The Gold Bug Variations

by Richard Powers

  A week later, Ressler takes his first outdoor tomato juice in months. In vitro is still jammed, and he has nothing to fall back on but the torture of relaxation. Propped in the forgotten lawn chair, he realizes that he’ll soon have been in the I-states a whole year. The landscape is unchanged, but his 1958 debut stretch on the lawn is incomplete. No Tooney and Evie Blake will materialize, step out from K-53-A, glasses in hand, having waited all winter for this first lawn party of the season. No one will set up a chair at Stuart’s side and kick in a conversational bracer. No decimated Woyty, now, and Jesus: no Lovering. And Koss’s awful resolve to keep away, keep from seeing him, will be no weaker, no less erratic, than her original passion.

  His eye scans K court, the tar-paper triplexes. He looks across the toytown street toward A through J. He imagines all the doors opening at once, pouring out their contents, Tornado Day. He animates the imagined occupants, marches them his way, stands them out on his front lawn tapping an imaginary but ample keg, trading the character flaws that are the generating spark of all beer bashes. A neighbor who studies wish fulfillment in corporate execs, a woman who conditions rabbits to do this trick with a rosary, a fellow with a theory about rag content in Spanish Renaissance manuscripts, another who claims he’s in grad school but whose big trick is to sing the words to the Gunsmoke theme so fast you can’t tell what language he’s in: they are all there, behind closed doors, lined up in these row houses. Statistics and human variability guarantee it.

  He has only to tap on any window and they will come out, eager to meet him. Ressler has yet to commit himself to whether dreams carry codified information or whether they’re just electrical residue. As he nods deeper into this one, the difference becomes insignificant. He snaps his head up each time it droops onto his chest. Then, from nowhere, he sees himself staring at clarity, at the rarest, most paradisiacal species.

  In that moment of visitation—arriving once in a life if lucky and requiring a further lifetime to recover—it comes to him. He is afraid to move; the least muscle tic will frighten the creature off. He sets his empty glass down on the grass, taking forever to reach ground. He lifts himself slowly from the chair, feeling his knees infinitesimally unbend. He stands, turns, looks: it is still there. Everything he is after, the last bit, the complete, documented map home, squarely in front of him. His.

  He stays up all night hitting it, but it will not break. He tries to knock it out of commission by reviewing the literature, but it stands up to the articles. The means are so clean, so self-evident, that the suspicion that someone must already have it sits in the crook of Ressler’s gut like a silver-dollar-sized, swallowed acid drop. He is waiting for Botkin outside her office when she shows up the next morning. She’s surprised enough to know not to ask anything until she opens the door. Stuart makes a beeline for the couch, where he lies back and announces, “We are so bloody stupid.”

  “Instantiate that pronoun. You and me? The research group? The department? The human species?”

  “Whichever is largest.”

  “This,” she says, her pitch cupping upwards with each word, “is Biology?”

  He grins in a way that confirms his sweeping generalization. “We’ve done the thing exactly ass-backwards. We’ve done step two, the hard part. And we’ve been stuck backing up to step one, the piece of cake. Like someone building an entire internal combustion engine and then serendipitously saying, ‘Hey! Why don’t we put gasoline in here?’ Stupid. Dumb. Pea-brained.”

  “Dull. Dim-witted. Duncical,” Botkin agrees. “So tell me.” She laughs, infected with the visitation of science, which she has felt once before. Laughs for this young man, for the moment of insight that will not come in this way again.

  “Unbelievable. I designed it toward this end. I’d already realized it would have to be something like this. That was the whole point of Gale and Folkes. I’d laid it out, everything but the method itself, months ago. But I must have …”. Marveling: how could it be? “I must have forgotten.”

  “And now you’ve recovered?”

  And more. Romped. Routed. “You see, it was the fault of pattern. All those months of numerology we put in. I’ve been as guilty as Gamow, Crick, Ulrich, any of them.”

  “Explain yourself. Two speeds slower, please.”

  “We all wanted to make the codon catalog conform to some kind of internal necessity. The problem is, math does provide a few surprising, elegant, yet irrelevant ways of producing the number twenty out of the numbers sixty-four, three, and four. But you see, Nature—well, it’s not even perverse, because it’s not even a noun. Nature had no idea what we had planned for it.”

  “You’re suggesting that we forget your poet’s advice about forcing Homer into English—allow the result to be less than rapid, plain, direct, noble?”

  Ressler nods his head impatiently. “Because no experimental evidence for internal commas exists, we assumed a self-punctuating code, got hung up on catalogs where no two successive codons create valid overlaps. The notion of a self-punctuating, error-correcting code was never far from my mind. It happens that the largest possible error-detecting, self-framing catalog is exactly twenty codons. As a result of this coincidence, I was predisposed against even thinking of long monomer chains like CCCCCC. Monotonous strings like poly-C carry no internal information. Not worth toying with, I thought. Couldn’t be more wrong.” Ressler sits up, carried forward by excitement. “The trivial chains are our entrée into this thing.”

  A slow, broad grin of understanding breaks out over Botkin’s face. She glimpses it. Her pleasure confirms Ressler. She could blurt it out, fill in the missing bit herself now. But she sits back happily, waiting for him.

  “We have built ourselves a working in vitro interpreter, an Enigma Machine that converts any nucleotide chain we feed it into the protein polymer it stands for. Oh Toveh!” His voice is a husky, amazed low wavelength. “Child’s play. Stupid, stupid, stupid. It really is. We’ve built the flower, then discovered sun.” He’s come too far not to spell out the obvious. “Grunberg-Manago and Ochoa had polyribonucleotide synthesis three years ago. Accidentally, but we’ll take it.” He nudges the smile in her direction, stands, spins Euclidians in the narrow office. “Khorana has nucleotide-building down to a science. We can say anything we want to our little transcriber. So we synthesize our own RNA message, only we make it the most simple-minded, open-throated, informationless whole-tone shout imaginable.” In the beginning was the Word. “We make our own gene for reading, only we make it all of one base. We take this constructed, monotone string—poly-C, poly-anything—and submit it to the protein-synthesis process. I’ll wager the remainder of my fellowship that the resulting protein will be a repeating polymer string of a single amino acid. We will have the first word of the code: the codon CCC codes for whatever poly-amino makes up the resulting string.”

  “All right,” says Botkin. “We get UUU, AAA, GGG, and CCC. Four down leaves sixty to go.” That takes care of transmuting lead into gold. What do you do for an encore?

  Ressler’s face drops before he sees that the woman’s calm is affected, her euphoria about to blow out every pore. “The rest of the catalog is just sweat.” It is not, in fact. He begins to see how there’s always call for one more insight, one more piece of improvised ingenuity. But labeling, controlled mutagen-tailoring of the submitted message, polydinucleotides, combinatorics, short chains—time-consuming, meticulous, brute lexical mop-up will get them through.

  “Simple,” she concurs. “Dr. Johnson’s dictionary.” But beneath the sardonic restraint, they both know he has done the hard part. He has listed the set of imperatives for lifting the curtain. Her excitement is unconcealable, and it spills out of her in cautionary checks. “Anyone wishing to make a little conversation with the angels has to remember that jeder Engel ist schrecklich.” At his blank, startled look, she laughs and glosses, “Every angel is terrible. You’ve told Dr. Koss?”

  Something, a slight rise in the woman’s cheerful to
ne, warns Ressler that she knows the half of what she is asking. He feels the last step in an untraceable hierarchy of chemical events flush his face, conveying the source by suppressing it. Enzyme spray laces his central nervous system. He will not go on this way, pretending. He cannot bear it. And now, he need not. Heart, lungs, viscera do a Coney Island. He is diminished, augmented all at once, hung out on the first intervals of a melody that pronounce him infinitely powerful and shatteringly afraid, a pairing he needs no code wheel to read. Promise first. You must never die.

  Now he can promise. He can go to her, say, “See what a flower I have found you.” No more cause, no possible loss, no need for this denial, the refusal they have fallen into, the separation standing in for life. She must get free. The two of them must marry, must make, of the time still in front of them, the everyday miracle time already hints at. He will go to her, tell her he has sprung through to the far side. He holds the answer in his hands; hers if she wants it. He will ask her help and offer her his, daily and for good. What will it be like then, how impossible, necessary, and real, to be able to look up from anything he is thinking, working on, just look up—nothing so simple as that—and speak to her, hear her, be with her?

  “I haven’t told her yet,” he says. “But she’s next.”

  THEORY AND COMPOSITION

  Sometimes we played a game, essentially Name that Tune.

  Our friend would challenge us: “A sequence please, some clues,

  But make it something from the repertoire I’ve had

  some chance in this amateur’s life of having heard.”

  The point was not mastery of the catalog, but the pleasure

  in quotation: Were we familiar with those few measures,

  a certain interval, a favorite leap; that abiding high G

  in the ’cello, surprise rising fifths, agitation in the reeds?

  He thought themes between us might make an intimacy, could

  be almost like singing. We didn’t get it: “How long should

  the phrase be?” “How long do I need? Give it to me a tone

  at a time. One after the other; I’ll stop you when I’m home.”

  We tried him on our most obscure: Stamitz, Machaut, Cui.

  Then graduated to guilty loves. At last, it grew fun to see

  if Gilbert and Sullivan, slowed to a stop and in minor, might

  slip him. Or “Satisfaction.” “Watchman, Tell Us of the Night.”

  I thought: so this is melody.

  Leased office, dull mechanical hum, irritating flicker of fluorescence, and a few friends, stretching their vocal cords. A little patter, a little mix of the dozen available intervals. And out of this weight on the chest, our desolation, came a sudden sweep, a quick-closing glimpse of that place beyond the incurable, where hope might still germinate.

  We resorted to the concert war-horses. The point was to see how far they might be sliced down, pared back to their essentials, and still be recognizable. Ressler was uncanny. Even with my feeble approximations, he could get most of what I knew by heart in a few pitches. Half by reading my mind, half by the shape of the phrase, he got Brahms’s Fourth, first movement, in four.

  The suggestion of predictability in the masters outraged Todd. “Now how in hell, out of all possible choices—”

  “That’s just the point. Each note reduces the choices that are left. What pitch could possibly come after such a setup? And if you already know the next pitch, then you know the piece.”

  Todd persisted, confused. “Tell me: could you conceivably Name That Tune in three?”

  “Not if the notes formed an ascending triad. The whole question is, within acceptable tonal syntax, how likely the sequence of intervals becomes. Where do they point? Is the next pitch already telegraphed? Some sequences are so free, so without redundancy, that they might lead anywhere. Others are more constrained. Every melody heaps up improbability until, by the cadence, it can only be the one thing it is. If your three pitches were improbable enough, they might suffice to prove the private domain of, say, Shostakovich. Or Dragnet.”

  “And two notes, then? Still possible?”

  “Don’t push your luck.”

  “One?”

  “Pure potential! No edge; no message. One note could be the start of any tune at all.”

  It took a trained reductionist, someone who arrived at effusion relatively late in life, to see the shape of songs governed by information theory. Perhaps he did so simply to lead Frank on, force him to toughen his own indulgence toward washes of sound. Whatever the case, Ressler tested the first, tentative equation relating music to constituent melody and melody to strings of frequencies, simple sequence.

  Q:I’m just your middle-distance listener. Forgive me asking: if it’s really language, a matter of tending toward tonic, being driven back, how can fragments of phrase, motives, voices stacked into chords, moments that strain toward greater departure or return, how can these explain, begin to account for, the terrace of light, mottled rays guttering back to dark, joy, loss, the scent of my own ending in this syllable-free tune? Layman’s answer please.

  J. O’D.

  Sound, he pronounced, always means more than it says. The parts only start to explain the thing waiting to spring out of them. So it is in every organized hive. Because we live on the seam between formula and mystery, because I can recognize in the harmonic vicissitudes the hummable tune is put through some similar, metaphorical bend, music marks out the way all messages go. Its contours deliver themselves, bent from the chance of experience. They live for a minute in ephemeral pattern, then collapse back to a uniform void that says nothing, carries no knowledge, far less information. The silence they fall back into, the nothing that they contrast with, is what notes make, for a measure, audible.

  What else is there in a melodic phrase? However much it wrenches me on the promise of sound, signals from a place lost beyond recovering, a musical line has nothing in it but notes. A choice of twelve possible pitch-equivalents, durations scored out by a simple-minded system of ten or so lengths based on powers of two. What else is there in an allegro but phrase, phrase, and development of phrase? What is there in the Jupiter but allegro, andante, minuet, plus allegro? At bottom, only notes.

  But notes passed through a transforming key: nothing is what it is except in where, when, and how it goes about unfolding. Push that pencil box of notes, pitch it faster, prolong it, pinch it, prod it upwards, follow its fall, attach it to a line, stack voices on top of it, slacken, shift it off into unlikely relation, let it breathe, grow, summon, augment, enhance, startle everything around it, and suddenly, out of those ridiculously constrained initial building blocks, those neutral frequencies meaningless in themselves, with only the most elementary grammar or enzymes to shape them:

  I am (at first modulation) coming home late, pressed under the hot but changeable air, studying the warnings, the bruise-blue striations of a storm-sky. Someone—my mother?—runs before me, entering, crashing through the house, slamming shut windows, spreading towels across the soaked sills. A cascade of flats, sudden appassionato, about-face at the double bar, and I am elsewhere: watching frigate birds dip in a graceful circle into fresh pools, an enchanted oasis of animals studied through a slight break in the vegetation.

  And yet: that’s still not it, exactly. It’s no more an excuse to free-associate than it is equations. Besides, those associations—house, storm, birds, pool—are all too literal. Everything Ressler ever said to us was an exercise in how words might fit to music. But music into words? Don’t push your luck. It will run from any description like floaters skidding across the cornea when and only when you look directly at them.

  Yet it is, beyond doubt, language. It may be closer to the architectural plan for that ruined Tower than any other available approximation. I once read, when combing the literature to save Jimmy from his hemorrhage, of the way CAT scans reveal sonatas ravishing the cerebral cortex. A single tone shows up as stagnant Sargasso. Scales create r
egular ripples of red, yellow, blue. But tune it, trip it into a sequence, three-three-four-fivefive-four-three-two, clothe it in vertical harmony, and it storms, splashes across a mass of uncontrollably firing neurons, exploding into the rose window at Chartres.

  We know all the rules of air, but we will never predict the weather. Something happens on the rungs of order above the chromatic scale; something happens between the four first pitches and Four Last Songs. According to the scan, even the simplest compositional rules are enough to awaken primitive wonder, release the brain from the conventions of verisimilitude, free it from its constant dictionary of representation. But the scan shows something even more surprising. Composers, skilled in theory, hear music differently. CAT profiles of their listening brains show more verbal hemisphere activity, as if they don’t just let the associative sensations of timbre and rhythm swell through them, but somehow eavesdrop on a point being argued on thought’s original instruments. Can the effect be any less beautiful for being better articulated?

  What message could anyone hear there, what terrible conversation except the same, out-of-place, inexecutable instruction carried in the Linear B script deep in the nucleus: feel this, grow, do more with what is scored here? Harmonize it every time you open your throat, but know you will never come close to saying, naming what it is.

  Even those who can look at a score, a graph of the raw wavelengths in annotated two dimensions, who can see an ingenious inversion or stretto and feel there in the soundless study a cold stab up the spinal column, who can leap from the single cut stone to the completed dome: even they are not replying just to the notes on that particular page. They are hearing in the sigh of the appoggiatura the covert, coded, Latin joy at the approach of the Spanish Armada transcribed in Byrd’s motet. They are remembering Lully putting the time-beating stick through his foot and dying of infection. They are repenting to Mendelssohn, unable to premier Schubert’s Ninth in London because the players wouldn’t take the work seriously. They are reliving late Beethoven’s obsession with variation form. They are reading, where they still lie open, extant, the notebooks in which an unhearable humanity addressed the deaf man. They are scribbling addenda in those notebooks, adding unanswered questions there.