The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer

by Neal Stephenson

  Miranda stayed onstage for an extra hour and a half, playing a role in a samurai ractive fairly popular in Japan, in which she was a platinum blond missionary's daughter abducted from Nagasaki by ronin. All she had to do was squeal a lot and eventually be rescued by a good samurai. It was a pity she didn't speak Nipponese and (beyond that) wasn't familiar with the theatrical style of that nation, because supposedly they were doing some radical and interesting things with karamaku—“empty screen” or “empty act.” Eight years ago, she would have taken the one-hour airship ride to Nippon and learned the language. Four years ago, she at least would have been disgusted with herself for playing this stupid role. But tonight she spoke her lines on cue, squealed and wriggled at the right times, and took her money, along with a hefty tip and the inevitable mash note from the payer—a middle-management type in Osaka who wanted to get to know her better. Of course, the same technology that made it impossible for Miranda to find Nell, made it impossible for this creep to find Miranda.

  An urgent job offer flashed over her screen just as she was putting her stuff together. She checked the Enquiry screen; the job didn't pay that much, but it was of very short duration. So she accepted it. She wondered who was sending her urgent job offers; six years ago it had happened frequently, but since she'd gone into her habit of working the evening shift she had, in general, become just another interchangeable Western bimbo with an unpronounceable name.

  It looked like some kind of weird bohemian art piece, some ractors'-workshop project from her distant past: a surreal landscape of abstract colored geometric forms with faces occasionally rising out of flat surfaces to speak lines. The faces were texture-mapped, as if wearing elaborately painted makeup, or were sculpted to the texture of orange peels, alligator hide, or durian fruit.

  “We miss her,” said one of the faces, the voice a little familiar, but disped into a weird ghostly echoing moan.

  “Where is she?” said another face, rather familiar in its shape.

  “Why has she abandoned us?” said a third face, and even through the texture-mapping and the voice disping, Miranda recognized Carl Hollywood.

  “If only she would come to our party!” cried another one, whom Miranda recognized as a member of the Parnasse Company named Christine something-or-other.

  The prompter gave her a line: Sorry, guys, but I'm working late again tonight.

  “Okay, okay,” Miranda said, “I'm going to ad lib. Where are you?”

  “The cast party, dummy!” said Carl. “There's a cab waiting for you outside—we sprung for a half-laner!”

  Miranda pulled out of the ractive, finished tidying up the body stage, and left it open so that some other member of the company could come in a few hours later and work the gold shift. She ran down the helical gauntlet of plaster cherubs, muses, and Trojans, across the lobby where a couple of bleary-eyed apprentice ractors were cleaning up the debris from this evening's live performance, and out the front doors. There in the street, illuminated by the queasy pink-and-purple neon of the marquee, was a half-lane cab with its lights on.

  She was dully surprised when the driver headed toward the Bund, not toward the midrise districts in Pudong, where tribeless, lower-income Westerners typically had their flats. Cast parties usually happened in someone's living room.

  Then she reminded herself that the Parnasse was a successful theatre company nowadays, that they had a whole building somewhere full of developers coming up with new ractives, that the current production of Macbeth had cost a lot of money. Carl had flown to Tokyo and Shenzhen and San Francisco seeking investors and had not come back empty-handed. The first month of performances was sold out.

  But tonight, there had been a lot of empty seats in the house, because most of the opening-night crowd was non-Chinese, and non-Chinese were nervous about going out on the streets because of rumors about the Fists of Righteous Harmony.

  Miranda was nervous too, though she wouldn't admit it. The taxi turned a corner, and its headlights swept across a knot of young Chinese men gathered in a doorway, and as one of them lifted a cigarette to his mouth, she caught a glimpse of a scarlet ribbon knotted around his wrist. Her chest clenched up, her heart fluttered, and she had to swallow hard a few times. But the young men could not see into the silvered windows of the cab. They did not converge on her, brandishing weapons and crying “Sha! Sha!”

  The Cathay Hotel stood in the middle of the Bund, at the intersection with Nanjing Road, the Rodeo Drive of the Far East. As far as Miranda could see—all the way to Nanjing, maybe—it was lined with Western and Nipponese boutiques and department stores, and the airspace above the street was besprent with almond-size aerostats, each with its own cine camera and pattern-recognition ware to watch for suspicious-looking congregations of young men who might be Fist cells.

  Like all of the other big Western buildings on the waterfront, the Cathay was outlined in white light, which was probably a good thing because otherwise it wouldn't have looked like much. The exterior was bleak and dingy in the daytime.

  She played a little game of chicken with the doorman. She strode toward the entrance, confident that he'd haul the door open for her, but he stood there with his hands clasped behind his back, staring back at her sullenly. Finally he gave way and hauled the door open, though she had to break her stride so as not to smash into it.

  George Bernard Shaw had stayed here; Noel Coward had written a play here. The lobby was high and narrow, Beaux Arts marble, glorious ironwork chandeliers, white light from the Bund buildings filtering in through stained-glass arches. An ancient jazz band was playing in the bar, slap bass over trashcan drums. Miranda stood on tiptoe in the entrance, looking for the party, and saw nothing except middle-aged Caucasian airship tourists slow-dancing and the usual lineup of sharp young Chinese men along the bar, hoping she'd come in.

  Eventually she found her way up to the eighth floor, where all the fancy restaurants were. The big banquet room had been rented out by some kind of garishly wealthy organization and was full of men wearing intimidatingly sophisticated suits, women wearing even more intimidating dresses, and the odd sprinkling of Victorians wearing far more conservative—but still dapper and expensive—stuff. The music was fairly restrained, just one tuxedoed Chinese man playing jazz on a grand piano, but on a stage at one end of the room, a larger band was setting up its equipment.

  She was just cringing away, wondering in what back room the scruffy actors' bash might be found, when she heard someone calling her name from inside.

  Carl Hollywood was approaching, striding across the middle of the banquet hall like he owned the place, resplendent in hand-tooled cowboy boots made of many supple and exotic bird and reptile skins, wearing a vast raiment, sort of a cross between a cape and a Western duster, that nearly brushed the floor, and that made him look seven feet tall rather than a mere six and a half. His long blond hair was brushed back away from his forehead, his King Tut beard was sharp and straight as a hoe. He was gorgeous and he knew it, and his blue eyes were piercing right through Miranda, holding her there in front of the open elevator doors, through which she'd almost escaped.

  He gave her a big hug and whirled her around. She shrank against him, shielded from the crowd in the banquet hall by his enveloping cloak. “I look like shit,” she said. “Why didn't you tell me it was going to be this kind of a party?”

  “Why didn't you know?” Carl said. As a director, one of his talents was to ask the most difficult imaginable questions.

  “I would have worn something different. I look like—”

  “You look like a young bohemian artiste,” Carl said, stepping back to examine her typically form-fitting black bodysuit, “who doesn't give a shit about pretentious clothes, who makes everyone else in the room feel overdressed, and who can get away with it because she's got that special something.”

  “You silver-tongued dog,” she said, “you know that's bullshit.”

  “A few years ago you would have sailed into that room with
that lovely chin of yours held up like a battering ram, and everyone would have stepped back to look at you. Why not now?”

  “I don't know,” Miranda said. “I think with this Nell thing, I've incurred all the disadvantages of parenthood without actually getting to have a child.”

  Carl relaxed and softened, and Miranda knew she'd spoken the words he was looking for. “C'mere,” he said. “I want you to meet someone.”

  “If you're going to try to fix me up with some wealthy son of a bitch—”

  “Wouldn't dream of it.”

  “I'm not going to become a housewife who acts in her spare time.”

  “I realize that,” Carl said. “Now calm yourself for a minute.”

  Miranda was forcibly ignoring the fact that they were walking through the middle of the room now. Carl Hollywood was drawing all of the attention, which suited her. She exchanged smiles with a couple of ractors who had appeared in the interactive invitation that had summoned her here; both of them were having what looked like very enjoyable conversations with fine-looking people, probably investors.

  “Who are you taking me to meet?”

  “A guy named Beck. An old acquaintance of mine.”

  “But not a friend?”

  Carl adopted an uncomfortable grin and shrugged. “We've been friends sometimes. We've also been collaborators. Business partners. This is how life works, Miranda: After a while, you build up a network of people. You pass them bits of data they might be interested in and vice versa. To me, he's one of those guys.”

  “I can't help wondering why you want me to meet him.”

  “I believe,” Carl said very quietly, but using some actor's trick so that she could hear every word, “that this gentleman can help you find Nell. And that you can help him find something he wants.”

  And he stepped aside with a swirl of cloak, pulling out a chair for her. They were in the corner of the banquet hall. Sitting on the opposite side of the table, his back to a large marble-silled window, the illuminated Bund and the mediatronic cacophony of Pudong spilling bloody light across the glossy shoulder-pads of his suit, was a young African man in dreadlocks, wearing dark glasses with minuscule circular lenses held in some kind of ostentatiously complex metallic space grid. Sitting next to him, but hardly noticed by Miranda, was a Nipponese businessman wearing a dark formal kimono and smoking what smelled like an old-fashioned, fully carcinogenic cigar.

  “Miranda, this is Mr. Beck and Mr. Oda, both privateers. Gentlemen, Ms. Miranda Redpath.”

  Both men nodded in a pathetic vestige of a bow, but neither made a move to shake hands, which was just as well—nowadays some amazing things could be transferred through skin-to-skin contact. Miranda didn't even nod back to them; she just sat down and let Carl scoot her in. She didn't like people who described themselves as privateers. It was just a pretentious word for a thete—someone who didn't have a tribe.

  Either that, or they really did belong to tribes—from the looks of them, probably some weird synthetic phyle she'd never heard of—and, for some reason, were pretending not to.

  Carl said, “I have explained to the gentlemen, without getting into any details, that you would like to do the impossible. Can I get you something to drink, Miranda?”

  After Carl Hollywood left, there was a rather long silence during which Mr. Beck presumably stared at Miranda, though she could not tell because of the dark glasses. Mr. Oda's primary function appeared to be that of nervous spectator, as if he had wagered half of his net worth on whether Miranda or Mr. Beck would speak first.

  A stratagem occurred to Mr. Oda. He pointed in the direction of the bandstand and nodded significantly. “You like this band?”

  Miranda looked over at the band, half a dozen men and women in an assortment of races. Mr. Oda's question was difficult to answer because they had not yet made any music. She looked back at Mr. Oda, who pointed significantly at himself.

  “Oh. You're the backer?” Miranda said.

  Mr. Oda withdrew a small glittering object from his pocket and slid it across the table toward Miranda. It was a cloisonné pin shaped like a dragonfly. She had noticed similar ones adorning several partygoers. She picked it up cautiously. Mr. Oda tapped himself on the lapel and nodded, encouraging her to put it on.

  She left it sitting there on the table for the time being.

  “I'm not seeing anything,” Mr. Beck finally said, apparently for Mr. Oda's benefit. “To a first approximation, she is clean.” Miranda realized that Mr. Beck had been checking her out using some kind of display in his phenomenoscopic glasses.

  Miranda was still trying to work out some kind of unpleasant response when Mr. Oda leaned forward into his own cloud of cigar smoke. “It is our understanding,” he said, “that you wish to make a connection. Your wish is very strong.”

  Privateers. The word also implied that these gentlemen, at least in their own minds, had some kind of an angle, some way of making money off of their own lack of tribal affiliation.

  “I've been told that such things are impossible.”

  “It's more correct to speak in probabilistic terms,” said Mr. Beck. His accent was more Oxford than anything else, with a Jamaican lilt, and a crispness that owed something to India.

  “Astronomically improbable, then,” Miranda said.

  “There you go,” said Mr. Beck.

  Now, somehow, the ball had found its way into Miranda's court. “If you guys think you've found a way to beat probability, why don't you go into the Vegas ractives and make a fortune?”

  Misters Beck and Oda were actually more amused by that crack than she had expected them to be. They were capable of irony. That was one good sign in the almost overwhelming barrage of negative signals she'd been getting from them so far.

  The band started up, playing dance music with a good beat. The lights came down, and the party began to glitter as light flashed from the dragonfly pins.

  “It wouldn't work,” Mr. Beck said, “because Vegas is a game of pure numbers with no human meaning to it. The mind doesn't interface to pure numbers.”

  “But probability is probability,” Miranda said.

  “What if you have a dream one night that your sister is in a crash, and you contact her the next day and learn that she broke up with her boyfriend?”

  “It could be a coincidence.”

  “Yes. But not a very probable one. You see, maybe it's possible to beat probability, when the heart as well as the mind is involved.”

  Miranda supposed that neither Mr. Beck nor Mr. Oda understood the essential cruelty of what they were saying. It was much better not to have any hope at all. “Are you guys involved in some kind of religious thing?” she said.

  Misters Beck and Oda looked at each other significantly. Mr. Oda went into some peculiar routine of tooth-sucking and throat-clearing that would probably convey a torrent of information to another Nipponese person but meant nothing to Miranda, other than giving her a general hint that the situation was rather complicated. Mr. Beck produced an antique silver snuffbox, or a replica of one, took out a pinch of nanosite dust, and hoovered it up into one of his great circular nostrils, then nervously scratched the underside of his nose. He slid his glasses way down, exposing his big brown eyes, and stared distractedly over Miranda's shoulder into the thick of the party, watching the band and the dancers' reaction to it. He was wearing a dragonfly pin, which had begun to glow and to flash gorgeous colored lights, like a fleet of police cars and firetrucks gathered round a burning house.

  The band segued into a peculiar, tuneless, beatless miasma of noise, spawning lazy convection currents in the crowd.

  “How do you guys know Carl?” Miranda said, hoping to break the ice a bit.

  Mr. Oda shook his head apologetically. “I have not had the pleasure of making his acquaintance until recently.”

  “Used to do thyuh-tuh with him in London.”

  “You're a ractor?”

  Mr. Beck snorted ironically. A variegated silk hankie flouri
shed in his hand, and he blew his nose quickly and cleanly like a practiced snuff-taker. “I am a technical boy,” he said.

  “You program ractives?”

  “That is a subset of my activities.”

  “You do lights and sets? Or digital stuff? Or nanotech?”

  “Invidious distinctions do not interest me. I am interested in one thing,” said Mr. Beck, holding up his index finger, topped with a very large but perfectly manicured claw of a fingernail, “and that is use of tech to convey meaning.”

  “That covers a lot of areas nowadays.”

  “Yes, but it shouldn't. That is to say that the distinctions between those areas are bogus.”

  “What's wrong with just programming ractives?”

  “Nothing at all,” said Mr. Beck, “just as nothing is wrong with traditional live theatre, or for that matter, sitting round a campfire telling stories, like I used to enjoy on the beach when I was a lad. But as long as there are new ways to be found, it is my job, as a technical boy, to find them. Your art, lady, is racting. Searching for the new tech is mine.”

  The noise coming from the band had begun to pulse irregularly. As they talked, the pulses gathered themselves into beats and became steadier. Miranda turned around to look at the people on the dance floor. They were all standing around with faraway looks on their faces, concentrating on something. Their dragonfly pins were flashing wildly now, joining in a coherent pulse of pure white on each beat. Miranda realized that the pins were somehow patched into the wearers' nervous systems and that they were talking to each other, creating the music collectively. A guitarist began to weave an improvised melodic line through the gradually coalescing pattern of sound, and the sound condensed around it as all of the dancers heard the tune. They had a feedback loop going. A young woman began to chant out some kind of tuneless rap that sounded improvised. As she went on, she broke into melody. The music was still weird and formless, but it was beginning to approach something you might hear on a professional recording.

  Miranda turned back to face Mr. Beck. “You think you've invented a new way to convey meaning with technology—”