PLOWING THE DARK

by Richard Powers

  But even while trapped in that old scroll's closed O, the storytelling race has been busy. Millennia pass in the war against matter. Every invention bootstraps off the next. The tale advances; thought extends its grasp over things until it arrives at the final interface. The ultimate display, the one that closes the gap between sign and thing.

  In this continuous room, images go real. You come to rest at last, in no more than the idea of a bed. The mere mention of love brings on the fact. The word "food" is enough to feed you. A carved-soap gun can kill your enemies. And a quick sketch of the Resurrection suffices to raise the dead.

  The room of the cave is something more than allegory. But the room of the cave is something less than real. Its wall shadows ripple with an undercurrent of substance, more than representation, but not yet stuff. Notion springs to life from the same, deep source in which the outdoors is scripted—what the run-on Greek once called the Forms.

  In this room, before this play of fire, you feel the deeper freeze just outside the cave's mouth. From here you can make out those more turbulent axioms, chill forces you couldn't feel until you touched your fingers to this coded pane.

  You breathe in. You lean forward, and the images advance toward you. You look up and rise, or gaze down and sink. You materialize on a stony cliff, ruined streets cutting switchbacks through a grove of olives. You fly to the end of the cliff and lift off, careful to stay, this time, above the ocean but below the sun.

  You learn to steer your fragile machine. You skim above the surface of a dark sea. You dive beneath these scattered reefs and float in your birthright air. The flight feels like reading, like skimming a thousand exhilarated pages, but without the brakes and ballast of an ending.

  Everywhere you look on the horizon, there are more islands. You fly past them, but always more appear. Desire moves you through them, down toward their surfaces. You've found your way back to the cradle where this project started. Here and there, against the sun-bleached shores, an amphitheater emerges, or a temple to that same bleaching sun that trails you overhead. One minute the air is thick with autumn, the next, a sweet-sapped spring. The seasons track that kidnapped goddess through the year, wandering to and from her underground prison.

  You fly too freely, or the land's geometry is wrong. Some titan fails to hold up his corner of the air's tent. Or you simply reach the edge of a story that, even at this final stage, remains eternally under construction. An embankment, pitch-white and blinding, looms up in front of you, too fast for you to take evasive action.

  The scene crashes before you do. The room of the cave slams to a breakpoint and empties itself into error's buffer. There on the wall where the oceans and olives and temples were, where the marble crags ran from their spine down into their unbroken chasm, the machine seizes up, the faulty allegory crumbles, the debugger spits out a continuous scroll of words.

  Only through this crack can you see where things lead. You step through the broken symbols, into something brighter.

  44

  In the room of shared experience, she disappears.

  She vanishes just days before they are to give the demo for the first round of visitors from the secular world.

  She's not the first to sign off and take up work elsewhere. The wizard Rajasundaran has already quit to join a team farther up the mountain, a loose confederation of technical visionaries backed by a serial venture capitalist who promises to underwrite wilder extensions of simulated space: direct electro-muscular stimulation tactors, ear monitor implants, digital-endorphin interfaces, 3-D scanners, force-feedback reality augmenters that slide whole data structures in and out of the visual cortex for direct parallel processing. Vishnu will assume all shapes before the world starts up again from scratch.

  O'Reilly, too, decides to bail, just before curtain time. But he heads in the opposite direction, back to the body's home islands. The spur comes in the form of another handwritten note sent by archaic air mail. A shock to recall: the race is still dragging around sacks full of scribbled paper in the cargo holds of lumbering jumbo jets.

  Ronan,

  All right; so I lied. The wedding was just a literary device. Clearly it failed. And you know what's especially pathetic? The fellow I invented? This Stephen Powys character? He's even worse than you are ...

  It is enough for him; more than enough. What was he thinking, after all? Midwife to the future: a man would have to be mad. He's seen what they're birthing—the runaway victory of the flat graph. The future does not need a midwife. The future needs an abortionist.

  By Delphic estimate as shrouded as any, the species still had another forty years. Best to spend them locked up among the earth's most backward people, who won't get the news for centuries, in a place where even one afternoon can stretch out into an eternal now. He'll put himself up against this fantasy husband, projection for projection.

  It will have to be a progressive arrangement, by Irish standards. But surely between O'Reilly, Maura, and this Powys invention, the three of them can reach some civilized understanding. He can return to the island of the damned. He can live in endless savagery, raise his children in savagery, await the savage future, and no one will ever be able to say just what may come of the life they'll make of it.

  The rest of the team is in attendance. Lim, in his passion for assimilation, plays the emcee. He puts the clients at their ease, speaking to each in the common diction of equipment. He shows them the reality engines in the hardware room, thinking Rembrandt, Claude, Hsieh Ho, but identifying the Power Agate servers by their current model designations.

  Here's where we started from, he tells the tour. Then he demos, for comic contrast, the first few primitive software rooms ever assembled for the Cavern. And something in those first childish endeavors—the nubby stray arc of crayon, after the distance they've come—jars loose an image in him. An aunt putting him on an airplane, telling him in a still-comprehensible foreign language that he must be big and brave. Handing him photos: this will be your country. This white woman with the funny, wedged head will be your mother. This woman, these features: yours.

  Sue Loque shows off her prototype visual development environment, playing to the hilt her role as token crossover. Her boy's gee-whiz soul in a girl's pierced body keenly awaits all the possible worlds to come, when she will be no more than the tamest of fertile blurrings. The virtual world will leap past all birthmarks. No age, no sex, no race, no clans, no power politics ...

  The scientists trot out their visualization tools, environments that, even as they debut, have already become commonplace. Kaladjian treats the paying visitors with his standard contempt, for remaining stupidly human in the face of so much rigor. He and Stance draw the first applause for their climate theater. Bergen's biosimulator entertains the industry nametags for a full half hour.

  Freese presides, smiling like a gracious head of state. But his heart is already elsewhere. Only two weeks earlier, lie received his first look at civilization's next leap. He's been to a demo of his own, returning with a little piece of software that will turn the whole Net into a medium of universal exchange. He's come away with a glimpse of the thing the human yarn has been spinning itself toward, ever since its first camp-fire recitation: every soul in the world, serving as every other soul's twenty-four-hour server. Movable type was no more than a shadow puppet show.

  The software he's seen is still text-only. But the breakout—pictures, clips, and, finally, the inevitable merge with VR—is just a few clock cycles away. The machinic phylum is on the move again, spinning itself out into another species. As always, there will be hell and turbulence to pay. But whatever the costs of this Next Big Thing, Freese means to be there.

  The first wave of the Cavern's prospective purchasers stroll through a string of worlds of increasing visual interest. Spiegel runs flack, hinting to all parties that the best still waits in the wings. Hoping it still does. He hasn't a clue what it looks like, the country his mate has left them with. No one has had time to run the p
lace through a final test.

  He knows only that she is gone, that she was gone already, weeks before she left. In the last leg, just before the final tape, she'd become obsessed. Something had happened under the dome, some visitation invisible to everyone but the project's designer. She dug frantically at the structure, as if at the mouth of a collapsed mine shaft where people had been trapped.

  She disappeared into the place she was making. Her immersion grew so total that he finally cornered her. What is it? he asked. What's happening in there?

  Stevie, it's ... I can't tell you. You'd never believe me.

  Belief? When have I ever failed you with belief?

  She looked at him, weighing the odds. Then she shook her head, dazed, denying, her own credulity spent. There's ... something in there. Something that wants out. Something we didn't make.

  I... don't understand. There? Where? Where exactly are you ... ?

  She turned to bolt, and he reached out to grab her—to force her now, this once, to stay. And in that reflex force, he lost her. She went passive, giving in to his stronger grip. He tried to turn her toward him, to lift her eyes up to his.

  Ade. If...I didn't know better, I'd say you were cheating on me.

  And the look she shot him then—caged, uncovered; How much do you know?—was worse than confirmation.

  I believe you, he tried again, in the dark. Wherever. Whatever you're.../... believe.

  But she was already off, lost in that emergency rescue mission her overworked imagination had devised. She worked alone, keeping some tryst, meeting some phantom assignation that Spiegel could not even begin to hang flesh upon. Her trips away into that private geometry were as terse and desperate as love.

  Three weeks before the end, they received a cardboard box from a small town in Ohio specializing in Shaker museums and close-security prisons. It was filled with books, tapes, photos, and a handful of other archaic media, earmarked for the two of them, discovered by the orderlies who cleaned out the bedroom after its tenant's forced evacuation.

  All Adie took from the inheritance was a floppy disk, Ted's last composition, the chamber symphony, in MIDI format. His bizarre, wilderness notion of a music that people might want to listen to.

  That's your keepsake? Steve asked. That's all you want, to remember him?

  Adie nodded once and made off with the file, a magpie thieving a shred of tinfoil for its growing nest.

  She worked on Byzantium flat out until she collapsed in exhaustion. They sent her home, feverish. She came back the next day, over the group's collective objections.

  Sweetheart. It's just a damn demo, Steve told her. People are going to buy the thing, whatever rooms we show them. The machine is state-of-the-art. Someone will want one. Adie. Ade. It's not worth ruining your health over.

  She went back, feverish, to work as if health were no more than a guilty, survivor's privilege. A figment of the imagination.

  She took her stolen shreds of code and quilted them into a landscape. She worked, deep in covert conversation with a life just out of earshot. The room might have gone on forever, a work in progress. But when her assemblage came provisionally together, Adie seemed to shake free, for the space of an evening, into a safe place. She came up for air and sat with Stevie once more, spent, silent, in the brief truce of accomplishment.

  He read the fact in her face. It's done?

  For now, she said.

  For good, I hope.

  Come on. Accredit me. I'm cutting-edge, for another few weeks at least. People are lusting for what I do. I can get a job anywhere I want.

  So where might that be, exactly?

  Search me. At least we know what we're looking for, now. At least we have a template. She hugged the loyal, uncomprehending Pinkham to her. We'll recognize it when we see it, huh, pup?

  I'm going with you, Spiegel said.

  She put her palm on his chest, the gentlest refusal. He grabbed her wrist, and she drew back.

  Ade, listen to me. Nothing I can make ... makes much sense. Without someone to make it for.

  She smiled a sfumato smile, the grin of one already sacrificed to canvas. Her finger came forward again, to trace his ribbed flesh, connecting the freckled dots she knew now by heart.

  How long have we all been cooped up here? she asked. My God, it's been forever. Like death. I've got to get out of this place. Head south. Do some sightseeing. You know: I don't know the first thing about what it looks like, out there?

  We can see it together. Better. Stereo.

  Stevie. I need ... to reinvent myself. Alone. In situ.

  He said nothing.

  She worked her mouth again, struggling. Just... give us a head-start. Six months. Then come find us.

  Where?

  If I knew, I'd tell you. She laughed and swept her arms. No, I wouldn't. That would be cheating.

  No clue? Anywhere?

  Sure. Scavenger hunt. How big can the place be?

  Big, Adie. Big enough for us all to get lost in.

  Small enough to fit in a shoebox, buddy. And shrinking by the nanosecond.

  She disappears just days before the audience arrives. Drafts an escape hatch and slips down it, off through color's interface, into the negative space, between the single brushstroke, the vanishing point that the hand invents to fool the eye.

  What's left of the design team stands in front of the Cavern mouth, waiting for their cue. Vulgamott paces, cursing under his breath. Damn artist. Bugging out at the eleventh hour. Leaving us to run the thing alone.

  Ebesen stands by him, wearing his first new shirt in years. His trousers, too, can only be a goodbye gift, if for no other reason than that they fit. Of course we have to run it alone. That's the whole beauty of fake reality.

  Vulgamott pretends not to hear him. News is something a civilized person shouldn't have to do more than watch. What if it doesn't work?

  Nothing ever works, Ebesen reminds him. That's why we keep fixing it.

  But in this room, the room of shared experience, the group show comes off without a hitch.

  45

  The room that holds you falls away. Space opens out in every direction, too big to see across, the biggest single opening that has ever surrounded you. Your eyes need time to adjust to the size of it, the glare. A single dome rises so high above you, its shell might as well be the thing it stands for. It hovers over a nimbus of forty windows, suspended on a crown of light.

  In the mystery of sealed volumes, the space is larger than its container. At ground level, under the angeled pendentives, beneath the lofty clerestory hung on its massive piers, your body shrinks to a single bit, the smallest switch in paradise's registers. Here is the oblivion life has always wanted—the chance to fade back into the scale that birthed it.

  Your eyes start ignorant, but slowly get knowledge. Pillars from the earth's four corners, stolen or permanently borrowed, display all stone's available hues. The walls are enameled with living pictures. The floor plan is too richly scalloped to decode. All you can do is wander, deeper in.

  Only movement reveals the room's full size. You drift forward, setting in motion free currents of air. The eddies cascade, accumulating into trade winds that whip through the open nave. The winds collect in pressure zones and fronts. They rise and cool; their moisture condenses in tiny thunderheads that soon, off in the bays beyond the north arcade, break out in a time-lapse storm. Rain falls and evaporates again, before it can moisten the dark floor tiles.

  Somewhere above your head, the carved stone capitals seethe. Spandrels unfurl their runner of vines. Out of those tangles of carved leaves, there coil denser strands. Surprised, you point. And pointing, you rise. You draw near the carvings, through more space than you'd gauged. The vines sharpen and swell. Up close, they turn into knotted hanks of macromolecule, twinning and twining in the air's interstices. Hovering in a nimbus to the east—the needle's Jerusalem, the map's Mecca—a mother cowers, holding her infant in front of her like a shield. On the child's face,
a plan already hatches: all-out subversion of the omnipotent State, the bafflement of vested interests, the last defeat of matter. The mother's face is pure fear. She's lost her baby already. She looks out to the west, on the chasm in front of her, on her boy's future, his fate as a political, his inevitable death at the hands of the authorities whose only goal is ever to preserve the domestic peace. Around the doomed nuclear family, huge black medallions proclaim the name of God and his servants: Allah, Mohammed, Ali ... Perched below these in the apse, a ghostly sphere spins: the world's nations, their parti-colored surfaces swirling like oil streaks on a stirred puddle. Their colors flare and go dark and, after an endless pause, blaze through their cycle again.

  The space seeps music. Its score breathes in time with your breath, a chamber symphony beginning in your inner ear and traveling outward. The pitches take on the line of your thoughts and give you others.

  You stumble upon a safe haven, just off the sacristy. A corner outfitted just for you, with provisions, clothes, a place to clean up and rest. You can stay here for good, all human needs met. You sit on a cane chair and crane your neck out the window, looking out onto the sea, the Bosphorus, the Golden Horn.

  A shattering barrage drives you from this paradise. You run back into the violated nave, where phantom crusaders and holy warriors now close for battle up and down the columned aisles. The great church goes pure theater. Grainy, mosaic footage plays against the paint-stripped tympana, digital clips from the earth's flaming islands: human chains, laser-guided night shots of bunkers erupting, walls shorn up and hammered back down again.

  You try to flee. But now the bombardment rips right through you. This violence is harmless, as innocent as any projected image. You rise up and watch in awful fascination. It plays out in every corner: the first war, the war over pictures, the showdown that imprisons you. The blasts explode in the name of a project too large to figure out, a game whose ends care nothing about your own.