A half-hour episode of a science news program, this one on the controversial new subject of infoastronomy, the search for radio signals coming from other solar systems. L. Bob Rife has taken a personal interest in the subject; as various national governments auction off their possessions, he has purchased a string of radio observatories and hooked them together, using his fabled fiberoptic net, to turn them into a single giant antenna as big as the whole earth. He is scanning the skies twenty-four hours a day, looking for radio waves that mean something—radio waves carrying information from other civilizations. And why, asks the interviewer—a celebrity professor from MIT—why would a simple oilman be interested in such a high-flown, abstract pursuit?
“I just about got this planet all sewn up.”
Rife delivers this line with an incredibly sardonic and contemptuous twang, the exaggerated accent of a cowboy who suspects that some Yankee pencilneck is looking down his nose at him.
Another news piece, this one apparently done a few years later. Again we are on the Enterprise, but this time the atmosphere is different again. The top deck has been turned into an openair refugee camp. It is swarming with Bangladeshis that L. Bob Rife plucked out of the Bay of Bengal after their country washed into the ocean in a series of massive floods, caused by deforestation farther upstream in India—hydrological warfare. The camera pans to look out over the edge of the flight deck, and down below, we see the first beginnings of the Raft: a relatively small collection of a few hundred boats that have glommed onto the Enterprise, hoping for a free ride across to America.
Rife’s walking among the people, handing out Bible comics and kisses to little kids. They cluster around with broad smiles, pressing their palms together and bowing. Rife bows back, very awkwardly, but there’s no gaiety on his face. He’s deadly serious.
“Mr. Rife, what’s your opinion of the people who say you’re just doing this as a self-aggrandizing publicity stunt?” This interviewer is trying to be more of a Bad Cop.
“Shit, if I took time out to have an opinion about everything, I wouldn’t get any work done,” L. Bob Rife says. “You should ask these people what they think.”
“You’re telling me that this refugee assistance program has nothing to do with your public image?”
“Nope. L—”
There’s an edit and they cut away to the journalist, pontificating into the camera. Rife was on the verge of delivering a sermon, Hiro senses, but they cut him off.
But one of the true glories of the Library is that it has so many outtakes. Just because a piece of videotape never got edited into a broadcast program doesn’t mean it’s devoid of intel value. CIC long ago stuck its fingers into the networks’ videotape libraries. All of those outtakes—millions of hours of footage—have not actually been uploaded to the Library in digital form yet. But you can send in a request, and CIC will go and pull that videotape off the shelf for you and play it back.
Lagos has already done it. The tape is right there.
“Nope. Look. The Raft is a media event. But in a much more profound, general sense than you can possibly imagine.”
“Oh.”
“It’s created by the media in that without the media, people wouldn’t know it was here, Refus wouldn’t come out and glom onto it the way they do. And it sustains the media. It creates a lot of information flow—movies, news reports—you know.”
“So you’re creating your own news event to make money off the information flow that it creates?” says the journalist, desperately trying to follow. His tone of voice says that this is all a waste of videotape. His weary attitude suggests that this is not the first time Rife has flown off on a bizarre tangent.
“Partly. But that’s only a very crude explanation. It really goes a lot deeper than that. You’ve probably heard the expression that the Industry feeds off of biomass, like a whale straining krill from the ocean.”
“I’ve heard the expression, yes.”
“That’s my expression. I made it up. An expression like that is just like a virus, you know—it’s a piece of information—data—that spreads from one person to the next. Well, the function of the Raft is to bring more biomass. To renew America. Most countries are static, all they need to do is keep having babies. But America’s like this big old clanking, smoking machine that just lumbers across the landscape scooping up and eating everything in sight. Leaves behind a trail of garbage a mile wide. Always needs more fuel. Ever read the story about the labyrinth and the minotaur?”
“Sure. That was on Crete, right?” The journalist only answers out of sarcasm; he can’t believe he’s here listening to this, he wants to fly back to L.A. yesterday.
“Yeah. Every year, the Greeks had to pony up a few virgins and send them to Crete as tribute. Then the king put them into the labyrinth, and the minotaur ate them up. I used to read that story when I was a kid and wonder who the hell these guys were, on Crete, that everyone else was so scared of them that they would just meekly give up their children to be eaten, every year. They must have been some mean sons of bitches.