Miranda was forcibly ignoring the fact that they were walking through the middle of the room now. Carl Hollywood was drawing all of the attention, which suited her. She exchanged smiles with a couple of ractors who had appeared in the interactive invitation that had summoned her here; both of them were having what looked like very enjoyable conversations with fine-looking people, probably investors.

"Who are you taking me to meet?"

"A guy named Beck. An old acquaintance of mine."

"But not a friend?"

Carl adopted an uncomfortable grin and shrugged. "We've been friends sometimes. We've also been collaborators. Business partners. This is how life works, Miranda: After a while, you build up a network of people. You pa.s.s them bits of data they might be interested in and vice versa. To me, he's one of those guys."

"I can't help wondering why you want me to meet him."

"I believe," Carl said very quietly, but using some actor's trick so that she could hear every word, "that this gentleman can help you find Nell. And that you can help him find something he wants."

And he stepped aside with a swirl of cloak, pulling out a chair for her. They were in the corner of the banquet hall. Sitting on the opposite side of the table, his back to a large marble-silled window, the illuminated Bund and the mediatronic cacophony of Pudong spilling b.l.o.o.d.y light across the glossy shoulder-pads of his suit, was a young African man in dreadlocks, wearing dark gla.s.ses with minuscule circular lenses held in some kind of ostentatiously complex metallic s.p.a.ce grid. Sitting next to him, but hardly noticed by Miranda, was a Nipponese businessman wearing a dark formal kimono and smoking what smelled like an old-fas.h.i.+oned, fully carcinogenic cigar.

"Miranda, this is Mr. Beck and Mr. Oda, both privateers. Gentlemen, Ms. Miranda Redpath."

Both men nodded in a pathetic vestige of a bow, but neither made a move to shake hands, which was just as well-nowadays some amazing things could be transferred through skin-to-skin contact. Miranda didn't even nod back to them; she just sat down and let Carl scoot her in. She didn't like people who described themselves as privateers. It was just a pretentious word for a thete-someone who didn't have a tribe.

Either that, or they really did belong to tribes-from the looks of them, probably some weird synthetic phyle she'd never heard of-and, for some reason, were pretending not to.

Carl said, "I have explained to the gentlemen, without getting into any details, that you would like to do the impossible. Can I get you something to drink, Miranda?"

After Carl Hollywood left, there was a rather long silence during which Mr. Beck presumably stared at Miranda, though she could not tell because of the dark gla.s.ses. Mr. Oda's primary function appeared to be that of nervous spectator, as if he had wagered half of his net worth on whether Miranda or Mr. Beck would speak first.

A stratagem occurred to Mr. Oda. He pointed in the direction of the bandstand and nodded significantly. "You like this band?"

Miranda looked over at the band, half a dozen men and women in an a.s.sortment of races. Mr. Oda's question was difficult to answer because they had not yet made any music. She looked back at Mr. Oda, who pointed significantly at himself.

"Oh. You're the backer?" Miranda said.

Mr. Oda withdrew a small glittering object from his pocket and slid it across the table toward Miranda. It was a cloisonne pin shaped like a dragonfly. She had noticed similar ones adorning several partygoers. She picked it up cautiously. Mr. Oda tapped himself on the lapel and nodded, encouraging her to put it on.

She left it sitting there on the table for the time being.

"I'm not seeing anything," Mr. Beck finally said, apparently for Mr. Oda's benefit. "To a first approximation, she is clean." Miranda realized that Mr. Beck had been checking her out using some kind of display in his phenomenoscopic gla.s.ses.

Miranda was still trying to work out some kind of unpleasant response when Mr. Oda leaned forward into his own cloud of cigar smoke. "It is our understanding," he said, "that you wish to make a connection. Your wish is very strong."

Privateers. The word also implied that these gentlemen, at least in their own minds, had some kind of an angle, some way of making money off of their own lack of tribal affiliation. The word also implied that these gentlemen, at least in their own minds, had some kind of an angle, some way of making money off of their own lack of tribal affiliation.

"I've been told that such things are impossible."

"It's more correct to speak in probabilistic terms," said Mr. Beck. His accent was more Oxford than anything else, with a Jamaican lilt, and a crispness that owed something to India.

"Astronomically improbable, then," Miranda said.

"There you go," said Mr. Beck.

Now, somehow, the ball had found its way into Miranda's court. "If you guys think you've found a way to beat probability, why don't you go into the Vegas ractives and make a fortune?"

Misters Beck and Oda were actually more amused by that crack than she had expected them to be. They were capable of irony. That was one good sign in the almost overwhelming barrage of negative signals she'd been getting from them so far.

The band started up, playing dance music with a good beat. The lights came down, and the party began to glitter as light flashed from the dragonfly pins.

"It wouldn't work," Mr. Beck said, "because Vegas is a game of pure numbers with no human meaning to it. The mind doesn't interface to pure numbers."

"But probability is probability," Miranda said.

"What if you have a dream one night that your sister is in a crash, and you contact her the next day and learn that she broke up with her boyfriend?"

"It could be a coincidence."

"Yes. But not a very probable one. You see, maybe it's possible to beat probability, when the heart as well as the mind is involved."

Miranda supposed that neither Mr. Beck nor Mr. Oda understood the essential cruelty of what they were saying. It was much better not to have any hope at all. "Are you guys involved in some kind of religious thing?" she said.

Misters Beck and Oda looked at each other significantly. Mr. Oda went into some peculiar routine of tooth-sucking and throat-clearing that would probably convey a torrent of information to another Nipponese person but meant nothing to Miranda, other than giving her a general hint that the situation was rather complicated. Mr. Beck produced an antique silver snuffbox, or a replica of one, took out a pinch of nanosite dust, and hoovered it up into one of his great circular nostrils, then nervously scratched the underside of his nose. He slid his gla.s.ses way down, exposing his big brown eyes, and stared distractedly over Miranda's shoulder into the thick of the party, watching the band and the dancers' reaction to it. He was wearing a dragonfly pin, which had begun to glow and to flash gorgeous colored lights, like a fleet of police cars and firetrucks gathered round a burning house.

The band segued into a peculiar, tuneless, beatless miasma of noise, sp.a.w.ning lazy convection currents in the crowd.

"How do you guys know Carl?" Miranda said, hoping to break the ice a bit.

Mr. Oda shook his head apologetically. "I have not had the pleasure of making his acquaintance until recently."

"Used to do thyuh-tuh thyuh-tuh with him in London." with him in London."

"You're a ractor?"

Mr. Beck snorted ironically. A variegated silk hankie flourished in his hand, and he blew his nose quickly and cleanly like a practiced snuff-taker. "I am a technical boy," he said.

"You program ractives?"

"That is a subset of my activities."

"You do lights and sets? Or digital stuff? Or nanotech?"

"Invidious distinctions do not interest me. I am interested in one thing," said Mr. Beck, holding up his index finger, topped with a very large but perfectly manicured claw of a fingernail, "and that is use of tech to convey meaning."

"That covers a lot of areas nowadays."

"Yes, but it shouldn't. That is to say that the distinctions between those areas are bogus."

"What's wrong with just programming ractives?"

"Nothing at all," said Mr. Beck, "just as nothing is wrong with traditional live theatre, or for that matter, sitting round a campfire telling stories, like I used to enjoy on the beach when I was a lad. But as long as there are new ways to be found, it is my job, as a technical boy, to find them. Your art, lady, is racting. Searching for the new tech is mine."

The noise coming from the band had begun to pulse irregularly. As they talked, the pulses gathered themselves into beats and became steadier. Miranda turned around to look at the people on the dance floor. They were all standing around with faraway looks on their faces, concentrating on something. Their dragonfly pins were flas.h.i.+ng wildly now, joining in a coherent pulse of pure white on each beat. Miranda realized that the pins were somehow patched into the wearers' nervous systems and that they were talking to each other, creating the music collectively. A guitarist began to weave an improvised melodic line through the gradually coalescing pattern of sound, and the sound condensed around it as all of the dancers heard the tune. They had a feedback loop going. A young woman began to chant out some kind of tuneless rap that sounded improvised. As she went on, she broke into melody. The music was still weird and formless, but it was beginning to approach something you might hear on a professional recording.

Miranda turned back to face Mr. Beck. "You think you've invented a new way to convey meaning with technology-"

"Medium."

"A new medium, and that it can help me get what I want. Because when meaning is involved, the laws of probability can be broken."

"There are two misconceptions in your statement. One: I did not invent the medium. Others did, perhaps for different purposes, and I have stumbled across it, or actually just heard intimations.

"As far as the laws of probability, my lady, these cannot be broken, any more than any other mathematical principle. But laws of physics and mathematics are like a coordinate system that runs in only one dimension. Perhaps there is another dimension perpendicular to it, invisible to those laws of physics, describing the same things with different rules, and those rules are written in our hearts, in a deep place where we cannot go and read them except in our dreams."

Miranda looked to Mr. Oda, hoping he'd wink or something, but he was staring into the dance floor with a terribly serious expression, as though enfolded in deep thoughts himself, nodding slightly. Miranda drew a deep breath and sighed.

When she looked up at Mr. Beck again, he was watching her, noting her curiosity about Mr. Oda. He turned one hand palm up and rubbed the ball of his thumb over his fingertips.

So Beck was the hacker and Oda was the backer. The oldest and most troublesome relations.h.i.+p in the technological world.

"We require a third partic.i.p.ant," Mr. Beck said, dovetailing into her thoughts.

"To do what?" Miranda said, evasive and defensive at the same time.

"All technomedia ventures have the same structure," said Mr. Oda, bestirring himself for the first time in a while. By now a nice synergy had developed between band and crowd, and a lot of dancing was going on-some intimidatingly sophisticated stuff, and also some primal mos.h.i.+ng. "Three-legged tripod." Oda held up a fist and began to extend fingers as he enumerated the same. Miranda noted that his fingers were gnarly and bent, as if they'd all been broken frequently. Mr. Oda was, perhaps, a veteran pract.i.tioner of certain martial arts now disdained by most Nipponese because of their lower-cla.s.s provenance. "Leg number one: new technological idea. Mr. Beck. Leg number two: adequate financial backing. Mr. Oda. Leg number three: the artist."

Misters Beck and Oda looked significantly at Miranda. She threw back her head and managed a nice solid laugh, hitting that sweet spot down in her diaphragm. It felt good. She shook her head, letting her hair swing back and forth across her shoulders. Then she leaned forward across the table, shouting to be heard above the band. "You guys must be desperate. I'm old hat, guys. There's half a dozen ractors in this room with better prospects than me. Didn't Carl fill you in? I've been holed up in a body stage for six years doing kid stuff. I'm not a star."

"Star means a master of conventional ractives, which are precisely the technology we are trying to move beyond," said Mr. Beck, a bit scornful that she wasn't getting it.

Mr. Oda pointed to the band. "None of these people were professional musicians-some not even amateurs. Musician skills are not relevant for this-these people were new kinds of artists born too early."

"Almost too early," Mr. Beck said. too early," Mr. Beck said.

"Oh, my G.o.d," Miranda said, starting to get it. For the first time, she believed that what Beck and Oda were talking about-whatever the h.e.l.l it was-was a real possibility. Which meant that she was ninety percent convinced-though only Beck and Oda understood that.

It was too loud to talk. A mosher backed into Miranda's chair and nearly fell over her. Beck stood up, came round the table, and extended one hand, asking her to dance. Miranda looked into the Dionysian revel filling the floor and understood that the only way to be safe was to join it. She plucked her dragonfly pin from the tabletop and followed Beck into the midst of the dance. As she pinned it on, it began to flash, and she thought she heard a new strain woven into the song.

From the Primer, Princess Nell enters into the lands of King Coyote.

All that hot afternoon Nell toiled up the numberless switchbacks, occasionally reaching into the bag that dangled at her waist, drawing out a handful of Purple's ashes and scattering them behind her like seeds. Whenever she stopped to rest, she could look out across the burnt desert she had just crossed: a tawny plain scabbed with reddish-brown volcanic rock, patches of aromatic greenish-gray shrubs clinging like bread mold to any parts that were sheltered from the eternal wind. She had hoped that when she climbed the face of this mountain, she would rise up above the dust, but it had followed her, coating her lips and her toes. When she drew a breath through her nose, it only stung her parched nostrils, and so she had given up trying to smell anything. But late in the afternoon a cool moist draft spilled down the mountain and over her face. She drew in a breath of it, hoping to catch some of the cold air before it trickled down into the desert. It smelled of evergreens.

As she climbed the switchbacks, she forded those delightful currents of air over and over, so that as she rounded each hairpin turn in the trail, she had an incentive to climb toward the next one. The little shrubs that clutched rocks and cowered in cracks became bigger and more numerous, and flowers began to appear, first tiny little white ones like handfuls of salt strewn over the rocks, then larger blossoms, blue and magenta and brilliant orange, br.i.m.m.i.n.g with scented nectar that attracted bees all fuzzy and yellow with stolen pollen. Gnarled oaks and short dense evergreens cast tiny shadows across the path. The skyline grew closer, and the turns in the path became wider as the mountain became less steep. Nell rejoiced when the switchbacks ended and the trail took off straight across an undulating mountaintop meadow thick with purple-flowered heather and marked with occasional stands of tall firs. For a moment she was afraid that this meadow was nothing more than a ledge, and that she had more mountains to ascend; but then the path turned downhill, and treading heavily as new muscles caught her descending weight, she half-ran across a vast boulder, pocked with tiny pools of clear water and occasional lozenges of wet snow, until she reached a point where it fell away from under her and she skidded to a precarious stop, looking down like a peregrine falcon over an immense country of blue lakes and green mountains, shrouded in a whirling storm of silver mist.

Nell turned the page and saw it, just as the book said. This was a two-page ill.u.s.tration-a color painting, she reckoned. Any one part of it looked just as real as a cine feed. But the geometry of the thing was funny, borrowing some suprarealistic tricks from cla.s.sical Chinese landscape painting; the mountains were too steep, and they marched away forever into the distance, and if Nell stared, she could see tall castles clinging to their impossibly precipitous slopes, colorful banners waving from their flagpoles bearing heraldic devices that were dynamic: The gryphons crouched, the lions roared, and she could see all of these details, even though the castles should have been miles away; whenever she looked at something it got bigger and turned into a different picture, and when her attention wavered-when she blinked and shook her head-it snapped back to the first view again.

She spent a long time doing that, because there were dozens of castles at the very least, and she got the feeling that if she kept looking and counting she might look forever. But it wasn't all castles: there were mountains, cities, rivers, lakes, birds and beasts, caravans, and travelers of all kinds.

She spent a while staring at a group of travelers who had drawn their wagons into a roadside meadow and set up a camp, clapping hands round a bonfire while one of them played a reel on some small bellows-powered bagpipes, barely audible these many miles away. Then she realized that the book hadn't said anything for a long time. "What happened then?" she said.

The Young Lady's Ill.u.s.trated Primer Young Lady's Ill.u.s.trated Primer said nothing. said nothing.

"Nell looked for a safe way down," Nell essayed.

Her vantage point began to move. A patch of snow swung into view. "No, wait!" she said, "Nell stuffed some clean snow into her water bottles."

In the painting, Nell could see her bare pink hands scooping up snow and packing it bit by bit into the neck of her bottle. When it was full, she put the cork back in (Nell didn't have to specify that) and began moving around on the rock, looking for a place that wasn't so steep. Nell didn't have to explain that in detail either; in the ractive, she searched the rock in a fairly rational way and in a few minutes found a stairway chiseled into the rock, winding down the mountain endlessly until it pierced a cloud layer far below. Princess Nell began descending the steps, one at a time.

After a while, Nell tried an experiment: "Princess Nell descended the stairs for many hours."

This triggered a series of dissolves like she'd seen on old pa.s.sives: Her current view dissolved into a closeup of her feet, trudging down a couple of steps, which dissolved into a view from considerably farther down the mountain, followed by a closeup of Princess Nell uns.c.r.e.w.i.n.g her water bottle and drinking melted snow; another view from farther down; Nell sitting down for a rest; a soaring eagle; the approaching cloud layer; big trees; descending through the mist; and finally, Nell tramping wearily down the last ten steps, which left her in a clearing in a dark coniferous forest, carpeted with rust-colored pine needles. It was twilight, and the wolves were beginning to howl. Nell made the usual arrangements for the night, lit a fire, and curled up to sleep.

Having reached a good stopping-place, Nell started to close the book. She'd have to continue this later.

She had just entered the land of the oldest and most powerful of all the Faery Kings. The many castles on the mountains belonged to all of his Dukes and Earls, and she suspected she would have to visit them all before she had gotten what she'd come for. It was not a quick adventure for an early Sat.u.r.day morning. But just as she was clasping the book together, new words and an ill.u.s.tration appeared on the page she'd been reading, and something about the ill.u.s.tration made her open the book back up. It showed a crow perched on a tree branch above Princess Nell, holding a necklace in its beak. It was eleven jeweled keys strung on a golden chain. Princess Nell had been wearing it around her neck; apparently the next event in the story was that this bird stole it while she was sleeping. Beneath the picture was a poem, spoken by the crow from his perch:

Castles, gardens, gold, and jewels Contentment signify, for fools Like Princess Nell; but those Who cultivate their wit Like King Coyote and his crows Compile their power bit by bit And hide it places no one knows.

Nell closed up the book. This was too upsetting to think about just now. She had been collecting those keys for most of her life. The first she'd taken from King Magpie just after she and Harv had arrived at Dovetail. She had picked up the other ten one at a time during the years since then. She had done this by traveling to the lands of the Faery Kings and Queens who owned those keys and using the tricks she had learned from her Night Friends. Each key had come to her in a different way.

One of the hardest keys to get had belonged to an old Faery Queen who had seen through every trick that Nell could think up and fought off every a.s.sault. Finally, in desperation, Princess Nell had thrown herself on the mercy of that Queen and told her the sad story of Harv locked up in the Dark Castle. The Queen had fed Nell a nice bowl of chicken soup and handed over the key with a smile.

Not much later, Duck had encountered a nice young mallard on the road and flown away with him to start a family. Purple and Princess Nell then traveled together for several years, and on many a dark night, sitting around the campfire under a full moon, Purple had taught Nell secret things from her magic books and from the ancient lore she kept in her head.

Recently they had traveled for a thousand miles on camelback across a great desert full of djinns, demons, sultans, and caliphs and finally reached the great onion-domed palace of the local Faery King-himself a djinn of great power-who ruled over all the desert lands. Princess Nell had devised a complicated plan to trick their way into the djinn's treasury. To carry it out, she and Purple had to live in the city around the palace for a couple of years and make many treks into the desert in search of magic lanterns, rings, secret caverns, and the like.

Finally, Princess Nell and Purple had penetrated to the djinn king's treasury and found the eleventh key. But they had been surprised by the djinn himself, who attacked them in the guise of a fire-breathing serpent. Purple had transformed herself into a giant eagle with metallic wings and talons that could not be burned-much to the surprise of Princess Nell, who had never imagined that her companion possessed such power.

The battle between Purple and the djinn raged for a day and a night, both combatants transforming themselves into any number of fantastical creatures and hurling all manner of devastating spells at each other, until finally the mighty castle lay in ruins, the desert was scorched and blasted for many miles around, and Purple and the djinn king both lay dead on the floor of what had been the treasury.

Nell had picked up the eleventh key from the floor, put it on her chain, cremated Purple's body, and scattered her ashes across the desert as she walked, for many days, toward the mountains and the green land, where the eleven keys had now been stolen away from her.

Nell's experiences at school; a confrontation with Miss Stricken; the rigors of Supplementary Curriculum; Miss Matheson's philosophy of education; three friends go separate ways.

AGLAIA B BRILLIANCE.

EUPHROSYNEJOY.

THALIABLOOM.

The names of the three graces, and diverse artists' conceptions of the ladies themselves, were chiseled, painted, and sculpted freely about the interior and exterior of Miss Matheson's Academy. Nell could hardly look anywhere without seeing one of them prancing across a field of wildflowers, distributing laurel wreaths to the worthy, jointly thrusting a torch toward heaven, or shedding lambent effulgence upon the receptive pupils.

Nell's favorite part of the curriculum was Thalia, which was scheduled for an hour in the morning and an hour in the afternoon. When Miss Matheson hauled once on the old bellrope dangling down from the belfry, belting a single dolorous clang across the campus, Nell and the other girls in her section would arise, curtsy to their teacher, walk in single file down the corridor to the courtyard-then break into a chaotic run until they reached the Hall of Physical Culture, where they would strip out of their heavy, scratchy complicated uniforms and climb into lighter, looser, scratchy complicated uniforms with more freedom of movement.