I can't possibly be contributing anything useful to this group. Any one of you knows more about art than I do. You have people who can make— None of us knows what to do with this stuff. We need your hand.
Your eye.
But I'm just thrashing around.
That's what learning is.
I need something specific to do.
Do? Do what you always do.
That would be making pretty designs to commercial specification.
The last of his muffin and mocha disappeared cleanly down the air lock. He smiled, the pan-and-scan smile of the career diplomat.
Look: Adie. I'll give you exact specifications. Make us the most beautiful Cavern room you can think of. Learn things. Enjoy yourself.
Learn. Enjoy. Make something beautiful. The man came from another galaxy. One that Adie had abandoned when she gave up art. One that art had abandoned around the turn of the century. Freese cupped her elbow in a friendly send-off. He stood to go, already striding back to his own corner of the RL in his seven-league, open-toed sandals.
She tried to get the real story from Jackdaw. The gentle Martian boy was as far from Freese's clipped competence as she could imagine. Between the two males, she hoped for something like a 3-D explanation. She found Acquerelli in his cubicle, in a network chat room. He scurried off-line, embarrassed, as she entered.
Jackdaw. Explain something to me. What are we doing here?
Doing? Eager, earnest, and utterly perplexed.
What's our business? What exactly is the end product?
He nodded his head encouragingly. Question: check. Parsed: check. Answer match: check. Virtual Environments, he said, still nodding.
No, I mean, how do you sell what we create? Who's buying? Why are we making these rooms?
Jackdaw thought a minute, flicking his eyes up and away, scanning some distant video scratch buffer. Well. I guess, mostly what we do is demo?
Good. Demo. Go on. Demos for…?
For the Nametags.
She'd seen them. Groups of eager techies, under escort, touring the premises at odd hours. Earnest guys wearing TeraSys lapel pins who ducked and flinched in the Cavern during Jackdaw and Spiegel's simulated roller-coaster rides. No one had quite laid it out for her in so many words. The Realization Lab was a ruinously expensive classroom, a mental wind chamber. She had no problem with the arrangement, once she understood it. The knowledge sprung her. Freed her to labor over Rousseau's trousseau, to prune and water and fertilize her laurel sprig, to turn it into a teeming jungle.
Like an evening game of statue-maker drawing children out of the neighborhood's lit houses, Adie's creeping philodendrons brought all manner of players out of the redwood woodwork. They came by twilight to her cubicle, nocturnal creatures peeking through the undergrowth like Rousseau's monkeys and lions.
Each contributed some custom function or subroutine. Loque helped with the surface rendering. Even after she went home for the night, Sue would go on answering Adie's 911 calls. She steered the new girl around blind, over the phone, like ground control giving the stewardess a crash course in flying after the cockpit gets sideswiped by a Cessna. Hon, hon. Don't panic. We got you. Now, how are you holding the mouse? Which way is the little wire tail pointing?
Loque trained her in the high-level visual environment, its friendly paintbox metaphor protecting Adie from the intricacies underneath. Adie scorned the scanner, painting by hand into a slate that sensed the weight and bruise of her fingers' every movement. Charcoal, chalk, spray can: the paintbox mimicked every natural tool she'd ever used, as well as several unnatural ones. She could smudge and unsmudge, spatter, crisp, paint with potato or foil, even invent brushes of any shape or property, magic brushes that lifted or plumped or selectively edged some narrow band of crimson three shades toward gold, brushes that watermarked or cloned or cross-faded while still managing to undo the last dozen things that any other brush had done.
This was the way the angels in heaven painted: less with their hands than with their mind. She had never imagined that life would grant her such license. Some tasks were clumsier or more infuriating to perform than their oil or acrylic counterparts. Others were no less than miracles, closed loops between brain, eye, fingers, and screen that revolved within themselves, cosmic elaborations of light, visual excursions deep and dimensionless, color-chord progressions that admitted no beginning or end. But within two months, the miracles naturalized, and Adie habituated to them as she once had to her first set of colored pencils.
Spiegel taught her how to assemble a few shoots into massed, cir-cumnavigable corsages. A single plant, by itself, was still just an image. But two plants next to each other in space, linked by data's rhizome, became the semblance of a live-in bower. From her workstation screen, Adie's hand-painted bouquets went out to an object script packager for transplanting to the virtual garden beds. All she lacked was dirt under her fingernails.
Vulgamott came by just to fuss, New Yorker to New Yorker. Make sure you re leaving enough space between those plants. It's not the foliage that makes this painting so brilliant. It's all the space he somehow manages to cram in between.
Dont worry, Michael. Ãò good with air. Air is easy. There'll be plenty of air in the finished weed patch.
Once, she could have scrutinized the original Dream, whenever she wished. That canvas hung in her own personal attic, at MoMA, one flight up from the cafeteria where she had bussed tables and peddled coffee. Once she had lived almost close enough to hear the spillover from that flute player's tune. Now she had to scour around a little toy town of a port city for the best reproductions of the image she could lay her hands on, testing the defects of each against the print that still hung in her mind's clearing.
Most nights between ten-thirty and quarter to eleven, Karl Ebesen checked in to say good night. Or so Adie assumed, for on these visits, the senior visual designer mostly said nothing at all. He'd show up in a streaked trench coat, a prop out of some Mitchum film noir, his ratty portfolio of the day's digitizing under one arm. He'd heave himself into the corner across from Adie's workstation, capitulating to the gravity he'd fended off for five decades, wheezing through his mouth and scowling.
She'd ask him about the architectural fly-through that he and Vulgamott were assembling. Ebesen would answer snidely or just wave her off. Over the course of several evenings, Adie settled into returning the man's morose silences with the mirror of her own. The idiom had for Adie a comforting familiarity. The silent conversation of her childhood. The absence she was raised in.
Ebesen would sit mute for anywhere from five minutes to an hour, then shuffle off like one of those benign street people down by the ferry docks who accept all offered change without once asking for any. She came to think of Ebesen as her guardian bagman. Any sign of human drama caused him to slink off to whatever Presbyterian soup kitchen had coughed him up. When Karl was around, she could talk out loud without worrying about anyone answering. Drawing into a digital graphics tablet seemed less displacing, in the shadow of this odder interface.