Richard Powers - Plowing the Dark

You stand in blinding anguish. Grope your way to the length of your chain. You arch your back slowly, then spring forward, slamming your forehead into the wall.

Your head bounces off the concrete. Something issues from the impact. Your back arches and slams forward again, building your leverage. The drinking toy duck. Again and again. Your forehead slips against the viscous wet spot building up on the stone.

"Make it stop," you hear yourself scream. "Make it stop. Make it—"

And then it does.

For years, you've hung by your nails over this drop. Now your fingers straighten, their strength gone. All life has been a fight against this slide into chaos, and here at the end, you feel the slide win. You look down into the abyss, give up your grip, and drop.

This room is dark, and without dimension.

It has no door. Or any window where you might have entered.

Something doesn't want us doing this.

Antecedent? Spiegel asked his mate. If not his mate, then at least the woman who slept beside him. What is this "this" of which you speak?

Images. Look. A thousand years of mosaics. Every few hundred years they'd fill the place, floor to dome. And every couple of centuries they'd cover them over or rip them out again.

Persistent little suckers, them they. And more than a little conflicted. Conflicted is not the half of it. Waves of iconoclasm. Waves of repainting. It's never-ending. Worse than the abortion debate. An all-out war for our eternal souls.

So who wins finally? I've a vested interest in knowing. Depends on where you stop the clock. Check in one century, and the walls of the church are completely gutted. Check the next, and it's your worst billboard nightmare.

Wait. You're telling me that this figure you're working on was done in the thirteenth century and this other one in the ninth? There's no difference. Exactly the same style.

That's what the Byzantines would like you to believe. But it's the Byzantines doing the ripping?

The Byzantines. The Roman Catholics. The Ottoman Turks. The modern secularists. Name your idol basher. And it's not just images. People die over this. Lots of people.

I don't see… I mean, what… what possible difference…? Spiegel's lover looked up from her expensive study plates, betrayed. He should know. He shouldn't have to ask. Form mangled the truth it housed. Every fixed image crucified the divinity it tried to copy.

Adie's tone grew chill. Well. After all. God told us not to. Burlesque skidded up against its own electric fences. The second rule He ever gave us. Uh, right. And remind me. What was the first one again? We're playing with the ultimate fire here. The one true prohibition. It's like God knew that if we ever got started drawing… She trailed off, conscience-stricken, in the face of the hi-res evidence.

That?

That we'd keep at it until the picture was done.

Something in him wanted her off the topic. Away. So where does that leave us? I mean, we have a millennium and a half of possible interiors, ranging from figure-clogged to buck naked. Which moment are we supposed to re-create?

She held her mouse up to her chest, a numbed virgin holding up her child victim for target practice again. That's the only question.

The container unfolded, as light bent in air. The eye, wandering through at ground level, slipped into so many slant archways, secret niches, and aisle forests, so many hints at further space that it could not make out the exact floor plan. All the action flew up — up into paradise's central dome and its flanking hemispheres.

Spiegel worked on the code that would move the pilgrim through so much sculpted emptiness. He turned the visiting body into its own joystick, accelerating down any arrow of the compass it leaned into. And he added a crowning stroke, so right it seemed a given. One raised index finger swept the visitor off the floor up into the soaring vaults.

No matter how often he tested the routine, Spiegel succumbed to the euphoria of flight. Here was the levitation all children dream of, the easy uplift of birds that the soul feels entitled to, brought weight-lessly to life. He pointed his digit skyward. The ground fell away. The upper arcades drew close. He hovered in place, twenty meters above the church floor, drafting on the currentless air like one of those miraculous medieval monks who repeat the Ascension on faith alone.

The RL lined up to try. Even hardened hackers could not get enough of flying. Hagia Sophia was fast becoming the biggest thing since bull jumping. Neither Ebesen nor Vulgamott would take part. Lim did, and paid for his ride with a gushing nosebleed.

Adie insisted on including every flourish: the Theotokos, hovering in the eastern apse; the Deesis, harsh in its second-story south gallery. A single overarching volume arose from her anthology of parts. But her flight toward sanctuary played out as the most secular of footraces: her push for transcendent detail versus spring's public demo deadline.

She labored for longer than she could afford over each tile in the southwest narthex tympanum: Justinian and Constantine presenting the church and city to the seated Christ. Each mosaic emperor held up his gift of a scale mosaic model: tiny domed cosmos inside the tiny domed cosmos they decorated.

Stevie watched her work, excited by the stillness that consumed her. So this is the dream of VR? he asked. Be of the world…?

She smiled and nodded. But not in it.

You know what we need?

Tell me what we need, Stevie.

Code that will crumble at the same rate mortar does. Stone that compresses. Joints that break. Bits of rubble that accumulate around the piers after the simulation has been running for a few hundred years. Rubble that no one actually programmed…

Oh, she said. We already have that.

They had the space sufficiently fleshed out in time to celebrate a simulated Christmas Mass. Klarpol and Spiegel spent the last few minutes of 1990 together, placing tiny stones into the vault of heaven.

Then came the New Year.

She could not say, later, that she hadn't seen. But she'd never once believed. For months she'd withstood the glut of informationless data issuing from the latest desert showdown, following without following. O'Reilly and Kaladjian had even placed angry bets on which side would blink first. But the age of blinks was past. The world's interface no longer responded to blinking.

Two weeks into the demo year, that electronic storm, so long in simulation, at last broke. Adie witnessed the opening shots by accident, on a television the size of a picture postcard that her Jordanian greengrocer stared at robotically as she tried to buy endive to bring home for dinner.

Two delirious American reporters trapped in a high-rise office babbled on, over satellite uplink, about the phantoms screaming across Baghdad's dome. She hurried back to her island, and Stevie. He knelt there on his haunches, on the bare living-room floor, three feet in front of the tube.

She set her plastic sacks of vegetable down in the doorway. What is it? she asked, knowing already. What's happening? As if that question ever had an answer.

"Baghdad was lit up like a Christmas tree," one pilot explained to the camera. "It was tremendous!"

"It looked like the Fourth of July down there," another boy said. "Just like in the movies."

"No," she said. Louder. Again. Hysterical. But no one paid her any attention.

The whole planet descended into the flicker of shared delirium. Scores of countries came onto the coaxial cable, just to get the twenty-four-hour feed. The Northern Hemisphere embarked on a winter of perpetual broadcast. On signal, by mass, silent agreement, an unbroken umbrella of full coverage stitched itself together.