RICHARD POWERS Read Online Free PDF Page A

years, New York turned on her, expelled her like an amateur. One more accosting, this one by a pack of grade-school thrashers in Chelsea using her as a crash-test dummy, and Adie realized what was happening. She'd started to make eye contact. Fallen back into that old, bad habit of looking up at people. And to look, in this place, was to beg for erasure.
    She called Spiegel and asked him to send out some rental listings. And there it was, on page 4 of the second Rentals column: Cozy Island Home, with garden. The gingerbread cottage she'd seen in her sleep.
    She called Steve right away, unable to wait a decent interval. Is the offer still good?
    The cackle at the other end of the line seemed to be a yes.
    She rented the house over the phone, sight unseen. She took possession on one of those rare Pacific crystalline afternoons, thick with the scent of white pine resin, when the Earth felt as freshly scrubbed as on the day it sat for its first formal portrait. The place was all she'd dreamed, and then some. She settled in on the Sound, forty minutes by ferry from town. Within a week of her moving into the cottage, she stopped dreaming of the city she'd abandoned.
    She sat on her porch those first nights, wrapped in the brackish tidal air. The future's breeze split across her face and joined up again behind her. She felt herself a spinster whose sudden new suitor must be either sadistic, blind, or a confused fortune hunter. She'd read all the cautionary fairy tales and knew the one inevitable outcome. Still, she consented to this courtship, and even decided to court it back.
    Seattle exceeded all expectation. She painted her gingerbreading a lovingly researched rainbow of maroons. She bought a chocolate Labrador and named him Pinkham, the trusting companion that a New York apartment had always denied her. She put in a dozen mailorder rosebushes, each one tagged with a tin octagon embossed with the warning "Asexual reproduction of this plant without license is prohibited by the Plant Patent Act." She found that she could live on wild blueberries, honey, and crabs from the crab pot she sank off the neighborhood slip.
    The sole catch was the corporate sponsor across the Sound, the one she had to report to, the one that footed the bill for this midlife summer bungalow. She rode over on the ferry, steeping herself in the blasted fifths of its foghorn. She freighted her secondhand, banged-up banana-colored Volvo across the Sound faster than it used to take her to get past the first pylon of the Verrazano Narrows.
    A perky personnel officer took Adie on the formal TeraSys welcoming rounds. They toured the expensive new glass and polished sandstone headquarters that coiled itself like so much self-replicating luxury mall, five miles down the road's clear-cut from the Realization Lab. Preoccupied specialists of all stripes paused in mid-coffee-room brain-storming to give her hand distracted shakes. Workstation designers, systems-software adepts: scores of names she promptly forgot and faces she couldn't keep from remembering.
    After a few hundred handshakes, Adie began to understand the hyena highlights in that phone cackle Spiegel had given her, when she asked if the offer was still good. Like the worst of number-dumb paintbox dabblers, she'd failed to guess the weight of this latest silicon thyroid case. Failed to gauge the size of the master hive, or just how many jobs it needed to fill.
    She'd once freelanced for a software vendor, the makers of a time management product whose marketers commissioned from her a hideously cheery pastel mouse and keyboard, each made to look as if it were stitched out of taffeta. Now, on an office wall plastered with sales brochures, she saw her faux-folksy logo among those of a dozen other subsidiaries buried in the TeraSys tree structure. An adjacent brochure described the test bed of the hour, the Realization Lab, with its prototype Cavern: "a second-generation, experimental, total-immersion environment