Diamond Age

The Constable returned his attention to the piece of paper and sca

The black telephone sported a metal disk with finger-size holes bored around its edge. The Constable hooked the phone's handset over his epaulet and then began to insert his finger into various of these holes, using them to torque the disk around against the countervailing force of a spring. A brief but exceedingly cheerful conversation ensued. Then he hung up the telephone and clasped his hands over his belly, as if he had accomplished his assigned tasks so completely that said extremities were now superfluous decorations.

"It'll be a minute," he said. "Please take your time, and don't scald yourselves on that tea. Care for some shortbread?"

Nell was not familiar with this delight. "No thank you, sir," she said, but Harv, ever pragmatic, allowed as he might enjoy some.

Suddenly the Constable's hands found a new reason for existence and began to busy themselves exploring the darker corners of old wooden cupboards here and there around the little room. "By the way," he said absent-mindedly, as he pursued this quest, "if you had in mind actually passing through the gate, that is to say, if you wanted to visit Dovetail, as you would be abundantly welcome to do, then you should know a few things about our rules. He stood up and turned toward them, displaying a tin box labeled SHORTBREAD.

"To be specific, the young gentleman's chocky sticks and switchblade will have to come out of his trousers and lodge here, in the loving care of me and my colleagues, and I will have to have a good long look at that monstrous chunk of rod logic, batteries, sensor arrays, and what-haveyou that the young lady is carrying in her little knapsack, concealed, unless I am mistaken, in the guise of a book. Hmmm?" And the Constable turned toward them with his eyebrows raised very high on his forehead, shaking the plaid box.

Constable Moore, as he introduced himself, examined Harv's weapons with more care than really seemed warranted, as if they were relics freshly exhumed from a pyramid. He took care to compliment Harv on their presumed effectiveness, and to meditate aloud on the grave foolishness of anyone's messing about with a young fellow like Harv. The weapons went into one of the cupboards, which Constable Moore locked by talking to it. "And now the book, young lady," he said to Nell, pleasantly enough.

She didn't want to let the Primer out of her hands, but she remembered the kids at the playroom who had tried to take it from her and been shocked, or something, for their trouble. So she handed it over. Constable Moore took it very carefully in both hands, and a tiny little moan of appreciation escaped his lips. "I should inform you that sometimes it does rather nasty things to people who, as it supposes, are trying to steal it from me," Nell said, then bit her lip, hoping she hadn't implied that Constable Moore was a thief.

"Young lady, I should be crestfallen if it didn't."

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-pi

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."