Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

"Oh," Woyty answers with a placid smile. "We're not talking about recent weeks. We're going back into the distant past. A year, year and a half."

"What are you talking about? Nonsense. Before Ivy?"

"Stuart. Leave me be. The kid's not mine."

"God. Don't tell me! Not learning fast enough. You've hit a wall in the instant-genius campaign, and the only explanation is that no child of yours. …" He breaks off in disgust.

Dan gives his evidence in monotone. "Five days ago, Ivy and I were playing with the letter blocks. It occurred to me that she might not be acquiring the alphabet at all, that I might be cuing her solely on block color. I thought it might be fun to set up a control, have her pick colored disks out of a ring. She couldn't do it very well. I tried it with some large letters and she selected them perfectly. That didn't make any sense. How could she learn letters and not colors? I tried the disks again, and she was erratic. She could do blue, black, white. But it became increasingly obvious that Ivy could not differentiate red from green disks without prompting."

"Your child is color-blind." An allele that might not have come to the surface for years had Woytowich not been so keen on bestowing super-stimulated intelligence on her.

"I've told you. She's not my child."

Ressler summons up the textbook treatments of the matter. He recalls the central irony of sight: good vision is recessive; myopia dominant. He skims past that irrelevance and concentrates on remembering what he can about red-green color-blindness. "Renée doesn't have it?"

Daniel clucks his tongue dryly against the roof of his mouth. "I thought you were supposed to be the boy wonder. Don't you remember anything from Mendel?"

Ressler suddenly sees why the question is stupidly irrelevant. Red-green color-blindness is the classic example of a sex-linked, X-linked recessive. Both Ivy's X chromosomes must have the allele for her to be color-blind. If Daniel isn't color-blind, his daughter can't be. "And you don't have it?" Ressler asks, again irrelevantly, of the first man in downstate Illinois to have bought a color set. "What about the autosomal varieties? At least two different assortments, as I remember."

Daniel snorts. "One in several tens of thousands. Which do you think is more likely? A fluke mutation or a woman getting herself plowed?" He turns away in pain, deaf to anything further Ressler has to say on the matter. "Too bad, too. I was looking forward to showing her the egg-in-the-bottle in a year or two." Science. "The potato and iodine."

"You're not going to ask for visitation?"

Woyty just spins lazily toward him. "How many times do I have to tell you? She's not mine."

The improbability of the event, the lateness of the hour leave Stuart helpless. "So what do you do now?" Woytowich flicks a wrist toward the corner, indicating a duffel bag and toilet kit. "Oh, no. Dan. You're not moving in here?"

"Just until I find a place."

"Turning your back on them? Just like that?"

"They'll get half the checks."

The next day Ressler visits Renée. The woman assaults him with dazed protests of innocence. "Stuart. There's never been anyone but Daniel. Not now, not two years ago. God. Not even before I met him." Clearly innocent: the way she rocks the baby between denials. She confesses to one sorry, fully clothed grope with her thesis instructor, momentarily aroused for the first time since his tenure when the two of them compared the relative merits of Volpone and As You Like It.

"You've told him as much?"

"He won't listen. He has that fucking proof."

"He told you about that?"

"Stuart," she says, ready to debase herself. Her vowels caramelize. "I don't care what inheritance says. Inheritance is w rong." He glances down at the bright child, tilting her head in curiosity all around the enormous room. All right, then. He's ready to accept the astronomical odds. But his willingness is not at issue. Ivy babbles, grabs Stuart's cuff, shakes it, waiting impatiently for the next letter game. The baby, however precocious, doesn't know what's hit her. But she is a fast study. She'll learn in no time.

A week later, Ressler takes his first outdoor tomato juice in months. In vitro is still jammed, and he has nothing to fall back on but the torture of relaxation. Propped in the forgotten lawn chair, he realizes that he'll soon have been in the I-states a whole year. The landscape is unchanged, but his 1958 debut stretch on the lawn is incomplete. No Tooney and Evie Blake will materialize, step out from K-53-A, glasses in hand, having waited all winter for this first lawn party of the season. No one will set up a chair at Stuart's side and kick in a conversational bracer. No decimated Woyty, now, and Jesus: no Levering. And Koss's awful resolve to keep away, keep from seeing him, will be no weaker, no less erratic, than her original passion.

His eye scans K court, the tar-paper triplexes. He looks across the toy town street toward A through J. He imagines all the doors opening at once, pouring out their contents, Tornado Day. He animates the imagined occupants, marches them his way, stands them out on his front lawn tapping an imaginary but ample keg, trading the character flaws that are the generating spark of all beer bashes. A neighbor who studies wish fulfillment in corporate execs, a woman who conditions rabbits to do this trick with a rosary, a fellow with a theory about rag content in Spanish Renaissance manuscripts, another who claims he's in grad school but whose big trick is to sing the words to the Gunsmoke theme so fast you can't tell what language he's in: they are all there, behind closed doors, lined up in these row houses. Statistics and human variability guarantee it.

He has only to tap on any window and they will come out, eager to meet him. Ressler has yet to commit himself to whether dreams carry codified information or whether they're just electrical residue. As he nods deeper into this one, the difference becomes insignificant. He snaps his head up each time it droops onto his chest. Then, from nowhere, he sees himself staring at clarity, at the rarest, most paradisiacal species.

In that moment of visitation — arriving once in a life if lucky and requiring a further lifetime to recover — it comes to him. He is afraid to move; the least muscle tic will frighten the creature off. He sets his empty glass down on the grass, taking forever to reach ground. He lifts himself slowly from the chair, feeling his knees infinitesimally unbend. He stands, turns, looks: it is still there. Everything he is after, the last bit, the complete, documented map home, squarely in front of him. His.

He stays up all night hitting it, but it will not break. He tries to knock it out of commission by reviewing the literature, but it stands up to the articles. The means are so clean, so self-evident, that the suspicion that someone must already have it sits in the crook of Ressler's gut like a silver-dollar-sized, swallowed acid drop. He is waiting for Botkin outside her office when she shows up the next morning. She's surprised enough to know not to ask anything until she opens the door. Stuart makes a beeline for the couch, where he lies back and announces, "We are so bloody stupid."

"Instantiate that pronoun. You and me? The research group? The department? The human species?"

"Whichever is largest."

"This," she says, her pitch cupping upwards with each word, "is Biology?"

He grins in a way that confirms his sweeping generalization. "We've done the thing exactly ass-backwards. We've done step two, the hard part. And we've been stuck backing up to step one, the piece of cake. Like someone building an entire internal combustion engine and then serendipitously saying, 'Hey! Why don't we put gasoline in here?' Stupid. Dumb. Pea-brained."