Interface

by Neal Stephenson

  Eleanor Richmond strode like a gunslinger into the horseshoe drive at 5:55 p.m. cradling a three-inch-thick stack of xeroxed handouts. Before she said a word, she held out one of the handouts up next to her face and stood motionless for a few seconds. She had learned this from watching pros in action. It gave the video people a chance to adjust the white balance on their cameras so that she, and everyone who followed her into the centre of the maelstrom, would not look pink or green on television. At the same time, it was a great pose for the still photographers. Dozens of motor drives whined, clearly audible in the astonishing silence that had suddenly fallen over this makeshift technological amphitheatre.

  If the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse had chosen this moment to gallop through the horseshoe drive on their fiery mounts, the journalists would have chased them out of the shot with verbal abuse, and possibly interviewed them later, after the main event. The only figure who dared break into the frame was a helpful reporter from the Washington Post who scurried up to Eleanor, relieved her of the stack of handouts, and frisbeed them wildly into the crowd.

  “My name is Eleanor Richmond. I am the Denver health and human services liaison for Senator Caleb Roosevelt Marshall. I have held that position for one month.

  “When I began working for the senator I was convinced, based on his past records and statements, that he was a racist. I am now convinced that he does not have a racist bone in his body. I have never met a man more willing to judge people on their individual merits, or lack thereof.

  “However even the most perceptive judge of human nature can occasionally be fooled by ambitious persons who practice to deceive. It is my unpleasant duty to report to you that several such people have risen to positions of influence on the Senators’ staff and, unbeknownst to Senator Marshall, have abused the power of his office for private gain.

  “Going direct to the media is not the best way to handle this situation. I should have met with the Senator first. I have made repeated efforts to try and reach him but he has been unavailable. Unfortunately I cannot wait any longer to release this information, because it has a bearing on the matter of Bianca Ramirez, and if, by inaction, I were to cause damage to her family, I could never forgive myself. So I am releasing the information now and I am also offering my resignation to Senator Marshall at the same time.”

  “Eleanor!” shouted all of the journalists at once, raising their hands.

  “Excuse me, excuse me, but I think that I should be given an opportunity to speak,” someone said, coming up behind Eleanor.

  She turned around and looked directly into the face of Shad Harper.

  And then she hesitated. She had her back to the lights and cameras now; he was facing them, every pore in his face exposed to their pitiless illumination. She felt like an interrogator as she stood there staring into his face, weighing the situation, trying to make up her mind.

  He didn’t look good. Shad was just a boy, after all, not very well seasoned, and although he had a few on-camera skills, he was hardly a master of the game. And right now, he was really, really upset.

  She knew that if she let Shad talk, he’d cut his own throat. He’d do it because he was a man and he had been conditioned. All his life, to deny his fear, to act before thinking, to get in over his head. A women, or an older man, would have backed off, thought it over, chosen the right time. Not Shad; Shad had to confront her right now, he couldn’t let her win even a single skirmish.

  “Be my guest,” she said, and stepped away from the microphone.

  “I’m Shad Harper,” he said, his voice cracking. “BLM liaison for Senator Marshall. And since I’m still on his staff, unlike Eleanor here, who has apparently resigned - and if she hasn’t resigned -which I can’t say for sure either way, since I have not seen and do not have any independent knowledge of any letter by which she might have resigned - if she hasn’t resigned then she will probably be fired, and in any case no longer speaks for Senator Marshall, if indeed she ever did - I do speak for Senator Marshall and so, since it appears that very damnable allegations are being made about him that I should step up and say something.”

  “She’s not making allegations about the Senator,” one of the journalists shouted, glancing through the handout. “She’s making allegations about you personally, Mr Harper.”

  Harper’s mouth fell open. “Well, I haven’t seen these alleged allegations yet, but-”

  “Is this your handwriting?” said another journalist, a woman from the L.A. Times, holding up one page of the handout.

  It was a photocopy of a sheet of stationary printed, at the top, with the words FROM THE DESK OF SHAD HARPER. It was covered with handwritten notes.

  “I’d have to take a better look-

  “Let me just read you some of this and maybe you can explain why you were writing some of these things down,” the woman said. “‘State of Washington versus Garcia 1990.’ That sounds like a court case.”

  “I don’t remember,” Shad said.

  “I looked it up,” Eleanor said. “It was a case in which some children died of carbon monoxide poisoning in the back of a pickup truck and the state of Washington successfully took custody of the surviving children on the grounds that their parents had neglected them.”

  “Why were you looking up that case, Shad?” the woman from the L.A. Times said. “How does that relate to your job as BLM liaison for the Senator?”

  “First and foremost, I am a servant of the people,” Shad said. The protestors gathered off to one side hooted derisively. The sound threw Shad off balance and he stumbled for a moment. “Uh, I’m entitled to look up court cases in the privacy of my own office.”

  “You were trying to assemble material with which to blackmail Anna and Carlos Ramirez,” Eleanor said. “By threatening them with the loss of their only remaining child, you could coerce them into silence, and reduce the intensity of the spotlight on the cozy arrangement between you and Sam Wyatt - which never drew any attention in public until a freak accident exposed it to public view.”

  “This is just, just - a terrible thing you are saying.”

  “What is terrible is to live in a time when saying things is considered worse than doing them,” Eleanor said.

  “You seem to be forgetting here that people in this state, and in this country are damn tired of these unemployed welfare mother illegal aliens coming into this country and stirring things up!”

  “Why don’t you call them spies and wetbacks, the way you do when you’re speaking on the telephone to Sam Wyatt?”

  “That is a totally unprovable allegation!” Shad yelped. He looked shocked, horrified, to hear these words spoken in public, as if he and Sam Wyatt had invented the words for their personal use. “Listen. I am not a person with any kind of ethnic bias or bigotry. I limit my concern to those people, of whatever ethnic group, who take advantage of the system. Who are like parasites on the prosperous economic system that has been built up over the years by the hard work of productive citizens the likes of Sam Wyatt.”

  “Sam Wyatt,” Eleanor said. “Sam Wyatt, who grazes his cattle on Government-owned land. Land that was occupied by Native Americans until the Government paid soldiers to come out here and kill them. Sam Wyatt, who irrigates his ranch with water from a Government-built dam. And you think that Anna Ramirez is a welfare queen? I’ve got news for you, cowboy. Everyone in the state of Colorado is a welfare queen. We all live and feed off the largesse of taxpayers in other parts of the country. It’s just that some of us, like Sam Wyatt, have been here longer than others, and have had time to pile up more government welfare checks in their bank accounts and funnel more of that money into big campaign contributions. So don’t stand here in Denver, a metropolis built on a creek, the capital of Colorado, a state that would dry up and turn back into a prairie without the continuing help of the government, and bray about the bad moral qualities of welfare queens. Because these people who come north across the border may not have gel in their hair and may not have ostrich-
hide cowboy boots, but unlike you, they have something a lot more important. They have values.”

  The hospital doors slid open and Bianca Ramirez rolled out in a wheelchair, pushed along by a smiling nurse, escorted by her entire medical team.

  A disturbance moved through protesters and suddenly Carlos and Anna Ramirez emerged from the crowd, smiles on their faces, tears streaming down their cheeks. They moved across the horseshoe drive, unhindered by journalists or INS agents or Shad Harper or anyone else, and engulfed their daughter in their arms. And they were engulfed, in turn, by hundreds of their supporters.

  The whole thing was a lot warmer and calmer than anyone had expected. The only real disturbance was off to the side, where an INS van, a paddywagon with steel grilles over all the windows, had begun rocking from side to side. The driver jumped out, leaving the van empty, and a broad open space suddenly appeared in the crowd. Then a dozen men, their arms and backs burly from stooping in Arkansas Valley truck farms, rolled it all the way over on to its roof and left it there like a turtle upended on a highway.

  31

  Eleanor was in the middle of cleaning out her office. This wasn’t much of a job since she had barely moved into it and the empty boxes were still stacked conveniently in the corner. Bent over with both hands in a file drawer, she didn’t notice Caleb Roosevelt Marshall coming into her office until he got her attention by tossing a keychain on to her vacant desktop.

  “I’m taking you on a ride, lady,” he said.

  She straightened up, startled to see him standing right in front of her, dressed in a blue work shirt and chinos, leaning on a cane. “I have my best conversations when I’m driving flat out into the mountains,” he said, nodding at the keychain. Eleanor picked it up; it was a set of keys to a rented Cadillac. “But now I’m getting too old to drive. Can’t even see the goddamn hood ornament.”

  “Allow me, then,” Eleanor said.

  It was a nice Cadillac, a convertible, parked in the Senator’s private space in back of the Alamo. The Senator had apparently dismissed his security detail, so Eleanor offered her arm and helped him out of the building and into the passenger seat. Then she got in and cranked it up. The car had a nice sound system with a tape player, and although the Senator complained that he wanted to get going, Eleanor decided to rummage around in the hollow center armrest for one of his tapes.

  “What are you going to play? Rap music?” he said as she popped a tape out of its case and shoved it into the dashboard.

  “Resurrection Symphony,” Eleanor said, as the opening bars came from speakers hidden all over the car.

  “Good,” Marshall said. “I been listening to it a lot. Figure I’d better become expert in the subject. Now let’s get going, damn it.”

  The Senator had a particular, highly detailed route he wanted to follow through Denver and up into the mountains. He eschewed the newfangled foolishness of freeways in favor of a devious route that took them down alleys, through parks, along curvy residential streets. For a while, as she followed his barked and seemingly improvised instructions, she was afraid that he had gone completely off his rocker and was getting them hopelessly lost. But they never got stuck at a slow stoplight, never had to make an impossible left turn, and in time the city began to spread out and undulate as the landscape awoke from the thousand-mile slumber of the prairie.

  “Thanks for saving my ass,” Senator Marshall said, when he wasn’t giving directions.

  She smiled. “I was wondering whether you’d see it that way.”

  “Course I do. I’m not senile,” he said. “Sooner or later a senator has to rely on someone like you.”

  “How do you figure?”

  “A senator has a big staff. He has to, in order to carry out the basic functions of his office, and to get reelected. Normal people don’t take those kinds of jobs. If I could take people off the street, I would. That’s how I got you. But normally I gotta hire the kinds of people who angle and maneuver for such work, which means weasels like Shad Harper. And almost the moment they get into the job, they start spinning their own goddamn agenda. Some of them know what they’re doing and some are just complete assholes. And when the assholes get themselves into trouble, like Shad did, then a senator has to have some way to get rid of them without bringing down his whole career. And you served that purpose admirably in the affair of Shad Harper.”

  “Did you get my letter?”

  “What letter? The resignation?”

  “Yes.”

  “Yeah, I got that damn letter. I don’t accept your resignation. I want you working for me. Hell, woman, you’re like a pit bull trained to attack white men. I want you on my side.”

  Eleanor laughed. “I don’t attack anyone.”

  “Well you sure do leave a lot of corpses in your wake.”

  The smile fell away from Eleanor’s face and she drove in silence for a while.

  She and Harmon hadn’t spent a lot of time driving into the mountains. She was not really a mountain person. They looked dangerous to her. For years she’d felt trapped, in a way, between the mountain wall on one side and the endless plains on the other. The devil and the deep blue sea. Now that they were getting closer to the first real range of mountains, a ridge of red stone that swept smoothly up out of the grassland and broke off jaggedly hundreds of feet above their heads, she was beginning to remember that the mountains had their attractions, that they were a lot more interesting when you got up close instead of viewing them through miles of brown Denver smog.

  “Sorry,” Caleb said, “that was a real stupid thing for me to say.” Clearly, the Senator was not a man who apologized very often, and he found it difficult.

  “It’s okay,” she said. “I know what you meant.”

  “If I intended to run for another term, I’d have to sack you,” he said, after they had drawn closer to the base of the first ridge and turned parallel to it along a rolling and winding road. They were now completely out in the country.

  “You don’t say.”

  “When one of my staffers steps up in front of the single largest collection of journalists ever assembled in Denver and announces that everyone in the state of Colorado is a welfare queen, it makes things a little awkward for me.”

  This time Eleanor didn’t laugh. She smiled, but it was a sheepish kind of grin. This was a Monday morning. She had spent yesterday morning reading scathing editorials and rebuttals in the editorial sections of the newspapers. To say that she had hit a nerve didn’t do justice to the level of indignation.

  “How many death threats have you gotten?” Senator Marshall asked.

  “I stopped listening to my messages after the third one,” Eleanor said.

  “They actually put them on tape? They must have been really pissed.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I can have the Secret Service check them out.”

  “It just sounds to me like a bunch of ranchers blowing off steam,” she said.

  “It ain’t just Colorado. You’re the most hated woman in the West,” Senator Marshall said. “A lightning rod.”

  “I know it.”

  “People wouldn’t be so vehement unless your words were largely true,” Senator Marshall said.

  She gave him a searching look. “What’s your opinion?”

  The Senator winced, as if he wished she hadn’t asked this question. He looked out the window for a while, appalled.

  “Well, of course you’re right,” he finally said. “The economy of this whole region is built on subsidies and federal programs. But people refuse to admit that because they want to believe in the cowboy myth. That their ancestors came out and made the desert bloom solely through their own hard work and pluck.

  “Now, they were plucky, and they did work hard. But there are a lot of plucky, hard-working people in other places who have gone down the toilet anyway just because they were pursuing a fool’s errand, economically speaking. The people who came here sort of lucked into a situation of cowboy socialism. Without
federal programs they’d go broke - no matter how hard they worked.”

  “Federal programs that are kept alive by senators.”

  “Yeah. Colorado’s small state population-wise. Our delegation in the House can’t do diddly. But in the Senate, every state is equal. When one senator, like me, gets some seniority, works his way up into a few key committee chairmanships, then some states are more equal than others. My job - my raison d’être - is to keep certain federal programs alive that prevent this region from turning back into the buffalo farm God intended it to be.

  “It’s a feedback loop. This is hightech lingo that I picked up in the sixties when some goddamn ecologist was raving to me. I keep the programs alive. The economy thrives. People move to Colorado and vote for me. The cycle begins again.

  “As long as those programs continue to exist, no one notices. They are part of the landscape. They are forces of nature, like the wind and the rain. The people who live off them, people like Sam Wyatt, have come to think of them as natural and divinely ordained. To them, living off of federal largesse is no different in principle than, say, fishing salmon from the Gulf of Alaska or tapping maple syrup from trees in Maine. So, when someone like you steps in front of the TV cameras and points out the obvious -that these people are no different in principle from people who live off of welfare checks - it just drives them crazy. It strikes at the heart of who they are.”

  Eleanor listened to this numbly. She couldn’t believe that Senator Marshall was saying these things. “So, why aren’t you going to accept my resignation?” she said.

  “My whole career I’ve been doing things because I had to. Now that I’m in my last term, I get to do all the things I always wished I could do but was afraid to.”

  “Well, the press should have a field day with that.”

  “The press can fuck themselves. Now I can say that. Take a right here.”

  Eleanor turned right on to a road that cut due west, straight into the mountains. Finally she understood what Caleb had been doing: steering them toward a cut through the mountain wall, the only place within miles you could get through it. The sight of it made her want to go fast and she punched the gas and surged toward it. It was a narrow gap with almost vertical sides that revealed a cross section of the ridge, normally hidden under grass and sage, its pink and peach and salmon and maroon strata fluorescing in the late afternoon sun.