Pym_ A Novel - Mat Johnson [99]
“The 3.2 Ultra, that’s top of the line; you don’t get something like that at Sam’s Club. Hermetically sealed, fully self-contained. Got solar panels all over the roof, even. NASA contracted for these things to colonize Mars someday. The fauna, the exchange of CO2 and oxygen: it’s all set up so we can get our own ecosystem fully self-contained. You can’t even find it with infrared satellite imagery: the exhaust system shoots the hot air right down into the ice tunnels, which makes the heat signatures invisible. Not even the government could find us. This is the safest place on the earth, right here.”
When one was standing in the middle of the construction, it really was awe inspiring. I’d seen other faux habitats before, but never walked around freely within such a big one.‡ Even more stunning was the amount of detail that went into the realism of the place. The sky, although stuck in perpetual sunset, was no mere clunky mural painting, it was clearly an actual photograph of a Karvel original, blown up to span the hundreds of yards that constituted the entire ceiling. The sides of the structure were equally meticulous in their attempt to continue the illusion: the room did not appear to end. Rather, the foliage around us became too dense to see through. Besides the apartment that floated above the waterfall, there was no sign that we were not really outside. And yet, despite these nods to realism, the overall look of the room was utterly unreal. The grass we walked on was green, but it was too green. The water that ran through the rambling stream that went diagonally through the space was actually blue. The azaleas and roses and tulips that appeared across the space were all, simultaneously, in the most vivid bloom. It was as if we were walking through a world that had been colorized with markers by an enthusiastic eight-year-old.
“God created nature. I just improved on it.”
“NASA’s biodome looks like this?” I asked, hard-pressed to imagine this landscape populated by bookish men in white overcoats. Garth flashed me a look, darting his eyes back to his hero in fear of finding him offended, but Karvel was indulgent, even jovial.
“Oh no, no, no. This is all custom,” he said, walking to the water’s edge. Bending down on his knees, he took a cup into his hands, sipped some water, and motioned for us to do the same. “For years, I kept painting all of those pictures, trying to create a perfect world. One day, I’m standing there with a brush in my hand, and I realize: I don’t just want to look at this world, I want to live in it.”
“See, that’s what I been talking about. That’s brilliance.” Garth took to his knees too, gathering some of the stream’s water in his hands. Thomas Karvel’s palms went to Garth’s shoulders, blessing.
“A man who lives a life worth living, he’s a hunter. He hunts for something, he hunts for his dream. And his dream is always the same thing: to create a world he can truly live in, without Big Brother enslaving him to mediocrity. So I created this free land. First within my art, and now in life,” Karvel said, motioning grandly around him, the king of all we could survey. “Had to come down here to do it too. As blank as the morning snow. A clean canvas. A place with no violence and no disease, no poverty and no crime. No taxes or building codes. This is a place without history. A place without stain. No yesterday, only tomorrow. Only beauty. Only the world the way it’s supposed to be.”
“This river tastes like grape Kool-Aid!” Garth exclaimed, staring at the bit left in his cupped fingers in disbelief.
“Yeah, but with Splenda instead of the real stuff. I tried to use corn syrup, but it killed