Richard Powers - Plowing the Dark

What's that? she whispered, afraid the thing might bolt. That. There. It just moved.

God only knows, Steve whined. That's our problem. Millions of dollars of funding, and nobody around this dump can draw worth squat.

His voice seemed to come from just to her left, though Adie would never again trust her sense of distance. As she turned to look at him, the Crayon World wrapped around her, tracking her head. Spiegel's grin leaked out from under his own pair of wraparound glasses. Go on and follow it, if you like.

Adie squeezed the wand and steered away. In three short bursts, she put half a moraine between herself and where Steve stood. Yet he stayed right next to her, meadow for meadow, bog for bog.

What are those things supposed to be: cattails? bulrushes? What in the world is that Douglas fir doing over there, all by itself?

Stevie threw back his head and snickered. Some chassis-jockey must have drawn that one. They have all the visual intelligence of a myopic, right-hemisphere-damaged eight-year-old loose with his first sixty-four-color box.

Spider Lim just smiled at the coder's taunt. Like software knows how to draw any better?

But it's fantastic, Adie demurred. Change one… one mark on it and I'll kill you in your sleep.

Pixel, Spider corrected. Change one pixel. And you'll kill us.

Voxel, Spiegel overtrumped him. Keep current, will you, Lim? Voxel or boxel. A 3-D pixel.

How come you didn't paint the backs of anything? I mean, look at this stump. A very funky mahogany, although I do like the Cubist growth rings. But if we go around to the other side? Nothing but white. That's the paper, Spider apologized. The paper?

The paper we drew them on. Yeah. We were too bloody lazy to…

Hardware elbowed software in the floating rib. This particular world is not really about painting the stump, you know. It's about getting the head-position tracking to work… With the Kalman filtering… Not to mention the human head…

While doing these massive bit-blits from one graphics array area to another at sufficiently high speeds and resolutions to—

Look, look! A house. Did you know there was a little house out there? Don’t you boys snort at me. Can we walk behind it? Does the world go back that far? Look! Flowers. What—? Tul—, no iri—

How many times we gotta tell you? You're not dealing with bloody Pick-ax-o here…

Oh God! Adie shouted. Little bees. And they're buzzing! Crude black-and-golden scraps with loops of straightened paperclip wings jittered about in organized confusion. Something turned over in her, as small, as social, as buzzing and robotic as the living original. They like it around the flowers. Steve pointed off into a glade. Try waving the wand over there.

She did. The magic scraps of would-be bees swarmed after every trail of digital scent she laid down willy-nilly.

Adie soared and looped and rolled. Each time she cocked her head, the trailing wires that tracked her goggles pulled the whole landscape along in her sight's wake. She waved the magic wand through ever more elaborate wingovers and Immelmanns. She skimmed above the trees and plowed through furrows between the grass blades. She navigated out to the farthest walls of this confinement and jiggled the ground beneath her feet with her giggling.

You like it, then? Steve demanded. You really like it?

I never dreamed… I've never seen anything like it.

Outside the Cavern, beyond the enveloping lab, past the research park's camouflaging cedar shingles, out on the fringe of the coastal forest, the hurt of a screech owl skipped like a stone across the night's glassy surface. Long-haul commerce whipped its errand trucks up and down the evacuated coast road, hard as scythes. But inside this womb of cool engineering, ingenuity schooled its hatchlings by moonlight.

You'll come in with us, then? Steve asked Adie. You want to play?

Some part of her had never wanted anything else. Had never hoped for more than to play in such a place, or even in its ugly machine imposture.

The three of them strolled out of the paper meadows and walked back into real weather. They left the high-tech monastery, stepping out into the actual night. It seemed to be seedtime, early in the curve of the world's regeneration. Say it was raining. A wrap of mist condensed on their clothing, coating them in a fine glaze. A few scared birds clicked and whistled in the night, to find themselves out.

They stood together in the dark parking lot, next to the rental car that was to take Adie back to her tepee-shaped theme hotel down along the old state highway. Lim toyed with a geode key ring. Spiegel leaned on the rental, awaiting her answer. Klarpol, for her part, could not stop laughing, shaking her head side to side in disbelief at what she'd just seen. Images built and broke inside her. For the first time in as long as she cared to remember, the future held more pictures than the past.

Stevie, it's amazing. But I cant. I really cant.

What does that mean, exactly?

What, indeed? The very weather, that first night, interrogated her, dared her to say exactly what she had sworn off. And the wider box of evening — the scrim of midnight — mocked all her available replies.

It's not paint, he said. No paint involved at all. No original expression required, Ade. It's all drawing by numbers, out here. Dont think of it as art. Think of it as a massive data structure. What SoHo doesn’t know wont hurt it.

She laid out all her objections, lined them up in a mental pulldown menu. None held water except the last: a general hatred for all things that the cabled world hoped to become. Yet something tugged at her. Something darting and striped and buzzing.

Those bees, she answered him. How do they know how to find those flowers? How do you get them to fly like that?

Something in those jittery black-and-golden scraps recalled her sight's desire. So it always went, with life and its paler imitations. The things that needed renouncing — our little acts of abdication, our desperate Lents — finally caved in. They slunk off, subdued by hair of the dog, their only cure. The abandoned palette returned to press its suit, sue for time, advocate.

All Adie had ever wanted was to people this place with gentian and tree rings and hidden houses folded from out of cardstock, to raise stalks under an animated sky, a sky calling out for glade-crazed, pollinating paper honeybees that followed every trail of scent that the wave of thought's wand laid down.

You bastards, she said. You filthy bitheads. She looked up, helpless, ready, her wet eyes seeing everything.

In the Crayon Room, all strokes are broad.

Wax goes on nubby. It clumps and gaps. Your main repertoire here is the happy smear. Leaving an edge is hard. Any two colors mix to make coffee. From faint to heavy, from dawn to dusk, the crayon sea and the crayon causeway stay chirpy, pert monotones.

The grain beneath the page seeps up to enter any scene you draw. Spread your newsprint on the sidewalk and make a fish; your fish comes into the Crayon World already fossilized. Rub a stick of brown lengthwise against a nude page; the plank behind the paper clones its own knots and whorls, returning the pulp to its woody matrix.

Every crayon furnishing is a flat façade. The sun's disk serves as its own nametag. Head-on, distant hills flatten to platters. From the visitor's floating crow's nest, scarecrows deployed in this ripening grain have no more width than the paper they're scrawled on.