Diamond Age or a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer

The lock on the Book of the Book yielded to the same key that Princess Nell had taken from King Coyote. She had discovered this very early in her exploration of the library but was unable to comprehend the contents of this volume until she had studied the others and learnt the secrets of these machines. The Book of the Book contained a complete set of plans for a magical book that would tell stories to a young person, tailoring them for the child's needs and interests– even teaching them how to read if need be. It was a fearsomely complicated work, and Princess Nell only skimmed it at first, recognizing that to understand the particulars might take years of study.

The lock on the Book of the Seed would not yield to King Coyote's key or to any other key in Princess Nell's possession, and because this book had been built atom by atom, it was stronger than any mortal substance and could not possibly be broken open. Princess Nell did not know what this book was about; but the cover bore an inlaid illustration of a striped seed, like the apple-sized seed that she had seen used in King Coyote's city to build a crystal pavilion, and this foreshadowed the book's purpose clearly enough.

Nell opened her eyes and propped herself up on one elbow. The Primer fell shut and slid off her belly onto the mattress. She had fallen asleep reading it.

The girls on their bunkbeds lay all around her, breathing quietly and smelling of soap. It made her want to lie back down and sleep too. But for some reason she was up on one elbow. Some instinct had told her she had to be up.

She sat up and drew her knees up to her chest, freeing the hem of her nightgown from between the sheets, then spun around and dropped to the floor soundlessly. Her bare feet took her silently between the rows of bunks and into the little lounge in the corner of the floor where the girls sat together, had tea, brushed their hair, watched old passives. It was empty now, the lights were off, the corner windows exposing a vast panorama: to the northeast, the lights of New Chusan and of the Nipponese and Hindustani concessions standing a few kilometers offshore, and the outlying parts of Pudong. Downtown Pudong was all around, its floating, mediatronic skyscrapers like biblical pillars of fire. To the northwest lay the Huang Pu River, Shanghai, its suburbs, and the ravaged silk and tea districts beyond. No fires burned there now; the Feed lines had been burned all the way to the edge of the city, and the Fists had stopped at the outskirts and hunkered down as they sought a way to penetrate the tattered remains of the security grid.

Nell's eye was drawn toward the water. Downtown Pudong offered the most spectacular urban nightscape ever devised, but she always found herself looking past it, staring instead at the Huang Pu, or the Yangzte to the north, or to the curvature of the Pacific beyond New Chusan.

She'd been having a dream, she realized. She had awakened not because of any external disturbance but because of what had happened in that dream. She had to remember it; but, of course, she couldn't.

Just a few snatches: a woman's face, a beautiful young woman, perhaps wearing a crown, but seen muddily, as through turbulent water. And something that glittered in her hands. No, dangling beneath her hands. A piece of jewelry on a golden chain.

Could it have been a key? Nell could not bring the image back, but an instinct told her that it was.

Another detail too: a gleaming swath of something that passed in front of her face once, twice, three times. Something yellow, with a repeating pattern woven into it: a crest consisting of a book, a seed, and crossed keys.

Cloth of gold. Long ago the mermaids had brought her to her stepfather, and she had been wrapped in cloth of gold, and from this she had always known that she was a Princess.

The woman in the dream, veiled in swirling water, must have been her mother. The dream was a memory from her lost infancy. And before her mother had given her up to the mermaids, she had given Princess Nell a golden key on a chain.

Nell perched herself on the windowsill, leaned against the pane, opened the Primer, and flipped all the way back to the beginning. It started with the same old story, as ever, but told now in more mature prose. She read the story of how her stepfather had gotten her from the mermaids, and read it again, drawing out more details, asking it questions, calling up detailed illustrations.

There, in one of the illustrations, she saw it: her stepfather's lock-box, a humble plank chest bound in rusted iron straps, with a heavy oldfashioned padlock, stored underneath his bed. It was in this chest that he had stored the cloth of gold-and, perhaps, the key as well.