The Diamond Age Part 22

The Bloom curriculum was taught by Miss Ramanujan or one of her a.s.sistants. Usually they did something vigorous in the morning, like field hockey, and something graceful in the afternoon, like ballroom dance, or peculiar, giggle-inducing exercises in how to walk, stand, and sit like a Lady.

Brilliance was Miss Matheson's department, though she mostly left it to her a.s.sistants, occasionally wheeling in and out of various cla.s.srooms in an old wood-and-wicker wheelchair. During the Aglaia period, the girls would get together in groups of half a dozen or so to answer questions or solve problems put to them by the teachers: For example, they counted how many species of plants and animals could be found in one square foot of the forest behind the school. They put on a scene from a play in Greek. They used a ractive simulation to model the domestic economy of a Lakota band before and after the introduction of horses. They designed simple machines with a nanopresence rig and tried to compile them in the M.C. and make them work. They wove brocades and made porcelain as Chinese ladies used to do. And there was an ocean of history to be learned: first biblical, Greek, and Roman, and then the history of many other peoples around the world that essentially served as backdrop for History of the English-Speaking Peoples.

The latter subject was, curiously, not part of the Brilliance curriculum; it was left firmly in the hands of Miss Stricken, who was mistress of Joy.

In addition to two one-hour periods each day, Miss Stricken had the attention of the entire a.s.sembled student body once in the morning, once at noon, and once in the evening. During these times her basic function was to call the students to order; publicly upbraid those sheep who had prominently strayed since the last such a.s.sembly; disgorge any random meditations that had been occupying her mind of late; and finally, in reverential tones, introduce Father c.o.x, the local vicar, who would lead the students in prayer. Miss Stricken also had the students all to herself for two hours on Sunday morning and could optionally command their attention for up to eight hours on Sat.u.r.days if she came round to the opinion that they wanted supplementary guidance.

The first time Nell sat down in one of Miss Stricken's cla.s.srooms, she found that her desk had perversely been left directly behind another girl's, so that she was unable to see anything except for the bow in that girl's hair. She got up, tried to skooch the desk, and found that it was fixed to the floor. All the desks, in fact, were arranged in a perfectly regular grid, facing in the same direction-which is to say, toward Miss Stricken or one of her two a.s.sistants, Miss Bowlware and Mrs. Disher.

Miss Bowlware taught them History of the English-Speaking Peoples, starting with the Romans at Londinium and careening through the Norman Conquest, Magna Carta, Wars of the Roses, Renaissance, and Civil War; but she didn't really hit her stride until she got to the Georgian period, at which point she worked herself up into a froth explaining the shortcomings of that syphilitic monarch, which had inspired the right-thinking Americans to break away in disgust. They studied the most ghastly parts of d.i.c.kens, which Miss Bowlware carefully explained was called called Victorian literature because it was Victorian literature because it was written written during the reign of Victoria I, but was actually during the reign of Victoria I, but was actually about about pre-Victorian times, and that the mores of the original Victorians-the ones who built the old British Empire-were actually a reaction against the sort of bad behavior engaged in by their parents and grandparents and so convincingly detailed by d.i.c.kens, their most popular novelist. pre-Victorian times, and that the mores of the original Victorians-the ones who built the old British Empire-were actually a reaction against the sort of bad behavior engaged in by their parents and grandparents and so convincingly detailed by d.i.c.kens, their most popular novelist.

The girls actually got to sit at their desks and play a few ractives showing what it was like to live during this time: generally not very nice, even if you selected the option that turned off all the diseases. At this point, Mrs. Disher stepped in to say, if you thought that that was scary, look at how poor people lived in the late twentieth century. Indeed, after ractives told them about the life of an inner-city Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C., child during the 1990s, most students had to agree they'd take a workhouse in pre-Victorian England over was scary, look at how poor people lived in the late twentieth century. Indeed, after ractives told them about the life of an inner-city Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C., child during the 1990s, most students had to agree they'd take a workhouse in pre-Victorian England over that that any day. any day.

All of the foregoing set the stage for a three-p.r.o.nged, parallel examination of the British Empire; pre-Vietnam America; and the modern and ongoing history of New Atlantis. In general, Mrs. Disher handled the more modern stuff and anything pertaining to America.

Miss Stricken handled the big payoff at the end of each period and at the end of each unit. She stormed in to explain what conclusion they were being led to and to make sure that all of them got it. She also had a way of lunging predatorily into the cla.s.sroom and rapping the knuckles of any girl who had been whispering, making faces at the teachers, pa.s.sing notes, doodling, woolgathering, fidgeting, scratching, nose-picking, sighing, or slumping.

Clearly, she was sitting in her closetlike office next door watching them with cine monitors. Once, Nell was sitting in Joy diligently absorbing a lecture about the Lend-Lease Program. When she heard the squeaky door from Miss Stricken's office swing open behind her, like all the other girls she suppressed the panicky urge to look around. She heard Miss Stricken's heels popping up her aisle, heard the whir of the ruler, and then suddenly felt her knuckles explode.

"Hairdressing is a private not a public activity, Nell," Miss Stricken said. "The other girls know this; now you do too."

Nell's face burned, and she wrapped her good hand around her damaged one like a bandage. She did not understand anything until one of the other girls caught her eye and made a corks.c.r.e.w.i.n.g motion with her index finger up near one temple: Apparently Nell had been twisting her hair around her finger, which she often did when she was reading the Primer or thinking hard about any one thing.

The ruler was such a p.i.s.sant form of discipline, compared to a real beating, that she could not take it seriously at first and actually found it funny the first few times. As the months went by, though, it seemed to get more painful. Either Nell was becoming soft, or-more likely-the full dimensions of the punishment were beginning to sink in. She had been such an outsider at first that nothing mattered. But as she began to excel in the other cla.s.ses and to gain the respect of teachers and students alike, she found herself with pride to lose. Part of her wanted to rebel, to throw everything away so that it could not be used against her. But she enjoyed the other cla.s.ses so much that she couldn't bear to think further of the possibility.

One day Miss Stricken decided to concentrate all her attentions on Nell. There was nothing unusual about that-it was standard to randomly single out particular scholars for intensive enforcement. With twenty minutes left in the hour, Miss Stricken had already gotten Nell on the right hand for hair-twisting and on the left for nail-biting, when, to her horror, Nell realized that she was scratching her nose and that Miss Stricken was standing in the aisle glaring at her like a falcon. Both of Nell's hands shot into her lap, beneath the desk.

Miss Stricken walked up to her deliberately, pop pop pop. "Your right hand, Nell," she said, "just about here." And she indicated with the end of the ruler an alt.i.tude that would be a convenient place for the a.s.sault-rather high above the desk, so that everyone in the room could see it.

Nell hesitated for a moment, then held her hand up.

"A bit higher, Nell," Miss Stricken said.

Nell moved her hand a bit higher.

"Another inch should do it, I think," Miss Stricken said, appraising the hand as if it were carved in marble and recently excavated from a Greek temple.

Nell could not bring herself to raise the hand any higher.

"Raise it one more inch, Nell," Miss Stricken said, "so that the other girls can observe and learn along with you."

Nell raised her hand just a bit.

"That was rather less than an inch, I should think," Miss Stricken said.

Other girls in the cla.s.s began to t.i.tter-their faces were all turned back toward Nell, and she could see their exultation, and somehow Miss Stricken and the ruler became irrelevant compared to the other girls. Nell raised her hand a whole inch, saw the windup out of the corner of her eye, heard the whir. At the last moment, on an impulse, she flipped her hand over, caught the ruler on her palm, grabbed it, and twisted in a way that Dojo had taught her, bending it against the grain of Miss Stricken's fingers so that she was forced to let go. Now Nell had the ruler, and Miss Stricken was disarmed.

Her opponent was a bulging sort of woman, taller than average, rather topheavy on those heels, the sort of teacher whose very fles.h.i.+ness becomes the object of morbid awe among her gamine pupils, whose personal toilet practices-the penchant for dandruff, the habitually worn-out lipstick, the little wad of congealed saliva at the corner of the mouth-loom larger in her students' minds than the Great Pyramids or the Lewis and Clark Expedition. Like all other women, Miss Stricken benefited from a lack of external genitalia that would make it more difficult for Nell to incapacitate her, but nevertheless, Nell could think of half a dozen ways to leave her a b.l.o.o.d.y knot on the floor and not waste more than a quarter of a minute in the process. During her time with Constable Moore, noting her benefactor's interest in war and weapons, she had taken up a renewed interest in martial arts, had paged back in the Primer to the Dinosaur's Tale and been pleased but hardly surprised to discover that Dojo was still holding lessons there, picking up just where he and Belle the Monkey had left off.

Thinking of her friend Dinosaur and her sensei, Dojo the Mouse, she suddenly felt shame far deeper than anything Miss Stricken or her sn.i.g.g.e.ring cla.s.smates could inflict. Miss Stricken was a stupid hag, and her cla.s.smates were snot-nosed clowns, but Dojo was her friend and her teacher, he had always respected her and given her his full attention, and he had carefully taught her the ways of humility and self-discipline. Now she had perverted his teachings by using her skill to take Miss Stricken's ruler. She could not have been more ashamed.

She handed the ruler back, raised her hand high in the air, and heard but did not feel the impacts of the ruler, some ten in all. "I shall expect you in my office after evening prayers, Nell," Miss Stricken said when she was finished.

"Yes, Miss Stricken," Nell said.

"What are you girls looking at?" blurted Mrs. Disher, who was running the cla.s.s today. "Turn around and pay attention!" And with that it was all over. Nell sat in her desk for the rest of the hour as if carved from a solid block of gypsum.

Her interview with Miss Stricken at the end of the day was short and businesslike, no violence or even histrionics. Nell was informed that her performance in the Joy phase of the curriculum was so deficient that it placed her in danger of failing and being expelled from the school altogether, and that her only hope was to come in each Sat.u.r.day for eight hours of supplementary study.

Nell wished more than anything that she could refuse. Sat.u.r.day was the only day of the week when she did not have to attend school at all. She always spent the day reading the Primer, exploring the fields and forests around Dovetail, or visiting Harv down in the Leased Territories.

She felt that, through her own mistakes, she had ruined her life at Miss Matheson's Academy. Until recently, Miss Stricken's cla.s.ses had been nothing more than a routine annoyance-an ordeal that she had to sit through in order to experience the fun parts of the curriculum. She could look back on a time only a couple of months ago when she would come home with her mind aglow from all the things she had learned in Brilliance, and when the Joy part was just an indistinct smudge around the edge. But in recent weeks, Miss Stricken had, for some reason, loomed larger and larger in her view of the place. And somehow, Miss Stricken had read Nell's mind and had chosen just the right moment to step up her campaign of hara.s.sment. She had timed today's events perfectly. She had brought Nell's most deeply hidden feelings out into the open, like a master butcher exposing the innards with one or two deft strokes of the knife. And now everything was ruined. Now Miss Matheson's Academy had vanished and become Miss Stricken's House of Pain, and there was no way for Nell to escape from that house without giving up, which her friends in the Primer had taught her she must never do.

Nell's name went up on a board at the front of the cla.s.sroom labeled, in heavy bra.s.s letters, S SUPPLEMENTARY C CURRICULUM S STUDENTS. Within a few days, her name had been joined by two others: Fiona Hackworth and Elizabeth Finkle-McGraw. Nell's disarming of the fearsome Miss Stricken had already become the stuff of oral legend, and her two friends had been so inspired by the act of defiance that they had gone to elaborate lengths to get themselves in trouble too. Now, the three best students of Miss Matheson's Academy were all doomed to Supplementary Curriculum. Within a few days, her name had been joined by two others: Fiona Hackworth and Elizabeth Finkle-McGraw. Nell's disarming of the fearsome Miss Stricken had already become the stuff of oral legend, and her two friends had been so inspired by the act of defiance that they had gone to elaborate lengths to get themselves in trouble too. Now, the three best students of Miss Matheson's Academy were all doomed to Supplementary Curriculum.

Each Sat.u.r.day, Nell, Fiona, and Elizabeth would arrive at the school at seven o'clock, enter the room, and sit down in the front row in adjacent desks. This was part of Miss Stricken's fiendish plan. A less subtle tormentor would have placed the girls as far apart as possible to prevent them from talking to each other, but Miss Stricken wanted them right next to each other so that they would be more tempted to visit and pa.s.s notes.

There was no teacher in the room at any time. They a.s.sumed that they were being monitored, but they never really knew. When they entered, each one of them had a pile of books on her desk-old books bound in chafed leather. Their job was to copy the books out by hand and leave the pages neatly stacked on Miss Stricken's desk before they went home. Usually, the books were transcripts of debates from the House of Lords, from the nineteenth century.

During their seventh Sat.u.r.day in Supplementary Curriculum, Elizabeth Finkle-McGraw suddenly dropped her pen, slammed her book shut, and threw it against the wall.

Nell and Fiona could not keep themselves from laughing. But Elizabeth did not convey the impression of being in a very lighthearted mood. The old book had scarcely come to rest on the floor before Elizabeth had run over to it and begun kicking at it. With each blow a furious grunt escaped from her gorge. The book absorbed this violence impa.s.sively, driving Elizabeth into a higher rage; she dropped to her knees, flung the cover open, and began to rip out pages by the fistful.

Nell and Fiona looked at each other, suddenly serious. The kicking had been funny, but something about the tearing of pages disturbed them both. "Elizabeth! Stop it!" Nell said, but Elizabeth gave no signs of having heard her. Nell ran up to Elizabeth and hugged her from behind. Fiona scurried in a moment later and picked up the book.

"G.o.d d.a.m.n it!" Elizabeth bellowed, "I don't care about any of the G.o.dd.a.m.n books, and I don't care about the Primer either!"

The door banged open. Miss Stricken stomped in, dislodged Nell with a simple body check, got both arms around Elizabeth's shoulders, and manhandled her out the door.

A few days later, Elizabeth left on a lengthy vacation with her parents, jumping from one New Atlantis clave to another in the family's private airs.h.i.+p, working their way across the Pacific and North America and finally to London itself, where they settled in for several months. In the first few days, Nell received one letter from her, and Fiona received two. After that they received no response to their letters and eventually stopped trying. Elizabeth's name was removed from the Supplementary Curriculum plaque.

Nell and Fiona soldiered on. Nell had reached the point where she could transcribe the old books all day long without actually absorbing a single word. During her first weeks in Supplementary Curriculum she had been frightened; in fact, she had been surprised at the level of her own fear and had come to realize that Authority, even when it refrained from violence, could be as disturbing a specter as anything she had seen in her earlier years. After the incident with Elizabeth, she became bored for many months, then furious for quite a while until she realized, in conversations with Duck and Purple, that her anger was eating her up inside. So with a conscious effort, she went back to being bored again.

The reason she'd been furious was that copying out those books was such an unforgivably stupid waste of time. There was no end to what she could have learned reading the Primer for those eight hours. For that matter, the normal curriculum at Miss Matheson's Academy would have been perfectly fine as well. She was tormented by the irrationality of this place.

One day, when she returned from a trip to the washroom, she was startled to notice that Fiona had hardly copied out a single page, though they had been there for hours.

After this, Nell made it a practice to look at Fiona from time to time. She noticed that Fiona never stopped writing, but she was not paying attention to the old books. As she finished each page, she folded it up and placed it in her reticule. From time to time, she would stop and stare dreamily out the window for a few minutes, and then resume; or she might place both hands over her face and rock back and forth silently in her chair for a while before giving herself over to a long burst of ardent writing that might cover several pages in as many minutes.

Miss Stricken cruised into the room late one afternoon, took the stack of completed pages from Nell's desk, flipped through them, and allowed her chin to decline by a few minutes of arc. This nearly imperceptible vestige of a nod was her way of saying that Nell was dismissed for the day. Nell had come to understand that one way for Miss Stricken to emphasize her power over the girls was for her to make her wishes known through the subtlest possible signs, so that her charges were forced to watch her anxiously at all times.

Nell took her leave; but after proceeding a few steps down the corridor, she turned and stole back to the door and peeked through the window into the cla.s.sroom.

Miss Stricken had gotten the folded-up pages out of Fiona's bag and was perusing them, strolling back and forth across the front of the room like the slow swing of a pendulum, a devastatingly ponderous motion. Fiona sat in her chair, her head bowed and her shoulders drawn together protectively.

After reading the papers for an eternity or two, Miss Stricken dropped them on her desk and made some kind of brief statement, shaking her head in hopeless disbelief. Then she turned and walked out of the room.

When Nell reached her, Fiona's shoulders were still shaking silently. Nell put her arms around Fiona, who finally began to draw in sobbing breaths. During the next few minutes she gradually moved on to that stage of crying where the body seems to swell up and poach in its own fluids.

Nell suppressed the urge to be impatient. She well knew, as did all of the other girls, that Fiona's father had disappeared several years ago and never come back. He was rumored to be on an honorable and official mission; but as years went by this belief was gradually supplanted by the suspicion that something disgraceful had taken place. It would be easy enough for Nell to make the point that she had been through much worse. But seeing the depth of Fiona's unhappiness, she had to consider the possibility that Fiona was in a worse situation now.

When Fiona's mother came by in a little half-lane car to pick her up, and saw her daughter's red and ruinous face, an expression of black rage came over her own visage and she drove Fiona away without so much as a glance at Nell. Fiona showed up for church the next day as if nothing had happened and said nothing of it to Nell during the next week at school. In fact, Fiona hardly said a word to anyone, as she spent all of her time now daydreaming.

When Nell and Fiona showed up at seven o'clock the next Sat.u.r.day morning, they were astonished to find Miss Matheson waiting for them at the front of the cla.s.sroom, sitting in her wood-and-wicker wheelchair, wrapped up in a thermogenic comforter. The stacks of books, paper, and fountain pens were not there, and their names had been removed from the plaque at the front of the room. "It's a lovely spring day," Miss Matheson said. "Let's gather some foxgloves."

They went across the playing fields to the meadow where the wildflowers grew, the two girls walking and Miss Matheson's wheelchair carrying her along on its many-spoked smart wheels.

"Chiselled Spam," Miss Matheson said, sort of mumbling it to herself.

"Pardon me, Miss Matheson?" Nell said.

"I was just watching the smart wheels and remembering an advertis.e.m.e.nt from my youth," Miss Matheson said. "I used to be a thrasher, you know. I used to ride skateboards through the streets. Now I'm still on wheels, but a different kind. Got a few too many b.u.mps and bruises during my earlier career, I'm afraid."

"It's a wonderful thing to be clever, and you should never think otherwise, and you should never stop being that way. But what you learn, as you get older, is that there are a few billion other people in the world all trying to be clever at the same time, and whatever you do with your life will certainly be lost-swallowed up in the ocean-unless you are doing it along with like-minded people who will remember your contributions and carry them forward. That is why the world is divided into tribes. There are many Lesser phyles and three Great ones. What are the Great ones?"

"New Atlantis," Nell began.

"Nippon," said Fiona.

"Han," they concluded together.

"That is correct," Miss Matheson said. "We traditionally include Han in the list because of its immense size and age-even though it has lately been crippled by intestine discord. And some would include Hindustan, while others would view it as a riotously diverse collection of microtribes sintered together according to some formula we don't get.

"Now, there was a time when we believed that what a human mind could accomplish was determined by genetic factors. Piffle, of course, but it looked convincing for many years, because distinctions between tribes were so evident. Now we understand that it's all cultural. That, after all, is what a culture is-a group of people who share in common certain acquired traits.

"Information technology has freed cultures from the necessity of owning particular bits of land in order to propagate; now we can live anywhere. The Common Economic Protocol specifies how this is to be arranged.

"Some cultures are prosperous; some are not. Some value rational discourse and the scientific method; some do not. Some encourage freedom of expression, and some discourage it. The only thing they have in common is that if they do not propagate, they will be swallowed up by others. All they have built up will be torn down; all they have accomplished will be forgotten; all they have learned and written will be scattered to the wind. In the old days it was easy to remember this because of the constant necessity of border defence. Nowadays, it is all too easily forgotten.

"New Atlantis, like many tribes, propagates itself largely through education. That is the raison d'etre raison d'etre of this Academy. Here you develop your bodies through exercise and dance, and your minds by doing projects. And then you go to Miss Stricken's cla.s.s. What is the point of Miss Stricken's cla.s.s? Anyone? Please speak up. You can't get in trouble, no matter what you say." of this Academy. Here you develop your bodies through exercise and dance, and your minds by doing projects. And then you go to Miss Stricken's cla.s.s. What is the point of Miss Stricken's cla.s.s? Anyone? Please speak up. You can't get in trouble, no matter what you say."

Nell said, after some dithering, "I'm not sure that it has any point." Fiona just watched her saying it and smiled sadly.

Miss Matheson smiled. "You are not far off the mark. Miss Stricken's phase of the curriculum comes perilously close to being without any real substance. Why do we bother with it, then?"

"I can't imagine," Nell said.

"When I was a child, I took a karate cla.s.s," Miss Matheson said, astonis.h.i.+ngly. "Dropped out after a few weeks. Couldn't stand it. I thought that the sensei would teach me how to defend myself when I was out on my skateboard. But the first thing he did was have me sweep the floor. Then he told me that if I wanted to defend myself, I should buy a gun. I came back the next week and he had me sweep the floor again. All I ever did was sweep. Now, what was the point of that?"

"To teach you humility and self-discipline," Nell said. She had learned this from Dojo long ago.

"Precisely. Which are moral qualities. It is upon moral qualities that a society is ultimately founded. All the prosperity and technological sophistication in the world is of no use without that foundation-we learned this in the late twentieth century, when it became unfas.h.i.+onable to teach these things."

"But how can you say it's moral?" said Fiona. "Miss Stricken isn't moral. She's so cruel."

"Miss Stricken is not someone I would invite to dinner at my house. I would not hire her as a governess for my children. Her methods are not my methods. But people like her are indispensable.

"It is the hardest thing in the world to make educated Westerners pull together," Miss Matheson went on. "That is the job of people like Miss Stricken. We must forgive them their imperfections. She is like an avatar-do you children know about avatars? She is the physical embodiment of a principle. That principle is that outside the comfortable and well-defended borders of our phyle is a hard world that will come and hurt us if we are not careful. It is not an easy job to have. We must all feel sorry for Miss Stricken."

They brought sheaves of foxgloves, violet and magenta, back to the school and set them in vases in each cla.s.sroom, leaving an especially large bouquet in Miss Stricken's office. Then they took tea with Miss Matheson, and then they each went home.

Nell could not bring herself to agree with what Miss Matheson had said; but she found that, after this conversation, everything became easy. She had the neo-Victorians all figured out now. The society had miraculously trans.m.u.tated into an orderly system, like the simple computers they programmed in the school. Now that Nell knew all of the rules, she could make it do anything she wanted.

"Joy" returned to its former position as a minor annoyance on the fringes of a wonderful schoolday. Miss Stricken got her with the ruler from time to time, but not nearly so often, even when she was, in fact, scratching or slumping.

Fiona Hackworth had a harder time of it, and within a couple of months she was back on the Supplementary Curriculum list. A few months after that, she stopped coming to school entirely. It was announced that she and her mother had moved to Atlantis/Seattle, and her address was posted in the hall for those who wished to write her letters.

But Nell heard rumors about Fiona from the other girls, who had picked up s.n.a.t.c.hes from their parents. After Fiona had been gone for a year or so, word got out that Fiona's mother had obtained a divorce-which, in their tribe, only happened in cases of adultery or abuse. Nell wrote Fiona a long letter saying she was terribly sorry if her father had been abusive, and offering her support in that case. A few days later she got back a curt note in which Fiona defended her father from all charges. Nell wrote back a letter of apology but didn't hear from Fiona Hackworth again.

It was about two years later that the news feeds filled up with astonis.h.i.+ng tales of the young heiress Elizabeth Finkle-McGraw, who had vanished from her family's estate outside of London and was rumored to have been sighted in London, Los Angeles, Hong Kong, Miami, and many other places, in the presence of people suspected of being high-ranking members of CryptNet.

Hackworth awakes from a dream; retreat from the world of the Drummers; chronological discrepancies.

Hackworth woke from a dream of unsustainable pleasure and realized it wasn't a dream; his p.e.n.i.s was inside someone else, and he was steaming like a runaway locomotive toward e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.n. He had no idea what was going on; but couldn't he be forgiven for doing the wrong thing? With a wiggle here and a thrust there, he finally nudged himself over the threshold, the smooth muscles of the tract in question executing their spinal algorithm.

Just a few deep breaths into the refractory period, and he had already disengaged, yelping a little from the electric spark of withdrawal, and levered himself up on one arm to see whom he'd just violated. The firelight was enough to tell him what he already knew: Whoever this woman was, it wasn't Gwen. Hackworth had violated the most important promise he'd ever made, and he didn't even know the other party.

But he knew it wasn't the first time. Far from it. He'd had s.e.x with a lot of people in the past few years-he'd even been b.u.g.g.e.red. b.u.g.g.e.red.

There was, for example, the woman- Never mind, there was the man who- Strange to say, he could not think of any specific examples. But he knew he was guilty. It was precisely like waking up from a dream and having a clear train of thought in your mind, something you were working on just a few seconds ago, but being unable to remember it, consciousness peeled away from cognition. Like a three-year-old who has a talent for vanis.h.i.+ng into crowds whenever you turn your back, Hackworth's memories had fled to the same place as words that are on the tip of your tongue, precedents for deja vu, last night's dreams.

He knew he was in big trouble with Gwen, but that Fiona still loved him-Fiona, taller than Gwen now, so self-conscious about her still linear figure, still devoid of the second derivatives that add spice to life.

Taller than Gwen? How's that?

Better get out of this place before he had s.e.x with someone else he didn't know.

He wasn't in the central chamber anymore, rather in one of the tunnel's aneurysms with some twenty other people, all just as naked as he was. He knew which tunnel led to the exit (why?) and began to crawl down it, rather stiffly as it seemed that he was stiff and laden with cricks and cramps. Must not have been very athletic s.e.x-more in the Tantric mode.

Sometimes they had s.e.x for days.

How did he know that?

The hallucinations were gone, which was fine with him. He crawled through the tunnels for a long time. If he tried to think about where he was going, he got lost and eventually circled back to where he started. Only when his mind began to wander did he make his way on some kind of autopilot to a long chamber filled with silvery light, sloping upward. This was beginning to look familiar, he had seen this when he was still a young man. He followed it upward until he reached the end, where something unusually stony was under his feet. A hatch opened above him, and several tons of cold seawater landed on his head.

He staggered up onto dry land and found himself in Stanley Park again, gray floor aft, green wall fore. The ferns rustled, and out stepped Kidnapper, who looked fuzzy and green. He also looked unusually dapper for a robotic horse, as Hackworth's bowler hat was perched on top of his head.

Hackworth reached up to feel himself and was astounded to feel his face covered with hair. Several months' growth of beard was there. But even stranger, his chest was much hairier than it had been before. Some of the chest hair was gray, the only gray hairs he had ever seen coming out of his own follicles.

Kidnapper was fuzzy and green because moss had been growing on him. The bowler looked terrible and had moss on it too. Hackworth reached out instinctively and put it on his head. His arm was thicker and hairier than it used to be, a not altogether unpleasing change, and even the hat felt a little tight.

From the Primer, Princess Nell crosses the trail of the enigmatic Mouse Army; a visit to an invalid.

The clearing dimly visible through the trees ahead was a welcome sight, for the forests of King Coyote were surpa.s.singly deep and forever shrouded in cool mists. Fingers of sunlight had begun to thrust between the clouds, and so Princess Nell decided to rest in the open s.p.a.ce and, with any luck, bask in the sunlight. But when she reached the clearing, she found that it was not the flower-strewn greensward she had expected; it was rather a swath that had been carved through the forest by the pa.s.sage of some t.i.tanic force, which had flattened trees and churned up the soil as it progressed. When Princess Nell had recovered from her astonishment and mastered her fear, she resolved to make use of the tracking skills she had learned during her many adventures, so as to learn something about the nature of this unknown creature.

As she soon discovered, the skills of an advanced tracker were not necessary in this case. The merest glance at the trampled soil revealed not (as she had antic.i.p.ated) a few enormous footprints, but millions of tiny ones, superimposed upon one another in such numbers that no sc.r.a.p of ground was unmarked by the impressions of tiny claws and footpads. A torrent of cats had pa.s.sed this way; even had Princess Nell not recognized the footprints, the b.a.l.l.s of loose hair and tiny scats, strewn everywhere, would have told the story.