Diamond Age or a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer Page 37

  “What is the point of Miss Stricken’s class? Anyone? Please speak up. You can’t get in trouble, no matter what you say.”

  Nell said, after some dithering, “I’m not sure that it has any point.” Fiona just watched her saying it and smiled sadly.

  Miss Matheson smiled. “You are not far off the mark. Miss Stricken’s phase of the curriculum comes perilously close to being without any real substance. Why do we bother with it, then?”

  “I can’t imagine,” Nell said.

  “When I was a child, I took a karate class,” Miss Matheson said, astonishingly. “Dropped out after a few weeks. Couldn’t stand it. I thought that the sensei would teach me how to defend myself when I was out on my skateboard. But the first thing he did was have me sweep the floor. Then he told me that if I wanted to defend myself, I should buy a gun. I came back the next week and he had me sweep the floor again. All I ever did was sweep. Now, what was the point of that?”

  “To teach you humility and self-discipline,” Nell said. She had learned this from Dojo long ago.

  “Precisely. Which are moral qualities. It is upon moral qualities that a society is ultimately founded. All the prosperity and technological sophistication in the world is of no use without that foundation-we learned this in the late twentieth century, when it became unfashionable to teach these things.”

  “But how can you say it’s moral?” said Fiona. “Miss Stricken isn’t moral. She’s so cruel.”

  “Miss Stricken is not someone I would invite to dinner at my house. I would not hire her as a governess for my children. Her methods are not my methods. But people like her are indispensable.

  “It is the hardest thing in the world to make educated Westerners pull together,” Miss Matheson went on. “That is the job of people like Miss Stricken. We must forgive them their imperfections. She is like an avatar-do you children know about avatars? She is the physical embodiment of a principle. That principle is that outside the comfortable and welldefended borders of our phyle is a hard world that will come and hurt us if we are not careful. It is not an easy job to have. We must all feel sorry for Miss Stricken.”

  They brought sheaves of foxgloves, violet and magenta, back to the school and set them in vases in each classroom, leaving an especially large bouquet in Miss Stricken’s office. Then they took tea with Miss Matheson, and then they each went home.

  Nell could not bring herself to agree with what Miss Matheson had said; but she found that, after this conversation, everything became easy. She had the neo-Victorians all figured out now. The society had miraculously transmutated into an orderly system, like the simple computers they programmed in the school. Now that Nell knew all of the rules, she could make it do anything she wanted.

  “Joy” returned to its former position as a minor annoyance on the fringes of a wonderful schoolday. Miss Stricken got her with the ruler from time to time, but not nearly so often, even when she was, in fact, scratching or slumping.

  Fiona Hackworth had a harder time of it, and within a couple of months she was back on the Supplementary Curriculum list. A few months after that, she stopped coming to school entirely. It was announced that she and her mother had moved to Atlantis/Seattle, and her address was posted in the hall for those who wished to write her letters.

  But Nell heard rumors about Fiona from the other girls, who had picked up snatches from their parents. After Fiona had been gone for a year or so, word got out that Fiona’s mother had obtained a divorce– which, in their tribe, only happened in cases of adultery or abuse. Nell wrote Fiona a long letter saying she was terribly sorry if her father had been abusive, and offering her support in that case. A few days later she got back a curt note in which Fiona defended her father from all charges. Nell wrote back a letter of apology but didn’t hear from Fiona Hackworth again.

  It was about two years later that the news feeds filled up with astonishing tales of the young heiress Elizabeth Finkle-McGraw, who had vanished from her family’s estate outside of London and was rumored to have been sighted in London, Los Angeles, Hong Kong, Miami, and many other places, in the presence of people suspected of being highranking members of CryptNet.

  Hackworth awakes from a dream;

  retreat from the world of the Drummers;

  chronological discrepancies.

  Hackworth woke from a dream of unsustainable pleasure and realized it wasn’t a dream; his penis was inside someone else, and he was steaming like a runaway locomotive toward ejaculation. He had no idea what was going on; but couldn’t he be forgiven for doing the wrong thing? With a wiggle here and a thrust there, he finally nudged himself over the threshold, the smooth muscles of the tract in question executing their spinal algorithm.

  Just a few deep breaths into the refractory period, and he had already disengaged, yelping a little from the electric spark of withdrawal, and levered himself up on one arm to see whom he’d just violated. The firelight was enough to tell him what he already knew: Whoever this woman was, it wasn’t Gwen. Hackworth had violated the most important promise he’d ever made, and he didn’t even know the other party.

  But he knew it wasn’t the first time. Far from it. He’d had sex with a lot of people in the past few years– he’d even been buggered.

  There was, for example, the woman—

  Never mind, there was the man who—

  Strange to say, he could not think of any specific examples. But he knew he was guilty. It was precisely like waking up from a dream and having a clear train of thought in your mind, something you were working on just a few seconds ago, but being unable to remember it, consciousness peeled away from cognition. Like a three-year-old who has a talent for vanishing into crowds whenever you turn your back, Hackworth’s memories had fled to the same place as words that are on the tip of your tongue, precedents for déjà vu, last night’s dreams.

  He knew he was in big trouble with Gwen, but that Fiona still loved him– Fiona, taller than Gwen now, so selfconscious about her still linear figure, still devoid of the second derivatives that add spice to life.

  Taller than Gwen? How’s that?

  Better get out of this place before he had sex with someone else he didn’t know.

  He wasn’t in the central chamber anymore, rather in one of the tunnel’s aneurysms with some twenty other people, all just as naked as he was. He knew which tunnel led to the exit (why?) and began to crawl down it, rather stiffly as it seemed that he was stiff and laden with cricks and cramps. Must not have been very athletic sex– more in the Tantric mode.

  Sometimes they had sex for days.

  How did he know that?

  The hallucinations were gone, which was fine with him. He crawled through the tunnels for a long time. If he tried to think about where he was going, he got lost and eventually circled back to where he started. Only when his mind began to wander did he make his way on some kind of autopilot to a long chamber filled with silvery light, sloping upward. This was beginning to look familiar, he had seen this when he was still a young man. He followed it upward until he reached the end, where something unusually stony was under his feet. A hatch opened above him, and several tons of cold seawater landed on his head.

  He staggered up onto dry land and found himself in Stanley Park again, gray floor aft, green wall fore. The ferns rustled, and out stepped Kidnapper, who looked fuzzy and green. He also looked unusually dapper for a robotic horse, as Hackworth’s bowler hat was perched on top of his head.

  Hackworth reached up to feel himself and was astounded to feel his face covered with hair. Several months’ growth of beard was there. But even stranger, his chest was much hairier than it had been before. Some of the chest hair was gray, the only gray hairs he had ever seen coming out of his own follicles.

  Kidnapper was fuzzy and green because moss had been growing on him. The bowler looked terrible and had moss on it too. Hackworth reached out instinctively and put it on his head. His arm was thicker and hairier than it used to be, a not altogether unplea
sing change, and even the hat felt a little tight.

  From the Primer, Princess Nell crosses the trail of the enigmatic Mouse Army;

  a visit to an invalid.

  The clearing dimly visible through the trees ahead was a welcome sight, for the forests of King Coyote were surpassingly deep and forever shrouded in cool mists. Fingers of sunlight had begun to thrust between the clouds, and so Princess Nell decided to rest in the open space and, with any luck, bask in the sunlight. But when she reached the clearing, she found that it was not the flowerstrewn greensward she had expected; it was rather a swath that had been carved through the forest by the passage of some titanic force, which had flattened trees and churned up the soil as it progressed. When Princess Nell had recovered from her astonishment and mastered her fear, she resolved to make use of the tracking skills she had learned during her many adventures, so as to learn something about the nature of this unknown creature.

  As she soon discovered, the skills of an advanced tracker were not necessary in this case. The merest glance at the trampled soil revealed not (as she had anticipated) a few enormous footprints, but millions of tiny ones, superimposed upon one another in such numbers that no scrap of ground was unmarked by the impressions of tiny claws and footpads.

  A torrent of cats had passed this way; even had Princess Nell not recognized the footprints, the balls of loose hair and tiny scats, strewn everywhere, would have told the story. Cats moving in a herd! It was most unfeline behavior. Nell followed their track for some time, hoping to divine the cause of this prodigy. After a few miles the road widened into an abandoned camp freckled with the remains of innumerable small campfires. Nell combed this area for more clues, not without success: she found many mouse droppings here, and mouse footprints around the fires. The pattern of footprints made it clear that the cats had been concentrated in a few small areas, while the mice had apparently had the run of the place.

  The final piece of the puzzle was a tiny scrap of twisted rawhide that Nell found abandoned near one of the little campfires. Turning it around in her fingers, Nell realized that it was much like a horse’s bridle– except sized to fit around the head of a cat.

  She was standing on the trail of a vast army of mice, who rode on the backs of cats in the way that knights ride on horses.

  She had heard tales of the Mouse Army in other parts of the Land Beyond and dismissed them as ancient superstitions.

  But once, several years ago, in an inn high in the mountains, where Princess Nell had stayed for the night, she had been awakened early in the morning by the sound of a mouse rooting through her pack. .

  Princess Nell uttered a light-making spell that Purple had taught her, kindling a ball of luminance that hung in the air in the center of the room. The words of the spell had been concealed in the howl of the mountain winds through the rickety structure of the old inn, and so the mouse was caught entirely by surprise, blinded by the sudden light. Nell was startled to see that the mouse was not gnawing its way into her supply of food, as any mouse should have done, but rather was going through some of her papers. And this was not the usual destructive search for nesting material-this mouse knew how to read and was looking for information. Princess Nell trapped the mouse spy under her hands.

  “What are you looking for? Tell me, and I shall let you escape!” she said. Her adventures had taught her to be on the lookout for tricks of all kinds, and it was important that she learn who had dispatched this tiny, but effective, spy.

  “I am but a harmless mouse!” the spy squealed. “I do not even desire your food– information only!”

  “I will give you a big piece of cheese, all to yourself, if you give me some information,” Princess Nell said. She caught the mouse’s tail and lifted him up into the air so that they could talk face-to-face. Meanwhile, with her other hand, she loosened the drawstring of her bag and drew out a nice piece of blue-veined Stilton.

  “We are seeking our lost Queen,” the mouse said.

  “I can assure you that none of my papers have any information about a missing mouse monarch,” Princess Nell said.

  “What is your name?” the mouse said.

  “That is none of your business, spy!” Princess Nell said. “I will ask the questions.”

  “But it is very important that I know your name,” the mouse said.

  “Why? I am not a mouse. I have not seen any little mice with crowns on their heads.”

  The mouse spy said nothing. He was staring carefully at Princess Nell with his little beady eyes. “Did you, by any chance, come from an enchanted island?”

  “You have been listening to too many fairy tales,” Princess Nell said, barely concealing her astonishment. “You have been most uncooperative and so do not deserve any cheese– but I admire your pluck and so will give you some anyway. Enjoy yourself!” She set the mouse down on the floor and took out her knife to cut off a bit of the cheese; but by the time she was finished, the mouse had disappeared. She just caught sight of his pink tail disappearing under the door.

  The next morning, she found him dead on the hallway floor. The innkeeper’s cat had caught him. .

  So the Mouse Army did exist! Princess Nell wondered whether they had ever located their lost Queen. She followed their trail for another day or two, as it went in approximately the right direction and was almost as convenient as a road.

  She passed through a few more campsites. At one of them, she even found a little gravesite, marked with a tiny headstone carved from a chip of soapstone.

  The carvings on this tiny monument were much too small to see. But Princess Nell carried with her a magnifying glass that she had pilfered from the treasury of one of the Faery Kings, and so now she removed it from its padded box and its velvet bag and used it to examine the inscription.

  At the top of the stone was a little bas-relief of a mouse knight, dressed in armor, with a sword in one hand, bowing before an empty throne. The inscription read,

  Here lies Clover, tail and all

  Her virtues far outweighed her flaws

  She from the saddle took a fall

  And perished ‘neath her charger’s paws.

  We know not if her final ride

  Hath led her into Heaven or Hell

  Wherever she doth now abide

  She’s loyal yet to Princess Nell.

  Princess Nell examined the remains of the fires, and the surfaces of the wood that the Mouse Army had cut, and the state of their droppings, and estimated that they had passed by here many weeks previously. One day she would rendezvous with them and find out why they had formed such an attachment to her; but for now, she had more pressing considerations.

  …

  She’d have to see about the Mouse Army later. Today was Saturday, and on Saturday morning she always went down to the Leased Territories to visit her brother. She opened up the wardrobe in the corner of her sleeping room and took out her traveling dress. Sensing her intentions, the chaperone flew out of its niche in the back and whined over to the door.

  Even at her still-tender age, just a few years past the threshold of womanhood, Nell had already had cause to be grateful for the presence of the droning chaperone pod that followed her everywhere when she ventured from home alone. Maturity had given her any number of features that would draw the attention of the opposite sex, and of women so inclined. Commentators rarely failed to mention her eyes, which were said to have a vaguely exotic appearance. There was nothing particularly unusual about their shape or size, and their color-a tweedy blend of green and light brown flecked with gold-did not make them stand out in a predominantly Anglo-Saxon culture. But Nell’s eyes had an appearance of feral alertness that seized the attention of anyone who met her. Neo-Victorian society produced many young women who, though highly educated and well-read, were still blank slates at Nell’s age. But Nell’s eyes told a different story. When she had been presented to society a few months ago, along with several other External Propagation girls at Miss Matheson’s Academy, she had n
ot been the prettiest girl at the dance, and certainly not the best dressed or most socially prominent. She had attracted a crowd of young men anyway. They did not do anything so obvious as mill around her; instead they tried to keep the distance between themselves and Nell below a certain maximum, so that wherever she went in the ballroom, the local density of young men in her area became unusually high.

  In particular she had excited the interest of a boy who was the nephew of an Equity Lord in Atlantis/Toronto. He had written her several ardent letters. She had responded saying that she did not wish to continue the relationship, and he had, perhaps with the help of a hidden monitor, encountered her and her chaperone pod one morning as she had been riding to Miss Matheson’s Academy. She had reminded him of the recent termination of their relationship by declining to recognize him, but he had persisted anyway, and by the time she had reached the gates of the Academy, the chaperone pod had gathered enough evidence to support a formal sexual harassment accusation should Nell have wished to bring one.

  Of course she did not, because this would have created a cloud of opprobrium that would have blighted the young man’s career. Instead, she excerpted one five-second piece of the cine record from the chaperone pod: the one in which, approached by the young man, Nell said, “I’m sorry, but I’m afraid you have me at a disadvantage,” and the young man, failing to appreciate the ramifications, pressed on as if he had not heard. Nell placed this information into a smart visiting card and arranged to have it dropped by the young man’s family home. A formal apology was not long in coming, and she did not hear again from the young man.

  Now that she had been introduced to society, her preparations for a visit to the Leased Territories were just as elaborate as for any New Atlantis lady. Outside of New Atlantis, she and her chevaline were surrounded everywhere by a shell of hovering security pods serving as a first line of personal defense. A modern lady’s chevaline was designed with a sort of Y-shaped body that made it unnecessary to ride sidesaddle, so Nell was able to wear a fairly normal-looking sort of dress: a bodice that took advantage of her fashionably narrow waist, so carefully honed on the Academy’s exercise machines that it might have been turned on a lathe from walnut. Beyond that, her skirts, sleeves, collar, and hat saw to it that none of the young ruffians of the Leased Territories would have the opportunity to invade her body space with their eyes, and lest her distinctive face prove too much of a temptation, she wore a veil too.