The Gold Bug Variations

by Richard Powers

  “Only they usually notice if they’ve left it lying on the street,” the second woman said acidly.

  The brother-in-law rummaged in his red-spined library and found the passage he was after. “If you three can put up a cash retainer equal to a third of the amount, and if we make a public declaration of the find—a newspaper ad will do—and if no legitimate claimants show after one week, then it’s all yours. Manna from heaven.”

  They punched the numbers up on a calculator. Adding a dash for the ads, they each needed to put up sixteen hundred dollars. They drove to their apartments, each woman running in and securing the funds. Annie and the second had to cash checks; the third, embarrassed, admitted that she kept her money under a rug. Annie’s collateral cleaned her out. They left the earnest money with the brother-in-law, who notarized receipts. They exchanged names and numbers, and agreed on the restaurant where they would eat out a week from then.

  “The next day, no ad. I called the first woman, and got some poor man in the Bronx. The second number gave me one of those dee-dee-deeps.” She sang the no-longer-in-service triad. “I took the subway to the lawyer’s office, my stomach in my throat. Cleaned out. For rent. I even tried to go back to the buildings where the two women got their money. Nobody by that name. The police say the notarized receipt is meaningless.” Annie stopped, swallowed, could not go on.

  She didn’t need to, except to say that the handle on the inside car door where they had her sit was broken; her door had to be opened from the outside. “These people play for keeps.” Ressler and Todd had their heads down. Old, their faces said. Old, treacherous, and transparent. It took a genuine naif like Annie to get so blindly stung. Yet I had never been tested against so elaborate a setup. If the con thrived, always with new wrinkles, now out of some other uptown office or in another city, marks must be in steady supply.

  In the wake of the story, Annie was the first to revert to form. She said she’d planned to give the windfall to an ecumenical food drive for Africa. “Just imagine, when I finally figured things out! You could have knocked me over with a truck.”

  ADAPTOR HYPOTHESIS (II)

  Cryptography lives in the seam between sense and randomness. Its deforming rules sow noise into a signal. But by reversing the rules, the signal reforms, like Dr. Ressler’s undispersed oil drop. I can’t quite put my hands through this paradox: scattered nonpattern and articulated message are somehow—what can the word mean?—equivalent.

  The entire Library of Congress, encoded with a single notch on a stick, like those colossi bestriding the narrow world under whose legs we book researchers peep about, keeping one foot on each of two unspannable coasts. The straddle is its own contradiction. The mark on the stick is trivial, blank, without significance. And yet, it inscribes everything in the archive. Even more counterintuitively, the mark could fall anywhere on the stick at all. An infinity of transforming schemes: take the fraction formed by the letter string, divide by its cubed root, add .344 … Any notch at all could fold out into the Library of Congress, including all books not yet catalogued.

  Such a notch would have to subdivide quantum spaces. But not even that physical catch clears things up. The rub remains: with an infinity of available enciphering keys, a meaningful string of letters can be translated into any available gibberish. So any random string of gibberish I choose already stands for that original string, provided I can locate, out of infinity, a transform that equates them.

  This unsettling two-way mapping of any sense onto any nonsense works because the key—the enciphering rule—itself contains information. Information (a science unfolding just moments before Ressler hit the scientific scene) is the degree of restriction clamped onto the set of all possible messages. Information is not meaning, but can be used to reveal it. It has, as Todd’s favorite living novelist notes, replaced cigarettes as the universal medium of exchange.

  Knowledge might be extracted from simple clues if given the right key: an idea as old as consciousness, existing in precursor form even in animals. Codes, ciphers, impresas, enigmas, mots, emblems, all forms of enfolded text propose not just their own hidden significance but a secret system where inscribed meaning built into the half-obscuring, half-revealing world surface is revealed.

  If any gibberish string can reveal not just one but all possible patterns (given an infinity of information-bearing keys), then gnosticism—arcane manipulation until pattern emerges—can’t return me to source meaning. The pattern such bit-fiddling produces would say more about its own manufacture than about the subcutaneous nature I’m after. Information between cipher, key, and source is conserved. If the key is simple, then the cipher, however mysterious, will carry much of the order of the original. But if the codetext contains little information—if it is random, full of possibilities —then information must be present in the clamped-down key. The revealing key would then be as difficult to arrive at by trial as the plaintext itself.

  The veil between signal and noise never lifts as easily as it falls. Any teenager can take a car apart, but few would be thrilled with a complete parts inventory for their coming-of-age gift. If signal is rich and noise deafening, then the deforming garble is practically irreversible without the formula. A hard code is like a lump of peat for an engagement stone, with the instructions: Press firmly and long. From message to code is trivial; but getting back to tonic, if the clamp on possibilities lies in a complex transposing scheme, is as entropically prohibitive as the postman springing back from the pool, the dog backing away, the letters shedding their droplets and returning to dryness.

  I may never come across the clause that revokes his exile. The journey back, however much it seems a birthright, a trip I ought to be able to do blind, remains as unlikely as my making it from alien Maple and Jefferson to unknown Walnut and Monroe with nothing but a world globe. Each cognate I stumble across gives a shock of recognition: here is the grammatical clue, something I can at last make out. The nearness is uncanny. The clues are all eall mast, al meist, allr mestr. But run through the decipherer, they remain all most. No ladders lead back up from where I’ve been lowered. I must lie down where all the ladders start.

  Science is hard, the notch intractable. It is not secret knowledge, but nominalism. Not facts; only a means of verifying the endless, tentative list. Like Lear’s look there; and there. Information theory proves that for a given purpose, an optimum code exists. But it supplies no means for finding it. The purpose of investigation seems to be to find the optimal code for purpose. Nature freely hands out isomorph variants of herself. Signals jam the air—patterns not nature but the shaped equivalents of her writing. Sometimes information lies entirely in particulars, and their uniting pattern lies only a light tweak away. But if the key packs a larger fraction of crucial information than the signal, reading it remains as statistically unlikely as launching at random and hitting upon life.

  How is it possible, in those cases, to recover anything? I have only the old, empirical trump: set up a local peep-holed world and watch; follow the effects, trace the shadow of the key as it encodes. Eavesdrop over the codebook. Then, with the silhouette of the transforming rule traced out, its transforms become trivial. Briefly: the thing I want to hear more than sound itself is the bliss beyond the fiddle. But the fiddle itself remains my only conveyance.

  The information of an organism is spread out over its substance, processes, organization. No one part embodies the life semantic. Nowhere in my cells does it say, “Woman, thirtyish, pretty to some, deserted, unemployed, desperate to know.” The code is not the gene, nor the enzymes, nor the lookup table, although these are the core of what the code knows.

  All of these assembled leave a bit of information still out: I lack a key. To make the catch, I must grab the adaptor.

  What are my odds of succeeding in the time remaining? By saving chance, the school where I learn to read obeys the same laws of probability constricting the codes that life writes itself in. There is a limit on the coding mechanism, on the i
nformation it contains. Evolution sets such unlikelihoods into existence that it seems, given time, universally ingenious, eternally able to one-up. In fact, it’s a patch job, short-term kludges barely breaking even, ducking down blind alleys, working only with existing parts. The map is full of places that one can’t get to from here. A fin might come in time to grasp marvelously as if designed for it, and a hand turn back into a fin. An air bladder, used to solve the flotation problem, might be tucked into a structure that can sustain a crawl into naked air. But nothing is a priori. Other solutions will never hit upon the particular next trick, no matter how many eons you let spin. Life on the planet could have been entirely different: billions of years of prokaryotes, unchanged since inception, stretching on steadily until the sun dies.

  The “hopeful monster”—Goldschmidt’s variation—has been resurrected from the scrap heap with the suggestion that evolution need not always progress by imperceptible gradualism. But despite the haggle in step size, all jumps are essentially local, for there are infinitely more ways of jumping wrong than jumping right. Small text changes ripple into huge phenotypic differences. But the way the text is read and processed will never change, short of the complete annihilation and improbable respark of all life. The code key is fixed, clamped from the first fluke discovery of self-propagation. The translator, the adaptor, is information-rich, determined, locked in. If we stumble on the place once, in the dark, during a storm, after a quarrel that has driven us wildly from home, we may never find the way again. The accumulation of accident along the way makes the journey irreversible. Each step is sculpted, restricted, feasible, frequently brilliant, on rare occasions even optimal. But the sum of these steps is unrepeatable. It will not happen again, not in this way, perhaps not at all.

  I look for a go-between. Inside the machine, deep in the cell, the molecule must take the rich hieroglyphics of the DNA string—randomly accumulated dots, crots, and mots—and, its own structure housing the missing key, translate the jiggles of the varying sequence into the purposeful, programmed, cybernetic, living enzymes. Outside, in the warehouse of time, the adaptor I look for must bridge the paradoxical equivalence of message and notch, caprice and complexity, theme and variation.

  I wake to sleep and take my waking slow. What falls away is always, and is near. Why are three quarters of my analogies drawn against lyric poetry? One would have to be a lingering sap to still think, with Wordsworth, that poetry is the impassioned expression that is in the countenance of all science. I don’t deny the sentimentality charge, but perhaps I keep reverting to anthologies—the ones I have memorized over a life of erratic reading—because they too are their own evolutionary kludge, new vehicles resurrected from modified parts, an historical stratigraphy, packets announcing, “This works, or worked once; use it, or lose it in favor of something else.” I learn by going where I have to go.

  Four months from now, I’ll have starved to death or will be employed again, somewhere. Either way, my education, these notes, the extended aside of this last year, will be over. Only two ways I might still get moonlight into a chamber. I can sit and wait for the calendar and capricious weather to accommodate. Or, even at this time of the night, I might find an intermediary. Get hold of the adaptor. Dress up as the visiting moon.

  THE TRANSFER MOLECULE

  He can’t explain it—maybe because from here on nothing can work out as hoped—but the morning after he makes love to Jeanette Koss on the floor of the Cyfer lab, he feels inappropriately alive. The physiological component is undeniable: yesterday’s nerve-shattering release produced a sleep deeper even than clean conscience. He wakes, lies in the bunk, arches, feels the muscles in the back of his thighs, the full power of the intellectual biped.

  He has had a dream: a world-renowned gynecologist, looking suspiciously like Toveh Botkin, told Jeanette Koss that her conception problem lay in sperm getting lost on their way through the egg. The doctor implanted an ultramicroscopic device, a sort of converter shaped to let the sperm enter at one end, pass easily through the cell wall, and sail through to the other end, snapped snugly over the egg nucleus.

  Stretched on his back, he tenses at the obvious message he has sent himself in sleep. He knows why they haven’t been able to get the cell-free system to work. He, Botkin, and Koss have assembled, in their simulated broth, messenger RNA for the instructions, ribosome material for the factory, ATP for the energy, amino acids for the contractors’ materials, GTP to glue them together, two types of enzymes as cut-and-paste wage laborers, and a handful of inorganic cations as a chemical hunch, salts over the shoulder. They have left out the key, the go-between, the bridge.

  Ressler, with the oceanic feeling of calm that makes investigation the most sustainable gratification available to living things, conceives of what they are missing. A molecule amorphous but vaguely familiar, one of those UN simultaneous translators. At one locus, the molecule has a spot, an anticodon that matches a codon on the message string. Another spot on this bilinguist holds the amino acid called for in the lookup table. No: the adaptor molecules—for there must be a whole class, each with different anticodon sites and corresponding amino acids—are the lookup table written into matter.

  The adaptor molecule is both sorter, porter, and rivet-holder. The anticodon gives it away: more nucleic acid, another RNA chain itself transcribed from—where else?—the parent DNA. Once they season their preparation with this interlocutor, they will be able to make nature break her own code, as she does constantly in the maniacal specific density of self-construction. But before he has time to work out the details, he hears the jiggle in the latch, the intrusion of human sympathy. Company, carrying something, muffled with care. Koss floats into his bedroom, crimson with cold, hazel in triumphant proximity. “Ah!” Ressler looks up, helpless to waylay elation. “The Man from Porlock.” But she is so lovely, so here, that he can’t resent the desertion of insight, its replacement by her.

  “I thought,” she says, looking away a little wickedly, a little shyly, “you might like a bite of breakfast.” She sits at his bedside and unwraps her packages. Coffee, sweet rolls, fruit. Ressler, slack, lets her insert torn-off pieces into his mouth. He chews, eyes closed, while her hands, losing their chill, colonize the covers. Slowly, seamlessly, they are forsaken again. She undresses, this time showing him. Now they are infinitely patient, exploratory, stripped of yesterday’s violence. Yesterday was public, awful, dangerous. Today is soft, secluded, trembling, expectant, admission of mutual rabbit-sin. Her throat takes over again at the end. Anyone home at this hour hears the decibels, knows what blood ritual takes place. Exultant, shouting for help, finding it.

  When she transfers control from ape back to angel, that sound is the first thing she mentions. “These barracks walls are pretty thin. They could present a problem for us.” Never did he expect a single word could trigger such instant, enzymatic rush. “How are the troops supposed to do their women without dispatching a communiqué?”

  “Enlisted men are not permitted to have sexual relations.”

  “And officers do it by semaphore?”

  Pretty Jeannie wrinkles her nose, kneels over his body, exploring everything in that inscribed universe. He rests a hand above her breasts, protects her even at the cost of this child-like moment. He tenses his metacarpals. “This is crazy, you realize.”

  Her change is astonishing. She collapses against him like a sensitive plant. She bows her head, hiding it. Muscles along her length clasp him with a desperate rocking. “Don’t forsake me now, Stuart.” The plea electrifies him.

  The discharge is doubled by the phone selecting that instant to ring. “That’ll be the HUAC,” Ressler jokes weakly. He gets up, throws a blanket around him, glad for the excuse to retreat to the front room. He grabs the receiver and mumbles hello.

  “Sleeping in this morning?” the other end says. The voice chills Ressler to the quick. Ulrich. His supervisor knows. “Not that sleep hurts. Look at Poincaré, Kekulé. Major work while unconscious.�
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  Jeanette creeps naked out of the bedroom. She reattaches to him, curled, like a small child, a gibbon on the ground, a hermit crab displaced from its shell. Ressler strokes her hair while she strokes the inside of his legs. He cannot concentrate, makes Ulrich repeat his message.

  “I said,” the chief enunciates, amusement and annoyance waiting for each other at a four-way stop, “you’d better get down to the lab. Some gentlemen from Life are here to see you.”

  TRANSPOSON

  I have made a Bush League mistake. Idiot! Pulling his words out for the thirtieth time, for the stupid pleasure of hoping they might be different this time, I see it, as self-evident as just out of the envelope. I could smother myself. The boy’s affectation has been staring me in the face, begging to be understood, obvious from the day of arrival.

  Had I remembered the first thing about him, I would have worked this out weeks ago. He always said the trick to picking up a foreign language was to wear it. Affect its idiom. Act. Assume a virtue if you have it not. I should have known that his method would extend even to written dates. He posted me from Europe. There, people have the good sense to arrange their calendar units in ascending order. He wanted local fluency as fast as possible. So why revert to old habits, just to write a friend back home?

  12/6: Not the sixth day of twelfth month. The twelfth of the sixth. I can hardly take it in. He wrote, not in early December, but in the middle of last June. Not X number of weeks ago. X months. Half a year before I thought he’d written. The opposite season. Every word I read of his was wrong, bungled, lost over the lines. The smallest tweak of context changes every sentence. Nagging anachronism, that weird sense of collapsed time disappears. Of course he had no grief. When Todd wrote me, Dr. Ressler was still alive. One stupid transposition and I hear what the man is saying for the first time. Only, after explanation, his message is more cryptic than ever.