RICHARD POWERS Read online

  Not tics, Adie said.

  Pardonnez-moi. Mannerisms.

  Love it, Spiegel said. Sort of the opposite of paint-by-numbers?

  Ari Kaladjian stewed in place. You mean that you are giving up on the idea of formulating those functions that—?

  We're not giving up on anything, Ari. We just thought we'd explore a new angle and see where it leads.

  I ask you again: Does it do us any good to produce a cute little parroting routine, without learning how to formalize its behavior?

  We're just letting the machine do the formalizing, Sue said.

  Adie's turn came. Her colleagues kept together as a group down the twisting paths in the undergrowth, stumbling over each new visual quote as if by accident. They gasped at the nativities, oohed and aahed at the animated still lifes, and laughed at the illuminated monks embroidering their scrolls with vegetation that spilled off the vellum and grew into the jungle all around them.

  On a path near the back edge of the forest, Kaladjian attacked. Will someone please tell me the point of this whole peculiar exercise?

  Freese rose to Adie's defense. Come on, An. Its a demo. No more than everyone else's.

  Yes. But what exactly does it demonstrate? It has no real three-dimensional modeling or ray tracing. The image field remains planar. There's no interaction to speak of. Aside from a few charming animal animations, the sprites are static. And the depicted data mean nothing at all. Hardly a state-of-the-art demonstration of what the environment might do.

  The group fell silent, scuffing their collective feet on the forest floor. Spider Lim stood guard over his divan woman, as if the mathematician might attack her.

  It struck Adie that the others were waiting for her to defend herself. Well, I don't know. I thought it was kind of nice to look at. Only Rajan laughed.

  Spiegel rushed into the gap, covering for his recruit. Come on, Kaladjian. Who are you to tell potential clients how they should use a Cavern? It's just as interesting to build a room to visualize inspiration as it is to build one to visualize long hydrocarbon chains.

  This "inspiration." Can you tell me where, in all these—snippets— we are supposed to find it? Can you give me one little proof by induction, one simple rule for telling it from non-inspiration?

  He's kind of right. Jackdaw looked away as he spoke. I mean, sure, it's beautiful and all. But it doesn't do anything. It's basically a flat gallery. The user can't really ... make anything happen.

  Adie's face shrank from him in a crooked smile. You. You child. What did I ever do to you? What do you mean, "cant" ...?

  It's not really what I'd call interactive.

  Of course it's interactive. You go down this path or you go down the other. You see something interesting, you go closer. What more interaction do you want?

  Well, see, I mean: as far as the little artworks are concerned? They don't even know the user is there.

  If a masterpiece bloomed in the forest, Rajan began, and no one was there to appraise it, would it still be a—?

  And after the user leaves? Jackdaw said. There's no trace in the database of anyone having ever been there. The jungle just keeps carrying on as if—

  Exactly, Adie interrupted. And thank God.

  Spiegel tried to interface between the races. What Jackie means, Ade, is that you need more collaboration between the humans and the data structures. More of the dance that is unique to this medium.

  I still don't get it. It's not like this place could exist anywhere else.

  She's right. Freese stepped back in. This is a legitimate virtual environment. And it's unlike any that I've seen anywhere else.

  Jackdaw shrugged. Oh, it's fine as far as it goes. But it doesn't transform the ordinary.

  Sue Loque put her arm around the world's creator. It's just not the future's transcendental art form yet. You can throw something like that together for us, can't you, babe?

  My God. Last month they were raving about it. Now they're bored.

  Motionless, downwind, Kaladjian hit his sprint from out of the crouch. I would just like to know what this teaches us? Either about the hardware, the software, or the exercise of European painting? I want to know what we learn here.

  That we couldn't learn in a good museum, Jackdaw said.

  I'll go further, Kaladjian added. What of any real consequence can we learn, even from the best of museums?

  The hook lodged deep in Adie's gills. You obviously aren't in any danger of having to learn anything.

  Art is not capable of teaching. This is my point. It contains no formal knowledge about the world. No predictions. Nothing falsifiable. Nothing repeatable. It's not about anything except itself. Other art. And even about that, it's at best equivocal

  Adie took off her shuttered glasses and stared at him. Mathemati-cian, has anyone ever told you that you're a very unpleasant man?

  Well, the pleasure is mutual. But at least you say what you mean. Which is more than most artists bother to do.

  Гт not an artist. I haven t made any art for more than—

  Too late, Freese resorted to authority. This is neither the time nor the place to air personality conflicts.

  This has nothing whatsoever to do with personality, Kaladjian shouted. This is about certain, definitive—

  Can someone please give me one simple rule for telling personality from non-personality? Rajan said. And the gathering degenerated into a free-for-all. Art and math skulked away from the spitting match, both gangs compromised.

  But out of the ugly exchange, the virulent parasite of Cavern innovation took up a new carrier. Inspiration passed through the tracts of its unwitting sponsors, using them and moving on. Now the virus lodged in Dale Bergen, the mousy University of Washington biochemist who lived by the iron precept of never attracting attention. Bergen's Large Molecule Docking Room threatened the next step in human mastery over matter. The user stood in microscopic space, among galaxies of enfolded polymers, zooming in on docking sites now large enough to walk inside and poke around. Shape and charge dictated this representation's behavior, just as they did in the physical world. The graphical atoms took up their available bonds, obeying the pull of electrostatics built into their data structures.

  In the Cavern's viewing chamber, the giant molecules calculated their own obligatory behaviors on the fly. Classroom became laboratory. Bergen dreamed that his Tinkertoy docking simulator would one day drive the actual mechanisms it symbolized. In the cybernetics of enzymes, the mousy, invisible man saw the basic switching and feedback networks of natural selection. In these shape messages telegraphing among their senders he heard whole counterpointing choirs, choruses untestable in isolation.

  Bergen stood in the Cavern, watching Ms. Klarpol's hallucinatory fronds brush up against the faces of this wayward safari. What if each of these static botanies could be made to grow, obeying internal curves like those that governed his graphic molecules? What if these plant genomes were allowed to compete with one another, egg each other on, converting the resources of simulated soil, air, water, and light into ever more convoluted conversations?

  The Cavern as crucible for simulated evolution: it was just a thought. The implementation lay, for the moment, well beyond Bergen. But the idea tickled him. One learned to build the rooms one wanted to visit. And ecology was a room that wanted visiting.

  He snagged Adie on her way out. Could I borrow your rubber trees sometime?

  She blossomed at his words. My flora and fauna are your flora and fauna. Just be sure to tell Dr. Calculus where you got them.

  She hunted down the traitor Jackdaw in his lair, where she rabbit-punched him in the sternum until he called out for mercy. What's the big idea? You betrayed me.

  What are you talking about?

  Total ambush. You turned me in to the authorities. Left me swinging in the breeze.

  What? I didn't do anything.

  Stale? Flat? Not very interactive?

  His fingers cast about anxiously for a keyboard to str
oke. Well? You let people walk through the jungle. But you dont let them walk into it.

  What in the hell is that supposed to mean?

  I can show you. Come on.

  She followed Jackdaw into the Cavern, where he gave up the secret of his recent labors. She watched him from outside the open mouth of the cube, behind the fourth wall. He stood alone in the chamber, taped with body sensors. The room came to life in a gray penumbra. Jackdaw raised one palm. Off to the east rose a roseate sunrise. He shifted his weight to one leg, lifted an arm, and turned his head. The forward portion of the room slid down the rainbow into a band of violets.

  He cycled through a suite of gyrations, wiggling like a traffic cop pegged to a busy intersection. His joints conducted the walls in a swirling Kandinsky, airbursts of color chords synched with an atonal MIDI accompaniment. He held up two fingers, and jagged lines lengthened across the horizon, thickening with the dove-flights of his hands.

  He stopped just as suddenly. You get the idea. He took off the glasses and joined her outside the cave opening.

  Adie stared into the gap between them. I'm sure it's very interesting, from a technological standpoint.

  But?

  Don't think I'm just trying to get back at you. It's ... a little tedious to watch, after the first fifteen seconds? You say our jungle is flat? Unless I missed something, you don't create any depth here at all. Sure, it's neat that you can get the color washes to back your body movements. But they're still just color washes.

  Try it. Here. Just try it for a minute. She donned the tracking glasses, skeptical.

  Keep your motions clean and distinct. Mark the starts and stops. Use your whole body, all the degrees of freedom.

  She started small. Commas with her fingertips. At first she tried to register what each motion produced. But the Pollock feedback came so thick and furious, so hard upon any plan her heels hatched, that she stopped thinking of her movements as causing the explosions ripping all around her. Her body was the sound and light.

  Nods became auroras. Angry lightning bolts loosed themselves with a shake of the head. She composed with her posture and drew by drawing breath. The uterine lining of color swallowed her—the breakthrough sensation she'd heretofore only read about. She passed into the walls, coming out on the far side, encrusted in light, her skin hovering huge around her.

  She forgot herself. Or she remembered. Dancing inside her dance, she could not say which. She embarked on a spiritual aerobics, the leap that sex never quite freed itself from self-consciousness to make. She decamped into pigment, molded, molding.

  She came out from behind the glasses and shuddered. She shook her head at the boy author, not wanting to talk about it. Aiy. She shook herself off, like her dog Pinkham, after a dousing. That's like drugs. Like being out in a stormy night on a hit of Windowpane.

  I wouldn't know.

  But it only works for the operator. The onlooker has no idea. You have to be at the steering wheel, even to imagine—

  He nodded a little sadly. One of its big problems. The other big one is that the graphics are ... what do you call them? Abstract. Sooner or later, something recognizable needs to happen. That, his voice hoped, was where she came in. Then we'll have the start of a real, live-in adventure.

  She sat safe, outside the theater, staring back at the walls where her circulatory system's sonata had just debuted. If this is just the primitive Marconi version... Television isn't even child's play. People are going to walk into these rooms, and they're never going to walk out again. Even her laugh came out bewildered. They'll starve in there. Like rats in those Skinner boxes, pressing their own pleasure buttons until they drop.

  Jackdaw perked up, pleased.

  You sure we really want to go down this road? she asked. Do we really want to hand something like this to an already addictive age? Aren't we in enough trouble the way things are?

  He squinted, not getting her. When had trouble ever been the issue?

  She thought for a long minute. I'm going to have to start all over again. From scratch.

  Sure, he said. Start small. We've found that it's not how many plates you get in the air at the same time. It's how well the plates spin.

  Start... small?

  Pick one thing. Your favorite place in existence. Something you connect to. Something you can go inside of.

  She closed her eyes and made the old pilgrimage. OK, she said, opening them. I have it.

  So what are we talking about, then?

  A bed. A bed by the shore of the Mediterranean.

  22

  This is the room life lends you to sleep in.

  Bedroom. Slaapkamer. Chambre а coucher. Simple accommodation, with all the basic fittings. Bed, washstand, chair, window, mirror: everything that you need to live. But closing your eyes, sleeping here may prove impossible. For this room fills with a relentless blaze. Clear sun pours in from all directions.

  A canted floor meets the wall in a mock horizon: the joint of earth and sky, of wheat and azure. The life that sleeps here has scuffed permanent patches in the floor's varnish. The room's real inhabitant has just stepped out. He leaves his shirts draped on the shirt rack. Their short-sleeve billow remembers his body. A straw hat, his shield from this southern sun, waits on a peg for his bared head to reclaim it. He leaves his bottles, his brush, his book on the bed stand. His towel, scudded with dirty handprints, hangs on the hook by the bathroom door.

  In the painted bedroom, the man's own paintings hang on view. The scenes his eyes have lived in cling listing to the drunken walls. They serve as this apartment's additions: tiny remodeled day rooms, cobbled onto this room of broadest day.

  The tenant has bent this apartment with his breathing. He proves, before the scientists, that space is curved. The chairs, the bed, the tilted table: each stick of furniture passes its own law of gravity. Each would-be solid lays down its own perspective, its various vanishing points scattered like buckshot in the hinted distance. No two of these pauper's objects belong to the same cubic space. The foot of the bed juts mysteriously through the doorframe. The floor swells like the loose sea. Walls and ceiling amble together by the art of compromise. The shutters give up on accommodating their casement, by turns closing inward and throwing themselves open to the Provenзal breeze.

  Is he happy, living here? Does the work of his hands please him? Do his eyes read this light's simplicity, grateful for a chance to handle it? Or do the cracks in this pitcher, the tears in the chairs' caning spell some unlivable agony?

  You know this fellow by his things. The shaving mirror above the water bowl holds his look, as surely as a photograph. His impression nestles in the wonky bed. The lay of this rented hideout explains him. There is a rhyme to how this bedroom works. It remembers the life it hides. This man's ways suffuse through his attic dormer. Sun assembles a life from these surrounding solids.

  But entering this painted life overhauls it. Your eyes change the bedclothes just by settling on them. Looking leaves its fingerprints on his glass. His towels take on your hand smudges. His shirts start to memorize the creases of your body.

  This will be your kamer, your chambre, for who can say how long. A place to enter and inhabit at will. A box whose every plank of wood furnishes your story. This life, now yours. These paintings, too, now belong to you. The bed, the chairs, the azure, the wheat, the window: everything this sleeping room speaks of will be yours, except—in such merciless light—for sleep.

  23

  Tell me, Jackdaw asked her. Where? Arles, Adie answered. Where is that, exactly? In the South of France. You know France?

  Don't abuse me. I may not get out very much. But I could find it on the Net.

  Oh, sweetie, forgive me. I'm sure you could. It's an old Roman town, in Provence. When I was a girl, we used to play a game.

  We?

  My sister and I.

  In the South of France?

  No. In our bedroom. The running average of those nine bedrooms, swapped every two years, ac
ross the air bases of the Free World.

  Did your sister have a name?

  Elise. My mother's fault. She was looking to enliven a very banal life. Elise and I used to lie in bed, across from each other, after lights-out. Hold our eyes open with our fingers, until we could see in the dark. We'd chatter away, turning the cracks in the ceiling into the Shire, Moria, Mordor...

  Been there. Made that map.

  After a couple hours, Elise would fall asleep. Weak-fleshed girl, my sister. I'd lie underneath my covers, feeling abandoned. I became the last vigilant person on Earth. The whole, dark bedroom would tighten around me. Yd lie there like a stone effigy, feet to the east, toward Jerusalem. With enough time—and eleven-year-old insomniacs have forever—I could turn my coffin into a snug ship's cabin. A first-class berth on a transatlantic crossing.

  Jackdaw nodded, replaying the trick in his own theater. After a while, just by squinting into the dark, 1 could make out the nighttime ocean through the starboard portal. I worked out this detailed saga—my sister and 1, recently orphaned, heading back to the Old World in the luxury befitting our recently recovered state. Back? Recovered?

  I've no idea where I got all that crap. One troubled little cookie, I guess. Yd lived in Germany, Turkey, Japan. But my fantasies always left me orphaned in New York. Anyway, in the dark, whatever Air Force barracks we were holed up in passed for a great stateroom. Walnut and brass. Tooled leather chairs. And I and my recently widowed sister—

  Widowed? I thought you said orphaned?

  Widowed, orphaned: depended on the night. You boys just don't get it, do you?

  Go on. You and your widowed sister...

  Me and my widowed thirteen-year-old sister furnished our cabin with a suite of priceless paintings that anyone who belonged to our same elevated station would instantly recognize.