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 Road motif, 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—I 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-con
scious 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 ti.”
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.