Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

journey(north-woods) if

Todd jumped at the chance. He suggested we three drive up the following Saturday to a cabin in New Hampshire. "Belongs to a college friend who will gladly lend it for a weekend."

Inviting the professor for a camping weekend seemed just short of asking one's priest if he'd care for a round of racquetball. Had Todd run the idea by me first, I certainly would have squashed it. But Dr. Ressler broke into a boy's grin and said, "Do you know how long it's been since I've gotten out of this damn city?" Both men turned to me, and I nodded with enthusiasm.

"Should we ask anyone else?" I couldn't think, aside from our day-shift friends and the man at the sandwich shop, who Todd had in mind.

Ressler handled Todd's question with his usual grace. "Having put our hand to this three-personed plow, I suggest we stay with it. This is a congenial enough group as it stands."

That was all it took. I arranged my hours at the branch. Todd secured not only the cabin but a beaten-up Plymouth to ferry us there. I was in charge of food and Dr. Ressler of kerosene and campfire reading. They picked me up at three in the morning after their Friday stint. Todd met me at the door of the antique shop, shushing hysterically, as if this were a teen-aged prank. I guess it was.

The roads were clear, and after we jumped the city, the night was crisp and quick. We got free of the interstate, preferring seat-of-the-pants navigation up through empty New England towns. Todd drove, and we passengers were assigned the task of keeping him awake. For a stretch, Dr. Ressler had us all rolling with a dry commentary about how every road sign in existence—"Slow children," "Cross traffic does not stop" — contained unintentional slipped meaning. Todd ruddered via Boston, Saturday morning. We spent two hours in the Fine Arts, studying the conflagration he was after, and he bought a postcard of it. Then he hauled us across the Fens to the Gardner and that domestic chamber music in amber by Vermeer.

We arrived at the cabin late Saturday. I felt, by contrast, how my life in New York had become a spasm of hormone and acid jolting my system into continuous speculation on how I was going to get killed. My key to surviving, or not dying too quickly, had been to swim in stress without feeling it. Adaptation to environment. Suddenly this place: rag-quilted, smelling of sap and kindling, spices hanging from kitchen beams, squirrels marauding in the walls. A foot-pumped parish church organ stood against a wall with a Lutheran hymnal on the music rack. A five-thousand-piece picture puzzle that Franklin identified as an Aelbert Cuyp lay spread over the dining-room table. Salvation, in short. I hadn't known I needed it until I was there.

We unpacked, laughing, pitched up on the beach of the New World. We put on coats and fell into the bracing air. Snow was falling thickly. A carpet gathered around the cabin clearing and up the stony hillside. The thought passed through us: head back now, while still possible. But all w e spoke out loud was, "Let's try this way."

There were so many stars that the sky seemed black gaps pasted over a silver source. The same lights as hung over the city, invisible. Todd looked up and quoted, " 'The stars get their brightness from the surrounding dark.' Dante, but who's keeping track?"

We walked in silence, in one another's footholes in the drifts. I felt, in the constriction in my chest, the intractable riddle facing the first species saddled with language: why are some things alive and others not? Snow, rock, star, lichen, rabbit scat, pine. It was the easiest, most blanketing protection in the world to imagine that everything partook of the same animation.

"Let's have it," Todd wheedled Ressler after we'd walked half a mile in chill awe. "You're the life scientist. Tell us what's happening here."

"I was never a life scientist, to my misfortune." His breath came out in white, frozen puffs against the snowy air. All our patient field work was about to come to fruition. "I was always, at best, a theorist. But before I was a theorist, I was a child. And every child knows… shh! Look. There. Just past that birch."

Ressler didn't even need to point. Against the black of the woods, a pair of eyes, reflecting dim analogy of starlight, observed us from a distance, measuring our every move, theorizing. We froze, matching it, watching for watching, not even whispering a guess as to what it was.

alive(X) if grows(X) and reproduces(X,Y) and member(Y,class(X)) and not (equals(Y,X)) and

A long, deliberate draw of observation, and the eyes blinked off. The creature vanished, freeing us to turn and retrace our path through the drifted snow. I knew it now: the world, even in the pitch of winter, metabolizing all around us. Every ledge of it, trampled by a permutation on the first principle, each straining for a crack at the Krebs cycle, a slice of the solar grant money. "Hubert's Infinite Hotel," Ressler described it. "Perpetually booked up, but always ready for more occupants, even an infinity of them." The place was penny-wedged, crammed, charged with doppelgängers, protean variants on the original: radial, ruddy, furred, barked, scaled, segmented, flecked, flat, lipped, stippled. Who knows how? The place was beyond counting, outside the sum of the inventory. And we, as of this weekend, were but a particular part.

As day broke, we returned to the cabin, spread ourselves in the existing beds, and slept. I had joined the night shift. I woke to soft talking in the room downstairs. Dr. Ressler was tutoring Todd, laying out the rudiments of the new, biological alchemy. It was afternoon, already dark. On the windowpane, thick flakes had been collecting for hours. I put my hand to the cold glass, leaving a negative ghost when I drew away. I hoped for the worst the elements could do, hoped harder than I've hoped since I was a girl.

I came downstairs. The men had a semblance of warm meal waiting. Flush with eating and drinking, we piled close together on the couch, in front of a fine fire. I thought: This could last forever, long evenings, passing around murder mysteries, losing weeks without glancing at the papers. A place where progress was obscene, unwanted. Todd could putter perpetually at his dissertation, I over some project in Maritime wool, Ressler fiddling with the smoky spruce logs.

Franker roused us to attack the bellows organ. He took the right pedal, Ressler the left. They each took a line in the upper staff, and I, on account of six years of piano lessons as a child, was expected to handle both tenor and bass while simultaneously pulling stops. Conquering the skittish entrances and squashing some unscored tritones, we flew along well. We pumped out Lobe den Herren and Nun danket alle Gott. After a while, we even grew bold enough to let the inner lines out and improvise on the cantus firmus, Todd laying on a counterpoint from "Mood Indigo." But human, we grew tired of hymns. Todd was the first to break off, pace back to the fire. Warming himself, with his back to Ressler, he asked, "How about it, then? Let's hear it for those man-made bacteria."

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."