Their envelopes, filled with nothing, were predominantly transparent. Instead of blocking the sunlight, they yellowed and puckered it, projecting vast abstract patterns of brighter and not-as-bright that the children in their best crinolines and natty short-pants suits tried to catch in their arms. A brass band played. A tiny figure in a white dress stood at the rail of the airshipAtlanti s, waving at the children below. They all knew that this must be the birthday girl herself, Princess Charlotte, and they cheered and waved back.
Fiona Hackworth had been wandering through the Royal Ecological Conservatory bracketed by her parents, who hoped that in this way they could keep mud and vegetable debris off her skirts. The strategy had not been completely successful, but with a quick brush, John and Gwendolyn were able to transfer most of the dirt onto their white gloves. From there it went straight into the air. Most gentlemen's and ladies' gloves nowadays were constructed of infinitesimal fabricules that knew how to eject dirt; you could thrust your gloved hand into mud, and it would be white a few seconds later.
The hierarchy of staterooms onÆthermatched the status of its passengers perfectly, as these parts of the ship could be decompiled and remade between voyages. For Lord Finkle-McGraw, his three children and their spouses, and Elizabeth (his first and only grandchild so far), the airship lowered a private escalator that carried them up into the suite at the very prow, with its nearly 180-degree forward view.
Aft of the Finkle-McGraws were a dozen or so other Equity Lords, merely earl— or baron-level, mostly ushering grandchildren rather than children into the class B suites. Then it was executives, whose gold watch chains, adangle with tiny email-boxes, phones, torches, snuffboxes, and other fetishes, curved round the dark waistcoats they wore to deemphasize their bellies. Most of their children had reached the age when they were no longer naturally endearing to anyone save their own parents; the size when their energy was more a menace than a wonder; and the level of intelligence when what would have been called innocence in a smaller child was infuriating rudeness. A honeybee cruising for nectar is pretty despite its implicit threat, but the same behavior in a hornet three times larger makes one glance about for some handy swatting material. So on the broad escalators leading to the first-class staterooms, one could see many upper arms being violently grabbed by hissing fathers with their top hats askew and teeth clenched and eyes swiveling for witnesses.
John Percival Hackworth was an engineer. Most engineers were assigned to tiny rooms with fold-down beds, but Hackworth bore the loftier title of Artifex and had been a team leader on this very project, so he rated a second-class stateroom with one double bed and a fold-out for Fiona. The porter brought their overnight bags around just asÆtherwas clearing her mooring mast— a twenty-meter diamondoid truss that had already dissolved back into the billiard-table surface of the oval by the time the ship had turned itself to the south. Lying as close as it did to Source Victoria, the park was riddled with catachthonic Feed lines, and anything could be grown there on short notice.
The Hackworths' stateroom was to starboard, and so as they accelerated away from New Chusan, they got to watch the sun set on Shanghai, shining redly through the city's eternal cloak of coal-smoke. Gwendolyn read Fiona stories in bed for an hour while John perused the evening edition of theTime s, then spread out some papers on the room's tiny desk. Later, they both changed into their evening clothes, primping quietly in twilight so as not to wake Fiona. At nine o'clock they stepped into the passageway, locked the door, and followed the sound of the big band toÆthe r's grand ballroom, where the dancing was just getting underway. The floor of the ballroom was a slab of transpicuous diamond. The lights were low. They seemed to float above the glittering moonlit surface of the Pacific as they did the waltz, minuet, Lindy, and electric slide into the night.
. . .
Sunrise found the three airships hovering over the South China Sea, no land visible. The ocean was relatively shallow here, but only Hackworth and a few other engineers knew that. The Hackworths had a passable view from their stateroom window, but John woke up early and staked out a place on the diamond floor of the ballroom, ordered an espresso and aTimesfrom a waiter, and passed the time pleasantly while Gwen and Fiona got themselves ready for the day. All around them he could hear children speculating on what was about to happen.
Gwen and Fiona arrived just late enough to make it interesting for John, who took his mechanical pocket watch out at least a dozen times as he waited, and finally ended up clutching it in one hand, nervously popping the lid open and shut. Gwen folded her long legs and spread her skirts out prettily on the transparent floor, drawing vituperative looks from several women who remained standing. But John was relieved to see that most of these women were relatively low-ranking engineers or their wives; none of the higher-ups needed to come to the ballroom.
Fiona collapsed to her hands and knees and practically shoved her face against the diamond, her fundament aloft. Hackworth gripped the creases of his trousers, hitched them up just a bit, and sank to one knee.
The smart coral burst out of the depths with violence that shocked Hackworth, even though he'd been in on the design, seen the trial runs. Viewed through the dark surface of the Pacific, it was like watching an explosion through a pane of shattered glass. It reminded him of pouring a jet of heavy cream into coffee, watching it rebound from the bottom of the cup in a turbulent fractal bloom that solidified just as it dashed against the surface. The speed of this process was a carefully planned sleight-of-hand; the smart coral had actually been growing down on the bottom of the ocean for the last three months, drawing its energy from a supercon that they'd grown across the seafloor for the occasion, extracting the necessary atoms directly from the seawater and the gases dissolved therein. The process happening below looked chaotic, and in a way it was; but each lithocule knew exactly where it was supposed to go and what it was supposed to do. They were tetrahedral building blocks of calcium and carbon, the size of poppyseeds, each equipped with a power source, a brain, and a navigational system.