H eavy rains had come rolling into Shanghai from the West, like a harbinger 
of the Fists of Righteous Harmony and the thundering herald of the coming 
Celestial Kingdom. Stepping off the airship from London, Carl Hollywood at once 
felt himself in a different Shanghai from the one he had left; the old city had 
always been wild, but in a sophisticated urban way, and now it was wild like a 
frontier
town. He sensed this ambience before he even left the Aerodrome; it leaked in 
from the streets, like ozone before a thunderstorm. Looking out the windows, he 
could see a heavy rain rushing down, knocking all the nanotech out of the air 
and down into the gutters, whence it would eventually stain the Huang Pu and 
then the Yangtze. Whether it was the wild atmosphere or the prospect of being 
rained upon, he stopped his porters short of the main exit doors so that he 
could change hats. The hatboxes were stacked on one of the carts; his bowler 
went into the smallest and topmost box, which was empty, and then he yanked the 
largest box out from underneath, popping the stack, and took out a ten-gallon 
Stetson of breathtaking width and sweep, almost like a head-mounted umbrella. 
Casting an eye into the street, where a rushing brown stream carried litter, 
road dust, cholera-ridden sewage, and tons of captive nanotech toward the storm 
drains, he slipped off his leather shoes and exchanged them for a pair of 
hand-tooled cowboy boots, made from hides of gaudy reptiles and avians, the 
pores of which had been corked with mites that would keep his feet dry even if 
he chose to wade through the gutters.