The Diamond Age

by Neal Stephenson

  Finally it all stopped. The silence was astonishing. Nell realized she had been cringing and stood up straight. The red glow from inside the Wizard began to die away.

  White light poured in from all around. Princess Nell could tell that it was coming in from outside the diamond walls of the keep. A few minutes ago it had been nighttime. Now there was light, but not daylight; it came from all directions and was cool and colorless.

  She ran down the aisle and opened the door to the anteroom, but it wasn't there. Nothing was there. The anteroom was gone. The flowery garden beyond it was gone, and the horses, the wall, the spiral road, the City of King Coyote, and the Land Beyond. Instead there was nothing but gentle white light.

  She turned around. The Chamber of the Wizard was still there.

  At the head of the aisle she could see a man sitting atop the altar, looking at her. He was wearing a crown. Around his neck was a key—the twelfth key to the Dark Castle.

  Princess Nell walked down the aisle toward King Coyote. He was a middle-aged man, sandy hair losing its color, gray eyes, and a beard, somewhat darker than his hair and not especially well trimmed. As Princess Nell approached, he seemed to become conscious of the crown around his head. He reached up, lifted it from his head, and tossed it carelessly onto the top of the altar.

  “Very funny,” he said. “You snuck a zero divide past all of my defenses.”

  Princess Nell refused to be drawn by his studied informality. She stopped several paces away. “As there is no one here to make introductions, I shall take the liberty of doing so myself. I am Princess Nell, Duchess of Turing,” she said, and held out her hand.

  King Coyote looked slightly embarrassed. He jumped down from the altar, approached Princess Nell, and kissed her hand. “King Coyote at your service.”

  “Pleased to make your acquaintance.”

  “The pleasure is mine. Sorry! I should have known that the Primer would have taught you better manners.”

  “I am not acquainted with the Primer to which you refer,” Princess Nell said. “I am simply a Princess on a quest: to obtain the twelve keys to the Dark Castle. I note you have one of them in your possession.”

  King Coyote held up his hands, palms facing toward her. “Say no more,” he said. “Single combat will not be necessary. You are already the victor.” He removed the twelfth key from his neck and held it out to Princess Nell. She took it from him with a little curtsy; but as the chain was sliding through his fingers, he tightened his grip suddenly, so that both of them were joined by the chain. “Now that your quest is over,” he said, “can we drop the pretense?”

  “I'm sure I don't take your meaning, Your Majesty.”

  He bore a controlled look of exasperation. “What was your purpose in coming here?”

  “To obtain the twelfth key.”

  “Anything else?”

  “To learn about Wizard 0.2.”

  “Ah.”

  “To discover whether it was, in fact, a Turing machine.”

  “Well, you have your answer. Wizard 0.2 is most certainly a Turing machine—the most powerful ever built.”

  “And the Land Beyond?”

  “All grown from seeds. Seeds that I invented.”

  “And it is also a Turing machine, then? All controlled by Wizard 0.2?”

  “No,” said King Coyote. “Managed by Wizard. Controlled by me.”

  “But the messages in the Cipherers' Market control all the events in the Land Beyond, do they not?”

  “You are most perceptive, Princess Nell.”

  “Those messages came to Wizard—just another Turing machine.”

  “Open the altar,” said King Coyote, pointing to a large brass plate with a keyhole in the middle.

  Princess Nell used her key to open the lock, and King Coyote flipped back the lid of the altar. Inside were two small machines, one for reading tapes and one for writing them.

  “Follow me,” said King Coyote, and opened a trapdoor set into the floor behind the altar.

  Princess Nell followed him down a spiral staircase into a small room. The connecting rods from the altar came down into this room and terminated at a small console.

  “Wizard is not even connected to the altar! It does nothing,” Princess Nell said.

  “Oh, Wizard does a great deal. It helps me keep track of things, does calculations, and so on. But all of that business up there on the stage is just for show—just to impress the commoners. When a message comes here from the Cipherers' Market, I read it myself, and answer it myself.

  “So as you can see, Princess Nell, the Land Beyond is not really a Turing machine at all. It's actually a person—a few people, to be precise. Now it's all yours.”

  King Coyote led Princess Nell back into the heart of his keep and gave her a tour of the place. The best part was the library. He showed her the books containing the rules for programming Wizard 0.2, and other books explaining how to make atoms build themselves into machines, buildings, and whole worlds.

  “You see, Princess Nell, you have conquered this world today, and now that you have conquered it, you'll find it a rather boring place. Now it's your responsibility to make new worlds for other people to explore and conquer.” King Coyote waved his hand out the window into the vast, empty white space where once had stood the Land Beyond. “There's plenty of empty space out there.”

  “What will you do, King Coyote?”

  “Call me John, Your Royal Highness. As of today, I no longer have a kingdom.”

  “John, what will you do?”

  “I have a quest of my own.”

  “What is your quest?”

  “To find the Alchemist, whoever he may be.”

  “And is there …”

  Nell stopped reading the Primer for a moment. Her eyes had filled up with tears.

  “Is there what?” said John's voice from the book.

  “Is there another? Another who has been with me during my quest?”

  “Yes, there is,” John said quietly, after a short pause. “At least I have always sensed that she is here.”

  “Is she here now?”

  “Only if you build a place for her,” John said. “Read the books, and they will show you how.”

  With that, John, the former King Coyote and Emperor of the Land Beyond, vanished in a flash of light, leaving Princess Nell alone in her great dusty library. Princess Nell put her head down on an old leather-bound book and smelled its rich fragrance. One tear of joy ran from each eye. But she mastered the impulse to cry and reached for the book instead.

  They were magic books, and they drew Princess Nell into them so deeply that, for many hours, perhaps even days, she was not aware of her surroundings; which scarcely mattered as nothing remained of the Land Beyond. But at some length, she realized that something was tickling her foot. She reached down absently and scratched it. Moments later the tickling sensation returned. This time she looked down and was astonished to see that the floor of the library was covered with a thick gray-brown carpet, flecked here and there with splotches of white and black.

  It was a living, moving carpet. It was, in fact, the Mouse Army. All of the other buildings, places, and creatures Princess Nell had seen in the Land Beyond had been figments produced by Wizard 0.2; but apparently the mice were an exception and existed independently of King Coyote's machinations. When the Land Beyond had disappeared, all of the obstructions and impedimenta that had kept the Mouse Army away from Princess Nell had disappeared with it, and in short order they had been able to fix her whereabouts and to converge upon their long-sought Queen.

  “What would you have me do?” Princess Nell said. She had never been a Queen before and did not know the protocol.

  A chorus of excited squeaking came from the mice as commands were relayed and issued. The carpet went into violent but highly organized motion as the mice drew themselves up into platoons, companies, battalions, and regiments, each of them commanded by an officer. One mouse clambered up the leg of Princess Nell
's table, bowed low to her, and then began to squeak commands from on high. The mice executed a close-order drill, withdrew to the edges of the room, and arrayed themselves in an empty box shape, leaving a large open rectangle in the middle of the floor.

  The mouse up on the table, whom Nell had dubbed the Generalissima, issued a lengthy series of orders, running to each of the four edges of the table to address different contingents of the Mouse Army. When the Generalissima was finished, very high piping music could be heard as the mouse pipers played their bagpipes and the drummers beat their drums.

  Small groups of mice began to encroach on the empty space, each group moving toward a different spot. Once each group had reached its assigned position, the individual mice arranged themselves in such a way that the group as a whole described a letter. In this way, the following message was written across the floor of the library:

  WE ARE ENCHANTED

  REQUEST ASSISTANCE

  REFER TO BOOKS

  “I shall bend all my efforts toward your disenchantment,” Princess Nell said, and a tremendous, earsplitting scream of gratitude rose from the tiny throats of the Mouse Army.

  Finding the required book did not take long. The Mouse Army split itself up into small detachments, each of which wrestled a different book from the shelf, opened it up on the floor, and scampered through it one page at a time, looking for relevant spells. Within the hour, Princess Nell noted that a broad open corridor had developed in the Mouse Army, and that a book was making its way toward her, seeming to float an inch above the floor.

  She lifted the book carefully from the backs of the mice who were bearing it and flipped through it until she found a spell for the disenchantment of mice. “Very well then,” she said, and began to read the spell; but suddenly, excited squeaking filled the air and all the mice were running away in a panic. The Generalissima climbed up onto the page, jumping up and down in a state of extreme agitation and waving her forelegs back and forth over her head.

  “Ah, I understand,” Princess Nell said. She picked up the book and walked out of the library, taking care not to step on any of her subjects, and followed them out to the vast empty space beyond.

  Once again the Mouse Army put on a dazzling display of close-order drill, drawing itself up across the empty, colorless plain by platoons, companies, battalions, regiments, and brigades; but this time the parade took up a much larger space, because this time the mice took care to space themselves as far apart as the length of a human arm. Some of the platoons had to march what was, for them, a distance of many leagues in order to reach the edges of the formation. Princess Nell took advantage of the time to wander about and inspect the ranks, and to rehearse the spell.

  Finally the Generalissima approached, bowed deeply, and gave her the thumbs-up, though Princess Nell had to pick the tiny leader up and squint to see this gesture.

  She went to the place that had been left for her at the head of the formation, opened up the book, and spoke the magic spell.

  There was a violent thunderclap, and a rush of wind that knocked Princess Nell flat on her back. She looked up, dazed, to see that she was surrounded by a vast army of some hundreds of thousands of girls, only a few years younger than she was. A wild cheer rose up, and all of the girls fell to their knees as one and, in a scene of riotous jubilation, proclaimed their fealty to Queen Nell.

  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; jai-alai 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 ve
ssels 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 disembowled. 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.