Under Hackworth's direction he rotated the cocklebur until a small spine-free patch came into view. A circular depression, marked with a regular pattern of holes and knobs, was set into the surface of the ball, like a docking port on the side of a spacecraft. Inscribed around the circumference of this fitting was his maker's mark: IOANNI HACVIRTUS FECIT.

Dr. X did not need an explanation. It was a standard port. He probably had half a dozen manipulator arms designed to mate with it. He selected one and maneuvered its tip into place, then spoke a command in Shanghainese. Then he pulled the rig off his head and watched his assistant pour him another cup of tea. "How long?" he said.

"About a terabyte," Hackworth said. This was a measure of storage capacity, not of time, but he knew that Dr. X was the sort who could figure it out.

The ball contained a machine-phase tape drive system, eight reels of tape rigged in parallel, each with its own read/write machinery. The tapes themselves were polymer chains with different side groups representing the logical ones and zeroes. It was a standard component, and so Dr. X already knew that when it was told to dump, it would spew out about a billion bytes a second.

Hackworth had just told him that the total stored on the tapes was a trillion bytes, so they had a thousand seconds to wait. Dr. X took advantage of the time to leave the room, supported by assistants, and tend to some of the other parallel threads of his enterprise, which was known informally as the Flea Circus.

Dr. X's assistant swung the door open and nodded insolently. Hackworth swung his top hat into place and stepped out of the Flea Circus, blinking at the reek of China: smoky like the dregs of a hundred million pots of lapsang souchong, mingled with the sweet earthy smell of pork fat and the brimstony tang of plucked chickens and hot garlic. He felt his way across the cobbles with the tip of his walking-stick until his eyes began to adjust. He was now poorer by several thousand ucus. A sizable investment, but the best a father could make.

Dr. X's neighborhood was in the Ming Dynasty heart of Shanghai, a warren of tiny brick structures sheathed in gray stucco, topped with tiled roofs, frequently surrounded by stucco walls. Iron poles projected from the second-story windows for drying clothes, so that in the narrow streets the buildings appeared to be fencing with each other. This neighborhood was near the foundation of the ancient city wall, built to keep out acquisitive Nipponese ronin, which had been torn down and made into a ring road.

It was part of the Outer Kingdom, which meant that foreign devils were allowed, as long as they were escorted by Chinese. Beyond it, deeper into the old neighborhood, was supposedly a scrap of the Middle Kingdom proper– the Celestial Kingdom, or C.K., as they liked to call it– where no foreigners at all were allowed.

An assistant took Hackworth as far as the border, where he stepped into the Chinese Coastal Republic, an entirely different country that comprised, among many other things, virtually all of Shanghai. As if to emphasize this, young men loitered on corners in Western clothes, listening to loud music, hooting at women, and generally ignoring their filial duties.

He could have taken an auto-rickshaw, which was the only vehicle other than a bicycle or skateboard narrow enough to negotiate the old streets. But you never could tell what kind of surveillance might be present in a Shanghai taxi. The departure of a New Atlantis gentleman from the Flea Circus late at night could only stimulate the imaginations of the gendarmes, who had intimidated the criminal element to such a degree that they were now feeling restless and looking for ways to diversify. Sages, seers, and theoretical physicists could only speculate at what, if any, relationship might exist between the Shanghai Police Department's astonishing scope of activities and actual law enforcement: Deplorable, but Hackworth was thankful for it as he sampled the French Settlement's ramified backstreets. A handful of figures skulked across an intersection several blocks away, bloody light from a mediatron glancing off their patchwork Nanobar outfits, the kind of thing only street criminals would need to wear. Hackworth comforted himself by reasoning that this must be a gang from one of the Leased Territories who had just come over the Causeway. They wouldn't possibly be so rash as to assault a gentleman in the street, not in Shanghai. Hackworth detoured around the intersection anyway. Having never done anything illegal in his life, he was startled to understand, all of a sudden, that a ruthless constabulary was a crucial resource to more imaginative sorts of criminals, such as himself.

Countless times that afternoon, Hackworth had been overcome by shame, and as many times he had fought it off with rationalization: What was so bad about what he was doing? He was not selling any of the new technologies that Lord Finkle-McGraw had paid Bespoke to develop. He was not profiting directly. He was just trying to secure a better place in the world for his descendants, which was every father's responsibility.

Old Shanghai was close to the Huang Pu; the mandarins had once sat in their garden pavilions enjoying the river view. Within a few minutes Hackworth had crossed a bridge into Pudong and was navigating narrow ravines between illuminated skyscrapers, heading for the coast a few miles farther to the east.

Hackworth had been catapulted out of the rank-and-file and into Bespoke's elite ranks by his invention of the mediatronic chopstick. He'd been working in San Francisco at the time. The company was thinking hard about things Chinese, trying to one-up the Nipponese, who had already figured out a way to generate passable rice (five different varieties, yet!) direct from Feed, bypassing the whole paddy/coolie rat race, enabling two billion peasants to hang up their conical hats and get into some serious leisure time– and don't think for one moment that the Nipponese didn't already have some suggestions for what they might do with it. Some genius at headquarters, stewing over Nippon's prohibitive lead in nanotechnological rice production, decided the only thing for it was to leapfrog them by mass-producing entire meals, from wonton all the way to digital interactive fortune cookies. Hackworth got the seemingly trivial job of programming the matter compiler to extrude chopsticks.

Now, doing this in plastic was idiotically simple– polymers and nanotechnology went together like toothpaste and tubes. But Hackworth, who'd eaten his share of Chinese as a student, had never taken well to the plastic chopsticks, which were slick and treacherous in the blunt hands of a gwailo. Bamboo was better– and not that much harder to program, if you just had a bit of imagination. Once he'd made that conceptual leap, it wasn't long before he came up with the idea of selling advertising space on the damn things, chopstick handles and Chinese columnar script being a perfect match. Before long he was presenting it to his superiors: eminently user-friendly bamboid chopsters with colorful advertising messages continuously scrolling up their handles in real time, like news headlines in Times Square. For that, Hackworth was kicked upstairs to Bespoke and across the Pacific to Atlantis/Shanghai. He saw these chopsticks everywhere now. To the Equity Lords, the idea had been worth billions; to Hackworth, another week's paycheck. That was the difference between the classes, right there. He wasn't doing that badly, compared to most other people in the world, but it still rankled him. He wanted more for Fiona. He wanted Fiona to grow up with some equity of her own. And not just a few pennies invested in common stocks, but a serious position in a major company.