Richard Powers - Plowing the Dark

The word lay beyond the rest of the team's list of formal descriptors. It seemed to have a real referent; the new woman apparently meant something when she used it. Beauty might even have had some physical reality, some selective advantage conferred over the last billion or so years. But what formal rules the quality adhered to, what behaviors it meant to elicit, not even Spider Lim's body could begin to guess.

Time for the people, Adie declared. Are we ready to start populating this place?

They went back to the color reproductions. They took the measure of the rain forest's two inhabitants: black and white, vertical and horizontal, male and female, player and listener… And the vegetative kingdom surrendered to its human sovereigns, those shapes that gave first green its order.

Then Spider's body began to specify, began to execute that unde-cidable function. However arbitrary, however recently contrived, beauty turned real inside him. It grew legible, a script as unambiguously phonetic as Korea's upstart Hangul.

For the woman began to invade him. Her inroads grew so wide they even upset his sleep. Not the living woman: he left Adie to the others, to the bit jockeys who ranked her overgenerously in the local hierarchy of desire purely on the basis of novelty. He left her to Spiegel, who saw in her some ghost of a lost shared life. He left the real woman to those who knew how to interact with such things. And he took up nightly with the imaginary one, the woman on the crested divan. The one who organized this profligate Eden and named it.

He watched art and science conspire to float that full, stuffed body among the foliage. Out of the electronic paintbox, she emerged, rising from the wedge of face, the coils draping her neck, extending through the crescent of almond opening just above her knees and down to those

curious, stub toes.

Spider donned a pair of glasses and walked clear around the couch where she lay. She remained remote, aloof, still, exuding the hint of something he could not figure. We did this. It's beautiful.

Their first successful leaf, twirling in the Cavern darkness, had led to this — this pale, lentil body turning in his mind's dark. This scapular profile, these tow-line braids. Her hips fell somewhere on the limaçon of Pascal. The squares of her breasts' abscissas and ordinates summed to an integer. This was the math of women, a field he'd given up studying, female equations whose complexities had long ago surpassed his ability to differentiate. The flawless chestnut manikins, their grade-school desks fastened to the front of his, whose strands of brunette hair he'd once tried to number. The white film enigmas, beckoning to him to join them behind the projection screen. The cycles of magazine sirens, that March Cosmopolitan cover from his second year at Stanford, the anemic, skewed-thigh, dazed-eye vision he'd preserved for ongoing reference, the visible deed to this land of American license he'd somehow landed in. He rebuilt her in detail at nights, on his drive home down the mountain, through the newly air-dropped communities where no one could tell him apart from any of the thousands of other thirty-year-old transpacific immigrant virgins with pronounced epicanthic folds wandering around the Greater Seattle area. Her crude constructedness tapped some secret in him, a figure beckoning at the entrance to the impenetrable undergrowth that fringed his life. A texture map that lay on a couch just past recall, prodding his body from its long forgetfulness.

Where does she come from? he asked Adie.

From the mind of a supremely bizarre customs officiai in a cold Paris atelier.

No. I mean… the way she looks. Where did he get her?

She showed him the river flowing through this figure. All the prone female flesh, up on one elbow, turned three-quarters to face the plane of paint. Those countless, recumbent, thinly veiled Renaissance mistresses, passed off as Venus. Titian's Urbino goddess, Madame Récamier, the naked Maja, ripe Olympia… She showed him the long genealogical tree, art's ancient bloodline: this fetishizing, fawning, degrading, loving, lurid intimacy played out in front of centuries of voyeurs, these canvases like mirrors on the ceiling of the race's collective motel room, rented, as always, this evening, by the hour.

As the spinning leaf programmed the light, so this strange almond algorithm programmed Spider Lim's body to take up some history too long to understand. The female nude wanted something from him, something commanded in a lost language, something Spider Lim hadn't the visual vocabulary to comprehend.

He took to avoiding the Cavern while the jungle group worked there. But his cure produced the symptoms it worked against. His policy of containment only multiplied the woman's nighttime visits. Soon, she came to him as regularly as a cross-sound ferry, demanding that he examine her every surface, gaze on her where she lay wrapped in a long, self-extending pageant, a tableau vivant he'd never dreamed himself capable of seeing…

But those who toured it at open house felt its leap in technique, its advances in surface modeling.

Seven or eight explorers pressed into the Cavern, taking turns wearing the master tracking glasses.

My word, Jonathan Freese admired. It sure does feel robust.

And responsive, O'Reilly added. Not a whole lot of depth effect yet. But at least a body can recognize what's in front of it.

Sue Loque just nodded her all-natural fright wig, like a teen keeping the beat under a pair of headphones.

Pretty flicker-free, Jackdaw said. Nice ray tracing. Not too much latency as you walk around.

The moon soaked them all in silence, from up in the highest branches. A handful of jungle visitors stood loose in their own overrun seedbed.

Steve Spiegel broke the spell. Explain something to me, Ade? What exactly is the dame on the sofa doing in the middle of all this malaria action?

Ha. Does that trouble your little bourgie norms? Adie jabbed her college chum in the ribs, her first attack on his underbelly in a dozen years. The underbelly had grown softer in the interim. So had the jab.

Sue jingled her tire-iron bracelets. She' s listening to the music, obviously. To the spooky ebony guy in the Day-Glo skirt.

No, no, Spider said. She lives there. She's some kind of jungle spirit. Like the other.

Like him.

Yeah, right. On a Louis Philippe divan?

Uh, Rajan wavered. You white people do happen to notice that she's

buck naked?

No one heard Karl Ebesen enter the room, until he snarled. Idiots. The woman is not in the jungle. The jungle is in the woman's living room. It grows in through her window, while she dreams.

The Jungle Room feels strangely familiar.

Your eye recognizes the place at once, although it has never been there. Or say your eye has been there, long ago. Back before childhood's childhood. Before your eye was even an eye. And say that you've toted this spurge around inside ever since, a keepsake of long-abandoned cover.

Origins converge in the Jungle Room. Choose your myth of preference: the garden banishment, the wayward chromosome. Either way, this green is a return engagement. Nostalgia sprawls from the overgrown nooks. Life leverages every cranny. Moonlit creepers spread a welcome mat. The pennant of mangrove branches announces Old Home Week.

Fronds appear with all the shocking clarity of fronds. Perhaps they began as metaphors. But now they grow into the species they once only represented. The Jungle Room creeps steadily toward arboretum: taxonomy without the formaldehyde, ripe fruit without the fall.