Richard Powers - Plowing the Dark

One thousand master craftsmen directing ten thousand conscripted laborers took half a dozen years to raise that model of paradise. The simulation team had between October and May.

Vulgamott took charge of the initial planning. The first thing we need to decide, of course, is magnification.

Adie stared at him, her face a blank.

Come on, he said. Scale? How large we want the thing to be?

I thought we'd just do it, you know: one to one?

Good Christ. Vulgamott struck himself on the forehead. She wants

it life-sized.

Spiegel rushed to defend her. At least we're not building in an earthquake zone. Getting the vault to stay up shouldn't be hard.

I don't know, Ebesen said. The model has gravity figured in. Thought, too, was an engineering problem. If you want a thing to stand, it has to be able to fall.

The room of holy wisdom spreads its tent beneath the dome of heaven.

Wood will not do, for its wooden parent burned. The building draws its stone from the farthest throws of empire. It cannibalizes for parts the world's great temples: columns from Ephesus and oracular Delphi, from Egyptian Heliopolis and Baalbek in the Levant.

It steals its palette of marble from the whole spectrum of imperial provinces: pink from Phrygia, Lydian gold, ivory Cappadocian, green from Thesselia, pure white quarries of sea-girt Proconnesus. Cut and dressed, the stone veins fan out to meet their mirror shapes at each facing's joint, picking up and echoing, like a stilled kaleidoscope, hints of heavenly device and earthly emblem, painted incantations, living creatures bolting through the symboled undergrowth.

The floor plan is a daring cross of conch and loggia. Basilica and hub — church architecture's two great streams — here flow together in a new confluence. And soaring above all, the dome rises to its awful altitude, climbing upward not to a point but cupped like the gentle firmament itself, a helmet resting on air, crowned in a crucifix, the world's

protector.

The dome bends over a gaping hole wider than its engineers should know how to span. Nor is the day's faith great enough to make up the shortfall. The emperor himself, at the building's christening, stumbles dazed into the vast vacuum of the eastern apse, dispenses with the prepared Deo Gratia, and blurts out, Solomon, I have outdone you!

Mosaic saints man the walls at strategic points. Deep-color tile squares of hammered gold leaf dusted over a layer of glass tesserae and finished with a layer of glass paste become the world's first bitmaps. Up close, their resolutions pixilate into discrete rectangles. But from down below, at the eye's prescribed distance, the folds of a gown hang full, and faces escape the waste of history into some stilled, further conviction.

Under the monstrous dome, empire draws itself tight into a hardened chrysalis. This room will fall first to Christian invaders, absorbing into its galleries the crypts of those crusaders who pillaged it. Later, from the conquering infidels, it will adopt calligraphic Arabic disks and minarets, and a subdued mihrab slipped into the east end, tilted slightly on the axis to Mecca. Another faith will command those mosaic saints to be destroyed, but fear and awe will leave them merely plastered over, protected for blasphemous mass viewing, centuries on, in the age of global tourism.

The world's ongoing project will fling itself upward, amassing public works so huge that this one will shrink to nothing in their wake. But something in the race yet chooses to build this one, here at the world's turning point, at obscene expense, to lay out a crippling percentage of the gross domestic product — greater than the sums it sinks into any other item in its governance — to raise this fixed navigation beacon for sailors breaking apart in the Hellespont, this vast, cupped dome huddling over the destitute, this omphalos, the Earth's navel, its cut umbilical cord.

Ringing the dome run these words, cut there by the supreme callig-raphers, this room's most recent owners:

God is the light

of Heaven and Earth.

His light is a niche in which there is a lamp,

the lamp enclosed in a globe of glass,

the globe of glass a shining star

lit from a blessed olive tree neither of the East nor the West…

The room of holy wisdom is a ruin. The world's largest, as large as the ruinous world. And propped against the stripped arcades, amnesiac, disinherited, illiterate in the unreadable wreck, you pitch your home.

The Qur'an runs out. No more need for it; no schedule left to preserve. You find yourself sitting blanked, your brain playing teatime host to the virus that consumes it. You look down in wonder at your arms and legs, where they tremble out of control. Hours mold. Your eyes fail to latch anywhere. From far off, in this perpetual dusk, you watch yourself stare at nothing. A translucent globe of light materializes in front of you, suspended on nothing, a spirit on air. Only as it covers your face in a silk thread does it occur to you: a spider.

You curl up fetal, your chin tucked between your hands. This close to your ear, your nail, rubbing up against your cheap cotton collar with every inhalation, sounds like the bobbing of boats against their ropes at anchor. There is a creaking like the creaking of rope on wood. There is a creaking that needs gulls, that says waves, insists sea.

Shapes spawn from the room's shadows, then dissolve in the startle they produce. But livid aftertaste lingers in the spots where these phantoms flicker. You turn back into that child of eight, pulled from a deep night's sleep, three hours past the reach of reason. A boy swimming to half-consciousness in a room not his own, its lumps of furniture a forest too tangled to navigate, without measure, without bearing, where north could be anywhere and the walls are as wide as dread.

All your life, you've awakened in this placeless place. Always the same, in its alien layout. Even as an adult, you felt it come to nuzzle, this other man's interior decoration. As late as three years ago you cried out loud, a groan forced up through sleep's thick opiates, scaring the wits out of the woman sleeping next to you. Your bed, your room, your Gwen, asking, What is it, sweetie? What is it?

You couldn't tell her. You couldn't say. You did not yet know. Not the deep trace of infant trauma. A warning of the trauma that awaited you, a glimpse of your last, furnished efficiency, this northless one. One and the same: the room that forever troubled your sleep is this one that you finally wake up in.

The deed, the title to the place is yours now, and it's way past time to remodel. You go with a bookshelf in deep cherry, and next to it, a tawny leather sofa long enough to stretch out on. The sinister shadow that cowered for decades in the far right corner becomes a mission-style chair and footstool. A record player, neat on its cart, appears in what had once been fear's worst alcove. The swelling shelf of records crawls with your guilty favorites.

Nowhere can you find a phone. You don't seem to own one, or much miss it. Now and then there's a knock on the door. One that you can ignore or humor at your will. When it's not Ali or Sayid with your dinner, it's Gwen, come to see if you'd like to do anything.

It all feels a bit suspect, really. How nice she's being. She never had ten consecutive minutes for you, when minutes were real. Now she hangs around all the time, if only because her place is still a dump while you've done up yours to comfortable perfection.

You tell her yes, you wouldn't mind taking a walk. The two of you, outdoors, on this glorious day. And maybe you could talk, just a little, about what went wrong. Turns out your place is on the third floor. Turns out you're living in a decent neighborhood in Lincoln Park, eight blocks from the lake.