Most of the people did not live in the Millhouse proper but in a couple of long outbuildings, two stories each, with workshops below and living quarters above. Nell was a little surprised to see that Rita did not actually live with Brad. Her apartment and her shop were each twice the size of Nell's old flat and filled with fine things of heavy wood, metal, cotton, linen, and porcelain that, as Nell was beginning to understand, had all been made by human hands, probably right here in Dovetail.

Rita's shop had great kettles where she would brew thick fibrous stew. She spread the stew thinly over screens to draw out the water and flattened it with a great hand-cranked press to make paper, thick and roughedged and subtly colored from the thousands of tiny fibers wending through it. When she had a stack of paper made, she would take it next door to a shop with a sharp oily smell, where a bearded man with a smudged apron would run it through another big hand-cranked machine. When it came out of this machine, it had letters on the top, giving the name and address of a lady in New Atlantis.

Since Nell had been decorous so far and not tried to stick her fingers into the machinery and not driven anyone to distraction with her questions, Rita gave her leave to visit some of the other shops, as long as she asked permission at each one. Nell spent most of the day making friends with various shopowners: a glassblower, a jeweler, a cabinetmaker, a weaver, even a. toymaker who gave her a tiny wooden doll in a calico dress.

Harv spent a while bothering the men who were putting shingles on the roof, then wandered about in the fields for most of the day, kicking small rocks from place to place, generally scoping out the boundaries and general condition of the community centered on the Millhouse. Nell checked in on him from time to time. At first he looked tense and skeptical, then he relaxed and enjoyed it, and finally, late in the afternoon, he became surly and perched himself on a boulder above the running stream, tossing pebbles into it, chewing his thumbnail, and thinking.

Brad came home early, riding a bay stallion straight down the mountain from the New Atlantis Clave, angling through the green belt and piercing the dog pod grid with scant consequences as the authorities knew him. Harv approached him with a formal mien, harrumphing phlegm out of the way as he prepared to offer up an explanation and a plea. But Brad's eyes merely glanced over Harv, settled on Nell, appraised her for a moment, then looked away shyly. The verdict was that they could stay the night, but all else depended on legal niceties that were beyond his powers.

"Have you done anything the Shanghai Police might find interesting?" Brad asked Harv gravely. Harv said no, a simple no without the usual technicalities, provisos, and subclauses.

Nell wanted to tell Brad everything. But she had been noticing how, in the Primer, whenever someone asked Peter Rabbit a direct question of any kind, he always lied.

"To look at our green fields and big houses, you might think we're on Atlantis turf here," Brad said, "but we're under Shanghai jurisdiction just like the rest of the Leased Territories. Now usually the Shanghai Police don't come around, because we are peaceable folk and because we have made certain arrangements with them. But if it were known that we were harboring runaway gang members-"

"'Nuff said," Harv blurted. It was clear that he had already worked all of this out in his head as he sat on the riverbank and was only waiting for the adults to catch up with his logic. Before Nell understood what was going on, he came up to her and gave her a hug and a kiss on the lips. Then he turned away from her and began running across a green field, down toward the ocean. Nell ran after him, but she could not keep up, and finally she fell down in a stand of bluebells and watched Harv dissolve into a curtain of tears. When she could no longer see him, she curled up sobbing, and in time Rita came and gathered her up in her strong arms and carried her slowly back across the field to the Millhouse where the steady wheel rolled.

Orphans of the Han are exposed to the benefits of modern educational technology;

Judge Fang reflects on the fundamental precepts of Confucianism.

The orphanage ships had built-in matter compilers, but they could not, of course, be hooked up to Sources. Instead they drew their supplies of matter from cubical containers, rather like tanks of atoms arranged very precisely. These containers could be loaded on board with cranes and hooked up to the matter compilers in the same way that Feed lines would be if they resided on shore. The ships put in to Shanghai frequently, offloaded empty containers, and took new ones on board-their hungry populations were fed almost exclusively on synthetic rice produced by the matter compilers.

There were seven ships now. The first five had been named after the Master's Five Virtues, and after that they had taken to naming them after major Confucian philosophers. Judge Fang flew out to the one named (as best it could be translated into English) Generosity of Soul, personally carrying the M.C. program in the sleeve of his garment. This was the very ship he had visited on the eventful night of his boat ride with Dr. X, and ever since then he had somehow felt closer to these fifty thousand little mice than any of the other quarter-million in the other vessels.

The program was written to work in a bulk compiler, extruding dozens of Primers each cycle. When the first batch was finished, Judge Fang plucked out one of the new volumes, inspected its cover, which had the appearance of marbled jade, flipped through the pages admiring the illustrations, and cast a critical eye over the calligraphy.

Then he carried it down a corridor and into a playroom where a few hundred little mice were running around, blowing off steam. He caught the eye of one girl and beckoned her over. She came, reluctantly, chivvied along by an energetic teacher who alternated between smiling to the girl and bowing to Judge Fang.

He squatted so that he could look her in the eye and handed her the book. She was much more interested in the book than in Judge Fang, but she had been taught the proper formalities and bowed and thanked him. Then she opened it up. Her eyes got wide. The book began to talk to her. To Judge Fang the voice sounded a bit dull, the rhythm of the speech not exactly right. But the girl didn't care. The girl was hooked.

Judge Fang stood up to find himself surrounded by a hundred little girls, all facing toward the little jade book, standing on tiptoes, mouths open.

Finally he had been able to do something unambiguously good with his position. In the Coastal Republic it wouldn't have been possible; in the Middle Kingdom, which hewed to the words and spirit of the Master, it was simply part of his duties.

He turned and left the room; none of the girls noticed, which was just as well, as they might have seen a quiver in his lip and a tear in his eye. As he made his way through the corridors toward the upper deck where his airship awaited him, he reviewed for the thousandth time the Great Learning, the kernel of the Master's thought: