Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

He wakes up early to the sound of someone letting himself in. He watches fuzzily as Tooney Blake enters and sits opposite Ressler and still-sleeping Eva. "She was cold and just fell asleep here. Your daughter is in the next room." Tooney fakes a suspicious look, speaking volumes, knowing that Ressler is already hopelessly compromised. Blake does not wake his wife, but only sits, staring disconcertedly through things rather than at them. Stuart asks if everything is all right.

"Fine," Blake answers, distracted tone contradicting him. The monosyllable rouses his wife, who in sleepy euphoria attaches herself to her mate. She rises up radiant, blinking, without a hint of question to her. The night's anxiety needs no other payment: they've weathered the worst, already more than repaired. When the embrace settles, the space of reprieve gives place to the collective need for postmorteming. Something Blake needs to announce, a chance locution that threatens to change his life. He has this aura about him, difficult to miss. Blake grabs his wife by her shoulders, about to launch into There was a ship…. "Honey," he says, "something's happened."

At the moment that the Civil Defense horns began their Gabrieli, he was across town, in the stacks. "Somebody has the whole microbiology library out on loan," he growls at Ressler, casting accusing glances about the periodical-strewn floor. "When the alarm went off, I figured I was already in as good a place as any other; no point going from one designated shelter to another. So I went down to Deck One, instinctively sought out the subterranean. I'd just gotten into a cozy study carrel when the power went out. Pitch-black, surrounded by that maze of shelves. I couldn't move without banging up against the 120s. I kept thinking, 'If this is the end, at least I'm surrounded by books.'

"After a long time, with a lot to think about, I tried to work my way to a stairwell. I found one at last, and after some trouble adjusting to the steps, I hauled myself up to the deck at ground level. Light coming in from the street. Cars shuttling. Life as normal, except for a few vanished trees. I groped along the aisles, doing my Theseus bit, keeping my right hand on the wall. I found the entrance and yanked the door. It wouldn't budge. Locked in. I heard the all clear go off downtown. I waited patiently in the dark, convinced that if I sat still long enough, something would happen. Sure enough, forty minutes later, the lights flooded on. When my eyes adjusted, I went to the emergency phone on Deck Five. The thing was as dead as a mayfly on day two. The lines must have come down in the storm."

Eva giggles, the low, jittery laugh of relief. "Oh Toon -ey! Locked in the stacks overnight! You must be a wreck."

"Strangely enough, I've never felt better in my life. They'd have to install vending machines before I'd agree to move back in on a long-term lease. But I've never spent a more important night." A comical whimper from his wife forces him to append, "Honeymoon excepted, sweet."

He lapses again into amazed gazes at various objects about the room until Ressler clears his throat. Tooney wraps his wife tighter and continues, "Realizing I was stuck awhile, I began to see the place differently. The stacks had always been a purely functional means to an end. But now, I lived there. A long night ahead, and the third-biggest collection in the country to pass it in. It occurred to me just what the place contained. Millions of volumes. The figure, which has always struck me as impressive, now became staggeringly real. At first, I got a chuckle going around looking up everything I've ever published. Then I began to track down every published reference about me.

"It slowly dawned on me that everything Ulrich, Botkin, or Woyty will leave behind is locked up in those shelves — their best insights, the record of how that trace spread or failed to catch hold. All the noise any of us has made in this world. I pulled our friend here's dissertation. I independently confirmed that he graduated summa cum laude." He gives Stuart a cuff. "After a while, the game of deciding which parts of each of us will live began to grow thin. It was after midnight, and I hadn't even gotten off that deck, let alone scratched a fraction of it. I had ten levels to play on, without the slightest plan of attack.

"You wouldn't believe the substance of that collection. A book-length study tracing a century and a half of disease among a single tribe on Mozambique. A thirteen-volume log of an 1848 botanical survey in the South Pacific. Photo cavalcades to performing hand surgery. An experimental account of chimps addicted to painting, whose work declined as soon as they began getting rewards for it. And I hadn't even gotten out of Biology yet.

"The words spread in all directions, an endless, continuous thread. I could jump in anywhere. Goethe. Glosses on the Koran. How-to dog sledding. Crackpot theories about ancient supercon-tinents. Accounts of Marian Anderson singing the national anthem at the Lincoln Memorial, because the DAR wouldn't let her sing it inside. Watercolors of Pemaquid Point by assorted artists. I lost twenty minutes to an article about whether or not Clara Bow had really slept with the entire UCLA offensive line."

Blake falls silent, preoccupied, sliding down the early slope of a syndrome that could drop off as suddenly as the continental shelf. Ressler tries for casual silliness. "We need to rush you to Info Detox, Tooney?"

Blake laughs, but nominally. "It's the world's damn DNA in there. Not to trivialize tornadoes, but suppose yesterday had been something more… extreme. How many died?"

"At last report, ten."

"Kick that figure up a few exponents. If worst-case scenario comes down to worst, there's enough information in the stacks right now to rebuild everything we have, within a narrow tolerance, from scratch."

"Provided the survivors would want to do something so ill-considered," Ressler counters.

"I'm serious," Blake insists.

"I am too."

Blake stands and begins to pace. Margaret waddles out of bed from the next room, welcomes her father back from missing per-sonhood with a nonchalant kiss, and curls up against her mom. Eva sits at attention, not quite knowing what's going on. Nor do any of them. "How much of that information do I — any of us— actually have a handle on?" Blake pauses, the question more than hypothetical.

To get the man to go on, Ressler answers, "Almost none."

"My God, we're reaching the point where we're stockpiling more information than we can manage."

"That's what indices are for," Ressler interrupts, this time to slow his friend down.

"But we're racing to the day when even indices won't help. We're outstripping even the Index of Indices. New discovery daily, and we can't even find the damn thing by this time next week. Go spend a night in the stacks. We're committed to nothing less than a point-for-point transcript of everything there is. Only one problem: the concordance is harder to use than the book. We'll live to see the day when retrieving from the catalog becomes more difficult than extracting it from the world that catalog condenses. Book and lab research will pass one another in the drifting continents of print."

"What are you suggesting?" Ressler asks. "It seems a bit late in the day to stop accumulating."

"No! We can't afford to stop. We've got to keep on top of the stockpile. Here we are, digging in the dirt, turning up shards, millions of shards, more than anyone expected to find. But nobody knows what the shattered vase they all came from looks like. Whether it's a single vase, or even a vase at all. What we need is not more shards. We need to accumulate something else altogether. Something much wider."

Ressler doesn't follow this last leap and says as much.