Diamond Age or a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer

The veil offered Nell protection from unwanted scrutiny. Many New Atlantis career women also used the veil as a way of meeting the world on their own terms, ensuring that they were judged on their own merits and not on their appearance. It served a protective function as well, bouncing back the harmful rays of the sun and intercepting many deleterious nanosites that might otherwise slip unhindered into the nose and mouth.

The latter function was of particular concern to Constable Moore on this morning. "It's been nasty of late," he said. "The fighting has been very bad." Nell had already inferred this from certain peculiarities of the Constable's behavior: he had been staying up late at night recently, managing some complicated enterprise spread out across his mediatronic floor, and she suspected that it was something along the lines of a battle or even a war.

As she rode her chevaline across Dovetail, she came to a height-of-land that afforded a fine view across the Leased Territories, Pudong, and Shanghai on a clear day. But the humidity had congealed into drifts of clouds forming a seamless layer about a thousand feet below their level, so that this high territory at the top of New Chusan seemed to be an island, the only land in all the world except for the snowcapped cone of the Nippon Clave a few miles up the coast.

She departed through the main gate and rode down the hill. She kept approaching the cloud layer but never quite reached it; the lower she went, the softer the light became, and after a few minutes she could no longer see the rambling settlements of Dovetail when she turned around, nor the spires of St. Mark's and Source Victoria above it. After another few minutes' descent the fog became so thick that she could not see more than a few meters, and she smelled the elemental reek of the ocean. She passed the former site of the Sendero Clave. The Senderos had been bloodily uprooted when Protocol Enforcement figured out that they were working in concert with the New Taiping Rebels, a fanatical cult opposed to both the Fists and the Coastal Republic. This patch of real estate had since passed into the hands of the Dong, an ethnic minority tribe from southwestern China, driven out of their homeland by the civil war. They had torn down the high wall and thrown up one of their distinctive many-layered pagodas.

Other than that, the L.T. didn't look all that different. The operators of the big wall-size mediatrons that had so terrified Nell on her first night in the Leased Territories had turned the brightness all the way up, trying to compensate for the fog.

Down by the waterfront, not far from the Aerodrome, the compilers of New Chusan had, as a charitable gesture, made some space available to the Vatican. In the early years it had contained nothing more than a twostory mission for thetes who had followed their lifestyle to its logical conclusion and found themselves homeless, addicted, hounded by debtors, or on the run from the law or abusive members of their own families.

More recently those had become secondary functions, and the Vatican had programmed the building's foundation to extrude many more stories. The Vatican had a number of serious ethical concerns about nanotech but had eventually decided that it was okay as long as it didn't mess about with DNA or create direct interfaces with the human brain. Using nanotech to extrude buildings was fine, and that was fortunate, because Vatican/Shanghai needed to add a couple of floors to the Free Phthisis Sanatorium every year. Now it loomed high above any of the other waterfront buildings.

As with any other extruded building, the design was drab in the extreme, each floor exactly alike. The walls were of an unexceptional beige material that had been used to construct many of the buildings in the L.T., which was unfortunate, because it had an almost magnetic attraction for the cineritious corpses of airborne mites. Like all the other buildings so constituted, the Free Phthisis Sanatorium had, over the years, turned black, and not evenly but in vertical rain-streaks. It was a cliché to joke that the outside of the Sanatorium looked much like the inside of its tenants' lungs. The Fists of Righteous Harmony had, however, done their best to pretty it up by slapping red posters over it in the dead of night.

Harv was lying on the top of a three-layer bunkbed on the twentieth floor, sharing a small room and a supply of purified air with a dozen other chronic asthma sufferers. His face was goggled into a phantascope, and his lips were wrapped around a thick tube plugged into a nebulizer socket on the wall. Vaporized drugs, straight from the matter compiler, were flowing down that tube and into his lungs, working to keep his bronchi from spasming shut.