The Diamond Age Part 24

"Is there any other information-"

"Nothing that I can reveal," Napier said brusquely, perhaps having revealed too much already. "Do let us know if you find him, though. Er, Hackworth, there is no tactful way to broach this subject. Are you aware that your wife has divorced you?"

"Oh, yes," Hackworth said quietly. "I suppose I did know that." But he hadn't been conscious of it until now.

"She was remarkably understanding about your long absence," Napier said, "but at some point it became evident that, like all the Drummers, you had become s.e.xually promiscuous in the extreme."

"How did she know?"

"We warned her."

"Pardon me?"

"I mentioned earlier that we found things in your blood. These haemocules were designed specifically to be spread through exchange of bodily fluids."

"How do you know that?"

Napier seemed impatient for the first time. "For G.o.d's sake, man, we know what we are doing. These particles had two functions: spread through exchange of bodily fluids, and interact with each other. Once we saw that, we had no ethical choice but to inform your wife."

"Of course. That's only right. As a matter of fact, I thank you for it," Hackworth said. "And it's not hard to understand Gwen's feelings about sharing bodily fluids with thousands of Drummers."

"You shouldn't beat yourself up," Napier said. "We've sent explorers down there."

"Really?"

"Yes. The Drummers don't mind. The explorers relate that the Drummers behave much the way people do in dreams. "Poorly defined ego boundaries' was the phrase, as I recall. In any event, your behaviour down there wasn't necessarily a moral transgression as such-your mind wasn't your own."

"You said that these particles interact with each other?"

"Each one is a container for some rod logic and some memory," Napier said. "When one particle encounters another either in vivo in vivo or or in vitro, in vitro, they dock and seem to exchange data for a few moments. Most of the time they disengage and drift apart. Sometimes they stay docked for a while, and computation takes place-we can tell because the rod logic throws off heat. Then they disconnect. Sometimes both particles go their separate ways, sometimes one of them goes dead. But one of them always keeps going." they dock and seem to exchange data for a few moments. Most of the time they disengage and drift apart. Sometimes they stay docked for a while, and computation takes place-we can tell because the rod logic throws off heat. Then they disconnect. Sometimes both particles go their separate ways, sometimes one of them goes dead. But one of them always keeps going."

The implications of that last sentence were not lost on Hackworth. "Do the Drummers only have s.e.x with one another, or-"

"That was our first question too," Napier said. "The answer is no. They have a very good deal of s.e.x with many, many other people. They actually run bordellos in Vancouver. They cater especially to the Aerodrome-and-tube-station crowd. A few years ago they came into conflict with the established bordellos because they were hardly charging any money at all for their services. They raised their prices just to be diplomatic. But they don't want the money-what on earth would they do with it?"

From the Primer, a visit to Castle Turing; a chat with Miss Matheson; speculation as to Nell's destiny; farewell; conversation with a grizzled hoplite; Nell goes forth to seek her fortune.

The new territory into which Princess Nell had crossed was by far the largest and most complex of all the Faery Kingdoms in the Primer. Paging back to the first panoramic ill.u.s.tration, she counted seven major castles perched on the mountaintops, and she knew perfectly well that she would have to visit all of them, and do something difficult in each one, in order to retrieve the eleven keys that had been stolen from her and the one key that remained.

She made herself some tea and sandwiches and carried them in a basket to a meadow, where she liked to sit among the wildflowers and read. Constable Moore's house was a melancholy place without the Constable in it, and it had been several weeks since she had seen him. During the last two years he had been called away on business with increasing frequency, vanis.h.i.+ng (as she supposed) into the interior of China for days, then weeks at a time, coming back depressed and exhausted to find solace in whiskey, which he consumed in surprisingly moderate quant.i.ties but with fierce concentration, and in midnight bagpipe recitals that woke up everyone in Dovetail and a few sensitive sleepers in the New Atlantis Clave.

During her trip from the campsite of the Mouse Army to the first of the castles, Nell had to use all the wilderness skills she had learned in years of traveling around the Land Beyond: She fought with a mountain lion, avoided a bear, forded streams, lit fires, built shelters. By the time Nell had maneuvered Princess Nell to the ancient moss-covered gates of the first castle, the sun was s.h.i.+ning horizontally across the meadow and the air was becoming a bit chilly. Nell wrapped herself up in a thermogenic shawl and set the thermostat for something a little on the cool side of comfortable; she had found that her wits became dull if she got too cozy. The basket had a thermos of hot tea with milk, and the sandwiches would hold out for a while.

The highest of the castle's many towers was surmounted by a great four-sailed windmill that turned steadily, even though only a mild breeze could be noticed at Princess Nell's alt.i.tude, hundreds of feet below.

Set into the main gate was a judas gate, and set into the judas was a small hatch. Below the hatch was a great bronze knocker made in the shape of a letter T, though its shape had become indistinct from an encrustation of moss and lichens. Princess Nell operated the knocker only with some effort and, given its decrepit state, did not expect a response; but hardly had the first knock sounded than the hatch opened up, and she was confronted by a helmet: For the gatekeeper on the other side was dressed from head to toe in a rusty and moss-covered suit of battle armor. But the gatekeeper said nothing, simply stared at Princess Nell; or so she a.s.sumed, as she could not see his face through the helmet's narrow vision-slits.

"Good afternoon," said Princess Nell. "I beg your pardon, but I am a traveler in these parts, and I wonder if you would be so good as to give me a place to stay for the night."

Without a word, the gatekeeper slammed the hatch closed. Nell could hear the creaking and clanking of his armor as he slowly marched away.

Some minutes later, she heard him coming toward her again, though this time the noise was redoubled. The rusty locks on the judas gate grumbled and shrieked. The gate door swung open, and Princess Nell stepped back from it as rust flakes, fragments of lichens, and divots of moss showered down around her. Two men in armor now stood there, beckoning her forward.

Nell stepped through the gate and into the dark streets of the castle. The gate slammed behind her. An iron vise clamped around each of Princess Nell's upper arms; the men had seized her with their gauntlets. They lifted her into the air and carried her for some minutes through the streets, stairs, and corridors of the castle. These were completely deserted. She did not see so much as a mouse or a rat. No smoke rose from the chimneys, no light came from any window, and in the long hallway leading to the throne room, the torches hung cold and blackened in their sconces. From place to place Princess Nell saw another armored soldier standing at attention, but, as none of them moved, she did not know whether these were empty suits of armor or real men.

Nowhere did she see the usual signs of commerce and human activity: horse manure, orange peels, barking dogs, running sewers. Somewhat to her alarm, she did see an inordinate number of chains. The chains were all of the same, somewhat peculiar design, and she saw them everywhere: piled up in heaps on streetcorners, overflowing from metal baskets, dangling from rooftops, strung between towers.

The clanking and squeaking of the men who bore her along made it difficult for her to hear anything else; but as they proceeded higher and deeper into the castle, she slowly became conscious of a deep grinding, growling noise that pervaded the very ashlars. This noise crescendoed as they hustled down the long final hallway, and became nearly earth-shaking as they finally entered the vaulted throne room at the very heart of the castle.

The room was dark and cold, though some light was admitted by clerestory windows high up in the vaults. The walls were lined with men in armor, standing stock-still. Sitting in the middle of the room, on a throne twice as high as a man, was a giant, dressed in a suit of armor that gleamed like a looking-gla.s.s. Standing below him was a man in armor holding a rag and a wire brush, vigorously buffing one of the lord's greaves.

"Welcome to Castle Turing," said the lord in a metallic voice.

By this time, Princess Nell's eyes had adjusted to the dimness, and she could see something else behind the throne: a tremendous Shaft, as thick as the mainmast of a dromond, made of the trunk of a great tree bound and reinforced with bra.s.s plates and bands. The Shaft turned steadily, and Princess Nell realized that it must be transmitting the power of the giant windmill far above them. Enormous gears, black and sticky with grease, were attached to the Shaft and transferred its power to other, smaller shafts that ran off horizontally in every direction and disappeared through holes in the walls. The turning and grinding of all these shafts and gears made the omnipresent noise she had noted earlier.

One horizontal shaft ran along each wall of the throne room at about the height of a man's chest. This shaft pa.s.sed through a gearbox at short, regular intervals. A stubby, square shaft projected from each gearbox at a right angle, sticking straight out of the wall. These gearboxes tended to coincide with the locations of the soldiers.

The soldier who was polis.h.i.+ng the lord's armor worked his way around to one of the lord's spiked knee protectors and, in so doing, turned his back on Princess Nell. She was startled to see a large square hole in the middle of his back.

Nell knew, vaguely, that the name Castle Turing was a hint; she'd learned a bit about Turing at Miss Matheson's Academy. He had something to do with computers. She could have turned to the Encyclopaedia pages and looked it right up, but she had learned to let the Primer tell the story its own way. Clearly the soldiers were not men in armor, but simply wind-up men, and the same was probably true of the Duke of Turing himself.

After a short and not very interesting conversation, during which Princess Nell tried unsuccessfully to establish whether the Duke was or was not human, he announced, unemotionally, that he was throwing her into the dungeon forever.

This sort of thing no longer surprised or upset Nell because it had happened hundreds of times during her relations.h.i.+p with the Primer. Besides, she had known, from the very first day Harv had given her the book, how the story would come out in the end. It was just that the story was anfractuous; it developed more ramifications the more closely she read it.

One of the soldiers detached himself from his gearbox on the wall, stomped into the corner, and picked up a metal basket filled with one of those peculiar chains Princess Nell had seen everywhere. He carried it to the throne, fished through it until he found the end, and fed the end into a hole on the side of the throne. In the meantime, a second soldier had also detached himself from the wall and taken up a position on the opposite side of the throne. This soldier flipped his visor open to expose some sort of mechanical device in the s.p.a.ce where his head ought to have been.

A tremendous chattering noise arose from inside the throne. The second soldier caught the end of the chain as it was emerging from his side and fed it into the opening in his visor. A moment later it popped out of a hatch on his chest. In this fas.h.i.+on, the entire length of the chain, some twenty or thirty feet in all, was slowly and noisily drawn out of the basket, into the noisy mechanism hidden beneath the throne, down the second soldier's throat, out the hatch in his chest, and down to the floor, where it gradually acc.u.mulated into a greasy heap. The process went on for much longer than Princess Nell first antic.i.p.ated, because the chain frequently changed direction; more than once, when the basket was nearly empty, the chain began to spew back into it until it was nearly full again. But on the whole it was more apt to go forward than backward, and eventually the last link lifted free from the basket and disappeared into the throne. A few seconds later, the din from the throne stopped; now Nell could only hear a somewhat lesser chattering from the second soldier. Finally that stopped as well, and the chain fell from his chest. The soldier scooped it up in his arms and deposited it in an empty basket that was sitting handily nearby. Then he strode toward Nell, bent forward at the waist, put his hard cold shoulder rather uncomfortably into the pit of her stomach, and picked her up off the floor like a sack of corn. He carried her for some minutes through the castle, most of that time spent descending endless stone staircases, and finally brought her to a very deep, dark, and cold dungeon, where he deposited her in a small and perfectly dark cell.

Nell said, "Princess Nell used one of the magic spells Purple had taught her to make light."

Princess Nell could see that the room was about two by three paces, with a stone bench on one wall to serve as a bed, and a hole in the floor for a toilet. A tiny barred window in the back wall led to an air shaft. Evidently this was quite deep and narrow, and Nell was close to the very bottom, because no light came through it. The soldier walked out of the cell and pulled the door shut behind him; as he did, she saw that the lock was extraordinarily large, about the size of an iron breadbox mounted to the door, full of clockwork and with a large crank dangling from its center.

The door was equipped with a small peephole. Peering out through it, Nell could see that the soldier did not have a key as such. Instead, he took a short length of chain, about as long as his arm, from a peg near the door and fed it into the giant lock. Then he began to turn the crank. The clockwork clicked, the chain clanked, and eventually the bolt shot out and engaged the jamb, locking Princess Nell into the dungeon. Immediately the chain crashed out of the lock and landed on the floor. The soldier picked it up and hung it back on the wall. Then he clanked away and did not come back until several hours later, when he brought her some bread and water, shoving it through a little hatch in the middle of the door, just above the mechanical lock.

It did not take Princess Nell long to explore the limited confines of her cell. In one corner, buried under dust and debris, she found something hard and cold and pulled it out for a better look: It was a fragment of chain, quite rusty, but clearly recognizable as the same sort of chain that she saw all over Castle Turing.

The chain was flat. Each link had a toggle: a movable bit of metal in the center, capable of rotating about and snapping into place in either of two positions, either parallel or perpendicular to the chain.

During her first night in the cell, Nell discovered two other things. First, the latch on the little door through which her food was delivered was partly accessible from her side, and with a little effort she was able to jam it so that it no longer locked properly. After that, she was able to stick her head out of the hatch and examine her surroundings, including the mechanical lock. Or she could reach out with one arm and feel the lock, spin the crank, and so on.

The second discovery came in the middle of the night, when she was awakened by a metallic clanking sound coming through the tiny window on the air shaft. Reaching out with one hand, she felt the end of a chain dangling there. She pulled on it, and after initial resistance, it came freely. In short order she was able to pull many yards of chain into her cell and pile it up on the floor.

Nell had a pretty good idea what to do with the chain. Starting with the end, she examined the toggles and began to mark their positions down (the Primer always gave her scratch pages when she needed them). She made a horizontal mark for toggles parallel to the chain and a vertical mark for those that were perpendicular, and came up with this: - - - - -- - - - .

If she counted the vertical marks and replaced them with numbers, this amounted to 8-5-12-12-15- -9- -1-13- - -4-21-11-5- - - - -20-21-18-9-14-7-.

and if the numbers stood for letters of the alphabet, horizontal marks divided the letters, and double horizontals were s.p.a.ces, this was h.e.l.lO I AM- - -DUKE- - - - -TURING.

Perhaps the multiple horizontals were codes for commonly used words: - - -the - - - -(not used; possibly a/an?) a/an?) - - - - -of If that was right, then the message was h.e.l.lO I AM THE DUKE OF TURING, which was interesting, since the giant fellow in the armor had previously identified himself as such, and she deemed it unlikely that he would be sending her a message by this route. This must have come from someone else calling himself the Duke of Turing-perhaps a real, living human being.

A few years ago Nell could have relied on it. But in recent years the Primer had become much subtler than it used to be, full of hidden traps, and she could no longer make comfortable and easy a.s.sumptions. It was just as likely that this chain had descended straight from the throne room itself, and that the mechanical Duke was, for some unfathomable reason, trying to dupe her. So while she was happy to respond to this message in kind, she intended to take a guarded approach until she had established whether the sender was human or mechanical.

The next part of the message was GIVE- - -CHAIN- - - -TUG- - - - - -ANSWER. a.s.suming that four horizontal marks stood for a/an a/an and six stood for and six stood for to, to, this was GIVE THE CHAIN A TUG TO ANSWER. this was GIVE THE CHAIN A TUG TO ANSWER.

Nell began to flip the toggles on the chain, erasing the message from this personage calling himself the Duke and replacing it with I AM PRINCESS NELL WHY DID YOU IMPRISON ME. Then she gave the chain a tug, and after a moment it began to withdraw from her cell. A few minutes later, back came the message: WELCOME PRINCESS NELL LET US DEVISE A MORE EFFICIENT MEANS OF COMMUNICATION.

followed by instructions on how to use a more compact system of toggles to represent numbers, and how to convert the numbers into letters and punctuation marks. Once this was settled, the Duke said I AM THE REAL DUKE. I CREATED THESE MACHINES, AND THEY IMPRISONED ME IN A HIGH TOWER FAR ABOVE YOU. THE MACHINE CALLING HIMSELF THE DUKE IS MERELY THE LARGEST AND MOST SOPHISTICATED OF MY CREATIONS.

Nell responded, THIS CHAIN WEIGHS HUNDREDS OF POUNDS. YOU MUST BE STRONG FOR A HUMAN.

The Duke responded YOU ARE A SHARP ONE PRINCESS NELL! THE FULL WEIGHT OF THE CHAIN IS ACTUALLY SEVERAL THOUSAND POUNDS, AND I MANAGE IT BY MEANS OF A WINCH LOCATED IN MY ROOM AND DERIVING ITS MOTIVE POWER FROM THE CENTRAL SHAFT.

Night had long since fallen on the meadow. Nell closed the Primer, packed up her basket, and returned home.

She stayed up late into the night with the Primer, just as she had when she was a small child, and as a result was late for church the next morning. They said a special prayer for Miss Matheson, who was at home and said to be feeling poorly. Nell called on her for a few minutes after the service, then went straight back home and dove into the Primer again.

She was attacking two problems at once. First, she needed to figure out how the lock on the door worked. Second, she needed to find out whether the person sending her the message was human or mechanical. If she could be confident that he was a human, she could ask him for a.s.sistance in opening the lock, but until she had settled this issue, she had to keep her activities a secret.

The lock only had a few parts that she could observe: the crank, the bolt, and a pair of bra.s.s drums set into the top with digits from 0 to 9 engraved in them, so that by spinning different ways, they could display all the integers from 00 to 99. These drums were in almost constant motion whenever the crank was turning.

Nell had managed to detach several yards of chain from the one that she was using to converse with the Duke, and so she was able to feed different messages into the lock and see what result they had.

The number on the top changed with every link that went into the machine, and it seemed to determine, in a limited way, what the machine would do next; for example, she had learned that the number happened to be 09, and if the next link in the chain was in the vertical position (which the Duke referred to as a one), the drums would spin around and change the number to 23. But if the next link was, instead, a zero (as the Duke referred to links with horizontal toggles), the number drums would change to 03. But that wasn't all: In this case, the machine would, for some reason, reverse the direction in which the chain was moving through the machine, and also flick the toggle from zero to one. That is, the machine could write on the chain as well as read from it.

From idle chitchat with the Duke she learned that the numbers on the drums were referred to as states. At first she did not know which states led to other states, and so she wandered aimlessly from one state to the next, recording the connections on scratch paper. This soon grew to a table listing some thirty-two different states and how the lock would respond to a one or a zero when it was in each of those states. It took a while for Nell to fill out all the blank s.p.a.ces in the table, because some of the states were hard to get to-they could be reached only by getting the machine to write a certain series of ones and zeros on the chain.

She would have gone crazy with ones and zeros were it not for the frequent interruptions from the Duke, who evidently had nothing better to do than to send her messages. These two parallel courses of inquiry occupied all of Nell's free time for a couple of weeks, and she made slow but steady progress.

"You must learn how to operate the lock on your door," the Duke said. "This will enable you to effect an escape and to come and rescue me. I will instruct you."

All he wanted to talk about was technology, which wouldn't help Nell in figuring out whether he was a human or a machine. "Why don't you pick your own lock," she responded, "and come and rescue me? I am just a poor helpless young thing all alone in the world, and so scared and lonely, and you seem so brave and heroic; your story really is quite romantic, and I cannot wait to see how it all comes out now that our fates have become intertwined."

"The machines placed a special lock on my door, not a Turing machine," responded the Duke.

"Describe yourself," Nell wrote.

"Nothing special, I'm afraid," wrote the Duke. "How about yourself?"

"Slightly taller than average, flas.h.i.+ng green eyes, raven hair falling in luxuriant waves to my waist unless I pin it up to emphasize my high cheekbones and full lips. Narrow waist, pert b.r.e.a.s.t.s, long legs, alabaster skin that flushes vividly when I am pa.s.sionate about something, which is frequently."

"Your description is reminiscent of my late wife, G.o.d rest her soul."

"Tell me about your wife."

"The subject fills me with such unutterable sadness that I cannot bear to write about it. Now, let's buckle down to work on the Turing machine."

Since the prurient approach had dead-ended, Nell tried a different tack: playing stupid. Sooner or later, the Duke would become a little testy. But he was always terribly patient with her, even after the twentieth repet.i.tion of "Could you explain it again with different words? I still don't get it." Of course, for all she knew, he was upstairs punching the walls until his knuckles were b.l.o.o.d.y and simply pretending to be patient with her. A man who'd been locked up in a tower for years would learn to be extremely patient.

She tried sending him poetry. He sent back glowing reviews but declined to send her any of his own, saying it wasn't good enough to be committed to metal.

On her twentieth day in the dungeon, Princess Nell finally got the lock open. Rather than making an immediate escape, she locked herself back in and sat down to ponder her next move.

If the Duke was human, she should notify him so that they could plan their escape. If he was a machine, doing so would lead to disaster. She had to figure out the Duke's ident.i.ty before she made another move.

She sent him another poem.

For the Greek's love she gave away her heart Her father, crown and homeland.

They stopped to rest on Naxos She woke up alone upon the strand The sails of her lover's s.h.i.+p descending Round the slow curve of the earth. Ariadne Fell into a swoon on the churned sand And dreamed of home. Minos did not forgive her And holding diamonds in the pouches of his eyes Had her flung into the Labyrinth.

She was alone this time. Through a wilderness Of blackness wandered Ariadne many days Until she tripped on the memory.

It was still wound all through the place.

She spun it round her fingers Lifted it from the floor Knotted it into lace Erased it.

The lace made a gift for him who had imprisoned her.

Blind with tears, he read it with his fingers And opened his arms.

The answer came back much too quickly, and it was the same answer as always: "I do so envy your skill with words. Now, if you do not object, let us turn our attention to the inner workings of the Turing machine."

She had made it as obvious as she dared, and the Duke still hadn't gotten the message. He must be a machine.

Why the deception?