Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

It chills Ressler to lie there and read the piece, the chill of recognizing Berlioz without having heard him. He does not sink, beaten. Quite the reverse. The piece breaks his heart with poignancy. It is a beautiful late-twentieth-century pilgrim's narrative— exegesis pressing outwards, refusing to stay confined to the dark backyard. It makes the work his own era struggles to produce seem unmatched by any Renaissance: a time when anything might come to be anything at all.

The shining confirmation — the correspondence between their own work and this work going on across the ocean — descends on him as relief. All sense of racing to the gate dissolves. There is still the weight of wanting to contribute somewhere along the line. But Crick's structure, so close to the one he has independently imagined, reassures him that contribution is never an endangered individual. It will be made, whatever might become of him, no matter how soon design's undertow drags him down.

Botkin mistakes the quiet that comes over him while reading. When he finishes, she consoles him. "He still seems confused between ribosomal and messenger RNA. And he has not yet picked up on Gale and Folkes."

"You think not?" He glances at the paper, frightened. Then he understands his friend is trying to motivate him to remain in the chase. How can he tell her: I am in, for good, forever, even if I drop out along the way? We have no choice in these things; they must be done for the greater glory of whatever there'is. "Maybe not," he whispers, grinning, conceding the responsibility still wrapped inside relief. "Maybe we can add something to this." He gazes at the creases in Dr. Botkin's face, the manifestation, the final working out of a textual puzzle written nowhere in particular, everywhere in general. He hands back the beautiful draft, Crick's notes toward a score for the young person's guide to the orchestra. "Let us go after this adaptor molecule, then."

"I think we have to."

"You know what it is, of course."

"More nucleic acid?"

"Who else?" Is there any other matter so skilled at grammar that it can write one, in its own language? "Thank you for showing me that," he says. "It's breathtaking." He spills over with the wonder of it: the organism guessing inspiredly at its own conveyance, mechanisms themselves the frozen record of inspired guesses about the environment. The practical substitute of words for words seems makeshift, courageous beyond imagining. He can say nothing.

Botkin lifts a hand to her darkwood shelves, takes down a book, and slowly reads to him. The source is in German, of which Ressler has only technical reading knowledge. But Botkin's native fluency bridges this impediment. Her eyes read in one language, her lips pronounce another, without the halting searches of the simultaneous interpreter.

" 'At the suggestion of Doles, the Cantor at the Leipzig Thomas-Schule, the choir surprised Mozart by performing the double-chorus motet Singet dem Herrn ein neues Lied. The choir had produced but a few measures when Mozart bolted upright, shocked. After a few more measures, he shouted out, "What is this?" His whole soul appeared to rise up into his ears. The singing ended; he cried out joyfully, "Here at last is something one might learn from."' I hope this holds up in translation."

Even in the translation of a translation. The image of Europe's prodigy, exiled in the loneliness of his abilities, unexpectedly discovering that he is not alone only augments the strange understanding welling in Ressler. "The name of that piece: 'Sing unto the Lord a new song'?"

"On the mark." He does not even ask the name of that surprise something, the someone one might at last learn from. No need to translate it into speech.

Lovering's assault seems more inexplicable after a week's simmering. But one accusation stands out of the erratic mass as possessing a germ of truth. Distance is not respectfully neutral, as he has always meant it. Socializing, like push-ups, is a necessary, unpleasant surrogate for the real thing. He has not visited Woytowich and Renée since they gazed at the evening news together last summer. Almost too late, he feels a funny, irrelevant need to exonerate himself. He finds himself on their stoop on the first of March, holding an amateurishly wrapped, postage-stamp-sized baby jumper, he hopes female.

Woyty opens the door, shouts "Stuart," clutches at his chest, burlesqueing a heart attack. "My God, man! Who died?" He rushes Ressler in, treating him just a notch below long-lost brother. Lovering is right: Ressler has let the thread of mutual sentence almost snap. "Renée honey," Daniel shouts. "You'll never guess!"

A thin voice from the distant room wafts back. "If it's the Census Bureau, tell them we're topping off at one."

"She's kidding," Daniel gushes. "She loves this motherhood racket. Come in, come in. We were just getting ready for the bassinet. Want to see?"

"I'd prefer the home movie, Dr. W." Ressler can't deliver the line without smirking. Woyty's elated regressing is infectious. He rushes Ressler upstairs. Renée fusses embarrassingly over the little jumper as if it were the coat of many colors. She retires it to the middle of a set of shelves that Dan has labeled "0 to 6," "6 to 12," and "12 to 24."

"We have to wash Ivy," Woyty sings in a high, squeaky voice, rubbing his nose into the infant's belly. "Don't we have to wash Ivy?" Ivy smiles, or perhaps it is just gas. Ivy's father undoes the enormous safety pin in her cotton diapers. "What did you do here? Did you make all this?" Daniel removes the soiled rags, showing Ressler the product, the miraculous residue left in a beaker after fractional distillation. The mocha clay — laid down in deposits— might fire in a kiln to silky porcelain.

The wrapper gets thrown into an enormous collecting sack for the cleaning service. Father daubs the holdouts from between Ivy's legs. The infant makes a confused gurgle, unsure whether to resist, screaming, or give in with pleasure. Ressler is hypnotized by the protozooic genitalia: a fatty eruption, almost tuberous, between the egg-roll thighs, a strange red rash disappearing into a discreet afterthought of a tuck, like the dimple that marks where the mold attaches.

Ivy goes into the bassinet, water warmed to half-degree precision on Renée's thermometer. She seems to enjoy returning to the drink, splashing about polywog-style with more muscular knowledge than she can muster on dry land. As he sops her clean, Daniel keeps up a constant stream of language games: "Where's your foot? Here it is! No, we haven't lost it. Where's your tummy? That's right. How did you know?"

Father and daughter have an uncanny rapport, almost spooky for the handful of weeks under the bridge. Reading Ressler's thoughts, Woyty concurs, "She's a prodigy. Renée and I are both amazed. Already twice where the books say she's supposed to be." He gazes at his wife in astonishment and pride. Renée responds in kind. Daniel goes on laving, talking, half to Stuart, half to Ivy, letting his daughter in on an awful prediction. "This is going to be the brightest baby in the world. Isn't she?" he asks, sponging the tiny creature's back.

"If Daddy has anything to do with it," Renée chuckles. "He's got the John Stuart Mill alphabet blocks strung up over her crib, and he spends an hour going through them with her every night."

"I swear she gets them already. I feel her catching on."

Ressler looks in the flat-focusing eyes of this baby to see if that can be possible. He remembers that other model of miraculous miniaturization, Margaret Blake. Ivy, no longer than Margaret's arm, retraces phylogeny back to some intermediary generating form. Staring at Ivy, amphibious in her bath, he begins to think that parenting may be science as well. The gradual testing, forgoing, and refinement of postulates, the constant probes of methodology and interpretation. Ivy is the subject of every lesser investigation anyone has ever run.