What? You mean no one has lived unless they know the classics?
No. I mean you name them and I won't kill you. Yet.
Lim came through early one evening, agitated from reading a new book on prehistoric art.
You have to read this. The author claims that the Upper Paleolithic caves were the first VR.
Sure. Spiegel twisted his palm in the air. What else can you call them?
No. Literally. Theater-sized, total-immersion staging chambers where they'd drag initiates by torchlight. The shock of the supernatural sound-and-light show supposedly altered the viewers consciousness. Lim stopped, mazed by the idea. Can you imagine? Catching your first ever glimpse of images, flickering out of pitch-darkness. Like nothing you've ever seen. Your deepest mental illusions made real.
Adie held up her hand to stop the stream, until she could improvise a bridge across it. You're saying that cave art begets all this? She waved to include the whole RL. That Lascaux starts a chain reaction that leads to…?
I'm saying that art explodes at exactly the same moment as tool-based culture. That cave pictures prepared the leap, after a million and a half years of static existence. That pictures were the tool that enabled human liftoff, the Ur-tech that planted the idea of a separate symbolic existence in the mind of—
Oh Jesus.
You see? You see? If we can makes these… scratch lines come to life, then life is not just some outside thing that happens to us. It's something we come into and remake.
Spiegel sat stilled, in a small reflecting pool. I read somewhere that Lascaux has become a simulation of itself? Tourism was killing the paintings. So the authorities built these complete underground replicas so that—
Lim's impatience cut him dead. You still dont get it. They were simulations to begin with. Consciousness holding itself up to its own light, for a look. An initiation ceremony for the new universe of symbolic thought.
If that's right… I cant begin… I dont even want to think what technologies the Cavern is trying to shock us into.
Lim traced the lines of the widening hunt in the air in front of him. The mind is the first virtual reality. He groped for the concept, by smoky torchlight. It gets to say what the world isn't yet. Its first speculations bootstrap all the others…
It's true, Adie said. She gestured at their rhizome, proliferating into the distance. A chill seeped up her spine, spreading at the entrance to her brain. Do you remember the night the two of you showed me the Crayon World? Now look!
Oh Lord. Spiegel held his head. What have we done? We've taken a decent, law-abiding hater of technology…
Oh, I still hate technology. I'm just learning how to make it please me.
Adie's new pleasure drew Spider back with greater frequency. He checked up on the Jungle Room's smallest alterations, like a log house owner watching a neighbor put in a barbecue pit too close to the property line.
Go on, she encouraged him. Just head down that way a little. That opening to the left of the divan. Nah. I kind of like it out here.
Even after a dozen solo trips, he refused to leave the comfortable foyer of Rousseau for the expanses of the greater mansion. She… reminds you of someone? Who? he bluffed.
Adie smiled at him. Pointed at the pointing woman, recumbent on her berth. Spider made no sign. Someone from around here?
He turned to look at her. Through their two sets of 3-D glasses, she couldn't see his eyes. He looked away. Depends on what you mean by "here." Where were you born? she asked. He shrugged. You dont want to say?
He swung around, hard. Not a question of wanting. How old were you when… you came over? He turned away again. Young. She waited a decent interval. Adopted?
You know the odd thing? He spoke to the woman on the sofa. They say I have an older brother. Somewhere.
She came and put her arm around him, where he stood in the foliage. He took off his glasses, but would not look at Adie. I really wish you'd paint some clothes on her.
Ebesen paid a visit one day, when Adie had the Cavern. For the first time since their near-conversation, he reappeared, ready to talk. He checked up on her progress. She walked him through the moving animals, including the monkey he'd animated.
Were you aware that your innocent customs official-turned-naive painter once did time in La Sante prison? Ebesen spoke as though the crime were hers.
No! Impossible.
Yes indeed. Aiding and abetting a forgery and embezzlement scheme.
I cant believe it. Did he know what he was doing?
Probably not. You folks rarely do.
You folks? Me folks?
A surfeit of wide-eyed artistic trust. At least that's what the authorities concluded. They let him out after a month.
She took Ebesen down the paths into the scanned anthology. They passed by the Botticelli without comment. They skirted the Poussin. Ebesen showed nothing more than a twitch of recognition around the lips. He took the controls, steering them down the jungle track as if in an ATV. Soon he refused even to slow down at the passing wayside attractions.
They reached the far end of the simulation, where the unbordered world dropped off into white. Ebesen removed his glasses and nodded. Interesting.
That's it? That's all the critique I get?
Well, unless I missed it down a hidden fork somewhere, you've left out something obvious. Something essential.
No Dr. Tulp, she said. No Gross Clinic. I refuse to do anything where anyone's veins are outside their body.
Hands. Red handprints. Elk. Bison. Magic arrows.
Oh! Yes, of course! A glow infused her eyes, the idea of perfection. Cant have a Cavern exhibition without a little cave painting.
Ebesen didn't register. The bagman was lost in disputation with himself. When he spoke again, it wasn't to her. Huh. That's it. That's how you need to do this.
He walked out of the Cavern. She watched him leave. The seat of his sagging khaki pants had worn through in two moth-eyed spots on either side of the inseam. It stabbed at her. The battle for existence shrunk to a decent pair of trousers — one meager gift that she'd never be able to give the man without humiliating him.
Against all indication, Ebesen came back. He dragged with him a massive quarto volume, its spine long ago broken, its loose pages in various degrees of prison break. A venerable book with the smell of mold and water damage to authenticate it. A text that had hectored generations of students when Janson's unfocused eyes still baffled themselves on that print of The Peaceable Kingdom pasted above his crib.
Here, Ebesen said, cracking open the tome. All the plates were black-and-white. Or had been black-and-white once. They'd since all mildewed to ashen and ivory. He held out his specimen for Adie's inspection: a wildly shadowed flamenco dancer. Adie kinked her brows and looked at him for explanation.