X-and did use that property to compile an illegal copy of a certain device known as theYoung Lady's Illustrated Primer ."
There was no point in claiming that this was not true. "But I have come here this evening specifically to regain possession of that same device," Hackworth said, "which is in the hands of my distinguished host here. Certainly you are not intending to arrest the distinguished Dr. X for trafficking in stolen property."
Constable Chang looked expectantly toward Dr. X. The Doctor adjusted his robes and adopted a radiant, grandfatherly smile. "I am sorry to tell you that some reprehensible person has apparently provided you with wrong information," he said. "In fact, I have no idea where the Primer is located."
The dimensions of this trap were so vast that Hackworth's mind was still reeling through it, bouncing haplessly from one wall to another, when he was hauled before the district magistrate twenty minutes later. They had set up a courtroom in a large, ancient garden in the interior of Old Shanghai. It was an open square paved with flat gray stones. At one end was a raised building open to the square on one side, covered with a sweeping tile roof whose corners curved high into the air and whose ridgeline was adorned with a clay frieze portraying a couple of dragons facing off with a large pearl between them. Hackworth realized, dimly, that this was actually the stage of an open-air theatre, which enhanced the impression that he was the sole spectator at an elaborate play written and staged for his benefit.
A judge sat before a low, brocade-covered table in the center of the stage, dressed in magnificent robes and an imposing winged hat decorated with a unicorn emblem. Behind him and off to one side stood a small woman wearing what Hackworth assumed were phenomenoscopic spectacles. When Constable Chang had pointed to a spot on the gray flagstones where Hackworth was expected to kneel, he ascended to the stage and took up a position flanking the Judge on the other side. A few other functionaries were arranged on the square, mostly consisting of Dr. X and members of his retinue, arranged in two parallel lines forming a tunnel between Hackworth and the Judge.
Hackworth's initial surge of terror had worn off. He had now entered into morbid fascination with the incredible dreadfulness of his situation and the magnificent performance staged by Dr. X to celebrate it. He knelt silently and waited in a stunned, hyper-relaxed state, like a pithed frog on the dissection table.
Formalities were gone through. The Judge was named Fang and evidently came from New York. The charge was repeated, somewhat more elaborately. The woman stepped forward and introduced evidence: a cine record that was played on a large mediatron covering the back wall of the stage. It was a film of the suspect, John Percival Hackworth, slicing a bit of skin from his hand and giving it to (the innocent) Dr. X, who (not knowing that he was being gulled into committing a theft) extracted a terabyte of hot data from a cocklebur-shaped mite, and so on, and so on.
"The only thing that remains is to prove that this information was, indeed, stolen-though this is strongly implied by the suspect's behavior," Judge Fang said. In support of this assertion, Constable Chang stepped forward and told the story of his visit to Hackworth's flat.
"Mr. Hackworth," said Judge Fang, "would you like to dispute that this property was stolen? If so, we will hold you here while a copy of the information is supplied to Her Majesty's Police; they can confer with your employer to determine whether you did anything dishonest. Would you like us to do that?"
"No, Your Honour," Hackworth said.
"So you are not disputing that the property was stolen, and that you deceived a subject of the Celestial Kingdom into colluding with your criminal behavior?"
"I am guilty as charged, Your Honour," Hackworth said, "and I throw myself on the mercy of the court."
"Very well," Judge Fang said, "the defendant is guilty. The sentence is sixteen strokes of the cane and ten years' imprisonment."
"Goodness gracious!" Hackworth murmured. Inadequate as this was, it was the only thing that came to him.
"Insofar as the strokes of the cane are concerned, since the defendant was motivated by his filial responsibility to his daughter, I will suspend all but one, on one condition."
"Your Honour, I shall endeavour to comply with whatever condition you may choose to impose."
"That you supply Dr. X with the decryption key to the data in question, so that additional copies of the book may be made available to the small children crowding our orphanages."
"This I will gladly do," Hackworth said, "but there are complications.,,
"I'm waiting," Judge Fang said, not sounding very pleased. Hackworth got the impression that this business about the caning and the Primer was a mere prelude to something bigger, and that the Judge just wanted to get through it.
"In order for me to weigh the seriousness of these complications," Hackworth said, "I will need to know how many copies, approximately, Your Honour intends to make."
"In the range of hundreds of thousands."
Hundreds of thousands!"Please excuse me, but does Your Honour understand that the book is engineered for girls starting around the age of four?"
"Yes."
Hackworth was taken aback. Hundreds of thousands of children of both sexes and all ages would not have been difficult to believe. Hundreds of thousands of four-year-old girls was hard for the mind to grasp. Just one of them was quite a handful. But it was, after all, China.
"The magistrate is waiting," Constable Chang said.
"I must make it clear to Your Honour that the Primer is, in large part, a ractive-that is, it requires the participation of adult ractors. While one or two extra copies might go unnoticed, a large number of them would overwhelm the built-in system provided for paying for such services."
"Then part of your responsibility will be to make alterations in the Primer so that it is suitable for our requirements-we can make do without those parts of the book that depend heavily on outside ractors, and supply our own ractors in some cases," Judge Fang said.
"This should be feasible. I can build in automatic voice-generation capabilities-not as good, but serviceable." At this point, John Percival Hackworth, almost without thinking about it and without appreciating the ramifications of what he was doing, devised a trick and slipped it in under the radar of the Judge and Dr. X and all of the other people in the theatre, who were better at noticing tricks than most other people in the world.
"While I'm at it, if it pleases the court, I can also," Hackworth said, most obsequiously, "make changes in the content so that it will be more suitable for the unique cultural requirements of the Han readership. But it will take some time."
"Very well," said Judge Fang, "all but one stroke of the cane are suspended, pending the completion of these alterations. As for the ten years of imprisonment, I am embarrassed to relate that this district, being very small, does not have a prison, and so the suspect will have to be released this evening after the business with the cane is finished. But rest assured, Mr. Hackworth, that your sentence will be served, one way or another."
The revelation that he would be released to his family this very evening hit Hackworth like a deep lungful of opium smoke. The caning went by quickly and efficiently; he did not have time to worry about it, which helped a little. The pain sent him straight into shock. Chang pulled his flaccid body off the rack and bore him over to a hard cot, where he lay semiconscious for a few minutes. They brought him tea-a nice Keemun with distinct lavender notes.
Without further ado he was escorted straight out of the Middle Kingdom and into the streets of the Coastal Republic, which had never been more than a stone's throw away from him during all of these proceedings, but which might as well have been a thousand miles and a thousand years distant. He made his way straight to a public matter compiler, moving in a broad-based gait, with tiny steps, bent over somewhat, and compiled some first-aid supplies— painkillers and some hæmocules that supposedly helped to knit wounds together.
Thoughts about the second part of the sentence, and how he might end up serving it, did not come back to him until he was halfway back across the Causeway, borne swiftly on autoskates, the wind keening through the fabric of his trousers and inflaming the laceration placed neatly across his buttocks, like the track of a router. This time, he was surrounded by a flock of hornet-size aerostats flying in an ellipsoidal formation all around him, hissing gently and invisibly through the night and waiting for an excuse to swarm.
This defensive system, which had seemed formidable to him when he compiled it, now seemed like a pathetic gesture. It might stop a youth gang. But he had insensibly transcended the plane of petty delinquents and moved into a new realm, ruled by powers almost entirely hidden from his ken, and knowable to the likes of John Percival Hackworth only insofar as they perturbed the trajectories of the insignificant persons and powers who happened to be in his vicinity. He could do naught but continue falling through the orbit that had been ordained for him. This knowledge relaxed him more than anything he had learned in many years, and when he returned home, he kissed the sleeping Fiona, treated his wounds with more therapeutic technology from the M.C., covered them with pajamas, and slid beneath the covers. Drawn inward by Gwendolyn's dark radiant warmth, he fell asleep before he had even had time to pray.
More tales from the Primer;
the story of Dinosaur and Dojo;
Nell learns a thing or two about the art of self-defense;
Nell's mother gets, and loses, a worthy suitor;
Nell asserts her position against a young bully.
She loved all of her four companions, but her favorite had come to be Dinosaur. At first she'd found him a little scary, but then she'd come to understand that though he could be a terrible warrior, he was on her side and he loved her. She loved to ask him for stories about the old days before the Extinction, and about the time he had spent studying with the mouse Dojo.
There were other students too . . . said the book, speaking in Dinosaur's voice, as Nell sat by herself in the corner of the playroom.
. . . In those days we had no humans, but we did have monkeys, and one day a little girl monkey came to the entrance of our cave looking quite lonely. Dojo welcomed her inside, which surprised me because I thought Dojo only liked warriors. When the little monkey saw me, she froze in terror, but then Dojo flipped me over his shoulder and bounced me off the walls of the cave a few times to demonstrate that I was fully under control. He made her a bowl of soup and asked her why she was wandering around the forest all by herself.
The monkey, whose name was Belle, explained that her mother and her mother's boyfriend had kicked her out of the family tree and told her to go swing on the vines for a couple of hours. But the bigger monkeys hogged all the vines and wouldn't let Belle swing, so Belle wandered off into the forest looking for companionship and got lost, finally stumbling upon the entrance to Dojo's cave.
"You may stay with us for as long as you like," Dojo said.
"All we do here is play games, and you are invited to join our games if it pleases you."
"But I am supposed to be home soon," Belle complained. "My mother's boyfriend will give me a whipping otherwise."
"Then I will show you the way from your family tree to my cave and back," Dojo said, "so that you can come here and play with us whenever your mother sends you out."
Dojo and I helped Belle find her way back through the forest to her family tree. On our way back to the cave, I said,
"Master, I do not understand."
"What seems to be the trouble?" Dojo said.
"You are a great warrior, and I am studying to become a great warrior myself. Is there a place in your cave for a little girl who just wants to play?"
"I'll be the judge of who does and doesn't make a warrior," Dojo said.
"But we are so busy with our drills and exercises," I said. "Do we have time to play games with the child, as you promised?"
"What is a game but a drill that's dressed up in colorful clothing?" Dojo said. "Besides, given that, even without my instruction, you weigh ten tons and have a cavernous mouth filled with teeth like butcher knives, and that all creatures except me flee in abject terror at the mere sound of your footsteps, I do not think that you should begrudge a lonely little girl some play-time."
At this I felt deeply ashamed, and when we got home, I swept out the cave seven times without even being asked. A couple of days later, when Belle came back to our cave looking lonely and forlorn, we both did our best to make her feel welcome. Dojo began playing some special games with her, which Belle enjoyed so much that she kept coming back, and believe it or not, after a couple of years of this had gone by, Belle was able to flip me over her shoulder just as well as Dojo.