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:
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:
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?'
