"Only in my dreams," Carl Hollywood said.

Nell's passage through Pudong;

she happens upon the offices of Madame Ping;

interview with the same.

Shanghai proper could be glimpsed only through vertical apertures between the high buildings of the Pudong Economic Zone as Nell skated westward. Downtown Pudong erupted from the flat paddy-land on the east bank of the Huang Pu. Almost all of the skyscrapers made use of mediatronic building materials. Some bore the streamlined characters of the Japanese writing system, rendered in sophisticated color schemes, but most of them were written in the denser high-resolution characters used by the Chinese, and these tended to be stroked out in fiery red, or in black on a background of that color.

The Anglo-Americans had their Manhattan, the Japanese had Tokyo. Hong Kong was a nice piece of work, but it was essentially Western. When the Overseas Chinese came back to the homeland to build their monument to enterprise, they had done it here, and they had done it bigger and brighter, and unquestionably redder, than any of those other cities. The nanotechnological trick of making sturdy structures that were lighter than air had come along just at the right time, as all of the last paddies were being replaced by immense concrete foundations, and a canopy of new construction had bloomed above the first-generation undergrowth of seventy– and eighty-story buildings. This new architecture was naturally large and ellipsoidal, typically consisting of a huge neonrimmed ball impaled on a spike, so Pudong was bigger and denser a thousand feet above the ground than it was at street level.

Seen from the apex of the big arch in the Causeway through several miles of bad air, the view was curiously flattened and faded, as if the whole scene had been woven into a fabulously complex brocade that had been allowed to gather dust for several decades and then been hung in front of Nell, about ten feet away. The sun had gone down not long before and the sky was still a dim orange fading up into purple, divided into irregular segments by half a dozen pillars of smoke spurting straight up out of the horizon and toward the dark polluted vault of the heavens, many miles off to the west, somewhere out in the silk and tea districts between Shanghai and Suzhou.

As she power-skated down the western slope of the arch and crossed the coastline of China, the thunderhead of neon reached above her head, spread out to embrace her, developed into three dimensions– and she was still several miles away from it. The coastal neighborhoods consisted of block after block of reinforced-concrete apartment buildings, four to five stories high, looking older than the Great Wall though their real age could not have exceeded a few decades, and decorated on the ends facing the street with large cartoonish billboards, some mediatronic, most just painted on. For the first kilometer or so, most of these were targeted at businessmen just coming in from New Chusan, and in particular from the New Atlantis Clave. Glancing at these billboards as she went by them,

Nell concluded that visitors from New Atlantis played an important role in supporting casinos and bordellos, both the old-fashioned variety and the newer scripted-fantasy emporia, where you could be the star in a little play you wrote yourself. Nell slowed down to examine several of these, memorizing the addresses of ones with especially new or well-executed signs.

She had no clear plan in mind yet. All she knew was that she had to keep moving purposefully. Then the young men squatting on the curbs talking into their cellphones would keep eyeing her but leave her alone. The moment she stopped or looked the tiniest bit uncertain, they would descend.

The dense wet air along the Huang Pu was supporting millions of tons of air buoys, and Nell felt every kilogram of their weight pressing upon her ribs and shoulders as she skated up and down the main waterfront thoroughfare, trying to maintain her momentum and her false sense of purposefulness. This was the Coastal Republic, which appeared to have no fixed principles other than that money talked and that it was a good thing to get rich. Every tribe in the world seemed to have its own skyscraper here. Some, like New Atlantis, were not actively recruiting and simply used the size and magnificence of their buildings as a monument to themselves.

Others, like the Boers, the Parsis, the Jews, went for the understated approach, and in Pudong anything understated was more or less invisible. Still others-the Mormons, the First Distributed Republic, and the Chinese Coastal Republic itself-used every square inch of their mediatronic walls to proselytize.

The only phyle that didn't seem to appreciate the ecumenical spirit of the place was the Celestial Kingdom itself. Nell stumbled across their territory, half a square block surrounded with a stucco-sheathed masonry wall, circular gates here and there, and an old three-story structure inside, done in high Ming style with eaves that curved way up at the corners and sculpted dragons along the ridgeline of the roof. The place was so tiny compared to the rest of Pudong that it looked as if you might trip over it. The gates were guarded by men in armor, presumably backed up by other, less obvious defensive systems.

Nell was fairly certain that she was being followed, unobtrusively, by at least three young men who had locked on to her during her initial passage in from the coast, and who were waiting to find out whether she really had somewhere to go or was just faking it. She had already made her way from one end of the waterfront to the other, pretending to be a tourist who just wanted to take in a view of the Bund across the river. She was now heading back into the heart of downtown Pudong, where she had better look as if she were doing something.

Passing by the grand entrance to one of the skyscrapers-a Coastal Republic edifice, not barbarian turf-she recognized its mediaglyphic logo from one of the signs she had seen on the way into town.

Nell could at least fill out an application without committing herself. It would allow her to kill an hour in relatively safe and clean surroundings. The important thing, as Dojo had taught her long ago in a different context, was not to stop; without movement she could do nothing.

Alas, Madame Ping's office suite was closed. A few lights were on in the back, but the doors were locked and no receptionist was on duty. Nell did not know whether to be amused or annoyed; whoever heard of a brothel that closed down after dark? But then these were only the administrative offices.

She loitered in the lobby for a few minutes, then caught a down elevator. Just as the doors were closing, someone jumped into the lobby and slammed the button, opening them back up again. A young Chinese man with a small, slender body, large head, neatly dressed, carrying some papers. "Pardon me," he said. "Did you require something?"

"I'm here to apply for a job," Nell said.

The man's eyes traveled up and down her body in a coolly professional fashion, almost completely devoid of prurience, starting and stopping on her face. "As a performer," he said. The intonation was somewhere between a question and a declaration.

"As a scriptwriter," she said.

Unexpectedly, he broke into a grin.

"I have qualifications that I will explain in detail."

"We have writers. We contract for them on the network."

"I'm surprised. How can a contract writer in Minnesota possibly provide your clients with the personalized service they require?"

"You could almost certainly get a job as a performer," said the young man. "You would start tonight. Good pay."

"Just by looking at the billboards on the way in, I could see that your customers aren't paying for bodies. They are paying for ideas. That's your value added, right?"