Nell had never looked through a real telescope before. It had a tendency 
to jiggle and go out of focus, it didn't zoom, and panning was tricky. But for 
all that, the image quality was a lot better than photographic, and she quickly 
forgot herself and began sweeping it back and forth across the city. She 
checked out the little Celestial Kingdom Clave in the heart of the old city, 
where a couple of
Mandarins stood on a zigzag bridge across a pond, contemplating a swarm of 
golden carp, wispy silver beards trailing down over the colorful silk of their 
lapels, blue sapphire buttons on their caps flashing as they nodded their 
heads. She looked into a high-rise building farther inland, apparently a 
foreign concession of some type, where some Euros were holding a cocktail 
party, some venturing onto the balcony with glasses of wine and doing some 
eavesdropping of their own. Finally she leveled the 'scope toward the horizon, 
out past the vast dangerous triad-ridden suburbs, where millions of Shanghai's 
poor had been forcibly banished to make way for high-rises. Beyond that was 
real agricultural land, a fractal network of canals and creeks glimmering like 
a golden net as they reflected the lambency of the sunset, and beyond that, as 
always, a few scattered pillars of smoke in the ultimate distance, where the 
Fists of Righteous Harmony were burning the foreign devils' Feed lines.