The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer

by Neal Stephenson

  “Certainly, go ahead, whatever,” said Fred Epidermis through the face and body of Mr. Willie, not even pretending to emote.

  “Well, it's just that I have this appliance that's very important to me, and it seems to have broken. I was wondering if you knew how to fix—one of these,” Miranda said. On the mediatron, Spirit said the same thing. But Spirit's hand was moving. She was holding something up next to her face. An elongated glossy white plastic thing. A vibrator.

  “Well,” said Mr. Willie, “it's a scientific fact that all electrical devices work on the same principles, so in theory I should be able to help you. But I must confess, I've never seen an appliance quite like that one. Would you mind explaining what it is and what it does?”

  “I'd be more than happy to—” said Miranda, but then the display froze and Fred Epidermis cut her off by shouting through the door. “Enough already,” he said. “I just had to make sure you could read.”

  He opened the stage door and said, “You're hired. Cubicle 238. My commission is eighty percent. The dormitory's upstairs—pick your own bunk, and clean it out. You can't afford to live anywhere else.”

  Harv brings Nell a present; she experiments

  with the Primer.

  When Harv came back home, he was walking with all of his weight on one foot. When the light struck the smudges on his face in the right way, Nell could see streaks of red mixed in with the dirt and the toner. He was breathing fast, and he swallowed heavily and often, as though throwing up were much on his mind. But he was not empty-handed. His arms were crossed tightly across his belly. He was carrying things in his jacket.

  “I made out, Nell,” he said, seeing his sister's face and knowing that she was too scared to talk first. “Didn't get much, but got some. Got some stuff for the Flea Circus.”

  Nell wasn't sure what the Flea Circus was, but she had learned that it was good to have stuff to take there, that Harv usually came back from the Flea Circus with an access code for a new ractive.

  Harv shouldered the light switch on and kneeled in the middle of the room before relaxing his arms, lest some small thing fall out and be lost in a corner. Nell sat in front of him and watched.

  He took out a piece of jewelry swinging ponderously at the end of a gold chain. It was circular, smooth gold on one side and white on the other. The white side was protected under a flattened glass dome. It had numbers written around the edge, and a couple of slender metal things like daggers, one longer than the other, joined at their hilts in the center. It made a noise like mice trying to eat their way through a wall in the middle of the night.

  Before she could ask about it, Harv had taken out other things. He had a few cartridges from his mite trap. Tomorrow Harv would take the cartridge down to the Flea Circus and find out if he'd caught anything, and whether it was worth money.

  There were other things like buttons. But Harv saved the biggest thing for last, and he withdrew it with ceremony.

  “I had to fight for this, Nell,” he said. “I fought hard because I was afraid the others would break it up for parts. I'm giving it to you.”

  It appeared to be a flat decorated box. Nell could tell immediately that it was fine. She had not seen many fine things in her life, but they had a look of their own, dark and rich like chocolate, with glints of gold.

  “Both hands,” Harv admonished her, “it's heavy.”

  Nell reached out with both hands and took it. Harv was right, it was heavier than it looked. She had to lay it down in her lap or she'd drop it. It was not a box at all. It was a solid thing. The top was printed with golden letters. The left edge was rounded and smooth, made of something that felt warm and soft but strong. The other edges were indented slightly, and they were cream-colored.

  Harv could not put up with the wait. “Open it,” he said.

  “How?”

  Harv leaned toward her, caught the upper-right corner under his finger, and flipped it. The whole lid of the thing bent upward around a hinge on the left side, pulling a flutter of cream-colored leaves after it.

  Underneath the cover was a piece of paper with a picture on it and some more letters.

  On the first page of the book was a picture of a little girl sitting on a bench. Above the bench was a thing like a ladder, except it was horizontal, supported at each end by posts. Thick vines twisted up the posts and gripped the ladder, where they burst into huge flowers. The girl had her back to Nell; she was looking down a grassy slope sprinkled with little flowers toward a blue pond. On the other side of the pond rose mountains like the ones they supposedly had in the middle of New Chusan, where the fanciest Vickys of all had their æstival houses. The girl had a book open on her lap.

  The facing page had a little picture in the upper left, consisting of more vines and flowers wrapped around a giant egg-shaped letter. But the rest of that page was nothing but tiny black letters without decoration. Nell turned it and found two more pages of letters, though a couple of them were big ones with pictures drawn around them. She turned another page and found another picture. In this one, the little girl had set aside her book and was talking to a big black bird that had apparently gotten its foot tangled up in the vines overhead. She flipped another page.

  The pages she'd already turned were under her left thumb. They were trying to work their way loose, as if they were alive. She had to press down harder and harder to keep them there. Finally they bulged up in the middle and slid out from underneath her thumb and, flop-flop-flop, returned to the beginning of the story.

  “Once upon a time,” said a woman's voice, “there was a little girl named Elizabeth who liked to sit in the bower in her grandfather's garden and read story-books.” The voice was soft, meant just for her, with an expensive Victorian accent.

  Nell slammed the book shut and pushed it away. It slid across the floor and came to rest by the sofa.

  The next day, Mom's boyfriend Tad came home in a bad mood. He slammed his six-pack down on the kitchen table, pulled out a beer, and headed for the living room. Nell was trying to get out of the way. She picked up Dinosaur, Duck, Peter Rabbit, and Purple, her magic wand, a paper bag that was actually a car her kids could drive around in, and a piece of cardboard that was a sword for killing pirates. Then she ran for the room where she and Harv slept, but Tad had already come in with his beer and begun rooting through the stuff on the sofa with his other hand, trying to find the control pad for the mediatron. He threw a lot of Harv's and Nell's toys on the floor and then stepped on the book with his bare foot.

  “Ouch, god damn it!” Tad shouted. He looked down at the book in disbelief. “What the fuck is this?!” He wound up as if to kick it, then thought better of it, remembering he was barefoot. He picked it up and hefted it, looking straight at Nell and getting a fix on her range and azimuth. “Stupid little cunt, how many times do I have to tell you to keep your fucking shit cleaned up?!” Then he turned away from her slightly, wrapping his arm around his body, and snapped the book straight at her head like a Frisbee.

  She stood watching it come toward her because it did not occur to her to get out of the way, but at the last moment the covers flew open. The pages spread apart. They all bent like feathers as they hit her in the face, and it didn't hurt at all.

  The book fell to the floor at her feet, open to an illustrated page.

  The picture was of a big dark man and a little girl in a cluttered room, the man angrily flinging a book at the little girl's head.

  “Once upon a time there was a little girl named Cunt,” the book said.

  “My name is Nell,” Nell said.

  A tiny disturbance propagated through the grid of letters on the facing page.

  “Your name's mud if you don't fucking clean this shit up,” Tad said. “But do it later, I want some fucking privacy for once.”

  Nell's hands were full, and so she shoved the book down the hallway and into the kids' room with her foot. She dumped all her stuff on her mattress and then ran back and shut the door. She left her ma
gic wand and sword nearby in case she should need them, then set Dinosaur, Duck, Peter, and Purple into bed, all in a neat line, and pulled the blanket up under their chins. “Now you go to bed and you go to bed and you go to bed and you go to bed, and be quiet because you are all being naughty and bothering Tad, and I'll see you in the morning.”

  “Nell was putting her children to bed and decided to read them some stories,” said the book's voice.

  Nell looked at the book, which had flopped itself open again, this time to an illustration showing a girl who looked much like Nell, except that she was wearing a beautiful flowing dress and had ribbons in her hair. She was sitting next to a miniature bed with four children tucked beneath its flowered coverlet: a dinosaur, a duck, a bunny, and a baby with purple hair. The girl who looked like Nell had a book on her lap. “For some time Nell had been putting them to bed without reading to them,” the book continued, “but now the children were not so tiny anymore, and Nell decided that in order to bring them up properly, they must have bedtime stories.”

  Nell picked up the book and set it on her lap.

  Nell's first experiences with the Primer.

  The book spoke in a lovely contralto, with an accent like the very finest Vickys. The voice was like a real person's—though not like anyone Nell had ever met. It rose and fell like slow surf on a warm beach, and when Nell closed her eyes, it swept her out into an ocean of feelings.

  Once upon a time there was a little Princess named Nell who was imprisoned in a tall dark castle on an island in the middle of a great sea, with a little boy named Harv, who was her friend and protector. She also had four special friends named Dinosaur, Duck, Peter Rabbit, and Purple.

  Princess Nell and Harv could not leave the Dark Castle, but from time to time a raven would come to visit them …

  “What's a raven?” Nell said.

  The illustration was a colorful painting of the island seen from up in the sky. The island rotated downward and out of the picture, becoming a view toward the ocean horizon. In the middle was a black dot. The picture zoomed in on the black dot, and it turned out to be a bird. Big letters appeared beneath. “R A V E N,” the book said. “Raven. Now, say it with me.”

  “Raven.”

  “Very good! Nell, you are a clever girl, and you have much talent with words. Can you spell raven?”

  Nell hesitated. She was still blushing from the praise. After a few seconds, the first of the letters began to blink. Nell prodded it.

  The letter grew until it had pushed all the other letters and pictures off the edges of the page. The loop on top shrank and became a head, while the lines sticking out the bottom developed into legs and began to scissor. “R is for Run,” the book said. The picture kept on changing until it was a picture of Nell. Then something fuzzy and red appeared beneath her feet. “Nell Runs on the Red Rug,” the book said, and as it spoke, new words appeared.

  “Why is she running?”

  “Because an Angry Alligator Appeared,” the book said, and panned back quite some distance to show an alligator, waddling along ridiculously, no threat to the fleet Nell. The alligator became frustrated and curled itself into a circle, which became a small letter. “A is for Alligator. The Very Vast alligator Vainly Viewed Nell's Valiant Velocity.”

  The little story went on to include an Excited Elf who was Nibbling Noisily on some Nuts. Then the picture of the Raven came back, with the letters beneath. “Raven. Can you spell raven, Nell?” A hand materialized on the page and pointed to the first letter.

  “R,” Nell said.

  “Very good! You are a clever girl, Nell, and good with letters,” the book said. “What is this letter?” and it pointed to the second one. This one Nell had forgotten. But the book told her a story about an Ape named Albert.

  A young hooligan before the court of Judge Fang; the

  magistrate confers with his advisers;

  Justice is served.

  The revolving chain of a nunchuk has a unique radar signature—reminiscent of that of a helicopter blade, but noisier,” Miss Pao said, gazing up at Judge Fang over the half-lenses of her phenomenoscopic spectacles. Her eyes went out of focus, and she winced; she had been lost in some enhanced three-dimensional image, and the adjustment to dull reality was disorienting. “A cluster of such patterns was recognized by one of Shanghai P.D.'s sky-eyes at ten seconds after 2351 hours.”

  As Miss Pao worked her way through this summary, images appeared on the big sheet of mediatronic paper that Judge Fang had unrolled across his brocade tablecloth and held down with carved jade paperweights. At the moment, the image was a map of a Leased Territory called Enchantment, with one location, near the Causeway, highlighted. In the corner was another pane containing a standard picture of an anticrime sky-eye, which always looked, to Judge Fang, like an American football as redesigned by fetishists: glossy and black and studded.

  Miss Pao continued, “The sky-eye dispatched a flight of eight smaller aerostats equipped with cine cameras.”

  The kinky football was replaced by a picture of a teardrop-shaped craft, about the size of an almond, trailing a whip antenna, with an orifice at its nose protected by an incongruously beautiful iris. Judge Fang was not really looking; at least three-quarters of the cases that came before him commenced with a summary almost exactly like this one. It was a credit to Miss Pao's seriousness and diligence that she was able to tell each story afresh. It was a challenge to Judge Fang's professionalism for him to listen to each one in the same spirit.

  “Converging on the scene,” Miss Pao said, “they recorded activities.”

  The large map image on Judge Fang's scroll was replaced by a cine feed. The figures were far away, flocks of relatively dark pixels nudging their way across a rough gray background like starlings massing before a winter gale. They got bigger and more clearly defined as the aerostat flew closer to the action.

  A man was curled on the street with his arms wrapped around his head. The nunchuks had been put away by this point, and hands were busy going through the innumerable pockets that were to be found in a gentleman's suit. At this point the cine went into slow-mo. A watch flashed and oscillated hypnotically at the end of its gold chain. A silver fountain pen glowed like an ascending rocket and vanished into the folds of someone's mite-proof raiment. And then out came something else, harder to resolve: larger, mostly dark, white around the edge. A book, perhaps.

  “Heuristic analysis of the cine feeds suggested a probable violent crime in progress,” Miss Pao said.

  Judge Fang valued Miss Pao's services for many reasons, but her deadpan delivery was especially precious to him.

  “So the sky-eye dispatched another flight of aerostats, specialized for tagging.”

  An image of a tagger stat appeared: smaller and narrower than the cinestats, reminiscent of a hornet with the wings stripped off. The nacelles containing the tiny air turbines, which gave such devices the power to propel themselves through the air, were prominent; it was built for speed.

  “The suspected assailants adopted countermeasures,” Miss Pao said, again using that deadpan tone. On the cine feed, the criminals were retreating. The cinestat followed them with a nice tracking shot. Judge Fang, who had watched thousands of hours of film of thugs departing from the scenes of their crimes, watched with a discriminating eye. Less sophisticated hoodlums would simply have run away in a panic, but this group was proceeding methodically, two to a bicycle, one person pedaling and steering while the other handled the countermeasures. Two of them were discharging fountains of material into the air from canisters on their bicycles' equipment racks, like fire extinguishers, waving the nozzles in all directions. “Following a pattern that has become familiar to law enforcement,” Miss Pao said, “they dispersed adhesive foam that clogged the intakes of the stats' air turbines, rendering them inoperative.”

  The big mediatron had also taken to emitting tremendous flashes of light that caused Judge Fang to close his eyes and pinch the bridge of his nose. After a f
ew of these, the cine feed went dead. “Another suspect used strobe illumination to pick out the locations of the cinestats, then disabled them with pulses of laser light—evidently using a device, designed for this purpose, that has recently become widespread among the criminal element in the L.T.”

  The big mediatron cut back to a new camera angle on the original scene of the crime. Across the bottom of the scroll was a bar graph depicting the elapsed time since the start of the incident, and the practiced Judge Fang noted that it had jumped backward by a quarter of a minute or so; the narrative had split, and we were now seeing the other fork of the plot. This feed depicted a solitary gang member who was trying to climb aboard his bicycle even as his comrades were riding away on contrails of sticky foam. But the bike had been mangled somehow and would not function. The youth abandoned it and fled on foot.

  Up in the corner, the small diagram of the tagging aerostat zoomed in to a high magnification, revealing some of the device's internal complications, so that it began to look less like a hornet and more like a cutaway view of a starship. Mounted in the nose was a device that spat out tiny darts drawn from an interior magazine. At first these were almost invisibly tiny, but as the view continued to zoom, the hull of the tagging aerostat grew until it resembled the gentle curve of a planet's horizon, and the darts became more clearly visible. They were hexagonal in cross-section, like pencil stubs. When they were shot out of the tag stat's nose, they sprouted cruel barbs at the nose and a simple empennage at the tail.

  “The suspect had experienced a ballistic interlude earlier in the evening,” Miss Pao said, “regrettably not filmed, and relieved himself of excess velocity by means of an ablative technique.”

  Miss Pao was outdoing herself. Judge Fang raised an eyebrow at her, briefly hitting the pause button. Chang, Judge Fang's other assistant, rotated his enormous, nearly spherical head in the direction of the defendant, who was looking very small as he stood before the court. Chang, in a characteristic gesture, reached up and rubbed the palm of his hand back over the short stubble that covered his head, as if he could not believe he had such a bad haircut. He opened his sleepy, slitlike eyes just a notch, and said to the defendant, “She say you have road rash.”