Diamond Age or a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer

Over the next two days many of the refugees on the shore got away on air or surface ships, but a few of these were destroyed in spectacular fashion 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 masse, 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 spawned 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 passage 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 shore and not entrust themselves to the evacuation ships: 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 balls. 'When their fragile shells 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 circumstances, 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 assumed 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, relinquishing 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 makeshift 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 shore laughing to think that now the Middle Kingdom was at last a whole country once more.