taken in.
Poor Jackdaw went back and affixed a new element to every data array, a variable pointer that would hold the clicks and pocks that Adie wanted to add to every plunkable object in the room. But he worked gladly. Rajasundaran's audio — the lowing and keening of it — had something of the innermost eerieness, something a visitor assimilated into her tissue before even noticing.
It knocked Adie out. The sounds are so present! Better than the real thing. It's as if the noises are going off inside my brain.
Oh, they are, Raj said. They are! We do our real-time signal processing right inside those flaps of twisted cartilage of yours. He wiggled his own flaps in question. We put a microphone in a subject's ear canal, capture the chaos, and reverse-engineer the sampling. Waves crashing into waves, nodes and antinodes wiping themselves out all over the place. Sounds like the Lower East Side, Adie said. You ought to try Jaffna. That's where you lived? Oh no no. Jaffna came to me.
Her hands dry-pointed the air in front of her, talking before her words could catch up. They scuttled, flustered, like the hands of library patrons at the five-minute warning, gathering together their materials and carrying their quarry up to the charge desk before it shut down for
the night. Explain.
What is there to explain, really? Raj spoke in the subcontinental, singsong inflection of Imperial English, whose practitioners outnumbered all of England several times over. My family and I were living our lives in Colombo. The Tigers made some high-profile power plays up in the peninsula. Our Sinhalese aunties and uncles decided that the Jaffna deaths required some symmetrical mischief to put them right. They voted to set fire to the hundred nearest Tamil houses, no matter that these belonged to their dear friends and neighbors. We beat a hasty retreat to Vancouver. A lovely city, by the way.
What do your parents do for a living?
You mean before our move or after?
Both… Both.
A familiar story. You don't really want to know.
How… how did you end up living here?
Here? He cast a gaze back at the Cavern, where windows broke, floorboards popped, and pigeons flew about the eaves. You mean Seattle? The idea amused him. I don't really live here. I'm just renting.
Raj wanted to develop a high-level audio programming language to match the visual one that Jackdaw and Loque were assembling. He wanted fast filter transforms that would change a frog to a choirboy with a few typed commands. He wanted to spin the aural sources in space, make them wheel about with each turn of the head.
But as with images, acoustic precision exacted its price in responsiveness. Milliseconds loomed huge. Latency killed the sense of presence. Only the tightest virtuoso chorus of sounds would flush the ear into belief. Spatializing the noisy universe and synchronizing it with sight involved a bit of higher mathematical modeling called the Head-Related Transfer Function.
We should get the Armenian in on this, Rajan said. Adie balked. Is that really necessary? Nothing is really necessary. Not really.
He's so incredibly unpleasant. The man has raised ugliness to the level of haute art. He's ugliness's high priest.
They brought in Kaladjian. He started out on his best behavior, which consisted of not saying anything at all. He walked into the Van Gogh bedroom and shrugged. He tapped the shutters and rapped the porcelain with a hand-gripped Polhemus sensor, unhappy with the delayed pocks and pings. He stepped out of the room and removed the stereo glasses.
Why would anyone want to build something like this?
Why does anyone want to build anything? Spiegel answered.
Kaladjian shrugged, more concession than contest.
Over the space of days, the quartet of males slowly squeezed Klarpol out. Form and warmth, rapture and azure all collapsed into engineering problems. The tasks at hand were well defined, formalizable. Why did they need an artist any longer? They had Adie's careful, hand-drawn surfaces. Once the authorities got their composite sketch, the artist was just ballast.
Adie went to Sue Loque. They're stealing my room.
Your room? Didn't you steal it from some Dutch guy?
My idea. My eye. I took everything off the flat plane and laid it out in three-space. I repainted all the surfaces by hand. Every inch of it is detailed enough to look good at life size.
Now they won't let you play?
Well, they let me sit in. But they're turning the whole thing into this
gigantic Rubik's Cube.
That's their thing. It's what they do, babe.
I know that's what they do. What am I supposed to do?
Sit in and listen, maybe? It's how I got into this racket
Serious? What did you do before?
Before what?
Before learning to program?
Oh, I taught myself to program when I was twelve. I had to cover for my parents. They couldn't even handle their dimmer switches. But before I started listening in on the boys — before I learned how projects worked — I was… just a programmer.
Adie went back and listened. She followed the four males as they invented problems, then invented solutions to throw at their problems. She watched them communicate by grunts and silences. She studied Jackdaw, Steve, and Raj as they hacked at their huge triple concerto for QWERTY keyboards, lost to a runaway pruning algorithm, while Kaladjian etched away on complex functions with a number-two pencil into yellow legal pads.
She sketched them in turn, capturing their shared trances in her own media. Their facial muscles reminded her of her father's, snoring on the sofa in any of a dozen Quonset living rooms, sleeping off the latest controlled R-and-R drunk, twitching in a dream of final, anesthetized escape. But the goal of these four men differed from her father's on one essential account. Her father retreated into a place that he hoped would silence the outside world. These four men, on the other hand, worked to build a mutual mirage that would match its source, noise for noise.
There's some kind of major tension there, Adie told Loque. / don't think any of them likes Kaladjian any more than I do. Bingo, babe. He's a nasty man.
Deeply creepy. But he knows a shitload. So everyone manages to make allowances for him, on strictly practical grounds.
Well sure. That's easy for them. They come from the same world as he does. They speak his language.
Not really. Not with any specificity. Anyway, that's not the real issue. They put up with him. They use him. The social contract, hon. They're getting something from him they can't get for themselves. I think he's masturbating over me.
He's what? You mean in private, right? Now how do you figure that? I'd really like to know.
Oh, I don't have any hard evidence. It's just this sixth sense. More like an eighth, if you're keeping count. I can always tell if there's somebody I'm working with who…? It's like radio waves. You can't ordinarily perceive them, but if you have the right equipment…
Uh, Ade? Sweetheart? I don't know how to tell you this. But any one of us might be putting out that channel.