General description of life with the Constable;
his avocations and other peculiarities;
a disturbing sight;
Nell learns about his past;
a conversation over dinner.

   The garden house had two rooms, one for sleeping and one for playing. The playing room had a set of double doors, made of many small windows, that opened onto Constable Moore's garden. Nell had been told to be careful with the little windows, because they were made of real glass. The glass was bubbly and uneven, like the surface of a pot of water just before it breaks into a boil, and Nell liked to look at things through it because, even though she knew it was not as strong as a common window, it made her feel safer, as though she were hiding behind something.
   The garden itself was forever trying to draw the little house into it; many vast-growing vines of ivy, wisteria, and briar rose were deeply engaged in the important project of climbing the walls, using the turtleshell-colored copper drainpipes, and the rough surfaces of the brick and mortar, as fingerholds. The slate roof of the cottage was phosphorescent with moss. From time to time, Constable Moore would charge into the breach with a pair of trimmers and cut away some of the vines that so prettily framed the view through Nell's glass doors, lest they imprison her.
   During Nell's second year living in the cottage, she asked the Constable if she might have a bit of garden space of her own, and after an early phase of profound shock and misgivings, the Constable eventually pulled up a few flagstones, exposing a small plot, and caused one of the Dovetail artisans to manufacture some copper window boxes and attach them to the cottage walls. In the plot, Nell planted some carrots, thinking about her friend Peter who had vanished so long ago, and in the window boxes she planted some geraniums. The Primer taught her how to do it and also reminded her to dig up a carrot sprout every few days and examine it so that she could learn how they grew. Nell learned that if she held the Primer above the carrot and stared at a certain page, it would turn into a magic illustration that would grow larger and larger until she could see the tiny little fibers that grew out of the roots, and the one-celled organisms clinging to the fibers, and the mitochondria inside them. The same trick worked on anything, and she spent many days examining flies' eyes, bread mold, and blood cells that she got out of her own body by pricking her finger. She could also go up on hilltops during cold clear nights and use the Primer to see the rings of Saturn and the moons of Jupiter.
   Constable Moore continued to work his daily shift at the gatehouse. When he came home in the evening, he and Nell would often dine together inside his house. At first they got food straight from the M.C., or else the Constable would fry up something simple, like sausage and eggs. During this period, Princess Nell and the other characters in the Primer found themselves eating a lot of sausage and eggs too, until Duck lodged a protest and taught the Princess how to cook healthier food. Nell then got in the habit of cooking a healthy meal with salad and vegetables, several afternoons a week after she got home from school. There was some grumbling from the Constable, but he always cleaned up his plate and sometimes washed the dishes.
   The Constable spent a lot of time reading books. Nell was welcome to be in his house when he was doing this, as long as she was quiet. Frequently he would shoo her out, and then he would get in touch with some old friend of his over the big mediatron on the wall of his library. Usually Nell would just go back to her little cottage during these times, but sometimes, especially if the moon was full, she would wander around in the garden. This seemed larger than it really was by virtue of being divided into many small compartments. On late full-moon nights, her favorite place was a grove of tall green bamboo with some pretty rocks strewn around. She would sit with her back against a rock, read her Primer, and occasionally hear sound emanating from the inside of Constable Moore's house as he talked on the mediatron: mostly deep bellowing laughter and explosions of good-natured profanity. For quite some time she assumed that it was not the Constable who was making these sounds, but rather whomever he was talking to; because in her presence the Constable was always very polite and reserved, albeit somewhat eccentric. But one night she heard loud moaning noises coming from his house, and crept down out of the bamboo grove to see what was happening.
   From her vantage point through the glass doors, she couldn't see the mediatron, which was facing away from her. Its light illuminated the whole room, painting the normally warm and cozy space with lurid flashing colors, and throwing long jagged shadows. Constable Moore had shoved all the furniture and other obstructions to the walls and rolled up the Chinese carpet to expose the floor, which Nell had always assumed was made of oak, like the floor in her cottage; but the floor was, in fact, a large mediatron itself, glowing rather dimly compared to the one on the wall, and displaying a lot of rather high-resolution material: text documents and detailed graphics with the occasional dine feed. The Constable was down on his hands and knees amidst this, bawling like a child, the tears collecting in the shallow saucers of his half-glasses and spattering onto the mediatron, which illuminated them weirdly from below.
   Nell wanted badly to go in and comfort him, but she was too scared. She stood and watched, frozen in indecision, and realized as she did so that the flashes of light coming from the mediatrons reminded her of explosions-or rather pictures of explosions. She backed away and went back into her little house.
   Half an hour later, she heard the unearthly noise of Constable Moore's bagpipes emanating from the bamboo grove. In the past he had occasionally picked them up and made a few squealing noises, but this was the first time she'd heard a formal recital. She was not an expert on the pipes, but she thought he sounded not bad. He was playing a slow number, a coronach, and it was so sad that it almost tore Nell's heart asunder; the sight of the Constable weeping helplessly on his hands and knees was not half so sad as the music he was playing now.
   In time he moved on to a faster and happier pibroch. Nell emerged from her cottage into the garden. The Constable was just a silhouette slashed into a hundred ribbons by the vertical shafts of the bamboo, but when she moved back and forth, some trick of her eye reassembled the image. He was standing in a pool of moonlight. He had changed clothes: now he was wearing his kilt, and a shirt and beret that seemed to belong to some sort of a uniform. When his lungs were empty, he would draw in a great breath, his chest would heave, and an array of silvery pins and insignia would glimmer in the moonlight.
   He had left the doors open. She walked into the house, not bothering to be stealthy because she knew that she could not possibly be heard over the sound of the bagpipe.
   The wall and the floor were both giant mediatrons, and both had been covered with a profusion of media windows, hundreds and hundreds of separate panes, like a wall on a busy city street where posters and bills have been pasted up in such abundance that they have completely covered the substrate. Some of the panes were only as big as the palm of Nell's hand, and some of them were the size of wall posters. Most of the ones on the floor were windows into written documents, grids of numbers, schematic diagrams (lots of organizational trees), or wonderful maps, drawn with breathtaking precision and clarity, with rivers, mountains, and villages labeled in Chinese characters. As Nell surveyed this panorama, she flinched once or twice from the impression that something small was creeping along the floor; but there were no bugs in the room, it was just an illusion created by small fluctuations in the maps and in the rows and columns of numbers. These things were ractive, just like the words in the Primer; but unlike the Primer, they were responding not to what Nell did but, she supposed, to events far away.
   When she finally raised her gaze from the floor to view the mediatrons lining the walls, she saw that most of the panes there were much larger, and most of them carried dine feeds, and most of these had been frozen. The images were very sharp and clear. Some of them were landscapes: a stretch of rural road, a bridge across a dried-up river, a dusty village with flames bubbling from some of the houses. Some of them were pictures of people: talking-head shots of Chinese men wearing dirty uniforms with dark mountains, clouds of dust, or drab green vehicles as backdrops.
   In one of the dine feeds, a man was lying on the ground, his dusty uniform almost the same color as the dirt. Suddenly this image moved; the feed had not been frozen like the others. Someone was walking past the camera: a Chinese man in indigo pajamas, decorated with scarlet ribbons tied round his head and his waist, though these had gone brown with grime. When he had passed out of the frame, Nell focused on the other man, the one who was lying in the dust, and she realized for the first time that he did not have a head.
   Constable Moore must have heard Nell's screaming over the sound of his bagpipes, for he was in the room within a few moments, shouting commands to the mediatrons, which all went black and became mere walls and a floor. The only image remaining in the room now was the big painting of Guan Di, the god of war, who glowered down upon them as always. Constable Moore was extremely ill at ease whenever Nell showed any kind of emotion, but he seemed more comfortable with hysteria than he was with, say, an invitation to play house or an attack of the giggles. He picked Nell up, carried her across the room at arm's length, and set her down in a deep leather chair. He left the room for a moment and came back with a large glass of water, then carefully molded her hands around it. "You must breathe deeply and drink water," he was saying, almost sotto voce; he seemed to have been saying it for a long time.
   She was a little surprised to find that she did not cry forever, though a few aftershocks came along and had to be managed in the same way. She kept trying to say, "I can't stop crying," stabbing the syllables one at a time.
   The tenth or eleventh time she said this, Constable Moore said,
   "You can't stop drying because you're all fucked up psychologically." He said it in a kind of bored professional tone that might have sounded cruel; but to Nell it was, for some reason, most reassuring.
   "What do you mean?" she said finally, when she could speak without her throat going all funny.
   "I mean you're a veteran, girl, just like me, and you've got scars"-he suddenly ripped his shirt open, buttons flying and bouncing all over the room, to reveal his particolored torso-"like I do. The difference is, I know I'm a veteran. You persist in thinking you're just a little girl, like those bloody Vickys you go to school with."

. . .
   From time to time, perhaps once a year, he would turn down the offer of dinner, put that uniform on, climb onto a horse, and ride off in the direction of the New Atlantis Clave. The horse would bring him back in the wee hours of the morning, so drunk he could barely remain in the saddle. Sometimes Nell would help get him into bed, and after he had lapsed into unconsciousness, she could examine his pins and medals and ribbons by candlelight. The ribbons in particular used a fairly elaborate color-coding system.
   But the Primer had some pages in the back that were called the Encyclopædia, and by consulting these, Nell was able to establish that Constable Moore was, or at least had used to be, a brigadier general in the Second Brigade of the Third Division of the First Protocol Enforcement Expeditionary Force. One ribbon implied that he had spent some time as an exchange officer in a Nipponese division, but his home division was apparently the Third. According to the Encyclopædia, the Third was often known as the Junkyard Dogs or, simply, the Mongrels, because it tended to draw its members from the White Diaspora: Uitlanders, Ulster Loyalists, whites from Hong Kong, and rootless sorts from all of the Anglo-American parts of the world.
   One of the pins on the Constable's uniform said that he had graduate-level training in nanotechnological engineering. This was consistent with his belonging to the Second Brigade, which specialized in nanotech warfare. The Encyclopædia said that it had been formed some thirty years ago to tackle some nasty fighting in Eastern Europe where primitive nanotech weapons were being employed.
   A couple of years later, the division had been sent off to South China in a panic. Trouble had been brewing there since Zhang Han Hua had gone on his Long Ride and forced the merchants to kowtow. Zhang had personally liberated several lao gai damps, where slave laborers were hard at work making trinkets for export to the West, smashing computer display screens with the massive dragon's-head grip of his cane, beating the overseers into bloody heaps on the ground. Zhang's "investigations" of various thriving businesses, mostly in the south, had thrown millions of people out of work. They had gone into the streets and raised hell and been joined by sympathetic units of the People's Liberation Army. The rebellion was eventually put down by PLA units from the north, but the leaders had vanished into the "concrete countryside" of the Pearl Delta, and so Zhang had been forced to set up a permanent garrison state in the south. The northern troops had kept order crudely but effectively for a few years, until, one night, an entire division of them, some 15,000 men, was wiped out by an infestation of nanosites.
   The leaders of the rebellion emerged from their hiding places, proclaimed the Coastal Republic, and called for Protocol Enforcement troops to come in and protect them. Colonel Arthur Hornsby Moore, a veteran of the fighting in Eastern Europe, was brought in to command. He had been born in Hong Kong, left as a small child when the Chinese took it over, spent much of his youth wandering around Asia with his parents, and eventually settled in the British Isles. He was picked for the job because he was fluent in Cantonese and not half bad in Mandarin. Looking at the old cine clips in the Encyclopædia, Nell could see a younger Constable Moore, the same man with more hair and fewer doubts.
   The Chinese Civil War began in earnest three years later, when the Northerns, who didn't have access to nanotech, started lobbing nukes. Not long afterward, the Muslim nations had finally gotten their act together and overrun much of Xinjiang Province, killing some of the Han Chinese population and driving the rest eastward into the maw of the civil war. Colonel Moore suffered an extremely dire infestation of primitive nanosites and was removed from the action and put on extended convalescent leave. By that time, the truce line between the Celestial Kingdom and the Coastal Republic had been established.
   Since then, as Nell knew from her studies at the Academy, Lau Ge had succeeded Zhang as the northern leader-the leader of the Celestial Kingdom. After a decent interval had passed, he had thoroughly purged all remaining traces of Communist ideology, denouncing it as a Western imperialist plot, and proclaimed himself Chamberlain to the Throneless King. The Throneless King was Confucius, and Lau Ge was now the highest-ranking of all the mandarins.
   The Encyclopædia did not say much more about Colonel Arthur Hornsby Moore, except that he'd resurfaced as an adviser a few years later during some outbreaks of nanotech terrorism in Germany, and later retired and became a security consultant. In this latter capacity he had helped to promulgate the concept of defense in depth, around which all modern cities, including Atlantis/Shanghai, were built.

. . .
   Nell cooked the Constable an especially nice dinner one Saturday, and when they were finished with dessert, she began to tell him about Harv and Tequila, and Harv's tales of the incomparable Bud, their dear departed father. Suddenly it was about three hours later, and Nell was still telling the Constable stories about Mom's boyfriends, and the Constable was continuing to listen, reaching up occasionally to fiddle with his white beard but otherwise displaying an extremely grave and thoughtful countenance. Finally she got to the part about Burt, and how Nell had tried to kill him with the screwdriver, and how he had chased them down the stairs and apparently met his demise at the hands of the mysterious round-headed Chinese gentleman. The Constable found this extremely interesting and asked many questions, first about the detailed tactical development of the screwdriver assault and then about the style of dancing used by the Chinese gentleman, and what he was wearing.
   "I have been angry at my Primer ever since that night," Nell said.
   "Why?" said the Constable, looking surprised, though he was hardly more surprised than Nell herself. Nell had said a remarkable number of things this evening without having ever, to her memory, thought them first; or at least she didn't believe she had ever thought them before.
   "I cannot help but feel that it misled me. It made me suppose that killing Burt would be a simple matter, and that it would improve my life; but when I tried to put these ideas into practice . . ." She could not think of what to say next.
   ". . . the rest of your life happened," the Constable said. "Girl, you must admit that your life with Burt dead has been an improvement on your life with Burt alive."
   "Yes."
   "So the Primer was correct on that point. Now, as to the fact that killing people is a more complicated business in practice than in theory, I will certainly concede your point. But I think it is not likely to be the only instance in which real life turns out to be more complicated than what you have seen in the book. This is the Lesson of the Screwdriver, and you would do well to remember it. All it amounts to is that you must be ready to learn from sources other than your magic book."
   "But of what use is the book then?"
   "I suspect it is very useful. You want only the knack of translating its lessons into the real world. For example," the Constable said, plucking his napkin from his lap and crushing it into the tabletop, "let us take something very concrete, such as beating the bejesus out of people." He stood up and tromped out into the garden. Nell ran after him. "I have seen you doing your martial-arts exercises," he said, switching to a peremptory outdoor voice, an addressing-the-troops voice. "Martial arts means beating the bejesus out of people. Now, let us see you try your luck with me." Negotiations ensued as Nell endeavored to establish whether the Constable was serious. This being accomplished, she sat down on the flagstones and began getting her shoes off. The Constable watched her with raised eyebrows.
   "Oh, that's very formidable," he said. "All evildoers had best be on the lookout for little Nell-unless she happens to be wearing her bloody shoes."
   Nell did a couple of stretching exercises, ignoring more derisive commentary from the Constable. She bowed to him, and he waved his hand at her dismissively. She got set into the stance that Dojo had taught her. In response, the Constable moved his feet about an inch farther apart than they had been, and pooched his belly out, which was apparently the chosen stance of some mysterious Scottish fighting technique.
   Nothing happened for a long time except for a lot of dancing around. Nell danced, that is, and the Constable blundered around desultorily. "What's this?" he said. "All you know is defense?"
   "Mostly, sir," Nell said. "I do not suppose it was the Primer's intention to teach me how to assault people."
   "Oh, what good is that?" the Constable sneered, and suddenly he reached out and grabbed Nell by the hair– not hard enough to hurt. He held her for a few moments, and then let her go. "Thus endeth the first lesson," he said.
   "You think that I should cut my hair off?"
   The Constable looked terribly disappointed. "Oh, no," he said,
   "never, ever, ever cut your hair off. If I grabbed you by your wrist"– and he did– "would you cut your arm off?"
   "No, sir."
   "Did the Primer teach you that people would pull your hair?"
   "No, sir."
   "Did it teach you that your mother's boyfriends would beat you up, and your mother not protect you?"
   "No, sir, except insofar as it told me stories about people who did evil."
   "People doing evil is a good lesson. What you saw in there a few weeks ago"-and by this Nell knew he was referring to the headless soldier on the mediatron-"is one application of that lesson, but it's too obvious to be of any good. Ah, but your mother not protecting you from boyfriends-that has some subtlety, doesn't it?
   "Nell," the Constable continued, indicating through his tone of voice that the lesson was concluding, "the difference between ignorant and educated people is that the latter know more facts. But that has nothing to do with whether they are stupid or intelligent. The difference between stupid and intelligent people-and this is true whether or not they are well-educated-is that intelligent people can handle subtlety. They are not baffled by ambiguous or even contradictory situations-in fact, they expect them and are apt to become suspicious when things seem overly straightforward.
   "In your Primer you have a resource that will make you highly educated, but it will never make you intelligent. That comes from life. Your life up to this point has given you all of the experience you need to be intelligent, but you have to think about those experiences. If you don't think about them, you'll be psychologically unwell. If you do think about them, you will become not merely educated but intelligent, and then, a few years down the road, you will probably give me cause to wish I were several decades younger."
   The Constable turned and walked back into his house, leaving Nell alone in the garden, pondering the meaning of that last statement. She supposed it was the sort of thing she might understand later, when she had become intelligent.

Carl Hollywood returns from abroad;
he and Miranda discuss the status and future of her racting career.

   Carl Hollywood came back from a month-long trip to London, where he'd been visiting old friends, catching some live theatre, and making face-to-face contacts with some of the big ractive developers, hoping to swing some contracts in their direction. When he got back, the whole company threw a party for him in the theatre's little bar. Miranda thought she handled it pretty well.
   But the next day he cornered her backstage. "What's up?" he said. "And I don't mean that in the usual offhanded way. I want to know what's going on with you. Why have you switched to the evening shift during my absence? And why were you acting so weird at the party?"
   "Well, Nell and I have had an interesting few months."
   Carl looked startled, stepped back half a pace, then sighed and rolled his eyes.
   "Of course, her altercation with Burt was traumatic, but she seems to have dealt with it well."
   "Who's Burt?"
   "I have no idea. Someone who was physically abusing her. Apparently she managed to find some kind of new living situation in short order, probably with the assistance of her brother Harv, who has, however, not stayed with her-he's stuck in the same old bad situation, while Nell has moved on to something better."
   "She has? That's good news," said Carl, only half sarcastically.
   Miranda smiled at him. "See? That's exactly the kind of feedback I need. I don't talk about this stuff to anyone because I'm afraid they'll think I'm mad. Thank you. Keep it up."
   "What is Nell's new situation?" Carl Hollywood asked contritely.
   "I think she's in school somewhere. She appears to be learning new material that isn't explicitly covered in the Primer, and she's developing more sophisticated forms of social interaction, suggesting that she's spending more time around a higher class of people."
   "Excellent."
   "She's not as concerned with immediate issues of physical self-defense, so I gather that she's in a safe living situation. However, her new guardian must be an emotionally distant sort, because she frequently seeks solace under the wings of Duck."
   Carl looked funny. "Duck?"
   "One of four personages who accompanies and advises Princess Nell. Duck embodies domestic, maternal virtues. Actually, Peter and Dinosaur are now gone– both male figures who embodied survival skills."
   "Who's the fourth one?"
   "Purple. I think she'll become a lot more relevant to Nell's life around puberty."
   "Puberty? You said Nell was between five and seven."
   "So?"
   "You think you'll still be doing this-" Carl's voice wound down to a stop as he worked out the implications.
   "-for at least six or eight years. Oh yes, I should certainly think so. It's a very serious commitment, raising a child."
   "Oh, god!" Carl Hollywood said, and collapsed into a big, tatty, overstuffed chair they kept backstage for such purposes.
   "That's why I've switched to the evening shift. Ever since Nell started going to school, she's started using the Primer exclusively in the evening. Apparently she's in a time zone within one or two hours of this one."
   "Good," Carl muttered, "that narrows it down to about half of the world's population."
   "What's the problem here?" Miranda said. "It's not like I'm not getting paid for this."
   Carl gave her a good, dispassionate, searching look. "Yes. It brings in adequate revenue."

Three girls go exploring;
a conversation between Lord Finkle-McGraw and Mrs. Hackworth;
afternoon at the estate.

   Three girls moved across the billiard-table lawn of a great manor house, circling and swarming about a common center of gravity like gamboling sparrows. Sometimes they would stop, turn inward to face one another, and engage in animated discussion. Then they would suddenly take off running, seemingly free from the constraints of inertia, like petals struck by a gust of spring wind.
   They wore long heavy wool coats over their dresses to protect them from the cool damp air of New Chusan's high central plateau. They seemed to be making their way toward an expanse of broken ground some half-mile distant, separated from the great house's formal gardens by a gray stone wall splashed with bits of lime green and lavender where moss and lichen had taken hold. The terrain beyond the wall was a muted hazel color, like a bolt of Harris tweed that has tumbled from the back of a wagon and come undone, though the incipient blooming of the heather had flung a pale violet mist across it, nearly transparent but startlingly vivid in those places where the observer's line of sight grazed the natural slope of the terrain-if the word natural could properly be applied to any feature of this island.
   Otherwise as light and free as birds, the girls were each weighed down by a small burden that seemed incongruous in the present setting, for the efforts of the adults to persuade them to leave their books behind had, as ever, been unavailing.
   One of the observers had eyes only for the little girl with long flamecolored hair. Her connexion to that child was suggested by her auburn hair and eyebrows. She was dressed in a hand-sewn frock of woven cotton, whose crispness betrayed its recent provenance in a milliner's atelier in Dovetail. If the gathering had included more veterans of that elongated state of low-intensity warfare known as Society, this observation would have been keenly made by those soi-disant sentries who stood upon the battlements, keeping vigil against bounders who would struggle their way up the vast glacis separating wage slaves from Equity Participants. It would have been duly noted and set forth in the oral tradition that Gwendolyn Hackworth, though attractive, hard-waisted, and poised, lacked the confidence to visit Lord Finkle-McGraw's house in anything other than a new dress made for the occasion.
   The gray light suffusing the drawing room through its high windows was as gentle as mist. As Mrs. Hackworth stood enveloped in that light, sipping beige tea from a cup of translucent bone china, her face let down its guard and betrayed some evidence of her true state of mind. Her host, Lord Finkle-McGraw, thought that she looked drawn and troubled, though her vivacious comportment during the first hour of their interview had led him to suppose otherwise.
   Sensing that his gaze had lingered on her face for longer than was strictly proper, he looked to the three little girls ambling across the garden. One of the girls had raven hair that betrayed her partly Korean heritage; but having established her whereabouts as a sort of reference point, he shifted his attention to the third girl, whose hair was about halfway through a natural and gradual transition from blond to brown. This girl was the tallest of the three, though all were of about the same age; and though she participated freely in all of their lighthearted games, she rarely initiated them and, when left to her own devices, tended toward a grave mien that made her seem years older than her playmates. As the Equity Lord watched the trio's progress, he sensed that even the style of her movement was different from the others'; she was lithe and carefully balanced, while they bounded unpredictably like rubber balls on rough-hewn stone.
   The difference was (as he realized, watching them more keenly) that Nell always knew where she was going. Elizabeth and Fiona never did. This was a question not of native intelligence (Miss Matheson's tests and observations proved that much) but of emotional stance. Something in the girl's past had taught her, most forcefully, the importance of thinking things through.
   "I ask you for a prediction, Mrs. Hackworth. Which one shall reach the moor first?"
   At the sound of his voice, Mrs. Hackworth recomposed her face. "This sounds like a letter to the etiquette columnist of the Times. If I try to flatter you by guessing that it will be your granddaughter, am I implicitly accusing her of impulsiveness?"
   The Equity Lord smiled tolerantly. "Let us set aside etiquette– a social convention not relevant to this enquiry-and be scientific."
   "Ah. If only my John were here."
   He is here, Lord Finkle-McGraw thought, in each one of thosebooks. But he didn't say it. "Very well, I will expose myself to the risk of humiliation by predicting that Elizabeth reaches the wall first; that Nell finds the secret way through; but that your daughter is the first one to venture through it."
   "I'm sure you could never be humiliated in my presence, Your Grace," Mrs. Hackworth said. It was something she had to say, and he did not really hear it.
   They turned back to the windows. When the girls had reached to within a stone's throw of the wall, they began to move toward it more purposefully. Elizabeth broke free from the group, ran forward, and was the first to touch the cool stones, followed a few paces later by Fiona. Nell was far behind, not having altered her steady stride.
   "Elizabeth is a Duke's granddaughter, accustomed to having her way, and has no natural reticence; she surges to the fore and claims the goal as her birthright," Finkle-McGraw explained. "But she has not really thought about what she is doing."
   Elizabeth and Fiona both had their hands on the wall now, as if it were Home in a game of tag. But Nell had stopped and was turning her head from side to side, surveying the length of the wall as it clambered and tumbled over the increasingly rough shape of the land. After some time she held out one hand, pointing at a section of the wall a short distance away, and began to move toward it.
   "Nell stands above the fray and thinks," Finkle-McGraw said.
   "To the other girls, the wall is a decorative feature, no? A pretty thing to run to and explore. But not to Nell. Nell knows what a wall is. It is a knowledge that went into her early, knowledge she doesn't have to think about. Nell is more interested in gates than in walls. Secret hidden gates are particularly interesting."
   Fiona and Elizabeth moved uncertainly, trailing their tiny pink hands across the damp stone, unable to see where Nell was leading them. Nell strode across the grass until she had reached a small declivity. She almost disappeared into it as she clambered down toward the foundation of the wall.
   "An opening for drainage," Finkle-McGraw explained. "Please do not be concerned. I happened to ride that way this morning. The current is only ankle-deep, and the diameter of the culvert just right for eight-yearold girls. The passage is several meters long-more promising than threatening, I should hope."
   Fiona and Elizabeth moved cautiously, startled by Nell's discovery. All three of the girls disappeared into the cleft. A few moments later, a blaze of fiery red could be descried bouncing rapidly across the moor beyond the wall. Fiona clambered up a small outcropping of rocks that marked the beginning of the moor, and beckoned excitedly to her companions.
   "The secret passage is found by Nell, but she is cautious and patient. Elizabeth is taken aback by her early impulsiveness-she feels foolish and perhaps even a bit sullen. Fiona-"
   "Fiona sees a magical gateway to an enchanted kingdom, no doubt," Mrs. Hackworth said, "and even now is crestfallen to find that you have not stocked the premises with unicorns and dragons. She would not hesitate for a moment to fly down that tunnel. This world is not where my Fiona wants to live, Your Grace. She wants another world, where magic is everywhere, and stories come to life, and ..."
   Her voice trailed away, and she cleared her throat uncomfortably. Lord Finkle-McGraw glanced at her and saw pain in her face, quickly masked. He understood the rest of her sentence without hearing it: . . . and my husband is here with us.
   A pair of riders, a man and a woman, trotted up a gravel path that ran along the edge of the gardens, through a pair of wrought-iron gates in the stone wall, which opened for them. The man was Lord Finkle-McGraw's son Colin, the woman was his wife, and they had ridden out onto the moor to keep an eye on their daughter and her two little friends. Seeing that their supervision was no longer required, Lord Finkle-McGraw and Mrs. Hackworth turned away from the window and drew instinctively closer to a fire burning in a stone fireplace the size of a garage.
   Mrs. Hackworth sat down in a small rocker, and the Equity Lord chose an old and incongruously battered leather wing chair. A servant poured more tea. Mrs. Hackworth set the saucer and cup in her lap, guarding it with her hands, and collected herself.
   "I have been desirous of making certain enquiries regarding my husband's whereabouts and activities, which have been a mystery to me almost since the moment he departed," she said, "and yet I was led to believe, from the very general and guarded statements he made to me, that the nature of those activities is secret, and that, if Your Grace has any knowledge of them-and that you do, is of course merely a convenient supposition on my part-you must treat that knowledge with flawless discretion. It goes without saying, I trust, that I would not use even my feeble powers of persuasion to induce you to violate the trust reposed in you by a higher power."
   "Let us take it as a given that both of us will do what is honourable," Finkle-McGraw said with a reassuringly casual smile.
   "Thank you. My husband continues to write me letters, every week or so, but they are extremely general, nonspecific, and perfunctory. But in recent months, these letters have become full of strange images and emotions. They are-bizarre. I have begun to fear for my husband's mental stability, and for the prospects of any undertaking that relies upon his good judgment. And while I would not hesitate to tolerate his absence for as long as is necessary for him to carry out his duties, the uncertainty has become most trying for me."
   "I am not wholly ignorant of the matter, and I do not think I am violating any trust when I say that you are not the only person who has been surprised by the duration of his absence," Lord Finkle-McGraw said. "Unless I am very much mistaken, those who conceived of his mission never imagined that it would last for so long. It may ease your suffering in some small degree to know that he is not thought to be in danger."
   Mrs. Hackworth smiled dutifully, and not for very long.
   "Little Fiona seems to handle her father's absence well."
   "Oh, but to Fiona, he has never been gone," Mrs. Hackworth said. "It is the book, you see, that ractive book. When John gave it to her, just before he departed, he said that it was magic, and that he would talk to her through it. I know it's nonsense, of course, but she really believes that whenever she opens that book, her father reads her a story and even plays with her in an imaginary world, so that she hasn't really missed him at all. I haven't the heart to tell her that it's nothing more than a computerized media programme."
   "I am inclined to believe that, in this case, keeping her in ignorance is a very wise policy," Finkle-McGraw said.
   "It has served her well thus far. But as time goes on, she is more and more flighty and less disposed to concentrate on her schoolwork. She lives in a fantasy and is happy there. But when she learns that the fantasy is just that, I fear it will not go well for her."
   "She is hardly the first young lady to display signs of a vivid imagination," the Equity Lord said. "Sooner or later they seem to turn out all right."
   The three little explorers, and their two adult outriders, returned to the great house shortly. Lord Finkle-McGraw's desolate private moor was as alienated from the tastes of little girls as single malt whiskey, Gothic architecture, muted colors, and Bruckner symphonies. Once they had reached it and found that it was not equipped with pink unicorns, cotton candy vendors, teen idol bands, or fluorescent green water slides, they lost interest and began to gravitate toward the house-which in and of itself was far from Disneyland, but in which a practiced and assertive user like Elizabeth could find a few consolatory nuggets, such as a full-time kitchen staff, trained in (among many other, completely useless skills) the preparation of hot chocolate.
   Having come as close to the subject of John Percival Hackworth's disappearance as they dared, and careened past it with no damage except some hot faces and watery eyes, Lord Finkle-McGraw and Mrs. Hackworth had withdrawn, by mutual consent, to cooler subjects. The girls would come inside to drink some hot chocolate, and then it would be time for the guests to repair to the quarters assigned them for the day, where they could freshen up and dress for the main event: dinner.
   "I should be pleased to look after the other little girl-Nell-– until the dinner hour," Mrs. Hackworth said. "I noticed that the gentleman who brought her round this morning has not returned from the hunt."
   The Equity Lord chuckled as he imagined General Moore trying to help a little girl dress for dinner. He was graceful enough to know his limits, and so he was spending the day shooting on the remoter stretches of the estate. "Little Nell has a talent for looking after herself and may not need or wish to accept your most generous offer. But she might enjoy spending the interim with Fiona."
   "Forgive me, Your Grace, but I am startled that you would consider leaving a child of her age unattended for most of the afternoon."
   "She would not view it in that way, I assure you, for the same reason that little Fiona does not think of her father as ever having left your house."
   The expression that passed over Mrs. Hackworth's face as she heard this statement suggested less than perfect comprehension. But before she could explain to her host the error of his ways, they were interrupted by the sound of a shrill and bitter conflict making its way down the hall toward them. The door swung open halfway, and Colin Finkle-McGraw appeared. His face was still ruddy from the wind on the moor, and it bore a forced grin that was not terribly distant from a smirk; though his brow knit up periodically as Elizabeth emitted an especially piercing shriek of anger. In one hand he held a copy of the Young Lady's Illustrated Primer. Behind him, Mrs. Finkle-McGraw could be seen holding Elizabeth by the wrist in a grip that recalled the blacksmith's tongs holding a dangerously hot ingot ready for smiting; and the radiant glow of the little girl's face perfected that analogy. She had bent down so that her face was level with Elizabeth's and was hissing something to her in a low and reproaching tone.
   "Sorry, Father," the younger Finkle-McGraw said in a voice slathered with not very convincing synthetic good humor. "Nap time, obviously." He nodded to the other. "Mrs. Hackworth." Then his eyes returned to his father's face and followed the Equity Lord's gaze downward to the book. "She was rude to the servants, Father, and so we have confiscated the book for the rest of the afternoon. It's the only punishment that seems to sink in-we employ it with some frequency."
   "Then perhaps it is not sinking in as well as you suppose," Lord Finkle-McGraw said, looking sad and sounding bemused. Colin Finkle-McGraw chose to interpret this remark as a witticism targeted primarily at Elizabeth-but then, parents of small children must perforce have an entirely different sense of irony than unimpaired humankind.
   "We can't let her spend her life between the covers of your magical book, Father, It is like a little interactive empire, with Elizabeth the empress, issuing all sorts of perfectly bloodcurdling decrees to her obedient subjects. It's important to bring her back to reality from time to time, so that she can get some perspective."
   "Perspective. Very well, I shall look forward to seeing you and Elizabeth, with her new perspective, at dinner."
   "Good afternoon, Father. Mrs. Hackworth," the younger man said, and closed the door, a heavy masterpiece of the woodcarver's art and a fairly effective decibel absorbant.
   Gwendolyn Hackworth now saw something in Lord Finkle-McGraw's face that made her want to leave the room. After speeding through the obligatory pleasantries, she did. She collected Fiona from the chimneycorner where she was cherishing the dregs of her hot chocolate. Nell was there too, reading her copy of the Primer, and Gwendolyn was startled to see that she had not touched her drink at all.
   "What is this?" she exclaimed in what she took to be an appropriately sugary voice. "A little girl who doesn't like hot chocolate?"
   Nell was deeply absorbed in her book, and for a moment Gwendolyn thought that her words had gone unheard. But a few beats later it became evident that the child was merely postponing her response until she reached the end of a chapter. Then she raised her eyes slowly from the page of the book. Nell was a reasonably attractive girl in the way that almost all girls are before immoderate tides of hormones start to make different parts of their faces grow out of proportion to others; she had light brown eyes, glowing orange in the light of the fire, with a kind of feral slant to them. Gwendolyn found it difficult to break her gaze; she felt like a captured butterfly staring up through a magnifying lens into the calm, keen eye of the naturalist.
   "Chocolate is fine," Nell said. "The question is, do I need it."
   There was a rather long pause in the conversation as Gwendolyn groped for something to say. Nell did not seem to be awaiting a response; she had delivered her opinion and was done with it.
   "Well," Gwendolyn finally said, "if you should decide that there is anything you do need, please know that I would be happy to assist you."
   "Your offer is most kind. I am in your debt, Mrs. Hackworth," Nell said. She said it perfectly, like a princess in a book.
   "Very well. Good afternoon," Gwendolyn said. She took Fiona's hand and led her upstairs. Fiona dawdled in a way that was almost perfectly calculated to annoy, and responded to her mother's questions only with nods and shakes of the head, because, as always, her mind was elsewhere. Once they had reached their temporary quarters in the guest wing, Gwendolyn got Fiona settled into bed for a nap, then sat down at an escritoire to work her way through some pending correspondence. But now Mrs. Hackworth found that her own mind was elsewhere, as she pondered these three very strange girls-the three smartest little girls in Miss Matheson's Academy-each with her very strange relationship with her Primer. Her gaze drifted away from the sheets of mediatronic paper scattered about the escritoire, out the window, and across the moor, where a gentle shower had begun to fall. She devoted the better part of an hour to worrying about girls and Primers.
   Then she remembered an assertion that her host had made that afternoon, which she had not fully appreciated at the time: These girls weren't any stranger than any other girls, and to blame their behavior on the Primers was to miss the point entirely. Greatly reassured, she took out her silver pen and began to write a letter to her missing husband, who had never seemed so far away.

Miranda receives an unusual ractive message;
a drive through the streets of Shanghai;
the Cathay Hotel;
a sophisticated soirée;
Carl Hollywood introduces her to two unusual characters.

   It was a few minutes before midnight, and Miranda was about to sign off from the evening shift and clear out of her body stage. This was a Friday night. Nell had apparently decided not to pull an all-nighter this time.
   On school nights, Nell reliably went to bed between ten-thirty and eleven, but Friday was her night to immerse herself in the Primer the way she had as a small child, six or seven years ago, when all of this had started. Right now, Nell was stuck in a part of the story that must have been frustrating for her, namely, trying to puzzle out the social rituals of a rather bizarre cult of faeries that had thrown her into an underground labyrinth. She'd figure it out eventually-she always did-but not tonight.
   Miranda stayed onstage for an extra hour and a half, playing a role in a samurai ractive fairly popular in Japan, in which she was a platinum blond missionary's daughter abducted from Nagasaki by ronin. All she had to do was squeal a lot and eventually be rescued by a good samurai. It was a pity she didn't speak Nipponese and (beyond that) wasn't familiar with the theatrical style of that nation, because supposedly they were doing some radical and interesting things with karamaku–"empty screen" or "empty act." Eight years ago, she would have taken the onehour airship ride to Nippon and learned the language. Four years ago, she at least would have been disgusted with herself for playing this stupid role. But tonight she spoke her lines on cue, squealed and wriggled at the right times, and took her money, along with a hefty tip and the inevitable mash note from the payer-a middle-management type in Osaka who wanted to get to know her better. Of course, the same technology that made it impossible for Miranda to find Nell, made it impossible for this creep to find Miranda.
   An urgent job offer flashed over her screen just as she was putting her stuff together. She checked the ENQUIRY screen; the job didn't pay that much, but it was of very short duration. So she accepted it. She wondered who was sending her urgent job offers; six years ago it had happened frequently, but since she'd gone into her habit of working the evening shift she had, in general, become just another interchangeable Western bimbo with an unpronounceable name.
   It looked like some kind of weird bohemian art piece, some ractors' workshop project from her distant past: a surreal landscape of abstract colored geometric forms with faces occasionally rising out of flat surfaces to speak lines. The faces were texture-mapped, as if wearing elaborately painted makeup, or were sculpted to the texture of orange peels, alligator hide, or durian fruit.
   "We miss her," said one of the faces, the voice a little familiar, but disped into a weird ghostly echoing moan.
   "Where is she?" said another face, rather familiar in its shape.
   "Why has she abandoned us?" said a third face, and even through the texture-mapping and the voice disping, Miranda recognized Carl Hollywood.
   "If only she would come to our party!" cried another one, whom Miranda recognized as a member of the Parnasse Company named Christine something-or-other.
   The prompter gave her a line: Sorry, guys, but I'm working lateagain tonight.
   "Okay, okay," Miranda said, "I'm going to ad lib. Where are you?"
   "The cast party, dummy!" said Carl. "There's a cab waiting for you outside-we sprung for a half-laner!"
   Miranda pulled out of the ractive, finished tidying up the body stage, and left it open so that some other member of the company could come in a few hours later and work the gold shift. She ran down the helical gauntlet of plaster cherubs, muses, and Trojans, across the lobby where a couple of bleary-eyed apprentice ractors were cleaning up the debris from this evening's live performance, and out the front doors. There in the street, illuminated by the queasy pink-and-purple neon of the marquee, was a half-lane cab with its lights on.
   She was dully surprised when the driver headed toward the Bund, not toward the midrise districts in Pudong, where tribeless, lower-income Westerners typically had their flats. Cast parties usually happened in someone's living room.
   Then she reminded herself that the Parnasse was a successful theatre company nowadays, that they had a whole building somewhere full of developers coming up with new ractives, that the current production of Macbeth had cost a lot of money. Carl had flown to Tokyo and Shenzhen and San Francisco seeking investors and had not come back emptyhanded. The first month of performances was sold out.
   But tonight, there had been a lot of empty seats in the house, because most of the opening-night crowd was non-Chinese, and non-Chinese were nervous about going out on the streets because of rumors about the Fists of Righteous Harmony.
   Miranda was nervous too, though she wouldn't admit it. The taxi turned a corner, and its headlights swept across a knot of young Chinese men gathered in a doorway, and as one of them lifted a cigarette to his mouth, she caught a glimpse of a scarlet ribbon knotted around his wrist. Her chest clenched up, her heart fluttered, and she had to swallow hard a few times. But the young men could not see into the silvered windows of the cab. They did not converge on her, brandishing weapons and crying "Sha! Sha!"
   The Cathay Hotel stood in the middle of the Bund, at the intersection with Nanjing Road, the Rodeo Drive of the Far East. As far as Miranda could see-all the way to Nanjing, maybe-it was lined with Western and Nipponese boutiques and department stores, and the airspace above the street was besprent with almond-size aerostats, each with its own cine camera and pattern-recognition ware to watch for suspicious-looking congregations of young men who might be Fist cells.
   Like all of the other big Western buildings on the waterfront, the Cathay was outlined in white light, which was probably a good thing because otherwise it wouldn't have looked like much. The exterior was bleak and dingy in the daytime.
   She played a little game of chicken with the doorman. She strode toward the entrance, confident that he'd haul the door open for her, but he stood there with his hands clasped behind his back, staring back at her sullenly. Finally he gave way and hauled the door open, though she had to break her stride so as not to smash into it.
   George Bernard Shaw had stayed here; Noel Coward had written a play here. The lobby was high and narrow, Beaux Arts marble, glorious ironwork chandeliers, white light from the Bund buildings filtering in through stained-glass arches. An ancient jazz band was playing in the bar, slap bass over trashcan drums. Miranda stood on tiptoe in the entrance, looking for the party, and saw nothing except middle-aged Caucasian airship tourists slow-dancing and the usual lineup of sharp young Chinese men along the bar, hoping she'd come in.
   Eventually she found her way up to the eighth floor, where all the fancy restaurants were. The big banquet room had been rented out by some kind of garishly wealthy organization and was full of men wearing intimidatingly sophisticated suits, women wearing even more intimidating dresses, and the odd sprinkling of Victorians wearing far more conservative-but still dapper and expensive– stuff. The music was fairly restrained, just one tuxedoed Chinese man playing jazz on a grand piano, but on a stage at one end of the room, a larger band was setting up its equipment.
   She was just cringing away, wondering in what back room the scruffy actors' bash might be found, when she heard someone calling her name from inside.
   Carl Hollywood was approaching, striding across the middle of the banquet hall like he owned the place, resplendent in hand-tooled cowboy boots made of many supple and exotic bird and reptile skins, wearing a vast raiment, sort of a cross between a cape and a Western duster, that nearly brushed the floor, and that made him look seven feet tall rather than a mere six and a half. His long blond hair was brushed back away from his forehead, his King Tut beard was sharp and straight as a hoe. He was gorgeous and he knew it, and his blue eyes were piercing right through Miranda, holding her there in front of the open elevator doors, through which she'd almost escaped.
   He gave her a big hug and whirled her around. She shrank against him, shielded from the crowd in the banquet hall by his enveloping cloak. "I look like shit," she said. "Why didn't you tell me it was going to be this kind of a party?"
   "Why didn't you know?" Carl said. As a director, one of his talents was to ask the most difficult imaginable questions.
   "I would have worn something different. I look like-"
   "You look like a young bohemian artiste," Carl said, stepping back to examine her typically form-fitting black bodysuit, "who doesn't give a shit about pretentious clothes, who makes everyone else in the room feel overdressed, and who can get away with it because she's got that special something."
   "You silver-tongued dog," she said, "you know that's bullshit."
   "A few years ago you would have sailed into that room with that lovely chin of yours held up like a battering ram, and everyone would have stepped back to look at you. Why not now?"
   "I don't know," Miranda said. "I think with this Nell thing, I've incurred all the disadvantages of parenthood without actually getting to have a child."
   Carl relaxed and softened, and Miranda knew she'd spoken the words he was looking for. "C'mere," he said. "I want you to meet someone."
   "If you're going to try to fix me up with some wealthy son of a bitch-"
   "Wouldn't dream of it."
   "I'm not going to become a housewife who acts in her spare time."
   "I realize that," Carl said. "Now calm yourself for a minute." Miranda was forcibly ignoring the fact that they were walking through the middle of the room now. Carl Hollywood was drawing all of the attention, which suited her. She exchanged smiles with a couple of ractors who had appeared in the interactive invitation that had summoned her here; both of them were having what looked like very enjoyable conversations with fine-looking people, probably investors.
   "Who are you taking me to meet?"
   "A guy named Beck. An old acquaintance of mine."
   "But not a friend?"
   Carl adopted an uncomfortable grin and shrugged. "We've been friends sometimes. We've also been collaborators. Business partners. This is how life works, Miranda: After a while, you build up a network of people. You pass them bits of data they might be interested in and vice versa. To me, he's one of those guys."
   "I can't help wondering why you want me to meet him."
   "I believe," Carl said very quietly, but using some actor's trick so that she could hear every word, "that this gentleman can help you find Nell. And that you can help him find something he wants." And he stepped aside with a swirl of cloak, pulling out a chair for her. They were in the corner of the banquet hall. Sitting on the opposite side of the table, his back to a large marble-silled window, the illuminated Bund and the mediatronic cacophony of Pudong spilling bloody light across the glossy shoulder-pads of his suit, was a young African man in dreadlocks, wearing dark glasses with minuscule circular lenses held in some kind of ostentatiously complex metallic space grid. Sitting next to him, but hardly noticed by Miranda, was a Nipponese businessman wearing a dark formal kimono and smoking what smelled like an old-fashioned, fully carcinogenic cigar.
   "Miranda, this is Mr. Beck and Mr. Oda, both privateers. Gentlemen, Ms. Miranda Redpath."
   Both men nodded in a pathetic vestige of a bow, but neither made a move to shake hands, which was just as well– nowadays some amazing things could be transferred through skin-to-skin contact. Miranda didn't even nod back to them; she just sat down and let Carl scoot her in. She didn't like people who described themselves as privateers. It was just a pretentious word for a thete– someone who didn't have a tribe.
   Either that, or they really did belong to tribes-from the looks of them, probably some weird synthetic phyle she'd never heard of-and, for some reason, were pretending not to.
   Carl said, "I have explained to the gentlemen, without getting into any details, that you would like to do the impossible. Can I get you something to drink, Miranda?"
   After Carl Hollywood left, there was a rather long silence during which Mr. Beck presumably stared at Miranda, though she could not tell because of the dark glasses. Mr. Oda's primary function appeared to be that of nervous spectator, as if he had wagered half of his net worth on whether Miranda or Mr. Beck would speak first.
   A stratagem occurred to Mr. Oda. He pointed in the direction of the bandstand and nodded significantly. "You like this band?" Miranda looked over at the band, half a dozen men and women in an assortment of races. Mr. Oda's question was difficult to answer because they had not yet made any music. She looked back at Mr. Oda, who pointed significantly at himself.
   "Oh. You're the backer?" Miranda said.
   Mr. Oda withdrew a small glittering object from his pocket and slid it across the table toward Miranda. It was a cloisonné pin shaped like a dragonfly. She had noticed similar ones adorning several partygoers. She picked it up cautiously. Mr. Oda tapped himself on the lapel and nodded, encouraging her to put it on. She left it sitting there on the table for the time being.
   "I'm not seeing anything," Mr. Beck finally said, apparently for Mr. Oda's benefit. "To a first approximation, she is clean."
   Miranda realized that Mr. Beck had been checking her out using some kind of display in his phenomenoscopic glasses. Miranda was still trying to work out some kind of unpleasant response when Mr. Oda leaned forward into his own cloud of cigar smoke. "It is our understanding," he said, "that you wish to make a connection. Your wish is very strong."
   Privateers. The word also implied that these gentlemen, at least in their own minds, had some kind of an angle, some way of making money off of their own lack of tribal affiliation.
   "I've been told that such things are impossible."
   "It's more correct to speak in probabilistic terms," said Mr. Beck. His accent was more Oxford than anything else, with a Jamaican lilt, and a crispness that owed something to India.
   "Astronomically improbable, then," Miranda said.
   "There you go," said Mr. Beck.
   Now, somehow, the ball had found its way into Miranda's court. "If you guys think you've found a way to beat probability, why don't you go into the Vegas ractives and make a fortune?"
   Misters Beck and Oda were actually more amused by that crack than she had expected them to be. They were capable of irony. That was one good sign in the almost overwhelming barrage of negative signals she'd been getting from them so far.
   The band started up, playing dance music with a good beat. The lights came down, and the party began to glitter as light flashed from the dragonfly pins.
   "It wouldn't work," Mr. Beck said, "because Vegas is a game of pure numbers with no human meaning to it. The mind doesn't interface to pure numbers."
   "But probability is probability," Miranda said.
   "What if you have a dream one night that your sister is in a crash, and you contact her the next day and learn that she broke up with her boyfriend?"
   "It could be a coincidence."
   "Yes. But not a very probable one. You see, maybe it's possible to beat probability, when the heart as well as the mind is involved."
   Miranda supposed that neither Mr. Beck nor Mr. Oda understood the essential cruelty of what they were saying. It was much better not to have any hope at all. "Are you guys involved in some kind of religious thing?" she said.
   Misters Beck and Oda looked at each other significantly. Mr. Oda went into some peculiar routine of tooth-sucking and throat-clearing that would probably convey a torrent of information to another Nipponese person but meant nothing to Miranda, other than giving her a general hint that the situation was rather complicated.
   Mr. Beck produced an antique silver snufibox, or a replica of one, took out a pinch of nanosite dust, and hoovered it up into one of his great circular nostrils, then nervously scratched the underside of his nose. He slid his glasses way down, exposing his big brown eyes, and stared distractedly over Miranda's shoulder into the thick of the party, watching the band and the dancers' reaction to it. He was wearing a dragonfly pin, which had begun to glow and to flash gorgeous colored lights, like a fleet of police cars and firetrucks gathered round a burning house.
   The band segued into a peculiar, tuneless, beatless miasma of noise, spawning lazy convection currents in the crowd.
   "How do you guys know Carl?" Miranda said, hoping to break the ice a bit.
   Mr. Oda shook his head apologetically. "I have not had the pleasure of making his acquaintance until recently."
   "Used to do thyuh-tuh with him in London."
   "You're a ractor?"
   Mr. Beck snorted ironically. A variegated silk hankie flourished in his hand, and he blew his nose quickly and cleanly like a practiced snufftaker. "I am a technical boy," he said.
   "You program ractives?"
   "That is a subset of my activities."
   "You do lights and sets? Or digital stuff? Or nanotech?"
   "Invidious distinctions do not interest me. I am interested in one thing," said Mr. Beck, holding up his index finger, topped with a very large but perfectly manicured claw of a fingernail, "and that is use of tech to convey meaning."
   "That covers a lot of areas nowadays."
   "Yes, but it shouldn't. That is to say that the distinctions between those areas are bogus."
   "What's wrong with just programming ractives?"
   "Nothing at all," said Mr. Beck, "just as nothing is wrong with traditional live theatre, or for that matter, sitting round a campfire telling stories, like I used to enjoy on the beach when I was a lad. But as long as there are new ways to be found, it is my job, as a technical boy, to find them. Your art, lady, is racting. Searching for the new tech is mine."
   The noise coming from the band had begun to pulse irregularly. As they talked, the pulses gathered themselves into beats and became steadier. Miranda turned around to look at the people on the dance floor. They were all standing around with faraway looks on their faces, concentrating on something. Their dragonfly pins were flashing wildly now, joining in a coherent pulse of pure white on each beat. Miranda realized that the pins were somehow patched into the wearers' nervous systems and that they were talking to each other, creating the music collectively. A guitarist began to weave an improvised melodic line through the gradually coalescing pattern of sound, and the sound condensed around it as all of the dancers heard the tune. They had a feedback loop going. A young woman began to chant out some kind of tuneless rap that sounded improvised. As she went on, she broke into melody. The music was still weird and formless, but it was beginning to approach something you might hear on a professional recording.
   Miranda turned back to face Mr. Beck. "You think you've invented a new way to convey meaning with technology-"
   "Medium."
   "A new medium, and that it can help me get what I want. Because when meaning is involved, the laws of probability can be broken."
   "There are two misconceptions in your statement. One: I did not invent the medium. Others did, perhaps for different purposes, and I have stumbled across it, or actually just heard intimations.
   "As far as the laws of probability, my lady, these cannot be broken, any more than any other mathematical principle. But laws of physics and mathematics are like a coordinate system that runs in only one dimension. Perhaps there is another dimension perpendicular to it, invisible to those laws of physics, describing the same things with different rules, and those rules are written in our hearts, in a deep place where we cannot go and read them except in our dreams."
   Miranda looked to Mr. Oda, hoping he'd wink or something, but he was staring into the dance floor with a terribly serious expression, as though enfolded in deep thoughts himself, nodding slightly. Miranda drew a deep breath and sighed.
   When she looked up at Mr. Beck again, he was watching her, noting her curiosity about Mr. Oda. He turned one hand palm up and rubbed the ball of his thumb over his fingertips.
   So Beck was the hacker and Oda was the backer. The oldest and most troublesome relationship in the technological world.
   "We require a third participant," Mr. Beck said, dovetailing into her thoughts.
   "To do what?" Miranda said, evasive and defensive at the same time.
   "All technomedia ventures have the same structure," said Mr. Oda, bestirring himself for the first time in a while. By now a nice synergy had developed between band and crowd, and a lot of dancing was going on-some intimidatingly sophisticated stuff, and also some primal moshing. "Three-legged tripod." Oda held up a fist and began to extend fingers as he enumerated the same. Miranda noted that his fingers were gnarly and bent, as if they'd all been broken frequently. Mr. Oda was, perhaps, a veteran practitioner of certain martial arts now disdained by most Nipponese because of their lower-class provenance. "Leg number one: new technological idea. Mr. Beck. Leg number two: adequate financial backing. Mr. Oda. Leg number three: the artist."
   Misters Beck and Oda looked significantly at Miranda. She threw back her head and managed a nice solid laugh, hitting that sweet spot down in her diaphragm. It felt good. She shook her head, letting her hair swing back and forth across her shoulders. Then she leaned forward across the table, shouting to be heard above the band. "You guys must be desperate. I'm old hat, guys. There's half a dozen ractors in this room with better prospects than me. Didn't Carl fill you in? I've been holed up in a body stage for six years doing kid stuff. I'm not a star."
   "Star means a master of conventional ractives, which are precisely the technology we are trying to move beyond," said Mr. Beck, a bit scornful that she wasn't getting it.
   Mr. Oda pointed to the band. "None of these people were professional musicians-some not even amateurs. Musician skills are not relevant for this-these people were new kinds of artists born too early."
   "Almost too early," Mr. Beck said.
   "Oh, my god," Miranda said, starting to get it. For the first time, she believed that what Beck and Oda were talking about– whatever the hell it was-was a real possibility. Which meant that she was ninety percent convinced-though only Beck and Oda understood that.
   It was too loud to talk. A mosher backed into Miranda's chair and nearly fell over her. Beck stood up, came round the table, and extended one hand, asking her to dance. Miranda looked into the Dionysian revel filling the floor and understood that the only way to be safe was to join it. She plucked her dragonfly pin from the tabletop and followed Beck into the midst of the dance. As she pinned it on, it began to flash, and she thought she heard a new strain woven into the song.

From the Primer, Princess Nell enters into the lands of King Coyote.

   All that hot afternoon Nell toiled up the numberless switchbacks, occasionally reaching into the bag that dangled at her waist, drawing out a handful of Purple's ashes and scattering them behind her like seeds. Whenever she stopped to rest, she could look out across the burnt desert she had just crossed: a tawny plain scabbed with reddish-brown volcanic rock, patches of aromatic greenish-gray shrubs clinging like bread mold to any parts that were sheltered from the eternal wind. She had hoped that when she climbed the face of this mountain, she would rise up above the dust, but it had followed her, coating her lips and her toes. When she drew a breath through her nose, it only stung her parched nostrils, and so she had given up trying to smell anything. But late in the afternoon a cool moist draft spilled down the mountain and over her face. She drew in a breath of it, hoping to catch some of the cold air before it trickled down into the desert. It smelled of evergreens.
   As she climbed the switchbacks, she forded those delightful currents of air over and over, so that as she rounded each hairpin turn in the trail, she had an incentive to climb toward the next one. The little shrubs that clutched rocks and cowered in cracks became bigger and more numerous, and flowers began to appear, first tiny little white ones like handfuls of salt strewn over the rocks, then larger blossoms, blue and magenta and brilliant orange, brimming with scented nectar that attracted bees all fuzzy and yellow with stolen pollen. Gnarled oaks and short dense evergreens cast tiny shadows across the path. The skyline grew closer, and the turns in the path became wider as the mountain became less steep. Nell rejoiced when the switchbacks ended and the trail took off straight across an undulating mountaintop meadow thick with purple-flowered heather and marked with occasional stands of tall firs. For a moment she was afraid that this meadow was nothing more than a ledge, and that she had more mountains to ascend; but then the path turned downhill, and treading heavily as new muscles caught her descending weight, she half-ran across a vast boulder, pocked with tiny pools of clear water and occasional lozenges of wet snow, until she reached a point where it fell away from under her and she skidded to a precarious stop, looking down like a peregrine falcon over an immense country of blue lakes and green mountains, shrouded in a whirling storm of silver mist.
   Nell turned the page and saw it, just as the book said. This was a twopage illustration-a color painting, she reckoned. Any one part of it looked just as real as a cine feed. But the geometry of the thing was funny, borrowing some suprarealistic tricks from classical Chinese landscape painting; the mountains were too steep, and they marched away forever into the distance, and if Nell stared, she could see tall castles clinging to their impossibly precipitous slopes, colorful banners waving from their flagpoles bearing heraldic devices that were dynamic: The gryphons crouched, the lions roared, and she could see all of these details, even though the castles should have been miles away; whenever she looked at something it got bigger and turned into a different picture, and when her attention wavered-when she blinked and shook her head-it snapped back to the first view again.
   She spent a long time doing that, because there were dozens of castles at the very least, and she got the feeling that if she kept looking and counting she might look forever. But it wasn't all castles: there were mountains, cities, rivers, lakes, birds and beasts, caravans, and travelers of all kinds.
   She spent a while staring at a group of travelers who had drawn their wagons into a roadside meadow and set up a camp, clapping hands round a bonfire while one of them played a reel on some small bellowspowered bagpipes, barely audible these many miles away. Then she realized that the book hadn't said anything for a long time. "What happened then?" she said.
   The Young Lady's Illustrated Primer said nothing.
   "Nell looked for a safe way down," Nell essayed.
   Her vantage point began to move. A patch of snow swung into view. "No, wait!" she said, "Nell stuffed some clean snow into her water bottles."
   In the painting, Nell could see her bare pink hands scooping up snow and packing it bit by bit into the neck of her bottle. When it was full, she put the cork back in (Nell didn't have to specifr that) and began moving around on the rock, looking for a place that wasn't so steep. Nell didn't have to explain that in detail either; in the ractive, she searched the rock in a fairly rational way and in a few minutes found a stairway chiseled into the rock, winding down the mountain endlessly until it pierced a cloud layer far below. Princess Nell began descending the steps, one at a time.
   After a while, Nell tried an experiment: "Princess Nell descended the stairs for many hours."
   This triggered a series of dissolves like she'd seen on old passives: Her current view dissolved into a closeup of her feet, trudging down a couple of steps, which dissolved into a view from considerably farther down the mountain, followed by a closeup of Princess Nell unscrewing her water bottle and drinking melted snow; another view from farther down; Nell sitting down for a rest; a soaring eagle; the approaching cloud layer; big trees; descending through the mist; and finally, Nell tramping wearily down the last ten steps, which left her in a clearing in a dark coniferous forest, carpeted with rust-colored pine needles. It was twilight, and the wolves were beginning to howl. Nell made the usual arrangements for the night, lit a fire, and curled up to sleep.
   Having reached a good stopping-place, Nell started to close the book. She'd have to continue this later.
   She had just entered the land of the oldest and most powerful of all the Faery Kings. The many castles on the mountains belonged to all of his Dukes and Earls, and she suspected she would have to visit them all before she had gotten what she'd come for. It was not a quick adventure for an early Saturday morning. But just as she was clasping the book together, new words and an illustration appeared on the page she'd been reading, and something about the illustration made her open the book back up. It showed a crow perched on a tree branch above Princess Nell, holding a necklace in its beak. It was eleven jeweled keys strung on a golden chain.
   Princess Nell had been wearing it around her neck; apparently the next event in the story was that this bird stole it while she was sleeping. Beneath the picture was a poem, spoken by the crow from his perch:
   Castles, gardens, gold, and jewels
   Contentment signify, for fools
   Like Princess Nell; but those
   Who cultivate their wit
   Like King Coyote and his crows
   Compile their power bit by bit
   And hide it places no one knows.
   Nell closed up the book This was too upsetting to think about just now. She had been collecting those keys for most of her life. The first she'd taken from King Magpie just after she and Harv had arrived at Dovetail. She had picked up the other ten one at a time during the years since then. She had done this by traveling to the lands of the Faery Kings and Queens who owned those keys and using the tricks she had learned from her Night Friends. Each key had come to her in a different way.
   One of the hardest keys to get had belonged to an old Faery Queen who had seen through every trick that Nell could think up and fought off every assault. Finally, in desperation, Princess Nell had thrown herself on the mercy of that Queen and told her the sad story of Harv locked up in the Dark Castle. The Queen had fed Nell a nice bowl of chicken soup and handed over the key with a smile.
   Not much later, Duck had encountered a nice young mallard on the road and flown away with him to start a family. Purple and Princess Nell then traveled together for several years, and on many a dark night, sitting around the campfire under a full moon, Purple had taught Nell secret things from her magic books and from the ancient lore she kept in her head.
   Recently they had traveled for a thousand miles on camelback across a great desert full of djinns, demons, sultans, and caliphs and finally reached the great onion-domed palace of the local Faery King– himself a djinn of great power-who ruled over all the desert lands. Princess Nell had devised a complicated plan to trick their way into the djinn's treasury. To carry it out, she and Purple had to live in the city around the palace for a couple of years and make many treks into the desert in search of magic lanterns, rings, secret caverns, and the like.
   Finally, Princess Nell and Purple had penetrated to the djinn king's treasury and found the eleventh key. But they had been surprised by the djinn himself, who attacked them in the guise of a fire-breathing serpent. Purple had transformed herself into a giant eagle with metallic wings and talons that could not be burned– much to the surprise of Princess Nell, who had never imagined that her companion possessed such power.
   The battle between Purple and the djinn raged for a day and a night, both combatants transforming themselves into any number of fantastical creatures and hurling all manner of devastating spells at each other, until finally the mighty castle lay in ruins, the desert was scorched and blasted for many miles around, and Purple and the djinn king both lay dead on the floor of what had been the treasury.
   Nell had picked up the eleventh key from the floor, put it on her chain, cremated Purple's body, and scattered her ashes across the desert as she walked, for many days, toward the mountains and the green land, where the eleven keys had now been stolen away from her.

Nell's experiences at school;
a confrontation with Miss Stricken;
the rigors of Supplementary Curriculum;
Miss Matheson's philosophy of education;
three friends go separate ways.

   AGLAIA BRILLIANCE
   EUPHROSYNE JOY
   THALIA BLOOM
   The names of the three graces, and diverse artists' conceptions of the ladies themselves, were chiseled, painted, and sculpted freely about the interior and exterior of Miss Matheson's Academy. Nell could hardly look anywhere without seeing one of them prancing across a field of wildflowers, distributing laurel wreaths to the worthy, jointly thrusting a torch toward heaven, or shedding lambent effulgence upon the receptive pupils.
   Nell's favorite part of the curriculum was Thalia, which was scheduled for an hour in the morning and an hour in the afternoon.
   When Miss Matheson hauled once on the old bellrope dangling down from the belfry, belting a single dolorous clang across the campus, Nell and the other girls in her section would arise, curtsy to their teacher, walk in single file down the corridor to the courtyard-then break into a chaotic run until they reached the Hall of Physical Culture, where they would strip out of their heavy, scratchy complicated uniforms and climb into lighter, looser, scratchy complicated uniforms with more freedom of movement.
   The Bloom curriculum was taught by Miss Ramanujan or one of her assistants. Usually they did something vigorous in the morning, like field hockey, and something graceful in the afternoon, like ballroom dance, or peculiar, giggle-inducing exercises in how to walk, stand, and sit like a Lady.
   Brilliance was Miss Matheson's department, though she mostly left it to her assistants, occasionally wheeling in and out of various classrooms in an old wood-and-wicker wheelchair. During the Aglaia period, the girls would get together in groups of half a dozen or so to answer questions or solve problems put to them by the teachers: For example, they counted how many species of plants and animals could be found in one square foot of the forest behind the school. They put on a scene from a play in Greek. They used a ractive simulation to model the domestic economy of a Lakota band before and after the introduction of horses. They designed simple machines with a nanopresence rig and tried to compile them in the M.C. and make them work They wove brocades and made porcelain as Chinese ladies used to do. And there was an ocean of history to be learned: first biblical, Greek, and Roman, and then the history of many other peoples around the world that essentially served as backdrop for History of the English-Speaking Peoples.
   The latter subject was, curiously, not part of the Brilliance curriculum; it was left firmly in the hands of Miss Stricken, who was mistress of Joy.
   In addition to two one-hour periods each day, Miss Stricken had the attention of the entire assembled student body once in the morning, once at noon, and once in the evening. During these times her basic function was to call the students to order; publicly upbraid those sheep who had prominently strayed since the last such assembly; disgorge any random meditations that had been occupying her mind of late; and finally, in reverential tones, introduce Father Cox, the local vicar, who would lead the students in prayer. Miss Stricken also had the students all to herself for two hours on Sunday morning and could optionally command their attention for up to eight hours on Saturdays if she came round to the opinion that they wanted supplementary guidance.
   The first time Nell sat down in one of Miss Stricken's classrooms, she found that her desk had perversely been left directly behind another girl's, so that she was unable to see anything except for the bow in that girl's hair. She got up, tried to skooch the desk, and found that it was fixed to the floor. All the desks, in fact, were arranged in a perfectly regular grid, facing in the same direction– which is to say, toward Miss Stricken or one of her two assistants, Miss Bowlware and Mrs. Disher.
   Miss Bowlware taught them History of the English-Speaking Peoples, starting with the Romans at Londinium and careening through the Norman Conquest, Magna Carta, Wars of the Roses, Renaissance, and Civil War; but she didn't really hit her stride until she got to the Georgian period, at which point she worked herself up into a froth explaining the shortcomings of that syphilitic monarch, which had inspired the rightthinking Americans to break away in disgust. They studied the most ghastly parts of Dickens, which Miss Bowlware carefully explained was called Victorian literature because it was written during the reign of Victoria I, but was actually about pre-Victorian times, and that the mores of the original Victorians-the ones who built the old British Empire– were actually a reaction against the sort of bad behavior engaged in by their parents and grandparents and so convincingly detailed by Dickens, their most popular novelist.
   The girls actually got to sit at their desks and play a few ractives showing what it was like to live during this time: generally not very nice, even if you selected the option that turned off all the diseases. At this point, Mrs. Disher stepped in to say, if you thought that was scary, look at how poor people lived in the late twentieth century. Indeed, after ractives told them about the life of an inner-city Washington, D.C., child during the 1990s, most students had to agree they'd take a workhouse in pre-Victorian England over that any day.
   All of the foregoing set the stage for a three-pronged, parallel examination of the British Empire; pre-Vietnam America; and the modern and ongoing history of New Atlantis. In general, Mrs. Disher handled the more modern stuff and anything pertaining to America.
   Miss Stricken handled the big payoff at the end of each period and at the end of each unit. She stormed in to explain what conclusion they were being led to and to make sure that all of them got it. She also had a way of lunging predatorily into the classroom and rapping the knuckles of any girl who had been whispering, making faces at the teachers, passing notes, doodling, woolgathering, fidgeting, scratching, nose-picking, sighing, or slumping.
   Clearly, she was sitting in her closetlike office next door watching them with cine monitors. Once, Nell was sitting in Joy diligently absorbing a lecture about the Lend-Lease Program. When she heard the squeaky door from Miss Stricken's office swing open behind her, like all the other girls she suppressed the panicky urge to look around. She heard Miss Stricken's heels popping up her aisle, heard the whir of the ruler, and then suddenly felt her knuckles explode.
   "Hairdressing is a private, not a public activity, Nell," Miss Stricken said. "The other girls know this; now you do too."
   Nell's face burned, and she wrapped her good hand around her damaged one like a bandage. She did not understand anything until one of the other girls caught her eye and made a corkscrewing motion with her index finger up near one temple: Apparently Nell had been twisting her hair around her finger, which she often did when she was reading the Primer or thinking hard about any one thing.
   The ruler was such a pissant form of discipline, compared to a real beating, that she could not take it seriously at first and actually found it funny the first few times. As the months went by, though, it seemed to get more painful. Either Nell was becoming soft, or– more likely-the full dimensions of the punishment were beginning to sink in. She had been such an outsider at first that nothing mattered. But as she began to excel in the other classes and to gain the respect of teachers and students alike, she found herself with pride to lose. Part of her wanted to rebel, to throw everything away so that it could not be used against her. But she enjoyed the other classes so much that she couldn't bear to think further of the possibility.
   One day Miss Stricken decided to concentrate all her attentions on Nell. There was nothing unusual about that-it was standard to randomly single out particular scholars for intensive enforcement. With twenty minutes left in the hour, Miss Stricken had already gotten Nell on the right hand for hair-twisting and on the left for nail-biting, when, to her horror, Nell realized that she was scratching her nose and that Miss Stricken was standing in the aisle glaring at her like a falcon. Both of Nell's hands shot into her lap, beneath the desk.
   Miss Stricken walked up to her deliberately, pop pop pop.
   "Your right hand, Nell," she said, "just about here." And she indicated with the end of the ruler an altitude that would be a convenient place for the assault– rather high above the desk, so that everyone in the room could see it.
   Nell hesitated for a moment, then held her hand up.
   "A bit higher, Nell," Miss Stricken said.
   Nell moved her hand a bit higher.
   "Another inch should do it, I think," Miss Stricken said, appraising the hand as if it were carved in marble and recently excavated from a Greek temple.
   Nell could not bring herself to raise the hand any higher.
   "Raise it one more inch, Nell," Miss Stricken said, "so that the other girls can observe and learn along with you."
   Nell raised her hand just a bit.
   "That was rather less than an inch, I should think," Miss Stricken said.
   Other girls in the class began to titter-their faces were all turned back toward Nell, and she could see their exultation, and somehow Miss Stricken and the ruler became irrelevant compared to the other girls. Nell raised her hand a whole inch, saw the windup out of the corner of her eye, heard the whir. At the last moment, on an impulse, she flipped her hand over, caught the ruler on her palm, grabbed it, and twisted in a way that Dojo had taught her, bending it against the grain of Miss Stricken's fingers so that she was forced to let go. Now Nell had the ruler, and Miss Stricken was disarmed.
   Her opponent was a bulging sort of woman, taller than average, rather topheavy on those heels, the sort of teacher whose very fleshiness becomes the object of morbid awe among her gamine pupils, whose personal toilet practices-the penchant for dandruff, the habitually worn-out lipstick, the little wad of congealed saliva at the corner of the mouth-loom larger in her students' minds than the Great Pyramids or the Lewis and Clark Expedition. Like all other women, Miss Stricken benefited from a lack of external genitalia that would make it more difficult for Nell to incapacitate her, but nevertheless, Nell could think of half a dozen ways to leave her a bloody knot on the floor and not waste more than a quarter of a minute in the process. During her time with Constable Moore, noting her benefactor's interest in war and weapons, she had taken up a renewed interest in martial arts, had paged back in the Primer to the Dinosaur's Tale and been pleased but hardly surprised to discover that Dojo was still holding lessons there, picking up just where he and Belle the Monkey had left off.
   Thinking of her friend Dinosaur and her sensei, Dojo the Mouse, she suddenly felt shame far deeper than anything Miss Stricken or her sniggering classmates could inflict. Miss Stricken was a stupid hag, and her classmates were snot-nosed clowns, but Dojo was her friend and her teacher, he had always respected her and given her his full attention, and he had carefully taught her the ways of humility and self-discipline. Now she had perverted his teachings by using her skill to take Miss Stricken's ruler. She could not have been more ashamed.
   She handed the ruler back, raised her hand high in the air, and heard but did not feel the impacts of the ruler, some ten in all. "I shall expect you in my office after evening prayers, Nell," Miss Stricken said when she was finished.
   "Yes, Miss Stricken," Nell said.
   "What are you girls looking at?" blurted Mrs. Disher, who was running the class today. "Turn around and pay attention!" And with that it was all over. Nell sat in her desk for the rest of the hour as if carved from a solid block of gypsum.
   Her interview with Miss Stricken at the end of the day was short and businesslike, no violence or even histrionics. Nell was informed that her performance in the Joy phase of the curriculum was so deficient that it placed her in danger of failing and being expelled from the school altogether, and that her only hope was to come in each Saturday for eight hours of supplementary study.
   Nell wished more than anything that she could refuse. Saturday was the only day of the week when she did not have to attend school at all. She always spent the day reading the Primer, exploring the fields and forests around Dovetail, or visiting Harv down in the Leased Territories.
   She felt that, through her own mistakes, she had ruined her life at Miss Matheson's Academy. Until recently, Miss Stricken's classes had been nothing more than a routine annoyance-an ordeal that she had to sit through in order to experience the fun parts of the curriculum. She could look back on a time only a couple of months ago when she would come home with her mind aglow from all the things she had learned in Brilliance, and when the Joy part was just an indistinct smudge around the edge. But in recent weeks, Miss Stricken had, for some reason, loomed larger and larger in her view of the place. And somehow, Miss Stricken had read Nell's mind and had chosen just the right moment to step up her campaign of harassment. She had timed today's events perfectly. She had brought Nell's most deeply hidden feelings out into the open, like a master butcher exposing the innards with one or two deft strokes of the knife. And now everything was ruined. Now Miss Matheson's Academy had vanished and become Miss Stricken's House of Pain, and there was no way for Nell to escape from that house without giving up, which her friends in the Primer had taught her she must never do.
   Nell's name went up on a board at the front of the classroom labeled, in heavy brass letters, SUPPLEMENTARY CURRICULUMSTUDENTS. Within a few days, her name had been joined by two others: Fiona Hackworth and Elizabeth Finkle-McGraw. Nell's disarming of the fearsome Miss Stricken had already become the stuff of oral legend, and her two friends had been so inspired by the act of defiance that they had gone to elaborate lengths to get themselves in trouble too. Now, the three best students of Miss Matheson's Academy were all doomed to Supplementary Curriculum.
   Each Saturday, Nell, Fiona, and Elizabeth would arrive at the school at seven o'clock, enter the room, and sit down in the front row in adjacent desks. This was part of Miss Stricken's fiendish plan. A less subtle tormentor would have placed the girls as far apart as possible to prevent them from talking to each other, but Miss Stricken wanted them right next to each other so that they would be more tempted to visit and pass notes.
   There was no teacher in the room at any time. They assumed that they were being monitored, but they never really knew. When they entered, each one of them had a pile of books on her desk-old books bound in chafed leather. Their job was to copy the books out by hand and leave the pages neatly stacked on Miss Stricken's desk before they went home. Usually, the books were transcripts of debates from the House of Lords, from the nineteenth century.
   During their seventh Saturday in Supplementary Curriculum, Elizabeth Finkle-McGraw suddenly dropped her pen, slammed her book shut, and threw it against the wall.
   Nell and Fiona could not keep themselves from laughing. But Elizabeth did not convey the impression of being in a very lighthearted mood. The old book had scarcely come to rest on the floor before Elizabeth had run over to it and begun kicking at it.
   With each blow a furious grunt escaped from her gorge. The book absorbed this violence impassively, driving Elizabeth into a higher rage; she dropped to her knees, flung the cover open, and began to rip out pages by the fistful.
   Nell and Fiona looked at each other, suddenly serious. The kicking had been funny, but something about the tearing of pages disturbed them both. "Elizabeth! Stop it!" Nell said, but Elizabeth gave no signs of having heard her. Nell ran up to Elizabeth and hugged her from behind. Fiona scurried in a moment later and picked up the book.
   "God damn it!" Elizabeth bellowed, "I don't care about any of the goddamn books, and I don't care about the Primer either!"
   The door banged open. Miss Stricken stomped in, dislodged Nell with a simple body check, got both arms around Elizabeth's shoulders, and manhandled her out the door.
   A few days later, Elizabeth left on a lengthy vacation with her parents, jumping from one New Atlantis clave to another in the family's private airship, working their way across the Pacific and North America and finally to London itself, where they settled in for several months. In the first few days, Nell received one letter from her, and Fiona received two. After that they received no response to their letters and eventually stopped trying. Elizabeth's name was removed from the Supplementary Curriculum plaque.
   Nell and Fiona soldiered on. Nell had reached the point where she could transcribe the old books all day long without actually absorbing a single word. During her first weeks in Supplementary Curriculum she had been frightened; in fact, she had been surprised at the level of her own fear and had come to realize that Authority, even when it refrained from violence, could be as disturbing a specter as anything she had seen in her earlier years. After the incident with Elizabeth, she became bored for many months, then furious for quite a while until she realized, in conversations with Duck and Purple, that her anger was eating her up inside. So with a conscious effort, she went back to being bored again.
   The reason she'd been furious was that copying out those books was such an unforgivably stupid waste of time. There was no end to what she could have learned reading the Primer for those eight hours. For that matter, the normal curriculum at Miss Matheson's Academy would have been perfectly fine as well. She was tormented by the irrationality of this place.
   One day, when she returned from a trip to the washroom, she was startled to notice that Fiona had hardly copied out a single page, though they had been there for hours.
   After this, Nell made it a practice to look at Fiona from time to time. She noticed that Fiona never stopped writing, but she was not paying attention to the old books. As she finished each page, she folded it up and placed it in her reticule. From time to time, she would stop and stare dreamily out the window for a few minutes, and then resume; or she might place both hands over her face and rock back and forth silently in her chair for a while before giving herself over to a long burst of ardent writing that might cover several pages in as many minutes.
   Miss Stricken cruised into the room late one afternoon, took the stack of completed pages from Nell's desk, flipped through them, and allowed her chin to decline by a few minutes of arc. This nearly imperceptible vestige of a nod was her way of saying that Nell was dismissed for the day. Nell had come to understand that one way for Miss Stricken to emphasize her power over the girls was for her to make her wishes known through the subtlest possible signs, so that her charges were forced to watch her anxiously at all times. Nell took her leave; but after proceeding a few steps down the corridor, she turned and stole back to the door and peeked through the window into the classroom.
   Miss Stricken had gotten the folded-up pages out of Fiona's bag and was perusing them, strolling back and forth across the front of the room like the slow swing of a pendulum, a devastatingly ponderous motion. Fiona sat in her chair, her head bowed and her shoulders drawn together protectively.
   After reading the papers for an eternity or two, Miss Stricken dropped them on her desk and made some kind of brief statement, shaking her head in hopeless disbelief. Then she turned and walked out of the room.
   When Nell reached her, Fiona's shoulders were still shaking silently. Nell put her arms around Fiona, who finally began to draw in sobbing breaths. During the next few minutes she gradually moved on to that stage of crying where the body seems to swell up and poach in its own fluids.
   Nell suppressed the urge to be impatient. She well knew, as did all of the other girls, that Fiona's father had disappeared several years ago and never come back. He was rumored to be on an honorable and official mission; but as years went by this belief was gradually supplanted by the suspicion that something disgraceful had taken place. It would be easy enough for Nell to make the point that she had been through much worse. But seeing the depth of Fiona's unhappiness, she had to consider the possibility that Fiona was in a worse situation now.
   When Fiona's mother came by in a little half-lane car to pick her up, and saw her daughter's red and ruinous face, an expression of black rage came over her own visage and she drove Fiona away without so much as a glance at Nell. Fiona showed up for church the next day as if nothing had happened and said nothing of it to Nell during the next week at school. In fact, Fiona hardly said a word to anyone, as she spent all of her time now daydreaming.
   When Nell and Fiona showed up at seven o'clock the next Saturday morning, they were astonished to find Miss Matheson waiting for them at the front of the classroom, sitting in her wood-and– wicker wheelchair, wrapped up in a thermogenic comforter.
   The stacks of books, paper, and fountain pens were not there, and their names had been removed from the plaque at the front of the room. "It's a lovely spring day," Miss Matheson said. "Let's gather some foxgloves."
   They went across the playing fields to the meadow where the wildflowers grew, the two girls walking and Miss Matheson's wheelchair carrying her along on its many-spoked smart wheels.
   "Chiselled Spam," Miss Matheson said, sort of mumbling it to herself.
   "Pardon me, Miss Matheson?" Nell said.
   "I was just watching the smart wheels and remembering an advertisement from my youth," Miss Matheson said. "I used to be a thrasher, you know. I used to ride skateboards through the streets. Now I'm still on wheels, but a different kind. Got a few too many bumps and bruises during my earlier career, I'm afraid."

. . .
   "It's a wonderful thing to be clever, and you should never think otherwise, and you should never stop being that way. But what you learn, as you get older, is that there are a few billion other people in the world all trying to be clever at the same time, and whatever you do with your life will certainly be lost-swallowed up in the ocean-unless you are doing it along with like-minded people who will remember your contributions and carry them forward. That is why the world is divided into tribes. There are many Lesser phyles and three Great ones. "What are the Great ones?"
   "New Atlantis," Nell began.
   "Nippon," said Fiona.
   "Han," they concluded together.
   "That is correct," Miss Matheson said. "We traditionally include Han in the list because of its immense size and age-even though it has lately been crippled by intestine discord. And some would include Hindustan, while others would view it as a riotously diverse collection of microtribes sintered together according to some formula we don't get.
   "Now, there was a time when we believed that what a human mind could accomplish was determined by genetic factors. Piffle, of course, but it looked convincing for many years, because distinctions between tribes were so evident. Now we understand that it's all cultural. That, after all, is what a culture is-a group of people who share in common certain acquired traits.
   "Information technology has freed cultures from the necessity of owning particular bits of land in order to propagate; now we can live anywhere. The Common Economic Protocol specifies how this is to be arranged.
   "Some cultures are prosperous; some are not. Some value rational discourse and the scientific method; some do not. Some encourage freedom of expression, and some discourage it. The only thing they have in common is that if they do not propagate, they will be swallowed up by others. All they have built up will be torn down; all they have accomplished will be forgotten; all they have learned and written will be scattered to the wind. In the old days it was easy to remember this because of the constant necessity of border defence. Nowadays, it is all too easily forgotten.
   "New Atlantis, like many tribes, propagates itself largely through education. That is the raison d'être of this Academy. Here you develop your bodies through exercise and dance, and your minds by doing projects. And then you go to Miss Stricken's class.
   "What is the point of Miss Stricken's class? Anyone? Please speak up. You can't get in trouble, no matter what you say."
   Nell said, after some dithering, "I'm not sure that it has any point." Fiona just watched her saying it and smiled sadly.
   Miss Matheson smiled. "You are not far off the mark. Miss Stricken's phase of the curriculum comes perilously close to being without any real substance. Why do we bother with it, then?"
   "I can't imagine," Nell said.
   "When I was a child, I took a karate class," Miss Matheson said, astonishingly. "Dropped out after a few weeks. Couldn't stand it. I thought that the sensei would teach me how to defend myself when I was out on my skateboard. But the first thing he did was have me sweep the floor. Then he told me that if I wanted to defend myself, I should buy a gun. I came back the next week and he had me sweep the floor again. All I ever did was sweep. Now, what was the point of that?"
   "To teach you humility and self-discipline," Nell said. She had learned this from Dojo long ago.
   "Precisely. Which are moral qualities. It is upon moral qualities that a society is ultimately founded. All the prosperity and technological sophistication in the world is of no use without that foundation-we learned this in the late twentieth century, when it became unfashionable to teach these things."
   "But how can you say it's moral?" said Fiona. "Miss Stricken isn't moral. She's so cruel."
   "Miss Stricken is not someone I would invite to dinner at my house. I would not hire her as a governess for my children. Her methods are not my methods. But people like her are indispensable.
   "It is the hardest thing in the world to make educated Westerners pull together," Miss Matheson went on. "That is the job of people like Miss Stricken. We must forgive them their imperfections. She is like an avatar-do you children know about avatars? She is the physical embodiment of a principle. That principle is that outside the comfortable and welldefended borders of our phyle is a hard world that will come and hurt us if we are not careful. It is not an easy job to have. We must all feel sorry for Miss Stricken."
   They brought sheaves of foxgloves, violet and magenta, back to the school and set them in vases in each classroom, leaving an especially large bouquet in Miss Stricken's office. Then they took tea with Miss Matheson, and then they each went home.
   Nell could not bring herself to agree with what Miss Matheson had said; but she found that, after this conversation, everything became easy. She had the neo-Victorians all figured out now. The society had miraculously transmutated into an orderly system, like the simple computers they programmed in the school. Now that Nell knew all of the rules, she could make it do anything she wanted.
   "Joy" returned to its former position as a minor annoyance on the fringes of a wonderful schoolday. Miss Stricken got her with the ruler from time to time, but not nearly so often, even when she was, in fact, scratching or slumping.
   Fiona Hackworth had a harder time of it, and within a couple of months she was back on the Supplementary Curriculum list. A few months after that, she stopped coming to school entirely. It was announced that she and her mother had moved to Atlantis/Seattle, and her address was posted in the hall for those who wished to write her letters.
   But Nell heard rumors about Fiona from the other girls, who had picked up snatches from their parents. After Fiona had been gone for a year or so, word got out that Fiona's mother had obtained a divorce– which, in their tribe, only happened in cases of adultery or abuse. Nell wrote Fiona a long letter saying she was terribly sorry if her father had been abusive, and offering her support in that case. A few days later she got back a curt note in which Fiona defended her father from all charges. Nell wrote back a letter of apology but didn't hear from Fiona Hackworth again.
   It was about two years later that the news feeds filled up with astonishing tales of the young heiress Elizabeth Finkle-McGraw, who had vanished from her family's estate outside of London and was rumored to have been sighted in London, Los Angeles, Hong Kong, Miami, and many other places, in the presence of people suspected of being highranking members of CryptNet.

Hackworth awakes from a dream;
retreat from the world of the Drummers;
chronological discrepancies.

   Hackworth woke from a dream of unsustainable pleasure and realized it wasn't a dream; his penis was inside someone else, and he was steaming like a runaway locomotive toward ejaculation. He had no idea what was going on; but couldn't he be forgiven for doing the wrong thing? With a wiggle here and a thrust there, he finally nudged himself over the threshold, the smooth muscles of the tract in question executing their spinal algorithm.
   Just a few deep breaths into the refractory period, and he had already disengaged, yelping a little from the electric spark of withdrawal, and levered himself up on one arm to see whom he'd just violated. The firelight was enough to tell him what he already knew: Whoever this woman was, it wasn't Gwen. Hackworth had violated the most important promise he'd ever made, and he didn't even know the other party.
   But he knew it wasn't the first time. Far from it. He'd had sex with a lot of people in the past few years– he'd even been buggered.
   There was, for example, the woman-
   Never mind, there was the man who-
   Strange to say, he could not think of any specific examples. But he knew he was guilty. It was precisely like waking up from a dream and having a clear train of thought in your mind, something you were working on just a few seconds ago, but being unable to remember it, consciousness peeled away from cognition. Like a three-year-old who has a talent for vanishing into crowds whenever you turn your back, Hackworth's memories had fled to the same place as words that are on the tip of your tongue, precedents for déjà vu, last night's dreams.
   He knew he was in big trouble with Gwen, but that Fiona still loved him– Fiona, taller than Gwen now, so self-conscious about her still linear figure, still devoid of the second derivatives that add spice to life.
   Taller than Gwen? How's that?
   Better get out of this place before he had sex with someone else he didn't know.
   He wasn't in the central chamber anymore, rather in one of the tunnel's aneurysms with some twenty other people, all just as naked as he was. He knew which tunnel led to the exit (why?) and began to crawl down it, rather stiffly as it seemed that he was stiff and laden with cricks and cramps. Must not have been very athletic sex– more in the Tantric mode.
   Sometimes they had sex for days.
   How did he know that?
   The hallucinations were gone, which was fine with him. He crawled through the tunnels for a long time. If he tried to think about where he was going, he got lost and eventually circled back to where he started. Only when his mind began to wander did he make his way on some kind of autopilot to a long chamber filled with silvery light, sloping upward. This was beginning to look familiar, he had seen this when he was still a young man. He followed it upward until he reached the end, where something unusually stony was under his feet. A hatch opened above him, and several tons of cold seawater landed on his head.
   He staggered up onto dry land and found himself in Stanley Park again, gray floor aft, green wall fore. The ferns rustled, and out stepped Kidnapper, who looked fuzzy and green. He also looked unusually dapper for a robotic horse, as Hackworth's bowler hat was perched on top of his head.
   Hackworth reached up to feel himself and was astounded to feel his face covered with hair. Several months' growth of beard was there. But even stranger, his chest was much hairier than it had been before. Some of the chest hair was gray, the only gray hairs he had ever seen coming out of his own follicles.
   Kidnapper was fuzzy and green because moss had been growing on him. The bowler looked terrible and had moss on it too. Hackworth reached out instinctively and put it on his head. His arm was thicker and hairier than it used to be, a not altogether unpleasing change, and even the hat felt a little tight.

From the Primer, Princess Nell crosses the trail of the enigmatic Mouse Army;
a visit to an invalid.

   The clearing dimly visible through the trees ahead was a welcome sight, for the forests of King Coyote were surpassingly deep and forever shrouded in cool mists. Fingers of sunlight had begun to thrust between the clouds, and so Princess Nell decided to rest in the open space and, with any luck, bask in the sunlight. But when she reached the clearing, she found that it was not the flowerstrewn greensward she had expected; it was rather a swath that had been carved through the forest by the passage of some titanic force, which had flattened trees and churned up the soil as it progressed. When Princess Nell had recovered from her astonishment and mastered her fear, she resolved to make use of the tracking skills she had learned during her many adventures, so as to learn something about the nature of this unknown creature.
   As she soon discovered, the skills of an advanced tracker were not necessary in this case. The merest glance at the trampled soil revealed not (as she had anticipated) a few enormous footprints, but millions of tiny ones, superimposed upon one another in such numbers that no scrap of ground was unmarked by the impressions of tiny claws and footpads.
   A torrent of cats had passed this way; even had Princess Nell not recognized the footprints, the balls of loose hair and tiny scats, strewn everywhere, would have told the story. Cats moving in a herd! It was most unfeline behavior. Nell followed their track for some time, hoping to divine the cause of this prodigy. After a few miles the road widened into an abandoned camp freckled with the remains of innumerable small campfires. Nell combed this area for more clues, not without success: she found many mouse droppings here, and mouse footprints around the fires. The pattern of footprints made it clear that the cats had been concentrated in a few small areas, while the mice had apparently had the run of the place.
   The final piece of the puzzle was a tiny scrap of twisted rawhide that Nell found abandoned near one of the little campfires. Turning it around in her fingers, Nell realized that it was much like a horse's bridle– except sized to fit around the head of a cat.
   She was standing on the trail of a vast army of mice, who rode on the backs of cats in the way that knights ride on horses.
   She had heard tales of the Mouse Army in other parts of the Land Beyond and dismissed them as ancient superstitions.
   But once, several years ago, in an inn high in the mountains, where Princess Nell had stayed for the night, she had been awakened early in the morning by the sound of a mouse rooting through her pack. .
   Princess Nell uttered a light-making spell that Purple had taught her, kindling a ball of luminance that hung in the air in the center of the room. The words of the spell had been concealed in the howl of the mountain winds through the rickety structure of the old inn, and so the mouse was caught entirely by surprise, blinded by the sudden light. Nell was startled to see that the mouse was not gnawing its way into her supply of food, as any mouse should have done, but rather was going through some of her papers. And this was not the usual destructive search for nesting material-this mouse knew how to read and was looking for information. Princess Nell trapped the mouse spy under her hands.
   "What are you looking for? Tell me, and I shall let you escape!" she said. Her adventures had taught her to be on the lookout for tricks of all kinds, and it was important that she learn who had dispatched this tiny, but effective, spy.
   "I am but a harmless mouse!" the spy squealed. "I do not even desire your food– information only!"
   "I will give you a big piece of cheese, all to yourself, if you give me some information," Princess Nell said. She caught the mouse's tail and lifted him up into the air so that they could talk face-to-face. Meanwhile, with her other hand, she loosened the drawstring of her bag and drew out a nice piece of blue-veined Stilton.
   "We are seeking our lost Queen," the mouse said.
   "I can assure you that none of my papers have any information about a missing mouse monarch," Princess Nell said.
   "What is your name?" the mouse said.
   "That is none of your business, spy!" Princess Nell said. "I will ask the questions."
   "But it is very important that I know your name," the mouse said.
   "Why? I am not a mouse. I have not seen any little mice with crowns on their heads."
   The mouse spy said nothing. He was staring carefully at Princess Nell with his little beady eyes. "Did you, by any chance, come from an enchanted island?"
   "You have been listening to too many fairy tales," Princess Nell said, barely concealing her astonishment. "You have been most uncooperative and so do not deserve any cheese– but I admire your pluck and so will give you some anyway. Enjoy yourself!" She set the mouse down on the floor and took out her knife to cut off a bit of the cheese; but by the time she was finished, the mouse had disappeared. She just caught sight of his pink tail disappearing under the door.
   The next morning, she found him dead on the hallway floor. The innkeeper's cat had caught him. .
   So the Mouse Army did exist! Princess Nell wondered whether they had ever located their lost Queen. She followed their trail for another day or two, as it went in approximately the right direction and was almost as convenient as a road.
   She passed through a few more campsites. At one of them, she even found a little gravesite, marked with a tiny headstone carved from a chip of soapstone.
   The carvings on this tiny monument were much too small to see. But Princess Nell carried with her a magnifying glass that she had pilfered from the treasury of one of the Faery Kings, and so now she removed it from its padded box and its velvet bag and used it to examine the inscription.
   At the top of the stone was a little bas-relief of a mouse knight, dressed in armor, with a sword in one hand, bowing before an empty throne. The inscription read,
   Here lies Clover, tail and all
   Her virtues far outweighed her flaws
   She from the saddle took a fall
   And perished 'neath her charger's paws.
   We know not if her final ride
   Hath led her into Heaven or Hell
   Wherever she doth now abide
   She's loyal yet to Princess Nell.
   Princess Nell examined the remains of the fires, and the surfaces of the wood that the Mouse Army had cut, and the state of their droppings, and estimated that they had passed by here many weeks previously. One day she would rendezvous with them and find out why they had formed such an attachment to her; but for now, she had more pressing considerations.

. . .
   She'd have to see about the Mouse Army later. Today was Saturday, and on Saturday morning she always went down to the Leased Territories to visit her brother. She opened up the wardrobe in the corner of her sleeping room and took out her traveling dress. Sensing her intentions, the chaperone flew out of its niche in the back and whined over to the door.
   Even at her still-tender age, just a few years past the threshold of womanhood, Nell had already had cause to be grateful for the presence of the droning chaperone pod that followed her everywhere when she ventured from home alone. Maturity had given her any number of features that would draw the attention of the opposite sex, and of women so inclined. Commentators rarely failed to mention her eyes, which were said to have a vaguely exotic appearance. There was nothing particularly unusual about their shape or size, and their color-a tweedy blend of green and light brown flecked with gold-did not make them stand out in a predominantly Anglo-Saxon culture. But Nell's eyes had an appearance of feral alertness that seized the attention of anyone who met her. Neo-Victorian society produced many young women who, though highly educated and well-read, were still blank slates at Nell's age. But Nell's eyes told a different story. When she had been presented to society a few months ago, along with several other External Propagation girls at Miss Matheson's Academy, she had not been the prettiest girl at the dance, and certainly not the best dressed or most socially prominent. She had attracted a crowd of young men anyway. They did not do anything so obvious as mill around her; instead they tried to keep the distance between themselves and Nell below a certain maximum, so that wherever she went in the ballroom, the local density of young men in her area became unusually high.
   In particular she had excited the interest of a boy who was the nephew of an Equity Lord in Atlantis/Toronto. He had written her several ardent letters. She had responded saying that she did not wish to continue the relationship, and he had, perhaps with the help of a hidden monitor, encountered her and her chaperone pod one morning as she had been riding to Miss Matheson's Academy. She had reminded him of the recent termination of their relationship by declining to recognize him, but he had persisted anyway, and by the time she had reached the gates of the Academy, the chaperone pod had gathered enough evidence to support a formal sexual harassment accusation should Nell have wished to bring one.
   Of course she did not, because this would have created a cloud of opprobrium that would have blighted the young man's career. Instead, she excerpted one five-second piece of the cine record from the chaperone pod: the one in which, approached by the young man, Nell said, "I'm sorry, but I'm afraid you have me at a disadvantage," and the young man, failing to appreciate the ramifications, pressed on as if he had not heard. Nell placed this information into a smart visiting card and arranged to have it dropped by the young man's family home. A formal apology was not long in coming, and she did not hear again from the young man.
   Now that she had been introduced to society, her preparations for a visit to the Leased Territories were just as elaborate as for any New Atlantis lady. Outside of New Atlantis, she and her chevaline were surrounded everywhere by a shell of hovering security pods serving as a first line of personal defense. A modern lady's chevaline was designed with a sort of Y-shaped body that made it unnecessary to ride sidesaddle, so Nell was able to wear a fairly normal-looking sort of dress: a bodice that took advantage of her fashionably narrow waist, so carefully honed on the Academy's exercise machines that it might have been turned on a lathe from walnut. Beyond that, her skirts, sleeves, collar, and hat saw to it that none of the young ruffians of the Leased Territories would have the opportunity to invade her body space with their eyes, and lest her distinctive face prove too much of a temptation, she wore a veil too.
   The veil was a field of microscopic, umbrellalike aerostats programmed to fly in a sheet formation a few inches in front of Nell's face. The umbrellas were all pointed away from her. Normally they were furled, which made them nearly invisible; they looked like the merest shadow before her face, though viewed sideways they created a subtle wall of shimmer in the air. At a command from Nell they would open to some degree. When fully open, they nearly touched each other. The outside-facing surfaces were reflective, the inner ones matte black, so Nell could see out as if she were looking through a piece of smoked glass. But others saw only the shimmering veil. The umbrellas could be programmed to dangle in different ways-always maintaining the same collective shape, like a fencing mask, or rippling like a sheet of fine silk, depending on the current mode.
   The veil offered Nell protection from unwanted scrutiny. Many New Atlantis career women also used the veil as a way of meeting the world on their own terms, ensuring that they were judged on their own merits and not on their appearance. It served a protective function as well, bouncing back the harmful rays of the sun and intercepting many deleterious nanosites that might otherwise slip unhindered into the nose and mouth.
   The latter function was of particular concern to Constable Moore on this morning. "It's been nasty of late," he said. "The fighting has been very bad." Nell had already inferred this from certain peculiarities of the Constable's behavior: he had been staying up late at night recently, managing some complicated enterprise spread out across his mediatronic floor, and she suspected that it was something along the lines of a battle or even a war.
   As she rode her chevaline across Dovetail, she came to a height-of-land that afforded a fine view across the Leased Territories, Pudong, and Shanghai on a clear day. But the humidity had congealed into drifts of clouds forming a seamless layer about a thousand feet below their level, so that this high territory at the top of New Chusan seemed to be an island, the only land in all the world except for the snowcapped cone of the Nippon Clave a few miles up the coast.
   She departed through the main gate and rode down the hill. She kept approaching the cloud layer but never quite reached it; the lower she went, the softer the light became, and after a few minutes she could no longer see the rambling settlements of Dovetail when she turned around, nor the spires of St. Mark's and Source Victoria above it. After another few minutes' descent the fog became so thick that she could not see more than a few meters, and she smelled the elemental reek of the ocean. She passed the former site of the Sendero Clave. The Senderos had been bloodily uprooted when Protocol Enforcement figured out that they were working in concert with the New Taiping Rebels, a fanatical cult opposed to both the Fists and the Coastal Republic. This patch of real estate had since passed into the hands of the Dong, an ethnic minority tribe from southwestern China, driven out of their homeland by the civil war. They had torn down the high wall and thrown up one of their distinctive many-layered pagodas.
   Other than that, the L.T. didn't look all that different. The operators of the big wall-size mediatrons that had so terrified Nell on her first night in the Leased Territories had turned the brightness all the way up, trying to compensate for the fog.
   Down by the waterfront, not far from the Aerodrome, the compilers of New Chusan had, as a charitable gesture, made some space available to the Vatican. In the early years it had contained nothing more than a twostory mission for thetes who had followed their lifestyle to its logical conclusion and found themselves homeless, addicted, hounded by debtors, or on the run from the law or abusive members of their own families.
   More recently those had become secondary functions, and the Vatican had programmed the building's foundation to extrude many more stories. The Vatican had a number of serious ethical concerns about nanotech but had eventually decided that it was okay as long as it didn't mess about with DNA or create direct interfaces with the human brain. Using nanotech to extrude buildings was fine, and that was fortunate, because Vatican/Shanghai needed to add a couple of floors to the Free Phthisis Sanatorium every year. Now it loomed high above any of the other waterfront buildings.
   As with any other extruded building, the design was drab in the extreme, each floor exactly alike. The walls were of an unexceptional beige material that had been used to construct many of the buildings in the L.T., which was unfortunate, because it had an almost magnetic attraction for the cineritious corpses of airborne mites. Like all the other buildings so constituted, the Free Phthisis Sanatorium had, over the years, turned black, and not evenly but in vertical rain-streaks. It was a cliché to joke that the outside of the Sanatorium looked much like the inside of its tenants' lungs. The Fists of Righteous Harmony had, however, done their best to pretty it up by slapping red posters over it in the dead of night.
   Harv was lying on the top of a three-layer bunkbed on the twentieth floor, sharing a small room and a supply of purified air with a dozen other chronic asthma sufferers. His face was goggled into a phantascope, and his lips were wrapped around a thick tube plugged into a nebulizer socket on the wall. Vaporized drugs, straight from the matter compiler, were flowing down that tube and into his lungs, working to keep his bronchi from spasming shut.
   Nell stopped for a moment before breaking him out of his ractive. Some weeks he looked better than others; this week he did not look good. His body was bloated, his face round and heavy, his fingers swollen to puffy cylinders; they had been giving him heavy steroid treatments. But she would have known he'd had a bad week anyway, because usually Harv didn't go in for immersive ractives. He liked the kind you held in your lap on a sheet of smart paper.
   Nell tried to send Harv a letter every day, simply written in mediaglyphics, and for a while he had tried to respond in kind. Last year he had even given up on this, though she wrote him faithfully anyway.
   "Nell!" he said when he had peeled the goggles away from his eyes. "Sorry, I was chasing some rich Vickys."
   "You were?"
   "Yeah. Or Burly Scudd was, I mean. In the ractive. See, Burly's bitch gets pregnant, and she's got to buy herself a Freedom Machine to get rid of it, so she gets a job as a maid-of-all-work for some snotty Vickys and rips off some of their nice old stuff, figuring that's a faster way to get the money. So the bitch is running away and they're chasing her on their chevs, and then Burly Scudd shows up in his big truck and turns the tables and starts chasing them. If you do it right, you can get the Vickys to fall into a big pit of manure! It's great! You should try it," Harv said, then, exhausted by this effort, grabbed his oxygen tube and pulled on it for a while.
   "It sounds entertaining," Nell said.
   Harv, temporarily gagged by the oxygen tube, watched her face carefully and was not convinced. "Sorry," he blurted between breaths, "forgot you don't care for my kind of ractive. Don't they have Burly Scudd in that Primer of yours?"
   Nell made herself smile at the joke, which Harv had been making every week. She handed him the basket of cookies and fresh fruit that she had brought down from Dovetail and sat with him for an hour, talking about the things he enjoyed talking about, until she could see his attention wandering back toward the goggles. Then she said good-bye until next week and kissed him good-bye.
   She turned her veil to its highest level of opacity and made her way toward the door. Harv impulsively grabbed his oxygen tube and sucked on it mightily a few times, then called her name just as she was about to leave.
   "Yes?" she said, turning toward him.
   "Nell, I want to tell you how fine you look," he said, "just like the finest Vicky lady in all of Atlantis. I can't believe you're my same Nell that I used to bring things to in the old flat-remember those days? I know that you and I have gone different ways, ever since that morning in Dovetail, and I know it's got a lot to do with that Primer. I just want to tell you, sister, that even though I say bad stuff about Vickys sometimes, I'm as proud of you as I could be, and I hope when you read that Primer-so full of stuff I could never understand or even read-you'll think back on your brother Harv, who saw it lying in the gutter years ago and took it into -his mind to bring it to his kid sister. Will you remember that, Nell?" With that he plugged the oxygen tube back into his mouth, and his ribs began to heave.
   "Of course I will, Harv," Nell said, her eyes filling with tears, and blundered her way back across the room until she could sweep Harv's bloated body up in her strong arms. The veil swirled like a sheet of water thrown into Harv's face, all the little umbrellas drawing themselves out of the way as she brought his face up to hers and planted a kiss on his cheek.
   The veil congealed again as he sank back down onto the foam mattress– just like the mattresses he had taught her to get from the M.C., long ago-and she turned and ran out of the room sobbing.

Hackworth is brought up-to-date by the great Napier.

   "Have you had the opportunity to speak with your family?" Colonel Napier said, speaking out of a mediatronic tabletop from his office in Atlantis/Shanghai. Hackworth was sitting in a pub in Atlantis/Vancouver.
   Napier looked good now that he was deeper into middle age– somewhat more imposing. He'd been working on his bearing.
   Hackworth had been temporarily impressed when Napier's image had first materialized on the mediatron, then he remembered his own image in the mirror. Once he'd gotten himself cleaned up and trimmed his beard, which he'd decided to keep, he realized that he had a new bearing of his own. Even if he was desperately confused about how he got it.
   "Thought I'd find out what the hell happened first. Besides-" He stopped talking for a while. He was having trouble getting his conversational rhythm back.
   "Yes?" Napier said in a labored display of patience.
   "I just spoke to Fiona this morning."
   "After you left the tunnels?"
   "No. Before. Before I-woke up, or whatever."
   Napier was slightly taken aback and only popped his jaw muscles a couple of times, reached for his tea, looked irrelevantly out the window at whatever view he had out his office window in New Chusan. Hackworth, on the other side of the Pacific, contented himself with staring into the inky depths of a pint of stout.
   A dream-image surfaced in Hackworth's mind, like a piece of debris rising to the surface after a shipwreck, inexorably muscling tons of green murk out of its path. He saw a glistening blue projectile shoot into the Doctor's beige-gloved hands, trailing a thick cord, watched it unfold, nay bloom into a baby.
   "Why did I think of that?" he said.
   Napier seemed puzzled by this remark. "Fiona and Gwendolyn are in Atlantis/Seattle now-half an hour from your present location by tube," he said.
   "Of course! They live– we live– in Seattle now. I knew that." He was remembering Fiona hiking around in the caldera of some snow-covered volcano.
   "If you are under the impression that you've been in contact with her recently-which is quite out of the question, I'm afraid– then it must have been mediated through the Primer. We were not able to break the encryption on the signals passing out of the Drummers' cave, but traffic analysis suggests that you've spent a lot of time racting in the last ten years."
   "Ten years!?"
   "Yes. But surely you must have suspected that, from evidence."
   "It feels like ten years. I sense that ten years of things have happened to me. But the engineer hemisphere has a bit of trouble coming to grips."
   "We are at a loss to understand why Dr. X would choose to have you serve out your sentence among the Drummers," Napier said. "It would seem to us that your engineer hemisphere, as you put it, is your most desirable feature as far as he is concerned-you know that the Celestials are still terribly short of engineers."
   "I've been working on something," Hackworth said. Images of a nanotechnological system, something admirably compact and elegant, were flashing over his mind's eye. It seemed to be very nice work, the kind of thing he could produce only when he was concentrating very hard for a long time. As, for example, a prisoner might do.
   "What sort of thing exactly?" Napier asked, suddenly sounding rather tense.
   "Can't get a grip on it," Hackworth finally said, shaking his head helplessly. The detailed images of atoms and bonds had been replaced, in his mind's eye, by a fat brown seed hanging in space, like something in a Magritte painting. A lush bifurcated curve on one end, like buttocks, converging to a nipplelike point on the other.
   "What the hell happened?"
   "Before you left Shanghai, Dr. X hooked you up to a matter compiler, no?"
   "Yes."
   "Did he tell you what he was putting into your system?"
   "I guessed it was hæmocules of some description."
   "We took blood samples before you left Shanghai."
   "You did?"
   "We have ways," Colonel Napier said. "We also did a full workup on one of your friends from the cave and found several million nanosites in her brain."
   "Several million?"
   "Very small ones," Napier said reassuringly. "They are introduced through the blood, of course-the hæmocules circulate through the bloodstream until they find themselves passing through capillaries in the brain, at which point they cut through the blood/brain barrier and fasten themselves to a nearby axon. They can monitor activity in the axon or trigger it. These 'sites all talk to each other with visible light."
   "So when I was on my own, my 'sites just talked to themselves," Hackworth said, "but when I came into close proximity with other people who had these things in their brains-"
   "It didn't matter which brain a 'site was in. They all talked to one another indiscriminately, forming a network. Get some Drummers together in a dark room, and they become a gestalt society."
   "But the interface between these nanosites and the brain itself-"
   "Yes, I admit that a few million of these things piggybacking on randomly chosen neurons is only a feeble interface to something as complicated as the human brain," Napier said. "We're not claiming that you shared one brain with these people."
   "So what did I share with them exactly?" Hackworth said.
   "Food. Air. Companionship. Body fluids. Perhaps emotions or general emotional states. Probably more."
   "That's all I did for ten years?"
   "You did a lot of things," Napier said, "but you did them in a sort of unconscious, dreamlike state. You were sleepwalking. When we figured that out-after doing the biopsy on your fellow-troglodyte– we realised that in some sense you were no longer acting of your own free will, and we engineered a hunter-killer that would seek out and destroy the nanosites in your brain. We introduced it, in a dormant mode, into this female Drummer's system, then reintroduced her to your colony. When you had sex with her-well, you can work out the rest for yourself."
   "You have given me information, Colonel Napier, and I am grateful, but it has only made me more confused. What do you suppose the Celestial Kingdom wanted with me?"
   "Did Dr. X ask anything of you?"
   "To seek the Alchemist."
   Colonel Napier looked startled. "He asked that of you ten years ago?"
   "Yes. In as many words."
   "That is very singular," Napier said, after a prolonged interlude of mustache-twiddling. "We have only been aware of this shadowy figure for some five years and know virtually nothing about him– other than that he is a wizardly artifex who is conspiring with Dr. X."
   "Is there any other information-"
   "Nothing that I can reveal," Napier said brusquely, perhaps having revealed too much already. "Do let us know if you find him, though. Er, Hackworth, there is no tactful way to broach this subject. Are you aware that your wife has divorced you?"
   "Oh, yes," Hackworth said quietly. "I suppose I did know that." But he hadn't been conscious of it until now.
   "She was remarkably understanding about your long absence," Napier said, "but at some point it became evident that, like all the Drummers, you had become sexually promiscuous in the extreme."
   "How did she know?"
   "We warned her."
   "Pardon me?"
   "I mentioned earlier that we found things in your blood. These hæmocules were designed specifically to be spread through exchange of bodily fluids."
   "How do you know that?"
   Napier seemed impatient for the first time. "For god's sake, man, we know what we are doing. These particles had two functions: spread through exchange of bodily fluids, and interact with each other. Once we saw that, we had no ethical choice but to inform your wife."
   "Of course. That's only right. As a matter of fact, I thank you for it," Hackworth said. "And it's not hard to understand Gwen's feelings about sharing bodily fluids with thousands of Drummers."
   "You shouldn't beat yourself up," Napier said. "We've sent explorers down there."
   "Really?"
   "Yes. The Drummers don't mind. The explorers relate that the Drummers behave much the way people do in dreams. 'Poorly defined ego boundaries' was the phrase, as I recall. In any event, your behaviour down there wasn't necessarily a moral transgression as such-your mind wasn't your own."
   "You said that these particles interact with each other?"
   "Each one is a container for some rod logic and some memory," Napier said. "When one particle encounters another either in vivo or in vitro, they dock and seem to exchange data for a few moments. Most of the time they disengage and drift apart. Sometimes they stay docked for a while, and computation takes place-we can tell because the rod logic throws off heat. Then they disconnect. Sometimes both particles go their separate ways, sometimes one of them goes dead. But one of them always keeps going."
   The implications of that last sentence were not lost on Hackworth. "Do the Drummers only have sex with one another, or-"
   "That was our first question too," Napier said. "The answer is no. They have a very good deal of sex with many, many other people. They actually run bordellos in Vancouver. They cater especially to the Aerodrome-and-tube-station crowd. A few years ago they came into conflict with the established bordellos because they were hardly charging any money at all for their services. They raised their prices just to be diplomatic. But they don't want the money– what on earth would they do with it?"

From the Primer, a visit to Castle Turing;
a final chat with Miss Matheson;
speculation as to Nell's destiny;
farewell;
conversation with a grizzled hoplite;
Nell goes forth to seek her fortune.

   The new territory into which Princess Nell had crossed was by far the largest and most complex of all the Faery Kingdoms in the Primer. Paging back to the first panoramic illustration, she counted seven major castles perched on the mountaintops, and she knew perfectly well that she would have to visit all of them, and do something difficult in each one, in order to retrieve the eleven keys that had been stolen from her and the one key that remained.
   She made herself some tea and sandwiches and carried them in a basket to a meadow, where she liked to sit among the wildflowers and read. Constable Moore's house was a melancholy place without the Constable in it, and it had been several weeks since she had seen him. During the last two years he had been called away on business with increasing frequency, vanishing (as she supposed) into the interior of China for days, then weeks at a time, coming back depressed and exhausted to find solace in whiskey, which he consumed in surprisingly moderate quantities but with fierce concentration, and in midnight bagpipe recitals that woke up everyone in Dovetail and a few sensitive sleepers in the New Atlantis Clave.
   During her trip from the campsite of the Mouse Army to the first of the castles, Nell had to use all the wilderness skills she had learned in years of traveling around the Land Beyond: She fought with a mountain lion, avoided a bear, forded streams, lit fires, built shelters. By the time Nell had maneuvered Princess Nell to the ancient moss-covered gates of the first castle, the sun was shining horizontally across the meadow and the air was becoming a bit chilly. Nell wrapped herself up in a thermogenic shawl and set the thermostat for something a little on the cool side of comfortable; she had found that her wits became dull if she got too cozy. The basket had a thermos of hot tea with milk, and the sandwiches would hold out for a while.
   The highest of the castle's many towers was surmounted by a great four-sailed windmill that turned steadily, even though only a mild breeze could be noticed at Princess Nell's altitude, hundreds of feet below.
   Set into the main gate was a judas gate, and set into the judas was a small hatch. Below the hatch was a great bronze knocker made in the shape of a letter T, though its shape had become indistinct from an encrustation of moss and lichens. Princess Nell operated the knocker only with some effort and, given its decrepit state, did not expect a response; but hardly had the first knock sounded than the hatch opened up, and she was confronted by a helmet: For the gatekeeper on the other side was dressed from head to toe in a rusty and moss-covered suit of battle armor. But the gatekeeper said nothing, simply stared at Princess Nell; or so she assumed, as she could not see his face through the helmet's narrow vision-slits.
   "Good afternoon," said Princess Nell. "I beg your pardon, but I am a traveler in these parts, and I wonder if you would be so good as to give me a place to stay for the night."
   Without a word, the gatekeeper slammed the hatch closed. Nell could hear the creaking and clanking of his armor as he slowly marched away.
   Some minutes later, she heard him coming toward her again, though this time the noise was redoubled. The rusty locks on the judas gate grumbled and shrieked. The gate door swung open, and Princess Nell stepped back from it as rust flakes, fragments of lichens, and divots of moss showered down around her. Two men in armor now stood there, beckoning her forward.
   Nell stepped through the gate and into the dark streets of the castle. The gate slammed behind her. An iron vise clamped around each of Princess Nell's upper arms; the men had seized her with their gauntlets. They lifted her into the air and carried her for some minutes through the streets, stairs, and corridors of the castle. These were completely deserted.
   She did not see so much as a mouse or a rat. No smoke rose from the chimneys, no light came from any window, and in the long hallway leading to the throne room, the torches hung cold and blackened in their sconces. From place to place Princess Nell saw another armored soldier standing at attention, but, as none of them moved, she did not know whether these were empty suits of armor or real men.
   Nowhere did she see the usual signs of commerce and human activity: horse manure, orange peels, barking dogs, running sewers. Somewhat to her alarm, she did see an inordinate number of chains. The chains were all of the same, somewhat peculiar design, and she saw them everywhere: piled up in heaps on streetcorners, overflowing from metal baskets, dangling from rooftops, strung between towers.
   The clanking and squeaking of the men who bore her along made it difficult for her to hear anything else; but as they proceeded higher and deeper into the castle, she slowly became conscious of a deep grinding, growling noise that pervaded the very ashlars. This noise crescendoed as they hustled down the long final hallway, and became nearly earth-shaking as they finally entered the vaulted throne room at the very heart of the castle.
   The room was dark and cold, though some light was admitted by clerestory windows high up in the vaults. The walls were lined with men in armor, standing stock-still. Sitting in the middle of the room, on a throne twice as high as a man, was a giant, dressed in a suit of armor that gleamed like a looking-glass. Standing below him was a man in armor holding a rag and a wire brush, vigorously buffing one of the lord's greaves.
   "Welcome to Castle Turing," said the lord in a metallic voice.
   By this time, Princess Nell's eyes had adjusted to the dimness, and she could see something else behind the throne: a tremendous Shaft, as thick as the mainmast of a dromond, made of the trunk of a great tree bound and reinforced with brass plates and bands. The Shaft turned steadily, and Princess Nell realized that it must be transmitting the power of the giant windmill far above them.
   Enormous gears, black and sticky with grease, were attached to the Shaft and transferred its power to other, smaller shafts that ran off horizontally in every direction and disappeared through holes in the walls. The turning and grinding of all these shafts and gears made the omnipresent noise she had noted earlier.
   One horizontal shaft ran along each wall of the throne room at about the height of a man's chest. This shaft passed through a gearbox at short, regular intervals. A stubby, square shaft projected from each gearbox at a right angle, sticking straight out of the wall. These gearboxes tended to coincide with the locations of the soldiers.
   The soldier who was polishing the lord's armor worked his way around to one of the lord's spiked knee protectors and, in so doing, turned his back on Princess Nell. She was startled to see a large square hole in the middle of his back.
   Nell knew, vaguely, that the name Castle Turing was a hint; she'd learned a bit about Turing at Miss Matheson's Academy. He had something to do with computers. She could have turned to the Encyclopædia pages and looked it right up, but she had learned to let the Primer tell the story its own way. Clearly the soldiers were not men in armor, but simply wind-up men, and the same was probably true of the Duke of Turing himself.
   After a short and not very interesting conversation, during which Princess Nell tried unsuccessfully to establish whether the Duke was or was not human, he announced, unemotionally, that he was throwing her into the dungeon forever.
   This sort of thing no longer surprised or upset Nell because it had happened hundreds of times during her relationship with the Primer. Besides, she had known, from the very first day Harv had given her the book, how the story would come out in the end. It was just that the story was anfractuous; it developed more ramifications the more closely she read it.
   One of the soldiers detached himself from his gearbox on the wall, stomped into the corner, and picked up a metal basket filled with one of those peculiar chains Princess Nell had seen everywhere. He carried it to the throne, fished through it until he found the end, and fed the end into a hole on the side of the throne. In the meantime, a second soldier had also detached himself from the wall and taken up a position on the opposite side of the throne. This soldier flipped his visor open to expose some sort of mechanical device in the space where his head ought to have been.
   A tremendous chattering noise arose from inside the throne. The second soldier caught the end of the chain as it was emerging from his side and fed it into the opening in his visor. A moment later it popped out of a hatch on his chest. In this fashion, the entire length of the chain, some twenty or thirty feet in all, was slowly and noisily drawn out of the basket, into the noisy mechanism hidden beneath the throne, down the second soldier's throat, out the hatch in his chest, and down to the floor, where it gradually accumulated into a greasy heap. The process went on for much longer than Princess Nell first anticipated, because the chain frequently changed direction; more than once, when the basket was nearly empty, the chain began to spew back into it until it was nearly full again. But on the whole it was more apt to go forward than backward, and eventually the last link lifted free from the basket and disappeared into the throne. A few seconds later, the din from the throne stopped; now Nell could only hear a somewhat lesser chattering from the second soldier. Finally that stopped as well, and the chain fell from his chest. The soldier scooped it up in his arms and deposited it in an empty basket that was sitting handily nearby. Then he strode toward Nell, bent forward at the waist, put his hard cold shoulder rather uncomfortably into the pit of her stomach, and picked her up off the floor like a sack of corn. He carried her for some minutes through the castle, most of that time spent descending endless stone staircases, and finally brought her to a very deep, dark, and cold dungeon, where he deposited her in a small and perfectly dark cell.
   Nell said, "Princess Nell used one of the magic spells Purple had taught her to make light." Princess Nell could see that the room was about two by three paces, with a stone bench on one wall to serve as a bed, and a hole in the floor for a toilet. A tiny barred window in the back wall led to an air shaft. Evidently this was quite deep and narrow, and Nell was close to the very bottom, because no light came through it. The soldier walked out of the cell and pulled the door shut behind him; as he did, she saw that the lock was extraordinarily large, about the size of an iron breadbox mounted to the door, full of clockwork and with a large crank dangling from its center.
   The door was equipped with a small peephole. Peering out through it, Nell could see that the soldier did not have a key as such. Instead, he took a short length of chain, about as long as his arm, from a peg near the door and fed it into the giant lock. Then he began to turn the crank. The clockwork clicked, the chain clanked, and eventually the bolt shot out and engaged the jamb, locking Princess Nell into the dungeon. Immediately the chain crashed out of the lock and landed on the floor. The soldier picked it up and hung it back on the wall. Then he clanked away and did not come back until several hours later, when he brought her some bread and water, shoving it through a little hatch in the middle of the door, just above the mechanical lock.
   It did not take Princess Nell long to explore the limited confines of her cell. In one corner, buried under dust and debris, she found something hard and cold and pulled it out for a better look: It was a fragment of chain, quite rusty, but clearly recognizable as the same sort of chain that she saw all over Castle Turing.
   The chain was flat. Each link had a toggle: a movable bit of metal in the center, capable of rotating about and snapping into place in either of two positions, either parallel or perpendicular to the chain.
   During her first night in the cell, Nell discovered two other things. First, the latch on the little door through which her food was delivered was partly accessible from her side, and with a little effort she was able to jam it so that it no longer locked properly. After that, she was able to stick her head out of the hatch and examine her surroundings, including the mechanical lock. Or she could reach out with one arm and feel the lock, spin the crank, and so on.
   The second discovery came in the middle of the night, when she was awakened by a metallic clanking sound coming through the tiny window on the air shaft. Reaching out with one hand, she felt the end of a chain dangling there. She pulled on it, and after initial resistance, it came freely. In short order she was able to pull many yards of chain into her cell and pile it up on the floor.
   Nell had a pretty good idea what to do with the chain. Starting with the end, she examined the toggles and began to mark their positions down (the Primer always gave her scratch pages when she needed them). She made a horizontal mark for toggles parallel to the chain and a vertical mark for those that were perpendicular, and came up with this:

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   –
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   If she counted the vertical marks and replaced them with numbers, this amounted to 8-5-12-12-15– -9– -1-13– – -4-21-11-5– – – – -20-21-18-9-14-7– and if the numbers stood for letters of the alphabet, horizontal marks divided the letters, and double horizontals were spaces, this was HELLO I AM– – -DUKE– – – – -TURING Perhaps the multiple horizontals were codes for commonly used words:
   – – – the
   – – – – (not used; possibly alan?)
   – – – – – of
   If that was right, then the message was HELLO I AM THE DUKE OF TURING, which was interesting, since the giant fellow in the armor had previously identified himself as such, and she deemed it unlikely that he would be sending her a message by this route. This must have come from someone else calling himself the Duke of Turing– perhaps a real, living human being.
   A few years ago Nell could have relied on it. But in recent years the Primer had become much subtler than it used to be, full of hidden traps, and she could no longer make comfortable and easy assumptions. It was just as likely that this chain had descended straight from the throne room itself, and that the mechanical Duke was, for some unfathomable reason, trying to dupe her. So while she was happy to respond to this message in kind, she intended to take a guarded approach until she had established whether the sender was human or mechanical.
   The next part of the message was GIVE– – -CHAIN– – – -TUG-– – – – -ANSWER. Assuming that four horizontal marks stood for alan and six stood for to, this was GIVE THE CHAIN A TUG TO ANSWER.
   Nell began to flip the toggles on the chain, erasing the message from this personage calling himself the Duke and replacing it with I AM PRINCESS NELL WHY DID YOU IMPRISON ME. Then she gave the chain a tug, and after a moment it began to withdraw from her cell. A few minutes later, back came the message: WELCOME PRINCESS NELL LET US DEVISE A MORE EFFICIENT MEANS OF COMMUNICATION followed by instructions on how to use a more compact system of toggles to represent numbers, and how to convert the numbers into letters and punctuation marks. Once this was settled, the Duke said I AM THE REAL DUKE. I CREATED THESE MACHINES, AND THEY IMPRISONED ME IN A HIGH TOWER FAR ABOVE YOU. THE MACHINE CALLING HIMSELF THE DUKE IS MERELY THE LARGEST AND MOST SOPHISTICATED OF MY CREATIONS.
   Nell responded, THIS CHAIN WEIGHS HUNDREDS OF POUNDS. YOU MUST BE STRONG FOR A HUMAN.
   The Duke responded YOU ARE A SHARP ONE PRINCESS NELL! THE FULL WEIGHT OF THE CHAIN IS ACTUALLY SEVERAL THOUSAND POUNDS, AND I MANAGE IT BY MEANS OF A WINCH LOCATED IN MY ROOM AND DERIVING ITS MOTIVE POWER FROM THE CENTRAL SHAFT.
   Night had long since fallen on the meadow. Nell closed the Primer, packed up her basket, and returned home.
   She stayed up late into the night with the Primer, just as she had when she was a small child, and as a result was late for church the next morning. They said a special prayer for Miss Matheson, who was at home and said to be feeling poorly. Nell called on her for a few minutes after the service, then went straight back home and dove into the Primer again.
   She was attacking two problems at once. First, she needed to figure out how the lock on the door worked. Second, she needed to find out whether the person sending her the message was human or mechanical. If she could be confident that he was a human, she could ask him for assistance in opening the lock, but until she had settled this issue, she had to keep her activities a secret.
   The lock only had a few parts that she could observe: the crank, the bolt, and a pair of brass drums set into the top with digits from 0 to 9 engraved in them, so that by spinning different ways, they could display all the integers from 00 to 99. These drums were in almost constant motion whenever the crank was turning.
   Nell had managed to detach several yards of chain from the one that she was using to converse with the Duke, and so she was able to feed different messages into the lock and see what result they had.
   The number on the top changed with every link that went into the machine, and it seemed to determine, in a limited way, what the machine would do next; for example, she had learned that the number happened to be 09, and if the next link in the chain was in the vertical position (which the Duke referred to as a one), the drums would spin around and change the number to 23. But if the next link was, instead, a zero (as the Duke referred to links with horizontal toggles), the number drums would change to 03. But that wasn't all: In this case, the machine would, for some reason, reverse the direction in which the chain was moving through the machine, and also flick the toggle from zero to one. That is, the machine could write on the chain as well as read from it.
   From idle chitchat with the Duke she learned that the numbers on the drums were referred to as states. At first she did not know which states led to other states, and so she wandered aimlessly from one state to the next, recording the connections on scratch paper.
   This soon grew to a table listing some thirty-two different states and how the lock would respond to a one or a zero when it was in each of those states. It took a while for Nell to fill out all the blank spaces in the table, because some of the states were hard to get to-they could be reached only by getting the machine to write a certain series of ones and zeros on the chain.
   She would have gone crazy with ones and zeros were it not for the frequent interruptions from the Duke, who evidently had nothing better to do than to send her messages. These two parallel courses of inquiry occupied all of Nell's free time for a couple of weeks, and she made slow but steady progress.
   "You must learn how to operate the lock on your door," the Duke said. "This will enable you to effect an escape and to come and rescue me. I will instruct you."
   All he wanted to talk about was technology, which wouldn't help Nell in figuring out whether he was a human or a machine.
   "Why don't you pick your own lock," she responded, "and come and rescue me? I am just a poor helpless young thing all alone in the world, and so scared and lonely, and you seem so brave and heroic; your story really is quite romantic, and I cannot wait to see how it all comes out now that our fates have become intertwined."
   "The machines placed a special lock on my door, not a Turing machine," responded the Duke.
   "Describe yourself," Nell wrote.
   "Nothing special, – I'm afraid," wrote the Duke. "How about yourself?"
   "Slightly taller than average, flashing green eyes, raven hair falling in luxuriant waves to my waist unless I pin it up to emphasize my high cheekbones and full lips. Narrow waist, pert breasts, long legs, alabaster skin that flushes vividly when I am passionate about something, which is frequently."
   "Your description is reminiscent of my late wife, God rest her soul."
   "Tell me about your wife."
   "The subject fills me with such unutterable sadness that I cannot bear to write about it. Now, let's buckle down to work on the Turing machine."
   Since the prurient approach had dead-ended, Nell tried a different tack: playing stupid. Sooner or later, the Duke would become a little testy. But he was always terribly patient with her, even after the twentieth repetition of "Could you explain it again with different words? I still don't get it." Of course, for all she knew, he was upstairs punching the walls until his knuckles were bloody and simply pretending to be patient with her. A man who'd been locked up in a tower for years would learn to be extremely patient.
   She tried sending him poetry. He sent back glowing reviews but declined to send her any of his own, saying it wasn't good enough to be committed to metal.
   On her twentieth day in the dungeon, Princess Nell finally got the lock open. Rather than making an immediate escape, she locked herself back in and sat down to ponder her next move.
   If the Duke was human, she should notify him so that they could plan their escape. If he was a machine, doing so would lead to disaster. She had to figure out the Duke's identity before she made another move.She sent him another poem.
   For the Greek's love she gave away her heart
   Her father, crown and homeland.
   They stopped to rest on Naxos
   She woke up alone upon the strand
   The sails of her lover's ship descending
   Round the slow curve of the earth. Ariadne
   Fell into a swoon on the churned sand
   And dreamed of home. Minos did not forgive her
   And holding diamonds in the pouches of his eyes
   Had her flung into the Labyrinth.
   She was alone this time. Through a wilderness
   Of blackness wandered Ariadne many days
   Until she tripped on the memory.
   It was still wound all through the place.
   She spun it round her fingers
   Lifted it from the floor
   Knotted it into lace
   Erased it.
   The lace made a gift for him who had imprisoned her.
   Blind with tears, he read it with his fingers
   And opened his arms.
   The answer came back much too quickly, and it was the same answer as always: "I do so envy your skill with words. Now, if you do not object, let us turn our attention to the inner workings of the Turing machine."
   She had made it as obvious as she dared, and the Duke still hadn't gotten the message. He must be a machine.
   Why the deception?
   Clearly, the mechanical Duke desired for her to learn about the Turing machines. That is, if a machine could ever be said to desire something.
   There must be something wrong with the Duke's programming. He knew there was something wrong with it, and he needed a human to fix it.
   Once Nell had figured these things out, the rest of the Castle Turing story resolved itself quickly and neatly. She slipped out of her cell and stealthily explored the castle. The soldiers rarely noticed her, and when they did, they could not improvise; they had to go back to the Duke to be reprogrammed. Eventually, Princess Nell found her way into a room beneath the windmill that contained a sort of clutch mechanism. By disengaging the clutch, she was able to stop the Shaft. Within a few hours, the springs inside the soldiers' back had all run down, and they had all stopped in their tracks. The whole castle was frozen, as if she had cast an enchantment over it.
   Now roaming freely, she opened up the Duke's throne and found a Turing machine beneath it. On either side of the machine was a narrow hole descending straight through the floor and into the earth for as far as her torch light could illuminate it. The chain containing the Duke's program dangled on either side into these holes. Nell tried throwing stones into the holes and never heard them hit bottom; the chain must be unfathomably long.
   High up in one of the castle's towers, Princess Nell found a skeleton in a chair, slumped over a table piled high with books. Mice, bugs, and birds had nibbled away all of the flesh, but traces of gray hair and whiskers were still scattered around the table, and around the cervical vertebrae was a golden chain bearing a seal with the T insignia.
   She spent some time going through the Duke's books. Most of them were notebooks where he would sketch the inventions he hadn't had time to build yet. He had plans for whole armies of Turing machines made to run in parallel, and for chains with links that could be set in more than two positions, and for machines that would read and write on two-dimensional sheets of chain mail instead of one-dimensional chains, and for a three-dimensional Turing grid a mile on a side, through which a mobile Turing machine would climb about, computing as it went.
   No matter how complicated his designs became, the Duke always found a way to simulate their behavior by putting a sufficiently long chain into one of the traditional Turing machines. That is to say that while the parallel and multidimensional machines worked more quickly than the original model, they didn't really do anything different.
   One afternoon, Nell was sitting in her favorite meadow, reading about these things in the Primer, when a riderless chevaline emerged from the woods and galloped directly toward her. This was not highly unusual, in and of itself; chevalines were smart enough to be sent out in search of specific persons. People rarely sent them in search of Nell, though.
   The chevaline galloped at her full-tilt until it was just a few feet away, and then planted its hooves and stopped instantly– a trick it could easily do when it wasn't carrying a human. It was carrying a note written in Miss Stricken's hand: "Nell, please come immediately. Miss Matheson has requested your presence, and time is short."
   Nell didn't hesitate. She gathered her things, stuffed them into the mount's small luggage compartment, and climbed on. "Go!" she said. Then, getting herself well situated and clenching the hand-grips, she added, "Unlimited speed." Within moments the chevaline was threading gaps between trees at something close to a cheetah's sprint velocity, clawing its way up the hill toward the dog pod grid.

   From the way the tubes ran, Nell guessed that Miss Matheson was plugged into the Feed in two or three different ways, though everything had been discreetly hidden under many afghans, piled up on top of her body like the airy layers of a French pastry. Only her face and hands were visible, and looking at them Nell remembered for the first time since their introduction just how old Miss Matheson was. The force of her personality had blinded Nell and all the girls to the blunt evidence of her true age.
   "Please let us be, Miss Stricken," Miss Matheson said, and Miss Stricken backed out warily, strewing reluctant and reproving glances along her trail.
   Nell sat on the edge of the bed and carefully lifted one of Miss Matheson's hands from the coverlet, as if it were the desiccated leaf of some rare tree. "Nell," Miss Matheson said, "do not waste my few remaining moments with pleasantries."
   "Oh, Miss Matheson-" Nell began, but the old lady's eyes widened and she gave Nell a certain look, practiced through many decades in the classroom, that still had not lost its power to silence.
   "I have requested that you come here because you are my favorite student. No! Do not say a word," Miss Matheson admonished her, as Nell leaned her face closer, eyes filling with tears. "Teachers are not supposed to have favorites, but I am approaching that time when I must confess all my sins, so there it is.
   "I know that you have a secret, Nell, though I cannot imagine what it is, and I know that your secret has made you different from any other girl I have ever taught. I wonder what you suppose you will do with your life when you leave this Academy, as you must soon, and go out into the world?"
   "Take the Oath, of course, as soon as I reach the age of eligibility. And I suppose that I should like to study the art of programming, and how ractives are made. Someday, of course, after I have become one of Her Majesty's subjects, I should like to find a nice husband and perhaps raise children– "
   "Oh, stop it," Miss Matheson said. "You are a young woman– of course you think about whether you shall have children– every young woman does. I haven't much time left, Nell, and we must dispense with what makes you like all the other girls and concentrate on what makes you different."
   At this point, the old lady gripped Nell's hand with surprising force and raised her head just a bit off the pillow. The tremendous wrinkles and furrows on her brow deepened, and her hooded eyes took on an intense burning appearance. "Your destiny is marked in some way, Nell. I have known it since the day Lord Finkle-McGraw came to me and asked me to admit you– a ragged little thete girl– into my Academy.
   "You can try to act the same– we have tried to make you the same– you can pretend it in the future if you insist, and you can even take the Oath– but it's all a lie. You are different."
   These words struck Nell like a sudden cold wind of pure mountain air and stripped away the soporific cloud of sentimentality. Now she stood exposed and utterly vulnerable. But not unpleasantly so.
   "Are you suggesting that I leave the bosom of the adopted tribe that has nurtured me?"
   "I am suggesting that you are one of those rare people who transcends tribes, and you certainly don't need a bosom any more," Miss Matheson said. "You will find, in time, that this tribe is as good as any other– better than most, really." Miss Matheson exhaled deeply and seemed to dissolve into her blankets. "Now, I haven't long. So give us a kiss, and then be on your way, girl."
   Nell leaned forward and pressed her lips against Miss Matheson's cheek, which looked leathery but was surprisingly soft. Then, unwilling to leave so abruptly, she turned her head and rested it on Miss Matheson's chest for a few moments. Miss Matheson stroked feebly at her hair and tut-tutted.
   "Farewell, Miss Matheson," Nell said. "I will never forget you."
   "Nor I you," Miss Matheson whispered, "though admittedly that is not saying much."

. . .
   A very large chevaline stood stolidly in front of Constable Moore's house, somewhere between a Percheron and a small elephant in size and bulk. It was the dirtiest object Nell had ever seen in her life-its encrustations alone must have weighed hundreds of pounds and were redolent with the scent of night soil and stagnant water. A fragment of a mulberry branch, still bearing leaves and even a couple of actual berries, had gotten wedged into a flexing joint between two adjoining armor plates, and long ropes of milfoil trailed from its ankles.
   The Constable was sitting in the middle of his bamboo grove, enveloped in a suit of hoplite armor, similarly filthy and scarred, that was twice as big as he was, and that made his bare head look absurdly small. He had ripped the helmet off and dropped it into his fish pond, where it floated around like the eviscerated hull of a scuttled dreadnought. He looked very gaunt and was staring vacantly, without blinking, at some kudzu that was slowly but inexorably conquering the wisteria. As soon as Nell saw the look on his face, she made him some tea and brought it to him. The Constable reached for the tiny alabaster teacup with armored hands that could have crumbled stones like loaves of stale bread. The thick barrels of the guns built into the arms of his suit were scorched on the inside. He plucked the cup from Nell's hands with the precision of a surgical robot, but did not lift it to his lips, perhaps afraid that he might, in his exhaustion, get the distance a bit wrong and inadvertently crush the porcelain into his jaw, or even decapitate himself. Merely holding the cup, watching the steam rise from its surface, seemed to calm him. His nostrils dilated once, then again.
   "Darjeeling," he said. "Well chosen. Always thought of India as a more civilised place than China. Have to throw out all of the oolong now, all the keemun, the lung jang, the lapsang souchong. Time to switch over to Ceylon, pekoe, assam." He chuckled.
   White trails of dried salt ran back from the corners of the Constable's eyes and disappeared into his hairline. He had been riding fast with his helmet off. Nell wished that she had been able to see the Constable thundering across China on his war chevaline.
   "I've retired for the last time," he explained. He nodded in the direction of China. "Been doing a bit of consulting work for a gentleman there. Complicated fellow. Dead now. Had many facets, but now he'll go down in history as just another damn Chinese warlord who didn't make the grade. It is remarkable, love," he said, looking at Nell for the first time, "how much money you can make shovelling back the tide. In the end you need to get out while the getting is good. Not very honourable, I suppose, but then, there is no honour among consultants."
   Nell did not imagine that Constable Moore wanted to get into a detailed discussion of recent events, so she changed the subject. "I think I have finally worked out what you were trying to tell me, years ago, about being intelligent," she said.
   The Constable brightened all at once. "Pleased to hear it."
   "The Vickys have an elaborate code of morals and conduct. It grew out of the moral squalor of an earlier generation, just as the original Victorians were preceded by the Georgians and the Regency. The old guard believe in that code because they came to it the hard way. They raise their children to believe in that code– but their children believe it for entirely different reasons."
   "They believe it," the Constable said, "because they have been indoctrinated to believe it."
   "Yes. Some of them never challenge it– they grow up to be smallminded people, who can tell you what they believe but not why they believe it. Others become disillusioned by the hypocrisy of the society and rebel– as did Elizabeth Finkle-McGraw."
   "Which path do you intend to take, Nell?" said the Constable, sounding very interested. "Conformity or rebellion?"
   "Neither one. Both ways are simple-minded– they are only for people who cannot cope with contradiction and ambiguity."
   "Ah! Excellent!" the Constable exclaimed. As punctuation, he slapped the ground with his free hand, sending up a shower of sparks and transmitting a powerful shock through the ground to Nell's feet.
   "I suspect that Lord Finkle-McGraw, being an intelligent man, sees through all of the hypocrisy in his society, but upholds its principles anyway, because that is what is best in the long run. And I suspect that he has been worrying about how best to inculcate this stance in young people who cannot understand, as he does, its historical antecedents– which might explain why he has taken an interest in me. The Primer may have been Finkle-McGraw's idea to begin with-a first attempt to go about this systematically."
   "The Duke plays his cards close," Constable Moore said, "and so I cannot say whether your suppositions are correct. But I will admit it hangs together nicely."
   "Thank you."
   "What do you intend to do with yourself, now that you have pieced all of this together? A few more years' education and polishing will place you in a position to take the Oath."
   "I am, of course, aware that I have favorable prospects in the Atlantan phyle," Nell said, "but I do not think that it would be fitting for me to take the straight and narrow path. I am going to China now to seek my fortune."
   "Well," Constable Moore said, "look out for the Fists." His gaze wandered over his battered and filthy armor and came to rest on the floating helmet. "They are coming now."
   The best explorers, like Burton, made every effort to blend in. In this spirit, Nell stopped at a public M.C., doffed her long dress, and compiled a new set of clothes– a navy blue skin-tight coverall emblazoned with SHIT HAPPENS in pulsating orange letters. She swapped her old clothes for a pair of powered skates on the waterfront, and then headed straight for the Causeway. It rose gently into the air for a few miles, and then the Pudong Economic Zone came into view at her feet, and Shanghai beyond that, and she suddenly began to pick up speed and had to cut the skates' power assist. She'd passed over the watershed now. Nell was alone in China.