Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

The need to distribute surplus care led her to sacrifice personal preference to prescribed taste. In another time or place, she might have fixed as easily on Shaw as she did on Burma-Shavian quatrain. Nothing mattered except giving compassion in the available dialect. I can't imagine what pleasure she found in staying around after hours, eavesdropping on the roundtable rotogravure. She couldn't have had the first idea of what those men were up to. When I saw her with them, wading bravely into cross-purpose conversation, I felt I was witnessing one of those confrontations beloved of science fiction: carbon-based life meets living silicon. She would clip shirt ads for Franker as a way of telling him his were hopelessly worn out, and admonish a startled Dr. Ressler about the dangers of smoking. She confided in me that the two fascinated her because they minced no bones.

She would have made herself a satellite of whoever was at hand. Todd, in one of his rare, Orphic ascents into the day shift, had accosted this stranger just as he did so many streetsweepers, cabbies, and commuting power brokers, demanding a full working account of her machine, her job, her sensibilities, and her life. That, followed by the requisite lunch, and Annie became a devoted friend. Words so freely given were to her a pact with him and all his friends. The casual contact he was so good at made Todd something real for her, not ever to be wholly understood, but cared for.

I often thought that Uncle Jimmy would have been Annie's ideal mate. They were both obliviously gentle people. They might have offered one another some protection against events. Even Todd suggested the idea to him: "Take her out to a show. See what happens."

Jimmy laughed him off. "Are you mad? I'm old enough to be the girl's father." The difference in their years was not great. But Annie was still a child and Jimmy already an old lady. He did, in fact, carry a torch for her, a crush that made him even more puppyish than usual whenever she was in the room. He flirted with her shyly, as he did with every woman who came through the suite of offices. "Have a boyfriend yet? Must be half a dozen guys who would jump at a chance to dance with the likes of you." Annie would say that she was ready anytime, say that evening. Jimmy would excuse himself, insisting that his expert supervision was required just then by the night shift. "Other men get to play with the ladies. Me, I've got to keep this ship running."

In fact, he was a nuisance, and every hour he stayed on into the shift cost Ressler and Todd two on the other end, in the early a.m. He liked to organize the stockroom and the card deck library, to create new rotation systems for the disk packs. Each scheme led to complete confusion. He would call his infirm mother. "These night-shift boys have fouled things up again; don't look for me until late."

Jimmy caught me in possession of the door password again, but this time resigned himself to my coming and going. I had free rein to let myself into the computer room as if I were on salary. A few nights after my confession to Todd, I arrived to find the entire population missing. Someone, in theory, was supposed to be laundering the day's data at all times. I sat and waited, thinking that the shift must have stepped out to an all-night sandwich dive. A minute later, all digital hell broke loose. Sys B began making the distress ah-oo-gahs of a wounded submarine. The spindles on Sys A powered up and the console spit cathode fireworks. Helpless, I ran to the screen, thinking I might at least jot down error codes. The screen erupted in animated celebration:

Our Dearest O'Deigh. Welcome to the median. The U.S. Bureau of On-Line Statistics assures us that 30 splits the country in half. As usual, you're right on the fence. Get out of that frilly blur of an apartment and acquire a mortgage. Accumulate some debt. Numbers compel you to do something middling___

The display was amazing: letters grew, skidded across the screen, recombined into new words, surged in normal distribution curves, twisted into visual syntax, "fence" forming one for "you" to sit on, "frilly blur" dissolving into one, "debt" coming out gothic, "middling" in Times Roman. The letters exploded into life, accompanied by bells and whistles on the terminal speaker:

Happy B-day. We hope that 30 is your most profound variation yet. Never forget that you are living at life's critical instant. Your fellows in aging, SRESSLER & FTODD

Then the screen went blank, came back with its inscrutable system prompt politely inquiring "Command?" I looked up from the console and clenched a fist at the initiators, doubtless observing behind the two-way mirror. Todd came out, followed by a sheepish Ressler. I cold-shouldered Todd, addressed the professor. "How did you do that?" He shrugged: all Boolean. A matter of access.

I wheeled on Todd. "How did you know it was my birthday?"

"You told me."

"I only said it was coming. How did you get the date?"

He grinned, thick with significance. "We looked it up."

Operation Santa Claus

Blake's departure hits Cyfer hard. The lab is poorer without the force of his arbitrating humor, his even keel. The defection makes the remaining members suspect they've been kidding themselves; chemical inheritance will evade them. To restore morale, Ulrich turns the last Blue Sky session of 1957 into a Christmas party. He invites other department members, staff, favored graduate students: anyone who might keep the remaining team from staring at one another in stunned silence.

Christmas is an odd holiday to be observing, intent as they are on substituting a molecular model for the miraculous winter birth.

Nevertheless, they go through the motions, set out a wassail bowl, paper cups depicting Santa Claus in various postures of levity, a herd of wax reindeer, and a university record player on which Toveh Botkin, music committee, keeps up a stream of modal progressions insisting glad tidings of great joy.

Ressler wants to know how it has come to pass, despite his friend's exit, the flicker of the tired capacitance lights, Sputnik standing in as Nativity Star, the daily radioed word of low-level violence decimating the unwatched flocks by night, that Christmas still lodges itself so deeply under his skin. It can't be the fugitive baby on the run from the authorities, a story he saw through when not much older than the infant in question. Still, he finds himself steeped in the crusty old four-parters Botkin churns out on the turntable. Their modulations draw him toward the pitiful speakers, exhalation of synchronized air through the trachea suggesting chords that might lift the edge of the translation table for a quick look. These medieval intervals, a fossil record of his dazed arrival here in this room of reagents and gauges, this change of venue, with no quantitative test for discerning the way back. A camaraderie he wishes he could admit: he too, smothered in the stink of gingerbread and pine needles, lapsing into Lydian under forever unangeled skies, might be culpable, guilty of trying to reach beyond his grasp, of attempting to comprehend something he can't hope to name, something that might better be left to metaphor, myth, popular fiction, the beautiful counterfeit.

At the record player, he asks Botkin with his eyes for an explanation. His old friend raises her finger. At the end of the current tune, she slaps on another sprightly chorale. "Samuel Scheldt," she identifies. "From the Köln Gesangbuch, early seventeenth century." Ressler cocks an eyebrow at her, uncomprehending. The piece has some slight charm, aura of otherworldliness. But as full of leftover Renaissance censer scent as this tune is, it cannot minister. It has no healing power, no explanation.

Botkin notes his confusion. "Wait. Wait." She musses about in the cardboard sleeves and pulls out another disk. "O Jesulein Suss." She drops the needle down on exactly the same tune. Only everything different. The thing now arches and breathes, soars through agonizing suspensions, pours across a new, unexpected support in the bass, moves its four lines independently yet in a coordinated harmonic terrace of beauty. "Bach," she says, shrugging, the attribution self-evident.