The Gold Bug Variations

by Richard Powers

  The medieval natural kingdom was not indifferent object but pointed symbol. How else to explain the obvious interlocked design? Even its descendant science, stripping the world of every motive, reads like allegory. Even “nature,” “evolution,” still flirt with immanent purpose.

  11/11: I begin to see science as a natural selection of species’ postulates about the environment. Today: first U.S. patent for telescope, 1851. Tomorrow: Hooke appointed Royal Society Curator of Experiments, 1662. Empirical survivals for every port of call in the calendar. Survival of the fittest. Die-tosses developing goals; restless invention searching for application.

  11/13: I spend the day among the ants, appalled by the Bulldog variety. They feed their sterile workers’ eggs to larvae and queen. The queen mates for a day, storing the semen her whole life, from which she produces the entire colony. The Weaver, a near relation, is a bio-universe away. This strain uses its larvae as web spray guns, clasping the grubs in their jaws, coaxing them with antennae, pointing them to spots to sew up. Weavers raise Blue Butterfly caterpillars, nurse them to adulthood,

  protect them, sacrifice guardians as caterpillar feed, all for nectar emitted by the monster babies.

  Flowers inscribed with ultraviolet runways, detectable only by particular bees. Wasps that live parasitically in bee bodies. The Bauhaus finesse of trapdoor spiders. Other spider strains that fish. Fish that shoot insects with water streams; fish that fish with electroluminescent bait. Two-pitch frog calls where males hear the low warning, females the high serenade. More bizarrerie than dreamt of in any bestiary. A species for every conceivable emblem.

  I feel the outrageousness of what Dr. Ressler was after: a simple generative axiom telling where all of this comes from. Macromolecular feedback supplies the how without recourse to metaphysical why. Darwin gives the first internally plausible explanation not requiring a leap of faith. But gaps in the fossil record leave incomplete the account of how variety itself comes about. How can pruning produce the irreducible width of the world lab? That’s where my friend came in. Ressler was after no less than ancient myth: a physical explanation of variety. How the creatures got their nature. How animate arose from inanimate. How different one can get.

  11/14: Monod, Jacques: Chance and Necessity, page 48 of my dogeared paperback: “[T]he prodigious diversity of macroscopic structures of living beings rests in fact on a profound and no less remarkable unity of microscopic makeup.” Many from one. Complexity from the simple first principle. The living world as single event. Speciation is stranger than I’ve guessed: unstoppable, incoherent, continuous. All the parts of speech proliferated from the first verb. How can that be? Each copy grown precise in design, everything recorded within it geared toward undeniable ends driving every cell, each organelle. How can such clear, formal purpose arise without a purposive designer, no plan more steeped in necessity than chance?

  11/16: Twenty-three weeks left; twenty-five with cold showers. Six months to discover how different you can get. To uncover the answer alone, in the seed-spreading core of the self-extending program. To validate that great tautology: survival of those who survive.

  CANON AT THE FOURTH

  Ressler replaces the receiver even as she identifies him, picks his voiceprint out of a field of ambiguous noise. She guesses what he called to ask, and why he cannot. Koss. He grows frantic for communication. Woytowich’s polling problem triggers an infant connection that he must run past someone. If he cannot find some safe other with whom he can coax it out, the link struggling to the surface will be lost. But he cannot call Koss back; the first phoneme of her voice already trickles with forgetting.

  He rushes from his office to Toveh Botkin’s Viennese study. Her door is unlocked, but Botkin is not there. Ressler scans the lavender, heavy furnishings and thinks: She will be dead soon. Her century of science will stop. She will disperse into ammonias, hydroxyls, aromatic hydrocarbons. Rilke and Furtwängler will scatter in auction. A regret passes through him that he cannot stop and predicate. No one at all in the building. He remembers: night-time. The ordinary world goes home. Ressler runs out into the autumn air, following the route by heart. He reaches Stadium Terrace, K court, then 53, but at that gauge, his internal pointer veers toward A, the Blakes’ end of the triplex. Ressler has not visited Tooney since the night he was shaken by child and wife. But he needs his neighbors now, needs to sound them out. Only words will get to the issue, however much he distrusts the medium. He rings the bell, stands on the stoop listening to the muffled sounds of surprise on the far side of the door. While the porch light floods on and the door lurches open, a shock of excitement stretches over his chest. The world is continuous, unlimited rearrangement: Jeanette knew his silence.

  The Blakes greet him with great huzzah. Ressler, here on their turf, so late, uncoerced. Margaret cheers the reprieve from bedtime. “Hello,” she greets him, wary with memory.

  “Hello,” Ressler grins. “Know any new poems?”

  Little Margaret turns her face into her shoulder. Ressler pecks Eva on the cheek shyly and pumps Tooney’s hand, grateful that the man has survived to be here at this moment. “Drink?” his host offers. “Eat? Be merry?” Ressler shakes his head. Blake, nonplussed but delighted, leads him into the front room.

  They barely sit down when Ressler bursts into things. “Tooney. What, in your opinion, have we been up to?”

  “Don’t know about you. I’ve been putting the kid to bed.”

  Ressler doesn’t even break stride. “Cyfer. These months. Trying to solve the coding problem by equating specific base sequences with amino acid arrangements in protein polypeptides.”

  “Now you tell me.” But Stuart’s excitement is contagious.

  “And how have we gone about it? Like bloody Poe. Studying all known enzymes. Looking for patterns. Letter frequencies. Clumps where we might wedge a lever of correspondence. But we’re making one, glaring, freshman presupposition.”

  “I give up.”

  Ressler is too fired up to be disappointed. “We’re combing amino sequences for some evidence of prior necessity. Why? There is no codemaker, Toon.” Ressler speaks as if bluntly urging a child to shake off a scrape.

  “All right,” Blake says slowly. “Assume I follow. I’m afraid I don’t see the ramifications, except …”

  “Except that we’ve been attacking the problem ass-backwards.” Talking to another is still superior to talking to himself, even if he must explain everything. “Listen, Tooney. I’ve got to talk dirty for a minute.”

  “Wife! Leave the room.”

  Eva, in the other room, hears her husband bellow and enters just in time to hear Ressler say “In vitro.”

  Eva laughs and says, “Et in terra pax.” Ressler, Lutheran, looks blank. But he latches onto Evie, her unspecialized ears every bit as helpful as her scientist mate’s. He explains the vitro/vivo dichotomy. To Eva, the difference between running an experiment outside rather than inside a living system seems functional. “I thought y’all did everything with test tubes,” she drawls. “Don’t you choose the most convenient method? Careful isolation under glass …”

  “… can stand in for runs on the real thing?” Ressler informs her of the hitches. He feels renewed need to make the point hurriedly. “In vivo—testing with living things—is like Murrow’s report from a street under fire. Firsthand information, but chaotic. In vitro gives a coherent but dangerously simplified recreation, from the calm of the studio. A whole new can of helical worms.”

  Blake whistles. “You want a cell-free system.”

  “Exactly,” Ressler shouts, jumping up. A moan of resigned fear comes from the just-dozing child in the next room, and he lowers his voice. “I knew you would come through.” Blake has supplied him with the thing he was after. A name.

  “Stuart. I don’t know. Even supposing that synthesis behaves no differently outside the cell than in. That a reaction’s a reaction, that living things form no special domain.” The whole point of the last hundred year
s. “Still …”

  Stuart waits for the objection, the use of talk. Blake thinks in silence, knowing what’s at stake and measuring ambiguities the best he can. After some seconds, he says, “In simulating the translation reactions outside the cell, reducing the case to manageable proportions, we might …”

  “Yes?”

  “I don’t know. Violate the complexity threshold?”

  “The what?”

  “I know. It sounds mystical. But can we be sure that reduction to constituents won’t strip out emergent phenomena?”

  “Is there such an animal?”

  “Jesus. Maybe I’m in the wrong line of work.” Eva sits next to her husband, squeezes his feet. “In vitro,” Blake works out tentatively, “might give us repeatable evidence. But would it ignore some cellular interdependence?”

  The two pore over the new angle while the third party sits by, asks for occasional clarification, keeps them honest. They push on the problem into early morning, hitting a hard spot that won’t budge. Tooney looks at his watch, laughs, and announces, “I have to drive to Chicago in five hours.” Ressler apologizes, Blake waves him off, and they tap the matter another fifteen minutes. It’s impossible to say, as the meeting breaks up and the Blakes lead Ressler to the door, how all three know that this talk, so highly charged, innocent, irrepeatable, will be the last of its kind. Blake walks Stuart across the lawn to K-53-C.

  “No coat?” Ressler asks, solicitous in the crisp air.

  “Don’t you start now. You sound like Lovering. Have you seen that pup recently? The man is so convinced that cold germs are gunning for him that he won’t even shake hands. It’s one thing to rage against a wet-head. Another to run around in permanent parka. I saw the madman yesterday, wearing gloves, indoors. He refuses to take off his muffler even to talk. And here it’s still practically summer.”

  “Tooney, it’s getting cold. There is a flu virus going around. I can sympathize with Joe’s desire to keep a distance. The idea of a packet of DNA attaching itself by landing gear on my cell wall, injecting me with alien nucleic acid, using my cell to reproduce itself by the hundreds, and then blowing it up in a grand exit is not especially savory.”

  “Tell me. But don’t you see how he practically forces me to bike to the lab in bermudas? I’m fatalistic about disease. I mean, if a virus has your cell’s name on it … I always say anyone can have Tea for Two, but it takes phage to make T4 tumor. Heard the one about the Cysteine Chapel? I gotta Millon ovum.”

  Ressler draws up short. “‘If a virus has your cell’s name on it …’?” But the idea, too far ahead of its time, is lost to a failure of concentration. They stand outside Ressler’s door, waiting for the vagaries of inspiration to visit once more in the pre-sunrise.

  “You want to trace protein synthesis forward?” Blake asks, summarizing, although the point is long since solidified. Ressler nods. “In a cell-free system? But how, man?” Ressler shrugs. He feels the answer inching on him, as inevitable as infection.

  Once inside the door, he dusts off the Goldberg disk and returns it to its absent place on the player. The music radiates again, with only a few additional scratch-induced mutations on the vinyl to record his fit of a few evenings before. The tune, suddenly exuberant this morning, confirms him that a method exists. An alternative, close to the beating heart of translation. In the precision of harmonic structure, he hears his own conviction that the coding problem rests on a simple look-up table—at ever lower levels, a mechanism to explain cell growth, viral piracy, symbiotic coalition government of organs, the origin of species, phone impulses broken off in panic, inexplicable behavior late in the year, fitful inspiration, the continuous cold modal rapture in chords, in vivo.

  He wakes after two hours and walks to the library, Saturday morning, bucking the current of fifty thousand Memorial Stadium football fans. Deep into the season, he still has not acclimated; getting from Stadium Terrace to the stacks against the crowd takes twice as long as normal. Inside the informational Fort Knox, he pores over the periodicals in a spiral search back into time, not knowing what he is looking for but certain he will recognize it when he sees it. He is skimming the Journal of Biological Chemistry back to the early 1950s when he is suddenly frozen by a muted roar—a tsunami coming from some distance. The sound flashes through him, followed by instant realization: this is it. The magazine ads for fallout shelters with plush carpeting and Scrabble sets, the sad government films teaching kindergartners to survive an airburst by popping under their school desks: the age of information has caught up with itself.

  But just as quickly, the collective howl collapses into silence. Ressler waits for another muffled announcement but hears nothing. Then the leap of inference: the home team threatening to score. All politics are local. Curious, he climbs to deck ten, looks out from this aerial outpost through the side of the stadium, between the banks of colonnades. There, a mass of fifty thousand particles forms a single, eukaryotic Football Fan. Waving, pink arms become the manifold cilia of a rotifer rippling across the membrane of this cooperative cell.

  Ohio State takes the local boys through a clinic, as they will down the years fading into time imMemorial. Watching this remarkable exercise in collective stimulus and response, the fifty thousand organelles testing and responding to their environment, he resolves to differentiate himself. He will give in to the pressure of selection, employ the one weapon he has for obtaining the one thing of any consequence to him: Jeanette Koss—tasting, achieving her, pressing, infecting, taking, joining, learning what she is. He will overwhelm her by sheer display of lovely force, of preening genotype. He will bring her an incalculable prize, like those chocolate-box corpses certain spiders bring their loves, proofs of potential that also shield the suitor from serving as meal.

  It relieves him to choose. Weeks he has held off, waiting for this impossible complication to become the first of simplicities. Now he will prove to her that he, of everyone she has ever met, most merits the selection of love. He will give her the most beautiful bouquet imaginable— objective, freezing, clear: the top rung of Jacob’s ladder. Half blind to their contents, he checks out a dozen bound journals and carries them back to his den. On his way, the collective supercell, its function over, lyses. He stands helpless, feels the crowd sweep over him. The walls of the stadium explode, issuing fifty thousand viruses into the air. Epidemic this time of year.

  LEARNING THE IRREGULAR VERBS

  I stopped loving Tuckwell and started resenting him. No reason. The same reason I first loved him. I can’t imagine how I ever thought my love might make a difference to him. Irrational arrival, irrational exit. I asked myself thirty times a day why I was trading him for an excellent shot at nothing. I wasn’t even trading. Nothing mercantile about it. I was giving him away. Throwing.

  In bad moments, I blamed advertising. It had always depressed me: form without substance, noise parading as sense. But in fairer intervals, I knew Keith only did what most of us do for a living: he sold things, only a little more honestly than most. He ridiculed his career himself: “The art form of the century. Concert, gallery, and holy writ in one convenient package. How to say ‘Eat Multinational Carcinogen Patties’ appealingly. How to convince the overcashed that all they need for happiness is leg weights. Mind-forged manacles.”

  For four years, he had shown me every ad campaign he did. Not for approval—to ward off boredom, keep us from drifting into different dialects. In the end, I chose one of his major accounts to throw a fit over. We were cooking dinner together, a familiar menu of acquired favorites. By tacit agreement, we did not talk about my plans to move—how far they’d gone, where I stood. We’d made that mistake twice since it became reality, and now cut the topic a wide berth. By dessert, Keith cracked his affectionate parody of my day at the office. “Question,” he said, mugging for my benefit. “Is the Human Bean getting any smarter?” Nostalgic lost offering, reminder of everything we’d given each other. He put it forward resignedly, but with an element
of outside shot. After all, the old joke had always worked before.

  But not that evening. “Answer: If you have to ask …”

  “Supporting documentation, please.” Behind the burlesque, Keithy was trying to save us. But I didn’t feel like playing. He spread a roll of paper towel and tried to amuse me by drawing a timeline of meliorism, marking pyramids, cathedrals, flotillas, railroads, and particle accelerators in little dots that broke out in a rash over the right side of the continuum. I ignored him, clearing dishes, putting up the leftovers.

  “Einstein,” he chuckled. “Lord Keynes. Pretty heavy hitters in recent generations. The semiconductor,” he challenged, drawing one at the far right, in a halo of stars. “Quantum electrodynamics. Got you there!” He drew a triumphal arch for each one. He caricatured a baroque staircase leading from midcentury ever upwards off the map, bearing a little sign reading “This Way. Watch Your Step.” He would have broken my heart had I let him.

  “This is absurd,” I said, level-voiced, ready for violence. “Love Canal. Ozone depletion. Tropical rain forest the size of Connecticut destroyed annually. A hundred thousand species extinct by the time we retire. How smart can you get?” Keithy diluted the silence by a low whistle. With a few deft sketches, he infested his staircase with cracks, broke it off in a shower of mortar and falling bodies. Mounted sideways on the resulting chasm, he hung a sign pointing downwards: “To Holiday Inn.” He waited for a reaction I wouldn’t give. “That reminds me,” he said, leaving the room to fetch his portfolio as I used the timeline to wipe the table. He returned with the boards for a national campaign and ran them past me for approval.

  I must have thought to make things easy for him by making myself ugly. I still loved him that much. But real connection between us died the moment I tried to protect him from what was happening. I flipped through his pictures, written in the world’s only ubiquitous language, its syntax carrying the cozy, intimate delusion of tin-can telephones. I read his copy with the feeling that none of it made any sense. I understood the message. But his whole campaign didn’t mean anything. “Keith, you say ‘safer’ here, but you never say safer than what.”