Richard Powers - Plowing the Dark

Just tell me where you are. OK, look: I'll start. I'm squatting in my undershirt out on a black wrought-iron grille about twenty feet above the exhaust fan of the kitchen of a pasta dive…

He played along, the stakes high. Khaki shorts and a green raglan T-shirt. Kicked back in a molded plastic office chair in the middle of a… well… redwood-and-cedar kind of thing. Lots of river stone. Local

materials.

Very tasteful, they declared in unison. Old shtick, recovered from a dozen lost lives ago.

Geez, I don't know. What does my building look like? I've never really thought about it, Adie.

Come on, poet. Look around you. Walk me through the front door.

Hmm. Let's see. Maybe 10,000 square feet of usable floor, all on a single story. Lots of brick and earth tones. A maze of little cubicles made out of those tan-fabric-lined divider things. There's a nice little sunken atrium and such. A ton of vegetation per cubic liter. Big panoramic expanse of passive-solar smart window looking out at Rainier, on the ventral side.

I see. Kind of a futuristic forest ranger's roost.

Sure. Why not? You'll love it.

Hang on. You? As in me…?

He slowed and unfolded. We're putting together a prototype immersion environment we're calling the Cavern. Computer-Assisted Virtual Environ— Look, Adie. I'm not going to describe this thing to you over the phone. You just have to come see it.

Sure, Steve. I'll be out in an hour.

How about a week from next Tuesday? For a no-obligations site visit. All expenses paid.

Oh. Oh God. You told them I knew C++ ?

Worse. I told them I knew the greatest illustrator since representational art self-destructed.

Illustrator, Stevie? How tasteful. Haven't lost your knack for words, I see.

Nothing had changed in him. He was still that kid of twenty, compelled to round up and protect everything he thought he loved. A mini-Moses, still shepherding around the dream of starting an artist's colony where he could gather all those who needed a hideout from the real world. His voice alone was proof, if Adie ever needed it: no one abandons his first survival kit. The most we ever do is upgrade the splints.

You're exactly what the project is looking for, Adie. We can make these incredible digital circus animals, and we can get them to jump through any hoop imaginable. We just need someone who can draw the hoops.

I don't get it, Stevie. Don't get it at all.

We're all coders and chrome monkeys. A bunch of logic monsters, trying to make walk-in, graphical worlds. We need someone who can see.

Know how I picture it out there? Open-toe sandals made out of silicon. Fuzzy-faced, bicycling Boeing executives. Tofu-eating knowledge engineers and multiply-pierced, purple-frosted meth heads waiting next to each other on the curb for the Walk light.

See? You know what the place looks like before you've even seen it. I told the team how you used to do those Draw-the-Pirate tests as a kid and fix all the original's errors. I showed them that ARTFORUM sidebar. The reviews of your SoHo show in 79…

Oh God, Stevie. That's ancient history.

Oh, I went further back than that. I showed them my color slide of your huge acrylic group portrait of us. The one that won the university painting prize…?

How dare you. I hate you.

I told them about the award controversy. How one of the judges thought you were using projection? How he refused to believe that you'd actually freehanded…

Steven. We were children then. You don't have to fly a stranger across the continent just to find someone who can draw. Courtroom portraitists are a dollar ninety-eight a square yard. Besides, I already have a life.

You're not a stranger, Ade. He sounded hurt. That's what's so perfect about this. You don't have to stop painting. Just come out here and do what you —

Steve. You have the wrong person. I don't do… I'm not painting anymore.

Silence pinged off the far coast, full duplex.

Did something happen? he asked.

Tons happened. Oh, all my parts are still intact, if that's what you mean. It's just that painting's over. No great loss, I assure you.

Loss? Adie! How can you say that? What… what are you doing, then?

About what? Oh. You mean for work? I freelance. Commercial stuff. Fliers and the like. Book jackets.

You'll do a book jacket but you won't…?

Wont do original work. I have no problem with designing for a living. Copy and paste. All the pastel coffee mugs and cartoon cars that you want. But Art's done.

Adie. If you can still make … Do you see? This would be a chance to do something completely…

Sounds like you're looking for somebody else, Stevie. For the greatest illustrator since representation self-destructed.

Well, have it your way. Something in his voice said: You always did. But do me a favor, Adie? Just make sure that you see this thing once

before you die.

The sentence jumped out at her, from a place she could not make out. The sound of the words, their roll, their order. See this thing once, before you die. The strange familiarity of the invitation caught her ear, if not yet her eyes.

Put it that way, she heard herself mouth, I wouldn't mind.

Sure, he said. He'd never asked for anything but the chance to save her. Whenever you like. Preferably after 10 p.m.

The hard rose building brick pressed up against the small of her back. From a flight and a half up above night's fire escape where she sat, she watched herself say, How about a week from next Tuesday, then? On you.

He gave her an address: a foothill road, twisting above the suburbs of that boomtown port built to service a forgotten gold rush. In her mind's eye, Adie pictured the Cavern, lying beached like art's ark, perched on a leeward Cascade slope greened by rains that forever returned yesterday's soaked breeze to the Pacific.

Spiegel expressed her the promotional brochures. In them, glossy images traced the Cavern back to the underground grottos of paint's nativity. In faded watermark beneath the tables of hardware specs, she could make out the faint traces of those Paleolithic herds, stained into stone thirty millennia before art even gave itself a name. Spectral digits, stenciled to the rock — outlines of the same phantom fingers that applied the rouge — waved at her from out of the world's original apse. And across the folds of the glossy brochure, from three hundred centuries on, 3-D, multiplanar, true-color, walk-around holograms waved back.

Adie arrived that first evening, after six hours trapped in the sealed hold of a 737. Stevie was there at the airport to Virgil her back to the Realization Lab. A dozen years. More. They hugged briefly at the arrival gate, laughed, started to falter over the baggage carousel, and drove straight out to his lair in the silence of small talk.

The RL baffled her. It resembled Stevie's description even less than he resembled the Wisconsin boy she'd gone to college with. It smelled faintly of ammonia and fake chemical lemon, the spoor of the late-night cleaning crew. She lingered in the central atrium, rubbing her hands along the redwood walls, trying to bring her image of the place into line with its real layout. She wanted to see the office he'd been sitting in when he'd called her. Steve gave her an impatient tour of the facility, under the compact fluorescent lights. Then he hurried her down the maze of runways, back into a room that opened onto a stalagmite-strewn pitch-blackness.