Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

In the following days, the shame of that look drives Ressler to force the equilibrium of aroused danger he lives in. He will push at the precarious spot, get to know his enemy, the rightful husband. The man she sleeps with every night in abject intimacy. He cannot invite himself to their home, sit on their settee, run a semantic differential on Herbert Koss as she looks on. His trial must be isolate, valid. Life, as always, supplies its own contrivance: the Local Industries Trade Show at the Champaign Holiday Inn. This year's theme is "1983: How We Will Live a Quarter Century On." Every east-central Illinois entrepreneur in the book has banded together to reassure the consuming public that the future will continue to present no end of new things to buy. The roster of participants lists Herbert Koss as a principal. Booth 112: "Better Food in a Fuller Tomorrow." Ressler locates him on the newsprint map amidst a forest of voice-activated appliances, vibrating soap, self-regulating lawn grass, and power-driven exercise cycles.

Ressler catches the food technologist manning the booth alone. Herbert and his outfit have taken a conservative stance compared to the antigravity, space-station approach of other vendors. His predictions are modest. Hexagonal steaks for efficient storage. Vegetable applique that cooks on the stove top. Plastic wrap at once spoil-retardant, clingy, and edible. Herbert's brave new delivery systems attract a continuous lull. Ressler wonders if he need introduce himself; he has met the man only casually, half a minute at a time. But Herbert greets him at once, friendlily, his color deepening to rose under the convention-hall neon.

"Dr. Ressler," he blusters. "Ha! You would have to catch me in my finest hour." They shake quickly. "My wife said you were likable, but coming to say hello to a neglected huckster is beyond the call of duty." He spreads his hands over his display, deeply embarrassed. "I assume you have no genuine interest in how the future bodes for edible goods."

The man's no fool. Just an engineer making a living. His self-deprecation fills Ressler with shame for the daily transgressions of thought, word, and everything up to and all but including deed against this man, whose carriage and speech embody a quality promoting him beyond contempt: good-natured humility. Ressler has for weeks enjoyed the self-congratulatory belief that disinterested tinkering with nature was somehow more virtuous than retail. Now he stands in front of the man, quietly accepting indictment in the lines of this fortyish, kind face. His failure to pick up the conversational gambit only makes Mr. Koss more graciously awkward.

"It's generous of you to pretend to really want the spiel. This peculiar gadget seems to be garnering the most attention at this year's show." He picks up a sealed can outfitted with metal nozzle. "Believe it or not, we've injected this full of cheese that has, alas, been pasteurized until it has become virtually eternal. It is probably also flame-resistant and impervious to radiation." Herbert bites a nail, but Ressler assures him with approving silence: The humiliation is all mine.

"The nozzle is still a little rickety. But in twenty-five years, I hope someone can bring this prototype into production. The long-term goal is to shoot cheese out in a controlled spray." He looks up from the device: I'm sorry; it's what I do. Whatever work your hands can find to do, do now.

"No," Stuart objects. "Go on. Please. It looks as if it will be very… useful." Herbert thanks him in silence. A look of complicity passes between them: Ah! But what's the use of use?

"Our main problem may not be the nozzle, however, but the plate presentation. As you see, the product at present bears an unfortunate resemblance to something you might scoop up after a Great Dane." Chuckling forlornly. In a moment, both men are laughing at a puerile species that can never stop ludicrous ingenuity, can't see what a fool it makes of itself in this world. Only invention's source, the loneliness longer than life, prevents the evidence from condemning the lot of them.

Ressler stops first. "Herbert, your wife is… wonderful."

Koss beams, proud without pride. "I envy you both, really."

Ressler's head snaps back. "What do you mean?"

"I would have liked to be a scientist." He shrugs at the spin-offs all around him in the booth, the garden he wound up in.

Ressler dismisses him with a wipe in the air. "No difference. You've heard that Congress is deciding whether actors in white coats have to identify themselves as simulations? If they do, we'll all be undertitled." They kick around that topic: Truth in Nomenclature. Herbert contributes his nemesis — a Western senator with a touch of religious mania and a mission to legislate the labels on synthetic foods. The law would prevent manufacturers from selling juice as "Juice" unless it contains a given percentage of real fruit sap. Others would require a suitable euphemism.

"Our outlandish creation here would be forced to go forth into the world under the ignominious name of 'Artificial Pasteurized Processed Cheeselike Food — Stick Drink — Spread Mix Spray.' It simply isn't fair to the entrepreneur."

Ressler laughs. He can't help himself. He likes this man, as much as he's liked any man since Tooney left. "Our legislators would be shocked to hear that evolution's greatest successes deliberately misrepresent appearances. Nature has never abided by truth in advertising." Your wife can attest to that.

"Jeanette's convinced me that your splinter group is on the right track." Ressler smiles, wincing. "Jeannie brings the journals into bed with her, and reads them out loud. We share a great deal." Herbert asks him his opinion of the possibility that cancer is gene-induced. The man may not have become a scientist, but no failure of curiosity, attention, or temperament prevented him. He is more current on this topic than Ressler, but Stuart takes a stab at the challenge. "A stretch of nucleic acid could code for a tumor-inducing enzyme, but a mutator gene is more likely, or a faulty feedback that causes other genes to run amok. All speculation, but I can at least conceive of an oncogene."

The comeback arrives from over his shoulder. "I had an Onco Gene, once."

Ressler sees her reflection in Herbert Koss's face: the painter in the convex mirror behind the subjects. The creases in Herbert's face swell like a succulent after flash flood. Even the cadence of his voice picks up conviction as he cracks back, "I remember him! Your Onco Gene and your Anti Body."

With a single-finger signal upon Ressler's back, Jeanette springs to her husband and kisses him behind the ear. The married couple exchange a few tokens of their idioglossia, the most natural thing in the world. Ressler is stunned: the husband is hopelessly in love, and the wife accepts his ministrations with a marvelous insistence on the ordinary.

"Wife, you must invite this fine fellow to have dinner with us." Herbert touches her upper arm in a way suggesting, circumspectly, that he may have found a friend.

"Feüow, you heard the man." Jeanette, perfectly modulated, relishes the idea. Ressler barely manages to mumble a transparent excuse, blanching at the look of hurt confusion coming over Herbert's face. The Know,Your Enemy campaign retreats from the field in disarray, Ressler smiling but routed.

For the next several days, he avoids her. He frequents the lab at night or when she is busy teaching. When they must be there together, he makes sure it's in the company of others. She touches his upper arm as she passes — familial, furtive, questioning. But she knows the source of his silence, and neither of them cares to put it in words. She leaves him gentle and absurd gifts as apology— currants, offprints, lozenges at the first hint of a cough. She moves through the day visibly holding her breath. She sheds all trace of public sarcasm. Lovering continues to give her ample opportunity to deliver the quick cut, but the woman contritely declines the kill. One of those creatures with two-stage life cycles, having metamorphosed in front of his eyes from sylph back into cipher, she wants nothing but another chance to return to the pupa and re-emerge with all the chestnut innocence she last week lost for him.