"Well, Spike, now I have to do something unbelievably great. Something impossible. Something these scum are too dumb even to imagine. To hell with grades. There are much fairer ways of showing how smart you are. I'm smarter than all of these fuckers, rules aside."
He cranked his vent window open. Outside a Tower War was raging: students shouting to one another, shining lights and lasers into one another's rooms, blaring their stereos across the gulfs. Now the countertenor cry of Casimir Radon rode in above the tumult.
"You can make it as hard as you want, as hard as you can, but I'm going to be the cleverest bastard this place has ever seen! I can make idiots of you all, damn it!"
"Fuck you!" came a long-drawn-out scream from F Tower. It was precisely what Casimir wanted to hear. He shut his window and sat in darkness to think.
At four in the morning the wing was quiet except for Sarah, who was up, preparing her laundry. It was not necessary to do it at four in the morning-- one could find open machines as late as six or seven-- but this was Sarah's time of day. At this time she could walk the halls like something supernatural (or as she put it, "something natural, in a place that is sub-natural"). In the corridors she would meet the stupid gotten-up-to-urinate, staggering half-dead for the bathroom, and they'd squint at her-- clothed, up and bright-- as though she were a moonbeam that had worked its way around their room to splash upon their faces. The ultra-late partiers, crushed by alcohol, floated, belched and slurred along in glitzy boogie dress, and the fresh and sober Sarah, in soft clothes and tennis shoes, could dance through them before they had even recognized her presence. The brightest nerds and premeds riding the elevators home from all-nighters were so thick with sleep they could hardly stand, much less appreciate the time of day. A dozen or so hard-core athletes liked to rise as early as Sarah, and when she encountered them they would nod happily and go their separate ways.
Being up at four in the morning was akin to being in the wilderness. It was as close to the outside world as you could get without leaving the Plex. The rest of the day, the harsh artificiality of the place ruled the atmosphere and the unwitting inhabitants, but the calm purity of the predawn had a way of seeping through the cinderblocks and pervading the place for an hour or so.
"Screw the laundry," is what she finally said. She had plenty of clean clothes.
She was kneeling amid a heap of white cottons, and the grim brackishness of her room was all around her. Suddenly she could not stand it. Laundry would not make the room seem decent, and she had to do something that would.
Out in the wing it was easy to find the leftover paints and brushes. The Castle in the Air paintings were just now getting their finishing touches. She found the supplies in a storage closet and brought them to her room.
Normally this would have been a quick and dirty process, but the spirit of four in the morning made her placid. She moved the furniture away from the walls and in a few minutes had the floor, door, windows and furniture covered with a Sunday New York Times. It looked better already.
The Castle in the Air, as will later be described, was a sickly yellow, floating on white clouds in a blue sky. By mixing cloud-color with Castle-color and a bit of Bambi-color (on the ground under the Castle, Bambis cavorted) she made a mellow creamy paint. This she applied to the walls and ceiling with a roller. It was breakfast-time. She wasn't hungry.
Sky-color and castle-color made green. She splayed open a cardboard box and made it into a giant palette, mixing up every shade of green she could devise and smearing them around to create an infinite variety. Then she began to dab away on one wall with no particular plan or goal.
The light fixture was in the middle of the wall. She paused, thinking of the dire consequences, then sighed blissfully and slapped it all over with thick green daubs.
By noon the wall was covered with pied green splotches ranging from almost-black to yellow. It was not a bad approximation of a forest in the sun, but it lacked fine detail and branches. She had long since decided to cut all her classes. She left her room for the first time since sunrise and started riding the 'vators toward the shopping mall. She felt great.
"Doin' some paintin'?" asked a doe-eyed woman in leg warmers. Plastered with paint, Sarah nodded, beaming. "Doin' your room?"
"Yep."
"Yeah. So did we. We did ours all really high-tech. Lots of glow-colors. How bout you? Lotsa green?"