Richard Powers - Operation Wandering Soul

This was his simple, inexorable idea. One school in the right place: all it would take. The most negligible null will unfold into all, if it has at its heart the self-propagating spark. Nail broth. Engines that could and estranged third sons that ascend all manner of glass mountains on sheer will. The goose that lays the golden eggs that hatch. He was no naïf, and knew that food would disappear in a week. Clothing too would stretch at best only into the next decade. But a school…

The boy's teacher made the fatal mistake of humoring the off-the-wall question. Build? Where? The boy was ready with his answer: upcountry. One of the hidden villages from which Squatter Town's most destitute continuously poured. He pointed out on the classroom map the spot he had selected, a tribal area near the border.

"Right here," he said, "Nam Chai." The easiest place to drain grief's ocean is up in the hills, where the flow is still a trickle.

The teacher juggled a few rough estimates, an improvised economics session. The boy's classmates took to the idea. Teacher then made a group project of writing up the proposal for the Institute's Headmaster, hoping thereby to vitiate the scheme with democracy's death sentence.

The boy's plan would have ended there, except for the ironies of design. In crumpling up the proposal, Headmaster gave himself a vicious paper cut. And when he put the bloody fingertip in his mouth to stanch it, the bubble tasted cold, like gold leaf patted on statue stone.

The taste brought to the man's mind the story of that plaster likeness of the Enlightened in one Angel monastery, pretty, but worthless. One day during handling, the plaster cracked. Deep in the fissure, something glistened. The plaster was stripped off, revealing a figure of pure gold. Only then did amnesia lift: the statue had been covered during one of the eternal incursions, to keep it from capture. As final safeguard, the city willed itself to forget, the last safety.

This had happened years ago, before the boy was born. But this letter, or rather the taste of the slit it made in Headmaster's finger, made the moral clear. The city itself was cracking. Its disguise of timeless compliance was forever compromised, stripped off in a pragmatic deal done at missile-point. The region was already lost, sacrificed en passant to historical destinies. Its fish runs and fecund fields had been redone in Air Force blue. The world was ending and about to begin again, and who could say what awful gold would appear beneath its plaster disguise?

The letter was opportune. The thin coalition, led by the country that once refused a Free king's offer of combat elephants for use in its own suicidal civil war, was in urgent need of PR. It was losing to its own self-incriminating conscience. If beaten prematurely, the farangs would never complete their reduction of the last sane stretch of the globe to total hell, a prerequisite for return to worldwide infancy. One good report on foreign philanthropy in the region, and the purge could go on a little longer. And yes, thought Headmaster, reading the petition. Why not the pupils of the International Institute?

In truth, the boy could not have cared less about the world. International interests were no more than the street gang refrain he knew in a half-dozen languages: Stay on your side of the line, or you die.

The world could rot with all the other unreachable mangoes on national interest's tree. It could incinerate itself, the goal of all governments, so long as it left this one innocent spot a chance to break into the still center of heaven's hub. The city's angel orders — the heavy smells of orchid and pedicab exhaust, sulfurous curries and feces-sweet durian, Som's saffron-flooded recipes, the timbre of temple bells, Sunday Market barter, the five tones — were too much to bear losing.

Yet the city had already started out on its own death march. Its venerable saving grace, a calculated accommodation, had been beaten at last. The lump was there, in a thousand and one Turkish baths, in the raw purchasing power of soldiers on R & R from the steady-state war, in cash that would trade this accommodating place into prosperity.

Against the Enlightened's advice, the floating city had chosen for growth, life, illusion. At dinner, the boy's father, baffled by the fact that attached itself more lovingly to him with his each covert business trip, said, "In ten years, the place will have launched itself into wealth or it will have burned up like cheap charcoal." Lotus pad pond, or cesspool. A mood came over the man, one that had never taken hold in any other of the far more miserable countries he had helped subvert.

The boy watched his father shake his head and exhale, "Serious infrastructure problems." At fourteen, the boy knew vaguely what infrastructure was — as much as he would ever know. It meant roads. Roads, telephones, depots, sewers: all as ethereal in the City of Angels as this trip around the rim of the Wheel.

This was the infrastructure he proposed to improve, beginning with an upcountry schoolhouse, that bootstrap, the capital required for lift-off. A bemused teacher relayed the message from Headmaster to cheering class that a school would cost almost nothing at all, providing you built it yourself.

In a rush of industry, they chartered buses, laid in supplies, requisitioned materials, and secured the state's approval. School books, chalk, pointers, and globes (some still proclaiming obsolete borders) miraculously began piling up from out of a fabulous caldron. The logistics were taken out of the initiators' hands. Yet, overwhelmed by success, the boy and his class hardly felt the coup, experience's autocratic take-over.

The unlikely project, theirs still in feeling if not in fact, was bar-raged with more student applicants than they needed. Headmaster culled them down to a final cut, as if picking the cast for the spring musical. The final mix had something calculated to it. Alongside the boy founder, Kraft, came a Security Council of upperclassmen: Elaine Chang (a compromise on the two Chinas question), Dimi Popovich, Gopal Patnaik, Eleni Katzourakis, Bandele K, and Jien Daishi. Fleshing out this core were a host of Tatis, Claudios, Yuans, Jacqueses, and Jills ranging from fourth-grader to near adult. The chaperons included Headmaster; Sampao, the Free art teacher; and old Springer, who had taught social studies at the Institute for so long he no longer had a nationality.

This careful cross-cultural balance was upended in one blow when it came to naming the project. Because it was December, because the build-it-yourself school would be a gift from the blue, and thinking, perhaps, to lend the whole enterprise an ironic disguise by giving it a paramilitary ring, Headmaster christened the expedition Operation Santa Claus. The name horrified the boy, and he nearly dropped out at the last minute. Only his friend Gopal's assurance that Santa was one of the officially recognized incarnations of Vishnu the Defender kept him in.

The expedition opened with a giddy field-trip feel. The caravan consisted of a busload of volunteers followed by ramshackle grain trucks filled with tools and donated supplies. Festivities on the bus ride up included manic, perpetual choruses of "Ninety-nine Bottles of Beer" and its anthropological equivalents from four continents.

Kraft joined the precocious Institute boys at the back of the bus. The moment's obsession was paper airplanes. For the previous two weeks, boys had stood on the roof during recess, struggling with the engineering problem of how best to fold a piece of paper to defy gravity. The ingenuity of the hundreds of experimental designs continued unabated in the cramped quarters of the child-mad vehicle, although test flights grew a little erratic. An Afro-Middle Eastern consortium worked on a tube-and-airfoil design to maximize distance and flight time. The Anglo-European alliance, feeling their competitive edge slipping, pursued showy climb rates and speed. Kraft worked for a group of independents who wanted to produce the most unlikely, unwieldy design that would still fly.