Would-be passengers skidded to a halt on the saliva-slickened floor of the Shanghai Aerodrome as the announcer brayed the names of great and ancient Chinese cities into his microphone. They set bags down, shushed children, furrowed brows, cupped hands around ears, and pursed lips in utter bewilderment. None of this was made any easier by the extended family of some two dozen just-arrived Boers, women in bonnets and boys in heavy coarse farmer's pants, who had convened by one of the gates and begun to sing a hymn of thanksgiving in thick hoarse voices.

When the announcer called out Hackworth's flight (San Diego with stops in Seoul, Vladivostok, Magadan, Anchorage, Juneau, Prince Rupert, Vancouver, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Santa Barbara, and Los Angeles), he apparently decided that it was beneath his dignity, above his abilities, or both to speak Korean, Russian, English, French, Coast Salish, and Spanish in the same sentence, and so he just hummed into the microphone for a while as if, far from being a professional announcer, he were a shy, indifferent vocalist hidden within in a vast choir.

Hackworth knew perfectly well that hours would pass before he actually found himself on an airship, and that having achieved that milestone, he might have to wait hours more for its actual departure. Nonetheless, he had to say good-bye to his family at some point, and this seemed no worse a time than any other.

Holding Fiona (so big and solid now!) in the crook of one arm, and holding hands with Gwen, he pushed insistently across a rip tide of travelers, beggars, pickpockets, and entrepreneurs trading in everything from bolts of real silk to stolen intellectual property.

Finally they reached a corner where a languid eddy had separated itself from the flow of people, and where Fiona could safely be set down.

He turned first to Gwen. She still looked as stunned and vacant as she had, more or less consistently, since he told her that he had received a new assignment "whose nature I am not at liberty to disclose, save to say that it concerns the future, not merely of my department, nor of John Zaibatsu, but of that phyle into which you had the good fortune to have been born and to which I have sworn undying loyalty," and that he was making a trip "of indefinite duration" to North America. It had been increasingly clear of late that Gwen simply didn't get it. At first, Hackworth had been annoyed by this, viewing it as a symptom of hitherto unevidenced intellectual shortcomings. More recently, he had come to understand that it had more to do with emotional stance. Hackworth was embarking on a quest of sorts here, real Boy's Own Paper stuff, highly romantic. Gwen hadn't been raised on the proper diet of specious adventure yarns and simply found the whole concept unfathomable. She did a bit of rote sniffling and tear-wiping, gave him a quick kiss and a hug, and stepped back, having completed her role in the ceremony with nothing close to enough histrionics. Hackworth, feeling somewhat disgruntled, squatted down to face Fiona.

His daughter seemed to have a better intuitive grasp of the situation; she had been up several times a night recently, complaining of bad dreams, and on the way to the Aerodrome she had been perfectly quiet. She stared at her father with large red eyes.

Tears came to Hackworth's eyes, and his nose began to run. He blew his nose plangently, held the handkerchief over his face for a moment, and composed himself.

Then he reached into the breast pocket of his overcoat and drew out a flat package, wrapped up in mediatronic paper of spring wildflowers bending in a gentle breeze. Fiona brightened up immediately, and Hackworth could not help chudding, not for the first time, at the charming susceptibility of small people to frank bribery. "You will forgive me for ruining the surprise," he said, "by telling you that this is a book, my darling. A magic book. I made it for you, because I love you and could not think of a better way to express that love. And whenever you open its pages, no matter how far away I might be, you will find me here."

"Thank you ever so much, Father," she said, taking it with both hands, and he could not help himself from sweeping her up in both arms and giving her a great hug and a kiss. "Good-bye, my best beloved, you will see me in your dreams," he whispered into her tiny, flawless ear, and then he set her free, spun around, and walked away before she could see the tears that had begun to run down his face.

Hackworth was a free man now, wandering through the Aerodrome in an emotional stupor, and only reached his flight by participating in the same flock instinct that all the natives used to reach theirs. 'Whenever he saw more than one gwailo heading purposefully in one direction, he followed them, and then others started following him, and thus did a mob of foreign devils coalesce among a hundred times as many natives, and finally, two hours after their ffight was supposed to leave, they mobbed a gate and climbed aboard the airship Hanjin Takhoma—which might or might not have been their assigned vessel, but the passengers now had a sufficient numerical majority to hijack it to America, which was the only thing that really counted in China.

He had received a summons from the Celestial Kingdom. Now he was on his way to the territory still known vaguely as America. His eyes were red from crying over Gwen and Fiona, and his blood was swarming with nanosites whose functions were known only to Dr. X; Hackworth had lain back, closed his eyes, rolled up his sleeve, and hummed "Rule, Atlantis" while Dr. X's physicians (at least he hoped they were physicians) shoved a fat needle into his arm. The needle was fed by a tube that ran directly into a special fitting on the matter compiler; Hackworth was plugged directly into the Feed, not the regulation Atlantan kind but Dr. X's black-market kludge. He could only hope that they'd given it the right instructions, as it would be a shame to have a washing machine, a mediatronic chopstick, or a kilo of China 'White materialize in his arm. Since then, he'd had a few attacks of the shivers, suggesting that his immune system was reacting to something Dr. X had put in there. His body would either get used to it or (preferably) destroy the offending nanosites.

The airship was a dromond, the largest class of noncargo vessel. It was divided into four classes. Hackworth was second from the bottom, in third. Below that was steerage, which was for migrating thetes, and for sky-girls, prostitutes of the air. Even now, these were bribing their way past the conductors and into the third-class lounge, making eyes at Hackworth and at the white-shirted sararimen who tended to travel this way. Those gentlemen had grown up in one crowded Dragon or another, where they knew how to generate a sort of artificial privacy field by determinedly ignoring each other. Hackworth had arrived at the point where he frankly didn't care, and so he stared directly at these men, front-line soldiers of their various microstates, as each one primly folded his navy blue suit jacket and elbow-crawled into a coffinlike microcabin like a GI squirming under a roll of concertina wire, accompanied or not by a camp follower.

Hackworth pointlessly wondered whether he was the only one of this ship's some two thousand passengers who believed that prostitution (or anything) was immoral. He did not consider this question in a selfrighteous way, more out of rueful curiosity; some of the sky-girls were quite fetching. But as he dragged his body into his microberth, he suffered another attack of the shivers, reminding him that even if his soul had been willing, his flesh was simply too weak.

Another possible explanation for the chills was that Dr. X's nanosites were seeking out and destroying the ones that H.M. Joint Forces had put in there, waging a turf war inside his body, and his immune system was doing overtime trying to pick up the carnage.

Hackworth unexpectedly fell asleep before the dromond had even pulled away from her mooring mast, and had dreams about the murderous implements he had seen magnified on Dr. X's mediatron during his first visit. In the abstract they were frightening enough. Having a few million of them in his veins didn't do much for his peace of mind. In the end it wasn't as bad as knowing your blood was full of spirochetes, which people used to live with for decades. Amazing what a person could get used to.

When he settled into bed, he heard a small chime, like faery bells. It was coming from the little pen dangling from his watch chain, and it meant that he had mail. Perhaps a thank-you note from Fiona. He couldn't sleep anyway, and so he took out a sheet of mediatronic paper and spoke the commands that transferred the mail from the pen charm onto the page.

He was disappointed to note that it was printed, not handwritten; some kind of official correspondence, and not, unfortunately, a note from Fiona. When he began to read it, he understood that it wasn't even official. It wasn't even from a human. It was a notification sent back to him automatically by a piece of machinery he had set into motion two years ago. The central message was wreathed in pages of technical gibberish, maps, graphs, and diagrams. The message was:

THE YOUNG LADY'S ILLUSTRATED PRIMER HAS BEEN FOUND.

It was accompanied by an animated, three-dimensional map of New Chusan with a red line drawn across it, starting in front of a rather seedy looking high-rise apartment building in the Leased Territory called Enchantment and making its way erratically around the island from there.

Hackworth laughed until his neighbors pounded on the adjoining walls and asked him to shut up.