PLOWING THE DARK

by Richard Powers

  Why would anyone want to build something like this?

  Why does anyone want to build anything? Spiegel answered.

  Kaladjian shrugged, more concession than contest.

  Over the space of days, the quartet of males slowly squeezed Klarpol out. Form and warmth, rapture and azure all collapsed into engineering problems. The tasks at hand were well defined, formalizable. Why did they need an artist any longer? They had Adie's careful, hand-drawn surfaces. Once the authorities got their composite sketch, the artist was just ballast.

  Adie went to Sue Loque. They're stealing my room.

  Your room? Didn't you steal it from some Dutch guy?

  My idea. My eye. I took everything off the flat plane and laid it out in three-space. I repainted all the surfaces by hand. Every inch of it is detailed enough to look good at life size.

  Now they won't let you play?

  Well, they let me sit in. But they're turning the whole thing into this gigantic Rubik's Cube.

  That's their thing. It's what they do, babe.

  I know that's what they do. What am I supposed to do?

  Sit in and listen, maybe? It's how I got into this racket

  Serious? What did you do before?

  Before what?

  Before learning to program?

  Oh, I taught myself to program when I was twelve. I had to cover for my parents. They couldn't even handle their dimmer switches. But before I started listening in on the boys—before I learned how projects worked—I was ... just a programmer.

  Adie went back and listened. She followed the four males as they invented problems, then invented solutions to throw at their problems. She watched them communicate by grunts and silences. She studied Jackdaw, Steve, and Raj as they hacked at their huge triple concerto for QWERTY keyboards, lost to a runaway pruning algorithm, while Kaladjian etched away on complex functions with a number-two pencil into yellow legal pads.

  She sketched them in turn, capturing their shared trances in her own media. Their facial muscles reminded her of her father's, snoring on the sofa in any of a dozen Quonset living rooms, sleeping off the latest controlled R-and-R drunk, twitching in a dream of final, anesthetized escape. But the goal of these four men differed from her father's on one essential account. Her father retreated into a place that he hoped would silence the outside world. These four men, on the other hand, worked to build a mutual mirage that would match its source, noise for noise.

  There's some kind of major tension there, Adie told Loque. / don't think any of them likes Kaladjian any more than I do. Bingo, babe. He's a nasty man.

  Deeply creepy. But he knows a shitload. So everyone manages to make allowances for him, on strictly practical grounds.

  Well sure. That's easy for them. They come from the same world as he does. They speak his language.

  Not really. Not with any specificity. Anyway, that's not the real issue. They put up with him. They use him. The social contract, hon. They're getting something from him they can't get for themselves. I think he's masturbating over me.

  He's what? You mean in private, right? Now how do you figure that? I'd really like to know.

  Oh, I don't have any hard evidence. It's just this sixth sense. More like an eighth, if you're keeping count. I can always tell if there's somebody I'm working with who ... ? It's like radio waves. You can't ordinarily perceive them, but if you have the right equipment...

  Uh, Ade? Sweetheart? I don't know how to tell you this. But any one of us might be putting out that channel.

  Rajasundaran alone enjoyed going head-to-head with the team's problem child. Indifferent to the drama of human personality, he savored each clash with the Armenian as if it were a good cricket test match.

  We ought to make it, he said one day, so that closing the shutters actually dampens all the ambient sounds coming from outside the bedroom windows.

  Kaladjian went for the easy kill. A pointless exercise. A complete waste of processing power.

  No, it's interesting. What might damping do to create a sense of inside and out?

  Don't ask vapid questions, Kaladjian said.

  What is your algorithm for telling vapid questions from their opposites? Jackdaw held up his hands in a T. Please, guys. We can't afford to start with the philosophy stuff, again.

  Kaladjian ignored the chance for peace with honor. A vapid question is one that any mature researcher recognizes as fruitless. You are willing to be ruled by consensus? You? All right. Then it's one where the answer serves no end but itself. Raj studied Kaladjian's face, as if he were his own portrait. When you look at the Pythagorean theorem, when you draw it graphically ... ? When you actually build little squares on each side, why should the two smaller squares be equal in area to the largest one? Is that a vapid question?

  Yes. Kaladjian smiled, even as the trap took shape.

  But it is also a profound question as well?

  Well. That depends.

  Spiegel waved his arms, drawing fire. There are no vapid questions.

  Only vapid questioners.

  May I ask you one? Adie asked Kaladjian. Probably vapid? What exactly is your problem?

  Kaladjian blinked condescension. His smile easily absorbed the attack. I suppose you find me largely contemptuous.

  Pretty much, Adie chirped.

  The kind of mutual flaming that enlivened a good Multi-User Dimension turned Jackdaw's stomach when it occurred face-to-face. Maybe we should put all this human stuff back in the box and get on with our work?

  The others humored him. Hours later, with the project scattered for the day, Adie cornered Kaladjian in his immaculate cubicle. So tell me.

  Kaladjian looked up, waiting. And what exactly would you like me to tell you?

  Why you're at war with the rest of creation.

  The Armenian appraised her for the length of a short syllogism. Is that what I am?

  Yes.

  He thought for a minute. You wouldn't understand.

  Adie swallowed the stream of ready profanity that welled up in her throat. Try me with the dumbed-down version.

  Something in the challenge appealed to him. He gestured for her to sit, then turned his back on her and gazed out his window into the rain-dripped woods. You know what I do for a living?

  Something to do with numbers.

  His laugh condensed to a bitter nib. I've told you already, young woman. Everything has something to do with numbers.

  Not young, she said.

  The silence lasted long enough for Adie to think she'd been dismissed. Then he broke it, addressing the plate glass.

  Say the thing that gives you more pleasure than anything in existence is to arrange a set of colored marbles according to strict and surprisingly sparse rules. God knows why, but the pastime fascinates you. So long as you're not hungry or cold or otherwise impaired, you want to devote yourself to it.

  Painting, she said. Something like painting.

  The hardest kind of painting. The most accountable. The more you push the marbles around, the harder it is to get them into interesting configurations. But you're not alone in the pursuit. A handful of other devotees have the same obsession. Everyone looks over one another's work, fixing and extending. You memorize all the beautiful moves of the grand masters. This goes on for a few thousand years. Every so often, someone stumbles onto a hidden wrinkle, one that puts the marbles into a surprise configuration, special, pleasing, something no one expected.

  Each of them stared off at an altarpiece the other couldn't see.

  Then, out of the blue, someone discovers that the marble game is a profound reformulation of an interlocking canister game, unknown to you, played by another circle of monks centuries ago on the other side of the world and shelved as a useless curiosity. These two unrelated, formally beautiful pursuits turn out to be, in a deep, singular, and unsought way, synonymous.

  She nodded toward some analogy. The concealed and ubiquitous

  golden mean.

  A truly shatterin
g insight descends on some master practitioner. Colored marbles and interlocking canisters, taken together, form a perfect translation of phenomena in the physical world. The patterns of marbles and canisters compose a map of, say, the cycle of tides or the bends in a river. And this correspondence works, not only after the fact, but in advance of it The game makes it possible to predict all kinds of otherwise unknown, otherwise unlooked-for, otherwise immeasurable events...

  Her neck hairs rose up, obeying their own rules. Every repeated time without exception, the harmless, artificial game advances in absolute lockstep with measurable event. The implications are inescapable. The marbles and the canisters—the simple but rigorous rules—somehow embody physical reality.

  The veil fell, and she stood looking on this abandoned man. She did not know how he managed to remain behind, in such pain.

  These inconsequential games mimic the most grandiose patterns we can identify. Gravity, time, light: name your fundament. Creation keeps to a few simple rules of interlocking shape and color, patterns replicating themselves across impossible distances. This is what the mathematician calls beauty. An ever more elaborate edifice spun out of the sparest symmetries. A perfection that outstrips all attempts to capture it.

  She put up her palms in puzzlement. This is a bad thing?

  He turned to her, his edge of aggression again sharpening. He stood and beckoned for her to follow, out the room and down the hall. They reached the Cavern, where Sybil Stance was taking her rightful slot on

  the sign-up sheet.

  We have an emergency, Kaladjian said. We need the machine.

  Aril I'm right in the middle of— Please. Ten minutes. You can have my hour tomorrow. He booted up an environment Adie had never seen. A shape like a Cycladic figure mushroomed in front of them. Kaladjian put the wand through an unaccompanied partita. The figure metamorphosed, its planes sliding upon itself, turning inside out in a virtuoso conjuring act of knotted space.

  All legitimate topological transformations of one another, he said. Adie nodded, hooked. She saw a centaur. The torso of a naked Aphrodite. A wondrous stalactite. A nexus of ribbonlike tubes passing through their own surfaces. Proteus, unholdable. We're going in, Kaladjian announced.

  The figure swelled in the air around them, and they passed inside. When they steadied out again, they found themselves riding along the inside edge of a secret junction of knotted expressway lanes, the deeply entangled passages of a decadent queen conch. Brace yourself.

  Kaladjian hit a button on the wand. The waterslide surfaces fragmented into the mosaic of polygons that composed them. Shards flew in all directions, a shower of math-meteors. The community of screen phenomena—a capacious, fecund, and extraneous metaphor of the machine's internal states—revealed itself to be a bastard lingua franca where alien races could meet in compromise.

  Adie's body grew large, galactic, her head wrapped in a cloud of stars. They zoomed out, pulling back to a distant vantage above what condensed into a spiral nebula. She looked out across a sweeping interstellar pinwheel, its slow spokes lapping around her midriff. Each wash of stars unfolded another billion years of cosmic evolution. She swelled to the size of God's recording angel, attending at the day of Creation.

  It's... magnificent. I had no idea. She felt her eyes spilling over, and did not care. There was no foolishness, no vanity, no shame in anything a body felt, looking on this.

  Yes. Now here is the math behind it. He pushed a button and the expanding universe fell away into a few polynomials, breathtaking in their slightness.

  She tried to say his name: An. The tag soured inside her mouth. I don't... I still don't... The man's pettiness appalled her more than ever, after what he'd just let her see. Where's the problem?

  The problem? The problem is that we still live here.

  He spread his hands to indicate the projectors, the modular office furniture, all the ugly bundles of cable and molded-plastic printed circuits that filled the space around them. It dawned on her. His days of true research were over. He had done no useful math, no beautiful math, for years. He, too: banished to industry. Wherever the there that the colored marble game whispered of, this man could no longer

  reach it.

  Words left Adie, to sound across inconceivable distances. That is no country for old men?

  That is no country for old men. He measured the line, liked it. Perhaps he thought she'd made it up. Clever of a young woman to see that.

  Not clever at all, in fact. Clever were those who had not seen, yet still perceived.

  That was no country for refugees of any age. Some nights, when Spiegel knew Adie was home in her island hermitage, he would call, chatting away happily to her answering machine. He'd hold rambling conversations on her tape, knowing full well she was in the room screening and could hear every word.

  Can I try something out on you? It's a Personals ad: "Carbon-based life-form seeking same to help fill the chilly immensity of existence." What do you think? I know, I know—the dictions a little off. How about this: "The universe is fifteen billion years old. I'm pushing forty. Looking for Solar System-based female in similar temporal predicament."

  At first she listened in real time. After a while, she turned off the speaker, checking the backlog of messages only at long stretches. Finally, she pulled the machine's plug.

  Early one morning in Aries, she at last hit upon the concealed hope that bound all these messy exiles to the same project. She stood in a room-sized cartoon among four men, each with his own agenda, each terrified that the breakneck pace of technology would prove too little, too late, each desperate to turn the Cavern into something more than a prohibitively expensive, slow, grainy, cold, monstrously cumbersome stereoscope. She looked through the windows of her provisional Mediterranean summer cottage, down along the fabricated path to the coast, out to the invented sea, and the farther sea beyond that one. And she saw, at last, what these men had been for so long gazing at.

  The Cavern was irrelevant. The Cavern was not even a flip-card deck compared to the Panovision it pointed at. The Cavern would shrink, year after rate-doubling year. Its carapace would wither away until all the pipes and projectors and reality engines fit into a gym bag. Steady improvement would knit belief-quality graphics into the living-room walls of every middle-class condo. Pin-sized lasers lashed to the stems of reading glasses would etch conviction directly onto living retinas.

  The technology meant nothing. The technology would disappear, go transparent. In a generation or two, no one would even see it. Someone would discover how to implant billions of transistors directly into the temporal lobes, on two little squares of metal foil. If not in Klarpol's lifetime, then soon enough —just around the bend of this long, logarithmic curve. The clumsy mass of distracting machine would vanish into software, into the impulse that had invented it. Into pure conception.

  Something gelled, and Adie saw this primitive gadget morph into the tool that humans have lusted after since the first hand-chipped adze. It seemed the prize at the end of a half-million years of provisional leapfrogging. It was not even a tool, really. More of a medium, the universal one. However much the Cavern had been built from nouns, it dreamed the dream of the unmediated, active verb. It lived where ideas stepped off the blackboard into real being. It represented humanity's final victory over the tyranny of matter. She'd mistaken this variable room for a high-tech novelty. Now Adie saw it as the thinnest first parchment, a thing that rivaled even speech in its ability to amplify thought. Time would turn it into the most significant jump in human communication since the bulking up of the cerebellum.

  The mature Cavern would become the body's deep space telescope; the test bed for all guesses; a programmable, live-in film; the zoom lens of the spirit; the umbilical cord for remote robot control; a visualization lab as powerful as human fancy; a tape deck capable of playing back any camera angle in history; a networked web of matter transporters where dispersed families would meet and greet as holographic specters. It
promised the wishing lamp that all children's stories described. It was the storybook that once expelled us and now offered to take us back in.

  All this Adie Klarpol saw in a single, smooth glance. The men she worked with meant to assemble all these things, and then some.

  Aries gleamed. The Mediterranean morning shone from out of the electronic scrap heap of the lab surrounding it. She watched the programmers test the latest audio algorithms. Video edge-detection routines tracked all movement in the room, punctuating any action that might generate sound. Jackdaw Acquerelli slipped off his shoes. He nudged them with a toe, under the lip of the bed. They scraped across the floor of the Cavern, a noise half actual, half synthetic. The elaborate basketball shoes sat like two hollowed-out white lab rabbits, visible through the illusion of the bed, but still beneath it.

  Pretty soon, Jackdaw said, any year now, this room will be good enough to live in.

  That, finally, was the hope. To live in the room that the painter's suicide vacated. The soul simply wanted better accommodations. Something more spacious to fasten to. Something more like itself than that dying animal.

  It had taken Adie a year and a half to see what she was working on. The rest of the lay world made the same leap in the space of a single Memorial Day weekend. Overnight, an explosion of interest rocked the RL, as if the mountainside they hugged chose that moment to simulate St. Helens. Media latched wholesale upon this thing that it refused to call anything else but virtual reality. The public took so quickly to the fantasy that it must have recognized the contour from something it already knew.

  The press launched a full-frontal assault. Journalists closed in on virtual reality as if on a celebrity murder. The luxury of monastic tinkering dissolved under the onslaught. Freese found himself devoting half his time to fielding reporters' questions. Disruption reigned supreme. The RL's mountain hideaway began to appear in speculative magazine accounts and TV news spots, reports that turned the lab's jerky, wire-frame predictions into gleaming, ray-traced chrome.