Land Beyond. This was divided into twelve countries each ruled by a Faery King or a Faery Queen. Each King or Queen had a wonderful Castle, and each Castle was a Treasury containing gold and jewels, and in each Treasury was a jeweled Key that would open one of the twelve locks on the iron door of the Dark Castle.
Princess Nell and her friends had many adventures as they visited each of the twelve kingdoms and collected the twelve keys. Some they got by persuasion, some by cleverness, and some they took in battle. By the end of the quest, some of Nell's four friends had died, and some had gone their separate ways. But Nell was not alone, for she had become a great heroine during her adventures.
In a great ship, accompanied by many soldiers, servants, and elders, Nell traveled back over the sea to the island of the Dark Castle. As she approached the iron door, Harv saw her from the top of a tower and gruffly told her to go away, for Princess Nell had changed so much during her Quest that Harv no longer recognized her. 'I have come to set you free,' Princess Nell said. Harv again told her to go away, saying that he had all the freedom he wanted within the walls of the Dark Castle.
Princess Nell put the twelve keys into the twelve locks and began to open them one by one. When the rusty door of the castle finally creaked open, she saw Harv standing with a bow at the ready, and an arrow drawn, pointed straight at her heart. He let fly the arrow, and it struck her in the chest and would have killed her except that she was wearing a locket Harv had given her many years ago, before she left the castle. The arrow struck and shattered the locket. In the same moment, Harv was cut down by an arrow from one of Princess Nell's soldiers. Nell rushed to her fallen brother to comfort him and wept over his body for three days and three nights.
When finally she dried her eyes, she saw that the Dark Castle had become glorious; for the river of tears that had flowed from her eyes had watered the grounds, and beautiful gardens and forests had sprung up overnight, and the Dark Castle itself was no longer dark, but a shining beacon filled with delightful things.
Princess Nell lived in that castle and ruled over that island for the rest of her days, and every morning she would go for a walk in the garden where Harv had fallen. She had many adventures and became a great Queen, and in time she met and married a Prince, and had many children, and lived happily ever after.
'What's an adventure?' Nell said.
The word was written across the page. Then both pages filled with moving pictures of glorious things: girls in armor fighting dragons with swords, and girls riding white unicorns through the forest, and girls swinging from vines, swimming in the blue ocean, piloting rocket ships through space. Nell spent a long time looking at all of the pictures, and after a while all of the girls began to look like older versions of herself.
Judge Fang visits his district;
Miss Pao arranges a demonstration;
the case of the stolen book takes on unexpected depth.
As Judge Fang proceeded across the Causeway on his chevaline, accompanied by his assistants, Chang and Miss Pao, he saw the Leased Territories wreathed in a mephitic fog. The emerald highlands of Atlantis/Shanghai floated above the squalor. A host of mirrored aerostats surrounded that lofty territory, protecting it from the larger and more obvious sorts of intruders; from here, miles away, the individual pods were of course not visible, but they could be seen in the aggregate as a subtle gleam in the air, a vast bubble, perfectly transparent, enveloping the sacrosanct territory of the Anglo-Americans, stretching this way and that in the shifting winds but never tearing.
The view was spoiled as they drew closer to the Leased Territories and entered into their eternal fogs. Several times as they rode through the streets of the L.T., Judge Fang made a peculiar gesture: He curled the fingers of his right hand into a cylinder, as though grasping an invisible stalk of bamboo. He cupped his other hand beneath, forming a dark enclosed cavity, and then peeked into it with one eye. When he stared into the pocket of air thus formed, he saw the darkness filled with coruscating light— something like staring into a cavern filled with fireflies, except that these lights came in all colors, and all of the colors were as pure and clear as jewels.
People who lived in the L.T. and who performed this gesture frequently developed a feel for what was going on in the microscopic world. They could tell when something was up. If the gesture was performed during a toner war, the result was spectacular.
Today it was nowhere near toner war levels, but it was fairly intense. Judge Fang suspected that this had something to do with the purpose of this errand, which Miss Pao had declined to explain.
They ended up in a restaurant. Miss Pao insisted on a table out on the terrace, even though it looked like rain. They ended up overlooking the street three stories below. Even at that distance it was difficult to make out faces through the fog.
Miss Pao drew a rectangular package from her bag, wrapped up in Nanobar. She unwrapped it and drew out two objects of roughly the same size and shape: a book and a block of wood. She placed them side by side on the table. Then she ignored them, turning her attention to the menu. She continued to ignore them for several minutes more, as she and Chang and Judge Fang sipped tea, exchanged polite chatter, and began to eat their meals.
'At Your Honor's convenience,' Miss Pao said, 'I would invite you to examine the two objects I laid on the table.'
Judge Fang was startled to notice that, while the block's appearance had not changed, the book had become covered in a layer of thick gray dust, as if it had been growing mildew for several decades.
'Oooh,' Chang blurted, sucking a lengthy skein of noodles into his maw and bulging his eyes in the direction of this peculiar exhibit.
Judge Fang rose, walked around the table, and bent down for a closer look. The gray dust was not uniformly distributed; it was much thicker toward the edges of the book cover. He opened the book and was startled to notice that the dust had infiltrated deep between the pages.
'This is dust with a purpose in life,' Judge Fang observed. Miss Pao glanced significantly at the block of wood. Judge Fang picked it up and examined it on all sides; it was clean. 'This stuff is discriminating too!' Judge Fang said.
'It is Confucian toner,' Chang said, finally choking down his noodles. 'It has a passion for books.'
The Judge smiled tolerantly and looked to Miss Pao for an explanation. 'You have examined this new species of mite, I take it?'
'It is more interesting than that,' Miss Pao said. 'Within the last week, not one but two new species of mite have appeared in the Leased Territories— both programmed to seek out anything that looks like a book.' She reached into her bag again and handed her master a rolled-up piece of mediatronic paper.
A waitress scurried up and helped move the dishes and teacups aside. Judge Fang unrolled the page and anchored it with various small items of faience. The paper was divided into two panes, each containing a magnified view of a microscopic device. Judge Fang could see that both were made to navigate through the air, but beyond that, they could hardly have been more different. One of them looked like a work of nature; it had several bizarre and elaborate arms and sported four enormous, wildly involuted, scooplike devices, arranged ninety degrees apart.
'The ears of a bat!' Chang exclaimed, tracing their impossibly complex whorls with the tip of a chopstick. Judge Fang said nothing but reminded himself that this sort of quick insight was just the sort of thing Chang excelled at.
'It appears to use echolocation, like a bat,' Miss Pao admitted. 'The other one, as you can see, is of a radically different design.' The other mite looked like a spacecraft as envisioned by Jules Verne. It had a streamlined, teardrop shape, a pair of manipulator arms folded neatly against its fuselage, and a deep cylindrical cavity in the nose that Eudge Fang took to be its eye.
'This one sees light in the ultraviolet range,' Miss Pao said. 'Despite their differences, each does the same thing: searches for books. When it finds a book, it lands on the cover and :rawls to the edge, then creeps between the pages and examines the internal structure of the paper.'
'What is it looking for?'
'There is no way to tell, short of disassembling its internal computer system and decompiling its program— which is difficult,' Miss Pao said, with characteristic understatement. 'When it finds that it has been
