The Gold Bug Variations

by Richard Powers

  The two sit in a San Francisco studio, battling toe to toe on the feasibility—no, the desirability—of a comprehensive nuclear test ban. “For those of you out in the home audience,” Woyty editorializes, “these men are not paid actors. They are two giants of modern science, delay-broadcast, of course. Any hair-tearing or tossed water glasses long since edited out.”

  Ressler wants the man to shut up so he can hear; he can’t believe it’s happening. The scientists both smile disarmingly. There’s a lot of heavy eyebrow work going on, and a good deal of finger-pointing as well. Teller’s deep, black eye sockets versus Pauling’s shiny pate. Incredulous, Ressler looks from combatant to combatant, trying to follow their reasoning. Teller seems to say that there would be no way of knowing how effective or reliable a device would be if testing were eliminated. Pauling shouts that that is precisely the point.

  Ressler studies the hook-nosed Hungarian. Like everyone else in science, Teller has recently tried his hand at the coding problem. Ressler read the paper, and concluded that the moonlighter ought not to give up the megaton day job. He wonders how this man can be a devotee of the same crystalline bracer that has recently awakened him to the uses of music. Teller’s adoration of Bach is legendary; he reportedly forced fellow members of the Manhattan Project to listen to poor recordings and passable personal renditions in labs ranging from Columbia to that New Mexico mesa.

  How can these men, researchers of the first rank, no matter what their politics, take the debate of so nebulous an issue out into the public forum? It violates positivism, the ban on discussing things one can’t know. Their sinking to the fallacies of politicians horrifies Ressler, grates against his belief that “is” and “ought to be” are and ought to be separate. He follows the debate, a glutton for revulsion. But before he can name the nausea in this public screech of intellect, Woytowich intrudes. “Stainer is canvassing this event heavily. In addition to figuring out who and how many are watching, they want an evaluation from any family that does tune in. They’ve sent out that favorite soft-science tool, a questionnaire. Seems they’re trying to determine if there’s a market for reality. If there’s any future for world-saving debate on television.”

  “World-saving?” Another defection. “You too …?”

  Woyty fails to notice Ressler’s crisis of conviction. “Of course. This is the Big One. The one I’m been rotting my mind on countless years of Wells Fargos to preserve.”

  Ressler watches aghast as the two debate safety, flipping the hot potato between their four hands as if the quarrel is just its subject matter. It’s agony to see Pauling, agent of so many discoveries, talking with such passion about so messy and unqualifiable a term as morality. It hurts the way a sports hero’s sellout to soft-drink vending hits a ten-year-old. Even Ressler can see that verifiability isn’t the real issue. If we can build the things, we can find a way of telling whether or not they’re being tested. The issue is, once set in motion, whether we want to rein the incredible apparatus in. What’ll it be? Turn back or get on with it?

  In disgust, he feels a gut-tug toward Teller. We’re condemned to test, to develop. How else can we know the desirability of an experiment unless we’ve run it? No ignorant constraints on knowledge. Yet something deeper swings him toward Pauling, the better scientist: aren’t we graced with some degree of foresight? Is what we can do always what we must?

  “We’ve got a problem here,” Woyty says. “Do I do my ineffectual bit for history? Pull out the stops tonight? Give my all to the cause? Slap the show solid nines across the board and risk instant ejection from Stainerhood? Or appease the testors’ expectations by turning in scores only a little above normal, seven point one or thereabouts?”

  Ressler’s problem is worse. Until this moment, he was certain that the highest obligation of science was to describe objectively, to reveal the purpose-free domain. But here are Teller and Pauling, carrying on on national TV as if some things were more urgent than truth, as if we’re condemned always to fall back on the blind viewpoint of need. As if observation—the dismissal of final causes necessary for any solution of the physical world—can solve everything except ethics. As if exploration without ethics were no better than data without theory.

  Woytowich runs on. “The secret word for tonight is seven point seven. A rough mean between what I want to give it and what I can afford to. Hover around a plausible pip, win an all-expenses-paid reprieve from responsibility. Escape a near-brush with commitment this time around, live to fight another way. What do you say, friend? Pick a number. Vote for me.”

  At that moment, rasped by this unexpected irritant, the next piece in Ressler’s maturing experimental procedure falls into place. Something’s been missing from his model of chemical inheritance. Obvious, now that it’s here: the coding problem is de facto a polling problem. Nucleotide triplets, wrapped in a supercoiled string, are not inert, static, informational bits. They are a referendum, a chorus of self-serving, purposive voices, a proliferation of experiment whose electoral outcome of enzyme behaviors decides their fates.

  If he can’t read the impossibly complex code directly, he can at least poll the encoder, map the mechanism by submitting it to ballot. Ressler walks quickly out of the room. Another word will jeopardize the fragile, crystallizing notion. Woytowich, looking up from the set, sees his junior partner disappearing down the hall. He misinterprets the flight. “Abstaining is still voting,” Woyty calls out to the vanishing back. “No vote is still a vote. A man’s gotta vote.”

  Ressler, not yet out of earshot, ignores him. He converges rapidly on an idea so beautiful that it needs his full attention. He can’t foster the notion alone. He needs to speak it to someone who can follow his thought, add to it. He races down the Georgian corridors to his office. He fumbles with keys, throws open the door, a sea of Lovering’s papers scattering in the gust. He blesses Joe for choosing that moment not to be around.

  He sits at the phone, runs a shaking finger down the names in the staff directory, picks up the receiver and dials. When the voice connects, pastel and alive, it shocks him to hear who he has called. He cannot talk, so amazing is the spectrum of composite pitches in that voice at the other end of the wire. “Hello? Is someone there?” As he places the handset back in its cradle, Ressler distinctly hears her catch her breath, whisper, “Is that you?”

  XII

  THE NATURAL KINGDOM

  11/3: Arrived again in November. Just being alive this late in the year is not in itself proof of having hit on a solution worth preserving. Here, now, as professional cold sets in in earnest, all the anticipation of autumn comes to this: surviving in changed conditions. New strategy for a new climate. I have twenty-five weeks left, twenty-seven if I shower with cold water. What to show for the months already spent? Only the months themselves. I’ve dabbled in the hard sciences, picked up a hint of chemistry. But I’m no closer to recovering that tune I dreamed myself inside of the night I heard of Dr. Ressler’s death. No closer to recording that score, the dance step that made me quit the working world.

  I’ve learned that the one panel Todd has sent me since running away did come not from over the ocean but from up the coast. The definitive cross-reference proves he brought the landscape along with him, knowing in advance not to leave traces. QED: I am here alone. And that’s best, when all is figured. Alone, flat out against myself. Close to the grain of the neighborhood, no motive except making it to the next calendar island. My days familiar, but flavored strange again. The closure of solitude, the only way of knowing I am here again in wet November, still imprinted with every shed skin.

  I now know the problem Ressler was after. He wanted to determine how clusters of inert particles able only to roll down potential-energy hills could stack themselves into grammars, loaded configurations readable and enactable: blueprints for assembling and regulating other clusters themselves capable of erecting, dismantling, rearranging, and elaborating every strategy that has ever emerged on this sliver of rock. A modest pro
blem for a by-product of those same, inert particles.

  11/4: I’ve learned how the molecular archives are written in sinuous ribbons tightly packed into each cell nucleus. How these chromosomes are demarked into discrete sentences. My file proves I’ve actually relearned this:

  Q:How many genes do I have?

  L.N., 3/23/78

  A:This number is not likely to be determined with precision anytime soon. The order of magnitude is 100,000. The complete genome of a human being is written on almost 7 feet of microscopic thread. Every human cell contains 3-6 billion nucleotide pairs.

  J. O’D., 3/25/78

  I’ve gotten a first sense of the tetragrammatonic golem recipe. I’ve won an analogic understanding of how seven feet of aperiodic crystal unzips, finds complements of each of its billion constituents, integrates them perfectly without tearing or entangling, then winds up again into a fraction of a millimeter, all in two minutes. I grasp, barely, that this process is taking place all over my body at this instant.

  I see in rough outline the dogma Ressler was out to extend: one gene, one nucleotide sequence, one synthesized enzyme, one chemical reaction, one inherited quality. I accept that synthesis takes place at the speed of two amino acids per second, constantly, for countless enzymes in every cell. I can, in cartoon, conceive how this codex might be read, how merely speaking its words creates three-dimensional globules whose folds make each a miniature chemical computer. I grant that one enormous concatenated clause of A’s, T’s, C’s, and G’s is the plan for hemoglobin and another, every bit as inanimate, for insulin.

  But I lack the critical keystone in the arch he was after: I cannot see how form emerges from the same mechanism. When to make bone, when pancreas, scale, hair, skin, or bowel? How large should the heart get? How to start it pumping? How indicate a heart at all? Take a broad, leafy, sun-spreading tuber factory, root, plumule, stolon: does the blueprint read, “Sprout a villus in the ileum; lace it up with veins”?

  Pattern-juggling pattern actually makes life. From brittle and spiny to sleek and silver: an impossible spreading text for four letters. Even crisp illustrations, the bright primary pastels by the Herris of natural history, their unambiguous lines running from luxurious organ encampments to the affixing term—“cilia,” “thorax,” “vascular bundle”—cannot convince me. How much worse, a millionfold more incomprehensible, the passage from monocot to monogamy.

  I find the evolution of eyesight remotely credible, but the production of perception from those same four letters baffles me. Behavior: the retreat of a sensitive plant from touch, phototaxis of plankton, nyctinasty in the morning glory, the butting of rams’ horns, neo-Palladian mud-and-twig palaces, the engineering monuments of colonial insects, the clicks and whistles of distress, the motor rhythm of walrus sonar (irresistibly sexy to their opposites), speech, for God’s sake? Are these enormous structures somehow in the invisible code? Can all this babel come from the same idiot idiolect?

  11/5: And that catalog is a mere draft, no, the draft of a draft. Years ago I received a scrawled Question Board submission, unsigned: Q: How different can you get? Inside joke, private incoherence. As it was anonymous, I felt no obligation to answer. But ever the compulsive collector, I kept the card, a record of what elbow-nudging humanity, Brooklyn branch, wanted to know in the late twentieth century. Now, five months since I’ve set foot in my old haunt, I’ve read enough to propose molecular biology’s stupefying solution.

  First, in a seven-year-old Scientific American—already fossil artifact—I learn that for an average human, almost every characteristic is homozygous. Only 6.7 percent of human genes are composed of different alleles. From that small fraction; all variability in legacy arises. How small is small? Taking 100,000 genes as a ballpark genome, 6,700 will be heterozygous. That gives 26700 ways of shuffling divergences—a number of more than two thousand digits—to pass on to a child. The growth of genetics has been the growth of realizing how huge the gap between individuals is.

  By contrast: the human genome, considered as a whole, represents only the slightest divergence from the closest living trial. More than 98 percent of our DNA is identical to that of both chimp and gorilla. Less than 2 percent of that seven-foot text is proprietarily human. The incredible conclusion is that two children of the same parents differ more from one another than Homo sapiens as a whole differs from the apes. Superabundance of intraspecies diversity holds across the spectrum of all the few million species nature is currently testing. The ways of varying the original life molecule have multiplied beyond any ability to conceive of them. How much do species themselves differ? I have only to look. Eel on one hand, elm on the other: two recombinations on the same letter set. How many different yous can you have? How different can you get?

  11/6: So different I can go no further on the coding problem until I narrow down my intended landing spot. If I’m to cross the bridge he was building, I’ve got to begin anew, with the question of what, if anything, all those coded strings are possibly after with their unbounded text scrambling. I accredit the ability of inanimate molecules to arrange themselves in configurations capable of coding. But I need to find why they go on coding for ever more elaborate configurations.

  I must return to the macroscopic world, to Darwin’s tautology. Survival of the fittest—Spencer’s phrase—has a definite ring. But can it explain that superfluous explosion of self-generating programs? Is the famous, world-altering phrase really a “law”? Survival of those who survive. Disappearance of those who disappear. After-the-fact synopsis of species drift, missing the driving undercurrent, the molecular surge toward diversity as a way of staying around, producing more of the same.

  On second look, I see I’ve misunderstood evolution as badly as my schoolgirl botch of Mendel. Education is wasted on those of school age. Now I find that evolution is not about competition or squeezing out, not a master plan of increasing efficiency. It is a deluge, a cascade of mistaken, tentative, branching, brocaded experiment, secrets seemingly dormant, shouted down from the past, wills and depositions hidden in the attic, how-to treasure maps reading “Tried this; it worked for a while; hang on to it,” program-palimpsests reworked beyond recognition, churches renovated so often in a procession of styles that it’s impossible to label them Romanesque, gothic, or baroque. It is about one instruction: “Make another similar something; insert this command; run; repeat.” It is about the resultant runaway seed-spreading arabesques, unrelated except in all being variations on that theme.

  “Struggle for survival,” red in tooth and claw, is misleading; low-profile passivity is the strategy of choice in at least as many niches as aggression. “Struggle” carries too much individual emphasis. Selection deals in the economy of individuals, even individual traits. But evolution deals only in populations, demanding not that they struggle but just that they procreate faster than they perish. No upward march, no drive toward perfection. Evolution’s move is lateral, spreading out, diversifying until every spot on the nearest-fit curve, every accidental juggle, has been auditioned against experience.

  A day’s reading makes plain that evolution is profoundly conservative. A species, on energetic grounds, stands to gain nothing by invention. Payoff lies in stable maintenance. Diversity, even more paradoxically, is born in preservation. “Natural selection,” like the chemistry of self-replicating molecules, needs fleshing out, bridging. Evolution is circular, post hoc until I can underpin it, link it to the same coding problem I’ve circled around for months.

  11/7: I read about barnacle geese. Beautiful creatures, larger than they should be, aerodynamically improbable, breathtaking in formation flight. Annually, their goslings pay the price of the safety of cliff nests. The flightless chicks throw themselves onto the rocks below, shielded by a centimeter of fluff. A few fledglings survive the massacre, perpetuate the behavior, build new nests next year in the fatal altitudes.

  11/8: Exhausted, I watch a nature show shown late enough at night to ensure that only the alrea
dy disenfranchised fringe will be disturbed by it. The film documents a slime mold so startling it needs seeing to be believed. A single-celled creature coats ponds in green scum. But when its food supply grows scarce, the particles transform. The cells congregate in huge colonies, differentiate, form the parts of a composite beast complete with head and body. The body grows spore cases that crack open and scatter single cells. The show cuts to a squid whose outer skin is an animated Kandinsky, awash in chromatophores that skitter across it in pigment ripples. The voiceover explains, in scientific baritone, that this fluctuating array is a map of the creature’s brain activity: a visible neural analog.

  Evolution becomes, on second look, an intricate switchboard, paths for passing signals back and forth: generation to generation, species to species, environment to creature, and back again. Life as exchange of mail. I think of the medieval bestiary, Frank’s beloved illuminations, circulated in hand manuscripts—the journals of the day. That interpretive system seeing the spectrum of natural form as a mirror of God, eager to alert us to His nature through every living, loaded semaphore in creation:

  The leun stant on hille & he man hunten here. Alle hise fet steppes after him he filleth … The lion stands on hill and hunts man here. Fills all his footsteps in after him, drags his tail over his tracks so he can’t be found. When he sleeps he never closes his eyes. Why? Welle heg is tat hil that is heven riche. Ure louerd is te leun the liveth ther abuven. Well high is that hill, that is heaven rich. Our Lord is the lion that liveth there above. No devil can find him; he never sleeps.