A few days ago, working on a script in Madame Ping's offices far above, 
Nell had gazed out the window at a barge making its way down the river, pulled 
by a rickety old diesel tug, swathed in dun tarps. A few hundred meters 
upstream of this very bridge she was now crossing, the tarps had begun 
squirming and boiling, and a dozen young men in white tunics had jumped out 
from beneath, scarlet bands tied about their
waists, scarlet ribbons around their wrists and foreheads. They had swarmed 
across the top of the barge hacking at ropes with knives, and the tarps had 
reluctantly and unevenly fallen away to expose a patchy new coat of red paint 
and, lined up on the top of the barge like a string of enormous firecrackers, 
several dozen compressed gas tanks, also painted a festive red for the 
occasion. Under the circumstances, she did not doubt for a moment that the men 
were Fists and the gas hydrogen or something else that burned well. But before 
they had been able to reach the bridge, the tanks had been burst and ignited by 
something too small and fast for Nell to see from her high post. The barge 
silently turned into a carbuncle of yellow flame that took up half the width of 
the Huang Pu, and though the diamond window filtered all of the heat out of its 
radiance, Nell was able to put her hand on the pane and feel the absorbed 
warmth, not much hotter than a person's skin. The whole operation had been 
touchingly hapless, in an age when a hand-size battery could contain as much 
energy as all those cylinders of gas. It had a quaint twentieth-century feel 
and made Nell oddly nostalgic for the days when dangerousness was a function of 
mass and bulk. The passives of that era were so fun to watch, with their big, 
stupid cars and big, stupid guns and big, stupid people.