The Diamond Age (58 page)

  Fiona screamed. She was staring over John's shoulder at the Nipponese youths. John turned around to see that there were only two of them now; the sick one was gone, and the other two had flung their bellies across the gunwhale and stretched out their arms, fingers like white rays shining into the black water. John felt Fiona's arm pull free from his grasp, and as he turned toward her, he just saw her vaulting over the rail.

  It was over before he had an opportunity to get really scared. The crew dealt with the matter with a practiced efficiency that suggested to Hackworth that the Nipponese man was really an actor, the entire incident part of the production. The Afro-Caribbean man cursed and shouted for them to hang on, his voice pure and powerful as a Stradivarius cello, a stage voice. He inverted the cooler, dumping out all the beer and wine, then snapped it shut and flung it over the stern as a life preserver. Meanwhile the pilot was swinging the boat round. Several passengers, including Hackworth, had turned on microtorches and focused their beams on Fiona, whose skirts had inflated as she'd jumped in feet-first and now surrounded her like a raft of flowers. With one hand she was clutching the Nipponese man's collar, and with the other, the handle of the ice chest. She did not have the strength or buoyancy to hold the drunken man out of the water, and so both of them were swamped by the estuary's rolling waves.

  The man with the dreadlocks hauled Fiona out first and handed her off to her father. The fabricules making up her clothing- countless mites linked elbow-to-elbow in a two-dimensional array- went to work pumping away the water trapped in the interstices. Fiona was wreathed in a sinuous veil of mist that burned with the captured light of the torches. Her thick red hair had been freed from the confines of her hat, which had been torn away by the waves and now fell about her in a cape of fire.

  She was looking defiantly at Hackworth, whose adrenal glands had finally jumped into the endocrinological fray. When he saw his daughter in this way, it felt as though someone were inexorably sliding a hundred pound block of ice up the length of his spine. When the sensation reached his medulla, he staggered and nearly had to sit down. She had somehow flung herself through an unknown and unmarked barrier and become supernatural, a naiad rising from the waves cloaked in fire and steam. In some rational compartment of his mind that had now become irrelevant, Hackworth wondered whether Dramatis Personae (for this was the name of the troupe that was running this show) had got some nanosites into his system, and if so what exactly they were doing to his mind.

  Water streamed from Fiona's skirts and ran between the floorboards, and then she was dry, except for her face and hair. She wiped her face on her sleeves, ignoring her father's proffered handkerchief. No words passed between them, and they did not embrace, as if Fiona were conscious now of the impact she was having upon her father and all the others-a faculty that, Hackworth supposed, must be highly acute in sixteen-year-old girls. By now the Nipponese man was just about finished coughing water out of his lungs and gasping piteously for air. As soon as he had the airways up and running, he spoke hoarsely and lengthily. One of his companions translated. "He says that we are not alone-that the water is filled with spirits-that they spoke to him. He followed them beneath the waves. But feeling his spirit about to leave his body, he felt fear and swam to the surface and was saved by the young woman. He says that the spirits are talking to all of us, and we must listen to them!"

  This was, needless to say, embarrassing, and so all of the passengers doused their torches and turned their backs on the stricken passenger. But when Hackworth's eyes had adjusted, he took another look at this man and saw that the exposed portions of his flesh had begun to radiate colored light.

  He looked at Fiona and saw that a band of white light encircled her head like a tiara, bright enough that it shone red through her hair, with a jewel centered upon her forehead. Hackworth marveled at this sight from a distance, knowing that she wanted to be free of him for now.

  Fat lights hung low above the water, describing the envelopes of great ships, sliding past each other as their parallax shifted with the steady progress of the boat. They had come to a place near the mouth of the estuary but not on the usual shipping lanes, where ships lay at anchor awaiting shifts in tides, winds, or markets. One constellation of lights did not move but only grew larger as they drew toward it. Experimenting with shadows and examining the pattern of light cast upon the water from this vessel, Hackworth concluded that the lights were being deliberately shone into their faces so that they could not make any judgments about the nature of the source.

  The fog slowly congealed into a wall of rust, so vast and featureless that it might have been ten or a hundred feet distant. The helmsman waited until they were about to ram it, then cut the engines. The raft lost speed instantly and nuzzled the hull of the big ship. Chains, slimy and dripping, descended from the firmament, diverging in Hackworth's view like radiance emanating from some heavy-industrial demigod, clanking harbingers of iron that the crew, heads thrown back ecstatically, throats bared to this kinky revelation, received into their bosoms. They snapped the chains onto metal loops fixed into the floor of the boat. Shackled, the boat rose free of the water and began to ascend the wall of rust, which soared vaguely into the infinite fog. Suddenly there was a railing, an open deck beyond it, pools of light here and there, a few red cigar-coals reciprocating through space. The deck swung under and rose to shove at the hull of the little boat. As they disembarked, they could see similar boats scattered about.

  "Dodgy" did not begin to describe the reputation of Dramatis Personae in the New Atlantan parts of London, but that was the adjective they always used anyway, delivered in a near-whisper, with brows raised nearly into the hairline and eyes glancing significantly over the shoulder. It had quickly become clear to Hackworth that a man could get a bad reputation simply for having known that Dramatis Personae existed-at the same time, it was clear that almost everyone had heard about it. Rather than being spattered with any more opprobrium, he had sought the tickets among other tribes.

  After all this it did not surprise him in the least to see that most of the attendees were fellow Victorians, and not just young bachelors having a night out, but ostensibly respectable couples, strolling the decks in their top hats and veils.

  Fiona vaulted out of the boat before it even touched the deck of the ship and vanished. She had repatterned her dress, ditching the chintzy flowered pattern for basic white, and skipped off into the darkness, her integral tiara glowing like a halo. Hackworth took a slow turn around the deck, watching his fellow-tribesmen trying to solve the following problem: get close enough to another couple to recognize them without getting so close that they can recognize you.

  From time to time, couples recognized each other simultaneously and had to say something: the women tittered wickedly, and the men laughed from their bellies and called each other scoundrels, the words glancing off the deckplates and burying themselves in the fog like arrows fired into a bale of cotton.

  Some kind of amplified music emanated from compartments below; atonal power chords came up through the deck like seismic disturbances. She was a bulk cargo carrier, now empty and bobbing, surprisingly jittery for something so big.

  Hackworth was alone and separate from all humanity, a feeling he had grown up with, like a childhood friend living next door. He had found Gwen by some miracle and lost touch with that old friend for a few years, but now he and solitude were back together, out for a stroll, familiar and comfortable. A makeshift bar amidships had drawn a dozen or so congregants, but Hackworth knew that he could not join in with them. He had been born without the ability to blend and socialize as some are born without hands.

  "Standing above it all?" said a voice. "Or standing aside perhaps?"

  It was a man in a clown outfit. Hackworth recognized it, vaguely, as an advertising fetish for an old American fast-food chain. But the costume was conspicuously ill-used, as if it were the sole garment of a refugee. It had been patched all over with swatches of chintz, Chinese silk, studded black leather, charcoal-gray pinstripe, and jungle camo. The clown wore integral makeup- his face glowed like an injection-molded plastic toy from the previous century with a light bulb stuck inside the head. It was disturbing to see him talk, like watching one of those animated CAT scans of a man swallowing.

  "Are you of it? Or just in it?" the Clown said, and looked at Hackworth expectantly.

  As soon as Hackworth had realized, quite some time ago, that this Dramatis Personae thing was going to be some kind of participatory theatre, he had been dreading this moment: his first cue. "Please excuse me," he said in a tense and not altogether steady voice, "this is not my milieu."

  "That's for damn fucking sure," said the Clown. "Put these on," he continued, taking something out of his pocket. He reached out to Hackworth, who was two or three meters away from him- but shockingly, his hand detached itself from his arm and flew through the air, the smutty white glove like a dirty ball of ice tumbling elliptically through the inner planets. It shoved something into Hackworth's breast pocket and then withdrew; but because Hackworth was watching, it described a smooth sudden figure-eight pattern in space before reattaching itself to the stump of the forearm.

  Hackworth realized that the clown was mechanical. "Put 'em on and be yourself, mister alienated loner steppenwolf bemused distant meta-izing technocrat rationalist fucking shithead." The Clown spun on his heel to leave; his floppy clown shoes were built around some kind of trick heel with a swivel built in, so that when he spun on his heel he really did spin on his heel, performing several complete rotations before stopping with his back turned to Hackworth and storming away. "Revolutionary, ain't it?" he snapped.

  The thing in Hackworth's pocket was a pair of dark sunglasses: wraparounds with a glimmering rainbow finish, the sort of thing that, decades ago, would have been worn by a Magnum-slinging rebel cop in a prematurely canceled television series. Hackworth unfolded them and slid the polished ends of the bows cautiously over his temples. As the lenses approached, he could see light coming from them; they were phenomenoscopes. Though in this context, the word
phantascope
might have been more appropriate.

  The image grew to fill his sight but would not focus until he put them all the way on, so he reluctantly plummeted into the hallucination until it resolved, and just then the bows behind his ears came alive, stretched, and grew around the back of his skull like a rubber band snapping in reverse, joining in the back to form an unbreakable band. "Release," Hackworth said, and then ran through a litany of other standard yuvree commands. The spectacles would not release his head. Finally, a cone of light pierced space from somewhere above and behind him and splashed across a stage.

  Footlights came up, and a man in a top hat emerged from behind a curtain. "Welcome to your show," he said. "You can remove the glasses at any time by securing a standing ovation from not less than ninety percent of the audience." Then the lights and curtain vanished, and Hackworth was left with what he had seen before, namely, a cybernetically enhanced night-vision rendering of the deck of the ship.

  He tried a few more commands. Most phenomenoscopes had a transparent mode, or at least translucent, that allowed the wearer to view what was really there. But these ones were doggedly opaque and would only show him a mediatronic rendering of the scene. The strolling and chatting theatregoers were represented by preposterously oversimplified wireframes, a display technology unused these eighty years or so, clearly intended to irritate Hackworth. Each figure had a large placard strapped to its chest:

JARED MASON GRIFFIN III, aged 35 (too Late to become an interesting character like you!) Nephew of an earl-level Equity Lord (don't you envy him?) Married to that sunken bitch on his right They go on these little escapades to escape their own crzppled lives. (why are you here?)

 
Hackworth looked down and tried to read the placard on his own chest but couldn't focus on it.

  When he walked around the deck, his viewpoint changed correspondingly. There was also a standard interface that enabled him to "fly" around the ship; Hackworth himself remained in one fixed location, of course, but his viewpoint in the spectacles became unlinked to his real coordinates. Whenever he used this mode, the following legend was superimposed on his view in giant flashing red block letters:
JOHN PERCIVAL HACKWORTH'S GODLIKE PERSPECTIVE
sometimes accompanied by a cartoon of a wizardly sort of fellow sitting atop a mountain peering down into a village of squalid midgets. Because of this annoyance, Hackworth did not use this feature very frequently. But on his initial reconnaissance, he discovered a few items of interest.

  For one thing, the Nipponese fellow who had got pissed and fallen overboard had encountered a group of several other people who had, by a remarkable coincidence, also fallen out of their boats on the way here, and who upon being rescued had all begun to emit colored light and see visions that they insisted on recounting to anyone in the vicinity. These people convened into a poorly organized chorus, all shouting at once and articulating visions that seemed to be linked in an approximate way-as if they had all just now awakened from the same dream and were all doing an equally bad job describing it. They stuck together despite their differences, drawn together by the same mysterious attractive force that causes streetcorner crackpots to set up their soapboxes right next to each other. Shortly after Hackworth zoomed toward them in his phenomenoscopic view, they began to hallucinate something along the lines of a giant eyeball peering at them from the heavens, the black skin of its eyelids studded with stars.