Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

As for the text of "Honeycomb," it strikes Ressler as a straightforward variation on the time-honored metaphor of Love-as-Edible-Food. Nuzzle, nibble, chew, swallow your baby, your honey-pie, your sweet. Until now, he always considered the pap embarrassing, indulgent drooling. Now he no longer holds it in contempt. Soft, tuneful, pathetically appropriate. He'd like to nuzzle, suck, sing to her, even. Jeanette's form sears him with the instantly consumed melancholic cheer of radio tunes. Heartbreaking, vulnerable, in black-pleated narrow waists, peach tapering bodices, she is the core of girlishness, a fleeting goodbye to summer, sailboats on the lake, the downy, borrowed body about to be eaten and spit out by the shape-hungry world. She hovers at her last moment, soon to be expelled from visitation. He must preserve, fix her at this unarrestable peak of loveliness. He doesn't know how. All he can do is attach himself to her at the mouth.

They preserve enough presence of mind to work together on in vitro. With Botkin's assistance, they advance on a clean technique. Lab work is exciting again, not solely on account of their proximity, hours spent within touching distance, more secret because more open. Back in the barracks, doing a dish, he is struck by how much repetitive maintenance it takes just to exist. Existence is the cycle extraordinaire; everything tangent, constantly spinning just to stay in place. But the missing piece of the coding problem offers entree to another process — lines, deltas. They stand at the base of Jacob's Ladder. Can they be on the threshold of completing what until then had been merely repetitive climb?

For weeks Ressler has bankrolled a private research venture, exploring to what extent a toothache is imaginary. When the tooth abscesses one morning, flash burning at the stake makes him recant, tear to the dentist. In the waiting room he blunts himself into oblivion over back issues of Life. He reads Dulles's brinksmanship quote, which he missed the first time around. He scans the magazine's breezy treatment turning high-ranking Nazi von Braun into the Rock Hudson of Rocketry. He has a premonition: the final solution to the modern crisis will be to turn the threat of news into light entertainment.

The world is at war, perpetual war, moving at all tangent angles. All over the world, a spreading collection of brushfires extends the head-on conflagration by other means. Wars come down to the control of information. They purport to be about the attainment of battlefields, defense of property, renovation of antiquated systems of ownership, liberation of oppressed peoples, geopolitical dominance. But these are just material proxies for pursuing conflict's real end: the testing of new technologies, the stockpiling of data.

Information is ordered contrast; it can be won only by building a differential between sound and noise. The purpose of gathering information is to increase predictability. Information theory was born in the War, when Norbert Wiener was asked to build a gun-sight that could tell where an enemy plane would be in the next few seconds. He's read Wiener: wars are won by making your enemies more ignorant than they can make you. A state's ability to wage war is measured only loosely in kilotonnage. A better indicator is a country's ability to wage randomness, to impose a signal-to-noise problem on the enemy, render his informational stockpile incoherent.

Since Caesar, warring states have known that the best way to protect information from enemy corruption is to disguise it as noise. A coded message already appears random, protectively colored. But since the Gauls, warring states have studied how to break the noise barrier, reverse the garble. The history of warfare is the story of cryptology. In one of the paperback cipher books he pored over when the coding problem was forming, Ressler read that the British alone during the recent outbreak sported thirty thousand information troops. The number has risen steeply since. The Cold War marks that moment in organized violence when the number of people attached to various code books surpasses the number toting rifles.

No matter how well coded a message, how ingeniously the treasure is reduced to apparent gibberish, there is always a key that reveals the underground sense under the cloak of noise. This gives secret writing its otherworldly quality. The cryptanalyst's arcane ritual of incantations — MAGIC, as the army/navy wartime decoding efforts were named — transmutes seeming meaningless-ness into firm predictions. The one who renders the message readable possesses all the import of the original.

In Life's breezy treatments of Dulles and von Braun — aided by the swatch his abscess cuts across his brain — Ressler sees that even the safe haven of academia, so far from the industrial trenches, will not prevent his being conscripted. The genetic code, however selflessly and reverently, will be co-opted in the broader code war. Life, use's henchman, serves up as comestibles everyone from assassins to scientists ("modern mandarins, modern necromancers"). His act of pure research, done with religious indifference to consequences, delivers all organic creation, codebroken and codespoken, into warring hands.

Just as his tooth sends up another flaming wave, Ressler stumbles across a photo essay of the twenty-odd-year-old pianist, interpreter of the Goldberg recording that Koss gave him. Given the ends of photojournalism, Ressler is not surprised to catch the gist: the boy is young, single, romantically eccentric, a crank hypochondriac, never seen without his panoply of pills and jars of spring water. He possesses the Lovering allele of cold virus paranoia, wearing wool coats in the height of summer. He sings out loud while recording— ghostly, alternate vocalizings the technicians can't muffle. He has a carefully worked-out, outlandish theory about recordings rendering the concert obsolete. Yet the nut is a genius. He has inherited a contrapuntal brain, and the Bach decoding algorithm is congenitally embedded into his ten-bit, digital circuitry.

Suddenly the notes are in Ressler's ears, conspiring voices, sounding of lost days, lost names, affections, friends. Those variations, fragments, flint-splinters of the original: how long he has lived with them since his first, dull attempts at theory. His slow, purpose-free pursuit of the four-by-four-by-four aria, the Sixty-four Sarabande Dollar Question has become so instilled, so somatic, that he has forgotten the point of the experiment until this moment.

Jeanette! Why infect a stranger in the first place? She hadn't a clue to his nature, yet she came, brought this unprovoked birthday encyclopedia of crystallized sounds — iced trees clicking together after a storm; scrape of metal runners coasting down a hill near evening, sparking bare rock, reticent snow brushing the blades; shouts in the city; the clink of tipping scales; the slosh of ankle-dangling euphoria; summer insect swarms; plash of sun's rays lengthening over the lawn; baroque silliness; French fluff; political fervor; the chill call of last illness; the swelling sound of always, of never. Did she know already where they would arrive, long before either dared to consider the first touch? He forgives himself this once the too-brief two-manual figure in the thick of his chest, deciding that the only measure that can crack these patterns is beauty.

Ressler reads the profile three times but finds no key to the Goldberg code. He is called into the operating theater. As the dentist administers the composite anesthetic, preparing to yank out the offensive handiwork of bacteria, Ressler calms himself, grips the arms of the chair, and relaxes, following the contour of the seductive melody he has never really put aside since that unbirthday party long ago. He recreates tracts of the piece in his head. Preexistent knowledge of the piece, recovered in a hundred hours of close listening, allows him perfect recall. But the music, the note-for-note isomorph in his interior concert hall, is not the piece she gave him. One cannot step into the same theme twice.