JК
Diamond Age :: Стивенсон Нил
Страница: 406 из 411Then all of the barbarians stepped into the ocean, leaving their filthy clothes strewn across the beach, relinquishing the last foothold of Chinese soil to the Celestial Kingdom. They all walked into the ocean until their heads disappeared. The rearguard was made up of the last part of the Mouse Army, which charged naked into the surf, linked up into a raft, and made its way slowly out to sea, nudging a few sick and wounded along with them in makeshift rafts. By the time the last girl's foot broke contact with the sandy ocean bottom, the end of the land had already been claimed by a man with a scarlet girdle round his waist, who stood on the shore laughing to think that now the Middle Kingdom was at last a whole country once more.
The last foreign devil to depart from the Middle Kingdom was a blond Victorian gentleman with gray eyes, who stood in the waves for some time looking back over Pudong before he turned around and continued his descent. As the sea rose over him, it lifted the bowler from his head, and the hat continued to bob on the tide for some minutes as the Chinese detonated strings of firecrackers on the shore and tiny shreds of the red paper wrappers drifted over the sea like cherry petals.
. . .
On one of her forays into the surf, Nell had encountered a man— a Drummer— who had come swimming out of the deep, naked except for a gill pack. This should have astonished her; instead, she had known he was out there before she saw him, and when he came close, she could feel things happening in her mind that were coming in from outside. There was something in her brain that made her connected to the Drummers.
Nell had drawn up some general plans and given them to her engineers for further elaboration, and they had given them to Carl, who had taken them to a functioning portable M.C. in the New Atlantan camp and compiled a little system for examining and manipulating nanotechnological devices.
In the dark, motes of light sparkled in Nell's flesh, like airplane beacons in the night sky. They scraped one of these away with a scalpel and examined it. They found similar devices circulating in her bloodstream. These things, they realized, must have been put into Nell's blood when she was raped. It was clear that the sparkling lights in Nell's flesh were beacons signaling to others across the gulf that separates each of us from our neighbors.
Carl opened one of the things from Nell's blood and found a rod logic system inside, and a tape drive containing some few gigabytes of data. The data was divided into discrete chunks, each one of which was separately encrypted.
The last foreign devil to depart from the Middle Kingdom was a blond Victorian gentleman with gray eyes, who stood in the waves for some time looking back over Pudong before he turned around and continued his descent. As the sea rose over him, it lifted the bowler from his head, and the hat continued to bob on the tide for some minutes as the Chinese detonated strings of firecrackers on the shore and tiny shreds of the red paper wrappers drifted over the sea like cherry petals.
. . .
On one of her forays into the surf, Nell had encountered a man— a Drummer— who had come swimming out of the deep, naked except for a gill pack. This should have astonished her; instead, she had known he was out there before she saw him, and when he came close, she could feel things happening in her mind that were coming in from outside. There was something in her brain that made her connected to the Drummers.
Nell had drawn up some general plans and given them to her engineers for further elaboration, and they had given them to Carl, who had taken them to a functioning portable M.C. in the New Atlantan camp and compiled a little system for examining and manipulating nanotechnological devices.
In the dark, motes of light sparkled in Nell's flesh, like airplane beacons in the night sky. They scraped one of these away with a scalpel and examined it. They found similar devices circulating in her bloodstream. These things, they realized, must have been put into Nell's blood when she was raped. It was clear that the sparkling lights in Nell's flesh were beacons signaling to others across the gulf that separates each of us from our neighbors.
Carl opened one of the things from Nell's blood and found a rod logic system inside, and a tape drive containing some few gigabytes of data. The data was divided into discrete chunks, each one of which was separately encrypted.