The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer

by Neal Stephenson

  “What rules?” Harv blurted before Nell could get into it in a level of detail that might have cast a negative light on them. Nell marveled for the hundredth time at her brother's multifarious trickiness, which would have done Peter himself proud.

  “We make things,” the woman said, as if this provided a nearly perfect and sufficient explanation of the phyle called Dovetail. “Brad makes horseshoes. But Brad's the exception because mostly he provides services relating to horses. Doesn't he, Eggshell?” the woman added for the mare's benefit. “That's why he had to live down in the L.T. for a while, because there was disagreement as to whether grooms, butlers, and other service providers fit in with Dovetail's charter. But we had a vote and decided to let them in. This is boring you, isn't it? My name's Rita, and I make paper.”

  “You mean, in the M.C.?”

  This seemed like an obvious question to Nell, but Rita was surprised to hear it and eventually laughed it off. “I'll show you later. But what I was getting at is that, unlike where you've been living, everything here at Dovetail was made by hand. We have a few matter compilers here. But if we want a chair, say, one of our craftsmen will put it together out of wood, just like in ancient times.”

  “Why don't you just compile it?” Harv said. “The M.C. can make wood.”

  “It can make fake wood,” Rita said, “but some people don't like fake things.”

  “Why don't you like fake things?” Nell asked.

  Rita smiled at her. “It's not just us. It's them,” she said, pointing up the mountain toward the belt of high trees that separated Dovetail from New Atlantis territory.

  Light dawned on Harv's face. “The Vickys buy stuff from you!” he said.

  Rita looked a little surprised, as if she'd never heard them called Vickys before. “Anyway, what was I getting at? Oh, yeah, the point is that everything here is unique, so you have to be careful with it.”

  Nell had a rough idea of what unique was, but Harv didn't, and so Rita explained it for a while as they walked through Dovetail. At some length it dawned on both Nell and Harv that Rita was actually trying to tell them, in the most bewilderingly circumspect way imaginable, that she didn't want them to run around and break stuff. This approach to child behavior modification was so at odds with everything they knew that, in spite of Rita's efforts to be pleasant, the conversation was blighted by confusion on the children's part and frustration on hers. From time to time her freckles vanished as her face turned red.

  Where Dovetail had streets, they were paved with little blocks of stone laid close together. The vehicles were horses, chevalines, and velocipedes with fat knobby tires. Except for one spot where a number of buildings clustered together around a central green, houses were widely spaced and tended to be very small or very large. All of them seemed to have nice gardens though, and from time to time Nell would dart off the road to smell a flower. At first Rita would watch her nervously, telling her not to pick any of the flowers as they belonged to other people.

  At the end of a road was a wooden gate with a laughably primitive latch consisting of a sliding plank, glossy with use. Past the gate, the road became a very rough mosaic of flagstones with grass growing between them. It wound between undulating pastures where horses and the occasional dairy cow grazed and eventually terminated at a great three-story stone building perched on the bank of a river that ran down the mountain from the New Atlantis Clave. A giant wheel grew out of the side of the building and spun slowly as the river pushed on it. A man stood outside before a large chopping-block, using a hatchet with an exceptionally wide blade to split thin wedges of red wood from a log. These were piled into a wicker basket that was hauled up on a rope by a man who stood on the roof, replacing some of the old gray shingles with these new red ones.

  Harv was paralyzed with wonder at this exhibition and stopped walking. Nell had seen much the same sort of process at work in the pages of her Primer. She followed Rita over to a long low building where the horses lived.

  Most of the people did not live in the Millhouse proper but in a couple of long outbuildings, two stories each, with workshops below and living quarters above. Nell was a little surprised to see that Rita did not actually live with Brad. Her apartment and her shop were each twice the size of Nell's old flat and filled with fine things of heavy wood, metal, cotton, linen, and porcelain that, as Nell was beginning to understand, had all been made by human hands, probably right here in Dovetail.

  Rita's shop had great kettles where she would brew thick fibrous stew. She spread the stew thinly over screens to draw out the water and flattened it with a great hand-cranked press to make paper, thick and rough-edged and subtly colored from the thousands of tiny fibers wending through it. When she had a stack of paper made, she would take it next door to a shop with a sharp oily smell, where a bearded man with a smudged apron would run it through another big hand-cranked machine. When it came out of this machine, it had letters on the top, giving the name and address of a lady in New Atlantis.

  Since Nell had been decorous so far and not tried to stick her fingers into the machinery and not driven anyone to distraction with her questions, Rita gave her leave to visit some of the other shops, as long as she asked permission at each one. Nell spent most of the day making friends with various shop owners: a glassblower, a jeweler, a cabinetmaker, a weaver, even a toymaker who gave her a tiny wooden doll in a calico dress.

  Harv spent awhile bothering the men who were putting shingles on the roof, then wandered about in the fields for most of the day, kicking small rocks from place to place, generally scoping out the boundaries and general condition of the community centered on the Millhouse. Nell checked in on him from time to time. At first he looked tense and skeptical, then he relaxed and enjoyed it, and finally, late in the afternoon, he became surly and perched himself on a boulder above the running stream, tossing pebbles into it, chewing his thumbnail, and thinking.

  Brad came home early, riding a bay stallion straight down the mountain from the New Atlantis Clave, angling through the greenbelt and piercing the dog pod grid with scant consequences as the authorities knew him. Harv approached him with a formal mien, harrumphing phlegm out of the way as he prepared to offer up an explanation and a plea. But Brad's eyes merely glanced over Harv, settled on Nell, appraised her for a moment, then looked away shyly. The verdict was that they could stay the night, but all else depended on legal niceties that were beyond his powers.

  “Have you done anything the Shanghai Police might find interesting?” Brad asked Harv gravely. Harv said no, a simple no without the usual technicalities, provisos, and subclauses.

  Nell wanted to tell Brad everything. But she had been noticing how, in the Primer, whenever someone asked Peter Rabbit a direct question of any kind, he always lied.

  “To look at our green fields and big houses, you might think we're on Atlantis turf here,” Brad said, “but we're under Shanghai jurisdiction just like the rest of the Leased Territories. Now usually the Shanghai Police don't come around, because we are peaceable folk and because we have made certain arrangements with them. But if it were known that we were harboring runaway gang members—”

  “ 'Nuff said,” Harv blurted. It was clear that he had already worked all of this out in his head as he sat on the riverbank and was only waiting for the adults to catch up with his logic. Before Nell understood what was going on, he came up to her and gave her a hug and a kiss on the lips. Then he turned away from her and began running across a green field, down toward the ocean. Nell ran after him, but she could not keep up, and finally she fell down in a stand of bluebells and watched Harv dissolve into a curtain of tears. When she could no longer see him, she curled up sobbing, and in time Rita came and gathered her up in her strong arms and carried her slowly back across the field to the Millhouse where the steady wheel rolled.

  Orphans of the Han are exposed to the benefits of

  modern educational technology; Judge Fang reflects

  on the fundamental precep
ts of Confucianism.

  The orphanage ships had built-in matter compilers, but they could not, of course, be hooked up to Sources. Instead they drew their supplies of matter from cubical containers, rather like tanks of atoms arranged very precisely. These containers could be loaded on board with cranes and hooked up to the matter compilers in the same way that Feed lines would be if they resided on shore. The ships put in to Shanghai frequently, offloaded empty containers, and took new ones on board—their hungry populations were fed almost exclusively on synthetic rice produced by the matter compilers.

  There were seven ships now. The first five had been named after the Master's Five Virtues, and after that they had taken to naming them after major Confucian philosophers. Judge Fang flew out to the one named (as best it could be translated into English) Generosity of Soul, personally carrying the M.C. program in the sleeve of his garment. This was the very ship he had visited on the eventful night of his boat ride with Dr. X, and ever since then he had somehow felt closer to these fifty thousand little mice than any of the other quarter-million in the other vessels.

  The program was written to work in a bulk compiler, extruding dozens of Primers each cycle. When the first batch was finished, Judge Fang plucked out one of the new volumes, inspected its cover, which had the appearance of marbled jade, flipped through the pages admiring the illustrations, and cast a critical eye over the calligraphy.

  Then he carried it down a corridor and into a playroom where a few hundred little mice were running around, blowing off steam. He caught the eye of one girl and beckoned her over. She came, reluctantly, chivvied along by an energetic teacher who alternated between smiling to the girl and bowing to Judge Fang.

  He squatted so that he could look her in the eye and handed her the book. She was much more interested in the book than in Judge Fang, but she had been taught the proper formalities and bowed and thanked him. Then she opened it up. Her eyes got wide. The book began to talk to her. To Judge Fang the voice sounded a bit dull, the rhythm of the speech not exactly right. But the girl didn't care. The girl was hooked.

  Judge Fang stood up to find himself surrounded by a hundred little girls, all facing toward the little jade book, standing on tiptoes, mouths open.

  Finally he had been able to do something unambiguously good with his position. In the Coastal Republic it wouldn't have been possible; in the Middle Kingdom, which hewed to the words and spirit of the Master, it was simply part of his duties.

  He turned and left the room; none of the girls noticed, which was just as well, as they might have seen a quiver in his lip and a tear in his eye. As he made his way through the corridors toward the upper deck where his airship awaited him, he reviewed for the thousandth time the Great Learning, the kernel of the Master's thought: The ancients who wished to demonstrate illustrious virtue throughout the kingdom, first ordered well their own states. Wishing to order well their states, they first regulated their families. Wishing to regulate their families, they first cultivated their persons. Wishing to cultivate their persons, they first rectified their hearts. Wishing to rectify their hearts, they first sought to be sincere in their thoughts. Wishing to be sincere in their thoughts, they first extended to the utmost their knowledge. Such extention of knowledge lay in the investigation of things. . . . From the Son of Heaven down to the mass of the people, all must consider the cultivation of the person the root of everything besides.

  Hackworth receives an ambiguous message; a ride

  through Vancouver; tattooed woman and totem

  poles; he enters the hidden world of the Drummers.

  Kidnapper had a glove compartment of sorts hollowed into the back of its neck. As he was riding across the causeway, Hackworth opened it up because he wanted to see whether it was large enough to contain his bowler without folding, bending, spindling, or mutilating the exquisite hyperboloid of its brim. The answer was that it was just a wee bit too small. But Dr. X had been thoughtful enough to toss in some snacks: a handful of fortune cookies, three of them to be exact. They looked good. Hackworth picked one and snapped it open. The strip of paper bore some kind of gaudily animated geometric pattern, long strands of something tumbling end over end and bouncing against one another. It looked vaguely familiar: These were supposed to be yarrow stalks, which Taoists used for divination. But instead of forming a hexagram of the I Ching, they began falling into place, one after another, in such a way as to form letters in the pseudo-Chinese typeface used in the logos of one-star Chinese restaurants. When the last one had bounced into place, the fortune read:

  SEEK THE ALCHEMIST.

  “Thanks ever so much, Dr. X,” Hackworth snapped. He continued to watch the fortune for a while, hoping that it would turn into something a little more informative, but it was dead, just a piece of litter now and forever.

  Kidnapper slowed to a canter and cruised purposefully through the university, then turned north and crossed a bridge into the peninsula that contained most of Vancouver proper. The chevaline did a perfectly good job of not stepping on anyone, and Hackworth soon learned to stop worrying and trust its instincts. This left his eyes free to wander through the sights of Vancouver, which had not been advisable when he'd come this way on the velocipede. He had not noticed, before, the sheer maddening profusion of the place, each person seemingly an ethnic group of one, each with his or her own costume, dialect, sect, and pedigree. It was as if, sooner or later, every part of the world became India and thus ceased to function in any sense meaningful to straight-arrow Cartesian rationalists like John Percival Hackworth, his family and friends.

  Shortly after passing the Aerodrome they reached Stanley Park, an unruined peninsula several miles around, which had, thank God, been forked over to Protocol and kept much as it had always been, with the same Douglas firs and mossy red cedars that had been growing there forever. Hackworth had been here a few times and had a vague idea of how it was laid out: restaurants here and there, paths along the beach, a zoo and aquarium, public playing fields.

  Kidnapper took him for a nice lope along a pebbly beach and then somewhat abruptly bounded up a slope, for that purpose switching into a gait never used by any real horse. Its legs shortened, and it clawed its way surefootedly up the forty-five-degree surface like a mountain lion. An alarmingly quick zigzag through a stand of firs brought them into an open grassy area. Then Kidnapper slowed to a mere walk, as if it were a real horse that had to be cooled down gradually, and took Hackworth into a semicircle of old totem poles.

  A young woman was here, standing before one of the poles with her hands clasped behind her back, which would have given her an endearingly prim appearance if she had not been stark naked and covered with constantly shifting mediatronic tattoos. Even her hair, which fell loosely to her waist, had been infiltrated with some kind of nanosite so that each strand's color fluctuated from place to place according to a scheme not just now apparent to Hackworth. She was looking intently at the carving of a totem pole and apparently not for the first time, for her tattoos were done in much the same style.

  The woman was looking at a totem pole dominated by a representation of an orca, head down and tail up, dorsal fin projecting horizontally out of the pole and evidently carved from a separate piece of wood. The orca's blowhole had a human face carved around it. The face's mouth and the orca's blowhole were the same thing. This promiscuous denial of boundaries was everywhere on the totem poles and on the woman's tattoo: The staring eyes of a bear were also the faces of some other sort of creature. The woman's navel was also the mouth of a human face, much like the orca's blowhole, and sometimes that face became the mouth of a larger face whose eyes were her nipples and whose goatee was her pubic hair. But as soon as he'd made out one pattern, it would change into something else, because unlike the totem poles the tattoo was dynamic and played with images in time the same way that the totem poles did in space.

  “Hello, John,” she said. “It's too bad I loved you because you had to leave.”

  Hackworth
tried to find her face, which should have been easy, it being the thing in the front of her head; but his eyes kept snagging on all the other little faces that came and went and flowed into one another, time-sharing her eyes, her mouth, even her nostrils. And he was starting to recognize patterns in her hair too, which was more than he could handle. He was pretty sure he had just caught a glimpse of Fiona in there.

  She turned her back on him, her hair spinning out momentarily like a twirling skirt, and for that instant he could see through it and begin to make sense of the image. He was positive that somewhere in there he'd seen Gwen and Fiona walking along a beach.

  He dismounted from Kidnapper and followed her on foot. Kidnapper followed him silently. They walked across the park for half a mile or so, and Hackworth kept his distance because when he got too close to her, the images in her hair bewildered his eyes. She took him to a wild stretch of beach where immense Douglas fir logs lay scattered around. As Hackworth clambered over the logs trying to keep up with the woman, he occasionally caught a handhold that appeared to have been carved by someone long ago.