Richard Powers - Plowing the Dark

Put me down for a Valdez's worth, Rajan ordered.

Well, Spiegel said. Time to make a better model. What actually did cause the oil embargo?

Rajan raised his hand. I believe it had something to do with a little Arab boy sticking his finger in the—

Shut up, Raj. I'm serious. Listen, Ronan. If your multiagent negotiations can really model the processes behind macroeconomic events, then they ought to be able to do political events as well. Expand the dialog. Include the missing contingencies. It seems to me that if patterns of petroleum consumption depend upon oil price, and oil price depends upon Western-Arab relations, and Western-Arab…

O'Reilly wandered away in mid-clause, his wilderness mind already laying the groundwork for the vast expansion.

I love it. The teen cashiers down at the Redi-Mart are throwing around the name Erich Honecker like he's one of their Saturday-night doper buddies.

We need a TelePrompTer here. Just tell me who to cue on this week. Still Poland?

Czechoslovakia. Poland's halfway to personal camcorders by now.

Something was under way, too wide to be astigmatism, too persistent to be the usual, fleeting, collective hallucination. Millennial developments began popping up in doses massive and frequent enough to string along any event addict.

Freese played spokesman for his hushed team. Almost makes one believe in a Zeitgeist.

It's all electronics, Spider said. Those Chinese students? That couldn't happen without satellite dishes. Cell phones. Faxes and photocopy machines. Notebooks and laser printers.

Machines, bringing to the earth's backwaters word of their dispossession, leaving them hungry to join the informational integration.

Not just an idea whose time has come. A time whose tech has come. Lim scanned the images of teeming students, as if looking for someone.

Adie took to patrolling the RL's central atrium, calling out idiotic Cory Aquino parodies to anyone she passed. People Power! People Power!

Spiegel laughed to see her, more gangly and unguarded than the girl she'd been at twenty-one. People Power? Isn't that being a little anthropocentric?

His old friend had come alive in this great awakening, more manic than he could have hoped for when he'd lured her out of her early retirement. The abdicated craftswoman, who'd sworn off any art beyond paint-by-numbers, who'd renounced all pleasures of the retina, now became the first to run down the halls, recidivist, proclaiming the world's latest Renaissance.

Nor could Spiegel say exactly what had tipped her back into the camp of the living. Something in the Cavern's proving grounds had prepped her for these global velvet uprisings. Some hybrid possibility, laid down in Rousseau's walk-in jungle, brought to life in each night's newscast of delirious Beijing students camped out under the Gates of Heavenly Peace. This miracle year, not yet halfway done, conspired to salve art's guilty conscience and free it for further indulgence.

The Adie that Spiegel had loved, the poised, potent undergrad who'd believed in the pencil's ability to redraw the world, was long dead the night he'd called to recruit her, a casualty of adulthood. He'd invited her out anyway, fantasizing that some lost fraction of her might revive at a glimpse of the prodigious world-redrawing pencil the RL was building. But for the world at large to choose this moment to collaborate in redrawing itself: he'd never been so mad as to count on that.

Maybe Lim was right. Maybe the spreading world machine was catalyzing this mass revolution. Maybe silicon seeds had planted in the human populace an image of its own potential. After ten thousand years of false starts, civilization was at last about to assemble the thing all history conspired toward: a place wide enough to house human restlessness. A device to defeat matter and turn dreams real. This was what those crowds of awakened students demanded: a room where people might finally live. Every displaced peasant would become a painter of the first rank. Every crippled life a restored landscape.

On Tuesdays and Thursdays, the extent of Spiegel's puerile, wishful thinking embarrassed him. Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, he was ready to put money on it. But whatever the cause, whatever the outcome, collective life was undeniably igniting. And Spiegel had his private, world-blessing Adie back.

It's sad, though, Stevie. Wouldn't you say?

Sad, woman? How do you figure?

Suppose that… ah, it's crazy even to think it. But it is crazy, isn't it? Everything that's happening.

Adie gestured to her terminal, as if the gathering worldwide protest were occurring there, in a background window, through the cable of headline news.

Suppose that peaceful world pluralism really is breaking out. What happens next?

What do you mean, what happens next? Next, we live it.

Live peace? Live arrival?

Sure. Sounds pretty good to me.

I don't know. Maybe this is just perversity. But something about complete consensus would just… sadden me. Think of art, all the shockers and rule breakers. Masaccio, Hals, Turner, Manet, Duchamp. All the guys up on the barricades: Caravaggio, David, Rodchenko, Siqueiros, Rivera … A// of them! All the good ones were either iconoclasts or revolutionaries. We need something to take up arms against. I'm not sure I want to live in a time when all battles have already been fought and

won.

I cant believe you re saying this. It's like something I would have come up with, back in our school days. Back at Mahler Haus.

Oh, probably.

First you say that art doesnt count for anything. Then you try to make it out to be the elitist conscience of the whole heedless race. Silly me.

Make up your mind, hey?

OK. It doesnt count for anything. That's better.

I feel strangely relieved. Here's to global peace and a common style. To the age of wallpaper. Bottoms up!

But Adie Klarpol could not stand under the coaxial cable's shower-head, the spray of pixels pouring down from bobbing satellites, and keep from feeling that the race's picture-making was only now beginning. A quorum of scribbling children had gotten loose, taken their pastel chalks out onto the sidewalk, over the curb, into the street beyond. Images from this group show of refuses streamed in on the continuous electron feed, images blunter and more impudent than the streetwalking Demoiselles. Images poured out in black-and-white into the next morning's print, then peeled off of four-color presses for the weekend highlights roundup.

Those pictures worked Adie's visual transference. Their portal swallowed her. They seized her by the neck hairs, held her gaze, and returned it. That crowd gathering in the world's largest public square— the student camp, the swelling hunger strike — touched off her sympathetic candlelight vigil in a chrome and molded-plastic corporate cafeteria perched on the American coast, ten thousand miles across a

spreading seafloor.

Look at that, Adie told her hypnotized colleagues. Beyond belief. The largest army in the world, brought to a complete standstill by a bunch of college kids.

A lot of bunches of college kids, Spiegel said.

A lot of lot of bunches, Rajan added.

Kaladjian scowled, dismayed by this latest proof of human irrationality. But the math intrigued him. Day after day. Spontaneous globular clustering.

Freese could say nothing these days without shaking his head. I'm sorry, Spider, but there's something more than cell phones causing all this.