The Gold Bug Variations

by Richard Powers

  Ressler sighed with exasperated pleasure. “Ice-minus Pseudomonas.” He returned to the couch, wrapping himself in a discarded quilt. “Not man-made. Man-manipulated. The process is neither so formidable nor so erotic as you think.”

  I wandered to the dining room. “Who’s up for a little jigsaw?” Neither man responded. “How ’bout a big jigsaw?” Flat. “Think your friend would mind if I worked on this thing?”

  “Of course not,” Todd smirked. “Just so long as you take out any pieces you put in before we leave.” I pottered away at Mr. Cuyp’s cows, an ear posted to the conversation I avoided.

  “How erotic is it?” Todd took the rocker opposite Ressler.

  “The lab technician identifies, by a lot of boring scutwork, that particular restriction enzyme with the ability to clip out from the bacterial DNA the sequence that directs the synthesis of a given protein. In the case of Pseudomonas, the deleted protein acts as a seed for ice-crystal formation. No gene, no protein. No protein, no crystal seed. No seed, no ice at that temperature. We aren’t bestowing any new characteristics on the microbe; we’re depriving it of one.”

  “Like clipping a Scotty’s tail?”

  “Only this snip is inherited.”

  “And this sort of deletion—can it happen in nature?”

  “It is nature. Only infinitely quicker.”

  “So where’s the danger?”

  Ressler shrugged. “Where’s the danger in a mongoose?”

  “But a mongoose is a separate species. Ice-minus bacteria are just a protein away.”

  “And you are just proteins away from either.” It thrilled to hear the man, the edge of alertness in his voice, discernible only in outline until then. “Yes, the Frankenstein fear is overblown. Transgenesis is not about creating life from scratch. It’s about juggling existing genes—existing formulas for protein manufacture. Deleting, adding, moving the factory parts from one organism to the other. You’re right: the whole genetic engineering revolution is only a quantitative extension of the ancient art of livestock breeding. Even interspecies gene transfer has a viral precedent. Only human snipping is a billion times faster, more facile.”

  “Moving around existing traits? That’s all we’re talking?”

  Ressler smiled. “All,” he said ironically. “For the time being.”

  Todd was high-strung. He spoke rapidly. “That just proves my point, then.”

  “No.” Ressler shook his head painfully. “That proves my point. Genetic engineering is not one single thing, but an assortment of various techniques and projects, all with different risks. By far the largest is ecological imbalance. Unpredictable, irreversible environmental mayhem that used to take selective breeders a lifetime to produce can now be knocked off in a dozen weeks.”

  “Mayhem?” Todd sounded personally wounded. “Are we that stupid? I’d think that any science capable of reaching down into the cell with a syringe a few molecules thick, of doping out the genetic commands and figuring out just where to cut and paste, should be able to predict the effect a simple rearrangement will have once it’s in place. The hard part’s doing it. Figuring out what you’ve done ought to be trivial.”

  “One would think so. But remember our simulation, back at the office. We wrote the piece. We knew what every line of the code did. We knew what effect a change to a given parameter would have locally. But the only way of determining the overall outcome was to run the code.” He learned forward under his quilt. “It surprised us. And that program was only a hundred instructions long. The human genome, in twelve-point Roman, is several thousand printed pages. The linked biosphere …”

  “This strikes me as a strange argument for an arch-empiricist to be taking.”

  “Names will never hurt me,” Dr. Ressler laughed. “I could do without the ‘arch,’ I suppose.”

  “We can learn about things by breaking them into parts?”

  “That’s the only way I know of to learn about things.”

  “But it sounds as if you’re describing some impenetrable big picture. Some transcendent sum that evades final analysis.”

  “I wouldn’t put it that way. Life is an immense turbulent system. Small changes produce large swings in outcome.”

  “Are you saying that even a complete understanding of the working parts can never predict how they fit together?”

  “I’m saying we don’t have anything close to a working understanding of any of those parts. A year and a half ago, two fellows at large state schools, using one of those miraculous syringes you mentioned, injected the gene for rat growth hormone and a promoter into a fertilized mouse cell. Their mighty mouse made the cover of Nature. Only: nobody knows how the mouse DNA took up the injected gene. It’s hard to condone commercial applications of work where the basic mechanism isn’t understood.”

  “Unfair. How can we possibly go after a breakdown of ‘how’ without first mapping out ‘what’?”

  Ressler was delighted that Todd, despite his lack of formal training, felt equal to the argument, even this deeply in. “Suppose the fault is not in what technology can tell us, but in what we are willing to hear from it?” Hope: the life cycle’s lethal enemy.

  I worked steadily on the jigsaw, a dozen times aching to jump into the dialogue, but knowing better than to risk involvement. Franker argued from a position of urgent altruism. He wanted to believe that by eliminating the blind, backsliding, short-interest, error-driven, groping element from the spark—the code at last rendering itself self-knowing, literate, able to grasp and correct the insensate message it has for eons posted forward to its later by-products—life might reach the verge of a new relation, cross the threshold of liberty. Dr. Ressler, for private reasons, put Franker’s hope through the burner.

  “Check out Chargaff’s piece in Nature. Half-dozen years old. ‘Have we the right to counteract, irreversibly, the evolutionary wisdom of millions of years …? The world is given to us on loan. We come and we go …’ This, from the fellow who first revealed the base ratios in DNA.

  “Hey lady,” Todd called me. “Verify this man’s citations.”

  If felt good to be spoken to. “First tell me where this tree branch with the two nubby end things goes.”

  The men came over to the table and began worrying the puzzle with me. Frank looked for spaces where particular pieces would fit, Ressler for pieces that would fit particular spaces. They were both infuriatingly good.

  “Do you have an ethical problem with it?” Todd asked casually.

  “That depends, I suppose, on what part of the ‘it’ we’re concerned with. Perhaps some genetic engineer somewhere is embarking on eugenic nightmares, but that’s another matter. I guess I’d say that I have no more moral qualms with ordinary gene transfer than with hybrid corn.”

  “Where in the world is the problem, then?”

  Ressler shrugged. “‘Where in the world,’ indeed. The field is only a decade old. In a little less than three years, the government has granted a dozen patents on new forms of life. Patents! There’s even talk of copyrighting segments of identified genome.”

  “OK, then. What part of recombinatory research would you legislate against?”

  “That’s just the problem. Legislation is too late. Legislation is about commerce, rights, equity. Once you need to pass laws about science, you’ve taken a wrong turn.”

  “Galileo muttering ‘But it does move,’ under his breath, just after recanting?”

  “Exactly. Of course, the state is right to prevent any process it thinks might harm the public interest, just as it takes action against phosphates in freshwater lakes.”

  “So what bothers you about genetic engineering?”

  “It’s not science. Science is not about control. It is about cultivating a perpetual condition of wonder in the face of something that forever grows one step richer and subtler than our latest theory about it. It is about reverence, not mastery. It might, from time to time, spin off an occasional miracle cure of the kind you dream about
. The world we would know, the living, interlocked world, is a lot more complex than any market. The market is a poor simulation of the ecosystem; market models will never more than parody the increasingly complex web of interdependent nature. All these plates in the air, and we want to flail at them. ‘Genetic engineering’ is full of attempts to replace a dense, diversified, heterogenous assortment of strains with one superior one. Something about us is in love with whittling down: we want the one solution that will drive out all others. Take our miracle superstrains, magnificent on the surface, but unlike the messy populations of nature, deceptive, thin, susceptible. One bug. One blight … No; the human marketplace has about as much chance of improving on the work of natural selection as a per diem typist has of improving Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations.”

  “But does recombination research necessarily mean selling the field into the market? We have this incredible leverage, this light source, mind. The ability to work consequences out in advance. Shed the stone-andchisel, save ourselves …”. I could make out his humanist’s evolution: cell, plant, animal, speaking animal, rational animal, laboring animal, Homo fabor, and ultimately: life as its own designer. Something in Franker too, voting for wonder. But wonder full of immanent expectation.

  Ressler was not buying, not all the way. “All we’ve done to date is uncover part of a pattern. We can’t mistake that for meaning. Meaning can’t be gotten at by pattern-matching.”

  “That’s why work is more crucial than ever. We’re so close.”

  “The experiment you want to extend is three billion years old. It may indeed be close to something unprecedented. All the more reason why we need to step back a bit and see how it runs.”

  When we went to bed, Todd joined me in mine. I was up early. It had stopped snowing at last, but nearly three feet had obliterated the contour of ground. Standing out against the unbroken white, as conspicuous as the pope without clothes, conifers went about as if there was nothing more natural in the world than converting sunlight into more fondled slang thesaurus entries on the idea of green. My eyes attenuated to movements, birds, squirrels, the extension of that trapped energy in the branches. I picked up a cacophony of buzzes, whirs, and whistles—an orchestra tuning up, about to embark on big-time counterpoint. Imagining the invisible sub-snow system—the larvae, grubs, thimblefuls of soil a thousand species wide—I suddenly understood Ressler’s point of the previous night: the transcendent, delivering world Franker so badly ached for: we were already there. Built into the middle of it, tangled so tightly in the net that we could not sense the balancing act always falling into some other, some farther configuration. The point of science was to lose ourselves in the world’s desire.

  Ressler came out, putting a biscuit in his mouth as if dipping litmus into solution. He greeted me happily. He gauged the snow and rubbed a palm over his temple. “The prospects of returning to the city in time to do tonight’s work have apparently slipped to less than slim.”

  Of course they had; we hadn’t left ourselves a margin to get back. We’d counted, covertly, on this emergency, and now we had it. We inspected the car, made token efforts at clearing the wheels. I got in and started the engine. Dr. Ressler wedged himself against the fender and tried to rock it down what was once the cabin path. But we were not so much stuck as buried. The back door of the cabin slammed and out ran Todd. “Brought you some traction!” Smirking like a schoolboy, he produced a salt shaker.

  “Save it for the boids’ tails,” I shouted. Giddy, euphoric.

  We rocked a while, stupidly, humanly, going a dozen feet.

  “Shovel time,” Todd suggested gaily.

  “You’re mad,” Ressler said. “It’s three hundred meters to the road.”

  “Note the metric precision,” Todd told me.

  “And the main road is itself under.”

  “Just as well. We don’t have a shovel anyway.”

  “We’d best call Jimmy,” Dr. Ressler suggested. “Not that he’ll be able to do much to pick up the pieces.”

  “Oh God,” Todd giggled, despite himself. “Jesus. East Coast Fiscal Collapse.”

  “Is there a problem?” Knowing what their typical evening consisted of, I couldn’t conceive of their being anywhere near indispensable to anyone.

  “We may not do anything. But those big metal boxes do. Quite a bit.”

  “Can’t Jimmy run them?”

  “Around the clock? Without cohabitors? Maybe for a day.”

  “At half speed,” Ressler clarified.

  “With the night operations procedures manual at his side.”

  “A book we haven’t kept current for months.”

  “So who has a phone up here?” Todd yodeled, listening for the echo.

  Ressler cocked his head in the direction of the path we’d taken Saturday night. His eyes flashed: it was not, perhaps, the shortest route, but was by far the more beautiful. This being North America, it had eventually to lead to a phone. We took off happily up the drifted hill. We made slow progress, propping up one another. At the spot where that pair of eyes had looked us over in the dark, we stopped and searched but found no tracks. The snow had long since rubbed out all trace. We crested and saw, a few hundred yards off, a house that looked lived in. We threaded our way down the valley, between the bare trees, hunters returning home. Making the most of the last few minutes before human contact, Todd asked, as if nothing had intervened between their conversation and now, “So is that why you quit?”

  I was walking next to Ressler, and he took my arm. “Not in so many words.” And because we weren’t going anywhere that night, or the night after, he suddenly had all the time in the world to tell us what had happened. And he did. In so many words.

  STORM WALTZ II

  sea_change(ressler,koss,X) if in_love(ressler,koss) and not(knows(X)).

  Briefly humanity recalls, in a dream of distant past, that use is no use. For a week, it’s again clear that the question is not ends and applications, but shape, sound, angels arriving on the raw doorstep, an ache, an instant hint, singing the new year in, in a bleak midwinter. Then back to grim progress. In a dim hall just off the Christmas party, the following afternoon in a public lecture, passing in crowded corridors, seated pointedly apart in team brainstorming, a few excruciating minutes alone in the lab: they fall deeper, more carelessly into unwished desire. Her confession of love, at the close of the old year, sweeps away his last sense that this has all been self-torture. He pays for that relief by losing all say in the outcome. He has confessed to her, too.

  He feels in Jeanette a perverse urge for danger. She is crazy reckless, slipping hand between his thighs at a faculty meeting. In their stolen clinches, she strains her head around with fear at the least rattle or click, only to relax her neck desperately again, hating herself, her nerves, loving the near-escape, moaning for more, moist fear. Startled, silky, mottled, new to the place, terrified, perpetually about to bolt.

  Away from her, he vows to break off, a resolution already hobbled by attached fatalist clauses. Hopeless. She demands to be pressed, kneaded, her trembling animal lip down registering the punishment of pleasure they cannot forego. Creature-reversion, triggered simply by touching certain spots on her—he can’t stop re-experimenting with it. The image comes involuntarily just before he falls asleep, how she closes her rolling eyes, shudders, lets her focal “I” slip twenty centimeters down her spinal column. He can feel it in her muscles, in how she stands against him, indentured to the flood response of her body, teaching him how.

  He too is addicted by the sense, new to him, of being victim to a thing he cannot help. Debauched, depraved; the words give him an erotic thrill proportionate to the pro forma resistance he still manages. He knows her public composure is the thinnest wallpaper patch above a seething hive in the board beneath. She wanders from the lab to the supply closet nearby, looking for something: tubing, glassware, him. He follows her into the distant room. She stands at the shelves, the picture of business. But turning, she
grabs him like a vegetative trap, nudges closed the door, begins to mouth him as if the verb were truly transitive.

  “If we get caught,” he says, “we’ll be dead on many levels.”

  “I know.” She kisses him, pushing away and pulling at the same time. “Leave me alone, why don’t you?” She kisses again, more circumspectly. “I must want to get in trouble.”

  He hears her struggle to keep from cooing audibly. “This is as far as I go without a note from your parents.” He nearly says husband.

  “Me too,” she replies dreamily, drugged, aroused. “As far as I go.” They catch one another’s eyes. The danger is real. They sober, swing back to adulthood, agreeing they must wean from this madness. “Little boy,” she says, restoring her glasses, “in another life, I could take you around the block a few times.”

  The brave kindness, the funny, forlorn way Dr. Koss delivers it pulls him back regretfully to her face, where they lose another moment. In this bittersweet heuristic, he is not the experimenter. He is the subject of these trial runs. That car will go around the block itself if he doesn’t brake.

  They share lucid moments, but only under supervision. She visits him in his office, in Lovering’s gaze. “I’ve just read Gale and Folkes,” she says. Ressler looks across the office. He can’t very well ask her if she’d like to talk outside, now that talk is really talk.

  “And?” he asks weakly. “What did you think?”

  “Incredible. ‘Incorporation reactions for specific amino acids can be activated by specific recombinations of nucleotides.’”

  “Spitting distance of an in vitro system that will crack the game wide open.”

  “You’re right. You must be right.” She smiles, her back to Lovering, a double entendre smile.

  “Two Cambridge scientists …” he doubts out loud.

  “… who’ve missed a follow-up. You’ve seen wrong turns before?” He’s more than just seen one. “A two-year-old article in one of the most prestigious journals going …”

  “And no one’s noticed it? No one picked up Mendel for thirty years.”