RICHARD POWERS (9 page)

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 f
or... ?

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, chalk, 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.

Most nights between ten-thirty and quarter to eleven, Karl Ebesen checked in to say good night. Or so Adie assumed, for on these visits, the senior visual designer mostly said nothing at all. He'd show up in a streaked trench coat, a prop out of some Mitchum film noir, his ratty portfolio of the day's digitizing under one arm. He'd heave himself into the corner across from Adie's workstation, capitulating to the gravity he'd fended off for five decades, wheezing through his mouth and scowling.

She'd ask him about the architectural fly-through that he and Vulgamott were assembling. Ebesen would answer snidely or just wave her off. Over the course of several evenings, Adie settled into returning the man's morose silences with the mirror of her own. The idiom had for Adie a comforting familiarity. The silent conversation of her childhood. The absence she was raised in.

Ebesen would sit mute for anywhere from five minutes to an hour, then shuffle off like one of those benign street people down by the ferry docks who accept all offered change without once asking for any. She came to think of Ebesen as her guardian bagman. Any sign of human drama caused him to slink off to whatever Presbyterian soup kitchen had coughed him up. When Karl was around, she could talk out loud without worrying about anyone answering. Drawing into a digital graphics tablet seemed less displacing, in the shadow of this odder interface.

Then one night, the derelict talked back. She was chattering, just making noise while her hand moved around the bits on her electronic palette, a little verbal dribbling, spinning through sentences the way some people spin through radio stations on the car dial, with no real intention of landing anywhere.

All these creatures,
she said.
All these animal eyes. What are they all looking at? An elephant, a snake, two birds, two lions, two monkeys ...

How many monkeys?
Ebesen sneered. A barking seal after the emergency tracheotomy.

Adie whipped around from her workstation. She stared at the man in the corner, the one she'd stopped looking up at half a dozen visits ago. He had his head down, circling ads in an old travel magazine with a red felt pen. She looked back at the twenty prints of the painting taped over every free corner of her cubicle. And saw the third monkey.

Bit by bit, bouquet by bouquet, she reconstructed the painted
Dream.
Every six days, she took her week's handiwork into the Cavern for a road test. Spiegel found her there one night, passing dismayed through a stand of Rousseau's head-high, alien anemones.

Stevie, help me. Nothing has depth. All the pieces are so planar. I want real furniture in my dollhouse. Not just cardboard flats.

He crafted her a solid lozenge, a blank batten upon which to paste her petals' surfaces. For each new blossom, now, she invented those sides hinted at but hidden in the plane of paint. Front folded seamlessly to back, and the flower stayed bulky from all points of the compass. Not much
—and yet, dimension. All the axes that we're given to live in.

The vessel took form, piece by piece, each separate square of hull arc-welded onto the mold of the master scaffolding. Klarpol became a tourist in her own Eden. Her wand and glasses did more than bring the jungle to her eyes. They spied back on her, gathering the data streams released by her every glance. The lenses that tracked her head also logged her glances into saved tables, files of code detailing the angles her eyes subtended, the time she spent focusing on each leaf, the errors her glimpse made in selecting its target, the tries she took in moving through these blooms that, even here, in her infant clumsiness, had already commenced using her
...

9

She would come from the Cavern recharged, in search of new techniques. Desire forced her out into the halls of the RL, that commonwealth beyond her cubicle, looking for new repertoire. In such a state, on a rainy spring evening, she found Spider Lim slumped over his workstation in a baby coma. He sat still, intent upon the screen, but dazed. Frothy, arrested, viscid, like someone in the first stages of hypo-glycemia. His fingers no longer clacked at their keys. He'd gone off elsewhere, lost down the successive iterations of a nested loop.

Adie called him. Spider just sat there, holding the keyboard, sub-audibly humming some catchy MIDI pop-synth arrangement. She bolted down the hall for the nearest live body. She found Steve and Rajan Rajasundaran, deep in conversation.