Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

The "hopeful monster" — Goldschmidt's variation — has been resurrected from the scrap heap with the suggestion that evolution need not always progress by imperceptible gradualism. But despite the haggle in step size, all jumps are essentially local, for there are infinitely more ways of jumping wrong than jumping right. Small text changes ripple into huge phenotypic differences. But the way the text is read and processed will never change, short of the complete annihilation and improbable respark of all life. The code key is fixed, clamped from the first fluke discovery of self-propagation. The translator, the adaptor, is information-rich, determined, locked in. If we stumble on the place once, in the dark, during a storm, after a quarrel that has driven us wildly from home, we may never find the way again. The accumulation of accident along the way makes the journey irreversible. Each step is sculpted, restricted, feasible, frequently brilliant, on rare occasions even optimal. But the sum of these steps is unrepeatable. It will not happen again, not in this way, perhaps not at all.

I look for a go-between. Inside the machine, deep in the cell, the molecule must take the rich hieroglyphics of the DNA string— randomly accumulated dots, crots, and mots — and, its own structure housing the missing key, translate the jiggles of the varying sequence into the purposeful, programmed, cybernetic, living enzymes. Outside, in the warehouse of time, the adaptor I look for must bridge the paradoxical equivalence of message and notch, caprice and complexity, theme and variation.

I wake to sleep and take my waking slow. What falls away is always, and is near. Why are three quarters of my analogies drawn against lyric poetry? One would have to be a lingering sap to still think, with Wordsworth, that poetry is the impassioned expression that is in the countenance of all science. I don't deny the sentimentality charge, but perhaps I keep reverting to anthologies— the ones I have memorized over a life of erratic reading — because they too are their own evolutionary kludge, new vehicles resurrected from modified parts, an historical stratigraphy, packets announcing, "This works, or worked once; use it, or lose it in favor of something else." I learn by going where I have to go.

Four months from now, I'll have starved to death or will be employed again, somewhere. Either way, my education, these notes, the extended aside of this last year, will be over. Only two ways I might still get moonlight into a chamber. I can sit and wait for the calendar and capricious weather to accommodate. Or, even at this time of the night, I might find an intermediary. Get hold of the adaptor. Dress up as the visiting moon.

The Transfer Molecule

He can't explain it — maybe because from here on nothing can work out as hoped — but the morning after he makes love to Jeanette Koss on the floor of the Cyfer lab, he feels inappropriately alive. The physiological component is undeniable: yesterday's nerve-shattering release produced a sleep deeper even than clean conscience. He wakes, lies in the bunk, arches, feels the muscles in the back of his thighs, the full power of the intellectual biped.

He has had a dream: a world-renowned gynecologist, looking suspiciously like Toveh Botkin, told Jeanette Koss that her conception problem lay in sperm getting lost on their way through the egg. The doctor implanted an ultramicroscopic device, a sort of converter shaped to let the sperm enter at one end, pass easily through the cell wall, and sail through to the other end, snapped snugly over the egg nucleus.

Stretched on his back, he tenses at the obvious message he has sent himself in sleep. He knows why they haven't been able to get the cell-free system to work. He, Botkin, and Koss have assembled, in their simulated broth, messenger RNA for the instructions, ribosome material for the factory, ATP for the energy, amino acids for the contractors' materials, GTP to glue them together, two types of enzymes as cut-and-paste wage laborers, and a handful of inorganic cations as a chemical hunch, salts over the shoulder. They have left out the key, the go-between, the bridge.

Ressler, with the oceanic feeling of calm that makes investigation the most sustainable gratification available to living things, conceives of what they are missing. A molecule amorphous but vaguely familiar, one of those UN simultaneous translators. At one locus, the molecule has a spot, an anticodon that matches a codon on the message string. Another spot on this bilinguist holds the amino acid called for in the lookup table. No: the adaptor molecules— for there must be a whole class, each with different anticodon sites and corresponding amino acids— are the lookup table written into matter.

The adaptor molecule is both sorter, porter, and rivet-holder. The anticodon gives it away: more nucleic acid, another RNA chain itself transcribed from — where else? — the parent DNA. Once they season their preparation with this interlocutor, they will be able to make nature break her own code, as she does constantly in the maniacal specific density of self-construction. But before he has time to work out the details, he hears the jiggle in the latch, the intrusion of human sympathy. Company, carrying something, muffled with care. Koss floats into his bedroom, crimson with cold, hazel in triumphant proximity. "Ah!" Ressler looks up, helpless to waylay elation. "The Man from Porlock." But she is so lovely, so here, that he can't resent the desertion of insight, its replacement by her.

"I thought," she says, looking away a little wickedly, a little shyly, "you might like a bite of breakfast." She sits at his bedside and unwraps her packages. Coffee, sweet rolls, fruit. Ressler, slack, lets her insert torn-off pieces into his mouth. He chews, eyes closed, while her hands, losing their chill, colonize the covers. Slowly, seamlessly, they are forsaken again. She undresses, this time showing him. Now they are infinitely patient, exploratory, stripped of yesterday's violence. Yesterday was public, awful, dangerous. Today is soft, secluded, trembling, expectant, admission of mutual rabbit-sin. Her throat takes over again at the end. Anyone home at this hour hears the decibels, knows what blood ritual takes place. Exultant, shouting for help, finding it.

When she transfers control from ape back to angel, that sound is the first thing she mentions. "These barracks walls are pretty thin. They could present a problem for us." Never did he expect a single word could trigger such instant, enzymatic rush. "How are the troops supposed to do their women without dispatching a communique?"

"Enlisted men are not permitted to have sexual relations."

"And officers do it by semaphore?"

Pretty Jeannie wrinkles her nose, kneels over his body, exploring everything in that inscribed universe. He rests a hand above her breasts, protects her even at the cost of this child-like moment. He tenses his metacarpals. "This is crazy, you realize."

Her change is astonishing. She collapses against him like a sensitive plant. She bows her head, hiding it. Muscles along her length clasp him with a desperate rocking. "Don't forsake me now, Stuart." The plea electrifies him.

The discharge is doubled by the phone selecting that instant to ring. "That'll be the HUAC," Ressler jokes weakly. He gets up, throws a blanket around him, glad for the excuse to retreat to the front room. He grabs the receiver and mumbles hello.

"Sleeping in this morning?" the other end says. The voice chills Ressler to the quick. Ulrich. His supervisor knows. "Not that sleep hurts. Look at Poincaré, Kekulé. Major work while unconscious."

Jeanette creeps naked out of the bedroom. She reattaches to him, curled, like a small child, a gibbon on the ground, a hermit crab displaced from its shell. Ressler strokes her hair while she strokes the inside of his legs. He cannot concentrate, makes Ulrich repeat his message.