"You can try to act the same– we have tried to make you the same– you can pretend it in the future if you insist, and you can even take the Oath– but it's all a lie. You are different."

These words struck Nell like a sudden cold wind of pure mountain air and stripped away the soporific cloud of sentimentality. Now she stood exposed and utterly vulnerable. But not unpleasantly so.

"Are you suggesting that I leave the bosom of the adopted tribe that has nurtured me?"

"I am suggesting that you are one of those rare people who transcends tribes, and you certainly don't need a bosom any more," Miss Matheson said. "You will find, in time, that this tribe is as good as any other– better than most, really." Miss Matheson exhaled deeply and seemed to dissolve into her blankets. "Now, I haven't long. So give us a kiss, and then be on your way, girl."

Nell leaned forward and pressed her lips against Miss Matheson's cheek, which looked leathery but was surprisingly soft. Then, unwilling to leave so abruptly, she turned her head and rested it on Miss Matheson's chest for a few moments. Miss Matheson stroked feebly at her hair and tut-tutted.

"Farewell, Miss Matheson," Nell said. "I will never forget you."

"Nor I you," Miss Matheson whispered, "though admittedly that is not saying much."

A very large chevaline stood stolidly in front of Constable Moore's house, somewhere between a Percheron and a small elephant in size and bulk. It was the dirtiest object Nell had ever seen in her life-its encrustations alone must have weighed hundreds of pounds and were redolent with the scent of night soil and stagnant water. A fragment of a mulberry branch, still bearing leaves and even a couple of actual berries, had gotten wedged into a flexing joint between two adjoining armor plates, and long ropes of milfoil trailed from its ankles.

The Constable was sitting in the middle of his bamboo grove, enveloped in a suit of hoplite armor, similarly filthy and scarred, that was twice as big as he was, and that made his bare head look absurdly small. He had ripped the helmet off and dropped it into his fish pond, where it floated around like the eviscerated hull of a scuttled dreadnought. He looked very gaunt and was staring vacantly, without blinking, at some kudzu that was slowly but inexorably conquering the wisteria. As soon as Nell saw the look on his face, she made him some tea and brought it to him. The Constable reached for the tiny alabaster teacup with armored hands that could have crumbled stones like loaves of stale bread. The thick barrels of the guns built into the arms of his suit were scorched on the inside. He plucked the cup from Nell's hands with the precision of a surgical robot, but did not lift it to his lips, perhaps afraid that he might, in his exhaustion, get the distance a bit wrong and inadvertently crush the porcelain into his jaw, or even decapitate himself. Merely holding the cup, watching the steam rise from its surface, seemed to calm him. His nostrils dilated once, then again.

"Darjeeling," he said. "Well chosen. Always thought of India as a more civilised place than China. Have to throw out all of the oolong now, all the keemun, the lung jang, the lapsang souchong. Time to switch over to Ceylon, pekoe, assam." He chuckled.

White trails of dried salt ran back from the corners of the Constable's eyes and disappeared into his hairline. He had been riding fast with his helmet off. Nell wished that she had been able to see the Constable thundering across China on his war chevaline.

"I've retired for the last time," he explained. He nodded in the direction of China. "Been doing a bit of consulting work for a gentleman there. Complicated fellow. Dead now. Had many facets, but now he'll go down in history as just another damn Chinese warlord who didn't make the grade. It is remarkable, love," he said, looking at Nell for the first time, "how much money you can make shovelling back the tide. In the end you need to get out while the getting is good. Not very honourable, I suppose, but then, there is no honour among consultants."

Nell did not imagine that Constable Moore wanted to get into a detailed discussion of recent events, so she changed the subject. "I think I have finally worked out what you were trying to tell me, years ago, about being intelligent," she said.

The Constable brightened all at once. "Pleased to hear it."

"The Vickys have an elaborate code of morals and conduct. It grew out of the moral squalor of an earlier generation, just as the original Victorians were preceded by the Georgians and the Regency. The old guard believe in that code because they came to it the hard way. They raise their children to believe in that code– but their children believe it for entirely different reasons."

"They believe it," the Constable said, "because they have been indoctrinated to believe it."

"Yes. Some of them never challenge it– they grow up to be smallminded people, who can tell you what they believe but not why they believe it. Others become disillusioned by the hypocrisy of the society and rebel– as did Elizabeth Finkle-McGraw."

"Which path do you intend to take, Nell?" said the Constable, sounding very interested. "Conformity or rebellion?"

"Neither one. Both ways are simple-minded– they are only for people who cannot cope with contradiction and ambiguity."

"Ah! Excellent!" the Constable exclaimed. As punctuation, he slapped the ground with his free hand, sending up a shower of sparks and transmitting a powerful shock through the ground to Nell's feet.

"I suspect that Lord Finkle-McGraw, being an intelligent man, sees through all of the hypocrisy in his society, but upholds its principles anyway, because that is what is best in the long run. And I suspect that he has been worrying about how best to inculcate this stance in young people who cannot understand, as he does, its historical antecedents– which might explain why he has taken an interest in me. The Primer may have been Finkle-McGraw's idea to begin with-a first attempt to go about this systematically."

"The Duke plays his cards close," Constable Moore said, "and so I cannot say whether your suppositions are correct. But I will admit it hangs together nicely."

"Thank you."

"What do you intend to do with yourself, now that you have pieced all of this together? A few more years' education and polishing will place you in a position to take the Oath."

"I am, of course, aware that I have favorable prospects in the Atlantan phyle," Nell said, "but I do not think that it would be fitting for me to take the straight and narrow path. I am going to China now to seek my fortune."

"Well," Constable Moore said, "look out for the Fists." His gaze wandered over his battered and filthy armor and came to rest on the floating helmet. "They are coming now."

The best explorers, like Burton, made every effort to blend in. In this spirit, Nell stopped at a public M.C., doffed her long dress, and compiled a new set of clothes– a navy blue skin-tight coverall emblazoned with SHIT HAPPENS in pulsating orange letters. She swapped her old clothes for a pair of powered skates on the waterfront, and then headed straight for the Causeway. It rose gently into the air for a few miles, and then the Pudong Economic Zone came into view at her feet, and Shanghai beyond that, and she suddenly began to pick up speed and had to cut the skates' power assist. She'd passed over the watershed now. Nell was alone in China.