Free RICHARD POWERS by Unknown

flicker across those living walls, the last, baffled Neanderthal standing by as Homo sapiens launched its breakout.
    With her olive pullovers and her four-foot hank of hair falling like the stern line of a sponge boat in a braid down her back, she drew mixed reviews from the doughnut-packing hackers. Rajan Rajasun-daran and the signal-processing team found her a mild abrasion. Ronan O'Reilly, the econometric modeler, plied her with polite indifference. Jackdaw Acquerelli responded to her like a spooled background process. Sue Loque slammed her New York provincialism at every opportunity. Spider Lim lavished her with almost ethnographic attention. Adie, for her part, clung to Stevie Spiegel. But the scent of an old friend only made the air of this new planet harder to breathe.
    Jonathan Freese, the RL director, dragged her down the mountainside to a cafe. Over a healthy shot of triple mocha, he launched into a rambling monologue on Parmigianino, Tiepolo, and the baptistery doors at Pisa. Like asking your first black neighbor over to listen to your Duke Ellington.
    A marvelous thing, the greatest pleasure were allowed. Art. It's OK , she assured him. I'm not really all that into it. Freese, pushing fifty, was a good twenty years older than the lab's median age. He mimicked the general Birkenstock look. Yet he looked a shade less anarchical than the programmers who worked for him, crisper, more pigmented, as if he still got outside now and
    then.
    Would you care for some bran muffin? he asked. Good source of roughage, you know.
    Adie declined, sticking to her herbal tea and arrowroot biscuit. Jonathan, I need to ask you something.
    Name it.
    He might have sold encyclopedias, or utopian communities, or patriotic evidence to Senate investigations.
    I'm not sure that Г ' т doing what's expected of me, she told him. I want you to get your money's worth.
    Well, first of all, think of your first year as a learning fellowship. It's not really a question of our getting our money's worth. It's more of a question of you getting your time's worth.
    Jonathan, be straight with me.
    I am straight. The higher-ups are all impressed by your work.
    What work? I haven't done any work.
    Your portfolio. We just want to put you together with a bunch of other talented people and see what synergies come out.
    What exactly is a synergy?
    He laughed, without losing track of a single bran crumb. That's what everyone's trying to figure out.
    She felt the force of this man's competence. He exuded an aura of the true administrator, the square-jawed command of those who understand how human organizations work. She saw why people of both sexes tried so hard to please him.
    The Realization Lab is just a research facility at present. TeraSys doesn't have to get its money's worth out of us yet. Not directly, anyway. The Cavern is an experiment in assembling several advanced technologies. We simply want to see what the world is going to look like a few years down the rail cut.
    But how do they pay for us?
    Freese swallowed a careful packet of bran muffin and then laughed again. Something in that laugh nagged at Adie: the mirth of a man who belonged to a chain of being much larger than he was.
    TeraSys has had a bit of a tax liability in the last few years, in case you've been living in Giverny and missed the annual reports. It can do no wrong, as far as windfall revenues go. R-and-D costs are the best write-offs available, and even those only make the problem worse, in the long run. What exactly is this so-called research supposed to feel like? Like any kind of exploration, I imagine. Like working up an altar-piece.
    I can't possibly be contributing anything useful to this group. Any one of you knows more about art than I do. You have people who can make — None of us knows what to do with this stuff. We need your hand.
    Your eye.
    But I'm just thrashing around.
    That's what learning is.
    I need something specific to do.
    Do? Do what you always do.
    That would