The Diamond Age

by Neal Stephenson

  They hadn't figured out a way to make the adverts come at you head-on, and so she maintained a roughly consistent direction down the middle of the street until she vaulted an energy-absorbing barrier at its end and vanished into the forest. Harv followed her a few seconds later, though his arm didn't support vaulting and so he ended up hurtling ignominiously over the top, like a hyped autoskater who hadn't seen the barrier at all, just body-kissed it full tilt. “Nell!” he was already hollering, as he came to rest in a nest of colorful discarded packaging materials. “You can't stay in here! You can't stay in the trees, Nell!”

  Nell had already worked her way deep into the woods, or as deep as you could get in a narrow greenbelt made to separate one Leased Territory from another. She fell down a couple of times and banged her head on a tree until, with childish adaptivity, she realized that she was on one of those surfaces that wasn't flat like a floor, street, or sidewalk. The ankles would actually have to show some versatility here. It was like one of those places she had read about in the Illustrated Primer, a magical zone where the fractal dimension of the terrain had been allowed to struggle off the pin, bumps supporting smaller copies of themselves, repeat until microscopic, throw dirt over it, and plant some of those creepy new Douglas firs that grow as fast as bamboo. Nell soon encountered a big Doug that had blown down in a recent typhoon, popping its own rootball out of the ground and thereby excavating a handy depression that invited nestling. Nell jumped in.

  For a few minutes she found it strangely hilarious that Harv could not find her. Their flat had only two hiding places, both closets, and so their traditional exploits in the hide-and-go-seek field had provided them with minimal entertainment value and left them wondering what the big deal was anyway about that stupid game. But now, here in the dark woods, Nell was beginning to get it.

  “Do you give up?” she finally said, and then Harv found her. He stood at the edge of the rootball pit and demanded that she come out. She refused. Finally he clambered down, though to an eye more critical than Nell's it might have looked as if he were falling. Nell jumped into his lap before he could get up. “We gotta go,” he said.

  “I want to stay here. It's nice,” Nell said.

  “You ain't the only one who thinks so,” Harv said. “That's why they got pods here.”

  “Pods?”

  “Aerostats. For security.”

  Nell was delighted to hear it and could not fathom why her brother spoke of security with such dread in his voice.

  A soprano turbojet seemed to bear down on them, fading in and out as it tacked through the flora. The creepy afflatus Dopplered down a couple of notes as it came to a stop directly above them. They couldn't see more than the odd glint of colored light, picked up by whatever-it-was from the distant mediatrons. A voice, flawlessly reproduced and just a hair too loud, came out of it: “Visitors are welcome to stroll through this park at any time. We hope you have enjoyed your stay. Please inquire if you need directions, and this unit will assist you.”

  “It's nice,” Nell said.

  “Not for long,” Harv said. “Let's get out of here before it gets pissed.”

  “I like it here.”

  Bluish light exploded out of the aerostat. They both hollered as their irises convulsed. It was hollering right back at them: “Allow me to light your way to the nearest exit!”

  “We're running away from home,” Nell explained. But Harv was scrambling up out of the hole, yanking Nell behind him with his good hand.

  The thing's turbines screeched briefly as it made a bluff charge. In this fashion it herded them briskly toward the nearest street. When they had finally climbed over a barrier and gotten their feet back on concreta firma, it snapped off its light and zoomed off without so much as a fare-thee-well.

  “It's okay, Nell, they always do that.”

  “Why?”

  “So this place don't fill up with transients.”

  “What's that?”

  “That's what we are, now,” Harv explained.

  “Let's go stay with your buds!” Nell said. Harv had never introduced Nell to any of his buds before, she knew them only as children of earlier epochs knew Gilgamesh, Roland, or Superman. She was under the impression that the streets of the Leased Territories were rife with Harv's buds and that they were more or less all-powerful.

  Harv's face squirmed for a while, and then he said, “We gotta talk about your magic book.”

  “The Young Lady's Illustrated Primer?”

  “Yeah, whatever it's called.”

  “Why must we talk about it?”

  “Huh?” Harv said in the dopey voice he affected whenever Nell talked fancy.

  “Why do we gotta talk about it?” Nell said patiently.

  “There's something I never told you about that book, but I gotta tell you now,” Harv said. “Come on, let's keep moving, or some creep's gonna come hassle us.” They headed toward the main street of Lazy Bay Towne, which was the Leased Territory into which the pod had ejected them. The main street curved along the waterfront, separating a beach from a very large number of drinking establishments fronted with lurid, bawdy mediatrons. “I don't want to go that way,” Nell said, remembering that last gauntlet of electromagnetic pimps. But Harv grabbed her wrist and hobbled downhill, pulling her behind. “It's safer than being in the back streets. Now let me tell you about that book. My buds and I pinched it and some other stuff from a Vicky we rolled. Doc told us to roll him.”

  “Doc?”

  “This Chinese guy who runs the Flea Circus. He said we should roll him, and make sure we made it good so it'd get picked up on the monitors.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Never mind. He also said he wanted us to lift something from this Vicky—a certain package about yay big.” Harv formed right angles with his thumbs and index fingers and defined the vertices of a rectangle, book-size. “Gave us to understand it was valuable. Well, we didn't find any such package. We did find a shitty old book on him, though. I mean, it looked old and fine, but no one reckoned it could be the thing Doc was looking for, since he's got lots of books. So I took it for you.

  “Well, a week or two later, Doc wants to know where is the package, and we told him this story. When he heard about that book, he flipped and told us that the book and the package were one and the same. By that time, you were already playing with that book all night and all day, Nell, and I couldn't bear to take it away from you, so I lied. I told him I threw the book down on the sidewalk when I saw it was junk, and if it wasn't still there, then someone else must have come along and picked it up. Doc was pissed, but he fell for it.

  “That's why I never brought my buds to the flat. If anyone finds out you still have that book, Doc'll kill me.”

  “What should we do?”

  Harv got a look on his face like he'd rather not talk about it. “For starters, let's get some free stuff.”

  They took a sneaky and indirect route to the waterfront, staying as far as possible from the clusters of drunks winding through the constellation of incandescent bordellos like cold dark clumps of rock wending their way through a bright nebula of young stars. They made their way to a public M.C. on a streetcorner and picked out items from the free menu: boxes of water and nutri-broth, envelopes of sushi made from nanosurimi and rice, candy bars, and packages about the size of Harv's hand, festooned with implausible block letter promises (“REFLECTS 99% OF INFRARED!”) that folded out into huge crinkly metallized blankets. Nell had been noticing a lot of rough shapes strewn around on the beach like giant chrome-plated larva. Must be fellow transients wrapped up in these selfsame. As soon as they had scored the goodies, they ran down to the beach and picked out their own spot. Nell wanted one closer to the surf, but Harv made some very well-considered observations about the inadvisability of sleeping below high tide. They trudged along the seawall for a good mile or so before finding a relatively abandoned bit of beach and wrapped themselves up in their blankets there. Harv insisted that one of
them had to stay awake at all times to act as a sentry. Nell had learned all about this kind of thing from her virtual adventures in the Primer, and so she volunteered to stay up first. Harv went to sleep pretty soon, and Nell opened up her book. At times like this, the paper glowed softly and the letters stood out crisp and black, like tree branches silhouetted against a full moon.

  Miranda's reactions to the evening's events; solace

  from an unexpected quarter; from the Primer, the

  demise of a hero, flight to the Land Beyond, and the

  lands of King Magpie.

  The Theatre Parnasse had a rather nice bar, nothing spectacular, just a sort of living room off the main floor, with the bar itself recessed into one wall. The old furniture and pictures had been looted by the Red Guards and later replaced with post-Mao stuff that was not as fine. The management kept the booze locked up when the ractors were working, not sharing any romantic notions about substance-abusing creative geniuses. Miranda stumbled down from her box, fixed herself a club soda, and settled into a plastic chair. She put her shaking hands together like the covers of a book and then buried her face in them. After a few deep breaths she got tears to come, though they came silently, a temporary letting-off-steam cry, not the catharsis she was hoping for. She hadn't earned the catharsis yet, she knew, because what had happened was just the first act. Just the initial incident, or whatever they called it in the books.

  “Rough session?” said a voice. Miranda recognized it, but just barely: It was Carl Hollywood, the dramaturge, in effect her boss. But he didn't sound like a gruff son of a bitch tonight, which was a switch.

  Carl was in his forties, six and a half feet tall, massively built and given to wearing long black coats that almost swept the floor. He had long wavy blond hair drawn back from his forehead and affected a sort of King Tut beard. Either he was celibate, or else he believed that the particulars of his sexual orientation and needs were infinitely too complex to be shared with those he worked with. Everyone was scared shitless of him, and he liked it that way; he couldn't do his job if he was buddies with all of the ractors.

  She heard his cowboy boots approaching across the bare, stained Chinese rug. He confiscated her club soda. “Don't want to drink this fizzy stuff when you're having a cry. It'll come out your nose. You need something like tomato juice—replace those lost electrolytes. I tell you what,” he said, rattling his tremendous keychain, “I'll break the rules and fix you an honest-to-god Bloody Mary. Usually I make 'em with tabasco, which is how we do it where I'm from. But since your mucus membranes are already irritated enough, I'll just make a boring one.”

  By the time he was finished with this oration, Miranda had gotten her hands away from her face at least. She turned away from him.

  “Kind of funny racting in that little box, ain't it,” Carl said, “kind of isolating. Theatre didn't used to be that way.”

  “Isolating? Sort of,” Miranda said. “I could use a little more isolation tonight.”

  “You telling me to leave you alone, or—”

  “No!” Miranda said, sounding desperate to herself. She brought her voice to heel before continuing. “No, that's not how I meant it. It's just that you never know what role you're going to play. And some of the roles can cut pretty deep. If someone handed me a script for what I just did and asked me if I were interested in the part, I'd refuse it.”

  “Was it a porn thing?” Carl Hollywood said. His voice sounded a bit strangled. He was angry all of a sudden. He had stopped in the middle of the room, clenching her Bloody Mary as if he might pop the glass in his fist.

  “No. It wasn't like that,” Miranda said. “At least, it wasn't porn in the sense you're talking about,” Miranda said, “though you never know what turns people on.”

  “Was the payer looking to get turned on?”

  “No. Absolutely not,” Miranda said.

  Then, after a long time, she said, “It was a kid. A little girl.”

  Carl gave her a searching look, then remembered his manners and glanced away, pretending to appraise the carving on the front of the bar.

  “So the next question is,” Miranda said after she'd steadied herself with a few gulps of the drink, “why I should get so upset over a kiddie ractive.”

  Carl shook his head. “I wasn't going to ask it.”

  “But you're wondering.”

  “What I'm wondering about is my problem,” Carl said. “Let's concentrate on your problems for now.” He frowned, sat down across from her and ran his hand back through his hair absentmindedly. “Is this that big account?” He had access to her spreadsheets; he knew how she'd been spending her time.

  “Yeah.”

  “I've sat in on a few of those sessions.”

  “I know you have.”

  “Seems different from normal kiddie stuff. The education is there, but it's darker. Lots of unreconstructed Grimm Brothers content. Powerful.”

  “Yeah.”

  “It's amazing to me that one kid can spend that much time—”

  “Me too.” Miranda took another swallow, then bit off the end of the celery stick and chewed awhile, stalling. “What it comes down to,” she said, “is that I'm raising someone's kid for them.”

  Carl looked her straight in the eye for the first time in a while. “And some heavy shit just went down,” he said.

  “Some very heavy shit, yes.”

  Carl nodded.

  “It's so heavy,” Miranda said, “that I don't even know if this girl is alive or dead.”

  Carl glanced up at the fancy old clock on the wall, its face yellowed from a century and a half's accumulation of tar and nicotine. “If she's alive,” he said, “then she probably needs you.”

  “Right,” Miranda said. She stood up and headed for the exit. Then, before Carl could react, she spun on the ball of her foot, bent down, and kissed him on the cheek.

  “Aw, stop it,” he said.

  “See you later, Carl. Thanks.” She ran up the narrow staircase, heading for her box.

  Baron Burt lay dead upon the floor of the Dark Castle. Princess Nell was terrified of the blood that gushed from his wound, but she approached him bravely and plucked the keychain with the twelve keys from his belt. Then she gathered up her Night Friends, tucking them into a little knapsack, and hurriedly packed a picnic lunch while Harv gathered up blankets and ropes and tools for their journey.

  They were walking across the courtyard of the Dark Castle, heading for the great gate with its twelve locks, when suddenly the evil Queen appeared before them, as tall as a giant, wreathed in lightning and thunderclouds! Tears gushed from her eyes and turned to blood as they rolled down her cheeks. “You have taken him away from me!” she cried. And Nell understood that this was a terrible thing for her wicked stepmother, because she was weak and helpless without a man. “For this,” the Queen continued, “I shall curse you to remain locked up in this Dark Castle forever!” And she reached down with one hand like talons and snatched the keychain from Princess Nell's hand. Then she turned into a great vulture and flew away across the ocean toward the Land Beyond.

  “We are lost!” Harv cried. “Now we shall never escape from this place!” But Princess Nell did not lose hope.

  Not long after the Queen had vanished over the horizon, another bird came flying toward them. It was the Raven, their friend from the Land Beyond, who frequently came to visit them and to entertain them with stories of far-off countries and famous heroes. “Now is your chance to escape,” said the Raven. “The evil Queen is engaged in a great battle of sorcery with the Faery Kings and Queens who rule the Land Beyond. Throw a rope out of yon arrow-slit, and climb down to freedom.”

  Princess Nell and Harv climbed the stairway into one of the bastions flanking the Dark Castle's main gate. These had narrow windows where in olden times soldiers should shoot arrows down at invaders. Harv tied one end of a rope to a hook in the wall and threw it out one of these slits. Princess Nell threw her Night Friends out, knowing that they
would land harmlessly below. Then she climbed out through the slit and down the rope to freedom.

  “Follow me, Harv!” she cried. “All is well down here, and it is a much brighter place than you can possibly imagine!”

  “I cannot,” he said. “I am too big to pass through the slit.” And he began to throw out the loaves of bread, pieces of cheese, wineskins, and pickles that they had packed for their lunch.

  “Then I will come back up the rope and stay with you,” Princess Nell said generously.

  “No!” Harv said, and reeled in the rope, trapping Nell on the outside.

  “But I will be lost without you!” Princess Nell cried.

  “That's your stepmother talking,” Harv said. “You are a strong, smart, and brave girl and can do fine without me.”

  “Harv is right,” said the Raven, flying overhead. “Your destiny is in the Land Beyond. Hurry, lest your stepmother return and trap you here.”

  “Then I will go to the Land Beyond with my Night Friends,” said Princess Nell, “and I will find the twelve keys, and I will come back here one day and free you from this Dark Castle.”

  “I'm not holding my breath,” Harv said, “but thanks anyway.”

  Down on the shore was a little boat that Nell's father had once used to row around the island. Nell climbed in with her Night Friends and began to row.

  Nell rowed for many hours until her back and shoulders ached. The sun set in the west, the sky became dark, and it became harder to make out the Raven against the darkling sky. Then, much to her relief, her Night Friends came alive as they always did. There was plenty of room in the boat for Princess Nell, Purple, Peter, and Duck, but Dinosaur was so big that he nearly swamped it; he had to sit in the bow and row while the others sat in the stern trying to balance his weight.

  They moved much faster with Dinosaur's strong rowing; but early in the morning a storm blew up, and soon the waves were above their heads, above even Dinosaur's head, and rain was coming down so fast that Purple and Princess Nell had to bail using Dinosaur's shiny helmet as a bucket. Dinosaur threw out all of his armor to lighten the load, but it soon became evident that this was not enough.