An assistant took Hackworth as far as the border, where he stepped into the Chinese Coastal Republic, an entirely different country that comprised, among many other things, virtually all of Shanghai. As if to emphasize this, young men loitered on corners in Western clothes, listening to loud music, hooting at women, and generally ignoring their filial duties.
He could have taken an auto-rickshaw, which was the only vehicle other than a bicycle or skateboard narrow enough to negotiate the old streets. But you never could tell what kind of surveillance might be present in a Shanghai taxi. The departure of a New Atlantis gentleman from the Flea Circus late at night could only stimulate the imaginations of the gendarmes, who had intimidated the criminal element to such a degree that they were now feeling restless and looking for ways to diversify. Sages, seers, and theoretical physicists could only speculate at what, if any, relationship might exist between the Shanghai Police Department's astonishing scope of activities and actual law enforcement: Deplorable, but Hackworth was thankful for it as he sampled the French Settlement's ramified backstreets. A handful of figures skulked across an intersection several blocks away, bloody light from a mediatron glancing off their patchwork Nanobar outfits, the kind of thing only street criminals would need to wear. Hackworth comforted himself by reasoning that this must be a gang from one of the Leased Territories who had just come over the Causeway. They wouldn't possibly be so rash as to assault a gentleman in the street, not in Shanghai. Hackworth detoured around the intersection anyway. Having never done anything illegal in his life, he was startled to understand, all of a sudden, that a ruthless constabulary was a crucial resource to more imaginative sorts of criminals, such as himself.
Countless times that afternoon, Hackworth had been overcome by shame, and as many times he had fought it off with rationalization: What was so bad about what he was doing? He was not selling any of the new technologies that Lord Finkle-McGraw had paid Bespoke to develop. He was not profiting directly. He was just trying to secure a better place in the world for his descendants, which was every father's responsibility.
Old Shanghai was close to the Huang Pu; the mandarins had once sat in their garden pavilions enjoying the river view. Within a few minutes Hackworth had crossed a bridge into Pudong and was navigating narrow ravines between illuminated skyscrapers, heading for the coast a few miles farther to the east.
Hackworth had been catapulted out of the rank-and-file and into Bespoke's elite ranks by his invention of the mediatronic chopstick. He'd been working in San Francisco at the time. The company was thinking hard about things Chinese, trying to one-up the Nipponese, who had already figured out a way to generate passable rice (five different varieties, yet!) direct from Feed, bypassing the whole paddy/coolie rat race, enabling two billion peasants to hang up their conical hats and get into some serious leisure time— and don't think for one moment that the Nipponese didn't already have some suggestions for what they might do with it. Some genius at headquarters, stewing over Nippon's prohibitive lead in nanotechnological rice production, decided the only thing for it was to leapfrog them by mass-producing entire meals, from wonton all the way to digital interactive fortune cookies. Hackworth got the seemingly trivial job of programming the matter compiler to extrude chopsticks.
Now, doing this in plastic was idiotically simple— polymers and nanotechnology went together like toothpaste and tubes. But Hackworth, who'd eaten his share of Chinese as a student, had never taken well to the plastic chopsticks, which were slick and treacherous in the blunt hands of a gwailo. Bamboo was better— and not that much harder to program, if you just had a bit of imagination. Once he'd made that conceptual leap, it wasn't long before he came up with the idea of selling advertising space on the damn things, chopstick handles and Chinese columnar script being a perfect match. Before long he was presenting it to his superiors: eminently user-friendly bamboid chopsters with colorful advertising messages continuously scrolling up their handles in real time, like news headlines in Times Square. For that, Hackworth was kicked upstairs to Bespoke and across the Pacific to Atlantis/Shanghai. He saw these chopsticks everywhere now. To the Equity Lords, the idea had been worth billions; to Hackworth, another week's paycheck. That was the difference between the classes, right there. He wasn't doing that badly, compared to most other people in the world, but it still rankled him. He wanted more for Fiona. He wanted Fiona to grow up with some equity of her own. And not just a few pennies invested in common stocks, but a serious position in a major company.
Starting your own company and making it successful was the only way. Hackworth had thought about it from time to time, but he hadn't done it. He wasn't sure why not; he had plenty of good ideas. Then he'd noticed that Bespoke was full of people with good ideas who never got around to starting their own companies. And he'd met a few big lords, spent considerable time with Lord Finkle-McGraw developing Runcible, and seen that they weren't really smarter than he. The difference lay in personality, not in native intelligence.
It was too late for Hackworth to change his personality, but it wasn't too late for Fiona.
Before Finkle-McGraw had come to him with the idea for Runcible, Hackworth had spent a lot of time pondering this issue, mostly while carrying Fiona through the park on his shoulders. He knew that he must seem distant to his daughter, though he loved her so— but only because, when he was with her, he couldn't stop thinking about her future. How could he inculcate her with the nobleman's emotional stance— the pluck to take risks with her life, to found a company, perhaps found several of them even after the first efforts had failed? He had read the biographies of several notable peers and found few common threads between them.
Just when he was about to give up and attribute it all to random chance, Lord Finkle-McGraw had invited him over to his club and, out of nowhere, begun talking about precisely the same issue. Finkle-McGraw couldn't prevent his granddaughter Elizabeth's parents from sending her to the very schools for which he had lost all respect; he had no right to interfere. It was his role as a grandparent to indulge and give gifts. But why not give her a gift that would supply the ingredient missing in those schools?
It sounds ingenious, Hackworth had said, startled by Finkle-McGraw's offhanded naughtiness. But what is that ingredient?
I don't exactly know, Finkle-McGraw had said, but as a starting-point, I would like you to go home and ponder the meaning of the word subversive.
Hackworth didn't have to ponder it for long, perhaps because he'd been toying with these ideas so long himself. The seed of this idea had been germinating in his mind for some months now but had not bloomed, for the same reason that none of Hackworth's ideas had ever developed into companies. He lacked an ingredient somewhere, and as he now realized, that ingredient was subversiveness. Lord Alexander Chung-Sik Finkle-McGraw, the embodiment of the Victorian establishment, was a subversive. He was unhappy because his children were not subversives and was horrified at the thought of Elizabeth being raised in the stodgy tradition of her parents. So now he was trying to subvert his own granddaughter.
A few days later, the gold pen on Hackworth's watch chain chimed. Hackworth pulled out a blank sheet of paper and summoned his mail. The following appeared on the page:
THE RAVEN A CHRISTMAS TALE, TOLD BY A SCHOOL-BOY TO HIS LITTLE BROTHERS AND SISTERS by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1798)
Underneath an old oak tree
There was of swine a huge company
That grunted as they crunched the mast: