For live testing, Annie was indispensable. As a remote terminal user herself, she could report to Dr. Ressler the effects of the modifications at a typical station. She could also enter keystrokes remotely, sequences that triggered a routine, set in motion as if by accident. This made it possible to invoke and trace changes during a normal day without irregularities back in the computer room. Annie did this in full knowledge of the risks, aware that her complicity violated the state criminal code if none of God’s own minor statutes. We each loved Jimmy after our own fashion.
The operation involved some degree of what white-collar espionage calls backstopping: dummying up the record after the fact. Todd, the artist, enjoyed this part: creating on the text editor bogus console logs that looked exactly like real ones. Faking labels and directory histories for the packs they experimented on. Going into the low-level driver software and altering the dates on modified files. “Do you remember that Holmes story where the bad guys create the complete, simulated, subterranean bank vault one story above the real one? That’s what we’re up to. Hijacking an entire office.”
I hadn’t seen him in such spirits since Jimmy’s stroke; no, before— since we began living together. As they closed in on debugging the last subtle change they meant to introduce into the machine, I saw how much the two of them enjoyed the work, enjoyed one another, the exertion. It was an elaborate game, an intellectual challenge, momentarily divorced from real-world consequences, the emergency motive. They got carried up in the charge of making it work, making it ingenious. The life-or-death matter became play, lab for lab’s sake: what would happen if we put the patch here? Wouldn’t it be prettier if we rebuilt the allocation table? Why not read the records directly from the cross-index?
They were both vital for a few days. Strong and inventive with effort. Alive. Franklin earned momentary respite from feeling that he’d personally crippled Jimmy. And Dr. Ressler had, here at the end, finally found an outlet, a call to put to use that superlative skill in pattern-searching and manipulation that had always been his second nature. The young postdoc would never, in a lifetime, have imagined this experiment. But after a long detour, it was his belated return to biology. To Life Science.
CANON AT THE NINTH
He leaves the Biology Building, walking slowly, too slowly to get anywhere, strolling into the middle of the place he’s been trying to reach from the start, from before childhood. The last click of in vitro reverberates in his head with the clang of a meter-thick cell door being thrown wide open. Sprung in the open air, he explores its layout, feels its foliage, wholly foreign yet still familiar. The landscape he has lucked into is wider, more surprising than he ever imagined. A difficult passage in arriving, blind alleys and doublings back that he could never retrace, reroute, so obvious is this place in retrospect.
Ressler feeds into pedestrian turbulence, the passing hour between classes. People scowl at him for failing to get out of their way, or smile tolerantly at his distraction. He cannot quite take in his breakthrough, cannot believe that his own mental construct—string-and-cardboard mock-up, manipulation of the available tools—has led him to this threshold. Research, that inefficient recombination of insufficiencies, has rewarded him with the one prize every researcher lives for but never expects: a chance to locate part of the palpable world’s terrain, to summarize some fraction of the solidity that cares nothing for theory, to say something definitive about their real home, to speak some word about the grammar carried around in every oblivious mote, down there, inside.
His idea is simplicity itself: they must feed the in vitro decoder a stripped-down signal of their own devising that will yield a message beyond ambiguity. The peal of the carillon just now breaking out of the university bell tower rings a change in him, slows his walk further. The waves of enabled air circle him, bang up against one another, create in him a standing crest of astonishment and gratitude. He cannot accept his good fortune, the odds against it. For a moment, he has been appointed caretaker of the entire, immensely delicate experiment, trustee of the living possibility. Whatever happens from here, he will be glad to have— well, just this once—to have made a joyful noise.
The decoding can be done. He glimpses the necessary process and knows it will work. What’s more, this afternoon, walking aimlessly across the quad in May air, Ressler understands that this work, the lookup table—that rung of the hierarchy linking the life principle with slavish molecular mechanics—will, the minute it is published, be turned to further work, extrapolated, taken farther afield than he can now guess. Ideas are as self-exploiting as tissue. Everyone ever pressed into service— Mendel, Avery, Crick, Cyfer—is but a primitive precursor. The problem each has worked on, the postulate passing through their hands, mutates with every generation. It must, to remain viable. The concerns of those working on the codon table will soon appear as blunt and unsubtle as those old biological models of animism and spontaneous generation.
The future of his science sweeps across Ressler with physical certainty: in a very few years, the Sunday-school work of cryptography will go public, enter commercial politics. Too much need always hinges on knowledge for it ever to remain uncorrupt, objective, a source of meditative awe. After wonder always comes the scramble, the applications for patents. Perhaps, he thinks, unable to keep from grinning at the oblivious undergrads who pass him under the sycamores, it won’t be patents at all. Perhaps it will be copyrights, like books and magazines: genes written, amended, and edited like any other text. Only alive. Cold goose flesh runs up his back at the word that profit requires and biology refuses to mention: improvement. Everything life has ever been, this magnificent accident of doubling, error, and feedback, changes forever in this minute, makes an incalculable macro-step of fatal evolution here, now, as he walks across the quad.
Yes, the message has changed before, momentously. The marshaling of the organelles, the development of the eukaryotic membrane, energy by ingestion, colonies, differentiation, the notochord, the brain, the first croak of distress, courtship, self-expression: the word has always been permanently restless, wanting only to repeat imperfectly, recast what it has been until then. Life can’t be protected against a fate it’s coveted from the beginning. But this break is something else again. Angelic, catastrophic, unprecedented except in the origin. Life is passing the second threshold, emending the contract. The next generation will wrap their opposable thumbs around processes he can’t even begin to conceive. What can be filled in of the map will be filled in.
Worse: everything that can be done to the process will be done. The thing the adaptor molecule has for billions of years tried to articulate will, in the last click of the second hand, be channeled into massive habitat clearance, would-be property improvements, trillion-dollar toxicity, terminal annihilation. A million species lost irretrievably by the time he dies, an acceleration of slaughter that can only be ignored by an effort of will. One species a day, soon one an hour, one a minute. Not research’s fault per se, but tied to the same destructive desire to grow, be more. And in return—he can’t grasp the grotesque trade-off—a few new species that, for the first time in creation, can be signed by the artist.
The realized ability to masquerade as the creator—not achieved this week yet, but certainly next—this slim, second shot at the garden calls out for nothing less than a complete, instant maturation. Anything short of the creator’s wisdom will chuck us into chaos. Ressler skims his eye across the open space of this campus: a quaint building for math, another brick Georgian for music, a curious, classical colonnade for English literature. Clearly, we lag behind ourselves, knowledge always hopelessly outstripped by available information.
At one end of the trimmed rectangle, in front of the auditorium, a boy and girl, both sweet-and-twenty, stand propping their bikes, one’s thighs brushing the other’s. Each pretends they are talking. Neither admits the real issue, both crazy with spring, aroused to inchoate blur by sap-distraction. These two children will be first-time lovers toni
ght, find a way to violate the segregated dorms. Neither realizes the historical moment they inhabit—the sad potential, the willful waste of it. They may never know the place the way he does in this minute, wider, stranger, more calamitous than he suspected, the place research from the first has been desperate to reach. They will feel rushing finality in everything they do without ever being able to name the utter change in life’s program that researchers at their own school have set inexorably in motion.
He weighs the odds against the day being saved by the arrival, in the nick of time, of that judicious, adult nature that must accompany this discovery. No chance. They are on their own, lost, lost to this obscene place, a place larger than anyone can safely care for, the place his carefully isolated adaptor molecules locate and leave him to. Left to whistle in the dark the tune described in information-bearing strands that life itself will now be able to compose, perform with the chemical philharmonic he and his friends now conduct. Even now the piece must be further improvised, built up from the given ground, played on that piano roll he will pass through test-tube ribosomes. The cell-free spinet must take up the tune, singing as it goes, the way the record his love gave him sings under the reading needle.
But his experiment, a first solution to the coding problem, will put him no step closer to solving the code-breaking urge, a place unlocatable in either the lookup table or any aggregate survey of it. Investigation is an ache, a permanent displacement, an accidental by-product of necessity written into the program itself. He sees it briefly, the random outline thrown up for an instant in an electrical storm: he will spend what remains of his life guessing at a pattern that is itself nothing more than exactly similar. Those codons all in a row: just successive approximations about the possibilities of pattern in this world. The gene is an experiment in its own decoding. It too, like the commands it shapes, remains a beginner in its own life. An educated guess. A blundering amateur.
How can the one place where that fragile experiment thrives, how can it be protected, kept from being trampled? Investigation cannot and ought not be stopped. The command to decipher was present at the start, driving the first clunky, unshelled, self-duping, primitive amino-assembler. But if research, life, is to protect itself from itself here at the eleventh hour, the moment of its second revolution, curiosity must be amended, matured. He cannot bring that new thing to life by himself. But there is one he might ask about this idea forming in his mind, a friend who might already be halfway toward founding that new science required to save creation from the creative urge.
A nervous coed approaches him as he drifts by the library. Are you the one from the picture magazine? She thrusts out a scrap of cash-register receipt and asks him to sign his name. “Oh, no,” Ressler objects. “Thank you, but this is premature. I haven’t done anything yet. Ask me next year, perhaps.” He grins to smooth her apology and backs away. He runs for the barracks. Sprinting, gulping air, he knows it is high time—yes, even this late in life—to tie himself forever to his companion. There is something they must find, develop together as helpmates. They will only be able to reach it in combination, each contributing a half-proposal to the corrective that pure research calls out for. It is not too late to fabricate, between them, an answer to the riot of silence awaiting life on the far side of the patent. They will put the finishing touches on the in vitro catalog. Then they will use the international reputation the work will lay at their doorstep to convince the world that it is not too late for the getting of wisdom.
This something else: he hasn’t gotten it yet, he does not know its precise shape. But they can arrive at it together—the one descendant he and Jeanette can leave to this teetering place. Herbert can, of course, visit anytime he wants. Even live with them if he likes. That will not be the last concession to the law of human averages they will need to make in the decades in front of them. They must perfect the only way home, the one trick of natural pattern forever unpatentable. They must learn quickly, this afternoon, to care for living existence with the tender survey of parental love. It’s time for him to become a husband. A father.
He sprints the distance to Stadium Terrace, arriving on the stoop gasping for breath. He is about to stumble inside when something stops him. Through the thin wooden door, he hears a strain of music as familiar to him as breathing. She has anticipated him. She is inside, playing this disk hinting of the new science they must originate. He stands for a moment, simply listening, hearing a certain play of counterpoint for the first time. He pushes the door open, shouting her name on the air.
The record is indeed playing, Olga indeed centrifuging dutifully above it. But Jeanette is, like the decoding urge, nowhere. He thinks: The bedroom, enters shyly, wondering what tender, depraved rendezvous she has arranged for him. But the room is empty, the linen unmussed. He calls once, softly, pointlessly, to her attending ghost.
His answer waits in the front room, both sides of a full sheet in his laboratory notebook, left lying on top of the stack of delinquent periodicals that has become his de facto reference library. Every relationship he enters into on this earth comes down to a carefully printed message. Her hand, that spidery, runic script—as much as her voice, her scent, the curve of her forehead where his fits—begins carefully, perfectly across the horizontal.
I didn’t want you to hear from Ulrich tomorrow, secondhand, about what concerns you at first. I worked up the courage to tell you face to face, but as you know, courage has always been at best a periodic phenomenon with me. A few minutes of sitting, waiting for you to catch me here, and I rush into the cowardice of print, I keep thinking I can hear your step coming up to the door. I keep rushing up, shutting this thing with guilty relief. Impossible hope that you might somehow still free me from having to say all this. You always could revise even my firmest rules. Why don’t you come home?
Here is what has happened. Herbert, my husband, foreseeing every eventuality, knowing I might take it in mind really to fall in love with you long before I did, put in for a transfer some months back. The arrangements have at last come through. He has been assigned to—no matter where. The world is flattening out to uniformity anyway. The next choice is mine: Wife, are you coming or staying? Coming.
You will walk in now before I can finish this clause. You’ll look over my shoulder, read this, laugh. You will turn and walk out, leave me, unable to understand. How could you? I told you once that I have never lied to you. It’s true, Stuart. But all along, from the opening note I passed you, I’ve let you draw your own conclusions. The line between that and lying now seems more equivocal than it did before I turned thirty. What good is it to claim that I never misrepresented myself to you, if I never presented, either?
Oh, love. If all I had to do now was admit, make out that we two stole your baby. If I could say: my husband, all along, was the barren one. That we two, in sickness and health, in love so deep that it reached bottom, colluded to dupe you. That he told me: go find someone, someone brilliant, soft, crystal in temperament, kind. That I found the most intelligent, gorgeous seed imaginable to use. (Beautiful isn’t enough: I see your tightening lids, the flush of your cheeks as you tense under me. Brilliant doesn’t suffice: your leaps are like nothing I will see again.)
If only we had stung you for a little fertility. I could have lived with that on my conscience. Isn’t that love, when it comes down to it? The old pollen trick? Mutually profitable trade, exploitation. I give you pleasure to match your inbred fantasy, and take, in return, a painless biopsy, a little tissue you will never miss. I could forgive myself for having tried to steal your genes.
But that isn’t how it went. That wasn’t how I came to you. It’s exactly as I told you long ago: Herbert is fine. I’m the one with something wrong. He could leave me cleanly by anyone’s rules of fairness. Give me the severance payoff, go land a twenty-fiveyear-old with all her parts working as advertised, and even now start a family. That’s what all the tests showed. But, good radical skeptic, I didn’t believe the tests. I h
ad to run my own. All I needed to disprove them was the perfect man. I told you I never lied to you. I wanted you, wanted to give myself to you from the moment I toweled dry your angelic hair. But from the start, want was couched in hysterical denial. I thought we might remake physiology, you and I, if we were fierce enough. All selfless and abject, but everything I ever gave you I handed over with an eye toward the impossible return on investment, your saving me. You see, I’ve never wanted anything in my life as I want to be a mother. Think of the deepest desire you have ever felt. Then let it last unanswered every day for ever.
He looks up from the page, up where the walls meet the ceiling. She means discovery. Science. An urge greater than what I am after: in vivo. And she will never have it.
All this makes what I did even worse. I loved you, I love you this minute. Stuart, believe none of this but that. I would retract, qualify beyond recognition, to be able to promise you again all the mutual evers we have ever given each other. That’s really why I came by. Not to tell you about my going: to stare you in the face, get you to swear that you will never leave me.
The most selfless love I ever felt was self-serving. The deepest altruism I am capable of feeling is still after something, the thing I was after in you. You were going to rewrite the rules for me, or at least explain, at cell level, why I’d been singled out, left with a desire beyond solving. But you couldn’t do that for me. You could do nothing for me but love me.
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