The wall and the floor were both giant mediatrons, and both had been 
covered with a profusion of media windows, hundreds and hundreds of separate 
panes, like a wall on a busy city street where posters and bills have been 
pasted up in such abundance that they have completely covered the substrate. 
Some of the panes were only as big as the palm of Nell's hand, and some of them 
were the size of wall posters. Most of the ones on the floor were windows into 
written documents, grids of numbers, schematic diagrams (lots of organizational 
trees), or wonderful maps, drawn with breathtaking precision and clarity, with 
rivers, mountains, and villages labeled in Chinese characters. As Nell surveyed 
this panorama, she flinched once or twice from the impression that something 
small was creeping along the floor; but there were no bugs in the room, it was 
just an illusion created by small fluctuations in the maps and in the rows and 
columns of numbers. These things were ractive, just like the words in the 
Primer; but unlike the Primer, they were responding not to what Nell did but, 
she supposed, to events far away.