The Diamond Age (36 page)

  "You look pretty," Nell said.

  "Thank you, Nell," Rita said. "Would you like to look like this too, for a little while? I have a surprise for you."

  One of the ladies who lived in the Millhouse was a milliner, and she had made Nell a dress, sewing it all together by hand. Rita had brought this dress with her, and she helped Nell change into it, right there in the middle of the meadow. Then she braided Nell's hair and even tucked some tiny wildflowers into it. Finally she helped Nell climb up on top of Eggshell with her and began riding back toward the Millhouse.

  "You will have to leave your book here today," Rita said.

  "Why?"

  "I'm taking you through the grid, into New Atlantis Clave," Rita said. "Constable Moore told me that I should not on any account allow you to carry your book through the grid. He said it would only stir things up. I know you're about to ask me why, Nell, but I don't have an answer."

  Nell ran upstairs, tripping over her long skirts a couple of times, and left the Primer in her little nook. Then she climbed back on Eggshell with Rita. They rode over a little stone bridge above the water-wheel and through the woods, until Nell could hear the faint afflatus of the security aerostats. Eggshell slowed to a walk and pushed gingerly through the field of shiny hovering teardrops. Nell even reached out and touched one, then snapped her hand back, even though it hadn't done anything except push back. The reflection of her face slithered backward across the surface of this pod as they went by.

  They rode across the territory of New Atlantis for some time without seeing anything other than trees, wildflowers, brooks, the occasional squirrel, or deer.

  "Why do the Vickys have such a big clave?" Nell asked.

  "Don't ever call them Vickys," Rita said.

  "Why?"

  "It's a word that people who don't like them use to describe them in kind of a bad, unfriendly way," Rita said.

  "Like a pejorative term?" Nell said.

  Rita laughed, more nervous than amused. "Exactly."

  "Why do the Atlantans have such a big clave?"

  "Well, each phyle has a different way, and some ways are better suited to making money than others, so some have a lot of territory and others don't."

  "What do you mean, a different way?"

  "To make money you have to work hard-to live your life in a certain way. The Atlantans all live that way, it's part of their culture. The Nipponese too. So the Nipponese and the Atlantans have as much money as all the other phyles put together."

  "Why aren't you an Atlantan?"

  "Because I don't want to live that way. All the people in Dovetail like to make beautiful things. To us, the things that the Atlantans do- dressing up in these kinds of clothes, spending years and years in school-are irrelevant. Those pursuits wouldn't help us make beautiful things, you see. I'd rather just wear my blue jeans and make paper."

  "But the M.C. can make paper," Nell said.

  "Not the kind that the Atlantans like."

  "But you make money from your paper only because the Atlantans make money from working hard," Nell said.

  Rita's face turned red and she said nothing for a little while. Then, in a tight voice, she said, "Nell, you should ask your book the meaning of the word
discretion
."

  They came across a riding-trail dotted with great mounds of horse manure, and began following it uphill. Soon the trail was hemmed in between dry stone walls, which Rita said that one of her friends in Dovetail had made. Forest gave way to pastures, then lawns like jade glaciers, and great houses on hilltops, surrounded by geometric hedges and ramparts of flowers. The trail became a cobblestone road that adopted new lanes from time to time as they rode into town. The mountain kept rising up above them for some distance, and on its green summit, half veiled behind a thin cloud layer, Nell could see Source Victoria.

  From down in the Leased Territories, the New Atlantis Clave had always looked clean and beautiful, and it was certainly those things. But Nell was surprised at how cool the weather was here compared to the L.T. Rita explained that the Atlantans came from northern countries and didn't care for hot weather, so they put their city high up in the air to make it cooler.

  Rita turned down a boulevard with a great flowery park running down the middle. It was lined with red stone row-houses with turrets and gargoyles and beveled glass everywhere. Men in top hats and women in long dresses strolled, pushed perambulators, rode horses or chevalines. Shiny dark green robots, like refrigerators tipped over on their sides, hummed down the streets at a toddler's walking pace, squatting over piles of manure and inhaling them.

  From place to place there was a messenger on a bicycle or an especially fancy personage in a black, full-lane car. Rita stopped Eggshell in front of a house and paid a little boy to hold the reins. From the saddlebags she took a sheaf of new paper, all wrapped up in special wrapping-paper that she'd also made. She carried it up the steps and rang the bell. The house had a round tower on the front, lined with bow windows with stained-glass inserts above them, and through the windows and the lace curtains Nell could see, on different stories, crystal chandeliers and fine plates and dark brown wooden bookcases lined with thousands and thousands of books.

  A parlormaid let Rita in the door. Through the window, Nell could see Rita putting a calling-card on a silver tray held out by the maid-a salver, they called it. The maid carried it back, then emerged a couple of minutes later and directed Rita into the back of the house.

  Rita didn't come back for half an hour. Nell wished she had the Primer to keep her company. She talked to the little boy for a bit; his name was Sam, he lived in the Leased Territories, and he put on a suit and took the bus here every morning so that he could hang around on the street holding people's horses and doing other small errands.

  Nell wondered whether Tequila worked in any of these houses, and whether they might run into her by accident. Her chest always got a tight feeling when she thought of her mother. Rita came out of the house. "Sorry," she said, "I got out as fast as I could, but I had to stay and socialize. Protocol, you know."

  "Explain protocol," Nell said. This was how she always talked to the Primer.

  "At the place we're going, you need to watch your manners. Don't say 'explain this' or 'explain that.'

  "Would it impose on your time unduly to provide me with a concise explanation of the term
protocol
?" Nell said.

  Again Rita made that nervous laugh and looked at Nell with an expression that looked like poorly concealed alarm. As they rode down the street, Rita talked about protocol for a little bit, but Nell wasn't really listening because she was trying to figure out why it was that, all of a sudden, she was capable of scaring grownups like Rita.

  They rode through the most built-up part of town, where the buildings and gardens and statues were all magnificent, and none of the streets were the same: Some were crescents, some were courts, or circles or ovals, or squares surrounding patches of greenery, and even the long streets turned this way and that. They passed from there into a less built-up area with many parks and playing fields and finally pulled up in front of a fancy building with ornate towers, surrounded by a wrought-iron fence and a hedge. Over the door it said MISS MATHESON'S ACADEMY OF THE THREE GRACES.

  Miss Matheson received them in a cozy little room. She was between eight hundred and nine hundred years of age, Nell estimated, and drank tea from fancy thimble-size cups with pictures painted on them. Nell tried to sit up straight and be attentive, emulating certain proper young girls she had read about in the Primer, but her eye kept wandering to the contents of the bookshelves, the pictures painted on the tea service and the painting on the wall above Miss Matheson's head, which depicted three ladies prancing about in a grove in diaphanous attire.

  "Our rolls are filled, the term has already begun, and you have none of the prerequisites. But you come with compelling recommendations," Miss Matheson said after she had peered lengthily at her small visitor.

  "Pardon me, madam, but I do not understand," Nell said.

  Miss Matheson smiled, her face blooming into a sunburst of radiating wrinkles. "It is not important. Let us only say that we have made room for you. This institution makes it a practice to accept a small number of students who are not New Atlantan subjects. The propagation of Atlantan memes is central to our mission, as a school and as a society. Unlike some phyles, which propagate through conversion or through indiscriminate exploitation of the natural biological capacity that is shared, for better or worse, by all persons, we appeal to the rational faculties. All children are born with rational faculties, which want only development. Our academy has recently welcomed several young ladies of extra-Atlantan extraction, and it is our expectation that all will go on to take the Oath in due time."

  "Pardon me, madam, but which one is Aglaia?" Nell said, looking over Miss Matheson's shoulder at the painting.

  "I beg your pardon?" Miss Matheson said, and initiated the procedure of turning her head around to look, which at her age was a civil-engineering challenge of daunting complexity and duration.

  "As the name of your school is the Three Graces, I have ventured to assume that yonder painting depicts the same subject," Nell said, "since they look more like Graces than Furies or Fates. I wonder if you would be so kind as to inform me which of the ladies represents Aglaia, or brilliance."

  "And the other two are?" Miss Matheson said, speaking out of the side of her mouth as she had almost got herself turned around by this point.

  "Euphrosyne, or joy, and Thalia, or bloom," Nell said.

  "Would you care to venture an opinion?" Miss Matheson said.

  "The one on the right is carrying flowers, so perhaps she is Thalia."

  "I would call that a sound assumption."

  "The one in the middle looks so happy that she must be Euphrosyne, and the one on the left is lit up with rays of sunlight, so perhaps she is Aglaia."

  "Well, as you can see, none of them is wearing a nametag, and so we must satisfy ourselves with conjecture," Miss Matheson said. "But I fail to see any gaps in your reasoning. And no, I don't suppose they are Fates or Furies."
. . .

 
"It's a boarding school, which means many of the pupils live there. But you won't live there," Rita said, "because it isn't proper." They were riding Eggshell home through the woods.

  "Why isn't it proper?"

  "Because you ran away from home, which raises legal problems."

  "Was it illegal for me to run away?"

  "In some tribes, children are regarded as an economic asset of their parents. So if one phyle shelters runaways from another phyle, it has a possible economic impact which is covered under the CEP." Rita looked back at Nell, appraising her coolly. "You have a sponsor of sorts in New Atlantis. I don't know who. I don't know why. But it seems that this person cannot take the risk of being the target of CEP legal action. Hence arrangements have been made for you to stay in Dovetail for now.

  "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.