Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

How can the one place where that fragile experiment thrives, how can it be protected, kept from being trampled? Investigation cannot and ought not be stopped. The command to decipher was present at the start, driving the first clunky, unshelled, self-duping, primitive amino-assembler. But if research, life, is to protect itself from itself here at the eleventh hour, the moment of its second revolution, curiosity must be amended, matured. He cannot bring that new thing to life by himself. But there is one he might ask about this idea forming in his mind, a friend who might already be halfway toward founding that new science required to save creation from the creative urge.

A nervous coed approaches him as he drifts by the library. Are you the one from the picture magazine? She thrusts out a scrap of cash-register receipt and asks him to sign his name. "Oh, no," Ressler objects. "Thank you, but this is premature. I haven't done anything yet. Ask me next year, perhaps." He grins to smooth her apology and backs away. He runs for the barracks. Sprinting, gulping air, he knows it is high time — yes, even this late in life — to tie himself forever to his companion. There is something they must find, develop together as helpmates. They will only be able to reach it in combination, each contributing a half-proposal to the corrective that pure research calls out for. It is not too late to fabricate, between them, an answer to the riot of silence awaiting life on the far side of the patent. They will put the finishing touches on the in vitro catalog. Then they will use the international reputation the work will lay at their doorstep to convince the world that it is not too late for the getting of wisdom.

This something else: he hasn't gotten it yet, he does not know its precise shape. But they can arrive at it together — the one descendant he and Jeanette can leave to this teetering place. Herbert can, of course, visit anytime he wants. Even live with them if he likes. That will not be the last concession to the law of human averages they will need to make in the decades in front of them.

They must perfect the only way home, the one trick of natural pattern forever unpatentable. They must learn quickly, this afternoon, to care for living existence with the tender survey of parental love. It's time for him to become a husband. A father.

He sprints the distance to Stadium Terrace, arriving on the stoop gasping for breath. He is about to stumble inside when something stops him. Through the thin wooden door, he hears a strain of music as familiar to him as breathing. She has anticipated him. She is inside, playing this disk hinting of the new science they must originate. He stands for a moment, simply listening, hearing a certain play of counterpoint for the first time. He pushes the door open, shouting her name on the air.

The record is indeed playing, Olga indeed centrifuging dutifully above it. But Jeanette is, like the decoding urge, nowhere. He thinks: The bedroom, enters shyly, wondering what tender, depraved rendezvous she has arranged for him. But the room is empty, the linen unmussed. He calls once, softly, pointlessly, to her attending ghost.

His answer waits in the front room, both sides of a full sheet in his laboratory notebook, left lying on top of the stack of delinquent periodicals that has become his de facto reference library. Every relationship he enters into on this earth comes down to a carefully printed message. Her hand, that spidery, runic script — as much as her voice, her scent, the curve of her forehead where his fits— begins carefully, perfectly across the horizontal.

I didn't want you to hear from Ulrich tomorrow, secondhand, about what concerns you at first. I worked up the courage to tell you face to face, but as you know, courage has always been at best a periodic phenomenon with me. A few minutes of sitting, waiting for you to catch me here, and I rush into the cowardice of print. I keep thinking I can hear your step coming up to the door. I keep rushing up, shutting this thing with guilty relief. Impossible hope that you might somehow still free me from having to say all this. You always could revise even my firmest rules. Why don't you come home?

Here is what has happened. Herbert, my husband, foreseeing every eventuality, knowing I might take it in mind really to fall in love with you long before I did, put in for a transfer some months back. The arrangements have at last come through. He has been assigned to — no matter where. The world is flattening out to uniformity anyway. The next choice is mine: Wife, are you coming or staying? Coming.

You will walk in now before I can finish this clause. You'll look over my shoulder, read this, laugh. You will turn and walk out, leave me, unable to understand. How could you? I told you once that I have never lied to you. It's true, Stuart. But all along, from the opening note I passed you, I've let you draw your own conclusions. The line between that and lying now seems more equivocal than it did before I turned thirty. What good is it to claim that I never misrepresented myself to you, if I never presented, either?

Oh, love. If all I had to do now was admit, make out that we two stole your baby. If I could say: my husband, all along, was the barren one. That we two, in sickness and health, in love so deep that it reached bottom, colluded to dupe you. That he told me: go find someone, someone brilliant, soft, crystal in temperament, kind. That I found the most intelligent, gorgeous seed imaginable to use. (Beautiful isn't enough: I see your tightening lids, the flush of your cheeks as you tense under me. Brilliant doesn't suffice: your leaps are like nothing I will see again.)

If only we had stung you for a little fertility. I could have lived with that on my conscience. Isn't that love, when it comes down to it? The old pollen trick? Mutually profitable trade, exploitation. I give you pleasure to match your inbred fantasy, and take, in return, a painless biopsy, a little tissue you will never miss. I could forgive myself for having tried to steal your genes.

But that isn't how it went. That wasn't how I came to you. It's exactly as I told you long ago: Herbert is fine. I'm the one with something wrong. He could leave me cleanly by anyone's rules of fairness. Give me the severance payoff, go land a twenty-five-year-old with all her parts working as advertised, and even now start a family. That's what all the tests showed. But, good radical skeptic, I didn't believe the tests. I had to run my own. All I needed to disprove them was the perfect man.

I told you I never lied to you. I wanted you, wanted to give myself to you from the moment I toweled dry your angelic hair. But from the start, want was couched in hysterical denial. I thought we might remake physiology, you and I, if we were fierce enough. All selfless and abject, but everything I ever gave you I handed over with an eye toward the impossible return on investment, your saving me. You see, I've never wanted anything in my life as I want to be a mother. Think of the deepest desire you have ever felt. Then let it last unanswered every day for ever.

He looks up from the page, up where the walls meet the ceiling. She means discovery. Science. An urge greater than what I am after: in vivo. And she will never have it.

All this makes what I did even worse. I loved you, I love you this minute. Stuart, believe none of this but that. I would retract, qualify beyond recognition, to be able to promise you again all the mutual evers we have ever given each other. That's really why I came by. Not to tell you about my going: to stare you in the face, get you to swear that you will never leave me.

The most selfless love I ever felt was self-serving. The deepest altruism I am capable of feeling is still after something, the thing I was after in you. You were going to rewrite the rules for me, or at least explain, at cell level, why I'd been singled out, left with a desire beyond solving. But you couldn't do that for me. You could do nothing for me but love me.