Another presence settles into your cell. The quaking in you starts up again in earnest. It takes you by your shoulders, determined to shake you back into sawdust. You cannot look for fear of reprisal. You saddle up near the new thing, crane back your neck, inspect it from under the safety of the blindfold. It's everything you fear it to be. Lying on the filthy planks, unswept since you came here, is that inconceivable device: a cunning, made world.
You kneel and pick it up. You freeze down there on the floor, crying. Afraid to so much as touch it, your fingers clapper spastically against the covers. You bounce the book in your hands, testing its weight for any sign of counterfeit. The mass of it swells up close to your eyes, in the slit of your vision. You hold it up close, trading off depth of field for detail and resolution. The weave of fibers in the paperback binding thickens into a jungle tangle.
Your sight scans up the book's length, seeking out the title that will sentence or deliver you. Terror is no less than desire with the chrome stripped away. In your atrophied eyes, the letters read like a line of alien hieroglyphs. Bizarre analphabetic randomness. English has no such series.
Then your pulse shoots into your ears. Great. Your word. Your title. You've done it, summoned up this book by the sheer force of weeks-long concentration. By some intricate, unsolvable plan, through the interplay of forces devised by that Engineer whom Creation but grossly caricatures, you have been looked after. The words you love have made their way back to you for awful safekeeping. Imagination survives its own cruelty. You've been set down in this hell for something more than mapping your abandonment.
For a long time, your eyes refuse the title's second word. Instead, they insist on the word that the word should be. But the surety of print survives your stare. You look again, and the title skids off into senselessness. You remove your blindfold and look dead on. Expectations somehow mutates into Escapes.
You drop the book, electrocuted. If no one saw you pick it up, they can't punish you for touching it. It lies there, upside down, innocent. Impossible to take in. As the immediate madness subsides, you tick off the possible explanations. A trap. A mistake. A senseless accident. A joke whose cruelty makes mainstream sadism seem like the Marquis of Queensberry.
It strikes you: maybe even Muhammad, with his clean syntax and accent, can't read. Maybe your guards' English extends no further than film and TV. They've bought this secondhand ream of paper scrap for pennies, down in the stalls of some bombed-out bazaar, left there by the last American with the good sense to get out of this suiciding country while the getting was good. Not one of these men knows what he puts into your hands.
At this thought, something cracks in your throat. You can't place it at first, a shape so strange you can only wait in wonder for it to take the dulled depths of your confinement, the hive extends its growing hum.
You vow to ration this opening chapter, to make it last at least through the end of summer. Great Escapes must be your daily introit and gradual. A single paragraph to serve as a matins service, another two sentences every other hour. The need to make astonishment last far exceeds your immediate urge to swallow it whole. The point is not to finish but to find yourself somewhere, forever starting.
You panic at the rapid slip of pages across the binding from the right width to the left. You scramble for a way to read without making reading's hated forward progress. But the whole book evaporates into fact before you know how you got to the end.
You close the back cover, sickened by what you've done. You seize up, you stand, you pace around on your chain. You close your eyes, guiltily savoring the cheap stories that you've just slammed down. You pick up the book and start again. It still holds some residual pleasure, but never again the launch into pure potential. Ten days from now, this dazed freedom still reverberating in you will have extinguished itself, starved out by repetition. Great Escapes is over. You will need another. But for a moment, for a thin, narrow, clouded, already closing moment: this. When you come to bed that evening, you turn to tell her, You'll never believe what I read today.
The year that ended history came to its own end. The retaining Wall fell down, and all certainty came down with it. The Realization Lab's engineers entered 1990 adrift in a fluid landscape, stripped of
all tether.
O'Reilly asked Klarpol, How do you like living in a time without safe
assumptions?
Have you ever lived anywhere else? she answered.
A world without assumptions should have been a world without surprises. But every day brought new shocks to the invented landscape, shocks requiring perpetual invention to smooth them over.
32
Wiring the Cavern for sound made more difference than Adie could have imagined. More than it should have. The Arlesean Room designers brought in Rajasundaran, who'd done a stint down at NASA/ Ames in Mountain View, to give the sunny South a tongue. Every event in Jackdaw's cabinet of interactions now came into its audible inheritance. Chairs learned to creak, floorboards to pop. The wind outside the window began to hiss a stereo mistral.
The key is spatiality, Raj said. We creatures evolved to believe in space, and that's about all you can say for certain about belief. We're binaural. Binocular. These are evolution's tricks for getting us to think in 3-D, and we can't help falling for them every time. 3-D is a trick? Adie asked. She sounded hurt. Sure. What isn't, finally?
They set to work voicing Aries, teaching the rented bed-sit to sing. To their arrays for texture and surface and dimension, they added sonority. The drawer coughed softly as it slid open. The pitcher pinged with the perfect pitch of porcelain. Off in the distance, past the edges of the casement, southward toward the invisible bay, gulls called.
Even the earliest results unnerved them. Six channels run through five speakers implanted in each wall face sufficed to raise the neck hairs on the most sophisticated visitor. They put Spider Lim, the human litmus, alone in the room. They flew a sonic pigeon through the rafters. He tracked the arc of the flapping bird, a fuller, more physiological belief than had he actually seen one. They broke a pane of glass in the center of the left-hand window. Spider jumped, a full-scale startle. He slammed his fist against his chest.
Don't ever do that to me again.
Sound is better than visual, Steve decided. It's more immediate. More virtual to begin with. It hangs in space, getting sharper in memory.
Adie ignored his invitation. She spoke to him now only when work required.
Raj sailed through the subaudible battlefield, unaware. Every modality that you can add will square the level of believability. Every new affordance, every connection we can lay down between out here and in there increases the sense of immersion geometrically.
Spiegel paced in place. We need some haptic device. Some kind of force-feedback jumpsuit that'll resist when you try to walk into things. Pressure-hammers that'll bruise your legs when you scrape against
the bed.
Not necessary, Lim said. And showed them his shins.
Raj grinned. At bottom, you know? At bottom, the mind wants to be