RICHARD POWERS (20 page)

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.

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.

18

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
...

It's true,
Adie said. She gestured at their rhizome, proliferating into the distance. A chill seeped up her spine, spreading at the entrance to her brain. Do
you remember the night the two of you showed me the Crayon World?
Now
look!

Oh Lord.
Spiegel held his head.
What have we done? We've taken a decent, law-abiding hater of technology…

Oh, I still hate technology. I'm just learning how to make it please me.