Harv brings Nell a present;
she experiments with the Primer.

   When Harv came back home, he was walking with all of his weight on one foot. When the light struck the smudges on his face in the right way, Nell could see streaks of red mixed in with the dirt and the toner. He was breathing fast, and he swallowed heavily and often, as though throwing up were much on his mind. But he was not empty-handed. His arms were crossed tightly across his belly. He was carrying things in his jacket.
   "I made out, Nell," he said, seeing his sister's face and knowing that she was too scared to talk first. "Didn't get much, but got some. Got some stuff for the Flea Circus."
   Nell wasn't sure what the Flea Circus was, but she had learned that it was good to have stuff to take there, that Harv usually came back from the Flea Circus with an access code for a new ractive. Harv shouldered the light switch on and kneeled in the middle of the room before relaxing his arms, lest some small thing fall out and be lost in a corner. Nell sat in front of him and watched.
   He took out a piece of jewelry swinging ponderously at the end of a gold chain. It was circular, smooth gold on one side and white on the other. The white side was protected under a flattened glass dome. It had numbers written around the edge, and a couple of slender metal things like daggers, one longer than the other, joined at their hilts in the center. It made a noise like mice trying to eat their way through a wall in the middle of the night.
   Before she could ask about it, Harv had taken out other things. He had a few cartridges from his mite trap. Tomorrow Harv would take the cartridge down to the Flea Circus and find out if he'd caught anything, and whether it was worth money. There were other things like buttons. But Harv saved the biggest thing for last, and he withdrew it with ceremony.
   "I had to fight for this, Nell," he said. "I fought hard because I was afraid the others would break it up for parts. I'm giving it to you."
   It appeared to be a flat decorated box. Nell could tell immediately that it was fine. She had not seen many fine things in her life, but they had a look of their own, dark and rich like chocolate, with glints of gold.
   "Both hands," Harv admonished her, "it's heavy."
   Nell reached out with both hands and took it. Harv was right, it was heavier than it looked. She had to lay it down in her lap or she'd drop it. It was not a box at all. It was a solid thing. The top was printed with golden letters. The left edge was rounded and smooth, made of something that felt warm and soft but strong. The other edges were indented slightly, and they were cream-colored.
   Harv could not put up with the wait. "Open it," he said.
   "How?"
   Harv leaned toward her, caught the upper-right corner under his finger, and flipped it. The whole lid of the thing bent upward around a hinge on the left side, pulling a flutter of cream-colored leaves after it. Underneath the cover was a piece of paper with a picture on it and some more letters. On the first page of the book was a picture of a little girl sitting on a bench. Above the bench was a thing like a ladder, except it was horizontal, supported at each end by posts. Thick vines twisted up the posts and gripped the ladder, where they burst into huge flowers.
   The girl had her back to Nell; she was looking down a grassy slope sprinkled with little flowers toward a blue pond. On the other side of the pond rose mountains like the ones they supposedly had in the middle of New Chusan, where the fanciest Vickys of all had their жstival houses. The girl had a book open on her lap. The facing page had a little picture in the upper left, consisting of more vines and flowers wrapped around a giant egg-shaped letter. But the rest of that page was nothing but tiny black letters without decoration. Nell turned it and found two more pages of letters, though a couple of them were big ones with pictures drawn around them. She turned another page and found another picture. In this one, the little girl had set aside her book and was talking to a big black bird that had apparently gotten its foot tangled up in the vines overhead. She flipped another page.
   The pages she'd already turned were under her left thumb. They were trying to work their way loose, as if they were alive. She had to press down harder and harder to keep them there. Finally they bulged up in the middle and slid out from underneath her thumb and, flop-flop-flop, returned to the beginning of the story.
   "Once upon a time," said a woman's voice, "there was a little girl named Elizabeth who liked to sit in the bower in her grandfather's garden and read story-books." The voice was soft, meant just for her, with an expensive Victorian accent.
   Nell slammed the book shut and pushed it away. It slid across the floor and came to rest by the sofa. The next day, Mom's boyfriend Tad came home in a bad mood. He slammed his six-pack down on the kitchen table, pulled out a beer, and headed for the living room. Nell was trying to get out of the way. She picked up Dinosaur, Duck, Peter Rabbit, and Purple, her magic wand, a paper bag that was actually a car her kids could drive around in, and a piece of cardboard that was a sword for killing pirates. Then she ran for the room where she and Harv slept, but Tad had already come in with his beer and begun rooting through the stuff on the sofa with his other hand, trying to find the control pad for the mediatron. He threw a lot of Harv's and Nell's toys on the floor and then stepped on the book with his bare foot.
   "Ouch, god damn it!" Tad shouted. He looked down at the book in disbelief. "What the fuck is this?!" He wound up as if to kick it, then thought better of it, remembering he was barefoot. He picked it up and hefted it, looking straight at Nell and getting a fix on her range and azimuth. "Stupid little cunt, how many times do I have to tell you to keep your flicking shit cleaned up!" Then he turned away from her slightly, wrapping his arm around his body, and snapped the book straight at her head like a frisbee.
   She stood watching it come toward her because it did not occur to her to get out of the way, but at the last moment the covers flew open. The pages spread apart. They all bent like feathers as they hit her in the face, and it didn't hurt at all.
   The book fell to the floor at her feet, open to an illustrated page. The picture was of a big dark man and a little girl in a cluttered room, the man angrily flinging a book at the little girl's head. "Once upon a time there was a little girl named Cunt," the book said.
   "My name is Nell," Nell said.
   A tiny disturbance propagated through the grid of letters on the facing page.
   "Your name's mud if you don't fucking clean this shit up," Tad said. "But do it later, I want some fucking privacy for once."
   Nell's hands were full, and so she shoved the book down the hallway and into the kids' room with her foot. She dumped all her stuff on her mattress and then ran back and shut the door. She left her magic wand and sword nearby in case she should need them, then set Dinosaur, Duck, Peter, and Purple into bed, all in a neat to be a bird. Big letters appeared beneath. "R A V E N," the book said. "Raven. Now, say it with me."
   "Raven."
   "Very good! Nell, you are a clever girl, and you have much talent with words. Can you spell raven?"
   Nell hesitated. She was still blushing from the praise. After a few seconds, the first of the letters began to blink. Nell prodded it. The letter grew until it had pushed all the other letters and pictures off the edges of the page. The loop on top shrank and became a head, while the lines sticking out the bottom developed into legs and began to scissor. "R is for Run," the book said. The picture kept on changing until it was a picture of Nell. Then something fuzzy and red appeared beneath her feet. "Nell Runs on the Red Rug," the book said, and as it spoke, new words appeared.
   "Why is she running?"
   "Because an Angry Alligator Appeared," the book said, and panned back quite some distance to show an alligator, waddling along ridiculously, no threat to the fleet Nell. The alligator became frustrated and curled itself into a circle, which became a small letter.
   "A is for Alligator. The Very Vast alligator Vainly Viewed Nell's Valiant Velocity." The little story went on to include an Excited Elf who was Nibbling Noisily on some Nuts. Then the picture of the Raven came back, with the letters beneath. "Raven. Can you spell raven, Nell?" A hand materialized on the page and pointed to the first letter.
   "R," Nell said.
   "Very good! You are a clever girl, Nell, and good with letters," the book said. "What is this letter?" and it pointed to the second one.
   This one Nell had forgotten. But the book told her a story about an Ape named Albert.

A young hooligan before the court of Judge Fang;
the magistrate confers with his advisers;
Justice is served.

   "The revolving chain of a nunchuk has a unique radar signature– reminiscent of that of a helicopter blade, but noisier," Miss Pao said, gazing up at Judge Fang over the half-lenses of her phenomenoscopic spectacles. Her eyes went out of focus, and she winced; she had been lost in some enhanced three-dimensional image, and the adjustment to dull reality was disorienting. "A cluster of such patterns was recognized by one of Shanghai P.D.'s sky-eyes at ten seconds after 2351 hours."
   As Miss Pao worked her way through this summary, images appeared on the big sheet of mediatronic paper that Judge Fang had unrolled across his brocade tablecloth and held down with carved jade paperweights. At the moment, the image was a map of a Leased Territory called Enchantment, with one location, near the Causeway, highlighted. In the corner was another pane containing a standard picture of an anticrime sky-eye, which always looked, to Judge Fang, like an American football as redesigned by fetishists: glossy and black and studded.
   Miss Pao continued, "The sky-eye dispatched a flight of eight smaller aerostats equipped with cine cameras." The kinky football was replaced by a picture of a teardrop-shaped craft, about the size of an almond, trailing a whip antenna, with an orifice at its nose protected by an incongruously beautiful iris. Judge Fang was not really looking; at least three-quarters of the cases that came before him commenced with a summary almost exactly like this one. It was a credit to Miss Pao's seriousness and diligence that she was able to tell each story afresh. It was a challenge to Judge Fang's professionalism for him to listen to each one in the same spirit.
   "Converging on the scene," Miss Pao said, "they recorded activities."
   The large map image on Judge Fang's scroll was replaced by a cine feed. The figures were far away, flocks of relatively dark pixels nudging their way across a rough gray background like starlings massing before a winter gale. They got bigger and more clearly defined as the aerostat flew closer to the action. A man was curled on the street with his arms wrapped around his head. The nunchuks had been put away by this point, and hands were busy going through the innumerable pockets that were to be found in a gentleman's suit. At this point the cine went into slow-mo. A watch flashed and oscillated hypnotically at the end of its gold chain. A silver fountain pen glowed like an ascending rocket and vanished into the folds of someone's mite-proof raiment. And then out came something else, harder to resolve: larger, mostly dark, white around the edge. A book, perhaps.
   "Heuristic analysis of the cine feeds suggested a probable violent crime in progress," Miss Pao said.
   Judge Fang valued Miss Pao's services for many reasons, but her deadpan delivery was especially precious to him.
   "So the sky-eye dispatched another flight of aerostats, specialized for tagging." An image of a tagger stat appeared: smaller and narrower than the cinestats, reminiscent of a hornet with the wings stripped off. The nacelles containing the tiny air turbines, which gave such devices the power to propel themselves through the air, were prominent; it was built for speed.
   "The suspected assailants adopted countermeasures," Miss Pao aaid, again using that deadpan tone. On the cine feed, the criminals were retreating. The cinestat followed them with a nice tracking shot. Judge Fang, who had watched thousands of hours of film of thugs departing from the scenes of their crimes, watched with a discriminating eye. Less sophisticated hoodlums would simply have run away in a panic, but this group was proceeding methodically, two to a bicycle, one person pedaling and steering while the other handled the countermeasures. Two of them were discharging fountains of material into the air from canisters on their bicycles' equipment racks, like fire extinguishers, waving the nozzles in all directions.
   "Following a pattern that has become familiar to law enforcement," Miss Pao said, "they dispersed adhesive foam that clogged the intakes of the stats' air turbines, rendering them inoperative." The big mediatron had also taken to emitting tremendous flashes of light that caused Judge Fang to close his eyes and pinch the bridge of his nose. After a few of these, the cine feed went dead.
   "Another suspect used strobe illumination to pick out the locations of the cinestats, then disabled them with pulses of laser light– evidently using a device, designed for this purpose, that has recently become widespread among the criminal element in the L.T."
   The big mediatron cut back to a new camera angle on the original scene of the crime. Across the bottom of the scroll was a bar graph depicting the elapsed time since the start of the incident, and the practiced Judge Fang noted that it had jumped backward by a quarter of a minute or so; the narrative had split, and we were now seeing the other fork of the plot. This feed depicted a solitary gang member who was trying to climb aboard his bicycle even as his comrades were riding away on contrails of sticky foam. But the bike had been mangled somehow and would not function. The youth abandoned it and fled on foot.
   Up in the corner, the small diagram of the tagging aerostat zoomed in to a high magnification, revealing some of the device's internal complications, so that it began to look less like a hornet and more like a cutaway view of a starship. Mounted in the nose was a device that spat out tiny darts drawn from an interior magazine. At first these were almost invisibly tiny, but as the view continued to zoom, the hull of the tagging aerostat grew until it resembled the gentle curve of a planet's horizon, and the darts became more clearly visible. They were hexagonal in crosssection, like pencil stubs. When they were shot out of the tag stat's nose, they sprouted cruel barbs at the nose and a simple empennage at the tail.
   "The suspect had experienced a ballistic interlude earlier in the evening," Miss Pao said, "regrettably not filmed, and relieved himself of excess velocity by means of an ablative technique." Miss Pao was outdoing herself. Judge Fang raised an eyebrow at her, briefly hitting the pause button.
   Chang, Judge Fang's other assistant, rotated his enormous, nearly spherical head in the direction of the defendant, who was looking very small as he stood before the court. Chang, in a characteristic gesture, reached up and rubbed the palm of his hand back over the short stubble that covered his head, as if he could not believe he had such a bad haircut. He opened his sleepy, slitlike eyes just a notch, and said to the defendant, "She say you have road rash."
   The defendant, a pale asthmatic boy, had seemed too awed to be scared through most of this. Now the corners of his mouth twitched. Judge Fang noticed with approval that he controlled the impulse to smile.
   "Consequently," Miss Pao said, "there were lapses in his Nanobar integument. An unknown number of tag mites passed through these openings and embedded themselves in his clothing and flesh. He discarded all of his clothing and scrubbed himself vigorously at a public shower before returning to his domicile, but three hundred and fifty tag mites remained in his flesh and were later extracted during the course of our examination. As usual, the tag mites were equipped with inertial navigation systems that recorded all of the suspect's subsequent movements."
   The big cine feed was replaced by a map of the Leased Territories with the suspect's movements traced out with a red line. This boy did a lot of wandering about, even going into Shanghai on occasion, but he always came back to the same apartment.
   "After a pattern was established, the tag mites automatically spored," Miss Pao said. The image of the barbed dart altered itself, the midsection– which contained a taped record of the dart's movements– breaking free and accelerating into the void.
   "Several of the spores found their way to a sky-eye, where their contents were downloaded and their serial numbers checked against police records. It was determined that the suspect spent much of his time in a particular apartment. Surveillance was placed on that apartment. One of the residents clearly matched the suspect seen on the cine feed. The suspect was placed under arrest and additional tag mites found in his body, tending to support our suspicions."
   "Oooh," Chang blurted, absently, as if he'd just remembered something important.
   "What do we know about the victim?" Judge Fang said.
   "The cine stat could track him only as far as the gates of New Atlantis," Miss Pao said. "His face was bloody and swollen, complicating identification. He had also been tagged, naturally– the tagger aerostat cannot make any distinction between victim and perpetrator– but no spores were received; we can assume that all of his tag mites were detected and destroyed by Atlantis/Shanghai's immune system."
   At this point Miss Pao stopped talking and swiveled her eyes in the direction of Chang, who was standing quiescently with his hands clasped behind his back, staring down at the floor as if his thick neck had finally given way under the weight of his head. Miss Pao cleared her throat once, twice, three times, and suddenly Chang came awake. "Excuse me, Your Honor," he said, bowing to Judge Fang. He rummaged in a large plastic bag and withdrew a gentleman's top hat in poor condition. "This was found at the scene," he said, finally reverting to his native Shanghainese.
   Judge Fang dropped his eyes to the tabletop and then looked up at Chang. Chang stepped forward and placed the hat carefully on the table, giving it a little nudge as if its position were not quite perfect. Judge Fang regarded it for a few moments, then withdrew his hands from the voluminous sleeves of his robe, picked it up, and flipped it over. The words JOHN PERCIVAL HACKWORTH were written in gold script on the hatband.
   Judge Fang cast a significant look at Miss Pao, who shook her head. They had not yet contacted the victim. Neither had the victim contacted them, which was interesting; John Percival Hackworth must have something to hide. The neo-Victorians were smart; why did so many of them get mugged in the Leased Territories after an evening of brothel-crawling?
   "You have recovered the stolen items?" Judge Fang said. Chang stepped to the table again and laid out a man's pocket watch. Then he stepped back, hands clasped behind him, bent his neck again, and watched his feet, which could not contain themselves from shuffling back and forth in tiny increments. Miss Pao was glaring at him.
   "There was another item? A book, perhaps?" Judge Fang said. Chang cleared his throat nervously, suppressing the urge to hawk and spit– an activity Judge Fang had barred in his courtroom. He turned sideways and backed up one step, allowing Judge Fang to view one of the spectators: a young girl, perhaps four years old, sitting with her feet up on the chair so that her face was blocked by her knees. Judge Fang heard the sound of a page turning and realized that the girl was reading a book propped up on her thighs. She cocked her head this way and that, talking to the book in a tiny voice.
   "I must humbly apologize to the Judge," Chang said in Shanghainese. "My resignation is hereby proffered."
   Judge Fang took this with due gravity. "Why?"
   "I was unable to wrest the evidence from the young one's grasp," Chang said.
   "I have seen you kill adult men with your hands," Judge Fang reminded him. He had been raised speaking Cantonese, but could make himself understood to Chang by speaking a kind of butchered Mandarin.
   "Age has not been kind," Chang said. He was thirty-six.
   "The hour of noon has passed," said Judge Fang. "Let us go and get some Kentucky Fried Chicken."
   "As you wish, Judge Fang," said Chang.
   "As you wish, Judge Fang," said Miss Pao.
   Judge Fang switched back to English. "Your case is very serious," he said to the boy. "We will go and consult the ancient authorities. You will remain here until we return."
   "Yes, sir," said the defendant, abjectly terrified. This was not the abstract fear of a first-time delinquent; he was sweating and shaking. He had been caned before.
   The House of the Venerable and Inscrutable Colonel was what they called it when they were speaking Chinese. Venerable because of his goatee, white as the dogwood blossom, a badge of unimpeachable credibility in Confucian eyes. Inscrutable because he had gone to his grave without divulging the Secret of the Eleven Herbs and Spices. It had been the first fast-food franchise established on the Bund, many decades earlier. Judge Fang had what amounted to a private table in the corner. He had once reduced Chang to a state of catalepsis by describing an avenue in Brooklyn that was lined with fried chicken establishments for miles, all of them ripoffs of Kentucky Fried Chicken. Miss Pao, who had grown up in Austin, Texas, was less easily impressed by these legends.
   Word of their arrival preceded them; their bucket already rested upon the table. The small plastic cups of gravy, coleslaw, potatoes, and so on had been carefully arranged. As usual, the bucket was placed squarely in front of Chang's seat, for he would be responsible for consumption of most of it. They ate in silence for a few minutes, communicating through eye contact and other subtleties, then spent several minutes exchanging polite formal chatter.
   "Something struck a chord in my memory," Judge Fang said, when the time was right to discuss business. "The name Tequila– the mother of the suspect and of the little girl."
   "The name has come before our court twice before," Miss Pao said, and refreshed his memory of two previous cases: one, almost five years ago, in which this woman's lover had been executed, and the second, only a few months ago, a case quite similar to this one.
   "Ah, yes," Judge Fang said, "I recall the second case. This boy and his friends beat a man severely. But nothing was stolen. He would not give a justification for his actions. I sentenced him to three strokes of the cane and released him."
   "There is reason to suspect that the victim in that case had molested the boy's sister," Chang put in, "as he has a previous record of such accomplishments."
   Judge Fang fished a drumstick out of the bucket, arranged it on his napkin, folded his hands, and sighed. "Does the boy have any filial relationships whatsoever?"
   "None," said Miss Pao.
   "Would anyone care to advise me?" Judge Fang frequently asked this question; he considered it his duty to teach his subordinates.
   Miss Pao spoke, using just the right degree of cautiousness. "The Master says, 'The superior man bends his attention to what is radical. That being established, all practical courses naturally grow up. Filial piety and fraternal submission!– are they not the root of all benevolent actions?'
   "How do you apply the Master's wisdom in this instance?"
   "The boy has no father– his only possible filial relationship is with the State. You, Judge Fang, are the only representative of the State he is likely to encounter. It is your duty to punish the boy firmly– say, with six strokes of the cane. This will help to establish his filial piety."
   "But the Master also said, 'If the people be led by laws, and uniformity sought to be given them by punishments, they will try to avoid the punishments, but have no sense of shame. Whereas, if they be led by virtue, and uniformity sought to be given them by the rules of propriety, they will have the sense of shame, and moreover will become good.'"
   "So you are advocating leniency in this case?" Miss Pao said, somewhat skeptically.
   Chang chimed in: "'Mang Wu asked what filial piety was. The Master said, "Parents are anxious lest their children should be sick."' But the Master said nothing about caning."
   Miss Pao said, "The Master also said, 'Rotten wood cannot be carved.' And, 'There are only the wise of the highest class, and the stupid of the lowest class, who cannot be changed.'"
   "So the question before us is: Is the boy rotten wood? His father certainly was. I am not certain about the boy, yet."
   "With utmost respect, I would direct your attention to the girl," said Chang, "who should be the true subject of our discussions. The boy may be lost; the girl can be saved."
   "Who will save her?" Miss Pao said. "We have the power to punish; we are not given the power to raise children."
   "This is the essential dilemma of my position," Judge Fang said. "The Mao Dynasty lacked a real judicial system. When the Coastal Republic arose, a judicial system was built upon the only model the Middle Kingdom had ever known, that being the Confucian. But such a system cannot truly function in a larger society that does not adhere to Confucian precepts. 'From the Son of Heaven down to the mass of the people, all must consider the cultivation of the person the root of everything besides.' Yet how am I to cultivate the persons of the barbarians for whom I have perversely been given responsibility?"
   Chang was ready for this opening and exploited it quickly. "The Master stated in his Great Learning that the extension of knowledge was the root of all other virtues."
   "I cannot send the boy to school, Chang."
   "Think instead of the girl," Chang said, "the girl and her book."
   Judge Fang contemplated this for a few moments, though he could see that Miss Pao badly wanted to say something.
   "'The superior man is correctly firm, and not firm merely,'" Judge Fang said. "Since the victim has not contacted the police seeking return of his property, I will allow the girl to keep the book for her own edification– as the Master said, 'In teaching there should be no distinction of classes' I will sentence the boy to six strokes of the cane. But I will suspend all but one of those strokes, since he has displayed the beginnings of fraternal responsibility by giving the book to his sister. This is correctly firm."
   "I have completed a phenomenoscopic survey of the book," Miss Pao said. "It is not an ordinary book."
   "I had already surmised that it was a ractive of some sort," Judge Fang said.
   "It is considerably more sophisticated than that description implies. I believe that it may embody hot I.P.," Miss Pao said.
   "You think that this book incorporates stolen technology?"
   "The victim works in the Bespoke division of Machine-Phase Systems. He is an artifex."
   "Interesting," Judge Fang said.
   "Is it worthy of further investigation?"
   Judge Fang thought about it for a moment, carefully wiping his fingertips on a fresh napkin. "It is," he said.

Hackworth presents the Primer to Lord Finkle-McGraw.

   "Is the binding and so on what you had in mind? Hackworth said.
   "Oh, yes," said Lord Finkle-McGraw. If I found it in an antiquarian bookshop, covered with dust, I shouldn't give it a second glance."
   "Because if you were not happy with any detail," Hackworth said, "I could recompile it." He had come in hoping desperately that Finkle-McGraw would object to something; this might give him an opportunity to filch another copy for Fiona. But so far the Equity Lord had been uncharacteristically complacent. He kept flipping through the book, waiting for something to happen.
   "It is unlikely to do anything interesting just now," Hackworth said. "It won't really activate itself until it bonds."
   "Bonds?"
   "As we discussed, it sees and hears everything in its vicinity," Hackworth said. "At the moment, it's looking for a small female. As soon as a little girl picks it up and opens the front cover for the first time, it will imprint that child's face and voice into its memory-"
   "Bonding with her. Yes, I see."
   "And thenceforth it will see all events and persons in relation to that girl, using her as a datum from which to chart a psychological terrain, as it were. Maintenance of that terrain is one of the book's primary processes. Whenever the child uses the book, then, it will perform a sort of dynamic mapping from the database onto her particular terrain."
   "You mean the database of folklore."
   Hackworth hesitated. "Pardon me, but not precisely, sir. Folklore consists of certain universal ideas that have been mapped onto local cultures. For example, many cultures have a Trickster figure, so the Trickster may be deemed a universal; but he appears in different guises, each appropriate to a particular culture's environment. The Indians of the American Southwest called him Coyote, those of the Pacific Coast called him Raven. Europeans called him Reynard the Fox. African-Americans called him Br'er Rabbit. In twentieth-century literature he appears first as Bugs Bunny and then as the Hacker."
   Finkle-McGraw chuckled. "When I was a lad, that word had a double meaning. It could mean a trickster who broke into things– but it could also mean an especially skilled coder."
   "The ambiguity is common in post-Neolithic cultures," Hackworth said. "As technology became more important, the Trickster underwent a shift in character and became the god of crafts– of technology, if you will– while retaining the underlying roguish qualities. So we have the Sumerian Enki, the Greek Prometheus and Hermes, Norse Loki, and so on.
   "In any case," Hackworth continued, "Trickster/Technologist is just one of the universals. The database is full of them. It's a catalogue of the collective unconscious. In the old days, writers of children's books had to map these universals onto concrete symbols familiar to their audience– like Beatrix Potter mapping the Trickster onto Peter Rabbit. This is a reasonably effective way to do it, especially if the society is homogeneous and static, so that all children share similar experiences.
   "What my team and I have done here is to abstract that process and develop systems for mapping the universals onto the unique psychological terrain of one child– even as that terrain changes over time. Hence it is important that you not allow this book to fall into the hands of any other little girl until Elizabeth has the opportunity to open it up."
   "Understood," said Lord Alexander Chung-Sik Finkle-McGraw.
   "I'll wrap it up myself, right now. Compiled some nice wrapping paper this morning." He opened a desk drawer and took out a roll of thick, glossy mediatronic paper bearing animated Christmas scenes: Santa sliding down the chimney, the ballistic reindeer, the three Zoroastrian sovereigns dismounting from their dromedaries in front of the stable. There was a lull while Hackworth and Finkle-McGraw watched the little scenes; one of the hazards of living in a world filled with mediatrons was that conversations were always being interrupted in this way, and that explained why Atlantans tried to keep mediatronic commodities to a minimum. Go into a thete's house, and every object had moving pictures on it, everyone sat around slackjawed, eyes jumping from the bawdy figures cavorting on the mediatronic toilet paper to the big-eyed elves playing tag in the bathroom mirror to . .
   "Oh, yes," Finkle-McGraw said. "Can it be written on? I should like to inscribe it to Elizabeth."
   "The paper is a subclass of both input-paper and output-paper, so it possesses all the underlying functionality of the sort of paper you would write on. For the most part these functions are not used– beyond, of course, simply making marks where the nib of the pen has moved across it.'
   "You can write on it," Finkle-McGraw translated with some asperity, "but it doesn't think about what you're writing."
   "Well, my answer to that question must be ambiguous," Hackworth said. "The Illustrated Primer is an extremely general and powerful system capable of more extensive self-reconfiguration than most. Remember that a fundamental part of its job is to respond to its environment. If the owner were to take up a pen and write on a blank page, this input would be thrown into the hopper along with everything else, so to speak."
   "Can I inscribe it to Elizabeth or not?" Finkle-McGraw demanded.
   "Certainly, sir."
   Finkle-McGraw extracted a heavy gold fountain pen from a holder on his desk and wrote in the front of the book for a while.
   "That being done, sir, there remains only for you to authorise a standing purchase order for the ractors."
   "Ah, yes, thank you for reminding me," said Finkle-McGraw, not very sincerely. "I still would have thought that for all the money that went into this project-"
   "That we might have solved the voice-generation problem to boot, yes sir," Hackworth said. "As you know, we took some stabs at it, but none of the results were up to the level of quality you demand. After all of our technology, the pseudo-intelligence algorithms, the vast exception matrices, the portent and content monitors, and everything else, we still can't come close to generating a human voice that sounds as good as what a real, live ractor can give us."
   "Can't say I'm surprised, really," said Finkle-McGraw. "I just wish it were a completely self-contained system."
   "It might as well be, sir. At any given time there are tens of millions of professional ractors in their stages all over the world, in every time zone, ready to take on this kind of work at an instant's notice. We are planning to authorise payment at a relatively high rate, which should bring in only the best talent. You won't be disappointed with the results."

Nell's second experience with the Primer;
the story of Princess Nell in a nutshell.

   Once upon a time there was a little Princess named Nell who was imprisoned in a tall dark castle on an island in the middle of a great sea, with a little boy named Harv, who was her friend and protector. She also had four special friends named Dinosaur, Duck, Peter Rabbit, and Purple.
   Princess Nell and Harv could not leave the Dark Castle, but from time to time a Raven would come to visit them and tell them of the wonderful things over the sea in the Land Beyond. One day the Raven helped Princess Nell escape from the castle, but alas, poor Harv was too big and had to stay locked up behind the castle's great iron door with twelve locks.
   Princess Nell loved Harv like a brother and refused to abandon him, so she and her friends, Dinosaur, Duck, Peter, and Purple, traveled over the sea in a little red boat, having many adventures, until they came to the Land Beyond. This was divided into twelve countries each ruled by a Faery King or a Faery Queen. Each King or Queen had a wonderful Castle, and each Castle was a Treasury containing gold and jewels, and in each Treasury was a jeweled Key that would open one of the twelve locks on the iron door of the Dark Castle.
   Princess Nell and her friends had many adventures as they visited each of the twelve kingdoms and collected the twelve keys. Some they got by persuasion, some by cleverness, and some they took in battle. By the end of the quest, some of Nell's four friends had died, and some had gone their separate ways. But Nell was not alone, for she had become a great heroine during her adventures.
   In a great ship, accompanied by many soldiers, servants, and elders, Nell traveled back over the sea to the island of the Dark Castle. As she approached the iron door, Harv saw her from the top of a tower and gruffly told her to go away, for Princess Nell had changed so much during her Quest that Harv no longer recognized her. "I have come to set you free," Princess Nell said. Harv again told her to go away, saying that he had all the freedom he wanted within the walls of the Dark Castle.
   Princess Nell put the twelve keys into the twelve locks and began to open them one by one. When the rusty door of the castle finally creaked open, she saw Harv standing with a bow at the ready, and an arrow drawn, pointed straight at her heart. He let fly the arrow, and it struck her in the chest and would have killed her except that she was wearing a locket Harv had given her many years ago, before she left the castle. The arrow struck and shattered the locket. In the same moment, Harv was cut down by an arrow from one of Princess Nell's soldiers. Nell rushed to her fallen brother to comfort him and wept over his body for three days and three nights.
   When finally she dried her eyes, she saw that the Dark Castle had become glorious; for the river of tears that had flowed from her eyes had watered the grounds, and beautiful gardens and forests had sprung up overnight, and the Dark Castle itself was no longer dark, but a shining beacon filled with delightful things.
   Princess Nell lived in that castle and ruled over that island for the rest of her days, and every morning she would go for a walk in the garden where Harv had fallen. She had many adventures and became a great Queen, and in time she met and married a Prince, and had many children, and lived happily ever after.
   "What's an adventure?" Nell said.
   The word was written across the page. Then both pages filled with moving pictures of glorious things: girls in armor fighting dragons with swords, and girls riding white unicorns through the forest, and girls swinging from vines, swimming in the blue ocean, piloting rocket ships through space. Nell spent a long time looking at all of the pictures, and after a while all of the girls began to look like older versions of herself.

Judge Fang visits his district;
Miss Pao arranges a demonstration;
the case of the stolen book takes on unexpected depth.

   As Judge Fang proceeded across the Causeway on his chevaline, accompanied by his assistants, Chang and Miss Pao, he saw the Leased Territories wreathed in a mephitic fog. The emerald highlands of Atlantis/Shanghai floated above the squalor. A host of mirrored aerostats surrounded that lofty territory, protecting it from the larger and more obvious sorts of intruders; from here, miles away, the individual pods were of course not visible, but they could be seen in the aggregate as a subtle gleam in the air, a vast bubble, perfectly transparent, enveloping the sacrosanct territory of the Anglo-Americans, stretching this way and that in the shifting winds but never tearing.
   The view was spoiled as they drew closer to the Leased Territories and entered into their eternal fogs. Several times as they rode through the streets of the L.T., Judge Fang made a peculiar gesture: He curled the fingers of his right hand into a cylinder, as though grasping an invisible stalk of bamboo. He cupped his other hand beneath, forming a dark enclosed cavity, and then peeked into it with one eye. When he stared into the pocket of air thus formed, he saw the darkness filled with coruscating light– something like staring into a cavern filled with fireflies, except that these lights came in all colors, and all of the colors were as pure and clear as jewels.
   People who lived in the L.T. and who performed this gesture frequently developed a feel for what was going on in the microscopic world. They could tell when something was up. If the gesture was performed during a toner war, the result was spectacular.
   Today it was nowhere near toner war levels, but it was fairly intense. Judge Fang suspected that this had something to do with the purpose of this errand, which Miss Pao had declined to explain.
   They ended up in a restaurant. Miss Pao insisted on a table out on the terrace, even though it looked like rain. They ended up overlooking the street three stories below. Even at that distance it was difficult to make out faces through the fog.
   Miss Pao drew a rectangular package from her bag, wrapped up in Nanobar. She unwrapped it and drew out two objects of roughly the same size and shape: a book and a block of wood. She placed them side by side on the table. Then she ignored them, turning her attention to the menu. She continued to ignore them for several minutes more, as she and Chang and Judge Fang sipped tea, exchanged polite chatter, and began to eat their meals.
   "At Your Honor's convenience," Miss Pao said, "I would invite you to examine the two objects I laid on the table."
   Judge Fang was startled to notice that, while the block's appearance had not changed, the book had become covered in a layer of thick gray dust, as if it had been growing mildew for several decades.
   "Oooh," Chang blurted, sucking a lengthy skein of noodles into his maw and bulging his eyes in the direction of this peculiar exhibit.
   Judge Fang rose, walked around the table, and bent down for a closer look. The gray dust was not uniformly distributed; it was much thicker toward the edges of the book cover. He opened the book and was startled to notice that the dust had infiltrated deep between the pages.
   "This is dust with a purpose in life," Judge Fang observed. Miss Pao glanced significantly at the block of wood. Judge Fang picked it up and examined it on all sides; it was clean. "This stuff is discriminating too!" Judge Fang said.
   "It is Confucian toner," Chang said, finally choking down his noodles. "It has a passion for books."
   The Judge smiled tolerantly and looked to Miss Pao for an explanation. "You have examined this new species of mite, I take it?"
   "It is more interesting than that," Miss Pao said. "Within the last week, not one but two new species of mite have appeared in the Leased Territories– both programmed to seek out anything that looks like a book." She reached into her bag again and handed her master a rolled-up piece of mediatronic paper.
   A waitress scurried up and helped move the dishes and teacups aside. Judge Fang unrolled the page and anchored it with various small items of faience. The paper was divided into two panes, each containing a magnified view of a microscopic device. Judge Fang could see that both were made to navigate through the air, but beyond that, they could hardly have been more different. One of them looked like a work of nature; it had several bizarre and elaborate arms and sported four enormous, wildly involuted, scooplike devices, arranged ninety degrees apart.
   "The ears of a bat!" Chang exclaimed, tracing their impossibly complex whorls with the tip of a chopstick. Judge Fang said nothing but reminded himself that this sort of quick insight was just the sort of thing Chang excelled at.
   "It appears to use echolocation, like a bat," Miss Pao admitted. "The other one, as you can see, is of a radically different design." The other mite looked like a spacecraft as envisioned by Jules Verne. It had a streamlined, teardrop shape, a pair of manipulator arms folded neatly against its fuselage, and a deep cylindrical cavity in the nose that Eudge Fang took to be its eye.
   "This one sees light in the ultraviolet range," Miss Pao said. "Despite their differences, each does the same thing: searches for books. When it finds a book, it lands on the cover and :rawls to the edge, then creeps between the pages and examines the internal structure of the paper."
   "What is it looking for?"
   "There is no way to tell, short of disassembling its internal computer system and decompiling its program– which is difficult," Miss Pao said, with characteristic understatement. "When it finds that it has been investigating a normal book made of old-fashioned paper, it deactivates and becomes dust."
   "So there are many dirty books in the Leased Territories now," Chang said.
   "There aren't that many books to begin with," Judge Fang said. Miss Pao and Chang chuckled, but the Judge showed no sign that he had been making a joke; it was just an observation. "What conclusions do you draw, Miss Pao?" the Judge said.
   "Two different parties are searching the Leased Territories for the same book," Miss Pao said. She did not have to state that the target of this search was probably the book stolen from the gentleman named Hackworth.
   "Can you speculate as to the identity of these parties?"
   Miss Pao said, "Of course, neither device carries a maker's mark. The bat-eared one has Dr. X written all over it; most of its features appear to be evolved, not engineered, and the Doctor's Flea Circus is nothing more than an effort to collect evolved mites with useful features. At a first glance, the other device could have come from any of the engineering works associated with major phyles– Nippon, New Atlantis, Hindustan, the First Distributed Republic being prime suspects. But on deeper examination I find a level of elegance-"
   "Elegance?"
   "Pardon me, Your Honor, the concept is not easy to explain– there is an ineffable quality to some technology, described by its creators as concinnitous, or technically sweet, or a nice hack– signs that it was made with great care by one who was not merely motivated but inspired. It is the difference between an engineer and a hacker."
   "Or an engineer and an artifex?" Judge Fang said.
   A trace of a smile came across Miss Pao's face. "I fear that I have enmeshed that little girl in a much deeper business than I ever imagined," Judge Fang said. He rolled up the paper and handed it back to Miss Pao. Chang set the Judge's teacup back in front oi him and poured more tea. Without thinking about it, the Judge put his thumb and fingertips together and tapped them lightly against the tabletop several times. This was an ancient gesture in China. The story was that one of the early Emperors liked to dress as a commoner and travel about the Middle Kingdom to see how the peasants were getting along. Frequently, as he and his staff were sitting about the table in some inn, he would pour tea for everyone. They could not kowtow to their lord without giving away his identity, so they would make this gesture, using their hand to imitate the act of kneeling. Now Chinese people used it to thank each other at the dinner table. From time to time, Judge Fang caught himself doing it: and thought about what a peculiar thing it was to be Chinese in a world without an Emperor.
   He sat, hands folded into sleeves, and thought about this and other issues for several minutes, watching the vapor rise from his tea and forn into a fog as it condensed round the bodies of micro-aerostats.
   "Soon we will obtrude upon Mr. Hackworth and Dr. X and learn more by observing their reactions. I will consider the right way to sei about this. In the meantime, let us concern ourselves with the girl. Chang, visit her apartment building and see whether there has been any trouble there– suspicious characters hanging about."
   "Sir, with all respect, everyone who lives in the girl's building is of suspicious character."
   "You know what I mean," said the Judge with some asperity. "The building should have a system for filtering nanosites from the air. If this system is working properly, and if the girl does not take the book out of her building, then she should go unnoticed by these." The Judge drew a streak through the dust on the book's cover and smeared the toner between his fingers. "Speak with the landlord of her building, and let him know that his air-filtering system is due for an inspection, and that this is genuine, not just a solicitation for a bribe."
   "Yes, sir," Chang said. He pushed his chair back, rose, bowed, and strode out of the restaurant, pausing only to extract a toothpick from the dispenser by the exit. It would have been acceptable for him to finish his lunch, but Chang had, in the past, evinced concern for the girl's welfare, and apparently wanted to waste no time.
   "Miss Pao, plant recording surveillance devices in the girl's flat. At first we will change and review the tapes every day. If the book is not detected soon, we will begin changing them every week."
   "Yes, sir," Miss Pao said. She slipped on her phenomenoscopic spectacles. Colored light reflected from the surfaces of her eyes as she lost herself in some kind of interface. Judge Fang refilled his tea, cupped it in the palm of his hand, and went for a stroll round the edge of the terrace. He had much more important things to think about than this girl and her book; but he suspected that from now on he would be thinking about little else.

Description of Old Shanghai;
situation of the Theatre Parnasse;
Miranda's occupation.

   Before the Europeans got their hooks into it, Shanghai had been a walled village on the Huang Pu River, a few miles south of its confluence with the estuary of the Yangtze. Much of the architecture was very sophisticated Ming Dynasty stuff, private gardens for rich families, a shopping street here and there concealing interior slums, a rickety, vertiginous teahouse rising from an island in the center of a pond. More recently the wall had been torn down and a sort of beltway built on its foundations. The old French concession wrapped around the north side, and in that neighborhood, on a corner looking across the ring road into the old city, the Theatre Parnasse had been constructed during the late 1800s. Miranda had been working there for five years, but the experience had been so intense that it often seemed more like five days.
   The Parnasse had been built by Europeans back when they were serious and unapologetic about their Europeanness. The facade was classical: a three-quarter-round portico on the streetcorner, supported by Corinthian columns, all done in white limestone. The portico was belted by a white marquee, circa 1990, outlined by tubes of purple and pink neon. It would have been easy enough to tear it off and replace it with something mediatronic, but they enjoyed hauling the bamboo ladders out from the set shop and snapping the black plastic letters into place, advertising whatever they were doing tonight. Sometimes they would lower the big mediatronic screen and show movies, and Westerners would come from all over Greater Shanghai, dressed up in their tuxedos and evening gowns, and sit in the dark watching Casablanca or Dances With Wolves. And at least twice a month, the Parnasse Company would actually get out on stage and do it: become actors rather than ractors for a night, lights and greasepaint and costumes. The hard part was indoctrinating the audience; unless they were theatre buffs, they always wanted to run up on stage and interact, which upset the whole thing. Live theatre was an ancient and peculiar taste, roughly on par with listening to Gregorian chants, and it didn't pay the bills. They paid the bills with ractives.
   The building was tall and narrow, making the most of precious Shanghai real estate, so the proscenium had a nearly square aspect ratio, like an old-fashioned television. Above it was the bust of some forgotten French actress, supported on gilt wings, flanked by angels brandishing trumpets and laurel wreaths. The ceiling was a circular fresco depicting Muses disporting themselves in flimsy robes. A chandelier hung from the center; its incandescent bulbs had been replaced by new things that didn't burn out, and now it cast light evenly onto the rows of tiny, creaking seats closely packed together on the main floor. There were three balconies and three stories of private boxes, two on the left side and two on the right side of each level. The fronts of the boxes and balconies were all painted with tableaux from classical mythology, the predominant color there as elsewhere being a highly French robin's-egg blue.
   The theatre was crammed with plasterwork, so that the faces of cherubs, overwrought Roman gods, impassioned Trojans, and such were always poking out of columns and soffits and cornices, catching you by surprise. Much of this work was spalled from bullets fired by high-spirited Red Guards during Cultural Revolution times. Other than the bullet holes, the Parnasse was in decent shape, though sometime in the twentieth century great blackiron pipes had been anchored vertically alongside the boxes and horizontally before the balconies so that spotlights could be bolted on. Nowadays the spotlights were coin-size disks– phased-array devices that carried their own batteries– and could be stuck up anywhere and controlled by radio. But the pipes were still there and always required a lot of explaining when tourists came through.
   Each of the twelve boxes had its own door, and a curtain rail curving around the front so that the occupants could get some privacy between acts. They'd mothballed the curtains and replaced them with removable soundproof screens, unbolted the seats, and stored them in the basement. Now each box was a private egg-shaped room just the right size to serve as a body stage. These twelve stages generated seventy-five percent of the cash flow of the Theatre Parnasse.
   Miranda always checked into her stage half an hour early to run a diagnostic on her tat grid. The 'sites didn't last forever– static electricity or cosmic rays could knock them out, and if you let your instrument go to pot out of sheer laziness, you didn't deserve to call yourself a ractor.
   Miranda had decorated the dead walls of her own stage with posters and photos of role models, largely actresses from twentieth-century passives. She had a chair in 'the corner for roles that involved sitting down. There was also a tiny coffee table where she set down her triple latte, a two-liter bottle of mineral water, and a box of throat lozenges. Then she peeled down to a black leotard and tights, hanging her street clothes on a tree by the door. Another ractor might have gone nude, worn street clothes, or tried to match her costume to the role she'd be playing, if she were lucky enough to know in advance. At the moment, though, Miranda never knew. She had standing bids on Kate in the ractive version of Taming of the Shrew (which was a butcherous kludge, but popular among a certain sort of male user); Scarlett O'Hara in the ractive Gone With the Wind; a double agent named Ilse in an espionage thriller set on a train passing through Nazi Germany; and Rhea, a neo-Victorian damsel in distress in Silk Road, an adventure-comedy-romance ractive set on the wrong side of contemporary Shanghai. She'd created that role. After the good review had come in ("a remarkably Rhea-listic portrayal by newcomer Miranda Redpath!") she had played little else for a couple of months, even though her bid was so steep that most users opted for one of the understudies or contented themselves with watching passively for one-tenth the price. But the distributor had botched the PR targeting when they tried to take it beyond the Shanghai market, and so now Silk Road was in limbo while various heads rolled.
   Four leading roles was about as many as she could keep in her head at once. The prompter made it possible to play any role without having seen it before, if you didn't mind making an ass of yourself. But Miranda had a reputation now and couldn't get away with shoddy work. To fill in the blanks when things got slow, she also had standing bids, under another name, for easier work: mostly narration jobs, plus anything having to do with children's media.
   She didn't have any kids of her own, but she still corresponded with the ones she'd taken care of during her governess days. She loved racting with children, and besides it was good exercise for the voice, saying those silly little rhymes just right. "Practice Kate from Shrew," she said, and the Miranda-shaped constellation was replaced by a dark-haired woman with green, feline eyes, dressed in some costume designer's concept of what a rich woman in the Italian Renaissance would be likely to wear. Miranda had large bunny eyes while Kate had cat eyes, and cat eyes were used differently from bunny eyes, especially when delivering a slashing witticism. Carl Hollywood, the company's founder and dramaturge, who'd been sitting in passively on her Shrews, had suggested that she needed more work in this area. Not many payers enjoyed Shakespeare or even knew who he was, but the ones who did tended to be very high on the income scale and worth catering to. Usually this kind of argument had no effect on Miranda, but she'd been finding that some of these (rich sexist snob asshole) gentlemen were remarkably good ractors. And any professional could tell you that it was a rare pleasure to ract with a payer who knew what he was doing.

. . .
   The Shift comprised the Prime Times for London, the East Coast, and the West Coast. In Greenwich Time, it started around nine P.M., when Londoners were finishing dinner and looking for entertainment, and wound up about seven A.M., when Californians were going to bed. No matter what time zones they actually lived in, all ractors tried to work during those hours. In Shanghai's time zone, The Shift ran from about five A.M. to midafternoon, and Miranda didn't mind doing overtime if some well-heeled Californian wanted to stretch a ractive late into the night. Some of the ractors in her company didn't come in until later in the day, but Miranda still had dreams of living in London and craved attention from that city's sophisticated payers. So she always came to work early.
   When she finished her warmups and went on, she found a bid already waiting for her. The casting agent, which was a semiautonomous piece of software, had assembled a company of nine payers, enough to ract all the guest roles in First Class to Geneva, which was about intrigue among rich people on a train in Nazi-occupied France, and which was to ractives what The Mousetrap was to passive theatre. It was an ensemble piece: nine guest roles to be assumed by payers, three somewhat larger and more glamorous host roles to be assumed by payees like Miranda. One of the characters was, unbeknownst to the others, an Allied spy.
   Another was a secret colonel in the SS, another was secretly Jewish, another was a Cheka agent. Sometimes there was a German trying to defect to the Allied side. But you never knew which was which when the ractive started up; the computer switched all the roles around at random.
   It paid well because of the high payer/payee ratio. Miranda provisionally accepted the bid. One of the other host roles hadn't been filled yet, so while she waited, she bid and won a filler job. The computer morphed her into the face of an adorable young woman whose face and hair looked typical of what was current in London at the moment; she wore the uniform of a British Airways ticket agent. "Good evening, Mr. Oremland," she gushed, reading the prompter. The computer disped it into an even perkier voice and made subtle corrections in her accent.
   "Good evening, er, Margaret," said the jowly Brit staring out of a pane on her mediatron. He was wearing half-glasses, had to squint to make out her nametag. His tie was loose on his chest, a gin and tonic in one hairy fist, and he liked the looks of this Margaret. Which was almost guaranteed, since Margaret had been morphed up by a marketing computer in London that knew more about this gentleman's taste in girlflesh than he would like to think.
   "Six months without a vacation!? How boring," Miranda/Margaret said. "You must be doing something terribly important," she continued, facetious without being mean, the two of them sharing a little joke.
   "Yes, I suppose even making lots of money does become boring after a while," the man returned, in much the same tone.
   Miranda glanced over at the casting sheet for First Class to Geneva. She'd be pissed if this Mr. Oremland got overly talkative and forced her to pass on the bigger role. Though he did seem a reasonably clever sort. "You know, it's a fine time to visit Atlantan West Africa, and the airship Gold Coast is scheduled to depart in two weeks– shall I book a stateroom for you? And a companion perhaps?"
   Mr. Oremland seemed iffy. "Call me old-fashioned," he said, "but when you say Africa, I think AIDS and parasites."
   "Oh, not in West Africa, sir, not in the new colonies. Would you like a quick tour?"
   Mr. Oremland gave Miranda/Margaret one long, searching, horny look, sighed, checked his watch, and seemed to remember that she was an imaginary being. "Thank you just the same," he said, and cut her off. Just in time too; the playbill for Geneva had just filled up. Miranda only had a few seconds to switch contexts and get herself into the character of Ilse before she found herself sitting in a first-class coach of a midtwentieth-century passenger train, staring into the mirror at a blond, blue-eyed, high-cheekboned ice queen.
   Unfolded on her dressing-table was a letter written in Yiddish. So tonight she was the secret Jew. She tore the letter into tiny pieces and fed them out her window, then did the same with a couple of Stars of David that she rooted out of her jewelry case.
   This thing was fully ractive, and there was nothing to prevent other characters from breaking into her coach and going through her possessions. Then she finished putting on her makeup and choosing her outfit, and went to the dining car for dinner. Most of the other characters were already in here. The nine amateurs were stiff and stilted as usual, the two other professionals were circulating among them, trying to loosen them up, break through that self-consciousness and get them into their characters.
   Geneva ended up dragging on for a good three hours. It was nearly ruined by one of the payers, who had clearly signed up exclusively for the purpose of maneuvering Ilse into bed. He turned out to be the secret SS colonel too; but he was so hell-bent on fucking Ilse that he spent the whole evening out of character. Finally Miranda lured him into the kitchen in the back of the dining car, shoved a foot-long butcher knife into his chest, and left him in the fridge. She had played this role a couple of hundred times and knew the location of every potentially lethal object on the train.
   After a ractive it was considered good form to go to the Green Room, a virtual pub where you could chat out-of-character with the other ractors. Miranda skipped it because she knew that the creep would be waiting for her there.
   Next was a lull of an hour or so. Primetime in London was over, and New Yorkers were still eating dinner. Miranda went to the bathroom, ate a little snack, and picked up a few kiddy jobs. Kids on the West Coast were getting back from school and jumping right 'into the high-priced educational ractives that their parents made available to them. These things created a plethora of extremely short but fun roles; in quick succession, Miranda's face was morphed into a duck, a bunny, a talking tree, the eternally elusive Carmen Sandiego, and the repulsively cloying Doogie the Dinosaur. Each of them got a couple of lines at most:
   "That's right! B stands for balloon! I like to play with balloons, don't you, Matthew?"
   "Sound it out, Victoria! You can do it!"
   "Soldier ants have larger and stronger jaws than their worker counterparts and play a key role in defending the nest from predators."
   "Please don't throw me into that briar patch, Br'er Fox!"
   "Hello, Roberta! I've been missing you all day. How was your field trip to Disneyland?"
   "Twentieth-century airships were filled with flammable hydrogen, expensive helium, or inefficient hot air, but our modern versions are filled literally with nothing at all. High-strength nanostructures make it possible to pump all the air from an airship's envelope and fill it with a vacuum. Have you ever been on an airship, Thomas?"

Nell's further experiences with the Primer;
the origin of Princess Nell.

   "Once upon a time there was a little Princess named Nell who was imprisoned in a tall dark castle on an island-"
   "Why?"
   "Nell and Harv had been locked up in the Dark Castle by their evil stepmother."
   "Why didn't their father let them out of the Dark Castle?"
   "Their father, who had protected them from the whims of the wicked stepmother, had gone sailing over the sea and never come back."
   "Why did he never come back?"
   "Their father was a fisherman. He went out on his boat every day. The sea is a vast and dangerous place, filled with monsters, storms, and other dangers. No one knows what fate befell him. Perhaps it was foolish of him to sail into such danger, but Nell knew better than to fret over things she could not change."
   "Why did she have a wicked stepmother?"
   "Nell's mother died one night when a monster came out of the sea and entered their cottage to snatch Nell and Harv, who were just babies. She fought with the monster and slew it, but in so doing suffered grievous wounds and died the next day with her adopted children still nestled in her bosom."
   "Why did the monster come from the sea?"
   "For many years, Nell's father and mother badly wanted children but were not so blessed until one day, when the father caught a mermaid in his net. The mermaid said that if he let her go, she would grant him a wish, so he wished for two children, a boy and a girl.
   "The next day, while he was out fishing, he was approached by a mermaid carrying a basket. In the basket were the two little babies, just as he had requested, wrapped up in cloth of gold. The mermaid cautioned him that he and his wife should not allow the babies to cry at night."
   "Why were they in gold cloth?"
   "They were actually a Princess and a Prince who had been in a shipwreck. The ship sank, but the basket containing the two babies bobbed like a cork on the ocean until the mermaids came and found them. They took care of those two babies until they found a good parent for them.
   "He took the babies back to the cottage and presented them to his wife, who swooned for joy. They lived happily together for some time, and whenever one of the babies cried, one of the parents would get up and comfort it. But one night father did not come home, because a storm had pushed his little red fishing boat far out to sea. One of the babies began to cry, and the mother got up to comfort it. But when the other began to cry as well, there was nothing she could do, and shortly the monster came calling.
   "When the fisherman returned home the next day, he found his wife's body lying beside that of the monster, and both of the babies unharmed. His grief was very great, and he began the difficult task of raising both the children.
   "One day, a stranger came to his door. She said that she had been cast out by the cruel Kings and Queens of the Land Beyond and that she needed a place to sleep and would do any kind of work in exchange. At first she slept on the floor and cooked and cleaned for the fisherman all day long, but as Nell and Harv got bigger, she began to give them more and more chores, until by the time their father disappeared, they toiled from dawn until long after nightfall, while their stepmother never lifted a finger."
   "Why didn't the fisherman and his babies live in the castle to protect them from the monster?"
   "The castle was a dark forbidding place on the top of a mountain. The fisherman had been told by his father that it had been built many ages ago by trolls, who were still said to live there. And he did not have the twelve keys."
   "Did the wicked stepmother have the twelve keys?"
   "She kept them buried in a secret place as long as the fisherman was around, but after he sailed away and did not come back, she had Nell and Harv dig them up again, along with a quantity of jewels and gold that she had brought with her from the Land Beyond. She bedecked herself with the gold and jewels, then opened up the iron gates of the Dark Castle and tricked Nell and Harv into going inside. As soon as they were in, she slammed the gates shut behind them and locked the twelve locks. 'When the sun goes down, the trolls will have you for a snack!' she cackled."
   "What's a troll?"
   "A scary monster that lives in holes in the ground and comes out after dark."
   Nell started to cry. She slammed the book closed, ran to her bed, gathered her stuffed animals up in her arms, started chewing on her blanket, and cried for a while, considering the question of trolls.
   The book made a fluttering sound. Nell saw it opening in the corner of her eye and looked over cautiously, afraid she might see a picture of a troll. But instead, she saw two pictures. One was of Princess Nell, sitting on the grass with four dolls gathered in her arms. Facing it was a picture of Nell surrounded by four creatures: a big dinosaur, a rabbit, a duck, and a woman in a purple dress with purple hair.
   The book said, "Would you like to hear the story of how Princess Nell made some friends in the Dark Castle, where she least expected it, and how they killed all of the trolls and made it a safe place to live?"
   "Yes!" Nell said, and scooted across the floor until she was poised above the book.

Judge Fang pays a visit to the Celestial Kingdom;
tea served in an ancient setting;
a "chance" encounter with Dr. X

   Judge Fang was not afflicted with the Westerner's inability to pronounce the name of the man known as Dr. X, unless a combined Cantonese/New York accent counted as a speech impediment. In his discussions with his trusted subordinates he had fallen into the habit of calling him Dr. X anyway.
   He had never had cause to pronounce the name at all, until recently. Judge Fang was district magistrate for the Leased Territories, which in turn were part of the Chinese Coastal Republic.
   Dr. X almost never left the boundaries of Old Shanghai, which was part of a separate district; more to the point, he stuck to a small but anfractuous subregion whose tendrils were seemingly ramified through every block and building of the ancient city. On the map, this region looked like the root system of a thousand-year-old dwarf tree; its border must have been a hundred kilometers long, even though it was contained within a couple of square kilometers. This region was not part of the Coastal Republic; it styled itself as the Middle Kingdom, a living vestige of Imperial China, prohibitively the oldest and greatest nation of the world.
   The tendrils went even farther than that; Judge Fang had known this for a long time. Many of the gang members running around the Leased Territories with Judge Fang's cane marks across their asses had connections on the mainland that could ultimately be traced back to Dr. X. It was rarely useful to dwell upon this fact; if it hadn't been Dr. X, it would have been someone else. Dr. X was unusually clever at taking advantage of the principle of grith, or right of refuge, which in the modern usage simply meant that Coastal Republic officials like Judge Fang could not enter the Celestial Kingdom and arrest someone like Dr. X. So usually when they bothered to trace a criminal's higher connections at all, they simply drew an arrow up the page to a single character, consisting of a box with a vertical slash drawn down through the middle. The character meant Middle, as in Middle Kingdom, though for Judge Fang it had come to mean, simply, trouble.
   At the House of the Venerable and Inscrutable Colonel and other Judge Fang hangouts, the name of Dr. X had been pronounced more frequently in recent weeks. Dr. X had tried to bribe everyone on Judge Fang's hierarchy except for the Judge himself. Of course, the overtures had been made by people whose connection with Dr. X was tenuous in the extreme, and had been so subtle that most of those approached had not even realized what was happening until, days or weeks later, they had suddenly sat up in bed exclaiming,
   "He was trying to bribe me! I must tell Judge Fang!"
   If not for grith, this might have made for a merry and stimulating couple of decades, as Judge Fang matched his wits against those of the Doctor, a worthy adversary at last and a welcome break from smelly, larcenous barbarian whelps. As it was, Dr. X's machinations were of purely abstract interest. But they were no less interesting for that, and many days, as Miss Pao proceeded through the familiar line of patter about sky-eyes, heuristic mugging detection, and tagger aerostats, Judge Fang found his attention wandering across town to the ancient city, to the hong of Dr. X.
   It was said that the Doctor frequently took tea in the morning at an old teahouse there, and so it was that one morning Judge Fang happened to drop in on the place. It had been built, centuries ago, in the center of a pond. Swarms of fire-colored fish hung just beneath the surface of the khaki water, glowing like latent coals, as Judge Fang and his assistants, Miss Pao and Chang, crossed the bridge.
   There was a Chinese belief that demons liked to travel only in straight lines. Hence the bridge zigzagged no fewer than nine times as it made its way to the center of the pond. The bridge was a demon filter, in other words, and the teahouse demon-free, which seemed of only limited usefulness if it still hosted people like Dr. X. But for Judge Fang, raised in a city of long straight avenues, full of straight talkers, it was useful to be reminded that from the point of view of some people, including Dr. X, all of that straightness was suggestive of demonism; more natural and human was the ever-turning way, where you could never see round the next corner, and the overall plan could be understood only after lengthy meditation.
   The teahouse itself was constructed of unfinished wood, aged to a nice gray. It looked rickety but evidently wasn't. It was narrow and tall, two stories high with a proud winglike roof. One entered through a low narrow door, built by and for the chronically undernourished. The interior had the ambience of a rustic cabin on a lake. Judge Fang had been here before, in mufti, but today he had thrown a robe over his charcoal-gray pinstripe suit– a reasonably subtle brocade, funereal by comparison with what people used to wear in China. He also wore a black cap embroidered with a unicorn, which in most company would probably be lumped in with rainbows and elves but here would be understood for what it was, an ancient symbol of acuity. Dr. X could be relied upon to get the message.
   The teahouse staff had had plenty of time to realize he was coming as he negotiated the endless turns in the causeway. A manager of sorts and a couple of waitresses were arrayed before the door, bowing deeply as he approached.
   Judge Fang had been raised on Cheerios, burgers, and jumbo burritos bulging with beans and meat. He was just a bit less than two meters in height. His beard was unusually thick, and he had been letting it grow out for a couple of years now, and his hair fell down past the tips of his shoulder blades. These elements, plus the hat and robe, and in combination with the power reposed in him by the state, gave him a certain presence of which he was well aware.
   He tried not to be overly satisfied with himself, as this would have gone against all Confucian precepts. On the other hand, Confucianism was all about hierarchy, and those who were in high positions were supposed to comport themselves with a certain dignity. Judge Fang could turn it on when he needed to. He used it now to get himself situated at the best table on the first floor, off in the corner with a nice view out the tiny old windows into the neighboring Ming-era garden. He was still in the Coastal Republic, in the middle of the Twenty-first century. But he could have been in the Middle Kingdom of yore, and for all intents and purposes, he was.
   Chang and Miss Pao separated themselves from their master and requested a table on the second floor, up a narrow and alarming stairway, leaving Judge Fang in peace whilst also making their presence forcibly known to Dr. X, who happened to be up there right now, as he always was at this time in the morning, sipping tea and chatting with his venerable homeboys.
   When Dr. X made his way down half an hour later, he was nonetheless delighted and surprised to see the moderately famous and widely respected Judge Fang sitting all by his lonesome staring out at the pond, its schools of fish flickering lambently. When he approached the table to tender his respects, Judge Fang invited him to take a seat, and after several minutes of sensitive negotiations over whether this would or would not be an unforgivable intrusion on the magistrate's privacy, Dr. X finally, gratefully, reluctantly, respectfully took a seat.
   There was lengthy discourse between the two men on which of them was more honored to be in the company of the other, followed by exhaustive discussion of the relative merits of the different teas offered by the proprietors, whether the leaves were best picked in early or late April, whether the brewing water should be violently boiling as the pathetic gwailos always did it, or limited to eighty degrees Celsius.
   Eventually, Dr. X got around to complimenting Judge Fang on his cap, especially on the embroidery work. This meant that he had noticed the unicorn and understood its message, which was that Judge Fang had seen through all of his efforts at bribery. Not long afterward, Miss Pao came down and regretfully informed the Judge that his presence was urgently required at a crime scene in the Leased Territories. To spare Judge Fang the embarrassment of having to cut short the conversation, Dr. X was approached, moments later, by one of his staff, who whispered something into his ear. The Doctor apologized for having to take his leave, and the two men then got into a very genteel argument over which one of them was being more inexcusably rude, and then over which would precede the other across the bridge. Judge Fang ended up going first, because his duties were deemed more pressing, and thus ended the first meeting between the Judge and Dr. X. The Judge was quite happy; it had all gone just as planned.

Hackworth receives an unexpected visit from Inspector Chang.

   Mrs. Hull had to shake the flour out of her apron to answer the door. Hackworth, working in his study, assumed it was a mere delivery until she appeared in his doorway, harrumphing lightly, holding a salver with a single card centered on it: Lieutenant Chang. His organization was called, in traditional Chinese general-to-specific order, China Coastal Republic Shanghai New Chusan Leased Territories District Magistrate Office.
   "What does he want?"
   "To give you your hat back."
   "Send him in," Hackworth said, startled.
   Mrs. Hull dawdled significantly. Hackworth glanced into a mirror and saw himself reaching for his throat, checking the knot on his necktie. His smoking jacket was hanging loose, and he wrapped it tight and retied the sash. Then he went to the parlor.
   Mrs. Hull led Lieutenant Chang into the parlor. He was a burly, ungainly fellow with a short buzz cut. Hackworth's top hat, looking rather ill-used, could be seen indistinctly through a large plastic bag clenched in his hand. "Lieutenant Chang," Mrs. Hull announced, and Chang bowed at Hackworth, smiling a bit more than seemed warranted.
   Hackworth bowed back. "Lieutenant Chang."
   "I will not disturb you for long, I promise," Chang said in clear but unrefined English. "During an investigation– details not relevant here– we got this from a suspect. It is marked your property. Much the worse for wear– please accept it."
   "Well done, Lieutenant," said Hackworth, receiving the bag and holding it up to the light. "I did not expect to see it again, even in such a battered condition."
   "Well, these boys do not have respect for a good hat, I am afraid," said Lieutenant Chang.
   Hackworth paused, not knowing what one was supposed to say at this point. Chang just stood there, seeming more at ease in Hackworth's parlor than Hackworth was. The first exchange had been simple, but now the East/West curtain fell between them like a rusty cleaver.
   Was this part of some official procedure? Was it a solicitation for a tip? Or just Mr. Chang being a nice guy?
   When in doubt, end the visit sooner rather than later. "Well," said Hackworth, "I don't know and don't care what you arrested him for, but I commend you for having done so."
   Lieutenant Chang did not get the hint and realize it was time to leave. On the contrary, he seemed just a bit perplexed now, where before everything had been so simple. "I cannot help being curious," Chang said, "what gave you the idea that anyone had been arrested?"
   Hackworth felt a spear pass through his heart. "You're a police lieutenant holding what appears to be an evidence bag," he said. "The implication is clear."
   Lieutenant Chang looked at the bag, laboriously perplexed. "Evidence? It is just a shopping bag– to protect your hat from the rain. And I am not here in my official capacity."
   Another spear, at right angles to the first one. "Though," Chang continued, "if some criminal activity has taken place of which I was not made aware, perhaps I should recharacterize this visit.
   Spear number three; now Hackworth's pounding heart sat at the origin of a bloody coordinate system plotted by Lieutenant Chang, conveniently pinned and exposed for thorough examination. Chang's English was getting better all the time, and Hackworth was beginning to think that he was one of those Shanghainese who had spent much of his life in Vancouver, New York, or London. "I had assumed that the gentleman's hat had simply been misplaced or perhaps blown off by a gust of wind. Now you say criminals were involved!" Chang looked as though he had never, to this day, suspected the existence of criminals in the Leased Territories. Then shock was transcended by wonder as he segued, none too subtly, into the next phase of the trap.
   "It was not important," Hackworth said, trying to derail Chang's relentless train of thought, sensing that he and his family were tied to the tracks. Chang ignored him, as if so exhilarated by the workings of his mind that he could not be distracted.
   "Mr.' Hackworth, you have given me an idea. I have been trying to solve a difficult case– a mugging that took place a few days ago. The victim was an unidentified Atlantan gentleman."
   "Don't you have tag mites for that kind of thing?"
   "Oh," Lieutenant Chang said, sounding rather downhearted, "tag mites are not very reliable. The perpetrators took certain precautions to prevent the mites from attaching. Of course, several mites attached themselves to the victim. But before we could track him, he made his way to New Atlantis Clave, where your superb immune system destroyed those mites. So his identity has remained a mystery." Chang reached into his breast pocket and pulled out a folded sheet of paper. "Mr. Hackworth, please tell me whether you recognize any of the figures in this clip."
   "I'm actually rather busy– " Hackworth said, but Chang unfolded the paper in front of him and gave it a command in Shanghainese. Initially the page was covered with static Chinese characters. Then a large panel in the middle opened up and began to play back a cine feed.
   Watching himself getting mugged was one of the most astonishing things Hackworth had ever seen. He could not stop watching it. The feed went to slow motion, and then out came the book. Tears came to Hackworth's eyes, and he made an effort not to blink lest he dislodge them. Not that it really mattered, since Lieutenant Chang was standing rather close to him and could no doubt see everything.
   Chang was shaking his head in wonderment. "So it was you, Mr. Hackworth. I had not made the connection. So many nice things, and such a vicious beating. You have been the victim of a very serious crime!"
   Hackworth could not speak and had nothing to say anyway. "It is striking to me," Chang continued, "that you did not bother to report this serious crime to the magistrate! For some time now we have been reviewing this tape, wondering why the victim– a respectable gentleman– did not step forward to assist us with our inquiries. So much effort wasted," Chang fretted. Then he brightened up. "But it's all water under the bridge, I suppose. We have one or two of the gang in custody, on an unrelated crime, and now I can charge them with your mugging as well. Of course, we will require your testimony."
   "Of course."
   "The items that were taken from you?"
   "You saw it."
   "Yes. A watch chain with various items, a fountain pen, and-"
   "That's it."
   Chang seemed just a bit nonplussed, but more than that he seemed deeply satisfied, suffused by a newly generous spirit. "The book does not even bear mentioning?"
   "Not really."
   "It looked like an antique of some sort. Quite valuable, no?"
   "A fake. That sort of thing is popular with us. A way to build an impressive-seeming library without going broke."
   "Ah, that explains it," said Mr. Chang, growing more satisfied by the minute. If Hackworth provided him any more reassurance on the matter of the book, he would no doubt curl up on the sofa and fall asleep. "Still, I should mention the book in my official report– which will be shared with New Atlantis authorities, as the victim in this case belonged to that phyle."
   "Don't," said Hackworth, finally turning to look Chang in the eye for the first time. "Don't mention it."
   "Ah, I cannot imagine your motive for saying this," Chang said, "but I have little leeway in the matter. We are closely monitored by our supervisors."
   "Perhaps you could simply explain my feelings to your supervisor."
   Lieutenant Chang received this suggestion with a look of wild surmise. "Mr. Hackworth, you are a very clever fellow– as I already gathered from your demanding and very responsible position– but I am ashamed to tell you that your excellently devious plan may not work. My supervisor is a cruel taskmaster with no regard for human feelings. To be quite frank– and I tell you this in all confidence– he is not entirely without ethical blemishes."
   "Ah," Hackworth said, "so if I am following you-"
   "Oh, no, Mr. Hackworth, it is I who am following you."
   "-the appeal to sympathy won't work, and we will have to sway him using another strategy, perhaps related to this ethical blind spot."
   "That is an approach that had not occurred to me."
   "Perhaps you should do some thinking, or even some research, as to what level and type of inducement might be required," Hackworth said, suddenly walking toward the exit. Lieutenant Chang followed him. Hackworth hauled his front door open and allowed Chang to retrieve his own hat and umbrella from the rack. "Then simply get back to me and spell it out as plainly and simply as you can manage. Good night, Lieutenant Chang."
   As he rode his bicycle toward the gate on his way back to the Leased Territories, Chang was exultant over the success of tonight's research. Of course, neither he nor Judge Fang was interested in extracting bribes from this Hackworth; but Hackworth's willingness to pay served as proof that the book did, in fact, embody stolen intellectual property. But then he bridled his emotions, remembering the words of the philosopher Tsang to Yang Fu upon the latter's appointment to chief criminal judge: "The rulers have failed in their duties, and the people consequently have been disorganized for a long time. When you have found out the truth of any accusation, be grieved for and pity them, and do not feel joy at your own ability."
   Not that Chang's abilities had even been tested this evening; nothing could be easier than getting the New Atlantans to believe that Chinese police were corrupt.

Miranda takes an interest in an anonymous client.

   Miranda scanned her balance sheet at the end of one month and discovered that her leading source of income was no longer Silk Road or Taming of the Shrew — it was that storybook about Princess Nell. In a way that was surprising, because kid stuff usually didn't pay well, but in another way it wasn't– because she had been spending an incredible amount of time in that ractive lately.
   It had started small: a story, just a few minutes long, involving a dark castle, a wicked stepmother, and a gate with twelve locks. It would have been forgettable, except for two things: It paid much better than most kid work, because they were specifically looking for highly rated actresses, and it was rather dark and weird by the standards of contemporary children's literature. Not many people were into that whole Grimm Brothers scene anymore.
   She collected a few ucus for her trouble and forgot about it. But the next day, the same contract number came up on her mediatron again. She accepted the job and found herself reading the same story, except that it was longer and more involved, and it kept backtracking and focusing in on tiny little bits of itself, which then expanded into stories in their own right.
   Because of the way that the ractive was hooked up, she didn't get direct feedback from her counterpart on the other end. She assumed it was a little girl. But she couldn't hear the girl's voice. Miranda was presented with screens of text to be read, and she read them. But she could tell that this process of probing and focusing was being directed by the girl. She had seen this during her governess days. She knew that on the other end of this connection was a little girl insatiably asking why. So she put a little gush of enthusiasm into her voice at the beginning of each line, as if she were delighted that the question had been asked.
   When the session was over, the usual screen came up telling her how much she'd made, the contract number, and so on. Before she signed off on it, she checked the little box labelled MARK HERE IF YOU WOULD LIKE A CONTINUING RELATIONSHIP WITH THIS CONTRACT. The relationship box, they called it, and it only came up with higher quality ractives, where continuity was important. The disping process worked so well that any ractor, male or female, bass or soprano, would sound the same to the end user. But discriminating customers could of course tell ractors apart anyway because of subtle differences in style, and once they had a relationship with one performer, they liked to keep it. Once Miranda checked the box and signed off, she'd get first crack at any more Princess Nell jobs.
   Within a week she was teaching this girl how to read. They'd work on letters for a while and then wander off into more stories about Princess Nell, stop in the middle for a quick practical demonstration of basic math, return to the story, and then get sidetracked with an endless chain of "why this?" and "why that?" Miranda had spent a lot of time with kiddie ractives, both as a child and as a governess, and the superiority of this thing was palpable– like hefting an antique silver fork when you'd been eating with plastic utensils for twenty years, or slithering into a tailor-made evening gown when you were used to jeans.
   These and other associations came into Miranda's mind on any of the rare moments when she came into contact with something of Quality, and if she didn't make a conscious effort to stop the process, she would end up remembering just about everything that had happened to her during the first years of her life– the Mercedes taking her to private school, the crystal chandelier that would ring like fairy bells when she climbed up on the huge mahogany dinner table to tickle it, her paneled bedroom with the four-poster bed with the silk-and-goosedown duvet. For reasons still unspecified, Mother had moved them far away from all of that, into what passed for poverty these days. Miranda only remembered that, when she had been physically close to Father, Mother had watched them with more vigilance than seemed warranted.
   A month or two into the relationship, Miranda groggily signed off from a long Princess Nell session and was astounded to notice that she'd been going for eight hours without a break. Her throat was raw, and she hadn't been to the loo in hours. She had made a lot of money. And the time in New York was something like six in the morning, which made it seem unlikely that the little girl lived there.
   She must be in a time zone not many hours different from Miranda's, and she must sit there playing with that ractive storybook all day long instead of going to school like a little rich girl should. It was slim evidence to go on, but Miranda never needed much evidence to confirm her belief that rich parents were just as capable of fucking with their children's minds as anyone.