The Diamond Age

by Neal Stephenson

  She climbed up the last flights of stairs and emerged onto the building's roof, exhilarated as much by the fresh air as by the discovery that it was completely deserted. She walked to the edge of the roof and peered down almost half a mile to the street. In the black windows of a dead skyscraper across the way, she could see the mirror image of Princess Nell's crest.

  After a minute or two, she noticed that something akin to a shock wave was making its way down the street far below, moving in slow motion, covering a city block every couple of minutes. Details were difficult to make out at this distance: it was a highly organized group of pedestrians, all wearing the same generally dark clothing, ramming its way through the mob of refugees, forcing the panicked barbarians toward the picket line of the Fists or sideways into the lobbies of the dead buildings.

  Nell was transfixed for several minutes by this sight. Then she happened to glance down a different street and saw the same phenomenon there.

  She made a quick circuit of the building's roof. All in all, several columns were advancing inexorably on the foundations of the building where Nell stood.

  In time, one of these columns broke through the last of the obstructing refugees and reached the edge of the broad open plaza that surrounded the foot of Nell's building, where it faced off against the Fist defenses. The column stopped abruptly at this point and waited for a few minutes, collecting itself and waiting for the other columns to catch up.

  Nell had supposed at first that these columns might be Fist reinforcements converging on this building, which was clearly intended to be the headquarters of their final assault on the Coastal Republic. But it soon became evident that these newcomers had arrived for other purposes. After a few minutes of unbearable tension had gone by in nearly perfect silence, the columns suddenly, on the same unheard signal, erupted into the plaza. As they debouched from the narrow streets, they spread out into many-pronged formations, arranging themselves with the precision of a professional drill team, and then charged forward into the suddenly panicked and disorganized Fists, throwing up a tremendous battle-cry. When that sound echoed up two hundred stories to Nell's ears, she felt her hair standing on end, because it was not the deep lusty roar of grown men but the fierce thrill of thousands of young girls, sharp and penetrating as the skirl of massed bagpipes.

  It was Nell's tribe, and they had come for their leader. Nell spun on her heel and made for the stairway.

  By the time she had reached ground level and burst out, somewhat unwisely, into the building's lobby, the girls had breached the walls of the building in several places and rushed in upon the remaining defenders. They moved in groups of four. One girl (the largest) would rush toward an opponent, holding a pointed bamboo stick aimed at his heart. While his attention was thus fixed, two other girls (the smallest) would converge on him from the sides. Each girl would hug one of his legs and, acting together, they would lift him off the ground. The fourth girl (the fastest) would by this point have circled all the way round and would come in from behind, driving a knife or other weapon into the victim's back. During the half-dozen or so applications of this technique that Nell witnessed, it never failed, and none of the girls ever suffered more than the odd bruise or scrape.

  Suddenly she felt a moment of wild panic as she thought they were doing the same to her; but after she had been lifted into the air, no attack came from front or back, though many girls rushed in from all sides, each adding her small strength to the paramount goal of hoisting Nell high into the air. Even as the last remnants of the Fists were being hunted down and destroyed in the nooks and corners of the lobby, Nell was being borne on the shoulders of her little sisters out the front doors of the building and into the plaza, where something like a hundred thousand girls—Nell could not count all the regiments and brigades—collapsed to their knees in unison, as though struck down by a divine wind, and presented her their bamboo stakes, pole knives, lead pipes, and nunchuks. The provisional commanders of her divisions stood foremost, as did her provisional ministers of defense, of state, and of research and development, all of them bowing to Nell, not with a Chinese bow or a Victorian one but something they'd come up with that was in between.

  Nell should have been tongue-tied and paralyzed with astonishment, but she was not; for the first time in her life she understood why she'd been put on the earth and felt comfortable with her position. One moment, her life had been a meaningless abortion, and the next it all made glorious sense. She began to speak, the words rushing from her mouth as easily as if she had been reading them from the pages of the Primer. She accepted the allegiance of the Mouse Army, complimented them on their great deeds, and swept her arm across the plaza, over the heads of her little sisters, toward the thousands upon thousands of stranded sojourners from New Atlantis, Nippon, Israel, and all of the other Outer Tribes. “Our first duty is to protect these,” she said. “Show me the condition of the city and all those in it.”

  They wanted to carry her, but she jumped to the stones of the plaza and strode away from the building, toward her ranks, which parted to make way for her. The streets of Pudong were filled with hungry and terrified refugees, and through them, in simple peasant clothes streaked with the blood of herself and of others, broken shackles dangling from her wrists, followed by her generals and ministers, walked the barbarian Princess with her book and her sword.

  Carl Hollywood takes a stroll to the waterfront.

  Carl Hollywood was awakened by a ringing in his ears and a burning in his cheek that turned out to be an inch-long fragment of plate glass driven into his flesh. When he sat up, his bed made clanking and crashing noises, shedding a heavy burden of shattered glass, and a fœtid exhalation from the wrecked windows blew over his face. Old hotels had their charms, but disadvantages too—such as windowpanes made out of antique materials.

  Fortunately some old Wyoming instinct had caused him to leave his boots next to the bed the night before. He inverted each one and carefully probed it for broken glass before he pulled it on. Only when he had put on all of his clothes and gathered his things together did he go to look out the window.

  His hotel was near the Huang Pu waterfront. Looking across the river, he could see that great patches of Pudong had gone black against the indigo sky of predawn. A few buildings, connected to the indigenous Feeds, were still lit up. On this side of the river the situation was not so simple; Shanghai, unlike Pudong, had lived through many wars and was therefore made to be robust: the city was rife with secret power sources, old diesel generators, private Sources and Feeds, water tanks and cisterns. People still raised chickens for food in the shadow of the Hongkong&Shanghai Banking Corporation. Shanghai would weather the onslaught of the Fists much better than Pudong.

  But as a white person, Carl Hollywood might not weather it very well at all. It was better to be across the river, in Pudong, with the rest of the Outer Tribes.

  From here to the waterfront was about three blocks; but since this was Shanghai, those three blocks were fraught with what in any other city would be three miles' worth of complications. The main problem was going to be Fists; he could already hear the cries of “Sha! Sha!” boiling up from the streets, and shining a pocket torch through the bars of his balcony, he could see many Fists, emboldened by the destruction of the foreign Feeds, running around with their scarlet girdles and headbands exposed to the world.

  If he weren't six and a half feet tall and blue-eyed, he'd probably try to disguise himself as Chinese and slink to the waterfront, and it probably wouldn't work. He went through his closet and hauled out his big duster, which swept nearly to his ankles. It was proof against bullets and most nanotech projectiles.

  There was a long item of luggage he had thrown up on the closet shelf unopened. Hearing the reports of trouble, he had taken the precaution of bringing these relics with him: an engraved lever-action .44 rifle with low-tech iron sights and, as a last-ditch sort of thing, a Colt revolver. These were unnecessarily glorious weapons, but he had long ago go
tten rid of any of his guns that did not have historical or artistic value.

  Two gunshots sounded from within the building, very close to him. Moments later, someone knocked at his door. Carl wrapped his duster around him, in case someone decided to fire through the door, and peered out through the peephole. To his surprise, he saw a white-haired Anglo gentleman with a handlebar mustache, gripping a semiautomatic. Carl had met him yesterday in the hotel bar; he was here trying to clear up some kind of business before the fall of Shanghai.

  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 shirts 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 fashionable.”

  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 nanoblades 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 shell, 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 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 constituted 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 butt 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 shell, 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 bump into him, and squeezed the trigger. The rifle butted 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 shell 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 pra
ctically 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 space 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.