Diamond Age or a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer

From down in the Leased Territories, the New Atlantis Clave had always looked clean and beautiful, and it was certainly those things. But Nell was surprised at how cool the weather was here compared to the L.T. Rita explained that the Atlantans came from northern countries and didn't care for hot weather, so they put their city high up in the air to make it cooler.

Rita turned down a boulevard with a great flowery park running down the middle. It was lined with red stone row-houses with turrets and gargoyles and beveled glass everywhere. Men in top hats and women in long dresses strolled, pushed perambulators, rode horses or chevalines. Shiny dark green robots, like refrigerators tipped over on their sides, hummed down the streets at a toddler's walking pace, squatting over piles of manure and inhaling them.

From place to place there was a messenger on a bicycle or an especially fancy personage in a black, full-lane car. Rita stopped Eggshell in front of a house and paid a little boy to hold the reins. From the saddlebags she took a sheaf of new paper, all wrapped up in special wrapping-paper that she'd also made. She carried it up the steps and rang the bell. The house had a round tower on the front, lined with bow windows with stained-glass inserts above them, and through the windows and the lace curtains Nell could see, on different stories, crystal chandeliers and fine plates and dark brown wooden bookcases lined with thousands and thousands of books.

A parlormaid let Rita in the door. Through the window, Nell could see Rita putting a calling-card on a silver tray held out by the maid-a salver, they called it. The maid carried it back, then emerged a couple of minutes later and directed Rita into the back of the house.

Rita didn't come back for half an hour. Nell wished she had the Primer to keep her company. She talked to the little boy for a bit; his name was Sam, he lived in the Leased Territories, and he put on a suit and took the bus here every morning so that he could hang around on the street holding people's horses and doing other small errands.

Nell wondered whether Tequila worked in any of these houses, and whether they might run into her by accident. Her chest always got a tight feeling when she thought of her mother. Rita came out of the house. "Sorry," she said, "I got out as fast as I could, but I had to stay and socialize. Protocol, you know."

"Explain protocol," Nell said. This was how she always talked to the Primer.

"At the place we're going, you need to watch your manners. Don't say 'explain this' or 'explain that.'

"Would it impose on your time unduly to provide me with a concise explanation of the term protocol?" Nell said.

Again Rita made that nervous laugh and looked at Nell with an expression that looked like poorly concealed alarm. As they rode down the street, Rita talked about protocol for a little bit, but Nell wasn't really listening because she was trying to figure out why it was that, all of a sudden, she was capable of scaring grownups like Rita.

They rode through the most built-up part of town, where the buildings and gardens and statues were all magnificent, and none of the streets were the same: Some were crescents, some were courts, or circles or ovals, or squares surrounding patches of greenery, and even the long streets turned this way and that. They passed from there into a less built-up area with many parks and playing fields and finally pulled up in front of a fancy building with ornate towers, surrounded by a wrought-iron fence and a hedge. Over the door it said MISS MATHESON'S ACADEMY OF THE THREE GRACES.

Miss Matheson received them in a cozy little room. She was between eight hundred and nine hundred years of age, Nell estimated, and drank tea from fancy thimble-size cups with pictures painted on them. Nell tried to sit up straight and be attentive, emulating certain proper young girls she had read about in the Primer, but her eye kept wandering to the contents of the bookshelves, the pictures painted on the tea service and the painting on the wall above Miss Matheson's head, which depicted three ladies prancing about in a grove in diaphanous attire.

"Our rolls are filled, the term has already begun, and you have none of the prerequisites. But you come with compelling recommendations," Miss Matheson said after she had peered lengthily at her small visitor.

"Pardon me, madam, but I do not understand," Nell said.