They downed what remained of the fried chickpea meal in silence. They stood to go, each clinging to one side of the righteous impasse.
What I want to know, O'Reilly said, halfway out the door, is whether "I lose" might mean that she's considering the possibility of coming out here to join me.
Adie bit her lip in disgust. Damned if I know, Ronan. Why don't you build yourself a little prediction machine and find out?
26
They laid down the old floor over the newer one, wall to wall, an inch to the inch. The synthetic white composites reverted to knotty pine. Jackdaw, Adie, and Spiegel measured and cut each wood-grained symbol, planing the cured boards like the most careful of carpenters.
They tinkered and trued, pulling up the planks from the source room and shimming them into the target. It took some doing, for the original floor at Aries had traveled a good deal. The wood was old and warped, and often refused to behave at all. But plank by plank, the salvaged floorboards agreed to lie down in their new frame.
Adie insisted that they save the spotty varnish. She wanted the worn patches translated wholesale to their same coordinates in the rebuilt bedroom. That meant work, for origin and destination belonged to different ordinal realities.
Her goal was a floor that swam and sank just like the original, yet sat snugly on the joints of the Cavern floor it overlaid. She wanted an Aries you could walk on: a lumber bridge fitted across time and space, tongue in groove, the stains and nicks of its private history preserved intact.
Spiegel watched Adie walk across the translated boards. Where her feet trod on the illusion, Magritte-like, they occluded it. Jackdaw attended on her every hand-drawn desire. Spiegel put the postadoles-cent somewhere in his early twenties: two or three years older than Steve had been when he met the woman. Back at the beginning of creation, everyone was twenty.
Whatever made Adie choose the University of Wisconsin, Spiegel had long ago forgotten. He barely remembered his own reason for going to college in what Life magazine called "America's best place to live." What he remembered most about Madison was the cold. The town's average daily temperature hovered around 19 degrees. He'd followed a high-school sweetheart there, a woman whom he hoped to marry. They lost one another to multiple discoveries halfway through their first semester. So life always liked to run the little shilclass="underline" the immortal cause vanishes, but the short-term effects last forever.
Stevie attended school on the Spiegel Memorial Scholarship, the family nest egg scraped together over two decades of middle-class scrimping. His parents meant the investment to give him a leg up in the practical world: fraternity membership, good connections, and a degree in civil engineering. Thirty credits into the process, little Stevie managed to sabotage all that, and more.
Madison was still reeling from its fatal bombing of the year before. The Army Math Research Center in Sterling Hall, "think tank of American militarism," had been gutted by campus radicals in the single most destructive act of sabotage in American history. The air on Lathrop Drive was still electric. A brilliant young low-temperature physicist lay dead, and a major national university stood teetering between revolution and revulsion, between We can do anything and What have we done?
Steve went back home to La Crosse that second Christmas, a semester's worth of dirty laundry in tow, and dropped his own bombshell on stunned parents. He'd found his real vocation. He couldn't, in good conscience, earn one more credit in engineering. He would study to become a poet. He stopped short of the phrase "true artificer," but it was in there, knocking around the back of his cerebellum.
This was the point in such stories when the father traditionally took the newly enlightened student prince out behind the woodshed and beat the living shit out of him. Maybe the Aged P was too incredulous to deliver the beating, as he should have. Maybe, in the wake of the Army Math bombing, his father's own sickened convictions had simply dissolved. Maybe Stevie's raw exuberance carried him through. Whatever the cause, both parents simply went ashen and wished him well, writing him off to a career as a greeter at some terminal superstore up on the periphery of north suburban Kotzebue.
Some residual shred of sanity prevented Steve from telling his parents the reason for his conversion. It had come in Introduction to English Literature, a Cakewalk survey course he took to satisfy his general education requirements. The teacher — in retrospect, probably only a hapless grad student caught up in the academic pyramiding scheme, awaiting his own superstore destiny — by way of lightening his class prep, had had each student recite and explicate a favorite poem.
And so in October of his twentieth year, Steve Spiegel sat in shock, listening to a shag-cut pug-faced girl across the room who had come to class tie-dyed on roller skates speak the words "Once out of nature I shall never take My bodily form from any natural thing."
The words, he supposed, were beautiful. The girl, he decided, was almost. But the way she said them: that was the warrant, the arrest, and the lifetime sentencing. Out of her mouth came a stream of discrete, miraculous gadgets — tiny but mobile creatures so intricately small that generations marveled and would go on marveling at how the inventor ever got the motors into them.
Once out of nature. The train of syllables struck the boy engineer as the most inconsolably bizarre thing that the universe had ever come up with. And this female mammal uttered the words as if they were so many fearsome, ornate Tinkertoys whose existence depended upon their having no discernible purpose under heaven. The words would not feed the speaker, nor clothe her, nor shelter her from the elements. They couldn't win her a mate, get her with child, defeat her enemies, or in any measurable way advance the cause of her survival here on earth. And yet they were among the most elaborate artifacts ever made. What was the point? How did evolution justify the colossal expenditure of energy? Once upon a time, rhythmic words might have cast some protecting spell. But that spell had broken long ago. And still the words issued from her mouth, mechanical birds mimicking living things. Sounds with meaning, but meaning to no end.
We'll put the door here, that girl's latest update said. Start it flush up against the back of the left-hand wall.
Spiegel and Jackdaw, her vaudeville apprentices, nodded in stereo.
We'II have to figure out what the floorboards actually look like, under the bed.
We can just reuse the piece we put in over there, Jackdaw said, all innocence.
No, no. That would be cheating. We have to follow the boards that he painted, and extend them. Work outward from the bits he could see.
Jackdaw groaned. But it's all going to be invisible in the finished product anyway.
Not to us, it isn't.
"But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make." The girl's lips were a factory of ethereal phonemes. "Of hammered gold and gold enameling." Spiegel had never heard words pronounced that way — alloys of confusion and astonishment. Her mouth became the metal-worked machine its sounds described. Whole sentences of hammered gold tumbled out of it.
Stevie might have taken her for a drama student, except for the clotted paint under her nails. She finished reciting and launched into her explication, an associative ramble through the maze of images. She'd drawn a series of pen-and-watercolor sketches, visual aids to illustrate her points. Byzantium. A gyre. The mechanical bird, which looked to Stevie like an intricate, gold-leafed, cutaway, feathery Bulova.