The refugees, now Drummers, all slept and dreamed the same dream, and the abstract lights flickering across the mediatronic lining of the cavern began to coalesce and organize themselves into dark memories from deep within their unconscious mind. Nell began to see things from her own life, experiences long since assimilated into the words of the Primer but here shown once more in a raw and terrifying form. She closed her eyes; but the walls made sounds too, from which she could not escape.
Carl Hollywood was monitoring the signals passing through the walls of the tunnels, avoiding the emotional content of these images by reducing them to binary digits and trying to puzzle out their internal codes and protocols.
"We have to go," Nell said finally, and Carl arose and followed her through a randomly chosen exit. The tunnel forked and forked again, and Nell chose forks by intuition. Sometimes the tunnels would widen into great caverns full of luminescent Drummers, sleeping or fucking or simply pounding on the walls. The caverns always had many outlets, which forked and forked and converged upon other caverns, the web of tunnels so vast and complicated that it seemed to fill the entire ocean, like neural bodies with their dendrites knitting and ramifying to occupy the whole volume of the skull.
A low drumming sound had been skirting the lower limits of perceptibility ever since they had left the cavern where the refugees slumbered. Nell had first taken it for the beat of submarine currents on the walls of the tunnel, but as it grew stronger, she knew that it was the Drummers talking to each other, convened in some central cavern sending messages out across their network. Realizing this, she felt a sense of urgency verging on panic that they find the central assembly, and for some time they ran through the perfectly bewildering three-dimensional maze, trying to locate the epicenter of the drumming.
Carl Hollywood could not run as quickly as the nimble Nell and eventually lost her at a fork in the tunnels. From there he made his own judgments, and after some time had passed– it was impossible to know how long– his tunnel dovetailed with another that was carrying a stream of Drummers downward toward the floor of the ocean. Carl recognized some of these Drummers as former refugees from the beaches at Pudong.
The sound of the drumming did not build gradually but exploded to a deafening, mind-dissolving roar as Carl emerged into a vast cavern, a conical amphitheatre that must have been a kilometer wide, roofed with a storm of mediatronic images that played across a vast dome. The Drummers, visible by the flickering light of the overhead media storm and by their own internal light, moved up and down the slopes of the cone in a kind of convection pattern. Caught up in an eddy, Carl was transported down toward the center and found that an orgy of fantastic dimensions was underway. The steam of vaporized sweat rose from the center of the pit in a cloud. The bodies pressing against Carl's naked skin were so hot that they almost burned him, as if everyone were running a high fever, and in some logical abstract compartment of his mind that was, somehow, continuing to run along its own reasonable course, he realized why: They were exchanging packets of data with their bodily fluids, the packets were mating in their blood, the rod logic throwing off heat that drove up their core temperature.
The orgy went on for hours, but the pattern of convection gradually slowed down and condensed into a stable arrangement, like a circulating crowd in a theatre that settles into its assigned seats as curtain time approaches A broad open space had formed at the center of the pit and the innermost ring of spectators consisted of men as if these were in some sense the winners of the enormous fornication tournament that was nearing its final round. A lone Drummer circulated around this innermost ring, handing something out; the something turned out to be mediatronic condoms that glowed bright colors when they were stripped onto the men's erect phalluses.
A lone woman entered the ring. The floor at the absolute center of the pit rose up beneath her feet, shoving her into the air as on an altar. The drumming built to an unbearable crescendo and then stopped. Then it began again a very slow steady beat and the men in the inner circle began to dance around her. Carl Hollywood saw that the woman in the center was Miranda.
He saw it all now: that the refugees had been gathered into the realm of the Drummers for the harvest of fresh data running in their bloodstreams, that this data had been infused into the wet Net in the course of the great orgy, and that all of it was now going to be dumped into Miranda, whose body would play host to the climax of some computation that would certainly burn her alive in the process.
It was Hackworth's doing; this was the culmination of his effort to design the Seed, and in so doing to dissolve the foundations of New Atlantis and Nippon and all of the societies that had grown up around the concept of a centralized, hierarchical Feed.
A lone figure, remarkable because her skin did not emit any light, was fighting her way in toward the center. She burst into the inner circle, knocking down a dancer who got in her way, and climbed up onto the central altar where Miranda lay on her back, arms outstretched as if crucified, her skin a galaxy of colored lights. Nell cradled Miranda's head in her arms, bent down, and kissed her, not a soft brush of the lips but a savage kiss with open mouth, and she bit down hard as she did it, biting through her own lips and Miranda's so that their blood mingled. The light shining from Miranda's body diminished and slowly went out as the nanosites were hunted down and destroyed by the hunter-killers that had crossed into her blood from Nell's. Miranda came awake and arose, her arms draped weakly around Nell's neck.
The drumming had stopped; the Drummers all sat impassively, clearly content to wait– for years if necessary-for a woman who could take Miranda's place. The light from their flesh had diminished, and the overhead mediatron had gone dim and vague.
Carl Hollywood, seeing at last a role for himself, stepped into the center, got one arm under Miranda's knees and another beneath her shoulders, and lifted her into the air. Nell turned around and led them up out of the cavern, holding her sword out before her; but none of the Drummers moved to stop them.
They passed up through many tunnels, always taking the uphill fork until they saw sunlight shining down from above through the waves, casting lines of white light on the translucent roof. Nell severed the tunnel behind them, wielding her sword like the sweep of a clock's hand. The warm water rushed in on them. Nell swam up toward the light. Miranda was not swimming strongly, and Carl was torn between a panicky desire to reach the surface and his duty to Miranda. Then he saw shadows descending from above, dozens of naked girls swimming downward, garlands of silver bubbles streaming from their mouths, their almond eyes excited and mischievous. Carl and Miranda were gripped by many gentle hands and borne upward into the light.
New Chusan rose above them, a short swim away, and up on the mountain they could hear the bells of the cathedral ringing.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Neal Stephenson is the author of The Diamond Age, Snow Crash, Zodiac, and The Big U
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Jeremy Bornstein
Douglas (Carl Hollywood) Crockford
K. Eric Drexier
Wayne "Hank" Hansen
Steve Horst
Steve Johnson
Marco Kakofen
Sachiko Emma Kashiwaya
Kevin Kelly
Alan Moores
Chris Peterson
Rattana Schicketanz
Dean Tribble