Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

Ressler was not buying, not all the way. "All we've done to date is uncover part of a pattern. We can't mistake that for meaning. Meaning can't be gotten at by pattern-matching."

"That's why work is more crucial than ever. We're so close."

"The experiment you want to extend is three billion years old. It may indeed be close to something unprecedented. All the more reason why we need to step back a bit and see how it runs."

When we went to bed, Todd joined me in mine. I was up early. It had stopped snowing at last, but nearly three feet had obliterated the contour of ground. Standing out against the unbroken white, as conspicuous as the pope without clothes, conifers went about as if there was nothing more natural in the world than converting sunlight into more fondled slang thesaurus entries on the idea of green. My eyes attenuated to movements, birds, squirrels, the extension of that trapped energy in the branches. I picked up a cacophony of buzzes, whirs, and whistles — an orchestra tuning up, about to embark on big-time counterpoint. Imagining the invisible sub-snow system — the larvae, grubs, thimblefuls of soil a thousand species wide — I suddenly understood Ressler's point of the previous night: the transcendent, delivering world Franker so badly ached for: we were already there. Built into the middle of it, tangled so tightly in the net that we could not sense the balancing act always falling into some other, some farther configuration. The point of science was to lose ourselves in the world's desire.

Ressler came out, putting a biscuit in his mouth as if dipping litmus into solution. He greeted me happily. He gauged the snow and rubbed a palm over his temple. "The prospects of returning to the city in time to do tonight's work have apparently slipped to less than slim."

Of course they had; we hadn't left ourselves a margin to get back. We'd counted, covertly, on this emergency, and now we had it. We inspected the car, made token efforts at clearing the wheels. I got in and started the engine. Dr. Ressler wedged himself against the fender and tried to rock it down what was once the cabin path. But we were not so much stuck as buried. The back door of the cabin slammed and out ran Todd. "Brought you some traction!" Smirking like a schoolboy, he produced a salt shaker.

"Save it for the boids' tails," I shouted. Giddy, euphoric.

We rocked a while, stupidly, humanly, going a dozen feet.

"Shovel time," Todd suggested gaily.

"You're mad," Ressler said. "It's three hundred meters to the road."

"Note the metric precision," Todd told me.

"And the main road is itself under."

"Just as well. We don't have a shovel anyway."

"We'd best call Jimmy," Dr. Ressler suggested. "Not that he'll be able to do much to pick up the pieces."

"Oh God," Todd giggled, despite himself. "Jesus. East Coast Fiscal Collapse."

"Is there a problem?" Knowing what their typical evening consisted of, I couldn't conceive of their being anywhere near indispensable to anyone.

"We may not do anything. But those big metal boxes do. Quite a bit."

"Can't Jimmy run them?"

"Around the clock? Without cohabitors? Maybe for a day."

"At half speed," Ressler clarified.

"With the night operations procedures manual at his side."

"A book we haven't kept current for months."

"So who has a phone up here?" Todd yodeled, listening for the echo.

Ressler cocked his head in the direction of the path we'd taken Saturday night. His eyes flashed: it was not, perhaps, the shortest route, but was by far the more beautiful. This being North America, it had eventually to lead to a phone. We took off happily up the drifted hill. We made slow progress, propping up one another. At the spot where that pair of eyes had looked us over in the dark, we stopped and searched but found no tracks. The snow had long since rubbed out all trace. We crested and saw, a few hundred yards off, a house that looked lived in. We threaded our way down the valley, between the bare trees, hunters returning home. Making the most of the last few minutes before human contact, Todd asked, as if nothing had intervened between their conversation and now, "So is that why you quit?"

I was walking next to Ressler, and he took my arm. "Not in so many words." And because we weren't going anywhere that night, or the night after, he suddenly had all the time in the world to tell us what had happened. And he did. In so many words,

Storm Waltz II

sea_change(ressler,koss,X) if in_Jove(ressler,koss) and

not(knows(X)).

Briefly humanity recalls, in a dream of distant past, that use is no use. For a week, it's again clear that the question is not ends and applications, but shape, sound, angels arriving on the raw doorstep, an ache, an instant hint, singing the new year in, in a bleak midwinter. Then back to grim progress. In a dim hall just off the Christmas party, the folio-wing afternoon in a public lecture, passing in crowded corridors, seated pointedly apart in team brain-storming, a few excruciating minutes alone in the lab: they fall deeper, more carelessly into unwished desire. Her confession of love, at the close of the old year, sweeps away his last sense that this has all been self-torture. He pays for that relief by losing all say in the outcome. He has confessed to her, too.

He feels in Jeanette a perverse urge for danger. She is crazy reckless, slipping hand between his thighs at a faculty meeting. In their stolen clinches, she strains her head around with fear at the least rattle or click, only to relax her neck desperately again, hating herself, her nerves, loving the near-escape, moaning for more, moist fear. Startled, silky, mottled, new to the place, terrified, perpetually about to bolt.

Away from her, he vows to break off, a resolution already hobbled by attached fatalist clauses. Hopeless. She demands to be pressed, kneaded, her trembling animal lip down registering the. punishment of pleasure they cannot forego. Creature-reversion, triggered simply by touching certain spots on her — he can't stop re-experimenting with it. The image comes involuntarily just before he falls asleep, how she closes her rolling eyes, shudders, lets her focal "I" slip twenty centimeters down her spinal column. He can feel it in her muscles, in how she stands against him, indentured to the flood response of her body, teaching him how.

He too is addicted by the sense, new to him, of being victim to a thing he cannot help. Debauched, depraved; the words give him an erotic thrill proportionate to the pro forma resistance he still manages. He knows her public composure is the thinnest wallpaper patch above a seething hive in the board beneath. She wanders from the lab to the supply closet nearby, looking for something: tubing, glassware, him. He follows her into the distant room. She stands at the shelves, the picture of business. But turning, she grabs him like a vegetative trap, nudges closed the door, begins to mouth him as if the verb were truly transitive.

"If we get caught," he says, we'll be dead on many levels."

"I know." She kisses him, pushing away and pulling at the same time. "Leave me alone, why don't you?" She kisses again, more circumspectly. "I must want to get in trouble."

He hears her struggle to keep from cooing audibly. "This is as far as I go without a note from your parents." He nearly says husband.

"Me too," she replies dreamily, drugged, aroused. "As far as I go." They catch one another's eyes. The danger is real. They sober, swing back to adulthood, agreeing they must wean from this madness. "Little boy," she says, restoring her glasses, "in another life, I could take you around the block a few times."

The brave kindness, the funny, forlorn way Dr. Koss delivers it pulls him back regretfully to her face, where they lose another moment. In this bittersweet heuristic, he is not the experimenter. He is the subject of these trial runs. That car will go around the block itself if he doesn't brake.