RICHARD POWERS Read online

  Oh shit, Michael Vulgamott said. Here I just bought an expensive new atlas.

  What a win. What an astonishing win. Adie looked about the gathered witnesses for confirmation. It is a win, isnt it?

  Data brightened all the witnesses' faces. Only O'Reilly still wore the curled Cold War lip. Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive. He hunched up his pained shoulders. But to be young was very heaven!

  Freese rose to the Irishman's quote-a-thon challenge. Come, my friends, 'Tis not too late to seek a newer world. The words urged his nominal employees back to their own complicit work. For deep in the bowels of the lab, inside the revolution's deepest recesses, an even newer world waited, eager to be made.

  18

  There in the land of spruce and cedar, fast Fourier transforms and the draftswoman's fine Italian hand unleashed a profusion of banana leaves, slit and droopy, indecent in their greens. Klarpol's magic gamboge grew, riddled through with movement. Banana leaves played like children in the undergrowth. Dreamlike bananas floated up to tickle the insouciant moon.

  Adie grafted Rousseau's peculiar tangerines onto her proliferating trees. Orange Christmas ornaments decked her branches. She extended the given foliage, working like those golden age landscapists who painted whole woods from asparagus tips and broccoli. The rain forest retrieved its original boundaries. She sought more creatures to people her garden, working for a patron she almost failed to recognize. For the first time since she was twenty-one, Adie felt that pleasure might be not only blameless; it might even be a moral imperative.

  She stepped into this Dream, recalling herself to things long forgotten, the way one remembered one's body after a sustained illness. The thicket parted before her wand. Copses split open, inviting her to lose herself down a new path in the tangle. Every fork worked the ploy of artificial nature, its burrs adhering to her pants cuffs, hitching a ride

  into the real.

  Under the shelter of a spreading yucca, a diminutive Venus, no larger than a mouse deer, rose from a puddle of water on her surfboard scallop. She surged upward for a few seconds, then sank back beneath the waves, only to rise again a moment later, her flat, scanned bitmap set to perform an eternal do-loop.

  Paths led on deeper into the forest, trails blazed by their own repeated use. Down one, the vegetation thinned into a clearing. In this open meadow, hemmed in by palms, there grazed another color Xerox: shepherds huddled around a rock tomb that bore a strange inscription, rustic archaeologists probing a vanished civilization whose technology

  dwarfed their own.

  At another fork in the forest, a plowman tore into the stony soil. A convex mirror nailed to a nearby tree trunk bared its surprise reflection. Up in the highest limbs, a boy threatened to release a soap bubble that quivered forever on the end of his straw. A golden-haired girl stared at him from across a chasm of vines. Between the branches of a spreading banyan, a dark projectile hovered on nothing. Only from directly underneath could the viewer make out a lady's slipper, hung motionless in space.

  Through the gaps in the jungle, off at the vanishing distance, there spread other woodlands, further rivers, seascapes, crags and cliffs floating dimensionless against the jungle night. On the far edge of the woods, where a road cut through midnight, a lone figure pumped gas. From a hewn trunk standing on a skull-strewn hill, furtive figures took down the body of an executed man and laid him in the lap of a grieving pyramid, female and blue.

  So it went: trinkets scattered like prizes through the boscage, a scavenger hunt of visual quotations obeying neither history nor influence nor significance nor theme nor any other principle of inclusion aside from one woman's private affections. A solitary trail of loved things, digitized. A haphazard, walk-in Cornell box of essential scraps, larger than life: her life.

  It baffled Jackdaw. So what exactly is all this crap?

  These? The escape valve for surviving the pressure of culture, she told him.

  She took Stevie on a tour. They slowed in front of a couple, knotted together under the vines. Schiele's Embrace, Spiegel said. What do I win?

  You're lucky if I let you break even, she said.

  Incredibly sexy. Two people melting into each other.

  Really? I always thought they were writhing in agony.

  They walked on, through the clipping gallery.

  What do I get if I name the rest of them?

  You get to live.

  What? You mean no one has lived unless they know the classics?

  No. I mean you name them and I won't kill you. Yet.

  Lim came through early one evening, agitated from reading a new book on prehistoric art.

  You have to read this. The author claims that the Upper Paleolithic caves were the first VR.

  Sure. Spiegel twisted his palm in the air. What else can you call them?

  No. Literally. Theater-sized, total-immersion staging chambers where they'd drag initiates by torchlight. The shock of the supernatural sound-and-light show supposedly altered the viewers consciousness. Lim stopped, mazed by the idea. Can you imagine? Catching your first ever glimpse of images, flickering out of pitch-darkness. Like nothing you've ever seen. Your deepest mental illusions made real.

  Adie held up her hand to stop the stream, until she could improvise a bridge across it. You're saying that cave art begets all this? She waved to include the whole RL. That Lascaux starts a chain reaction that leads to ...?

  I'm saying that art explodes at exactly the same moment as tool-based culture. That cave pictures prepared the leap, after a million and a half years of static existence. That pictures were the tool that enabled human liftoff, the Ur-tech that planted the idea of a separate symbolic existence in the mind of—

  Oh Jesus.

  You see? You see? If we can makes these ... scratch lines come to life, then life is not just some outside thing that happens to us. It's something we come into and remake.

  Spiegel sat stilled, in a small reflecting pool. I read somewhere that Lascaux has become a simulation of itself? Tourism was killing the paintings. So the authorities built these complete underground replicas so that—

  Lim's impatience cut him dead. You still dont get it. They were simulations to begin with. Consciousness holding itself up to its own light, for a look. An initiation ceremony for the new universe of symbolic thought.

  If that's right... I cant begin ... I dont even want to think what technologies the Cavern is trying to shock us into.

  Lim traced the lines of the widening hunt in the air in front of him. The mind is the first virtual reality. He groped for the concept, by smoky torchlight. It gets to say what the world isn't yet. Its first speculations bootstrap all the others ...

  It's true, Adie said. She gestured at their rhizome, proliferating into the distance. A chill seeped up her spine, spreading at the entrance to her brain. Do you remember the night the two of you showed me the Crayon World? Now look!

  Oh Lord. Spiegel held his head. What have we done? We've taken a decent, law-abiding hater of technology…

  Oh, I still hate technology. I'm just learning how to make it please me.

  Adie's new pleasure drew Spider back with greater frequency. He checked up on the Jungle Room's smallest alterations, like a log house owner watching a neighbor put in a barbecue pit too close to the property line.

  Go on, she encouraged him. Just head down that way a little. That opening to the left of the divan. Nah. I kind of like it out here.

  Even after a dozen solo trips, he refused to leave the comfortable foyer of Rousseau for the expanses of the greater mansion. She ... reminds you of someone? Who? he bluffed.

  Adie smiled at him. Pointed at the pointing woman, recumbent on her berth. Spider made no sign. Someone from around here?

  He turned to look at her. Through their two sets of 3-D glasses, she couldn't see his eyes. He looked away. Depends on what you mean by "here." Where were you born? she asked. He shrugged. You dont want to say?

  He swung around, hard. Not a
question of wanting. How old were you when ... you came over? He turned away again. Young. She waited a decent interval. Adopted?

  You know the odd thing? He spoke to the woman on the sofa. They say I have an older brother. Somewhere.

  She came and put her arm around him, where he stood in the foliage. He took off his glasses, but would not look at Adie. I really wish you'd paint some clothes on her.

  Ebesen paid a visit one day, when Adie had the Cavern. For the first time since their near-conversation, he reappeared, ready to talk. He checked up on her progress. She walked him through the moving animals, including the monkey he'd animated.

  Were you aware that your innocent customs official-turned-naive painter once did time in La Sante prison? Ebesen spoke as though the crime were hers.

  No! Impossible.

  Yes indeed. Aiding and abetting a forgery and embezzlement scheme.

  I cant believe it. Did he know what he was doing?

  Probably not. You folks rarely do.

  You folks? Me folks?

  A surfeit of wide-eyed artistic trust. At least that's what the authorities concluded. They let him out after a month.

  She took Ebesen down the paths into the scanned anthology. They passed by the Botticelli without comment. They skirted the Poussin. Ebesen showed nothing more than a twitch of recognition around the lips. He took the controls, steering them down the jungle track as if in an ATV. Soon he refused even to slow down at the passing wayside attractions.

  They reached the far end of the simulation, where the unbordered world dropped off into white. Ebesen removed his glasses and nodded. Interesting.

  That's it? That's all the critique I get?

  Well, unless I missed it down a hidden fork somewhere, you've left out something obvious. Something essential.

  No Dr. Tulp, she said. No Gross Clinic. I refuse to do anything where anyone's veins are outside their body.

  Hands. Red handprints. Elk. Bison. Magic arrows.

  Oh! Yes, of course! A glow infused her eyes, the idea of perfection. Cant have a Cavern exhibition without a little cave painting.

  Ebesen didn't register. The bagman was lost in disputation with himself. When he spoke again, it wasn't to her. Huh. That's it. That's how you need to do this.

  He walked out of the Cavern. She watched him leave. The seat of his sagging khaki pants had worn through in two moth-eyed spots on either side of the inseam. It stabbed at her. The battle for existence shrunk to a decent pair of trousers—one meager gift that she'd never be able to give the man without humiliating him.

  Against all indication, Ebesen came back. He dragged with him a massive quarto volume, its spine long ago broken, its loose pages in various degrees of prison break. A venerable book with the smell of mold and water damage to authenticate it. A text that had hectored generations of students when Janson's unfocused eyes still baffled themselves on that print of The Peaceable Kingdom pasted above his crib.

  Here, Ebesen said, cracking open the tome. All the plates were black-and-white. Or had been black-and-white once. They'd since all mildewed to ashen and ivory. He held out his specimen for Adie's inspection: a wildly shadowed flamenco dancer. Adie kinked her brows and looked at him for explanation.

  You don't know it? She shook her head. You don't know it. I'm disappointed in you. El Jaleo? By Sargent? You do know Sargent, don't you?

  Karl. Be nice.

  I am being nice. You haven't seen mean yet. Here. Look here. He pressed his thumb to where she was supposed to look, further smudging her chances of making out the data.

  She stared, feeling her old loupes kick in. She scoured the wall behind the dancer, the play of macabre shadow, obscured in a cheap print, rubbed out through years of shameless use by hands that probably prayed more often than they washed. Seeing anything there was a hopeless prospect, except for his insistence that she see it.

  And then she saw. Painted on the painting's painted plaster wall: a replica of the first-made images.

  He's quoting Altamira, Karl said. Just discovered by Sautuola and his little daughter. Written up the year before Sargent does the painting. A Spanish cave, you see. The painting's not really about the dancer. It's about the first-ever proof that we have to paint. Paint like we clap our hands. Took four more decades for the experts to accept the idea of Stone Age art. Nobody wanted to believe that these bison were the real thing. Except for painters, of course.

  She looked at him, taken apart by what she saw.

  Scan Sargent and stick him in your nature walk, he said. You'll get Altamira for free. He stared back at the image inside the image, shaking his head a little sadly. Think of it. All these centuries of greater realisms, more light, deeper psychological penetration, and the golem still never came alive. Paint: disowned by technology, discredited, until technology needed it again. And now, he said, shrugging at the Cavern walls, the water and the mud and the spark are finally coming together. Now we're at last threatening to pull it off...

  Karl. Karl. Who was this man? Why aren't you an art history professor?

  His face flushed, as if her words had slapped him. A hard, red hand slap. Flamenco.

  Fuck you, too, doll.

  Ebesen bundled up his yellowing gift and removed it from the negotiating table. He turned his threadbare trousers on her—pallid mandrill on its deathbed—and made for the exit.

  Karl. Stop. Stop right now! I meant that as a compliment.

  He turned in the doorway. His face twisted up, as if he were a non-native speaker, trying to remember "compliment," the shifty homonym, the false friend.

  Help me with this, she said, waving to include all that was now invisible. It's the greatest game in the world. But it would be even more fun with someone who understood all the jokes.

  His face came forward a nanometer. Jokes?

  Ah. Sorry. I mean "allusions"

  Ebesen suppressed a lip twitch. He studied the Cavern walls, empty now, their projections shut down. Bled of all electrons, they looked as blank and white as heavyweight bond. You'// help us out with the architectural fly-through, in return?

  Sure, sure. Although I warn you, I cant tell a corbel from a cornice.

  And you'll let me litter your little theme park with my personal favorites?

  Of course. That's the whole point. Only ... ?

  Go ahead. Say what you were going to say. Only?

  She winced. Only ... we might want to work from some more recent prints.

  Ebesen held the grubby book to his chest for an awful moment. You want me, you get my anthology.

  I'm sure we can find an out-of-the-way bush to stick you both under.

  So Design's senior derelict led Adie down the overgrown path of Western art. Ebesen muttered to himself while he worked, reciting stray facts and vesper-captions that kept him to the task at hand. She listened as inconspicuously as she could, from across the cubicle, reacquainting herself with all his old, exhausted favorites from scratch. From another's eye.

  The man pattered on everything from Paleolithic fertility figures to late-day silk-screened sex sirens. On New Britain, he told her, people believed that humans came to life when the gods dribbled blood on drawings of them.

  Or: Picasso thought he'd invented camouflage. And by free association: You know how the Dutch kept the Night Watch out of the hands of the Nazis? They hid it underground, in the Limburg marl grottos.

  He'd hold two prints up for her, side by side. Comic in their contrast: Watteau and El Greco. Art has only two obsessions. Denial of death and preoccupation with it. Real achievement depends on either utter indifference or utter terror.

  Genuflecting in front of the Ghent Altarpiece, he'd say, Do you know why Mary's hand towel is dirty? The angel took her by surprise, at her prayers. No time to tidy up for the guests. Know why the Annunciation script is upside down? God's dictating, from above ...

  Karl, Karl. Where on earth do you come up with these things?

  She asked his opinion about the eighties internation
al superstars, the market where art now lived. Ebesen just shrugged. His knowledge ended abruptly in the year that Adie's SoHo show had opened.

  It passed for friendship in the low fluorescent light, Ebesen's halting glosses, his overture of closeness. And Adie kept her end of the bargain. She cleared herself a workspace in the room that Ebesen shared with Michael Vulgamott. The bagman and the architect had already used their Cavern tool kit to simulate a skeletal bungalow. The viewer could wand through this interior, not just along predetermined paths, but in any direction she cared to explore. Their simulated rooms occupied real volume. Although little more than hasty polygon fills with a dash of surface texture, their interiors held together from any angle. Walls blocked access and doors allowed it. Light streamed through windows from a consistent source. Stairs led up and down. Opposite views supplied each other's complements.

  Proof of concept, Vulgamott said. Enough to show how the Cavern can bust open spatial visualization. But just a five-finger exercise. A mock-up for the real tool.

  Their idea was to assemble a chest of architectural primitives: three-dimensional icons, universal building blocks for creating countless further rooms. They imagined a visual catalogue of prefab parts, designed once, reused forever—the full Vitruvian library of any building component that imagination might require. Each solid piece had to be deformable along any axis. When Adie joined them, Ebesen had already been working on the Ionic capital for weeks.

  We figured we'd start with your more high-demand items, he

  explained.

  Doric was done. Abacus and echinus each bore resizable handles that one could click and drag to shrink or swell the capital. The moldings below adjusted accordingly, while the necking and flutes stretched to fit snugly onto any column underneath them. The Ionic model improved upon this basic unit, upping the number of flutes, changing the echinus to egg and dart, and adding adjustable volutes.