She looked a bit surprised, not unpleasantly so, but she wasn't nearly that easy. “So why are you here? Which show did you come to see?”
“What do you mean? I suppose I came to see this one.”
“But there is no this one. It's a whole family of shows. Interlaced.” She parked her beer and executed Phase 1 of the here-is-the-church maneuver. “Which show you see depends on which feed you're viewing.”
“I don't seem to have any control over what I see.”
“Ah, then you're a performer.”
“So far I have felt like a very inept slapstick performer.”
“Inept slapstick? Isn't that a bit redundant?”
It wasn't that funny, but she said it wittily, and Hackworth chuckled politely.
“It sounds as though you've been singled out to be a performer.”
“You don't say.”
“Now, I don't normally reveal our trade secrets,” the woman continued in a lower voice, “but usually when someone is singled out as a performer, it's because they have come here for some purpose other than pure, passive entertainment.”
Hackworth stuttered and fumbled for words a bit. “Does that—is that done?”
“Oh, yes!” the woman said. She rose from her stool and moved to the one right next to Hackworth. “Theatre's not just a few people clowning about on a stage, being watched by this herd of oxen. I mean, sometimes it's that. But it can be ever so much more—really it can be any sort of interaction between people and people, or people and information.” The woman had become quite passionate now, forgotten herself completely. Hackworth got boundless pleasure just from watching her. When she'd first entered the bar, he'd thought she had a sort of nondescript face, but as she let her guard down and spoke without any self-consciousness, she seemed to become prettier and prettier. “We are tied in to everything here—plugged into the whole universe of information. Really, it's a virtual theatre. Instead of being hardwired, the stage, sets, cast, and script are all soft—they can be reconfigured simply by shifting bits about.”
“Oh. So the show—or interlaced set of shows—can be different each night?”
“No, you're still not getting it,” she said, becoming very excited. She reached out and gripped his forearm just below the elbow and leaned toward him, desperate to make sure he got this. “It's not that we do a set show, reconfigure, and a different one next night. The changes are dynamic and take place in real time. The show reconfigures itself dynamically depending upon what happens moment to moment—and mind you, not just what happens here, but what is happening in the world at large. It is a smart play—an intelligent organism.”
“So, if, for example, a battle between the Fists of Righteous Harmony and the Coastal Republic were taking place in the interior of China at this moment, then shifts in the battle might in some way—”
“Might change the color of a spotlight or a line of dialogue—not necessarily in any simple and deterministic fashion, mind you—”
“I think I understand,” Hackworth said. “The internal variables of the play depend on the total universe of information outside—”
The woman nodded vigorously, quite pleased with him, her huge black eyes shining.
Hackworth continued, “As, for example, a person's state of mind at any given moment might depend on the relative concentrations of innumerable chemical compounds circulating through his bloodstream.”
“Yes,” the woman said, “like if you're in a pub being chatted up by a fetching young gentleman, the words coming out of your mouth are affected by the amount of alcohol you've put into your system, and, of course, by concentrations of natural hormones—again, not in a simple deterministic way—these things are all inputs.”
“I think I'm beginning to get your meaning,” Hackworth said.
“Substitute tonight's show for the brain, and the information flowing across the net for molecules flowing through the bloodstream, and you have it,” the woman said.
Hackworth was a bit disappointed that she had chosen to pull back from the pub metaphor, which he had found more immediately interesting.
The woman continued, “That lack of determinism causes some to dismiss the whole process as wanking. But in fact it's an incredibly powerful tool. Some people understand that.”
“I believe I do,” Hackworth said, desperately wanting her to believe that he did.
“And so some people come here because they are on a quest of some sort—trying to find a lost lover, let's say, or to understand why something terrible happened in their lives, or why there is cruelty in the world, or why they aren't satisfied with their career. Society has never been good at answering these questions—the sorts of questions you can't just look up in a reference database.”
“But the dynamic theatre allows one to interface with the universe of data in a more intuitive way,” Hackworth said.
“That is precisely it,” the woman said. “I'm so pleased that you get this.”
“When I was working with information, it frequently occurred to me, in a vague and general way, that such a thing might be desirable,” Hackworth said. “But this is beyond my imagination.”
“Where did you hear of us?”
“I was referred here by a friend who has been associated with you in the past, in some vague way.”
“Oh? May I ask who? Perhaps we have a mutual friend,” the woman said, as if that would be a fine thing.
Hackworth felt himself reddening and let out a deep breath. “All right,” he said, “I lied. It wasn't really a friend of mine. It was someone I was led to.”
“Ah, now we're getting into it,” the woman said. “I knew there was something mysterious going on with you.”
Hackworth was abashed and did not know what to say. He looked into his beer. The woman was staring at him, and he could feel her eyes on his face like the warmth of a follow spot.
“So you did come here in search of something. Didn't you? Something you couldn't find by looking it up in a database.”
“I'm seeking a fellow called the Alchemist,” Hackworth said.
Suddenly, things got bright. The side of the woman's face that was toward the window was brilliantly illuminated, like a probe in space lit on one side by the directional light of the sun. Hackworth sensed, somehow, that this was not a new development. Looking out over the audience, he saw that nearly all of them were aiming their spotlights into the bar, and that everyone in the place had been watching and listening to his entire conversation with the woman. The spectacles had deceived him by adjusting the apparent light levels. The woman looked different too; her face had reverted to the way it looked when she came in, and Hackworth now understood that her image in his spectacles had been gradually evolving during their conversation, getting feedback from whatever part of his brain buzzed when he saw a beautiful woman.
The curtain parted to reveal a large electric sign descending from the fly space: JOHN HACKWORTH in QUEST FOR THE ALCHEMIST starring JOHN HACKWORTH as HIMSELF.
The Chorus sang:
He's such a stiff, John Hackworth is
Can't show emotion to save his life
With nasty repercussions, viz
He lost his job and lost his wife.
So now he's on a goshdarn Quest
Wandering all o'er the world
Hunting down that Alchemist
'Cept when he stops to pick up girls.
Maybe he'll clean up his act
And do the job tonight
A fabulous adventure packed
With marvelous sounds and sights
Let's get it on, oh Hacker John
Let's get it on, on, on.
Something jerked violently at Hackworth's neck. The woman had tossed a noose around him while he'd been staring out the window, and now she was hauling him out the door of the bar like a recalcitrant dog. As soon as she cleared the doorway, her cape inflated like a time-lapse explosion, and she shot twelve feet into the air, propelled on jets of air built into her
clothing somehow—she payed out the leash so that Hackworth wasn't hanged in the process. Flying above the audience like the cone of fire from a rocket engine, she led the stumbling Hackworth down the sloping floor and to the edge of the water. The thrust stage was linked to the water's edge by a couple of narrow bridges, and Hackworth negotiated one of these, feeling hundreds of lights on his shoulders, seemingly hot enough to ignite his clothing. She led him straight back through the center of the Chorus, beneath the electric sign, through the backstage area, and through a doorway, which clanged shut behind him. Then she vanished.
Hackworth was surrounded on three sides by softly glowing blue walls. He reached out to touch one and received a mild shock for his troubles. Stepping forward, he tripped over something that skittered across the floor: a dry bone, big and heavy, larger than a human femur.
He stepped forward through the only gap available to him and found more walls. He had been deposited into the heart of a labyrinth.
It took him an hour or so to realize that escape through normal means was hopeless. He didn't even try to figure out the labyrinth's floor plan; instead, realizing that it couldn't possibly be larger than the ship, he followed the foolproof expedient of turning right at every corner, which as all clever boys knew must always lead to an exit. But it didn't, and he did not understand why until once, in the corner of his eye, he saw a wall segment shift sideways, closing up an old gap and creating a new one. It was a dynamic labyrinth.
He found a rusty bolt on the floor, picked it up, and threw it at a wall. It did not bounce off but passed through and clattered onto the floor beyond. So the walls did not exist except as figments in his spectacles. The labyrinth was constructed of information. In order to escape, he would have to hack it.
He sat down on the floor. Nick the barman appeared, walking unhindered through walls, bearing a tray with another stout on it, and handed it to him along with a bowl of salty peanuts. As the evening went on, other people passed through his area, dancing or singing or dueling or arguing or making love. None of these had anything to do, particularly, with Hackworth's Quest, and they appeared to have nothing to do with each other. Apparently Hackworth's Quest was (as the devil-woman herself had told him) just one of several concurrent stories being acted out tonight, coexisting in the same space.
So what did any of this have to do with the life of John Hackworth? And how was Fiona mixed up in it?
As Hackworth thought about Fiona, a panel in front of him slid to the side, exposing several yards of corridor. During the next couple of hours he noted the same thing several times: An idea would occur to him, and a wall would move.
In this way he moved in fits and starts through the maze, as his mind moved from one idea to the next. The floor was definitely sloping downward, which would obviously bring him below the waterline at some point; and indeed he had begun to sense a heavy drumming noise coming up through the deckplates, which might have been the pounding of mighty engines except that this ship, as far as he knew, wasn't going anywhere. He smelled seawater before him and saw dim lights shining through its surface, broken by the waves, and knew that in the flooded ballast tanks of this ship lay a network of underwater tunnels, and that in those tunnels were Drummers. For all he knew, the whole show was just a figment being enacted in the mind of the Drummers. Probably not the main event either; it was probably just an epiphenomenon of whatever deep processes the Drummers were running down there in their collective mind.
A wall panel slid aside and gave him a clear path to the water. Hackworth squatted at the water's edge for a few minutes, listening to the drums, then stood up and began to undo his necktie.
He was terribly hot and sweaty, and bright light was in his eyes, and none of these things were consistent with being underwater. He awoke to see a bright blue sky overhead, pawed at his face, and found that the spectacles were gone. Fiona was there in her white dress, watching him with a rueful smile. The floor was pounding Hackworth on the buttocks and evidently had been for some time, as the bony parts of his backside were bruised and raw. He realized that they were on the raft, heading back toward the London docks; that he was naked and that Fiona had covered him with a sheet of plastic to protect his skin from the sun. A few other theatergoers were scattered about, slumped against one another, utterly passive, like refugees, or people who've just had the greatest sex of their lives, or people who are tremendously hung over.
“You were quite a hit,” Fiona said. And suddenly Hackworth remembered himself being paraded naked and dripping down the thrust stage, waves of applause rolling over him from the standing audience.
“The Quest is finished,” he blurted. “We're going to Shanghai.”
“You're going to Shanghai,” Fiona said. “I'll see you off at the dock. Then I'll be going back.” She cocked her head over the stern.
“Back to the ship?”
“I was a bigger hit than you were,” she said. “I've found my calling in life, Father. I've accepted an invitation to join Dramatis Personae.”
Carl Hollywood's hack.
Carl Hollywood leaned back against the hard lacquered back of his corner seat for the first time in many hours and rubbed his face with both hands, scratching himself with his own whiskers. He had been sitting in the teahouse for almost twenty-four hours, consumed twelve pots of tea, and twice called in masseuses to unknot his back. The afternoon light coming in the windows behind him flickered as the crowd outside began to break up. They had been treated to a remarkable free media show, watching over his shoulders for hours as the dramaturgical exploits of John Percival Hackworth had played themselves out, in several different camera angles, on floating cine windows on Carl Hollywood's pages. None of them could read English, and so they had been unable to follow the story of Princess Nell's adventures in the land of King Coyote, which had been streaming across the pages at the same time, the storyline fluctuating and curling in upon itself like a cloud of smoke spun and torn by invisible currents.
Now the pages were blank and empty. Carl reached out lazily with one hand and began to stack the sheets on top of each other, just for something to occupy his hands while his mind worked—though it wasn't working, at this point, so much as stumbling blindly through a dark labyrinth à la John Percival Hackworth.
Carl Hollywood had long suspected that, among other things, the network of the Drummers was a giant system for breaking codes. The cryptographic systems that made the media network run securely, and that made it capable of securely transferring money, were based on the use of immense prime numbers as magic keys. The keys could theoretically be broken by throwing enough computing power at the problem. But at any given level of computing power, code-making was always much easier than code-breaking, so as long as the system kept moving to larger and larger prime numbers as computers got faster, the code-makers could stay far ahead of the code-breakers forever.
But the human mind didn't work like a digital computer and was capable of doing some funny things. Carl Hollywood remembered one of the Lone Eagles, an older man who could add huge columns of numbers in his head as quickly as they were called out. That, in and of itself, was merely a duplication of something that a digital computer could do. But this man could also do numerical tricks that could not easily be programmed into a computer.
If many minds were gathered together in the network of the Drummers, perhaps they could somehow see through the storm of encrypted data that roared continuously through media space, cause the seemingly random bits to coalesce into meaning. The men who had come to talk to Miranda, who had persuaded her to enter the world of the Drummers, had implied that this was possible; that through them, Miranda could find Nell.
Superficially, this would be disastrous, because it would destroy the system used for financial transactions. It would be as if, in a world where commerce was based upon the exchange of gold, some person had figured out how to change lead into gold. An Alchemist.
But Carl Hollywood wondered if it really made a differen
ce. The Drummers could only do such things by subsuming themselves into a gestalt society. As the case of Hackworth demonstrated, as soon as a Drummer removed himself from that gestalt, he lost touch with it completely. All communication between the Drummers and normal human society took place unconsciously, through their influence upon the Net, in patterns that appeared subliminally in the ractives that everyone played with in their homes and saw playing across the walls of buildings. The Drummers could break the code, but they couldn't take advantage of it in an obvious way, or perhaps they simply did not want to. They could make gold, but they were no longer interested in having it.
John Hackworth, somehow, was better than anyone else at making the transition between the society of Drummers and the Victorian tribe, and each time he crossed the boundary, he seemed to bring something with him, clinging to his garments like traces of scent. These faint echoes of forbidden data entrained in his wake caused tangled and unpredictable repercussions, on both sides of the boundary, that Hackworth himself might not even be aware of. Carl Hollywood had known little of Hackworth until several hours ago, when, alerted by a friend in Dramatis Personae, he had joined his story in progress on the black decks of the show boat. Now he seemed to know a great deal: that Hackworth was the progenitor of the Young Lady's Illustrated Primer, and that he had a deep relationship with the Drummers that went far beyond anything as simpleminded as captivity. He had not just been eating lotuses and getting his rocks off during his years beneath the waves.
Hackworth had brought something back with him this time, when he had emerged naked and streaming with cold seawater from the warren of Drummers in the ballast tanks of the ship. He had emerged with a set of numerical keys that were used to identify certain entities: the Primer, Nell, Miranda, and someone else who went by the name of Dr. X. Before he had fully reentered his conscious state, he had supplied those keys to the Clown, who had been there to haul his gasping and shivering body out of the water. The Clown was a mechanical device, but Dramatis Personae had been good enough to allow Carl Hollywood to control it—and to improvise much of Hackworth's personal script and storyline—for the duration of the show.
The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer Page 49