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.
Hackworth walked across the parking lot toward the McDonald's, followed at a respectful distance by one of the soldiers. Another soldier opened the door for him, and Hackworth sighed with delight as cold dry air flowed over his face and began to chase the muggy stuff through the weave of his clothing. The place had been lightly sacked. He could smell a cold, almost clinical greasy smell wafting from behind the counter, where containers of fat had spilled onto the floor and congealed like snow. Much of this had been scooped up by looters; Hackworth could see the parallel tracks of women's fingers. The place was decorated in a Silk Roadmotif, transpicuous mediatronic panels portraying wondrous sights between here and the route's ancient terminus in Cadiz.
Dr. X was seated in the corner booth, his face radiant in the cool, UV-filtered sunlight. He was wearing a Mandarin cap with dragons embroidered in gold thread and a magnificent brocade robe. The robe was loose at the neck and had short sleeves so that Hackworth could see the inner garment of a hoplite suit underneath.
Dr. X was at war, and had emerged from the safe perimeter of Suzhou, and needed to be prepared for an attack. He was sipping green tea from a jumbo McDonald's cup, made in the local style, great clouds of big green leaves swirling around in a tumbler of hot water. Hackworth doffed his hat and bowed in the Victorian style, which was proper under the circumstances. Dr. X returned the bow, and as his head tilted forward, Hackworth could see the button on the top of his cap. It was red, the color of the highest ranks, but it was made of coral, marking him as second rank. A ruby button would have put him at the very highest level. In Western terms this made Dr. X roughly equivalent to a lesser cabinet minister or three-star general. Hackworth supposed that this was the highest rank of Mandarin permitted to converse with barbarians.
Hackworth sat down across the table from Dr. X. A young woman padded out of the kitchen on silk slippers and gave Hackworth his own tumbler full of green tea. Watching her mince away, Hackworth was only mildly shocked to see that her feet were no more than four inches long. There must be better ways to do it now, maybe by regulating the growth of the tarsal bones during adolescence. It probably didn't even hurt.
Realizing this, Hackworth also realized, for the first time, that he had done the right thing ten years ago.
Dr. X was watching him and might as well have been reading his mind. This seemed to put him in a pensive mood. He said nothing for a while, just gazed out the window and occasionally sipped his tea. This was fine with Hackworth, who had had a long ride.
"Have you learned anything from your ten-year sentence?" Dr. X finally said.
"It would seem so. But I have trouble pulling it up," Hackworth said.
This was a bit too idiomatic for Dr. X. By way of explanation, Hackworth flipped out a ten-year-old card bearing Dr. X's dynamic chop. As the old fisherman hauled the dragon out of the water, Dr. X suddenly got it, and grinned appreciatively. This was showing a lot of emotion— assuming it was genuine— but age and war had made him reckless.
"Have you found the Alchemist?" Dr. X said.
"Yes," Hackworth said. "I am the Alchemist."
"When did you know this?"
"Only very recently," Hackworth said. "Then I understood it all in an instant— pulled it up," he said, pantomiming the act of reeling in a fish. "The Celestial Kingdom was far behind Nippon and Atlantis in nanotech. The Fists could always have burned the barbarians' Feed lines, but this would only have plunged the peasants into poverty and made the people long for foreign goods. The decision was made to leapfrog the barbarian tribes by developing Seed technology. At first you pursued the project in cooperation with second-tier phyles like Israel, Armenia, and Greater Serbia, but they proved unreliable. Again and again your carefully cultivated networks were scattered by Protocol Enforcement.