RICHARD POWERS (31 page)

Now and then, livid signals of hope and longing shot out in bolts across the continents, messages cascading across a telephone switchboard. Adie sucked in her breath. The glistening meant something, as sure as constellations in the sky once did. The lit net flashed denser than the circuitry inside a thinking mind. It was its own goal, the home that a displaced immigrant can only dream of one day reaching.

What
...
what is it supposed to be?

The cities of the world. Talking to each other.

Yes, but what are they saying?

Two things. "Give me more energy" and "Here's what you asked for."

Last month's trading in petrochemicals,
Lim translated.

O'Reilly's eyes glinted like two more point eels in the mosaic.
Actually, they're next month's.

Lim rocked back.
You're keeping a log? We'll be able to check how well you do?

Of course.

Adie stared at the sumptuous pageant unfolding in the air around her. She paused, reluctant to step out of the diving bell. Then she walked through the projection. As she passed through the membrane, it played for a moment upon her own body.

It's lights, Ronan. Just lights.

He took a theatrical step toward her.
That's right.
He showed her his empty palms, then the backs of his hands. He stood against the north wall of the Cavern, a living silhouette, glowing with a luminous halo.
Just lights. But then, what isn't?

It's my turn,
Lim said.
Everyone out. Eleven until two. Says so on the sheet.

Yes. Your rightful hour upon the stage.
O'Reilly turned to Klarpol and offered his hand. She grabbed and inspected it, looking for the sleight.

Would you like to get a bite of something real to eat?
he asked.

Something real?

Something other than a burrito, I mean.

Who's paying?

You are.

All right, then.

They drove down the hill to a twenty-four-hour falafel shack that catered to the TeraSys late-night set.
Ulterior motive,
he told her, once they were served.

That's a redundancy. Even our revealed motives have hidden ones.

He thought for a moment, in mid-chew.
Yes.
He laughed.
Yes, you re right.
And they both returned to eating.

After some mouthfuls, she prompted him.
You were saying?

Hmm?

Your real reason for luring me into this tryst?

Oh. Right Have a look at this, then, will you? If you don't mind? Had to sign for it at the P.O. this morning.

He handed an envelope across the table, blue onionskin, exotically stamped, and fringed with the airmail barber-pole striping around its edges. Adie opened it and removed a single, handwritten sheet.

Ronan, you shiftless bastard. You were supposed to come back here by now.
Is
this a contest of wills? Because if it is, I lose.

Adie lifted her eyes from the paper. I
cant read the signature.

It says "Maura."

Wife?

Something like that. Housemate for the better part of a decade.

Adie returned to the page, the changed message.
Why are you showing me this? I mean, it's OK. I dont mind. I'm even flattered. But...

I need a woman's read. Someone who can tell me what she's saying.

What she's saying? She's saying she wants you to come back.

Hmm. It's that easy?

Yes. It's that easy. You jerk.

O'Reilly bit off a mouthful and swallowed, in one continuous motion.
What do you suppose she means by "I lose"?

Oh, for the love of... You cant mean this. Not even you. You need this spelled out?

I guess I do. First off, you ought to know that there was never any talk about my
—

Look. She wants you. She loves you. She's surrendering. Work it out, or I'll cut your balls off for her.

Ms. Klarpol. You know I can't possibly go back.

Her head shot back. I
know nothing of the sort.

You know what we're assembling here.

The Cavern? A glorified drive-in movie. Not worth screwing up a couple of lives over.

The Cavern is the race's next step. The consolidation. Nothing comparable has ever existed, except in our imaginations. And Maura wants me to walk away from it.
How
long has history been working at this device? Centuries. Millennia.

About a year, for me. And I'd trade the matter transporter in a second, and throw in the antiaging beam to boot, if someone wrote me a note like that.

They downed what remained of the fried chickpea meal in silence. They stood to go, each clinging to one side of the righteous impasse.

What I want to know,
O'Reilly said, halfway out the door, is
whether
"I
lose" might mean that she's considering the possibility of coming out here to join me.

Adie bit her lip in disgust.
Damned if I know, Ronan. Why don't you build yourself a little prediction machine and find out?

26

They laid down the old floor over the newer one, wall to wall, an inch to the inch. The synthetic white composites reverted to knotty pine. Jackdaw, Adie, and Spiegel measured and cut each wood-grained symbol, planing the cured boards like the most careful of carpenters.

They tinkered and trued, pulling up the planks from the source room and shimming them into the target. It took some doing, for the original floor at Aries had traveled a good deal. The wood was old and warped, and often refused to behave at all. But plank by plank, the salvaged floorboards agreed to lie down in their new frame.

Adie insisted that they save the spotty varnish. She wanted the worn patches translated wholesale to their same coordinates in the rebuilt
bedroom. That meant work, for origin and destination belonged to different ordinal realities.

Her goal was a floor that swam and sank just like the original, yet sat snugly on the joints of the Cavern floor it overlaid. She wanted an Aries you could walk on: a lumber bridge fitted across time and space, tongue in groove, the stains and nicks of its private history preserved intact.

Spiegel watched Adie walk across the translated boards. Where her feet trod on the illusion, Magritte-like, they occluded it. Jackdaw attended on her every hand-drawn desire. Spiegel put the postadoles-cent somewhere in his early twenties: two or three years older than Steve had been when he met the woman. Back at the beginning of creation, everyone was twenty.

Whatever made Adie choose the University of Wisconsin, Spiegel had long ago forgotten. He barely remembered his own reason for going to college in what
Life
magazine called "America's best place to live." What he remembered most about Madison was the cold. The town's average daily temperature hovered around 19 degrees. He'd followed a high-school sweetheart there, a woman whom he hoped to marry. They lost one another to multiple discoveries halfway through their first semester. So life always liked to run the little shill: the immortal cause vanishes, but the short-term effects last forever.

Stevie attended school on the Spiegel Memorial Scholarship, the family nest egg scraped together over two decades of middle-class scrimping. His parents meant the investment to give him a leg up in the practical world: fraternity membership, good connections, and a degree in civil engineering. Thirty credits into the process, little Stevie managed to sabotage all that, and more.

Madison was still reeling from its fatal bombing of the year before. The Army Math Research Center in Sterling Hall, "think tank of American militarism," had been gutted by campus radicals in the single most destructive act of sabotage in American history. The air on Lathrop Drive was still electric. A brilliant young low-temperature physicist lay dead, and a major national university stood teetering between revolution and revulsion, between
We can do anything
and
What have we done?

Steve went back home to La Crosse that second Christmas, a semester's worth of dirty laundry in tow, and dropped his own bombshell on stunned parents. He'd found his real vocation. He couldn't, in good conscience, earn one more credit in engineering. He would study to become a poet. He stopped short of the phrase "true artificer," but it was in there, knocking around the back of his cerebellum.

This was the point in such stories when the father traditionally took the newly enlightened student prince out behind the woodshed and beat the living shit out of him. Maybe the Aged P was too incredulous to deliver the beating, as he should have. Maybe, in the wake of the Army Math bombing, his father's own sickened convictions had simply dissolved. Maybe Stevie's raw exuberance carried him through. Whatever the cause, both parents simply went ashen and wished him well, writing him off to a career as a greeter at some terminal superstore up on the periphery of north suburban Kotzebue.

Some residual shred of sanity prevented Steve from telling his parents the reason for his conversion. It had come in Introduction to English Literature, a Cakewalk survey course he took to satisfy his general education requirements. The teacher
—in retrospect, probably only a hapless grad student caught up in the academic pyramiding scheme, awaiting his own superstore destiny—by way of lightening his class prep, had had each student recite and explicate a favorite poem.

And so in October of his twentieth year, Steve Spiegel sat in shock, listening to a shag-cut pug-faced girl across the room who had come to class tie-dyed on roller skates speak the words "Once out of nature I shall never take My bodily form from any natural thing."

The words, he supposed, were beautiful. The girl, he decided, was almost. But the way she said them: that was the warrant, the arrest, and the lifetime sentencing. Out of her mouth came a stream of discrete, miraculous gadgets
—tiny but mobile creatures so intricately small that generations marveled and would go on marveling at how the inventor ever got the motors into them.

Once out of nature. The train of syllables struck the boy engineer as the most inconsolably bizarre thing that the universe had ever come up with. And this female mammal uttered the words as if they were so many fearsome, ornate Tinkertoys whose existence depended upon
their having no discernible purpose under heaven. The words would not feed the speaker, nor clothe her, nor shelter her from the elements. They couldn't win her a mate, get her with child, defeat her enemies, or in any measurable way advance the cause of her survival here on earth. And yet they were among the most elaborate artifacts ever made. What was the point? How did evolution justify the colossal expenditure of energy? Once upon a time, rhythmic words might have cast some protecting spell. But that spell had broken long ago. And still the words issued from her mouth, mechanical birds mimicking living things. Sounds with meaning, but meaning to no end.

We'll put the door here,
that girl's latest update said.
Start it flush up against the back of the left-hand wall.

Spiegel and Jackdaw, her vaudeville apprentices, nodded in stereo.

We'II have to figure out what the floorboards actually look like, under the bed.

We can just reuse the piece we put in over there,
Jackdaw said, all
innocence.

No,
no. That would be cheating. We have to follow the boards that he painted, and extend them. Work outward from the bits he could see.

Jackdaw groaned.
But it's all going to be invisible in the finished product anyway.

Not to us, it isn
'
t.

"But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make." The girl's lips were a factory of ethereal phonemes. "Of hammered gold and gold enameling." Spiegel had never heard words pronounced that way
—alloys of confusion and astonishment. Her mouth became the metal-worked machine its sounds described. Whole sentences of hammered gold tumbled out of it.

Stevie might have taken her for a drama student, except for the clotted paint under her nails. She finished reciting and launched into her explication, an associative ramble through the maze of images. She'd drawn a series of pen-and-watercolor sketches, visual aids to illustrate her points. Byzantium. A gyre. The mechanical bird, which looked to Stevie like an intricate, gold-leafed, cutaway, feathery Bulova.

This woman exuded a flavor he'd forgotten ever existed. She had the scent of immediacy, of planlessness. Existence was stranger than
he'd ever realized. Every life held in its hands a bit of charcoal stick pressed from the ashes of the first campfire.

She must have felt his stare upon her as she gave her presentation. For when she brushed past him after the class let out, she asked, "That made absolutely no sense at all, did it?"

"You smell like something," he told her.

She laughed. "I'm sure you're right."

"No," he said. The breeze of association, the loose smell of free syllables played all around him. Pleasures too recently overlooked. Exercises out of the singing masters' book. "No. You smell like something my father used to keep in cans out in the garage. To clean paint brushes."

"That would be turpentine."

"Why are your fingers all green?"

She brought them up to her eyes. "It's not green. It's mostly chartreuse."

All he could do was nod.

"What do you do?" she quizzed him. Before any other data. Even before asking his name.

"Oh," he improvised, "I... write." He tipped his head to the side, toward the paperback
Collected Yeats
cradled in her chartreuse fingers. He tapped his own secondhand anthology, as if the volume were some hefty tab he'd run up at an all-night sidewalk cafe.

The bed should run from just inside that corner to right about here.
The late-day Adie impersonator, her fingers now pristine, stood on an invisible X marking a spot on the Cavern floor that corresponded to points deep beneath the grid. She stood straight, arms at her side, turning her body into a surveyor's siting stick. Jackdaw, at the console, got a bead on her. He typed some words, and a reddish rectangular block sprang up along the wall's length, up to this woman's still-callow waist.

A
little higher,
she called out. To
figure in the blankets and headboards.

Nothing in this voice still hinted at its precursor, the voice that had long ago told Spiegel, "Well, if you write, you ought to come to our Tuesday nights. In fact, I'm surprised I haven't seen you there before now."

"I mostly keep to myself. I work in a style that isn't really ... fashionable these days."