Interface. Part 39

"Huh. That's interesting," Ogle said. "The appeal to pride seems to work. But it's not old-fashioned jingoism. It's a question of personal, individual pride. Core values."

On TV, Dr. Hunter P. Lawrence was explaining that the candidates could now rebut each other's statements.

McLane flashed up on the screen with a bit of a stunned, nervous, beady-eyed look, as if he wanted to stare at Cozzano but couldn't. "Well, it seems to me that, uh, the best ticket to self-esteem and dignity is to have a steady job. Everything else follows from that. Under my administration, I'll be pursuing policies that will stimulate the vigor of our free enterprise system and lead to job growth in general. After all, it's hard to be dignified when you're living on welfare."

The Eye of Cy pinkened briefly as the word "welfare" was spoken. "Cheap shot," Ogle mumbled.

"It's easy to scoff at the concept of the unlevel playing field when you have been born into an affluent family and haven't suffered from ma.s.sive layoffs the way our auto workers have," McLane continued. "But for those people in Detroit-"

The Eye of Cy displayed a few brief flashes of green as several people took pleasure in McLane's personal attack on Cozzano. But most people didn't like it. They didn't like it at all.

Cozzano had turned slightly in McLane's direction. He looked like a great man, alone in his study, busy with important matters, who has to get up and discipline a puppy who has just piddled on the rug.

"My family is affluent because we love each other and we work hard," Cozzano said. "And I can promise you, Tip, that if you seek to gain the esteem of the American public by running my family into the ground, I will make you regret it on many levels. When a man makes cracks about my family, my natural response is to invite him to step outside. And I'm not above doing that here and now." Ogle rocketed half out of is chair and started screaming. "CUT TO TIP! CUT TO TIP! CUT TO TIP!" Aaron could hardly see anything; the Eye of Cy had become blindingly intense, like a parabolic dish pointed directly into the sun. But the image in the middle changed and Tip came on the screen; his mouth was half open, his eyebrows somewhere up in the middle of his forehead, his eyes darting back and forth nervously. The Eye of Cy turned blue (people who, as of three seconds ago, hated Tip McLane), with a few angry red screens (people who wanted Cozzano to punch McLane right here and now).

"Knockout punch," Ogle said. "Tip's out of the race." But just in case, he shoved the KIND/GENTLE- BELLIGERENT joystick toward KIND/GENTLE. Then he moved the MATERIAL-ETHEREAL joystick a lot closer to ETHEREAL.It was almost possible to see the wheels turning in McLane's head. The look of surprise gradually faded, until he looked impa.s.sive, then calm and almost coldly defiant. "It wouldn't be the first time I had settled an argument that way," McLane said.

"Ouch," Ogle said.

"But one of the first things a president has to learn is to separate his personal feelings from the affairs of the nation, and-'

Colors shifted all over the Eye. "Damage control!" Ogle said, and slammed one of the b.u.t.tons on the armrest.

"-as for the issue of the auto industry," Cozzano said, continuing his own sentence as if McLane had never opened his mouth, and blithely running him off the road, "it is simply wrong to say that people get jobs first and then feel good about themselves. That is a shallow view of human nature. Dignity can't be bought with a paycheck. Your student deferments kept you out of Vietnam, Tip, so you never saw what I saw: stooped peasants in the rice paddies who never made a dime in their lives but who had more dignity in the last joint of their little finger than a lot of highly paid lawyers and chief executives I can name. It goes the other way: if you have dignity, if you respect yourself, you will find a job. I don't care how bad the economy is. When my great- grandfather came to this part of the country, there weren't any jobs. So he came up with his own job. He had only been in America for a few weeks, but in that time he had become thoroughly American. He had come to believe that he could change his own life. That he could take charge of his own destiny."

"Very inspiring. But when my family came to California-" McLane began.

"Some think that unemployment hurts because of money," Cozzano said. "Because you can't afford to buy Nintendo games and fancy sneakers. That is shallow and cheap. Americans are not pure, money-grubbing materialists. Unemployment hurts people's feelings far more than their pocketbooks."

In the past few seconds all the graphs had veered downward, the colors turned bluish. "I f.u.c.ked that up!" Ogle said, whacking keys and sliding joysticks furiously. "Bad move!"

Suddenly Tip McLane was on the screen. It was too late for Cozzano to dig himself out.

"s.h.i.t!" Ogle hissed. "Where does he get off saying that Americans are not shallow materialists?"

McLane was amused. He knew he had Cozzano. "Apparently the Governor of Illinois thinks that we'd all be happier being fully employed ... in rice paddies!"

The audience laughed. The Eye warmed suddenly to Tip McLane.

"d.a.m.n!" Ogle said. "Why'd he have to get profound on us?" He scratched his chin nervously, thinking hard, and fussed with the controls. "We have to suppress that urge to philosophize."

"Maybe the Governor hasn't been seeing a full cross section of the American public from his backyard in Tuscola," McLane said. "But I have, because I've visited all fifty states during the long primary campaign - even smaller states that my campaign manager begged me not to visit because he said they weren't important. I have talked to a lot of people. And over and over again, I get the impression that the people of America don't like being talked down to by politicians."

"That's for d.a.m.n sure," Ogle said, punching a key that caused a hallucinatory bullet to whiz past Cozzano's head.

"They know what they want: jobs. Good jobs," McLane said. "What they don't need is vague talk about how to feel more dignified."

Ogle groaned. The PIPER 100 were showing strong support for McLane now. "They're killing us," he said, and slammed a big red b.u.t.ton that said, simply, FLIP FLOP.

"When the forces of freedom and democracy stormed Hitler's Fortress Europe on D day," Cozzano said, "the elite spearhead of that invasion rained down out of the sky on parachutes. Parachutes made of nylon that was manufactured about half a mile away from my house in Tuscola, by my family. The nervous paratroopers, standing in the open doorways of those airplanes, looking down at the landscape of France thousands of feet below them, were putting a lot of trust in those folds of nylon."

"What does this have to do with anything?" Aaron said, mirroring the feelings displayed on the Eye of Cy: a state of chaotic flux."Shut up," Ogle mumbled. "This is good material. Reaganesque in its cloying nostalgia - with the metaphorical punch of Ross Perot before he went bats.h.i.t."

"When you jump out of an airplane flying over a war zone, you need more than self-esteem to get you safely to the ground," Cozzano said. "You need a solid, well-made parachute. Young people leaving high school and college within the last few weeks have a lot in common with those troopers jumping out of that airplane. And if you think that William A. Cozzano intends to send them out that door with nothing more than some feel-good talk, you're dead wrong."

"But that's the opposite of what he just said," Aaron said.

"Just shut up," Ogle said. "I think he's got them going." As Cozzano's a.n.a.logy started to become clearer, the monitor screens had stopped fluctuating and begun settling down into a dim greenish pattern. "We need to get Anecdote Development working on that D day thing."

Cozzano continued. "Just as nylon replaced silk in parachutes, new technologies have to replace the old ones in our job market. And I can promise you that no country in the world is better than America when it comes to inventing new technologies."

McLane interrupted him. "And no country is better capitalizing on those inventions than j.a.pan," he said, "which is why I'm going to make sure that America, not j.a.pan, reaps the benefit of her creative powers, unique among all the nations of the world."

Ogle slapped his face and groaned. "That McLane son of a b.i.t.c.h is a vampire. Give me a projection."

Aaron worked at his computer for a minute, running some statistical routines. "Based on the reactions of the PIPER 100, allowing for a typical seventy-two-hour debate bounce, correcting for their likelihood to actually cast a ballot, we get 27 electoral votes for the President, 206 for Cozzano, and 302 for Tip McLane."

"We have a long way to go," Ogle said.

"Seems pretty good to me," Aaron said, "considering he's not even running for president."

"Details!" Ogle scoffed.

38.

IT TOOK WILLIAM A. COZZANO NEARLY AN HOUR TO FIGHT HIS WAY from the dressing room, where his TV makeup had been sponged off, to his car in the parking lot of the Decatur Civic Center. Along the way he had to shake what seemed like every hand in downstate Illinois, and kiss a fair percentage of the babies. His car, a four-wheel-drive sport-utility vehicle with every luxury feature and antenna known to science, showed up regularly on downstate television (every time he changed the oil in his driveway) and so everyone knew where he was going. Meanwhile, Tip McLane skulked from an obscure fire exit into his waiting Secret Service motorcade.

The Decatur Civic Center was equipped with loading docks and ramps that would have enabled Cozzano's driver to pull straight into the building and pick him up, but it looked a lot better for him to fight his way through a crowd of supporters. Ogle's men had set up a double rope line to hold them back, providing a clear corridor across the asphalt from the building to Cozzano's car. Cy Ogle had personally walked the length of this corridor with a tape measure, making sure it was just narrow enough to allow the crowd to nearly surge in on Cozzano as they bent over the ropes and waved babies and pens and papers in his face. Banks of lights had been erected on mobile jackstands, illuminating the scene like a high-school football field on a Friday night, and network camera crews gladly availed themselves of the platforms Ogle had set up for their use."It was not half-bad," Cozzano said. He was sitting in the backseat of his car, next to Zeldo. His driver and an Illinois State Patrolman were in the front. They were driving down a two-lane blacktop road at eighty miles an hour, accompanied by one of Ogle's vehicles, a Secret Service car, and a few Highway Patrol cruisers. It had taken them several hours to get to Decatur this morning because they'd taken a circuitous route through Champaign and Springfield. But on the direct route, at this speed, Tuscola was minutes away.

Zeldo's brain was practically overloaded by everything that had just happened, but to him the most marvelous thing about the whole night was that they were driving eighty miles an hour - with a state patrolman right there in the car with them.

He shook his head and tried to concentrate on matters at hand. Cozzano had turned on a little courtesy light that shone a pool of golden light into his lap, and was jotting down some notes. Zeldo watched the Governor's right hand, gripping the thick barrel of an expensive fountain pen so tightly it looked like it might burst and spray ink all over the car. He wrote in shaky block letters, one at a time, like a first grader.

His recovery had far exceeded their wildest hopes, and a person who did not know of his stroke would never notice anything was wrong - except when he tried to write. Cozzano knew this, it infuriated him, and he spent a lot of time practicing his penmanship, trying to erase this last vestige of weakness.

"We've got a lot of data to crank through. We're going to do a core dump on this whole night," Zeldo said. "a.n.a.lyze it every which way. Then we'll go over the results with you."

"Good," Cozzano said, thinking about something else.

"I just have one question," Zeldo said. Cozzano looked up at him expectantly, and Zeldo hesitated for a moment.

Even after all the time they'd spent together, Cozzano made him nervous. Zeldo always got thick-tongued and self-conscious when he was about to ask the Governor something personal, something he suspected that Cozzano might not appreciate. Like a lot of powerful men - like Zeldo's boss, Kevin Tice - Cozzano didn't suffer fools gladly.

"What was it like?" Zeldo said.

"What was what like?" Cozzano said.

"You're the only person in history who's ever done this, so I don't know how to ask. I know it's a vague question. But someday I'd like to get an implant of my own, you know."

"So you've said," Cozzano said.

"So I'm trying to get some sense of what it's like to communicate in that way - transmissions from outside, bypa.s.sing all the sensory subsystems, going directly into the brain's neural net."

"I'm still not sure if I follow," Cozzano said.

Zeldo started to grope. "Normally we get input through our senses. Information comes down the optic nerve, or through the nerves in our skin or whatever. Those nerves are hooked up to parts of the brain that act like filters between ourselves and our environment."

Cozzano nodded slightly, more out of politeness than anything else. He was still nonplussed. But one good thing about Cozzano was that he was always game for an intellectual discussion.

"Ever seen an optical illusion?" Zeldo said, trying a new tack.

"Of course."

"An optical illusion is what we computer people would call a hack - an ingenious trick that takes advantage of a defect in our brain, a bug if you will, to make us see something that's not really there. Normally our brains were too smart for that. Like, when you watch something on television, you understand that it's not really happening - it's just an image on a screen."

"I think I'm following you now," Cozzano said.

"The inputs you were getting from Ogle tonight didn't pa.s.s through any of your normal filters - they went straight into your brain, kind of like an optical illusion does. What's that like?" "I'm not sure what you mean by inputs," Cozzano said.

"The signals he was sending you from his chair."

Suddenly Cozzano's face crinkled up in amus.e.m.e.nt and he chuckled. "Oh, that business," he said. Then heshook his head indulgently. "I know you guys have a lot of fun with that stuff. It's all just parlor tricks. Was Cy doing any of that nonsense tonight?"

"He was doing it more or less constantly," Zeldo said.

"Well, then you can tell him to stop wasting his time," Cozzano said, "because it didn't have any effect. I didn't notice a thing, Zeldo, have you ever been in a situation like that? Debating on live television before millions of people?"

"I can't say that I have," Zeldo said.

"You get into a sort of zone, as the football players like to say. Every minute seems to last an hour. You forget about all the lights and cameras and audience and become totally focused on the event itself, the exchange of ideas, the rhetorical counterplay. I can a.s.sure you that if Cy Ogle were to walk on to the set during one of those debates and throw a bucket of ice water over my head, I wouldn't even notice it. So none of that silly business with the b.u.t.tons and joysticks has any effect."

"Didn't it stimulate memories and images?"

Cozzano grinned paternally. "Son, the mind is a complicated bit of business. It is a churning sea of memories and images and everything else. My mind is always filled with competing ideas. If Cy wants to toss in one or two extras, then he's welcome to do so, but it's kind of like p.i.s.sing in the ocean."

Cozzano stopped talking and got a distant look in his eyes.

"What's going on?" Zeldo said.

"For example, right now my mind is full of images, an overwhelming flood of memories and ideas - you have any idea how many memories are buried in the mind? Fishing for bluegill on Lake Argyle with my father, the hook caught in his thumb, forcing it through the other side and cutting it off with wirecutters, the severed barb flying dangerously into the air spinning its cut facet gleaming in the sun and I jerking back for fear it would plunge into my eye, squinting protectively, opening my eyes again it is mud, all mud, a universe of mud and the mortar sh.e.l.l has just taken flight, my fingers jammed into my ears, the smell of the explosion penetrating my sinuses making them clench up and bleed, the sh.e.l.l exploding in the trees, a puff of white smoke but the trees are still there and the gunfire still raining down like hailstones on the cellar door on the day that the tornado wrecked our farmhouse and we packed into my aunt's fruit cellar and I looked up at the stacked mason jars of rhubarb and tomatoes and wondered what would happen to us when the gla.s.s shattered and flew through the air like the horizontal sleet of Soldier Field on the day that I caught five for eighty-seven yards and put such a hit on Cornelius Hayes that he took five minutes to get up. G.o.d, I can see my entire life! Stop the car! Stop the car!"

Then William A. Cozzano froze up entirely, except for his eyes which were jittering back and forth in their sockets, irises opening and closing sporadically, focus changing in and out as they tried to lock on to things that weren't actually there.

They pulled on to the shoulder, opened the back doors of the car, and laid Cozzano out full-length on the backseat. But then he sprang back up, slid out the open door into the roadside ditch, and began to march into a field of eight-foot-high corn, bellowing in Italian. At first it was just inchoate noise, but then it settled down into a pa.s.sable rendition of an aria from Verdi, baritone stuff, a bad-guy role. The state patrolmen did not know what to do, whether or not they should try to restrain him, so they did what cops do when they feel uncertain: they shone lights on him. He had thoughtfully removed his suit jacket and so his white shirt, neatly trisected by suspenders, stood out brilliantly among the cornstalks. He was walking across the field, leaving trampled stalks in his wake, followed at a respectful distance by a couple of the patrolmen. His course zigged and zagged, but he seemed to be settling on one particular direction. He was headed for the only landmark in the vicinity: a tall narrow tower that rose from the field several hundred feet from the road, with blinking red lights.

"The red lights," one of the patrolmen said. "He's attracted by the lights!"

But Zeldo just shook his head. Right now his brain was almost as overloaded as Cozzano's, and it was all he could do to force an explanatory word out: "Microwaves."

Cozzano finally collapsed a stone's throw from the microwave relay tower. The patrolmen rushed inward, converged on him, hoisted him into the air, and began to hustle him back.

By the time they got him back to the car he was thrashing around again, but the spittle and blood around his mouth told Zeldo that he'd had a seizure and probably bitten his tongue. "Let's get out of here!" Zeldo said.Zeldo had already folded down the rear seat of Cozzano's sport/utility vehicle and opened the tailgate. They threw him in back like a heavy roll of carpet. "Go! Go!" Zeldo shouted, and the driver pulled off the shoulder and down the road, all four tires burning rubber.

Cozzano relaxed and, apropos of nothing, quoted a lengthy pa.s.sage, verbatim, from the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trades. Then he was silent for a while.

Then he said, "Why the h.e.l.l is the tailgate open? You want us to end up like Bianca Ramirez?"

Floyd Wayne Vishniak wanted to sleep but his thoughts would not let him. He lay on his mattress having an imaginary discussion inside of his head, moving his lips and gesturing with his hands in the air as he debated politics with William A. Cozzano and Tip McLane. The more he went over the discussion in his head, the clearer his thoughts became, and he kept finding ways to explain them. Finally he decided that he would write them down.

The light over the kitchen table hurt his eyes. He held one hand over his face as a visor and tripped around the kitchen looking for something to write with. Eventually he located the stub of a pencil on top of the fridge. Back next to his mattress was his weight bench and underneath that was a box full of weights and dumbell parts. In the bottom of that, under all the weights, was an old spiral notebook with half the pages missing, which he had used to record his progress when he was sticking to his weight-lifting program. He turned it to a fresh page and tossed it on to the kitchen table; directly under the light, the white page was very bright and made him squint. He grabbed a beer from the fridge and sat down to collect his thoughts.

He took the address from the videotape, as Aaron Green had told him to do.

Floyd Wayne Vishniak RR. 6 Box 895 Davenport, Iowa Aaron Green Ogle Data Research Pentagon Towers Arlington, Virginia Dear Mr. Green: I am writing this letter to you to express my additional thoughts and opinions, which you said you wanted to hear all about. Maybe you have already forgotten about me since I am just a n.o.body who lives in a trailer. But we have seen each other face-to-face once, and maybe we will again. This is about the Debate that was tonight in Decatur, Illinois, not so very far from where I live.

It is real interesting that one hundred years ago people were thinking the same things they are now about the Wall Street financial kingpins running the country. How ironic that still nothing has changed. I wonder why that is. Maybe it is because all of the politicians run on money, money, money.

McLane is power-grubbing sc.u.m and you can see it in his face and in how he acts, like a stiff. That is because if he acts natural and tells the truth he will probably offend someone who is feeding him money.

But Cozzano is an honest man and he tells it straight. He is the only honest man up there because he is the only one who is not running for anything. To me, the favorite part of the debate was when he invited McLane to step outside. I felt good when I heard Cozzano speak words of righteousness, like out of the Bible, and I truly wanted to see his fist smashing into McLane's face.

I bet that you got some good reactions off my wrist.w.a.tch at that moment. I bet the readings all went off the scale. Now you probably think that I am some kind of a violent person.

But in my heart that is not the real truth. When I lay in bed I felt ashamed to think that I had felt such violent thoughts. Even if Tip McLane is a s.h.i.thead it would not be OK to punch him out because that is not the basis of our democratic system. So I think that I would not vote for Cozzano after tonight's debate, no matter whatyour computer system said about me. Please make a note of it.

You will be hearing again from me soon, I am sure.

Sincerely, Floyd Wayne Vishniak.

39.

DR. MARY CATHERINE COZZANO FINISHED HER NEUROLOGY residency during the last week of June.

She spent a couple of days in Chicago celebrating with her fellow graduates, but during the past four years they had forgotten how to goof off, and it took a positive effort to have fun. Then she moved back into her old bedroom in Tuscola. She wasn't crazy about moving back home at the age of thirty, but she needed a quiet place in which to study for the board exams. She didn't have a job lined up yet, and probably wouldn't, at least until things settled down, which would not be until Election Day.

Besides, the house was still partly occupied by technical personnel from the Radhakrishnan Inst.i.tute, their computers were all over the place, and so she could almost convince herself that she was actually living in an advanced neurological research center. She spent an hour or two each day going over the records of Dad's recovery, learning about the therapy and how it worked. As Dad had gotten the basic rehab out of the way - learning to walk, learning to talk - his staff of therapists had withered away to a handful who helped him with things like writing. In the same way, the hard-tech people had dwindled, going back to the Radhakrishnan Inst.i.tute and leaving high-bandwidth communications links in their place, so that they could monitor the biochip from the other side of the country. Zeldo had told her at the beginning of June that he too would be leaving soon, but he was still here, sleeping on the floor of James's old bedroom, which had become a weird mixture of James's adolescent decor (ILLINI pennants and Michael Jordan posters) with appallingly pricey, high-powered computer gear. When Mary Catherine asked Zeldo why he was still here, he broke eye contact and muttered some hacker aphorism about how hard it was to chase down the last few bugs.