Richard Powers - Plowing the Dark

They clung to each other as if it couldn't be obscene, so long as neither looked. Spiegel broke the pact of silence first. Less than two weeks after their return from Ohio, Adie logged in to her Cavern workspace. There, a missive in a bottle waited to ambush her. It launched itself from a niche in system memory that Adie thought had been empty. She scrambled to don a pair of stereo glasses. Beyond that, all she could do was stand and watch.

From out of nothing's well colors rose up. Specks of light off at various horizons rushed toward her from a slew of deep-space vanishing points. Space expanded along all axes at once. Her body succumbed to the pull of conflicting vertigos while the sky around her scattered with novas. Each star migrated to its own slot on the spectrum, only to split again into something fuller. The bursts bent closer over her, fireworks drooping back to awe their earthbound audience. Their flares passed a threshold of definition where she at last made them out: descendants of that first wire-frame leaf that Lim had made for her. Cut blooms from her abandoned jungle.

Petals rained down into the space around her. The full weight of the bouquet pressed against her eyes. She laughed at the trick, astonished. She flashed in anger. How dare Spiegel steal her tool set? The vector-drawn blossoms drew near, blowing away all pretense of ownership. These growths weren't hers to copyright. Even Rousseau had stolen them from too many sources to start counting now. Every human mark was mortgaged to the hilt.

She stood in this petal shower, someone's gift to her, someone from whom she had only taken. The day was coming, faster than these fireworks fell, a day when anyone could give shape to their innermost space and leave it on another's digital doorstep. All our private declarations of long love would come home for inhabiting.

The petals expanded until they had no more place to grow. Adie stood surrounded in a circle of stamens taller than she. The corsage grew bigger than the room that held it. The walls flashed pink, dragging her below the tissue surface. Still the view zoomed in. She passed through the cell wall and into a sea of cytoplasm, ever deeper down, punctuated by chaotic phase changes at each shift in gauge. Skeins of biochemical skeleton, pirated from Bergen's Molecule Room, rose up around her.

At last she found herself in another jungle, the flowers now huge colored spheres of amino acids, their entwined stems a dance of protein chains. The molecule bouquets bobbed on all sides of her, eager in space, whichever way she turned her head. And up flush against her, whispering binaurally close to her ear, the voice of the man who'd made her this living card said, See what a flower I have found you!

Darkness brought her back. When she again located the size of her own body, she used it to walk out of the Cavern and down the hall to the man's cubicle. Steve sat at his own workstation, toying with variable declarations.

It's beautiful, she told him.

She dropped herself into the scoop of plastic next to his desk that passed for a chair. The race that engineered the Cavern could not design a chair that comfortably fit the shape of a seated human being.

She shook her head at the colors she still saw. So fast, she said. So quick.

Adie! How long have I known you? How slow do you want to go? Oh. No. Real blood shot up to crimson her face. Not that! I mean, you built that… piece so fast. A few days.

He leaned forward. He put his hand to her mouth, palm flat, as if he were blind and gazing on her for the first time. J used one hundred percent existing parts.

It felt by turns sacred and profane. A man lay between them in bed, dying between them in an unattended nowhere, having lost the last control over his body. They both made love to him.

I lived with you so long, he said to her, in the dark. My whole adult life. Every year, you seemed more solid to me. And every year, I felt less real. I thought of you for so long, I felt myself becoming you.

She let him talk.

She brought Pinkham, whenever she came to stay the night with him. Love me, love my dog.

Oh, I love your dog, all right. I haven't decided yet what to make of you.

And sometimes, stretched in bed, he'd watch her transported, tranced out, waiting on the edge of herself for the rapture to come, steering her whole body with telekinesis toward climax, moving herself the way she had once, as a girl, moved the shutters of that painted

room.

Release would plunge her into a postcoital abyss so profound she would burst into tears, lost in the depths that such filling opened up. It was the greatest sadness that life offered, consummation.

It's nothing, she'd say, trying to keep her devastation from him. It's not you. It's just physiology.

Do you want… not to do this anymore?

You quit on me now and I'll kill you.

And sometimes, after they lost themselves to their bodies and lay slack, he'd look out to see her surreptitiously flexing her fists, balling and sloughing her thighs, as if to prove she still could. Recovering those moves for the one who had lost them.

Once, as they made slow, memory-stricken love, the phone rang. The obedient answering-machine speaker broadcast a message so thick and garbled it seemed a prank call. De… nise… Giran… dell Triumph blazed from the petrified voice.

Stcvie tried to stop, all the sadness of existence pressing down on the small of his back. But pressing upward against him, Adie kept him inside her until their plosive end.

She held her own little memorial service in advance. It could not happen at home, now that another lived there. And the lab, of course, was out of the question. That left only the infinite outdoors.

She bought a battery-driven boom box, skulking through the purchase as if she were buying child pornography. She hid it in the backseat of the Volvo, and took it up into the strip of woods on her island's northwest coast. She parked off the road and, with a little judicious trespassing, made her way out of public earshot.

There under the canopy— Look at that tree! Look at that… tree! — she held her wordless service. She played it once through, the shameless bit of ravishing nostalgia Ted wished he could have written but would never be able to. Tribute, buyoff, plea bargain, indulgence: she could not say what the archaic song sounded like, except that it sounded like him.

Before Dives and Lazarus could exhaust itself once more, she heard a person coming through the undergrowth. Despite her precautions, someone had heard. There was no place left on earth far enough away to be inaudible.

She thought to hit the Stop button and scamper off before she could be caught. But the tune still had a few measures to go, and the sound of its cadence made her ready to suffer the consequences. A gnarled, bearded lumberjack in a red plaid shirt and jeans came through the thicket, glaring at her. He slowed his arrival to coincide with the music's end.

She launched into her apologies even before the last note died away. I'm sorry. I'm on your property, aren't I? I was just… It won't happen —

Thank you, the man interrupted her. I'd completely forgotten that that piece existed.

With one stray word, they had stumbled onto the Cavern room Adie was after. But they could get no farther than that word. Together, Spiegel and Klarpol brought their lone clue to Vulgamott.

Byzantium? As in the empire? Adie nodded her head. Steve shook his. Byzantium, as in the Yeats poem, Spiegel said. Ask O'Reilly. He's the Irishman.

Well. Ronan eyed them. It's not really my favorite of his poems, you see.