Do you want… not to do this anymore?
You quit on me now and I'll kill you.
And sometimes, after they lost themselves to their bodies and lay slack, he'd look out to see her surreptitiously flexing her fists, balling and sloughing her thighs, as if to prove she still could. Recovering those moves for the one who had lost them.
Once, as they made slow, memory-stricken love, the phone rang. The obedient answering-machine speaker broadcast a message so thick and garbled it seemed a prank call. De… nise… Giran… dell Triumph blazed from the petrified voice.
Stcvie tried to stop, all the sadness of existence pressing down on the small of his back. But pressing upward against him, Adie kept him inside her until their plosive end.
She held her own little memorial service in advance. It could not happen at home, now that another lived there. And the lab, of course, was out of the question. That left only the infinite outdoors.
She bought a battery-driven boom box, skulking through the purchase as if she were buying child pornography. She hid it in the backseat of the Volvo, and took it up into the strip of woods on her island's northwest coast. She parked off the road and, with a little judicious trespassing, made her way out of public earshot.
There under the canopy—Look at that tree! Look at that… tree! — she held her wordless service. She played it once through, the shameless bit of ravishing nostalgia Ted wished he could have written but would never be able to. Tribute, buyoff, plea bargain, indulgence: she could not say what the archaic song sounded like, except that it sounded like him.
Before Dives and Lazarus could exhaust itself once more, she heard a person coming through the undergrowth. Despite her precautions, someone had heard. There was no place left on earth far enough away to be inaudible.
She thought to hit the Stop button and scamper off before she could be caught. But the tune still had a few measures to go, and the sound of its cadence made her ready to suffer the consequences. A gnarled, bearded lumberjack in a red plaid shirt and jeans came through the thicket, glaring at her. He slowed his arrival to coincide with the music's end.
She launched into her apologies even before the last note died away. I'm sorry. I'm on your property, aren't I? I was just… It won't happen —
Thank you, the man interrupted her. I'd completely forgotten that that piece existed.
With one stray word, they had stumbled onto the Cavern room Adie was after. But they could get no farther than that word. Together, Spiegel and Klarpol brought their lone clue to Vulgamott.
Byzantium? As in the empire? Adie nodded her head. Steve shook his. Byzantium, as in the Yeats poem, Spiegel said. Ask O'Reilly. He's the Irishman.
Well. Ronan eyed them. It's not really my favorite of his poems, you see.
Which is?
"Meditations in Time of Civil War?"
He pronounced the word to rhyme with "far." The Americans studied one another.
Buy you a pint if you recite?
You could have gotten it for free, woman. But it's too late now. They went over to The Office, where the standing suite of TVs offered the full range of available data streams. O'Reilly parked them in a booth in front of the drive-through news headlines. Apparently history was still in the throes of ending. The largest, most heavily armed nation on earth was cracking apart, apparatchik by apparatchik, scattering its warheads into a host of makeshift republics. Western experts were fanning out through the Eastern Bloc, ministering to the total economic disintegration by doling out shock therapy.
The beers arrived. O'Reilly warmed to his. You think the fourteenth century was a free-for-all? You think the Dark Ages were a major step backward? Amateur night, my friends. Small change. We're watching the show that those acts merely opened for.
Spiegel laughed at the hyperbole. Come on, Ronan. What are you talking about? The Cold War's over. The most destructive suck of resources in history.
Well, that's your problem right there, friend.
What? You're going to get nostalgic for Mutually Assured Destruction, just because it was familiar?
It kept things in check, that particular madness. It kept those resources of yours from realizing their full capacities. Ronan, Adie said, I've never seen you like this. That's because I've never been like this.
The news cycled through its cavalcade. Europe's vacationland, Yugoslavia, prepared to repeat the unthinkable.
All right, we have a problem there, Steve conceded. But doesn't that whole morass go back to the Ottomans?
The Iraqis still occupied by force the world's most concentrated dome of oil, invited there by the United States, which now threatened Armageddon if they did not vacate.
Stevie fidgeted. Well, you can't use the Middle East to prove anything. The Middle East has been self-destructing since the dawn of civilization.
Now we know the reason for the oil price hike that my model predicted a few months ago. Too bad I couldn't predict the cause.
They'll have to back down, Adie said. It's suicide otherwise, isn't it?
O'Reilly pointed to her, then put the tip of his pointer to his own nose.
The news stories did not wait for explanation. They went on to describe an American prison population greater than Orlando, with a per capita cost that outstripped most Ivy League schools. Lockups, the cable said, had doubled in less than a decade, making no discernible dent in the crime rate. O'Reilly glanced over at the Americans and raised his eyebrows.
Spiegel shrugged. We're a lawless people, Marshal. Always have been.
Adie thumped the booth. Hey! You promised us a recitation here. We're not picking up your tab if you don't deliver.
"Meditations in Time of Civil War"?
Adie nodded. Stevie shook his head.
O'Reilly looked into the foam on his beer, reading the scraps of text there. It's that bit toward the end, he said. The Stare's Nest at My Window. The words, when he finally spoke them, came out in astonished starts, like a gift left on the table of an empty room, locked from the inside.
The bees build in the crevices
Of loosening masonry, and there
The mother birds bring grubs and flies.
My wall is loosening; honey-bees,
Come build in the empty house of the stare.
Each looked away from the others, into a lost place. O'Reilly on his country, Spiegel on his abandoned calling, and Klarpol on the bee-loud Crayon World.
---------------
O'Reilly's despair revealed itself in another collective shit-shoot at week's end. Freese called a meeting and laid out the revised timetable for the next half a year, leading up to the commercial Cavern rollout in the spring. Then he threw open the floor to the usual free-range futurism that any gathering of two or more of them always degenerated into.
Everyone agreed that the data transfer rates would continue to rise without foreseeable limit. Lim predicted they'd be able to move complex surfaces around at film quality without dropping a frame by the mid-nineties. When the curve of data compression and the curve of bandwidth crossed, people would be able to swap imaginative spaces as easily as they now traded roses or bottles of Chardonnay.