling waves.
   The man with the dreadlocks hauled Fiona out first and handed her off to her father. The fabricules making up her clothing– countless mites linked elbow-to-elbow in a two-dimensional array– went to work pumping away the water trapped in the interstices. Fiona was wreathed in a sinuous veil of mist that burned with the captured light of the torches. Her thick red hair had been freed from the confines of her hat, which had been torn away by the waves and now fell about her in a cape of fire.
   She was looking defiantly at Hackworth, whose adrenal glands had finally jumped into the endocrinological fray. When he saw his daughter in this way, it felt as though someone were inexorably sliding a hundred pound block of ice up the length of his spine. When the sensation reached his medulla, he staggered and nearly had to sit down. She had somehow flung herself through an unknown and unmarked barrier and become supernatural, a naiad rising from the waves cloaked in fire and steam. In some rational compartment of his mind that had now become irrelevant, Hackworth wondered whether Dramatis Personae (for this was the name of the troupe that was running this show) had got some nanosites into his system, and if so what exactly they were doing to his mind.
   Water streamed from Fiona's skirts and ran between the floorboards, and then she was dry, except for her face and hair. She wiped her face on her sleeves, ignoring her father's proffered handkerchief. No words passed between them, and they did not embrace, as if Fiona were conscious now of the impact she was having upon her father and all the others-a faculty that, Hackworth supposed, must be highly acute in sixteen-year-old girls. By now the Nipponese man was just about finished coughing water out of his lungs and gasping piteously for air. As soon as he had the airways up and running, he spoke hoarsely and lengthily. One of his companions translated. "He says that we are not alone-that the water is filled with spirits-that they spoke to him. He followed them beneath the waves. But feeling his spirit about to leave his body, he felt fear and swam to the surface and was saved by the young woman. He says that the spirits are talking to all of us, and we must listen to them!"
   This was, needless to say, embarrassing, and so all of the passengers doused their torches and turned their backs on the stricken passenger. But when Hackworth's eyes had adjusted, he took another look at this man and saw that the exposed portions of his flesh had begun to radiate colored light.
   He looked at Fiona and saw that a band of white light encircled her head like a tiara, bright enough that it shone red through her hair, with a jewel centered upon her forehead. Hackworth marveled at this sight from a distance, knowing that she wanted to be free of him for now.
   Fat lights hung low above the water, describing the envelopes of great ships, sliding past each other as their parallax shifted with the steady progress of the boat. They had come to a place near the mouth of the estuary but not on the usual shipping lanes, where ships lay at anchor awaiting shifts in tides, winds, or markets. One constellation of lights did not move but only grew larger as they drew toward it. Experimenting with shadows and examining the pattern of light cast upon the water from this vessel, Hackworth concluded that the lights were being deliberately shone into their faces so that they could not make any judgments about the nature of the source.
   The fog slowly congealed into a wall of rust, so vast and featureless that it might have been ten or a hundred feet distant. The helmsman waited until they were about to ram it, then cut the engines. The raft lost speed instantly and nuzzled the hull of the big ship. Chains, slimy and dripping, descended from the firmament, diverging in Hackworth's view like radiance emanating from some heavy-industrial demigod, clanking harbingers of iron that the crew, heads thrown back ecstatically, throats bared to this kinky revelation, received into their bosoms. They snapped the chains onto metal loops fixed into the floor of the boat. Shackled, the boat rose free of the water and began to ascend the wall of rust, which soared vaguely into the infinite fog. Suddenly there was a railing, an open deck beyond it, pools of light here and there, a few red cigar-coals reciprocating through space. The deck swung under and rose to shove at the hull of the little boat. As they disembarked, they could see similar boats scattered about.
   "Dodgy" did not begin to describe the reputation of Dramatis Personae in the New Atlantan parts of London, but that was the adjective they always used anyway, delivered in a near-whisper, with brows raised nearly into the hairline and eyes glancing significantly over the shoulder. It had quickly become clear to Hackworth that a man could get a bad reputation simply for having known that Dramatis Personae existed-at the same time, it was clear that almost everyone had heard about it. Rather than being spattered with any more opprobrium, he had sought the tickets among other tribes.
   After all this it did not surprise him in the least to see that most of the attendees were fellow Victorians, and not just young bachelors having a night out, but ostensibly respectable couples, strolling the decks in their top hats and veils.
   Fiona vaulted out of the boat before it even touched the deck of the ship and vanished. She had repatterned her dress, ditching the chintzy flowered pattern for basic white, and skipped off into the darkness, her integral tiara glowing like a halo. Hackworth took a slow turn around the deck, watching his fellow-tribesmen trying to solve the following problem: get close enough to another couple to recognize them without getting so close that they can recognize you.
   From time to time, couples recognized each other simultaneously and had to say something: the women tittered wickedly, and the men laughed from their bellies and called each other scoundrels, the words glancing off the deckplates and burying themselves in the fog like arrows fired into a bale of cotton.
   Some kind of amplified music emanated from compartments below; atonal power chords came up through the deck like seismic disturbances. She was a bulk cargo carrier, now empty and bobbing, surprisingly jittery for something so big.
   Hackworth was alone and separate from all humanity, a feeling he had grown up with, like a childhood friend living next door. He had found Gwen by some miracle and lost touch with that old friend for a few years, but now he and solitude were back together, out for a stroll, familiar and comfortable. A makeshift bar amidships had drawn a dozen or so congregants, but Hackworth knew that he could not join in with them. He had been born without the ability to blend and socialize as some are born without hands.
   "Standing above it all?" said a voice. "Or standing aside perhaps?"
   It was a man in a clown outfit. Hackworth recognized it, vaguely, as an advertising fetish for an old American fast-food chain. But the costume was conspicuously ill-used, as if it were the sole garment of a refugee. It had been patched all over with swatches of chintz, Chinese silk, studded black leather, charcoal-gray pinstripe, and jungle camo. The clown wore integral makeup– his face glowed like an injection-molded plastic toy from the previous century with a light bulb stuck inside the head. It was disturbing to see him talk, like watching one of those animated CAT scans of a man swallowing.
   "Are you of it? Or just in it?" the Clown said, and looked at Hackworth expectantly.
   As soon as Hackworth had realized, quite some time ago, that this Dramatis Personae thing was going to be some kind of participatory theatre, he had been dreading this moment: his first cue. "Please excuse me," he said in a tense and not altogether steady voice, "this is not my milieu."
   "That's for damn fucking sure," said the Clown. "Put these on," he continued, taking something out of his pocket. He reached out to Hackworth, who was two or three meters away from him– but shockingly, his hand detached itself from his arm and flew through the air, the smutty white glove like a dirty ball of ice tumbling elliptically through the inner planets. It shoved something into Hackworth's breast pocket and then withdrew; but because Hackworth was watching, it described a smooth sudden figure-eight pattern in space before reattaching itself to the stump of the forearm.
   Hackworth realized that the clown was mechanical. "Put 'em on and be yourself, mister alienated loner steppenwolf bemused distant meta-izing technocrat rationalist fucking shithead." The Clown spun on his heel to leave; his floppy clown shoes were built around some kind of trick heel with a swivel built in, so that when he spun on his heel he really did spin on his heel, performing several complete rotations before stopping with his back turned to Hackworth and storming away. "Revolutionary, ain't it?" he snapped.
   The thing in Hackworth's pocket was a pair of dark sunglasses: wraparounds with a glimmering rainbow finish, the sort of thing that, decades ago, would have been worn by a Magnum-slinging rebel cop in a prematurely canceled television series. Hackworth unfolded them and slid the polished ends of the bows cautiously over his temples. As the lenses approached, he could see light coming from them; they were phenomenoscopes. Though in this context, the word phantascope might have been more appropriate.
   The image grew to fill his sight but would not focus until he put them all the way on, so he reluctantly plummeted into the hallucination until it resolved, and just then the bows behind his ears came alive, stretched, and grew around the back of his skull like a rubber band snapping in reverse, joining in the back to form an unbreakable band. "Release," Hackworth said, and then ran through a litany of other standard yuvree commands. The spectacles would not release his head. Finally, a cone of light pierced space from somewhere above and behind him and splashed across a stage.
   Footlights came up, and a man in a top hat emerged from behind a curtain. "Welcome to your show," he said. "You can remove the glasses at any time by securing a standing ovation from not less than ninety percent of the audience." Then the lights and curtain vanished, and Hackworth was left with what he had seen before, namely, a cybernetically enhanced night-vision rendering of the deck of the ship.
   He tried a few more commands. Most phenomenoscopes had a transparent mode, or at least translucent, that allowed the wearer to view what was really there. But these ones were doggedly opaque and would only show him a mediatronic rendering of the scene. The strolling and chatting theatregoers were represented by preposterously oversimplified wireframes, a display technology unused these eighty years or so, clearly intended to irritate Hackworth. Each figure had a large placard strapped to its chest:

   JARED MASON GRIFFIN III, aged 35
   (too Late to become an interesting character like you!)
   Nephew of an earl-level Equity Lord
   (don't you envy him?)
   Married to that sunken bitch on his right
   They go on these little escapades to escape their own crippledlives.
   (why are you here?)

   Hackworth looked down and tried to read the placard on his own chest but couldn't focus on it.
   When he walked around the deck, his viewpoint changed correspondingly. There was also a standard interface that enabled him to "fly" around the ship; Hackworth himself remained in one fixed location, of course, but his viewpoint in the spectacles became unlinked to his real coordinates. Whenever he used this mode, the following legend was superimposed on his view in giant flashing red block letters: JOHN PERCIVAL HACKWORTH'S GODLIKE PERSPECTIVE sometimes accompanied by a cartoon of a wizardly sort of fellow sitting atop a mountain peering down into a village of squalid midgets. Because of this annoyance, Hackworth did not use this feature very frequently. But on his initial reconnaissance, he discovered a few items of interest.
   For one thing, the Nipponese fellow who had got pissed and fallen overboard had encountered a group of several other people who had, by a remarkable coincidence, also fallen out of their boats on the way here, and who upon being rescued had all begun to emit colored light and see visions that they insisted on recounting to anyone in the vicinity. These people convened into a poorly organized chorus, all shouting at once and articulating visions that seemed to be linked in an approximate way-as if they had all just now awakened from the same dream and were all doing an equally bad job describing it. They stuck together despite their differences, drawn together by the same mysterious attractive force that causes streetcorner crackpots to set up their soapboxes right next to each other. Shortly after Hackworth zoomed toward them in his phenomenoscopic view, they began to hallucinate something along the lines of a giant eyeball peering at them from the heavens, the black skin of its eyelids studded with stars.
   Hackworth skulked away and focused in on another large gathering: a couple of dozen older people of the trim, fit, and active style, tennis sweaters draped over their shoulders and sensible walking shoes firmly but not too tightly laced to their feet, piling off a small airship that had just moored on the old helicopter pad near the ship's stern. The airship had many windows and was festooned with mediatronic advertisements for aerial tours of London. As the tourists climbed off, they tended to stop in their tracks, so that a severe bottleneck was forever forming. They had to be goaded into the outer darkness by their tour guide, a young actress dressed in a cheesy devil outfit, complete with flashing red horns and a trident.
   "Is this Whitechapel?" one of them said to the fog, speaking in an American accent. These people were obviously members of the Heartland tribe, a prosperous phyle closely allied with New Atlantis that had absorbed many responsible, sane, educated, white, Midwestern, middleclass types. Listening in on their furtive conversations, Hackworth divined that these tourists had been brought in from a Holiday Inn in Kensington, under the ruse that they were going to take the Jack the Ripper tour in Whitechapel. As Hackworth listened, the diabolical tour guide explained that their drunken airship pilot had accidentally flown them to a floating theatre, and they were welcome to enjoy the show, which would be starting shortly; a free (to them) performance of Cats, the longest-running musical of all time, which most of them had already seen on their first night in London.
   Hackworth, still peering through the mocking red letters, did a quick scan belowdecks. There were a dozen cavernous compartments down there. Four of them had been consolidated into a capacious theatre; four more served as the stage and backstage. Hackworth located his daughter there. She was seated on a throne of light, rehearsing some lines. Apparently she'd already been cast in a major role.
   "I don't want you to watch me like that," she said, and vanished from Hackworth's display in a burst of light. The ship's foghorn sounded. The sound continued to echo sporadically from other ships in the area. Hackworth returned to his natural view of the deck just in time to see a blazing figment rushing toward him: the Clown again, who apparently possessed the special power of moving through Hackworth's display like a phantasm.
   "Going to stay up here all night, guessing the distance to the other ships by timing the echoes? Or may I show you to your seat?"
   Hackworth decided that the best thing was not to be ruffled.
   "Please," he said.
   "Well, there it is then," said the Clown, gesturing with one maculated glove toward a plain wooden chair right before them on the deck. Hackworth did not believe it was really there, because he hadn't seen it before now. But the spectacles allowed him no way to tell.
   He stepped forward like a man making his way to the toilet in a dark and unfamiliar room, knees bent, hands outstretched, moving his feet gingerly so as not to bark shins or toes on anything. The Clown had drawn to one side and was watching him scornfully. "Is this what you call getting into your role? Think you can get away with scientific rationalism all night? What's going to happen the first time you actually start believing what you see?"
   Hackworth found his seat exactly where the display told him it would be, but it wasn't a simple wooden chair; it was foam-covered and it had arms. It was like a seat in a theatre, but when he groped to either side, he did not find any others. So he depressed the seat and fell into it.
   "You'll be needing this," the Clown said, and snapped a tubular object into the palm of Hackworth's hand. Hackworth was just recognizing it as some kind of torch when something loud and violent happened just below him. His feet, which had been resting on the deckplates, were now dangling in air. In fact, all of him was dangling. A trap door had flown open beneath him, and he was in free fall. "Enjoy the show," the Clown said, tipping his hat and peering down at him through a rapidly diminishing square hole.
   "And while you're accelerating toward the center of the earth at nine point eight meters per second squared, riddle me this: We can fake sounds, we can fake images, we can even fake the wind blowing over your face, but how do we fake the sensation of free fall?"
   Pseudopods had sprouted from the chair's foam and wrapped around Hackworth's waist and upper thighs. This was fortunate as he had gone into a slow backward spin and soon found himself falling face-first, passing through great amorphous clouds of light: a collection of old chandeliers that Dramatis Personae had scavenged from condemned buildings. The Clown was right: Hackworth was definitely in free fall, a sensation that could not be faked with spectacles. If his eyes and ears were to be believed, he was plunging toward the floor of the big theatre he had reconnoitered earlier. But it was not grooved with neat rows of seats like an ordinary theatre. The seats were present but scattered about randomly. And some of them were moving.
   The floor continued to accelerate toward him until he got really scared and started to scream. Then he felt gravity again as some force began to slow him down. The chair spun around so that Hackworth was looking up into the irregular constellation of chandeliers, and the acceleration shot up to several gees. Then back to normal. The chair rotated so that he was on the level once more, and the phenomenoscope went brilliant, blinding white. The earpieces were pumping white noise at him; but as it began to diminish, he realized it was actually the sound of applause.
   Hackworth was not able to see anything until he fiddled with the interface and got back to a more schematic view of the theatre. Then he determined that the place was about half full of theatregoers, moving about independently on their chairs, which were somehow motorized, and that several dozen of them were aiming their torches toward him, which accounted for the blinding light. He was on center stage, the main attraction. He wondered if he was supposed to say something. A line was written across his spectacles: Thanks very much, Ladies and gentlemen, for letting me
   drop in. We have a great show for you tonight. . . .
   Hackworth wondered if he was somehow obligated to read this line. But soon the torches turned away from him, as more audience members began to rain down through the astral plane of the chandeliers. Watching them fall, Hackworth realized that he'd seen something like it before at amusement parks: This was nothing more than bungee-jumping. It's just that the spectacles had declined to show Hackworth his own bungee cord, just to add an extra frisson to the whole experience.
   The armrest of Hackworth's chair included some controls that enabled him to move it around the floor of the house, which was coneshaped, sloping sharply in toward the center. A pedestrian would have found difficult footing, but the chair had powerful nanotech motors and compensated for the slope.
   It was a round theatre, Globe-style. The conical floor was encompassed by a circular wall, pierced here and there by openings of different sizes. Some appeared to be ventilation shafts, some were the apertures of private boxes or technical control rooms, and by far the largest was a proscenium that occupied a quarter of the circumference, and that was currently closed off by a curtain.
   Hackworth noted that the lowest and innermost part of the house floor was not occupied. He motored down the slope and was shocked to realize that he was suddenly up to his waist in painfully chilly water. He threw the chair into reverse, but it did not respond to the controls. "Dead in the water!" cried the Clown triumphantly, sounding as if he were standing right there, though Hackworth couldn't see him. He found a way to release the chair's built-in restraints and struggled up the raked floor, his legs stiff from the cold and reeking of seawater. Evidently the central third of the floor actually plunged beneath the waterline and was open to the sea– another fact that Hackworth's spectacles had not bothered to reveal.
   Again, dozens of lights were on him. The audience was laughing, and there was even some sarcastic applause. Come on in,
   folks, the water 's fine! suggested the spectacles, but once again Hackworth declined to read the line. Apparently these were nothing more than suggestions tossed out by Dramatis Personae's writers, which faded from the display as they lost their currency.
   The events of the last few minutes-the phenomenoscopes that couldn't be taken off, the unexpected bungee jump, the plunge into cold seawater-had left Hackworth in a state of shock. He felt a strong need to hole up somewhere and shake off the disorientation.
   He clambered up toward the perimeter of the house, dodging the occasional moving chair, and tracked by a few spotlight beams from fellow audience members who had taken a particular interest in his personal story. An aperture was above him, glowing with warm light, and passing through it, Hackworth found himself in a cozy little bar with a curving window that afforded an excellent view of the theatre. It was a refuge in more ways than one; he could see normally through the spectacles here, they seemed to be giving him an untampered view of reality. He ordered a pint of stout from the barman and took a seat at the counter along the window.
   Somewhere around his third or fourth gulp of stout, he realized that he had already submitted to the Clown's imperative. The plunge into the water had taught him that he had no choice but to believe in what the spectades showed his eyes and ears– even though he knew it to be false– and to accept the consequences. A pint of stout went some distance toward warming up his legs, and toward relaxing his mind. He had come here for a show, and he was getting one, and there was no reason to fight it; Dramatis Personae might have a dodgy reputation, but no one had ever accused them of killing a member of the audience.
   The chandeliers dimmed. The torch-wielding audience went into motion like sparks stirred by a gust of wind, some motoring toward the high ground and others preferring the water's edge. As the house lights faded to black, they amused themselves playing their torches back and forth across the walls and the curtain, creating an apocalyptic sky torn by hundreds of comets. A tongue of clammy, algae-colored light shone beneath the water, resolving itself into a long narrow thrust stage as it rose toward the surface, like Atlantis resurgent. The audience noticed it and bounced their spotlights off the surface, catching a few dark motes in the crossfire: the heads of a dozen or so performers, slowly rising out of the water. They began to speak in something like unison, and Hackworth realized that they were the chorus of lunatics he had seen earlier.
   "Set me up, Nick," said a woman's voice behind him.
   "Tucked 'em in, did you?" said the barkeep.
   "Ninnies."
   Hackworth turned and saw that it was the young woman in the devil costume who had acted as tour guide for the Heartlanders. She was very petite, dressed in a long black skirt slit all the way to the hipbone, and she had nice hair, very thick and black and glossy. She carried a glass of wheat beer over to the counter, primly swept her devil's tail out of the way in a gesture that Hackworth found hopelessly fetching, and took a seat. Then she let out an explosive sigh and put her head down on her arms for a few moments, her blinking red horns reflecting in the curved window like the taillights of a full-laner. Hackworth laced his fingers together around his pint and smelled her perfume. Down below, the chorus had gotten out of hand and was trying to pull off a rather ambitious Busby Berkeley dance number. They showed an uncanny ability to act in unison– something to do with the 'sites that had burrowed into their brains– but their bodies were stiff, weak, and badly coordinated. What they did, they did with absolute conviction, which made it good anyway.
   "Did they buy it?" Hackworth said.
   "Pardon me?" said the woman, looking up alertly like a bird, as if she hadn't known Hackworth was here.
   "Do those Heartlanders really believe that story about the drunken pilot?"
   "Oh. Who cares?" the woman said.
   Hackworth laughed, pleased that a member of Dramatis Personae was affording him this confidence.
   "It's off the point, isn't it," the woman said in a lower voice, getting a bit philosophical now. She squeezed a wedge of lemon into her wheat beer and took a sip. "Belief isn't a binary state, not here at least. Does anyone believe anything one hundred percent? Do you believe everything you see through those goggles?"
   "No," Hackworth said, "the only thing I believe at the moment is that my legs are wet, this stout is good, and I like your perfume."
   She looked a bit surprised, not unpleasantly so, but she wasn't nearly that easy. "So why are you here? Which show did you come to see?"
   "What do you mean? I suppose I came to see this one."
   "But there is no this one. It's a whole family of shows. Interlaced." She parked her beer and executed Phase 1 of the here-is– the-church maneuver. "Which show you see depends on which feed you're viewing."
   "I don't seem to have any control over what I see."
   "Ah, then you're a performer."
   "So far I have felt like a very inept slapstick performer."
   "Inept slapstick? Isn't that a bit redundant?"
   It wasn't that funny, but she said it wittily, and Hackworth chuckled politely.
   "It sounds as though you've been singled out to be a performer."
   "You don't say."
   "Now, I don't normally reveal our trade secrets," the woman continued in a lower voice, "but usually when someone is singled out as a performer, it's because they have come here for some purpose other than pure, passive entertainment."
   Hackworth stuttered and fumbled for words a bit. "Does that– is that done?"
   "Oh, yes!" the woman said. She rose from her stool and moved to the one right next to Hackworth. "Theatre's not just a few people clowning about on a stage, being watched by this herd of oxen. I mean, sometimes it's that. But it can be ever so much more-really it can be any sort of interaction between people and people, or people and information." The woman had become quite passionate now, forgotten herself completely. Hackworth got boundless pleasure just from watching her. When she'd first entered the bar, he'd thought she had a sort of nondescript face, but as she let her guard down and spoke without any self-consciousness, she seemed to become prettier and prettier. "We are tied in to everything here– plugged into the whole universe of information. Really, it's a virtual theatre. Instead of being hard-wired, the stage, sets, cast, and script are all soft-they can be reconfigured simply by shifting bits about."
   "Oh. So the show-or interlaced set of shows-can be different each night?"
   "No, you're still not getting it," she said, becoming very excited. She reached out and gripped his forearm just below the elbow and leaned toward him, desperate to make sure he got this.
   "It's not that we do a set show, reconfigure, and a different one next night. The changes are dynamic and take place in real time. The show reconfigures itself dynamically depending upon what happens moment to moment-and mind you, not just what happens here, but what is happening in the world at large. It is a smart play–an intelligent organism."
   "So, if, for example, a battle between the Fists of Righteous Harmony and the Coastal Republic were taking place in the interior of China at this moment, then shifts in the battle might in some way-"
   "Might change the color of a spotlight or a line of dialogue– not necessarily in any simple and deterministic fashion, mind you-"
   "I think I understand," Hackworth said. "The internal variables of the play depend on the total universe of information outside-"
   The woman nodded vigorously, quite pleased with him, her huge black eyes shining.
   Hackworth continued, "As, for example, a person's state of mind at any given moment might depend on the relative concentrations of innumerable chemical compounds circulating through his bloodstream."
   "Yes," the woman said, "like if you're in a pub being chatted up by a fetching young gentleman, the words coming out of your mouth are affected by the amount of alcohol you've put into your system, and, of course, by concentrations of natural hormones– again, not in a simple deterministic way-these things are all inputs."
   "I think I'm beginning to get your meaning," Hackworth said.
   "Substitute tonight's show for the brain, and the information flowing across the net for molecules flowing through the bloodstream, and you have it," the woman said.
   Hackworth was a bit disappointed that she had chosen to pull back from the pub metaphor, which he had found more immediately interesting.
   The woman continued, "That lack of determinism causes some to dismiss the whole process as wanking. But in fact it's an incredibly powerful tool. Some people understand that."
   "I believe I do," Hackworth said, desperately wanting her to believe that he did.
   "And so some people come here because they are on a quest of some sort-trying to find a lost lover, let's say, or to understand why something terrible happened in their lives, or why there is cruelty in the world, or why they aren't satisfied with their career. Society has never been good at answering these questions-the sorts of questions you can't just look up in a reference database."
   "But the dynamic theatre allows one to interface with the universe of data in a more intuitive way," Hackworth said.
   "That is precisely it," the woman said. "I'm so pleased that you get this."
   "When I was working with information, it frequently occurred to me, in a vague and general way, that such a thing might be desirable," Hackworth said. "But this is beyond my imagination."
   "Where did you hear of us?"
   "I was referred here by a friend who has been associated with you in the past, in some vague way."
   "Oh? May I ask who? Perhaps we have a mutual friend," the woman said, as if that would be a fine thing. Hackworth felt himself reddening and let out a deep breath.
   "All right," he said, "I lied. It wasn't really a friend of mine. It was someone I was led to."
   "Ah, now we're getting into it," the woman said. "I knew there was something mysterious going on with you."
   Hackworth was abashed and did not know what to say. He looked into his beer. The woman was staring at him, and he could feel her eqes on his face like the warmth of a follow spot.
   "So you did come here in search of something. Didn't you? Something you couldn't find by looking it up in a database."
   "I'm seeking a fellow called the Alchemist," Hackworth said. Suddenly, things got bright. The side of the woman's face that was toward the window was brilliantly illuminated, like a probe in space lit on one side by the directional light of the sun. Hackworth sensed, somehow, that this was not a new development. Looking out over the audience, he saw that nearly all of them were aiming their spotlights into the bar, and that everyone in the place had been watching and listening to his entire conversation with the woman. The spectacles had deceived him by adjusting the apparent light levels. The woman looked different too; her face had reverted to the way it looked when she came in, and Hackworth now understood that her image in his spectacles had been gradually evolving during their conversation, getting feedback from whatever part of his brain buzzed when he saw a beautiful woman.
   The curtain parted to reveal a large electric sign descending from the fly space: JOHN HACKWORTH in QUEST FOR THE ALCHEMIST starring JOHN HACKWORTH as HIMSELF.
   The Chorus sang:
   He's such a stiff John Hackworth is
   Can't show emotion to save his life
   With nasty repercussions, viz
   He lost his job and lost his wife
   So now he's on a goshdarn Quest
   Wandering all o'er the world
   Hunting down that Alchemist
   'Cept when he stops to pick up girls.
   Maybe he'll clean up his act
   And do the job tonight
   A fabulous adventure packed
   With marvelous sounds and sights
   Let's get it on, oh Hacker John
   Let's get it on, on, on.
   Something jerked violently at Hackworth's neck. The woman had tossed a noose around him while he'd been staring out the window, and now she was hauling him out the door of the bar like a recalcitrant dog. As soon as she cleared the doorway, her cape inflated like a time-lapse explosion, and she shot twelve feet into the air, propelled on jets of air built into her clothing somehow-she payed out the leash so that Hackworth wasn't hanged in the process. Flying above the audience like the cone of fire from a rocket engine, she led the stumbling Hackworth down the sloping floor and to the edge of the water. The thrust stage was linked to the water's edge by a couple of narrow bridges, and Hackworth negotiated one of these, feeling hundreds of lights on his shoulders, seemingly hot enough to ignite his clothing. She led him straight back through the center of the Chorus, beneath the electric sign, through the backstage area, and through a doorway, which clanged shut behind him. Then she vanished.
   Hackworth was surrounded on three sides by softly glowing blue walls. He reached out to touch one and received a mild shock for his troubles. Stepping forward, he tripped over something that skittered across the floor: a dry bone, big and heavy, larger than a human femur.
   He stepped forward through the only gap available to him and found more walls. He had been deposited into the heart of a labyrinth.
   It took him an hour or so to realize that escape through normal means was hopeless. He didn't even try to figure out the labyrinth's floor plan; instead, realizing that it couldn't possibly be larger than the ship, he followed the foolproof expedient of turning right at every corner, which as all clever boys knew must always lead to an exit. But it didn't, and he did not understand why until once, in the corner of his eye, he saw a wall segment shift sideways, closing up an old gap and creating a new one. It was a dynamic labyrinth.
   He found a rusty bolt on the floor, picked it up, and threw it at a wall. It did not bounce off but passed through and clattered onto the floor beyond. So the walls did not exist except as figments in his spectacles. The labyrinth was constructed of information. In order to escape, he would have to hack it.
   He sat down on the floor. Nick the barman appeared, walking unhindered through walls, bearing a tray with another stout on it, and handed it to him along with a bowl of salty peanuts. As the evening went on, other people passed through his area, dancing or singing or dueling or arguing or making love. None of these had anything to do, particularly, with Hackworth's Quest, and they appeared to have nothing to do with each other. Apparently Hackworth's Quest was (as the devil-woman herself had told him) just one of several concurrent stories being acted out tonight, coexisting in the same space.
   So what did any of this have to do with the life of John Hackworth? And how was Fiona mixed up in it?
   As Hackworth thought about Fiona, a panel in front of him slid to the side, exposing several yards of corridor. During the next couple of hours he noted the same thing several times: An idea would occur to him, and a wall would move. In this way he moved in fits and starts through the maze, as his mind moved from one idea to the next. The floor was definitely sloping downward, which would obviously bring him below the waterline at some point; and indeed he had begun to sense a heavy drumming noise coming up through the deckplates, which might have been the pounding of mighty engines except that this ship, as far as he knew, wasn't going anywhere. He smelled seawater before him and saw dim lights shining through its surface, broken by the waves, and knew that in the flooded ballast tanks of this ship lay a network of underwater tunnels, and that in those tunnels were Drummers. For all he knew, the whole show was just a figment being enacted in the mind of the Drummers. Probably not the main event either; it was probably just an epiphenomenon of whatever deep processes the Drummers were running down there in their collective mind.
   A wall panel slid aside and gave him a clear path to the water. Hackworth squatted at the water's edge for a few minutes, listening to the drums, then stood up and began to undo his necktie.

. . .
   He was terribly hot and sweaty, and bright light was in his eyes, and none of these things were consistent with being underwater. He awoke to see a bright blue sky overhead, pawed at his face, and found that the spectacles were gone. Fiona was there in her white dress, watching him with a rueful smile. The floor was pounding Hackworth on the buttocks and evidently had been for some time, as the bony parts of his backside were bruised and raw.
   He realized that they were on the raft, heading back toward the London docks; that he was naked and that Fiona had covered him with a sheet of plastic to protect his skin from the sun. A few other theatergoers were scattered about, slumped against one another, utterly passive, like refugees, or people who've just had the greatest sex of their lives, or people who are tremendously hung over.
   "You were quite a hit," Fiona said. And suddenly Hackworth remembered himself being paraded naked and dripping down the thrust stage, waves of applause rolling over him from the standing audience.
   "The Quest is finished," he blurted. "We're going to Shanghai."
   "You're going to Shanghai," Fiona said. "I'll see you off at the dock. Then I'll be going back." She cocked her head over the stern.
   "Back to the ship?"
   "I was a bigger hit than you were," she said. "I've found my calling in life, Father. I've accepted an invitation to join Dramatis Personae."

Carl Hollywood's hack.

   Carl Hollywood leaned back against the hard lacquered back of his corner seat for the first time in many hours and rubbed his face with both hands, scratching himself with his own whiskers. He had been sitting in the teahouse for almost twenty-four hours, consumed twelve pots of tea, and twice called in masseuses to unknot his back.
   The afternoon light coming in the windows behind him flickered as the crowd outside began to break up. They had been treated to a remarkable free media show, watching over his shoulders for hours as the dramaturgical exploits of John Percival Hackworth had played themselves out, in several different camera angles, on floating cine windows on Carl Hollywood's pages. None of them could read English, and so they had been unable to follow the story of Princess Nell's adventures in the land of King Coyote, which had been streaming across the pages at the same time, the storyline fluctuating and curling in upon itself like a cloud of smoke spun and torn by invisible currents.
   Now the pages were blank and empty. Carl reached out lazily with one hand and began to stack the sheets on top of each other, just for something to occupy his hands while his mind worked– though it wasn't working, at this point, so much as stumbling blindly through a dark labyrinth a la John Percival Hackworth. Carl Hollywood had long suspected that, among other things, the network of the Drummers was a giant system for breaking codes. The cryptographic systems that made the media network run securely, and that made it capable of securely transferring money, were based on the use of immense prime numbers as magic keys. The keys could theoretically be broken by throwing enough computing power at the problem. But at any given level of computing power, code-making was always much easier than code-breaking, so as long as the system kept moving to larger and larger prime numbers as computers got faster, the code-makers could stay far ahead of the code-breakers forever.
   But the human mind didn't work like a digital computer and was capable of doing some funny things. Carl Hollywood remembered one of the Lone Eagles, an older man who could add huge columns of numbers in his head as quickly as they were called out. That, in and of itself, was merely a duplication of something that a digital computer could do. But this man could also do numerical tricks that could not easily be programmed into a computer.
   If many minds were gathered together in the network of the Drummers, perhaps they could somehow see through the storm of encrypted data that roared continuously through media space, cause the seemingly random bits to coalesce into meaning. The men who had come to talk to Miranda, who had persuaded her to enter the world of the Drummers, had implied that this was possible; that through them, Miranda could find Nell.
   Superficially, this would be disastrous, because it would destroy the system used for financial transactions. It would be as if, in a world where commerce was based upon the exchange of gold, some person had figured out how to change lead into gold. An Alchemist.
   But Carl Hollywood wondered if it really made a difference. The Drummers could only do such things by subsuming themselves into a gestalt society. As the case of Hackworth demonstrated, as soon as a Drummer removed himself from that gestalt, he lost touch with it completely. All communication between the Drummers and normal human society took place unconsciously, through their influence upon the Net, in patterns that appeared subliminally in the ractives that everyone played with in their homes and saw playing across the walls of buildings. The Drummers could break the code, but they couldn't take advantage of it in an obvious way, or perhaps they simply did not want to. They could make gold, but they were no longer interested in having it.
   John Hackworth, somehow, was better than anyone else at making the transition between the society of Drummers and the Victorian tribe, and each time he crossed the boundary, he seemed to bring something with him, clinging to his garments like traces of scent. These faint echoes of forbidden data entrained in his wake caused tangled and unpredictable repercussions, on both sides of the boundary, that Hackworth himself might not even be aware of. Carl Hollywood had known little of Hackworth until several hours ago, when, alerted by a friend in Dramatis Personae, he had joined his story in progress on the black decks of the show boat. Now he seemed to know a great deal: that Hackworth was the progenitor of the Young Lady's Illustrated Primer, and that he had a deep relationship with the Drummers that went far beyond anything as simple-minded as captivity. He had not just been eating lotuses and getting his rocks off during his years beneath the waves.
   Hackworth had brought something back with him this time, when he had emerged naked and streaming with cold seawater from the warren of Drummers in the ballast tanks of the ship. He had emerged with a set of numerical keys that were used to identify certain entities: the Primer, Nell, Miranda, and someone else who went by the name of Dr. X. Before he had fully reentered his conscious state, he had supplied those keys to the Clown, who had been there to haul his gasping and shivering body out of the water.
   The Clown was a mechanical device, but Dramatis Personae had been good enough to allow Carl Hollywood to control it– and to improvise much of Hackworth's personal script and storyline– for the duration of the show.
   Now Carl had the keys and, for the purposes of the Net, was indistinguishable from Miranda or Nell or Dr. X or even Hackworth himself. They were written out across the surface of a page, long columns of digits grouped in bunches of four. Carl Hollywood told this sheet to fold itself and then tucked it into his breast pocket. He could use them to untangle this whole business, but that would be another night's hack. Snuff and caffeine had done as much as they could. It was time to go back to the hotel, soak in a bath, get some sleep, and prepare for the final act.

From the Primer, Princess Nell's ride to the Castle of King Coyote;
description of the castle;
an audience with a Wizard;
her final triumph over King Coyote;
an enchanted army.

   Princess Nell rode north into an explosive thunderstorm. The horses were driven nearly mad with terror by the cannonlike explosions of the thunder and the unearthly blue flashes of the lightning, but with a firm hand and a soothing voice in the ear, Nell urged them forward. The cairns of bones strewn along the roadside were evidence that this mountain pass was no place to dawdle, and the poor animals would be no less terrified huddling under a rock. For all she knew, the great King Coyote was capable of controlling even the weather itself and had prepared this reception to try Princess Nell's will.
   Finally she crested the pass, and none too soon, as the horses' hooves had begun to slip on a thick layer of ice, and ice had begun thickly to coat the reins and to weigh down the animals' manes and tails. Working her way down the switchbacks, she left the high fury of the storm behind and pushed into masses of rain as dense as any jungle. It was well that she had paused for a few days at the foot of the mountains to review all of Purple's magic books, for on this night ride through the mountains she used every spell Purple had taught her: spells for casting light, for choosing the right fork in the road, for calming animals and warming chilled bodies, for bolstering her own failing courage, for sensing the approach of any monsters foolish enough to venture out in such weather, and for defeating those desperate enough to attack. This night ride was, perhaps, a rash act, but Princess Nell proved equal to the challenge. King Coyote would not expect her to make such a crossing. Tomorrow when the storm on high had cleared, he would send his raven sentinels winging through the pass and down into the plain below to spy on her, as he had for the last several days, and they would return with dismaying news: The Princess had vanished! Even King Coyote's best trackers would not be able to follow her path from yesterday's campsite, so craftily had she covered her real tracks and laid false ones.
   Dawn found her in the heart of a great forest. King Coyote's castle was built on a high woodland plateau surrounded by mountains; she estimated she was several hours' ride away. Staying well clear of the high road taken by the messengers from the Cipherers' Market, she made camp under an overhanging rock along a river, sheltered from the chill wet wind and safe from the eyes of the raven sentinels, and lit a tiny fire where she made some tea and porridge. She napped until the middle of the afternoon, then rose, bathed in the bitter water of the stream, and untied the oilcloth packet she had brought with her. It contained one of the costumes worn by the messengers who galloped to and from the Cipherers' Market. It also contained a few books containing enciphered messages– authentic ones dispatched from various stalls in the market addressed to King Coyote's castle.
   As she made her way through the woods toward the high road, she heard massed hoofbeats rolling by and knew that the first contingent of messengers had just come over the pass after waiting for the storm to pass. She waited a few minutes and then followed them. Turning onto the high road out of the dense woods, she reined in her horse and sat for a moment, astonished by her first sight of the Castle of King Coyote.
   She had never seen its like in all of her travels through the Land Beyond. Its base was as wide as a mountain, and its walls rose sheer and straight into the clouds. Galactic clouds of lights shone from its myriad windows. It was guarded by mighty stockades, each of them a great castle unto itself, but built not on stony foundations, but upon the very clouds themselves; for King Coyote, in his cleverness, had devised a way to make buildings that floated on the air. Princess Nell spurred her horse forward, for even in her numbness she sensed that someone might be watching the high road from a window high in one of the castle's glittering oriels. As she galloped toward the castle, she was torn between a sense of her own foolishness in daring to assault such a mighty fortress and admiration for King Coyote's work. Faint clouds of diaphanous black oozed between the towers and stockades, and as Princess Nell drew closer, she saw that they were actually regiments of ravens going through their military drills. They were the closest thing King Coyote had to an army; for as one of the ravens had told her, after he had stolen the eleven keys from around her neck,
   Castles, gardens, gold, and jewels
   Contentment signify, for fools
   Like Princess Nell; but those
   Who cultivate their wit
   Like King Coyote and his crows
   Compile their power bit by bit
   And hide it places no one knows.
   King Coyote did not preserve his power by armed might but by cleverness, and sentinels were the only army he needed, information his only weapon.
   As she galloped the final miles to the gate, wondering whether her legs and back would hold out, a thin steam of black issued from a narrow portal high in one of the floating stockades, thickened into a transparent ball, and dove toward her like a plunging comet. She could not help flinching from the illusion of mass and momentum, but, a stone's throw above her head the cloud of ravens parted into several contingents that whirled around and struck from several directions, converging on her, passing around her so closely that the wind from their rattling wings blew her hair back, finally reforming into a disciplined group that returned to its stockade without a look back. Apparently she had passed the inspection. When she reached the mighty gate, it was standing open for her, and no one was guarding it. Princess Nell rode into the broad streets of King Coyote's castle.
   It was the finest place she had ever seen. Here gold and crystal were not hidden away in the King's treasury but were used as building materials. Green and growing things were everywhere, for King Coyote was fascinated by the secrets of nature and had sent his agents to the farthest reaches of the world to bring back exotic seeds. The wide boulevards of King Coyote's city were lined with trees whose arching limbs closed over the ashlars to form a rustling vault. The undersides of the leaves were silver and seemed to cast a gentle light, and the branches were filled with violet and magenta bromeliads the size of kettles, making a sweet sharp smell, aswarm with ruby-throated hummingbirds and filled with water where tiny fluorescent frogs and beetles lived.
   The Messenger's Route was marked with polished brass plates set among the paving-stones. Princess Nell followed it down the grand boulevard, into a park that encircled the city, and then onto a rising street that spiraled around the central promontory. As the horse took her toward the clouds, her ears popped again and again, and from each curve in the road she enjoyed a sweeping view over the lower city and into the constellation of floating stockades where the raven sentinels soared, coming and going in flights and squadrons, bringing news from every corner of the empire.
   She rode by a place where King Coyote was adding on to the castle; but instead of an army of stonemasons and carpenters, the builder was a single man, a portly gray-bearded fellow puffing at a long slender pipe, carrying a leather bag on his belt. Arriving at the center of the building site, he reached into his bag and drew out a great seed the size of an apple and pitched it into the soil. By the time this man had walked back to the spiral road, a tall shaft of gleaming crystal had arisen from the soil and grown far above their heads, gleaming in the sunlight, and branched out like a tree. By the time Princess Nell lost sight of it around the corner, the builder was puffing contentedly and looking at a crystalline vault that nearly covered the lot.
   This and many other wonders Princess Nell saw during her long ride up the spiral road. The clouds cleared away, and Nell found that she could see great distances in every direction. King Coyote's domain was in the very heart of the Land Beyond, and his castle was built on a high plateau in the center of his domain, so that from his windows he could see all the way to the shining ocean in every direction. Nell kept a sharp eye on the horizon as she climbed toward the King's inner keep, hoping she might get a glimpse of the faraway island where Harv languished in the Dark Castle; but there were many islands in the distant sea, and it was hard to tell the Dark Castle's towers from mountain crags.
   Finally the road became level and turned inward to pierce another unguarded gate in another high wall, and Princess Nell found herself in a green, flowery court before the King's keep-a high palace that appeared to have been hewn from a single diamond the size of an iceberg. By now the sun was sinking low in the west, and its orange rays ignited the walls of the keep and cast tiny rainbows everywhere like shards from a shattered crystal bowl. A dozen or so messengers stood in a queue before the doors of the keep. They had left their horses in a corner of the yard where a watering-trough and manger were available. Princess Nell did likewise and joined the queue.
   "I have never had the honor of carrying a message to King Coyote," Princess Nell said to the messenger preceding her in the queue.
   "It is an experience you will never forget," said the messenger, a cocky young man with black hair and a goatee.
   "Why must we wait in this queue? In the stalls at the Cipherers' Market, we leave the books on the table and continue on our way."
   Several of the messengers turned and looked back at Princess Nell disdainfully. The messenger with the goatee made a visible effort to control his amusement and said, "King Coyote is no small-timer sitting in a stall at the Cipherers' Market! This you will soon see for yourself."
   "But doesn't he make his decisions the same way as all the others-by consulting rules in a book?"
   At this the other messengers made no effort to control their amusement. The one with the goatee took on a distinctly sneering tone. "What would be the point of having a King in that case?" he said. "He does not take his decisions from any book. King Coyote has built a mighty thinking machine, Wizard 0.2, containing all the wisdom in the world. When we bring a book to this place, his acolytes decipher it and consult with Wizard 0.2. Sometimes it takes hours for Wizard to reach its decision. I would advise you to wait respectfully and quietly in the presence of the great machine!"
   "That I will certainly do," said Princess Nell, amused rather than angered by this lowly messenger's impertinence.
   The queue moved along steadily, and as darkness fell and the orange rays of the sun died away, Princess Nell became aware of colored lights streaming out from within the keep. The lights seemed to be quite brilliant whenever Wizard 0.2 was cogitating and dropped to a low flicker the rest of the time. Princess Nell tried to make out other details of what was going on inside the keep, but the countless facets broke up the light and bent it into all directions so that she could get only hints and fragments; trying to see into King Coyote's inner sanctum was like trying to remember the details of a forgotten dream.
   Finally the messenger with the goatee emerged, gave Princess Nell a final smirk, and reminded her to display proper respect.
   "Next," intoned the acolyte in a chanting voice, and Princess Nell entered the keep.
   Five acolytes sat in the anteroom, each one at a desk piled high with dusty old books and long reels of paper tape. Nell had brought thirteen books from the Cipherers' Market, and at their direction, she distributed these books among the acolytes for decipherment. The acolytes were neither young nor old but in the middle of their lives, all dressed in white coats decorated, in golden thread, with the crest of King Coyote. Each also had a key around his neck. As Princess Nell waited, they deciphered the contents of the books she had brought and punched the results onto strips of paper tape using little machines built into their tables.
   Then, with great ceremony, the thirteen paper tapes were coiled up and placed on a tremendous silver platter carried by a young altar boy. A pair of large doors was swung open, and the acolytes, the altar boy, and Princess Nell formed into a procession of sorts, which marched into the Chamber of the Wizard, a vast vaulted room, and down its long central aisle.
   At the far end of the chamber was-nothing. A sort of large empty space surrounded by elaborate machinery and clockwork, with a small altar at the front. It reminded Princess Nell of a stage, empty of curtains and scenery. Standing next to the stage was a high priest, older and wearing a more impressive white robe.
   When they reached the head of the aisle, the priest went through a perfunctory ceremony, praising the Wizard's excellent features and asking for its cooperation. As he said these words, lights began to come on and the machinery began to whir. Princess Nell saw that this vault was, in fact, nothing more than an anteroom for a much vaster space within, and that this space was filled with machinery: countless narrow shining rods, scarcely larger than pencil leads, laid in a fine gridwork, sliding back and forth under the impetus of geared power shafts running throughout the place. All of the machinery threw off heat as it ran, and the room was quite warm despite a vigorous draught of cold mountain air being pumped through it by windmill-size fans.
   The priest took the first of the thirteen rolls of paper tape from the platter and fed it into a slot on the top of the altar. At this point, Wizard 0.2 really went into action, and Princess Nell saw that all the whirring and humming she'd seen to this point had been nothing more than a low idle. Each of its million pushrods was tiny, but the force needed to move all of them at once was seismic, and she could sense the tremendous strains on the power shafts and gear boxes thundering through the sturdy floor of the keep.
   Lights came on around the stage, some of them built into the surface of the stage itself and some hidden in the machinery around it. To Princess Nell's surprise, a seemingly three-dimensional shape of light began to coalesce in the center of the empty stage. It gradually formed itself into a head, which took on additional details as the machinery thundered and hissed away: it was an old bald man with a long white beard, his face deeply furrowed in thought. After a few moments, the beard exploded into a flock of white birds and the head turned into a craggy mountain, the white birds swarming about it, and then the mountain erupted in orange lava that gradually filled up the entire volume of the stage until it was a solid glowing cube of orange light. In this fashion did one image merge into another, most astonishingly, for several minutes, and all the time the machinery was screaming away and making Princess Nell most anxious, and she suspected that if she had not seen less sophisticated machines at work at Castle Turing, she might have turned around and fled.
   Finally, though, the images died away, the stage became empty again, and the altar spat out a length of paper tape, which the priest carefully folded up and handed to one of the acolytes. After a brief prayer of thanks, the priest fed the second tape into the altar, and the whole process started up again, this time with different but equally remarkable images.
   So it went with one tape after another. When Princess Nell became accustomed to the noise and vibration of the Wizard, she began to enjoy the images, which seemed quite artistic to her– like something a human would come up with, and not machinelike at all.
   But the Wizard was undoubtedly a machine. She had not yet had the opportunity to study it in detail, but after her experiences in all of King Coyote's other castles, she suspected that it, too, was just another Turing machine. Her study of the Cipherers' Market, and particularly of the rulebooks used by the cipherers to respond to messages, had taught her that for all its complexity, it too was nothing more than another Turing machine. She had come here to the Castle of King Coyote to see whether the King answered his messages according to Turing-like rules. For if he did, then the entire system– the entire kingdom– the entire Land Beyond-was nothing more than a vast Turing machine. And as she had established when she'd been locked up in the dungeon at Castle Turing, communicating with the mysterious Duke by sending messages on a chain, a Turing machine, no matter how complex, was not human. It had no soul. It could not do what a human did.
   The thirteenth tape was fed into the altar, and the machinery began to whine, then to whir, and then to rumble. The images appearing above the stage flourished into wilder and more exotic forms than any they had seen yet, and watching the faces of the priest and the acolytes, Princess Nell could see that even they were surprised; they had never seen anything of the like before. As the minutes wore on, the images became fragmented and bizarre, mere incarnations of mathematical ideas, and finally the stage went entirely dark except for occasional random flashes of color. The Wizard had worked itself up to such a pitch that all of them felt trapped within the bowels of a mighty machine that could tear them to shreds in a moment. The little altar boy finally broke away and fled down the aisle. Within a minute or so, the acolytes, one by one, did the same, backing slowly away from the Wizard until they were about halfway down the aisle and then turning away and running. Finally even the high priest turned and fled. The rumbling of the machinery had now reached such a pitch that it felt as though an epochal earthquake were in progress, and Nell had to steady herself with a hand on the altar. The heat coming from back in the machine was like that from a forge, and Nell could see a dim red light from deep inside as some of the pushrods became hot enough to glow.
   Finally it all stopped. The silence was astonishing. Nell realized she had been cringing and stood up straight. The red glow from inside the Wizard began to die away. White light poured in from all around. Princess Nell could tell that it was coming in from outside the diamond walls of the keep. A few minutes ago it had been nighttime. Now there was light, but not daylight; it came from all directions and was cool and colorless.
   She ran down the aisle and opened the door to the anteroom, but it wasn't there. Nothing was there. The anteroom was gone. The flowery garden beyond it was gone, and the horses, the wall, the spiral road, the City of King Coyote, and the Land Beyond. Instead there was nothing but gentle white light.
   She turned around. The Chamber of the Wizard was still there.
   At the head of the aisle she could see a man sitting atop the altar, looking at her. He was wearing a crown. Around his neck was a key-the twelfth key to the Dark Castle. Princess Nell walked down the aisle toward King Coyote. He was a middle-aged man, sandy hair losing its color, gray eyes, and a beard, somewhat darker than his hair and not especially well trimmed. As Princess Nell approached, he seemed to become conscious of the crown around his head. He reached up, lifted it from his head, and tossed it carelessly onto the top of the altar.
   "Very funny," he said. "You snuck a zero divide past all of my defenses."
   Princess Nell refused to be drawn by his studied informality. She stopped several paces away. "As there is no one here to make introductions, I shall take the liberty of doing so myself. I am Princess Nell, Duchess of Turing," she said, and held out her hand.
   King Coyote looked slightly embarrassed. He jumped down from the altar, approached Princess Nell, and kissed her hand. "King Coyote at your service."
   "Pleased to make your acquaintance."
   "The pleasure is mine. Sorry! I should have known that the Primer would have taught you better manners."
   "I am not acquainted with the Primer to which you refer," Princess Nell said. "I am simply a Princess on a quest: to obtain the twelve keys to the Dark Castle. I note you have one of them in your possession."
   King Coyote held up his hands, palms facing toward her.
   "Say no more," he said. "Single combat will not be necessary. You are already the victor." He removed the twelfth key from his neck and held it out to Princess Nell. She took it from him with a little curtsy; but as the chain was sliding through his fingers, he tightened his grip suddenly, so that both of them were joined by the chain. "Now that your quest is over," he said, "can we drop the pretense?"
   "I'm sure I don't take your meaning, Your Majesty."
   He bore a controlled look of exasperation. "What was your purpose in coming here?"
   "To obtain the twelfth key."
   "Anything else?"
   "To learn about Wizard 0.2."
   "Ah."
   "To discover whether it was, in fact, a Turing machine."
   "Well, you have your answer. Wizard 0.2 is most certainly a Turing machine-the most powerful ever built."
   "And the Land Beyond?"
   "All grown from seeds. Seeds that I invented."
   "And it is also a Turing machine, then? All controlled by Wizard 0.2?"
   "No," said King Coyote. "Managed by Wizard. Controlled by me."
   "But the messages in the Cipherers' Market control all the events in the Land Beyond, do they not?"
   "You are most perceptive, Princess Nell."
   "Those messages came to Wizard-just another Turing machine."
   "Open the altar," said King Coyote, pointing to a large brass plate with a keyhole in the middle.
   Princess Nell used her key to open the lock, and King Coyote flipped back the lid of the altar. Inside were two small machines, one for reading tapes and one for writing them.
   "Follow me," said King Coyote, and opened a trap door set into the floor behind the altar.
   Princess Nell followed him down a spiral staircase into a small room. The connecting rods from the altar came down into this room and terminated at a small console.
   "Wizard is not even connected to the altar! It does nothing," Princess Nell said.
   "Oh, Wizard does a great deal. It helps me keep track of things, does calculations, and so on. But all of that business up there on the stage is just for show– just to impress the commoners. When a message comes here from the Cipherers' Market, I read it myself, and answer it myself.
   "So as you can see, Princess Nell, the Land Beyond is not really a Turing machine at all. It's actually a person– a few people, to be precise. Now it's all yours."
   King Coyote led Princess Nell back into the heart of his keep and gave her a tour of the place. The best part was the library. He showed her the books containing the rules for programming Wizard 0.2, and other books explaining how to make atoms build themselves into machines, buildings, and whole worlds.
   "You see, Princess Nell, you have conquered this world today, and now that you have conquered it, you'll find it a rather boring place. Now it's your responsibility to make new worlds for other people to explore and conquer." King Coyote waved his hand out the window into the vast, empty white space where once had stood the Land Beyond. "There's plenty of empty space out there."
   "What will you do, King Coyote?"
   "Call me John, Your Royal Highness. As of today, I no longer have a kingdom."
   "John, what will you do?"
   "I have a quest of my own."
   "What is your quest?"
   "To find the Alchemist, whoever he may be."
   "And is there . . ."

   Nell stopped reading the Primer for a moment. Her eyes had filled up with tears.
   "Is there what?" said John's voice from the book.
   "Is there another? Another who has been with me during my quest?"
   "Yes, there is," John said quietly, after a short pause. "At least I have always sensed that she is here."
   "Is she here now?"
   "Only if you build a place for her," John said. "Read the books, and they will show you how."

   With that, John, the former King Coyote and Emperor of the Land Beyond, vanished in a flash of light, leaving Princess Nell alone in her great dusty library. Princess Nell put her head down on an old leather-bound book and smelled its rich fragrance. One tear of joy ran from each eye. But she mastered the impulse to cry and reached for the book instead.
   They were magic books, and they drew Princess Nell into them so deeply that, for many hours, perhaps even days, she was not aware of her surroundings; which scarcely mattered as nothing remained of the Land Beyond. But at some length, she realized that something was tickling her foot. She reached down absently and scratched it. Moments later the tickling sensation returned. This time she looked down and was astonished to see that the floor of the library was covered with a thick gray-brown carpet, flecked here and there with splotches of white and black.
   It was a living, moving carpet. It was, in fact, the Mouse Army. All of the other buildings, places, and creatures Princess Nell had seen in the Land Beyond had been figments produced by Wizard 0.2; but apparently the mice were an exception and existed independently of King Coyote's machinations. When the Land Beyond had disappeared, all of the obstructions and impedimenta that had kept the Mouse Army away from Princess Nell had disappeared with it, and in short order they had been able to fix her whereabouts and to converge upon their long-sought Queen.
   "What would you have me do?" Princess Nell said. She had never been a Queen before and did not know the protocol.
   A chorus of excited squeaking came from the mice as commands were relayed and issued. The carpet went into violent but highly organized motion as the mice drew themselves up into platoons, companies, battalions, and regiments, each of them commanded by an officer. One mouse clambered up the leg of Princess Nell's table, bowed low to her, and then began to squeak commands from on high. The mice executed a close-order drill, withdrew to the edges of the room, and arrayed themselves in an empty box shape, leaving a large open rectangle in the middle of the floor.
   The mouse up on the table, whom Nell had dubbed the Generalissima, issued a lengthy series of orders, running to each of the four edges of the table to address different contingents of the Mouse Army. When the Generalissima was finished, very high piping music could be heard as the mouse pipers played their bagpipes and the drummers beat their drums.
   Small groups of mice began to encroach on the empty space, each group moving toward a different spot. Once each group had reached its assigned position, the individual mice arranged themselves in such a way that the group as a whole described a letter. In this way, the following message was written across the floor of the library:
   WE ARE ENCHANTED
   REQUEST ASSISTANCE
   REFER TO BOOKS
   "I shall bend all my efforts toward your disenchantment," Princess Nell said, and a tremendous, earsplitting scream of gratitude rose from the tiny throats of the Mouse Army. Finding the required book did not take long. The Mouse Army split itself up into small detachments, each of which wrestled a different book from the shelf, opened it up on the floor, and scampered through it one page at a time, looking for relevant spells. Within the hour, Princess Nell noted that a broad open corridor had developed in the Mouse Army, and that a book was making its way toward her, seeming to float an inch above the floor.
   She lifted the book carefully from the backs of the mice who were bearing it and flipped through it until she found a spell for the disenchantment of mice. "Very well then," she said, and began to read the spell; but suddenly, excited squeaking filled the air and all the mice were running away in a panic. The Generalissima climbed up onto the page, jumping up and down in a state of extreme agitation and waving her forelegs back and forth over her head.
   "I understand," Princess Nell said. She picked up the book and walked out of the library, taking care not to step on any of her subjects, and followed them out to the vast empty space beyond.
   Once again the Mouse Army put on a dazzling display of close order drill, drawing itself up across the empty, colorless plain by platoons, companies, battalions, regiments, and brigades; but this time the parade took up a much larger space, because this time the mice took care to space themselves as far apart as the length of a human arm. Some of the platoons had to march what was, for them, a distance of many leagues in order to reach the edges of the formation.
   Princess Nell took advantage of the time to wander about and inspect the ranks, and to rehearse the spell.
   Finally the Generalissima approached, bowed deeply, and gave her the thumbs-up, though Princess Nell had to pick the tiny leader up and squint to see this gesture. She went to the place that had been left for her at the head of the formation, opened up the book, and spoke the magic spell.
   There was a violent thunderclap, and a rush of wind that knocked Princess Nell flat on her back. She looked up, dazed, to see that she was surrounded by a vast army of some hundreds of thousands of girls, only a few years younger than she was. A wild cheer rose up, and all of the girls fell to their knees as one and, in a scene of riotous jubilation, proclaimed their fealty to Queen Nell.