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.

A few days ago, working on a script in Madame Ping's offices far above, Nell had gazed out the window at a barge making its way down the river, pulled by a rickety old diesel tug, swathed in dun tarps. A few hundred meters upstream of this very bridge she was now crossing, the tarps had begun squirming and boiling, and a dozen young men in white tunics had jumped out from beneath, scarlet bands tied about their waists, scarlet ribbons around their wrists and foreheads. They had swarmed across the top of the barge hacking at ropes with knives, and the tarps had reluctantly and unevenly fallen away to expose a patchy new coat of red paint and, lined up on the top of the barge like a string of enormous firecrackers, several dozen compressed gas tanks, also painted a festive red for the occasion. Under the circumstances, she did not doubt for a moment that the men were Fists and the gas hydrogen or something else that burned well. But before they had been able to reach the bridge, the tanks had been burst and ignited by something too small and fast for Nell to see from her high post. The barge silently turned into a carbuncle of yellow flame that took up half the width of the Huang Pu, and though the diamond window filtered all of the heat out of its radiance, Nell was able to put her hand on the pane and feel the absorbed warmth, not much hotter than a person's skin. The whole operation had been touchingly hapless, in an age when a hand-size battery could contain as much energy as all those cylinders of gas. It had a quaint twentieth-century feel and made Nell oddly nostalgic for the days when dangerousness was a function of mass and bulk. The passives of that era were so fun to watch, with their big, stupid cars and big, stupid guns and big, stupid people.

Up— and downstream of the bridge, the funeral piers were crowded with refugee families heaving corpses into the Huang Pu; the emaciated bodies, rolled up in white sheets, looked like cigarettes. The Coastal Republic authorities had instituted a pass system on the bridges to prevent rural refugees from swarming across into the relatively spacious streets, plazas, atria, and lobbies of Pudong and gumming up the works for the office crowd. By the time Nell made it across, a couple of hundred refugees had already picked her out as a likely alms source and were waiting with canned demonstrations: women holding up their gaunt babies, or older children who were trained to hang comatose in their arms; men with open wounds, and legless gaffers dauntlessly knucklewalking through the crowd, butting at people's knees. The taxi-drivers were stronger and more aggressive than the rurals, though, and had a fearsome reputation that created space around them in the crowd, and that was more valuable than an actual vehicle; a vehicle would always get stuck in traffic, but a taxi-driver's hat generated a magic force field that enabled the wearer to walk faster than anyone else.

The taxi-drivers converged on Nell too, and she picked out the biggest one and haggled with him, holding up fingers and essaying a few words in Shanghainese. When the numbers had climbed into the right range for him, he spun around suddenly to face the crowd. The suddenness of the movement drove people back, and the meter-long bamboo stick in his hand didn't hurt either. He stepped forward and Nell hurried after him, ignoring the myriad tuggings at her long skirts, trying not to wonder which of the beggars was a Fist with a concealed knife. If her clothes hadn't been made of untearable, uncuttable nanostuff, she would have been stripped naked within a block.

Madame Ping's was still doing a decent business. Its clientele were willing to put up with some inconvenience to get there. It was only a short distance from the bridgehead, and the Madame had put a few truculent taxi-drivers on retainer as personal escorts. The business was startlingly large given the scarcity of real estate in Shanghai; it occupied most of a five-story reinforced-concrete Mao Dynasty apartment block, having started out with just a couple of flats and expanded room by room as the years went on.

The reception area reminded one of a not-bad hotel lobby, except that it had no restaurant or bar; none of the clients wanted to see or be seen by any other. The desk was staffed by concierges whose job was to get the clients out of view as quickly as possible, and they did it so well that an uninitiated passerby might get the impression that Madame Ping's was some kind of a walk-in kidnapping operation.

One of these functionaries, a tiny woman who seemed oddly prim and asexual considering that she was wearing a black leather miniskirt, briskly took Nell to the top floor, where the large apartments had been built and elaborate scenarios were now realized for Madame Ping's clients.

As the writer, Nell of course never actually entered the same room as the client. The woman in the miniskirt escorted her into a nearby observation room, where a high-res cine feed from the next room covered most of one wall.

If she hadn't known it already, Nell would have seen from the client's uniform that he was a colonel in Her Majesty's Joint Forces. He was wearing a full dress uniform, and the various pins and medals on his coat indicated that he had spent a good deal of his career attached to various Protocol Enforcement units, been wounded in action several times, and displayed exceptional heroism on one occasion. In fact, it was clear that he was a rather important fellow. Reviewing the previous half-hour, Nell saw that, not surprisingly, he had arrived in mufti, carrying the uniform in a leather satchel. Wearing the uniform must be part of the scenario.

At the moment he was seated in a rather typical Victorian parlor, sipping tea from a Royal Albert china cup decorated with a somewhat agonistic briar rose pattern. He looked fidgety; he'd been kept waiting for half an hour, which was also part of the scenario. Madame Ping kept telling her that no one ever complained about having to wait too long for an orgasm; that men could do that to themselves any time they wanted, and that it was the business leading up to it that they would pay for. The biological readouts seemed to confirm Madame Ping's rule: Perspiration and pulse were rather high, and he was about half erect.

Nell heard the sound of a door opening. Switching to a different angle she saw a parlormaid entering the room. Her uniform was not as overtly sexy as most of the ones in Madame Ping's wardrobe department; the client was sophisticated. The woman was Chinese, but she played the role with the mid-Atlantic accent currently in vogue among neo-Victorians: "Mrs. Braithwaite will see you now."

The client stepped into an adjoining drawing room, where two women awaited him: a heavy Anglo in late middle age and a very attractive Eurasian woman, about thirty. Introductions were performed: The old woman was Mrs. Braithwaite, and the younger woman was her daughter. Mrs. was somewhat addled, and Miss was obviously running the show.

This section of the script never changed, and Nell had been over it a hundred times trying to troubleshoot it. The client went through a little speech in which he informed Mrs. Braithwaite that her son Richard had been killed in action, displaying great heroism in the process, and that he was recommending him for a posthumous Victoria Cross.

Nell had already done the obvious, going back through the Times archives to see whether this was a reconstruction of an actual event in the client's life. As far as she could determine, it was more like a composite of many similar events, perhaps with a dollop of fantasy thrown in.

At this point, the old lady got a case of the vapors and had to be helped from the room by the parlormaid and other servants, leaving the client alone with Miss Braithwaite, who was taking the whole thing quite stoically. "Your composure is admirable, Miss Braithwaite," said the client, "but please be assured that no one will blame you for giving vent to your emotions at such a time." When the client spoke this line, there was an audible tremor of excitement in his voice.

"Very well, then," said Miss Braithwaite. She withdrew a small black box from her reticule and pressed a button. The client grunted and arched his back so violently that he fell out of his chair onto the rug, where he lay paralyzed.

"Mites— you have infected my body with some insidious nanosite," he gasped. "in the tea."

"But that is impossible— most mites highly susceptible to thermal damage— boiling water would destroy them."

"You underestimate the capabilities of CryptNet, Colonel Napier. Our technology is advanced far beyond your knowledge— as you will discover during the next few days!"

"Whatever your plan is— be assured that it will fail!"

"Oh, I have no plan in particular," Miss Braithwaite said. "This is not a CryptNet operation. This is personal. You are responsible for the death of my brother Richard— and I will have you show the proper contrition."

"I assure you that I was as deeply saddened-"

She zapped him again. "I do not want your sadness," she said. "I want you to admit the truth: that you are responsible for his death!"

She pressed another button, which caused Colonel Napier's body to go limp. She and a maid wrestled him into a dumbwaiter and moved him down to a lower floor, where, after descending via the stairway, they tied him to a rack.

This was where the problem came in. By the time they had finished tying him up, he was sound asleep.

"He did it again," said the woman playing the role of Miss Braithwaite, addressing herself to Nell and anyone else who might be monitoring. "Six weeks in a row now."

When Madame Ping had explained this problem to Nell, Nell wondered what the problem was. Let the man sleep, as long as he kept coming and paid his bill. But Madame Ping knew her clients and feared that Colonel Napier was losing interest and might shift his business to some other establishment unless they put some variety into the scenario.

"The fighting has been very bad," the actress said. "He's probably exhausted."

"I don't think it's that," Nell said. She had now opened a private voice channel direct to the woman's eardrum. "I think it is a personal change."

"They never change, sweetheart," said the actress. "Once they get the taste, they have it forever."

"Yes, but different situations may trigger those feelings at different times of life," Nell said. "In the past it has been guilt over the deaths of his soldiers. Now he has made his peace. He has accepted his guilt, and so he accepts the punishment. There is no longer a contest of wills, because he has become submissive."

"So what do we do?"

"We must create a genuine contest of wills. We must force him to do something he really doesn't want to do," Nell said, thinking aloud. What would fit that bill?

"Wake him up," Nell said. "Tell him you were lying when you said this wasn't a CryptNet operation. Tell him you want real information. You want military secrets."

Miss Braithwaite sent the maid out for a bucket of cold water and heaved it over Colonel Napier's body. Then she played the role as Nell had suggested, and did it well; Madame Ping hired people who were good at improvisation, and since most of them never actually had to have sex with clients, she had no trouble finding good ones.

Colonel Napier seemed surprised, not unpleasantly so, at the script change. "If you suppose that I will divulge information that might lead to the deaths of more of my soldiers, you are sadly mistaken," he said. But his voice sounded a little bored and disappointed, and the bio readouts coming in from the nanosites in his body did not show the full flush of sexual excitement that, presumably, he was paying for. They still were not meeting their client's needs.

On the private channel to Miss Braithwaite, Nell said, "He still doesn't get it. This isn't a fantasy scenario anymore. This is real. Madame Ping's is actually a CryptNet operation. We've been drawing him in for the last several years. Now he belongs to us, and he's going to give us information, and he's going to keep giving it to us, because he's our slave."

Miss Braithwaite acted the scene as suggested, making up more florid dialogue as she went along. Watching the bio readouts, Nell could see that Colonel Napier was just as scared and excited, now, as he had been on his very first visit to Madame Ping's several years ago (they kept records). They were making him feel young again, and fully alive.

"Are you connected with Dr. X?" Colonel Napier said.

"We'll ask the questions," Nell said.

"I shall do the asking. Lotus, give him twenty for that!" said Miss Braithwajte, and the maid went to work on Colonel Napier with a cane.

The rest of the session almost ran itself, which was good for Nell, because she had been startled by Napier's reference to Dr. X and had gone into a reverie, remembering comments that Harv had made about the same person many years ago.

Miss Braithwaite knew her job and understood Nell's strategy instantly: the scenario did not excite the client unless there was a genuine contest of wills, and the only way for them to create that contest was to force Napier to reveal real classified information.

Reveal it he did, bit by bit, under the encouragement of Lotus's bamboo and Miss Braithwaite's voice. Most of it had to do with troop movements and other minutiae that he probably thought was terribly interesting. Nell didn't.

"Get more about Dr. X," she said. "Why did he assume a connection between CryptNet and Dr. X?" After a few more minutes of whacking and verbal domination, Colonel Napier was ready to spill. "Big operation of ours for many years now-Dr. X is working in collusion with a high-level CryptNet figure, the Alchemist. Working on something they mustn't be allowed to have."

"Don't you dare hold back on me," Miss Braithwaite said.

But before she could extract more information about the Alchemist, the building was jolted by a tremendous force that sent thin cracks racing through the old concrete. In the silence that followed, Nell could hear women screaming all over the building, and a crackling, hissing sound as dust and sand sifted out of a fissure in the ceiling. Then her ears began to resolve another sound: men shouting, "Sha! Sha!"

"I suggest that someone has just breached the wall of your building with an explosive charge," Colonel Napier said, perfectly calm. "If you would be so good as to terminate the scenario now and release me, I shall try to make myself useful in whatever is to follow."

Whatever is to follow. The shouting meant simply, "Kill! Kill!" and was the battle cry of the Fists of Righteous Harmony.

Perhaps they wanted Colonel Napier. But it was more likely that they had decided to attack this place for its symbolic value as a den of barbarian decadence.

Miss Braithwaite and Lotus had already gotten Colonel Napier out of his restraints, and he was pulling on his trousers. "That we are not all dead implies that they are not making use of nanotechnological methods," he said professorially. "Hence this attack may safely be assumed to originate from a low-level neighborhood cell. The attackers probably believe the Fist doctrine that they are immune from all weapons. It never hurts, in these situations, to give them a reality check of some sort."

The door to Napier's room flew open, splinters of blond naked wood hissing across the floor. Nell watched, as though watching an old movie, as Colonel Napier drew a ridiculously shiny cavalry saber from its scabbard and ran it through the chest of the attacking Fist. This one fell back into another, creating momentary confusion; Napier took advantage of it, methodically planting his feet in a rather prissy-looking stance, squaring his shoulders, calmly reaching out, as if he were using the saber to poke around in a dark closet, and twitching the point beneath the second Fist's chin, incidentally cutting his throat in the process. A third Fist had gotten into the room by this point, this one bearing a long pole with a knife lashed to the end of it with the gray polymer ribbon peasants used for rope.

But as he tried to wheel the weapon around, its butt end got tangled up in the rack to which Napier had lately been tied. Napier stepped forward cautiously, checking his footing as he went, as if he did not want to get any blood on his boots, parried a belated attack, and stabbed the Fist in the thorax three times in quick succession. Someone kicked at the door to Nell's room.

"Ah," Colonel Napier sighed, when it seemed clear that there were no more attackers in this party, "it is really very singular that I happen to have brought the full dress uniform, as edged weapons are not a part of our usual kit."

Several kicks had failed to open Nell's door, which unlike the ones in the scenario rooms was made of a modern substance and could not possibly be broken in that way. But Nell could hear voices out in the corridor and suspected that contrary to Napier's speculation, they might have nanotech devices of a very primitive sort— small explosives, say, capable of blowing doors open.

She ditched her long dress, which would only get in the way, and got down on knees and elbows to peer through the crack under the door. There were two pairs of feet. She could hear them conversing in low, businesslike tones.

Nell opened the door suddenly with one hand, reaching through with the other to shove a fountain pen into the throat of the Fist standing closest to the door. The other one reached for an old automatic rifle slung over his shoulder. This gave Nell more than enough time to kick him in the knee, which may or may not have done permanent damage but certainly threw him off balance. The Fist kept trying to bring his rifle to bear, as Nell kicked him over and over again. In the end she was able to twist the rifle free from his feeble one-handed grasp, whirl it around, and butt him in the head.

The Fist with the pen in his neck was sitting on the floor watching her calmly. She aimed the rifle his way, and he held up one hand and looked down and away. His wound was bleeding, but not all that much; she had ruined his week but not hit anything big.

She reflected that it was probably a healthy thing for him in the long run to be rid of the superstition that he was immune to weapons.

Constable Moore had taught her a thing or two about rifles. She stepped back into her room, locked the door, and devoted a minute or so to familiarizing herself with its controls, checking the magazine (only half full) and firing a single round (into the door, which stopped it) just to make sure it worked.

She was trying to suppress a flashback to the screwdriver incident. This frightened her until she realized that this time around she was much more in control of the situation. Her conversations with the Constable had not been without effect.

Then she made her way down the corridors and stairwells toward the lobby, slowly gathering a retinue of terrified young women along her way. They passed a few clients, mostly male and mostly European, who had been pulled from their scenario rooms and crudely hacked up by the Fists. Three times she had to fire, surprised each time at how complicated it was. Accustomed to the Primer, Nell had to make allowances when functioning in the real world.

She and her followers found Colonel Napier in the lobby, about three-quarters dressed, carrying on a memorable edged-weapons duel with a couple of Fists who had, perhaps, been left there to keep the path of escape open. Nell considered trying to shoot at the Fists but decided against it, because she did not trust her marksmanship and also because she was mesmerized by the entire scene.

Nell would have been dazzled by Colonel Napier if she had not recently seen him strapped to a rack. Still, there was something about this very contradiction that made him, and by extension all Victorian men, fascinating to her. They lived a life of nearly perfect emotional denial-a form of asceticism as extreme as that of a medieval stylite. Yet they did have emotions, the same as anyone else, and only vented them in carefully selected circumstances.

Napier calmly impaled a Fist who had tripped and fallen, then turned his attention to a new antagonist, a formidable character skilled with a real sword. The duel between Western and Eastern martial arts moved back and forth across the lobby floor, the two combatants staring directly into one another's eyes and trying to intuit the other's thoughts and emotional state. The actual thrusts and parries and ripostes, when they came, were too rapid to be understood. The Fist's style was quite beautiful to watch, involving many slow movements that looked like the stretching of large felines at the zoo. Napier's style was almost perfectly boring: He moved about in a crabbed stance, watched his opponent calmly, and apparently did a lot of deep thinking.

Watching Napier at work, watching the medals and braid swinging and glinting on his jacket, Nell realized that it was precisely their emotional repression that made the Victorians the richest and most powerful people in the world. Their ability to submerge their feelings, far from pathological, was rather a kind of mystical art that gave them nearly magical power over Nature and over the more intuitive tribes. Such was also the strength of the Nipponese.

Before the struggle could be resolved, a smart flechette, horsefly-size, trailing a whip antenna as thick as a hair and as long as a finger, hissed in through a broken window and thunked into the back of the Fist's neck. It did not strike very hard but must have shot some poison into his brain. He sat down quickly on the floor, closed his eyes, and died in that position.

"Not very chivalrous," Colonel Napier said distastefully. "I suppose I have some bureaucrat up on New Chusan to thank for that."

A cautious tour of the building turned up several more Fists who had died in the same fashion. Outside, the same old crowd of refugees, beggars, pedestrians, and cargo-carrying bicyclists streamed on, about as undisturbed as the Yangtze.

Colonel Napier did not return to Madame Ping's the next week, but Madame Ping did not blame Nell for the loss of his custom. To the contrary, she praised Nell for having correctly divined Napier's wishes and for improvising so well. "A fine performance," she said.

Nell had not really thought of her work as a performance, and for some reason Madame Ping's choice of words provoked her in a way that kept her awake late that night, staring into the darkness above her bunk.

Since she had been very small, she had made up stories and recited them to the Primer, which were often digested and incorporated into the Primer's stories. It had come naturally to Nell to do the same work for Madame Ping. But now her boss was calling it a performance, and Nell had to admit that it was, in a way.

Her stories were being digested, not by the Primer, but by another human being, becoming a part of that person's mind. That seemed simple enough, but the notion troubled her for a reason that did not become clear until she had lain half-asleep and fretted over it for several hours.

Colonel Napier did not know her and probably never would. All of the intercourse between him and Nell had been mediated through the actress pretending to be Miss Braithwaite, and through various technological systems.

Nonetheless she had touched him deeply. She had penetrated farther into his soul than any lover. If Colonel Napier had chosen to return the following week and Nell had not been present to make up the story for him, would he have missed her? Nell suspected that he would have. From his point of view, some indefinable essence would have been wanting, and he would have departed unsatisfied.

If this could happen to Colonel Napier in his dealings with Madame Ping's, could it happen to Nell in her dealings with the Primer? She had always felt that there was some essence in the book, something that understood her and even loved her, something that forgave her when she did wrong and appreciated what she did right.

When she'd been very young, she hadn't questioned this at all; it had been part of the book's magic. More recently she had understood it as the workings of a parallel computer of enormous size and power, carefully programmed to understand the human mind and give it what it needed.

Now she wasn't so sure. Princess Nell's recent travels through the lands of King Coyote, and the various castles with their increasingly sophisticated computers that were, in the end, nothing more than Turing machines, had caught her up in a bewildering logical circle. In Castle Turing she had learned that a Turing machine could not really understand a human being. But the Primer was, itself, a Turing machine, or so she suspected; so how could it understand Nell?

Could it be that the Primer was just a conduit, a technological system that mediated between Nell and some human being who really loved her? In the end, she knew, this was basically how all ractives worked. The idea was too alarming to consider at first, and so she circled around it cautiously, poking at it from different directions, like a cavewoman discovering fire for the first time. But as she settled in closer, she found that it warmed her and satisfied her, and by the time her mind wandered into sleep, she had become dependent upon it and would not consider going back into the cold and dark place where she had been traveling for so many years.