Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

They share lucid moments, but only under supervision. She visits him in his office, in Lovering's gaze. "I've just read Gale and Folkes," she says. Ressler looks across the office. He can't very well ask her if she'd like to talk outside, now that talk is really talk.

"And?" he asks weakly. "What did you think?"

"Incredible. 'Incorporation reactions for specific amino acids can be activated by specific recombinations of nucleotides.'"

"Spitting distance of an in vitro system that will crack the game wide open."

"You're right. You must be right." She smiles, her back to Lovering, a double entendre smile.

"Two Cambridge scientists…" he doubts out loud.

"… who've missed a follow-up. You've seen wrong turns before?"

He's more than just seen one. "A two-year-old article in one of the most prestigious journals going___"

"And no one's noticed it? No one picked up Mendel for thirty years."

"What's this over yonder?" Lovering banters. "I distinctly hear dreaming."

"Joey," Koss says, returning to the thuggish quip-trader Ressler first took her for, "call your wife, Sandy. I hear she's at home taking a delivery from the furniture man."

"She's not my wife. Sandy doesn't believe in the hypocrisy of the institution. We live in sin. And believe me, sin's gotten an undeserved bad name."

"Have you told Ulrich about this?" Koss readdresses Ressler.

"I tried to," he claims.

"How hard?" She grins.

"You know the man's bias. You told me yourself. Hung up on pushing the thing through statistically. The last time I spoke with him, he tried to interest me in doing some machine coding."

"Sounds interesting," Lovering throws out.

"Damn it, it's not." Ressler slams his hand on his desk, surprising even himself. "He thinks we can put together some kind of grind-out generator of all sequenced nucleotides, throw it up against some data structure showing every known protein, and let the thing iterate a couple hundred hours___"

"Couple hundred?" Jeanette almost falls in his lap. "On the ILLIAC?" CU's trimmed-down, transistor-overhauled, performance-boosted, cutting-edge version of the power-hungry rooms full of hardware, brave new programmable switch boxes, descendants of those devices originally built in the forties to assist in cracking wartime codes.

"Sounds like it would work," Lovering says.

"I'm not saying it wouldn't."

"What's the problem, then?"

"It's overlaborious, superfluous drudgery, that's the problem." Koss and Lovering both laugh at his adjective production line. "I can't believe it. Not after the success of the first paper." Ressler's first work has already caused ripples. The English and French, as well as the Californians, have requested reprints. But the more notorious the work gets, the more cautiously Ulrich pursues it.

Lovering shows his allegiance. "Come on. How hard could the programming be?"

"Oh, the algorithm is trivial. Little more than a nested loop, with cases hooked on to it. It would take a few weeks to throw together, test it, get the bugs out. But it would be a time-eating monster."

Koss blurts out, "Joey! Friend. How much programming have you done in your wee lifetime?"

"Zero. Null. Nil. Naught. Void."

"Good. I'll teach you everything I know."

"Everything?"

"Everything that can be expressed politely in FORTRAN. And Joey." She stares at him and whispers. "We'll race you there."

helps(heaven,X) if helps(X,X).

Koss and Ressler get clearance from a dubious Ulrich to try the incorporating techniques suggested by Gale and Folkes, under condition that they give Lovering a hand in formulating an algorithm for the matching program. They are to split their time between in vitro synthesis and computer tutorials. He gives them a two-month probation, not enough time for anything, yet more than Ressler expected. If they have something tangible to show by then, Ulrich will talk extension.

Ressler tries to cop assistance from Woyty, but the man is tied up reading Baby and Child Care. Renée, pregnancy safe from spontaneous abortion, is due in weeks. Stuart visits Toveh Botkin in her oriental-carpeted office. He surprises her, slumped back in chair, in a Ringstrasse Hapsburg reverie. "Where were you?" he asks softly.

"In the Café Centrale," she smiles.

"Talking to Mahler?"

She scoffs. "To Trotsky. In French. He was trying to make me pick up his check." She laughs at herself, a laugh that trails off into a tsk. "Friend, it may be time to retire."

"I've something that will change your mind." He shows her the article, which she devours in minutes. He tells her about the release time he and Koss have won from Ulrich.

"Let me wash beakers. Pull periodicals. Anything." Her eyes plead for one more shot at the code before giving in to it.

"We can pull our own damn periodicals. From you, we need chemistry. And the appropriate inspirational music."

"Be not afeard," she says. "The isle is full of noises."

What noises? Down the quad, over in the Music Building, Lejaren Hiller and Leonard Isaacson put the finishing touches on their composition, "ILLIAC Suite for String Quartet," spawning a new genre. They use the computer as a giant random-number generator, an engine that produces, within restrictions set by the programmer-composers, sounds and suite airs for four-pair hands to unvary. The project reflects a dawning awareness that the life score itself is assembled from successive iterations of random mutation. It is left to the unprepared audience's ears to unalgorithm as best they can, to reverse the random process, to hear in the blips and bleeps of this new, startling conch shell the steady surf of the first sea.

theme(goldberg,list[g,f#,e,d,b,c,d,g,g,f#,e,a,f#,g,a,d,d,b,c,b,g,a,b,e,c,b,a,d,g,c,d,g]).

variation(X,Y) if theme(Name,X) and equals(Y,mutation(X)).

mutation(X) if

"ILLIAC Suite" shares processing time with Cyfer's attempts to secure the definition of life. Compared to the tunes coming in over the transistors at that moment, it comes from a new planet. "Honeycomb" is the hit of the season. Even Ressler, after laborious attention now able to distinguish between Haydn's London and Mozart's Prague, dissects the disposable tune in two hearings. For the week in question, he is forced to listen to it twice an hour. The message is inescapable — the measure of the minute. It blasts from a thousand portable radios all across town. For the invention of the transistor, blame crosstown physics faculty member John Bardeen. The 1956 Nobel laureate, Bardeen has come to Urbana to continue the work that will make him the first repeat winner in the same field.

The transistor itself is a flexible current junction: small voltage differences at the base produce large differences between emitter and collector. With this simple lexicon, the transistor can serve as everything from current amplifier to logic gate. In the ten years since its evolution, the device has crept into circuits ranging from ILLIAC to the portable radios giving white kids of Anywhere, America, their first taste of black sonority, racy innuendoed danger. R and B currently mutates to R and R, a dialect banned in several communities as subversive, destructive, and unpatriotic. In years, changed beyond recognition yet virtually the same, the sound will go from threat to ubiquitous backdrop: decorative prop for everything from news broadcasts to barber shops.

William Shockley, Bardeen's collaborator and corecipient of the '56 Nobel, has gone from Bell Labs to California. There he begins thinking taboo thoughts about the inherited nature of intelligence. Might it be passed along as discretely as wrinkled pods? He becomes possessed by an idea in embryo — a sperm bank for geniuses. Keep the genetic pool from pollution. The racist tinge and resultant outcry are picked up, reported, and amplified in the general transistor noise.