Big mistake. Here. Watch this. From out of a menu labeled "Transforms" came a choice called "Vortex." Sue blinked, and the laurel sprig descended into a Cartesian maelstrom. It wrung itself out like a topologisfs spent dishrag. And still it twirled in the mythic blackness.
Wait. God. What have you done? You've wrecked it. It looks horrible.
Easy, sweetie. Haven t you heard? What's done can always be undone.
With a single click, Sue returned the spinning branch to mint condition. There you are. Unblemished. Untouched by human tinkering.
The idea grazed Adie, like a pile of bricks falling off a scaffold and killing the pedestrian in front of her. She saw why the mind raced to convert to digital. Why it needed this place where ingenuity could always hit the Undo button.
Sue Loque warped and bulged and folded the innocent sprig until it was no longer fit to grace a wilted salad. Laurel twisted into oak into maple. Each derangement offered its own custom parameters, permutations too numerous to investigate.
Adie watched her expert pilot steer them into "Shadows and Edges." On the Cavern wall, the leaves fell away to a penciled outline. The mottled surface of a thousand greens vanished into mere contour flapping in the invented breeze. Surface reduced to a ghostly mold, a pipe-cleaner sculpture that Adie reached out and poked her fingers through.
This isn't right. I cant cope…
Hang on. It gets worse.
We're not meant to be able to do all this. It's not good for us.
Loque turned her attention to the archaic creature. She fiddled with the chains dangling from her studded skirt. I don't get it. You've never used a computer in your work?
Adie shot her head back, horrified.
All those little pastel magic princess thingies of yours?
Thanks, Sue. By hand. Every one. You remember the human hand, don't you?
Do you? Sue asked, and reached out. Adie, despite herself, stepped back. Sue laughed, and snorted again at the color she brought to the artist woman's cheeks. You've never seen Monday Night Football? Saturday cartoons? This stuff is all over every prime-time fifteen-second commercial spot that—
Another horrified head shake. I don't own a TV.
Well. Aren't we precious? Wait until the baddies at TeraSys learn who they've hired.
Adie regrouped. What they don't know can't hurt them.
Oh, they know everything, finally. And nothing hurts them.
Sue popped backward through the Undo catalogue, the history of their voyage here. She retrieved the original plant from its pipe-cleaner outline. The thousand greens returned from their brief banishment to transparency, now deepening, by contrast, their mimicry of the living.
OK, doll. Pull up your virtual La-Z-Boy and kick back. Are you ready for this?
I severely doubt it. You want a minute?
I want a lifetime.
Sue tsked. Chill out, girl scout. Here goes. Let's start with "Water-color."
She blinked the word, and the fact followed. The result did not resemble a watercolor of a laurel sprig. It was one, down to the fibers in the moistened idea of rag paper. Down to the simulated color-bleeding, the dribbled imperfections of a gummed-up camel-hair brush, although the brush that painted it never existed outside this software library.
Everything was perfect: the palette, the semitransparent matte, the fuzzy borders, the splotchy jade inks running into each other like broken yolks in a crooked skillet. All the kinks and cutaneous leaf landmarks still laced this revamped image. Only now they appeared as manhandled, hand-mangled parodies of the original. The leaf bobbed on its stalk in front of Adie, a copy of a copy, a debasement of the debasement of the Forms.
Help me, Adie whimpered, appalled and euphoric at once. Ãò drowning.
No prob. Heading for dry land here, boss. What'll it be? Chalks? Colored pencil? Dry point? Conte? Here's something a little offbeat: stained glass. At a blink, the laurel fractured into the leaded lozenges of a free-floating lancet, hued in cool Chartres blue.
They played like girls stumbling upon a rolltop desk in an attic, all the pigeonholes intact. Oil and Quilt; Paper Scrap and Tapestry; Putty Knife, Aluminum Foil, Fresco.
Agitated Cave Painting? What in creation…?
As in Lascaux. I named that one. That's one of mine.
Yours? Hang on a minute. You wrote…?
Sure. What'd you think? You think Ãò just some Turbo Pascal farm-team stringer?
Math does all this, Adie chanted. All some kind of— The greatest paint-by-numbers kit in the universe.
Princess, Ãò ready to love you, and all that. But you gotta pull it together a little, or we'll never manage to drag you over the finish line.
You mean there's more?
Always. "More" is what we do. "More" is this outfit's end product.
Always another level down, always another branch led off from the branch where they stood, until the spreading tree grew to fill all the available arbor. Submenu Art Effects. Submenu Filters. Submenu Artist Styles. Pointillism. Seurat. Their grafted leaves speckled into something from the Grande Jatte. The imitation was uncanny — an exact running average, stained on the mottled leaf, of every dot that the dead painter ever applied to canvas.
Oh Jesus. I cant believe this. God help me.
Sue dragged her stunned apprentice through a pantheon of styles. They tried on painters like teens trying on jeans at a factory outlet. Giotto bent the green into chalky sapphire chunks. The Caravaggio leaf darkened to tenebrismo. Van der Weyden glistened, hard-edged and luminous. Rothko bled a whole woodland of greens out of one monotone block. Artists who'd never dreamed of painting a leaf now did so in a perfect parody of their leafless life's work.
Adie stood still in the Cavern, straddling rapture and despair.
Who made all these things?
What do you mean who made them? We just did. Didnt you just see us?
No. I mean, who made the routines. Who made.. Rothko? Caravaggio?
Oh. Yeah. That was us too.
Us?
Us. Me, Acquerelli, Rajasundaran, Spiegel…
Spiegel? My Spiegel? Does every one of you know more about painting than I know about computers?
Watch this, Sue commanded. As if Adie could help but watch. Sue blinked onward, narrow and accurate. We can take a Rubens palette and put it on top ofPoussin shrubbery. Using Mary Cassatt's brushstrokes.
Don't. Please. You realize that what makes these people great is…?
That you cant reduce them to a statistical average? Yeah, yeah, we've looked into all that. But still, Sue wheedled. I bet you know who this is.
Adie did, at a glance. And the one after that was even more obvious. A little aura began to glow, just behind the globe of her left eye. The harbinger of an out-of-this-world migraine that would prostrate her for the next ten hours.
Gauguin, she called out. I need to see Gauguin.