Vulgamott fussed at a nearby screen, perfecting his own pier and shaft. Nobody here is exactly looking forward to Corinthian. Adjustable acanthus leaves. It's going to be a bloody nightmare.
The tool-kit language took ordinary architectural descriptions and parsed them into tiny aesthetic machines. Someday — with luck, before the hour that TeraSys set for a final Cavern rollout — a goggled architect would be able to stand inside this wraparound drafting table and, by clicking, cutting, and pasting in the empty air, produce a ghostly scale-model Parthenon, on the fly. The designer, immersed in a virtual design environment: Vulgamott christened the idea V–CAD. It had a certain recursive beauty, using a chamber of the Cavern itself to build more stately chambers…
So use me already, she told them. Tell me what to work on.
How would you like to be the greatest expert on triglyphs and metopes north of the Bay Area? Michael Vulgamott asked. No experience necessary.
He spoke with a perpetual mope, that burlesque of depression that could only be depression-induced. Even expressions of appreciation sounded like a dental complaint. She slaved over bits of frieze and pediment that she felt sure would please the man. But when he came and stood over her shoulder to monitor her monitor, he could manage no more than a whimper. He'd start to object, and then — objecting to his own objections — trip himself up before he could get back to his sentence's line of scrimmage.
What? she said. Tell me. What'd I do wrong?
It isnt you, doll. He'd turn his back and throw one operatic hand up in the air. It's humanity at large. A persistent source of stress to me.
Michael, Michael, Michael. It's like being back in the Union Square subway station, talking to you. Where d you grow up, anyway?
Hattiesburg, Mississippi. Who wants to know?
Vulgamott nagged at Adie. She couldn't read him. Is he being flip? she finally had to ask Karl one night. Or is he just permanently testy? Adie wasn't sure she could always tell the difference in Karl himself.
Who, Vulgate? The man is holding on by his fingernails for the moment of worldwide redemption. He wants to make the Cavern into a giant ark. He's in a race against the clock to save everything of worth that has ever existed from the flood. It's a thankless business, and the odds are, shall we say, not in his favor.
It was, for Adie, the ideal apprenticeship: time-sharing between her jungle, strewn with its snippets from the West's crumbling museum, and this growing warehouse of Lego blocks, Michael Vulgamott's windbreak against the coming long night. She moved freely between the adjacent countries. Her knowledge of architecture had never extended beyond the obligatory chapter in the survey texts. Now, viewing the trade from the crypt up, she made the connection. Buildings were art's skin, the pictures we lived in. They were many-planed concoctions of color, line, and shape, paintings that had to stand up to the rain. The simplest self-supporting structure involved as many aesthetic decisions as a midsized Titian. A temple's texture and light changed with the season, the hour, the thousand-and-one viewing angles. Frozen music, yes. But also thawed paint: harmony and radiance made whole by an accountability to engineering.
She loved the idea: programming the programmable room to house its own model progeny. Even more perfect were those two models of male strangeness, her supervisors in architecture. For Michael's high-strung perfectionism, she felt increasing respect. Toward her surly bagman, she developed something like a maternal impulse. Proprietary zeal. Finder's pride. The curator's interest in the wrongly discarded.
The deposits into her word hoard alone more than paid for this exchange of labor. Architrave, entablature, stylobate, fillet, fret, torus, scotia, plinth, anta, oculus, entasis, brattishing, extrados, acroterion, spandrel, finial, bargeboard, tympanum, coving, diaper, mandorla, crocket, archivolt, salomónica, baldachin, reredos, rinceau, boss, bucranium, coffering, rustication, lancet, anthemion, swag, corbie step, dado, moucharaby, lunette, flèche, exedra, mullion, newel, oriel, quoin, shoin, stoa, loggia, joist, squinch, pendentive… A term for every feature that ever made for decorated shelter. The plainest ornament, the smallest piece of frozen function, bore its own label, however obscure, in the encyclopedia of available parts.
In her dreams, she ran through a fitness course of free-floating vaults and arches, each requiring some maneuver as she pushed through the reticulated air. And that sense of swimming freedom stayed with her when she awoke each morning. For the first time since Spiegel's and her failed college experiment in cooperative living, she felt a panic at sunset, at the racing clock cheating her out of her rightful hours.
Life was not long enough to finish all the projects it wanted from her. She could live with that. But the idea that any one of the projects now haunting her might take all the years she had left and still not reach fruition seemed cruel, even by creation's sadistic baseline. She would return home on a late ferry to her island cottage — her neglected berry bushes and weed-shot garden — reeling from all that she'd learned that day. Something hurt inside her. She'd forgotten the feel of it: that eager pain of bone growing faster than its own muscle.
Down the mountain from the lab, the world's wider growth continued to outstrip her. Her day's discoveries began showing up on the evening news. If she cleared a space on the edge of her forest for a Bruegel crowd, that same milling throng would show up on the cable feed later that night, bounced off a satellite from Wenceslas Square. When she spent an evening on the drapery of a resizable caryatid, the statue promptly materialized on all the breakfast cavalcades — a surreal Goddess of Democracy, a ten-meter imitation of Liberty coming to life on the numbered cobblestones in front of the Great Hall of the People. Art's impudence was nothing, held up to its source. Imitation fell back, astonished by the scale of the original.
Vulgamott needed the spigot of cabled images wide open at all times. Ebesen just as violently needed it off. They worked out a tacit deal between them. Michael sat at his workstation, the daily cataclysm pouring in, live, through a corner of his screen, its sound track turned down just loud enough for him to hear. Karl sat as far as possible across the room, hunched over his own graphics box, piping in a bit of annihilating trickle from an audio disk in the CD drive — Ockeghem's Missa Prolationum or Byrd's Great Service.
Holy shit, Vulgamott would exclaim at the image feed, a couple times a day. / cant believe this is happening. You have to see this.
Ebesen never flinched. Let me guess. Shocking pictorial. Demi Moore fully clad. And each would carry on living, in the face of the other.
The compromise satisfied both men, each content to live in that band of the event spectrum that he accredited. But Adié, sitting alongside them, trapped between both data channels, at the focal tip of their stereo cone, would get so agitated by the chill intersection of polyphony and politics that she'd have to go out and trot the half-mile loop around the lab parking lot just to calm down.
In the first few days of June, the rains giving way in the approach of summer, Adie sat in that cross fire. She sketched on her screen while the peaks and troughs of CNN and Renaissance counterpoint canceled each other out into a standing wave. The work she gave her hands seemed good, a sustainable development, something to tinker at indefinitely, to learn a little bit more from each day until the lesson was whole. If we make six perfect frames in a row, do we get to rest? You dream, Vulgamott answered, not looking up. After six million, you can knock off for a fifteen-minute latie. Then, in another voice altogether, he said, No. Oh no. He sounded like a mother, thick with disappointment, scolding a child who'd just spilled sauce down the front of his Sunday best. Then, Jesus Christ. No. No! And the game changed for good. Michael? What is it? What's wrong?