Richard Powers - Plowing the Dark

Rajan shrugged. The breath in the mouth and the breath of the sun are both similarly hot.

Translate, for Christ's sake.

The form seen in the eye is the same as the form seen in the sun. The joints of the one are the joints of the other.

Vulgamott appeared at their boothside.

Michael, O'Reilly greeted the architect. Thank God for another Westerner. Have a seat, man. Would you say that you're a materialist at heart?

Can this wait until I've gotten my blood-alcohol content to a respectable level?

O'Reilly ordered the American a Trappist Trippel. Out with it now.

What do you believe?

Vulgamott looked around suspiciously. I believe that God created the world one high-resolution frame at a time. And on the seventh frame, he rested.

Rajan smiled. And then he said, "You mean I'm supposed to do thirty of these things a second for the next ten billion years?"

Thank you both, O'Reilly snapped. I'll just tell you what you believe in, then.

That'd be easier, Vulgamott agreed.

You both believe — as all good lab rats do — that reality is basically computational, whether or not we'll ever lay our hands on a good, clean copy of the computation. At the core of your deepest convictions about the universe lies a Monte Carlo simulation. Sounds about right, Vulgamott said.

Even miracle-preaching evangelists, God love them, make their point statistically. Every modern mind is out there with a yardstick, a stopwatch, and a chi-square.

Hang on. You're not saying there's a hidden order behind all this? Vulgamott cast his eyes abroad. Something bigger than statistics?

O'Reilly smiled. What do you mean, hidden order? That the universe is formalizable, but not from where we're standing? That it's unformaliz-able? Now there's a one-word contradiction in terms.

Ronan, baba. Some of us believe in contradictions in terms.

O'Reilly faced down Rajasundaran. Even mysticism is a non-Euclidean geometry. No, gentlemen. The world is a numbers racket, all the way down.

Rajan drummed his hands on the booth top. Come on, my friend. Don't quit now. This is even more entertaining than violent revelations of deep incestuous secrets as brought to you by the Mormons.

But the Sponsor chose that moment to announce itself. Out of the depths of barroom broadcast, the TeraSys anthem unfurled. On a screen across the room, a commercial began. Its sound-track chorale of Renaissance recorders morphed — via the malleable magic of MIDI and sampled wave-table instrument definitions — in thirty seconds, over the entire spectrum of world music, cadencing on an ecstatic burst of Shona mbiras. Synched to the sound track with Balanchinean brilliance, a spinning globe mutated in dizzying succession into the rose window at Chartres, an exploding jigsaw puzzle, the condensing chains of a long polymer, inked ideograph characters on an unfurling scroll, tessellated Iznik tiles, solar cells on a space satellite, and finally, back to old Pangea doing its slow, stately breakup into Laurasia, Gond-wanaland, and all the rest of the continental separatists, special interest groups, and irredentist movements.

Rajan beamed. I'm afraid I contributed to that one. They used my interpolation routines for the pretty morphing sequence.

What in the name of creation do they think they're doing, airing that spot on the Humiliating Public Disclosures Channel?

Big audience, Vulgamott said.

They're mad, you know.

Of course they're mad. Who's the "they" this time, Î Ulsterman?

Americans. Every last soul in this national enterprise of yours.

Rajan raised his hand. Excuse me. Exactly how long can a person live here before he is infected?

None of them has a clue, you know, O'Reilly persisted. Like children at Christmas, their whole bleeding lives. Every last mother's son of them.

Be all you can be. Go for all the gusto you can get. Who says you can't have it all?

Well. Raj glanced at Vulgamott for confirmation. There's their Internal Revenue Service, to start with.

And this outfit that we work for? They're the worst instigators of all. "Realize your dreams." Clever foreigners really ought to pinch all their best ideas and smuggle them back over the border, into the lands of sanity.

Ach, sure. Vulgamott affected a frighteningly convincing brogue. And tell me: what might a Belfast boy know about sanity?

Precious little, you bastard. Yet I alone have held onto a fact that your obscenely inventive lot never seemed to have twigged.

And that would be…?

There's a real world out there, underneath the elaborate slipcovers we're knitting for it.

Rajan rolled his eyes. So you Caucasian materialists like to insist. Speaking of the real world… Vulgamott, the edgy quidnunc, had gone almost a full thirty minutes without a headline fix. Any word on the Argentina situation today?

As far as we know, Rajan said, it's still down there, attached to the skinny part of South America.

Belfast saluted Colombo. You're blending in here splendidly, Raj. Listen. Vulgamott sounded desperate. Would it upset your experiment in assimilation if we watched some news?

Sure, no problem. Rajasundaran scanned through the channel selector, built into their booth. How about this little thing called Celebrity Police Blotter?

Some spin-off of CNN, O'Reilly guessed. Or how about this so-called Channel 56? Sport Salary Update? Vulgamott's agitation threatened to spill him out of the booth. You two have no interest in learning what's going on?

Absolutely, O'Reilly said. That's why I vote for pulling the plug. Come on, man. We're living on the brink. The single most precarious moment in—

Rajan wagged his head. This has all happened many times before, you know.

The room of economics runs to an open horizon.

Every compass heading stretches so far that even walking flat-out, for hours, scrolls you only the smallest fraction against the landscape. Your inlet reveals itself to be but a bight on a cove on a lagoon on a bay on a gulf opening onto a measureless ocean, the one continuous Panthalassa, its waters linking up, its surf cutting the complex curve of these shores.

Light and shadow play upon the deeps. The spills and splashes of geographic accident serve as this world's genes. Here woods work out the local exchange rates. Gorse trades its stored energies with geese. Tundra warehouses whole quantities of carbon. Bottoms, morasses, moors, plateaus, and rain basins bargain in a river pidgin that keeps the dimples of microclimate in nutrients all year.

Where is the nearest caravanserai? Who will swap salt for ocher? How goes the southern coffee bean harvest? Will the scares in Johannesburg tip the Frankfurt Börse?

Will the leading indicators level off? What of the anticipated export boom among the Asian tigers? When will collapse come? This room's tides will tell you.

Even its ceiling rises forever. High overhead, above the atmospheric tree line, past the edge where color thins out beyond blue, electronic kingfishers hover. Each beats its wings in blackness, fixed in place above its assigned coordinates. Stationary passenger pigeons, message-bearing corbies, each bird is but a bit in the widest imaginable linkup. Perched in their geosynchronous orbits, the birds root out all data and beam it back down to the ground below. There, a trillion worker ants cull the factual wheat from its fallacious chaff, blind to the upshot of their tireless winnowing. The global economic simulator sieves out an answer in nanoseconds, in no time. This room can snare any fact you wish, faster than a gentled pointer can fetch your morning paper.