Diamond Age or a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer

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.

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