RICHARD POWERS (54 page)

So you liked it better when they turned away the great unwashed at the doors of the palazzo?

I liked it better when the human heart was more than a commodity. And when was that, exactly?

God only knows. Never, probably. That's why I bailed. Why I ended up so completely lost, for all those years.

You ran to commerce to get away from commercialism? In a funny way, yes. That's exactly what happened. Adie, my Ade
...

You have no idea how horrible it is.
To
give your life to a thing you think represents the best that humanity can do, only to discover that it's not about beauty at all. It's about coercion and manipulation and power politics and market share and the maintenance of class relations.

Then what
...
?
He teetered on the edge of making the obvious point. Maybe the obvious point was never worth making.
What's
...
different about what we're doing?

She pieced her tiles together, in silence. Blue, rose, gold: sages standing in God's holy fire.

As
a product? Maybe nothing. But as a process? It feels as if there's something we have to make. As if we're closing in on something that the world somehow
...
needs.

He laughed in astonishment. I
never thought I'd live to see you become the spokesperson for high technology.

Not the technology.
She grew shy, diffident. She did not say it. The

sanctuary.

You
see what you're making, don't you?
His chin pointed at the paint-by-numbers coming to life on her screen.
Human portraiture. The thing you'd sworn off of.

She blushed, a schoolgirl caught slipping a secret valentine into a mailbox.
Maybe so. But they're not my originals! And they're not especially realistic.

When you work your way down to the damaged bits—the parts the Crusaders and the Turks destroyed? Are you going to finish them?

I haven't thought about it.
You can't think too much about this thing. The one that tracks you like the moon.
I'll see when I get there.

All the lab's orioles brought them scraps of colored rag to weave into the deepening nest. Nineteenth-century Orientalist engravings of the immense interior. Photographs shot from atop Sophia's descendant: Sinan's Sultanahmet, the Blue Mosque. Translations of the dazzling, calligraphic, verse maze that lined the inside of that stone firmament.

The whole felt fresh, like something from the days when making things was still young and not yet overcome by terminal success.

Freese suggested a treadmill, to speed the visitor through the enormous distances.

Adie vetoed.
No machines inside. It's a sacred space.

They settled on a simpler propulsion. Lean in the direction of travel, and that compass point would drift toward you. Lean harder to run.

Why is the math so hard?
she asked Kaladjian.

Which math?

Perspective. Proportion. Depth.

Perspective? Perspective is easy. Just the visual cone turned inside out. Once the Italians got wind of Arab optics, the whole globe was up for grabs.

Not that perspective,
she said, harsh enough to surprise him. But he was alongside her in a flash. The most difficult man she knew was also among the smartest.

Oh. Perspective. Knowing where you are?

She nodded. He scribbled with a number-two pencil on a pad of blank canary legal paper. He drew her diagrams, space's irrefutable proof.
If being alive were a single problem in long division—how to divide infinity by threescore and ten—we'd have a reasonable chance of solving existence. But the solution for seventy years misses catastrophically for thirty, because the numerator is infinite. And those solutions, in turn, look nothing like the quotient for this year, this fiscal quarter, or today, let alone the next thirty minutes.

We live between our next heartbeat and forever.
The mathematician shot her a look: How much do you know?
That's it. We are supposed to solve all the conflicting quotients at once. That is what makes
...
the math so hard.

He lifted his eyebrows at her, as if he did not mind being of use, if only this once.

Revived by work, Adie returned to the play of her body. Limbered, she and Stevie tussled at each other, like fast-learning pups. Pinkham barked at the sounds of happy scuffling, and he would scrape his nails at the other side of the closed bedroom door to be let in.

Sex in middle age felt illicit, blunted, sad, curdled by knowledge, each of them aware how little a role the loved object actually played in the perpetuation of happiness. But neither of them could shrug off the forms of happiness. Joy grasped and dismissed them by turns, the only solace against its own affliction.

Adie opened. She tried on a whole wardrobe of abandoned clothes for Spiegel that she had never worn in front of anyone, even for the solitary mirror. She sported looks that weren't her, outfits that quickened her to inhabit.

She talked to Stevie widely, as she once had to her sister, in childhood. She talked to him of Ted, now without guilt or recrimination. She spoke of the things that had gone wrong. The ways in which their paired equations failed to balance.

She narrated the horrors of New York. The molestations in the subway. Rats the size of a healthy baby. The fashion of nihilism and runaway hipness. The serenade of all-night car alarms under her apartment window.

He smirked at her. You
miss it, don't you? Admit it.

In your dreams.

She made him get out more. The trips stunned him.
Our ancestors spoke of this thing, the sun.

She made him sit, dank and chilled, with a book in his lap, in her harvested garden. She took him to that hideout in the Cascades, her secret swimming hole. The water was too cold now to swim. They postponed full immersion until they got home.

There she lay waste to him, with a hunger that grew with each feeding. It surprised Stevie sometimes, the ferocity of it. Her sniffing him, tasting, holding him up to the light, inspecting. Searching his every part for some sensory testament she could never quite find.

You're not bad at this,
she told him. His reward.
For an old guy.

Yep. That's me. The Loin in Winter.

But each encounter fed the question in him, the one that would undo them, whether he asked it or held it under.

When you make love to me ... ?

Yy-yess?
she teased, touching him in a place, in a way to derail all words.

He took away her hand.
When you make love to me ... who are you touching?

She clamped.
Don't want to play this game, Stevie. Don't even want to visit.

But she came back easily those days, even from his most willful disruptions. She wore an aura now that nothing could dissipate. A woman who had found, again, the work she was meant to give herself to.

Spiegel squinted, and called it love.

The word spread, a winter contagion. Jackdaw came to them and announced his engagement.
You're the first two people I've told. I haven't even told my parents yet.

Jackie,
Adie pouted.
I thought you loved me.

Something in his stuttering objections said that the two facts weren't incompatible.

Spiegel clapped him on the back.
Fantastic, man. Who's the happy shackle-to-be?

She's called Fatima.

Last name?
Adie asked.

Morgan.

You make her change it,
she threatened,
and I'll kill you.

Spiegel waved for the floor.
Let me guess. Mother hails from Tunis and father from Piscataway.

I... 1 don't really know.

Humor, Jackie.
Adie wrapped her arm around the boy.

It's
an analog thing,
Spiegel said.
You wouldn't understand.

So what's she like?

Oh, she's fantastic. All over the map. She's got something new going every ten minutes. And she doesn't take any shit from men, I'll tell you that much.

Have you set a date yet?

Date? Oh no. We're still working that one out. One of these years, anyway.

Get it in writing,
Spiegel stage-whispered.

So when are you going to bring her around? We need to give her our stamp of approval.

Meet you people? Before we're legally married? You think I'm crazy?

Come on, Jackie. We have to see what you're getting into here.

Jackdaw grinned beatifically.
Use your imagination.

What does she do?
Adie heard herself, the parental interrogation she'd forsworn.

She's a docs writer. Real verbal chick. The mouth on her? Man.

You like that in a woman?
Spiegel asked. Acquerelli nodded vigorously.

What does she look like?

Stevie!
Adie punished his upper arm.

Can't help it. I'm visually biased. She's dark. Dark, and
...
uh, nice? About Adie's height.
Adie backpedaled.
Documentation writer for
...
? Motorola.

Motorola?
Steve dropped a beat.
Which facility? Chicago.

The penny dropped.
Where exactly did you meet this woman? In
...
in a Multi-User Dimension. On-line. A MUD? And you haven't really . .. seen her yet? Not. Really. Not yet.

Steve looked away. Adie examined the back of her fingers. The stunted gestures of liberal tolerance.

But of course we'll see each other, before we get
...
We're going to meet, FTF, pretty soon.

Face-to-face,
Steve told Adie. To spare her the humiliation of asking.

They spoke about it alone, in bed, after lights-out. Spiegel spoke with real pain.

The kid. Falling in love with a character in a MUD. Because she's a fast-typing put-down artist.

Why not?
Adie said.
That's his world. Who else is he going to fall in love with? The whole thing is always an exercise in mutual projection, anyway, isn't it?

Is it? Some projections at least have a chance of surviving the light of day.

Then don't take it out into the light of day.

What are we going to do?

About what?

About keeping Jackdaw safe?

Adie put her hand out to feel this man's neck.
Stevie. Stevie. Who ever told you that safe is an option?

The packet-switched courtship grew as rich as any love match. Router by router, chat room by chat room, the new couple negotiated their future space.

She hates TV as much as I do,
Jackdaw told them.
She loves 'zines. I think I'll eat better once she's around.

He started to dress more carefully. He even shed a couple of pounds of hacker's corn-chip flab. Adie caught him working out in the Cavern, waving the wand like a racket, hitting a projectile back and forth with a distant, animated stick figure a dozen feet beyond the Cavern's front wall.

Aiy. The age-old battle of man versus machine. It's not enough that they have to destroy us at chess? That they've started drawing better than we do? You have to teach them how to beat us at tennis, too?

Jackdaw stopped to look and lost the serve.
Oh. That's not a machine at the other end. That's Fatima.

Fa—? Hang on. You mean there's another Cavern? In Chicago?

He swung the electronic racket and cackled at her dread. No,
no. She's sitting
out
there at a terminal, with a joystick. We converted the app interface and migrated it out to her client
.

Adie watched in horror: shadowy lives playing against living shadows. A sudden pupaphobia overtook her as she watched the boy volley, step out, recompile a few new lines of code, step back in and volley again. Like Buster Keaton's projectionist, slipping in and out of his own projection. She turned from the scene to bolt, but there was no way out of the frame.

Jackdaw came to them in mid-November, high on adrenaline.
She's traveling out here. Over Thanksgiving. For three days.

Here? As in Seattle-here? That's great. Are we going to get to meet her?

You're joking She's in town for three days. No way are we going to waste that on other people.

He returned to work after the holiday, destroyed.

Let me guess,
Kaladjian said.
She's twelve years old.

No,
Freese said.
She'
s
a hundred and twelve. But remarkably well preserved for her age.

Rajan fell in with the cadence.
Don't tell us. You didn't realize from the name that she was part foreign.

Her name's not really Fatima?

She's really a guy.

She's really two guys.

She's really a LISP routine.

Jackdaw's nose flared and his mouth caved under. One tight globe of salt water pinched out of the corner of his right eye. He turned on his heel and left, over the cries of group protest that only too late realized the truth.

Freese received a one-line e-mail the following day. Jack Acquerelli would not be returning to the project.

Jackie's departure plunged them all into a cloud of bad faith.

Not your fault,
Steve told Adie. But she had long ago learned to discount forgiveness and work harder. And now there was more work for all of them, shorthanded, a man down with the match still in question.

Did not need this,
Lim said.
Not with the finish line looming. The guy used to put in hundred-hour weeks.

But eighty of them were just playing,
Kaladjian said.

You're saying there's a difference?

Adie tried to absorb the bulk of those lost man-hours herself. Slu worked around the clock. She lived in Hagia Sophia now, and wher she couldn't get into the cathedral itself, she pitched tent in the trace; of its flat-screen shadow.

That's where Stevie found her, with the next intruding news.

What is it?
she asked him. One look.
What's wrong?

Doris Singlegate?

She shook her head, unable to place the name.

The Mole-Woman?

She snapped to attention, revelation already making its way up her neck hair.
What's happened?

They let her out. After something like two years underground. They brought her back up to the surface. She passed a physical. A few small, strange things wrong with her body clock, but nothing critical.

Stevie. Just tell me. It's not like I know the woman.

She seems to have taken her own life. Back in her own home. In her own bed.