S ource Victoria's air intakes erupted from the summit of the Royal 
Ecological Conservatory like a spray of hundred-meter-long calla lilies. Below, 
the analogy was perfected by an inverted tree of rootlike plumbing that spread 
fractally through the diamondoid bedrock of New Chusan, terminating in the warm 
water of the South China Sea as numberless
capillaries arranged in a belt around the smartcoral reef, several dozen meters 
beneath the surface. One big huge pipe gulping up seawater would have done 
roughly the same thing, just as the lilies could have been replaced by one 
howling maw, birds and litter whacking into a bloody grid somewhere before they 
could gum up the works.