RICHARD POWERS (14 page)

Even its ceiling rises forever. High overhead, above the atmospheric tree line, past the edge where color thins out beyond blue, electronic kingfishers hover. Each beats its wings in blackness, fixed in place above its assigned coordinates. Stationary passenger pigeons, message-bearing corbies, each bird is but a bit in the widest imaginable linkup. Perched in their geosynchronous orbits, the birds root out all data and beam it back down to the ground below. There, a trillion worker ants cull the factual wheat from its fallacious chaff, blind to the upshot of their tireless winnowing. The global economic simulator sieves out an answer in nanoseconds, in no time. This room can snare any fact you wish, faster than a gentled pointer can fetch your morning paper.

The cells of a continuous compound lens now cap the whole heavens above this ceiling. Near and far are as nothing. Scale is no issue. The Economics Room can zoom from the neighborhood fruit stand all the way up through the G7 annual deficits. Its simulation means to render mystery visible. To turn the market's enigmatic piano rolls into freewheeling rags. To throw open the global portfolios to public inspection, for close reading.

A crimson comet, at ten o'clock, just above the horizon, paints an upturn in third-quarter commodities. A rose of starbursts means stubborn unemployment. Hidden relations spill out, suddenly obvious, from a twist of the tabular data. Tendencies float like lanterns across the face of a summer's night.

In the Economics Room, you can freeze a frame or skip ten million. The press of a button throws a clean model eon into fast-forward or a hard reverse. The economics map requires only four colors, but can splinter into forty or four billion. Animated maps enact last season's cod haul off Georges Bank, this week's top box-office grossers, four centuries of Lycian olive pressing.

This room is deeper than its interface makes out. Bigger than will fit into the space that houses it. All the world's predictors, running flat out, fall back surprised by their own outcomes. Fresh winds mix, mistral on sirocco, chinook against levanter, khamsin with bise. Cusps touch off one another. Trends compound, too quick to name. Yugoslavian prices rise three thousand percent. Drought and war destroy East Africa.
Argentina heads into free fall. China comes alive, threatening to swamp the continental balance of trade. Sweeping liberalizations cascade. The median keeps to a holding pattern. Vested interests bitterly dig in. Something is at work here, something momentous. You need only stand in mid-room and look. Once-in-a-lifetime headlines flower immodestly, poking up like shameless patches of crocus in the unmown spring. Yet no image can say what this sprouting means. Import remains oblique, geological, obscure. Interpretation is a sleight of hand, reversing itself with each new read. Streams of bits combine to produce a pocket score, astonishing, symphonic, but too small to read.

The data are here, in surfeit. In fact, this flood of noise and color never abates long enough to submit to a basin. Events transpire too fast to register before they go obsolete. Who can take their eyes off the ticker long enough to tabulate?

But here you can eavesdrop on the chaos of voices. When that shipyard on the North Sea erupts again, you can examine the underlying inputs. Production as a function of hours. Hours as a function of volatility. Volatility as a function of morale. Morale as a function of expectation. Expectation as a function of income. Income as a function of production. This room combs out the Gordian tangle. Here you can watch the revolution unfold, at any speed, along any axis, at any magnification, testing each infinitesimal contingency's effect on every other.

The kingfisher satellites swoop down, hitting their minnowed marks. They snatch the silver data aloft, flapping in blackness, before dropping the catch back down to the globe's surface, where it replicates, shooting the rapids of broadband relays and repeaters, transmitter to transmitter, pooling ever more downstream, to school in the hatcheries of petabyte shoals.

In this room of open prediction, facts flash like a headland light. The search flares burst around you where you stand, lost in an informational fantasia: tangled graphical dances of devaluation, industrial upheaval, protective tariffs, striking shipbuilders, the G7, Paraguay, Kabul. The sweep of the digital
—now beyond its inventors' collective ability to index—falls back, cowed by the sprawl of the runaway analog.

Five billion parallel processors, each a world economy, update, revise, negate one another, capsize the simulation, pumping their dissatisfied gross national product beyond the reach of number.

This sea defeats all navigation. At best, the model can say only where in this, our flood, we will drown. Walk from this diorama on a May evening and feel the earth's persistent fact gust against your face. Sure as this disclosing spring breeze, it blows. Data survive all hope of learning. But hope must learn how to survive the data.

14

A woman, dead for a decade, steps out of a yellow Volvo. Walks back into a life that recalls her shape better than it remembers its own.

Of course she chose the worst imaginable moment to materialize. Returned to Karl Ebesen's life just to survey the maximum extent of the rubble. Came back to find him holed up in a decrepit trailer, on a lot that flooded from October to June, subsisting on microwave lasagna and apple chips, living only to get the work out, serving his daily penance with a precision that spooked even his most intense colleagues. Prepared to concede the final slide into bagmanhood.

Not exactly the state he cared to be found in. Not the ghost he cared to be found by, in any state. But that was how ghosts chose their moments. Disruption: the only gift that memory had to give.

Of course the ghost had no idea who she was. They never did. No sense of her death or untimely resurrection. The Volvo returned, day after day, obstinately yellow, to haunt its slot in the asphalt parking lot. Clearly the corpse came here to dog him. The only thing Ebesen couldn't figure out was the reason.

He made himself known to the woman. He paid evening visits to her cubicle, freely showing her the wreck of his present self. He spoke as little as possible, for her voice destroyed the illusion. He just sat in her presence, under the available cover, fussing with acetate stills or marking up old magazines with a greasy highlighter, trying not to stare at her. Hoping to dispel the ephemeral resemblance.

This living woman stayed a dead ringer, although the physical match was, in truth, but slight. Coloration similar, if the light was low enough. Height, build, and other such irrelevancies, close enough to pass. The eyes, cheeks, and jaw were only rough approximations, the best that God's plastic surgeons could restore them to. But the whole was Gail, as much as Gail had ever been.

Even now, Ebesen might have sketched the dead woman from memory and gotten more of her than any of the photographs that had graced her closed-casket wake. But he couldn't reconstruct this living woman's cheekbones from one night to the next. He, whose draftsman's talents had always inclined toward that embarrassing anachronism, the human likeness; he, who might have made a brilliant portraitist, had he lived two centuries ago: he simply could not resolve this Adie's face into its gaunt primitives. His mind couldn't see her to draw her.

He'd felt the same doubt with the dead woman once, when she still lived. Every day that the two of them had spent together. The nagging suspicion that Gail was, in fact, her own succubus. He'd gaze on her illicitly in her sleep, when her musculature dropped its guard and returned to its preexistence, those terms before pain, before gravity, before the assault of sunlight, before the awful contortions that the public mirror induced in all faces.

He'd scrutinize her by lamplight, Eros hovering over his wife with the forbidden candle. He studied her features, unmasked by sleep, searching out what she looked like before she looked like this, looking for the face he recognized, from before he met her, the face that, like a rebus, an Arcimboldo, a hidden-picture game, spread itself out across the landscape of his synapses.

Her features held their own fossil record, her facial bones a skeleton key that picked with a click of recognition Ebesen's rusted lock. The face leapt out of his life's faded photo album, his brain's deepest Marianas, his infant pass-in-review, held on to long after it should have gone extinct. She killed his sense of safety, his feel for error, his certainty of light and dark. The haunted face had survived its own burial. The twitch of this Adie's cheek cut him. Her pits and shadows flirted with a
familiarity they refused to settle into. He could not name it, this overlap, or locate the crossover in any aspect of her appearance. Dead love and its living copy: two halves of a torn original.

He took to shaving more often, so as not to spook her. He hung his trousers over the bathroom door when he showered, to steam out the worst of the wrinkles. He worked dish soap on a worn toothbrush against the stains of his shirt collars, watching himself, wondering how far he might sink in the name of revived feeling.

Months after her arrival, the spell broke. Sight did nothing to disperse it. His eye was worthless, in the end. Three stray words delivered him: speech, the medium that Ebesen distrusted above all others. Of all the absurdities, something she
said.

She was chattering. Something Ms. Klarpol did whenever he visited. Talking out loud, to anyone, to herself, to her chocolate Lab, the faithful Pinkham, who loved to accompany her to work. Chattering about the absurdly beautiful place she found herself living in.

An island cottage, Karl. Right out of a poem. Circling gulls wake me up in the morning. In New York, it was always sirens.

"New York" and "siren" fused, and Gail stood before him. Each plane of her face materialized, a frantic hologram. He looked up at this Adie, still amusing herself with a running account of her windfall. He stared at her, no longer caring if she caught him looking. The living woman resolved into her own parts, lost to all likeness. Nothing remained of the ghost story but his need to be near it.

He tried to stop visiting her. He started coming by again. She greeted him happily on his return, asking for no explanation. He contented himself with serving as her mascot of bitterness. He dispensed with any threat of recovered respectability. But as he carved mortise-and-tenon furnishings for Vulgamott's architectural fly-through or designed anvil thunderheads for Stance and Kaladjian's Weather Room, he felt the flinch of recollection, the awful willingness of arousal that he thought he'd put to death.

He taught her how to animate. You
only need to paint a few eels. Say, one at each two-second interval. Rajasundaran has written morph-ing software that will fill in all the midpoints.

Then he sat back and watched her bring motion to the jungle's fixed planes. Already, bushes rustled and the moon strayed across the child sky. Soon her frozen birds would thaw into a flutter, the snake slink, the monkeys scamper, the flutist weave, and the lions crouch in the perfect impression of stalking.

He watched her paint dozens of frames, creatures in various postures. She painted each cross-sectioned creature as lovingly as the first, assembling them into time-lapse fragments that moved more surely than he did.
The Dream
awakened, channeling the dead painter's spirit through the hand of this living woman medium.

He heard her, when things got buggy, pleading with the terminal.
Please, nice Mr. Machine. Don't be mean to me. I haven t done anything wrong, aside from belonging to the organic life-forms. Karl, the little chips are acting up again. What should I do?

Accept adversity,
Ebesen said.
It's soul-strengthening.

It's not my soul that needs work,
she told him.

He watched her scratch at the drawing tablet. He stood behind her workstation screen while she willed her graphics pen through glad arcs. The lightness of her aping dazzled him. Her fingers played at the existing shapes, exhilarated by their constraint to copying. Something in that virtuosity did not want to be free.

You're good.

Thank you.

Watch out,
he razzed her.
Not too original, now. They could get loose otherwise, your animals.

She looked up at him. Doubtless she saw a stubble-faced fifty-five-year-old man with soap smears around his collar. She turned back to her cookie-cut time sequences and cooed at them.

That's right, my little beasties. You're getting loose someday, aren't you? That's exactly what you're going to do.

Something in her pet-coddling voice alerted her Labrador, until then curled up, on best behavior, in the corner. The dog padded over to his owner and nuzzled her.

Oh, you too, Pinkham. You too. Gonna cut loose someday? That your plan? Oh yes, you are, my sweetie.

Placated, Pinkham returned to his post and settled back in. Ebesen, too, wandered back to his post.
Have you ever thought about work that didn't involve some violation of visual copyright?

She scowled, the look one reserved for the drunken party pest.
I'm a good copyist, Karl. All God's creatures should do what they're best at. I know what
you'
re best at
I saw
your show.

Ah, yes! The latest
Wild Kingdom.
Mr. Rousseau, version
2.0.
She held up a hand-drawn eel of an elephant rearing back to trumpet. She rocked the painted profile in the arc that animation planned for it. I
didnt mean Rousseau
2.0.
I
meant Klarpol
1.0.