Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

The Perpetual Calendar

June 6: 1520. Henry VIII hosts a Renaissance extravaganza for archrival Francois I in an attempt to secure an alliance. The feast fails to bring about any lasting political effect….

1918. For the next nineteen days, the marine brigade of the American Second Division meet the Germans in the forested area of Belleau Wood, in the Aisne region of France. Expending more than half their men to gain…

1944. Operation Overlord, involving the close coordination of 4,000 ships, 10,000 planes, 180,000…

2004. The planet Venus will make its next transit across the sun—

Political effects will be negligible. It feels as if I have done nothing but fiddle masochistically with the card set, waiting for the resulting pain to convince me that things have happened. A desperate, deluded attempt at triangulation: the old Laplacian engine applied to today in history. If one samples enough points, writes out all the differential equations governing the days' independent paths, the resulting vector might be somehow solvable, the long consequence lying patiently in the repetition might be revealed. The coward's hope that if I go over the three-by-five events again, I might catch the bit I missed, the bit that renders inevitable exactly what it was (and always had been) that was supposed to happen today, just what part that I was meant to play in it. I can add nothing to the June 6 dossier but a classified ad:

1986. Position Wanted. MLS. Years in the public service. Some programming experience. Hands-on knowledge of genetics. Good with data.

There are no more events to go over, no more data to manipulate. The data stream will only widen, deepen, strengthen in current; I can get no closer to where I need to be than these particulars. I lived a year, I lost a year, I spent a third in the archives. It's time to go back, to dust off the resume.

When I started on this tour, I was afraid that the place he inhabited might be bigger than I could safely live in. I have confirmed that hunch by direct measurement. It is immense beyond surviving, larger than the space between brilliance and brittle stars. Older than the oldest soft tissue in the fossil record. As densely populated as a drop of water. More complex than anything I can imagine, as complex as self-reproducing automata. As long as the entire text of history's card file. As terrifying as the threshold of liberty. I have put it down here as a notch on a stick, afraid to name it any more closely than code.

I have lost them all, lost those few days when, as inimitable Annie said, we got our feet dirty, lost them by saying nothing at the critical moment. But I have at least this. This field notebook. My after-the-fact year of mapping. But the map is still not the place. I am ready to follow him there, all the way into the locus itself, without benefit of intermediary, to live in it for a moment, everywhere and nowhere, the space between pine and everglade, between adjoining nucleotides, disappearing with the rain forest, glazed with acid rain, vanishing like habitat, like the magician's knot, but carrying on, varying, learning by trick to subsist on poison, on heavy toxins if I can, living on just a little longer, shouting with all the invented parts of speech for a little assistance.

But how to get there: how can I find it? All at once it is clear, clear as the first, aperiodic crystal. The double helix is a fractal curve. Ecology's every part — regardless of the magnification, however large the assembled spin-off or small the enzymatic trigger— carries in it some terraced, infinitely dense ecosystem, an inherited hint of the whole. He said only what the texts say: the code is universal. Here, this city, me, the forest of infection on my hands, the sea of silver cells scraped from the inside of my mouth. Every word I have I knock out of its component letters. Every predication, every sculpted metaphor, sprung from the block. Let's save what life cannot. Play me, he asked, all he ever asked: play me one of my variations. What could it hurt to carry that tune a little longer? Perhaps I might be up to it after all.

Today in History

6/23: Midsummer Eve. Everything and nothing happened: one day, one gene, one enzyme, one reaction, one island in the perpetual calendar. I feel, with reasonable professional confidence, that I could extract if not the sum of the day's doctored console log at least a rough transcript. After a long while, one hits on the illuminating idea of building the room around the moonlight.

Today caught up with me a week ago. Last Monday. I had closed the notebooks and started in on the job search. My main problem in putting myself on the block was how to account for my year off without seeming to host some secret pathology that might flare up again at any moment. I tried to pass it off on the resume as a school year, but my inability to claim any accredited course of study seemed conspicuous, to say the least.

But that did not stop me exploiting my old employers for my own purposes. On Monday, early, I went downtown to 40th Street and began researching the registers. I was looking for a certain kind of outfit — conservation, public awareness. Places that worked to preserve those stakes now dissolving. It seemed the career change of choice, whether or not there was still time left for it. By midafternoon, I had a dozen addresses. It was slow going, culling them by hand. The next time I job-search, the whole world will be on-line.

I broke for packed lunch and in the afternoon decided that I would need an interview suit to restore some of the credibility my resume now lacked. I needed cash, and stopped at an automated teller that would take my bank card. I punched in my four-digit sequence and watched the screen flash "Incorrect code.

Please try again." Before I could reason with the machine, it cleared its screen and posted a new message: "Hello old friend. Here's an easy one." And out of that simple, vibrating speaker, designed to make no more than a few inarticulate flutes and beeps, came music. More than easy: I knew the piece before it even started. I knew the melody at once, both melodies as they entered, all three, four. A gathering of old friends, as easy to me, as familiar and close as my own name.

The Quodlibet

The Bach family, gathered at home, would begin with chorales and proceed to feats of extemporary combinatorics. One would start in with a popular tune, eighteenth-century radio music. Another would add, transposed, augmented, or diminuted to nestle down in perfect counterpoint, an older folk melody. A third would insert something racy, suggestive, even obscene, and a fourth might lay on top of all these a hymn. The words would fly in all directions, as would the piled-up melodic lines. But the whole would hang together, spontaneous, radiant, invented. Discovered harmony.

This is how he ends the set. No canon at the tenth, as the variation's position demands, although the snippets of trivial folk tune enter imitatively, in double counterpoint. No last flash of virtuosic brilliance. Just home: solid, radiant, warm, improvisation night with the family. Two of the folk strains — as recognizable as snatches of bus-stop melody heard this morning — have been identified from out of the thicket:

Ich bin so lang nicht bei dir gewest. Ruck her, Ruck her, Ruck her I've been away from you for so long. Come here, come here, come here!

Kraut und Rüben haben mich vertrieben… Cabbage and beets drove me away__