Only now was he beginning to understand the cost—in artistic terms—of such realism, the limiting factors and the disciplines involved. It was not enough to create the perfect illusion; it was also necessary to maintain a sequential integrity in the experiencing mind. The illusion depended on him staying within his own skull, behind his own eyes, the story developing in real time.
There was, of course, a simple answer: abandon all breaches of sequential integrity. But that limited the kind of story one could tell. It was a straitjacket of the worst kind, limiting fiction to the vignette, briefly told. He had recognized this at once and agonized over it, but weeks of wrestling with the problem had left him without an answer.
Perhaps this was why all previous practitioners of the form had kept to the quasi-realism of a cartoon, leaving the experiencing imagination to suspend disbelief and form a bridge between what was presented and the reality. Maybe some of them had even tried what he was attempting now, had experimented with "perfected," realistic images and had faced the same constricting factors. Maybe so, but he had to make a choice—pursue his ideal of a perfect art form or compromise that vision in favor of a patently synthetic form, a mere embellishment of the old. It was no real choice at all, yet still he procrastinated.
He wound the tapes back and replayed, this time at one-tenth speed—five frames a second—watching the bird thrust slowly outward from the cage in an explosion of sudden, golden, living fire; seeing beyond it the girl's face, its whiteness framed in flames of red as it turned to face the screen.
He closed his eyes and froze the image. It was the best thing he had done. Something real and beautiful—a tiny, perfect work of art. And yet . . . He shivered, then pressed ERASE. In an instant it was gone, the tapes blanked. He stood there for a long time afterward, leaning against the machine, perfectly still, his eyes closed. Then, with a tiny shudder, he turned away. There was that much anyway. It was there—it would always be there—in his head.
He went to the bed and sat, not knowing what he felt, staring intently, almost obsessively at the narrow ridge of flesh that circled his left wrist. Then he got up again and went out into the other room.
For a while he stood there in the center of the room, his mind still working at the problem; but just now he could not see past his tiredness. He was stretched thin by the demands he had placed on himself these last few weeks. All he could see were problems, not solutions.
He took a long, shuddering breath. "Small steps," he told himself, his voice soft, small in the darkness. "There is an answer," he added after a moment, as if to reassure himself. Yet he was far from certain.
He turned away, rubbing at his eyes, too tired to pursue the thought, for once wanting nothing but the purging oblivion of sleep. And in the morning? In the morning he would begin anew.
THE SQUARE was a huge, airy space at the top of Oxford Canton, the uppermost level of a complex warren of Colleges that extended deep into the stack below. To the eternal delight of each new generation of students, however, the Square was not square at all, but hexagonal, a whole deck opened up for leisure. Long, open balconies overlooked the vastness of the Green, leaning back in five great tiered layers on every side, while overhead the great dome of the stars turned slowly in perfect imitation of the sky beyond the ice.
Here, some seventeen years earlier, so rumor had it, Berdichev, Lehmann, and Wyatt had met and formed the Dispersionist party, determined to bring change to this world of levels. Whether the rumor was true or not, the Square was a place to which the young intelligentsia of all seven cities were drawn. If the world of thought were a wheel, this was its hub, and the Green its focus.
A line of oaks bordered the Green, hybrid evergreens produced in the vats of SynFlor; while at its center was an aviary, a tall, pagoda-like cage of thirteen tiers, modeled upon the Liu he t'a, the Pagoda of the Six Harmonies at Hang Chou. As ever, young men and women strolled arm in arm on the vast lawn or gathered about the lowest tier, looking in at the brightly colored birds.
The Square was the pride of Oxford Canton and the haunt of its ten thousand students. The elite of the Above sent their children to Oxford, just as the elite of a small nation state had done centuries before. It was a place of culture and for the children of First Level families, a guarantee of continuity.
No big MedFac screens cluttered the Green itself, but in the cool walkways beneath the overhang, small Vidscreens showed the local cable channels to a clientele whose interests and tastes differed considerably from the rest of the Above.
The overhang was a place of coffee shops and restaurants, CulVid boutiques and SynParlors. It was a curious mixture of new and old, of timelessness and state-of-the-art, of purity and decadence; its schizophrenic face a reflection of its devotees. At the Cafe Burgundy business was brisk. It was a favorite haunt of the Arts Faculty students, who, at this hour, crowded every available table, talking, drinking, gesturing wildly with all the passion and flamboyance of youth. The tables themselves—more than two hundred in all—spread out from beneath the overhang toward the edge of the Green. Overhead, a network of webbing, draped between strong poles, supported a luxuriant growth of flowering creepers. The plants were a lush, almost luminous green, decorated with blooms of vivid purples, yellows, reds, and oranges—huge gaping flowers with tongues of contrasting hues, like the silent heads of monsters. Beneath them the tables and chairs were all antiques, the wood stained and polished. They were a special feature of the cafe, a talking point, though in an earlier century they would have seemed quite unexceptional.
Han waiters made their way between the packed tables, carrying trays and taking orders. They were dressed in the plain, round-collared robes of the Tang Dynasty, the sleeves narrow, the long er-silks a dark vermilion with an orange band below the knee: the clothes of an earlier, simpler age.
At a table near the edge sat four students. Their table was empty but for three glasses and a bottle. They had eaten and were on their third bottle of the excellent Burgundy from which the cafe took its name. A vacant chair rested between the two males of the party, as if they were expecting another to join them. But it was not so. All spaces at the table had to be paid for, and they had paid to keep it vacant.
There was laughter at the table. A dark-haired, olive-skinned young man was holding sway, leaning well back in his chair, a wineglass canted in his hand. The singsong tones of his voice were rather pleasant, well-modulated. He was a handsome, aristocratic man with a pronounced aquiline profile, a finely formed mouth, and dark, almost gypsy eyes. Strong-limbed and broad-shouldered, he looked more a sportsman than an artist, though a fastidiousness about his clothes somewhat redressed that impression. As he talked, his free hand carved forms from the air, the movements deft, rehearsed. He was older than the others by some four or five years, a factor that made them defer to him in most things; and often—as now— he monopolized their talk, leading it where he would.
His name was Sergey Novacek and he was a Masters student and a sculptor. His father, Lubos, was a well-to-do merchant who, at his wife's behest, indulged his only son, buying him a place at Oxford. Not that Sergey was unintelligent. He could easily have won a scholarship. It was simply a matter of prestige. Of status. At the level on which Lubos Novacek had his interests, it was not done to accept state charity.