Diamond Age

"What will you do, King Coyote?"

"Call me John, Your Royal Highness. As of today, I no longer have a kingdom."

"John, what will you do?"

"I have a quest of my own."

"What is your quest?"

"To find the Alchemist, whoever he may be."

"And is there . . ."

Nell stopped reading the Primer for a moment. Her eyes had filled up with tears.

"Is there what?" said John's voice from the book.

"Is there another? Another who has been with me during my quest?"

"Yes, there is," John said quietly, after a short pause. "At least I have always sensed that she is here."

"Is she here now?"

"Only if you build a place for her," John said. "Read the books, and they will show you how."

With that, John, the former King Coyote and Emperor of the Land Beyond, vanished in a flash of light, leaving Princess Nell alone in her great dusty library. Princess Nell put her head down on an old leather-bound book and smelled its rich fragrance. One tear of joy ran from each eye. But she mastered the impulse to cry and reached for the book instead.

They were magic books, and they drew Princess Nell into them so deeply that, for many hours, perhaps even days, she was not aware of her surroundings; which scarcely mattered as nothing remained of the Land Beyond. But at some length, she realized that something was tickling her foot. She reached down absently and scratched it. Moments later the tickling sensation returned. This time she looked down and was astonished to see that the floor of the library was covered with a thick gray-brown carpet, flecked here and there with splotches of white and black.

It was a living, moving carpet. It was, in fact, the Mouse Army. All of the other buildings, places, and creatures Princess Nell had seen in the Land Beyond had been figments produced by Wizard 0.2; but apparently the mice were an exception and existed independently of King Coyote's machinations. When the Land Beyond had disappeared, all of the obstructions and impedimenta that had kept the Mouse Army away from Princess Nell had disappeared with it, and in short order they had been able to fix her whereabouts and to converge upon their long-sought Queen.

"What would you have me do?" Princess Nell said. She had never been a Queen before and did not know the protocol.

A chorus of excited squeaking came from the mice as commands were relayed and issued. The carpet went into violent but highly organized motion as the mice drew themselves up into platoons, companies, battalions, and regiments, each of them commanded by an officer. One mouse clambered up the leg of Princess Nell's table, bowed low to her, and then began to squeak commands from on high. The mice executed a close-order drill, withdrew to the edges of the room, and arrayed themselves in an empty box shape, leaving a large open rectangle in the middle of the floor.

The mouse up on the table, whom Nell had dubbed the Generalissima, issued a lengthy series of orders, ru

Small groups of mice began to encroach on the empty space, each group moving toward a different spot. Once each group had reached its assigned position, the individual mice arranged themselves in such a way that the group as a whole described a letter. In this way, the following message was written across the floor of the library:

WE ARE ENCHANTED

REQUEST ASSISTANCE

REFER TO BOOKS

"I shall bend all my efforts toward your disenchantment," Princess Nell said, and a tremendous, earsplitting scream of gratitude rose from the tiny throats of the Mouse Army. Finding the required book did not take long. The Mouse Army split itself up into small detachments, each of which wrestled a different book from the shelf, opened it up on the floor, and scampered through it one page at a time, looking for relevant spells. Within the hour, Princess Nell noted that a broad open corridor had developed in the Mouse Army, and that a book was making its way toward her, seeming to float an inch above the floor.

She lifted the book carefully from the backs of the mice who were bearing it and flipped through it until she found a spell for the disenchantment of mice. "Very well then," she said, and began to read the spell; but suddenly, excited squeaking filled the air and all the mice were ru

"I understand," Princess Nell said. She picked up the book and walked out of the library, taking care not to step on any of her subjects, and followed them out to the vast empty space beyond.

Once again the Mouse Army put on a dazzling display of close order drill, drawing itself up across the empty, colorless plain by platoons, companies, battalions, regiments, and brigades; but this time the parade took up a much larger space, because this time the mice took care to space themselves as far apart as the length of a human arm. Some of the platoons had to march what was, for them, a distance of many leagues in order to reach the edges of the formation.

Princess Nell took advantage of the time to wander about and inspect the ranks, and to rehearse the spell.

Finally the Generalissima approached, bowed deeply, and gave her the thumbs-up, though Princess Nell had to pick the tiny leader up and squint to see this gesture. She went to the place that had been left for her at the head of the formation, opened up the book, and spoke the magic spell.

There was a violent thunderclap, and a rush of wind that knocked Princess Nell flat on her back. She looked up, dazed, to see that she was surrounded by a vast army of some hundreds of thousands of girls, only a few years younger than she was. A wild cheer rose up, and all of the girls fell to their knees as one and, in a scene of riotous jubilation, proclaimed their fealty to Queen Nell.

Hackworth in China;

depredations of the Fists;

a meeting with Dr. X;

an unusual procession.

They said that the Chinese had great respect for madmen, and that during the days of the Boxer Rebellion, certain Western missionaries, probably unstable characters to begin with, who had been trapped behind walls of rubble for weeks, scurrying through the sniper fire of the encircling Boxers and Imperial troops and listening to the cries of their flock being burned and tortured in the streets of Beijing, had become deranged and had walked unharmed into the ranks of their besiegers and been given food and treated with deference.

Now John Percival Hackworth, having checked into a suite on the top floor of the Shangri-La in Pudong (or Shong-a-lee-lah as the taxi drivers sang it), put on a fresh shirt; his best waistcoat, girded with the gold chain, adangle with his chop, snuffboxes, fob, and watchphone; a long coat with a swallowtail for riding; boots, the black leather and brass spurs hand-shined in the lobby of the Shong-a— lee-lah by a coolie who was so servile that he was insolent, and Hackworth suspected him of being a Fist; new kid gloves; and his bowler, de-mossed and otherwise spruced up a bit, but obviously a veteran of many travels in rough territory.

As he crossed the western bank of the Huang Pu, the usual crowd of starving peasants and professional amputees washed around him like a wave ru

The ride down Nanjing Road took him through the heart of Shanghai's shopping district, now an endless gauntlet of ta

So it was chic to be Confucian now, or at least it was politic. This was one of the few shop windows that didn't have red Fist posters pasted all over it.

Hackworth rode past marble villas built by Iraqi Jews in previous centuries, past the hotel where Nixon had once stayed, past the high-rise enclaves that Western businessmen had used as the beachheads of the post-Communist development that had led to the squalid affluence of the Coastal Republic. He rode past nightclubs the size of stadiums; jaialai pits where stu

But as the day went on, he truly did approach the limit of the city and kept riding anyway toward the west, and it became evident then that he was a madman and the people in the streets looked at him with awe and got out of his way. Bicycles and pedestrians became less common, replaced by heavier and faster military traffic.