RICHARD POWERS Read online

  Then the real woman calls you. Dead on schedule. Just as one of you recovers some semblance of health, some solidifying core of self-esteem, the other one calls to crash it. At least now, the two-dollar-a-minute taxi meter and the audible satellite lag protect you from extended conversation.

  Or they would, if she weren't wild. Cost means nothing to her. Her words come through the phone like a violent cough. "Taimur. Tai. Thank God you're alive. You have to come back. Tonight. Now."

  Too pathetic, even for retaliation. You can't even rouse yourself to decent brutality.

  "I don't think so," you singsong into the receiver.

  "I skipped my period."

  You recover before the satellite link can click. "You skip every other month, Gwen. You're a high-strung, finger-pointing, street-brawling drama queen who never menstruates in the middle of a fight. Which is pretty much all the time."

  Too many adjectives, and you've lost another round. Lost her. Lost yourself. Lost the person you were trying to become by coming here, one who refuses to return knee-jerk hurt for hurt.

  She starts to sob, but softly, horribly. You hear her give up on the hope of consolation. And that, where nothing else could, makes you want to console her. Succor, once more, becomes your secret sickness. Your awful, tip-top secret.

  "Gwen. Don't start. We can't do this again. We both promised." "I need you, Tai. I can't do this by myself."

  "Cut the theater, Gwen. You're fine. Give it another couple of weeks." "I've given it eight!'

  It blossoms in you again, in the space of a second. Full-blown, the old, loving parasite you carry around inside, awaiting its chance to graze. A pillar of purity rises in your chest, so righteous it can't even be called anger. "Don't you think you ought to call the father, then?"

  "You, Taimur. You. Don't you remember? Our long goodbye?" The weekend window when she seemed almost happy, knowing you were already gone. "Nobody before. Nobody since ..."

  The words are whiplash. And yet: they must be bluff. Florid, desperate, sadistic, even by the standards that the two of you have perfected.

  "Gwen. As far as I remember from high-school biology, sperm must actually meet egg in order to—"

  "Oh fuck. Oh fuck. I knew we shouldn't have ... I told you that we shouldn't..."

  "What you said was 'Sex with your ex is asking for trouble.' In a soft, slinky voice, if I remember correctly."

  She starts shrieking, the performance over-the-top, incredible. "Come home, Tai. I can be better. You can."

  The accusation maddens you. You: better. You, who she always punished, just for being you.

  "I need you. I can't do this. Come home. Now."

  The now is hideous; it gives the game away. You don't bother to tell her: you are home. Or as close as you're going to get, for the foreseeable future. You place the still-pleading stream of hysteria back into the cradle. And you don't pick up on the ringing phone again, for several days.

  You leave the compound sometimes, between classes, for fried fava beans or a breath of air. A non-cigarette break. Escape from Butt Central. Staff doesn't like it, but no one can stay cooped up forever. You keep close, always doubling back after a few minutes.

  Today, a knot of men a little younger than you mill around on the pavement outside school, examining a flat tire. Someone approaches for help. You walk toward him and he shows you something. And the something is metal, and a gun. And then he is not. Not asking for help.

  "Please enter the car. Fast, fast."

  Three of them persuade you of the idea. They're all shouting quietly, a Chinese fire drill. An improvised skit of confusion. One ties your hands behind you. Another shoves your head down to clear the car roof, just like in the cop shows. Too fast even for fear. A crazy mistake that'll have to wait to be straightened out. Wait until they remove the greasy rag they tie around your face. Wait until they settle down.

  The engine starts. The car lurches forward. There is no flat, you realize, your thoughts even stupider than this crisis. The one sitting next to you pushes your head to the floor.

  On your way down, he presses close to your ear. "Don't worry. Don't worry. This is just political." The comic diction comforts you. These men are amateurs.

  On the floor of a dark car. Someone's foot rests on your temple, just for the thrill of disgracing you. They drive at least an hour. Maybe two. Time enough to catch up with your own pulse rate, with what's happening to you, your fatal stupidity. You give in to the heat of the floorboard, to the nail of the shoe on your skull, the sponge bath of terror. You start to quake. The rope around your wrists keeps your arms from banging together.

  The car traces an enormous circle. They are playing some insane charade of distance, doubling back, trying to throw you off. You want to call out to them to get where they're going. You're long since lost. But every sound from you elicits a hiss and a heel crush.

  They stop. They bang you out of the car. You cock back your head, to see beneath the oily blindfold. Someone chops you hard in the neck. They drag you, doubled over, inside.

  They take your keys and the trinkets from your pockets. Your Swiss Army knife causes a buzz out of proportion to its two pinkie blades and nail clippers.

  They confiscate your wallet, pulling it apart piece by piece. They demand an account of every scrap and wrapper. Your expired organ donor declarations. Your eyeglass prescription. Your student ID, ten years obsolete. Bank cards that you couldn't use anywhere within a thousand kilometers.

  "What is this?" a venomous tenor shouts at you, sticking each enigma under your blindfold for inspection. "What these numbers mean?"

  "Those ... are phone numbers. Phone numbers of friends in America."

  "Don't lie!" Another pair of hands slams you from the rear, more for the drama than for the pain.

  "Codes," a neutral voice declares.

  "Not codes. Phone numbers. Go ahead. Call them. Tell them I say hello."

  The voice laughs without humor.

  Another bodiless voice draws close to your face. "You American? Why you look like a Arab?"

  You curse your failure to memorize the fourteen splinter groups. Who are these people? What do they need to hear? Answer wrong and you will never answer again. They'll kill you for your political ignorance.

  "Why?" your interrogator shouts. "What kind of name is Taimur Martin?"

  The question you grew up with. Your gut snaps tight. You roll the die and answer: "I am ... half Iranian."

  Rapid bursts of translation pass among several people. They argue, climbing up the pitches of virulent Arabic. You've never realized how much you need your eyes to converse.

  "Where your passport?"

  "I... didn't think I'd need it when I stepped out of the compound."

  For a moment they soften, pat you on the shoulder. They shuffle around in the invisible room, collecting your things. They'll put you back in the car, return you to the school, drop you off, and fade back into whatever lunatic cabal of posturing boys put them up to this stunt.

  Instead, they strip and search you. The hunt grows violent. Your body starts to convulse again. You will shit all over the floor. You will die here, and you won't even know why.

  "Please, not the necklace," you beg. "That's a present. A gift from a—

  "Don't call us thieves." Spit sprays your cheek. And the necklace, Gwen's good-luck charm, disappears into the political.

  They want names. Names of who? It's absurd. They can spot an American from ten kilometers, if they only look. What would they do with names? Saunter up and down the street, calling them out? Still they ask, but listlessly, a dry read-through of the barest minimum script.

  "Tell us what we ask. We know how to use ... electricity. You understand?"

  You understand. You fake a weak composure. You tell them you'll do whatever they ask.

  "What are you doing here?"

  You cannot stop yourself. "You kidnapped me."

  Something cracks you just above the left ear. Lights explode aga
inst the curtain of your blindfold. You bite into your tongue. You vomit, stinging and dry, in your mouth.

  "What are you doing here?"

  "I am a teacher." Slower and slower. "I give conversational English lessons at—"

  "You are stupid. Big shit. You are American spy. You are CIA."

  The first objecting syllable out of your throat whips your interrogator into fury. "You lie. You liel We know why you come here. We know about your big secret."

  Connections light you up at last. It comes back to you, the vanished lesson from your teacher-training days in Des Moines. The first rule of any classroom: Never resort to irony.

  8

  The first generation of imaginary landscapes began pouring from the simulator just as Adie settled in to her own new one. She took only a few weeks to see just what chambers the Cavern meant to mimic. She stood inside the room-sized box, watching a stream of images flicker across those living walls, the last, baffled Neanderthal standing by as Homo sapiens launched its breakout.

  With her olive pullovers and her four-foot hank of hair falling like the stern line of a sponge boat in a braid down her back, she drew mixed reviews from the doughnut-packing hackers. Rajan Rajasun-daran and the signal-processing team found her a mild abrasion. Ronan O'Reilly, the econometric modeler, plied her with polite indifference. Jackdaw Acquerelli responded to her like a spooled background process. Sue Loque slammed her New York provincialism at every opportunity. Spider Lim lavished her with almost ethnographic attention. Adie, for her part, clung to Stevie Spiegel. But the scent of an old friend only made the air of this new planet harder to breathe.

  Jonathan Freese, the RL director, dragged her down the mountainside to a cafe. Over a healthy shot of triple mocha, he launched into a rambling monologue on Parmigianino, Tiepolo, and the baptistery doors at Pisa. Like asking your first black neighbor over to listen to your Duke Ellington.

  A marvelous thing, the greatest pleasure were allowed. Art. It's OK, she assured him. I'm not really all that into it. Freese, pushing fifty, was a good twenty years older than the lab's median age. He mimicked the general Birkenstock look. Yet he looked a shade less anarchical than the programmers who worked for him, crisper, more pigmented, as if he still got outside now and

  then.

  Would you care for some bran muffin? he asked. Good source of roughage, you know.

  Adie declined, sticking to her herbal tea and arrowroot biscuit. Jonathan, I need to ask you something.

  Name it.

  He might have sold encyclopedias, or utopian communities, or patriotic evidence to Senate investigations.

  I'm not sure that Г'т doing what's expected of me, she told him. I want you to get your money's worth.

  Well, first of all, think of your first year as a learning fellowship. It's not really a question of our getting our money's worth. It's more of a question of you getting your time's worth.

  Jonathan, be straight with me.

  I am straight. The higher-ups are all impressed by your work.

  What work? I haven't done any work.

  Your portfolio. We just want to put you together with a bunch of other talented people and see what synergies come out.

  What exactly is a synergy?

  He laughed, without losing track of a single bran crumb. That's what everyone's trying to figure out.

  She felt the force of this man's competence. He exuded an aura of the true administrator, the square-jawed command of those who understand how human organizations work. She saw why people of both sexes tried so hard to please him.

  The Realization Lab is just a research facility at present. TeraSys doesn't have to get its money's worth out of us yet. Not directly, anyway. The Cavern is an experiment in assembling several advanced technologies. We simply want to see what the world is going to look like a few years down the rail cut.

  But how do they pay for us?

  Freese swallowed a careful packet of bran muffin and then laughed again. Something in that laugh nagged at Adie: the mirth of a man who belonged to a chain of being much larger than he was.

  TeraSys has had a bit of a tax liability in the last few years, in case you've been living in Giverny and missed the annual reports. It can do no wrong, as far as windfall revenues go. R-and-D costs are the best write-offs available, and even those only make the problem worse, in the long run. What exactly is this so-called research supposed to feel like? Like any kind of exploration, I imagine. Like working up an altar-piece.

  I can't possibly be contributing anything useful to this group. Any one of you knows more about art than I do. You have people who can make— None of us knows what to do with this stuff. We need your hand.

  Your eye.

  But I'm just thrashing around.

  That's what learning is.

  I need something specific to do.

  Do? Do what you always do.

  That would be making pretty designs to commercial specification.

  The last of his muffin and mocha disappeared cleanly down the air lock. He smiled, the pan-and-scan smile of the career diplomat.

  Look: Adie. I'll give you exact specifications. Make us the most beautiful Cavern room you can think of. Learn things. Enjoy yourself.

  Learn. Enjoy. Make something beautiful. The man came from another galaxy. One that Adie had abandoned when she gave up art. One that art had abandoned around the turn of the century. Freese cupped her elbow in a friendly send-off. He stood to go, already striding back to his own corner of the RL in his seven-league, open-toed sandals.

  She tried to get the real story from Jackdaw. The gentle Martian boy was as far from Freese's clipped competence as she could imagine. Between the two males, she hoped for something like a 3-D explanation. She found Acquerelli in his cubicle, in a network chat room. He scurried off-line, embarrassed, as she entered.

  Jackdaw. Explain something to me. What are we doing here?

  Doing? Eager, earnest, and utterly perplexed.

  What's our business? What exactly is the end product?

  He nodded his head encouragingly. Question: check. Parsed: check. Answer match: check. Virtual Environments, he said, still nodding.

  No, I mean, how do you sell what we create? Who's buying? Why are we making these rooms?

  Jackdaw thought a minute, flicking his eyes up and away, scanning some distant video scratch buffer. Well. I guess, mostly what we do is demo?

  Good. Demo. Go on. Demos for... ?

  For the Nametags.

  She'd seen them. Groups of eager techies, under escort, touring the premises at odd hours. Earnest guys wearing TeraSys lapel pins who ducked and flinched in the Cavern during Jackdaw and Spiegel's simulated roller-coaster rides. No one had quite laid it out for her in so many words. The Realization Lab was a ruinously expensive classroom, a mental wind chamber. She had no problem with the arrangement, once she understood it. The knowledge sprung her. Freed her to labor over Rousseau's trousseau, to prune and water and fertilize her laurel sprig, to turn it into a teeming jungle.

  Like an evening game of statue-maker drawing children out of the neighborhood's lit houses, Adie's creeping philodendrons brought all manner of players out of the redwood woodwork. They came by twilight to her cubicle, nocturnal creatures peeking through the undergrowth like Rousseau's monkeys and lions.

  Each contributed some custom function or subroutine. Loque helped with the surface rendering. Even after she went home for the night, Sue would go on answering Adie's 911 calls. She steered the new girl around blind, over the phone, like ground control giving the stewardess a crash course in flying after the cockpit gets sideswiped by a Cessna. Hon, hon. Don't panic. We got you. Now, how are you holding the mouse? Which way is the little wire tail pointing?

  Loque trained her in the high-level visual environment, its friendly paintbox metaphor protecting Adie from the intricacies underneath. Adie scorned the scanner, painting by hand into a slate that sensed the weight and bruise of her fingers' every movement. Charcoal, chal
k, spray can: the paintbox mimicked every natural tool she'd ever used, as well as several unnatural ones. She could smudge and unsmudge, spatter, crisp, paint with potato or foil, even invent brushes of any shape or property, magic brushes that lifted or plumped or selectively edged some narrow band of crimson three shades toward gold, brushes that watermarked or cloned or cross-faded while still managing to undo the last dozen things that any other brush had done.

  This was the way the angels in heaven painted: less with their hands than with their mind. She had never imagined that life would grant her such license. Some tasks were clumsier or more infuriating to perform than their oil or acrylic counterparts. Others were no less than miracles, closed loops between brain, eye, fingers, and screen that revolved within themselves, cosmic elaborations of light, visual excursions deep and dimensionless, color-chord progressions that admitted no beginning or end. But within two months, the miracles naturalized, and Adie habituated to them as she once had to her first set of colored pencils.

  Spiegel taught her how to assemble a few shoots into massed, cir-cumnavigable corsages. A single plant, by itself, was still just an image. But two plants next to each other in space, linked by data's rhizome, became the semblance of a live-in bower. From her workstation screen, Adie's hand-painted bouquets went out to an object script packager for transplanting to the virtual garden beds. All she lacked was dirt under her fingernails.

  Vulgamott came by just to fuss, New Yorker to New Yorker. Make sure you re leaving enough space between those plants. It's not the foliage that makes this painting so brilliant. It's all the space he somehow manages to cram in between.

  Dont worry, Michael. Гт good with air. Air is easy. There'll be plenty of air in the finished weed patch.

  Once, she could have scrutinized the original Dream, whenever she wished. That canvas hung in her own personal attic, at MoMA, one flight up from the cafeteria where she had bussed tables and peddled coffee. Once she had lived almost close enough to hear the spillover from that flute player's tune. Now she had to scour around a little toy town of a port city for the best reproductions of the image she could lay her hands on, testing the defects of each against the print that still hung in her mind's clearing.