The country was so flat its inhabitants had four different words for horizon. Its sunlight was watery, full of tumbling clouds. Canals cut across a vast wet chaos of tidal mud, connecting tidy red-brick towns with straight streets, secure and well-ordered behind walls. The houses were all alike behind their stepped facades, high windows set in pairs letting through pale light on rooms scrubbed and spotless. The people who lived in the rooms were industrious, pious, and preoccupied with money.

A fantasist might decide that they were therefore dull, smug and inherently unromantic, the sort of people among whom the Hero might be born, but against whom he would certainly rebel, and from whom he would ultimately escape to follow his dreams.

Nothing could have been further from the truth. The people who lived in the houses above the placid mud flats had fought like demons against their oppressors, and were now in the midst of a philosophical and artistic flowering of such magnificence that their names would be written in gold in all the arts.

Still, they had to make a living. And making a living is a hard, dirty and desperate business.

The weaver's son and the draper's son sat at a small table. They had been passing back and forth a pipe of tobacco slightly adulterated with hemp, and, now that it was smoked out, were attempting to keep the buzz going with two pots of beer. It wasn't proving successful. The weaver's son, thin and threadbare, was nervously eyeing his guest and trying to summon the courage to make a business proposition. The draper's son, reasonably well-fed and dressed, seemed in a complacent mood.

"So you learned a thing or two about lenses in Amsterdam, eh?" said the weaver's son.

"I'd have gone blind if I hadn't," replied the draper's son, belching gently. "Counting threads on brocade? You can't do it without a magnifying glass."

"I had this idea," said the weaver's son. "Involving lenses, see. Have you looked at de Hooch's paintings lately? He's using a camera obscura for his interiors. They're the greatest thing—"

"You know my Latin's no good," said the draper's son. "What's a camera obscura, anyway?"

"All the words mean is dark room," explained the weaver's son. "It's a trick device, a box with two lenses and a focusing tube. The Italians invented it. Solves all problems of perspective drawing! You don't have to do any math, no calculations to get correct angles of view. It captures an image and throws a little picture of it on your canvas, and all you have to do is trace over it. It's like magic!"

"And you want me to loan you the money for one?" asked the draper's son, looking severe.

"No! I just thought, er, if you knew about lenses, you might want to help me make one," said the weaver's son, flushing. "And then I'd cut you in for a share of the paintings I sell afterward."

"But your stuff doesn't sell," said the draper's son.

"But it would sell, if I had a camera obscura! See, that's my problem, getting perspective right," argued the weaver's son. "That was the problem with my Procuress. I'm no good with math."

"That's certainly true."

"But the device would solve all that. I've got a whole new line of work planned: no more Bible scenes. I'm going to do ladies and soldiers in rooms, like de Hooch and Metsu are doing. The emblem stuff with hidden meanings, that people can puzzle over. That's what everyone wants, and it's selling like crazy now," said the weaver's son.

The draper's son sighed and drained his beer.

"Look, Jan," he said. "Your father died broke. He made good silk cloth, he ran a pretty decent inn; if he'd stayed out of the art business he'd have done all right for himself. Our fathers were friends, so I'm giving you advice for nothing: you won't make a living by painting. I know it's what you've always wanted to do, and I'm not saying you're not good—but the others are better, and there are a lot of them. And you're not very original, you know."

The weaver's son scowled. He was on the point of telling the draper's son to go to Hell when a shadow fell across their table.

"I'm very sorry to interrupt, Mynheeren," said the woman. They looked up at her. The weaver's son stared, struck by the image she presented, the way the light from the window fell on her white coif, glittered along the line of brass beads on her sleeve, the way the layered shadows modeled her serene face.

"What do you want?" asked the draper's son. She didn't look like a whore; she looked like any one of the thousand respectable young matrons who were even now peeling apples in a thousand kitchens. What, then, was she doing in the common-room of a shabby inn on the market square?

"Well, I couldn't help but overhear that you two young gentlemen were talking about making a camera obscura. And, you know, I said to myself, isn't that the strangest coincidence! Really, when a coincidence this remarkable occurs it's got to be the work of God or the holy angels, at least that was what my mother used to say, so then I said to myself, whether it's quite polite or not, I'll just have to go over there and introduce myself! Elisabeth van Drouten, gentlemen, how do you do?"

And she drew up a three-legged stool, and sat, and thumped her covered basket down on the table. Looking from one to the other of the men, she whisked off the cover. There, nestled in a linen kerchief, were a handful of objects that shone like big water-drops, crystal-clear, domed, gleaming.

"Lenses!" cried Mevrouw van Drouten triumphantly. "What do you think of that?"

The two gentlemen blinked at them like owls, and the draper's son reached into the basket and held one up to the light.

"Nice lenses," he admitted. "Are you selling them?"

"Not exactly," said Mevrouw van Drouten. "It's a long story. There's a friend of my family's in Amsterdam, actually that's where I'm from, you could probably tell from my accent, yes? Well, anyway, he grinds lenses, this friend of mine. And because he got in trouble with his family—and then later on the Jews kicked him out of their synagogue for something, I'm not sure what it was all about, but anyway, bang, there went poor Spinoza's inheritance. So we were trying to help him out by selling some of his lenses, you see?

"So last time I was here in Delft visiting my auntie, which was, let's see, I guess it was five years ago now, I brought some lenses to see if I could sell them, which I did when I was at my cousin's tavern to this nice man who was maybe a little drunk at the time, and I understood him to say he was a painter and wanted them for optical effects. Fabritius, that was his name!"

The two men grunted. In a gesture that had become involuntary for citizens of their town, they both turned to the northeast and raised their beers in salute. The woman watched them, her brows knitted.

"He died in the explosion," the weaver's son explained.

"Yes, the 'Delft Thunderclap', we called it," said Mevrouw van Drouten, nodding her head. "When your city powder magazine went blooie! Awful tragedy. And that's what my cousin said, when I went back to her tavern yesterday. That poor Fabritius had been so drunk that he left the packet of lenses on the table, and he never came back to get them because the explosion happened the next day. So she kept them until she saw me again. And I said, 'What am I supposed to do with them now? He paid for them, so I don't feel right keeping them,' and she said, 'Well, Elisabeth, why don't you find some other painters to give them to?' And I said, 'Where would I find some other painters?' and she said, 'Try that inn over in the Market Square,' so I came straight over, and here you are, fellow artists I guess, eh? Maybe you knew Fabritius?"

"I did," said the weaver's son. "He was a genius."

"Well then! I'm sure he'd want you to have these, wouldn't he?"

The weaver's son reached into the basket and the lenses rattled, clicked softly as he drew one out. He peered at the tiny rainbowed point of light it threw. It magnified wildly the lines of his palm, the yellow hairs on the back of his hand. He held it up to the window and saw his thumbprint become a vast swirl etched in silver. The draper's son held his lens up beside it.

"Ooh!" Mevrouw van Drouten clasped her hands in pleasure. "I wish I could capture this moment, somehow. Can't help thinking it's portentous, in a way I can't explain. Fabritius's ghost is probably smiling down from heaven at you two fine young fellows. Now you can build your camera obscura, eh? And maybe find one or two other uses for the lenses."

"Are you sure you want to give them away?" said the draper's son, a little vaguely because he was still entranced by the play of rainbows across crystal. The buzz from the hemp hadn't quite vanished.

"Quite sure," said Mevrouw van Drouten cheerfully. She spilled the remaining lenses out on the table and stood, tucking her empty basket under her arm. "There. Much as I'd love to stay and chat, I've got a boat to catch. Mynheer van Leeuwenhoek, Mynheer Vermeer, may God keep you both."

Then she was gone, as suddenly and inexplicably as she'd arrived. The weaver's son tore his gaze away from the liquid contours of the piled lenses and looked around. The light still streamed in, clear and soft, but the room was empty save for a drunk snoring on a bench in the corner.

The other Dutch masters had long since been dismissed from popular taste. Rembrandt didn't suit because his work was too muddy, too dark, too full of soldiers and too big, and who wanted to look at Bible pictures anyway in an enlightened age? To say nothing of the fact that his brush strokes were sloppy. Franz Hals painted too many dirty-looking, grimacing people, and his brush strokes were even sloppier. The whole range of still life paintings of food were out: too many animal or fish corpses, too many bottles of alcohol. Then too, a preoccupation with food might lead the viewer to obesity, which was immoral, after all!

Had they known of their demotion, the old gentlemen of Amsterdam and Utrecht might not have felt too badly; for by the twenty-fourth century, the whole of Medieval art had been condemned for its religious content, as had the works of the masters of the Italian Renaissance. The French Impressionists were considered incoherent and sleazy, the Spanish morbid, the Germans degenerate, and the Americans frivolous. Almost nothing from the twentieth or twenty-first centuries was acceptable. Primitive art was grudgingly accepted as politically correct, as long as it didn't deal in objectionable subjects like sex, religion, war, or animal abuse, but the sad fact was that it generally did, so there wasn't a lot of it on view.

But who could find fault with the paintings of Jan Vermeer?

It was true he'd done a couple of religious paintings in his youth, before his style had become established, and the subject matter of his Procuress was forbidden, but it too was atypical of the larger body of his work. And his Diana and her Companions was enthusiastically accepted by the Ephesian Church as proof that Vermeer had been a secret initiate of the Goddess, and since the Ephesians were about the only faith left with political power or indeed much of a following, the painting was allowed to remain in catalogs.

There was, of course, the glaring problem of the Servant Pouring Milk. But, since Vermeer's original canvases hadn't been seen in years due to their advanced state of deterioration, it was no more than the work of a few keystrokes to delete the mousetrap from the painting's background and, more important, alter the stream of proscribed dairy product so it was no longer white, in order that the painting might henceforth be referred to as Girl Pouring Water. This would avoid any reference to the vicious exploitation of cows.

Those objections having been put aside, Vermeer was universally loved.

He glorified science—look at his Astronomer and Surveyor! He was obviously in favor of feminism, or why would he have depicted so many quiet, dignified women engaged in reading and writing letters? There were, to be sure, a couple of paintings of women drinking with cavaliers, but everyone was decorously clad and upright, and anyway the titles had been changed to things like Girl with Glass of Apple Juice or Couple Drinking Lemonade. He valued humble domestic virtues, it was clear, but refrained from cluttering up his paintings with children, as his contemporary de Hoogh had done. All in all his morality, as perceived by his post-postmodern admirers, suited the twenty-fourth century perfectly.

They liked the fact that his paintings looked real, too. The near-photographic treatment of a subject was now considered the ultimate in good taste. An orange should look like an orange! The eventual backlash against Modern Art had been so extreme as to relegate Picasso and Pollock to museum basements. Maxfield Parrish and the brothers Hildebrandt might have been popular, had they not unfortunately specialized in fantasy (read demonic) themes, and David painted too many naked dead people. So, with the exception of a few landscape painters and the flower paintings of DeLongpre, Vermeer was pretty much the undisputed ruler of popular art.

Having been dead nearly seven centuries, however, it is unlikely he cared.

The camera obscura had worked, after a fashion. The image hadn't been especially bright, muzzily like a stained-glass window out of focus, but Jan had been able to sharpen it up by sealing all the gaps in the cabinet with pieces of black felt. All he had to do then was set up the picture: so he tried a variation on a popular piece by Maes, The Lazy Maid.

Catharina obligingly posed at the table, pretending to sleep. Above her, Jan hung the old painting of Cupid from the stock his father had been unable to sell. Beside her was the view through to the room where the dog posed with simpleton Willem, both of them apparently fascinated by circling flies. Jan had laid their one Turkey carpet on the table, and carefully set out the symbolic objects that would give the painting its disguised meaning, to be deciphered by the viewer: the jug and wineglass to imply drunkenness, the bowl of fruit to suggest the sin of Eve, the egg to symbolize lust.

"Why don't these things ever have anything good to say about ladies?" Catharina complained.

"Damned if I know," Jan told her, adjusting her right arm so she was resting her head on her hand. "But it's what the customers want. Hold it like that, see? That symbolizes sloth."

"Oh, yes, I know all about sloth," she retorted, without opening her eyes. "I'm a real woman of leisure, aren't I?"

"Mama, the baby's awake," little Maria informed them cautiously, edging into the room.

"See if you can rock her back to sleep, then."

"But she's really awake," Maria insisted, wringing her hands.

"Then give her a toy or something! Just don't let her cry."

"All right." Maria left the room. Catharina opened one eye and glared at Jan.

"If she starts crying, I'll run like a fountain, and that'll ruin this gown, and it's my best one! Unless you can get me a pair of sponges in a hurry," she said.

"I'll be as fast as I can." Jan retreated into the black cabinet with his palette.

Working quickly, despite the panicky realization that he'd installed the cabinet too far away from the light of the window, he roughed out everything he could see in a few wide swipes of the brush, applying the pale paint thinly. The main thing here was to get the perspective nailed down. Afterward there would be plenty of time to lavish on color and detail …

A thin wailing floated into the room. He saw the reflected image of Catharina sit upright, saw her eyes snap open, saw her clutch at her bodice.

"Jan, I've got to go," she said, and fled from the sight of the lens.

Six weeks later, he sat at the easel and contemplated his Girl Asleep sadly.

It hadn't worked. The perspective was correct, certainly, the camera obscura had done its job there; but left to himself he hadn't been able to nail down the direction from which the light ought to be coming. Was it strong sunset light coming through a nonexistent window? Firelight? Was it in front of the table or to one side? What was lighting the room beyond, where he'd finally settled for painting out Willem and the dog?

Growling to himself, he took a bit of lead-tin yellow on his brush and picked out a pattern of brass tackheads on the back of the chair. Halfway through the job he stopped and considered it. No, because if the light was falling on the table—

"Papa?" Maria came up to him.

"You're standing in my light, baby," he told her, gently nudging her to one side.

"I'm sorry, Papa. There's a lady to see you."

He came instantly alert, started to sweat. "Is it about a bill?"

"No, Papa, I asked." Maria raised her little pinched face to his. "Because then I would have said you were out. But she wants to buy something. That would be a good thing, wouldn't it? So I told her she could come up."

"But—" Jan looked up in panic as Mevrouw van Drouten swept into the room, basket over her arm.

"Good-day, Mynheer!" she cried gaily. "I see you remember me. So this is where you work, eh? And there's the camera obscura! Yes, that's a nice big one, but are you sure you don't want to move it closer to the windows?" She came straight to his shoulder and bent to look at the painting. "Yes, you definitely want to move it over. The light didn't work out at all in this one, did it? Nice painting, though."

"Thank you—but—" He rose clumsily, wiping his brush with a rag. "If you've come to buy, I'm afraid this one is already sold. I've got to deliver it to the baker. I have a lot of other fine paintings by other artists, though, and they're for sale! Would you perhaps like to see—?"

"No, no." Mevrouw van Drouten held up her hand. "I had a commission in mind, if you want to know."

"Certainly, Mevrouw," Jan exclaimed. "Can I offer you—" he halted, mortified to realize he was unable to offer her anything but bread and butter.

"That's all right," she told him. "I didn't come here to eat." She reached into her basket—it was an immense basket this time—and brought out a small paper parcel. Turning with a smile, she offered it to Maria. "There you go: spekulaas with almonds! Baked this morning. You run along and share them with the little brothers and sisters, yes? Papa and I have to talk in quiet."

"Thank you," said Maria, wide-eyed. She exited and, with some effort as she clutched the parcel, pulled the door shut after her. If the big lady wanted privacy, Maria would make sure she had it, so long as she bought something. A painting sold meant Mama and Papa not shouting at each other, and no dirty looks from the grocer.

Mevrouw van Drouten pulled up a chair. She paused a moment to smile at the little carved lion heads on its back rest. Seating herself, she crossed her arms and leaned forward.

"This commission of mine is a bit unusual, dear sir. My late husband was an alchemist—well, actually, he kept a lodging-house, but alchemy was his hobby, you see? Always fussing with stinky stuff in a back room, blowing off his eyebrows with small explosions now and then, breaking pots and bottles every time. Geraert, I told him, you'll put an eye out one of these days! And of course he never made any gold. About all he ever came up with was a kind of invisible ink, except that it's no good as ink, because it's too thick. Well, he poisoned himself at last, wasn't trying to commit suicide so far as we could tell but he was still just as dead, there you are, and left me with nothing but the house and a book full of cryptic scribbling and that one formula for invisible ink, only it's more of an invisible paste, and what good's that to a spy, I said to myself?"

"I'm so sorry, Mevrouw," said Jan, feeling his head spin at her relentless flow of words.

"Oh, that's all right. I'm containing my grief. The thing is, I figured out a use for the invisible stuff." She leaned back and, from under the cloth, drew out another parcel. This one was a flat rectangle, about the size of a thin account book. It was tightly wrapped in black felt and fastened with string. Holding it up for Jan to see, she said: "This is a little canvas that's been coated in it."

She set it on the table and reached into the basket again, drawing out a small covered pot and a brush. "This is the reagent. If the ink was worth a damn as ink, this would make hidden messages appear when you brushed it on. I think we can do something better, though."

"What are you talking about?" Jan asked, wondering if she were a little crazy. "And what has this got to do with me?"

"You've got a camera obscura, that's what it's got to do with you, and you're a painter, besides. You've got flint but no steel. I've got steel but no flint. If the two of us got together over some tinder, though, I'll bet we could make a nice little fire," said Mevrouw van Drouten. "I'll show you. You go stand in front of the cabinet and put your hand over the lens, eh? Nice and tight, so it's pitch black inside."

Mystified, Jan obeyed nonetheless, cupping the palm of his hand over the focusing tube. Mevrouw van Drouten moved rapidly to the cabinet, carrying what she'd brought, and stepped inside and closed the door.

"Oh, my, this is nice and dark! You did a good job. We'll need to seal it up a little more, that's all. Now, what I'm doing is unwrapping my little canvas …" He heard a rustling and thumping from inside the cabinet. "Here's where you put your pictures, obviously. Very good. Now, Mynheer, keep your hand on the tube but back away at arm's length, yes? And when I give the signal, drop your hand, but stand perfectly still there."

"What'll happen?"

"Well, eventually, guilders will rain out of the sky on us. No, that's just my little joke! Are you ready? Now!"

Jan dropped his hand. Nothing happened. He was relieved.

"Don't move," Mevrouw van Drouten admonished him in a muffled voice. "Just stay like that. I'm counting to sixty. Wait."

When a minute had passed, she said: "Now, quickly, put your hand back."

He obeyed. He heard more bustling and thumping from within the cabinet, and a gentle splashing; then the room filled with an acrid smell that made his throat contract. He heard Mevrouw van Drouten sneeze.

"Whew! Nasty stuff. We'll want to open the windows after this. Oh, but, yes! Here we go! Just a minute more. You should make a cap for the tube so you don't have to keep doing that with the hand, you know, maybe out of a sheet of lead? And lined with more of the black felt. Oh, hurray! Here, my friend, now you'll see I'm not at all mad."

Mevrouw van Drouten emerged smiling from the cabinet in a blast of chemical fume, waving her little canvas. She thrust it at him. "Looky!"

It was a moment before Jan realized what he was seeing.

The canvas appeared to have been primed with a pale gray undercoat. On it, rendered in various grays ranging from silvery to charcoal, was the portrait of a man. He was staring out at the viewer with a doubtful expression. Behind his right shoulder was a wall, with a corner of a painting in its frame, the naked leg of Cupid just visible—

"Jesus God!" Jan shouted, having recognized himself at last.

"The stuff on the canvas reacts to light, you see?" chortled Mevrouw van Drouten. "The way words drawn in lemon juice react to a flatiron! You just slap it on a canvas, expose it to light—and the picture draws itself!

"At least, it does as soon as you brush on a coat of reagent," she added, sneezing again.

Jan held the picture close, wrinkling his nose at the smell but unable to look away from it. Every detail, perfect and exact, as though—

"As though God Himself had painted it, yes?" said Mevrouw van Drouten, watching his face. "We can make a lot of money out of this, my friend, wouldn't you say?"

"I haven't got a guilder to invest," said Jan reluctantly.

"Who needs to invest? We want to keep this a secret, yes? Or we'll have Saint Luke's Guild bringing a lawsuit against us on behalf of painters everywhere," said Mevrouw van Drouten. Jan, pacing back and forth with the portrait, only half heard her.

"Not only the problems of perspective solved," he said, "but the lighting problems too! God in Heaven, look at it! It's the perfect study for a portrait. You could take as long as you needed with this—wouldn't matter if your model had to get up to feed the baby, wouldn't matter if you lost the daylight! It's all laid out before you, permanent!" He turned to look at her in awe. She smiled at him and, from the seemingly-bottomless basket, drew forth a bottle of wine.

"Shall we drink to our partnership?"

Over a convivial couple of glasses, they worked out the details of their arrangement. Mevrouw van Drouten would mix the secret formula herself, and purchase and prepare the canvases. She would have them delivered, along with a supply of the reagent, to Jan, who would capture images on them and then complete the paintings. He would return the finished canvases to her and receive half the proceeds when she found a buyer.

There were complications, of course. The images would only appear if the canvas received limited, focused exposure to light, which was why the camera obscura was necessary. Take a prepared canvas out of its wrapping in an open room and all it would show, when the reagent was brushed on, would be a uniform dark surface. The reagent was poisonous, the fumes mustn't be inhaled for long, so it was a good idea not to take more than one image a day, and best to leave a window open. The cabinet must be moved to the corner under the windows, to take the most advantage of daylight, but every crack and sliver of light visible inside must be covered over. Also, the images weren't truly permanent; left in the air they would fade to nothing, so it was vital that he begin painting over them as soon as he could after the images developed.

Because it was a secret formula, no one was to know about the use to which the camera obscura was being put. This meant that Jan must take no pupils, and entertain few guests. Poor as he was, this wasn't much of a problem.

And Mevrouw van Drouten would decide what was painted.

"I know what the public likes," Jan protested.

"I'm sure you do, my friend. But I have a particular customer in mind, you see, and I know his tastes! A rich old doctor in Amsterdam, a collector in fact, but he's very particular about what he buys. No religious scenes, for example—he's a bit of an atheist," Mevrouw van Drouten explained. "Likes pretty girls but in a nice way, you know what I mean? No boobs sticking out, no whores. Likes scholarly stuff. By the way, how's your friend van Leeuwenhoek? Seen him lately?"

"Not much," said Jan, feeling uncomfortable. "We move in different circles nowadays. The friendship was more between our fathers, really. But he took a lot of those lenses you gave us. I think he's fooling around with lens-grinding himself, now, as a hobby."

"How nice," said Mevrouw van Drouten.