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

by Neal Stephenson

  “Your strategy was much too subtle for me to follow. I thank you for explaining it. You encourage subversiveness because you think that it will have an effect opposite to what one might naively suppose.”

  “Yes. And that's the whole point of being an Equity Lord, you know—to look after the interests of the society as a whole instead of flogging one's own company, or whatever. At any rate, this brings us to the subject of the advertisement I placed in the ractives section of the Times and our consequent cinephone conversation.”

  “Yes,” Carl Hollywood said, “you are looking for ractors who performed in a project called the Young Lady's Illustrated Primer.”

  “The Primer was my idea. I commissioned it. I paid the racting fees. Of course, owing to the way the media system is organised, I had no way to determine the identity of the ractors to whom I was sending the fees—hence the need for a public advertisement.”

  “Your Grace, I should tell you immediately—and would have told you on the cinephone, had you not insisted that we defer all substantive discussion to a face-to-face—that I myself did not ract in the Primer. A friend of mine did. When I saw the advertisement, I undertook to respond on her behalf.”

  “I understand that ractors are frequently pursued by overly appreciative members of their audience,” said Finkle-McGraw, “and so I suppose I understand why you have chosen to act as intermediary in this case. Let me assure you that my motives are perfectly benign.”

  Carl adopted a wounded look. “Your Grace! I would never have supposed otherwise. I am arrogating this role to myself, not to protect the young lady in question from any supposed malignity on your part, but simply because her current circumstances make establishing contact with her a somewhat troublesome business.”

  “Then pray tell me what you know about the young woman.”

  Carl gave the Equity Lord a brief description of Miranda's relationship with the Primer.

  Finkle-McGraw was keenly interested in how much time Miranda had spent in the Primer each week. “If your estimates are even approximately accurate, this young woman must have singlehandedly done at least nine-tenths of the racting associated with that copy of the Primer.”

  “That copy? Do you mean to say there were others?”

  Finkle-McGraw walked on silently for a few moments, then resumed in a quieter voice. “There were three copies in all. The first one went to my granddaughter—as you will appreciate, I tell you this in confidence. A second went to Fiona, the daughter of the artifex who created it. The third fell into the hands of Nell, a little thete girl.

  “To make a long story short, the three girls have turned out very differently. Elizabeth is rebellious and high-spirited and lost interest in the Primer several years ago. Fiona is bright but depressed, a classic manic-depressive artist. Nell, on the other hand, is a most promising young lady.

  “I prepared an analysis of the girls' usage habits, which were largely obscured by the inherent secrecy of the media system, but which can be inferred from the bills we paid to hire the ractors. It became clear that, in the case of Elizabeth, the racting was done by hundreds of different performers. In Fiona's case, the bills were strikingly lower because much of the racting was done by someone who did not charge money for his or her services—probably her father. But that's a different story. In Nell's case, virtually all of the racting was done by the same person.”

  “It sounds,” Carl said, “as if my friend established a relationship with Nell's copy—”

  “And by extension, with Nell,” said Lord Finkle-McGraw.

  Carl said, “May I inquire as to why you wish to contact the ractor?”

  “Because she is a central part of what is going on here,” said Lord Finkle-McGraw, “which I did not expect. It was not a part of the original plan that the ractor would be important.”

  “She did it,” Carl Hollywood said, “by sacrificing her career and much of her life. It is important for you to understand, Your Grace, that she was not merely Nell's tutor. She became Nell's mother.”

  These words seemed to strike Lord Finkle-McGraw quite forcefully. His stride faltered, and he ambled along the riverbank for some time, lost in thought.

  “You gave me to believe, several minutes ago, that establishing contact with the ractor in question would not be a trivial process,” he said finally, in quieter voice. “Is she no longer associated with your troupe?”

  “She took a leave of absence several years ago in order to concentrate on Nell and the Primer.”

  “I see,” said the Equity Lord, leaning into the words a little bit and turning it into an exclamation. He was getting excited. “Mr. Hollywood, I hope you will not be offended by my indelicacy in inquiring as to whether this has been a paid leave of absence.”

  “Had it been necessary, I would have underwritten it. Instead there is another backer.”

  “Another backer,” repeated Finkle-McGraw. He was obviously fascinated, and slightly alarmed, by the use of financial jargon in this context.

  “The transaction was fairly simple, as I suppose all transactions are au fond,” said Carl Hollywood. “Miranda wanted to locate Nell. Conventional thinking dictates that this is impossible. There are, however, some unconventional thinkers who would maintain that it can be done through unconscious, nonrational processes. There is a tribe called the Drummers who normally live underwater—”

  “I am familiar with them,” said Lord Finkle-McGraw.

  “Miranda joined the Drummers four years ago,” Carl said. “She had entered into a partnership. The two other partners were a gentleman of my acquaintance, also in the theatrical business, and a financial backer.”

  “What did the backer hope to gain from it?”

  “A leased line to the collective unconscious,” said Carl Hollywood. “He thought it would be to the entertainment industry what the philosopher's stone was to alchemy.”

  “And the results?”

  “We have all been waiting to hear from Miranda.”

  “You have heard nothing at all?”

  “Only in my dreams,” Carl Hollywood said.

  Nell's passage through Pudong; she happens upon

  the offices of Madame Ping;

  interview with the same.

  Shanghai proper could be glimpsed only through vertical apertures between the high buildings of the Pudong Economic Zone as Nell skated westward. Downtown Pudong erupted from the flat paddy-land on the east bank of the Huang Pu. Almost all of the skyscrapers made use of mediatronic building materials. Some bore the streamlined characters of the Japanese writing system, rendered in sophisticated color schemes, but most of them were written in the denser high-resolution characters used by the Chinese, and these tended to be stroked out in fiery red, or in black on a background of that color.

  The Anglo-Americans had their Manhattan, the Japanese had Tokyo. Hong Kong was a nice piece of work, but it was essentially Western. When the Overseas Chinese came back to the homeland to build their monument to enterprise, they had done it here, and they had done it bigger and brighter, and unquestionably redder, than any of those other cities. The nanotechnological trick of making sturdy structures that were lighter than air had come along just at the right time, as all of the last paddies were being replaced by immense concrete foundations, and a canopy of new construction had bloomed above the first-generation undergrowth of seventy- and eighty-story buildings. This new architecture was naturally large and ellipsoidal, typically consisting of a huge neon-rimmed ball impaled on a spike, so Pudong was bigger and denser a thousand feet above the ground than it was at street level.

  Seen from the apex of the big arch in the Causeway through several miles of bad air, the view was curiously flattened and faded, as if the whole scene had been woven into a fabulously complex brocade that had been allowed to gather dust for several decades and then been hung in front of Nell, about ten feet away. The sun had gone down not long before and the sky was still a dim orange fading up into purple, divided into irregular
segments by half a dozen pillars of smoke spurting straight up out of the horizon and toward the dark polluted vault of the heavens, many miles off to the west, somewhere out in the silk and tea districts between Shanghai and Suzhou.

  As she power-skated down the western slope of the arch and crossed the coastline of China, the thunderhead of neon reached above her head, spread out to embrace her, developed into three dimensions—and she was still several miles away from it. The coastal neighborhoods consisted of block after block of reinforced-concrete apartment buildings, four to five stories high, looking older than the Great Wall though their real age could not have exceeded a few decades, and decorated on the ends facing the street with large cartoonish billboards, some mediatronic, most just painted on. For the first kilometer or so, most of these were targeted at businessmen just coming in from New Chusan, and in particular from the New Atlantis Clave. Glancing at these billboards as she went by them, Nell concluded that visitors from New Atlantis played an important role in supporting casinos and bordellos, both the old-fashioned variety and the newer scripted-fantasy emporia, where you could be the star in a little play you wrote yourself. Nell slowed down to examine several of these, memorizing the addresses of ones with especially new or well-executed signs.

  She had no clear plan in mind yet. All she knew was that she had to keep moving purposefully. Then the young men squatting on the curbs talking into their cellphones would keep eyeing her but leave her alone. The moment she stopped or looked the tiniest bit uncertain, they would descend.

  The dense wet air along the Huang Pu was supporting millions of tons of air buoys, and Nell felt every kilogram of their weight pressing upon her ribs and shoulders as she skated up and down the main waterfront thoroughfare, trying to maintain her momentum and her false sense of purposefulness. This was the Coastal Republic, which appeared to have no fixed principles other than that money talked and that it was a good thing to get rich. Every tribe in the world seemed to have its own skyscraper here. Some, like New Atlantis, were not actively recruiting and simply used the size and magnificence of their buildings as a monument to themselves. Others, like the Boers, the Parsis, the Jews, went for the understated approach, and in Pudong anything understated was more or less invisible. Still others—the Mormons, the First Distributed Republic, and the Chinese Coastal Republic itself—used every square inch of their mediatronic walls to proselytize.

  The only phyle that didn't seem to appreciate the ecumenical spirit of the place was the Celestial Kingdom itself. Nell stumbled across their territory, half a square block surrounded with a stucco-sheathed masonry wall, circular gates here and there, and an old three-story structure inside, done in high Ming style with eaves that curved way up at the corners and sculpted dragons along the ridgeline of the roof. The place was so tiny compared to the rest of Pudong that it looked as if you might trip over it. The gates were guarded by men in armor, presumably backed up by other, less obvious defensive systems.

  Nell was fairly certain that she was being followed, unobtrusively, by at least three young men who had locked on to her during her initial passage in from the coast, and who were waiting to find out whether she really had somewhere to go or was just faking it. She had already made her way from one end of the waterfront to the other, pretending to be a tourist who just wanted to take in a view of the Bund across the river. She was now heading back into the heart of downtown Pudong, where she had better look as if she were doing something.

  Passing by the grand entrance to one of the skyscrapers—a Coastal Republic edifice, not barbarian turf—she recognized its mediaglyphic logo from one of the signs she had seen on the way into town.

  Nell could at least fill out an application without committing herself. It would allow her to kill an hour in relatively safe and clean surroundings. The important thing, as Dojo had taught her long ago in a different context, was not to stop; without movement she could do nothing.

  Alas, Madame Ping's office suite was closed. A few lights were on in the back, but the doors were locked and no receptionist was on duty. Nell did not know whether to be amused or annoyed; whoever heard of a brothel that closed down after dark? But then these were only the administrative offices.

  She loitered in the lobby for a few minutes, then caught a down elevator. Just as the doors were closing, someone jumped into the lobby and slammed the button, opening them back up again. A young Chinese man with a small, slender body, large head, neatly dressed, carrying some papers. “Pardon me,” he said. “Did you require something?”

  “I'm here to apply for a job,” Nell said.

  The man's eyes traveled up and down her body in a coolly professional fashion, almost completely devoid of prurience, starting and stopping on her face. “As a performer,” he said. The intonation was somewhere between a question and a declaration.

  “As a scriptwriter,” she said.

  Unexpectedly, he broke into a grin.

  “I have qualifications that I will explain in detail.”

  “We have writers. We contract for them on the network.”

  “I'm surprised. How can a contract writer in Minnesota possibly provide your clients with the personalized service they require?”

  “You could almost certainly get a job as a performer,” said the young man. “You would start tonight. Good pay.”

  “Just by looking at the billboards on the way in, I could see that your customers aren't paying for bodies. They are paying for ideas. That's your value added, right?”

  “Pardon me?” said the young man, grinning again.

  “Your value added. The reason you can charge more than a whorehouse, pardon my language, is that you provide a scripted fantasy scenario tailored to the client's requirements. I can do that for you,” Nell said. “I know these people, and I can make you a lot of money.”

  “You know what people?”

  “The Vickys. I know them inside and out,” Nell said.

  “Please come inside,” said the young man, gesturing toward the diamondoid door with MADAME PING'S written on it in red letters. “Would you care for tea?”

  “There are only two industries. This has always been true,” said Madame Ping, enfolding a lovely porcelain teacup in her withered fingers, the two-inch fingernails interleaving neatly like the pinions of a raptor folding its wings after a long hard day of cruising the thermals. “There is the industry of things, and the industry of entertainment. The industry of things comes first. It keeps us alive. But making things is easy now that we have the Feed. This is not a very interesting business anymore.

  “After people have the things they need to live, everything else is entertainment. Everything. This is Madame Ping's business.”

  Madame Ping had an office on the hundred-and-eleventh floor with a nice unobstructed view across the Huang Pu and into downtown Shanghai. When it wasn't foggy, she could even see the facade of her theatre, which was on a side street a couple of blocks in from the Bund, its mediatronic marquee glowing patchily through the dun limbs of an old sycamore tree. She had a telescope mounted in one of her windows, fixed upon the theatre's entrance, and noting Nell's curiosity, she encouraged her to look through it.

  Nell had never looked through a real telescope before. It had a tendency to jiggle and go out of focus, it didn't zoom, and panning was tricky. But for all that, the image quality was a lot better than photographic, and she quickly forgot herself and began sweeping it back and forth across the city. She checked out the little Celestial Kingdom Clave in the heart of the old city, where a couple of Mandarins stood on a zigzag bridge across a pond, contemplating a swarm of golden carp, wispy silver beards trailing down over the colorful silk of their lapels, blue sapphire buttons on their caps flashing as they nodded their heads. She looked into a high-rise building farther inland, apparently a foreign concession of some type, where some Euros were holding a cocktail party, some venturing onto the balcony with glasses of wine and doing some eavesdropping of their own. Finally she leveled the 'scope t
oward the horizon, out past the vast dangerous triad-ridden suburbs, where millions of Shanghai's poor had been forcibly banished to make way for high-rises. Beyond that was real agricultural land, a fractal network of canals and creeks glimmering like a golden net as they reflected the lambency of the sunset, and beyond that, as always, a few scattered pillars of smoke in the ultimate distance, where the Fists of Righteous Harmony were burning the foreign devils' Feed lines.

  “You are a curious girl,” Madame Ping said. “That is natural. But you must never let any other person—especially a client—see your curiosity. Never seek information. Sit quietly and let them bring it to you. What they conceal tells you more than what they reveal. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, madam,” Nell said, turning toward her interlocutor with a little curtsy. Rather than trying to do Chinese etiquette and making a hash of it, she was taking the Victorian route, which worked just as well. For purposes of this interview, Henry (the young man who had offered her tea) had advanced her a few hard ucus, which she had used to compile a reasonably decent full-length dress, hat, gloves, and reticule. She had gone in nervous and realized within a few minutes that the decision to hire her had already been made, somehow, and that this little get-together was actually more along the lines of an orientation session.

  “Why is the Victorian market important to us?” Madame Ping asked, and fixed Nell with an incisive glare.

  “Because New Atlantis is one of the three first-tier phyles.”

  “Not correct. The wealth of New Atlantis is great, yes. But its population is just a few percent. The successful New Atlantis man is busy and has just a bit of time for scripted fantasies. He has much money, you understand, but little opportunity to spend it. No, this market is important because everyone else—the men of all other phyles, including many of Nippon—want to be like Victorian gentlemen. Look at the Ashantis—the Jews—the Coastal Republic. Do they wear traditional costume? Sometimes. Usually though, they wear a suit on the Victorian pattern. They carry an umbrella from Old Bond Street. They have a book of Sherlock Holmes stories. They play in Victorian ractives, and when they have to spend their natural urges, they come to me, and I provide them with a scripted fantasy that was originally requested by some gentleman who came sneaking across the Causeway from New Atlantis.” Somewhat uncharacteristically, Madame Ping turned two of her claws into walking legs and made them scurry across the tabletop, like a furtive Vicky gent trying to slip into Shanghai without being caught on a monitor. Recognizing her cue, Nell covered her mouth with one gloved hand and tittered.