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

by Neal Stephenson

  “That's not true, Father! You're ever so much more than that. You know so many stories—you told me so many, when you were gone, remember?”

  “I suppose so,” he allowed, strangely diffident.

  “And I read it every night. And though the stories were about faeries and pirates and djinns and such, I could always sense that you were behind them. Like the puppeteer pulling the strings and imbuing them with voices and personalities. So I think you're more than an engineer. It's just that you need a magic book to bring it out.”

  “Well . . . that's a point I had not considered,” her father said, his voice suddenly emotional. She fought the temptation to peer over the edge of the bed and look at his face, which would have embarrassed him. Instead she curled up in her bed and closed her eyes.

  “Whatever you may think of me, Fiona—and I must say I am pleasantly surprised that you think of me so favourably—to those who despatched me on this errand, I am an engineer. Without being arrogant, I might add that I have advanced rapidly in that field and attained a position of not inconsiderable responsibility. As this is the only characteristic that distinguishes me from other men, it can be the only reason I was chosen to find the Alchemist. From this I infer that the Alchemist is himself a nanotechnological researcher of some sophistication, and that he is thought to be developing a product that is of interest to more than one of the Powers.”

  “Are you talking about the Seed, Father?”

  He was silent for a few moments. When he spoke again, his voice was high and tight. “The Seed. How did you know about the Seed?”

  “You told me about it, Father. You told me it was a dangerous thing, and that Protocol Enforcement mustn't allow it to be created. And besides …”

  “Besides what?”

  She was on the verge of reminding him that her dreams had been filled with seeds for the last several years, and that every story she had seen in her Primer had been replete with them: seeds that grew up into castles; dragon's teeth that grew up into soldiers; seeds that sprouted into giant beanstalks leading to alternate universes in the clouds; and seeds, given to hospitable, barren couples by itinerant crones, that grew up into plants with bulging pods that contained happy, kicking babies.

  But she sensed that if she mentioned this directly, he would slam the steel door in her face—a door that was tantalizingly cracked open at the moment.

  “Why do you think that Seeds are so interesting?” she essayed.

  “They are interesting inasmuch as a beaker of nitroglycerin is interesting,” he said. “They are subversive technology. You are not to speak of Seeds again, Fiona—CryptNet agents could be anywhere, listening to our conversation.”

  Fiona sighed. When her father spoke freely, she could sense the man who had told her the stories. When certain subjects were broached, he drew down his veil and became just another Victorian gentleman. It was irksome. But she could sense how the same characteristic, in a man who was not her father, could be provocative. It was such an obvious weakness that neither she nor any woman could resist the temptation to exploit it—a mischievous and hence tantalizing notion that was to occupy much of Fiona's thinking for the next few days, as they encountered other members of their tribe in London.

  After a simple dinner of beer and pasties in a pub on the fringes of the City, they rode south across the Tower Bridge, pierced a shallow layer of posh development along the right bank of the river, and entered into Southwark. As in other Atlantan districts of London, Feed lines had been worked into the sinews of the place, coursing through utility tunnels, clinging to the clammy undersides of bridges, and sneaking into buildings through small holes bored in the foundations. The tiny old houses and flats of this once impoverished quarter had mostly been refurbished into toeholds for young Atlantans from all around the Anglosphere, poor in equity but rich in expectations, who had come to the great city to incubate their careers. The businesses on the ground floors tended to be pubs, coffeehouses, and music halls. As father and daughter worked their way east, generally paralleling the river, the lustre that was so evident near the approaches to the bridge began to wear thin in places, and the ancient character of the neighborhood began to assert itself, as the bones of the knuckles reveal their shape beneath the stretched skin of a fist. Wide gaps developed between the waterfront developments, allowing them to look across the river into a district whose blanket of evening fog was already stained with the carcinogenic candy-colored hues of big mediatrons.

  Fiona Hackworth noticed a glow in the air, which resolved into a constellation when she blinked and focused. A pinprick of green light, an infinitesimal chip of emerald, touched the surface of her eye, expanding into a cloud of light. She blinked twice, and it was gone. Sooner or later it and many others would make their way to the corners of her eyes, giving her a grotesque appearance. She drew a handkerchief from her sleeve and wiped her eyes. The presence of so many lidar-emitting mites prompted her to realize that they had been infiltrating a great expanse of fog for some minutes without really being aware of it; moisture from the river was condensing around the microscopic guardians of the border. Colored light flashed vaguely across the screen of fog before them, silhouetting a stone column planted in the center of the road: wings of a gryphon, horn of a unicorn, crisp and black against a lurid cosmos. A constable stood beside the pediment, symbolically guarding the bar. He nodded to the Hackworths and mumbled something gruff but polite through his chinstrap as father and daughter rode out of New Atlantis and into a gaudy clave full of loutish thetes scrumming and chanting before the entrances of pubs. Fiona caught sight of an old Union Jack, then did a double-take and realized that the limbs of the St. Andrew's Cross had been enhanced with stars, like the Confederate Battle Flag. She gave her chevaline a nudge and pulled up nearly abreast with her father.

  Then the city became darker and quieter, though no less crowded, and for a few blocks they saw only dark-haired men with mustaches and women who were nothing more than columns of black fabric. Then Fiona smelled anise and garlic, and they passed into Vietnamese territory for a short time. She would have enjoyed stopping at one of the sidewalk café for a bowl of pho, but her father rode on, pursuing the tide that was ebbing down the Thames, and in a few more minutes they had come once again to the bank. It was lined with ancient masonry warehouses—a category of structure now so obsolete as to defy explanation—which had been converted into offices.

  A pier rode on the surface of the river, riding up and down on the tide, linked to the rim of the granite embankment by a hinged gangway. A shaggy black vessel was tied up to the pier, but it was completely unlit, visible only by its black shadow against the charcoal-gray water. After the chevalines had planted themselves and the Hackworths had dismounted, they were able to hear low voices coming from below.

  John Hackworth withdrew some tickets from his breast pocket and asked them to illuminate themselves; but they were printed on old-fashioned paper that did not contain its own energy source, and so he finally had to use the microtorch dangling from his watch chain. Apparently satisfied that they had arrived at the right place, he offered Fiona his arm and escorted her down the gangway to the pier. A tiny flickering light bobbed toward them and resolved into an Afro-Caribbean man, wearing rimless glasses and carrying an antique hurricane lamp. Fiona watched his face as his enormous eyes, yellowed like antique ivory billiard balls, scanned their tickets. His skin was rich and warm and glowing in the light of the candle, and he smelled faintly of citrus combined with something darker and less ingratiating. When he was finished, he looked up, not at the Hackworths but off into the distance, turned his back, and ambled away. John Hackworth stood there for a few moments, awaiting instructions, then straightened, squared his shoulders, and led Fiona across the pier to the boat.

  It was eight or ten meters long. There was no gangway, and persons already on board had to reach out and clutch their arms and pull them in, a breach of formality that happened so quickly that they had no time to become u
ncomfortable.

  The boat was basically a large flat open tub, not much more than a life raft, with some controls in the bow and some sort of modern and hence negligibly small propulsion system built into the stern. As their eyes adjusted to the dim light scattering through the fog, they could see perhaps a dozen other passengers around the edge of the boat, seated so that wakes from passing vessels would not upset them. Seeing wisdom in this, John led Fiona to the only remaining open space, and they sat down between two other groups: a trio of young Nipponese men forcing cigarettes on one another, and a man and woman in bohemian-but-expensive clothes, sipping lager from cans and conversing in Canadian accents.

  The man from the pier cast off the painters and vaulted aboard. Another functionary had taken the controls and gently accelerated into the current, cutting the throttle at one point and swinging her about into an oncoming wake. When the boat entered the main channel and came up to speed, it very quickly became chilly, and all the passengers murmured, demanding more warmth from their thermogenic clothing. The Afro-Caribbean man made a circuit lugging a heavy chest stocked with cans of lager and splits of pinot noir. Conversation stopped for several minutes as the passengers, all driven by the same primal impulses, turned their faces into the cool wind and relaxed into the gentle thumping of hull against waves.

  The trip took the better part of an hour. After several minutes, conversation resumed, most of the passengers remaining within their little groups. The refreshment chest made a few more circuits. John Hackworth began to realize, from a few subtleties, that one of the Nipponese youths was much more intoxicated than he was letting on and had probably spent a few hours in a dockside pub before reaching the pier. He took a drink from the chest every time it came by, and half an hour into the ride, he rose unsteadily to his feet, leaned over the edge, and threw up. John turned to smirk at his daughter. The boat struck an unseen wave, rolling sideways into the trough. Hackworth clutched first at the railing and then at his daughter's arm.

  Fiona screamed. She was staring over John's shoulder at the Nipponese youths. John turned around to see that there were only two of them now; the sick one was gone, and the other two had flung their bellies across the gunwale and stretched out their arms, fingers like white rays shining into the black water. John felt Fiona's arm pull free from his grasp, and as he turned toward her, he just saw her vaulting over the rail.

  It was over before he had an opportunity to get really scared. The crew dealt with the matter with a practiced efficiency that suggested to Hackworth that the Nipponese man was really an actor, the entire incident part of the production. The Afro-Caribbean man cursed and shouted for them to hang on, his voice pure and powerful as a Stradivarius cello, a stage voice. He inverted the cooler, dumping out all the beer and wine, then snapped it shut and flung it over the stern as a life preserver. Meanwhile the pilot was swinging the boat round. Several passengers, including Hackworth, had turned on microtorches and focused their beams on Fiona, whose skirts had inflated as she'd jumped in feet-first and now surrounded her like a raft of flowers. With one hand she was clutching the Nipponese man's collar, and with the other, the handle of the ice chest. She did not have the strength or buoyancy to hold the drunken man out of the water, and so both of them were swamped by the estuary's rolling waves.

  The man with the dreadlocks hauled Fiona out first and handed her off to her father. The fabricules making up her clothing—countless mites linked elbow-to-elbow in a two-dimensional array—went to work pumping away the water trapped in the interstices. Fiona was wreathed in a sinuous veil of mist that burned with the captured light of the torches. Her thick red hair had been freed from the confines of her hat, which had been torn away by the waves and now fell about her in a cape of fire.

  She was looking defiantly at Hackworth, whose adrenal glands had finally jumped into the endocrinological fray. When he saw his daughter in this way, it felt as though someone were inexorably sliding a hundred-pound block of ice up the length of his spine. When the sensation reached his medulla, he staggered and nearly had to sit down. She had somehow flung herself through an unknown and unmarked barrier and become supernatural, a naiad rising from the waves cloaked in fire and steam. In some rational compartment of his mind that had now become irrelevant, Hackworth wondered whether Dramatis Personae (for this was the name of the troupe that was running this show) had got some nanosites into his system, and if so what exactly they were doing to his mind.

  Water streamed from Fiona's skirts and ran between the floorboards, and then she was dry, except for her face and hair. She wiped her face on her sleeves, ignoring her father's proffered handkerchief. No words passed between them, and they did not embrace, as if Fiona were conscious now of the impact she was having upon her father and all the others—a faculty that, Hackworth supposed, must be highly acute in sixteen-year-old girls. By now the Nipponese man was just about finished coughing water out of his lungs and gasping piteously for air. As soon as he had the airways up and running, he spoke hoarsely and lengthily. One of his companions translated. “He says that we are not alone—that the water is filled with spirits—that they spoke to him. He followed them beneath the waves. But feeling his spirit about to leave his body, he felt fear and swam to the surface and was saved by the young woman. He says that the spirits are talking to all of us, and we must listen to them!”

  This was, needless to say, embarrassing, and so all of the passengers doused their torches and turned their backs on the stricken passenger. But when Hackworth's eyes had adjusted, he took another look at this man and saw that the exposed portions of his flesh had begun to radiate colored light.

  He looked at Fiona and saw that a band of white light encircled her head like a tiara, bright enough that it shone red through her hair, with a jewel centered upon her forehead. Hackworth marveled at this sight from a distance, knowing that she wanted to be free of him for now.

  Fat lights hung low above the water, describing the envelopes of great ships, sliding past each other as their parallax shifted with the steady progress of the boat. They had come to a place near the mouth of the estuary but not on the usual shipping lanes, where ships lay at anchor awaiting shifts in tides, winds, or markets. One constellation of lights did not move but only grew larger as they drew toward it. Experimenting with shadows and examining the pattern of light cast upon the water from this vessel, Hackworth concluded that the lights were being deliberately shone into their faces so that they could not make any judgments about the nature of the source.

  The fog slowly congealed into a wall of rust, so vast and featureless that it might have been ten or a hundred feet distant. The helmsman waited until they were about to ram it, then cut the engines. The raft lost speed instantly and nuzzled the hull of the big ship. Chains, slimy and dripping, descended from the firmament, diverging in Hackworth's view like radiance emanating from some heavy-industrial demigod, clanking harbingers of iron that the crew, heads thrown back ecstatically, throats bared to this kinky revelation, received into their bosoms. They snapped the chains onto metal loops fixed into the floor of the boat. Shackled, the boat rose free of the water and began to ascend the wall of rust, which soared vaguely into the infinite fog. Suddenly there was a railing, an open deck beyond it, pools of light here and there, a few red cigar-coals reciprocating through space. The deck swung under and rose to shove at the hull of the little boat. As they disembarked, they could see similar boats scattered about.

  “Dodgy” did not begin to describe the reputation of Dramatis Personae in the New Atlantan parts of London, but that was the adjective they always used anyway, delivered in a near-whisper, with brows raised nearly into the hairline and eyes glancing significantly over the shoulder. It had quickly become clear to Hackworth that a man could get a bad reputation simply for having known that Dramatis Personae existed—at the same time, it was clear that almost everyone had heard about it. Rather than being spattered with any more opprobrium, he had sought the tickets among other tribes.r />
  After all this it did not surprise him in the least to see that most of the attendees were fellow Victorians, and not just young bachelors having a night out, but ostensibly respectable couples, strolling the decks in their top hats and veils.

  Fiona vaulted out of the boat before it even touched the deck of the ship and vanished. She had repatterned her dress, ditching the chintzy flowered pattern for basic white, and skipped off into the darkness, her integral tiara glowing like a halo. Hackworth took a slow turn around the deck, watching his fellow-tribesmen trying to solve the following problem: get close enough to another couple to recognize them without getting so close that they can recognize you. From time to time, couples recognized each other simultaneously and had to say something: the women tittered wickedly, and the men laughed from their bellies and called each other scoundrels, the words glancing off the deckplates and burying themselves in the fog like arrows fired into a bale of cotton.

  Some kind of amplified music emanated from compartments below; atonal power chords came up through the deck like seismic disturbances. She was a bulk cargo carrier, now empty and bobbing, surprisingly jittery for something so big.

  Hackworth was alone and separate from all humanity, a feeling he had grown up with, like a childhood friend living next door. He had found Gwen by some miracle and lost touch with that old friend for a few years, but now he and solitude were back together, out for a stroll, familiar and comfortable. A makeshift bar amidships had drawn a dozen or so congregants, but Hackworth knew that he could not join in with them. He had been born without the ability to blend and socialize as some are born without hands.

  “Standing above it all?” said a voice. “Or standing aside perhaps?”

  It was a man in a clown outfit. Hackworth recognized it, vaguely, as an advertising fetish for an old American fast-food chain. But the costume was conspicuously ill-used, as if it were the sole garment of a refugee. It had been patched all over with swatches of chintz, Chinese silk, studded black leather, charcoal-gray pinstripe, and jungle camo. The clown wore integral makeup—his face glowed like an injection-molded plastic toy from the previous century with a light bulb stuck inside the head. It was disturbing to see him talk, like watching one of those animated CAT scans of a man swallowing.