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.
A mile past the checkpoint, at another small intersection, Hackworth found a pair of very makeshift crucifixes fashioned from freshly cut mulberry trees, green leaves still fluttering from their twigs. Two young white men had been bound to the crucifixes with gray plastic ties, burned in many places and incrementally disemboweled. From the looks of their haircuts and the somber black neckties that had been ironically left around their necks, Hackworth guessed they were Mormons. A long skein of intestine trailed from one of their bellies down into the dirt, where a gaunt pig was tugging on it stubbornly.
He did not see much more death, but he smelled it everywhere in the hot wet air. He thought that he might be seeing a network of nanotech defense barriers until he realized that it was a natural phenomenon: Each waterway supported a linear black nimbus of fat, drowsy flies. From this he knew that if he tugged a bit on this or that rein and guided Kidnapper to the bank of the canal, he would find it filled with ballooning corpses.
Ten minutes after passing the Coastal Republic checkpoint, he rode through the center of a Fist encampment. As he looked neither right nor left, he could not really estimate its size; they had taken over a village of low brick-and-stucco buildings. A long straight smudge running across the earth marked the location of a burned Feed line, and as he crossed it, Hackworth fantasized that it was a meridian engraved on the living globe by an astral cartographer.
Most of the Fists were shirtless, wearing indigo trousers, scarlet girdles knotted at the waist, sometimes scarlet ribbons tied round necks, foreheads, or upper arms. The ones who weren't sleeping or smoking were practicing martial arts. Hackworth rode slowly through their midst, and they pretended not to notice him, except for one man who came running out of a house with a knife, shouting
"Sha! Sha!" and had to be tackled by three comrades.
As he rode the forty miles to Suzhou, nothing changed about the landscape except that creeks became rivers and ponds became lakes. The Fist encampments became somewhat larger and closer together. When the thick air infrequently roused itself to a breeze, he could smell the clammy metallic reek of stagnant water and knew he was close to the great lake of Tai Wu, or Taifu as the Shanghainese pronounced it. A grayscale dome rose from the paddies some miles away, casting a film of shadow before a cluster of tall buildings, and Hackworth knew it must be Suzhou, now a stronghold of the Celestial Kingdom, veiled in its airborne shield like a courtesan behind a translucent sheen of Suzhou silk.
Nearing the shore of the great lake he found his way onto an important road that ran south toward Hangzhou. He set Kidnapper ambling northward. Suzhou had thrown out tendrils of development along its major roads, and so as he drew closer he saw strip malls and franchises, now destroyed, deserted, or colonized by refugees.
Most of these places catered to truck drivers: lots of motels, casinos, teahouses, and fast-food places. But no trucks ran on the highway now, and Hackworth rode down the center of a lane, sweating uncontrollably in his dark clothes and drinking frequently from a refrigerated bottle in Kidnapper's glove compartment.
A McDonald's sign lay toppled across the highway like a giant turnpike; something had burned through the single pillar that thrust it into the air. A couple of young men were standing in front of it smoking cigarettes and, as Hackworth realized, waiting for him. As Hackworth drew closer, they ground out their cigarettes, stepped forward, and bowed. Hackworth tipped his bowler. One of them took Kidnapper's reins, which was a purely ceremonial gesture in the case of a robot horse, and the other invited Hackworth to dismount. Both of the men were wearing heavy but flexible coveralls with cables and tubes running through the fabric: the inner layer of armor suits. They could turn themselves into battle-ready hoplites by slapping on the harder and heavier outer bits, which were presumably stashed somewhere handy. Their scarlet headbands identified them as Fists. Hackworth was one of the few members of the Outer Tribes ever to find himself in the presence of a Fist who was not running toward him with a weapon screaming "Kill! Kill!" and found it interesting to see them in a more indulgent mood. They were dignified, formal, and controlled, like military men, with none of the leering and snickering that were fashionable among Coastal Republic boys of the same age.