Dont mind him, Ebesen said. Some blip on the AP wire. Our friend thinks he's holding the world together by the force of personal concentration.
But Vulgamott kept repeating his hypnotic mantra. Please no. Not
that.
Adie crossed over to his desk. She leaned and looked at his screen, the source of distress. In a postage-stamp window, difficult to make out, a human crowd milled. It looked like the same continuous surge they'd been watching daily for the last several weeks. Only this crowd was panicking.
What is it? What's happening?
Vulgamott stared at the screen, fixed by occluded revelation.
Make it bigger, she said. He did. But when the picture reached viewable size, it pixilated. The blocky clip only fed her ignorance.
Some newsreader's voice in New York rambled on over the blurred film stock, something about Deng learning from his previous mistakes and sending in young Mongolians. The number of casualties is still not known.
Not known? Vulgamott yelled at the disembodied voice. Not known? Cant you see?
He stood and left the room. Adie, in an informational trance, followed behind. She moved as in some ancient school fire drill out of tornado season. Only when they reached the hall and began drifting like dust motes did it dawn on her. Vulgamott didn't know where he was going.
They ran into Spider. Listen, Michael asked. Can you patch an analog signal into the Cavern?
Sure. But Ronans booked in there for another—
Thank God. Someone who knows what's going on. I'll deal with O'Reilly. You just give us the feed.
By the time Lim succeeded in piping the massacre into the Cavern, a small crowd had gathered. No glasses. No parallax. Just the standard mayhem of aerial film, trained on the walls of the theater box. Cadets shooting into crowds; kids thrashing each other through clouds of gas; a lone semaphore signaler, for a few electrifying minutes, holding up a column of tanks: the scenes the whole world would watch again and again, until broadcast made sure to inure all viewers.
A small, stunned congregation assembled in this smaller public square, surrounded on all sides by planes of video. Tiananmen filled the horizon, at eye level, all around them. Then, punishing them for their silence, video plunged the dozen viewers into another crowd. On no logic but the quick cut, they floated in an ocean of mad, mourning black. A different riot moved to the same nightmare surge. Now no soldiers, no Mongolian trainees offered up group death. Now just mass self-mutilation, grief over the lost Imam, returned from his state of exile to redeem the world.
Adie stood pinned in the group hysteria. The madness of crowds swept over her, even in this back projection. Only when the cameras cut for a commercial could she breathe. She turned and walked out through the Cavern's open wall. Up from the nightmare, no chains or checkpoints. She cast a look back from the outer doorway. And there she saw a scene that haunted her long after Tehran and Tiananmen faded to black: a dozen stunned lives, huddled in a picture-pitched tent, trapped in the rising information flood.
She moved back to the jungle full-time, away from the press of all facts, out of the reach of news. Off on a spur in the far corner of the Rousseau room, down a path unreachable from the jungle's entrance, she placed a detail from that most beautiful version of the Massacre of the Innocents. After that, she used nothing more troubled than Matisse, Chagall, and Corot. Trees feathering on Creation's breath. Goldfish floating ravished in the refracting ether.
Underground, she told Ebesen. Deep in the marl grottos. Nobody will bother looking for them there.
Her island cottage gave her refuge. That summer was the Sound's sunniest in recorded memory. She worked at her columbine and tea roses, bringing them back from weed. She pruned the blackberries and set the crab pots from the dock off her inlet, then sat back and waited for a peace that refused to come. Instead, the sight of those panicked crowds ambushed her, in the surreal hours flanking 2 a.m., when low blood sugar and abetting blackness combined to docent her around her own private Bosch.
Lost, her eye grew stronger. She would sit in the RL's atrium, looking out through its expanse of picture window, gazing down on the unbroken mountainside. She'd sit and squint, applying to this real scene all of Loque's anthology of software filters. She'd work it like the aged Renoir, a brush strapped to his wrists just above the worthless claws. She'd slide a mental adjuster knob from left to right, pulling the whole landscape through discrete, imagined steps from Patinir to Goyen to Ruisdael to Hobbema, on through Kensett and Cole and Bierstadt, then down to Millet, Sisley, or Signac, stopping only when the light started to fail.
This scenic outlook became her private outpost, a place where she could be among people yet not have to look at them. From a hundred yards away, she caught sight of a leaf fat with July's solar spoon-feeding, and saw in it the sprig that Stevie had grown for her, so long ago. She stared for hours out this picture window on the unearthly convolutions of nature's prototype, the only view large enough to erase the human.
One afternoon, on the downward slope of summer, she sat surveying that people-free Barbizon. Everywhere across the landscape's panel, life cast its filaments. She watched a northern flicker lift off a branch in mid-distance, its ventral gold splash flashing as it took flight. Drawn by her glance, the bird bore straight for the RL. Helpless, she stared as it slammed into the picture window, a feathered fist bouncing off the plate glass with a smack.
At the sickening pop, Adie's body ruptured. She screamed, but nothing came out. She ran pointlessly to the pane. The thing lay on the ground in a broken heap, striped, tawny, stilled.
A smear of grease on the glass marked the impact, like the chalk outline around a corpse. Adie fought the gasps coming out of her, an effort that only made her sound even more like a strangled animal. By luck, Spiegel came across her first. Stevie, she didn't care about. Steve had seen her a lot worse off.
Adie, what's happened? What's wrong?
She pointed to the crumpled sack of taxidermy. The bright crest of red in the grass.
Spiegel looked at the window smudge. Aiy. A hard hit Innocence always hit hardest. He glanced behind them, into the expanse of room. Confused by the atrium, probably. From out there, it must look like more of the same.
My fault. My fault.
Your…? Now, how in creation do you—?
I saw it coming. I… I drew it…
Adie. He put his arm around her. She neither let him nor refused.
They stared down at the dead thing, appealing the verdict. Absurdly, the bird chose that exact moment to come to life again. It flapped once or twice, thumping on the ground.
Then it found its gears, lifted up, and followed some remembered angle of incidence back to its delayed errand.