Diamond Age or a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer Read online

  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 illused, 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 crippled 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.

  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.

  “Please,” he said.

  “Well, there it is then,” said the Clown, gesturing with one maculated glove toward a plain wooden chair right before them on the deck. Hackworth did not believe it was really there, because he hadn’t seen it before now. But the spectacles allowed him no way to tell.

  He stepped forward like a man making his way to the toilet in a dark and unfamiliar room, knees bent, hands outstretched, moving his feet gingerly so as not to bark shins or toes on anything. The Clown had drawn to one side and was watching him scornfully. “Is this what you call getting into your role? Think you can get away with scientific rationalism all night? What’s going to happen the first time you actually start believing what you see?”

  Hackworth found his seat exactly where the display told him it would be, but it wasn’t a simple wooden chair; it was foam-covered and it had arms. It was like a seat in a theatre, but when he groped to either side, he did not find any others. So he depressed the seat and fell into it.

  “You’ll be needing this,” the Clown said, and snapped a tubular object into the palm of Hackworth’s hand. Hackworth was just recognizing it as some kind of torch when something loud and violent happened just below him. His feet, which had been resting on the deckplates, were now dangling in air. In fact, all of him was dangling. A trap door had flown open beneath him, and he was in free fall. “Enjoy the show,” the Clown said, tipping his hat and peering down at him through a rapidly diminishing square hole.

  “And while you’re accelerating toward the center of the earth at nine point eight meters per second squared, riddle me this: We can fake sounds, we can fake images, we can even fake the wind blowing over your face, but how do we fake the sensation of free fall?”

  Pseudopods had sprouted from the chair’s foam and wrapped around Hackworth’s waist and upper thighs. This was fortunate as he had gone into a slow backward spin and soon found himself falling face-first, passing through great amorphous clouds of light: a collection of old chandeliers that Dramatis Personae had scavenged from condemned buildings. The Clown was right: Hackworth was definitely in free fall, a sensation that could not be faked with spectacles. If his eyes and ears were to be believed, he was plunging toward the floor of the big theatre he had reconnoitered earlier. But it was not grooved with neat rows of seats like an ordinary theatre. The seats were present but scattered about randomly. And some of them were moving.

  The floor continued to accelerate toward him until he got really scared and started to scream. Then he felt gravity again as some force began to slow him down. The chair spun around so that Hackworth was looking up into the irregular constellation of chandeliers, and the acceleration shot up to several gees. Then back to normal. The chair rotated so that he was on the level once more, and the phenomenoscope went brilliant, blinding white. The earpieces were pumping white noise at him; but as it began to diminish, he realized it was actually the sound of applause.

  Hackworth was not able to see anything until he fiddled with the interface and got back to a more schematic view of the theatre. Then he determined that the place was about half full of theatregoers, moving about independently on their chairs, which were somehow motorized, and that several dozen of them were aiming their torches toward him, which accounted for the blinding light. He was on center stage, the main attraction. He wondered if he was supposed to say something. A line was written across his spectacles: Thanks very much, Ladies and gentlemen, for letting me

  drop in. We have a great show for you tonight… .

  Hackworth wondered if he was somehow obligated to read this line. But soon the torches turned away from him, as more audience members began to rain down through the astral plane of the chandeliers. Watching them fall, Hackworth realized that he’d seen something like it before at amusement parks: This was nothing more than bungee-jumping. It’s just that the spectacles had declined to show Hackworth his own bungee cord, just to add an extra frisson to the whole experience.

  The armrest of Hackworth’s chair included some controls that enabled him to move it around the floor of the house, which was coneshaped, sloping sharply in toward the center. A pedestrian would have found difficult footing, but the chair had powerful nanotech motors and compensated for the slope.

  It was a round theatre, Globe-style. The conical floor was encompassed by a circular wall, pierced here and there by openings of different sizes. Some appeared to be ventilation shafts, some were the apertures of private boxes or technical control rooms, and by far the largest was a proscenium that occupied a quarter of the circumference, and that was currently closed off by a curtain.

  Hackworth noted that the lowest and innermost part of the house floor was not occupied. He motored down the slope and was shocked to realize that he was suddenly up to his waist in painfully chilly water. He threw the chair into reverse, but it did not respond to the controls. “Dead in the water!” cried the Clown triumphantly, sounding as if he were standing right there, though Hackworth couldn’t see him. He found a way to release the chair’s built-in restraints and struggled up the raked floor, his legs stiff from the cold and reeking of seawater. Evidently the central third of the floor actually plunged beneath the waterline and was open to the sea– another fact that Hackworth’s spectacles had not bothered to reveal.

  Again, dozens of lights were on him. The audience was laughing, and there was even some sarcastic applause. Come on in,

  folks, the water ‘s fine! suggested the spectacles, but once again Hackworth declined to read the line. Apparently these were nothing more than suggestions tossed out by Dramatis Personae’s writers, which faded from the display as they lost their currency.

  The events of the last few minutes-the phenomenoscopes that couldn’t be taken off, the unexpected bungee jump, the plunge into cold seawater-had left Hackworth in a state of shock. He felt a strong need to hole up somewhere and shake off the disorientation.

  He clambered up toward the perimeter of the house, dodging the occasional moving chair, and tracked by a few spotlight beams from fellow audience members who had taken a particular interest in his personal story. An aperture was above him, glowing with warm light, and passing through it, Hackworth found himself in a cozy little bar with a curving window that afforded an excellent view of the theatre. It was a refuge in more ways than one; he could see normally through the spectacles here, they seemed to be giving him an untampered view of reality. He ordered a pint of stout from the barman and took a seat at the counter along the window.

  Somewhere around his third or fourth gulp of stout, he realized that he had already submitted to the Clown’s imperative. The plunge into the water had taught him that he had no choice but to believe in what the spectades showed his eyes and ears– even though he knew it to be false– and to accept the consequences. A pint of stout went some distance toward warming up his legs, and toward relaxing his mind. He had come here for a show, and he was getting one, and there was no reason to fight it; Dramatis Personae might have a dodgy reputation, but no one had ever accused them of killing a member of the audience.

  The chandeliers dimmed. The torch-wielding audience went into motion like sparks stirred by a gust of wind, some motoring toward the high ground and others preferring the water’s edge. As the house lights faded to black, they amused themselves playing their torches back and forth across the walls and the curtain, creating an apocalyptic sky torn by hundreds of comets. A tongue of clammy, algae-colored light shone beneath the water, resolving itself into a long narrow thrust stage as it rose toward the surface, like Atlantis resurgent. The audience noticed it and bounced their spotlights off the surface, catching a
few dark motes in the crossfire: the heads of a dozen or so performers, slowly rising out of the water. They began to speak in something like unison, and Hackworth realized that they were the chorus of lunatics he had seen earlier.

  “Set me up, Nick,” said a woman’s voice behind him.

  “Tucked ‘em in, did you?” said the barkeep.

  “Ninnies.”

  Hackworth turned and saw that it was the young woman in the devil costume who had acted as tour guide for the Heartlanders. She was very petite, dressed in a long black skirt slit all the way to the hipbone, and she had nice hair, very thick and black and glossy. She carried a glass of wheat beer over to the counter, primly swept her devil’s tail out of the way in a gesture that Hackworth found hopelessly fetching, and took a seat. Then she let out an explosive sigh and put her head down on her arms for a few moments, her blinking red horns reflecting in the curved window like the taillights of a full-laner. Hackworth laced his fingers together around his pint and smelled her perfume. Down below, the chorus had gotten out of hand and was trying to pull off a rather ambitious Busby Berkeley dance number. They showed an uncanny ability to act in unison– something to do with the ‘sites that had burrowed into their brains– but their bodies were stiff, weak, and badly coordinated. What they did, they did with absolute conviction, which made it good anyway.

  “Did they buy it?” Hackworth said.

  “Pardon me?” said the woman, looking up alertly like a bird, as if she hadn’t known Hackworth was here.

  “Do those Heartlanders really believe that story about the drunken pilot?”

  “Oh. Who cares?” the woman said.

  Hackworth laughed, pleased that a member of Dramatis Personae was affording him this confidence.

  “It’s off the point, isn’t it,” the woman said in a lower voice, getting a bit philosophical now. She squeezed a wedge of lemon into her wheat beer and took a sip. “Belief isn’t a binary state, not here at least. Does anyone believe anything one hundred percent? Do you believe everything you see through those goggles?”