Neal Stephenson - Interface

She jumped as a burst of music sounded from nearby. Someone was listening to a transistor radio behind her, back in the bushes. "Hello?" she said. "Is someone back there?" But there was no answer.

There was still barely enough light to see. She stood up and peered into the bushes. "Hello?"

The music faded out and was replaced by the sound of an announcer. "From the National Town Meeting, four contenders for the vice presidency debate the issues ..."

She was almost positive that no one was back there. She walked back and forth in front of the bushes, peering in through gaps between the leaves, trying to see. Something was glowing back there. It looked like a little TV set. And no one was anywhere near it. She found a sort of gap through the little thicket where it looked as though someone had charged through it, flattening down the branches. She followed it in and picked up the source of the noise and light: a Dick Tracy watch.

She debated whether to take it. It had obviously been stolen and dropped here by some criminal who might come back later to look for it.

She looked at the screen. It was showing a TV program: a debate featuring four people who wanted to be William Cozzano's vice-presidential candidate. One by one, the announcer introduced them as they nodded into the camera.

"Brandon F. Doyle, former U.S. Representative from Massa­chusetts, currently on the faculty of Georgetown University..." This was a handsome, youngish man, probably in his late forties but young-looking for that age. He smiled a tight little smile into the camera and nodded. She didn't like him.

"Marco Gutierrez, Mayor of Brownsville, Texas, and a found­ing member of the international environmental group Toxic Borders ..." This was a burly Latino man with a mustache and large, intense black eyes. He was leaning back in his chair, stroking his mustache with one finger. He raised his hand away from his face as his name was called and waved at the camera.

Mae Hunter snapped the Dick Tracy watch into place around her wrist. She wanted to see at least this one program.

The TV image cut to a blond, blue-eyed woman with one of those professional-looking haircuts that Mae always saw on the young women in midtown. She stared directly, and almost coldly, into the camera. "Laura Thibodeaux-Green, founder and CEO of Santa Fe Software, who, two years ago, came within a thousand votes of being elected senator from New Mexico."

Finally, to Mae Hunter's surprise and delight, she appeared on the screen!

"And Eleanor Richmond of Alexandria, Virginia, assistant to the late Senator Caleb Marshall."

The woman was so cool. She didn't even look at the camera, didn't react to the introduction at all. She was looking at some papers in her lap. Then she glanced up and looked around a little bit, calm, alert, but not paying any attention to the announcer or the TV cameras. She was so like a princess.

What a terrible introduction that was! It didn't do justice to the life and times of Eleanor Richmond at all. Mae Hunter knew all about her, she had followed her career in the discarded pages of The New York Times. She was a modern-day hero. Mae pushed her way out through the bushes and went on to the broad open bank of the Hudson to watch her girlfriend Eleanor.

The moderator was Marcus Hale, a grizzled ex-anchorman who had gotten to the place in his career where he could write his own job description. He did a lot of work for TV North America now, because there, he didn't have to keep stopping in midparagraph to pimp hemorrhoid remedies to the American public. And now that the candidacy of William A. Cozzano had developed into a media-certified Important Phenomenon, he had been all too eager to serve as the moderator of this vice-presidential showdown. He opened things up, in typical Marcus Hale style, with a lengthy editorial, though he probably would have preferred to call it analysis. Eventually he worked his way around to asking a question.

And it was a doozy. "All of you are young people, in your forties. Chances are you'll be around for at least another twenty-five years. One or more of you may even become president during that time. By then, people who are being born today will just be coming into the adult job market, and their success in that market will depend largely on the economic and educational initiatives that are taken during the next decade. These will be most important to the poorest people, who today face the most restricted opportunities. And without putting too fine a point on it, you know and I know that what I'm really talking about here is inner-city blacks. My question is: twenty-five years from now, what will life be like for these people, and what will you have done to make that life better?"

Brandon F. Doyle of Massachusetts went first, and he looked scared. It was easy enough for an old man like Marcus Hale to drag these scary and difficult issues into the limelight. It was a lot harder for someone like Doyle to deal with the resulting mess, especially considering that he was sharing the stage with a black person who could shoot him down whenever she wanted.

"Well, first of all, Marcus, let me say that opportunity - for all people, white or black - is a function of education. This is a message that we have always taken to heart in Massachusetts, which has a long heritage of brilliant institutions of higher learning. It's my hope - and my intention - that twenty-five years from now, a lot of the people you're talking about will be entering graduate school, or law school, or medical school, and they'll be doing it with the full assistance and support of a government that takes these things with the utmost seriousness. Which is not to support big-spending government programs. I prefer to think of education as an investment, not an expense."

Next came Marco Gutierrez, who had a heavy, stolid, calm affect. That and his hair and his clothes had all been developed to make him seem like a cool norteamericano, not the jumpy, emotional Mexican that blue-eyed Duluth voters were afraid of. "Well, I would second a lot of what my friend Brandon said, but where we differ is at the end. Look. Government has a moral duty to educate its children. No matter what it costs. To say that education is a good investment misses the point. Even if it cost every penny in the Treasury, we should educate our kids to the best of our ability, because it's the right thing to do."

It was Laura Thibodeaux-Green's turn. "Kids spend seven hours a day in front of the television. Seven hours a day. Just think about that for a second. That's a lot more time than they spend in the classroom. Well, my opinion is that TV doesn't have to be mind-rotting garbage. It has the ability to educate. And the digital, high-definition TV that's just starting to be introduced to the living rooms of America can be the most potent educational tool ever devised. I advocate a massive program to develop educational software that can run on these TV sets of the future, so that those seven hours a day spent in front of the TV can turn our little kids into little Shakespeares and Einsteins instead of illiterate couch potatoes."

Finally, Eleanor Richmond got her chance. "Look," she said, "Abe Lincoln learned his lessons by writing on the back of a shovel. During slavery times, a lot of black people learned to read and write even though they weren't allowed to go to school. And nowadays, Indochinese refugee kids do great in school even though they got no money at all and their folks don't speak English. The fact that many black people nowadays aren't getting educated has nothing to do with how much money we spend on schools. Spending more money won't help. Neither will writing educational software to run on your home TV set. It's just a question of values. If your family places a high value on being educated, you'll get educated, even if you have to do your homework on the back of a shovel. And if your family doesn't give a damn about developing your mind, you'll grow up stupid and ignorant even if you go to the fanciest private school in America.