This place was entirely different. It was much bigger. It was much richer. And unlike all of the other castles in the domain of King Coyote, it worked. As she approached the castle, she learned to keep her horse to the edge of the road, for messengers were constantly blowing past her at a full gallop in both directions.
It was a vast open marketplace with thousands of stalls, filled with carts and runners carrying product in all directions. But no vegetables, fish, spices, or fodder were to be seen here; all the product was information written down in books. The books were trundled from place to place on wheelbarrows and carried here and there on great long seedylooking conveyor belts made of hemp and burlap. Book-carriers bumped into each other, compared notes as to what they were carrying and where they were going, and swapped books for other books. Stacks of books were sold in great, raucous auctions-and paid for not with gold but with other books. Around the edges of the market were stalls where books were exchanged for gold, and beyond that, a few alleys where gold could be exchanged for food.
In the midst of this hubbub, Princess Nell saw a dark knight sitting on a black horse, paging through one of these books. Without further ado, she spurred her horse forward and drew her sword. She slew him in single combat, right there in the middle of the marketplace, and the book-sellers simply backed out of their way and ignored them as Princess Nell and the dark knight hacked and slashed at each other. When the dark knight fell dead and Princess Nell sheathed her sword, the commotion closed in about her again, like the waters of a turbulent river closing over a falling stone. Nell picked up the book that the dark knight had been reading and found that it contained nothing but gibberish. It was written in some kind of a cipher.
She spent some time reconnoitering, looking for the center of the place, and found no center. One stall was the same as the next. There was no tower, no throne room, no clear system of authority. Examining the market stalls in more detail, she saw that each one included a man who did nothing but sit at a table and decipher books, writing them out on long sheets of foolscap and handing them over to other people, who would read through the contents, consult rule-books, and dictate responses to the man with the quill pen, who enciphered them and wrote them out in books that were then tossed out into the marketplace for delivery. The men with the quill pens, she noticed, always wore jeweled keys on chains around their necks; the key was apparently the badge of the cipherers' guild.
This castle proved fiendishly difficult to figure out, and Nell spent a few weeks working on it. Part of the problem was that this was the first castle Princess Nell had visited that was actually functioning as intended; the dark knight had not been able to foul the place up, probably because everything was done in ciphers here, and everything was decentralized. Nell discovered that a smoothly functioning system was much harder to puzzle out than one that was broken.
In the end, Princess Nell had to apprentice herself to a master cipherer and learn everything there was to know about codes and the keys that unlocked them. This done, she was given her own key, as a badge of her office, and found a job in one of the stalls enciphering and deciphering books. As it turned out, the key was more than just a decoration; rolled up inside its shaft was a strip of parchment inscribed with a long number that could be used to decipher a message, if the sender wanted you to decipher it. From time to time she would go to the edge of the market, exchange a book for some gold, then go buy some food and drink.
On one of these trips, she saw another member of the cipherer's guild, also taking his break, and noticed that the key hanging around his neck looked familiar: it was one of the eleven keys that Nell and her Night Friends had taken from the Faery Kings and Queens! She concealed her excitement and followed this cipherer back to his stall, making a note of where he worked. Over the next few days, going from stall to stall and examining each cipherer, she was able to locate the rest of the eleven keys. She was able to steal a look at the rule-books that her employers used to respond to the encoded messages. They were written in the same special language used at the previous two castles.
In other words, once Princess Nell had deciphered the messages, her stall functioned like another Turing machine. It would have been easy enough to conclude that this whole castle was, like the others, a Turing machine. But the Primer had taught Nell to be very careful about making unwarranted assumptions. Just because her stall functioned according to Turing rules did not mean that all of the others did. And even if every stall in this castle was, in fact, a Turing machine, she still could not come to any fixed conclusions. She had seen riders carrying books to and from the castle, which meant that cipherers must be at work elsewhere in this kingdom. She could not verify that all of them were Turing machines.
It did not take long for Nell to attain prosperity here. After a few months (which in the Primer were summarized in as many sentences) her employers announced that they were getting more work than they could handle. They decided to split their operation. They erected a new stall at the edge of the market and gave Nell some of their rule-books.
They also obtained a new key for her. This was done by dispatching a special coded message to the Castle of King Coyote himself, which was three days' ride to the north. Seven days later, Nell's key came back to her in a scarlet box bearing the seal of King Coyote himself.
From time to time, someone would come around to her stall and offer to buy her out. She always turned them down but found it interesting that the keys could be bought and sold in this fashion.
All Nell needed was money, which she quickly accumulated through shrewd dealings in the market. Before long, all eleven of the keys were in her possession, and after liquidating her holdings and turning them into jewels, which she sewed into her clothes, she rode her horse out of the sixth castle and turned north, heading for the seventh: the Castle of King Coyote, and the ultimate goal of her lifelong quest.
Nell goes to Madame Ping's Theatre;
rumors of the Fists;
an important client;
assault of the Fists of Righteous Harmony;
ruminations on the inner workings of ractives.
Like much that was done with nanotechnology, Feed lines were assembled primarily from a few species of small and uncomplicated atoms in the upper right-hand corner of Mendeleev's grid: carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, silicon, phosphorus, sulfur, and chlorine. The Fists of Righteous Harmony had discovered, to their enduring delight, that objects made of these atoms burned rather nicely once you got them going. The flat, low Yangtze Delta country east of Shanghai was a silk district well stocked with mulberry trees, which when felled, stacked, and burned beneath the Feed lines would eventually ignite them like road flares.
The Nipponese Feed was heavy on the phosphorus and burned with a furious white flame that lit up the night sky in several places as seen from the tall buildings in Pudong. One major line led toward Nanjing, one toward Suzhou, one toward Hangzhou: these distant flares inevitably led to rumors, among the hordes of refugees in Shanghai, that those cities were themselves burning.
The New Atlantan Feed had a higher sulfur content that, when burned, produced a plutonic reek that permeated everything for dozens of miles downwind, making the fires seem much closer than they really were. Shanghai was smelling pretty sulfurous as Nell walked into it across one of the bridges linking downtown Pudong with the much lower and older Bund. The Huang Pu had been too wide to bridge easily until nano had come along, so the four downtown bridges were made of the new materials and seemed impossibly fragile compared with the reinforced-concrete behemoths built to the north and south during the previous century.