Diamond Age

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

"Who's that?"

"You've met him," Rita said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Yes, sir."

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

"No, sir, as per your instructions."

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

"What did you do to your hand?"

"Cut it, sir."

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

"I got it from your swords."

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

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

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

Carl Hollywood's activities at the Parnasse;

conversation over a milk shake;

explanation of the media system;

Miranda perceives the futility of her quest.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"What-directing plays?"

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

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

"Did you invent the little spotlights?"

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

"Well, I want to buy you di

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

"Okay, do you want a complete grounding in the whole thing, starting with Turing machines, or what?" Carl said pleasantly— humoring her. Miranda decided not to become indignant. They were in a red vinyl booth at a restaurant near the Bund that supposedly simulated an American diner on the eve of the Ke

"I guess so," Miranda said.

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