PLOWING THE DARK

by Richard Powers

  O'Reilly smiled. What do you mean, hidden order? That the universe is formalizable, but not from where we're standing? That it's unformaliz-able? Now there's a one-word contradiction in terms.

  Ronan, baba. Some of us believe in contradictions in terms.

  O'Reilly faced down Rajasundaran. Even mysticism is a non-Euclidean geometry. No, gentlemen. The world is a numbers racket, all the way down.

  Rajan drummed his hands on the booth top. Come on, my friend. Don't quit now. This is even more entertaining than violent revelations of deep incestuous secrets as brought to you by the Mormons.

  But the Sponsor chose that moment to announce itself. Out of the depths of barroom broadcast, the TeraSys anthem unfurled. On a screen across the room, a commercial began. Its sound-track chorale of Renaissance recorders morphed—via the malleable magic of MIDI and sampled wave-table instrument definitions—in thirty seconds, over the entire spectrum of world music, cadencing on an ecstatic burst of Shona mbiras. Synched to the sound track with Balanchinean brilliance, a spinning globe mutated in dizzying succession into the rose window at Chartres, an exploding jigsaw puzzle, the condensing chains of a long polymer, inked ideograph characters on an unfurling scroll, tessellated Iznik tiles, solar cells on a space satellite, and finally, back to old Pangea doing its slow, stately breakup into Laurasia, Gond-wanaland, and all the rest of the continental separatists, special interest groups, and irredentist movements.

  Rajan beamed. I'm afraid I contributed to that one. They used my interpolation routines for the pretty morphing sequence.

  What in the name of creation do they think they're doing, airing that spot on the Humiliating Public Disclosures Channel?

  Big audience, Vulgamott said.

  They're mad, you know.

  Of course they're mad. Who's the "they" this time, О Ulsterman?

  Americans. Every last soul in this national enterprise of yours.

  Rajan raised his hand. Excuse me. Exactly how long can a person live here before he is infected?

  None of them has a clue, you know, O'Reilly persisted. Like children at Christmas, their whole bleeding lives. Every last mother's son of them.

  Be all you can be. Go for all the gusto you can get. Who says you can't have it all?

  Well. Raj glanced at Vulgamott for confirmation. There's their Internal Revenue Service, to start with.

  And this outfit that we work for? They're the worst instigators of all. "Realize your dreams." Clever foreigners really ought to pinch all their best ideas and smuggle them back over the border, into the lands of sanity.

  Ach, sure. Vulgamott affected a frighteningly convincing brogue. And tell me: what might a Belfast boy know about sanity?

  Precious little, you bastard. Yet I alone have held onto a fact that your obscenely inventive lot never seemed to have twigged.

  And that would be ... ?

  There's a real world out there, underneath the elaborate slipcovers we're knitting for it.

  Rajan rolled his eyes. So you Caucasian materialists like to insist. Speaking of the real world ... Vulgamott, the edgy quidnunc, had gone almost a full thirty minutes without a headline fix. Any word on the Argentina situation today?

  As far as we know, Rajan said, it's still down there, attached to the skinny part of South America.

  Belfast saluted Colombo. You're blending in here splendidly, Raj. Listen. Vulgamott sounded desperate. Would it upset your experiment in assimilation if we watched some news?

  Sure, no problem. Rajasundaran scanned through the channel selector, built into their booth. How about this little thing called Celebrity Police Blotter?

  Some spin-off of CNN, O'Reilly guessed. Or how about this so-called Channel 56? Sport Salary Update? Vulgamott's agitation threatened to spill him out of the booth. You two have no interest in learning what's going on?

  Absolutely, O'Reilly said. That's why I vote for pulling the plug. Come on, man. We're living on the brink. The single most precarious moment in—

  Rajan wagged his head. This has all happened many times before, you know.

  13

  The room of economics runs to an open horizon.

  Every compass heading stretches so far that even walking flat-out, for hours, scrolls you only the smallest fraction against the landscape. Your inlet reveals itself to be but a bight on a cove on a lagoon on a bay on a gulf opening onto a measureless ocean, the one continuous Panthalassa, its waters linking up, its surf cutting the complex curve of these shores.

  Light and shadow play upon the deeps. The spills and splashes of geographic accident serve as this world's genes. Here woods work out the local exchange rates. Gorse trades its stored energies with geese. Tundra warehouses whole quantities of carbon. Bottoms, morasses, moors, plateaus, and rain basins bargain in a river pidgin that keeps the dimples of microclimate in nutrients all year.

  Where is the nearest caravanserai? Who will swap salt for ocher? How goes the southern coffee bean harvest? Will the scares in Johannesburg tip the Frankfurt Bцrse?

  Will the leading indicators level off? What of the anticipated export boom among the Asian tigers? When will collapse come? This room's tides will tell you.

  Even its ceiling rises forever. High overhead, above the atmospheric tree line, past the edge where color thins out beyond blue, electronic kingfishers hover. Each beats its wings in blackness, fixed in place above its assigned coordinates. Stationary passenger pigeons, message-bearing corbies, each bird is but a bit in the widest imaginable linkup. Perched in their geosynchronous orbits, the birds root out all data and beam it back down to the ground below. There, a trillion worker ants cull the factual wheat from its fallacious chaff, blind to the upshot of their tireless winnowing. The global economic simulator sieves out an answer in nanoseconds, in no time. This room can snare any fact you wish, faster than a gentled pointer can fetch your morning paper.

  The cells of a continuous compound lens now cap the whole heavens above this ceiling. Near and far are as nothing. Scale is no issue. The Economics Room can zoom from the neighborhood fruit stand all the way up through the G7 annual deficits. Its simulation means to render mystery visible. To turn the market's enigmatic piano rolls into freewheeling rags. To throw open the global portfolios to public inspection, for close reading.

  A crimson comet, at ten o'clock, just above the horizon, paints an upturn in third-quarter commodities. A rose of starbursts means stubborn unemployment. Hidden relations spill out, suddenly obvious, from a twist of the tabular data. Tendencies float like lanterns across the face of a summer's night.

  In the Economics Room, you can freeze a frame or skip ten million. The press of a button throws a clean model eon into fast-forward or a hard reverse. The economics map requires only four colors, but can splinter into forty or four billion. Animated maps enact last season's cod haul off Georges Bank, this week's top box-office grossers, four centuries of Lycian olive pressing.

  This room is deeper than its interface makes out. Bigger than will fit into the space that houses it. All the world's predictors, running flat out, fall back surprised by their own outcomes. Fresh winds mix, mistral on sirocco, chinook against levanter, khamsin with bise. Cusps touch off one another. Trends compound, too quick to name. Yugoslavian prices rise three thousand percent. Drought and war destroy East Africa. Argentina heads into free fall. China comes alive, threatening to swamp the continental balance of trade. Sweeping liberalizations cascade. The median keeps to a holding pattern. Vested interests bitterly dig in. Something is at work here, something momentous. You need only stand in mid-room and look. Once-in-a-lifetime headlines flower immodestly, poking up like shameless patches of crocus in the unmown spring. Yet no image can say what this sprouting means. Import remains oblique, geological, obscure. Interpretation is a sleight of hand, reversing itself with each new read. Streams of bits combine to produce a pocket score, astonishing, symphonic, but too small to read.

  The data are here, in surfeit. In fact, this flood of noise and col
or never abates long enough to submit to a basin. Events transpire too fast to register before they go obsolete. Who can take their eyes off the ticker long enough to tabulate?

  But here you can eavesdrop on the chaos of voices. When that shipyard on the North Sea erupts again, you can examine the underlying inputs. Production as a function of hours. Hours as a function of volatility. Volatility as a function of morale. Morale as a function of expectation. Expectation as a function of income. Income as a function of production. This room combs out the Gordian tangle. Here you can watch the revolution unfold, at any speed, along any axis, at any magnification, testing each infinitesimal contingency's effect on every other.

  The kingfisher satellites swoop down, hitting their minnowed marks. They snatch the silver data aloft, flapping in blackness, before dropping the catch back down to the globe's surface, where it replicates, shooting the rapids of broadband relays and repeaters, transmitter to transmitter, pooling ever more downstream, to school in the hatcheries of petabyte shoals.

  In this room of open prediction, facts flash like a headland light. The search flares burst around you where you stand, lost in an informational fantasia: tangled graphical dances of devaluation, industrial upheaval, protective tariffs, striking shipbuilders, the G7, Paraguay, Kabul. The sweep of the digital —now beyond its inventors' collective ability to index—falls back, cowed by the sprawl of the runaway analog.

  Five billion parallel processors, each a world economy, update, revise, negate one another, capsize the simulation, pumping their dissatisfied gross national product beyond the reach of number.

  This sea defeats all navigation. At best, the model can say only where in this, our flood, we will drown. Walk from this diorama on a May evening and feel the earth's persistent fact gust against your face. Sure as this disclosing spring breeze, it blows. Data survive all hope of learning. But hope must learn how to survive the data.

  14

  A woman, dead for a decade, steps out of a yellow Volvo. Walks back into a life that recalls her shape better than it remembers its own.

  Of course she chose the worst imaginable moment to materialize. Returned to Karl Ebesen's life just to survey the maximum extent of the rubble. Came back to find him holed up in a decrepit trailer, on a lot that flooded from October to June, subsisting on microwave lasagna and apple chips, living only to get the work out, serving his daily penance with a precision that spooked even his most intense colleagues. Prepared to concede the final slide into bagmanhood.

  Not exactly the state he cared to be found in. Not the ghost he cared to be found by, in any state. But that was how ghosts chose their moments. Disruption: the only gift that memory had to give.

  Of course the ghost had no idea who she was. They never did. No sense of her death or untimely resurrection. The Volvo returned, day after day, obstinately yellow, to haunt its slot in the asphalt parking lot. Clearly the corpse came here to dog him. The only thing Ebesen couldn't figure out was the reason.

  He made himself known to the woman. He paid evening visits to her cubicle, freely showing her the wreck of his present self. He spoke as little as possible, for her voice destroyed the illusion. He just sat in her presence, under the available cover, fussing with acetate stills or marking up old magazines with a greasy highlighter, trying not to stare at her. Hoping to dispel the ephemeral resemblance.

  This living woman stayed a dead ringer, although the physical match was, in truth, but slight. Coloration similar, if the light was low enough. Height, build, and other such irrelevancies, close enough to pass. The eyes, cheeks, and jaw were only rough approximations, the best that God's plastic surgeons could restore them to. But the whole was Gail, as much as Gail had ever been.

  Even now, Ebesen might have sketched the dead woman from memory and gotten more of her than any of the photographs that had graced her closed-casket wake. But he couldn't reconstruct this living woman's cheekbones from one night to the next. He, whose draftsman's talents had always inclined toward that embarrassing anachronism, the human likeness; he, who might have made a brilliant portraitist, had he lived two centuries ago: he simply could not resolve this Adie's face into its gaunt primitives. His mind couldn't see her to draw her.

  He'd felt the same doubt with the dead woman once, when she still lived. Every day that the two of them had spent together. The nagging suspicion that Gail was, in fact, her own succubus. He'd gaze on her illicitly in her sleep, when her musculature dropped its guard and returned to its preexistence, those terms before pain, before gravity, before the assault of sunlight, before the awful contortions that the public mirror induced in all faces.

  He'd scrutinize her by lamplight, Eros hovering over his wife with the forbidden candle. He studied her features, unmasked by sleep, searching out what she looked like before she looked like this, looking for the face he recognized, from before he met her, the face that, like a rebus, an Arcimboldo, a hidden-picture game, spread itself out across the landscape of his synapses.

  Her features held their own fossil record, her facial bones a skeleton key that picked with a click of recognition Ebesen's rusted lock. The face leapt out of his life's faded photo album, his brain's deepest Marianas, his infant pass-in-review, held on to long after it should have gone extinct. She killed his sense of safety, his feel for error, his certainty of light and dark. The haunted face had survived its own burial. The twitch of this Adie's cheek cut him. Her pits and shadows flirted with a familiarity they refused to settle into. He could not name it, this overlap, or locate the crossover in any aspect of her appearance. Dead love and its living copy: two halves of a torn original.

  He took to shaving more often, so as not to spook her. He hung his trousers over the bathroom door when he showered, to steam out the worst of the wrinkles. He worked dish soap on a worn toothbrush against the stains of his shirt collars, watching himself, wondering how far he might sink in the name of revived feeling.

  Months after her arrival, the spell broke. Sight did nothing to disperse it. His eye was worthless, in the end. Three stray words delivered him: speech, the medium that Ebesen distrusted above all others. Of all the absurdities, something she said.

  She was chattering. Something Ms. Klarpol did whenever he visited. Talking out loud, to anyone, to herself, to her chocolate Lab, the faithful Pinkham, who loved to accompany her to work. Chattering about the absurdly beautiful place she found herself living in.

  An island cottage, Karl. Right out of a poem. Circling gulls wake me up in the morning. In New York, it was always sirens.

  "New York" and "siren" fused, and Gail stood before him. Each plane of her face materialized, a frantic hologram. He looked up at this Adie, still amusing herself with a running account of her windfall. He stared at her, no longer caring if she caught him looking. The living woman resolved into her own parts, lost to all likeness. Nothing remained of the ghost story but his need to be near it.

  He tried to stop visiting her. He started coming by again. She greeted him happily on his return, asking for no explanation. He contented himself with serving as her mascot of bitterness. He dispensed with any threat of recovered respectability. But as he carved mortise-and-tenon furnishings for Vulgamott's architectural fly-through or designed anvil thunderheads for Stance and Kaladjian's Weather Room, he felt the flinch of recollection, the awful willingness of arousal that he thought he'd put to death.

  He taught her how to animate. You only need to paint a few eels. Say, one at each two-second interval. Rajasundaran has written morph-ing software that will fill in all the midpoints.

  Then he sat back and watched her bring motion to the jungle's fixed planes. Already, bushes rustled and the moon strayed across the child sky. Soon her frozen birds would thaw into a flutter, the snake slink, the monkeys scamper, the flutist weave, and the lions crouch in the perfect impression of stalking.

  He watched her paint dozens of frames, creatures in various postures. She painted each cross-sectioned creature as lovingly as the first, ass
embling them into time-lapse fragments that moved more surely than he did. The Dream awakened, channeling the dead painter's spirit through the hand of this living woman medium.

  He heard her, when things got buggy, pleading with the terminal. Please, nice Mr. Machine. Don't be mean to me. I haven t done anything wrong, aside from belonging to the organic life-forms. Karl, the little chips are acting up again. What should I do?

  Accept adversity, Ebesen said. It's soul-strengthening.

  It's not my soul that needs work, she told him.

  He watched her scratch at the drawing tablet. He stood behind her workstation screen while she willed her graphics pen through glad arcs. The lightness of her aping dazzled him. Her fingers played at the existing shapes, exhilarated by their constraint to copying. Something in that virtuosity did not want to be free.

  You're good.

  Thank you.

  Watch out, he razzed her. Not too original, now. They could get loose otherwise, your animals.

  She looked up at him. Doubtless she saw a stubble-faced fifty-five-year-old man with soap smears around his collar. She turned back to her cookie-cut time sequences and cooed at them.

  That's right, my little beasties. You're getting loose someday, aren't you? That's exactly what you're going to do.

  Something in her pet-coddling voice alerted her Labrador, until then curled up, on best behavior, in the corner. The dog padded over to his owner and nuzzled her.

  Oh, you too, Pinkham. You too. Gonna cut loose someday? That your plan? Oh yes, you are, my sweetie.

  Placated, Pinkham returned to his post and settled back in. Ebesen, too, wandered back to his post. Have you ever thought about work that didn't involve some violation of visual copyright?