The Diamond Age (4 page)

  "But a man in my position was not responsible for promoting you to Bespoke. A man in an entirely different position was. And I am very much afraid that such men do tend to see a contradiction."

  "Yes, I see. Well, sir, I studied English literature in college."

  "Ah! So you are not one of those who followed the straight and narrow path to engineering."

  "I suppose not, sir."

  "And your colleagues at Bespoke?"

  "Well, if I understand your question, sir, I would say that, as compared with other departments, a relatively large proportion of Bespoke engineers have had- well, for lack of a better way of describing it, interesting lives."

  "And what makes one man's life more interesting than another's?"

  "In general, I should say that we find unpredictable or novel things more interesting."

  "That is nearly a tautology." But while Lord Finkle-McGraw was not the sort to express feelings promiscuously, he gave the appearance of being nearly satisfied with the way the conversation was going. He turned back toward the view again and watched the children for a minute or so, twisting the point of his walking-stick into the ground as if he were still skeptical of the island's integrity. Then he swept the stick around in an arc that encompassed half the island. "How many of those children do you suppose are destined to lead interesting lives?"

  "Well, at least two, sir-Princess Charlotte, and your granddaughter."

  "You're quick, Hackworth, and I suspect capable of being devious if not for your staunch moral character," Finkle-McGraw said, not without a certain archness. "Tell me, were your parents subjects, or did you take the Oath?"

  "As soon as I turned twenty-one, sir. Her Majesty- at that time, actually, she was still Her Royal Highness- was touring North America, prior to her enrollment at Stanford, and I took the Oath at Trinity Church in Boston."

  "Why? You're a clever fellow, not blind to culture like so many engineers. You could have joined the First Distributed Republic or any of a hundred synthetic phyles on the West Coast.  You would have had decent prospects and been free from all this"- Finkle-McGraw jabbed his cane at the two big airships-  "behavioural discipline that we impose upon ourselves. Why did you impose it on yourself, Mr. Hackworth?"

  "Without straying into matters that are strictly personal in nature," Hackworth said carefully, "I knew two kinds of discipline as a child: none at all, and too much. The former leads to degenerate behaviour. When I speak of degeneracy, I am not being priggish, sir- I am alluding to things well known to me, as they made my own childhood less than idyllic."

  Finkle-McGraw, perhaps realizing that he had stepped out of bounds, nodded vigorously. "This is a familiar argument, of course."

  "Of course, sir. I would not presume to imply that I was the only young person ill-used by what became of my native culture."

  "And I do not see such an implication. But many who feel as you do found their way into phyles wherein a much harsher regime prevails and which view us as degenerates."

  "My life was not without periods of excessive, unreasoning discipline, usually imposed capriciously by those responsible for laxity in the first place. That combined with my historical studies led me, as many others, to the conclusion that there was little in the previous century worthy of emulation, and that we must look to the nineteenth century instead for stable social models."

  "Well done, Hackworth! But you must know that the model to which you allude did not long survive the first Victoria."

  "We have outgrown much of the ignorance and resolved many of the internal contradictions that characterised that era."

  "Have we, then? How reassuring. And have we resolved them in a way that will ensure that all of those children down there live interesting lives?"

  "I must confess that I am too slow to follow you."

  "You yourself said that the engineers in the Bespoke department- the very best- had led interesting lives, rather than coming from the straight and narrow. Which implies a correlation, does it not?"

  "Clearly."

  "This implies, does it not, that in order to raise a generation of children who can reach their full potential, we must find a way to make their lives interesting. And the question I have for you, Mr. Hackworth, is this: Do you think that our schools accomplish that? Or are they like the schools that Wordsworth complained of?"

  "My daughter is too young to attend school- but I should fear that the latter situation prevails."

  "I assure you that it does, Mr. Hackworth. My three children were raised in those schools, and I know them well. I am determined that Elizabeth shall be raised differently."

  Hackworth felt his face flushing. "Sir, may I remind you that we have just met-I do not feel worthy of the confidences you are reposing in me."

  "I'm telling you these things not as a friend, Mr. Hackworth, but as a professional."

  "Then I must remind you that I am an engineer, not a child psychologist."

  "This I have not forgotten, Mr. Hackworth. You are indeed an engineer, and a very fine one, in a company that I still think of as mine- though as an Equity Lord, I no longer have a formal connection. And now that you have brought your part of this project to a successful conclusion, I intend to put you in charge of a new project for which I have reason to believe you are perfectly suited."

Bud embarks on a life of crime;  an insult to a tribe & its consequences.

 
Bud rolled his first victim almost by accident. He'd taken a wrong turn into a cul-de-sac and inadvertently trapped a black man and woman and a couple of little kids who'd blundered in there before him. They had a scared look about them, like a lot of the new arrivals did, and Bud noticed the way the man's gaze lingered on his Sights, wondering whether those crosshairs, invisible to him, were centered on him, his lady, or his kid.

  Bud didn't get out of their way. He was packing, they weren't, it was up to them to get out of his way. But instead they just froze up. "You got a problem?" Bud said.

  "What do you want?" the man said.

  It had been a while since anyone had manifested such sincere concern for Bud's desires, and he kind of liked it. He realized that these people were under the impression that they were being mugged. "Oh, same as anyone else. Money and shit," Bud said, and just like that, the man took some hard ucus out of his pocket and handed them over-and then actually thanked him as he backed away.

  Bud enjoyed getting that kind of respect from black people- it reminded him of his noble heritage in the trailer parks of North Florida- and he didn't mind the money either. After that day he began looking for black people with that same scared uncertain look about them. These people bought and sold off the record, and so they carried hard money. He did pretty well for himself for a couple of months. Every so often he would stop by the flat where his bitch Tequila lived, give her some lingerie, and maybe give Harv some chocolate.

  Harv was presumed by both Bud and Tequila to be Bud's son. He was five, which meant that he had been conceived in a much earlier cycle of Bud and Tequila's break-up-and-make-up relationship. Now the bitch was pregnant again, which meant that Bud would have to bring even more gifts to her place when he came around. The pressures of fatherhood!

  One day Bud targeted a particularly well-dressed family because of their fancy clothes. The man was wearing a business suit and the woman a nice clean dress, and they were carrying a baby all dressed up in a white lacy thing, and they had hired a porter to help them haul their luggage away from the Aerodrome. The porter was a white guy who vaguely reminded Bud of himself, and he was incensed to see him acting as a pack animal for blacks. So as soon as these people got away from the bustle of the Aerodrome and into a more secluded neighborhood, Bud approached them, swaggering in the way he'd practiced in the mirror, occasionally pushing his Sights up on his nose with one index finger.

  The guy in the suit was different from most of them. He didn't try to act like he hadn't seen Bud, didn't try to skulk away, didn't cringe or slouch, just stood his ground, feet planted squarely, and very pleasantly said, "Yes, sir, can I be of assistance?" He didn't talk like an American black, had almost a British accent, but crisper.

  Now that Bud had come closer, he saw that the man had a strip of colored cloth thrown around his neck and over his lapels, dangling down like a scarf. He looked well-housed and well-fed for the most part, except for a little scar high up on one cheekbone.

  Bud kept walking until he was a little too close to the guy. He kept his head tilted back until the last minute, like he was kicking back listening to some loud tunes (which he was), and then suddenly snapped his head forward so he was staring the guy right in the face. It was another way to emphasize the fact that he was packing, and it usually did the trick. But this guy did not respond with the little flinch that Bud had come to expect and enjoy. Maybe he was from some booga-booga country where they didn't know about skull guns.

  "Sir," the man said, "my family and I are on the way to our hotel. We have had a long journey, and we are tired; my daughter has an ear infection. If you would state your business as expeditiously as possible, I would be obliged."

  "You talk like a fucking Vicky," Bud said.

  "Sir, I am not what you refer to as a Vicky, or I should have gone directly there. I would be obliged if you could be so kind as to moderate your language in the presence of my wife and child."

  It took Bud a while to untangle this sentence, and a while longer to believe that the man really cared about a few dirty words spoken within earshot of his family, and longer yet to believe that he had been so insolent to Bud, a heavily muscled guy who was obviously packing a skull gun.

  "I'm gonna fucking say whatever I fucking want to your bitch and your flicking brat," Bud said, very loud. Then he could not keep himself from grinning. Score a few points for Bud!

  The man looked impatient rather than scared and heaved a deep sigh. "Is this an armed robbery or something? Are you sure you know what you are getting into?"

  Bud answered by whispering "hut" under his breath and firing a Crippler into the man's right bicep. It went off deep in the muscle, like an M-80, blowing a dark hole in the sleeve of the man's jacket and leaving his arm stretched out nice and straight- the trike now pulling without anything to oppose it. The man clenched his teeth, his eyes bulged, and for a few moments he made strangled grunting noises from way down in his chest, making an effort not to cry out.

  Bud stared at the wound in fascination. It was just like shooting people in a ractive. Except that the bitch didn't scream and beg for mercy. She just turned her back, using her body to shield the baby, and looked over her shoulder, calmly, at Bud. Bud noticed she had a little scar on her cheek too.

  "Next I take your eye," Bud said, "then I go to work on the bitch."

  The man held up his good hand palm out, indicating surrender. He emptied his pocket of hard Universal Currency Units and handed them over. And then Bud made himself scarce, because the monitors- almond-size aerostats with eyes, ears, and radios- had probably picked up the sound of the explosion and begun converging on the area. He saw one hiss by him as he rounded the corner, trailing a short whip antenna that caught the light like a hairline crack in the atmosphere.

  Three days later, Bud was hanging around the Aerodrome, looking for easy pickings, when a big ship came in from Singapore. Immersed in a stream of thousand arrivals was a tight group of some two dozen solidly built, very dark-skinned black men dressed in business suits, with Strips of colored cloth draped around their necks and little scars on their cheekbone.

  It was later that night that Bud, for the first time in his life, heard the word
Ashanti
. "Another twenty-five Ashanti just came in from L.A.!" said a man in a bar. "The Ashanti had a big meeting in the conference room at the Sheraton!" said a woman on the street. Waiting in a queue for one of the free matter compilers, a bum said, "One of them Ashanti gave me five yuks. They're fine folks." When Bud ran into a guy he knew, a former comrade in the decoy trade, he said, "Hey, the place is crawling with them Ashanti, ain't it?"

  "Yup," said the guy, who had seemed unaccountably shocked to see Bud's face on the Street, and who was annoyingly distracted all of a sudden, swiveling his head to look all ways.

  "They must be having a convention or something," Bud theorized. "I rolled one of 'em the other night."

  "Yeah, I know," his friend said.

  "Huh? How'd you know that?"

  "They ain't having a convention, Bud. All of those Ashanti- except the first one-came to town hunting for you."

  Paralysis struck Bud's vocal cords, and he felt lightheaded, unable to concentrate.

  "I gotta go," his friend said, and removed himself from Bud's vicinity.

  For the next few hours Bud felt as though everyone on the street was looking at him. Bud was certainly looking at them, looking for those suits, those colored strips of cloth. But he caught sight of a man in shorts and a T-shirt- a black man with very high cheeks, one of which was marked with a tiny scar, and almost Asian-looking eyes in a very high state of alertness. So he couldn't rely on the Ashanti wearing stereotyped clothing.

  Very soon after that, Bud swapped clothes with an indigent down on the beach, giving up all his black leather and coming away      with a T-shirt and shorts of his own. The T-shirt was much too small; it bound him under the armpits and pressed against his muscles so that he felt the eternal twitching even more than usual. He wished he could turn the stimulators off now, relax his muscles even for one night, but that would require a trip to the mod parlor, and he had to figure that the Ashanti had the mod parlors all staked out. He could have gone to any of several brothels, but he didn't know what kind of connections these Ashanti might have- or even what the hell an Ashanti was, exactly-and he wasn't sure he could get a boner under these circumstances anyway.