Death Match - Diane Duane [20]
Catie picked up the page and hung it up in the air, off to one side of her chair. There it held itself flat as if pasted up against a window. “Space,” she said, “is Noreen online right now?”
“Checking,” said her workspace manager. It paused a moment, then said, “Online, but occupied.”
“Maybe not as occupied as she looks,” Catie said. “Give me voice hail.”
“Hail away,” said the workspace manager.
“Noreen,” Catie said, “you got a moment?”
The “pastel” drawing of Noreen abruptly grew to full size and went three-dimensional, flushing into life as Noreen looked up and out of the “drawing” at Catie. Then the background changed, too, showing what looked like the depths of a forest, and Noreen in the middle of it, with the palette-routine window of the “BluePeriod” virtual rendering program hanging behind her. “Catie! I was wondering if you’d call tonight. Got a minute to look at this?”
“That long anyway,” Catie said. Noreen turned to do something to her rendering, probably to save it, and Catie got up out of her chair and stepped through the drawing into Noreen’s workspace.
It took her a second to get her bearings as she looked around her. “Wow,” Catie said, “you’ve really come a long way with this….”
Noreen smiled a dry smile, tired but pleased, and paused to rub her eyes. “This is really getting to be ‘the forest primeval….’” she said. “And I feel like I’ve beenat it about that long.”
The forest rendering in which they sat was a project for Noreen’s honors art certification course at her high school in Seattle. Noreen had her eye on a degree from one of the big art colleges after she graduated, something like the Fine Applied Computer Arts degree that the Sorbonne and ETZ were offering. But to even think of getting in the doors of one of those places, you had to produce a “journeyman” work of sufficient artistry to get the attention of instructors who saw the best work of thousands of insanely talented people in the course of a year, and were in a position to pick and choose. The work genuinely had to be art, too. There was no simply letting a “simm” program multiply the same prefabricated stylistic elements over and over again to be dragged and dropped where you wanted them. Instead, an artistic rendering involved the careful choice and piece-by-piece modification of code you wrote yourself, all of it then being fed into one of the major rendering programs, and tweaked until the effect was perfect.
Noreen had been working on the Forest Primeval for the better part of six months now, starting with a rough concept based in a piny mountain glade of the Black Forest in Germany. But this was a wilder version of one of those glades: an older forest, more dangerous-feeling than the shrinking though carefully tended Schwarzwald that existed today. Noreen was attempting to suggest a forest in which the original forms of this century’s oversanitized fairy tales might still be walking around in the shadows—wolves who might actually just haul off and eat you rather than trying to sweet-talk you first, wicked stepmothers who wouldn’t need three tries to do in a too-beautiful stepdaughter, and castles that cast unnerving shadows over the territory they controlled—a landscape in which the peasants had good reason to carry torches and pitchforks. It was a wonder, this forest, for as you looked around inside it, you could feel eyes looking at you out of the dimness with the gold-glinting forward stare of predators’ eyes; and the shadows gathered themselves together under the deep jade-green silence of the trees, a green that was almost black, and dared you to step into them. Far, far up between the overhanging