The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson Read Free Book Online Page A

twenty degrees warmer on the average day. But whenever the women's chorus chimed in with their armor-piercing refrain about the all-seeing beneficence of the Serene Leader, it felt as if they were right next door.
      Gwendolyn didn't even stir. She would sleep soundly for another hour, or until Tiffany Sue, her lady's maid, came bustling into the room and began to lay out her clothes: stretchy lingerie for the morning workout, a business frock, hat, gloves, and veil for later.
      Hackworth drew a silk dressing gown from the wardrobe and poured it over his shoulders. Binding the sash around his waist, the cold tassels splashing over his fingers in the dark, he glanced through the doorway to Gwendolyn's closet and out the other side into her boudoir. Against that room's far windows was the desk she used for social correspondence, really just a table with a top of genuine marble, strewn with bits of stationery, her own and others', dimly identifiable even at this distance as business cards, visiting cards, note cards,  invitations from various people still going through triage. Most of the boudoir floor was covered with a tatty carpet, worn through in places all the way down to its underlying matrix of jute, but hand-woven and sculpted by genuine Chinese slave labor during the Mao Dynasty. Its only real function was to protect the floor from Gwendolyn's exercise equipment, which gleamed in the dim light scattering off the clouds from Shanghai: a step unit done up in Beaux-Arts ironmongery, a rowing machine cleverly fashioned of writhing sea-serpents and hard-bodied nereids, a rack of free weights supported by four callipygious caryatids-not chunky Greeks but modern women, one of each major racial group, each tricep, gluteus, latissimus, sartorius, and rectus abdominus casting its own highlight. Classical architecture indeed. The caryatids were supposed to be role models, and despite subtle racial differences, each body fit the current ideal: twenty-two-inch waist, no more than 17% body fat. That kind of body couldn't be faked with undergarments, never mind what the ads in the women's magazines claimed; the long tight bodices of the current mode, and modern fabrics thinner than soap bubbles, made everything obvious. Most women who didn't have superhuman willpower couldn't manage it without the help of a lady's maid who would run them through two or even three vigorous workouts a day. So after Fiona had stopped breast-feeding and the time had loomed when Gwen would have to knacker her maternity clothes, they had hired Tiffany Sue- just another one of the child-related expenses Hackworth had never imagined until the bills had started to come in. Gwen accused him, half-seriously, of having eyes for Tiffany Sue. The accusation was almost a standard formality of modern marriage, as lady's maids were all young, pretty, and flawlessly buffed. But Tiffany Sue was a typical thete, loud and classless and heavily made up, and Hackworth couldn't abide her. If he had eyes for anyone, it was those caryatids holding up the weight rack; at least they had impeccable taste going for them.
      Mrs. Hull had not heard him and was still bumping sleepily around in her quarters. Hackworth put a crumpet into the toaster oven and went out on their flat's tiny balcony with a cup of tea, catching a bit of the auroral breeze off the Yangtze Estuary.
      The Hackworths' building was one of several lining a block-long garden where a few early risers were already out walking their spaniels or touching their toes. Far down the slopes of New Chusan, the Leased Territories were coming awake: the Senderos streaming out of their barracks and lining up in the streets to chant and sing through their morning calisthenics. All the other thetes, coarcted into the tacky little claves belonging to their synthetic phyles, turning up their own mediatrons to drown out the Senderos, setting off firecrackers or guns- he could never tell them apart- and a few