Hackworth in China;
depredations of the Fists;
a meeting with Dr. X;
an unusual procession.

   They said that the Chinese had great respect for madmen, and that during the days of the Boxer Rebellion, certain Western missionaries, probably unstable characters to begin with, who had been trapped behind walls of rubble for weeks, scurrying through the sniper fire of the encircling Boxers and Imperial troops and listening to the cries of their flock being burned and tortured in the streets of Beijing, had become deranged and had walked unharmed into the ranks of their besiegers and been given food and treated with deference.
   Now John Percival Hackworth, having checked into a suite on the top floor of the Shangri-La in Pudong (or Shong-a-lee-lah as the taxi drivers sang it), put on a fresh shirt; his best waistcoat, girded with the gold chain, adangle with his chop, snuffboxes, fob, and watchphone; a long coat with a swallowtail for riding; boots, the black leather and brass spurs hand-shined in the lobby of the Shong-a– lee-lah by a coolie who was so servile that he was insolent, and Hackworth suspected him of being a Fist; new kid gloves; and his bowler, de-mossed and otherwise spruced up a bit, but obviously a veteran of many travels in rough territory.
   As he crossed the western bank of the Huang Pu, the usual crowd of starving peasants and professional amputees washed around him like a wave running up a flat beach because, though riding here was dangerous, it was not crazy, and they did not know him for a madman. He kept his gray eyes fixed upon the picket of burning Feed lines that demarcated the shrinking border of the Coastal Republic, and let their hands tug at his coattails, but he took no notice of them. At different times, three very rural young men, identifiable as much by their deep tans as their ignorance of modern security technology, made the mistake of reaching for his watch chain and received warning shocks for their trouble. One of them refused to let go until the smell of burned flesh rose from his palm, and then he peeled his hand away slowly and calmly, staring up at Hackworth to show that he didn't mind a little pain, and said something clearly and loudly that caused a titter to run through the crowd.
   The ride down Nanjing Road took him through the heart of Shanghai's shopping district, now an endless gauntlet of tanned beggars squatting on their heels gripping the brightly colored plastic bags that served as their suitcases, carefully passing the butts of cigarettes back and forth. In the shop windows above their heads, animated mannikins strutted and posed in the latest Coastal Republic styles. Hackworth noticed that these were much more conservative than they had been ten years ago, during his last trip down Nanjing Road. The female mannikins weren't wearing slit skirts anymore. Many weren't wearing skirts at all, but silk pants instead, or long robes that were even less revealing. One display was centered upon a patriarchal figure who reclined on a dais, wearing a round cap with a blue button on the top: a Mandarin. A young scholar was bowing to him. Around the dais, four groups of mannikins were demonstrating the other four filial relationships.
   So it was chic to be Confucian now, or at least it was politic. This was one of the few shop windows that didn't have red Fist posters pasted all over it.
   Hackworth rode past marble villas built by Iraqi Jews in previous centuries, past the hotel where Nixon had once stayed, past the high-rise enclaves that Western businessmen had used as the beachheads of the post-Communist development that had led to the squalid affluence of the Coastal Republic. He rode past nightclubs the size of stadiums; jaialai pits where stunned refugees gaped at the jostling of the bettors; side streets filled with boutiques, one street for fine goods made from alligators, another for furs, another for leathers; a nanotech district consisting of tiny businesses that did bespoke engineering; fruit and vegetable stands; a cul-de-sac where peddlers sold antiques from little carts, one specializing in cinnabar boxes, another in Maoist kitsch. Each time the density began to wane and he thought he must be reaching the edge of the city, he would come to another edge city of miniature three-story strip malls and it would begin again.
   But as the day went on, he truly did approach the limit of the city and kept riding anyway toward the west, and it became evident then that he was a madman and the people in the streets looked at him with awe and got out of his way. Bicycles and pedestrians became less common, replaced by heavier and faster military traffic.
   Hackworth did not like riding on the shoulder of highways, and so he directed Kidnapper to find a less direct route to Suzhou, one that used smaller roads. This was flat Yangtze Delta territory only inches above the waterline, where canals, for transport, irrigation, and drainage, were more numerous than roads. The canals ramified through the black, stinky ground like blood vessels branching into the tissues of the brain. The plain was interrupted frequently by small tumuli containing the coffins of someone's ancestors, just high enough to stay above the most routine floods. Farther to the west, steep hills rose from the paddies, black with vegetation. The Coastal Republic checkpoints at the intersections of the roads were gray and fuzzy, like house-size clots of bread mold, so dense was the fractal defense grid, and staring through the cloud of macro– and microscopic aerostats, Hackworth could barely make out the hoplites in the center, heat waves rising from the radiators on their backs and stirring the airborne soup. They let him pass through without incident. Hackworth expected to see more checkpoints as he continued toward Fist territory, but the first one was the last; the Coastal Republic did not have the strength for defense in depth and could muster only a one-dimensional picket line.
   A mile past the checkpoint, at another small intersection, Hackworth found a pair of very makeshift crucifixes fashioned from freshly cut mulberry trees, green leaves still fluttering from their twigs. Two young white men had been bound to the crucifixes with gray plastic ties, burned in many places and incrementally disemboweled. From the looks of their haircuts and the somber black neckties that had been ironically left around their necks, Hackworth guessed they were Mormons. A long skein of intestine trailed from one of their bellies down into the dirt, where a gaunt pig was tugging on it stubbornly.
   He did not see much more death, but he smelled it everywhere in the hot wet air. He thought that he might be seeing a network of nanotech defense barriers until he realized that it was a natural phenomenon: Each waterway supported a linear black nimbus of fat, drowsy flies. From this he knew that if he tugged a bit on this or that rein and guided Kidnapper to the bank of the canal, he would find it filled with ballooning corpses.
   Ten minutes after passing the Coastal Republic checkpoint, he rode through the center of a Fist encampment. As he looked neither right nor left, he could not really estimate its size; they had taken over a village of low brick-and-stucco buildings. A long straight smudge running across the earth marked the location of a burned Feed line, and as he crossed it, Hackworth fantasized that it was a meridian engraved on the living globe by an astral cartographer.
   Most of the Fists were shirtless, wearing indigo trousers, scarlet girdles knotted at the waist, sometimes scarlet ribbons tied round necks, foreheads, or upper arms. The ones who weren't sleeping or smoking were practicing martial arts. Hackworth rode slowly through their midst, and they pretended not to notice him, except for one man who came running out of a house with a knife, shouting
   "Sha! Sha!" and had to be tackled by three comrades.
   As he rode the forty miles to Suzhou, nothing changed about the landscape except that creeks became rivers and ponds became lakes. The Fist encampments became somewhat larger and closer together. When the thick air infrequently roused itself to a breeze, he could smell the clammy metallic reek of stagnant water and knew he was close to the great lake of Tai Wu, or Taifu as the Shanghainese pronounced it. A grayscale dome rose from the paddies some miles away, casting a film of shadow before a cluster of tall buildings, and Hackworth knew it must be Suzhou, now a stronghold of the Celestial Kingdom, veiled in its airborne shield like a courtesan behind a translucent sheen of Suzhou silk.
   Nearing the shore of the great lake he found his way onto an important road that ran south toward Hangzhou. He set Kidnapper ambling northward. Suzhou had thrown out tendrils of development along its major roads, and so as he drew closer he saw strip malls and franchises, now destroyed, deserted, or colonized by refugees.
   Most of these places catered to truck drivers: lots of motels, casinos, teahouses, and fast-food places. But no trucks ran on the highway now, and Hackworth rode down the center of a lane, sweating uncontrollably in his dark clothes and drinking frequently from a refrigerated bottle in Kidnapper's glove compartment.
   A McDonald's sign lay toppled across the highway like a giant turnpike; something had burned through the single pillar that thrust it into the air. A couple of young men were standing in front of it smoking cigarettes and, as Hackworth realized, waiting for him. As Hackworth drew closer, they ground out their cigarettes, stepped forward, and bowed. Hackworth tipped his bowler. One of them took Kidnapper's reins, which was a purely ceremonial gesture in the case of a robot horse, and the other invited Hackworth to dismount. Both of the men were wearing heavy but flexible coveralls with cables and tubes running through the fabric: the inner layer of armor suits. They could turn themselves into battle-ready hoplites by slapping on the harder and heavier outer bits, which were presumably stashed somewhere handy. Their scarlet headbands identified them as Fists. Hackworth was one of the few members of the Outer Tribes ever to find himself in the presence of a Fist who was not running toward him with a weapon screaming "Kill! Kill!" and found it interesting to see them in a more indulgent mood. They were dignified, formal, and controlled, like military men, with none of the leering and snickering that were fashionable among Coastal Republic boys of the same age.
   Hackworth walked across the parking lot toward the McDonald's, followed at a respectful distance by one of the soldiers. Another soldier opened the door for him, and Hackworth sighed with delight as cold dry air flowed over his face and began to chase the muggy stuff through the weave of his clothing. The place had been lightly sacked. He could smell a cold, almost clinical greasy smell wafting from behind the counter, where containers of fat had spilled onto the floor and congealed like snow. Much of this had been scooped up by looters; Hackworth could see the parallel tracks of women's fingers. The place was decorated in a Silk Roadmotif, transpicuous mediatronic panels portraying wondrous sights between here and the route's ancient terminus in Cadiz.
   Dr. X was seated in the corner booth, his face radiant in the cool, UV-filtered sunlight. He was wearing a Mandarin cap with dragons embroidered in gold thread and a magnificent brocade robe. The robe was loose at the neck and had short sleeves so that Hackworth could see the inner garment of a hoplite suit underneath.
   Dr. X was at war, and had emerged from the safe perimeter of Suzhou, and needed to be prepared for an attack. He was sipping green tea from a jumbo McDonald's cup, made in the local style, great clouds of big green leaves swirling around in a tumbler of hot water. Hackworth doffed his hat and bowed in the Victorian style, which was proper under the circumstances. Dr. X returned the bow, and as his head tilted forward, Hackworth could see the button on the top of his cap. It was red, the color of the highest ranks, but it was made of coral, marking him as second rank. A ruby button would have put him at the very highest level. In Western terms this made Dr. X roughly equivalent to a lesser cabinet minister or three-star general. Hackworth supposed that this was the highest rank of Mandarin permitted to converse with barbarians.
   Hackworth sat down across the table from Dr. X. A young woman padded out of the kitchen on silk slippers and gave Hackworth his own tumbler full of green tea. Watching her mince away, Hackworth was only mildly shocked to see that her feet were no more than four inches long. There must be better ways to do it now, maybe by regulating the growth of the tarsal bones during adolescence. It probably didn't even hurt.
   Realizing this, Hackworth also realized, for the first time, that he had done the right thing ten years ago.
   Dr. X was watching him and might as well have been reading his mind. This seemed to put him in a pensive mood. He said nothing for a while, just gazed out the window and occasionally sipped his tea. This was fine with Hackworth, who had had a long ride.
   "Have you learned anything from your ten-year sentence?" Dr. X finally said.
   "It would seem so. But I have trouble pulling it up," Hackworth said.
   This was a bit too idiomatic for Dr. X. By way of explanation, Hackworth flipped out a ten-year-old card bearing Dr. X's dynamic chop. As the old fisherman hauled the dragon out of the water, Dr. X suddenly got it, and grinned appreciatively. This was showing a lot of emotion– assuming it was genuine– but age and war had made him reckless.
   "Have you found the Alchemist?" Dr. X said.
   "Yes," Hackworth said. "I am the Alchemist."
   "When did you know this?"
   "Only very recently," Hackworth said. "Then I understood it all in an instant– pulled it up," he said, pantomiming the act of reeling in a fish. "The Celestial Kingdom was far behind Nippon and Atlantis in nanotech. The Fists could always have burned the barbarians' Feed lines, but this would only have plunged the peasants into poverty and made the people long for foreign goods. The decision was made to leapfrog the barbarian tribes by developing Seed technology. At first you pursued the project in cooperation with second-tier phyles like Israel, Armenia, and Greater Serbia, but they proved unreliable. Again and again your carefully cultivated networks were scattered by Protocol Enforcement.
   "But through these failures you made contact for the first time with CryptNet, whom you doubtless view as just another triad-a contemptible band of conspirators. However, CryptNet was tied in with something much deeper and more interesting-the society of the Drummers. With their flaky and shallow Western perspective, CryptNet didn't grasp the full power of the Drummers' collective mind. But you got it right away.
   "All you required to initiate the Seed project was the rational, analytical mind of a nanotechnological engineer. I fit the bill perfectly. You dropped me into the society of the Drummers like a seed into fertile soil, and my knowledge spread through them and permeated their collective mind-as their thoughts spread into my own unconscious. They became like an extension of my own brain. For years I laboured on the problem, twenty-four hours a day.
   "Then, before I was able to finish the job, I was pulled out by my superiors at Protocol Enforcement. I was close to being finished. But not finished yet."
   "Your superiors had uncovered our plan?"
   "Either they are completely ignorant, or else they know everything and are pretending ignorance," Hackworth said.
   "But surely you have told them everything now," Dr. X said almost inaudibly.
   "If I were to answer that question, you would have no reason not to kill me," Hackworth said.
   Dr. X nodded, not so much to concede the point as to express sympathy with Hackworth's admirably cynical train of thought-as though Hackworth, after a series of seemingly inconclusive moves, had suddenly flipped over a large territory of stones on a go board.
   "There are those who would advocate that course, because of what has happened with the girls," Dr. X said.
   Hackworth was so startled to hear this that he became somewhat lightheaded for a moment and too self-conscious to speak
   "Have the Primers proved useful?" he finally said, trying not to sound giddy.
   Dr. X grinned broadly for a moment. Then the emotion dropped beneath the surface again, like a breaching whale. "They must have been useful to someone," he said. "My opinion is that we made a mistake in saving the girls."
   "How can this act of humanity possibly have been a mistake?"
   Dr. X considered it. "It would be more correct to say that, although it was virtuous to save them, it was mistaken to believe that they could be raised properly. We lacked the resources to raise them individually, and so we raised them with books. But the only proper way to raise a child is within a family. The Master could have told us as much, had we listened to his words."
   "Some of those girls will one day choose to follow in the ways of the Master," Hackworth said, "and then the wisdom of your decisions will be demonstrated."
   This seemed to be a genuinely new thought to Dr. X. His gaze returned to the window. Hackworth sensed that the matter of the girls and the Primers had been concluded.
   "I will be open and frank," said Dr. X after some ruminative tea slurping, "and you will not believe that I am being so, because it is in the heads of those from the Outer Tribes to think that we never speak directly. But perhaps in time you will see the truth of my words.
   "The Seed is almost finished. When you left, the building of it slowed down very much– more than we expected. We thought that the Drummers, after ten years, had absorbed your knowledge and could continue the work without you. But there is something in your mind that you have gained through your years of scholarly studies that the Drummers, if they ever had it, have given up and cannot get back unless they come out of the darkness and live their lives in the light again.
   "The war against the Coastal Republic reaches a critical moment. We ask you to help us now."
   "I must say that it is nearly inconceivable for me to help you at this point," Hackworth said, "unless it would be in the interest of my tribe, which does not strike me as a likely prospect."
   "We need you to help us finish building the Seed," Dr. X said doggedly.
   Only decades of training in emotional repression kept Hackworth from laughing out loud. "Sir. You are a worldly man and a scholar. Certainly you are aware of the position of Her Majesty's government, and indeed of the Common Economic Protocol itself, on the subject of Seed technologies."
   Dr. X raised one hand a few inches from the tabletop, palm down, and pawed once at the air. Hackworth recognized it as the gesture that well-to-do Chinese used to dismiss beggars, or even to call bullshit on people during meetings. "They are wrong," he said.
   "They do not understand. They think of the Seed from a Western perspective. Your cultures– and that of the Coastal Republic– are poorly organized. There is no respect for order, no reverence for authority. Order must be enforced from above lest anarchy break out. You are afraid to give the Seed to your people because they can use it to make weapons, viruses, drugs of their own design, and destroy order. You enforce order through control of the Feed. But in the Celestial Kingdom, we are disciplined, we revere authority, we have order within our own minds, and hence the family is orderly, the village is orderly, the state is orderly. In our hands the Seed would be harmless."
   "Why do you need it?" Hackworth said.
   "We must have technology to live," Dr. X said, "but we must have it with our own."
   Hackworth thought for a moment that Dr. X was referring to the beverage. But the Doctor began to trace characters on the tabletop, his hand moving deftly and gracefully, the brocade sleeve rasping across the plastic surface. "Yong is the outer manifestation of something. Ti is the underlying essence. Technology is a yong associated with a particular ti that is"-the Doctor stumbled here and, through a noticeable effort, refrained from using pejorative terms like barbarian or gwailo–"that is Western, and completely alien to us. For centuries, since the time of the Opium Wars, we have struggled to absorb the yong of technology without importing the Western ti. But it has been impossible. Just as our ancestors could not open our ports to the West without accepting the poison of opium, we could not open our lives to Western technology without taking in the Western ideas, which have been as a plague on our society. The result has been centuries of chaos. We ask you to end that by giving us the Seed."
   "I do not understand why the Seed will help you."
   "The Seed is technology rooted in the Chinese ti. We have lived by the Seed for five thousand years," Dr. X said. He waved his hand toward the window. "These were rice paddies before they were parking lots. Rice was the basis for our society. Peasants planted the seeds and had highest status in the Confucian hierarchy. As the Master said, 'Let the producers be many and the consumers few.' When the Feed came in from Atlantis, From Nippon, we no longer had to plant, because the rice now came From the matter compiler. It was the destruction of our society. When our society was based upon planting, it could truly be said, as the Master did, 'Virtue is the root; wealth is the result.' But under the Western ti, wealth comes not from virtue but from cleverness. So the filial relationships became deranged. Chaos," Dr. X said regretfully, then looked up From his tea and nodded out the window. "Parking lots and chaos."
   Hackworth remained silent for a full minute. Images had come into his mind again, not a fleeting hallucination this time, but a full-fledged vision of a China freed from the yoke of the foreign Feed. It was something he'd seen before, perhaps something he'd even helped create. It showed something no gwailo would ever get to see: the Celestial Kingdom during the coming Age of the Seed. Peasants tended their fields and paddies, and even in times of drought and flood, the earth brought forth a rich harvest: food, of course, but many unfamiliar plants too, fruits that could be made into medicines, bamboo a thousand times stronger than the natural varieties, trees that produced synthetic rubber and pellets of clean safe fuel. In an orderly procession the suntanned farmers brought their proceeds to great markets in clean cities free of cholera and strife, where all of the young people were respectful and dutiful scholars and all of the elders were honored and cared for. This was a ractive simulation as big as all of China, and Hackworth could have lost himself in it, and perhaps did for he knew not how long. But finally he closed his eyes, blinked it away, sipped some tea to bring his rational mind back into control.
   "Your arguments are not without merit," Hackworth said. "Thank you for helping me to see the matter in a different light. I will ponder these questions on my return to Shanghai."
   Dr. X escorted him to the parking lot of the McDonald's. The heat felt pleasant at first, like a relaxing bath, though Hackworth knew that soon he would feel as if he were drowning in it. Kidnapper ambled over and folded its legs, allowing Hackworth to mount it easily.
   "You have helped us willingly for ten years," Dr. X said. "It is your destiny to make the Seed."
   "Nonsense," Hackworth said, "I did not know the nature of the project."
   Dr. X smiled. "You knew it perfectly well." He freed one hand from the long sleeves of his robe and shook his finger at Hackworth, like an indulgent teacher pretending to scold a clever but mischievous pupil. "You do these things not to serve your Queen but to serve your own nature, John Hackworth, and I understand your nature. For you cleverness is its own end, and once you have seen a clever way to do a thing, you must do it, as water finding a crack in a dike must pass through it and cover the land on the other side."
   "Farewell, Dr. X," Hackworth said. "You will understand that although I hold you in the highest personal esteem, I cannot earnestly wish you good fortune in your current endeavour." He doffed his hat and bowed low to one side, forcing Kidnapper to adjust its stance a bit. Dr. X returned the bow, giving Hackworth another look at that coral button on his cap. Hackworth spurred Kidnapper on to Shanghai.

. . .
   He followed a more northerly route now, along one of the many radial highways that converged on the metropolis. After he had been riding for some time, he became consciously aware of a sound that had been brushing against the outer fringes of perceptibility for some time: a heavy, distant, and rapid drumbeat, perhaps twice as fast as the beat of his own heart. His first thought, of course, was of the Drummers, and he was tempted to explore one of the nearby canals to see whether their colony had spread its tendrils this far inland. But then he looked northward across the flat land for a couple of miles and saw a long procession making its way down another highway, a dark column of pedestrians marching on Shanghai.
   He saw that his path was converging with theirs, so he spurred Kidnapper forward at a hand-gallop, hoping to reach the intersection of the roads before it was clogged by this column of refugees. Kidnapper outdistanced them easily, but to no avail; when he reached the intersection, he found it had been seized by the column's vanguard which had established a roadblock there and would not let him pass.
   The contingent now controlling the intersection consisted entirely of girls, some eleven or twelve years old. There were several dozen of them, and they had apparently taken the objective by force from a smaller group of Fists, who could now be seen lying in the shade of some mulberry trees, hogtied with plastic rope.
   Probably three-quarters of the girls were on guard duty, mostly armed with sharpened bamboo stakes, though a few guns and blades were in evidence. The remaining quarter were on break, hunkered down in a circle near the intersection, sipping freshly boiled water and concentrating intently on books. Hackworth recognized the books; they were all identical, and they all had marbled jade covers, though all of them had been personalized with stickers, graffiti, and other decorations over the years.
   Hackworth realized that several more girls, organized in groups of four, had been following him down the road on bicycles; these outriders passed by him now and rejoined their group.
   He had no choice but to wait until the column had passed. The drumbeat grew and grew in volume until the pavement shook with each blow, and the shock absorption gear built into Kidnapper's legs went into play, flinching minutely at each beat. Another vanguard passed through: Hackworth easily calculated its size at two hundred and fifty-six. A battalion was four platoons, each of which was four companies of four troops of four girls each. The vanguard consisted of one such battalion, moving at a very brisk double-time, probably going ahead of the main group to fall upon the next major intersection.
   Then, finally, the main column passed through, organized in battalions, each foot hitting the ground in unison with all the others. Each battalion carried a few sedan chairs, which were passed from one four-girl troop to another every few minutes to spread out the work. They were not luxurious palanquins but were improvised from bamboo and plastic rope and upholstered with materials stripped from old plastic cafeteria furniture. Riding in these chairs were girls who did not seem all that different from the others, except that they might have been a year or two older. They did not seem to be officers; they were not giving orders and wore no special insignia. Hackworth did not understand why they were riding in sedan chairs until he got a look at one of them, who had crossed one ankle up on her knee and taken her slipper off. Her foot was defective; it was several inches too short.
   But all of the other sedan chair girls were deeply absorbed in their Primers. Hackworth unclipped a small optical device from his watch chain, a nanotech telescope/microscope that frequently came in handy, and used it to look over one girl's shoulder. She was looking at a diagram of a small nanotechnological device, working her way through a tutorial that Hackworth had written several years ago.
   The column went past much faster than Hackworth had feared; they moved down the highway like a piston. Each battalion carried a banner, a very modest thing improvised from a painted bedsheet. Each banner bore the number of the battalion and a crest that Hackworth knew well, as it played an important role in the Primer. In all, he counted two hundred and fifty-six battalions. Sixty-five thousand girls ran past him, hell-bent on Shanghai.

From the Primer, Princess Nell's return to the Dark Castle;
the death of Harv;
The Books of the Book and of the Seed;
Princess Nell's quest to find her mother;
Destruction of the Causeway;
Nell falls into the hands of Fists;
she escapes into a greater peril;
deliverance.

   Princess Nell could have used all of the powers she had acquired during her great quest to dig Harv's grave or caused the work to be done for her by the Disenchanted Army, but it did not seem fitting, and so instead she found an old rusty shovel hung up in one of the Dark Castle's outbuildings. The ground was dry and stony and veined with the roots of thorn bushes, and more than once the shovel struck ancient bones.
   Princess Nell dug throughout the long day, softening the hard earth with her tears, but did not slacken until the ground was level with her own head. Then she went into the little room in the Dark Castle where Harv had died of a consumption, carefully wrapped his withered body in fine white silk, and bore it out to the grave. She had found lilies growing wild in the overgrown flower-garden by the little fisherman's cottage, so she put a spray of these in the grave with him, along with a little children's story-book that Harv had given her for a present many years ago. Harv could not read, and many nights as they had sat round the fire in the courtyard of the Dark Castle, Nell had read to him from this book, and she supposed that he might like to have it wherever he was going now.
   Filling in the grave went quickly; the loose dirt more than filled the hole. Nell left more lilies atop the long low mound of earth that marked Harv's resting place. Then she turned her back and walked into the Dark Castle. The stain-colored granite walls had picked up some salmon highlights from the western sky, and she suspected that she could see a beautiful sunset from the room in the high tower where she had established her library.
   It was a long climb up a dank and mildewy staircase that wound up the inside of the Dark Castle's highest tower. In the circular room at the top, which was built with mullioned windows looking out in all directions, Nell had placed all of the books she had gathered during her quest: books given her as presents by Purple, books from the library of King Magpie, the first Faery King that she had vanquished, and more from the palace of the djinn, and Castle Turing, and many other hidden libraries and treasuries that she had discovered or pillaged on her way. And, of course, there was the entire library of King Coyote, which contained so many books that she had not even had time to look at them yet.
   There was so much work to be done. Copies of all of these books had to be made for all of the girls in the Disenchanted Army. The Land Beyond had vanished, and Princess Nell wanted to make it anew. She wanted to write down her own story in a great book that young girls could read. And she had one remaining quest that had been pressing on her mind of late, during her long voyage across the empty sea back to the island of the Dark Castle: she wanted to solve the mystery of her own origins. She wanted to find her mother. Even after the destruction of the Land Beyond, she had sensed the presence of another in the world, one who had always been there. King Coyote himself had confirmed it. Long ago, her stepfather, the kindly fisherman, had received her from mermaids; whence had the mermaids gotten her?
   She suspected that the answer could not be found without the wisdom contained in her library. She began by causing a catalog to be made, starting with the first books she had gotten on her early adventures with her Night Friends. At the same time she established a Scriptorium in the great hall of the castle, where thousands of girls sat at long tables making exact copies of all of the books.
   Most of King Coyote's books had to do with the secrets of atoms and how to put them together to make machines. Naturally, all of them were magic books; the pictures moved, and you could ask them questions and get answers. Some of them were primers and workbooks for novices, and Princess Nell spent a few days studying this art, putting atoms together to make simple machines and then watching them run.
   Next came a very large set of matched volumes containing reference materials: One contained designs for thousands of sleeve bearings, another for computers made of rods, still another for energy storage devices, and all of them were ractive so that she could use them to design such things to her own specifications. Then there were more books on the general principles of putting such things together into systems.
   Finally, King Coyote's library included some books inscribed in the King's own hand, containing designs for his greatest masterpieces. Of these, the two very finest were the Book of the Book and the Book of the Seed. They were magnificent folio-size volumes, as thick as Princess Nell's hand was broad, bound in rich leather illuminated with hair-thin gilt lines in an elaborate interlace pattern, and closed with heavy brass hasps and locks.
   The lock on the Book of the Book yielded to the same key that Princess Nell had taken from King Coyote. She had discovered this very early in her exploration of the library but was unable to comprehend the contents of this volume until she had studied the others and learnt the secrets of these machines. The Book of the Book contained a complete set of plans for a magical book that would tell stories to a young person, tailoring them for the child's needs and interests– even teaching them how to read if need be. It was a fearsomely complicated work, and Princess Nell only skimmed it at first, recognizing that to understand the particulars might take years of study.
   The lock on the Book of the Seed would not yield to King Coyote's key or to any other key in Princess Nell's possession, and because this book had been built atom by atom, it was stronger than any mortal substance and could not possibly be broken open. Princess Nell did not know what this book was about; but the cover bore an inlaid illustration of a striped seed, like the apple-sized seed that she had seen used in King Coyote's city to build a crystal pavilion, and this foreshadowed the book's purpose clearly enough.

   Nell opened her eyes and propped herself up on one elbow. The Primer fell shut and slid off her belly onto the mattress. She had fallen asleep reading it.
   The girls on their bunkbeds lay all around her, breathing quietly and smelling of soap. It made her want to lie back down and sleep too. But for some reason she was up on one elbow. Some instinct had told her she had to be up.
   She sat up and drew her knees up to her chest, freeing the hem of her nightgown from between the sheets, then spun around and dropped to the floor soundlessly. Her bare feet took her silently between the rows of bunks and into the little lounge in the corner of the floor where the girls sat together, had tea, brushed their hair, watched old passives. It was empty now, the lights were off, the corner windows exposing a vast panorama: to the northeast, the lights of New Chusan and of the Nipponese and Hindustani concessions standing a few kilometers offshore, and the outlying parts of Pudong. Downtown Pudong was all around, its floating, mediatronic skyscrapers like biblical pillars of fire. To the northwest lay the Huang Pu River, Shanghai, its suburbs, and the ravaged silk and tea districts beyond. No fires burned there now; the Feed lines had been burned all the way to the edge of the city, and the Fists had stopped at the outskirts and hunkered down as they sought a way to penetrate the tattered remains of the security grid.
   Nell's eye was drawn toward the water. Downtown Pudong offered the most spectacular urban nightscape ever devised, but she always found herself looking past it, staring instead at the Huang Pu, or the Yangzte to the north, or to the curvature of the Pacific beyond New Chusan.
   She'd been having a dream, she realized. She had awakened not because of any external disturbance but because of what had happened in that dream. She had to remember it; but, of course, she couldn't.
   Just a few snatches: a woman's face, a beautiful young woman, perhaps wearing a crown, but seen muddily, as through turbulent water. And something that glittered in her hands. No, dangling beneath her hands. A piece of jewelry on a golden chain.
   Could it have been a key? Nell could not bring the image back, but an instinct told her that it was.
   Another detail too: a gleaming swath of something that passed in front of her face once, twice, three times. Something yellow, with a repeating pattern woven into it: a crest consisting of a book, a seed, and crossed keys.
   Cloth of gold. Long ago the mermaids had brought her to her stepfather, and she had been wrapped in cloth of gold, and from this she had always known that she was a Princess.
   The woman in the dream, veiled in swirling water, must have been her mother. The dream was a memory from her lost infancy. And before her mother had given her up to the mermaids, she had given Princess Nell a golden key on a chain.
   Nell perched herself on the windowsill, leaned against the pane, opened the Primer, and flipped all the way back to the beginning. It started with the same old story, as ever, but told now in more mature prose. She read the story of how her stepfather had gotten her from the mermaids, and read it again, drawing out more details, asking it questions, calling up detailed illustrations.
   There, in one of the illustrations, she saw it: her stepfather's lock-box, a humble plank chest bound in rusted iron straps, with a heavy oldfashioned padlock, stored underneath his bed. It was in this chest that he had stored the cloth of gold-and, perhaps, the key as well.
   Paging forward through the book, she came across a long-forgotten story of how, following her stepfather's disappearance, her wicked stepmother had taken the lock-box to a high cliff above the sea and flung it into the waves, destroying any evidence that Princess Nell was of royal blood. She had not known that her stepdaughter was watching her from between the branches of a thicket, where she often concealed herself during her stepmother's rages.
   Nell flipped to the last page of the Young Lady's Illustrated Primer.

   As Princess Nell approached the edge of the cliff, picking her way along carefully through the darkness, taking care not to snag the train of her nightgown on thorny shrubs, she experienced a peculiar feeling that the entire ocean had become dimly luminescent. She had often noticed this phenomenon from the high windows of her library in the tower and reckoned that the waves must be reflecting back the light of the moon and stars. But this was a cloudy night, the sky was like a bowl of carved onyx, allowing no light to pass down from the heavens. The light she saw must emanate from beneath.
   Arriving cautiously at the rim of the cliff, she saw that her surmise was true. The ocean-the one constant in all the world– the place from where she had come as an infant, from which the Land Beyond had grown out of King Coyote's seed, and into which it had dissolved– the ocean was alive.
   Since the departure of King Coyote, Princess Nell had supposed herself entirely alone in the world. But now she saw cities of light beneath the waves and knew that she was alone only by her own choice.

   "'Princess Nell gathered the hem of her nightgown in both hands and raised it over her head, letting the chill wind stream over her body and carry the garment away,' " Nell said. " 'Then, drawing a deep breath and closing her eyes, she bent her legs and sprang forward into space.'
   She was reading about the way the illuminated waves rushed up toward her when suddenly the room filled with light. She looked toward the door, thinking that someone had come in and turned the lights on, but she was alone in the room, and the light was flickering against the wall. She turned her head the other way.
   The center span of the Causeway had become a ball of white light hurling its marbled shroud of cold dark matter into the night. The sphere expanded until it seemed to occupy most of the interval between New Chusan and the Pudong shoreline, though by this time the color had deepened from white into reddish-orange, and the explosion had punched a sizable crater into the water, which developed into a circular wave of steam and spray that ran effortlessly across the ocean's surface like the arc of light cast by a pocket torch.
   Fragments of the giant Feed line that had once constituted most of the Causeway's mass had been pitched into the sky by the explosion and now tumbled end over end through the night sky, the slowness of their motion bespeaking their size, casting yellow sulfurous light over the city as they burned furiously in the wind-blast created by their own movement. The light limned a pair of tremendous pillars of water vapor rising from the ocean north and south of the Causeway; Nell realized that the Fists must have blown the Nipponese and Hindustani Feeds at the same moment. So the Fists of Righteous Harmony had nanotechnological explosives now; they'd come a long way since they'd tried to torch the bridge over the Huang Pu with a few cylinders of hydrogen.
   The shock wave rapped at the window, startling several of the girls from sleep. Nell heard them murmuring to one another in the bunk room. She wondered if she should go in and warn them that Pudong was cut off now, that the final assault of the Fists had commenced. But though she could not understand what they were saying, she could understand their tone of voice clearly enough: They were not surprised by this, nor unhappy.
   They were all Chinese and could become subjects of the Celestial Kingdom simply by donning the conservative garb of that tribe and showing due deference to any Mandarins who happened by. No doubt this was exactly what they would do as soon as the Fists came to Pudong. Some of them might suffer deprivation, imprisonment, or rape, but within a year they would all be integrated into the C.K., as if the Coastal Republic had never existed.
   But if the news feeds from the interior meant anything, the Fists would kill Nell gradually, with many small cuts and burns, when they grew weary of raping her. In recent days she had often seen the Chinese girls talking in little groups and sneaking glances at her, and the suspicion had grown in her breast that some of them might know of the attack in advance and might make arrangements to turn Nell over to the Fists as a demonstration of their loyalty. She opened the door a crack and saw two of these girls padding toward the bunk room where Nell usually slept, carrying lengths of red polymer ribbon.
   As soon as they had stolen into Nell's bunk room, Nell ran down the corridor and got to the elevators. As she awaited the elevator, she was more scared than she had ever been; the sight of the cruel red ribbons in the small hands of the girls had for some reason struck more terror into her heart than the sight of knives in the hands of Fists.
   A shrill commotion arose from the bunk room.
   The bell for the elevator sounded.
   She heard the bunk room door fly open, and someone running down the hall.
   The elevator door opened.
   One of the girls came into the lobby, saw her, and shrieked something to the others in a dolphinlike squeal.
   Nell got into the elevator, punched the button for the lobby, and held down the DOOR CLOSE button. The girl thought for a moment, then stepped forward to hold the door. Several more girls were running down the hall. Nell kicked the girl in the face, and she spun away in a helix of blood. The elevator door began to close. Just as the two doors were meeting in the center, through the narrowing slit she saw one of the other girls diving toward the wall button. The doors closed. There was a brief pause, and then they slid open again.
   Nell was already in the correct stance to defend herself. If she had to beat each of the girls to death individually, she would do it. But none of them rushed the elevator. Instead, the leader stepped forward and aimed something at Nell. There was a little popping noise, a pinprick in Nell's midsection, and within a few seconds she felt her arms becoming impossibly heavy. Her bottom drooped. Her head bowed. Her knees buckled. She could not keep her eyes open; as they closed, she saw the girls coming toward her, smiling with pleasure, holding up the red ribbons. Nell could not move any part of her body, but she remained perfectly conscious as they tied her up with the ribbon. They did it slowly and methodically and perfectly; they did it every day of their lives.
   The tortures of the next few hours were of a purely experimental and preliminary nature. They did not last for long and accomplished no permanent damage. These girls had made a living out of binding and torturing people in a way that didn't leave scars, and that was all they really knew. When the leader came up with the idea of shoving a cigarette into Nell's cheek, it was something entirely novel and left the rest of the girls startled and silent for a few minutes. Nell sensed that most of the girls had no stomach for such things and merely wanted to turn her over to the Fists in exchange for citizenship in the Celestial Kingdom.
   The Fists themselves began to arrive some twelve hours later. Some of them wore conservative business suits, some wore the uniforms of the building's security force, others looked as if they'd arrived to take a girl out to a disco.
   They all had things to do when they arrived. It was obvious that this suite would act as local headquarters of some sort when the rebellion began in earnest. They began to bring up supplies on the freight elevator and seemed to spend a lot of time on the telephone. More arrived every hour, until Madame Ping's suite was playing host to between one and two dozen. Some of them were very tired and dirty and went to sleep in the bunks immediately.
   In a way, Nell wished that they would do whatever they were going to do and get it over with fast. But nothing happened for quite some time. When the first Fists arrived, the girls brought them in to see Nell, who had been shoved under a bed and was now lying there in a puddle of her own urine. The leader shone a light on her face briefly and then turned away, completely uninterested. It seemed that once he'd verified that the girls had done their bit for the revolution, Nell ceased to be relevant.
   She supposed it was inevitable that, in due time, these men would take those liberties with her that have ever been claimed as angary by irregular fighting men, who have willfully severed themselves from the softening feminine influence of civilized society, with those women who have had the misfortune to become their captives. To make this prospect less attractive, she took the desperate measure of allowing her person to become tainted with the noisome issue of her natural internal processes. But most of the Fists were too busy, and when some of the grungy foot-soldier types arrived, Madame Ping's girls were eager to make themselves useful in this regard. Nell reflected that a bunch of soldiers who found themselves billeted in a bawdy-house would naturally arrive with certain expectations, and that the inmates would be unwise to disappoint them.
   Nell had gone into the world to seek her fortune and this was what she had found. She understood more forcibly than ever the wisdom of Miss Matheson's remarks about the hostility of the world and the importance of belonging to a powerful tribe; all of Nell's intellect, her vast knowledge and skills, accumulated over a lifetime of intensive training, meant nothing at all when she was confronted with a handful of organized peasants. She could not really sleep in her current position but drifted in and out of consciousness, visited occasionally by hallucinatory waking dreams. More than once she dreamed that the Constable had come in his hoplite suit to rescue her; and the pain she felt when she returned to full consciousness and realized that her mind had been lying to her, was worse than any tortures others might inflict.
   Eventually they got tired of the stink under the bed and dragged her out of there on a smear of half-dried body fluids. It had been at least thirty-six hours since her capture. The leader of the girls, the one who had put out the cigarette on Nell's face, cut the red ribbon away and cut off Nell's filthy nightgown with it. Nell's limbs bounced on the floor. The leader had brought a whip that they sometimes used on clients and beat Nell with it until circulation returned. This spectacle drew quite a crowd of Fist soldiers, who crowded into the bunk room to watch.
   The girl drove Nell on hands and knees to a maintenance closet and made her get out a bucket and mop. Then she made Nell clean up the mess under the bed, frequently inspecting the results and beating her, apparently acting out a parody of a rich Westerner bossing around some poor running dog. It became clear after the third or fourth scrubbing of the floor that this was being done as much for the entertainment of the soldiers as for hygienic reasons. Then it was back to the maintenance closet, where Nell was bound again, this time with lightweight police shackles, and left there on the floor in the dark, naked and filthy. A few minutes later, her possessions– some clothes that the girls didn't like and a book they couldn't read– were thrown in there with her.
   When she was sure that the girl with the whip had gone, she spoke to her Primer and told it to make light.
   She could see a big matter compiler on the floor in the back of the closet; the girls used it to manufacture larger items when they were needed. This building was apparently hooked up to the Coastal Republic's Pudong Feed, because it hadn't lost Feed services when the Causeway had blown up; and indeed the Fists probably would not have bothered to establish their base here if the place had been cut off.
   Once every couple of hours or so, a Fist would come into this closet and order the M.C. to create something, usually a simple bulk substance like rations. On two of these occasions, Nell was outraged in the manner she had long suspected was inevitable. She closed her eyes during the commission of these atrocities, knowing that whatever might be done to the mere vessel of her soul by the likes of these, her soul itself was as serene, as remote from their grasp, as is the full moon from the furious incantations of an aboriginal shaman. She tried to think about the machine that she was designing in her head, with the help of the Primer, about how the gears meshed and the bearings spun, how the rod logic was programmed and where the energy was stored.
   On her second night in the closet, after most of the Fists had gone to bed and use of the matter compiler had apparently ceased for the night, she instructed the Primer to load her design into the M.C.'s memory, then crept forward and pressed the START button with her tongue.
   Ten minutes later, the machine released its vacuum with a shriek. Nell tongued the door open. A knife and a sword rested on the floor of the M.C. She turned herself around, moving in small, cautious increments and breathing deeply so that she would not whimper from the pain emanating from those parts of her that were most tender and vulnerable and yet had been most viciously depredated by her captors. She reached backward with her shackled hands and gripped the handle of the knife.
   Footsteps were approaching down the hallway. Someone must have heard the hiss of the M.C. and thought it was dinner time. But Nell couldn't rush this; she had to be careful.
   The door opened. It was one of the ranking Fists, perhaps the rough equivalent of a sergeant. He shone a torch in her face, then chuckled and turned on the overhead light.
   Nell's body blocked his view of the M.C., but it was obvious that she was reaching for something. He probably assumed it was only food.
   He stepped forward and kicked her casually in the ribs, then grabbed her upper arm and jerked her away from the M.C., causing such pain in her wrists that tears spurted down her face. But she held on to the knife.
   The Fist was staring into the M.C. He was startled and would be for several moments. Nell maneuvered the knife so that the blade was touching nothing but the link between the shackles, then hit the ON switch. It worked; the edge of the blade came to life like a nanotech chainsaw and zipped through the link in a moment, like clipping a fingernail. Nell brought it around her body in the same motion and buried it in the base of the Fist's spine.
   He fell to the ground without speaking– he wasn't feeling any pain from that wound or from anything below his waist. Before he could assess matters any further, she plunged the knife into the base of his skull.
   He was wearing simple peasant stuff: indigo trousers and a tank-top. She put them on. Then she tied her hair up behind her head using strings cut from a mop and devoted a precious minute or two to stretching her arms and legs.
   And then it was out into the hallway with her knife in her waistband and her sword in her hands. Going round a corner, she cut a man in half as he emerged from the bathroom; the sword kept going of its own momentum and carved a long gash in the wall. This assault released a prodigious amount of blood, which Nell put behind her as quickly as possible. Another man was on guard in the elevator lobby, and as he came to investigate the sounds, she ran him through several times quickly, taking a page from Napier's book this time.
   The elevators were now under some kind of central control and probably subject to surveillance; rather than press the button in the lobby, she cut a hole in the doors, sheathed her sword, and clambered out onto a ladder that ran down the shaft.
   She forced herself to descend slowly and carefully, pressing herself flat against the rungs whenever the car went by. By the time she had descended perhaps fifty or sixty floors, the building had come awake; all of the cars were in constant motion, and when they went past her, she could hear men talking excitedly inside them.
   Light flooded into the shaft several floors below. The doors had been forced open. A couple of Fists thrust their heads out carefully into the shaft and began looking up and down, shining torches here and there. Several floors below them, more Fists pried another door open; but they had to pull their heads in rapidly as the ascending car nearly decapitated them.
   She had imagined that Madame Ping's was playing host to an isolated cell of Fists, but it was now clear that most if not all of the building had been taken over. For that matter, all of Pudong might now be a part of the Celestial Kingdom. Nell was much more profoundly isolated than she had feared.
   The skin of her arms glowed yellow-pink in the beam of a torch shone up from below. She did not make the mistake of looking down into the dazzling light and did not have to; the excited voice of the Fist below her told her that she had been discovered. A moment later, the light vanished as the ascending elevator interposed itself between Nell and the Fists who had seen her.
   She recalled Harv and his buds elevator-surfing in their old building and reckoned that this would be a good time to take up the practice. As the car rose toward her, she jumped off the ladder, trying to give herself enough upward thrust to match its velocity. She landed hard on the roof, for it was moving far more rapidly than she could jump. The roof knocked her feet out from under her, and she fell backward, slamming her arms out as Dojo had taught her so that she absorbed the impact with her fists and forearms, not her back.
   More excited talking from inside the car. The access panel on the roof suddenly flew into the air, driven out of its frame by a well-delivered kick from below. A head popped out of the open hatch; Nell skewered it on her knife. The man tumbled down into the car.
   There was no point in waiting now; the situation had gone into violent motion, which Nell was obliged to use. She rolled onto her belly and kicked both feet downward into the hatch, spun down into the car, landed badly on the corpse, and staggered to one knee. She had barked the point of her chin on the edge of the hatch as she fell tjirough and bitten her tongue, so she was slightly dazed. A gaunt man in a black leather skullcap was standing directly in front of her, reaching for a gun, and while she was shoving her knife up through the center of his thorax, she bumped into someone behind her. She jumped to her feet and spun around, terrified, readying the knife for another blow, and discovered a much more terrified man in a blue coverall, standing by the elevator's control panel, holding his arms up in front of his face and screaming.
   Nell stepped back and lowered the point of the knife. The man was wearing the uniform of a building services worker and had obviously been yanked away from whatever he had been doing and put in charge of the elevator's controls. The man whom Nell had just killed, the one in the black leather skullcap, was some sort of low-level official in the rebellion and could not be expected to demean himself by punching the buttons himself.
   "Keep going! Up! Up!" she said, pointing at the ceiling. The last thing she wanted was for him to stop the elevator at Madame Ping's.
   The man bowed several times in quick succession and did something with the controls, then turned and smiled ingratiatingly at Nell.
   As a Coastal Republic citizen working in services, he knew a few words of English, and Nell knew a few of Chinese. "Down below– Fists?" she said.
   "Many Fist."
   "Ground floor-Fists?"
   "Yes, many Fist ground floor."
   "Street– Fists?"
   "Fist, army have fight in street."
   "Around this building?"
   "Fist around this building all over."
   Nell looked at the elevator's control panel: four columns of tightly spaced buttons, color-coded according to each floor's function: green for shopping, yellow for residential, red for offices, and blue for utility floors. Most of the blue floors were below ground level, but one of them was fifth from the top.
   "Building office?" she said, pointing to it.
   "Yes."
   "Fists there?"
   "No, Fist all down below. But Fist on roof!"
   "Go there."
   When the elevator reached the fifth floor from the top, Nell had the man freeze it there, then climbed on top and trashed its motors so that it would remain there. She dropped back into the car, trying not to look at the bodies or smell the reek of blood and other body fluids that had gotten all over it, and that were now draining out the open doors and dripping down the shaft. It would not take long for any of this to be discovered.
   She had some time, though; all she had to do was decide how to make use of it. The maintenance closet had a matter compiler, just like the one Nell had used to make her weapons, and she knew that she could use it to compile explosives and booby-trap the lobby. But the Fists had explosives of their own and could just as well blow the top floors of the building to kingdom come.
   For that matter, they were probably down in some basement control room watching traffic on the building's Feed network. Use of the M.C. would simply announce her location; they would shut off the Feed and then come after her slowly and carefully. She took a quick tour of the offices, sizing up her resources.
   Looking out the panoramic windows of the finest office suite, she saw a new state of affairs in the streets of Pudong. Many of the skyscrapers had been rooted in lines from the foreign Feeds and were now dark, though in some places flames vented from broken windows, casting primitive illumination over the streets a thousand feet below. These buildings had mostly been evacuated, and so the streets were crowded with far more people than they could really handle. The plaza immediately surrounding this particular building had been staked out by a picket line of Fists and was relatively uncrowded.
   She found a windowless room with mediatronic walls that bore a bewildering collage of images: flowers, details of European cathedrals and Shinto temples, Chinese landscape art, magnified images of insects and pollen grains, many-armed Indian goddesses, planets and moons of the solar system, abstract patterns from the Islamic world, graphs of mathematical equations, head shots of models male and female. Other than that, the room was empty except for a model of the building that stood in the center of the room, about Nell's height. The model's skin was mediatronic, just like the skin of the building itself, and it was currently echoing (as she supposed) whatever images were being displayed on the outside of the building: mostly advertising panels, though some Fists had apparently come in here and scrawled graffiti across them.
   On top of the model rested a stylus– just a black stick pointed on one end-and a palette, covered with a color wheel and other controls. Nell picked them up, touched the tip of the stylus to a green area on the palette's color wheel, and drew it across the surface of the model. A glowing green line appeared along the track of the stylus, disfiguring an ad panel for an airship line.
   Whatever other steps Nell might take in the time she had left, there was one thing she could do quickly and easily here. She was not entirely sure why she did it, but some intuition told her that it might be useful; or perhaps it was an artistic urge to make something that would live longer than she would, even if only by a few minutes. She began by erasing all of the big advertising panels on the upper levels of the skyscraper. Then she sketched out a simple line drawing in primary colors: an escutcheon in blue, and within it, a crest depicting a book drawn in red and white; crossed keys in gold; and a seed in brown. She caused this image to be displayed on all sides of the skyscraper, between the hundredth and two-hundredth floors.
   Then she tried to think of a way out of this place. Perhaps there were airships on the roof. There would certainly be Fist guards up there, but perhaps through a combination of stealth and suddenness she could overcome them. She used the emergency stairs to make her way up to the next floor, then the next, and then the next. Two flights above, she could hear Fist guards posted at the roof, talking to each other and playing mah-jongg. Many flights below, she could hear more Fists making their way up the stairs one flight at a time, looking for her.
   She was pondering her next move when the guards above her were rudely interrupted by orders squawking from their radios. Several Fists came charging down the stairway, shouting excitedly. Nell, trapped in the stairwell, made herself ready to ambush them as they came toward her, but instead they ran into the top floor and made for the elevator lobby. Within a minute or two, an elevator had arrived and carried them away. Nell waited for a while, listening, and could no longer hear the contingent approaching from below.
   She climbed up the last flights of stairs and emerged onto the building's roof, exhilarated as much by the fresh air as by the discovery that it was completely deserted. She walked to the edge of the roof and peered down almost half a mile to the street. In the black windows of a dead skyscraper across the way, she could see the mirror image of Princess Nell's crest.
   After a minute or two, she noticed that something akin to a shock wave was making its way down the street far below, moving in slow motion, covering a city block every couple of minutes. Details were difficult to make out at this distance: it was a highly organized group of pedestrians, all wearing the same generally dark clothing, ramming its way through the mob of refugees, forcing the panicked barbarians toward the picket line of the Fists or sideways into the lobbies of the dead buildings.
   Nell was transfixed for several minutes by this sight. Then she happened to glance down a different street and saw the same phenomenon there.
   She made a quick circuit of the building's roof. All in all, several columns were advancing inexorably on the foundations of the building where Nell stood.
   In time, one of these columns broke through the last of the obstructing refugees and reached the edge of the broad open plaza that surrounded the foot of Nell's building, where it faced off against the Fist defenses. The column stopped abruptly at this point and waited for a few minutes, collecting itself and waiting for the other columns to catch up.
   Nell had supposed at first that these columns might be Fist reinforcements converging on this building, which was clearly intended to be the headquarters of their final assault on the Coastal Republic. But it soon became evident that these newcomers had arrived for other purposes. After a few minutes of unbearable tension had gone by in nearly perfect silence, the columns suddenly, on the same unheard signal, erupted into the plaza. As they debouched from the narrow streets, they spread out into many-pronged formations, arranging themselves with the precision of a professional drill team, and then charged forward into the suddenly panicked and disorganized Fists, throwing up a tremendous battle-cry.
   When that sound echoed up two hundred stories to Nell's ears, she felt her hair standing on end, because it was not the deep lusty roar of grown men but the fierce thrill of thousands of young girls, sharp and penetrating as the skirl of massed bagpipes.
   It was Nell's tribe, and they had come for their leader. Nell spun on her heel and made for the stairway.
   By the time she had reached ground level and burst out, somewhat unwisely, into the building's lobby, the girls had breached the walls of the building in several places and rushed in upon the remaining defenders. They moved in groups of four. One girl (the largest) would rush toward an opponent, holding a pointed bamboo stick aimed at his heart. While his attention was thus fixed, two other girls (the smallest) would converge on him from the sides. Each girl would hug one of his legs and, acting together, they would lift him off the ground. The fourth girl (the fastest) would by this point have circled all the way round and would come in from behind, driving a knife or other weapon into the victim's back. During the half-dozen or so applications of this technique that Nell witnessed, it never failed, and none of the girls ever suffered more than the odd bruise or scrape.
   Suddenly she felt a moment of wild panic as she thought they were doing the same to her; but after she had been lifted into the air, no attack came from front or back, though many girls rushed in from all sides, each adding her small strength to the paramount goal of hoisting Nell high into the air. Even as the last remnants of the Fists were being hunted down and destroyed in the nooks and corners of the lobby, Nell was being borne on the shoulders of her little sisters out the front doors of the building and into the plaza, where something like a hundred thousand girls– Nell could not count all the regiments and brigades– collapsed to their knees in unison, as though struck down by a divine wind, and presented her their bamboo stakes, pole knives, lead pipes, and nunchuks. The provisional commanders of her divisions stood foremost, as did her provisional ministers of defense, of state, and of research and development, all of them bowing to Nell, not with a Chinese bow or a Victorian one but something they'd come up with that was in between.
   Nell should have been tongue-tied and paralyzed with astonishment, but she was not; for the first time in her life she understood why she'd been put on the earth and felt comfortable with her position. One moment, her life had been a meaningless abortion, and the next it all made glorious sense. She began to speak, the words rushing from her mouth as easily as if she had been reading them from the pages of the Primer. She accepted the allegiance of the Mouse Army, complimented them on their great deeds, and swept her arm across the plaza, over the heads of her little sisters, toward the thousands upon thousands of stranded sojourners from New Atlantis, Nippon, Israel, and all of the other Outer Tribes. "Our first duty is to protect these," she said. "Show me the condition of the city and all those in it."
   They wanted to carry her, but she jumped to the stones of the plaza and strode away from the building, toward her ranks, which parted to make way for her. The streets of Pudong were filled with hungry and terrified refugees, and through them, in simple peasant clothes streaked with the blood of herself and of others, broken shackles dangling from her wrists, followed by her generals and ministers, walked the barbarian Princess with her book and her sword.

Carl Hollywood takes a stroll to the waterfront.

   Carl Hollywood was awakened by a ringing in his ears and a burning in his cheek that turned out to be an inch-long fragment of plate glass driven into his flesh. When he sat up, his bed made clanking and crashing noises, shedding a heavy burden of shattered glass, and a foetid exhalation from the wrecked windows blew over his face. Old hotels had their charms, but disadvantages too-such as windowpanes made out of antique materials.
   Fortunately some old Wyoming instinct had caused him to leave his boots next to the bed the night before. He inverted each one and carefully probed it for broken glass before he pulled it on. Only when he had put on all of his clothes and gathered his things together did he go to look out the window.
   His hotel was near the Huang Pu waterfront. Looking across the river, he could see that great patches of Pudong had gone black against the indigo sky of predawn. A few buildings, connected to the indigenous Feeds, were still lit up. On this side of the river the situation was not so simple; Shanghai, unlike Pudong, had lived through many wars and was therefore made to be robust: the city was rife with secret power sources, old diesel generators, private Sources and Feeds, water tanks and cisterns. People still raised chickens for food in the shadow of the Hongkong & Shanghai Banking Corporation. Shanghai would weather the onslaught of the Fists much better than Pudong.
   But as a white person, Carl Hollywood might not weather it very well at all. It was better to be across the river, in Pudong, with the rest of the Outer Tribes.
   From here to the waterfront was about three blocks; but since this was Shanghai, those three blocks were fraught with what in any other city would be three miles' worth of complications. The main problem was going to be Fists; he could already hear the cries of "Sha! Sha!" boiling up from the streets, and shining a pocket torch through the bars of his balcony, he could see many Fists, emboldened by the destruction of the foreign Feeds, running around with their scarlet girdles and headbands exposed to the world.
   If he weren't six and a half feet tall and blue-eyed, he'd probably try to disguise himself as Chinese and slink to the waterfront, and it probably wouldn't work. He went through his closet and hauled out his big duster, which swept nearly to his ankles. It was proof against bullets and most nanotech projectiles.
   There was a long item of luggage he had thrown up on the closet shelf unopened. Hearing the reports of trouble, he had taken the precaution of bringing these relics with him: an engraved lever-action .44 rifle with low-tech iron sights and, as a last-ditch sort of thing, a Colt revolver. These were unnecessarily glorious weapons, but he had long ago gotten rid of any of his guns that did not have historical or artistic value.
   Two gunshots sounded from within the building, very close to him. Moments later, someone knocked at his door. Carl wrapped his duster around him, in case someone decided to fire through the door, and peered out through the peephole. To his surprise, he saw a white-haired Anglo gentleman with a handlebar mustache, gripping a semiautomatic. Carl had met him yesterday in the hotel bar; he was here trying to clear up some kind of business before the fall of Shanghai.
   He opened the door. The two men regarded each other briefly.
   "One might think we had come for an antique weapons convention," the gentleman said through his mustache. "Say, I'm frightfully sorry to have disturbed you, but I thought you might like to know that there are Fists in the hotel." He gestured down the corridor with his gun. Carl poked his head out and discovered a dead bellboy sprawled out in front of an open door, still clutching a long knife.
   "As it happens, I was already up," said Carl Hollywood, "and contemplating a bit of a stroll to the waterfront. Care to join me?"
   "Delighted. Colonel Spence, Royal Joint Forces, Retired."
   "Carl Hollywood."
   On their way down the fire stairs, Spence killed two more hotel employees whom he had, on somewhat ambiguous grounds, identified as Fists. Carl was skeptical in both cases until Spence ripped their shirts open to reveal the scarlet girdles beneath. "It's not that they're really Fists, you see," Spence explained jovially. "Just that when the Fists come, this sort of nonsense becomes terribly fashionable."
   After exchanging some more self-consciously dry humor about whether they should settle their bills before departure, and how much you were supposed to tip a bellboy who came after you with a carving knife, they agreed it might be safest to exit through the kitchens. Half a dozen dead Fists littered the floor here, their bodies striped with the marks of cookie-cutters. Arriving at the exit they found two fellow guests, both Israelis, staring at them with the fixed gaze that implies the presence of a skull gun. Seconds later, they were joined by two Zulu management consultants carrying long, telescoping poles with nanoblades affixed to the ends, which they used to destroy all of the light fixtures in their path. It took Carl a minute to appreciate their plan: They were all about to step out into a dark alley, and they would need their night vision.
   The door began to shudder in its frame and make tremendous booming noises. Carl stepped forward and peered through the peephole; it was a couple of urban homeboy types having at it with a fire axe. He stepped away from the door, shrugging the rifle from his shoulder, levered in a shell, and fired it through the door, aiming away from the youths. The booming stopped abruptly, and they heard the head of the axe ringing like a bell as it fell to the pavement.
   One of the Zulus kicked the door open and leapt into the alley, whirling his blade in a vast, fatal arc like the blade of a helicopter, slicing through a garbage can but not hitting any people. When Carl came piling through the door a few seconds later, he saw several young toughs scattering down the alley, dodging among several dozen refugees, loiterers, and street people who pointed helpfully at their receding backsides, making sure it was understood that their only reason for being in this alley at this time was to act as a sort of block watch on behalf of the gwailo visitors.
   Without talking about it much, they fell into an improvised formation there in the alley, where they had a bit of room to maneuver. The Zulus went in front, whirling their poles over their heads and hollering some kind of traditional war-cry that drove a good many of the Chinese out of their path. One of the Jews went behind the Zulus, using his skull gun to pick off any Fists who charged them. Then came Carl Hollywood, who, with his height and his rifle, seemed to have ended up with the job of long-range reconnaissance and defense. Colonel Spence and the other Israeli brought up the rear, walking backward most of the time.
   This got them down the alley without much trouble, but that was the easy part; when they reached the street, they were no longer the only focus of action but mere motes in a sandstorm. Colonel Spence discharged most of a clip into the air; the explosions were nearly inaudible in the chaos, but the gouts of light from the weapon's barrel drew some attention, and people in their immediate vicinity actually got out of their way. Carl saw one of the Zulus do something very ugly with his long weapon and looked away; then he reflected that it was the Zulus' job to break trail and his to concentrate on more distant threats. He turned slowly around as he walked, trying to ignore the threat that was just beyond arm's length and to get a view of the larger scene.
   They had walked into a completely disorganized street fight between the Coastal Republic forces and the Fists of Righteous Harmony, which was not made any clearer by the fact that many of the Coastals had defected by tying strips of red cloth round the arms of their uniforms, and that many of the Fists were not wearing any markings at all, and that many others who had no affiliation were taking advantage of the situation to loot stores and were being fought off by private guards; many of the looters were themselves being mugged by organized gangs.
   They were on Nanjing Road, a broad thoroughfare leading straight to the Bund and the Huang Pu, lined with four– and five-story buildings so that many windows looked out over them, any one of which might have contained a sniper.
   A few of them did contain snipers, Carl realized, but many of these were shooting across the street at each other, and the ones who were firing into the street could have been shooting at anyone. Carl saw one fellow with a laser-sighted rifle emptying clip after clip into the street, and he reckoned that this constituted a clear and present danger; so at a moment when their forward progress had stalled momentarily, while the Zulus were waiting for an especially desperate Coastal/Fist melee to resolve itself ahead of them, Carl planted his feet, swung his rifle up to his shoulder, took aim, and fired. In the dim fire– and torch-light rising up from the street, he could see powder explode from the stone window frame just above the sniper's head. The sniper cringed, then began to sweep the street with his laser, looking for the source of the bullet.
   Someone jostled Carl from behind. It was Spence, who had been hit with something and lost the use of his leg. A Fist was in the Colonel's face. Carl rammed the butt of the rifle into the man's chin, sending him backward into the melee with his eyes rolled up into their sockets. Then he levered in another shell, raised the weapon to his shoulder again, and tried to find the window with his sniper friend.
   He was still there, tracing a ruby-red line patiently across the boiling surface of the crowd. Carl took in a deep breath, released it slowly, prayed that no one would bump into him, and squeezed the trigger. The rifle butted him hard in the shoulder, and at the same moment he saw the sniper's rifle fall out of the window, spinning end over end, the laser beam sweeping through the smoke and steam like the trace on a radar scope.
   The whole thing had probably been a bad idea; if any of the other snipers had seen this, they'd be wanting to get rid of him, whatever their affiliation. Carl levered in another shell and then let the rifle dangle from one hand, pointed down at the street, where it wouldn't be so conspicuous. He got the other hand into Spence's armpit and helped him continue down the street. The ends of Spence's mustache wiggled as he continued with his endless and unflappable line of patter; Carl couldn't hear a word but nodded encouragingly. Not even the most literal-minded neo-Victorian could take that stiff-upper-lip thing seriously; Carl realized now that it was all done with a nod and a wink. It was not Colonel Spence's way of saying that he wasn't scared; it was, rather, a code of sorts, a face-saving way for him to admit that he was terrified half out of his wits, and for Carl to admit likewise.
   Several Fists rushed them at once; the Zulus got two, the leading Israeli got one, but another came in and bounced his knife from the Israeli's knife-proof jacket. Carl raised the rifle, clamping the stock between his arm and his body, and fired from the hip. The recoil nearly knocked the weapon out of his hand; the Fist practically did a backflip.
   He couldn't believe they had not reached the waterfront yet; they had been doing this for hours. Something prodded him hard in the back, causing him to stumble forward; he looked back over his shoulder and saw a man trying to run him through with a bayonet. Another man ran up and tried to wrench the rifle out of Carl's hand.
   Carl, too startled to respond for a moment, finally let go of Spence, reached across, and poked him in the eyes. A great explosion sounded in his ear, and he looked over to see that Spence had twisted himself round and shot the attacker who had the bayonet. The Israeli who had been guarding their rear had simply vanished. Carl raised his rifle toward the people who were converging on them from the rear; that and Spence's pistol opened up a gratifying clear space in their wake. But something more powerful and terrifying was driving more people toward them from the side, and as Carl tried to see what it was, he realized that a score of Chinese people were now between him and the Zulus. The looks on their faces were pained and panicky; they were not attacking, they were being attacked.
   Suddenly all of the Chinese were gone. Carl and Colonel Spence found themselves commingled with a dozen or so Boers– not just men, but women and children and elders too, a whole laager on the move. All of them surged forward instinctively and reabsorbed the vanguard of Carl's group. They were a block from the waterfront.
   The Boer leader, a stout man of about fifty, somehow identified Carl Hollywood as the leader, and they quickly redeployed what forces they had for the final push to the waterfront. The only thing Carl remembered of this conversation was the man saying, "Good. You've got Zulus."
   The Boers in the vanguard were carrying some sort of automatic weapons firing tiny nanotech high-explosive rounds, which, indiscriminately used, could have turned the crowd into a rampart of chewed meat; but they fired the weapons in disciplined bursts even when the charging Fists penetrated to within a sword's length. From time to time, one of them would raise his head and sweep a row of windows with continuous automatic fire; riflemen would tumble out of the darkness and spin down into the street like rag dolls. The Boers must be wearing some kind of night vision stuff.
   Colonel Spence suddenly felt very heavy on Carl's arm, and he realized that the Colonel was unconscious, or close to it. Carl slung the rifle over his shoulder, bent down, and picked up Spence in a fireman's carry.
   They arrived at the waterfront and established a defensive perimeter. The next question was: Were there any boats? But this part of China was half underwater and seemed to have as many boats as bicycles. Most of them seemed to have found their way downstream to Shanghai during the gradual onslaught of the Fists. So when they arrived at the water's edge, they discovered thousands of people with boats, eager to transact some business. But as the Boer leader rightly pointed out, it would be suicide to split up the group among several tiny, unpowered craft; the Fists were paying high bounties for the heads of barbarians. Much safer to wait for one of the larger vessels out in the channel to make its way to shore, where they could cut a deal with the captain and climb on board as a group.
   Several vessels, ranging from motor yachts to fishing trawlers, were already vying to be the first to make that deal, shouldering their way inexorably through the organic chaff of small boats crowded along the shore.
   A rhythmic beat had begun to resonate in their lungs. At first it sounded like drumbeats, but as it drew closer it developed into the sound of hundreds or thousands of human voices chanting in unison: "Sha! Sha! Sha! Sha!" Nanjing Road began to vomit forth a great crowd of people shoved out onto the Bund like exhaust pushed out by a piston. They cleared out of the way, dispersing up and down the riverfront.
   An army of hoplites– professional warriors in battle armor– was marching toward the river, a score abreast, completely filling the width of Nanjing Road. These were not Fists; they were the regular army, the vanguard of the Celestial Kingdom, and Carl Hollywood was appalled to realize that the only thing now standing between them and their three-decade march to the banks of the Huang Pu was Carl Hollywood, his .44, and a handful of lightly armed civilians.
   A nice-looking yacht had penetrated to within a few meters of the shore. The remaining Israeli, who was fluent in Mandarin, had already commenced negotiations with its captain.
   One of the Boers, a wiry grandmother with a white bun on her head and a black bonnet pinned primly over that, conferred briefly with the Boer leader. He nodded once, then caught her face in his hands and kissed her.
   She turned her back on the waterfront and began to march toward the head of the advancing column of Celestials. The few Chinese crazy enough to remain along the waterfront, respecting her age and possible madness, parted to make way for her.
   The negotiations over the boat appeared to have hit some kind of snag. Carl Hollywood could see individual hoplites vaulting two and three stories into the air, crashing headfirst into the windows of the Cathay Hotel.
   The Boer grandmother doggedly made her way forward until she was standing in the middle of the Bund. The leader of the Celestial column stepped toward her, covering her with some kind of projectile weapon built into one arm of his suit and waving her aside with the other. The Boer woman carefully got down on both knees in the middle of the road, clasped her hands together in prayer, and bowed her head.
   Then she became a pearl of white light in the mouth of the dragon. In an instant this pearl grew to the size of an airship. Carl Hollywood had the presence of mind to close his eyes and turn his head away, but he didn't have time to throw himself down; the shock wave did that, slamming him full-length into the granite paving-stones of the waterfront promenade and tearing about half of his clothes from his body.
   Some time passed before he was really conscious; he felt it must have been half an hour, though debris was still raining down around him, so five seconds was probably more like it. The hull of the white yacht had been caved in on one side and most of its crew flung into the river. But a minute later, a fishing trawler pulled up and took the barbarians on board with only perfunctory negotiations. Carl nearly forgot about Spence and almost left him there; he found that he no longer had the strength to raise the Colonel's body from the ground, so he dragged him on board with the help of a couple of young Boers– identical twins, he realized, maybe thirteen years old. As they headed across the Huang Pu, Carl Hollywood huddled on a piled-up fishing net, limp and weak as though his bones had all been shattered, staring at the hundred-foot crater in the center of the Bund and looking into the rooms of the Cathay Hotel, which had been neatly cross-sectioned by the bomb in the Boer woman's body.
   Within fifteen minutes, they were free on the streets of Pudong. Carl Hollywood found his way to the local New Atlantan encampment, reported for duty, and spent a few minutes composing a letter to Colonel Spence's widow; the Colonel had bled to death from a leg wound during the voyage across the river. Then he spread his pages out on the ground before him and returned to the pursuit that had occupied him in his hotel room for the past few days, namely, the search for Miranda. He had begun this search at the bidding of Lord Finkle-McGraw, pursued it with mounting passion over the last few days as he had begun to understand how much he'd been missing Miranda, and was now pressing the work desperately; for he had realized that in this search might reside the only hope for the salvation of the tens of thousands of Outer Tribesmen now encamped upon the dead streets of the Pudong Economic Zone.

Final onslaught of the Fists;
victory of the Celestial Kingdom;
refugees in the domain of the Drummers;
Miranda.

   The Huang Pu stopped the advance of the Celestial Army toward the sea, but having crossed the river farther inland, it continued to move northward up the Pudong Peninsula at a walking pace, driving before it flocks of starving peasants much like the ones who had been their harbingers in Shanghai.
   The occupants of Pudong– a mixture of barbarians, Coastal Republic Chinese who feared persecution at the hands of their Celestial cousins, and Nell's little sisters, a third of a million strong and constituting a new phyle unto themselves– were thus caught between the Celestials on the south, the Huang Pu on the west, the Yangtze on the north, and the ocean on the east. All the links to the artificial islands offshore had been cut.
   The geotects of Imperial Tectonics, in their Classical and Gothic temples high atop New Chusan, made various efforts to build a temporary bridge between their island and Pudong. It was simple enough to throw a truss or floating bridge across the gap, but the Celestials now had the technology to blow such things up faster than they could be constructed. On the second day of the siege, they caused the island to reach toward Pudong with a narrow pseudopod of smart coral, rooted on the ocean floor. But there were very simple and clear limits to how fast such things could be grown, and as the refugees continued to throng the narrow defiles of downtown Pudong, bearing increasingly dire reports of the Celestials' advance, it became evident to everyone that the land bridge would not be completed in time.
   The encampments of the various tribes moved north and east as they were forced out of downtown by the pressure of the refugees and fear of the Celestials, until several miles of shoreline had been claimed and settled by the various groups. The southern end, along the seashore, was anchored by the New Atlantans, who had prepared themselves to fend off any assaults along the beach. The chain of camps extended northward from there, curving along the ocean and then eastward along the banks of the Yangtze to the opposite end, which was anchored by Nippon against any onslaught across the tidal flats. The entire center of the line was guarded against a direct frontal assault by Princess Nell's tribe/army of twelve-year-old girls, who were gradually trading in their pointed sticks for more modern weapons compiled from portable Sources owned by the Nipponese and the New Atlantans.
   Carl Hollywood had been assigned to military duty as soon as he reported to the New Atlantan authorities, despite his efforts to convince his superiors that he might be of more use pursuing his own line of research. But then a message came through from the highest levels of Her Majesty's government. The first part of it praised Carl Hollywood for his "heroic" actions in getting the late Colonel Spence out of Shanghai and suggested that a knighthood might be waiting for him if he ever got out of Pudong. The second part of it named him as a special envoy of sorts to Her Royal Highness, Princess Nell.
   Reading the message, Carl was momentarily stunned that his Sovereign was according equivalent status to Nell; but upon some reflection he saw that it was simultaneously just and pragmatic.
   During his time in the streets of Pudong, he had seen enough of the Mouse Army (as they called themselves, for some reason) to know that they did, in fact, constitute a new ethnic group of sorts, and that Nell was their undisputed leader. Victoria's esteem for the new sovereign was well-founded. At the same time, that the Mouse Army was currently helping to protect many New Atlantans from being taken hostage, or worse, by the Celestial Kingdom made such recognition an eminently pragmatic step.
   It fell to Carl Hollywood, who had been a member of his adopted tribe only for a few months, to forward Her Majesty's greetings and felicitations to Princess Nell, a girl about whom he had heard much from Miranda but whom he had never met and could hardly fathom. It did not take very deep reflection to see the hand of Lord Alexander Chung-Sik Finkle-McGraw in all this.
   Freed from day-to-day responsibilities, he walked north from the New Atlantan camp on the third day of the siege, following the tideline. Every few yards he came to a tribal border and presented a visa that, under the provisions of the Common Economic Protocol, was supposed to afford him free passage. Some of the tribal zones were only a meter or two wide, but their owners jealously guarded their access to the sea, sitting up all night staring out into the surf, waiting for some unspecified form of salvation. Carl Hollywood strolled through encampments of Ashantis, Kurds, Armenians, Navajos, Tibetans, Senderos, Mormons, Jesuits, Lapps, Pathans, Tutsis, the First Distributed Republic and its innumerable offshoots, Heartlanders, Irish, and one or two local CryptNet cells who had now been flushed into the open. He discovered synthetic phyles he had never heard of, but this did not surprise him.
   Finally he came to a generous piece of beach frontage guarded by twelve-year-old Chinese girls. At this point he presented his credentials from Her Majesty Queen Victoria II, which were extremely impressive, so much so that many of the girls gathered around to marvel at them. Carl Hollywood was surprised to hear them all speaking perfect English in a rather high Victorian style. They seemed to prefer it when discussing things in the abstract, but when it came to practical matters they reverted to Mandarin.
   He was ushered through the lines into the Mouse Army's encampment, which was mostly an open-air hospice for ragged, sick and injured discards from other phyles. The ones who weren't flat on their backs, being tended to by Mouse Nurses, were sitting on the sand, hugging their knees, staring out across the water in the direction of New Chusan. The slope of the land was quite gentle here, and a person could wade for a good long stone's throw into the waves.
   One person had: a young woman whose long hair fell about her shoulders and trailed in the water around her waist. She stood with her back to the shore, holding a book in her hands, and did not move for a long time.
   "What is she doing out there?" Carl Hollywood said to his Mouse Army escort, who had five little stars on her lapels. In Pudong, he had figured out their insignia: Five stars meant that she was in charge of (4)5 people, or 1,024. A regimental commander, then.
   "She is calling to her mother."
   "Her mother?"
   "Her mother is beneath the waves," the woman said. "She is a Queen."
   "Queen of what?"
   "She is the Queen of the Drummers who live beneath the sea."
   And then Carl Hollywood knew that Princess Nell was searching for Miranda too. He threw his long coat down on the sand and sloshed out Into the Pacific, accompanied by the officer, and remained at a judicious distance, partly to show due respect, and partly because Nell had a sword in her waistband. Her face was inclined over the pages of her book like a focusing lens, and he half expected the pages to curl and smoke under her gaze.
   She looked up from the book after some time. The officer spoke to her in a low voice. Carl Hollywood did not know the protocol when one was up to midthigh in the East China Sea, so he stepped forward, bowed as low as he could under the circumstances, and handed Princess Nell the scroll from Queen Victoria II.
   She accepted it wordlessly and read it through, then went back to the top and read it again. Then she handed it to her officer, who rolled it up carefully. Princess Nell stared out over the waves for a while, then looked Carl in the eye and said quietly, "I accept your credentials and request that you convey my warm thanks and regard to Her Majesty, along with my apologies that circumstances prevent me from composing a more formal response to her kind letter, which at any other time would naturally be my highest priority."
   "I shall do so at the earliest opportunity, Your Majesty," Carl Hollywood said. Hearing these words, Princess Nell looked a bit unsteady and shifted her feet to maintain her balance; though this might have been the undertow. Carl realized that she had never been addressed in this way before; that, until she had been recognized in this fashion by Victoria, she had never fully realized her position.
   "The woman you seek is named Miranda," he said.
   All thoughts of crowns, queens, and armies seemed to vanish from Nell's mind, and she was just a young lady again, looking for-what? Her mother? Her teacher? Her friend? Carl Hollywood spoke to Nell in a low gentle voice, projecting just enough to be heard over the strumming of the waves. He spoke to her of Miranda, and of the book, and of the old stories about the deeds of Princess Nell, which he had watched from the wings, as it were, by looking in on Miranda's feed many years ago at the Parnasse.
   Over the next two days many of the refugees on the shore got away on air or surface ships, but a few of these were destroyed in spectacular fashion before they could get out of range of the Celestial Kingdom's weaponry. Three-quarters of the Mouse Army evacuated itself through the technique of stripping naked and walking into the ocean en masse, linked arm-in-arm into a flexible and unsinkable raft that gradually, slowly, exhaustingly paddled across the sea to New Chusan. Rumors spread rapidly up and down the length of the coast; the tribal borders seemed to accelerate rather than hinder this process as interfaces between languages and cultures spawned new variants of each rumor, tailored to the local fears and prejudices. The most popular rumor was that the Celestials planned to give everyone safe passage and that the attacks were being carried out by intelligent mines that had run out of control or, at worst, by a few fanatical commanders who were defying orders and who would soon be brought to heel. There was a second, stranger rumor that gave some people an incentive to remain on the shore and not entrust themselves to the evacuation ships: A young woman with a book and a sword was creating magical tunnels from out of the deep that would carry them all away to safety. Such ideas were naturally met with skepticism among more rational cultures, but on the morning of the sixth day of the siege, the neap tide carried a peculiar omen up onto the sand: a harvest of translucent eggs the size of beach balls. 'When their fragile shells were torn open, they were found to contain sculpted backpacks pierced with a fractal pattern of delicate louvers. A stiff hose extended from the top and connected to a facemask. Under the circumstances, it was not difficult to divine the use of these objects. People strapped the packs onto their backs, slipped on the facemasks, and plunged into the water. The backpacks acted like the gills of a fish and provided a steady supply of oxygen.
   The gill packs did not carry any tribal identification; they merely washed up onto the beach, by the thousands, with each high tide, cast up organically by the sea. The Atlantans, Nipponese, and others each assumed that they had come from their own tribes. But many perceived a connection between this and the rumors of Princess Nell and the tunnels beneath the waves. Such people migrated toward the center of the Pudong coast, where the tiny, weak, and flaky tribes had all been concentrated. This contraction of the defensive line became inevitable as the number of defenders was shrunk by the evacuation. Borders between tribes became unstable and finally dissolved, and on the fifth day of the siege the barbarians had all become fungible and formed into a huddle on the uttermost point of the Pudong Peninsula, several tens of thousands of persons packed into an area not exceeding a few city blocks. Beyond that were the Chinese refugees, mostly persons strongly identified with the Coastal Republic who knew that they could never blend into the Celestial Kingdom. These did not dare to invade the camp of the refugees, who were still armed with powerful weapons, but by advancing an inch at a time and never retreating, they insensibly shrank the perimeter so that many barbarians found themselves standing knee-deep in the ocean.
   The rumor spread that the woman called Princess Nell had a wizard and adviser named Carl, who had appeared out of nowhere one day knowing nearly everything that Princess Nell did, and a few things she didn't. This man, according to rumor, had in his possession a number of magic keys that gave him and the Princess power to speak with the Drummers who lived beneath the waves.
   On the seventh day, Princess Nell walked naked into the sea at dawn, vanished beneath waves turned pink by the sunrise, and did not return. Carl followed her a minute later, though unlike the Princess he took the precaution of wearing a gill pack. Then all of the barbarians stepped into the ocean, leaving their filthy clothes strewn across the beach, relinquishing the last foothold of Chinese soil to the Celestial Kingdom. They all walked into the ocean until their heads disappeared. The rearguard was made up of the last part of the Mouse Army, which charged naked into the surf, linked up into a raft, and made its way slowly out to sea, nudging a few sick and wounded along with them in makeshift rafts. By the time the last girl's foot broke contact with the sandy ocean bottom, the end of the land had already been claimed by a man with a scarlet girdle round his waist, who stood on the shore laughing to think that now the Middle Kingdom was at last a whole country once more.
   The last foreign devil to depart from the Middle Kingdom was a blond Victorian gentleman with gray eyes, who stood in the waves for some time looking back over Pudong before he turned around and continued his descent. As the sea rose over him, it lifted the bowler from his head, and the hat continued to bob on the tide for some minutes as the Chinese detonated strings of firecrackers on the shore and tiny shreds of the red paper wrappers drifted over the sea like cherry petals.

. . .
   On one of her forays into the surf, Nell had encountered a man– a Drummer– who had come swimming out of the deep, naked except for a gill pack. This should have astonished her; instead, she had known he was out there before she saw him, and when he came close, she could feel things happening in her mind that were coming in from outside. There was something in her brain that made her connected to the Drummers.
   Nell had drawn up some general plans and given them to her engineers for further elaboration, and they had given them to Carl, who had taken them to a functioning portable M.C. in the New Atlantan camp and compiled a little system for examining and manipulating nanotechnological devices.
   In the dark, motes of light sparkled in Nell's flesh, like airplane beacons in the night sky. They scraped one of these away with a scalpel and examined it. They found similar devices circulating in her bloodstream. These things, they realized, must have been put into Nell's blood when she was raped. It was clear that the sparkling lights in Nell's flesh were beacons signaling to others across the gulf that separates each of us from our neighbors.
   Carl opened one of the things from Nell's blood and found a rod logic system inside, and a tape drive containing some few gigabytes of data. The data was divided into discrete chunks, each one of which was separately encrypted. Carl tried all of the keys that he had obtained from John Percival Hackworth and found that one of them– Hackworth's key– unlocked some of the chunks. When he examined the decrypted contents, he discovered fragments of a plan for some kind of nanotechnological device.
   They drew blood from several volunteers and found that one of them had the same little devices in his blood. When they put two of these devices in close proximity, they locked onto one another using lidar and embraced, exchanging data and performing some sort of computation that threw off waste heat.
   The devices lived in the blood of the human race like viruses and passed from one person to the next during sex or any other exchange of bodily fluids; they were smart packets of data, just like the ones traversing the media network, and by mating with one another in the blood, they formed a vast system of communication, parallel to and probably linked with the dry Net of optical lines and copper wires. Like the dry Net, the wet Net could be used for doing computations– for running programs. And it was now clear that John Percival Hackworth was using it for exactly that, running some kind of vast distributed program of his own devising. He was designing something.
   "Hackworth is the Alchemist," Nell said, "and he is using the wet Net to design the Seed."

. . .
   Half a kilometer offshore, the tunnels began. Some of them must have been there for many years, for they were rough as tree trunks, encrusted with barnacles and algae. But it was clear that in the last few days they had forked and split organically, like roots questing for moisture; clean new tubes forced their way out through the encrustation and ran uphill toward the tide line, splitting again and again until many orifices presented themselves to the refugees.
   The shoots terminated in lips that grabbed people and drew them in, like the tip of an elephant's trunk, accepting the refugees with a minimum of seawater. The tunnels were lined with mediatronic images urging them forward into the deep; it always seemed as though a warm dry well-lit space awaited them just a bit farther down the line. But the light moved along with the viewer so that they were drawn down the tunnels in a kind of peristalsis. The refugees came to the main tunnel, the old encrusted one, and continued moving on, now packed together in a solid mass, until they were disgorged into a large open cavity far below the surface of the ocean. Here, food and fresh water awaited them and they ate hungrily.
   Two people did not eat or drink except from the provisions they had brought with them; these were Nell and Carl. After they had discovered the nanosites in Nell's flesh that made her a part of the Drummers, Nell had stayed up through the night and designed a counternanosite, one that would seek out and destroy the Drummers' devices. She and Carl had both put these devices into their bloodstreams, so that Nell was now free of the Drummers' influences and both of them would remain so. Nevertheless they did not press their luck by eating of the Drummers' food, and it was well, because after their meal the refugees became drowsy and lay down on the floor and slept, steam rising from their naked flesh, and before long the sparks of light began to come on, like stars coming out as the sun goes down. After two hours the stars had merged together into a continuous surface of flickering light, bright enough to read by, as if a full moon were shining down upon the bodies of slumbering revelers in a meadow.
   The refugees, now Drummers, all slept and dreamed the same dream, and the abstract lights flickering across the mediatronic lining of the cavern began to coalesce and organize themselves into dark memories from deep within their unconscious mind. Nell began to see things from her own life, experiences long since assimilated into the words of the Primer but here shown once more in a raw and terrifying form. She closed her eyes; but the walls made sounds too, from which she could not escape.
   Carl Hollywood was monitoring the signals passing through the walls of the tunnels, avoiding the emotional content of these images by reducing them to binary digits and trying to puzzle out their internal codes and protocols.
   "We have to go," Nell said finally, and Carl arose and followed her through a randomly chosen exit. The tunnel forked and forked again, and Nell chose forks by intuition. Sometimes the tunnels would widen into great caverns full of luminescent Drummers, sleeping or fucking or simply pounding on the walls. The caverns always had many outlets, which forked and forked and converged upon other caverns, the web of tunnels so vast and complicated that it seemed to fill the entire ocean, like neural bodies with their dendrites knitting and ramifying to occupy the whole volume of the skull.
   A low drumming sound had been skirting the lower limits of perceptibility ever since they had left the cavern where the refugees slumbered. Nell had first taken it for the beat of submarine currents on the walls of the tunnel, but as it grew stronger, she knew that it was the Drummers talking to each other, convened in some central cavern sending messages out across their network. Realizing this, she felt a sense of urgency verging on panic that they find the central assembly, and for some time they ran through the perfectly bewildering three-dimensional maze, trying to locate the epicenter of the drumming.
   Carl Hollywood could not run as quickly as the nimble Nell and eventually lost her at a fork in the tunnels. From there he made his own judgments, and after some time had passed– it was impossible to know how long– his tunnel dovetailed with another that was carrying a stream of Drummers downward toward the floor of the ocean. Carl recognized some of these Drummers as former refugees from the beaches at Pudong.
   The sound of the drumming did not build gradually but exploded to a deafening, mind-dissolving roar as Carl emerged into a vast cavern, a conical amphitheatre that must have been a kilometer wide, roofed with a storm of mediatronic images that played across a vast dome. The Drummers, visible by the flickering light of the overhead media storm and by their own internal light, moved up and down the slopes of the cone in a kind of convection pattern. Caught up in an eddy, Carl was transported down toward the center and found that an orgy of fantastic dimensions was underway. The steam of vaporized sweat rose from the center of the pit in a cloud. The bodies pressing against Carl's naked skin were so hot that they almost burned him, as if everyone were running a high fever, and in some logical abstract compartment of his mind that was, somehow, continuing to run along its own reasonable course, he realized why: They were exchanging packets of data with their bodily fluids, the packets were mating in their blood, the rod logic throwing off heat that drove up their core temperature.
   The orgy went on for hours, but the pattern of convection gradually slowed down and condensed into a stable arrangement, like a circulating crowd in a theatre that settles into its assigned seats as curtain time approaches A broad open space had formed at the center of the pit and the innermost ring of spectators consisted of men as if these were in some sense the winners of the enormous fornication tournament that was nearing its final round. A lone Drummer circulated around this innermost ring, handing something out; the something turned out to be mediatronic condoms that glowed bright colors when they were stripped onto the men's erect phalluses.
   A lone woman entered the ring. The floor at the absolute center of the pit rose up beneath her feet, shoving her into the air as on an altar. The drumming built to an unbearable crescendo and then stopped. Then it began again a very slow steady beat and the men in the inner circle began to dance around her. Carl Hollywood saw that the woman in the center was Miranda.
   He saw it all now: that the refugees had been gathered into the realm of the Drummers for the harvest of fresh data running in their bloodstreams, that this data had been infused into the wet Net in the course of the great orgy, and that all of it was now going to be dumped into Miranda, whose body would play host to the climax of some computation that would certainly burn her alive in the process.
   It was Hackworth's doing; this was the culmination of his effort to design the Seed, and in so doing to dissolve the foundations of New Atlantis and Nippon and all of the societies that had grown up around the concept of a centralized, hierarchical Feed.
   A lone figure, remarkable because her skin did not emit any light, was fighting her way in toward the center. She burst into the inner circle, knocking down a dancer who got in her way, and climbed up onto the central altar where Miranda lay on her back, arms outstretched as if crucified, her skin a galaxy of colored lights. Nell cradled Miranda's head in her arms, bent down, and kissed her, not a soft brush of the lips but a savage kiss with open mouth, and she bit down hard as she did it, biting through her own lips and Miranda's so that their blood mingled. The light shining from Miranda's body diminished and slowly went out as the nanosites were hunted down and destroyed by the hunter-killers that had crossed into her blood from Nell's. Miranda came awake and arose, her arms draped weakly around Nell's neck.
   The drumming had stopped; the Drummers all sat impassively, clearly content to wait– for years if necessary-for a woman who could take Miranda's place. The light from their flesh had diminished, and the overhead mediatron had gone dim and vague.
   Carl Hollywood, seeing at last a role for himself, stepped into the center, got one arm under Miranda's knees and another beneath her shoulders, and lifted her into the air. Nell turned around and led them up out of the cavern, holding her sword out before her; but none of the Drummers moved to stop them.
   They passed up through many tunnels, always taking the uphill fork until they saw sunlight shining down from above through the waves, casting lines of white light on the translucent roof. Nell severed the tunnel behind them, wielding her sword like the sweep of a clock's hand. The warm water rushed in on them. Nell swam up toward the light. Miranda was not swimming strongly, and Carl was torn between a panicky desire to reach the surface and his duty to Miranda. Then he saw shadows descending from above, dozens of naked girls swimming downward, garlands of silver bubbles streaming from their mouths, their almond eyes excited and mischievous. Carl and Miranda were gripped by many gentle hands and borne upward into the light.
   New Chusan rose above them, a short swim away, and up on the mountain they could hear the bells of the cathedral ringing.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

   Neal Stephenson is the author of The Diamond Age, Snow Crash, Zodiac, and The Big U

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

   Jeremy Bornstein
   Douglas (Carl Hollywood) Crockford
   K. Eric Drexier
   Wayne "Hank" Hansen
   Steve Horst
   Steve Johnson
   Marco Kakofen
   Sachiko Emma Kashiwaya
   Kevin Kelly
   Alan Moores
   Chris Peterson
   Rattana Schicketanz
   Dean Tribble

The Big U

Neal Stephenson

The Go Big Red Fan
First Semester
* * *
Second Semester
Credits

Neal Stephenson
The Big U




   "WHEN I THINK OF THE MEN WHO WERE MY TEACHERS, I REALIZED THAT MOST OF THEM WERE SLIGHTLY MAD. THE MEN WHO COULD BE REGARDED AS GOOD TEACHERS WERE EXCEPTIONAL. IT'S TRAGIC TO THINK THAT SUCH PEOPLE HAVE THE POWER TO BAR A YOUNG MAN'S WAY."

German political figure Adolf Hitler, 1889-1945 (from Hitler's Secret Conversations, 1941-44, translated by Norman Cameron and R.H. Stevens.)



   I am indebted to the following people for the following things:
   My parents for providing several kinds of support.
   Edward Gibbon, for writing The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
   Julian Jaynes, for writing The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.
   William Blake and William Butler Yeats, for providing Pertinax with inspiration.
   Kathrin Day Lassila, for numerous and thoughtful disagreements.
   Gordon Lish, for the most productive rejection slip of all time.
   Gary Fisketjon, for buying me a beer in Top Hat in Missoula, Montana, on July 1, 1983, and other services beyond the call of editorial duty.

The Go Big Red Fan

   The Go Big Red Fan was John Wesley Fenrick's, and when ventilating his System it throbbed and crept along the floor with a rhythmic chunka-chunka-chunk. Fenrick was a Business major and a senior. From the talk of my wingmates I gathered that he was smart, yet crazy, which helped. The description weird was also used, but admiringly. His roomie, Ephraim Klein of New Jersey, was in Philosophy. Worse, he was found to be smart and weird and crazy, intolerably so on all these counts and several others besides.
   As for the Fan, it was old and square, with a heavy rounded design suitable for the Tulsa duplex window that had been its station before John Wesley Fenrick had brought It out to the Big U with him. Running up one sky-blue side was a Go Big Red bumper sticker. When Fenrick ran his System– that is, bludgeoned the rest of the wing with a record or tape– he used the Fan to blow air over the back of the component rack to prevent the electronics from melting down. Fenrick was tall and spindly, with a turkey-like head and neck, and all of us in the east corridor of the south wing of the seventh floor of E Tower knew him for three things: his seventies rock-'n'-roll souvenir collection, his trove of preposterous electrical appliances, and his laugh– a screaming hysterical cackle that would ricochet down the long shiny cinderblock corridor whenever something grotesque flashed across the 45-Inch screen of his Video System or he did something especially humiliating to Ephraim Klein.
   Klein was a subdued, intellectual type. He reacted to his victories with a contented smirk, and this quietness gave some residents of EO7S East the impression that Fenrick, a roomie-buster with many a notch on his keychain, had already cornered the young sage. In fact, Klein beat Fenrick at a rate of perhaps sixty percent, or whenever he could reduce the conflict to a rational discussion. He felt that he should be capable of better against a power-punker Business major, but he was not taking into account the animal shrewdness that enabled Fenrick to land lucrative oil-company internships to pay for the modernization of his System.
   Inveterate and cynical audio nuts, common at the Big U, would walk into their room and freeze solid, such was Fenrick's System, its skyscraping rack of obscure black slabs with no lights, knobs or switches, the 600-watt Black Hole Hyperspace Energy Nexus Field Amp that sat alone like the Kaaba, the shielded coaxial cables thrown out across the room to the six speaker stacks that made it look like an enormous sonic slime mold in spawn. Klein himself knew a few things about stereos, having a system that could reproduce Bach about as well as the American Megaversity Chamber Orchestra, and it galled him.
   To begin with there was the music. That was bad enough, but Klein had associated with musical Mau Maus since junior high, and could inure himself to it in the same way that he kept himself from jumping up and shouting back at television commercials. It was the Go Big Red Fan that really got to him. "Okay, okay, let's just accept as a given that your music is worth playing. Now, even assuming that, why spend six thousand dollars on a perfect system with no extraneous noises in it, and then, then, cool it with a noisy fan that couldn't fetch six bucks at a fire sale?" Still, Fenrick would ignore him. "I mean, you amaze me sometimes. You can't think at all, can you? I mean, you're not even a sentient being, if you look at it strictly."
   When Klein said something like this (I heard the above one night when going down to the bathroom), Fenrick would look up at him from his Business textbook, peering over the wall of bright, sto record-store displays he had erected along the room's centerline; because his glasses had slipped down his long thin nose, he would wrinkle it, forcing the lenses toward the desired altitude, involuntarily baring his canine teeth in the process and causing the stiff spiky hair atop his head to shift around as though inhabited by a band of panicked rats.
   "You don't understand real meaning," he'd say. "You don't have a monopsony on meaning. I don't get meaning from books. My meaning means what it means to me." He would say this, or something equally twisted, and watch Klein for a reaction. After he had done it a few times, though, Klein figured out that his roomie was merely trying to get him all bent out of shape– to freak his brain, as it were– and so he would drop it, denying Fenrick the chance to shriek his vicious laugh and tell the wing that he had scored again.
   Klein was also annoyed by the fact that Fenrick, smoking loads of parsley-spiked dope while playing his bad music, would forget to keep an eye on the Go Big Red Fan. Klein, sitting with his back to the stereo, wads of foam packed in his ears, would abruptly feel the Fan chunk into the back of his chair, and as he spazzed out in hysterical surprise it would sit there maliciously grinding away and transmitting chunka-chunka-chunks into his pelvis like muffled laughs.
   If it was not clear which of them had air rights, they would wage sonic wars.
   They both got out of class at 3:30. Each would spend twenty minutes dashing through the labyrinthine ways of the Monoplex, pounding fruitlessly on elevator buttons and bounding up steps three at a time, palpitating at the thought of having to listen to his roommate's music until at least midnight. Often as not, one would explode from the elevator on EO7S, veer around to the corridor, and with disgust feel the other's tunes pulsing victoriously through the floor. Sometimes, though, they would arrive simultaneously and power up their Systems together. The first time they tried this, about halfway through September, the room's circuit breaker shut down. They sat in darkness and silence for above half an hour, each knowing that if he left his stereo to turn the power back on, the other would have his going full blast by the time he returned. This impasse was concluded by a simultaneous two-tower fire drill that kept both out of the room for three hours.
   Subsequently John Wesley Fenrick ran a fifty-foot tin-lead extension cord down the hallway and into the Social Lounge, and plugged his System into that. This meant that he could now shut down Klein's stereo simply by turning on his burger-maker, donut-maker, blow-dryer and bun-warmer simultaneously, shutting off the room's circuit breaker. But Klein was only three feet from the extension cord and thus could easily shut Fenrick down with a tug. So these tactics were not resorted to; the duelists preferred, against all reason, to wait each other out.
   Klein used organ music, usually lush garbled Romantic masterpieces or what he called Atomic Bach. Fenrick had the edge in system power, but most of that year's music was not as dense as, say, Heavy Metal had been in its prime, and so this difference was usually erased by the thinness of his ammunition. This did not mean, however, that we had any trouble hearing him.The Systems would trade salvos as the volume controls were brought up as high as they could go, the screaming-guitars-from-Hell power chords on one side matched by the subterranean grease-gun blasts of the 32-foot reed stops on the other. As both recordings piled into the thick of things, the combatants would turn to their long thin frequency equalizers and shove all channels up to full blast like Mr. Spock beaming a live antimatter bomb into Deep Space. Finally the filters would be thrown off and the loudness switches on, and the speakers would distort and crackle with strain as huge wattages pulsed through their magnet coils. Sometimes Klein would use Bach's "Passacaglia and Fugue in C Minor," and at the end of each phrase the bass line would plunge back down home to that old low C, and Klein's sub-woofers would pick up the temblor of the 64-foot pipes and magnify it until he could watch the naked speaker cones thrash away at in the air. This particular note happened to be the natural resonating frequency of the main hallways, which were cut into 64-foot, 3-inch halves by the fire doors (Klein and I measured one while drunk), and therefore the resonant frequency of every other hall in every other wing of all the towers of the Plex, and so at these moments everything in the world would vibrate at sixteen cycles per second; beds would tremble, large objects would float off the edges of tables, and tables and chairs themselves would buzz around the rooms of their own volition. The occasional wandering bat who might be in the hall would take off in random flight, his sensors jammed by the noise, beating his wings against the standing waves in the corridor in an effort to escape.
   The Resident Assistant, or RA, was a reclusive Social Work major who, intuitively knowing she was never going to get a job, spent her time locked in her little room testing perfumes and watching MTV under a set of headphones. She could not possibly help.
   That made it my responsibility. I lived on EO7S that year as faculty-in-residence. I had just obtained my Ph.D. from Ohio State in an interdisciplinary field called Remote Sensing, and was a brand-shiny-new associate professor at the Big U.
   Now, at the little southern black college where I went to school, we had no megadorms. We were cool at the right times and academic at the right times and we had neither Kleins nor Fenricks. Boston University, where I did my Master's, had pulled through its crisis when I got there; most students had no time for sonic war, and the rest vented their humors in the city, not in the dorms. Ohio State was nicely spread out, and I lived in an apartment complex where noisy shit-for-brains undergrads were even less welcome than tweedy black bachelors. I just did not know what to make of Klein and Fenrick; I did not handle them well at all. As a matter of fact, most of my time at the Big U was spent observing and talking, and very little doing, and I may bear some of the blame.
   This is a history, in that it intends to describe what happened and suggest why. It is a work of the imagination in that by writing it I hope to purge the Big U from my system, and with it all my bitterness and contempt. I may have fooled around with a few facts. But I served as witness until as close to the end as anyone could have, and I knew enough of the major actors to learn about what I didn't witness, and so there is not so much art in this as to make it irrelevant. What you are about to read is not an aberration: it can happen in your local university too. The Big U, simply, was a few years ahead of the rest.

First Semester

September
   On back-to-school day, Sarah Jane Johnson and Casimir Radon waited, for a while, in line together. At the time they did not know each other. Sarah had just found that she had no place to live, and was suffering that tense and lonely feeling that sets in when you have no place to hide. Casimir was just discovering that American Megaversity was a terrible place, and was not happy either.
   After they had worked their way down the hail and into the office of the Dean of the College of Sciences and Humanities, they sat down next to each other on the scratchy Dayglo orange chairs below the Julian Didius III Memorial Window. The sunlight strained in greyly over their shoulders, and occasionally they turned to look at the scene outside.
   Below them on one of the Parkway off-ramps a rented truck from Maryland had tried to pass under a low bridge, its student driver forgetting that he was in a truck and not his Trans-Am. Upon impact, the steel molding that fastened the truck's top to its sides had wrapped itself around the frame of a green highway sign bolted to the bridge. Now the sign, which read:
   AMERICAN MEGAVERSITY
   VISITOR PARKING
   SPORTS EVENTS
   EXIT 500 FT
   was suspended in the air at the end of a long strip of truck that had been peeled up and aside.
   A small crowd students, apparently finished with all their line-waiting, stood on the bridge and beside the ramp, throwing Frisbees and debris into the torn-open back of the truck, where its renters lounged in sofas and recliners and drank beer, and threw the projectiles back. Sarah thought it was idiotic, and Casimir couldn't understand it at all.
   Out in the hallway, people behind them in the line were being verbally abused by an old derelict who had penetrated the Plex security system. "The only degree you kids deserve is the third degree!" he shouted, waving his arms and staggering in place. He wore a ratty tweed jacket whose elbow patches flapped like vestigial wings, and he drank in turns from a bottle of Happy's vodka and a Schlitz tall-boy which he kept holstered in his pockets. He had the full attention of the students, who were understandably bored, and most of them laughed and tried to think of provocative remarks.
   As the drunk was wading toward them, one asked another how her summer had been. "What about it?" asked the derelict. "Fiscal conservatism? Fine in theory! Tough, though! You have to be tough and humane together, you see, the two opposites must unite in one great leader! Can't be a damn dictator like S. S. Krupp!" This brought cheers and laughter from the upperclassmen, who had just decided the drunk was a cool guy. Septimius Severus Krupp, the President of American Megaversity, was not popular. "Jesus Christ!" he continued through the laughter, "What the hell are they teaching you savages these days? You need a spanking! No more circuses. Maybe a dictator is just what you need! Alcibiades! Pompilius Numa! They'd straighten things out good and fast."
   Sarah knew the man. He liked to break into classes at the Big U and lecture the professors, who usually were at a loss as to how to deal with him. His name was Bert Nix. He had taken quite a shine to Sarah: for her part, she did not know whether or not to be scared of him. During the preceding spring's student government campaign, Bert Nix had posed with Sarah for a campaign photo which had then appeared on posters all over the Plex. This was just the kind of thing that Megaversity students regarded as a sign of greatness, so she had won, despite progressive political ideas which, as it turned out, nobody was even aware of. This was all hard for Sarah to believe. She felt that Bert Nix had been elected President, not the woman he had appeared with on the campaign poster, and she felt obliged to listen to him even when he simply jabbered for hours on end. He was a nice lunatic, but he was adrift in the Bert Nix universe, and that stirred deep fears in Sarah's soul.
   Casimir paid little attention to the drunk and a great deal to Sarah. He could not help it, because she was the first nice-seeming person, concept or thing he had found in his six hours at the Big U. During the ten years he had spent saving up money to attend this school, Casimir had kept himself sane by imagining it. Unfortunately, he had imagined quiet talks over brunch with old professors, profound discussions in the bathrooms, and dazzling, sensitive people everywhere just waiting to make new friends. What he had found, of course, was American Megaversity. There was only one explanation for this atmosphere that he was willing to believe: that these people were civilized, and that for amusement they were acting out a parody of the squalor of high school life, which parody Casimir had been too slow to get so far. The obvious explanation– that it was really this way– was so horrible that it had not even entered his mind.
   When he saw the photo of her on the back page of the back-to-school edition of the Monoplex Monitor, and read the caption identifying her as Sarah Jane Johnson, Student Government President, he made the most loutish double take between her and the photograph. He knew that she knew that he now knew who she was, and that was no way to start a passionate love affair. All he could do was to make a big show of reading about her in the Monitor, and wait for her to make the first move. He nodded thoughtfully at the botched quotations and oversimplifications in the article.
   Sarah was aware of this; she had watched him page slowly and intensely through the paper, waiting with mild dread for him to get to the back page, see the picture and say something embarrassing. Instead– even more embarrassing – he actually read the article, and before he reached the bottom of the page, the student ahead of Sarah stomped out and she found herself impaled on the azure gaze of the chief bureaucrat of the College of Sciences and Humanities. "How," said Mrs. Santucci crisply, "may I help you?"
   Mrs. Santucci was polite. Her determination to be decent, and to make all things decent, was like that of all the Iranian Revolutionary Guards combined. Her policy of no-first-use meant that as long as we were objective and polite, any conversation would slide pleasantly down greased iron rails into a pit of despair. Any first strike by us, any remarks deemed improper by this grandmother of twenty-six and player of two dozen simultaneous bingo cards, would bring down massive retaliation. Sarah knew her. She arose primly and moved to the front chair of the line to look across a barren desk at Mrs. Santucci.
   "I'm a senior in this college. I was lucky enough to get an out-of-Plex apartment for this fall. When I got there today I found that the entire block of buildings had been shut down for eight months by the Board of Health. I went to Housing. Upon reaching the head of that line, I was told that it was being handled by Student Affairs. Upon reaching the head of the line there, I was given this form and told to get signatures at Housing and right here.
   Mrs. Santucci reached out with the briskness that only old secretaries can approach and seized the papers. "This form is already signed," she informed Sarah.
   "Right. I got that done at about one o'clock. But when I got to my new temporary room assignment it turned out to be the B-men's coffee lounge and storeroom for the northeast quad of the first sublevel. It is full of B-men all the time. You know how they are– they don't speak much English, and you know what kinds of things they decorate their walls with"– this attempt to get Mrs. Santucci's sympathy by being prissy was not obviously successful– "and I can't possibly live there. I returned to Housing. To change my room assignment is a whole new procedure, and I need a form from you which says I'm in good academic standing so far this semester."
   "That form," Mrs. Santucci noted, "will require signatures from all your instructors."
   "I know," said Sarah. All was going according to plan and she was approaching the center of her pitch. "But the semester hasn't started yet! And half my courses don't even have teachers assigned! So, since I'm a senior and my GPA is good, could the Dean okay my room change without the form? Doesn't that make sense? Sort of?" Sarah sighed. She had broken at the end, her confidence destroyed by Mrs. Santucci's total impassivity, by those arms folded across a navy-blue bosom like the Hoover Dam, by a stare like the headlights of an oncoming streetsweeper.
   "I'm sure this is all unnecessary. Perhaps they don't know that their lounge has been reassigned. If you can just explain matters to them, I'm sure that Building Maintenance will be happy to accommodate you."
   Sarah felt defeated. It had been a nice summer, and while away she had forgotten how it was. She had forgotten that the people who ran this place didn't have a clue as to how reality worked, that in their way they were all as crazy as Bert Nix. She closed her eyes and tilted her tense head back, and the man in the chair behind her intervened.
   "Wait a minute," he said righteously. His voice was high, but carried conviction and reasonable sensitivity. "She can't be expected to do that. Those guys don't even speak English. All they speak is Bosnian or Moldavian or something."
   "Moravian," said Mrs. Santucci in her Distant Early Warning voice, which was rumored to set off burglar alarms Within a quarter-mile radius.
   "The language is Crotobaltislavonian, a modern dialect of Old Scythian," announced Sarah, hoping to end the conflict. The B-Men are refugees from Crotobaltislavonia."
   "Listen, I talk to Magrov all the time, and I say it's Moravian." Sarah felt her body temperature begin to drop as she chanced a direct look at Mrs. Santucci.
   Trying to sound prim, Sarah said, "Have you ever considered the possibility that you are confusing Magrov with Moravian?" Seeing the look on Mrs. Santucci's face, she then inhaled sharply and shifted away. Just as the old bureaucrat's jaw was starting to yawn, her chest rising like the return of Atlantis, Casimir Radon leaned way across and yanked something out of Sarah's lap and– in a tone so arresting that it was answered by Bert Nix outside– exclaimed, "Wait a minute!"
   Casimir was meek and looked like a nerd and a wimp, but he was great in a crisis. The lost continent subsided and Mrs. Santucci leaned forward with a dangerous frown. Out in the hallway the exasperated Bert Nix cried, "But there's no more minutes to wait! To save the Big U we've got to start now!"
   Casimir had taken Sarah's room assignment card from the stack of ammunition on her lap, and was peering at it like a scientific specimen. It was an IBM card, golden yellow, with a form printed on it in yellow-orange ink. In the center of the form was a vague illustration of the Monoplex, looking decrepit and ruined because of the many rectangular holes punched through it. Along the top was a row of boxes labeled with tiny blurred yellow-orange abbreviations that were further abbreviated by rectangular holes. Numbers and letters were printed in black ink in the vicinity of each box.
   Bert Nix was still carrying on outside. "Then fell the fires of Eternity with loud & shrill Sound of loud Trumpet thundering along from heaven to heaven, A mighty sound articulate Awake ye dead & come To Judgment from the four winds Awake & Come away Folding like scrolls of the Enormous volume of Heaven & Earth With thunderous noises & dreadful shakings rocking to & fro: The heavens are shaken & the Earth removed from its place; the foundations of the eternal Hills discovered; The thrones of Kings are shaken they have lost their robes and crowns … and that's what poetry is! Not the caterwaulings of the Unwise!"
   Finally, Casimir looked relieved. "Yeah, I thought that might be it. You were reading this number here. Right?" He got up and stood beside Sarah and pointed to her temporary room number. "Sure," said Sarah, suddenly feeling dreadful.
   "Well," said Casimir, sounding apologetic, "that's not what you want. Your room is not identified by room number, because some rooms repeat. It's identified by door number, which is unique for all doors. This number you were looking at isn't either of those, it's your room ID number, which has to do with data processing. That ID number refers to your actual door number, incorrectly called room number. It is the middle six digits of this character string here. See?" He masked the string of figures between the dirty backward parenthesis of his thumbnails. "In your case we have E12S, giving tower, floor and wing, and then 49, your actual room number."
   Sarah did not know whether to scream, apologize or drop dead. She shoved her forms into her knapsack and stood. "Thank you for your trouble, Mrs. Santucci," she said quickly. "Thank you," she said to Casimir, then snapped around and headed for the door, though not fast enough to escape a withering harrrumph from Mrs. Santucci. But as she stepped into the hallway, which in order to hold down utility costs was dimly lit, she saw a dark and ragged figure out of the corner of her eye. She looked behind to see Bert Nix grab the doorframe and swing around until he was leaning into the office.
   "Listen, Genevieve," he said, "she doesn't need any of your phlegm! She's President! She's my friend! You're just a doorstop!" As much as Sarah wanted to hear the rest of this, she didn't have the energy.
   Casimir was left inside, his last view of Sarah interrupted by the dangling figure of the loony, caught in a crossfire he wanted no part of.
   "I'll call the guards," said Mrs. Santucci, who for the first time was showing uneasiness.
   "Today?" Bert Nix found this a merry idea. "You think you can get a guard today?"
   "You'd better stop coming or we'll keep you from coming back."
   His eyes widened in mock, crimson-rimmed awe, "Ooh," he sighed, "that were terrible. I'd have no reason to live." He pulled himself erect, walked in and climbed from the arm of Casimir's chair to the broad slate sill of the window. As Mrs. Santucci watched with more terror than seemed warranted, the derelict swung one window open like a door, letting in a gust of polluted steam.
   By the time he was leaning far outside and grinning down the seventy-foot drop to the Parkway and the interchange. she had resolved to try diplomacy– though she motioned that Casimir should try to grab his legs. Casimir ignored this; it was obvious that the man was just trying to scare her. Casimir was from Chicago and found that these Easterners had no sense of humor.
   "Now, Bert," said Mrs. Santucci, "don't give an old lady a hard time."
   Bert Nix dropped back to the sill. "Hard time! What do you know about hard times?" He thrust his hand through a hole in his jacket, wiggling his long fingers at her, and wagging his out-of-control tongue for a few seconds. Finally he added, "Hard times make you strong."
   "I've got work to do, Pert."
   This seemed to remind him of something. He closed the window and cascaded to the floor. "So do I," he said, then turned to Casimir and whispered, "That's the Julian Didius III Memorial Window. That's what I call it, anyway. Like the view?"
   "Yeah, it's nice," said Casimir, hoping that this would not become a conversation.
   "Good," said the derelict, "so did J. D. It's the last view he ever saw. Couldn't handle the job. That's why I call it that." The giggling Bert Nix ambled back into the hail, satisfied, pausing only to steal the contents of the office wastebasket. Through most of this Casimir sat still and stared at the faded German ti 1 poster on the wall. Now he was really in the talons of Mrs. Santucci, who had probably shifted into adrenaline overdrive and was likely to fling her desk through the wall. Instead, she was perfectly calm and professional. Casimir disliked her for it.
   "I'm a junior physics major and I transferred in from a community college in Illinois. I know the first two years of physics inside and out, but there's a problem. The rules here say physics courses must include 'socioeconomic contexts backgrounding,' which I guess means it has to explain how it fits in with today's something or other.
   "In order to context the learning experience with the real world," said Mrs. Santucci gravely, "we must include socioeconomic backgrounding integral with the foregrounded material." "Right. Anyway, my problem is that I don't think I need it. I'm not here to give you my memoirs or anything, but my parents were immigrants, I came from a slum, got started in electronics, sort of made my own way, saw a lot of things, and so I don't think I really need this. It'd be a shame if I had to start all over, learning, uh, foregrounded material I already know."
   Mrs. Santucci rolled her eyes so that the metal-flake blue eyeshadow on her lids flashed intermittently like fishing lures drawn through a murky sea. "Well, it has been done. It must be arranged with the curriculum chair of your department."
   "Who is that for physics?"
   "Distinguished Professor Sharon," she said. Bulging her eyeballs at Casimir, she made a respectful silence at the Professor's name, daring him to break it.
   When Casimir returned to consciousness he was drifting down a hallway, still mumbling to himself in astonishment. He had an appointment to meet the Professor Sharon. He would have been ecstatic just to have sat in on one of the man's lectures!
   Casimir Radon was an odd one, as American Megaversity students went. This was a good thing for him, as the Housing people simply couldn't match him up with a reasonable roommate; he was assigned a rare single. It was in D Tower, close to the sciences bloc where he would spend most of his time, on a floor of single rooms filled by the old, the weird and the asinine who simply could not live in pairs.

   In order to find his room he would have to trace a mind-twisting path through the lower floors until he found the elevators of D Tower. So before he got himself lost, he went to the nearest flat surface, which was the top of a large covered wastebasket. From it he cleared away a few Dorito bags and a half-drained carton of FarmSun SweetFresh brand HomeLivin' Artificial Chocolate-Flavored Dairy Beverage and forced them into the overflowing maw below. He then removed his warped and sweat-soaked Plex map (the Plexus) from his pocket and unfolded it on the woodtoned Fiberglass surface.
   As was noted at the base of the Plexus, it had been developed by the AM Advanced Graphics Workshop. Rather than presenting maps of each floor of the Plex, they had used an Integrated Projection to show the entire Plex as a network of brightly colored paths and intersections. The resulting tangle was so convoluted and yet so clean and spare as to be essentially without meaning. Casimir, however, could read it, because he was not like us. After applying his large intelligence to the problem for several minutes he was able to find the most efficient route, and following it with care, he quickly became lost.
   The mistake was a natural one. The elevators, which were busy even in the dead of night, were today clogged with catatonic parents from New Jersey clutching beanbag chairs and giant stuffed animals. Fortunately (he thought), adjacent to each elevator was an entirely unused stairwell.
   Casimir discovered shortly afterward that in the lower floors of the Plex all stairwell doors locked automatically from the outside. I discovered it myself at about the same time. Unlike Casimir I had been a the Plex for ten days, but I had spent them typing up notes for my classes, It is unwise to prepare two courses in ten days, and I knew it. I hadn't gotten to it until the last minute, for various reasons, and so I'd spent ten days sitting there in my bicycling shorts, drinking beer, typing, and sweating monumentally in the fetid Plex air. So my first exposure to the Plex and its people really came that afternoon, when I wandered out into the elevator lobby and punched the buttons. The desperate Tylenol-charged throngs in the elevators did not budge when the doors opened, because they couldn't. They stared at me as though I were Son of Godzilla, which I was used to, and I stared at them and tried to figure out how they got that way, and the doors clunked shut. I discovered the stairways, and once I got below the bottom of the tower and into the lower levels, I also found that I was locked in.
   For fifteen minutes I followed dimly lit stairs and corridors smelling of graffiti solvent and superfluous floor wax, helplessly following the paths that students would take if the Plex ever had to be evacuated. Through little windows in the locked doors I peered out of this twilight zone and into the different zones of the Plex– Cafeteria, Union, gymnasia, offices– but my only choice was to follow the corridors, knowing they would dump me into the ghetto outside. At last I turned a corner and saw the wall glistening with noisy grey outside light. At the end of the line, a metal door swung silently in the breeze, emblazoned thus: FIRE ESCAPE ONLY. WARNING– ALARM WILL SOUND.
   I stepped out the door and looked down along, steep slope into the canyon of the Turnpike.
   The American Megaversity Campustructure was three blocks on a side, and squatted between the Megalopolitan Turnpike on the north and the Ronald Reagan Parkway on the south. Megaversity Stadium, the only campus building not inside the Plex proper, was to the west, and on the east was an elaborate multilevel interchange interconnecting the Pike, the Parkway, the Plex and University Avenue. The Pike ran well below the base of the Plex, and so as I emerged from the north wall of the building I found myself atop a high embankment. Below me the semis and the Audis shot past through the layered blue monoxide, and their noises blended into a waterfall against the unyielding Plex wall. Aside from a few wretched weeds growing from cracks in the embankment, no life was to be seen, except for Casimir Radon.
   He had just emerged from another emergency exit. We saw each other from a hundred feet apart, waved and walked toward each other. As we converged, I regarded a tall and very thin man with an angular face and a dense five-o'clock shadow. He wore round rimless glasses. His black hair was in disarray as usual; during the year it was to vary almost randomly between close-cropped and shoulder-length. I soon observed that Casimir could grow a shadow before lunch, and a beard in three days. He and I were the same age, though I was a recent Ph.D. and he a junior.
   Later I was to think it remarkable that Casimir and I should emerge from those fire doors at nearly the same moment, and meet. On reflection I have changed my mind. The Big U was an unnatural environment, a work of the human mind, not of God or plate tectonics. If two strangers met in the rarely used stairways, it was not unreasonable that they should turn out to be similar, and become friends. I thought of it as an immense vending machine, cautiously crafted so that any denomination too ancient or foreign or irregular would rattle about randomly for a while, find its way into the stairway system, and inevitably be deposited in the reject tray on the barren back side. Meanwhile, brightly colored graduates with attractively packaged degrees were dispensed out front every June, swept up by traffic on the Parkway and carried away for leisurely consumption. Had I understood this earlier I might have come to my senses and immediately resigned, but on that hot September day, with the exhaust abrading our lungs and the noise squashing our conversation, it seemed worthwhile to circle around to the Main Entrance and give it another try.
   We headed east to avoid the stadium. On our right the wall stretched and away for acres in a perfect cinderblock grid. After passing dozens of fire doors we came to the corner and turned into the access lot that stretched along the east wall. Above, at many altitudes, cars and trucks screeched and blasted through the tight curves of the interchange. People called it the Death Vortex, and some claimed that parts of it extended into the fourth dimension. As soon as it had been planned, the fine old brownstone neighborhood that was its site plummeted into slumhood; Haitians and Vietnamese filled the place up, and the feds airproofed the buildings and installed giant electric air filters before proceeding.
   Here on the access lot we could look down a long line of loading docks, the orifices of the Plex where food and supplies were ingested and trash discharged, serviced by an endless queue of trucks. The first of these docks, by the northern corner, was specially designed for the discharge of hazardous wastes produced in Plex labs and was impressively surrounded by fences, red lights and threatening signs. The next six loading docks were for garbage trucks, and the rest, all the way down to the Parkway, for deliveries. We swung way out from the Plex to avoid all this, and followed the fence at the border of the lot, gazing into the no-man's-land of lost mufflers and shredded fanbelts beyond, and sometimes staring up into the Plex itself.
   The three-by-three block base had six stories above ground and three below. Atop it sat eight 25-story towers where lived the 40,000 students of the university. Each tower had four wings 160 feet long, thrown out at right angles to make a Swiss cross. These towers sat at the four corners and four sides of the base. The open space between them was a huge expanse of roof called Tar City, inhabited by great machines, crushed furniture thrown from above, rats, roaches, students out on dares, and the decaying corpses of various things that had ventured out on hot summer days and become mired in the tar. All we could see were the neutral light brown towers and their thousands and thousands of identical windows reaching into the heavens. Even for a city person, it was awesome. Compared to the dignified architecture of the old brownstones, though, it caused me a nagging sense of embarrassment.
   The Vortex whose coils were twined around those brown-stones threw out two ramps which served as entrance and exit for the Plex parking ramp. These ran into the side of the building at about third-story level. To us they were useless, so we continued around toward the south side.
   Here was actually some green: a strip of grass between the walk and the Parkway. On this side the Plex was faced with darker brown brick and had many picture windows and signs for the businesses of the built-in mall on the first floor. The Main Entrance itself was merely eight revolving doors in a row, and having swished through them we were drowned in conditioned air, Muzak, the smell of Karmel Korn and the idiotic babble of penny-choked indoor fountains. We passed through this as quickly as possible and rode the long escalators ("This must be what a ski lift is like," said Casimir) to the third floor, where a rampart of security booths stretched across our path like a thruway toll station. Several of the glass cages were occupied by ancient guards in blue uniforms, who waved us wearily through the turnstiles as we waved our ID cards at them. Casimir stopped on the other side, frowning.
   "They shouldn't have let me in," he said.
   "Why?" I asked. "Isn't that your ID?"
   "Of course it is," said Casimir Radon, "but the photo is so bad they had no way of telling." He was serious. We surveyed the rounded blue back of the guard. Most of them had been recruited out of Korea or the Big One. The glass cages of the Plex had ruined their bodies. Now they had become totally passive in their outlook; but, by the same token, they had become impossible to faze or surprise.
   We stepped through more glass doors and were in the Main Lobby.
   The Plex's environmental control system was designed so that anyone could spend four years there wearing only a jockstrap and a pair of welding goggles and yet never feel chilly or find the place too dimly lit. Many spent their careers there without noticing this. Casimir Radon took less than a day to notice the pitiless fluorescent light. Acres of light glanced off the Lobby's polished floor like sun off the Antarctic ice, and a wave of pain now rolled toward Casimir from near the broad vinyl information desk and washed over him, draining through a small hole in the center of his skull and pooling coldly behind his eyes. Great patches of yellow blindness appeared in the center of his vision and he coasted to a stop, hands on eyes, mouth open. I knew enough to know it was migraine, so I held his skinny arm and led him, blind, to his room in D Tower. He lay cautiously down on the naked plastic mattress, put a sock over his eyes and thanked me. I drew the blinds, sat there helplessly for a while, then left him to finish his adjustment to the Big U.
   After that he wore a uniform of sorts: old T-shirt, cutoffs or gym shorts, hightop tennis shoes ("to keep the rats off my ankles") and round purple mountain-climbing goggles with leather bellows on the sides to block out peripheral light. He was planning such a costume as I left his room. More painfully, he was beginning to question whether he could live in such a place for even one semester, let alone four. He did not know that the question would be decided for him, and so he felt the same edgy uncertainty that nagged at me.
   Some people, however, were quite at home in the Flex. At about this time, below D Tower in the bottom sublevel, not far from the Computing Center, several of them were crossing paths in a dusty little dead end of a hallway. To begin with, three young men were standing by the only door in the area, taking turns peering into the room beyond. The pen lights from their shirt pockets illuminated a small windowless room containing a desk, a chair and a computer terminal. The men stared wistfully at the latter, and had piled their math and computer textbooks on the floor like sandbags, as though they planned a siege. They had been discussing their tactical alternatives for getting past the door, and had run the gamut from picking the lock to blowing it open with automatic-weapon bursts, but so far none had made any positive moves.
   "If we could remove that window," said one, a mole-faced individual smelling of Brut and sweat and glowing in a light blue iridescent synthetic shirt and hi-gloss dark blue loafers, "we could reach in and unlock it from inside."
   "Some guy tried to get into my grandma's house that way one time," recalled another, a skinny, long-haired, furtive fellow who was having trouble tracking the conversation, "but she took a sixteen-ounce ball-peen hammer and smashed his hand with it. He never came back." He delivered the last sentence like the punchline to a Reader's Digest true anecdote, convulsing his pals with laughter.
   The third, a disturbingly 35-ish looking computer science major with tightly permed blond hair, eventually calmed down enough to ask, "Hey, Gary, Gary! Did she use the ball end or the peen end?" Gary was irked and confused, He had hoped to impress them by specifying the weight of the hammer, but he was stumped by this piece of one-upsmanship; he didn't know which end was which. He radiated embarrassment for several seconds before saying, "Oh, gee, I don't know, I think she probably used both of 'em before she was done with the guy. But that guy never came back."
   Their fun was cut short by a commanding voice. "A sixteen-ounce ball-peen hammer isn't much good against a firearm. If I were a woman living alone I'd carry a point thirty-eight revolver, minimum. Double action. Effective enough for most purposes." The startling newcomer had their surprised attention. He had stopped quite close to them and was surveying the door, and they instinctively stepped out of his way. He was tall, thin and pale, with thin brown Bryicreemed hair and dark red lips. The calculator on his hip was the finest personal computing machine, and on the other hip, from a loop of leather, hung a fencing foil, balanced so that its red plastic tip hung an inch above the floor. It was Fred Fine.
   "You're the guy who runs the Wargames Club, aren't you," asked the blond student.
   "I am Games Marshall, if that's the intent of your question. Administrative and financial authority are distributed among the leadership cadre according to the Constitution."
   "The Wargames Club?" asked Gary, his voice suffused with hope. "What, is there one?"
   "The correct title is the Megaversity Association for Reenactments and Simulations, or MARS," snapped Fred Fine. Still almost breathless, Gary said, "Say. Do you guys ever play 'Tactical Nuclear War in Greenland?'"
   Fred Fine stared just over Gary's head, screwing up his face tremendously and humming. "Is that the earlier version of 'Martians in Godthaab,' "he finally asked, though his tone indicated that he already knew the answer.
   Gary was hopelessly taken aback, and looked around a bit before allowing his gaze to rest on Fred Fine's calculator. "Oh, yeah, I guess. I guess 'Martians in Godthaab' must be new." "No," said Fred Fine clearly, "it came out six months ago." To soften the humiliation he chucked Gary on the shoulder. "But to answer your question. Some of our plebes– our novice wargamers– do enjoy that game. It's interesting in its own way, I suppose, though I've only played it a dozen times. Of course, it's a Simuconflict product, and their games have left a lot to be desired since they lost their Pentagon connections, but there's nothing really wrong with it."
   The trio stared at him. How could he know so much? "Uh, do you guys," ventured the blue one, "ever get into role-playing games? Like Dungeons and Dragons?"
   "Those of us high in the experiential hierarchy find conventional D and D stultifying and repetitive. We prefer to stage live-action role-playing scenarios. But that's not for just anyone." They looked timidly at Fred Fine's fencing foil and wondered if he were on his way to a live-action wargame at this very moment. For an instant, as he stood in the dim recess of the corridor, light flickering through a shattered panel above and playing on his head like distant lightning, his feet spread apart, hand on sword pommel, it seemed to them that they beheld some legendary hero of ancient times, returned from Valhalla to try his steel against modern foes.
   The mood was broken as another man suddenly came around the corner. He brushed silently past Fred Fine and nearly impaled Gary on a key, but Gary moved just in time and the new arrival shoved the key home and shot back the deadbolt. He was tall, with nearly white blond hair, pale blue eyes and a lean but cherubic face, dressed in cutoffs and a white dress shirt. Shouldering through them, he entered the little room.
   Fred Fine reacted with uncharacteristic warmth. "Well, well, well," he said, starting in a high whine and dropping in pitch from there. I had Fred Fine in one of my classes and when in a good mood he really did talk like Colonel Klink; it took some getting used to. "So they haven't caught up with you and your master key yet, eh, Virgil? Very interesting."
   Virgil Gabrielsen turned smoothly while stepping through the doorway, and stared transparently through Fred Fine's head. "No," he said, "but I have plenty of copies anyway. They aren't about to change every lock in the Plex on my account. The only doors this won't open are in the hazardous waste area, the Administration Bloc, Doors 1253 through 1778 and 7899 to 8100, which obviously no one cares about, and Doors 753, 10100 and the high 12,500's, and I'm obviously not going to go ripping off vending-machine receipts, am I?" At this the three friends frowned and looked back and forth. Virgil entered the room and switched on the awesomely powerful battery of overhead fluorescent lights. Everything was somewhat dusty inside.
   "No rat poison on the floor," observed Fred Fine. "Dusty. Still keeping the B-men out, eh?"
   "Yeah," said Virgil, barely aware of them, and began to pull things from his knapsack. "I told them I was doing werewolf experiments in here."
   Fred Fine nodded soberly at this. Meanwhile, the three younger students had invited themselves in and were gathered around the 'terminal, staring raptly into its printing mechanism. "It's just an antique Teletype," said the blue one. He had already said this once, but repeated it now for Fred Fine. "However, I really like these. Real dependable, and lots of old-fashioned class despite an inferior character menu." Fred Fine nodded approvingly. Virgil shouldered through them, sat before the terminal and, without looking up, announced, "I didn't invite any of you in, so you can all leave NOW.' They did not quite understand.
   "Catch my drift? I dislike audiences."
   Fred Fine avoided this by shaking his head, smiling a red smile and chuckling. The others were unmanned and stood still, waiting to be told that Virgil was kidding.
   "Couldn't we just sit in?" one finally asked. "I've just got to XEQ one routine. It's debugged and bad data tested. It's fast, it outputs on batch. I can wait till you're done."
   "Forget it," said Virgil airily, scooting back and nudging him away. "I won't be done for hours. It's all secret Science Shop data. Okay?"
   "But turnover for terminals at CC is two hours to the minus one!"
   "Try it at four in the morning. You know? Four in the morning is a great time at American Megaversity. Everything is quiet, there are no lines even at the laundry, you can do whatever you want without fucking with a mob of freshmen. Put yourselves on second shift and you'll be fine. Okay?"
   They left, sheeshing. Fred Fine stopped in the doorway, still grinning broadly and shaking his head, as though leaving just for the hell of it.
   "You're still the same old guy, Virgil. You still program in raw machine code, still have that master key. Don't know where science at AM would be without you. What a wiz."
   Virgil stared patiently at the wall. "Fred. I told you I'd fix your MCA and I will. Don't you believe me?"
   "Sure I do. Say! That invitation I made you, to join MARS anytime you want, is still open. You'll be a Sergeant right away, and we'll probably commission you after your first night of gaming, from what I know of you."
   "Thanks. I won't forget. Goodbye."

   "Ciao." Fred Fine bowed his thin frame low and strode off. "What a creep," said Virgil, and ferociously snapped the deadbolt as soon as Fred Fine was almost out of earshot. Removing supplies from the desk drawer, he stuffed a towel under the door and taped black paper over the window. By the terminal he set up a small lamp with gel over its mouth, which cast a dim pool of red once he had shut off the room lights. He activated the terminal, and the computer asked him for the number of his account, Instead of typing in an account number, though, Virgil typed: FIAT LUX.
   Later, Virgil and I got to know each other. I had problems with the computer only he could deal with, and after our first contacts he seemed to find me interesting enough to stay in touch, He began to show me parts of his secret world, and eventually allowed me to sit in on one of these computer sessions. Nothing at all made sense until he explained the Worm to me, and the story of Paul Bennett.
   "Paul Bennett was one of these computer geniuses. When he was a sophomore here he waltzed through most of the secret codes and keys the Computing Center uses to protect valuable data. Well, he really had the University by the short hairs then. At any time he could have erased everything in the computer– financial records, scientific data, expensive software, you name it. He could have devastated this university just sitting there at his computer terminal– that's how vulnerable computers are. Eventually the Center found out who he was, and reprimanded him. Bennett was obviously a genius, and he wasn't malicious, so the Center then went ahead and hired him to design better security locks. That happens fairly often– the best lock-designers are people who have a talent for picking locks."
   "They hired him right out of his sophomore year?" I asked. "Why not? He had nothing more to learn. The people who were teaching his classes were the same ones whose security programs he was defeating! What's the point of keeping someone like that in school? Anyway, Bennett did very well at the Center, but he was still a kid with some big problems, and no one got along with him. Finally they fired him.
   "When they fire a major Computing Center employee, they have to be sneaky. If they give him two weeks' notice he might play havoc with the computer during those two weeks, out of spite. So when they fire these people, it happens overnight. They show up at work and all the locks have been changed, and they have to empty out their desks while the senior staff watch them. That's what they did to Paul Bennett, because they knew he was just screwed up enough to frag the System for revenge."
   "So much for his career, then."
   "No. He was immediately hired by a firm in Massachusetts for four times his old salary. And CC was happy, because they'd gotten good work out of him and thought they were safe from reprisals. About a week later, though, the Worm showed up."
   "And that is– ?"
   "Paul Bennett's sabotage program. He put it into the computer before he was fired, you see, and activated it, but every morning when he came to work he entered a secret command that would put it on hold for another twenty-four hours. As soon as he stopped giving the command, the Worm came out of hiding and began to play hell with things."
   "But what good did it do him? It didn't prevent his being fired,"
   "Who the hell knows? I think he put it in to blackmail the CC staff and hold on to his job. That must have been his original plan. But when you make a really beautiful, brilliant program, the temptation to see it work is just overwhelming. He must have been dying to see the Worm in action. So when he was fired, he decided, what the hell, they deserve it, I'll unleash the Worm. That was in the middle of last year. At first it did minor things such as erasing student programs, shutting the System down at odd times, et cetera. Then it began to worm its way deeper and deeper into the Operator– the master program that controls the entire System– and wreak vandalism on a larger scale. The Computing Center personnel fought it for a while, but they were successful for only so long. The Operator is a huge program and you have to know it all at once in order to understand what the Worm is doing to it."
   "Aha," I said, beginning to understand, "they needed someone with a photographic memory. They needed another prodigy, didn't they? So they got you? Is that it?"
   At this Virgil shrugged. "It's true that I am the sort of person they needed," he said quietly. "But don't assume that they 'got' me."
   "Really? You're a free lance?"
   "I help them and they help me. It is a free exchange of services. You needn't know the details."
   I was willing to accept that restriction. Virgil had told me enough so that what he was doing made sense to me. Still, it was very abstract work, consisting mostly of reading long strings of numbers off the terminal and typing new ones in. On the night I sat in, the Worm had eaten all of the alumni records for people living in states beginning with "M." ("M!," said Virgil, "the worst letter it could have picked.") Virgil was puttering around in various files to see if the information had been stored elsewhere. He found about half of Montana hidden between lines of an illegal video game program, retrieved the data, erased the illegal program and caused the salvaged information to be printed out on a string of payroll check forms in a machine in the administrative bloc.
   On this night, the first of the new school year, Virgil was not nobly saving erased data from the clutches of the Worm. He was actually arranging his living situation for the coming year. He had about five choice rooms around the Plex, which he filled with imaginary students in order to keep them vacant– an easy matter on the computer. To support his marijuana and ale habits he extracted a high salary from various sources, sending himself paychecks when necessary. For this he felt neither reluctance nor guilt, because Fred Fine was right: without Virgil, whose official job was to work in the Science Shop, scientific research at the Big U would simply stop. To support himself he took money from research accounts in proportion to the extent they depended on him. This was only fair. An indispensable place like the Science Shop needed a strong leader, someone bold enough to levy appropriate taxes against its users and spend the revenues toward the ends those users desired. Virgil had figured out how to do it, and made himself a niche at the Big U more comfortable than anyone else's.
   Sarah lived in a double room just five floors above me and Ephraim Klein and John Wesley Fenrick, on E12S– E Tower, twelfth floor, south wing. The previous year she had luxuriated in a single, and resolved never to share her private space again; this double made her very angry. In the end, though, she lucked out. Her would-be roommate had only taken the space as a front, to fake out her pay-rents, and was actually living in A Tower with her boyfriend. Thus Sarah did not have to live four feet away from some bopper who would suffer an emotional crisis every week and explore the standard uses of sex and drugs and rock-and-roll in noisy experimental binges on the other side of the room.
   Sarah's problem now was to redecorate what looked like the inside of a water closet. The cinderblock walls were painted chocolate brown and absorbed most light, shedding only the garish parts of the spectrum. The shattered tile floor was gray and felt sticky no matter how hard she scrubbed. On each side of the perfectly symmetrical room, long fluorescent light fixtures were bolted to the walls over the beds, making a harsh light nearby but elsewhere only a dull greenish glow. After some hasty and low-budget efforts at making it decent, Sarah threw herself into other activities and resigned herself to another year of ugliness.
   On Wednesday of the term's second week there was a wing meeting. American Megaversity's recruitment propaganda tried to make it look as though the wings did everything as a jolly group, but this had not been true on any of Sarah's previous wings. This place was different. When she had dragged her duffel bags through the stairwell door on that first afternoon, a trio of well-groomed junior matrons had risen from a lace-covered card table in the lobby, helped her with the luggage, pinned a pink carnation on her sweaty T-shirt and welcomed her to "our wing." Under her pillow she had found a "starter kit" comprising a small teddy bear named Bobo, a white candle, a GOLLYWHATAFACE-brand PERSONAL COLOUR SAMPLER PACQUET, a sack of lemon drops, a red garter, six stick-on nametags with SARA written on them, a questionnaire and a small calligraphied Xeroxed note inviting her to the wing meeting. All had been wrapped in flowery pastel wrapping paper and cutely beribboned.
   Most of it she had snarlingly punted into the nether parts of her closet. The wing meeting, however, was quasi-political, and hence she ought to show up. A quarter of an hour early, she pulled on a peasant blouse over presentable jeans and walked barefoot down the hall to the study lounge by the elevator lobby.
   She was almost the last to arrive. She was also the only one not in a bathrobe, which was so queer that she almost feared she was having one of those LSD flashbacks people always warn you about. Her donut tasted like a donut, though, and all seemed normal otherwise, so it was reality– albeit a strange and distant branch thereof.
   Obviously they had not all been bathing, because their hair was dry and their makeup fresh. There were terry robes, silk robes, Winnie-the-Pooh robes, long plush robes, plain velvety robes, designer robes, kimonos and even a few night-shirts on the cute and skinny. Also, many slippers, too many of them high-heeled. Once she was sure her brain was okay, she edged up to a nearby wingmate and mumbled, "Did I miss something? Everyone's in bathrobes!"
   "Shit, don't ask me!" hissed the woman firmly. "I just took a shower, myself."
   Looking down, Sarah saw that the woman was indeed clean of face and wet of hair. She was shorter than average and compact but not overweight, with pleasant strong features and black-brown hair that fell to her shoulders. Her bathrobe was short, old and plain, with a clothesline for a sash.
   "Oh, sorry," said Sarah. "So you did. Uh, I'm Sarah, and my bathrobe is blue."
   "I know. President of the Student Government."
   Sarah shrugged and tried not to look stuck-up.
   "What's the story, you've never lived on one of these floors?" The other woman seemed surprised.
   "What do you mean, 'one of these floors?'"
   She sighed. "Ah, look. I'm Hyacinth. I'll explain all this later. You want to sit down? It'll be a long meeting." Hyacinth grasped Sarah's belt loop and led her politely to the back row of chairs, where they sat a row behind the next people up. Hyacinth turned sideways in her chair and examined Sarah minutely.
   The Study Lounge was not a pretty place. Designed to be as cheery as a breath mint commercial, it had aged into something not quite so nice. Windows ran along one wall and looked out into the elevator lobby, where the four wings of E12S came together. It was furnished with the standard public-area furniture of the Plex: cubical chairs and cracker-box sofas made of rectangular beams and slabs of foam covered in brilliant scratchy polyester. The carpet was a membrane of compressed fibers, covered with the tats and cigarette-burns and barfstains of years. Overhead, the ubiquitous banks of fluorescent lights cheerfully beamed thousands of watts of pure bluish energy down onto the inhabitants. Someone was always decorating the lounge, and this week the theme was football; the decorations were cardboard cutouts of well-known cartoon characters cavorting with footballs.
   The only other nonrobed person in the place was the RA, Mitzi, who sat bolt upright at the lace-covered card table in front, left hand still as a dead bird In her lap, right hand three inches to the side of her jaw and bent back parallel to the tabletop, fingers curled upward holding a ballpoint pen at a jaunty but not vulgar forty-five-degree angle. She bore a fixed, almost manic smile which as far as Sarah could tell had nothing to do with anything– charm school, perhaps, or strychnine poisoning. Mitzi wore an overly formal dress and a kilogram of jewelry, and when she spoke, though not even her jawbone moved, one mighty earring began to swing violently.
   Among other things, Mitzi welcomed new "members." There were three: another woman, Hyacinth and Sarah, introduced in that order. The first woman explained that she was Sandi and she was into like education and stuff. Then came Hyacinth; she was into apathy. She announced this loudly and they all laughed and complimented Hyacinth on her sense of humor.
   Sarah was introduced last, being famous. "What are you into, Sarah Jane?" asked Mitzi. Sarah surveyed the glistening, fiercely smiling faces turned round to aim at her.
   "I'm into reality," she said. This brought delighted laughter, especially from Hyacinth, who screamed like a sow.
   The meeting then got underway. Hyacinth leaned back, crossed her arms and tilted her head back until she was staring openmouthed at the ceiling. As the meeting went on she combed her hair, bit her nails, played with loose threads from her robe, cleaned her toes and so on. The thing was, Sarah found all of this more interesting than the meeting itself. Sarah looked interested until her face got tired. She had spoken in front of groups enough to know that Mitzi could see them all clearly, and that to be obviously bored would be rude. Sometimes politeness had to give way to sanity, though, and before she knew it she found herself trying to swing the tassels at the ends of her sleeves in opposite directions at the same time. Hyacinth watched this closely and patted her on the back when she succeeded.
   Mainly what they were doing was filling a huge social calendar with parties and similar events. Sarah wanted to announce that she liked to do things by herself or with a few friends, but she saw no diplomatic way of saying so. She did resurface for the discussion of the theme for the Last Night party, the social climax of the semester: Fantasy Island Nite.
   "Wonder how they're going to tell it apart from all the other nights," grumbled Hyacinth. Nearby wingmates turned and smiled, failing to understand but assuming that whatever Hyacinth said must be funny.
   Another phase of the social master plan was to form an official sister/brother relationship with the wing upstairs, known as the Wild and Crazy Guys. This in turn led to the wing naming idea. After all, if E13S had a name for itself, shouldn't E12S have one too? Mari Meegan, darling of the wing, made this point, and "Yeah!"s zephyred up all around.
   Sarah was feeling pretty sour by this point but said nothing. If they wanted a name, fine. Then the ideas started coming out: Love Boat, for example.
   "We could paint our lobby with a picture of the Love Boat like it looks at the start of the show, and we could, you know, do everything, like parties and stuff, with like that kind of a theme. Then on Fantasy Island Nite, we could pretend the Boat was visiting Fantasy Island!"
   This idea went over well and the meeting broke up into small discussions about how to apply this theme to different phases of existence. Finally, though, Sarah spoke up, and they all smiled and listened. "I'm not sure I like that idea. There are plenty of creeps on the floor already, because we're all-female. If we name it Love Boat, everyone will think it's some kind of outcall massage service, and we'll never get a break."
   Several seconds of silence. A few nods were seen, some "yeah"s heard, and Love Boat was dead. More names were suggested, most of them obviously dumb, and then Mari Meegan raised her hand. All quieted as her fingernails fluttered like a burst of redhot flak above the crowd. "I know," she said.
   There was silence save for the sound of Hyacinth's comb rushing through her hair. Mari continued. "We can call ourselves 'Castle in the Air.' "
   The lounge gusted with oohs and aahs.
   "I like that."
   "You're so creative, Mari."
   "We could do a whole Dark Ages theme, you know, castles and knights and shining armor."
   "That's nice! Really nice!"
   "Wait a sec." This came from Hyacinth.
   At this some of the women were clearly exasperated, looking at the ceiling, but most wore expressions of forced tolerance. Hyacinth continued flatly. "Castle in the Air is derogatory. That means it's not-nice. When you talk about a castle in the air, you mean something with no basis in reality. It's like saying someone has her head in the clouds."
   They all continued to stare morosely, as though she hadn't finished. Sarah broke in. "You can call it anything you want. She is just making the point that you're using an unflattering name." Mari was comforted by two friends. The rest of them defended the name, nicely. "I never heard that."
   "I think it sounds nice."
   "Like a Barry Manilow song."
   "Like one of those little Chinese poems."
   "I always thought if your head was in the clouds, that was nice, like you were really happy or something. Besides, castles are a neat theme for parties and stuff– can't you see Mark dressed up like a knight?" Giggles.
   "And this way we can call ourselves the Airheads!" Screams of delight. Hyacinth's objection having been thus obliterated, Castle In the Air was voted In unanimously, with two abstentions, and it was decided that paints and brushes would be bought and the wing would be painted in this theme during the weeks to come. Presently the meeting adjourned.
   "We've got forty minutes until the Candle Passing," observed Mitzi, "and until then we can have a social hour. But not a whole hour"
   The meeting dissolved into chattering fragments. Sarah leaned towards Hyacinth to whisper in her ear, and Hyacinth tensed. They had been whispering to each other in turns for the last half hour, and as both had ticklish ears this had caused much hysterical lip-biting and snorting. Sarah did not really have to whisper now, but it was her turn. "What candle passing?" she asked.
   Hyacinth's attempt to whisper back was met by violent resistance from Sarah, so they laughed and made a truce. "It's kind of complicated. It means something personal happened between someone and her boyfriend, so everyone else has to know about it. Listen. We've got to escape, okay?"
   "Okay."