Interface (65 page)

Ogle slapped his face and groaned. "That McLane son of a bitch
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. "Analyze 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, bypassing 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 pass
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 amusement and he
chuckled. "Oh, that business," he said. Then he shook 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 assure
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 buttons 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 pissing 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 over
whelming 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 shell 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 shell
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 glass 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. God, 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 passable 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
passage, verbatim, from the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trades. Then he was silent for a while.

Then he said, "Why the hell 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.