RICHARD POWERS (40 page)

32

Wiring the Cavern for sound made more difference than Adie could have imagined. More than it should have. The Arlesean Room designers brought in Rajasundaran, who'd done a stint down at NASA/ Ames in Mountain View, to give the sunny South a tongue. Every event in Jackdaw's cabinet of interactions now came into its audible inheritance. Chairs learned to creak, floorboards to pop. The wind outside the window began to hiss a stereo mistral.

The key is spatiality,
Raj said.
We creatures evolved to believe in space, and that's about all you can say for certain about belief. We're binaural. Binocular. These are evolution's tricks for getting us to think in 3-D, and we can't help falling for them every time. 3-D is a trick?
Adie asked. She sounded hurt. Sure.
What isn't, finally?

They set to work voicing Aries, teaching the rented bed-sit to sing. To their arrays for texture and surface and dimension, they added sonority. The drawer coughed softly as it slid open. The pitcher pinged with the perfect pitch of porcelain. Off in the distance, past the edges of the casement, southward toward the invisible bay, gulls called.

Even the earliest results unnerved them. Six channels run through five speakers implanted in each wall face sufficed to raise the neck hairs on the most sophisticated visitor. They put Spider Lim, the human litmus, alone in the room. They flew a sonic pigeon through the rafters. He tracked the arc of the flapping bird, a fuller, more physiological belief than had he actually seen one. They broke a pane of glass in the center of the left-hand window. Spider jumped, a full-scale startle. He slammed his fist against his chest.

Don't ever do that to me again.

Sound is better than visual,
Steve decided.
It's more immediate. More virtual to begin with. It hangs in space, getting sharper in memory.

Adie ignored his invitation. She spoke to him now only when work required.

Raj sailed through the subaudible battlefield, unaware.
Every modality that you can add will square the level of believability. Every new affordance, every connection we can lay down between out here and in there increases the sense of immersion geometrically.

Spiegel paced in place.
We need some haptic device. Some kind of force-feedback jumpsuit that'll resist when you try to walk into things. Pressure-hammers that'll bruise your legs when you scrape against the bed.

Not necessary,
Lim said. And showed them his shins.

Raj grinned. At
bottom, you know? At bottom, the mind wants to be taken in.

Poor Jackdaw went back and affixed a new element to every data array, a variable pointer that would hold the clicks and pocks that Adie wanted to add to every plunkable object in the room. But he worked gladly. Rajasundaran's audio—the lowing and keening of it—had something of the innermost eerieness, something a visitor assimilated into her tissue before even noticing.

It knocked Adie out.
The sounds are so present! Better than the real thing. It's as if the noises are going off inside my brain.

Oh, they are,
Raj said.
They are! We do our real-time signal processing right inside those flaps of twisted cartilage of yours.
He wiggled his own flaps in question. We
put a microphone in a subject's ear canal, capture the chaos, and reverse-engineer the sampling. Waves crashing into waves, nodes and antinodes wiping themselves out all over the place. Sounds like the Lower East Side,
Adie said. You
ought to try Jaffna. That's where you lived? Oh no no. Jaffna came to me.

Her hands dry-pointed the air in front of her, talking before her words could catch up. They scuttled, flustered, like the hands of library patrons at the five-minute warning, gathering together their materials and carrying their quarry up to the charge desk before it shut down for

the night.
Explain.

What is there to explain, really?
Raj spoke in the subcontinental, singsong inflection of Imperial English, whose practitioners outnumbered all of England several times over.
My family and I were living our lives in Colombo. The Tigers made some high-profile power plays up in the peninsula. Our Sinhalese aunties and uncles decided that the Jaffna deaths required some symmetrical mischief to put them right. They voted to set fire to the hundred nearest Tamil houses, no matter that these belonged to their dear friends and neighbors. We beat a hasty retreat to Vancouver. A lovely city, by the way.

What do your parents do for a living?

You mean before our move or after?

Both
...
Both.

A familiar story. You don't really want to know.

How
...
how did you end up living here?

Here?
He cast a gaze back at the Cavern, where windows broke, floorboards popped, and pigeons flew about the eaves.
You mean Seattle?
The idea amused him. I
don't really live here. I'm just renting.

Raj wanted to develop a high-level audio programming language to match the visual one that Jackdaw and Loque were assembling. He wanted fast filter transforms that would change a frog to a choirboy with a few typed commands. He wanted to spin the aural sources in space, make them wheel about with each turn of the head.

But as with images, acoustic precision exacted its price in responsiveness. Milliseconds loomed huge. Latency killed the sense of presence. Only the tightest virtuoso chorus of sounds would flush the ear into belief. Spatializing the noisy universe and synchronizing it with sight involved a bit of higher mathematical modeling called the Head-Related Transfer Function.

We
should get the Armenian in on this,
Rajan said. Adie balked.
Is that really necessary? Nothing is really necessary. Not really.

He's so incredibly unpleasant. The man has raised ugliness to the level of haute art. He's ugliness's high priest.

They brought in Kaladjian. He started out on his best behavior, which consisted of not saying anything at all. He walked into the Van Gogh bedroom and shrugged. He tapped the shutters and rapped the
porcelain with a hand-gripped Polhemus sensor, unhappy with the delayed pocks and pings. He stepped out of the room and removed the stereo glasses
.

Why would anyone want to build something like this?

Why does anyone want to build anything?
Spiegel answered.

Kaladjian shrugged, more concession than contest.

Over the space of days, the quartet of males slowly squeezed Klarpol out. Form and warmth, rapture and azure all collapsed into engineering problems. The tasks at hand were well defined, formalizable. Why did they need an artist any longer? They had Adie's careful, hand-drawn surfaces. Once the authorities got their composite sketch, the artist was just ballast.

Adie went to Sue Loque.
They're stealing my room.

Your room? Didn't you steal it from some Dutch guy?

My idea. My eye. I took everything off the flat plane and laid it out in three-space.
I
repainted all the surfaces by hand. Every inch of it is detailed enough to look good at life size.

Now they won't let you play?

Well, they let me sit in. But they're turning the whole thing into this gigantic Rubik's Cube.

That's their thing. It's what they do, babe.

I know that's what they do. What am
I
supposed to do?

Sit in and listen, maybe? It's how I got into this racket

Serious? What did you do before?

Before what?

Before learning to program?

Oh,
I
taught myself to program when I was twelve. I had to cover for my parents. They couldn't even handle their dimmer switches. But before I started listening in on the boys—before I learned how projects worked—I was ... just a programmer.

Adie went back and listened. She followed the four males as they invented problems, then invented solutions to throw at their problems. She watched them communicate by grunts and silences. She studied Jackdaw, Steve, and Raj as they hacked at their huge triple concerto for QWERTY keyboards, lost to a runaway pruning algorithm, while Kaladjian etched away on complex functions with a number-two pencil
into
yellow legal pads.

She sketched them in turn, capturing their shared trances in her own media. Their facial muscles reminded her of her father's, snoring on the sofa in any of a dozen Quonset living rooms, sleeping off the latest controlled R-and-R drunk, twitching in a dream of final, anesthetized escape. But the goal of these four men differed from her father's on one essential account. Her father retreated into a place that he hoped would silence the outside world. These four men, on the other hand, worked to build a mutual mirage that would match its source, noise for noise.

There's some kind of major tension there,
Adie told Loque. /
don't think any of them likes Kaladjian any more than I do. Bingo, babe. He's a nasty man.

Deeply creepy. But he knows a shitload. So everyone manages to make allowances for him, on strictly practical grounds.

Well sure. That's easy for them. They come from the same world as he does. They speak his language.

Not really. Not with any specificity. Anyway, that's not the real issue. They put up with him. They use him. The social contract, hon. They're getting something from him they can't get for themselves. I think he's masturbating over me.

He's what? You mean in private, right? Now how do you figure that? I'd really like to know.

Oh, I don't have any hard evidence. It's just this sixth sense. More like an eighth, if you're keeping count. I can always tell if there's somebody I'm working with who
...
? It's like radio waves. You can't ordinarily perceive them, but if you have the right equipment
...

Uh, Ade? Sweetheart? I don't know how to tell you this. But any one of us might be putting out that channel.

Rajasundaran alone enjoyed going head-to-head with the team's problem child. Indifferent to the drama of human personality, he savored each clash with the Armenian as if it were a good cricket test match.

We ought to make it,
he said one day,
so that closing the shutters actually dampens all the ambient sounds coming from outside the bedroom windows.

Kaladjian went for the easy kill. A
pointless exercise. A complete waste of processing power.

No, it's interesting. What might damping do to create a sense of inside and out?

Don't ask vapid questions,
Kaladjian said.

What is your algorithm for telling vapid questions from their opposites?
Jackdaw held up his hands in a T.
Please, guys. We can't afford to start with the philosophy stuff, again.

Kaladjian ignored the chance for peace with honor. A
vapid question is one that any mature researcher recognizes as fruitless. You are willing to be ruled by consensus? You? All right. Then it's one where the answer serves no end but itself.
Raj studied Kaladjian's face, as if he were his own portrait.
When you look at the Pythagorean theorem, when you draw it graphically ... ? When you actually build little squares on each side, why should the two smaller squares be equal in area to the largest one? Is that a vapid question?

Yes.
Kaladjian smiled, even as the trap took shape.

But it is also a profound question as well?

Well. That depends.

Spiegel waved his arms, drawing fire.
There are no vapid questions.

Only vapid questioners.

May
I
ask you one?
Adie asked Kaladjian.
Probably vapid? What exactly is your problem?

Kaladjian blinked condescension. His smile easily absorbed the attack. I
suppose you find me largely contemptuous.

Pretty much,
Adie chirped.

The kind of mutual flaming that enlivened a good Multi-User Dimension turned Jackdaw's stomach when it occurred face-to-face.
Maybe we should put all this human stuff back in the box and get on with our work?

The others humored him. Hours later, with the project scattered for the day, Adie cornered Kaladjian in his immaculate cubicle.
So tell me.

Kaladjian looked up, waiting.
And what exactly would you like me to tell you?

Why you're at war with the rest of creation.

The Armenian appraised her for the length of a short syllogism.
Is that what I am?

Yes.

He thought for a minute.
You wouldn't understand.

Adie swallowed the stream of ready profanity that welled up in her throat.
Try me with the dumbed-down version.

Something in the challenge appealed to him. He gestured for her to sit, then turned his back on her and gazed out his window into the rain-dripped woods.
You know what I do for a living?

Something to do with numbers.

His laugh condensed to a bitter nib.
I've told you already, young woman. Everything has something to do with numbers.

Not young,
she said.

The silence lasted long enough for Adie to think she'd been dismissed. Then he broke it, addressing the plate glass.

Say the thing that gives you more pleasure than anything in existence is to arrange a set of colored marbles according to strict and surprisingly sparse rules. God knows why, but the pastime fascinates you. So long as you're not hungry or cold or otherwise impaired, you want to devote yourself to it.

Painting,
she said.
Something like painting.

The hardest kind of painting. The most accountable. The more you push the marbles around, the harder it is to get them into interesting configurations. But you're not alone in the pursuit. A handful of other devotees have the same obsession. Everyone looks over one another's work, fixing and extending. You memorize all the beautiful moves of the grand masters. This goes on for a few thousand years. Every so often, someone stumbles onto a hidden wrinkle, one that puts the marbles into a surprise configuration, special, pleasing, something no one expected.

Each of them stared off at an altarpiece the other couldn't see.

Then, out of the blue, someone discovers that the marble game is a profound reformulation of an interlocking canister game, unknown to
you,
played by another circle of monks centuries ago on the other side of the world and shelved as a useless curiosity. These two unrelated, formally beautiful pursuits turn out to be, in a deep, singular, and unsought way, synonymous.

She nodded toward some analogy. The concealed and ubiquitous

golden mean.

A
truly shattering insight descends on some master practitioner. Colored marbles and interlocking canisters, taken together, form a perfect translation of phenomena in the physical world. The patterns of marbles and canisters compose a map of, say, the cycle of tides or the bends in a river. And this correspondence works, not only after the fact, but in advance of it The game makes it possible to predict all kinds of otherwise unknown, otherwise unlooked-for, otherwise immeasurable events...

Her neck hairs rose up, obeying their own rules.
Every repeated time without exception, the harmless, artificial game advances in absolute lockstep with measurable event. The implications are inescapable. The marbles and the canisters—the simple but rigorous rules—somehow embody physical reality.

The veil fell, and she stood looking on this abandoned man. She did not know how he managed to remain behind, in such pain.

These inconsequential games mimic the most grandiose patterns we can identify. Gravity, time, light: name your fundament. Creation keeps to a few simple rules of interlocking shape and color, patterns replicating themselves across impossible distances. This is what the mathematician calls beauty. An ever more elaborate edifice spun out of the sparest symmetries. A perfection that outstrips all attempts to capture it.

She put up her palms in puzzlement.
This is a bad thing?

He turned to her, his edge of aggression again sharpening. He stood and beckoned for her to follow, out the room and down the hall. They reached the Cavern, where Sybil Stance was taking her rightful slot on

the sign-up sheet.

We
have an emergency,
Kaladjian said. We
need the machine.

Aril I'm right in the middle of— Please. Ten minutes. You can have my hour tomorrow.
He booted up an environment Adie had never seen. A shape like a Cycladic figure mushroomed in front of them. Kaladjian put the wand through an unaccompanied partita. The figure metamorphosed, its planes sliding upon itself, turning inside out in a virtuoso conjuring act of knotted space.

All legitimate topological transformations of one another,
he said. Adie nodded, hooked. She saw a centaur. The torso of a naked Aphrodite. A wondrous stalactite. A nexus of ribbonlike tubes passing through their own surfaces. Proteus, unholdable.
We're going in,
Kaladjian announced.

The figure swelled in the air around them, and they passed inside. When they steadied out again, they found themselves riding along the inside edge of a secret junction of knotted expressway lanes, the deeply entangled passages of a decadent queen conch.
Brace yourself.

Kaladjian hit a button on the wand. The waterslide surfaces fragmented into the mosaic of polygons that composed them. Shards flew in all directions, a shower of math-meteors. The community of screen phenomena—a capacious, fecund, and extraneous metaphor of the machine's internal states—revealed itself to be a bastard lingua franca where alien races could meet in compromise.

Adie's body grew large, galactic, her head wrapped in a cloud of stars. They zoomed out, pulling back to a distant vantage above what condensed into a spiral nebula. She looked out across a sweeping interstellar pinwheel, its slow spokes lapping around her midriff. Each wash of stars unfolded another billion years of cosmic evolution. She swelled to the size of God's recording angel, attending at the day of Creation.

It's... magnificent. I had no idea.
She felt her eyes spilling over, and did not care. There was no foolishness, no vanity, no shame in anything a body felt, looking on this.

Yes. Now here is the math behind it.
He pushed a button and the expanding universe fell away into a few polynomials, breathtaking in their slightness.

She tried to say his name: An. The tag soured inside her mouth. I
don't... I still don't...
The man's pettiness appalled her more than ever, after what he'd just let her see.
Where's the problem?

The problem? The problem is that we still live
here.