Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

The two works differ as a salt crystal and a spider's web. Scheldt, competent craftsman, labors on a carved doll that, however lifelike, remains wooden, while the other joiner need only apply the lightest imaginable touch to transform the clunky melody, lift the crippled thing to life. "A cradle song," Botkin glosses. "Composers cut their eyeteeth on chorales. No musical form is less sophisticated. A year of theory and you could churn them out blindfold. Bach manufactured them by the hundreds. And yet___" She points to the turntable, as if the secret behind the miraculous transformation searing Ressler lies there. On the vinyl. In the vibrating diamond.

Just as she is about to make the critical point, to identify what turns beats into beating, Toveh is interrupted by Dan Woytowich. He grabs them both in a friendly embrace, happier than Ressler has ever seen him, happy enough to be another person. The only happy soul in the room. Team setback can't touch him. Wife Renée, after losing two first-trimester fetuses, has finally passed the danger point and is on her way to making the couple a family. Woyty has chosen the party to announce, sure that this time the news will not turn out premature.

"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 hem-orrhaged. 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 melange 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-and-out 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.