RICHARD POWERS Read online

  History and its victims kept their hands to the plow, broken, exhausted, like an old married couple trapped for life in love's death lock, unable to break through to that sunlit upland. The future, under construction, leveraged to the hilt, could only press forward, hooked on its own possibility. Hope not only persisted; it made a schoolgirl spectacle of itself, skirt in the air, all shame on view.

  Fall was well into its return engagement. The rains signaled an early and long winter. Adie Klarpol grieved for current events until she could no longer feel them. Then another shame gripped her, more private and local. She'd lived here for the better part of a year and had not yet learned the first thing about this town. It was as if she'd had room in her for only one exploration at a go. Now the days began to lose their length and weight, heading to winter. She vowed to get out a little, while there was still time.

  She laid out a box around the downtown, one of those numbered grids that archaeologists use to inventory a virgin field. She rode to the top of the Space Needle, fixing a shorthand map of the streets' layout. From that bird's-eye view, she picked out sights to acquire over the next half-dozen Saturdays. She turned over every inch of the City Center. She got the Woodland Park Zoo out of the way early, racing past the various forms of captivity. She paid her overdue pilgrimage to the Asian Art Museum and the Frye, blasting through them with the same guilty squeamishness.

  Jefferson, James, Cherry, Columbia, Marion, Madison, Spring, Seneca ... She clicked the streets off, climbing and diving with the strangest sensation, feeling as if she were wanding through them. As she walked, the high-resolution, water-lapped horizon swelled and filled, without pixilating or dropping frames. She swung her head side to side, and life tracked her pan seamlessly. The piers, Alki Point, Pike Place Market: all appeared to her astonishingly solid, with fantastic color depth, and no trade-off between realism and responsiveness. When the sun chiseled its way through a chink in the stratocumulus and, for fifteen seconds, blazed the cityscape into highest contrast, Adie discovered the real use of binary. The greatest value of the clumsy, inexorable, accreting digitization of creation lay in showing, for the first time, how infinitely beyond formulation the analog would always run.

  She prowled, one blustery Saturday, up and down the four floors of the Mindful Binding, that fantastic, expanding, used-book universe perfect for getting lost in. She headed first for Architecture, searching for scannable plans that might be of interest to Ebesen and Vulgamott, peace offerings for having abandoned them. Then—old bad habit— Art. The oversized color coffee-table books just sat there on the shelves, past hurting anyone. And there was no one at all to catch her looking.

  She moved on to Travel, Victoriana, and Local History. Then, decorously delayed, she paid the obligatory visit to her first love, Juvenile Fiction. And there in that most unlikely place, she ran into Stevie Spiegel. The last person alive she would have figured on meeting under that heading.

  He saw her, and his eyes darted quickly away to check if he might slip off unseen. But they were both caught. Adia Klarpol! What brings you out into the light?

  She laughed. Not a full-blooded vampire yet. Still just a novitiate, remember? Don't we get to venture abroad for short intervals during the first year?

  Sure, sure. Whatever gets you through the night.

  Besides, I could ask you the same thing.

  Me? I like the light. I make it a point to get out in it. Once every other month or so, whether I need to or not.

  She gestured to the motley-colored bindings. Kids' books, Stevie? You're not responsible for any illegitimate little charges that I don't know about, are you?

  He blushed. Hope not. It's ... He wrestled with expediency. It's just that I've been looking for this one story ...

  Since you were nine?

  Well, seven, if you must know.

  Called?

  Oh. Now. If I knew what the damn thing was called, I wouldn't still be looking for it after all this time, would I?

  Author? Subject?

  Gone. All gone. My daughter, my ducats.

  Hang on a minute. You've been trying to locate a book for thirty years, and you can't remember what it's about?

  Oh, it was a fabulous story, if that's what you mean. This boy has the ability to make the things he imagines come into existence, just by—and here I'm a little shaky on the exact mechanism—

  Stevie. You're hopeless. Was this an older book? American? English? Translated?

  It was about so big. Amazing illustrations, mostly sepia and magenta. Oh. Why didn't you say so in the first place? That narrows it down considerably.

  He hung his head. They scoured the shelves together, separately, in silence. Each looking for a secret buried treasure. Neither of them finding.

  She capitulated first. That's it I'm taking off.

  You going somewhere? Or do you have a minute?

  I have my whole life, she told him. Until Monday.

  They wandered at random through the afternoon-soaked streets. The air thickened and expanded around them as they stirred it with their bodies. They talked shop, their only safe common denominator.

  So how s Art s Greatest Hits going?

  She shrugged. It's still a jungle out there.

  They looked up: Pioneer Square. Sit for a minute? he asked. Expecting to be refused.

  They found a vacant bench. Adie sat and exhaled. Unfolded. The sun ducked in and out through a scattering crowd of cloud.

  God, she said. Damn. I feel like the Mole-Woman. You know? The one they've buried in that hermetic sunken shelter? The woman who lives in that Ramada Inn lab at the bottom of a mine shaft, with the flock of video cameras and microphones pointed at her around the clock? What's her name again?

  Mmm ... Doris .. Singlegate?

  Stevie. You never cease to amaze me. How long has she been underground?

  Good question. It has to be at least a year.

  And what's the point, again?

  Study her physiology. Changes in biological clocks and such. In the absence of all outside cues.

  You science types are all sickos.

  He laughed, a little offended. Since when do you lump your old fellow traveler with the science types?

  Ever since you wired up your iambs.

  Look who's talking. But I'll admit to a certain sick fascination with the Mole-Woman. I hear she's gone sidereal. That her body's reset itself onto a twenty-five-hour cycle. Can you imagine? Every four weeks, she loses a whole day.

  What do you mean, "imagine"? How long have I been working for you thugs, anyway? I'т ahead of schedule.

  At least we let you come up for air now and then.

  Spiegel produced a sack of slightly linted honey-coated peanuts from his jacket pocket. Adie ate the minimum that politeness dictated. Stevie swung his head east to west, a pivoting Minicam. Through his eyes, she saw the square unfold. A clump of people queued up for the next Seattle Underground tour. Knots of autonomous agents milled about the lost pergola, each holding to the hem of a private goal.

  People school, Adie said. They flock. Have you ever noticed?

  He nodded. They're looking for places of power. But they cant find them, because none exists anymore.

  Places... ?

  You know. Stone circles. Barrows. Temples, cathedrals, mosques, pagodas. Even town halls, I suppose, once upon a time.

  Stevie. I thought you'd graduated from poetry. I thought you were sticking to subroutines these days.

  He flashed his can't-hurt-me-with-that smile. Not entirely incompatible, I've found.

  And these places of power of yours ... ?

  All dried up. Where's our Stonehenge these days?

  What, they've moved it from Salisbury Plain? Those vandals.

  Spiegel snickered. No, it's still sitting there. Behind a chain-link fence. Salisbury Cathedral, down the road, is no better. Two pounds for a peek, and a little numbered walking booklet demystifying all the high points.

  Adie waved her hand outward.
I don't suppose you'd be willing to count a colorful totem pole and a tasteful bust of Chief Seathl as magic lenses?

  People don't even see those things. They blow right past them, on their way to the stores.

  Well, the stores, then. The malls.

  I'm talking about places where we can be subsumed by forces larger than ourselves.

  You've obviously never run up a monolithic MasterCard tab at Bloomie's, have you?

  Places where we can reconstruct ourselves and nature. Where people can share transforming experiences.

  The Kingdome?

  His lips tightened, without much mirth. All right. Adie sobered. Books, then. Who has time to read anymore? Little magenta books from your childhood. Lost. Broken.

  Movies. Of course. Movies.

  Too solipsistic. You sit there for an hour and a half, chained up in the dark. Immersed, sure, but eyes forward, on the screen. Your guts get turned inside out, completely manipulated, fine-tuned by the industry's latest big release. But two weeks later, you cant even paraphrase the plot. Adie threw a few honeyed peanuts to the birds. Every pigeon in the Pacific Northwest went into an all-points feeding frenzy. Why do I have this sneaking suspicion about where you're heading here?

  He nodded. You got it I mean, the car, the airplane, even printing. They only changed the speed with which humans can do existing tasks. But the computer...

  Ah ha! Adie said, slapping him on the thigh. The computer changes the tasks. Other inventions alter the conditions of human existence. The computer alters the human. It's our complement, our partner, our vindication. The goal of all the previous stopgap inventions. It builds us an entirely new home.

  Hey? What's wrong with the old home? I liked living in the old home. Did you? He held her eye. She looked away first. Well, however you feel about the new one, you have to admit, it's out of this world. Oh, that much Ym sure of.

  You know what we're working on, don't you? Time travel, Ade. The matter transporter. Embodied art; a life-sized poem that we can live inside. It's the grail we've been after since the first campfire recital. The defeat of time and space. The final victory of the imagination.

  Whoa there, cowboy. It's four bedsheets and some slide projectors. Oh, you ain't seen nothin yet. Forget the technology for a moment. I'm talking about the raw idea. The ability to make worlds—whole, dense, multisensory places that are both out there and in here at the same time. Invented worlds that respond to what we're doing, worlds where the interface disappears. Places we can meet in, across any distance. Places where we can change all the rules, one at a time, to see what happens. Fleshed-out mental labs to explore and extend. VR rein-vents the terms of existence. It redefines what it means to be human. All those old dead-end ontological undergrad conundrums? They've now become questions of engineering.

  Adie tilted her head, withholding and conceding at the same time. What makes you think ...? Nothing else has ever worked. All the arts, all the technologies in the world have failed to placate people. Why should it be any different this time around?

  First, because we're assembling them all into a total—

  Na, na. That's Wagner. That's Bayreuth. And you see all the good that did.

  But the Cavern blows opera out of the box. We're not just passive recipients anymore. We'll become the characters in our own living drama.

  She shook her head. The problem isn't going to answer to technology, you know. The problem is inside us. In our bodies.

  The Cavern is the first art form to play directly to that body. We're on the verge of immediate, bodily knowledge.

  It doesn't work that way, Stevie. We habituate. Something in us doesn't want to stay sublime for very long.

  We can be refreshed. Revitalized, by the sheer density ...

  She took in Pioneer Square in one glance: this palpable place, the master foil to Stevie's crazy vision. All at once, the tap of sunlight opened. Why not life, then? she said. Life itself, as our final art form. Our supreme high-tech invention. It's a lot more robust than anything else we've got going. Deeply interactive. And the resolution is outstanding.

  But we can't see life. He gestured to include the world's tourists, rushing through the miraculous density of day's data structure without so much as a second glance. Not without some background to hold it up against. In order for the fish to know that it's swimming in an ocean-He has to jump into the frying pan?

  Spiegel snorted. Something like that. Something like that.

  Some cloud passed from off the face of the sun. The sky grew so briefly radiant that it forced Adie's face up. Something in the light felt so desperate for sharing that it stretched out the deficit in her heart and left it, for the length of that glint, fillable. Breezes were stronger than reason. They just didn't last as long.

  Nothing, she said, nothing we make will ever match sunlight. A beautiful day beats all the art in the world.

  He looked at her oddly. As if they were bound together. As if they had the luxury of the rest of their lives to come to terms with each other. I wouldn't know. I live in Seattle.

  That reminds me, she said. Car. Ferry. Island. She stood and stretched. Garden. Dinner. Sleep. Wake. Work.

  He stood with her. Where are you parked? I'll walk you.

  They steered uphill, through the public sphere, avoiding by complex collision algorithm a throng of other autonomous agents loose on their own improvised routes. They pressed along Occidental, above the buried Underground warrens. A juggler to their left kept a small pastel solar system twirling in orbit. From the south floated the sound of a busker picking out "Will the Circle Be Unbroken?" Panhandlers of all races, colors, and creeds approached them with elaborate narratives— wives in vehicular distress, misunderstandings with employers involving salary moratoria, momentary misplacement of all worldly possessions— then retreated again, fifty cents richer, wishing them both the best of available afternoons.

  They plotted a course through Occidental Park, midway between the totem pole and the knockoff pseudo-Greek plaster sculpture directly across the square from it. Adie threw repeated backward glances over her shoulder through the peopled fray.

  It's bothering you, he caught her. Isn't it?

  What is?

  That statue. What's the matter? Can't name that tune?

  Oh, I guess it's supposed to be an imitation of some kind ofkouros. One of the Apollos, maybe? Hard to tell. It's not a very good copy, to say the least

  That's it? Don't look. What else?

  She stopped and closed her eyes. Well, the size, for one thing. Too big. And it has all its limbs. I don't think any real ones are that intact.

  That's all?

  Can I peek again?

  No.

  The colors off. But I guess it's hard to make gypsum look like marble. And the face isn't right. More Roman than Archaic, I think.

  And?

  She shrugged.

  Go ahead. Look.

  Well, it bugs me that it's draped. I mean, really. Isnt the muzzling of the NEA bad enough? Next thing you know, the Met's going to be chipping off all the gonads with a chisel, like they did in the Middle Ages.

  That's it?

  She stamped in place. You tell me, Stevie. I give.

  Come on. Let's go have a look.

  They turned and doubled back. She stood in the prow of her step, watching the plaster statue swim into focus. Each step upped the resolution until she called out, My God.

  Yep, Spiegel said. You got it.

  She kept walking, as if additional evidence might overturn the obvious. They walked up to the threshold of the sculpture, its optimal viewing horizon. Close enough to see it blink, twitch, breathe.

  Steve addressed the work. She thinks it's a disgrace that you're draped.

  Adie dragged him away, trawling in her purse for some change to pitch into the inverted discus at the statue's feet.

  She thinks that today's modern audience is mature enough to take their Classical antiquities without censorship ...

 
; She twisted his arm up behind his back, marching him. She cast another look over her shoulder, like Lot's wife. Like Orpheus. The statue refused to ripple so much as a crow's foot around its wet irises.

  Across the square, she loosened her grip on his arm. So your eye is better than mine. Is that what you're trying to tell me?

  He twisted free of her clamp. Their hands caught each other, holding on for a few awkward seconds.

  Beginner's luck. Besides: I noticed him earlier, setting up.

  Spiegel's futurist vision nagged at her for days afterward. He was mad, of course. But certain of his formulations made Adie wonder just what program she was, in fact, working on. For her, the electronic doll-house's sheer inconsequence had returned her to pleasure. And now pleasure—it shamed her to admit—intensified in the suggestion that it might be headed somewhere.

  From the scorpion-tailed branch of one of her digital mango trees, she hung that fluid, flaming Munch painting of three northern women, hands behind their backs, midway between aesthetic transport and anxiety attack. And on the flip side of the bitmap, for anyone who walked around to the far side of the picture, she penciled a calligraphic quote from the painter: "Nature shows the images on the back side of the eye."

  Jon Freese e-mailed her, asking for a jungle open house.

  It's not ready yet, she cabled back.

  He insisted. Just for the other in-house groups. So you can get some formal feedback.

  The open house turned into a group show. Loque demoed a major new concept for writing paintbox filters. Got the idea from working with the artsy chick.

  All hers, Adie objected. Don't look at me.

  Instead of starting with bit-fiddling algorithms and trying to match them to artistic styles, we scan in a dozen examples of a given artist and make the edge-detection and signal-processing routines build up a catalog of stylistic tics.