Plowing the Dark

34

Loque sat entertaining Klarpol, in the safe haven of morning. You know that our director used to fly military aircraft?

Adie did not know. She knew nothing of importance.

Never in combat, as far as I know. He picked up the whole virtual environment bug from his exposure to it in the Air Force. One of the first generation of pilots to test out the Head's-Up gear. You know: where they project the instrument display as a graphic, right onto your visor? Man, I'd kill for a gig like that. The chrome, the leather…

The Air Force? The United States Air Force? They're into this stuff?

Loque cawed at her. What planet core are you living in? The Air Force was building simulators a decade before you were born. Before digital. Whole film-wrapped rooms that pitched and yawed as you swung the stick around.

The Air Force wants make-believe?

Everybody wants make-believe. It's the most powerful leverage over non-make-believe that you can get. By now, the Air Force must have toys that would blow our little Brownie box camera out of the skies.

But why on earth…?

Come on. Use your circuits, girlie. It's a whole lot more cost-effective to let the little gunner boys kill themselves a few times in synthetic space than to have them all baptized under real fire. Hardware is cheap; wet-ware is what runs you.

Good God. Something issued from Adie that couldn't be called a laugh. I'm working for Dr. Strangelove. Again. She closed her eyes and shook her head. One palm flew up to supplicate, then gave up and fell back to her lap. My dad was Air Force.

Did he abuse you?

Ab—? No. No. Not… in so many words. Why do you ask?

You ought to try abuse sometime. I mean, on the receiving end.

Adie looked at Loque, the eyebrow studs, the chains and bangles, the new tattoo of barbed wire that had recently sprouted around her pale biceps. Your father?

Loque flicked back her grenadine hair. It's what they do.

No. Mine was too… too absent for anything like that. He got the dagger in in other ways. I went into art just to spite him.

Sue's head rocked back and forth. Can't spite those guys. Can't fight the Air Force. Dad holds the patents on anything we might want to throw at him.

How did he end up in industry?

Fearless Leader, you mean? Freese? You get too old to zap things, they turn you out to pasture.

God help us. Retired Air Force. What does he want from me?

Nothing much. Just wants you to design a world that will wow the press corps and excite the greater purchasing public at the same time.

I'm dead meat. Nothing we might possibly design can hope to… Compared to what the public already imagines, anything we make is going to seem like an inflatable jerk-off doll.

Hmm. Sounds like a killer app. Lot of folks are looking for just that.

Help me, Sue. You're my only hope.

Content's your department, babe. I'm just a tool guy, myself.

Oy, oy. Adie gripped her head in the vise of her two hands. You're telling me that the boss was a fighter pilot, before he became himself?

Sue nodded with vigor, her nose rings flapping happily.

Do you know about Karl Ebesen? Adie asked.

What about him?

About who he was, in his former life?

Sue shrugged. We all want something from the machine.

It messes us up, Adie decided. It really screws us over, representation. You know that?

Of course it does. Whatever hasn't been totally fucked up already.

The upgraded hardware was back up and running. The bit pipes that served each wall quadrupled again in throughput. The recompiled visual development software ratcheted up its efficiency, shoveling ever more data with fewer cycle clicks. It was the old Ben Hur galley-rowing trick with the tom-toms, only with semiconductors standing in for galley slaves.

Cavern time became that much harder to come by, now that real time became real. O'Reilly was first to get up and running with a new native-code version of his price-prediction model. He showed up on the shores of society one day with a startling announcement. Within the next half a dozen months, oil is going to take a severe hit.

Rajasundaran rose to the bait. A hit? In price, you mean? Will that be up or down?

Up. Significantly.

How do you know?

This is what the numbers indicate.

Yes, yes. Rajan gave his exasperated Tamil imitation of patience. But for what reason do the numbers indicate this?

Oh. The reason? That's not a question the model is capable of answering, just yet.

Nor did any model predict the hit that O'Reilly took first. It came in a letter from Belfast, surface mail, and insufficient postage at that. It had been a long time making the crossing and sat in his letter box for a few more days before he came home from the labs long enough to check. The envelope bore Maura's handwriting, but no return address.

He set the envelope on the kitchen counter while he poured himself something to drink. Liquid carrot: a delicacy peculiar to these United States. He looked at the thing, picked it up, held it to the light, set it back down, and took another swig of root juice. Maura always used a return address.

Unless she no longer had one. Perhaps she was already on her way over. Had given up the flat on impulse, had commenced shipping everything here. Such was the way she operated, that Maura. She had a gift for living with both feet, a zeal that came free with her high coloration.

O'Reilly set down the carrot juice and hunted around in his silverware drawer. He turned up a tiny paring knife that he'd earned as a lagniappe for sitting through an entire cutlery demonstration at a warehouse supermarket. He coaxed the blade under the envelope corner and sliced cleanly across the top lip. Pinching the corner open, he tweezered out the single sheet of note paper between his third and fourth fingers. He smoothed the message out on the kitchen counter and bent over it:

Ronan. I'm going to be married. You don't really care, do you? His name is Stephen Powys and he runs a bicycle shop in Hen's Lane. You make one crack and I'll wring your neck…

Stephen is probably no you, but then again, you're no you, either. At any rate, you're not here anymore, are you? We don't really need your blessing, but you'll give it to us anyway, if you aren't a total shit. Either way, I figured you'd want to hear…

He'd failed to predict the obvious: a new return address that he was not privileged to know.

O'Reilly refolded the note and slid it back into the perfect slit. He slashed the last slug of carrot juice with one clean backhand into the sink. He could not sit. He found himself outside, in front of his apartment building, heading west — the American bearing. His pulse rate set the clip, and he fell in with it. The real brilliance of this country lay in its square blocks. You could circle at random and still be exactly where you were.

She ought to have come out. Just once, just for a four-day, no-obligations, sample tour. If she had taken even a single look at what they were putting together, she would have seen. This work would overhaul the terms of human existence. It was his chance to partake in the discovery of fire. How could she think that he had any choice in the matter? Accuse him of selfishness or neglect? Everything he worked on here, he did for her.

They might have made a life out here, built a common house from the ground up. They might have laughed like idiots together, from their aerial perch above this magnificent, navigable panorama. She ought to have come help him map the infinite mystery of the subjunctive. But she chose instead to serve him with this, the indicative's last word.

Odds were good that he'd live to see at least the rough outline of embodied thought, the first human passage into living, active graphics. By the end of the day, he might even be able to travel to any spot of the hypothetical panorama he cared to visit. Only now, there was no one left he cared to travel with.

On the fourth swing past his apartment steps, O'Reilly ascended. He reentered his cavernous flat, the one he'd picked expressly because it was large enough to absorb the ridiculous proliferation of pointless stuff that Maura so loved to accumulate. There he pulled from his collection of a thousand years of Western music the one disc that was to have been their recessional music after their run down to the justice of the peace, whose address they'd have found in the Yellow Pages on the morning when they knew they wanted at last to do the silly deed together, for all time.

Mr. Big, of course. Because they wanted the best available blessing, and Maura could always have put on her beloved pennywhistles afterward. Cantata number 197, one of the wedding ones. A bass aria, for nach der Trauung, rolling in innocence, sung by a bass whose perfect, amused intonation declared that he had never lived anywhere but here, his vocal cords squarely at home in the bungled, compromised, roundly resonant place nearest to hand.

Ronan lay back against the folding card-table chair — he'd have pitched it instantly on her arrival — and let the text wash over him.

O du angenehmes Paar! Dir wird eitel Heil begegnen, Gott wird dich aus Zion segnen Und dich leiten immerdar.

O you most delightful pair, he tried, padding out the words to preserve the meter. May you every blessing find; may the Lord shine forth His Mind. Not quite, but it scanned. May all happiness caress you, and the Lord from Zion bless you. Closer. May life all comforts bring you, and may God from Zion ping you. Wing you. Whatever.

In the rippling sequences, Ronan counted up all the partners he had ever had, every woman he'd ever slept with or sworn promises to, the ones he'd truly loved flush up against the ones he'd loved less. The ones he left without ever knowing. The ones who left him for a whole range of reasons, declared and undeclared. The ones who had cut him off from all wherewithal. The ones whom he drove stark frothing mad simply by being who he was.

He numbered them up in a dimensioned array. Then he counted Maura's. All the ghosts and goings-on she had ever told him about, and the ones he knew strictly through inference. The ones she replaced, and the ones she replaced them with. The lunatics and stalkers, the thugs he'd had to hustle out of the foyer, the dead little Michael Fureys he could never hope to compete with, the ones who stood under her memory's window in the dark rain, tossing pebbles at her pane.

Then he followed the list out to the second degree. All the partners that his ex-partners had partnered off with. And then Maura's, as far along as he knew them, inventing no one, leaving no one out. Couples split and divided and multiplied in front of him, pairing off and propagating in the well-lit room, a runaway chain reaction. He lost count, then took it up again.

He stopped at a hundred and forty-four, a heavily dividable number in anyone's book. Then he lined them all up, making a provisional seventy-two couples ol them, leaving room at the altar for all the unknown permutations — a melee of brides and grooms, brides and brides, grooms and grooms — and married them off in one mass, cull American wedding while the bass rolled on through those pure, practical Bach sequences:

Oh you sweet, delightful Pair, May this life its blessing send you, May the Lord always defend you And preserve you everywhere. O you sweet, delightful pair!

O'Reilly raised his ethereal stemware of now-imaginary ambrosia and toasted the pair in question, across a distance that no amount of technology would ever be able to close.

And full of sleep, Spiegel echoed. And nodding by the fire. That I've become a bloody-minded bitch? You know how I am about the truth, Ade.

She blessed the telephone for not broadcasting facial gestures. Stevie, tell me something. Whose life do you think you're writing, anyway? Oh, I'm not particular. Just so long as the story has a happy ending? Across the wires, there came only raw spacer. Stevie?

Ted's… not good. He's had a bad falling off. He called a few nights ago, from the nursing home. I thought it was a crank call. Even after I figured it was him, I thought he was putting me on. Not his voice. Not his sentences. It took him two minutes to get through six words. And you don't want to know which six.

She closed her eyes. Kept them closed while she said, Yes. I do.

On the far end, a harsh exhale. "Come out now. If you want."

Adie clutched the line's silence to her ear. Soon she would need to make a sound, just to keep whoever it was, out there, tied to the other end. Every available word was a small death.

Spiegel spoke first, his voice veering. I figured I'd make him, you know, a little piece? A little show, for light diversion? I don't even know if he'll be able to watch the fucking thing.

Stevie? Are you going out?

Go? Out there? His voice caught at each consonant. He'd never considered the possibility. To Ohio? Vaguer, less reachable than any invented dimension.

I could go with you. She matched him, daze for daze. I've been thinking. You're right. Whatever room we end up making here? It's going to need a score.

The plane out to Cincinnati was almost empty. Having rushed to make the flight, they waited in the airport, waited on the runway, then waited in midair. Adie stared down through her smoky Plexiglas portal onto the crumpled sheets of the Rockies below. Stevie watched her staring.

All back projection, he told her. You know. They put a few massive hydraulic jacks under the so-called plane, fake the dips and pressure changes, and treat us to the chroma-keyed Refreshing Landscapes tape out of the New Age catalogue. When the tape runs out, they fire up the fog machines.

Her eyes stayed fixed on the panorama. But Spiegel needed to chatter. People are way too mobile, he said. You know that? We run up the frequent-flyer tab like we're buying bagels. Look at us. Three thousand miles for a long weekend. On an impulse. My parents would be scandalized. They needed three weeks just to implement a two-hundred-mile bus trip.

Not us. Adie addressed the back-projected Rockies. We flew everywhere. Langley, Khorat, Chanute, Okinawa, Germany. Bounced around like pachinko balls, on an hour's notice. Half the planes I flew in as a kid didn't even have real seats.

It's not right, you know. It's institutionalized schizophrenia. Close the door on Seattle, open it three hours later on Cincinnati? Guaranteed to make you nuts after a while. Something's wrong with full mobility. We need some obstacles. Places we can't get to from here.

At last she turned, her eyebrows mocking the peaks below. My, my. Scratch a technocrat, find a Luddite. You're putting in seventeen-hour days trying to develop the matter transporter and you're saying we travel too much?

His head sagged on its ball joint. The whole point of machine imitation is to venerate the original. This… He waved at the scandal of a cabin. This turns the original into a cheap tart.

Later, somewhere over a featureless jumble of felt-colored rectangles, she asked him, How did you do that?

An hour had passed since they'd last spoken. He squinted at her, unable to figure the antecedent. Adie stuck both hands out toward her drop-down tray and jiggled her fingers in the air. Pantomiming the pantomime.

Oh. The ghost organ? The looking-glass harmonica?

She waited, not even nodding.

All the parts were already in place. The position trackers. The waveform lookups and instrument definitions. The sound generators. The only new thing I had to write was the formal description of a musical keyboard. You know: if a finger passes through the plane of a key surface, x centimeters along the horizontal axis, go and get an F-sharp, and play it until the finger lifts or the envelope decays, whichever comes first.

Formal description? That's all? That's a lot.

She put out her palms sunny-side up. How complicated can it be? He reached out and touched a finger to her near earlobe. She did not recoil. Tell me how to cook an egg. Cook…? Well. Boil a quart of water-Hang on.

What? Oh. Fill a medium pan with a quart-Wait.

OK. Find a pan.

Ah! Now you've almost broken it down to the level of a complex subroutine. If pan exists and pan not in use and pan not dirty then for each cabinet of kitchen, search cabinet-sub-sink for pan, and so on, for another couple of hundred lines of code. Else if pan…

She nodded a fraction of a millimeter, forestalling elaboration. Then she coughed up a thought two years in assembling. Software is the final victory of description over thing.

He held her declaration in midair, turning it over. With software, the thing and its description are one and the same. Any item that you can learn how to say, you can make, pretty much out of raw syntax.

Saying and making…

… are one another's night jobs.

Wonder and disgust vied for control of her voice. So that's why we want to do everything over again in software. Why we all want to move there.

Well, it's no worse than words, really.

What are you talking about? It's a lot worse than words. It's words on steroids. Words are safe exactly because they're so fuzzy. Deniable near-misses. Give them teeth, and every teenaged thing that you ever regretted saying is out there drunk behind the wheel of the Chevy.

They went on speaking, trading their widest words since their old, disowned ones. But east of the Mississippi, Adie fell sullen with memory. Soon they began their descent, the return to all hurt and hostility.

They made their way from the airport on total improvisation. Adie drove; Spiegel navigated.

He knows we're coming in today? she asked, as they headed north along the state highway.

He did yesterday.

Rural Ohio rolled past the windows, lone farmhouses on their hillocks, each at the center of their few hundred acres. She fixed her eyes on the rushing cornstalks. Everyone's nerve cells were decomposing. Everyone alive. It was only a question of rate.

The nursing home stood a hundred yards from the site of the failed Shaker Utopian community. Every original building had vanished. No plank of that old, spare ecstasy remained behind. Adie and Spiegel parked and walked up to the single-story brick building. Nothing distinguished this particular purgatory from the identical geriatric holding tanks that every town over ten thousand inhabitants tucked away somewhere, behind an eight-foot hedge. A waiting room for the abandoned: the last place any infirm would want to land.

Just past the foyer, a group of shattered bodies formed an enchanted circle around a TV set. On the screen, the National Little League Championship played out in silence, the sound track muted without the audience noticing. Heads bowed forward over their walkers in a silent prayer ring, their cracked-vellum faces poised for some sign.

Why is it, Adie asked, under her breath, that the later in the day, the earlier a person falls asleep? She blessed the enchanted circle as she and Spiegel pushed past.

They found their way down an ammonia-flavored corridor to the nurses' station. There they asked for Zimmerman. They found his room and knocked, but no invitation came from within. Stevie turned the handle and pushed. The door swung open upon their own invention. Bed to the right, bed stand to the left, unshuttered window in the middle. Only in this world, the artist was still at home.

Ted lay in bed, strapped to the raised headrest. His arms wavered in the air like dried seedpods on autumn's first breeze. The bewildered bulge of his face took them in, mouth sagging, eyes fleeing back into their wells of bone. Age and incapacitation had added thirty pounds. He'd grown a mane, like Beethoven's.

Ste-ven Spie-gel. The four syllables spread out over so long an astonishment that they lost themselves, like the word "Asia" on a good-sized globe. Then Ted saw Adie. And her name took so long to come out that it never did.

Their embraces glanced against a body that could not manage them. Ted's limbs thrashed in grief and gladness. At last they settled, like stormed water seeking its level in the ocean's permanent bowl. Words were past considering. Then there was nothing but words.

They spoke of the flight out and of their luck in finding the home. We knew this had to be the place, Spiegel said. The Welcome Wagon of catatonics up front gave it away.

Zimmerman hauled back and sucked air. He seized up, a cracked

ignition failing to turn over at thirty below. It flashed through Adie to

call for a nurse. But Ted, in agonizing slow motion, was only laughing.

What… the hell. Am I doing… somewhere… like this? Can

you… imagine?

Adie could. Could imagine. She wanted to tell him not to exhaust himself. Not to try to talk. Ever again.

On the bed stand where the washbasin should have been sat a portable computer. A wheelchair faced the lone window, looking out upon a bird feeder. Three drab sparrows flicked about in the seed. A day in this room would turn their bickering into top-drawer Verdi.

Against the left wall where the towel should have hung stood a hands-free reading podium. A book lay under its acrylic plate, pinned open like a museum butterfly. An automatic page-turning device beneath the acrylic waited with infinite patience for the thrash that commanded it to advance the story. The book gaped open at a chapter reading "Meditation Four: What God Can Properly Give."

Spiegel's eyes fell upon the deus ex machina. No. Tell me it isn't true. Don Giovanni gets religion?

Ted seized up again, the silent, sucking sound of freeze-frame mirth. He tried to grab Spiegel by the arm and address Adie at the same time. A little more myelin and he might have pulled it off.

This… man and I… have known each other… forever.

She held his eyes. And you and I, a few days longer.

The two males fell to remembering. The composer, his grasp on yesterday growing tenuous at best, reached back fifteen years and reconstructed all their old arias, note-perfect. Spiegel kept pace, as if this one-upsmanship of detail recovered from oblivion actually gave him pleasure.

Adie sat listening, eviscerated. When she couldn't make out Ted's words, she made them up rather than ask him to repeat a single vowel. The boys talked on, memories feeding on themselves, for in the end, there was nothing but reworking the one hope chest full of stories. For a while Adie walked around the room, groping every object she could reach. She looked over the small library of CDs, a medium invented since she and Ted had lived together. The tune that she searched for cowered there, among the others.

Do you listen much to your discs? A decade and a half of dodged questions, and this was the thing she chose to ask. She bit her tongue and hoped for a yes. At least some pit orchestra, to accompany the endless afternoons of sparrow-bickering.

Not…. as often as you might think. They're hard to get to. Hard… to load.

She knew what "hard" stood for. "Hard" was the last euphemism that dignity left him.

Lunch came. A tuna salad for the resident, and a cube of Jell-O for his guests to share. Steve and the nurse, with orchestration from Zimmerman, moved him from bed to chair. Adie watched. TeraSys robots moved with more mobility and coordination. The body that had warmed her once, that she had warmed, now flopped toward its target like hardened rubber.

The nurse hovered. You want some help with your food, Ted?

He waved her off, the arm a brutal flail. I will lunch alone with my friends. With whom I have not dined for some time.

His fork performed a bravura, involuntary loop-the-loop. Steve, suppressing a laugh, started to choke on a bite of tuna. Ted flailed at him, and his fork hit the rug. This second fling sent celery chunks flying in all directions. The boys were both hysterical. And then they weren't. That long, wheezing suck of air that each previous time had turned into a laugh veered into another place.

Adie stepped into the breach before she even knew there was one. She pulled her chair flush against Ted's and took up his jettisoned fork. As if she had done it forever, each day of her adult life, she stabbed a chunk of tuna and steered it into this lunging little chick's mouth. Ted opened, received, and swallowed, also knowing the drill. Her free arm went out and encircled him, steadying the bull's-eye.

So how about that Little League World Series? she asked him. Something else, huh?

The corners of his chewing mouth pulled up in an almost controlled rictus.

Lunch decimated, the composer confided in them about his new project, just under way. A last-minute sprint to the finish, something midway between setting Scottish folk tunes and heaving up an Opus 111. The work lay hiding inside his portable computer. Spiegel fired the box up for a look. The full score appeared on the screen.

Spiegel cleared his throat in shock. Chamber orchestra, Ted? Where are you going to find a chamber orchestra to play contemporary music these days? Or is this another soap-company commercial?

Zimmerman howled. Look at it. Read the notes, you Philist…

Adie came up behind Spiegel. The two of them inspected the score, trying to turn the armada of formal symbols into a symphony for the inner ear.

How are you entering this? she asked.

It seemed one of the nurses, an amateur pianist, occasionally came and took dictation. It took Ted almost a full minute to say as much. She s also… something of a… piece. It aids… the composition process… to have someone… to impress.

The visitors traded disbelief. The man was dead up to the waist, with the tide rising. But something in him still pursued the conquest, long after conquest could be of any use.

/'// take some dictation if you like, Steve offered.

Ted's eyes went round and terrified: Would you?

Just don't try to cop a feel while I'm at it.

Adie stood to go. I'm taking a walk. My bit to aid the creative process.

She came back an hour later. Stevie swung around at her entrance, utterly panicked. His look accused her: Where have you been? It's hopeless. Hopeless. She came over to the screen. They'd added no more than four measures.

We're going on an expedition, she announced. It's gorgeous out there. She crossed over to Ted and draped herself around him. You'd like that, wouldn't you?

His eyes fled back into their place of wonder. I… would… indeed.

They dollied his wheelchair down the linoleum hall and through the rec room. The circle of charmed TV viewers now sat in communion over an extinguished set. No one objected to the fact that the screen had gone blank. At the sight, Ted sucked air in through the sides of his mouth—eeegh… eeegh—and Adie accelerated him out the front door.

His spectral wail only crescendoed, once out in the open air. Everything in this scared, small town that could possibly stare at him did. All Lebanon gawked at the man in a wheelchair, bellowing at this chance gift of freedom.

Adie leaned down to Ted's ear. Sotto voce, through the side of her mouth, she giggled, Now, Grandpa, you fucking control yourself or we're taking you back to the can. This only made Stevie pick up and propagate the horse laugh.

First time, Ted tried to say. First time in six months. Not fifty yards down the asphalt, he cried out, My God!

Adie slammed the wheelchair to a stop, bracing for crisis.

Look.. at that… tree!

They turned toward the midsized maple that Ted's wavering arm stalk seemed to indicate. Steve and Adie looked up into the boughs, searching out a source large enough to rate the alarm. The branches drifted, a crowd of thousand-palmed arms waving callow-green, three-fingered salutes.

I've never… seen anything like it.

And then, looking, neither had any of them. Matte, shiny, then matte again as the wind flipped their surfaces, each leaf semaphored a single bit in a composite message too large to read. The trio stood until self-consciousness set in again, blinding them.

The cedars of Lebanon, Spiegel pronounced. Adie shoved him. Good Christ, there's another one!

They were, in fact, all over the place. Cheap and eager miracles, too common to look at twice. The wheelchair rolled slowly up the street, under that greening canopy.

It took some pushing to get to town. But town ended as soon as they entered it. Thirty-two places in the United States went by the same name, half of them having started existence as Utopias. Texas alone boasted three of them. This particular Lebanon now existed, to the extent that it could be said to exist, as a theme park version of itself. The Glendower Shaker Museum. The junk-turned-antiques shops, the fleabag hotels upgraded to bed-and-breakfasts for weekenders escaping Cinci or Columbus.

Main Street ran its eight blocks before giving up the ghost. The expedition came to rest at Main and Broadway, awaiting the rapture, which, when it finally came, would surely be at least this quiet. Zimmerman swung his arm in a resounding upbeat, Adie's cue to cut up to Pleasant, circle around, and start the whole loop over again.

J can't believe it. It's all still here.

They never let you out? Spiegel asked. Never take you for a spin?

How could they? Too… label-intensive.

They ran the meager gauntlet of storefronts, Ted narrating the tour. Good place to eat. Place I used to do my laundry. This… guy still fixes shoes. Can you imagine? A hobbler!

Air spit out of Spiegel's pressed lips. Cobbler, buddy.

Unless he's a bad one, Adie offered.

Cobbler. That's what I said! Followed by the rasping inhale, the eegh of uncontainable glee at this, the black comedy of his existence.

Adie weighed the size of the two ratios: New York to this prop town; this prop town to the nursing home. Which was the farther fall? She was not good at math. Her private calculator tape rarely gave the same subtotal twice. But the answer to this long division was obvious. The second drop-off made the first seem level. The next drop would be no problem at all.

They rounded the loop again. On the third pass, revelation flagged. The thick, supernal gift past deserving now only fatigued them, at least the two doing the pushing. Spiegel broke first. That so-called good place to eat. Want to give it a try?

I do, indeed. And I hope that… woman we saw is still… sitting out

front.

Spiegel and Adie traded glances. There was something supremely cruel to evolution. Desire survived the purpose of its burn.

In that public place, Adie again rose to save them. She ordered for Ted, spoon-fed him, and wiped his face without a trace of patronage. She helped the waitress clean up the glass that Zimmerman's lunging backhand managed to swipe from the table. And she ate her own meal as well, all the while holding up her end of the conversation.

Ted asked about her work out West. She described the magic lantern show, in detail.

I've told you about all that stuff, Steve kept interrupting. Over the phone. You remember.

Clearly he didn't. Also clear that Ted could make nothing of the sketch Adie now drew for him. But she carried on gamely, the only strategy ever available.

We're supposed to demo for the general public next spring, and I haven't a clue as to what we should be building.

Spiegel laughed. She says that like she's saying, "I don't have a thing to wear."

Ted just stared at his two lost friends, ecstatic with bafflement.

By the time they rolled back down the long hill to the home, darkness had settled in. The old folks were watching a video blooper out-take show, gales of hilarity pouring out of the set. The instant they got back to his room, Ted blurted, Put me… on the bed.

Neither healthy body knew what was happening. They worked the badly distributed sack, Steve under the shoulders and Adie at the knees. They floundered, slipped, and banged his deadened torso against the metal sides of the hospital bed, at last getting him more or less supine, face-up, and centered.

Pull down my pants.

Spiegel punched him. Jesus, Zimmerman. Will you never change?

Hurry!

Thickened with emergency, Adie spent whole milliseconds wondering how they'd avoided this moment until now. She dove under the bed, the likely hiding spot, and surfaced with the bedpan.

Just put… just put me…

Between the two of them, they figured out the logistics. While Ted mewled in agony, the cause lost, Adie and Steve lifted his naked middle and slipped the pan underneath him.

I'm sorry. Humiliation bubbled up, broken, from Ted's throat. You two. I'm so… sorry.

About what? Adie rubbed his shoulder, looking away from his worthless, bared groin. We got you.

I'm in? His eyes retreated deep into their stunned corners. I made it…?

She nodded.

Oh. His voice relaxed in a wave of wonder. Oh! What a… good… day.

How does he pay for the single room? she asked Spiegel, on the way to their own motel that night.

Steve had fallen away sharply from jovial to grim, the minute they left the home. He made a fortune on those sell-out TV ads. The beatific Shaker rip-off. His thirty seconds of tonal recidivism.

She closed her eyes, hearing the beautiful tune against her will. That cash can't possibly last much longer.

Neither can he, Steve said.

At the motel check-in, she surprised him. One room, she told the desk clerk. With two single beds. She turned to Steve. Hope that's all right with you? I'm not sleeping in a strange room by myself tonight. Not after that.

Nothing separated them but a bedside light. My God, Spiegel whispered into the dark. The man can't go to the bathroom by himself. And he's still… he's still…

Don't say it, she said.

Each faced the other's wall, silent for a while. You know? he said at last. No lesson in life cripples me worse than "life goes on." And he fell asleep.

She followed, mere hours later.

Adie dawdled the next morning, first in the shower and later over the complimentary continental breakfast. It crossed Spiegel's mind as well, just how many eternities they could knock off the tally simply by showing up a few minutes later.

When they arrived, Ted was waiting for them, agitated. I woke up with this weird… idea. That you said something yesterday. About building a cave?

Adie embraced him where he lay. A Cavern.

Technically speaking, Spiegel added.

Why would anyone…?

Haven't you watched the tape I sent you?

Ted flailed in the direction of the TV room. I don't go out there much.

I spent weeks slaving over a hot workstation cooking that up for you, and this is the thanks I get?

Spiegel found the video on Ted's shelf. Grateful for the diversion, Adie collaborated in dragging Ted out and commandeering the set. And so the nodding, enchanted geriatric ring looked on at their first working demo of virtual reality, a new galaxy beyond their combined ken.

Steve appeared on the videotape, making a few off-color comments that no one, Ted included, seemed to decipher. Then he stepped into the Cavern and fired it up. He took a spin through the Crayon World, then the Weather Room, then the Jungle.

What is this? a blue-skinned, beaked woman asked. A travel show or something?

I seen one of them, explained a man attached to a tube of oxygen. It's got to do with special effects.

On the tape, Spiegel set the controls for Aries.

I did that, Adie said, holding Ted's flapping hand.

I… thought it was… Van Gogh.

Then the taped version of Steve booted up the invisible organ. His hands played upon air, and a deeper air issued from them. Ted sat forward, transfixed. Here at last was something one could learn from. They'd forgotten to attach his belt restraint. Adie had to reach over to keep him in the chair.

I need… one of those. But one.. that doesn't need hands. Ted wanted to see the instrument again. He asked for a third look, but the rest of the audience shouted him down. He rocked his head all the way back to his room. That's… the thing I'm going to be playing. Any month now.

Somehow that day passed faster than the last. Time's aperture stopped down to match the stunted bandwidth. Steve took more dictation. F… sharp. No. Make that a G… flat. Even the simplest whole-note triads required endless revision.

Adie watched. Through the window, at the contested feeder, the sparrow industry worked out its continued survival, eating and excreting, twitching and chattering, inventing each minute from scratch.

They rolled Ted out to the terrace, hoping to store up the outdoors in the cells of his body. He asked for a windbreaker, despite the warmth. He seemed happy just to sit and look, without any walls to jam his focal length.

Spiegel, workless now for longer than he had been since college, paced in place. Already he wanted the airport waiting lounge and the flight back to Seattle. So what do you do all day? How do you fill the damn vacuum?

Ted's eyes opened wide. For the last few weeks… I've been trying to remember… the name of every woman I've ever… enjoyed.

Spiegel all but spit his teeth across the terrace. How many of those that you enjoyed did you actually… enjoy?

Not… many. Ted avoided looking at either of them. I'm just trying… to put my story together. Where I was… when. I don't know. Half a minute passed. And why.

Done, Adie laughed. And it's taken me less than forty seconds.

Ted stared at her, that look of myelin-stripped panic. You knew… all of them?

Not yours, you idiot. Mine.

Oh. Ted's grin worked against the width of the disease. Oh. In that case… I wonder if you could help me with… the name of the cat woman?

Spiegel tucked his face under his arm. Adie smiled sweetly. You asshole.

The… cat woman. You two… know the one I mean?

The three of them sat loosened by the breeze, looking over the accumulated wreckage of the past that still, somehow, seemed worth enumerating.

They didn't brave a restaurant again that evening. Instead, Adie ran out for candles and wine, a decent BV Napa cabernet that they drank out of paper cups. By dinner's end, there seemed nothing left to say.

Steve, as always, broke first under the silence. Well. Shall we have a listen before we go?

A… listen? Ted's face shrank in horror at the possible meanings.

To the chamber symphony, man. What did you think I meant?

The chamber…? How?

Steve pointed at the computer and whirled his finger around in space — the obscure sign language for whirring electrons. Through the magic of semiconductors. How else?

Oh. It flooded Ted's voice, a bitterness so great that only an immobilized soul could survive it. Oh. I thought you meant a real listen.

But a fake listen would have to do, for the fake was all they had. Spiegel loaded the piece, set quarter note equal to sixty, clicked the cursor on the first measure, and released the synthetic music.

Notes spread over them in the dark, notes in a constellation that no one could have guessed came out of this man. The sound stunned Adie, even in the synthesized clarinets and trombones, even in the tinny approximation of inch-wide speakers. This music was not Ted, not any Ted either of them had ever known. It had no edge, no irony, no flamboyance, no demonstration of academic credentials. It was tonal. Standing waves of continuous, proscribed modulations outdid even Dives in luxurious archaism. Music meant nothing, except by convention. But this massive parallel data of pitches in time turned her viscera in a way unreachable by any paraphrase. There were things so complicated that only the ear could know them.

Sound snaked around itself, pointless and beautiful. The shaped sound counted for nothing. It demonstrated nothing. It proved nothing but its own raw need for a redemption that, finally, could only be denied. Something in this music had been lost in transcription. Some impediment to Zimmerman's conception brought about by the disease. Some inability to write what he meant, dictating through the ether while lying in bed.

But a look came across Ted's face as he listened. The music came as close to conception as the encumbered process was ever going to let him come. At last the piece trickled out, stumbling through the incomplete measure that Spiegel had transcribed that very evening. And when the chords decayed, the piece still abided in the night that scattered it.

Ted's eyes pleaded with the two of them. His mouth latched on to a sudden rush. If I could just finish all four movements. It's music… that people might love. That people might think about and… feel. Not like that alien stuff we all used to make…

You'll finish, Spiegel said. And then you'll write something else. Because this one won't please you anymore. Yet, Ted corrected. Won't… please me yet. Give us a minute, Adie ordered.

Spiegel's head jerked back. I have been asked to evacuate, he told Ted. Goodbye. Farewell. Take care. Write if you get work.

He walked without looking, out to the front room, where a ballroom of white-tied aristocrats swirled to the strains of a Strauss ländler. Near the door, a doubled-up woman, trembling against her rocker in time to the meter, hummed a descant to the ghost dance's tune.

Adie reappeared, pumice-faced. OK. I'm done. Let's get out of here.

Nothing outside could touch either of them. The rental car was their cocoon, a safe capsule heading north in the dark.

Were you aware, Stevie said to the Ohio night, that a huge percentage of the population eventually gets sick and dies?

Adie stared at the ribboning road. Finally, in a voice the color of that hypnotic pavement, she said, Denise Girandel.

Denise Girandel? Nothing. Then: Denise Girandell How in the name of hell did you dig up that one?

She shrugged. How many cat women are there in one persons life?

Why didn't you tell him?

I wasn't about to give the bastard the satisfaction. A mile went by. Besides. Trying to remember gives him something to do all day.

They pulled up at the motel. Spiegel sat still in the passenger seat, the motor dead. You two should never have gotten divorced. You know that, don't you?

Whatever you say, Stevie. Then, softer. It's not that people shouldn't get divorced. It's that they can't.

Hours into the night, she came into his bed. Looking for something— an explanation, a barricade, another mammal's pelt.

I'm not going to hurt you, she said. I just need to lie here. I just need to hold someone.

Holding lasted no longer than holding ever does. But when it came to the things she needed, hurt and hurting were not least among them. She kneaded into him, as if the thing she had to release lay on the far side of a wall, just out of her reach. She ground against him, less in pleasure than in desperation, in search of some permanence she meant to work on his body. She forced into him, desperate to press all shale to slate. He tried to say her name, but she put her fingers into his mouth, gagging him with desire.

Whatever release she wheedled out of the contact had nothing to do with him. He was just the nearest body, the closest living thing that Would hold still. She fell off him finally, spent, holding him so that he could not turn to embrace her.

For the longest time she did nothing except to lie beside him on this single motel bed, returning to the unbearable baseline of sixty beats a minute. Then she reached over, her hand cupping around his face, a child playing guess who.

By the tips of her fingers, Stevie felt that his temples were wet. Remind me, he said.

She rustled up close to his ear. Remind you what?

Once out of nature. To look for something better than this body.

She stroked his temples, counterclockwise. Each trace around the circle undid one spent year. Then she placed his words — the past, the poem that he was quoting. Her fingers clenched. Go on, she commanded. Desperate. Say it. Say the rest.

He could not refuse her anything. He'd given her worse, more irreversible, already this night. His own voice rang strange to him, speaking into the black:

Once out of nature I shall never take My bodily form from any natural thing, But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make Of hammered gold and gold enamelling…

Her hand closed on the skin around his eyes. Her nails clenched, as she pressed back into him. He held still in pain, ready to be blinded.

That's it, she whispered into the gaping motel room. That's the room we're supposed to build. And set upon a golden bough to sing. The place we're after. Byzantium.