He went on to write that the book should not be taken from the girl if this were the case; but thinking about it a bit more carefully, he scribbled out that part of the letter and it vanished from the page. It was not Hackworth's role to tell Finkle-McGraw how to manage affairs. He signed the letter and dispatched it.

Half an hour letter, his pen chimed again and he checked his mail.

Hackworth,

Message received. Better late than never. Can't wait to meet the girl.

Yours &c.

Finkle-McGraw

When Hackworth got back to the post office and looked through the window of the big matter compiler, he saw a large machine taking shape in the dim red light. Its body had already been finished and was now rising slowly as its four legs were compiled underneath. Dr. X had provided Hackworth with a chevaline.

Hackworth noted, not without approval, that this one's engineers had put a high priority on the virtues of simplicity and strength and a low priority on comfort and style. Very Chinese. No effort was made to disguise it as a real animal. Much of the mechanical business in the legs was exposed so that you could see how the joints and pushrods worked, a little like staring at the wheels of an old steam locomotive. The body looked gaunt and skeletal. It was made of star-shaped connectors where five or six cigarette-size rods would come together, the rods and connectors forming into an irregular web that wrapped around into a geodesic space frame. The rods could change their length. Hackworth knew from seeing the same construction elsewhere that the web could change its size and shape to an amazing degree while providing whatever combination of stiffness and flexibility the controlling system needed at the moment. Inside the space frame Hackworth could see aluminum-plated spheres and ellipsoids, no doubt vacuum-filled, containing the mount's machinephase guts: basically some rod logic and an energy source.

The legs compiled quickly, the complicated feet took a little longer. When it was finished, Hackworth released the vacuum and opened the door. "Fold," he said. The chevaline's legs buckled, and it lay down on the floor of the M.C. Its space frame contracted as much as it could, and its neck shortened. Hackworth bent down, laced his fingers through the space frame, and lifted the chevaline with one hand. He carried it through the lobby of the post office, past bemused customers, and out the door onto the street.

"Mount," he said. The chevaline rose into a crouch. Hackworth threw one leg over its saddle, which was padded with some kind of elastomeric stuff, and immediately felt it shoving him into the air.

His feet left the ground and flailed around until they found the stirrups. A lumbar support pressed thoughtfully on his kidneys, and then the chevaline trotted into the street and began heading back toward the causeway.

It wasn't supposed to do that. Hackworth was about to tell it to stop. Then he figured out why he'd gotten the chit at the last minute:

Dr. X's engineers had been programming something into this mount's brain, telling it where to take him.

"Name?" Hackworth said.

"Unnamed," the chevaline said.

"Rename Kidnapper," Hackworth said.

"Name Kidnapper," said Kidnapper; and sensing that it was reaching the edge of the business district, it started to canter. Within a few minutes they were blasting across the causeway at a tantivy. Hackworth turned back toward Atlantis and looked for pursuing aerostats; but if Napier was tracking him, he was doing so with some subtlety.

A morning stroll through the Leased Territories;

Dovetail;

a congenial Constable.

High up the mountain before them, they could see St. Mark's Cathedral and hear its bells ringing changes, mostly just tuneless sequences of notes, but sometimes a pretty melody would tumble out, like an unexpected gem from the permutations of the I Ching.

The Diamond Palace of Source Victoria glittered peach and amber as it caught the sunrise, which was still hidden behind the mountain. Nell and Harv had slept surprisingly well under the silver blanket, but they had not by any means slept late. The martial reveille from the Sendero Clave had woken them, and by the time they hit the streets again, Sendero's burly Korean and Incan evangelists were already pouring out of their gate into the common byways of the Leased Territories, humping their folding mediatrons and heavy crates of little red books. "We could go in there, Nell," Harv said, and Nell thought he must be joking. "Always plenty to eat and a warm cot in Sendero."

"They wouldn't let me keep my book," Nell said.

Harv looked at her, mildly startled. "How do you know? Oh, don't tell me, you learned it from the Primer."

"They only have one book in Sendero, and it tells them to burn all the other books."

As they climbed toward the green belt, the way got steeper and Harv started wheezing. From time to time he would stop with his hands on his knees and cough in high hoarse bursts like the bark of a seal. But the air was cleaner up here, they could tell by the way it felt going down their throats, and it was colder too, which helped.

A band of forest surrounded the high central plateau of New Chusan. The clave called Dovetail backed right up against this green belt and was no less densely wooded, though from a distance it had a finer texture-more and smaller trees, and many flowers.

Dovetail was surrounded by a fence made of iron bars and painted black. Harv took one look at it and said it was a joke if that was all the security they had. Then he got to noticing that the fence was lined with a greensward about a stone's throw in width, smooth enough for championship croquet. He raised his eyebrows significantly at Nell, implying that any unauthorized personnel who tried to walk across it would be impaled on hydraulic stainless-steel spikes or shot through with cookiecutters or rent by robot dogs.

The gates to Dovetail stood wide open, which deeply alarmed Harv. He got in front of Nell lest she try to run through them. At the boundary line, the pavement changed from the usual hard-but-flexible, smoothbut-high-traction nanostuff to an irregular mosaic of granite blocks.

The only human in evidence was a white-haired Constable whose belly had created a visible divergence between his two rows of brass buttons. He was bent over using a trowel to extract a steaming turd from the emerald grass. Circumstances suggested that it had come from one of two corgis who were even now slamming their preposterous bodies into each other not far away, trying to roll each other over, which runs contrary to the laws of mechanics even in the case of corgis that are lean and trim, which these were not.

This struggle, which appeared to be only one skirmish in a conflict of epochal standing, had driven all lesser considerations, such as guarding the gate, from the combatants' sphere of attention, and so it was the Constable who first noticed Nell and Harv. "Away with you!" he hollered cheerfully enough, waving his redolent trowel down the hill. "We've no work for such as you today! And the free matter compilers are all down by the waterfront."

The effect of this news on Harv was contrary to what the Constable had intended, for it implied that sometimes there was work for such as him. He stepped forward alertly. Nell took advantage of this to run out from behind him. "Pardon me, sir," she called, "we're not here for work or to get free things, but to find someone who belongs to this phyle."

The Constable straightened his tunic and squared his shoulders at the appearance of this little girl, who looked like a thete but talked like a Vicky. Suspicion gave way to benevolence, and he ambled toward them after shouting a few imprecations at his dogs, who evidently suffered from advanced hearing loss. "Very well," he said. "Who is it that you're looking for?"