RICHARD POWERS Read online

  Ebesen worked the stone meticulously, testing on a flat-screen monitor. He carved, examined, jimmied, and carved again. The tedious scut work fell as far below design as design fell below the skills of the man who, Adie suspected, could freehand any object in creation.

  Vulgamott fussed at a nearby screen, perfecting his own pier and shaft. Nobody here is exactly looking forward to Corinthian. Adjustable acanthus leaves. It's going to be a bloody nightmare.

  The tool-kit language took ordinary architectural descriptions and parsed them into tiny aesthetic machines. Someday—with luck, before the hour that TeraSys set for a final Cavern rollout—a goggled architect would be able to stand inside this wraparound drafting table and, by clicking, cutting, and pasting in the empty air, produce a ghostly scale-model Parthenon, on the fly. The designer, immersed in a virtual design environment: Vulgamott christened the idea V-CAD. It had a certain recursive beauty, using a chamber of the Cavern itself to build more stately chambers...

  So use me already, she told them. Tell me what to work on.

  How would you like to be the greatest expert on triglyphs and metopes north of the Bay Area? Michael Vulgamott asked. No experience necessary.

  He spoke with a perpetual mope, that burlesque of depression that could only be depression-induced. Even expressions of appreciation sounded like a dental complaint. She slaved over bits of frieze and pediment that she felt sure would please the man. But when he came and stood over her shoulder to monitor her monitor, he could manage no more than a whimper. He'd start to object, and then—objecting to his own objections—trip himself up before he could get back to his sentence's line of scrimmage.

  What? she said. Tell me. What'd I do wrong?

  It isnt you, doll. He'd turn his back and throw one operatic hand up in the air. It's humanity at large. A persistent source of stress to me.

  Michael, Michael, Michael. It's like being back in the Union Square subway station, talking to you. Where d you grow up, anyway?

  Hattiesburg, Mississippi. Who wants to know?

  Vulgamott nagged at Adie. She couldn't read him. Is he being flip? she finally had to ask Karl one night. Or is he just permanently testy? Adie wasn't sure she could always tell the difference in Karl himself.

  Who, Vulgate? The man is holding on by his fingernails for the moment of worldwide redemption. He wants to make the Cavern into a giant ark. He's in a race against the clock to save everything of worth that has ever existed from the flood. It's a thankless business, and the odds are, shall we say, not in his favor.

  It was, for Adie, the ideal apprenticeship: time-sharing between her jungle, strewn with its snippets from the West's crumbling museum, and this growing warehouse of Lego blocks, Michael Vulgamott's windbreak against the coming long night. She moved freely between the adjacent countries. Her knowledge of architecture had never extended beyond the obligatory chapter in the survey texts. Now, viewing the trade from the crypt up, she made the connection. Buildings were art's skin, the pictures we lived in. They were many-planed concoctions of color, line, and shape, paintings that had to stand up to the rain. The simplest self-supporting structure involved as many aesthetic decisions as a midsized Titian. A temple's texture and light changed with the season, the hour, the thousand-and-one viewing angles. Frozen music, yes. But also thawed paint: harmony and radiance made whole by an accountability to engineering.

  She loved the idea: programming the programmable room to house its own model progeny. Even more perfect were those two models of male strangeness, her supervisors in architecture. For Michael's high-strung perfectionism, she felt increasing respect. Toward her surly bagman, she developed something like a maternal impulse. Proprietary zeal. Finder's pride. The curator's interest in the wrongly discarded.

  The deposits into her word hoard alone more than paid for this exchange of labor. Architrave, entablature, stylobate, fillet, fret, torus, scotia, plinth, anta, oculus, entasis, brattishing, extrados, acroterion, spandrel, finial, bargeboard, tympanum, coving, diaper, mandorla, crocket, archivolt, salomуnica, baldachin, reredos, rinceau, boss, bucranium, coffering, rustication, lancet, anthemion, swag, corbie step, dado, moucharaby, lunette, flиche, exedra, mullion, newel, oriel, quoin, shoin, stoa, loggia, joist, squinch, pendentive ... A term for every feature that ever made for decorated shelter. The plainest ornament, the smallest piece of frozen function, bore its own label, however obscure, in the encyclopedia of available parts.

  In her dreams, she ran through a fitness course of free-floating vaults and arches, each requiring some maneuver as she pushed through the reticulated air. And that sense of swimming freedom stayed with her when she awoke each morning. For the first time since Spiegel's and her failed college experiment in cooperative living, she felt a panic at sunset, at the racing clock cheating her out of her rightful hours.

  Life was not long enough to finish all the projects it wanted from her. She could live with that. But the idea that any one of the projects now haunting her might take all the years she had left and still not reach fruition seemed cruel, even by creation's sadistic baseline. She would return home on a late ferry to her island cottage—her neglected berry bushes and weed-shot garden—reeling from all that she'd learned that day. Something hurt inside her. She'd forgotten the feel of it: that eager pain of bone growing faster than its own muscle.

  Down the mountain from the lab, the world's wider growth continued to outstrip her. Her day's discoveries began showing up on the evening news. If she cleared a space on the edge of her forest for a Bruegel crowd, that same milling throng would show up on the cable feed later that night, bounced off a satellite from Wenceslas Square. When she spent an evening on the drapery of a resizable caryatid, the statue promptly materialized on all the breakfast cavalcades—a surreal Goddess of Democracy, a ten-meter imitation of Liberty coming to life on the numbered cobblestones in front of the Great Hall of the People. Art's impudence was nothing, held up to its source. Imitation fell back, astonished by the scale of the original.

  Vulgamott needed the spigot of cabled images wide open at all times. Ebesen just as violently needed it off. They worked out a tacit deal between them. Michael sat at his workstation, the daily cataclysm pouring in, live, through a corner of his screen, its sound track turned down just loud enough for him to hear. Karl sat as far as possible across the room, hunched over his own graphics box, piping in a bit of annihilating trickle from an audio disk in the CD drive—Ockeghem's Missa Prolationum or Byrd's Great Service.

  Holy shit, Vulgamott would exclaim at the image feed, a couple times a day. / cant believe this is happening. You have to see this.

  Ebesen never flinched. Let me guess. Shocking pictorial. Demi Moore fully clad. And each would carry on living, in the face of the other.

  The compromise satisfied both men, each content to live in that band of the event spectrum that he accredited. But Adiй, sitting alongside them, trapped between both data channels, at the focal tip of their stereo cone, would get so agitated by the chill intersection of polyphony and politics that she'd have to go out and trot the half-mile loop around the lab parking lot just to calm down.

  In the first few days of June, the rains giving way in the approach of summer, Adie sat in that cross fire. She sketched on her screen while the peaks and troughs of CNN and Renaissance counterpoint canceled each other out into a standing wave. The work she gave her hands seemed good, a sustainable development, something to tinker at indefinitely, to learn a little bit more from each day until the lesson was whole. If we make six perfect frames in a row, do we get to rest? You dream, Vulgamott answered, not looking up. After six million, you can knock off for a fifteen-minute latie. Then, in another voice altogether, he said, No. Oh no. He sounded like a mother, thick with disappointment, scolding a child who'd just spilled sauce down the front of his Sunday best. Then, Jesus Christ. No. No! And the game changed for good. Michael? What is it? What's wrong?

  Dont mind him, Ebesen said. Some blip on the AP wire. Our frien
d thinks he's holding the world together by the force of personal concentration.

  But Vulgamott kept repeating his hypnotic mantra. Please no. Not that.

  Adie crossed over to his desk. She leaned and looked at his screen, the source of distress. In a postage-stamp window, difficult to make out, a human crowd milled. It looked like the same continuous surge they'd been watching daily for the last several weeks. Only this crowd was panicking.

  What is it? What's happening?

  Vulgamott stared at the screen, fixed by occluded revelation.

  Make it bigger, she said. He did. But when the picture reached viewable size, it pixilated. The blocky clip only fed her ignorance.

  Some newsreader's voice in New York rambled on over the blurred film stock, something about Deng learning from his previous mistakes and sending in young Mongolians. The number of casualties is still not known.

  Not known? Vulgamott yelled at the disembodied voice. Not known? Cant you see?

  He stood and left the room. Adie, in an informational trance, followed behind. She moved as in some ancient school fire drill out of tornado season. Only when they reached the hall and began drifting like dust motes did it dawn on her. Vulgamott didn't know where he was going.

  They ran into Spider. Listen, Michael asked. Can you patch an analog signal into the Cavern?

  Sure. But Ronans booked in there for another—

  Thank God. Someone who knows what's going on. I'll deal with O'Reilly. You just give us the feed.

  By the time Lim succeeded in piping the massacre into the Cavern, a small crowd had gathered. No glasses. No parallax. Just the standard mayhem of aerial film, trained on the walls of the theater box. Cadets shooting into crowds; kids thrashing each other through clouds of gas; a lone semaphore signaler, for a few electrifying minutes, holding up a column of tanks: the scenes the whole world would watch again and again, until broadcast made sure to inure all viewers.

  A small, stunned congregation assembled in this smaller public square, surrounded on all sides by planes of video. Tiananmen filled the horizon, at eye level, all around them. Then, punishing them for their silence, video plunged the dozen viewers into another crowd. On no logic but the quick cut, they floated in an ocean of mad, mourning black. A different riot moved to the same nightmare surge. Now no soldiers, no Mongolian trainees offered up group death. Now just mass self-mutilation, grief over the lost Imam, returned from his state of exile to redeem the world.

  Adie stood pinned in the group hysteria. The madness of crowds swept over her, even in this back projection. Only when the cameras cut for a commercial could she breathe. She turned and walked out through the Cavern's open wall. Up from the nightmare, no chains or checkpoints. She cast a look back from the outer doorway. And there she saw a scene that haunted her long after Tehran and Tiananmen faded to black: a dozen stunned lives, huddled in a picture-pitched tent, trapped in the rising information flood.

  She moved back to the jungle full-time, away from the press of all facts, out of the reach of news. Off on a spur in the far corner of the Rousseau room, down a path unreachable from the jungle's entrance, she placed a detail from that most beautiful version of the Massacre of the Innocents. After that, she used nothing more troubled than Matisse, Chagall, and Corot. Trees feathering on Creation's breath. Goldfish floating ravished in the refracting ether.

  Underground, she told Ebesen. Deep in the marl grottos. Nobody will bother looking for them there.

  Her island cottage gave her refuge. That summer was the Sound's sunniest in recorded memory. She worked at her columbine and tea roses, bringing them back from weed. She pruned the blackberries and set the crab pots from the dock off her inlet, then sat back and waited for a peace that refused to come. Instead, the sight of those panicked crowds ambushed her, in the surreal hours flanking 2 a.m., when low blood sugar and abetting blackness combined to docent her around her own private Bosch.

  Lost, her eye grew stronger. She would sit in the RL's atrium, looking out through its expanse of picture window, gazing down on the unbroken mountainside. She'd sit and squint, applying to this real scene all of Loque's anthology of software filters. She'd work it like the aged Renoir, a brush strapped to his wrists just above the worthless claws. She'd slide a mental adjuster knob from left to right, pulling the whole landscape through discrete, imagined steps from Patinir to Goyen to Ruisdael to Hobbema, on through Kensett and Cole and Bierstadt, then down to Millet, Sisley, or Signac, stopping only when the light started to fail.

  This scenic outlook became her private outpost, a place where she could be among people yet not have to look at them. From a hundred yards away, she caught sight of a leaf fat with July's solar spoon-feeding, and saw in it the sprig that Stevie had grown for her, so long ago. She stared for hours out this picture window on the unearthly convolutions of nature's prototype, the only view large enough to erase the human.

  One afternoon, on the downward slope of summer, she sat surveying that people-free Barbizon. Everywhere across the landscape's panel, life cast its filaments. She watched a northern flicker lift off a branch in mid-distance, its ventral gold splash flashing as it took flight. Drawn by her glance, the bird bore straight for the RL. Helpless, she stared as it slammed into the picture window, a feathered fist bouncing off the plate glass with a smack.

  At the sickening pop, Adie's body ruptured. She screamed, but nothing came out. She ran pointlessly to the pane. The thing lay on the ground in a broken heap, striped, tawny, stilled.

  A smear of grease on the glass marked the impact, like the chalk outline around a corpse. Adie fought the gasps coming out of her, an effort that only made her sound even more like a strangled animal. By luck, Spiegel came across her first. Stevie, she didn't care about. Steve had seen her a lot worse off.

  Adie, what's happened? What's wrong?

  She pointed to the crumpled sack of taxidermy. The bright crest of red in the grass.

  Spiegel looked at the window smudge. Aiy. A hard hit Innocence always hit hardest. He glanced behind them, into the expanse of room. Confused by the atrium, probably. From out there, it must look like more of the same.

  My fault. My fault.

  Your... ? Now, how in creation do you—?

  I saw it coming. I... I drew it...

  Adie. He put his arm around her. She neither let him nor refused.

  They stared down at the dead thing, appealing the verdict. Absurdly, the bird chose that exact moment to come to life again. It flapped once or twice, thumping on the ground.

  Then it found its gears, lifted up, and followed some remembered angle of incidence back to its delayed errand.

  Oh Jesus, Spiegel laughed. Would you look at that.

  Brute animal persistence. Adie followed the escape, incredulous. She gathered herself in. It should have died.

  Spiegel broke off cackling and stared. He took his arm from her shoulder. I'm sorry? It should have what?

  Better off dead than that. You saw how it flew off? More sky, as if nothing at all had changed.

  Ade, it's a bird. A bird, for Christ's sake. A second ago, you were grieving for it.

  She shook her head, insistent. There were worse things to be killed by than false distances. Worse things to die of than naпvetй.

  19

  In imagination's room, all things work out.

  This is the place's guiding rule. Nothing gets in that doesn't already fit. No twist of plot, except what is slated.

  In this room, nothing bleeds. Nothing rots. Nothing breaks. There is pain here, but there is no suffering. Things do grow, but never past their prime. All local flesh has learned that lizard trick of regeneration. The cheetah takes no more than half the antelope's flank. Then the sacrifice grows back again.

  Grizzlies stand in the rapids, swiping at stray salmon. But they fish more for sport than out of real need. Theirs is strictly a catch and release. The fish, too, understand the game, the pure run of it, there being no strong line between loss and win. They
leap free, teasing, or go belly-up, surrender a pound like a tree sheds fruit, then drift back downstream to try their luck again tomorrow.

  The politics of watering holes resolves itself through negotiation. Dogs still fight for their place in the pack's pyramid, but every Omega will have his day. Ant colonies still go to glorious war, although their fronts remain static. Soldiers give their lives to the cause, and the giving completes them.

  Every accident has its repair. Nests crumble in the wind, just to gratify the oriole's need to rebuild. Unfledged chicks still blow to the ground, injured. But some benevolent biped ultimately returns them to their high, woven safety.

  The people in this room grow up to become what they've always dreamed of being. The human economy teems with doctors and firemen. Oil bubbles up in the back yards of tar-paper shacks. Lost children find their parents again, after many harrowing adventures. Abused orphans wind up adopted by kind uncles and aunts.

  Lovers quarrel, slam down the receiver, swear off each other, remember everything, and call each other back laughing in embarrassment. Widowers receive nightly visits from their mates' ghosts. Lonely souls, locked in their own timidity, finally write each other letters, three days before it would have been too late.

  All countries move steadily toward democratic free markets. Poor nations catch spark, enjoying the advantages of the late starter. Growth is everywhere export-driven, yet all lands enjoy a favorable balance of trade. Disease yields new insights into how the body works. Someone invents the solar-powered car. Someone discovers how to extract energy from tepid water.

  Zealots, on the road to some mass persecution, fall down blind and rise ecumenical. Hotbeds of factionalism succumb to improvements in communication.

  Music here heads through the occasional passing dissonance. But always, by cadence, it finds its way back to Do. Revolutions in style still build upon the past. Art constantly refreshes itself, and the occasional harshness, after years of study, proves to be beauty by another name. Lost cantatas now and then come to light. The stolen panel of the Just Judges turns up in a Carthusian monastery.