Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

"Dull. Dim-witted. Duncical," Botkin agrees. "So tell me." She laughs, infected with the visitation of science, which she has felt once before. Laughs for this young man, for the moment of insight that will not come in this way again.

"Unbelievable. I designed it toward this end. I'd already realized it would have to be something like this. That was the whole point of Gale and Folkes. I'd laid it out, everything but the method itself, months ago. But I must have___" Marveling: how could it be? "I must have forgotten."

"And now you've recovered?"

And more. Romped. Routed. "You see, it was the fault of pattern. All those months of numerology we put in. I've been as guilty as Gamow, Crick, Ulrich, any of them."

"Explain yourself. Two speeds slower, please."

"We all wanted to make the codon catalog conform to some kind of internal necessity. The problem is, math does provide a few surprising, elegant, yet irrelevant ways of producing the number twenty out of the numbers sixty-four, three, and four. But you see, Nature — well, it's not even perverse, because it's not even a noun. Nature had no idea what we had planned for it."

"You're suggesting that we forget your poet's advice about forcing Homer into English — allow the result to be less than rapid, plain, direct, noble?"

Ressler nods his head impatiently. "Because no experimental evidence for internal commas exists, we assumed a self-punctuating code, got hung up on catalogs where no two successive codons create valid overlaps. The notion of a self-punctuating, error-correcting code was never far from my mind. It happens that the largest possible error-detecting, self-framing catalog is exactly twenty codons. As a result of this coincidence, I was predisposed against even thinking of long monomer chains like CCCCCC. Monotonous strings like poly-C carry no internal information. Not worth toying with, I thought. Couldn't be more wrong." Ressler sits up, carried forward by excitement. "The trivial chains are our entree into this thing."

A slow, broad grin of understanding- breaks out over Botkin's face. She glimpses it. Her pleasure confirms Ressler. She could blurt it out, fill in the missing bit herself now. But she sits back happily, waiting for him.

"We have built ourselves a working in vitro interpreter, an Enigma Machine that converts any nucleotide chain we feed it into the protein polymer it stands for. Oh Toveh!" His voice is a husky, amazed low wavelength. "Child's play. Stupid, stupid, stupid. It really is. We've built the flower, then discovered sun." He's come too far not to spell out the obvious. "Grunberg-Manago and Ochoa had polyribonucleotide synthesis three years ago. Accidentally, but we'll take it." He nudges the smile in her direction, stands, spins Euclidians in the narrow office. "Khorana has nucleotide-building down to a science. We can say anything we want to our little transcriber. So we synthesize our own RNA message, only we make it the most simple-minded, open-throated, informationless whole-tone shout imaginable." In the beginning was the Word. "We make our own gene for reading, only we make it all of one base. We take this constructed, monotone string — poly-C, poly-anything— and submit it to the protein-synthesis process. I'll wager the remainder of my fellowship that the resulting protein will be a repeating polymer string of a single amino acid. We will have the first word of the code: the codon CCC codes for whatever poly-amino makes up the resulting string."

"All right," says Botkin. "We get UUU, AAA, GGG, and CCC. Four down leaves sixty to go." That takes care of transmuting lead into gold. What do you do for an encore?

Ressler's face drops before he sees that the woman's calm is affected, her euphoria about to blow out every pore. "The rest of the catalog is just sweat." It is not, in fact. He begins to see how there's always call for one more insight, one more piece of improvised ingenuity. But labeling, controlled mutagen-tailoring of the submitted message, poly-dinucleotides, combinatorics, short chains — time-consuming, meticulous, brute lexical mop-up will get them through.

"Simple," she concurs. "Dr. Johnson's dictionary." But beneath the sardonic restraint, they both know he has done the hard part. He has listed the set of imperatives for lifting the curtain. Her excitement is unconcealable, and it spills out of her in cautionary checks. "Anyone wishing to make a little conversation with the angels has to remember that jeder Engel ist schrecklich." At his blank, startled look, she laughs and glosses, "Every angel is terrible. You've told Dr. Koss?"

Something, a slight rise in the woman's cheerful tone, warns Ressler that she knows the half of what she is asking. He feels the last step in an untraceable hierarchy of chemical events flush his face, conveying the source by suppressing it. Enzyme spray laces his central nervous system. He will not go on this way, pretending. He cannot bear it. And now, he need not. Heart, lungs, viscera do a Coney Island. He is diminished, augmented all at once, hung out on the first intervals of a melody that pronounce him infinitely powerful and shatteringly afraid, a pairing he needs no code wheel to read. Promise first. You must never die.

Now he can promise. He can go to her, say, "See what a flower I have found you." No more cause, no possible loss, no need for this denial, the refusal they have fallen into, the separation standing in for life. She must get free. The two of them must marry, must make, of the time still in front of them, the everyday miracle time already hints at. He will go to her, tell her he has sprung through to the far side. He holds the answer in his hands; hers if she wants it. He will ask her help and offer her his, daily and for good. What will it be like then, how impossible, necessary, and real, to be able to look up from anything he is thinking, working on, just look up — nothing so simple as that — and speak to her, hear her, be with her?

"I haven't told her yet," he says. "But she's next."

Theory and Composition

Sometimes we played a game, essentially Name that Tune. Our friend would challenge us: "A sequence please, some clues, But make it something from the repertoire I've had some chance in this amateur's life of having heard."

The point was not mastery of the catalog, but the pleasure in quotation: Were we familiar with those few measures, a certain interval, a favorite leap; that abiding high G in the 'cello, surprise rising fifths, agitation in the reeds?

He thought themes between us might make an intimacy, could be almost like singing. We didn't get it: "How long should the phrase be?" "How long do I need? Give it to me a tone at a time. One after the other; I'll stop you when I'm home."

We tried him on our most obscure: Stamitz, Machaut, Cui. Then graduated to guilty loves. At last, it grew fun to see if Gilbert and Sullivan, slowed to a stop and in minor, might slip him. Or "Satisfaction." "Watchman, Tell Us of the Night."

I thought: so this is melody.

Leased office, dull mechanical hum, irritating flicker of fluorescence, and a few friends, stretching their vocal cords. A little patter, a little mix of the dozen available intervals. And out of this weight on the chest, our desolation, came a sudden sweep, a quick-closing glimpse of that place beyond the incurable, where hope might Still germinate.

We resorted to the concert war-horses. The point was to see how far they might be sliced down, pared back to their essentials, and still be recognizable. Ressler was uncanny. Even with my feeble approximations, he could get most of what I knew by heart in a few pitches. Half by reading my mind, half by the shape of the phrase, he got Brahms's Fourth, first movement, in four.

The suggestion of predictability in the masters outraged Todd. "Now how in hell, out of all possible choices—"