Diamond Age

Each of the guys grabs a corner of the sheet. Her remains tumble into the center, powdery ash flies, flecks of red-hot coals spark. The skeleton men carry the remains over to a fifty-five-gallon steel drum and dump it in. There is a burst of steam and lots of sizzling noises as the hot coals contact some kind of liquid that was in the drum. One of the skeleton men picks up a long spoon and gives the mix a stir, then dips a cracked and spalled University of Michigan coffee mug into it and takes a long drink.

The other three skeleton men each drink in their turn. By now, the spectators have formed a long queue. One by one they step forward. The leader of the skeleton men holds the mug for them, gives each one a sip. Then they all wander off, individually or in small, conversing groups. Show's over.

Nell's life at Dovetail;

developments in the Primer;

a trip to the New Atlantis Clave;

she is presented to Miss Matheson;

new lodgings with an "old" acquaintance.

Nell lived in the Millhouse for several days. They gave her a little bed under the eaves on the top floor, in a cozy place only she was tiny enough to reach. She had her meals with Rita or Brad or one of the other nice people she knew there. During the days she would wander in the meadow or dangle her feet in the river or explore the woods, sometimes going as far as the dog pod grid. She always took the Primer with her. Lately, it had been filled with the doings of Princess Nell and her friends in the city of King Magpie.

It kept getting more like a ractive and less like a story, and by the end of each chapter she was exhausted from all the cleverness she had expended just to get herself and her friends through another day without falling into the clutches of pirates or of King Magpie himself.

In time, she and Peter came up with a very tricky plan to sneak into the castle, create a diversion, and seize the magic books that were the source of King Magpie's power. This plan failed the first time, but the next day, Nell turned the page back and tried it again, this time with a few changes. It failed again, but not before Princess Nell and her friends had gotten a little farther into the castle. The sixth or seventh time, the plan worked perfectly-while King Magpie was locked in a battle of riddles with Peter Rabbit (which Peter won), Purple used a magic spell to smash open the door to his secret library, which was filled with books even more magical than the Young Lady's Illustrated Primer. Hidden inside one of those books was a jeweled key. Princess Nell took the key, and Purple made off with several of King Magpie's magic books while she was at it.

They made a breathtaking escape across a river into the next country, where King Magpie could not chase them, and camped in a nice meadow for a few days, resting. During the daytime, when the others were just stuffed animals, Princess Nell would peruse some of the new magic books that Purple had stolen. When she did, its image in the illustration would zoom toward her until it filled the page, and then the Primer itself would become that magical book until she decided to put it away.

Nell's favorite book was a magical Atlas which she could use to explore any land, real or imaginary. During the nighttime, Purple spent most of her time reading a very large, crusty, worn, stained, burnt tome entitled PANTECHNICON. This book had a built-in hasp with a padlock. Whenever Purple wasn't using it, she locked it shut. Nell asked to see it a few times, but Purple told her she was too young to know such things as were written in this Book.

During this time, Duck as usual made herself busy around the camp, tidying up and fixing their meals, doing laundry on the rocks by the river, and mending their clothes that had become ragged during their wanderings. Peter became restless. He was quick with words, but he had not learned the trick of reading, and so the books from King Magpie's library were of no use to him save as nest-lining material. He got into the habit of exploring the surrounding forests, particularly the ones to the north. At first he would be gone for a few hours at a time, but once he stayed away all night and did not come back until the following noon. Then he began to go on trips for several days at a time.

Peter vanished into the north woods one day, staggering under a heavy pack, and didn't come back at all.

. . .

Nell was in the meadow one day, gathering flowers, when a fine lady— a Vicky— came riding toward her on a horse. When she drew closer, Nell was surprised to see that the horse was Eggshell and the lady was Rita, all dressed up in a long dress like the Vicky ladies wore, with a riding hat on her head, and riding sidesaddle of all things.

"You look pretty," Nell said.

"Thank you, Nell," Rita said. "Would you like to look like this too, for a little while? I have a surprise for you."

One of the ladies who lived in the Millhouse was a milliner, and she had made Nell a dress, sewing it all together by hand. Rita had brought this dress with her, and she helped Nell change into it, right there in the middle of the meadow. Then she braided Nell's hair and even tucked some tiny wildflowers into it. Finally she helped Nell climb up on top of Eggshell with her and began riding back toward the Millhouse.

"You will have to leave your book here today," Rita said.

"Why?"

"I'm taking you through the grid, into New Atlantis Clave," Rita said. "Constable Moore told me that I should not on any account allow you to carry your book through the grid. He said it would only stir things up. I know you're about to ask me why, Nell, but I don't have an answer."

Nell ran upstairs, tripping over her long skirts a couple of times, and left the Primer in her little nook. Then she climbed back on Eggshell with Rita. They rode over a little stone bridge above the water-wheel and through the woods, until Nell could hear the faint afflatus of the security aerostats. Eggshell slowed to a walk and pushed gingerly through the field of shiny hovering teardrops. Nell even reached out and touched one, then snapped her hand back, even though it hadn't done anything except push back. The reflection of her face slithered backward across the surface of this pod as they went by.

They rode across the territory of New Atlantis for some time without seeing anything other than trees, wildflowers, brooks, the occasional squirrel, or deer.

"Why do the Vickys have such a big clave?" Nell asked.

"Don't ever call them Vickys," Rita said.

"Why?"

"It's a word that people who don't like them use to describe them in kind of a bad, unfriendly way," Rita said.

"Like a pejorative term?" Nell said.

Rita laughed, more nervous than amused. "Exactly."

"Why do the Atlantans have such a big clave?"

"Well, each phyle has a different way, and some ways are better suited to making money than others, so some have a lot of territory and others don't."

"What do you mean, a different way?"

"To make money you have to work hard-to live your life in a certain way. The Atlantans all live that way, it's part of their culture. The Nipponese too. So the Nipponese and the Atlantans have as much money as all the other phyles put together."

"Why aren't you an Atlantan?"

"Because I don't want to live that way. All the people in Dovetail like to make beautiful things. To us, the things that the Atlantans do— dressing up in these kinds of clothes, spending years and years in school-are irrelevant. Those pursuits wouldn't help us make beautiful things, you see. I'd rather just wear my blue jeans and make paper."

"But the M.C. can make paper," Nell said.

"Not the kind that the Atlantans like."

"But you make money from your paper only because the Atlantans make money from working hard," Nell said.

Rita's face turned red and she said nothing for a little while. Then, in a tight voice, she said, "Nell, you should ask your book the meaning of the word discretion."

They came across a riding-trail dotted with great mounds of horse manure, and began following it uphill. Soon the trail was hemmed in between dry stone walls, which Rita said that one of her friends in Dovetail had made. Forest gave way to pastures, then lawns like jade glaciers, and great houses on hilltops, surrounded by geometric hedges and ramparts of flowers. The trail became a cobblestone road that adopted new lanes from time to time as they rode into town. The mountain kept rising up above them for some distance, and on its green summit, half veiled behind a thin cloud layer, Nell could see Source Victoria.

From down in the Leased Territories, the New Atlantis Clave had always looked clean and beautiful, and it was certainly those things. But Nell was surprised at how cool the weather was here compared to the L.T. Rita explained that the Atlantans came from northern countries and didn't care for hot weather, so they put their city high up in the air to make it cooler.

Rita turned down a boulevard with a great flowery park running down the middle. It was lined with red stone row-houses with turrets and gargoyles and beveled glass everywhere. Men in top hats and women in long dresses strolled, pushed perambulators, rode horses or chevalines. Shiny dark green robots, like refrigerators tipped over on their sides, hummed down the streets at a toddler's walking pace, squatting over piles of manure and inhaling them.

From place to place there was a messenger on a bicycle or an especially fancy personage in a black, full-lane car. Rita stopped Eggshell in front of a house and paid a little boy to hold the reins. From the saddlebags she took a sheaf of new paper, all wrapped up in special wrapping-paper that she'd also made. She carried it up the steps and rang the bell. The house had a round tower on the front, lined with bow windows with stained-glass inserts above them, and through the windows and the lace curtains Nell could see, on different stories, crystal chandeliers and fine plates and dark brown wooden bookcases lined with thousands and thousands of books.

A parlormaid let Rita in the door. Through the window, Nell could see Rita putting a calling-card on a silver tray held out by the maid-a salver, they called it. The maid carried it back, then emerged a couple of minutes later and directed Rita into the back of the house.

Rita didn't come back for half an hour. Nell wished she had the Primer to keep her company. She talked to the little boy for a bit; his name was Sam, he lived in the Leased Territories, and he put on a suit and took the bus here every morning so that he could hang around on the street holding people's horses and doing other small errands.

Nell wondered whether Tequila worked in any of these houses, and whether they might run into her by accident. Her chest always got a tight feeling when she thought of her mother. Rita came out of the house. "Sorry," she said, "I got out as fast as I could, but I had to stay and socialize. Protocol, you know."

"Explain protocol," Nell said. This was how she always talked to the Primer.

"At the place we're going, you need to watch your manners. Don't say 'explain this' or 'explain that.'

"Would it impose on your time unduly to provide me with a concise explanation of the term protocol?" Nell said.

Again Rita made that nervous laugh and looked at Nell with an expression that looked like poorly concealed alarm. As they rode down the street, Rita talked about protocol for a little bit, but Nell wasn't really listening because she was trying to figure out why it was that, all of a sudden, she was capable of scaring grownups like Rita.

They rode through the most built-up part of town, where the buildings and gardens and statues were all magnificent, and none of the streets were the same: Some were crescents, some were courts, or circles or ovals, or squares surrounding patches of greenery, and even the long streets turned this way and that. They passed from there into a less built-up area with many parks and playing fields and finally pulled up in front of a fancy building with ornate towers, surrounded by a wrought-iron fence and a hedge. Over the door it said MISS MATHESON'S ACADEMY OF THE THREE GRACES.

Miss Matheson received them in a cozy little room. She was between eight hundred and nine hundred years of age, Nell estimated, and drank tea from fancy thimble-size cups with pictures painted on them. Nell tried to sit up straight and be attentive, emulating certain proper young girls she had read about in the Primer, but her eye kept wandering to the contents of the bookshelves, the pictures painted on the tea service and the painting on the wall above Miss Matheson's head, which depicted three ladies prancing about in a grove in diaphanous attire.

"Our rolls are filled, the term has already begun, and you have none of the prerequisites. But you come with compelling recommendations," Miss Matheson said after she had peered lengthily at her small visitor.

"Pardon me, madam, but I do not understand," Nell said.

Miss Matheson smiled, her face blooming into a sunburst of radiating wrinkles. "It is not important. Let us only say that we have made room for you. This institution makes it a practice to accept a small number of students who are not New Atlantan subjects. The propagation of Atlantan memes is central to our mission, as a school and as a society. Unlike some phyles, which propagate through conversion or through indiscriminate exploitation of the natural biological capacity that is shared, for better or worse, by all persons, we appeal to the rational faculties. All children are born with rational faculties, which want only development. Our academy has recently welcomed several young ladies of extra-Atlantan extraction, and it is our expectation that all will go on to take the Oath in due time."

"Pardon me, madam, but which one is Aglaia?" Nell said, looking over Miss Matheson's shoulder at the painting.

"I beg your pardon?" Miss Matheson said, and initiated the procedure of turning her head around to look, which at her age was a civil-engineering challenge of daunting complexity and duration.

"As the name of your school is the Three Graces, I have ventured to assume that yonder painting depicts the same subject," Nell said, "since they look more like Graces than Furies or Fates. I wonder if you would be so kind as to inform me which of the ladies represents Aglaia, or brilliance."

"And the other two are?" Miss Matheson said, speaking out of the side of her mouth as she had almost got herself turned around by this point.

"Euphrosyne, or joy, and Thalia, or bloom," Nell said.

"Would you care to venture an opinion?" Miss Matheson said.

"The one on the right is carrying flowers, so perhaps she is Thalia."

"I would call that a sound assumption."

"The one in the middle looks so happy that she must be Euphrosyne, and the one on the left is lit up with rays of sunlight, so perhaps she is Aglaia."

"Well, as you can see, none of them is wearing a nametag, and so we must satisfy ourselves with conjecture," Miss Matheson said.

"But I fail to see any gaps in your reasoning. And no, I don't suppose they are Fates or Furies."

. . .

"It's a boarding school, which means many of the pupils live there. But you won't live there," Rita said, "because it isn't proper." They were riding Eggshell home through the woods.

"Why isn't it proper?"

"Because you ran away from home, which raises legal problems."

"Was it illegal for me to run away?"

"In some tribes, children are regarded as an economic asset of their parents. So if one phyle shelters runaways from another phyle, it has a possible economic impact which is covered under the CEP." Rita looked back at Nell, appraising her coolly. "You have a sponsor of sorts in New Atlantis. I don't know who. I don't know why. But it seems that this person cannot take the risk of being the target of CEP legal action. Hence arrangements have been made for you to stay in Dovetail for now.

"Now, we know that some of your mother's boyfriends treated you badly, and so there is sentiment in Dovetail to take you in. But we can't keep you at the Millstone community, because if we got into a fracas with Protocol, it could sour our relations with our New Atlantis clients. So it's been decided that you will stay with the one person in Dovetail who doesn't have any clients here."

"Who's that?"

"You've met him," Rita said.

Constable Moore's house was dimly lit and so full of old stuff that even Nell had to walk sideways in some places. Long strips of yellowed rice paper, splashed with large Chinese characters and pimpled with red chop marks, hung from a molding that ran around the living room a foot or two beneath the ceiling. Nell followed Rita around a corner into an even smaller, darker, and more crowded room, whose main decoration was a large painting of a furious chap with a Fu Manchu mustache, goatee, and tufts of whiskers sprouting in front of his ears and trailing down below his armpits, wearing elaborate armor and chain mail decorated with lion's faces. Nell stepped away from this fierce picture despite herself, tripped over the drone of a large bagpipe splayed across the floor, and crashed into a large beaten-copper bucket of sorts, which made tremendous smashing noises. Blood welled quietly from a smooth cut on the ball of her thumb, and she realized that the bucket was being used as a repository for a collection of old rusty swords of various descriptions.

"You all right?" Rita said. She was backlit with blue light coming in through a pair of glass doors. Nell put her thumb in her mouth and picked herself up.

The glass doors looked out on Constable Moore's garden, a riot of geraniums, foxtails, wisteria, and corgi droppings. On the other side of a small khaki-colored pool rose a small garden house. Like this one, it was built from blocks of reddish-brown stone and roofed with rough-edged slabs of green-gray slate. Constable Moore himself could be descried behind a screen of somewhat leggy rhododendrons, hard at work with a shovel, continually harassed by the ankle-biting corgis.

He was not wearing a shirt, but he was wearing a skirt: a red plaid number. Nell hardly noticed this incongruity because the corgis heard Rita turning the latch on the glass doors and rushed toward them yapping, and this drew out the Constable himself, who approached them squinting through the dark glass, and once he was out from behind the rhodies, Nell could see that there was something amiss with the flesh of his body. Overall he was well proportioned, muscular, rather thick around the middle, and evidently in decent health. But his skin came in two colors, which gave him something of a marbled look. It was as though worms had eaten through his torso, carving out a network of internal passageways that had later been backfilled with something that didn't quite match.

Before she could get a better look, he plucked a shirt from the back of a lawn chair and shrugged it on. Then he subjected the corgis to a minute or so of close-order drill, using a patch of moss-covered flagstones as parade ground, and stringently criticizing their performance in tones loud enough to penetrate through the glass doors. The corgis pretended to listen attentively. At the end of the performance, Constable Moore burst in through the glass doors. "I shall be with you momentarily," he said, and disappeared into a back room for a quarter of an hour. When he returned, he was dressed in a tweed suit and a rough-hewn sweater over a very fine-looking white shirt. The last article looked too thin to prevent the others from being intolerably scratchy, but Constable Moore had reached the age when men can subject their bodies to the worst irritations-whiskey, cigars, woolen clothes, bagpipes-without feeling a thing or, at least, without letting on.

"Sorry to have burst in on you," Rita said, "but there was no answer when we rang the bell."

"I don't care," said Constable Moore, not entirely convincingly. "There's a reason why I don't live up there." He pointed upward, vaguely in the direction of the New Atlantis Clave.

"Just trying to trace the root system of some infernal vine back to its source. I'm afraid it might be kudzu." The Constable narrowed his eyes as he spoke this word, and Nell, not knowing what kudzu was, supposed that if kudzu were something that could be attacked with a sword, burned, throttled, bludgeoned, or blown up, it would not stand a chance for long in Constable Moore's garden-once, that is, he got round to it.

"Can I interest you in tea? Or"-this was directed to Nell-"some hot chocolate?"

"Sounds lovely, but I can't stay," Rita said.

"Then let me see you to the door," Constable Moore said, standing up. Rita looked a little startled by this abruptness, but in another moment she was gone, riding Eggshell back toward the Millhouse.

"Nice lady," Constable Moore muttered out in the kitchen.

"Fine of her to do what she did for you. Really a very decent lady. Perhaps not the sort who deals very well with children. Especially peculiar children."

"Am I to live here now, sir?" Nell said.

"Out in the garden house," he said, coming into the room with a steaming tray and nodding through the glass windows and across the garden. "Vacant for some time. Cramped for an adult, perfect for a child. The decor of this house," he said, glancing around the room, "is not really suitable for a young one."

"Who is the scary man?" Nell said, pointing to the big painting.

"Guan Di. Emperor Guan. Formerly a soldier named Guan Yu. He was never really an emperor, but later on he became the Chinese god of war, and they gave him the title just to be respectful. Terribly respectful, the Chinese-it's their best and worst feature."

"How could a man become a god?" Nell asked.

"By living in an extremely pragmatic society," said Constable Moore after some thought, and provided no further explanation. "Do you have the book, by the way?"

"Yes, sir."

"You didn't take it through the border?"

"No, sir, as per your instructions."

"That's good. The ability to follow orders is a useful thing, especially if you're living with a chap who's used to giving them." Seeing that Nell had gotten a terribly serious look on her face, the Constable huffed and looked exasperated. "It doesn't really matter, mind you! You have friends in high places. It's just that we are trying to be discreet." Constable Moore brought Nell her cup of cocoa. She needed one hand for the saucer and another for the cup, so she took her hand out of her mouth.

"What did you do to your hand?"

"Cut it, sir."

"Let me see that." The Constable took her hand in his and peeled the thumb away from the palm. "Quite a nice little slash. Looks recent."

"I got it from your swords."

"Ah, yes. Swords are that way," the Constable said absently, then screwed up his brow and turned back to Nell. "You did not cry," he said, "and you did not complain."

"Did you take all of those swords away from burglars?" Nell said.

"No-that would have been relatively easy," Constable Moore said. He looked at her for a while, pondering. "Nell, you and I will do just fine together," he said. "Let me get my first-aid kit."

Carl Hollywood's activities at the Parnasse;

conversation over a milk shake;

explanation of the media system;

Miranda perceives the futility of her quest.

Miranda found Carl Hollywood sitting fifth row center in the Parnasse, holding a big sheet of smart foolscap on which he had scrawled blocking diagrams for their next live production. He apparently had it crosslinked to a copy of the script, because as she sidestepped her way down the narrow aisle, she could hear voices rather mechanically reading lines, and as she came closer she could see the little X's and 0's representing the actors moving around on the diagram of the stage that Carl had sketched out.

The diagram also included some little arrows along the periphery, all aimed inward. Miranda realized that the arrows must be the little spotlights mounted to the fronts of the balconies, and that Carl Hollywood was programming them.

She rolled her head back and forth, trying to loosen up her neck, and looked up at the ceiling. The angels or Muses or whatever they were, were all parading around up there, accompanied by a few cherubs. Miranda thought of Nell. She always thought of Nell.

The script came to the end of its scene, and Carl paused it.

"You had a question?" he asked, a bit absently.

"I've been watching you work from my box."

"Naughty girl. Should be making money for us."

"Where'd you learn to do that stuff?"

"What-directing plays?"

"No. The technical stuff-programming the lights and so on."

Carl turned around to look at her. "This may be at odds with your notion of how people learn things," he said, "but I had to teach myself everything. Hardly anyone does live theatre anymore, so we have to develop our own technology. I invented all of the software I was just using."

"Did you invent the little spotlights?"

"No. I'm not as good at the nanostuff. A friend of mine in London came up with those. We swap stuff all the time-my mediaware for his matterware."

"Well, I want to buy you dinner somewhere," Miranda said, "and I want you to explain to me how it all works."

"That's a rather tall order," Carl said calmly, "but I accept the invitation.

. . .

"Okay, do you want a complete grounding in the whole thing, starting with Turing machines, or what?" Carl said pleasantly— humoring her. Miranda decided not to become indignant. They were in a red vinyl booth at a restaurant near the Bund that supposedly simulated an American diner on the eve of the Kennedy assassination. Chinese hipsters-classic Coastal Republic types in their expensive haircuts and sharp suits-were lined up on the rotating stools along the lunch counter, sucking on their root beer floats and flashing wicked grins at any young women who came in.

"I guess so," Miranda said.

Carl Hollywood laughed and shook his head. "I was being facetious. You need to tell me exactly what you want to know. Why are you suddenly taking up an interest in this stuff? Aren't you happy just making a good living from it?"

Miranda sat very still for a moment, hypnotized by the colorful flashing lights on a vintage jukebox.

"This is related to Princess Nell, isn't it?" Carl said.

"Is it that obvious?"

"Yeah. Now, what do you want?"

"I want to know who she is," Miranda said. This was the most guarded way she could put it. She didn't suppose that it would help matters to drag Carl down through the full depth of her emotions.

"You want to backtrace a payer," Carl said. It sounded terrible when he translated it into that kind of language.

Carl sucked powerfully on his milk shake for a bit, his eyes looking over Miranda's shoulder to the traffic on the Bund. "Princess Nell's a little kid, right?"

"Yes. I would estimate five to seven years old."

His eyes swiveled to lock on hers. "You can tell that?"

"Yes," she said, in tones that warned him not to question it.

"So she's probably not paying the bill anyway. The payer is someone else. You need to backtrace the payer and then, from there, track down Nell." Carl broke eye contact again, shook his head, and tried unsuccessfully to whistle through frozen lips. "Even the first step is impossible."

Miranda was startled. "That seems pretty unequivocal. I expected to hear 'difficult' or 'expensive.' But-"

"Nope. It's impossible. Or maybe"-Carl thought about it for a while-"maybe 'astronomically improbable' is a better way of putting it." Then he looked mildly alarmed as he watched Miranda's expression change. "You can't just trace the connection backward. That's not how media works."

"How does media work, then?"

"Look out the window. Not toward the Bund-check out Yan'an Road."

Miranda swiveled her head around to look out the big window, which was partly painted over with colorful Coke ads and descriptions of blue plate specials. Yan'an Road, like all of the major thoroughfares in Shanghai, was filled, from the shop windows on one side to the shop windows on the other, with people on bicycles and powerskates. In many places the traffic was so dense that greater speed could be attained on foot. A few half-lane vehicles sat motionless, polished boulders in a sluggish brown stream.

It was so familiar that Miranda didn't really see anything. "What am I looking for?"

"Notice how no one's empty-handed? They're all carrying something."

Carl was right. At a minimum, everyone had a small plastic bag with something in it. Many people, such as the bicyclists, carried heavier loads.

"Now just hold that image in your head for a moment, and think about how to set up a global telecommunications network."

Miranda laughed. "I don't have any basis for thinking about something like that."

"Sure you do. Until now, you've been thinking in terms of the telephone system in the old passives. In that system, each transaction had two participants-the two people having the conversation. And they were connected by a wire that ran through a central switchboard. So what are the key features of this system?"

"I don't know-I'm asking you," said Miranda.

"Number one, only two people, or entities, can interact.

Number two, it uses a dedicated connection that is made and then broken for the purposes of that one conversation. Number three, it is inherently centralized-it can't work unless there is a central switchboard."