Jackdaw cleared his throat. Is that anything like the six degrees of freedom?
And we'll need a Rembrandt. For a lifetime devoted to the play of light against dark. And the last one ought to be Picasso, because—
Because he fucked everything that moved for the better part of a century? Sue suggested.
Jackdaw jerked at the profanity. He lurched for the door, and safety. Uh, maybe we'd better vacate. Gotta get back to that Z-order filter…
Sue fell in behind him. Let's just hope that Rembrandt here doesn't
decide to wig out again before the recompile, tomorrow.
You see? Adie said. It’s useful to know their names, isn't it?
Sue made her noise again, the one Adie warned her not to. Deeper in her sinuses, this time. I love you art school chicks. I really do. You give the whole female race a little — how to say? — éclat.
They might join forces, this female race. A woman who knew how to extract any one of imagination's images from these boxes. And another who knew just which images to extract.
Sue, Adie petitioned her fuchsia-haired colleague. Can you show me how to make these suckers draw?
6
Adie Klarpol and Sue Loque stood shoulder to shoulder, facing the front wall of the Cavern. Each sported a pair of those ridiculous shuttered glasses. A loud sprig of rhinestones studded the corners of Adie's, a giddy display brought on by the usual overexertion. Sue wore the head-tracking glasses, the ones with the cable conduit that recorded exactly what her eyes were doing at all times.
On the front wall, a wreath of laurel materialized out of an expanse of bridal white. It hung there, blowing in an invisible breeze. On the left wall, menus cascaded out of one another. The other cave walls darkened to a contrasting black, the soot of countless digital campfires. The wreath in front of them had grown from a seed in Adie Klar-pol's mental window box. The Crayon World had thawed the sap of images inside her. It left her needing to see a new bud germinate from scratch. To that end, she and her design colleagues had assembled for a series of tutorials, to learn the ways that virtual leaves might be made.
Grow me a rubber tree, she'd asked Spiegel. Give me a philodendron tendril. She had in mind a surface as rich and convoluted as the solar surf that shaped it. But anything more than a jagged crayon smear would have satisfied her.
Here, she told her fallen poet Stevie. Something like these. And she held out to the softwarewolf a picture in a book.
The color plate she held out was a supremely clumsy representation. Leaves everywhere: a veritable jungle of them. But no leaf that grew on any tree in any country Spiegel or Adie had ever lived in. A rash of stems, fruits, and flowers — all native to the republic of invention. And among the blooms, a naked white woman sprawled upon a jungle-violating sofa, listening to the tune of an ebony flute player from deep in the undergrowth.
Spiegel stared at this hemophiliac sunbather — lenticular, wrong— in a trance of memory. At last he looked away, breaking the picture's spell. He glanced up at his circle of apprentices and said, as if no one were naked: We can make a leaf in several different ways. The simplest of all is to use basic trig.
Spiegel hacked several quick expressions into a terminal. The points of a curve percolated up from out of the algebraic shorthand. He sliced off a conic section and roughed up its edges. He wrote out a well-behaved polynomial to describe the range and rise and run. The X of the thing, the willing Y, the demure Z.
Frame buffers then threw his results upon a screen for the design group to witness. Artists and engineers drifted through the room as Steve's shapes spun in space. Each time his right pinkie hit the Enter key, the screen turned into a luscious spirograph, pouring forth a
petaled profusion.
Lunettes, Michael Vulgamott, the architect, called. Spandrels. Tracery. Adie heard, in the man's voice, a fellow displaced Gothamite. Vulgamott's manic, twitching fingers ticked off the terms as if he were stepping into a crowded midtown intersection to hail a thesaurus.
The words he used made the mathematician Ari Kaladjian's bushy eyebrows balkanize. They're properly called cardioids and tricuspids and folia. Limagon of Pascal. Plane algebraic geometry has been making these curves for at least two hundred years. Kaladjian had fled the globe's chaos for the safety of mathematics, and he did not care to surrender his sanctuary to fuzzy-mindedness.
Spiegel quit his keyboard jabbing long enough to shrug. Call them what you want. They're graphics primitives. All art is Euclid's baby.
I can think of at least a couple of dubious paternity suits, Adie said.
I love my wife, Sue Loque stage-whispered. But oh, Euclid!
What's the point of starting with equations? Vulgamott wanted to know. What do we gain?
Kaladjian grunted. Everything starts with equations. Spiegel spoke with the distraction of the engrossed encoder. Plane curves are the fastest, easiest artifacts in the world to implement. And you can make trillions of them with just a few iterated expressions.
Streams in the desert? Adie mocked. Orchards from out of the arid places?
Something like that. Yes. Spiegel smiled at her, immune to her aggression. Knowing it, of old.
She frowned at his geometric petals. But where's the leaf? I see nothing that even faintly resembles the Rousseau I showed you. At best, they look like victims of a hit-and-run Calder mobile.
That's what you lose when you generate leaves by algorithm. Everything's a trade-off. In this case, you trade off natural complexity for something that's easier and faster… and much too geometrical. Much too perfect.
Too perfect! Kaladjian shouted. You cannot get too perfect. Where are the shadows and gradations? Adie sounded betrayed.
We'd have to add them. Spiegel demonstrated. A few calls to a shading routine produced a rough, pencil-sketched idea of surface.
Huh, Adie said, as the cardioid went crosshatched. Huh. That puts us about three baby steps toward a Miro. Wait! Go back a little bit. There. Try the feathered edges with the Bonnard orange.
Numbers and art both fell silent at how quickly Spiegel pulled a crepe carnation out of code's silk hat.
A pout stole over Adie's face. She extended her arm to slow things down, one palm out to break her fall.
You're trying to tell me that… math… is enough to get fake leaves to look real?
Math, Kaladjian snarled, is enough to get real leaves to look real.
Spiegel defended her. I don't think that's what she means.
What the hell does she mean, then? Kaladjian flicked one hand through the air, a disgusted scythe.
Spiegel turned to Adie. Well, she? What the hell do you mean?
God only knows. I was hoping someone here could tell me. I mean: are these equations — these cosine things — inside real plants?
Kaladjian's Of course rammed in midair into Spiegel's Not really.