"Pardon me?" said the young man, grinning again.
"Your value added. The reason you can charge more than a whorehouse, pardon my language, is that you provide a scripted fantasy scenario tailored to the client's requirements. I can do that for you," Nell said. "I know these people, and I can make you a lot of money."
"You know what people?"
"The Vickys. I know them inside and out," Nell said.
"Please come inside," said the young man, gesturing toward the diamondoid door with MADAME PING'S written on it in red letters. "Would you care for tea?"
"There are only two industries. This has always been true," said Madame Ping, enfolding a lovely porcelain teacup in her withered fingers, the two-inch fingernails interleaving neatly like the pinions of a raptor folding its wings after a long hard day of cruising the thermals. "There is the industry of things, and the industry of entertainment. The industry of things comes first. It keeps us alive. But making things is easy now that we have the Feed. This is not a very interesting business anymore.
"After people have the things they need to live, everything else is entertainment. Everything. This is Madame Ping's business."
Madame Ping had an office on the hundred-and-eleventh floor with a nice unobstructed view across the Huang Pu and into downtown Shanghai. When it wasn't foggy, she could even see the facade of her theatre, which was on a side street a couple of blocks in from the Bund, its mediatronic marquee glowing patchily through the dun limbs of an old sycamore tree. She had a telescope mounted in one of her windows, fixed upon the theatre's entrance, and noting Nell's curiosity, she encouraged her to look through it.
Nell had never looked through a real telescope before. It had a tendency to jiggle and go out of focus, it didn't zoom, and panning was tricky. But for all that, the image quality was a lot better than photographic, and she quickly forgot herself and began sweeping it back and forth across the city. She checked out the little Celestial Kingdom Clave in the heart of the old city, where a couple of Mandarins stood on a zigzag bridge across a pond, contemplating a swarm of golden carp, wispy silver beards trailing down over the colorful silk of their lapels, blue sapphire buttons on their caps flashing as they nodded their heads. She looked into a high-rise building farther inland, apparently a foreign concession of some type, where some Euros were holding a cocktail party, some venturing onto the balcony with glasses of wine and doing some eavesdropping of their own. Finally she leveled the 'scope toward the horizon, out past the vast dangerous triad-ridden suburbs, where millions of Shanghai's poor had been forcibly banished to make way for highrises. Beyond that was real agricultural land, a fractal network of canals and creeks glimmering like a golden net as they reflected the lambency of the sunset, and beyond that, as always, a few scattered pillars of smoke in the ultimate distance, where the Fists of Righteous Harmony were burning the foreign devils' Feed lines.
"You are a curious girl," Madame Ping said. "That is natural. But you must never let any other person-especially a client-see your curiosity. Never seek information. Sit quietly and let them bring it to you. What they conceal tells you more than what they reveal. Do you understand?"
"Yes, madam," Nell said, turning toward her interlocutor with a little curtsy. Rather than trying to do Chinese etiquette and making a hash of it, she was taking the Victorian route, which worked just as well. For purposes of this interview, Henry (the young man who had offered her tea) had advanced her a few hard ucus, which she had used to compile a reasonably decent full-length dress, hat, gloves, and reticule. She had gone in nervous and realized within a few minutes that the decision to hire her had already been made, somehow, and that this little get-together was actually more along the lines of an orientation session.
"Why is the Victorian market important to us?" Madame Ping asked, and fixed Nell with an incisive glare.
"Because New Atlantis is one of the three first-tier phyles."
"Not correct. The wealth of New Atlantis is great, yes. But its population is just a few percent. The successful New Atlantis man is busy and has just a bit of time for scripted fantasies. He has much money, you understand, but little opportunity to spend it. No, this market is important because everyone else-the men of all other phyles, including many of Nippon– want to be like Victorian gentlemen. Look at the Ashantis– the Jews– the Coastal Republic. Do they wear traditional costume? Sometimes. Usually though, they wear a suit on the Victorian pattern. They carry an umbrella from Old Bond Street. They have a book of Sherlock Holmes stories. They play in Victorian ractives, and when they have to spend their natural urges, they come to me, and I provide them with a scripted fantasy that was originally requested by some gentleman who came sneaking across the Causeway from New Atlantis." Somewhat uncharacteristically, Madame Ping turned two of her claws into walking legs and made them scurry across the tabletop, like a furtive Vicky gent trying to slip into Shanghai without being caught on a monitor. Recognizing her cue, Nell covered her mouth with one gloved hand and tittered.
"This way, Madame Ping does a magic trick– she turns one satisfied client from New Atlantis into a thousand clients from all tribes."
"I must confess that I am surprised," Nell ventured. "Inexperienced as I am in these matters, I had supposed that each tribe would exhibit a different preference."
"We change the script a little," Madame Ping said, "to allow for cultural differences. But the story never changes. There are many people and many tribes, but only so many stories."
Peculiar practices in the woods;
the Reformed Distributed Republic;
an extraordinary conversation in a log cabin;
CryptNet;
the Hackworths depart.
Half a day's slow eastward ride took them well up into the foothills of the Cascades, where the clouds, flowing in eternally from the Pacific, were forced upward by the swelling terrain and unburdened themselves of their immense stores of moisture. The trees were giants, rising branchless to far above their heads, the trunks aglow with moss. The landscape was a checkerboard of old-growth forest alternating with patches that had been logged in the previous century; Hackworth tried to guide Kidnapper toward the latter, because the scarcity of undergrowth and deadfalls made for a smoother ride. They passed through the remains of an abandoned timber town, half small clapboard buildings and half moss-covered and rust-streaked mobile homes. Through their dirty windows, faded signs were dimly visible, stenciled THIS HOUSEHOLD DEPENDS ON TIMBER MONEY. Ten-foot saplings grew up through cracks in the streets. Narrow hedges of blueberry shrubs and blackberry canes sprouted from the rain gutters of houses, and gigantic old cars, resting askew on flat and cracked tires, had become trellises for morning glories and vine maples. They also passed through an old mining encampment that had been abandoned even longer ago. For the most part, the signs of modern habitation were relatively subtle. The houses up here tended to be of the same unassuming style favored by the software khans closer to Seattle, and from place to place a number of them would cluster around a central square with playground equipment, cafés, stores, and other amenities. He and Fiona stopped at two such places to exchange ucus for coffee, sandwiches, and cinnamon rolls.
The unmarked, decussating paths would have been confusing to anyone but a native. Hackworth had never been here before. He had gotten the coordinates from the second fortune cookie in Kidnapper's glove compartment, which was much less cryptic than the first had been. He had no way to tell whether he was really going anywhere. His faith did not begin to waver until evening approached, the eternal clouds changed from silver to dark gray, and he noticed that the chevaline was taking them higher and toward less densely populated ground.