Diamond Age or a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer

As he crossed the western bank of the Huang Pu, the usual crowd of starving peasants and professional amputees washed around him like a wave running up a flat beach because, though riding here was dangerous, it was not crazy, and they did not know him for a madman. He kept his gray eyes fixed upon the picket of burning Feed lines that demarcated the shrinking border of the Coastal Republic, and let their hands tug at his coattails, but he took no notice of them. At different times, three very rural young men, identifiable as much by their deep tans as their ignorance of modern security technology, made the mistake of reaching for his watch chain and received warning shocks for their trouble. One of them refused to let go until the smell of burned flesh rose from his palm, and then he peeled his hand away slowly and calmly, staring up at Hackworth to show that he didn't mind a little pain, and said something clearly and loudly that caused a titter to run through the crowd.

The ride down Nanjing Road took him through the heart of Shanghai's shopping district, now an endless gauntlet of tanned beggars squatting on their heels gripping the brightly colored plastic bags that served as their suitcases, carefully passing the butts of cigarettes back and forth. In the shop windows above their heads, animated mannikins strutted and posed in the latest Coastal Republic styles. Hackworth noticed that these were much more conservative than they had been ten years ago, during his last trip down Nanjing Road. The female mannikins weren't wearing slit skirts anymore. Many weren't wearing skirts at all, but silk pants instead, or long robes that were even less revealing. One display was centered upon a patriarchal figure who reclined on a dais, wearing a round cap with a blue button on the top: a Mandarin. A young scholar was bowing to him. Around the dais, four groups of mannikins were demonstrating the other four filial relationships.

So it was chic to be Confucian now, or at least it was politic. This was one of the few shop windows that didn't have red Fist posters pasted all over it.

Hackworth rode past marble villas built by Iraqi Jews in previous centuries, past the hotel where Nixon had once stayed, past the high-rise enclaves that Western businessmen had used as the beachheads of the post-Communist development that had led to the squalid affluence of the Coastal Republic. He rode past nightclubs the size of stadiums; jaialai pits where stunned refugees gaped at the jostling of the bettors; side streets filled with boutiques, one street for fine goods made from alligators, another for furs, another for leathers; a nanotech district consisting of tiny businesses that did bespoke engineering; fruit and vegetable stands; a cul-de-sac where peddlers sold antiques from little carts, one specializing in cinnabar boxes, another in Maoist kitsch. Each time the density began to wane and he thought he must be reaching the edge of the city, he would come to another edge city of miniature three-story strip malls and it would begin again.

But as the day went on, he truly did approach the limit of the city and kept riding anyway toward the west, and it became evident then that he was a madman and the people in the streets looked at him with awe and got out of his way. Bicycles and pedestrians became less common, replaced by heavier and faster military traffic.

Hackworth did not like riding on the shoulder of highways, and so he directed Kidnapper to find a less direct route to Suzhou, one that used smaller roads. This was flat Yangtze Delta territory only inches above the waterline, where canals, for transport, irrigation, and drainage, were more numerous than roads. The canals ramified through the black, stinky ground like blood vessels branching into the tissues of the brain. The plain was interrupted frequently by small tumuli containing the coffins of someone's ancestors, just high enough to stay above the most routine floods. Farther to the west, steep hills rose from the paddies, black with vegetation. The Coastal Republic checkpoints at the intersections of the roads were gray and fuzzy, like house-size clots of bread mold, so dense was the fractal defense grid, and staring through the cloud of macro– and microscopic aerostats, Hackworth could barely make out the hoplites in the center, heat waves rising from the radiators on their backs and stirring the airborne soup. They let him pass through without incident. Hackworth expected to see more checkpoints as he continued toward Fist territory, but the first one was the last; the Coastal Republic did not have the strength for defense in depth and could muster only a one-dimensional picket line.