Diamond Age or a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer

(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 crippledlives.

(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.

Hackworth skulked away and focused in on another large gathering: a couple of dozen older people of the trim, fit, and active style, tennis sweaters draped over their shoulders and sensible walking shoes firmly but not too tightly laced to their feet, piling off a small airship that had just moored on the old helicopter pad near the ship's stern. The airship had many windows and was festooned with mediatronic advertisements for aerial tours of London. As the tourists climbed off, they tended to stop in their tracks, so that a severe bottleneck was forever forming. They had to be goaded into the outer darkness by their tour guide, a young actress dressed in a cheesy devil outfit, complete with flashing red horns and a trident.

"Is this Whitechapel?" one of them said to the fog, speaking in an American accent. These people were obviously members of the Heartland tribe, a prosperous phyle closely allied with New Atlantis that had absorbed many responsible, sane, educated, white, Midwestern, middleclass types. Listening in on their furtive conversations, Hackworth divined that these tourists had been brought in from a Holiday Inn in Kensington, under the ruse that they were going to take the Jack the Ripper tour in Whitechapel. As Hackworth listened, the diabolical tour guide explained that their drunken airship pilot had accidentally flown them to a floating theatre, and they were welcome to enjoy the show, which would be starting shortly; a free (to them) performance of Cats, the longest-running musical of all time, which most of them had already seen on their first night in London.

Hackworth, still peering through the mocking red letters, did a quick scan belowdecks. There were a dozen cavernous compartments down there. Four of them had been consolidated into a capacious theatre; four more served as the stage and backstage. Hackworth located his daughter there. She was seated on a throne of light, rehearsing some lines. Apparently she'd already been cast in a major role.

"I don't want you to watch me like that," she said, and vanished from Hackworth's display in a burst of light. The ship's foghorn sounded. The sound continued to echo sporadically from other ships in the area. Hackworth returned to his natural view of the deck just in time to see a blazing figment rushing toward him: the Clown again, who apparently possessed the special power of moving through Hackworth's display like a phantasm.

"Going to stay up here all night, guessing the distance to the other ships by timing the echoes? Or may I show you to your seat?"

Hackworth decided that the best thing was not to be ruffled.