At the bottom of the page he wrote the word MIRANDA and drew a circle around it. It was not connected to anything else in the diagram yet. He hoped that before long it would be. Carl Hollywood worked on his papers late into the night, and Mrs. Kwan continued to replenish his teapot and to bring him little sweets and decorated the edge of his table with candles as night fell and the teahouse darkened, for she remembered that he liked to work by candlelight.
The Chinese people outside, separated from him by half an inch of crosslinked diamond, watched with their noses making white ellipses against the pane, their faces glowing in the candlelight like ripe peaches hanging in dark lush foliage.
The Hackworths in transit, and in London;
the East End;
a remarkable boatride;
Dramatis Personae;
a night at the theatre.
Smooth, fine-grained arctic clouds undulated slowly like snow drifts into the distance, a thousand miles looking like the width of a front yard, lit but not warmed by a low apricot sun that never quite went down. Fiona lay on her stomach on the top bunk, looking out the window, watching her breath condense on the pane and then evaporate in the parched air.
"Father?" she said, very softly, to see if he was awake.
He wasn't, but he woke up quickly, as if he'd been in one of those dreams that just skims beneath the surface of consciousness, like an airship clipping a few cloud-tops. "Yes?"
"Who is the Alchemist? Why are you looking for him?"
"I would rather not explain why I'm looking for him. Let us say that I have incurred obligations that want settling." Her father seemed more preoccupied with the second part of the question than she'd expected, and his voice was steeped in regret.
"Who is he?" she insisted gently.
"Oh. Well, my darling, if I knew that, I'd have found him."
"Father!"
"What sort of a person is he? I haven't been afforded many clues, unfortunately. I've tried to draw some deductions from the sorts of people who are looking for him, and the sort of person I am."
"Pardon me, Father, but what bearing does your own nature have on that of the Alchemist?"
"More than one knowledgeable sort has arrived at the conclusion that I'm just the right man to find this fellow, even though I know nothing of criminals and espionage and so forth. I'm just a nanotechnological engineer."
"That's not true, Father! You're ever so much more than that. You know so many stories-you told me so many, when you were gone, remember?"
"I suppose so," he allowed, strangely diffident.
"And I read it every night. And though the stories were about faeries and pirates and djinns and such, I could always sense that you were behind them. Like the puppeteer pulling the strings and imbuing them with voices and personalities. So I think you're more than an engineer. It's just that you need a magic book to bring it out."
"Well . . . that's a point I had not considered," her father said, his voice suddenly emotional. She fought the temptation to peer over the edge of the bed and look at his face, which would have embarrassed him. Instead she curled up in her bed and closed her eyes.
"Whatever you may think of me, Fiona— and I must say I am pleasantly surprised that you think of me so favourably— to those who despatched me on this errand, I am an engineer. Without being arrogant, I might add that I have advanced rapidly in that field and attained a position of not inconsiderable responsibility. As this is the only characteristic that distinguishes me from other men, it can be the only reason I was chosen to find the Alchemist. From this I infer that the Alchemist is himself a nanotechnological researcher of some sophistication, and that he is thought to be developing a product that is of interest to more than one of the Powers."
"Are you talking about the Seed, Father?"
He was silent for a few moments. When he spoke again, his voice was high and tight. "The Seed. How did you know about the Seed?"
"You told me about it, Father. You told me it was a dangerous thing, and that Protocol Enforcement mustn't allow it to be created. And besides . . .
"Besides what?"
She was on the verge of reminding him that her dreams had been filled with seeds for the last several years, and that every story she had seen in her Primer had been replete with them: seeds that grew up into castles; dragon's teeth that grew up into soldiers; seeds that sprouted into giant beanstalks leading to alternate universes in the clouds; and seeds, given to hospitable, barren couples by itinerant crones, that grew up into plants with bulging pods that contained happy, kicking babies.
But she sensed that if she mentioned this directly, he would slam the steel door in her face— a door that was tantalizingly cracked open at the moment.
"Why do you think that Seeds are so interesting?" she essayed.
"They are interesting inasmuch as a beaker of nitroglycerin is interesting," he said. "They are subversive technology. You are not to speak of Seeds again, Fiona— CryptNet agents could be anywhere, listening to our conversation."
Fiona sighed. When her father spoke freely, she could sense the man who had told her the stories. When certain subjects were broached, he drew down his veil and became just another Victorian gentleman. It was irksome. But she could sense how the same characteristic, in a man who was not her father, could be provocative. It was such an obvious weakness that neither she nor any woman could resist the temptation to exploit it-a mischievous and hence tantalizing notion that was to occupy much of Fiona's thinking for the next few days, as they encountered other members of their tribe in London.
After a simple dinner of beer and pasties in a pub on the fringes of the City, they rode south across the Tower Bridge, pierced a shallow layer of posh development along the right bank of the river, and entered into Southwark. As in other Atlantan districts of London, Feed lines had been worked into the sinews of the place, coursing through utility tunnels, clinging to the clammy undersides of bridges, and sneaking into buildings through small holes bored in the foundations. The tiny old houses and flats of this once impoverished quarter had mostly been refurbished into toeholds for young Atlantans from all around the Anglosphere, poor in equity but rich in expectations, who had come to the great city to incubate their careers. The businesses on the ground floors tended to be pubs, coffeehouses, and music halls. As father and daughter worked their way east, generally paralleling the river, the lustre that was so evident near the approaches to the bridge began to wear thin in places, and the ancient character of the neighborhood began to assert itself, as the bones of the knuckles reveal their shape beneath the stretched skin of a fist. Wide gaps developed between the waterfront developments, allowing them to look across the river into a district whose blanket of evening fog was already stained with the carcinogenic candy-colored hues of big mediatrons.