Diamond Age or a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer

After Constable Moore had turned the book over in his hands a few times, complimenting Nell on the binding, the gold script, the feel of the paper, be set it down gingerly on the table, first rubbing his hand over the wood to ensure no tea or sugar had earlier been spilled there. He wandered away from the table and seemed to stumble at random upon an oak-and-brass copier that sat in one of the obtuse corners of the octagonal room. He happened upon a few pages in its output tray and went through them for a bit, from time to time chuckling ruefully. At one point he looked up at Nell and shook his head wordlessly before finally saying, "Do you have any idea . . ." but then he just chuckled again, shook his head, and went back to the papers.

"Right," he finally said, "right." He fed the papers back into the copier and told it to destroy them. He thrust his fists into his trouser pockets and walked up and down the length of the room twice, then sat down again, looking not at Nell and Harv and not at the book, but somewhere off into the distance. "Right," he said. "I will not confiscate the book during your stay in Dovetail, if you follow certain conditions. First of all, you will not under any circumstances make use of a matter compiler. Secondly, the book is for your use, and your use only. Third, you will not copy or reproduce any of the information contained in the book. Fourth, you will not show the book to anyone here or make anyone aware of its existence. Violation of any of these conditions will lead to your immediate expulsion from Dovetail and the confiscation and probable destruction of the book. Do I make myself clear?"

"Perfectly clear, sir," Nell said. Outside, they heard the thrudalump thrudalump of an approaching horse.

A new friend; Nell sees a real horse; a ride through Dovetail; Nell and Harv are separated.

The person on the horse was not Brad, it was a woman Nell and Harv didn't know. She had straight reddish-blond hair, pale skin with thousands of freckles, and carrot-colored eyebrows and eyelashes that were almost invisible except when the sun grazed her face. "I'm a friend of Brad's," she said. "He's at work. Does he know you?"

Nell was about to pipe up, but Harv shushed her with a hand on her arm and gave the woman a somewhat more abridged version than Nell might have provided. He mentioned that Brad had been "a friend of" their mother's for a while, that he had always treated them kindly and had actually taken them to the NAC to see the horses. Not far into the story, the blank expression on the woman's face was replaced by one that was somewhat more guarded, and she stopped listening. "I think Brad told me about you once," she finally said when Harv had wandered into a blind alley. "I know he remembers you. So what is it that you would like to happen now?"

This was a poser. Nell and Harv had settled into a habit of concentrating very strongly on what they would like not to happen. They were baffled by options, which to them seemed like dilemmas. Harv left off clutching Nell's arm and took her hand instead. Neither of them said anything.

"Perhaps," Constable Moore finally said, after the woman had turned to him for a cue, "it would be useful for the two of you to set awhile in some safe, quiet place and gather your thoughts."

"That would do nicely, thank you," Nell said.

"Dovetail contains many public parks and gardens . .

"Forget it," the woman said, knowing her cue when she heard it. "I'll take them back to the Milihouse until Brad gets home. Then," she said significantly to the Constable, "we'll figure something out."

The woman stepped out of the gatehouse briskly, not looking back at Nell and Harv. She was tall and wore a pair of loose khaki trousers, much worn at the knees but hardly at all in the seat, and splotched here and there with old unidentifiable stains. Above that she wore a very loose Irish fisherman's sweater, sleeves rolled up and safety-pinned to form a dense woolen torus orbiting each of her freckled forearms, the motif echoed by a whorl of cheap silver bangles on each wrist. She was muttering something in the direction of her horse, an Appaloosa mare who had already swung her neck down and begun to nuzzle at the disappointingly close-cropped grass inside the fence, looking for a blade or two that had not been marked by the assiduous corgis. When she stopped to stroke the mare's neck, Nell and Harv caught up with her and learned that she was simply giving a simplified account of what had just happened in the gatehouse, and what was going to happen now, all delivered rather absent-mindedly, just in case the mare might want to know.