RICHARD POWERS Read online

  With nothing but touch, she unlocked a loft inside him, boarded up since college. He made love to a long-dead invention, she to the only person who loved her ex-husband more than she did. Sleeping together became a dare, a mutual suicide pact to cast off the last drag of ballast and lose what was left to lose. To raise loss to the level of high art. To scatter projection to the winds and push the past down into pure aesthetics.

  They clung to each other as if it couldn't be obscene, so long as neither looked. Spiegel broke the pact of silence first. Less than two weeks after their return from Ohio, Adie logged in to her Cavern workspace. There, a missive in a bottle waited to ambush her. It launched itself from a niche in system memory that Adie thought had been empty. She scrambled to don a pair of stereo glasses. Beyond that, all she could do was stand and watch.

  From out of nothing's well colors rose up. Specks of light off at various horizons rushed toward her from a slew of deep-space vanishing points. Space expanded along all axes at once. Her body succumbed to the pull of conflicting vertigos while the sky around her scattered with novas. Each star migrated to its own slot on the spectrum, only to split again into something fuller. The bursts bent closer over her, fireworks drooping back to awe their earthbound audience. Their flares passed a threshold of definition where she at last made them out: descendants of that first wire-frame leaf that Lim had made for her. Cut blooms from her abandoned jungle.

  Petals rained down into the space around her. The full weight of the bouquet pressed against her eyes. She laughed at the trick, astonished. She flashed in anger. How dare Spiegel steal her tool set? The vector-drawn blossoms drew near, blowing away all pretense of ownership. These growths weren't hers to copyright. Even Rousseau had stolen them from too many sources to start counting now. Every human mark was mortgaged to the hilt.

  She stood in this petal shower, someone's gift to her, someone from whom she had only taken. The day was coming, faster than these fireworks fell, a day when anyone could give shape to their innermost space and leave it on another's digital doorstep. All our private declarations of long love would come home for inhabiting.

  The petals expanded until they had no more place to grow. Adie stood surrounded in a circle of stamens taller than she. The corsage grew bigger than the room that held it. The walls flashed pink, dragging her below the tissue surface. Still the view zoomed in. She passed through the cell wall and into a sea of cytoplasm, ever deeper down, punctuated by chaotic phase changes at each shift in gauge. Skeins of biochemical skeleton, pirated from Bergen's Molecule Room, rose up around her.

  At last she found herself in another jungle, the flowers now huge colored spheres of amino acids, their entwined stems a dance of protein chains. The molecule bouquets bobbed on all sides of her, eager in space, whichever way she turned her head. And up flush against her, whispering binaurally close to her ear, the voice of the man who'd made her this living card said, See what a flower I have found you!

  Darkness brought her back. When she again located the size of her own body, she used it to walk out of the Cavern and down the hall to the man's cubicle. Steve sat at his own workstation, toying with variable declarations.

  It's beautiful, she told him.

  She dropped herself into the scoop of plastic next to his desk that passed for a chair. The race that engineered the Cavern could not design a chair that comfortably fit the shape of a seated human being.

  She shook her head at the colors she still saw. So fast, she said. So quick.

  Adie! How long have I known you? How slow do you want to go? Oh. No. Real blood shot up to crimson her face. Not that! I mean, you built that... piece so fast. A few days.

  He leaned forward. He put his hand to her mouth, palm flat, as if he were blind and gazing on her for the first time. J used one hundred percent existing parts.

  It felt by turns sacred and profane. A man lay between them in bed, dying between them in an unattended nowhere, having lost the last control over his body. They both made love to him.

  I lived with you so long, he said to her, in the dark. My whole adult life. Every year, you seemed more solid to me. And every year, I felt less real. I thought of you for so long, I felt myself becoming you.

  She let him talk.

  She brought Pinkham, whenever she came to stay the night with him. Love me, love my dog.

  Oh, I love your dog, all right. I haven't decided yet what to make of you.

  And sometimes, stretched in bed, he'd watch her transported, tranced out, waiting on the edge of herself for the rapture to come, steering her whole body with telekinesis toward climax, moving herself the way she had once, as a girl, moved the shutters of that painted

  room.

  Release would plunge her into a postcoital abyss so profound she would burst into tears, lost in the depths that such filling opened up. It was the greatest sadness that life offered, consummation.

  It's nothing, she'd say, trying to keep her devastation from him. It's not you. It's just physiology.

  Do you want... not to do this anymore?

  You quit on me now and I'll kill you.

  And sometimes, after they lost themselves to their bodies and lay slack, he'd look out to see her surreptitiously flexing her fists, balling and sloughing her thighs, as if to prove she still could. Recovering those moves for the one who had lost them.

  Once, as they made slow, memory-stricken love, the phone rang. The obedient answering-machine speaker broadcast a message so thick and garbled it seemed a prank call. De ... nise ... Giran ... dell Triumph blazed from the petrified voice.

  Stcvie tried to stop, all the sadness of existence pressing down on the small of his back. But pressing upward against him, Adie kept him inside her until their plosive end.

  She held her own little memorial service in advance. It could not happen at home, now that another lived there. And the lab, of course, was out of the question. That left only the infinite outdoors.

  She bought a battery-driven boom box, skulking through the purchase as if she were buying child pornography. She hid it in the backseat of the Volvo, and took it up into the strip of woods on her island's northwest coast. She parked off the road and, with a little judicious trespassing, made her way out of public earshot.

  There under the canopy—Look at that tree! Look at that... tree!— she held her wordless service. She played it once through, the shameless bit of ravishing nostalgia Ted wished he could have written but would never be able to. Tribute, buyoff, plea bargain, indulgence: she could not say what the archaic song sounded like, except that it sounded like him.

  Before Dives and Lazarus could exhaust itself once more, she heard a person coming through the undergrowth. Despite her precautions, someone had heard. There was no place left on earth far enough away to be inaudible.

  She thought to hit the Stop button and scamper off before she could be caught. But the tune still had a few measures to go, and the sound of its cadence made her ready to suffer the consequences. A gnarled, bearded lumberjack in a red plaid shirt and jeans came through the thicket, glaring at her. He slowed his arrival to coincide with the music's end.

  She launched into her apologies even before the last note died away. I'm sorry. I'm on your property, aren't I? I was just... It won't happen —

  Thank you, the man interrupted her. I'd completely forgotten that that piece existed.

  With one stray word, they had stumbled onto the Cavern room Adie was after. But they could get no farther than that word. Together, Spiegel and Klarpol brought their lone clue to Vulgamott.

  Byzantium? As in the empire? Adie nodded her head. Steve shook his. Byzantium, as in the Yeats poem, Spiegel said. Ask O'Reilly. He's the Irishman.

  Well. Ronan eyed them. It's not really my favorite of his poems, you see.

  Which is?

  "Meditations in Time of Civil War?"

  He pronounced the word to rhyme with "far." The Americans studied one another.

  Buy you a pint if you recite?
/>   You could have gotten it for free, woman. But it's too late now. They went over to The Office, where the standing suite of TVs offered the full range of available data streams. O'Reilly parked them in a booth in front of the drive-through news headlines. Apparently history was still in the throes of ending. The largest, most heavily armed nation on earth was cracking apart, apparatchik by apparatchik, scattering its warheads into a host of makeshift republics. Western experts were fanning out through the Eastern Bloc, ministering to the total economic disintegration by doling out shock therapy.

  The beers arrived. O'Reilly warmed to his. You think the fourteenth century was a free-for-all? You think the Dark Ages were a major step backward? Amateur night, my friends. Small change. We're watching the show that those acts merely opened for.

  Spiegel laughed at the hyperbole. Come on, Ronan. What are you talking about? The Cold War's over. The most destructive suck of resources in history.

  Well, that's your problem right there, friend.

  What? You're going to get nostalgic for Mutually Assured Destruction, just because it was familiar?

  It kept things in check, that particular madness. It kept those resources of yours from realizing their full capacities. Ronan, Adie said, I've never seen you like this. That's because I've never been like this.

  The news cycled through its cavalcade. Europe's vacationland, Yugoslavia, prepared to repeat the unthinkable.

  All right, we have a problem there, Steve conceded. But doesn't that whole morass go back to the Ottomans?

  The Iraqis still occupied by force the world's most concentrated dome of oil, invited there by the United States, which now threatened Armageddon if they did not vacate.

  Stevie fidgeted. Well, you can't use the Middle East to prove anything. The Middle East has been self-destructing since the dawn of civilization.

  Now we know the reason for the oil price hike that my model predicted a few months ago. Too bad I couldn't predict the cause.

  They'll have to back down, Adie said. It's suicide otherwise, isn't it?

  O'Reilly pointed to her, then put the tip of his pointer to his own nose.

  The news stories did not wait for explanation. They went on to describe an American prison population greater than Orlando, with a per capita cost that outstripped most Ivy League schools. Lockups, the cable said, had doubled in less than a decade, making no discernible dent in the crime rate. O'Reilly glanced over at the Americans and raised his eyebrows.

  Spiegel shrugged. We're a lawless people, Marshal. Always have been.

  Adie thumped the booth. Hey! You promised us a recitation here. We're not picking up your tab if you don't deliver.

  "Meditations in Time of Civil War"?

  Adie nodded. Stevie shook his head.

  O'Reilly looked into the foam on his beer, reading the scraps of text there. It's that bit toward the end, he said. The Stare's Nest at My Window. The words, when he finally spoke them, came out in astonished starts, like a gift left on the table of an empty room, locked from the inside.

  The bees build in the crevices

  Of loosening masonry, and there

  The mother birds bring grubs and flies.

  My wall is loosening; honey-bees,

  Come build in the empty house of the stare.

  Each looked away from the others, into a lost place. O'Reilly on his country, Spiegel on his abandoned calling, and Klarpol on the bee-loud Crayon World.

  -----------------------------

  O'Reilly's despair revealed itself in another collective shit-shoot at week's end. Freese called a meeting and laid out the revised timetable for the next half a year, leading up to the commercial Cavern rollout in the spring. Then he threw open the floor to the usual free-range futurism that any gathering of two or more of them always degenerated into.

  Everyone agreed that the data transfer rates would continue to rise without foreseeable limit. Lim predicted they'd be able to move complex surfaces around at film quality without dropping a frame by the mid-nineties. When the curve of data compression and the curve of bandwidth crossed, people would be able to swap imaginative spaces as easily as they now traded roses or bottles of Chardonnay.

  But who's going to make those spaces? Vulgamott wanted to know. Doesn't matter how wide the pipes get, if all we're going to pump through them is shit.

  Aesthetic elitist, Rajasundaran said. You don't think that content is also an engineering problem?

  Just you wait, Mikey. Once the Cavern develops an installed client base, things are really going to take off. Loque rolled the threat of fecundity around on her tongue tip, savoring it. If we can get the kinks out of voice-activated, user-directed, high-level VR-CAD, virtual spaces are going to come pouring out as fast as users can dream them up.

  Vulgamott cocked his head. And when exactly is this breakthrough slated to happen?

  By the end of the decade, Loque said.

  Century, Jackdaw corrected.

  Millennium, Rajan deadpanned.

  Wait until the immersant starts to design pilot worlds on the fly. Clearly Loque couldn't wait. Who knows what will come pissing out of the collective imagination.

  Kaladjian almost choked. Who wants to live in a world pissed on by the collective imagination?

  We're approaching the point of full symbolic liberation. Free and infinite creation of imagery. Loque almost sang it, gospel-style.

  What's the point? Ebesen asked. Wasn't there enough imagery out there already?

  But reality had never been large enough, because the body had never been large enough for the thing it hosted. Where else but in the imagination could such a kludge live? The engineers carried on speculating. Human appetite would not stop short of the fully deformable universe. The walk-in hologram was right around the corner. Full-body force-feedback devices would extend illusion to the crucial sense of touch.

  Electronic skin promised pleasures deeper than the real thing. Full six-direction telepresence would follow shortly thereafter, linking the mind to remote robotic agents anywhere in space, lifting human senses off the face of the planet.

  Jackdaw opened up the latest hot topic—painting images directly onto the human retina. A couple of competing groups were busy honing micro-scanning lasers up to 10K by 10K scan lines, close enough to the resolving power of the retina to call an image continuous. Now if you can get the bandwidth to flip these images at fusing rates, you can take direct control of the whole field of vision. The complete airspace ...

  Belief, Adie said, is not a question of bandwidth.

  Lim looked surprised. What else can it be? That's the variable, isn't it? A question of how much symbol you can fit in the pipe at one go ...?

  I'm taking bets, Raj announced. On the precise year that computer-generated worlds will first be mistaken for NSR.

  NSR? hapless Adie asked.

  Non-simulated reality. You know. The secular world. All this opaque stuff.

  They got together an ad hoc office pool. Everybody agreed to put up 1 percent of the pots of money they were all going to make, once their machine started selling. The one who came closest to guessing the year that simulation finally surpassed reality would win the kitty?

  In the midst of the general hilarity, O'Reilly dropped his bomb. It's all well and good for this business to have a long-term game plan. But if you're really interested in the future, you'll want to hear my latest projections.

  Having predicted, out of the blue, the current oil crisis, O'Reilly's models were enjoying a surge in market value. He invited a band of stragglers from the dispersing group into the Cavern. They stood inside his global interface, looking up on the planet's closed surface.

  You're looking at the latest recursively updating map of world petrochemical production and consumption. He gave them a crash course in reading the data, the thermometer of colors from cold to hot. We'll start in 1990. The fractal smoke curls unfolded and refolded in such beauty that the band gasped in pleasure.

  This looks ju
st like one of our Weather Rooms, Sybil Stance said. Like our ocean current work.

  You're manufacturing some very pretty singularities there, Freese

  added.

  Bergen whistled. We get these same cascade effects in the new biosim.

  The Red Spot of Jupiter, Spiegel decided.

  O'Reilly ticked off the count. OK: here's 2000. The hots got hotter and the cools cooled off. Here's 2010.

  He called out the mileposts without passion, having seen the sequence unfold countless times. The color zones began to break up and mix more richly. They spilled like ice crystals across a frozen pane. They swirled like paints on a child's easel. They fused like molten elements in the hearts of stars.

  By 2020, all the earth's surfaces began tending toward the higher frequencies. Even the lagging continents started to heat up. The whole globe went beet red, blushing or holding its breath. At 2030, the color map staggered, stumbled, then plummeted. All tones free-fell toward

  blue.

  After two or three attempts to stabilize, the remaining lit nations settled in around a handful of campfires. One by one, these too blinked out. Lim teetered on his feet and had to be walked around to keep from blacking out. The little band of virtual pilgrims stood in the dark,

  tittering.

  Rajan broke the silence. Amazing. I'd never have seen it if I hadn't believed it.

  Kaladjian gave in to outrage. How can you presume to model that far out with any semblance of accuracy? Between faulty assumptions and compounding error, you're in fantasy land before you get two years down the road.

  You know the funny thing? O'Reilly replied. I've run it a few hundred times, tweaking all sorts of parameters, sometimes quite dramatically. And I always get something like this.

  What about all the unknowns? Political upheavals. Crazy heads of state. Grassroots revolutions. Technological breakthroughs ...

  They're in the model.

  How can they be in the model? You don't know them. That's the whole point. They're random events.