Richard Powers - Plowing the Dark

Not us. Adie addressed the back-projected Rockies. We flew everywhere. Langley, Khorat, Chanute, Okinawa, Germany. Bounced around like pachinko balls, on an hour's notice. Half the planes I flew in as a kid didn't even have real seats.

It's not right, you know. It's institutionalized schizophrenia. Close the door on Seattle, open it three hours later on Cincinnati? Guaranteed to make you nuts after a while. Something's wrong with full mobility. We need some obstacles. Places we can't get to from here.

At last she turned, her eyebrows mocking the peaks below. My, my. Scratch a technocrat, find a Luddite. You're putting in seventeen-hour days trying to develop the matter transporter and you're saying we travel too much?

His head sagged on its ball joint. The whole point of machine imitation is to venerate the original. This… He waved at the scandal of a cabin. This turns the original into a cheap tart.

Later, somewhere over a featureless jumble of felt-colored rectangles, she asked him, How did you do that?

An hour had passed since they'd last spoken. He squinted at her, unable to figure the antecedent. Adie stuck both hands out toward her drop-down tray and jiggled her fingers in the air. Pantomiming the pantomime.

Oh. The ghost organ? The looking-glass harmonica?

She waited, not even nodding.

All the parts were already in place. The position trackers. The waveform lookups and instrument definitions. The sound generators. The only new thing I had to write was the formal description of a musical keyboard. You know: if a finger passes through the plane of a key surface, x centimeters along the horizontal axis, go and get an F-sharp, and play it until the finger lifts or the envelope decays, whichever comes first.

Formal description? That's all? That's a lot.

She put out her palms sunny-side up. How complicated can it be? He reached out and touched a finger to her near earlobe. She did not recoil. Tell me how to cook an egg. Cook…? Well. Boil a quart of water-Hang on.

What? Oh. Fill a medium pan with a quart-Wait.

OK. Find a pan.

Ah! Now you've almost broken it down to the level of a complex subroutine. If pan exists and pan not in use and pan not dirty then for each cabinet of kitchen, search cabinet-sub-sink for pan, and so on, for another couple of hundred lines of code. Else if pan…

She nodded a fraction of a millimeter, forestalling elaboration. Then she coughed up a thought two years in assembling. Software is the final victory of description over thing.

He held her declaration in midair, turning it over. With software, the thing and its description are one and the same. Any item that you can learn how to say, you can make, pretty much out of raw syntax.

Saying and making…

… are one another's night jobs.

Wonder and disgust vied for control of her voice. So that's why we want to do everything over again in software. Why we all want to move there.

Well, it's no worse than words, really.

What are you talking about? It's a lot worse than words. It's words on steroids. Words are safe exactly because they're so fuzzy. Deniable near-misses. Give them teeth, and every teenaged thing that you ever regretted saying is out there drunk behind the wheel of the Chevy.

They went on speaking, trading their widest words since their old, disowned ones. But east of the Mississippi, Adie fell sullen with memory. Soon they began their descent, the return to all hurt and hostility.

They made their way from the airport on total improvisation. Adie drove; Spiegel navigated.

He knows we're coming in today? she asked, as they headed north along the state highway.

He did yesterday.

Rural Ohio rolled past the windows, lone farmhouses on their hillocks, each at the center of their few hundred acres. She fixed her eyes on the rushing cornstalks. Everyone's nerve cells were decomposing. Everyone alive. It was only a question of rate.

The nursing home stood a hundred yards from the site of the failed Shaker Utopian community. Every original building had vanished. No plank of that old, spare ecstasy remained behind. Adie and Spiegel parked and walked up to the single-story brick building. Nothing distinguished this particular purgatory from the identical geriatric holding tanks that every town over ten thousand inhabitants tucked away somewhere, behind an eight-foot hedge. A waiting room for the abandoned: the last place any infirm would want to land.

Just past the foyer, a group of shattered bodies formed an enchanted circle around a TV set. On the screen, the National Little League Championship played out in silence, the sound track muted without the audience noticing. Heads bowed forward over their walkers in a silent prayer ring, their cracked-vellum faces poised for some sign.

Why is it, Adie asked, under her breath, that the later in the day, the earlier a person falls asleep? She blessed the enchanted circle as she and Spiegel pushed past.

They found their way down an ammonia-flavored corridor to the nurses' station. There they asked for Zimmerman. They found his room and knocked, but no invitation came from within. Stevie turned the handle and pushed. The door swung open upon their own invention. Bed to the right, bed stand to the left, unshuttered window in the middle. Only in this world, the artist was still at home.

Ted lay in bed, strapped to the raised headrest. His arms wavered in the air like dried seedpods on autumn's first breeze. The bewildered bulge of his face took them in, mouth sagging, eyes fleeing back into their wells of bone. Age and incapacitation had added thirty pounds. He'd grown a mane, like Beethoven's.

Ste-ven Spie-gel. The four syllables spread out over so long an astonishment that they lost themselves, like the word "Asia" on a good-sized globe. Then Ted saw Adie. And her name took so long to come out that it never did.

Their embraces glanced against a body that could not manage them. Ted's limbs thrashed in grief and gladness. At last they settled, like stormed water seeking its level in the ocean's permanent bowl. Words were past considering. Then there was nothing but words.

They spoke of the flight out and of their luck in finding the home. We knew this had to be the place, Spiegel said. The Welcome Wagon of catatonics up front gave it away.

Zimmerman hauled back and sucked air. He seized up, a cracked

ignition failing to turn over at thirty below. It flashed through Adie to

call for a nurse. But Ted, in agonizing slow motion, was only laughing.

What… the hell. Am I doing… somewhere… like this? Can

you… imagine?

Adie could. Could imagine. She wanted to tell him not to exhaust himself. Not to try to talk. Ever again.

On the bed stand where the washbasin should have been sat a portable computer. A wheelchair faced the lone window, looking out upon a bird feeder. Three drab sparrows flicked about in the seed. A day in this room would turn their bickering into top-drawer Verdi.

Against the left wall where the towel should have hung stood a hands-free reading podium. A book lay under its acrylic plate, pinned open like a museum butterfly. An automatic page-turning device beneath the acrylic waited with infinite patience for the thrash that commanded it to advance the story. The book gaped open at a chapter reading "Meditation Four: What God Can Properly Give."

Spiegel's eyes fell upon the deus ex machina. No. Tell me it isn't true. Don Giovanni gets religion?

Ted seized up again, the silent, sucking sound of freeze-frame mirth. He tried to grab Spiegel by the arm and address Adie at the same time. A little more myelin and he might have pulled it off.