RICHARD POWERS (48 page)

All night long, wonder refuses to vanish. Unrestricted mobility. Crouching, cantering, contrapposto, tiptoe: all postures enter the available repertoire. North and South return, and East and West with them, dragging along every skew axis. Amazement, here in the pitch-black passages, is a tactile thing, feeling its way along the smooth-bore corridors into open defiles of feeling that you haven't allowed yourself since the earliest days of captivity.

With movement comes memory. A string of shuffle-ball-changes carries you back through a packed cocktail party of tongue-tied Japanese businessmen. Four hundred incredulous stutter-steps take you to the muddy crocus beds that your industrious girlfriend once caused to stud your lawn.

You lie down flat in the middle of this Grand Ballroom. You pry at the lip of your wall of sheet tin, searching for stretches that haven't been stapled down. You drop to the ground in front of the sliver under the door. Up close, through the slit of this science fair experiment, you can see the whole universe. The feet of your captors take turns on the watch, standing sentry over a suite of cells, cells that hold the lives of those taken along with you.

Hour by hour, the gift expands. You take possession of more room than you know what to do with. Free, at leisure, you pace back and forth across the gaping eight feet. You take up residence in the corner farthest from the radiator, pressing yourself against the far walls, sniffing their surface. Then disbelief shoves you on again, to more discovery. A strangeness spreads over you, one awful enough to seem the reason you were taken. Never again will you gainsay anything, or chafe against your allowed radius, or take a square inch for granted
...

Daybreak's first covered strands are the cue to slip back to base camp. You lie waiting, acquiescent, on your bed of straw when breakfast arrives. They will see, in this harmless creature, how little need they have for the redundant lockdown.

But the sight of your freedom drives your guards insane. Bodies fly shouting through your room, enraged. Shadow puppets, through your blindfold, rush around in clumps, testing the lock, searching your clothes, slashing at your mattress with knives. How far do they think you could have gotten in
your overnight excursion?

Voices lash at one another, spitting through their teeth like cornered rats. A feral, crazed face pulls yours up to it, its breath chamoising your cheeks. "How you do this? How you get out?"

"Please. I did nothing. The guard never came to lock me up again last night."

They haul you to your feet and slam you down again. A knee swings up, smashing your genitals against the back of your pelvis. One spongy testicle smears against this vise of bone. The wave of red shoots up through your spinal column and comes out through the seams of your skull.

Even unconsciousness cannot protect you. Each time you wake, the pain sucks you back under. You come to at last, your face in a pool of vomit, the half-digested dinner from your evening of liberation. The Qur'an can't tell you how long ago that was. Scores of verses pass before you can straighten up and stand.

By the book's count, they leave you on the chain for a full month. The day they take you off again, your atrophied flesh collapses after four slow drags around the oval. Two more weeks pass before you can lift your knees without puking.

Then, late one evening run, your laps closing in on their old target, it happens all over again. The half-hour trot widens into three-quarters. Once more, you feel the awful accident of freedom. The day's meals have all arrived. No one else is coming. Six mobile hours could easily build back half the muscle you've lost.

But there's something too casual this time, too obviously cat and mouse. A test of last term's lesson. A blatant taunt. A cheap trick to justify another beating. Anyone might barge in, at 2 a.m., to catch you
in flagrante,
flaunting your freedom. They are huddled, even now, over a hidden peephole in these walls, to catch you in the very instant of joy. Sick and beaten, worse than an animal, you return to the padlock and submit. You close the loop tight around your own ankle. The metal clicks; your eyes swell with humiliation. The hate you bear yourself exceeds any that you can feel for your captors. They have their cause; you have nothing. All self, all dignity, sold. All night long, the pathetic dose of freedom that you deny yourself snickers at you from the darkness. Debasement complete, you bare all your openings to
the rape.

3
6

They flew back to a Sound rearranged in their absence. Adie forced Spiegel to come home with her the night they landed. To her island cottage, her safe haven. Once might have passed itself off as an accident. Twice had to mean something. But still, she wouldn't tell him what. And he wouldn't ask, afraid she might tell him. Willful ignorance could still pass itself off as anything.

With nothing but touch, she unlocked a loft inside him, boarded up since college. He made love to a long-dead invention, she to the only person who loved her ex-husband more than she did. Sleeping together became a dare, a mutual suicide pact to cast off the last drag of ballast and lose what was left to lose. To raise loss to the level of high art. To scatter projection to the winds and push the past down into pure aesthetics.

They clung to each other as if it couldn't be obscene, so long as neither looked. Spiegel broke the pact of silence first. Less than two weeks after their return from Ohio, Adie logged in to her Cavern workspace. There, a missive in a bottle waited to ambush her. It launched itself from a niche in system memory that Adie thought had been empty. She scrambled to don a pair of stereo glasses. Beyond that, all she could do was stand and watch.

From out of nothing's well colors rose up. Specks of light off at various horizons rushed toward her from a slew of deep-space vanishing points. Space expanded along all axes at once. Her body succumbed to the pull of conflicting vertigos while the sky around her scattered with novas. Each star migrated to its own slot on the spectrum, only to split again into something fuller. The bursts bent closer over her, fireworks drooping back to awe their earthbound audience. Their flares passed a threshold of definition where she at last made them out: descendants of that first wire-frame leaf that Lim had made for her. Cut blooms from her abandoned jungle.

Petals rained down into the space around her. The full weight of the bouquet pressed against her eyes. She laughed at the trick, astonished. She flashed in anger. How dare Spiegel steal her tool set? The vector-drawn blossoms drew near, blowing away all pretense of ownership. These growths weren't hers to copyright. Even Rousseau had stolen them from too many sources to start counting now. Every human mark was mortgaged to the hilt.

She stood in this petal shower, someone's gift to her, someone from whom she had only taken. The day was coming, faster than these fireworks fell, a day when anyone could give shape to their innermost space and leave it on another's digital doorstep. All our private declarations of long love would come home for inhabiting.

The petals expanded until they had no more place to grow. Adie stood surrounded in a circle of stamens taller than she. The corsage grew bigger than the room that held it. The walls flashed pink, dragging her below the tissue surface. Still the view zoomed in. She passed through the cell wall and into a sea of cytoplasm, ever deeper down, punctuated by chaotic phase changes at each shift in gauge. Skeins of biochemical skeleton, pirated from Bergen's Molecule Room, rose up around her.

At last she found herself in another jungle, the flowers now huge colored spheres of amino acids, their entwined stems a dance of protein chains. The molecule bouquets bobbed on all sides of her, eager in space, whichever way she turned her head. And up flush against her, whispering binaurally close to her ear, the voice of the man who'd made her this living card said,
See what a flower I have found you!

Darkness brought her back. When she again located the size of her own body, she used it to walk out of the Cavern and down the hall to the man's cubicle. Steve sat at his own workstation, toying with variable declarations.

It's beautiful,
she told him.

She dropped herself into the scoop of plastic next to his desk that passed for a chair. The race that engineered the Cavern could not design a chair that comfortably fit the shape of a seated human being.

She shook her head at the colors she still saw.
So fast,
she said.
So quick.

Adie! How long have I known you? How slow do you want to go? Oh. No.
Real blood shot up to crimson her face.
Not that! I mean, you built that... piece so fast. A few days.

He leaned forward. He put his hand to her mouth, palm flat, as if he were blind and gazing on her for the first time. J
used one hundred percent existing parts.

It felt by turns sacred and profane. A man lay between them in bed, dying between them in an unattended nowhere, having lost the last control over his body. They both made love to him.

I
lived with you so long,
he said to her, in the dark.
My whole adult life. Every year, you seemed more solid to me. And every year, I felt less real. I thought of you for so long, I felt myself becoming you.

She let him talk.

She brought Pinkham, whenever she came to stay the night with him.
Love me, love my dog.

Oh, I love your dog, all right. I haven't decided yet what to make of you.

And sometimes, stretched in bed, he'd watch her transported, tranced out, waiting on the edge of herself for the rapture to come, steering her whole body with telekinesis toward climax, moving herself the way she had once, as a girl, moved the shutters of that painted

room.

Release would plunge her into a postcoital abyss so profound she would burst into tears, lost in the depths that such filling opened up. It was the greatest sadness that life offered, consummation.

It's nothing,
she'd say, trying to keep her devastation from him.
It's not you. It's just physiology.

Do you want... not to do this anymore?

You quit on me now and I'll kill you.

And sometimes, after they lost themselves to their bodies and lay slack, he'd look out to see her surreptitiously flexing her fists, balling and sloughing her thighs, as if to prove she still could. Recovering those moves for the one who had lost them.

Once, as they made slow, memory-stricken love, the phone rang. The obedient answering-machine speaker broadcast a message so thick and garbled it seemed a prank call. De ...
nise ... Giran ... dell
Triumph blazed from the petrified voice.

Stcvie tried to stop, all the
sadness of existence pressing down on
the small of his back. But pressing upward against him, Adie kept him inside her until their plosive end.

She held her own little memorial service in advance. It could not happen at home, now that another lived there. And the lab, of course, was out of the question. That left only the infinite outdoors.

She bought a battery-driven boom box, skulking through the purchase as if she were buying child pornography. She hid it in the backseat of the Volvo, and took it up into the strip of woods on her island's northwest coast. She parked off the road and, with a little judicious trespassing, made her way out of public earshot.

There under the canopy—
Look at that tree! Look at that... tree!—
she held her wordless service. She played it once through, the shameless bit of ravishing nostalgia Ted wished he could have written but would never be able to. Tribute, buyoff, plea bargain, indulgence: she could not say what the archaic song sounded like, except that it sounded like him.

Before
Dives and Lazarus
could exhaust itself once more, she heard a person coming through the undergrowth. Despite her precautions, someone had heard. There was no place left on earth far enough away to be inaudible.

She thought to hit the Stop button and scamper off before she could be caught. But the tune still had a few measures to go, and the sound of its cadence made her ready to suffer the consequences. A gnarled, bearded lumberjack in a red plaid shirt and jeans came through the thicket, glaring at her. He slowed his arrival to coincide with the music's end.

She launched into her apologies even before the last note died away.
I'm sorry. I'm on your property, aren't I? I was just... It won't happen —

Thank you,
the man interrupted her.
I'd completely forgotten that that piece existed.

With one stray word, they had stumbled onto the Cavern room Adie was after. But they could get no farther than that word. Together, Spiegel and Klarpol brought their lone clue to Vulgamott.

Byzantium? As in the empire?
Adie nodded her head. Steve shook his.
Byzantium, as in the Yeats poem,
Spiegel said.
Ask O'Reilly. He's the Irishman.

Well.
Ronan eyed them.
It's not really my favorite of his poems, you see.

Which is?

"Meditations in Time of Civil War?"

He pronounced the word to rhyme with "far." The Americans studied one another.

Buy you a pint if you recite?

You could have gotten it for free, woman. But it's too late now.
They went over to The Office, where the standing suite of TVs offered the full range of available data streams. O'Reilly parked them in a booth in front of the drive-through news headlines. Apparently history was still in the throes of ending. The largest, most heavily armed nation on earth was cracking apart, apparatchik by apparatchik, scattering its warheads into a host of makeshift republics. Western experts were fanning out through the Eastern Bloc, ministering to the total economic disintegration by doling out shock therapy.

The beers arrived. O'Reilly warmed to his.
You think the fourteenth century was a free-for-all? You think the Dark Ages were a major step backward? Amateur night, my friends. Small change. We're watching the show that those acts merely opened for.

Spiegel laughed at the hyperbole.
Come on, Ronan. What are you talking about? The Cold War's over. The most destructive suck of resources in history.

Well, that's your problem right there, friend.

What? You're going to get nostalgic for Mutually Assured Destruction, just because it was familiar?

It kept things in check, that particular madness. It kept those resources of yours from realizing their full capacities. Ronan,
Adie said,
I've never seen you like this. That's because I've never been like this.

The news cycled through its cavalcade. Europe's vacationland, Yugoslavia, prepared to repeat the unthinkable.

All right, we have a problem there,
Steve conceded.
But doesn't that whole morass go back to the Ottomans?

The Iraqis still occupied by force the world's most concentrated dome of oil, invited there by the United States, which now threatened Armageddon if they did not vacate.

Stevie fidgeted.
Well, you can't use the Middle East to prove anything. The Middle East has been self-destructing since the dawn of civilization.

Now we know the reason for the oil price hike that my model predicted a few months ago. Too bad I couldn't predict the cause.

They'll have to back down,
Adie said.
It's suicide otherwise, isn't it?

O'Reilly pointed to her, then put the tip of his pointer to his own nose.

The news stories did not wait for explanation. They went on to describe an American prison population greater than Orlando, with a per capita cost that outstripped most Ivy League schools. Lockups, the cable said, had doubled in less than a decade, making no discernible dent in the crime rate. O'Reilly glanced over at the Americans and raised his eyebrows.

Spiegel shrugged.
We're a lawless people, Marshal. Always have been.

Adie thumped the booth.
Hey! You promised us a recitation here. We're not picking up your tab if you don't deliver.

"Meditations in Time of Civil War"?

Adie nodded. Stevie shook his head.

O'Reilly looked into the foam on his beer, reading the scraps of text there.
It'
s
that bit toward the end,
he said.
The Stare's Nest at My Window.
The words, when he finally spoke them, came out in astonished starts, like a gift left on the table of an empty room, locked from the inside.

The bees build in the crevices

Of loosening masonry, and there

The mother birds bring grubs and flies.

My wall is loosening; honey-bees,

Come build in the empty house of the stare.

Each looked away from the others, into a lost place. O'Reilly on his country, Spiegel on his abandoned calling, and Klarpol on the bee-loud Crayon World.