RICHARD POWERS (3 page)

But it's fantastic,
Adie demurred.
Change one
...
one mark on it and I'll kill you in your sleep.

Pixel,
Spider corrected.
Change one pixel. And you'll kill us.

Voxel,
Spiegel overtrumped him.
Keep current, will you, Lim? Voxel or boxel. A 3-D pixel.

How
come you didn't paint the backs of anything? I mean, look at this stump.
A
very funky mahogany, although I do like the Cubist growth rings. But if we go around to the other side? Nothing but white. That's the paper,
Spider apologized.
The paper?

The paper we drew them on. Yeah. We were too bloody lazy
to ...

Hardware elbowed software in the floating rib.
This particular world is not really about painting the stump, you know. It's about getting the head-position tracking to work
...
With the Kalman filtering ... Not to mention the human head
...

While doing these massive bit-blits from one graphics array area to another at sufficiently high speeds and resolutions to
—

Look, look! A house. Did you know there was a little house out there? Don
’
t you boys snort at me. Can we walk behind it? Does the world go back that far? Look! Flowers. What
— ? Tul—, no iri—

How many times we gotta tell you? You're not dealing with bloody Pick-ax-o here
...

Oh God!
Adie shouted.
Little bees. And they're buzzing!
Crude black-and-golden scraps with loops of straightened paperclip wings jittered about in organized confusion. Something turned over in her, as small, as social, as buzzing and robotic as the living original.
They like it around the flowers.
Steve pointed off into a glade.
Try waving the wand over there.

She did. The magic scraps of would-be bees swarmed after every trail of digital scent she laid down willy-nilly.

Adie soared and looped and rolled. Each time she cocked her head, the trailing wires that tracked her goggles pulled the whole landscape along in her sight's wake. She waved the magic wand through ever more elaborate wingovers and Immelmanns. She skimmed above the trees and plowed through furrows between the grass blades. She navigated out to the farthest walls of this confinement and jiggled the ground beneath her feet with her giggling.

You
like it, then?
Steve demanded. You
really like it?

I never dreamed
...
I've never seen anything like it.

Outside the Cavern, beyond the enveloping lab, past the research park's camouflaging cedar shingles, out on the fringe of the coastal forest, the hurt of a screech owl skipped like a stone across the night's glassy surface. Long-haul commerce whipped its errand trucks up and down the evacuated coast road, hard as scythes. But inside this womb of cool engineering, ingenuity schooled its hatchlings by moonlight.

You'll
come in with us, then?
Steve asked Adie. You
want to play?

Some part of her had never wanted anything else. Had never hoped for more than to play in such a place, or even in its ugly machine imposture.

The three of them strolled out of the paper meadows and walked back into real weather. They left the high-tech monastery, stepping out into the actual night. It seemed to be seedtime, early in the curve of the world's regeneration. Say it was raining. A wrap of mist condensed on their clothing, coating them in a fine glaze. A few scared birds clicked and whistled in the night, to find themselves out.

They stood together in the dark parking lot, next to the rental car that was to take Adie back to her tepee-shaped theme hotel down along the old state highway. Lim toyed with a geode key ring. Spiegel leaned on the rental, awaiting her answer. Klarpol, for her part, could not stop laughing, shaking her head side to side in disbelief at what she'd just seen. Images built and broke inside her. For the first time in as long as she cared to remember, the future held more pictures than the past.

Stevie, it's amazing. But I cant. I really cant.

What does that mean, exactly?

What, indeed? The very weather, that first night, interrogated her, dared her to say exactly what she had sworn off. And the wider box of evening
—the scrim of midnight—mocked all her available replies.

It's not paint,
he said. No
paint involved at all. No original expression required, Ade. It's all drawing by numbers, out here. Dont think of it as art. Think of it as a massive data structure. What SoHo doesn’t know wont hurt it.

She laid out all her objections, lined them up in a mental pulldown menu. None held water except the last: a general hatred for all things that the cabled world hoped to become. Yet something tugged at her. Something darting and striped and buzzing.

Those bees,
she answered him. How
do they know how
to
find those flowers?
How
do you get them to fly like that?

Something in those jittery black-and-golden scraps recalled her sight's desire. So it always went, with life and its paler imitations. The things that needed renouncing
—our little acts of abdication, our desperate Lents—finally caved in. They slunk off, subdued by hair of the dog, their only cure. The abandoned palette returned to press its suit, sue for time, advocate.

All Adie had ever wanted was to people this place with gentian and tree rings and hidden houses folded from out of cardstock, to raise stalks under an animated sky, a sky calling out for glade-crazed, pollinating paper honeybees that followed every trail of scent that the wave of thought's wand laid down.

You bastards,
she said. You
filthy bitheads.
She looked up, helpless, ready, her wet eyes seeing everything.

3

In the Crayon Room, all strokes are broad.

Wax goes on nubby. It clumps and gaps. Your main repertoire here is the happy smear. Leaving an edge is hard. Any two colors mix to make coffee. From faint to heavy, from dawn to dusk, the crayon sea and the crayon causeway stay chirpy, pert monotones.

The grain beneath the page seeps up to enter any scene you draw. Spread your newsprint on the sidewalk and make a fish; your fish comes into the Crayon World already fossilized. Rub a stick of brown lengthwise against a nude page; the plank behind the paper clones its own knots and whorls, returning the pulp to its woody matrix.

Every crayon furnishing is a flat
fa
зade.
The sun's disk serves as its own
nametag.
Head-on, distant hills flatten to platters. From the visitor's floating crow's nest, scarecrows deployed in this ripening grain have no more width than the paper they're scrawled on.

Signs of human life abound. A bitten apple hides amid the pile rotting at the foot of a tree. An abandoned bucket, half full, slops its squig
gles of water. A bent rag doll sits compliant on a bench. A kite tied to a picket fence floats ripe for unleashing.

But this world leaves no trace of its makers. No people populate the Crayon Room. It is a simple place, pristine, prelapsarian. Curls of smoke craze up from the crippled chimney of one little summer cottage, too cozy for habitation. Behind gapped, sashed windows, a crayon cat purrs, fixed on a goldfish that darts against its rough-hewn bowl.

The Crayon World is a proud mother's gallery, the first retrospective refrigerator-magnet show of a budding child genius. But nothing here looks much like what it stands for. Only the conventions of a house, the insanely pitched roof, the burnt sienna front door lolling on its hinge. The code for cat and apple and bucket and tree and abandoned doll.

Visitors here face down their own ghostliness. The casual walker collides against nothing. Try to climb a hill, and you pass right through it. Hedgerows serve as mere suggestions. Approached, their bushes swell in detail, swimming toward the eye until they fill it. Then, with an optical pop, they vanish, freeing the scrawled grazing lands beyond them.

Now and then, an eagle shrills, invisible. Otherwise, silence, save for the gurgle of a hidden stream and, down in the gardens, the drone of the loosened hive. Circlets of scissored medallions buzz freely, in skittish digital trajectories, each striped with the icon for honeybee. Their randomly cycled rasp, the sound of fidget flight, stands in for the beating of insect wings.

A wheelbarrow in scarlet wax sits tilted on a path somewhere down a projected dell. The pasture is plain and the woods a welcoming cartoon. This mad perspective, drifting between dimensions, is perfect for getting lost in.

The Crayon World feels bigger than it is. Its space is curved. It wraps back onto itself. Hikers strike out to the southwest, into a weald of clumsy flowering horse chestnuts. The stroll unrolls, always a new copse in front of you. The hike moseys on, furlong stretching into mile, mile into league, for crayon measures conform to the lost imperial units of bedtime enchantment.

Sky blue drops to Prussian, then to a darker cobalt. And still, ever more southwest stretches out in front of you. More than when you
started. Your walk in the woods threatens to turn into a panicked sprint. Then the crayon receptors at the edge of your retina say
wait:
that tree is wrong. That tree shouldn't be here. And in that mental crossing where scribbles synapse against words, you wonder:
Where have I seen that thing before?

Sure enough, in a ridiculously few steps, the tree returns. It looms up from the same speck on the same compass point, without your shifting tack. It zooms to the same height as you draw close. It bares the same rift down the middle of its data. Even before you can wonder how you missed it, the trail loops and the whole scene recycles.

The wand you use to wend through this wilderness has a knob for leaving breadcrumbs. But as in all such worlds, the crumbs attract a murder of crayon crows that devour your trail markers the moment you lay them down. All your wax signs will not guide you for more than a virtual minute. The path is past preserving, and the crayon adventure knows no goal except itself. The Crayon World is just a broad-stroked test. The test of how to enter it, and walk back out intact.

4

When rage reprised itself, when you fell back again on the old bitter tit for tat, when the need to escape finally left you throwing darts at the world map, at last it hit you. Simple choice: replay the old routine, the self-triggering cycle of accusations, the verbal razor cuts daubed in love's alcohol. Traipse down the path of tender sadomasochism yet one more soul-shredding time. Or turn around and walk. Escape down the path that must still lie somewhere to the south, the way you walked in.

One more tearful reconciliation would only further demean you both. The place you pushed for
—the tumbledown house in the country, your dream of intimacy that always made her bite in fear—vanishes now into fantasy. It gives way to that darker late-night venue, where hisses of desire shade off into abuse, abuse feeding back into desire.

You've been each other's shared addiction, slinking back repeatedly to the nightmare rush that you've both fought to be rid of. you've come
back from the dead a dozen times, only to spin out again, worse, for whole weeks at a time. You've suffered the delirium of total withdrawal: one month, two, without so much as a word. Then, clean, virginal, at peace, calling again, just to see if you can. Just to see who's in charge. Just a quick little needle slipped into one another's waiting veins.

All that changes forever, this Friday. You're off to a place where you can't ask her to hurt you again, where neither of you can backslide into care. Where you can no longer reach one another, however much mutual tenderness revives. It rocks you, just to imagine.

Among your friends, the plan produces only stunned hilarity. "You're going
where?
Don't they shoot people in the street there, without even asking whose side they're on?"

"No," you shit them back. "You're thinking of D.C." At last they realize, these friends who've witnessed your worst whiplash for years now. You mean it, and it blows them away.

You rush to assure everyone. The school you'll teach for is a virtual armed compound. Tensions are nowhere near what they were this time last year. The civil war is ending; all sides are talking compromise. The foreign armies have left. Their president has finally taken the reins. All that old insanity is a thing of the past.

And it's only for two terms, anyway. Eight months. Safer than a daily commute on the
Edens
Expressway.

You sleep well on the long flight, crushed up against the window with one of those squares of cotton gauze the stewardesses pass off as pillows. In your sleep, you already speak fluent Arabic. Even your dream marionette is struck by the strangeness: these guttural rapid bursts issuing from you, part nonsense, part gift of tongues.