RICHARD POWERS

by Unknown

  The upgraded hardware was back up and running. The bit pipes that served each wall quadrupled again in throughput. The recompiled visual development software ratcheted up its efficiency, shoveling ever more data with fewer cycle clicks. It was the old Ben Hur galley-rowing trick with the tom-toms, only with semiconductors standing in for galley slaves.

  Cavern time became that much harder to come by, now that real time became real. O'Reilly was first to get up and running with a new native-code version of his price-prediction model. He showed up on the shores of society one day with a startling announcement. Within the next half a dozen months, oil is going to take a severe hit.

  Rajasundaran rose to the bait. A hit? In price, you mean? Will that be up or down?

  Up. Significantly.

  How do you know?

  This is what the numbers indicate.

  Yes, yes. Rajan gave his exasperated Tamil imitation of patience. But for what reason do the numbers indicate this?

  Oh. The reason? That's not a question the model is capable of answering, just yet.

  Nor did any model predict the hit that O'Reilly took first. It came in a letter from Belfast, surface mail, and insufficient postage at that. It had been a long time making the crossing and sat in his letter box for a few more days before he came home from the labs long enough to check. The envelope bore Maura's handwriting, but no return address.

  He set the envelope on the kitchen counter while he poured himself something to drink. Liquid carrot: a delicacy peculiar to these United States. He looked at the thing, picked it up, held it to the light, set it back down, and took another swig of root juice. Maura always used a return address.

  Unless she no longer had one. Perhaps she was already on her way over. Had given up the flat on impulse, had commenced shipping everything here. Such was the way she operated, that Maura. She had a gift for living with both feet, a zeal that came free with her high coloration.

  O'Reilly set down the carrot juice and hunted around in his silverware drawer. He turned up a tiny paring knife that he'd earned as a lagniappe for sitting through an entire cutlery demonstration at a warehouse supermarket. He coaxed the blade under the envelope corner and sliced cleanly across the top lip. Pinching the corner open, he tweezered out the single sheet of note paper between his third and fourth fingers. He smoothed the message out on the kitchen counter and bent over it:

  Ronan. I'm going to be married. You don't really care, do you? His name is Stephen Powys and he runs a bicycle shop in Hen's Lane. You make one crack and I'll wring your neck ...

  Stephen is probably no you, but then again, you're no you, either. At any rate, you're not here anymore, are you? We don't really need your blessing, but you'll give it to us anyway, if you aren't a total shit. Either way, I figured you'd want to hear...

  He'd failed to predict the obvious: a new return address that he was not privileged to know.

  O'Reilly refolded the note and slid it back into the perfect slit. He slashed the last slug of carrot juice with one clean backhand into the sink. He could not sit. He found himself outside, in front of his apartment building, heading west—the American bearing. His pulse rate set the clip, and he fell in with it. The real brilliance of this country lay in its square blocks. You could circle at random and still be exactly where you were.

  She ought to have come out. Just once, just for a four-day, no-obligations, sample tour. If she had taken even a single look at what they were putting together, she would have seen. This work would overhaul the terms of human existence. It was his chance to partake in the discovery of fire. How could she think that he had any choice in the matter? Accuse him of selfishness or neglect? Everything he worked on here, he did for her.

  They might have made a life out here, built a common house from the ground up. They might have laughed like idiots together, from their aerial perch above this magnificent, navigable panorama. She ought to have come help him map the infinite mystery of the subjunctive. But she chose instead to serve him with this, the indicative's last word.

  Odds were good that he'd live to see at least the rough outline of embodied thought, the first human passage into living, active graphics. By the end of the day, he might even be able to travel to any spot of the hypothetical panorama he cared to visit. Only now, there was no one left he cared to travel with.

  On the fourth swing past his apartment steps, O'Reilly ascended. He reentered his cavernous flat, the one he'd picked expressly because it was large enough to absorb the ridiculous proliferation of pointless stuff that Maura so loved to accumulate. There he pulled from his collection of a thousand years of Western music the one disc that was to have been their recessional music after their run down to the justice of the peace, whose address they'd have found in the Yellow Pages on the morning when they knew they wanted at last to do the silly deed together, for all time.

  Mr. Big, of course. Because they wanted the best available blessing, and Maura could always have put on her beloved pennywhistles afterward. Cantata number 197, one of the wedding ones. A bass aria, for nach der Trauung, rolling in innocence, sung by a bass whose perfect, amused intonation declared that he had never lived anywhere but here, his vocal cords squarely at home in the bungled, compromised, roundly resonant place nearest to hand.

  Ronan lay back against the folding card-table chair—he'd have pitched it instantly on her arrival—and let the text wash over him.

  O du angenehmes Paar! Dir wird eitel Heil begegnen, Gott wird dich aus Zion segnen Und dich leiten immerdar.

  O you most delightful pair, he tried, padding out the words to preserve the meter. May you every blessing find; may the Lord shine forth His Mind. Not quite, but it scanned. May all happiness caress you, and the Lord from Zion bless you. Closer. May life all comforts bring you, and may God from Zion ping you. Wing you. Whatever.

  In the rippling sequences, Ronan counted up all the partners he had ever had, every woman he'd ever slept with or sworn promises to, the ones he'd truly loved flush up against the ones he'd loved less. The ones he left without ever knowing. The ones who left him for a whole range of reasons, declared and undeclared. The ones who had cut him off from all wherewithal. The ones whom he drove stark frothing mad simply by being who he was.

  He numbered them up in a dimensioned array. Then he counted Maura's. All the ghosts and goings-on she had ever told him about, and the ones he knew strictly through inference. The ones she replaced, and the ones she replaced them with. The lunatics and stalkers, the thugs he'd had to hustle out of the foyer, the dead little Michael Fureys he could never hope to compete with, the ones who stood under her memory's window in the dark rain, tossing pebbles at her pane.

  Then he followed the list out to the second degree. All the partners that his ex-partners had partnered off with. And then Maura's, as far along as he knew them, inventing no one, leaving no one out. Couples split and divided and multiplied in front of him, pairing off and propagating in the well-lit room, a runaway chain reaction. He lost count, then took it up again.

  He stopped at a hundred and forty-four, a heavily dividable number in anyone's book. Then he lined them all up, making a provisional seventy-two couples ol them, leaving room at the altar for all the unknown permutations—a melee of brides and grooms, brides and brides, grooms and grooms—and married them off in one mass, cull American wedding while the bass rolled on through those pure, practical Bach sequences:

  Oh you sweet, delightful Pair, May this life its blessing send you, May the Lord always defend you And preserve you everywhere. O you sweet, delightful pair!

  O'Reilly raised his ethereal stemware of now-imaginary ambrosia and toasted the pair in question, across a distance that no amount of technology would ever be able to close.

  And full of sleep, Spiegel echoed. And nodding by the fire. That I've become a bloody-minded bitch? You know how I am about the truth, Ade.

  She blessed the telephone for not broadcasting facial gestures. Stevie, tell me something. Whose life do you
think you're writing, anyway? Oh, I'm not particular. Just so long as the story has a happy ending? Across the wires, there came only raw spacer. Stevie?

  Ted's ... not good. He's had a bad falling off. He called a few nights ago, from the nursing home. I thought it was a crank call. Even after I figured it was him, I thought he was putting me on. Not his voice. Not his sentences. It took him two minutes to get through six words. And you don't want to know which six.

  She closed her eyes. Kept them closed while she said, Yes. I do.

  On the far end, a harsh exhale. "Come out now. If you want."

  Adie clutched the line's silence to her ear. Soon she would need to make a sound, just to keep whoever it was, out there, tied to the other end. Every available word was a small death.

  Spiegel spoke first, his voice veering. I figured I'd make him, you know, a little piece? A little show, for light diversion? I don't even know if he'll be able to watch the fucking thing.

  Stevie? Are you going out?

  Go? Out there? His voice caught at each consonant. He'd never considered the possibility. To Ohio? Vaguer, less reachable than any invented dimension.

  I could go with you. She matched him, daze for daze. I've been thinking. You're right. Whatever room we end up making here? It's going to need a score.

  The plane out to Cincinnati was almost empty. Having rushed to make the flight, they waited in the airport, waited on the runway, then waited in midair. Adie stared down through her smoky Plexiglas portal onto the crumpled sheets of the Rockies below. Stevie watched her staring.

  All back projection, he told her. You know. They put a few massive hydraulic jacks under the so-called plane, fake the dips and pressure changes, and treat us to the chroma-keyed Refreshing Landscapes tape out of the New Age catalogue. When the tape runs out, they fire up the fog machines.

  Her eyes stayed fixed on the panorama. But Spiegel needed to chatter. People are way too mobile, he said. You know that? We run up the frequent-flyer tab like we're buying bagels. Look at us. Three thousand miles for a long weekend. On an impulse. My parents would be scandalized. They needed three weeks just to implement a two-hundred-mile bus trip.

  Not us. Adie addressed the back-projected Rockies. We flew everywhere. Langley, Khorat, Chanute, Okinawa, Germany. Bounced around like pachinko balls, on an hour's notice. Half the planes I flew in as a kid didn't even have real seats.

  It's not right, you know. It's institutionalized schizophrenia. Close the door on Seattle, open it three hours later on Cincinnati? Guaranteed to make you nuts after a while. Something's wrong with full mobility. We need some obstacles. Places we can't get to from here.

  At last she turned, her eyebrows mocking the peaks below. My, my. Scratch a technocrat, find a Luddite. You're putting in seventeen-hour days trying to develop the matter transporter and you're saying we travel too much?

  His head sagged on its ball joint. The whole point of machine imitation is to venerate the original. This... He waved at the scandal of a cabin. This turns the original into a cheap tart.

  Later, somewhere over a featureless jumble of felt-colored rectangles, she asked him, How did you do that?

  An hour had passed since they'd last spoken. He squinted at her, unable to figure the antecedent. Adie stuck both hands out toward her drop-down tray and jiggled her fingers in the air. Pantomiming the pantomime.

  Oh. The ghost organ? The looking-glass harmonica?

  She waited, not even nodding.

  All the parts were already in place. The position trackers. The waveform lookups and instrument definitions. The sound generators. The only new thing I had to write was the formal description of a musical keyboard. You know: if a finger passes through the plane of a key surface, x centimeters along the horizontal axis, go and get an F-sharp, and play it until the finger lifts or the envelope decays, whichever comes first.

  Formal description? That's all? That's a lot.

  She put out her palms sunny-side up. How complicated can it be? He reached out and touched a finger to her near earlobe. She did not recoil. Tell me how to cook an egg. Cook ... ? Well. Boil a quart of water-Hang on.

  What? Oh. Fill a medium pan with a quart-Wait.

  OK. Find a pan.

  Ah! Now you've almost broken it down to the level of a complex subroutine. If pan exists and pan not in use and pan not dirty then for each cabinet of kitchen, search cabinet-sub-sink for pan, and so on, for another couple of hundred lines of code. Else if pan ...

  She nodded a fraction of a millimeter, forestalling elaboration. Then she coughed up a thought two years in assembling. Software is the final victory of description over thing.

  He held her declaration in midair, turning it over. With software, the thing and its description are one and the same. Any item that you can learn how to say, you can make, pretty much out of raw syntax.

  Saying and making ...

  ... are one another's night jobs.

  Wonder and disgust vied for control of her voice. So that's why we want to do everything over again in software. Why we all want to move there.

  Well, it's no worse than words, really.

  What are you talking about? It's a lot worse than words. It's words on steroids. Words are safe exactly because they're so fuzzy. Deniable near-misses. Give them teeth, and every teenaged thing that you ever regretted saying is out there drunk behind the wheel of the Chevy.

  They went on speaking, trading their widest words since their old, disowned ones. But east of the Mississippi, Adie fell sullen with memory. Soon they began their descent, the return to all hurt and hostility.

  They made their way from the airport on total improvisation. Adie drove; Spiegel navigated.

  He knows we're coming in today? she asked, as they headed north along the state highway.

  He did yesterday.

  Rural Ohio rolled past the windows, lone farmhouses on their hillocks, each at the center of their few hundred acres. She fixed her eyes on the rushing cornstalks. Everyone's nerve cells were decomposing. Everyone alive. It was only a question of rate.

  The nursing home stood a hundred yards from the site of the failed Shaker Utopian community. Every original building had vanished. No plank of that old, spare ecstasy remained behind. Adie and Spiegel parked and walked up to the single-story brick building. Nothing distinguished this particular purgatory from the identical geriatric holding tanks that every town over ten thousand inhabitants tucked away somewhere, behind an eight-foot hedge. A waiting room for the abandoned: the last place any infirm would want to land.

  Just past the foyer, a group of shattered bodies formed an enchanted circle around a TV set. On the screen, the National Little League Championship played out in silence, the sound track muted without the audience noticing. Heads bowed forward over their walkers in a silent prayer ring, their cracked-vellum faces poised for some sign.

  Why is it, Adie asked, under her breath, that the later in the day, the earlier a person falls asleep? She blessed the enchanted circle as she and Spiegel pushed past.

  They found their way down an ammonia-flavored corridor to the nurses' station. There they asked for Zimmerman. They found his room and knocked, but no invitation came from within. Stevie turned the handle and pushed. The door swung open upon their own invention. Bed to the right, bed stand to the left, unshuttered window in the middle. Only in this world, the artist was still at home.

  Ted lay in bed, strapped to the raised headrest. His arms wavered in the air like dried seedpods on autumn's first breeze. The bewildered bulge of his face took them in, mouth sagging, eyes fleeing back into their wells of bone. Age and incapacitation had added thirty pounds. He'd grown a mane, like Beethoven's.

  Ste-ven Spie-gel. The four syllables spread out over so long an astonishment that they lost themselves, like the word "Asia" on a good-sized globe. Then Ted saw Adie. And her name took so long to come out that it never did.

  Their embraces glanced against a body that could not manage them. Ted's limbs thrashed in g
rief and gladness. At last they settled, like stormed water seeking its level in the ocean's permanent bowl. Words were past considering. Then there was nothing but words.

  They spoke of the flight out and of their luck in finding the home. We knew this had to be the place, Spiegel said. The Welcome Wagon of catatonics up front gave it away.

  Zimmerman hauled back and sucked air. He seized up, a cracked

  ignition failing to turn over at thirty below. It flashed through Adie to

  call for a nurse. But Ted, in agonizing slow motion, was only laughing.

  What... the hell. Am I doing ... somewhere ... like this? Can you ... imagine?

  Adie could. Could imagine. She wanted to tell him not to exhaust himself. Not to try to talk. Ever again.

  On the bed stand where the washbasin should have been sat a portable computer. A wheelchair faced the lone window, looking out upon a bird feeder. Three drab sparrows flicked about in the seed. A day in this room would turn their bickering into top-drawer Verdi.

  Against the left wall where the towel should have hung stood a hands-free reading podium. A book lay under its acrylic plate, pinned open like a museum butterfly. An automatic page-turning device beneath the acrylic waited with infinite patience for the thrash that commanded it to advance the story. The book gaped open at a chapter reading "Meditation Four: What God Can Properly Give."

  Spiegel's eyes fell upon the deus ex machina. No. Tell me it isn't true. Don Giovanni gets religion?

  Ted seized up again, the silent, sucking sound of freeze-frame mirth. He tried to grab Spiegel by the arm and address Adie at the same time. A little more myelin and he might have pulled it off.

  This ... man and I... have known each other... forever.

  She held his eyes. And you and I, a few days longer.

  The two males fell to remembering. The composer, his grasp on yesterday growing tenuous at best, reached back fifteen years and reconstructed all their old arias, note-perfect. Spiegel kept pace, as if this one-upsmanship of detail recovered from oblivion actually gave him pleasure.