"Who are you taking me to meet?"
"A guy named Beck. An old acquaintance of mine."
"But not a friend?"
Carl adopted an uncomfortable grin and shrugged. "We've been friends sometimes. We've also been collaborators. Business partners. This is how life works, Miranda: After a while, you build up a network of people. You pass them bits of data they might be interested in and vice versa. To me, he's one of those guys."
"I can't help wondering why you want me to meet him."
"I believe," Carl said very quietly, but using some actor's trick so that she could hear every word, "that this gentleman can help you find Nell. And that you can help him find something he wants." And he stepped aside with a swirl of cloak, pulling out a chair for her. They were in the corner of the banquet hall. Sitting on the opposite side of the table, his back to a large marble-silled window, the illuminated Bund and the mediatronic cacophony of Pudong spilling bloody light across the glossy shoulder-pads of his suit, was a young African man in dreadlocks, wearing dark glasses with minuscule circular lenses held in some kind of ostentatiously complex metallic space grid. Sitting next to him, but hardly noticed by Miranda, was a Nipponese businessman wearing a dark formal kimono and smoking what smelled like an old-fashioned, fully carcinogenic cigar.
"Miranda, this is Mr. Beck and Mr. Oda, both privateers. Gentlemen, Ms. Miranda Redpath."
Both men nodded in a pathetic vestige of a bow, but neither made a move to shake hands, which was just as well— nowadays some amazing things could be transferred through skin-to-skin contact. Miranda didn't even nod back to them; she just sat down and let Carl scoot her in. She didn't like people who described themselves as privateers. It was just a pretentious word for a thete— someone who didn't have a tribe.
Either that, or they really did belong to tribes-from the looks of them, probably some weird synthetic phyle she'd never heard of-and, for some reason, were pretending not to.
Carl said, "I have explained to the gentlemen, without getting into any details, that you would like to do the impossible. Can I get you something to drink, Miranda?"
After Carl Hollywood left, there was a rather long silence during which Mr. Beck presumably stared at Miranda, though she could not tell because of the dark glasses. Mr. Oda's primary function appeared to be that of nervous spectator, as if he had wagered half of his net worth on whether Miranda or Mr. Beck would speak first.
A stratagem occurred to Mr. Oda. He pointed in the direction of the bandstand and nodded significantly. "You like this band?" Miranda looked over at the band, half a dozen men and women in an assortment of races. Mr. Oda's question was difficult to answer because they had not yet made any music. She looked back at Mr. Oda, who pointed significantly at himself.
"Oh. You're the backer?" Miranda said.
Mr. Oda withdrew a small glittering object from his pocket and slid it across the table toward Miranda. It was a cloisonn
"I'm not seeing anything," Mr. Beck finally said, apparently for Mr. Oda's benefit. "To a first approximation, she is clean."
Miranda realized that Mr. Beck had been checking her out using some kind of display in his phenomenoscopic glasses. Miranda was still trying to work out some kind of unpleasant response when Mr. Oda leaned forward into his own cloud of cigar smoke. "It is our understanding," he said, "that you wish to make a connection. Your wish is very strong."
Privateers. The word also implied that these gentlemen, at least in their own minds, had some kind of an angle, some way of making money off of their own lack of tribal affiliation.
"I've been told that such things are impossible."
"It's more correct to speak in probabilistic terms," said Mr. Beck. His accent was more Oxford than anything else, with a Jamaican lilt, and a crispness that owed something to India.
"Astronomically improbable, then," Miranda said.
"There you go," said Mr. Beck.
Now, somehow, the ball had found its way into Miranda's court. "If you guys think you've found a way to beat probability, why don't you go into the Vegas ractives and make a fortune?"
Misters Beck and Oda were actually more amused by that crack than she had expected them to be. They were capable of irony. That was one good sign in the almost overwhelming barrage of negative signals she'd been getting from them so far.
The band started up, playing dance music with a good beat. The lights came down, and the party began to glitter as light flashed from the dragonfly pins.
"It wouldn't work," Mr. Beck said, "because Vegas is a game of pure numbers with no human meaning to it. The mind doesn't interface to pure numbers."
"But probability is probability," Miranda said.
"What if you have a dream one night that your sister is in a crash, and you contact her the next day and learn that she broke up with her boyfriend?"
"It could be a coincidence."
"Yes. But not a very probable one. You see, maybe it's possible to beat probability, when the heart as well as the mind is involved."
Miranda supposed that neither Mr. Beck nor Mr. Oda understood the essential cruelty of what they were saying. It was much better not to have any hope at all. "Are you guys involved in some kind of religious thing?" she said.
Misters Beck and Oda looked at each other significantly. Mr. Oda went into some peculiar routine of tooth-sucking and throat-clearing that would probably convey a torrent of information to another Nipponese person but meant nothing to Miranda, other than giving her a general hint that the situation was rather complicated.
Mr. Beck produced an antique silver snufibox, or a replica of one, took out a pinch of nanosite dust, and hoovered it up into one of his great circular nostrils, then nervously scratched the underside of his nose. He slid his glasses way down, exposing his big brown eyes, and stared distractedly over Miranda's shoulder into the thick of the party, watching the band and the dancers' reaction to it. He was wearing a dragonfly pin, which had begun to glow and to flash gorgeous colored lights, like a fleet of police cars and firetrucks gathered round a burning house.
The band segued into a peculiar, tuneless, beatless miasma of noise, spawning lazy convection currents in the crowd.
"How do you guys know Carl?" Miranda said, hoping to break the ice a bit.
Mr. Oda shook his head apologetically. "I have not had the pleasure of making his acquaintance until recently."
"Used to do thyuh-tuh with him in London."
"You're a ractor?"
Mr. Beck snorted ironically. A variegated silk hankie flourished in his hand, and he blew his nose quickly and cleanly like a practiced snufftaker. "I am a technical boy," he said.
"You program ractives?"
"That is a subset of my activities."
"You do lights and sets? Or digital stuff? Or nanotech?"
"Invidious distinctions do not interest me. I am interested in one thing," said Mr. Beck, holding up his index finger, topped with a very large but perfectly manicured claw of a fingernail, "and that is use of tech to convey meaning."
"That covers a lot of areas nowadays."
"Yes, but it shouldn't. That is to say that the distinctions between those areas are bogus."
"What's wrong with just programming ractives?"
"Nothing at all," said Mr. Beck, "just as nothing is wrong with traditional live theatre, or for that matter, sitting round a campfire telling stories, like I used to enjoy on the beach when I was a lad. But as long as there are new ways to be found, it is my job, as a technical boy, to find them. Your art, lady, is racting. Searching for the new tech is mine."
The noise coming from the band had begun to pulse irregularly. As they talked, the pulses gathered themselves into beats and became steadier. Miranda turned around to look at the people on the dance floor. They were all standing around with faraway looks on their faces, concentrating on something. Their dragonfly pins were flashing wildly now, joining in a coherent pulse of pure white on each beat. Miranda realized that the pins were somehow patched into the wearers' nervous systems and that they were talking to each other, creating the music collectively. A guitarist began to weave an improvised melodic line through the gradually coalescing pattern of sound, and the sound condensed around it as all of the dancers heard the tune. They had a feedback loop going. A young woman began to chant out some kind of tuneless rap that sounded improvised. As she went on, she broke into melody. The music was still weird and formless, but it was beginning to approach something you might hear on a professional recording.
Miranda turned back to face Mr. Beck. "You think you've invented a new way to convey meaning with technology-"
"Medium."
"A new medium, and that it can help me get what I want. Because when meaning is involved, the laws of probability can be broken."
"There are two misconceptions in your statement. One: I did not invent the medium. Others did, perhaps for different purposes, and I have stumbled across it, or actually just heard intimations.
"As far as the laws of probability, my lady, these cannot be broken, any more than any other mathematical principle. But laws of physics and mathematics are like a coordinate system that runs in only one dimension. Perhaps there is another dimension perpendicular to it, invisible to those laws of physics, describing the same things with different rules, and those rules are written in our hearts, in a deep place where we cannot go and read them except in our dreams."
Miranda looked to Mr. Oda, hoping he'd wink or something, but he was staring into the dance floor with a terribly serious expression, as though enfolded in deep thoughts himself, nodding slightly. Miranda drew a deep breath and sighed.
When she looked up at Mr. Beck again, he was watching her, noting her curiosity about Mr. Oda. He turned one hand palm up and rubbed the ball of his thumb over his fingertips.
So Beck was the hacker and Oda was the backer. The oldest and most troublesome relationship in the technological world.
"We require a third participant," Mr. Beck said, dovetailing into her thoughts.
"To do what?" Miranda said, evasive and defensive at the same time.
"All technomedia ventures have the same structure," said Mr. Oda, bestirring himself for the first time in a while. By now a nice synergy had developed between band and crowd, and a lot of dancing was going on-some intimidatingly sophisticated stuff, and also some primal moshing. "Three-legged tripod." Oda held up a fist and began to extend fingers as he enumerated the same. Miranda noted that his fingers were gnarly and bent, as if they'd all been broken frequently. Mr. Oda was, perhaps, a veteran practitioner of certain martial arts now disdained by most Nipponese because of their lower-class provenance. "Leg number one: new technological idea. Mr. Beck. Leg number two: adequate financial backing. Mr. Oda. Leg number three: the artist."
Misters Beck and Oda looked significantly at Miranda. She threw back her head and managed a nice solid laugh, hitting that sweet spot down in her diaphragm. It felt good. She shook her head, letting her hair swing back and forth across her shoulders. Then she leaned forward across the table, shouting to be heard above the band. "You guys must be desperate. I'm old hat, guys. There's half a dozen ractors in this room with better prospects than me. Didn't Carl fill you in? I've been holed up in a body stage for six years doing kid stuff. I'm not a star."
"Star means a master of conventional ractives, which are precisely the technology we are trying to move beyond," said Mr. Beck, a bit scornful that she wasn't getting it.
Mr. Oda pointed to the band. "None of these people were professional musicians-some not even amateurs. Musician skills are not relevant for this-these people were new kinds of artists born too early."
"Almost too early," Mr. Beck said.
"Oh, my god," Miranda said, starting to get it. For the first time, she believed that what Beck and Oda were talking about— whatever the hell it was-was a real possibility. Which meant that she was ninety percent convinced-though only Beck and Oda understood that.
It was too loud to talk. A mosher backed into Miranda's chair and nearly fell over her. Beck stood up, came round the table, and extended one hand, asking her to dance. Miranda looked into the Dionysian revel filling the floor and understood that the only way to be safe was to join it. She plucked her dragonfly pin from the tabletop and followed Beck into the midst of the dance. As she pinned it on, it began to flash, and she thought she heard a new strain woven into the song.
From the Primer, Princess Nell enters into the lands of King Coyote.
All that hot afternoon Nell toiled up the numberless switchbacks, occasionally reaching into the bag that dangled at her waist, drawing out a handful of Purple's ashes and scattering them behind her like seeds. Whenever she stopped to rest, she could look out across the burnt desert she had just crossed: a tawny plain scabbed with reddish-brown volcanic rock, patches of aromatic greenish-gray shrubs clinging like bread mold to any parts that were sheltered from the eternal wind. She had hoped that when she climbed the face of this mountain, she would rise up above the dust, but it had followed her, coating her lips and her toes. When she drew a breath through her nose, it only stung her parched nostrils, and so she had given up trying to smell anything. But late in the afternoon a cool moist draft spilled down the mountain and over her face. She drew in a breath of it, hoping to catch some of the cold air before it trickled down into the desert. It smelled of evergreens.
As she climbed the switchbacks, she forded those delightful currents of air over and over, so that as she rounded each hairpin turn in the trail, she had an incentive to climb toward the next one. The little shrubs that clutched rocks and cowered in cracks became bigger and more numerous, and flowers began to appear, first tiny little white ones like handfuls of salt strewn over the rocks, then larger blossoms, blue and magenta and brilliant orange, brimming with scented nectar that attracted bees all fuzzy and yellow with stolen pollen. Gnarled oaks and short dense evergreens cast tiny shadows across the path. The skyline grew closer, and the turns in the path became wider as the mountain became less steep. Nell rejoiced when the switchbacks ended and the trail took off straight across an undulating mountaintop meadow thick with purple-flowered heather and marked with occasional stands of tall firs. For a moment she was afraid that this meadow was nothing more than a ledge, and that she had more mountains to ascend; but then the path turned downhill, and treading heavily as new muscles caught her descending weight, she half-ran across a vast boulder, pocked with tiny pools of clear water and occasional lozenges of wet snow, until she reached a point where it fell away from under her and she skidded to a precarious stop, looking down like a peregrine falcon over an immense country of blue lakes and green mountains, shrouded in a whirling storm of silver mist.
Nell turned the page and saw it, just as the book said. This was a twopage illustration-a color painting, she reckoned. Any one part of it looked just as real as a cine feed. But the geometry of the thing was funny, borrowing some suprarealistic tricks from classical Chinese landscape painting; the mountains were too steep, and they marched away forever into the distance, and if Nell stared, she could see tall castles clinging to their impossibly precipitous slopes, colorful banners waving from their flagpoles bearing heraldic devices that were dynamic: The gryphons crouched, the lions roared, and she could see all of these details, even though the castles should have been miles away; whenever she looked at something it got bigger and turned into a different picture, and when her attention wavered-when she blinked and shook her head-it snapped back to the first view again.
She spent a long time doing that, because there were dozens of castles at the very least, and she got the feeling that if she kept looking and counting she might look forever. But it wasn't all castles: there were mountains, cities, rivers, lakes, birds and beasts, caravans, and travelers of all kinds.
She spent a while staring at a group of travelers who had drawn their wagons into a roadside meadow and set up a camp, clapping hands round a bonfire while one of them played a reel on some small bellowspowered bagpipes, barely audible these many miles away. Then she realized that the book hadn't said anything for a long time. "What happened then?" she said.
The Young Lady's Illustrated Primer said nothing.
"Nell looked for a safe way down," Nell essayed.
Her vantage point began to move. A patch of snow swung into view. "No, wait!" she said, "Nell stuffed some clean snow into her water bottles."
In the painting, Nell could see her bare pink hands scooping up snow and packing it bit by bit into the neck of her bottle. When it was full, she put the cork back in (Nell didn't have to specifr that) and began moving around on the rock, looking for a place that wasn't so steep. Nell didn't have to explain that in detail either; in the ractive, she searched the rock in a fairly rational way and in a few minutes found a stairway chiseled into the rock, winding down the mountain endlessly until it pierced a cloud layer far below. Princess Nell began descending the steps, one at a time.
After a while, Nell tried an experiment: "Princess Nell descended the stairs for many hours."
This triggered a series of dissolves like she'd seen on old passives: Her current view dissolved into a closeup of her feet, trudging down a couple of steps, which dissolved into a view from considerably farther down the mountain, followed by a closeup of Princess Nell unscrewing her water bottle and drinking melted snow; another view from farther down; Nell sitting down for a rest; a soaring eagle; the approaching cloud layer; big trees; descending through the mist; and finally, Nell tramping wearily down the last ten steps, which left her in a clearing in a dark coniferous forest, carpeted with rust-colored pine needles. It was twilight, and the wolves were beginning to howl. Nell made the usual arrangements for the night, lit a fire, and curled up to sleep.
Having reached a good stopping-place, Nell started to close the book. She'd have to continue this later.
She had just entered the land of the oldest and most powerful of all the Faery Kings. The many castles on the mountains belonged to all of his Dukes and Earls, and she suspected she would have to visit them all before she had gotten what she'd come for. It was not a quick adventure for an early Saturday morning. But just as she was clasping the book together, new words and an illustration appeared on the page she'd been reading, and something about the illustration made her open the book back up. It showed a crow perched on a tree branch above Princess Nell, holding a necklace in its beak. It was eleven jeweled keys strung on a golden chain.
Princess Nell had been wearing it around her neck; apparently the next event in the story was that this bird stole it while she was sleeping. Beneath the picture was a poem, spoken by the crow from his perch:
Castles, gardens, gold, and jewels
Contentment signify, for fools
Like Princess Nell; but those
Who cultivate their wit
Like King Coyote and his crows
Compile their power bit by bit
And hide it places no one knows.
Nell closed up the book This was too upsetting to think about just now. She had been collecting those keys for most of her life. The first she'd taken from King Magpie just after she and Harv had arrived at Dovetail. She had picked up the other ten one at a time during the years since then. She had done this by traveling to the lands of the Faery Kings and Queens who owned those keys and using the tricks she had learned from her Night Friends. Each key had come to her in a different way.
One of the hardest keys to get had belonged to an old Faery Queen who had seen through every trick that Nell could think up and fought off every assault. Finally, in desperation, Princess Nell had thrown herself on the mercy of that Queen and told her the sad story of Harv locked up in the Dark Castle. The Queen had fed Nell a nice bowl of chicken soup and handed over the key with a smile.
Not much later, Duck had encountered a nice young mallard on the road and flown away with him to start a family. Purple and Princess Nell then traveled together for several years, and on many a dark night, sitting around the campfire under a full moon, Purple had taught Nell secret things from her magic books and from the ancient lore she kept in her head.
Recently they had traveled for a thousand miles on camelback across a great desert full of djinns, demons, sultans, and caliphs and finally reached the great onion-domed palace of the local Faery King— himself a djinn of great power-who ruled over all the desert lands. Princess Nell had devised a complicated plan to trick their way into the djinn's treasury. To carry it out, she and Purple had to live in the city around the palace for a couple of years and make many treks into the desert in search of magic lanterns, rings, secret caverns, and the like.
Finally, Princess Nell and Purple had penetrated to the djinn king's treasury and found the eleventh key. But they had been surprised by the djinn himself, who attacked them in the guise of a fire-breathing serpent. Purple had transformed herself into a giant eagle with metallic wings and talons that could not be burned— much to the surprise of Princess Nell, who had never imagined that her companion possessed such power.
The battle between Purple and the djinn raged for a day and a night, both combatants transforming themselves into any number of fantastical creatures and hurling all manner of devastating spells at each other, until finally the mighty castle lay in ruins, the desert was scorched and blasted for many miles around, and Purple and the djinn king both lay dead on the floor of what had been the treasury.
Nell had picked up the eleventh key from the floor, put it on her chain, cremated Purple's body, and scattered her ashes across the desert as she walked, for many days, toward the mountains and the green land, where the eleven keys had now been stolen away from her.
Nell's experiences at school;
a confrontation with Miss Stricken;
the rigors of Supplementary Curriculum;
Miss Matheson's philosophy of education;
three friends go separate ways.
AGLAIA BRILLIANCE
EUPHROSYNE JOY
THALIA BLOOM
The names of the three graces, and diverse artists' conceptions of the ladies themselves, were chiseled, painted, and sculpted freely about the interior and exterior of Miss Matheson's Academy. Nell could hardly look anywhere without seeing one of them prancing across a field of wildflowers, distributing laurel wreaths to the worthy, jointly thrusting a torch toward heaven, or shedding lambent effulgence upon the receptive pupils.
Nell's favorite part of the curriculum was Thalia, which was scheduled for an hour in the morning and an hour in the afternoon.
When Miss Matheson hauled once on the old bellrope dangling down from the belfry, belting a single dolorous clang across the campus, Nell and the other girls in her section would arise, curtsy to their teacher, walk in single file down the corridor to the courtyard-then break into a chaotic run until they reached the Hall of Physical Culture, where they would strip out of their heavy, scratchy complicated uniforms and climb into lighter, looser, scratchy complicated uniforms with more freedom of movement.
The Bloom curriculum was taught by Miss Ramanujan or one of her assistants. Usually they did something vigorous in the morning, like field hockey, and something graceful in the afternoon, like ballroom dance, or peculiar, giggle-inducing exercises in how to walk, stand, and sit like a Lady.
Brilliance was Miss Matheson's department, though she mostly left it to her assistants, occasionally wheeling in and out of various classrooms in an old wood-and-wicker wheelchair. During the Aglaia period, the girls would get together in groups of half a dozen or so to answer questions or solve problems put to them by the teachers: For example, they counted how many species of plants and animals could be found in one square foot of the forest behind the school. They put on a scene from a play in Greek. They used a ractive simulation to model the domestic economy of a Lakota band before and after the introduction of horses. They designed simple machines with a nanopresence rig and tried to compile them in the M.C. and make them work They wove brocades and made porcelain as Chinese ladies used to do. And there was an ocean of history to be learned: first biblical, Greek, and Roman, and then the history of many other peoples around the world that essentially served as backdrop for History 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 finished.
"Yes, Miss Stricken," Nell said.
"What are you girls looking at?" blurted Mrs. Disher, who was running the class today. "Turn around and pay attention!" And with that it was all over. Nell sat in her desk for the rest of the hour as if carved from a solid block of gypsum.
Her interview with Miss Stricken at the end of the day was short and businesslike, no violence or even histrionics. Nell was informed that her performance in the Joy phase of the curriculum was so deficient that it placed her in danger of failing and being expelled from the school altogether, and that her only hope was to come in each Saturday for eight hours of supplementary study.
Nell wished more than anything that she could refuse. Saturday was the only day of the week when she did not have to attend school at all. She always spent the day reading the Primer, exploring the fields and forests around Dovetail, or visiting Harv down in the Leased Territories.
She felt that, through her own mistakes, she had ruined her life at Miss Matheson's Academy. Until recently, Miss Stricken's classes had been nothing more than a routine annoyance-an ordeal that she had to sit through in order to experience the fun parts of the curriculum. She could look back on a time only a couple of months ago when she would come home with her mind aglow from all the things she had learned in Brilliance, and when the Joy part was just an indistinct smudge around the edge. But in recent weeks, Miss Stricken had, for some reason, loomed larger and larger in her view of the place. And somehow, Miss Stricken had read Nell's mind and had chosen just the right moment to step up her campaign of harassment. She had timed today's events perfectly. She had brought Nell's most deeply hidden feelings out into the open, like a master butcher exposing the innards with one or two deft strokes of the knife. And now everything was ruined. Now Miss Matheson's Academy had vanished and become Miss Stricken's House of Pain, and there was no way for Nell to escape from that house without giving up, which her friends in the Primer had taught her she must never do.
Nell's name went up on a board at the front of the classroom labeled, in heavy brass letters, SUPPLEMENTARY CURRICULUMSTUDENTS. Within a few days, her name had been joined by two others: Fiona Hackworth and Elizabeth Finkle-McGraw. Nell's disarming of the fearsome Miss Stricken had already become the stuff of oral legend, and her two friends had been so inspired by the act of defiance that they had gone to elaborate lengths to get themselves in trouble too. Now, the three best students of Miss Matheson's Academy were all doomed to Supplementary Curriculum.
Each Saturday, Nell, Fiona, and Elizabeth would arrive at the school at seven o'clock, enter the room, and sit down in the front row in adjacent desks. This was part of Miss Stricken's fiendish plan. A less subtle tormentor would have placed the girls as far apart as possible to prevent them from talking to each other, but Miss Stricken wanted them right next to each other so that they would be more tempted to visit and pass notes.
There was no teacher in the room at any time. They assumed that they were being monitored, but they never really knew. When they entered, each one of them had a pile of books on her desk-old books bound in chafed leather. Their job was to copy the books out by hand and leave the pages neatly stacked on Miss Stricken's desk before they went home. Usually, the books were transcripts of debates from the House of Lords, from the nineteenth century.
During their seventh Saturday in Supplementary Curriculum, Elizabeth Finkle-McGraw suddenly dropped her pen, slammed her book shut, and threw it against the wall.
Nell and Fiona could not keep themselves from laughing. But Elizabeth did not convey the impression of being in a very lighthearted mood. The old book had scarcely come to rest on the floor before Elizabeth had run over to it and begun kicking at it.
With each blow a furious grunt escaped from her gorge. The book absorbed this violence impassively, driving Elizabeth into a higher rage; she dropped to her knees, flung the cover open, and began to rip out pages by the fistful.
Nell and Fiona looked at each other, suddenly serious. The kicking had been funny, but something about the tearing of pages disturbed them both. "Elizabeth! Stop it!" Nell said, but Elizabeth gave no signs of having heard her. Nell ran up to Elizabeth and hugged her from behind. Fiona scurried in a moment later and picked up the book.
"God damn it!" Elizabeth bellowed, "I don't care about any of the goddamn books, and I don't care about the Primer either!"
The door banged open. Miss Stricken stomped in, dislodged Nell with a simple body check, got both arms around Elizabeth's shoulders, and manhandled her out the door.
A few days later, Elizabeth left on a lengthy vacation with her parents, jumping from one New Atlantis clave to another in the family's private airship, working their way across the Pacific and North America and finally to London itself, where they settled in for several months. In the first few days, Nell received one letter from her, and Fiona received two. After that they received no response to their letters and eventually stopped trying. Elizabeth's name was removed from the Supplementary Curriculum plaque.
Nell and Fiona soldiered on. Nell had reached the point where she could transcribe the old books all day long without actually absorbing a single word. During her first weeks in Supplementary Curriculum she had been frightened; in fact, she had been surprised at the level of her own fear and had come to realize that Authority, even when it refrained from violence, could be as disturbing a specter as anything she had seen in her earlier years. After the incident with Elizabeth, she became bored for many months, then furious for quite a while until she realized, in conversations with Duck and Purple, that her anger was eating her up inside. So with a conscious effort, she went back to being bored again.
The reason she'd been furious was that copying out those books was such an unforgivably stupid waste of time. There was no end to what she could have learned reading the Primer for those eight hours. For that matter, the normal curriculum at Miss Matheson's Academy would have been perfectly fine as well. She was tormented by the irrationality of this place.
One day, when she returned from a trip to the washroom, she was startled to notice that Fiona had hardly copied out a single page, though they had been there for hours.
After this, Nell made it a practice to look at Fiona from time to time. She noticed that Fiona never stopped writing, but she was not paying attention to the old books. As she finished each page, she folded it up and placed it in her reticule. From time to time, she would stop and stare dreamily out the window for a few minutes, and then resume; or she might place both hands over her face and rock back and forth silently in her chair for a while before giving herself over to a long burst of ardent writing that might cover several pages in as many minutes.
Miss Stricken cruised into the room late one afternoon, took the stack of completed pages from Nell's desk, flipped through them, and allowed her chin to decline by a few minutes of arc. This nearly imperceptible vestige of a nod was her way of saying that Nell was dismissed for the day. Nell had come to understand that one way for Miss Stricken to emphasize her power over the girls was for her to make her wishes known through the subtlest possible signs, so that her charges were forced to watch her anxiously at all times. Nell took her leave; but after proceeding a few steps down the corridor, she turned and stole back to the door and peeked through the window into the classroom.
Miss Stricken had gotten the folded-up pages out of Fiona's bag and was perusing them, strolling back and forth across the front of the room like the slow swing of a pendulum, a devastatingly ponderous motion. Fiona sat in her chair, her head bowed and her shoulders drawn together protectively.
After reading the papers for an eternity or two, Miss Stricken dropped them on her desk and made some kind of brief statement, shaking her head in hopeless disbelief. Then she turned and walked out of the room.
When Nell reached her, Fiona's shoulders were still shaking silently. Nell put her arms around Fiona, who finally began to draw in sobbing breaths. During the next few minutes she gradually moved on to that stage of crying where the body seems to swell up and poach in its own fluids.
Nell suppressed the urge to be impatient. She well knew, as did all of the other girls, that Fiona's father had disappeared several years ago and never come back. He was rumored to be on an honorable and official mission; but as years went by this belief was gradually supplanted by the suspicion that something disgraceful had taken place. It would be easy enough for Nell to make the point that she had been through much worse. But seeing the depth of Fiona's unhappiness, she had to consider the possibility that Fiona was in a worse situation now.
When Fiona's mother came by in a little half-lane car to pick her up, and saw her daughter's red and ruinous face, an expression of black rage came over her own visage and she drove Fiona away without so much as a glance at Nell. Fiona showed up for church the next day as if nothing had happened and said nothing of it to Nell during the next week at school. In fact, Fiona hardly said a word to anyone, as she spent all of her time now daydreaming.
When Nell and Fiona showed up at seven o'clock the next Saturday morning, they were astonished to find Miss Matheson waiting for them at the front of the classroom, sitting in her wood-and— wicker wheelchair, wrapped up in a thermogenic comforter.