Diamond Age

"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 pi

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 fu

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 begi

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.