Diamond Age

of the English-Speaking Peoples.

The latter subject was, curiously, not part of the Brilliance curriculum; it was left firmly in the hands of Miss Stricken, who was mistress of Joy.

In addition to two one-hour periods each day, Miss Stricken had the attention of the entire assembled student body once in the morning, once at noon, and once in the evening. During these times her basic function was to call the students to order; publicly upbraid those sheep who had prominently strayed since the last such assembly; disgorge any random meditations that had been occupying her mind of late; and finally, in reverential tones, introduce Father Cox, the local vicar, who would lead the students in prayer. Miss Stricken also had the students all to herself for two hours on Sunday morning and could optionally command their attention for up to eight hours on Saturdays if she came round to the opinion that they wanted supplementary guidance.

The first time Nell sat down in one of Miss Stricken's classrooms, she found that her desk had perversely been left directly behind another girl's, so that she was unable to see anything except for the bow in that girl's hair. She got up, tried to skooch the desk, and found that it was fixed to the floor. All the desks, in fact, were arranged in a perfectly regular grid, facing in the same direction— which is to say, toward Miss Stricken or one of her two assistants, Miss Bowlware and Mrs. Disher.

Miss Bowlware taught them History of the English-Speaking Peoples, starting with the Romans at Londinium and careening through the Norman Conquest, Magna Carta, Wars of the Roses, Renaissance, and Civil War; but she didn't really hit her stride until she got to the Georgian period, at which point she worked herself up into a froth explaining the shortcomings of that syphilitic monarch, which had inspired the rightthinking Americans to break away in disgust. They studied the most ghastly parts of Dickens, which Miss Bowlware carefully explained was called Victorian literature because it was written during the reign of Victoria I, but was actually about pre-Victorian times, and that the mores of the original Victorians-the ones who built the old British Empire— were actually a reaction against the sort of bad behavior engaged in by their parents and grandparents and so convincingly detailed by Dickens, their most popular novelist.

The girls actually got to sit at their desks and play a few ractives showing what it was like to live during this time: generally not very nice, even if you selected the option that turned off all the diseases. At this point, Mrs. Disher stepped in to say, if you thought that was scary, look at how poor people lived in the late twentieth century. Indeed, after ractives told them about the life of an inner-city Washington, D.C., child during the 1990s, most students had to agree they'd take a workhouse in pre-Victorian England over that any day.

All of the foregoing set the stage for a three-pronged, parallel examination of the British Empire; pre- Vietnam America; and the modern and ongoing history of New Atlantis. In general, Mrs. Disher handled the more modern stuff and anything pertaining to America.

Miss Stricken handled the big payoff at the end of each period and at the end of each unit. She stormed in to explain what conclusion they were being led to and to make sure that all of them got it. She also had a way of lunging predatorily into the classroom and rapping the knuckles of any girl who had been whispering, making faces at the teachers, passing notes, doodling, woolgathering, fidgeting, scratching, nose-picking, sighing, or slumping.

Clearly, she was sitting in her closetlike office next door watching them with cine monitors. Once, Nell was sitting in Joy diligently absorbing a lecture about the Lend-Lease Program. When she heard the squeaky door from Miss Stricken's office swing open behind her, like all the other girls she suppressed the panicky urge to look around. She heard Miss Stricken's heels popping up her aisle, heard the whir of the ruler, and then suddenly felt her knuckles explode.

'Hairdressing is a private, not a public activity, Nell,' Miss Stricken said. 'The other girls know this; now you do too.'

Nell's face burned, and she wrapped her good hand around her damaged one like a bandage. She did not understand anything until one of the other girls caught her eye and made a corkscrewing motion with her index finger up near one temple: Apparently Nell had been twisting her hair around her finger, which she often did when she was reading the Primer or thinking hard about any one thing.

The ruler was such a pissant form of discipline, compared to a real beating, that she could not take it seriously at first and actually found it funny the first few times. As the months went by, though, it seemed to get more painful. Either Nell was becoming soft, or— more likely-the full dimensions of the punishment were beginning to sink in. She had been such an outsider at first that nothing mattered. But as she began to excel in the other classes and to gain the respect of teachers and students alike, she found herself with pride to lose. Part of her wanted to rebel, to throw everything away so that it could not be used against her. But she enjoyed the other classes so much that she couldn't bear to think further of the possibility.

One day Miss Stricken decided to concentrate all her attentions on Nell. There was nothing unusual about that-it was standard to randomly single out particular scholars for intensive enforcement. With twenty minutes left in the hour, Miss Stricken had already gotten Nell on the right hand for hair-twisting and on the left for nail-biting, when, to her horror, Nell realized that she was scratching her nose and that Miss Stricken was standing in the aisle glaring at her like a falcon. Both of Nell's hands shot into her lap, beneath the desk.

Miss Stricken walked up to her deliberately, pop pop pop.

'Your right hand, Nell,' she said, 'just about here.' And she indicated with the end of the ruler an altitude that would be a convenient place for the assault— rather high above the desk, so that everyone in the room could see it.

Nell hesitated for a moment, then held her hand up.

'A bit higher, Nell,' Miss Stricken said.

Nell moved her hand a bit higher.

'Another inch should do it, I think,' Miss Stricken said, appraising the hand as if it were carved in marble and recently excavated from a Greek temple.

Nell could not bring herself to raise the hand any higher.

'Raise it one more inch, Nell,' Miss Stricken said, 'so that the other girls can observe and learn along with you.'

Nell raised her hand just a bit.

'That was rather less than an inch, I should think,' Miss Stricken said.

Other girls in the class began to titter-their faces were all turned back toward Nell, and she could see their exultation, and somehow Miss Stricken and the ruler became irrelevant compared to the other girls. Nell raised her hand a whole inch, saw the windup out of the corner of her eye, heard the whir. At the last moment, on an impulse, she flipped her hand over, caught the ruler on her palm, grabbed it, and twisted in a way that Dojo had taught her, bending it against the grain of Miss Stricken's fingers so that she was forced to let go. Now Nell had the ruler, and Miss Stricken was disarmed.

Her opponent was a bulging sort of woman, taller than average, rather topheavy on those heels, the sort of teacher whose very fleshiness becomes the object of morbid awe among her gamine pupils, whose personal toilet practices-the penchant for dandruff, the habitually worn-out lipstick, the little wad of congealed saliva at the corner of the mouth-loom larger in her students' minds than the Great Pyramids or the Lewis and Clark Expedition. Like all other women, Miss Stricken benefited from a lack of external genitalia that would make it more difficult for Nell to incapacitate her, but nevertheless, Nell could think of half a dozen ways to leave her a bloody knot on the floor and not waste more than a quarter of a minute in the process. During her time with Constable Moore, noting her benefactor's interest in war and weapons, she had taken up a renewed interest in martial arts, had paged back in the Primer to the Dinosaur's Tale and been pleased but hardly surprised to discover that Dojo was still holding lessons there, picking up just where he and Belle the Monkey had left off.

Thinking of her friend Dinosaur and her sensei, Dojo the Mouse, she suddenly felt shame far deeper than anything Miss Stricken or her sniggering classmates could inflict. Miss Stricken was a stupid hag, and her classmates were snot-nosed clowns, but Dojo was her friend and her teacher, he had always respected her and given her his full attention, and he had carefully taught her the ways of humility and self-discipline. Now she had perverted his teachings by using her skill to take Miss Stricken's ruler. She could not have been more ashamed.

She handed the ruler back, raised her hand high in the air, and heard but did not feel the impacts of the ruler, some ten in all. 'I shall expect you in my office after evening prayers, Nell,' Miss Stricken said when she was