Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

"You are brilliant," he says.

Jeanette drops her jaw. "Why? Because I like gardening?"

But the germ has taken hold in him. Flowers and their cipher-texts, smearing the one-for-one trip-wire correspondence that in vitro would isolate. Can the handle relating base patterns to proteins clear this up? Or could it be that in vitro is less precise than this hopeless, associative morass: Baby's Breath, Crowfoot, Lily of the Valley, Queen Anne's Lace?

"But can we call them anything we like?" His words elicit only a confused look. "I mean," he measures, "people call flowers what their grandmothers teach them to call them. But some grandmother assigned the tag once, way back, right?"

Jeannie chuckles at his earnestness. "Several grandmothers in several places at several different times." No conspiracy.

"Why is a given common name the plant's name? No one in a million years is ever likely to argue with 'Black-Eyed Susan.' What makes it right?" Dark and disturbing, a flare threatening the reductionist certainty that has guided his every step since the home nature museum. The task of the skeptic is to determine, for every appearance, if the label fits the thing. Every tag must be either apt or inapt. Was Charles the Bald? Louis the Fat? Richard the Lion-Hearted? By a slow tightening of terms, exclusion of middles, improvement of instrument, each sobriquet's appropriateness becomes discernible. But the assumption is shaken to the core by the introduction of Jeanette the Misnicknamed. If the name is apt, it's not; if it's not, it is.

She tightens against him. Her waist persuades, hands help, eyes ratify, arms work their armistice. "Well, I suppose a name is right if it sticks, if it becomes the name."

"I'd like something more than the tyranny of the vote."

She gives him the once-over. "All right, bub. You are above average in looks, so we're gonna give you one more shot. What exactly do you have in mind?"

"These," he says, leading her by the digits. "These tiny, bulbous ones."

"Oh!" She smiles widely. "Excellent choice; the name for these is inspired. Note how puffy, spacious. And how they hang upside down. You have thirty seconds."

When he makes no reply, she patters. "Ready for this? Dutchman's Breeches." He makes a puzzled, slight tightening of the mouth, flick of fingers. Faltering, she says, "See the trousers?" There are no trousers. For one, the flowers are less than an inch across. The blossoms flare out in a three-dimensional solid, more H than Y, an oriental kite. Upside down, opening underneath. But why Dutchman? At his failure to respond, Jeannie's features deepen, ready to run from the first hint of disaster. She is more beautiful in distress than at her sunniest. He needs this woman, her scattered stimuli of joy, intensity, and fright. He will end up on her doorstep in the dark rain, waiting for her to come out and utter even so little as one not unkind word.

He drops to his knees and examines, up close, this fragile palate opening diffidently to the air. The more Ressler looks, the more iridescent the bloom becomes until it goes purple around the lip. It smells of nothing — sinister, promising, forsworn, far away, as far away as Jeannie's hair. He moves it under his eye, careful to manipulate only the stem. Glass, it would shatter at a fingerprint. Even so, nature uses him: light rearrangement of examining is enough to dust pollen across his hand.

"But what if it weren't?" he says at last. "What if it were something else? Say, the Common Speak-a-portal."

Dr. Koss, who has followed him to knee level, struggles to her feet like a newborn wildebeest. She stares at him, slowly going radiant, finding in him what she has been after. He has broken the code. Ressler too tries to struggle to his feet, but her mouth blocks his way. "Mouth" is certainly misnamed: what he kisses is something lighter, wider, more enveloping. He is set for weeks, for as long as memory holds out.

How obvious, waiting to be discovered: the tracts of rectilinear Midwest that he once loved for their reserved refusal to interfere with fact in fact consist of an indivisible density of named things. Purple-green weeds sprouting ubiquitously throughout spring. Exploding pollen packets. Seeds parachuting on currents of wind. Waxy pitchers, dull matte, convoluted packed rosettes, bright, round, fierce day's eyes, each replicating and subduing the earth, attempting to demonstrate by success the aptness of their sobriquet.

Jeanette, wetting his mouth with hers, breaks only long enough to pull him impatiently back toward the barracks. But before she can cover him in the prize she will bestow on him for his discovery, while he can still remember the wrinkle with sufficient agitation, Ressler grabs the spiral notebook that came out to Illinois with him. He has reserved it until this moment for lab notes, hypotheses, models, the verifiable jottings of procedure. The pages fill with a complete, handwritten history of the in vitro attempt. Now they seem the logical place to record the afternoon's momentous insight. Jeannie clings lightly to his back, sinking her teeth into his shoulder. She looks on, reads as she murmurs, allowing him two minutes to say what he needs. Then she will take from him everything he has shown himself to be worth. But first, he arrests in print amber the skeleton that might one day release the world from its condition of standing cipherhood: "Flowers have names."

Today in History

March 21: First day of spring, vernal equinox, pedal point of Aries, the calendar's octave. My file for the day is full of forgettable sports records, local legislation, small-time politics, standard international bickering. I can find only one thing of lasting consequence that happened on this date, one recombination that will stick, lodge itself in the permanent gene. For once, I break the self-imposed rule prohibiting birthdays: today is Bach's.

Ressler was celebrating that musical provincial's 299th the night I walked into MOL to make my goodbyes. Todd, alone in the lunchroom, was cheery. "Thanks for breakfast," he said, implying by a grin that they both had needed it. "Why didn't you wake me?"

The question, self-evident to him, knocked the words out of me. I sat down at the empty lunchtable. I had nothing left to say. I didn't even want to be there. Impulse instructed me to run, get rid of him without pointless postmortems. I would have, except for the farewell I owed Dr. Ressler, the blessing I needed from him.

"Why didn't I wake you?" I could manage nothing more than a flat, journalistic survey. Todd nodded, but betrayed the pretense by fiddling with the knobs on the microwave. I was getting softer, fainter. I felt nothing. No resentment, no desperation. Zero. A cipher. I lifted my eyebrows: I release you; now will you let me out cleanly?

"You didn't want to wake our friend?" Todd's voice tacked suddenly, came about. Its preemptive volume, front first, dropping the would-be innocence, jerked me by the neck.

"I didn't want to wake your friend," I said, this time finding the exact, disdaining disengagement I was after. He tilted toward me and rubbed an eyebrow; every natural defense lay with him. I could not lie, could neither attack nor escape. Tolerance of animal stupidity, the only religion I believe in, kept me from choking him. He had broken no rules; we had never laid down any. From the first, I could have him only without promise or propriety. But he had broken something, unforgivably cheated. He had not said. From the day he first showed at the Information Desk, all facts were to be on the table, public domain.

I

"How long?" I asked him. I might have been conducting a phone poll, a product questionnaire.

Todd closed his eyes, pressed thumb to the lids, and struggled to suppress an hysterical snicker. "How long what?"