Diamond Age

In particular she had excited the interest of a boy who was the nephew of an Equity Lord in Atlantis/Toronto. He had written her several ardent letters. She had responded saying that she did not wish to continue the relationship, and he had, perhaps with the help of a hidden monitor, encountered her and her chaperone pod one morning as she had been riding to Miss Matheson's Academy. She had reminded him of the recent termination of their relationship by declining to recognize him, but he had persisted anyway, and by the time she had reached the gates of the Academy, the chaperone pod had gathered enough evidence to support a formal sexual harassment accusation should Nell have wished to bring one.

Of course she did not, because this would have created a cloud of opprobrium that would have blighted the young man's career. Instead, she excerpted one five-second piece of the cine record from the chaperone pod: the one in which, approached by the young man, Nell said, "I'm sorry, but I'm afraid you have me at a disadvantage," and the young man, failing to appreciate the ramifications, pressed on as if he had not heard. Nell placed this information into a smart visiting card and arranged to have it dropped by the young man's family home. A formal apology was not long in coming, and she did not hear again from the young man.

Now that she had been introduced to society, her preparations for a visit to the Leased Territories were just as elaborate as for any New Atlantis lady. Outside of New Atlantis, she and her chevaline were surrounded everywhere by a shell of hovering security pods serving as a first line of personal defense. A modern lady's chevaline was designed with a sort of Y-shaped body that made it u

The veil was a field of microscopic, umbrellalike aerostats programmed to fly in a sheet formation a few inches in front of Nell's face. The umbrellas were all pointed away from her. Normally they were furled, which made them nearly invisible; they looked like the merest shadow before her face, though viewed sideways they created a subtle wall of shimmer in the air. At a command from Nell they would open to some degree. When fully open, they nearly touched each other. The outside-facing surfaces were reflective, the i

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.

Nell stopped for a moment before breaking him out of his ractive. Some weeks he looked better than others; this week he did not look good. His body was bloated, his face round and heavy, his fingers swollen to puffy cylinders; they had been giving him heavy steroid treatments. But she would have known he'd had a bad week anyway, because usually Harv didn't go in for immersive ractives. He liked the kind you held in your lap on a sheet of smart paper.

Nell tried to send Harv a letter every day, simply written in mediaglyphics, and for a while he had tried to respond in kind. Last year he had even given up on this, though she wrote him faithfully anyway.

"Nell!" he said when he had peeled the goggles away from his eyes. "Sorry, I was chasing some rich Vickys."

"You were?"

"Yeah. Or Burly Scudd was, I mean. In the ractive. See, Burly's bitch gets pregnant, and she's got to buy herself a Freedom Machine to get rid of it, so she gets a job as a maid-of-all-work for some snotty Vickys and rips off some of their nice old stuff, figuring that's a faster way to get the money. So the bitch is ru

"It sounds entertaining," Nell said.

Harv, temporarily gagged by the oxygen tube, watched her face carefully and was not convinced. "Sorry," he blurted between breaths, "forgot you don't care for my kind of ractive. Don't they have Burly Scudd in that Primer of yours?"

Nell made herself smile at the joke, which Harv had been making every week. She handed him the basket of cookies and fresh fruit that she had brought down from Dovetail and sat with him for an hour, talking about the things he enjoyed talking about, until she could see his attention wandering back toward the goggles. Then she said good-bye until next week and kissed him good-bye.

She turned her veil to its highest level of opacity and made her way toward the door. Harv impulsively grabbed his oxygen tube and sucked on it mightily a few times, then called her name just as she was about to leave.

"Yes?" she said, turning toward him.

"Nell, I want to tell you how fine you look," he said, "just like the finest Vicky lady in all of Atlantis. I can't believe you're my same Nell that I used to bring things to in the old flat-remember those days? I know that you and I have gone different ways, ever since that morning in Dovetail, and I know it's got a lot to do with that Primer. I just want to tell you, sister, that even though I say bad stuff about Vickys sometimes, I'm as proud of you as I could be, and I hope when you read that Primer-so full of stuff I could never understand or even read-you'll think back on your brother Harv, who saw it lying in the gutter years ago and took it into -his mind to bring it to his kid sister. Will you remember that, Nell?" With that he plugged the oxygen tube back into his mouth, and his ribs began to heave.