The Gold Bug Variations

by Richard Powers

  Time to dig out of storage clothes stinking of cedar and naphthalene. Heinrich Schliemann Stumbles Across Grandmother’s Trunk. Did I really wear this? As late as last year? Should have bought the replacement winter coat last spring, capitalized on old stock’s mark-downs. Too late now; as with fresh vegetables and apartment rentals, it’s a cellar’s market.

  It seemed this week that sixty-eight degrees would hold out as long as its constituency. But a seasonal swing of warmth’s buffer, a few dry flakes, the hint of a pressure system setting sail, and the air is suddenly cold enough for the frames of my glasses to numb my temples. The radio playing in the apartment just below runs afoul of a flux in the ionosphere, bleeding the stations in and out across the dial. Partly sunny skies, breezy and somewhat colder. Dropping by this weekend, with the lows ranging into the deo gratias of medieval monks, or the cheerful idiocy of a helium-voiced talk radio host who argues with the home audience that things might not be half so bleak as they seem. That is, only twice as bleak as survivable.

  Every year, preexistent in the almanac, each day already marked out on the perpetual calendar. Light length on the downward trend, caught for a moment at fulcrum. Hours are too small an increment to think in. Clocks go inconsequential. I need a wider instrument—the click of tree branches—to measure the only quality that has ever counted. Weather is the one tenuous connection between this year and two years ago. Then too, the season slid so deep in me it seemed to change direction. Ambiguous cusp of temperature; newly bare branches identical to those on the verge of budding. With only the lightest push, tonight’s temperature could easily set off in me the same cell-programmed thaw. Cells can’t tell that no one is around anymore. Spark of arousal—dumb fixation, stupid holdover—while paging the atlas for him. I haven’t even pinned him down to a specific city. But he’s there, somewhere among the burnt umbers.

  In autumn, Herri, the Flemish landscaper whose rescue from obscurity will never be written, stood on a hill just outside a Renaissance village and painted the sweep of trees turning autumnal tones, harvest being hauled in, stooks standing in the vacated fields, departing vees of geese, soft rub of dusk on the contoured hills. And in the corner of the panel, almost overlooked—autumn bonfire. The only persuasive argument against living practically. The return of a familiar friend.

  It suddenly occurs to me how I might fix him to a specific spot. I’m not restricted to the atlas. Perhaps that landscape—the one word he’s sent since Dr. Ressler’s death—never existed. But the panel itself exists somewhere, if not the panorama it imitates. The picture sits in a collection, and all collections have catalogs, compiled and archived. I’ve got a skill. Let me use it, however irrelevantly. However much my trying to locate him puts me on par with those birds whose apparatus does not stop them returning yearly to the unilaterally abandoned nest.

  The shape of my day may already have been printed in the almanac. Sunrise at x. Sunset at y. H amount of daylight hours. The arc of prediction intercepting today. And yet: something about to give, about to happen, near at hand. Quick, close, behind the advertising, during the frozen dinner, over television, after the office politics, waiting its turn in the queue of current events. Something fundamental. Something real this time. The secret will come clean. I will not die in bed.

  It’s good to go to sleep with a project. Staves off winter for another week. But the day needs its quote, and one has just occurred to me. They still suggest themselves in the evenings—evolutionary holdovers tonsil or appendix. I juggle today’s for a minute, so tired I can barely spell, before I get it intact and identified. De Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. “They are all advancing every day towards a goal with which they are unacquainted.” The only direction the calendar allows, forward toward that old friend, leaving. The goal of autumn.

  IX

  CANON AT THE THIRD

  Days later, Ressler still doesn’t know the reason for Dr. Koss’s visit. Neither seeking nor avoiding, he sees her everywhere—in the lab, in conference, in the creaking Georgian hallways of Biology. He studies her for flutter, but sees none. She is unaffectedly congenial. No secrets: so I was wrong about your birthday. He does his best to be congenial back. A week after the visit, coming out of the office he shares with Lovering, he practically knocks the woman over. Who knows how long she’s been standing there. “You scared me,” she says. All at once, the pound of blood pressure, hypertension bruits coming on like Mardi Gras. Excitement or fear? His or hers?

  “Were you looking for me?” he asks stupidly.

  Embarrassment clouds her face. She looks away shyly, confessing something for the first time since her visit. “No. Your office mate. Can you give him this?” She hands him a note and rushes off too quickly. Ressler battles with ethics for as long as it takes to peek. The message is unsealed and he kills no cats by looking. It’s nothing; a reminder to Joe to get his paperwork in. The man has a mailbox for these things.

  She’s taken to dressing differently, but he can’t say how. She seems airier, her walk a brisker cadence, her shoulders buoyant. She no longer fits the make he’d assigned her. She can’t quite make the flamboyant smartmouth stick. He has no idea how to classify her, let alone interpret her late-night light arm around him the week before. Only her gift—those vinyl keyboard variations—proves irrefutably that she really dropped by. But that piece is the most ambiguous code wheel of all.

  He needs real work to distract him from speculation. He throws himself into the rate trials, promoting them from the make-work they were made for. He visits Ulrich’s office without appointment. Rousing the team leader from a pile of papers, he feels the force of his ludicrous mission. Low man on the totem, with no productive work to speak of, asking a man of thirty years his senior to humor a proposal he hasn’t even formulated. He sits nervously. “Stuart?” the chief asks, affecting pleasure.

  “Dr. Ulrich, I …”. He seizes up, choosing just that moment to remember Koss’s departure at his door, his trailing I want, which he now can too clearly name. “I think we ought to leave amino sequence analysis to the chemists.”

  Ulrich smiles at the boy’s diplomatic choice of words. “How do you suggest we get to the translation without the ciphertext?”

  Ressler knows Ulrich to be intellectually capable of grabbing the heart of things. “There must be a way to determine the codon-to-amino map without pacing over every inch of resulting print. The thing’s too dense. We’ll be forever.”

  “I agree.” Ulrich lets the full weight of silence spread without comment. Ressler fights the urge to run. After an agonizing half minute, he tries feebly to elaborate. “The sequences on both sides are too numerous and complex to correlate without a key.”

  “You’d like some kind of Rosetta apparatus?”

  “The cell is our Rosetta.”

  “Hmm. Have you any argument other than analogy?”

  “No.”

  Ulrich forgives the antagonized monosyllable, remains the understanding boss. “Interesting. But let’s follow through awhile longer with what we have. After the write-up on your trials, we’ll see where we stand.”

  Hot-faced, humiliated, Ressler leaves. Yet in losing his discussion with Ulrich, he’s gone a small step further in the elusive process. The cell itself as Rosetta. Feed it the barest theme … He lavishes attention on the radiation-doped microbes in his care. He hangs about the lab, isolating, repeating, recording, filtering for telltale mutants that might surprise, prove him wonderfully wrong. He fishes for results that will buy him time to consolidate, gather strength, coax the next hint into place.

  As he shepherds the petris, almost contaminating them with overcare, Ressler replays that day, ancient history, when Dr. Koss made him bend and surrender his head for toweling. The imprint will not extinguish. His temples tense under the contour of her recreated fingers. He maps his own, slow, reciprocal finger path over her head, the bridge over her eyes,

  the gentle ridge running along the sides of her skull to its crown. He
r skin’s capacitance courses down the length of his arm into an endocrine reservoir filling his abdomen.

  These buzzers set off others, until he cuts the chain reaction, recalls another day when a clue from Koss sent him into the stacks in search of the gold bug. One deletion, one insertion, and one substitution brings him to goldberg. Too near a variation to be accidental. Koss, yet another code thug, infects him with some viral mess, injects him with some vital message mutation. Before his paranoia can flail out, finding hidden significance in every coincidental letter-string, another message arrests him. A clipping left on his desk: a cartoon of a marvelous, machine-age invention employing two dozen elaborate programmed steps to butter a piece of toast. The contraption is pencil-captioned, “Goldberg Variation #?” Lovering saunters over from his side of the office. “Dr. Koss left that. Said you’d know what it means.” It means the woman likes puns. That he’s been a first-class goldberg rube.

  When the Blakes invite him to dine at K-53-A, Ressler gratefully accepts. He never imagined human company could be so welcome. Evie greets him at the door with an elbow squeeze. “I’ve prepared something incredible: a baste-a-bag turkey that ejects a little flag when done.” She leads him into the kitchen, where the rest of the family peers intently into the oven. Tooney introduces him to Margaret, a seven-year-old marvel of precocity and miniaturization. “I bet it’s a tiny Union Jack,” Blake baits his daughter.

  “Don’t be silly,” Margaret says, shoving him. “The bird’s from Virginia. A Stars and Bars.” With no trace of shyness, she commands Ressler, “Watch! Fowl in a flag-bag. It’s going to wave when it’s cooked.”

  “Maybe it’s a white flag. Surrender?”

  The kid rolls her eyes. “Funny friend you’ve got, Dad.”

  Ressler wonders what role Herbert Koss, the man who put Champaign-Urbana on the Food Technology map, had in developing the self-semaphoring bird. The family sits down to eat, making an unbelievable racket for a trio. Blake begs everyone’s silence, then drops his head. “Bless food thank Lord selves service.” High-speed blur. Ressler is stunned; is the man truly devout, racing through the prayer for the visiting agnostic’s sake? Or is the rapid-fire benediction for his amusement?

  He looks at Eva, but she just mugs back pertly. “Service selves Lord thank food bless!” Retrograde grace, in Eva’s mouth, the purest thanksgiving imaginable.

  Little Margaret giggles and adds, “Amen. Dig in.”

  The invocation wrecks Ressler’s appetite. “Dig in” these days has other connotations altogether. Home shelters, advertised in the backs of magazines. If the race knew the rads they’ve already released it would roll over and give up, adrift in a sea of brave new mutagens. Only this family’s free affection keeps him from the thought. He and Tooney swap anecdotes about their colleagues. Eva entertains them with more Tales from the Civil Service. “I have the sneaking suspicion that despite the upward spiral in the standard of living, we’re all getting poorer.”

  “Come again?” Ressler says.

  “You realize my wife hasn’t really quantified this.”

  “You should read some of these applications. ‘How are you qualified for this position?’ ‘I need it real bad.’ ‘Why did you leave your last job?’ ‘False pretenses.’ One fellow filled out the space Below the Dotted Line reserved for previous employer’s comments: ‘Would you hire this worker again?’ The guy wrote, ‘Yes indeed.’ Only he misspelled ‘indeed.’”

  In the general hilarity, Ressler leans over and whispers to Eva, soft enough so the kid can’t hear, “You have a beautiful child. Mail-order.”

  Eva claps her hands. “No, I assure you we got her through the conventional channels. Oh! That’s rude, isn’t it?”

  “All right, short stuff,” Tooney says from the head of the table. “Do your thing.”

  “Have to?” Both parents nod gravely. The child groans, clearly delighted. “‘Margaret are you grieving over goldenglove unleaving?’ What the heck is a ‘goldenglove,’ anyways?”

  “It’s ‘Goldengrove,’ sweet,” Mother corrects. Eva, with her ambidextrous brain capable of retrograde inversions, must have a soft spot for postromantic poetry. “As in groves of plants that have lost their green.”

  “Oh. I like ‘goldenglove’ better. As in golden glove.”

  “So do I,” Ressler concurs.

  “Get on with it,” Tooney mock-growls.

  “‘Leaves …’”

  “‘Like the things of man …’ Come on, girl!”

  “‘Leaves like the things of man you with your fresh thoughts care for can you? Ah! As the heart grows older it will come to such sights colder by and by.’”

  As recitation, the half-dozen lines are mediocre at best. But the child cuts Ressler to the quick. To a scientist habituated to the microscopic, her snip nose, proto-mouth, tiny eyes that actually focus and see are miracles. Blood courses through Margaret as she recites. Lungs pump, kidneys filter. Systems and subsystems weave an intricate, interdependent free-for-all. Her nervous system, a fine spray of veil, a cascading waterfall of paths and signals, subdivides into web-bouquets, structures more elaborate and beautiful the more he imagines their constituent firings.

  This is the awful northern face that molecular self-duplication must scale, an ascent as unlikely as the climb of chemicals out of the primordial soup of reducing atmosphere. The superstructure alone is inconceivable. Just the thought that a single zygote, in less time than it takes the average Civil Service gang to dig a bed for a mile of interstate, differentiates into vertebrae, liver, dimpled knees, and ears complete with recording membrane is enough to knock Ressler flat on the metaphorical mat. Yet nucleotide rungs alone curve this child’s cornea, curl her lashes. Nothing else needed; he’s sure of that. The entire, magic morphogenesis is explainable as terraced chemical mechanisms.

  This machine, this polyp, this self-assembling satellite of two parents with no special technical ability outside of inserting complementary parts inside one another, this self-governing bureaucratic republic of mutually dependent parasites (every one incorporating a transcript of the master speech), has mastered speech. Mimicked language. Biggest of the big L’s, from fist to lash, the real tissue. Margaret’s cells have found out how to say what they mean, or a rough approximation. Her hierarchy of needs insists it is more than chance initiation.

  This child, all of seven, creates, in a few phonemes, real grief, the shorthand sequence until then only metaphored. The metric, or rather Margaret’s meter, invokes the strangest insight: this morphologically perfect package is not a little girl, but a chemical unknown putting itself through reduction analysis. Her life is the task of isolation, the desperate longshot of learning. Margaret’s virtuosity denies objective treatment; he gets sucked into the shape of the line, the precocious musculature, the labial coordination. He stares at the juvenile a nanosecond longer than is appropriate, begins to see in that self-delighting, self-affrighting library of sentient routines a thing to spook the strongest empiricist. Design without designer. Effect, perfect and purposive, without even casual cause.

  The child—with that sensitivity, like linguistic preknowledge, built into children—picks up on his fear. Half into “by and by, nor spare a sigh,” she stops. The silence does it: his nose flares, blood flushes his cheeks, his glands secrete. A reaction mechanism, one of those instincts that puzzles the issuing organism as much as anyone. Margaret shoots a pitying look at him.

  “Peg, my leg,” Tooney jokes. “What’s up? Why heck you stop?”

  “That man is crying,” she whispers, suddenly no more precocious than her years. Ressler looks away, unable to evade this minutest observation. He has somehow grasped her, not as a performing child, but as this trial run. The helix’s experiment.

  “Well, maybe this poem is sad. Did you ever think of that?”

  She looks at Ressler, eyes huge: can this be? He makes no denial.

  Incredulous, danger past, racing through the syllables for sheer love of the sound,
shooting out of the gate again in amazing breach of decorum, in that elaborate, cumbersome, ornate, mathematical, obsolete, and hopelessly contrapuntal ritual of rhyme, she shouts, “‘Nor spare a sigh though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie.’” “Wanwood leafmeal” cracks her up. She cannot keep a seven-year-old’s smirk off her face as she finishes the postponed feat. And yet you will weep and know why. “‘Now no matter, child, the name!’”

  But Ressler no longer listens, let alone cries. He knows the name. He was that little girl’s age once. He knows the layout, the mortgage of that miracle—the process that has coarsened features, thickened spirit, and slowed joy while leaving him a perverse window through which to see the place he has left. He was himself that exploration once, despite his mother’s repeated objection “You were never a child.”

  How could the enormous head, passing only with agony through Evie’s conventional channels, a design resulting in years of dependent helplessness—the longest adolescence in the animal kingdom—ever have been selected for? A liability for millennia before earning anywhere near its keep. Yet that outsized organ is his biome, his stock in trade. He was the prodigy once, not much older than this girl. He lavished this precocious love on the home nature museum—a walk-in catalog of the planetary pageant. Every Saturday he redrew the floor plan: protective coloration got pushed against the kitchen wall and the ant colony went into the living room, clearing the place of honor in the front foyer for this month’s cause célèbre, the struggle between Allosaurus and Triceratops, in 3-D.

  His parents suffered the formaldehyde stench in happy silence. While classmates spent their energies on kick the can, he curated. It took him until sixteen even to consider running away, and then it wasn’t to join the circus but Byrd. Yes, like the rest of his peer group, he avoided sidewalk cracks. But he kept to the clear concrete on account of Pascal’s Wager: the consequences of coming home to find the ambulance carting off broken-backed mother prohibited taking the infinitesimal chance.