Richard Powers - Plowing the Dark

Spider scanned the nearest screen for evidence. They do seem to have reached a critical mass.

Incredible, Adie said. The largest government on earth forced to back down. Nothing else to do. They waited too long.

Hang on, hang on. Spiegel waved his arms at the television tableau of protesters. Can everybody just relax and regroup for a few months? I cant do things at this speed. This is not my postwar world. Little boy from La Crosse learning how to hide under his school desk from the atom bombs.

Even Ebesen stood and stared. I cant believe Yve lived long enough to witness this.

Oh shit, Michael Vulgamott said. Here I just bought an expensive new atlas.

What a win. What an astonishing win. Adie looked about the gathered witnesses for confirmation. It is a win, isnt it?

Data brightened all the witnesses' faces. Only O'Reilly still wore the curled Cold War lip. Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive. He hunched up his pained shoulders. But to be young was very heaven!

Freese rose to the Irishman's quote-a-thon challenge. Come, my friends, 'Tis not too late to seek a newer world. The words urged his nominal employees back to their own complicit work. For deep in the bowels of the lab, inside the revolution's deepest recesses, an even newer world waited, eager to be made.

There in the land of spruce and cedar, fast Fourier transforms and the draftswoman's fine Italian hand unleashed a profusion of banana leaves, slit and droopy, indecent in their greens. Klarpol's magic gamboge grew, riddled through with movement. Banana leaves played like children in the undergrowth. Dreamlike bananas floated up to tickle the insouciant moon.

Adie grafted Rousseau's peculiar tangerines onto her proliferating trees. Orange Christmas ornaments decked her branches. She extended the given foliage, working like those golden age landscapists who painted whole woods from asparagus tips and broccoli. The rain forest retrieved its original boundaries. She sought more creatures to people her garden, working for a patron she almost failed to recognize. For the first time since she was twenty-one, Adie felt that pleasure might be not only blameless; it might even be a moral imperative.

She stepped into this Dream, recalling herself to things long forgotten, the way one remembered one's body after a sustained illness. The thicket parted before her wand. Copses split open, inviting her to lose herself down a new path in the tangle. Every fork worked the ploy of artificial nature, its burrs adhering to her pants cuffs, hitching a ride

into the real.

Under the shelter of a spreading yucca, a diminutive Venus, no larger than a mouse deer, rose from a puddle of water on her surfboard scallop. She surged upward for a few seconds, then sank back beneath the waves, only to rise again a moment later, her flat, scanned bitmap set to perform an eternal do-loop.

Paths led on deeper into the forest, trails blazed by their own repeated use. Down one, the vegetation thinned into a clearing. In this open meadow, hemmed in by palms, there grazed another color Xerox: shepherds huddled around a rock tomb that bore a strange inscription, rustic archaeologists probing a vanished civilization whose technology

dwarfed their own.

At another fork in the forest, a plowman tore into the stony soil. A convex mirror nailed to a nearby tree trunk bared its surprise reflection. Up in the highest limbs, a boy threatened to release a soap bubble that quivered forever on the end of his straw. A golden-haired girl stared at him from across a chasm of vines. Between the branches of a spreading banyan, a dark projectile hovered on nothing. Only from directly underneath could the viewer make out a lady's slipper, hung motionless in space.

Through the gaps in the jungle, off at the vanishing distance, there spread other woodlands, further rivers, seascapes, crags and cliffs floating dimensionless against the jungle night. On the far edge of the woods, where a road cut through midnight, a lone figure pumped gas. From a hewn trunk standing on a skull-strewn hill, furtive figures took down the body of an executed man and laid him in the lap of a grieving pyramid, female and blue.

So it went: trinkets scattered like prizes through the boscage, a scavenger hunt of visual quotations obeying neither history nor influence nor significance nor theme nor any other principle of inclusion aside from one woman's private affections. A solitary trail of loved things, digitized. A haphazard, walk-in Cornell box of essential scraps, larger than life: her life.

It baffled Jackdaw. So what exactly is all this crap?

These? The escape valve for surviving the pressure of culture, she told him.

She took Stevie on a tour. They slowed in front of a couple, knotted together under the vines. Schiele's Embrace, Spiegel said. What do I win?

You're lucky if I let you break even, she said.

Incredibly sexy. Two people melting into each other.

Really? I always thought they were writhing in agony.

They walked on, through the clipping gallery.

What do I get if I name the rest of them?

You get to live.

What? You mean no one has lived unless they know the classics?

No. I mean you name them and I won't kill you. Yet.

Lim came through early one evening, agitated from reading a new book on prehistoric art.

You have to read this. The author claims that the Upper Paleolithic caves were the first VR.

Sure. Spiegel twisted his palm in the air. What else can you call them?

No. Literally. Theater-sized, total-immersion staging chambers where they'd drag initiates by torchlight. The shock of the supernatural sound-and-light show supposedly altered the viewers consciousness. Lim stopped, mazed by the idea. Can you imagine? Catching your first ever glimpse of images, flickering out of pitch-darkness. Like nothing you've ever seen. Your deepest mental illusions made real.

Adie held up her hand to stop the stream, until she could improvise a bridge across it. You're saying that cave art begets all this? She waved to include the whole RL. That Lascaux starts a chain reaction that leads to…?

I'm saying that art explodes at exactly the same moment as tool-based culture. That cave pictures prepared the leap, after a million and a half years of static existence. That pictures were the tool that enabled human liftoff, the Ur-tech that planted the idea of a separate symbolic existence in the mind of—

Oh Jesus.

You see? You see? If we can makes these… scratch lines come to life, then life is not just some outside thing that happens to us. It's something we come into and remake.

Spiegel sat stilled, in a small reflecting pool. I read somewhere that Lascaux has become a simulation of itself? Tourism was killing the paintings. So the authorities built these complete underground replicas so that—

Lim's impatience cut him dead. You still dont get it. They were simulations to begin with. Consciousness holding itself up to its own light, for a look. An initiation ceremony for the new universe of symbolic thought.

If that's right … I cant begin … I dont even want to think what technologies the Cavern is trying to shock us into.

Lim traced the lines of the widening hunt in the air in front of him. The mind is the first virtual reality. He groped for the concept, by smoky torchlight. It gets to say what the world isn't yet. Its first speculations bootstrap all the others…