Diamond Age

Fiona Hackworth noticed a glow in the air, which resolved into a constellation when she blinked and focused. A pinprick of green light, an infinitesimal chip of emerald, touched the surface of her eye, expanding into a cloud of light. She blinked twice, and it was gone. Sooner or later it and many others would make their way to the corners of her eyes, giving her a grotesque appearance. She drew a handkerchief from her sleeve and wiped her eyes. The presence of so many lidar-emitting mites prompted her to realize that they had been infiltrating a great expanse of fog for some minutes without really being aware of it; moisture from the river was condensing around the microscopic guardians of the border. Colored light flashed vaguely across the screen of fog before them, silhouetting a stone column planted in the center of the road: wings of a gryphon, horn of a unicorn, crisp and black against a lurid cosmos. A constable stood beside the pediment, symbolically guarding the bar. He nodded to the Hackworths and mumbled something gruff but polite through his chinstrap as father and daughter rode out of New Atlantis and into a gaudy dave full of loutish thetes scrumming and chanting before the entrances of pubs. Fiona caught sight of an old Union Jack, then did a double-take and realized that the limbs of the St. Andrew's Cross had been enhanced with stars, like the Confederate Battle Flag. She gave her chevaline a nudge and pulled up nearly abreast with her father.

Then the city became darker and quieter, though no less crowded, and for a few blocks they saw only dark-haired men with mustaches and women who were nothing more than columns of black fabric. Then Fiona smelled anise and garlic, and they passed into Vietnamese territory for a short time. She would have enjoyed stopping at one of the sidewalk cafés for a bowl of pho, but her father rode on, pursuing the tide that was ebbing down the Thames, and in a few more minutes they had come once again to the bank. It was lined with ancient masonry warehouses-a category of structure now so obsolete as to defy explanation-which had been converted into offices.

A pier rode on the surface of the river, riding up and down on the tide, linked to the rim of the granite embankment by a hinged gangway. A shaggy black vessel was tied up to the pier, but it was completely unlit, visible only by its black shadow against the charcoal-gray water. After the chevalines had planted themselves and the Hackworths had dismounted, they were able to hear low voices coming from below.

John Hackworth withdrew some tickets from his breast pocket and asked them to illuminate themselves; but they were printed on old-fashioned paper that did not contain its own energy source, and so he finally had to use the microtorch dangling from his watch chain. Apparently satisfied that they had arrived at the right place, he offered Fiona his arm and escorted her down the gangway to the pier. A tiny flickering light bobbed toward them and resolved into an Afro-Caribbean man, wearing rimless glasses and carrying an antique hurricane lamp. Fiona watched his face as his enormous eyes, yellowed like antique ivory billiard balls, sca

It was eight or ten meters long. There was no gangway, and persons already on board had to reach out and clutch their arms and pull them in, a breach of formality that happened so quickly that they had no time to become uncomfortable.

The boat was basically a large flat open tub, not much more than a liferaft, with some controls in the bow and some sort of modern and hence negligibly small propulsion system built into the stern. As their eyes adjusted to the dim light scattering through the fog, they could see perhaps a dozen other passengers around the edge of the boat, seated so that wakes from passing vessels would not upset them. Seeing wisdom in this, John led Fiona to the only remaining open space, and they sat down between two other groups: a trio of young Nipponese men forcing cigarettes on one another, and a man and woman in bohemian-but-expensive clothes, sipping lager from cans and conversing in Canadian accents.

The man from the pier cast off the painters and vaulted aboard. Another functionary had taken the controls and gently accelerated into the current, cutting the throttle at one point and swinging her about into an oncoming wake. When the boat entered the main cha

The trip took the better part of an hour. After several minutes, conversation resumed, most of the passengers remaining within their little groups. The refreshment chest made a few more circuits. John Hackworth began to realize, from a few subtleties, that one of the Nipponese youths was much more intoxicated than he was letting on and had probably spent a few hours in a dockside pub before reaching the pier. He took a drink from the chest every time it came by, and half an hour into the ride, he rose unsteadily to his feet, leaned over the edge, and threw up. John turned to smirk at his daughter. The boat struck an unseen wave, rolling sideways into the trough. Hackworth clutched first at the railing and then at his daughter's arm.

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 ru

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 ru

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.