Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

I have the likeness for the whole process in front of me. How could I have been so long in hearing it? Each alternate translation is an emblem of the generating tune. But variation grows rich in a new tongue. The tune in February. The tune as laborer. The tune in love. The tune in the Information Revolution. The tune intoned without hope or longing in the cloister of a solitary order. The tune in vitro. The tune swung round, wrenched into minor. The tune as a lost vee of geese. The tune triumphant. The tune as sudden stroke, erasing all personality. The tune as folk tune. How long you have been away from me. Come home, come home, come home. Change the signature, rhythm, harmonic underpinning, even the intervals. Where is the theme? Oh, still in there, in the new terms, the awful euphoria of more. It needs only a listener with the right key to find that unprecedented, surprising, radical bit that from the first, all along, it was saying.

Because he is not where I thought he is; because I had him badly figured; because I set out last June to identify Dr. Ressler at last; because Ressler died; because I thought Todd had run off to Europe; because he in fact came back for his friend's death, leaving my letter sealed under some casement, waiting months for a benevolent stranger to post it; because I thought to learn genetics, hoping that way to work my way around to the man; because I loved with all the force of metaphor; because I loved those two as if they were the last similes left on earth; because I will never get the exact words and will be lucky to hint at the weakest equivocation; because I shut myself away for months for work (because I thought them both gone); because I find, tonight, in crossing over, that I was wrong on virtually every account worth being wrong on, I hear the old tune as if it were some absurdly singable new song. Sing it then. Friend, thou art translated.

Century of Progress

Q: Why not a test ban? If satellites can read license plates from outer space, couldn't they also detect your basic multimegaton blasts going off here or there?

P.N.

A: Official line is that a test ban would not be verifiable, and thus not desirable. But many in the scientific community say tremor detection has permitted verification for at least a decade. Nuclear detonations are required by the space weapons program now under development. Measurement is never separate from motive.

J. O'D.

Q: How many humans will there be by the beginning of next century? How many other living things?

R.P.

A: Eight billion humans, by conservative estimate. There will still be many animals. But far fewer kinds—

J. O'D.

Q: My parents used to sing a song together when I was a girl, before the First World War. It was called something like "A Hundred Years from Now." It was beautiful, but I've never been able to find it since. Do an old lady a favor?

L.S.

A: One Hundred Years Hence what a change will be made In politics, morals, religions, and trade;

In statesman who wrangle or ride on the fence, These things will be altered a hundred years hence.

Then woman, man's partner, man's equal will stand,

While beauty and harmony cover the land;

To think for oneself will be no offense,

The world will be thinking, a hundred years hence.

Oppression and war will be heard of no more,

Nor the blood of the slave leave its print on our shore;

Conventions will then be a useless expense,

For we'll all go free suffrage, One Hundred Years Hence.

J. O'D.

Change of Venue

He did not run for Europe; he came back. Ressler's death did not leave him cutting human ties, cleaning off, briskly efficient. Franklin was in the Low Countries already last spring, throwing his lot in with new words. Days after he wrote me, second week in June, he heard that Dr. Ressler was entering the last turn. He must have dropped everything and come back home.

Home to what? The death notice says nothing. "I have just heard__" Midwestern postmark; the town Ressler chose to die in. Did Franklin make it? Was he able to see the man? In my last word from Franklin, a trail a half year old, he'd just arrived stateside. No reason to believe he isn't still here. Somewhere. Today.

On the Threshold of Liberty

On March 11, the AEC concedes to angry scientists that seismic shock from last year's test in the Nevada desert registered in Alaska, 2,320 miles away, and was not limited to 250 miles, as first claimed. Ressler can't imagine how even government might think that figures will conform to decree. But he understands its temptation to dictate to measurement. Agencies sit on sheaves of results they can't ingest, a report of increasing mastery over material that grows faster than they can read it; each new breakthrough edges deeper into that place where everything is certain to happen — wider extremes of availability tahn the biome ever anticipated.

Foreign policy snaps precedent. Leaders are left hanging on to realpolitik, chanting the trusty, rusted formulae long obsolete. Nations haven't the first notion what to do about the eager weapons that will garble irreversibly the three-billion-year message inside the informational molecule. The lone trustee, the incompetent caretaker, is loose on the estate.

The public, even those still buying the myth of species permanence, has lately latched onto the most horrible fold in the new dogma. Life is no longer a priori appropriate. Creatures become sickeningly plastic, moldable, as mistakable as clay. Two-headed monsters, nightmarish collages of scales, fur, wings, and jagged things, hybrid ghouls of unbound imagination inhabit theaters nearest you. Godzillas, lagoon creatures, giant Gila monsters: nothing now prevents life from running amok in the shower of mutagenic material already unleashed. Lovering pins up a Yardley cartoon on the office bulletin board. "Radiation didn't hurt us a bit." The speaker is an amorphous blob with three eyes.

The specter is more terrifying than mass extinction. The annihilation of most of the globe seemed survivable so long as some fraction of the message remained intact. But if monstrous mean-inglessness propagates with the speed and exactitude of natural transmission, everything is over. The loss of a great library to fire is a tragedy. But the surreptitious introduction of thousands of untraceable errors into reliable books, errors picked up and distributed endlessly by tireless researchers, is nightmare beyond measure.

Ressler's read Neel and Schull on the effects of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on childbirth. He'd be the first to point out the impossibility of generalizing about the effects of radiation after one generation. New lethals float around in the pool, garblings that won't reveal their consequences for several lifetimes. If a bomb can be heard 2,300 miles away, then how unacceptably far might invisible, message-melting static seep out? Government, confronted with living nightmare among its own constituency, refits the facts, making human ingenuity seem somehow survivable, benign, commensurate with being alive. The project of procreation can't be allowed to scare itself sterile on its own imagination.

If scientific fact disappears in a sea of carefully tailored editing, then the protecting officials will have induced the corruption they meant to stave off. Fear of sinister garbling is just the first, obscure public realization of molecular genetics. The greatest revolution in thought ever, the one material theory of being that isn't an after-the-fact put-up, has an even more unpalatable ramification. The sanctity of one life, the primacy of the particular, has no place in the new science. Biology has united ecology, taxonomy, paleontology, and genetics in a single grand theory of encoded nucleotides, but in doing so, it lays bare terminal grimness. Gene, organism, and tribe operate by opposing means, are driven by inimical goals. The individual is a myth of scale.