Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

Behind the radiation-horror is another so great that it requires agencies to interdict the facts. The life script's playwright is a die; even now the script is not fixed. Smudges change it from one reading to the next. The spectacular species-fan is spelled out in a table-bumped game of Scrabble. Who can go on breathing when mutagens are everywhere in the air? A severe birth defect, annihilating a sacred existence, is to the gene just another guess, to the population, just bean-curve indifference. Ten million mutations per U.S. generation. A half-dozen deleterious genes per person.

More unlivable still: the steady generation of noise — birth defects, the eternal perjury of even healthy bodies, infection beyond death — is life's motor. The text, self-trimming, self-writing, self-reading, is also self-garbling. Necessity's chance horror is the mother of variation. Time plays with deleterious mutations strewn through the common gene pool, extracting from them, every handful of millennia, new functionality. Useful difference comes about only through decanting tons of detritus, error, waste. Weed it and reap.

Individual interests are sacrificed to the interests of the species. A billion cripplings to produce one meliorism. Radiation becomes Pentecostal, the procurement of the overspecies that will rescue the speaking animal from the general botch of things, the disastrous night it has brought on itself. Mutation as evolution's arrow: further text depends on the garble, whether from UV or Nagasaki. The garble is the code talking about itself, a decision to go forth, be fruitful, and mutate.

Even the nausea of knowing where the message hails from cannot touch him today. Even knowing that the individual is permitted by gene and tribe only so long as it serves their ends cannot, this hour, alter how he feels. Despite knowledge, he is shamefully alive, weeks away from pushing through. Discovery, once-chaotic things clicking together into a tight matrix, is so unequaled a rush that it overwhelms even the ugliness of what it reveals.

Part of this ankle-dangling euphoria is more prosaic: the absurdly pleasant spring weather that's plagued Champaign-Urbana for days. Who can feel distressed for long in the face of this breeze? The core of brutal insistence thaws with the assurance that his love— recalcitrant, unique, individual — is reciprocated. Jeanette's minutes, he now knows, are as laden with him as his are with her. To be loved reciprocally promotes them to special-interest group. He no longer cares what codes for their shared obsession, what drives them deeper when they both know it can come to no issue. No behavior is so pointless but can be ratified by a second of the motion, mutual agreement, the binding site of love.

Love, like the mutation blade, both maims and surgically saves. He knows both incisions. Today it is good; a surge of surety putting anguish to bed. He savors the slight shift in his favor. Lovely sound rings K-53-C: car honks, someone getting married. The beep persists; he smiles at the summoned party's refusing to answer. At that moment, Jeannie's head appears at the window. "Ask not for whom the car honks."

He forgets himself, the careful propriety they've learned to coat themselves in. He rushes to the opening where she and the soft breeze pour in, holds her face, kisses it in adolescent profusion. Another instant and he is shod, wrapped in windbreaker, out the door. He tears around the corner of the shack, brakes just short of flying into the woman. He stretches out an arm and messes her hair. "Do you still love me? Are you all right? Nothing's happened since I saw you last?" All this delivered at the sprinting speed of one who's just discovered how little time he can afford anything except life.

He lifts her shoulders, pinches her waist, clasps each hand in rapid succession, pulls himself away, and glances at the windows that look out on where they stand. His puppyish eagerness to touch her already gives the ache hopelessly away. She laughs and strolls with him to the waiting car, not the familiar Koss futuristic spaceship. "What's this? What happened to the fins?"

She puts thumb to lip, hesitantly bites the nail. The gesture's endangered tenderness ravishes him. "I know this sounds terribly genre-ish, but I thought it less conspicuous to rent this for the day." She looks at him: the day. The whole day. To be squandered together over its entire length, as if it were really theirs without constraint to be disposed of. She stares at him. "Want a lift?"

How can he help but want? He is prepared to go wherever she designs to take them, today, ever. He throws himself into the camouflaged rental on the seat beside her, passenger, co-escapee, surrendered to travel. They wander out of town onto an unnumbered county road heading south, a lane unrolling as straight as the cut of a plow-scythe, the trailing arrow of a compass. The snow has melted, leaving the muted, moldy yellows of last fall's stalk residue, the blue-black of the soil, the clinical gray of a tree or windbreak hedge, the protestant white of a farmer's two-storied frame. He feels no inclination to ask where they're going. They are there already, here, in the same car with one another, released, untethered, unsponsored, on the thin crust of the earth.

Out here in rural emptiness, road calculations are irrelevant. They are vulnerable to the slightest change of mind, the possibilities presented by the infinite numbered grid of county roads leading exactly everywhere. He can't imagine how anyone taking a trip could possibly plan his destination ahead of time. One can only get from Here to There by plotting the way simultaneously from both, and hoping against odds that the tendrils will meet in the middle.

He looks at the loveliness beside him. She too needs no more forethought than the game she plays with him every time they come to an intersection. She rolls up to the node, slightly reducing speed and asking languidly, while testing the wheel imperceptibly to left or right, "What do you think? Turn here?" Sometimes she turns, sometimes not. It comes to the same thing.

Something catches their eyes in the expanse of cumulused air. She tugs at his sleeve, disbelieving the remarkable phenomenon. Above a town that before this moment barely merited the name, a plane strews an aerial milt stream of confetti from its cargo bay. Jeanette steers toward this celebration — some local cause for wonder, a marriage perhaps, or a birth. As the dispersed load approaches the ground, Ressler makes out the artificial cloud: a flurry of rose petals, storm of leaf-lets showering the town. All these miles of A-frames and straight acreage, naked fields being readied for corn, bathed in a burst of pink petal-points. He would not be able to take in this March-shower surreality except that Jeannie is there at the wheel beside him, stone-still, just looking, for all she is worth.

How long has it been since he's gotten out? Out of town, out of range, out of the lab, out of touch, out of himself? He hasn't sampled this liberating emptiness since that day, negotiated lifetimes ago, when he Greyhounded into town through this same enchanted vacancy of may and might. The field returns, even as they pass, from black sand to the first, primitive hint of callow, new green. The challenge of this spilling emptiness cuts into him. He commits himself to feeling it, to riding aimlessly with her, to living this rented day. He stretches, feeling his feet against the floorboards, his back flexing against the car seat. He pushes out his arm, which falls experimentally across her welcoming shoulders, exercises its privilege to play with her rose neck hair. "Is this a kidnapping, by the way?"

Jeanette smiles, far away. "I sure hope not. Because you won't get any money out of my husband these days." Even mention of the man has no power over them. Herbert falls away, sinks into the road shoulder disappearing behind their wheels. When she looks over at him, lifting her eyes from the hazardless road, it is with all the dismay of care: we are abducting each other, throwing away everything in complicity.