Diamond Age or a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer

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.