"No, sir, except insofar as it told me stories about people who did evil."

"People doing evil is a good lesson. What you saw in there a few weeks ago"-and by this Nell knew he was referring to the headless soldier on the mediatron-"is one application of that lesson, but it's too obvious to be of any good. Ah, but your mother not protecting you from boyfriends-that has some subtlety, doesn't it?

"Nell," the Constable continued, indicating through his tone of voice that the lesson was concluding, "the difference between ignorant and educated people is that the latter know more facts. But that has nothing to do with whether they are stupid or intelligent. The difference between stupid and intelligent people-and this is true whether or not they are well-educated-is that intelligent people can handle subtlety. They are not baffled by ambiguous or even contradictory situations-in fact, they expect them and are apt to become suspicious when things seem overly straightforward.

"In your Primer you have a resource that will make you highly educated, but it will never make you intelligent. That comes from life. Your life up to this point has given you all of the experience you need to be intelligent, but you have to think about those experiences. If you don't think about them, you'll be psychologically unwell. If you do think about them, you will become not merely educated but intelligent, and then, a few years down the road, you will probably give me cause to wish I were several decades younger."

The Constable turned and walked back into his house, leaving Nell alone in the garden, pondering the meaning of that last statement. She supposed it was the sort of thing she might understand later, when she had become intelligent.

Carl Hollywood returns from abroad;

he and Miranda discuss the status and future of her racting career.

Carl Hollywood came back from a month-long trip to London, where he'd been visiting old friends, catching some live theatre, and making face-to-face contacts with some of the big ractive developers, hoping to swing some contracts in their direction. When he got back, the whole company threw a party for him in the theatre's little bar. Miranda thought she handled it pretty well.

But the next day he cornered her backstage. "What's up?" he said. "And I don't mean that in the usual offhanded way. I want to know what's going on with you. Why have you switched to the evening shift during my absence? And why were you acting so weird at the party?"

"Well, Nell and I have had an interesting few months."

Carl looked startled, stepped back half a pace, then sighed and rolled his eyes.

"Of course, her altercation with Burt was traumatic, but she seems to have dealt with it well."

"Who's Burt?"

"I have no idea. Someone who was physically abusing her. Apparently she managed to find some kind of new living situation in short order, probably with the assistance of her brother Harv, who has, however, not stayed with her-he's stuck in the same old bad situation, while Nell has moved on to something better."

"She has? That's good news," said Carl, only half sarcastically.

Miranda smiled at him. "See? That's exactly the kind of feedback I need. I don't talk about this stuff to anyone because I'm afraid they'll think I'm mad. Thank you. Keep it up."

"What is Nell's new situation?" Carl Hollywood asked contritely.

"I think she's in school somewhere. She appears to be learning new material that isn't explicitly covered in the Primer, and she's developing more sophisticated forms of social interaction, suggesting that she's spending more time around a higher class of people."

"Excellent."

"She's not as concerned with immediate issues of physical self-defense, so I gather that she's in a safe living situation. However, her new guardian must be an emotionally distant sort, because she frequently seeks solace under the wings of Duck."

Carl looked funny. "Duck?"

"One of four personages who accompanies and advises Princess Nell. Duck embodies domestic, maternal virtues. Actually, Peter and Dinosaur are now gone– both male figures who embodied survival skills."

"Who's the fourth one?"

"Purple. I think she'll become a lot more relevant to Nell's life around puberty."

"Puberty? You said Nell was between five and seven."

"So?"

"You think you'll still be doing this-" Carl's voice wound down to a stop as he worked out the implications.

"-for at least six or eight years. Oh yes, I should certainly think so. It's a very serious commitment, raising a child."

"Oh, god!" Carl Hollywood said, and collapsed into a big, tatty, overstuffed chair they kept backstage for such purposes.

"That's why I've switched to the evening shift. Ever since Nell started going to school, she's started using the Primer exclusively in the evening. Apparently she's in a time zone within one or two hours of this one."

"Good," Carl muttered, "that narrows it down to about half of the world's population."

"What's the problem here?" Miranda said. "It's not like I'm not getting paid for this."

Carl gave her a good, dispassionate, searching look. "Yes. It brings in adequate revenue."

Three girls go exploring;

a conversation between Lord Finkle-McGraw and Mrs. Hackworth;

afternoon at the estate.

Three girls moved across the billiard-table lawn of a great manor house, circling and swarming about a common center of gravity like gamboling sparrows. Sometimes they would stop, turn inward to face one another, and engage in animated discussion. Then they would suddenly take off running, seemingly free from the constraints of inertia, like petals struck by a gust of spring wind.

They wore long heavy wool coats over their dresses to protect them from the cool damp air of New Chusan's high central plateau. They seemed to be making their way toward an expanse of broken ground some half-mile distant, separated from the great house's formal gardens by a gray stone wall splashed with bits of lime green and lavender where moss and lichen had taken hold. The terrain beyond the wall was a muted hazel color, like a bolt of Harris tweed that has tumbled from the back of a wagon and come undone, though the incipient blooming of the heather had flung a pale violet mist across it, nearly transparent but startlingly vivid in those places where the observer's line of sight grazed the natural slope of the terrain-if the word natural could properly be applied to any feature of this island.

Otherwise as light and free as birds, the girls were each weighed down by a small burden that seemed incongruous in the present setting, for the efforts of the adults to persuade them to leave their books behind had, as ever, been unavailing.

One of the observers had eyes only for the little girl with long flamecolored hair. Her connexion to that child was suggested by her auburn hair and eyebrows. She was dressed in a hand-sewn frock of woven cotton, whose crispness betrayed its recent provenance in a milliner's atelier in Dovetail. If the gathering had included more veterans of that elongated state of low-intensity warfare known as Society, this observation would have been keenly made by those soi-disant sentries who stood upon the battlements, keeping vigil against bounders who would struggle their way up the vast glacis separating wage slaves from Equity Participants. It would have been duly noted and set forth in the oral tradition that Gwendolyn Hackworth, though attractive, hard-waisted, and poised, lacked the confidence to visit Lord Finkle-McGraw's house in anything other than a new dress made for the occasion.

The gray light suffusing the drawing room through its high windows was as gentle as mist. As Mrs. Hackworth stood enveloped in that light, sipping beige tea from a cup of translucent bone china, her face let down its guard and betrayed some evidence of her true state of mind. Her host, Lord Finkle-McGraw, thought that she looked drawn and troubled, though her vivacious comportment during the first hour of their interview had led him to suppose otherwise.