“Christmas music: is that the topic here? You two hear about the phantom of Urbana? Yesterday’s paper. Two undergrads walking on the quad at night in the snow hear this harpsichord tinkling. Nowhere in the world it could come from. But they both hear it, and track it down, with difficulty, to one of those cast-iron grates in the sidewalk. Turns out a fellow’s been living down in the steam tunnels for months. Persian rugs, stuffed chair, harpsichord, candelabra, bookshelves full of classics pinched from the library.”
Ressler listens to the transformed Woyty. After a bit more banter, he excuses himself. The snippet of excruciating chorale, Toveh’s interrupted explication, confirms it: some part of him has hemorrhaged. Companionship, connection to another is now as locked off as that beautiful halo of notes hanging above the winter cradle. He turns from the music, from his friend Botkin, from grinning Woytowich, turns into the decorated lab. Clots of partygoers, the forced gaiety of holiday streamers close the matter. He wanders the lab, a priori lost; it’s not miraculous birth all these desperate preparations are for, not birth at all. Each face swinging to greet him is etched with the same scrimshaw hysteria. The thought of doing his bit for this outfit repulses him. Behind the sickening mélange of aromas—the light Euglena petri mildew, the smoky paraffin and dye of burning reindeer, the sweet-greasy thermoplastic mistletoe, the unguent perfumes, hair oil, deodorant, skin lotion, the beakers of astringent and rinsing acids, furtive fart vapor trails—is a smell so stand-out that not even this richness can smother it: the mammal-gland emission, out-andout animal bafflement at being left here, spoorless, to toast in another New Year.
Then another scent, as neutral as air. Thin aromatic hydrocarbon, one part per billion in the room, catalyzes him. The smell fits; he knows it. There, shining from a corner, standing out against the sepia clumps of conversation, a still spot in the sea of relayed distress, a face as familiar to him as speech. Clear as the cold, cloudless night, a lucid journey of features framed in a shell of hair, eyes that flash recognition, that have been marking him all along, a mouth smiling broadly at his rush of relief, a young head shaking at him in wonder, in pure pleasure from across the room, announcing one, unambiguous certainty: be of good cheer.
Jeanette. His Jeannie. He can no longer keep away. Nor can he remember, so strong is this welcome home, why he needed to. He forces his way through the celebrants, drawn to her north. She takes a few steps to him, verifying: inevitable. In the blaring secrecy of this public place, she places the flat of her palm across his ribs. “I love you,” he tells her. He expects her to spring fawnlike at the snap of a tree branch, the flush of this snare. Instead, she melts against him, catches her breath.
“Don’t say it,” she answers. She looks up, all forgiveness. She moves her hand minutely against him. With that gesture, she assumes all blame, confesses to a symmetrical wedge. She lowers her eyes, awaiting further sentence. Every program in his body, every enzyme, every gemule collaborates on synthesizing a single biophor: take this woman and kiss her. He does, here in the middle of danger, hard, moist, lasting. Empty symbol, leading nowhere, appeasing only the immediate edge of hunger, explodes in his brain. A hand grasps his shoulder and he steels himself to receive the blow. But it is not the enemy, the legitimate complement to this jean-home. It is Joe Lovering, pulling Ressler out of the clinch.
“OK, Buddy. Move over.” Ressler, reeling, looks up where Joe points: a dismal piece of plastic mistletoe. The crowd around them smiles indulgently. Jeanette straightens his tie. He backs off, dizzy. Lovering steps into his place, looking over his shoulder confidentially as he takes his turn at grabbing Jeanette. “Sandy doesn’t need to hear anything about this,” he winks to Stuart.
After preliminary recon, Lovering launches his frontal campaign. To Ressler’s horror, Jeanette kisses the cretin back, with a laugh of anonymous pleasure in the license. Of course: she has to. Protective coloration, or they are both exposed. But her easy subterfuge makes him crazy. Lovering at last breaks off, pronouncing, “Hmm. In Sandy’s league. Could substitute in a pinch. But doesn’t quite ring the bell one hundred percent.”
“Thank you very much,” Koss sniffs. Lovering goes on to regale them with his astonishment at actually being more fixated on the polymorphous Sandy than when she was still a veiled novelty, so many months ago. Koss and Ressler ignore him. Unflapped, Joe snags a cup of wassail. “What is this stuff?” Lovering swills a mouthful, cocks his head contemplatively, and declares, “1889 Jolly Roger Green. Cheeky bouquet. Sandy’s a great wine connoisseur. Me, all I know is ‘Beer then whiskey, pretty risky. Whiskey then beer, never fear.’”
Koss blinks, rests a sympathetic hand on Lovering’s shoulder. “Joey, it might be furlough time.” Lovering downs another glass and goes on to perform combinatorial studies on the gifts from “The Twelve Days of Christmas.”
Ressler mingles, his gaze scrambling back to the buoy of Jeanette’s. She catches his glance with one just as helpless: Where can we go? We need to talk. He checks his watch; how long can the bash last? He is cornered by Ulrich and Woytowich, the euphoric father-to-be. Anxious to follow up the coup of the first paper, they are debating the next step: might the table be based on a super-symmetry of purines and pyrimidines? Never angels and shepherds for very long.
His earthbound colleagues exasperate Ressler. “Why don’t we go in and have a look? Study the effect of positional havoc.” He tries to take the edge out of his voice. “Induce point mutations along the length of the message. Compare the synthesized proteins. The words will fall like dominoes …”
He doesn’t labor the ramifications of Ike’s metaphor. The seniors smile in the thing’s glare. Ressler receives, for his pedagogical pains, a clinical gaze. Woyty strokes his chin, scanning the notion for flaws. “We’d have to work out a few bugs, of course.” Vogue expression, derived from the moth that crashed a complex program on one of the first sequential logic machines. Sent the coded instructions out into the electronic ether.
Ressler nods. He feels the blast of the kiln: the method, a complete experimental attack, all but here. He dies a slow death for the chance to work it out with someone who’ll grasp it, help him past the last hurdle. He bursts inside to diversify. Multiply, subdue with fruition. But he is alone—no ears to hear, no hands to understand. Except perhaps hers.
He slips out of the party, the mocked-up festive lab. He stands in the darkened hall, a hundred steps down, in a blind recess, waiting. Five minutes turns into an agonized ten. Surely she must have seen him leave. At last, she hurries out furtively, looking over her shoulder in fear, sheer erotic terror at being caught. He steps from his shadow. She stifles a shout and collapses into him, clinging.
“Listen,” he orders. “Nature, 1955. Gale and Folkes. Test-tube protein synthesis. Incorporation. I told Tooney, before he left. He thinks it’ll work. We place the sequence to study in glass. Out comes the offending enzyme.”
“Shh,” she says, convulsing rhythmically. “I love you.” The sound of singing, candle scent from the far end of the hall. He holds her to him, all along his length. Her tangled hair, her face, her muscular shoulders, the small of her back, her upper legs. “Make up for lost time,” she laughs, sniffling. She lets out a short, soft, pained cry midway between a howler monkey and a gothic angel’s et exultavit. He signals her, unnecessarily in the dark: Don’t even say it.
DEUS EX MACHINA
Q: Who made me? Defensible evidence only please.
A molecule able to influence two others that would not react otherwise: can my miracle reside here? Does DNA, the map unfolding the whole organism, do no more than manufacture reagents, golem formulae, tinctures where soul emerges if the secret proportions are hit on? The code I am after must embody not just stuff but substance: process, decision, feedback. Not data alone; behavior at molecular level.
The lint-ball tangle of an enzyme—its charged terrain of twists and turns, vise-grips for welding chemical substrate—makes it a three-dimensional, supple machine. Here is t
he muse of fire I’ve been needing. Certain of these enzyme proteins become single-molecule transistors, devices that test and respond to feedback, creating a free repertoire from predictable physics. The assembled amino string of an allosteric enzyme can tangle into two different shapes. With unique twists in each shape, it thus possesses two separate sets of binding sites. The molecule may be enzymatically active in one shape and inert in the other, like a shoehorn that sometimes warps into worthlessness. A substance that binds to a site in either the active or inert shape will lock the enzyme into that configuration:
The inert shape of this enzyme has a binding site that fits substance A. The active shape has a site matching B as well as materials C and D that it transforms into product E. If A grabs the molecule first, it locks it into inert shape, eliminating those sites that accept the catalyzable materials. The enzyme is switched off, C and D can’t bind, and manufacture of E stops. But if B first binds to the enzyme in active form, it locks the molecule into a shape with C and D’s sites intact. The faucet is held open; the enzyme joins C and D into E so long as supplies of C and D exist.
Ressler’s magic Boolean circuitry begins to emerge. The presence of A inhibits the manufacture of E; B promotes it. None of the compounds reacts with the enzyme itself; the machine remains unchanged except for switching on or off, always capable of switching back if the splint-substances detach. Even wilder: the inhibitors, promoters, and inputs, binding to independent sites, need have nothing to do with one another. A, B, C, D, and E can be anything at all. In theory, any chemical can be made to inhibit or promote the formation or degradation of any other. The effect can even be nonlinear; multiple binding sites on an enzyme could cause small amounts of compound to have enormous effects on the synthesis of others.
Here it is, my escape act from chemical necessity. Microcircuitry I can’t begin to map: a single allosteric enzyme made up of a few hundred amino acids, weighing less than a million billionth of a gram, accepting multiple, graded inputs and producing nonlinear output, a free-floating if-then program. It smacks of religion to me. But the conjuring act hasn’t even begun. Link the logical feeds of an allosteric circuit together, and the molecule virtually lives. E, the reaction product, can be the same as A, the inhibitor. Every successful catalysis then shuts off the switch. Or E, used up by the body, might degrade into promoter B, ensuring that new E is created whenever old stock is expended.
With self-regulating feedback, the enzyme becomes its own economy, gauging supply and demand in the chemical soup, even acting to adjust these. I enter loops, linked regulatory patterns more ingenious than theistic design. One molecule’s manufactured product can inhibit or promote another’s. Two enzymes activate each other in conjunction or opposition. Metabolic pathways branch and conjoin, one enzyme setting off two others, or two in tandem combining to shut down a first. These and, or, and not operations create a complete propositional calculus.
Coordinated microprograms capable of changing their own environment, able to spring into production modes within an instant of encountering a trigger, create a cybernetic network powerful enough to initiate the impossibly articulated behavior of the composite cell. Q: Is the tracery of microprogramming networks too complex to have arisen through guided chance? Q: Is it complex enough to account for the autonomy that high-level enzyme by-products—Ressler, Todd, myself—all suffer from?
I’ve started four times today, on four separate sheets—what? Nothing. Trivial message strings going no farther than Dear Franklin. Even the adjective is problematic. After months, I have the man’s address. I have a world of things to tell him. Nothing stops me. I want to write. But even today—Caesar crosses Rubicon, 49 B.C.—I can’t. I won’t. English doesn’t have the modality to say what’s keeping me. Writing him is fine, but words are out. A is too functional, B too forgiving. C and D are transparent excuses for E, which I will never bring myself to say to him again.
I own his mailbox, the lookup table to the one spot where he can be reached. If I could finish a fifth sheet, seal and mail it without reading … I could; I want to. The first letter of the first sentence, and I waver from one urge to the other. I am truly stochastic, indecisive. Do all inputs, computed, already drive me to one course or the other, or can they still be interfered with by some messy conglomerate circuit, me?
I try on Laplace’s old dream—to solve the world through giant inference engine. Ressler, alert, talkative as I had never before seen him, racing through the data stacks looking for our place to cut, cracked a joke about the final triumph of the reductionist program. “NASA’s eyes in the sky determine the vectors on every molecule of atmosphere. They feed all these numbers into a Cray, and the animal pounds away, megaflops, on a simulation that knows everything about adiabatic cooling, turbulence, vapor pressures, topography, solar radiation. The machine assembles and delivers a perfect prediction of tomorrow’s weather. Only it takes two days to run.”
The problem is irresistible. Do all my active enzymes plus the running average of the chemical soup they find themselves in, the jungle of bioeconomy (vast, uncatalogued tracts of electrochemical memory, mine and earlier), all the stimuli bombarding me from outside—the January sun’s false springs out my window, the glass of water at my elbow (complete with Brooklyn reservoir heavy impurities), the feel of the keys under my fingers—do all these independent effectors sum to one unique output: write him or not? They couldn’t sum to more than one outcome. What would it even mean to say the choice, the final cybernetic weighing were left open? Open to what? Whom?
I must be asking the question wrong. Any outcome, once reached, must have been decided by something. The sort of freedom I am talking about—Dear Franklin, Where are you? When can I see you? How long you have been away! Come home—must be constraint by another name. Constraint that jumps some complexity threshold. The molecules I look for need not be capable of autonomous behavior; the word, when pushed, probably has no meaning. But are they enough, in themselves, to escape the determinism of physical vectors? Do these microprograms, once fired up, always run the same way, water down an arroyo? Or can they self-determine, self-modify, rewrite their own program listings?
They can. Allosteric enzymes are themselves synthesized. The microtransistors are drawn up, tailored, detached, and sent into the fray by a macroprogram, the nucleotide sequence—semantic bursts of DNA thread. Worker bees, assembled by the queen in her hive, these hatchetmen, day laborers, have the critical ability to apply their logical toolboxes back on the master program. Allosteric proteins can bind to and influence DNA, inhibiting or promoting the synthesis of allosteric enzymes themselves. I stare at purpose, at the molecular level. The running program—DNA synthesizing enzymes—creates and executes subroutines that double back, influence the way the master program executes, cascading into new subroutines, run-time solutions.
To the best of my metaphoric understanding, it goes like this. Codons along a stretch of DNA direct the sequencing of amino acids in a protein. This sequence constrains the lint-ball molecule to adopt one of two or more possible shapes. Held in one shape by an attached brace, its personality—the lure of its binding sites—is inert. But when that jamb is removed, the protein recoils, takes on a new surface. Part of that switched-on surface attaches to a segment of DNA, switching off that segment’s instructions. The segment of code temporarily patched out could even be the one manufacturing the binding molecule itself. The substance that switches the protein’s code-modifying abilities on and off theoretically could be anything, even the by-product of enzymes manufactured on that or other DNA segments. The master control and its agents combine to alter their own combined behaviors.
One allosteric enzyme, working by itself, is already a formidable machine, reactively linking unrelated substances. Thousands of them, joined into branching, judging, regulating feedback networks, can just about account for the numbing inventories, the shifting assembly lines that run the corporate cell. With meta-programming—the ability of the central net
work to reset even its own switches—the last constraints of the hardwired universe are shed. The field is broken wide open. Anything can happen, and does.
But can chance alone create such structures? Oh, yes. I have become abandoned to the idea. Chance is necessity by another name, thrown over the complexity barrier. The building blocks for self-replicating molecules can emerge from a milky suspension of ammonia, methane, water, and free hydrogen treated with an electrical spark. All the other steps from polypeptide to vanished near-Nobelists can be derived.
Solution can take shape—slowly, stupidly, agonizingly inefficiently—on trial and error alone. Error takes care of itself, in the hardwired universe’s unforgiving compulsion to extinguish its dead ends. The trial: that much emerges from quantum perturbation—random mutation that infests the duplicating life molecule with variation. Molecular rules are not fixed, but statistical. That mother lode of modern anxiety—indeterminacy—lifts the whole dance off the ground and holds out the promise of sending it anywhere there might be to go.
Who made me? My answer, all but demonstrated, ten days past New Year’s, 1986, has none of the crisp, winter, nighttime traveler’s comfort offered by the old Baltimore Catechism. The science I study doesn’t even frame the question the same way. Each system answers only the question it asks. The magic, memorized chants of my girlhood dealt in revealed things—truths that could be got at only by leap, flash, obedience, and rejection of human comprehension. They will never be reconciled with a skepticism based on repeatable test.
Yet in both, the name is not the thing. The one scientist I really knew came within a hair shirt’s breadth of being a divine. Ressler was a Franciscan minus the cassock. He of anyone I’ve ever met was free from use’s hammerlock, the blundering functionalism that leaves us blind to the miracle of our presence here. I can’t begin to describe his speech, his actions, his days—they were so empty, selfless, contemplative. For a brief moment, he achieved a synthesis between scientist’s certainty in underlying particulars and the cleric’s awe at the unmappable whole.
The Gold Bug Variations Page 48
