The Diamond Age (34 page)

  After Constable Moore had turned the book over in his hands a few times, complimenting Nell on the binding, the gold script, the feel of the paper, be set it down gingerly on the table, first rubbing his hand over the wood to ensure no tea or sugar had earlier been spilled there. He wandered away from the table and seemed to stumble at random upon an oak-and-brass copier that sat in one of the obtuse corners of the octagonal room. He happened upon a few pages in its output tray and went through them for a bit, from time to time chuckling ruefully. At one point he looked up at Nell and shook his head wordlessly before finally saying, "Do you have any idea . . ." but then he just chuckled again, shook his head, and went back to the papers.

  "Right," he finally said, "right." He fed the papers back into the copier and told it to destroy them. He thrust his fists into his trouser pockets and walked up and down the length of the room twice, then sat down again, looking not at Nell and Harv and not at the book, but somewhere off into the distance. "Right," he said. "I will not confiscate the book during your stay in Dovetail, if you follow certain conditions. First of all, you will not under any circumstances make use of a matter compiler. Secondly, the book is for your use, and your use only. Third, you will not copy or reproduce any of the information contained in the book. Fourth, you will not show the book to anyone here or make anyone aware of its existence. Violation of any of these conditions will lead to your immediate expulsion from Dovetail and the confiscation and probable destruction of the book. Do I make myself clear?"

  "Perfectly clear, sir," Nell said. Outside, they heard the
thrudalump thrudalump
of an approaching horse.

A new friend;  Nell sees a real horse;  a ride through Dovetail;  Nell and Harv are separated.

  The person on the horse was not Brad, it was a woman Nell and Harv didn't know. She had straight reddish-blond hair, pale skin with thousands of freckles, and carrot-colored eyebrows and eyelashes that were almost invisible except when the sun grazed her face. "I'm a friend of Brad's," she said. "He's at work. Does he know you?"

  Nell was about to pipe up, but Harv shushed her with a hand on her arm and gave the woman a somewhat more abridged version than Nell might have provided. He mentioned that Brad had been "a friend of" their mother's for a while, that he had always treated them kindly and had actually taken them to the NAC to see the horses. Not far into the story, the blank expression on the woman's face was replaced by one that was somewhat more guarded, and she stopped listening. "I think Brad told me about you once," she finally said when Harv had wandered into a blind alley. "I know he remembers you. So what is it that you would like to happen now?"

  This was a poser. Nell and Harv had settled into a habit of concentrating very strongly on what they would like
not
to happen. They were baffled by options, which to them seemed like dilemmas. Harv left off clutching Nell's arm and took her hand instead. Neither of them said anything.

  "Perhaps," Constable Moore finally said, after the woman had turned to him for a cue, "it would be useful for the two of you to set awhile in some safe, quiet place and gather your thoughts."

  "That would do nicely, thank you," Nell said.

  "Dovetail contains many public parks and gardens . .

  "Forget it," the woman said, knowing her cue when she heard it. "I'll take them back to the Milihouse until Brad gets home. Then," she said significantly to the Constable, "we'll figure something out."

  The woman stepped out of the gatehouse briskly, not looking back at Nell and Harv. She was tall and wore a pair of loose khaki trousers, much worn at the knees but hardly at all in the seat, and splotched here and there with old unidentifiable stains. Above that she wore a very loose Irish fisherman's sweater, sleeves rolled up and safety-pinned to form a dense woolen torus orbiting each of her freckled forearms, the motif echoed by a whorl of cheap silver bangles on each wrist. She was muttering something in the direction of her horse, an Appaloosa mare who had already swung her neck down and begun to nuzzle at the disappointingly close-cropped grass inside the fence, looking for a blade or two that had not been marked by the assiduous corgis. When she stopped to stroke the mare's neck, Nell and Harv caught up with her and learned that she was simply giving a simplified account of what had just happened in the gatehouse, and what was going to happen now, all delivered rather absent-mindedly, just in case the mare might want to know.

  For a moment Nell thought that the mare might actually be a chevaline dressed up in a fake horse skin, but then it ejected a stream of urine the dimensions of a fencepost, glittering like a light saber in the morning sun and clad in a torn cloak of steam, and Nell smelled it and knew the horse was real. The woman did not mount the horse, which she had apparently ridden bareback, but took its reins as gently as if they were cobwebs and led the horse on. Nell and Harv followed, a few paces behind, and the woman walked across the green for some time, apparently organizing things in her mind, before finally tucking her hair behind her ear on one side and turning toward them. "Did Constable Moore talk to you about rules at all?"

  "What rules?" Harv blurted before Nell could get into it in a level of detail that might have cast a negative light on them. Nell marveled for the hundredth time at her brother's multifarious trickiness, which would have done Peter himself proud.

  "We make things," the woman said, as if this provided a nearly perfect and sufficient explanation of the phyle called Dovetail. "Brad makes horseshoes. But Brad's the exception because mostly he provides services relating to horses. Doesn't he, Eggshell?" the woman added for the mare's benefit. "That's why he had to live down in the L.T. for a while, because there was disagreement as to whether grooms, butlers, and other service providers fit in with Dovetail's charter. But we had a vote and decided to let them in. This is boring you, isn't it? My name's Rita, and I make paper."

  "You mean, in the M.C.?"

  This seemed like an obvious question to Nell, but Rita was surprised to hear it and eventually laughed it off. "I'll show you later. But what I was getting at is that, unlike where you've been living, everything here at Dovetail was made by hand. We have a few matter compilers here. But if we want a chair, say, one of our craftsmen will put it together out of wood, just like in ancient times."

  "Why don't you just compile it?" Harv said. "The M.C. can make wood."

  "It can make fake wood," Rita said, "but some people don't like fake things."

  "Why don't you like fake things?" Nell asked.

  Rita smiled at her. "It's not just us. It's them," she said, pointing up the mountain toward the belt of high trees that separated Dovetail from New Atlantis territory.

  Light dawned on Harv's face. "The Vickys buy stuff from you!" he said.

  Rita looked a little surprised, as if she'd never heard them called Vickys before. "Anyway, what was I getting at? Oh, yeah, the point is that everything here is unique, so you have to be careful with it."

  Nell had a rough idea of what unique was, but Harv didn't, and so Rita explained it for a while as they walked through Dovetail. At some length it dawned on both Nell and Harv that Rita was actually trying to tell them, in the most bewilderingly circumspect way imaginable, that she didn't want them -to run around and break stuff. This approach to child behavior modification was so at odds with everything they knew that, in spite of Rita's efforts to be pleasant, the conversation was blighted by confusion on the children's part and frustration on hers. From time to time her freckles vanished as her face turned red.

  Where Dovetail had streets, they were paved with little blocks of stone laid close together. The vehicles were horses, chevalines, and velocipedes with fat knobby tires. Except for one spot where a number of buildings clustered together around a central green, houses were widely spaced and tended to be very small or very large. All of them seemed to have nice gardens though, and from time to time Nell would dart off the road to smell a flower. At first Rita would watch her nervously, telling her not to pick any of the flowers as they belonged to other people.

  At the end of a road was a wooden gate with a laughably primitive latch consisting of a sliding plank, glossy with use. Past the gate, the road became a very rough mosaic of flagstones with grass growing between them. It wound between undulating pastures where horses and the occasional dairy cow grazed and eventually terminated at a great three-story stone building perched on the bank of a river that ran down the mountain from the New Atlantis Clave.

  A giant wheel grew out of the side of the building and spun slowly as the river pushed on it. A man stood outside before a large chopping-block, using a hatchet with an exceptionally wide blade to split thin wedges of red wood from a log. These were piled into a wicker basket that was hauled up on a rope by a man who stood on the roof, replacing some of the old gray shingles with these new red ones.

  Harv was paralyzed with wonder at this exhibition and stopped walking. Nell had seen much the same sort of process at work in the pages of her Primer. She followed Rita over to a long low building where the horses lived.

  Most of the people did not live in the Millhouse proper but in a couple of long outbuildings, two stories each, with workshops below and living quarters above. Nell was a little surprised to see that Rita did not actually live with Brad. Her apartment and her shop were each twice the size of Nell's old flat and filled with fine things of heavy wood, metal, cotton, linen, and porcelain that, as Nell was beginning to understand, had all been made by human hands, probably right here in Dovetail.

  Rita's shop had great kettles where she would brew thick fibrous stew. She spread the stew thinly over screens to draw out the water and flattened it with a great hand-cranked press to make paper, thick and roughedged and subtly colored from the thousands of tiny fibers wending through it. When she had a stack of paper made, she would take it next door to a shop with a sharp oily smell, where a bearded man with a smudged apron would run it through another big hand-cranked machine. When it came out of this machine, it had letters on the top, giving the name and address of a lady in New Atlantis.

  Since Nell had been decorous so far and not tried to stick her fingers into the machinery and not driven anyone to distraction with her questions, Rita gave her leave to visit some of the other shops, as long as she asked permission at each one. Nell spent most of the day making friends with various shopowners: a glassblower, a

jeweler, a cabinetmaker, a weaver, even a. toymaker who gave her a tiny wooden doll in a calico dress.

  Harv spent a while bothering the men who were putting shingles on the roof, then wandered about in the fields for most of the day, kicking small rocks from place to place, generally scoping out the boundaries and general condition of the community centered on the Millhouse. Nell checked in on him from time to time. At first he looked tense and skeptical, then he relaxed and enjoyed it, and finally, late in the afternoon, he became surly and perched himself on a boulder above the running stream, tossing pebbles into it, chewing his thumbnail, and thinking.

  Brad came home early, riding a bay stallion straight down the mountain from the New Atlantis Clave, angling through the green belt and piercing the dog pod grid with scant consequences as the authorities knew him. Harv approached him with a formal mien, harrumphing phlegm out of the way as he prepared to offer up an explanation and a plea. But Brad's eyes merely glanced over Harv, settled on Nell, appraised her for a moment, then looked away shyly. The verdict was that they could stay the night, but all else depended on legal niceties that were beyond his powers.

  "Have you done anything the Shanghai Police might find interesting?" Brad asked Harv gravely. Harv said no, a simple no without the usual technicalities, provisos, and subclauses.

  Nell wanted to tell Brad everything. But she had been noticing how, in the Primer, whenever someone asked Peter Rabbit a direct question of any kind, he always lied.

  "To look at our green fields and big houses, you might think we're on Atlantis turf here," Brad said, "but we're under Shanghai jurisdiction just like the rest of the Leased Territories. Now usually the Shanghai Police don't come around, because we are peaceable folk and because we have made certain arrangements with them. But if it were known that we were harboring runaway gang members-"

  "'Nuff said," Harv blurted. It was clear that he had already worked all of this out in his head as he sat on the riverbank and was only waiting for the adults to catch up with his logic. Before Nell understood what was going on, he came up to her and gave her a hug and a kiss on the lips. Then he turned away from her and began running across a green field, down toward the ocean. Nell ran after him, but she could not keep up, and finally she fell down in a stand of bluebells and watched Harv dissolve into a curtain of tears. When she could no longer see him, she curled up sobbing, and in time Rita came and gathered her up in her strong arms and carried her slowly back across the field to the Millhouse where the steady wheel rolled.

Orphans of the Han are exposed to the benefits of modern educational technology;  Judge Fang reflects on the fundamental precepts of Confucianism.

  The orphanage ships had built-in matter compilers, but they could not, of course, be hooked up to Sources. Instead they drew their supplies of matter from cubical containers, rather like tanks of atoms arranged very precisely. These containers could be loaded on board with cranes and hooked up to the matter compilers in the same way that Feed lines would be if they resided on shore. The ships put in to Shanghai frequently, offloaded empty containers, and took new ones on board-their hungry populations were fed almost exclusively on synthetic rice produced by the matter compilers.