He opened the door. The two men regarded each other briefly. "One might think we had come for an antique weapons convention," the gentleman said through his mustache. "Say, I'm frightfully sorry to have disturbed you, but I thought you might like to know that there are Fists in the hotel." He gestured down the corridor with his gun. Carl poked his head out and discovered a dead bellboy sprawled out in front of an open door, still clutching a long knife.

"As it happens, I was already up," said Carl Hollywood, "and contemplating a bit of a stroll to the waterfront. Care to join me?"

"Delighted. Colonel Spence, Royal Joint Forces, Retired."

"Carl Hollywood."

On their way down the fire stairs, Spence killed two more hotel employees whom he had, on somewhat ambiguous grounds, identified as Fists. Carl was skeptical in both cases until Spence ripped their s.h.i.+rts open to reveal the scarlet girdles beneath. "It's not that they're really Fists, you see," Spence explained jovially. "Just that when the Fists come, this sort of nonsense becomes terribly fas.h.i.+onable."

After exchanging some more self-consciously dry humor about whether they should settle their bills before departure, and how much you were supposed to tip a bellboy who came after you with a carving knife, they agreed it might be safest to exit through the kitchens. Half a dozen dead Fists littered the floor here, their bodies striped with the marks of cookie-cutters. Arriving at the exit they found two fellow guests, both Israelis, staring at them with the fixed gaze that implies the presence of a skull gun. Seconds later, they were joined by two Zulu management consultants carrying long, telescoping poles with nan.o.blades affixed to the ends, which they used to destroy all of the light fixtures in their path. It took Carl a minute to appreciate their plan: They were all about to step out into a dark alley, and they would need their night vision.

The door began to shudder in its frame and make tremendous booming noises. Carl stepped forward and peered through the peephole; it was a couple of urban homeboy types having at it with a fire axe. He stepped away from the door, shrugging the rifle from his shoulder, levered in a sh.e.l.l, and fired it through the door, aiming away from the youths. The booming stopped abruptly, and they heard the head of the axe ringing like a bell as it fell to the pavement.

One of the Zulus kicked the door open and leapt into the alley, whirling his blade in a vast, fatal arc like the blade of a helicopter, slicing through a garbage can but not hitting any people. When Carl came piling through the door a few seconds later, he saw several young toughs scattering down the alley, dodging among several dozen refugees, loiterers, and street people who pointed helpfully at their receding backsides, making sure it was understood that their only reason for being in this alley at this time was to act as a sort of block watch on behalf of the gwailo gwailo visitors. visitors.

Without talking about it much, they fell into an improvised formation there in the alley, where they had a bit of room to maneuver. The Zulus went in front, whirling their poles over their heads and hollering some kind of traditional war-cry that drove a good many of the Chinese out of their path. One of the Jews went behind the Zulus, using his skull gun to pick off any Fists who charged them. Then came Carl Hollywood, who, with his height and his rifle, seemed to have ended up with the job of long-range reconnaissance and defense. Colonel Spence and the other Israeli brought up the rear, walking backward most of the time.

This got them down the alley without much trouble, but that was the easy part; when they reached the street, they were no longer the only focus of action but mere motes in a sandstorm. Colonel Spence discharged most of a clip into the air; the explosions were nearly inaudible in the chaos, but the gouts of light from the weapon's barrel drew some attention, and people in their immediate vicinity actually got out of their way. Carl saw one of the Zulus do something very ugly with his long weapon and looked away; then he reflected that it was the Zulus' job to break trail and his to concentrate on more distant threats. He turned slowly around as he walked, trying to ignore the threat that was just beyond arm's length and to get a view of the larger scene.

They had walked into a completely disorganized street fight between the Coastal Republic forces and the Fists of Righteous Harmony, which was not made any clearer by the fact that many of the Coastals had defected by tying strips of red cloth round the arms of their uniforms, and that many of the Fists were not wearing any markings at all, and that many others who had no affiliation were taking advantage of the situation to loot stores and were being fought off by private guards; many of the looters were themselves being mugged by organized gangs.

They were on Nanjing Road, a broad thoroughfare leading straight to the Bund and the Huang Pu, lined with four- and five-story buildings so that many windows looked out over them, any one of which might have contained a sniper.

A few of them did contain snipers, Carl realized, but many of these were shooting across the street at each other, and the ones who were firing into the street could have been shooting at anyone. Carl saw one fellow with a laser-sighted rifle emptying clip after clip into the street, and he reckoned that this const.i.tuted a clear and present danger; so at a moment when their forward progress had stalled momentarily, while the Zulus were waiting for an especially desperate Coastal/Fist melee to resolve itself ahead of them, Carl planted his feet, swung his rifle up to his shoulder, took aim, and fired. In the dim fire- and torch-light rising up from the street, he could see powder explode from the stone window frame just above the sniper's head. The sniper cringed, then began to sweep the street with his laser, looking for the source of the bullet.

Someone jostled Carl from behind. It was Spence, who had been hit with something and lost the use of his leg. A Fist was in the Colonel's face. Carl rammed the b.u.t.t of the rifle into the man's chin, sending him backward into the melee with his eyes rolled up into their sockets. Then he levered in another sh.e.l.l, raised the weapon to his shoulder again, and tried to find the window with his sniper friend.

He was still there, tracing a ruby-red line patiently across the boiling surface of the crowd. Carl took in a deep breath, released it slowly, prayed that no one would b.u.mp into him, and squeezed the trigger. The rifle b.u.t.ted him hard in the shoulder, and at the same moment he saw the sniper's rifle fall out of the window, spinning end over end, the laser beam sweeping through the smoke and steam like the trace on a radar scope.

The whole thing had probably been a bad idea; if any of the other snipers had seen this, they'd be wanting to get rid of him, whatever their affiliation. Carl levered in another sh.e.l.l and then let the rifle dangle from one hand, pointed down at the street, where it wouldn't be so conspicuous. He got the other hand into Spence's armpit and helped him continue down the street. The ends of Spence's mustache wiggled as he continued with his endless and unflappable line of patter; Carl couldn't hear a word but nodded encouragingly. Not even the most literal-minded neo-Victorian could take that stiff-upper-lip thing seriously; Carl realized now that it was all done with a nod and a wink. It was not Colonel Spence's way of saying that he wasn't scared; it was, rather, a code of sorts, a face-saving way for him to admit that he was terrified half out of his wits, and for Carl to admit likewise.

Several Fists rushed them at once; the Zulus got two, the leading Israeli got one, but another came in and bounced his knife from the Israeli's knife-proof jacket. Carl raised the rifle, clamping the stock between his arm and his body, and fired from the hip. The recoil nearly knocked the weapon out of his hand; the Fist practically did a backflip.

He couldn't believe they had not reached the waterfront yet; they had been doing this for hours. Something prodded him hard in the back, causing him to stumble forward; he looked back over his shoulder and saw a man trying to run him through with a bayonet. Another man ran up and tried to wrench the rifle out of Carl's hand. Carl, too startled to respond for a moment, finally let go of Spence, reached across, and poked him in the eyes. A great explosion sounded in his ear, and he looked over to see that Spence had twisted himself round and shot the attacker who had the bayonet. The Israeli who had been guarding their rear had simply vanished. Carl raised his rifle toward the people who were converging on them from the rear; that and Spence's pistol opened up a gratifying clear s.p.a.ce in their wake. But something more powerful and terrifying was driving more people toward them from the side, and as Carl tried to see what it was, he realized that a score of Chinese people were now between him and the Zulus. The looks on their faces were pained and panicky; they were not attacking, they were being attacked.

Suddenly all of the Chinese were gone. Carl and Colonel Spence found themselves commingled with a dozen or so Boers-not just men, but women and children and elders too, a whole laager on the move. All of them surged forward instinctively and reabsorbed the vanguard of Carl's group. They were a block from the waterfront.

The Boer leader, a stout man of about fifty, somehow identified Carl Hollywood as the leader, and they quickly redeployed what forces they had for the final push to the waterfront. The only thing Carl remembered of this conversation was the man saying, "Good. You've got Zulus." The Boers in the vanguard were carrying some sort of automatic weapons firing tiny nanotech high-explosive rounds, which, indiscriminately used, could have turned the crowd into a rampart of chewed meat; but they fired the weapons in disciplined bursts even when the charging Fists penetrated to within a sword's length. From time to time, one of them would raise his head and sweep a row of windows with continuous automatic fire; riflemen would tumble out of the darkness and spin down into the street like rag dolls. The Boers must be wearing some kind of night vision stuff. Colonel Spence suddenly felt very heavy on Carl's arm, and he realized that the Colonel was unconscious, or close to it. Carl slung the rifle over his shoulder, bent down, and picked up Spence in a fireman's carry.

They arrived at the waterfront and established a defensive perimeter. The next question was: Were there any boats? But this part of China was half underwater and seemed to have as many boats as bicycles. Most of them seemed to have found their way downstream to Shanghai during the gradual onslaught of the Fists. So when they arrived at the water's edge, they discovered thousands of people with boats, eager to transact some business. But as the Boer leader rightly pointed out, it would be suicide to split up the group among several tiny, unpowered craft; the Fists were paying high bounties for the heads of barbarians. Much safer to wait for one of the larger vessels out in the channel to make its way to sh.o.r.e, where they could cut a deal with the captain and climb on board as a group.

Several vessels, ranging from motor yachts to fis.h.i.+ng trawlers, were already vying to be the first to make that deal, shouldering their way inexorably through the organic chaff of small boats crowded along the sh.o.r.e.

A rhythmic beat had begun to resonate in their lungs. At first it sounded like drumbeats, but as it drew closer it developed into the sound of hundreds or thousands of human voices chanting in unison: "Sha! Sha! Sha! Sha!" "Sha! Sha! Sha! Sha!" Nanjing Road began to vomit forth a great crowd of people shoved out onto the Bund like exhaust pushed out by a piston. They cleared out of the way, dispersing up and down the riverfront. Nanjing Road began to vomit forth a great crowd of people shoved out onto the Bund like exhaust pushed out by a piston. They cleared out of the way, dispersing up and down the riverfront.

An army of hoplites-professional warriors in battle armor-was marching toward the river, a score abreast, completely filling the width of Nanjing Road. These were not Fists; they were the regular army, the vanguard of the Celestial Kingdom, and Carl Hollywood was appalled to realize that the only thing now standing between them and their three-decade march to the banks of the Huang Pu was Carl Hollywood, his .44, and a handful of lightly armed civilians.

A nice-looking yacht had penetrated to within a few meters of the sh.o.r.e. The remaining Israeli, who was fluent in mandarin, had already commenced negotiations with its captain.

One of the Boers, a wiry grandmother with a white bun on her head and a black bonnet pinned primly over that, conferred briefly with the Boer leader. He nodded once, then caught her face in his hands and kissed her.

She turned her back on the waterfront and began to march toward the head of the advancing column of Celestials. The few Chinese crazy enough to remain along the waterfront, respecting her age and possible madness, parted to make way for her.

The negotiations over the boat appeared to have hit some kind of snag. Carl Hollywood could see individual hoplites vaulting two and three stories into the air, cras.h.i.+ng headfirst into the windows of the Cathay Hotel.

The Boer grandmother doggedly made her way forward until she was standing in the middle of the Bund. The leader of the Celestial column stepped toward her, covering her with some kind of projectile weapon built into one arm of his suit and waving her aside with the other. The Boer woman carefully got down on both knees in the middle of the road, clasped her hands together in prayer, and bowed her head.

Then she became a pearl of white light in the mouth of the dragon. In an instant this pearl grew to the size of an airs.h.i.+p. Carl Hollywood had the presence of mind to close his eyes and turn his head away, but he didn't have time to throw himself down; the shock wave did that, slamming him full-length into the granite paving-stones of the waterfront promenade and tearing about half of his clothes from his body.

Some time pa.s.sed before he was really conscious; he felt it must have been half an hour, though debris was still raining down around him, so five seconds was probably more like it. The hull of the white yacht had been caved in on one side and most of its crew flung into the river. But a minute later, a fis.h.i.+ng trawler pulled up and took the barbarians on board with only perfunctory negotiations. Carl nearly forgot about Spence and almost left him there; he found that he no longer had the strength to raise the Colonel's body from the ground, so he dragged him on board with the help of a couple of young Boers-identical twins, he realized, maybe thirteen years old. As they headed across the Huang Pu, Carl Hollywood huddled on a piled-up fis.h.i.+ng net, limp and weak as though his bones had all been shattered, staring at the hundred-foot crater in the center of the Bund and looking into the rooms of the Cathay Hotel, which had been neatly cross-sectioned by the bomb in the Boer woman's body.

Within fifteen minutes, they were free on the streets of Pudong. Carl Hollywood found his way to the local New Atlantan encampment, reported for duty, and spent a few minutes composing a letter to Colonel Spence's widow; the Colonel had bled to death from a leg wound during the voyage across the river.

Then he spread his pages out on the ground before him and returned to the pursuit that had occupied him in his hotel room for the past few days, namely, the search for Miranda. He had begun this search at the bidding of Lord Finkle-McGraw, pursued it with mounting pa.s.sion over the last few days as he had begun to understand how much he'd been missing Miranda, and was now pressing the work desperately; for he had realized that in this search might reside the only hope for the salvation of the tens of thousands of Outer Tribesmen now encamped upon the dead streets of the Pudong Economic Zone.

Final onslaught of the Fists; victory of the Celestial Kingdom; refugees in the domain of the Drummers; Miranda.

The Huang Pu stopped the advance of the Celestial Army toward the sea, but having crossed the river farther inland, it continued to move northward up the Pudong Peninsula at a walking pace, driving before it flocks of starving peasants much like the ones who had been their harbingers in Shanghai.

The occupants of Pudong-a mixture of barbarians, Coastal Republic Chinese who feared persecution at the hands of their Celestial cousins, and Nell's little sisters, a third of a million strong and const.i.tuting a new phyle unto themselves-were thus caught between the Celestials on the south, the Huang Pu on the west, the Yangtze on the north, and the ocean on the east. All the links to the artificial islands offsh.o.r.e had been cut.

The geotects of Imperial Tectonics, in their Cla.s.sical and Gothic temples high atop New Chusan, made various efforts to build a temporary bridge between their island and Pudong. It was simple enough to throw a truss or floating bridge across the gap, but the Celestials now had the technology to blow such things up faster than they could be constructed. On the second day of the siege, they caused the island to reach toward Pudong with a narrow pseudopod of smart coral, rooted on the ocean floor. But there were very simple and clear limits to how fast such things could be grown, and as the refugees continued to throng the narrow defiles of downtown Pudong, bearing increasingly dire reports of the Celestials' advance, it became evident to everyone that the land bridge would not be completed in time.

The encampments of the various tribes moved north and east as they were forced out of downtown by the pressure of the refugees and fear of the Celestials, until several miles of sh.o.r.eline had been claimed and settled by the various groups. The southern end, along the seash.o.r.e, was anch.o.r.ed by the New Atlantans, who had prepared themselves to fend off any a.s.saults along the beach. The chain of camps extended northward from there, curving along the ocean and then eastward along the banks of the Yangtze to the opposite end, which was anch.o.r.ed by Nippon against any onslaught across the tidal flats. The entire center of the line was guarded against a direct frontal a.s.sault by Princess Nell's tribe/army of twelve-year-old girls, who were gradually trading in their pointed sticks for more modern weapons compiled from portable Sources owned by the Nipponese and the New Atlantans.

Carl Hollywood had been a.s.signed to military duty as soon as he reported to the New Atlantan authorities, despite his efforts to convince his superiors that he might be of more use pursuing his own line of research. But then a message came through from the highest levels of Her Majesty's government. The first part of it praised Carl Hollywood for his "heroic" actions in getting the late Colonel Spence out of Shanghai and suggested that a knighthood might be waiting for him if he ever got out of Pudong. The second part of it named him as a special envoy of sorts to Her Royal Highness, Princess Nell.

Reading the message, Carl was momentarily stunned that his Sovereign was according equivalent status to Nell; but upon some reflection he saw that it was simultaneously just and pragmatic. During his time in the streets of Pudong, he had seen enough of the Mouse Army (as they called themselves, for some reason) to know that they did, in fact, const.i.tute a new ethnic group of sorts, and that Nell was their undisputed leader. Victoria's esteem for the new sovereign was well-founded. At the same time, that the Mouse Army was currently helping to protect many New Atlantans from being taken hostage, or worse, by the Celestial Kingdom made such recognition an eminently pragmatic step.

It fell to Carl Hollywood, who had been a member of his adopted tribe only for a few months, to forward Her Majesty's greetings and felicitations to Princess Nell, a girl about whom he had heard much from Miranda but whom he had never met and could hardly fathom. It did not take very deep reflection to see the hand of Lord Alexander Chung-Sik Finkle-McGraw in all this.

Freed from day-to-day responsibilities, he walked north from the New Atlantan camp on the third day of the siege, following the tideline. Every few yards he came to a tribal border and presented a visa that, under the provisions of the Common Economic Protocol, was supposed to afford him free pa.s.sage. Some of the tribal zones were only a meter or two wide, but their owners jealously guarded their access to the sea, sitting up all night staring out into the surf, waiting for some unspecified form of salvation. Carl Hollywood strolled through encampments of Ashantis, Kurds, Armenians, Navajos, Tibetans, Senderos, Mormons, Jesuits, Lapps, Pathans, Tutsis, the First Distributed Republic and its innumerable offshoots, Heartlanders, Irish, and one or two local CryptNet cells who had now been flushed into the open. He discovered synthetic phyles he had never heard of, but this did not surprise him.

Finally he came to a generous piece of beach frontage guarded by twelve-year-old Chinese girls. At this point he presented his credentials from Her Majesty Queen Victoria II, which were extremely impressive, so much so that many of the girls gathered around to marvel at them. Carl Hollywood was surprised to hear them all speaking perfect English in a rather high Victorian style. They seemed to prefer it when discussing things in the abstract, but when it came to practical matters they reverted to mandarin.

He was ushered through the lines into the Mouse Army's encampment, which was mostly an open-air hospice for ragged, sick and injured discards from other phyles. The ones who weren't flat on their backs, being tended to by Mouse Nurses, were sitting on the sand, hugging their knees, staring out across the water in the direction of New Chusan. The slope of the land was quite gentle here, and a person could wade for a good long stone's throw into the waves.

One person had: a young woman whose long hair fell about her shoulders and trailed in the water around her waist. She stood with her back to the sh.o.r.e, holding a book in her hands, and did not move for a long time.

"What is she doing out there?" Carl Hollywood said to his Mouse Army escort, who had five little stars on her lapels. In Pudong, he had figured out their insignia: Five stars meant that she was in charge of 45 people, or 1024. A regimental commander, then. people, or 1024. A regimental commander, then.

"She is calling to her mother."

"Her mother?"

"Her mother is beneath the waves," the woman said. "She is a Queen."

"Queen of what?"

"She is the Queen of the Drummers who live beneath the sea."

And then Carl Hollywood knew that Princess Nell was searching for Miranda too. He threw his long coat down on the sand and sloshed out into the Pacific, accompanied by the officer, and remained at a judicious distance, partly to show due respect, and partly because Nell had a sword in her waistband. Her face was inclined over the pages of her book like a focusing lens, and he half expected the pages to curl and smoke under her gaze.

She looked up from the book after some time. The officer spoke to her in a low voice. Carl Hollywood did not know the protocol when one was up to midthigh in the East China Sea, so he stepped forward, bowed as low as he could under the circ.u.mstances, and handed Princess Nell the scroll from Queen Victoria II.

She accepted it wordlessly and read it through, then went back to the top and read it again. Then she handed it to her officer, who rolled it up carefully. Princess Nell stared out over the waves for a while, then looked Carl in the eye and said quietly, "I accept your credentials and request that you convey my warm thanks and regard to Her Majesty, along with my apologies that circ.u.mstances prevent me from composing a more formal response to her kind letter, which at any other time would naturally be my highest priority."

"I shall do so at the earliest opportunity, Your Majesty," Carl Hollywood said. Hearing these words, Princess Nell looked a bit unsteady and s.h.i.+fted her feet to maintain her balance; though this might have been the undertow. Carl realized that she had never been addressed in this way before; that, until she had been recognized in this fas.h.i.+on by Victoria, she had never fully realized her position.

"The woman you seek is named Miranda," he said.

All thoughts of crowns, queens, and armies seemed to vanish from Nell's mind, and she was just a young lady again, looking for-what? Her mother? Her teacher? Her friend? Carl Hollywood spoke to Nell in a low gentle voice, projecting just enough to be heard over the strumming of the waves. He spoke to her of Miranda, and of the book, and of the old stories about the deeds of Princess Nell, which he had watched from the wings, as it were, by looking in on Miranda's feed many years ago at the Parna.s.se.

Over the next two days many of the refugees on the sh.o.r.e got away on air or surface s.h.i.+ps, but a few of these were destroyed in spectacular fas.h.i.+on before they could get out of range of the Celestial Kingdom's weaponry. Three-quarters of the Mouse Army evacuated itself through the technique of stripping naked and walking into the ocean en ma.s.se, linked arm-in-arm into a flexible and unsinkable raft that gradually, slowly, exhaustingly paddled across the sea to New Chusan. Rumors spread rapidly up and down the length of the coast; the tribal borders seemed to accelerate rather than hinder this process as interfaces between languages and cultures sp.a.w.ned new variants of each rumor, tailored to the local fears and prejudices. The most popular rumor was that the Celestials planned to give everyone safe pa.s.sage and that the attacks were being carried out by intelligent mines that had run out of control or, at worst, by a few fanatical commanders who were defying orders and who would soon be brought to heel. There was a second, stranger rumor that gave some people an incentive to remain on the sh.o.r.e and not entrust themselves to the evacuation s.h.i.+ps: A young woman with a book and a sword was creating magical tunnels from out of the deep that would carry them all away to safety. Such ideas were naturally met with skepticism among more rational cultures, but on the morning of the sixth day of the siege, the neap tide carried a peculiar omen up onto the sand: a harvest of translucent eggs the size of beach b.a.l.l.s. When their fragile sh.e.l.ls were torn open, they were found to contain sculpted backpacks pierced with a fractal pattern of delicate louvers. A stiff hose extended from the top and connected to a facemask. Under the circ.u.mstances, it was not difficult to divine the use of these objects. People strapped the packs onto their backs, slipped on the facemasks, and plunged into the water. The backpacks acted like the gills of a fish and provided a steady supply of oxygen.

The gill packs did not carry any tribal identification; they merely washed up onto the beach, by the thousands, with each high tide, cast up organically by the sea. The Atlantans, Nipponese, and others each a.s.sumed that they had come from their own tribes. But many perceived a connection between this and the rumors of Princess Nell and the tunnels beneath the waves. Such people migrated toward the center of the Pudong coast, where the tiny, weak, and flaky tribes had all been concentrated. This contraction of the defensive line became inevitable as the number of defenders was shrunk by the evacuation. Borders between tribes became unstable and finally dissolved, and on the fifth day of the siege the barbarians had all become fungible and formed into a huddle on the uttermost point of the Pudong Peninsula, several tens of thousands of persons packed into an area not exceeding a few city blocks. Beyond that were the Chinese refugees, mostly persons strongly identified with the Coastal Republic who knew that they could never blend into the Celestial Kingdom. These did not dare to invade the camp of the refugees, who were still armed with powerful weapons, but by advancing an inch at a time and never retreating, they insensibly shrank the perimeter so that many barbarians found themselves standing knee-deep in the ocean.

The rumor spread that the woman called Princess Nell had a wizard and adviser named Carl, who had appeared out of nowhere one day knowing nearly everything that Princess Nell did, and a few things she didn't. This man, according to rumor, had in his possession a number of magic keys that gave him and the Princess power to speak with the Drummers who lived beneath the waves.

On the seventh day, Princess Nell walked naked into the sea at dawn, vanished beneath waves turned pink by the sunrise, and did not return. Carl followed her a minute later, though unlike the Princess he took the precaution of wearing a gill pack. Then all of the barbarians stepped into the ocean, leaving their filthy clothes strewn across the beach, relinquis.h.i.+ng the last foothold of Chinese soil to the Celestial Kingdom. They all walked into the ocean until their heads disappeared. The rearguard was made up of the last part of the Mouse Army, which charged naked into the surf, linked up into a raft, and made its way slowly out to sea, nudging a few sick and wounded along with them in makes.h.i.+ft rafts. By the time the last girl's foot broke contact with the sandy ocean bottom, the end of the land had already been claimed by a man with a scarlet girdle round his waist, who stood on the sh.o.r.e laughing to think that now the Middle Kingdom was at last a whole country once more.

The last foreign devil to depart from the Middle Kingdom was a blond Victorian gentleman with gray eyes, who stood in the waves for some time looking back over Pudong before he turned around and continued his descent. As the sea rose over him, it lifted the bowler from his head, and the hat continued to bob on the tide for some minutes as the Chinese detonated strings of firecrackers on the sh.o.r.e and tiny shreds of the red paper wrappers drifted over the sea like cherry petals.

On one of her forays into the surf, Nell had encountered a man-a Drummer-who had come swimming out of the deep, naked except for a gill pack. This should have astonished her; instead, she had known he was out there before she saw him, and when he came close, she could feel things happening in her mind that were coming in from outside. There was something in her brain that made her connected to the Drummers.

Nell had drawn up some general plans and given them to her engineers for further elaboration, and they had given them to Carl, who had taken them to a functioning portable M.C. in the New Atlantan camp and compiled a little system for examining and manipulating nanotechnological devices.

In the dark, motes of light sparkled in Nell's flesh, like airplane beacons in the night sky. They sc.r.a.ped one of these away with a scalpel and examined it. They found similar devices circulating in her bloodstream. These things, they realized, must have been put into Nell's blood when she was raped. It was clear that the sparkling lights in Nell's flesh were beacons signaling to others across the gulf that separates each of us from our neighbors.

Carl opened one of the things from Nell's blood and found a rod logic system inside, and a tape drive containing some few gigabytes of data. The data was divided into discrete chunks, each one of which was separately encrypted. Carl tried all of the keys that he had obtained from John Percival Hackworth and found that one of them-Hackworth's key-unlocked some of the chunks. When he examined the decrypted contents, he discovered fragments of a plan for some kind of nanotechnological device.

They drew blood from several volunteers and found that one of them had the same little devices in his blood. When they put two of these devices in close proximity, they locked onto one another using lidar and embraced, exchanging data and performing some sort of computation that threw off waste heat.

The devices lived in the blood of the human race like viruses and pa.s.sed from one person to the next during s.e.x or any other exchange of bodily fluids; they were smart packets of data, just like the ones traversing the media network, and by mating with one another in the blood, they formed a vast system of communication, parallel to and probably linked with the dry Net of optical lines and copper wires. Like the dry Net, the wet Net could be used for doing computations-for running programs. And it was now clear that John Percival Hackworth was using it for exactly that, running some kind of vast distributed program of his own devising. He was designing something.

"Hackworth is the Alchemist," Nell said, "and he is using the wet Net to design the Seed."

Half a kilometer offsh.o.r.e, the tunnels began. Some of them must have been there for many years, for they were rough as tree trunks, encrusted with barnacles and algae. But it was clear that in the last few days they had forked and split organically, like roots questing for moisture; clean new tubes forced their way out through the encrustation and ran uphill toward the tide line, splitting again and again until many orifices presented themselves to the refugees. The shoots terminated in lips that grabbed people and drew them in, like the tip of an elephant's trunk, accepting the refugees with a minimum of seawater. The tunnels were lined with mediatronic images urging them forward into the deep; it always seemed as though a warm dry well-lit s.p.a.ce awaited them just a bit farther down the line. But the light moved along with the viewer so that they were drawn down the tunnels in a kind of peristalsis. The refugees came to the main tunnel, the old encrusted one, and continued moving on, now packed together in a solid ma.s.s, until they were disgorged into a large open cavity far below the surface of the ocean. Here, food and fresh water awaited them and they ate hungrily.

Two people did not eat or drink except from the provisions they had brought with them; these were Nell and Carl.

After they had discovered the nanosites in Nell's flesh that made her a part of the Drummers, Nell had stayed up through the night and designed a counternanosite, one that would seek out and destroy the Drummers' devices. She and Carl had both put these devices into their bloodstreams, so that Nell was now free of the Drummers' influences and both of them would remain so. Nevertheless they did not press their luck by eating of the Drummers' food, and it was well, because after their meal the refugees became drowsy and lay down on the floor and slept, steam rising from their naked flesh, and before long the sparks of light began to come on, like stars coming out as the sun goes down. After two hours the stars had merged together into a continuous surface of flickering light, bright enough to read by, as if a full moon were s.h.i.+ning down upon the bodies of slumbering revelers in a meadow. The refugees, now Drummers, all slept and dreamed the same dream, and the abstract lights flickering across the mediatronic lining of the cavern began to coalesce and organize themselves into dark memories from deep within their unconscious mind. Nell began to see things from her own life, experiences long since a.s.similated into the words of the Primer but here shown once more in a raw and terrifying form. She closed her eyes; but the walls made sounds too, from which she could not escape.

Carl Hollywood was monitoring the signals pa.s.sing through the walls of the tunnels, avoiding the emotional content of these images by reducing them to binary digits and trying to puzzle out their internal codes and protocols.

"We have to go," Nell said finally, and Carl arose and followed her through a randomly chosen exit. The tunnel forked and forked again, and Nell chose forks by intuition. Sometimes the tunnels would widen into great caverns full of luminescent Drummers, sleeping or f.u.c.king or simply pounding on the walls. The caverns always had many outlets, which forked and forked and converged upon other caverns, the web of tunnels so vast and complicated that it seemed to fill the entire ocean, like neural bodies with their dendrites knitting and ramifying to occupy the whole volume of the skull.

A low drumming sound had been skirting the lower limits of perceptibility ever since they had left the cavern where the refugees slumbered. Nell had first taken it for the beat of submarine currents on the walls of the tunnel, but as it grew stronger, she knew that it was the Drummers talking to each other, convened in some central cavern sending messages out across their network. Realizing this, she felt a sense of urgency verging on panic that they find the central a.s.sembly, and for some time they ran through the perfectly bewildering three-dimensional maze, trying to locate the epicenter of the drumming.

Carl Hollywood could not run as quickly as the nimble Nell and eventually lost her at a fork in the tunnels. From there he made his own judgments, and after some time had pa.s.sed-it was impossible to know how long-his tunnel dovetailed with another that was carrying a stream of Drummers downward toward the floor of the ocean. Carl recognized some of these Drummers as former refugees from the beaches at Pudong.

The sound of the drumming did not build gradually but exploded to a deafening, mind-dissolving roar as Carl emerged into a vast cavern, a conical amphitheatre that must have been a kilometer wide, roofed with a storm of mediatronic images that played across a vast dome. The Drummers, visible by the flickering light of the overhead media storm and by their own internal light, moved up and down the slopes of the cone in a kind of convection pattern. Caught up in an eddy, Carl was transported down toward the center and found that an orgy of fantastic dimensions was underway. The steam of vaporized sweat rose from the center of the pit in a cloud. The bodies pressing against Carl's naked skin were so hot that they almost burned him, as if everyone were running a high fever and in some logical abstract compartment of his mind that was, somehow, continuing to run along its own reasonable course, he realized why: They were exchanging packets of data with their bodily fluids, the packets were mating in their blood, the rod logic throwing off heat that drove up their core temperature.

The orgy went on for hours, but the pattern of convection gradually slowed down and condensed into a stable arrangement, like a circulating crowd in a theatre that settles into its a.s.signed seats as curtain time approaches. A broad open s.p.a.ce had formed at the center of the pit, and the innermost ring of spectators consisted of men, as if these were in some sense the winners of the enormous fornication tournament that was nearing its final round. A lone Drummer circulated around this innermost ring, handing something out; the something turned out to be mediatronic condoms that glowed bright colors when they were stripped onto the men's erect phalluses.

A lone woman entered the ring. The floor at the absolute center of the pit rose up beneath her feet, shoving her into the air as on an altar. The drumming built to an unbearable crescendo and then stopped. Then it began again, a very slow steady beat, and the men in the inner circle began to dance around her.

Carl Hollywood saw that the woman in the center was Miranda.

He saw it all now: that the refugees had been gathered into the realm of the Drummers for the harvest of fresh data running in their bloodstreams, that this data had been infused into the wet Net in the course of the great orgy, and that all of it was now going to be dumped into Miranda, whose body would play host to the climax of some computation that would certainly burn her alive in the process. It was Hackworth's doing; this was the culmination of his effort to design the Seed, and in so doing to dissolve the foundations of New Atlantis and Nippon and all of the societies that had grown up around the concept of a centralized, hierarchical Feed.

A lone figure, remarkable because her skin did not emit any light, was fighting her way in toward the center. She burst into the inner circle, knocking down a dancer who got in her way, and climbed up onto the central altar where Miranda lay on her back, arms outstretched as if crucified, her skin a galaxy of colored lights.

Nell cradled Miranda's head in her arms, bent down, and kissed her, not a soft brush of the lips but a savage kiss with open mouth, and she bit down hard as she did it, biting through her own lips and Miranda's so that their blood mingled. The light s.h.i.+ning from Miranda's body diminished and slowly went out as the nanosites were hunted down and destroyed by the hunter-killers that had crossed into her blood from Nell's. Miranda came awake and arose, her arms draped weakly around Nell's neck.

The drumming had stopped; the Drummers all sat impa.s.sively, clearly content to wait-for years if necessary-for a woman who could take Miranda's place. The light from their flesh had diminished, and the overhead mediatron had gone dim and vague. Carl Hollywood, seeing at last a role for himself, stepped into the center, got one arm under Miranda's knees and another beneath her shoulders, and lifted her into the air. Nell turned around and led them up out of the cavern, holding her sword out before her; but none of the Drummers moved to stop them.

They pa.s.sed up through many tunnels, always taking the uphill fork until they saw sunlight s.h.i.+ning down from above through the waves, casting lines of white light on the translucent roof. Nell severed the tunnel behind them, wielding her sword like the sweep of a clock's hand. The warm water rushed in on them. Nell swam up toward the light. Miranda was not swimming strongly, and Carl was torn between a panicky desire to reach the surface and his duty to Miranda. Then he saw shadows descending from above, dozens of naked girls swimming downward, garlands of silver bubbles streaming from their mouths, their almond eyes excited and mischievous. Carl and Miranda were gripped by many gentle hands and borne upward into the light.

New Chusan rose above them, a short swim away, and up on the mountain they could hear the bells of the cathedral ringing.

ABOUT THE A AUTHOR.

Neal Stephenson is the author of The Diamond Age, Snow Crash, Zodiac, The Diamond Age, Snow Crash, Zodiac, and and The Big U. The Big U.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.

Jeremy Bornstein Douglas (Carl Hollywood) Crockford K. Eric Drexler Wayne "Hank" Hansen Steve Horst Steve Johnson Marco Kaltofen Sachiko Emma Kas.h.i.+waya Kevin Kelly Alan Moores Chris Peterson Rattana Schicketanz Dean Tribble

BANTAM B BOOKS BY N NEAL S STEPHENSON:.