Cruise zeppelins don't have windows looking down. Theirs open at night to look with indifference to the stars and with admiring envy to the orbital bunkers of the rich and insane.
We are here to look down; to record everything; to help those we can; to memorialize the vastly more we cannot. So our zeppelins' windows look down and have anti-suicide failsafes.
When our fleets meet we pretend not to realize — their ships over ours and both between dying fields and gaudy skies — but some nights you can almost hear a faint music trickling down from their parties. There's something hellish in it distinct from the Hell below.
By unspoken consent we deactivate the failsafes on those nights. It's a ritual which we consider complete when the sun has come up and nobody has jumped. Whether it's too much despair or too much anger we don't, don't want to, and might not be able to know.
(Originally posted on my blog.)