Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

The heart of the code must lie hidden in its grammar. The catch they are after is not what a particular string of DNA says, but how it says it. For the first time, it is possible to do more than wedge open the door. They must throw wide open the means of molecular articulation. They must learn, with the fluency of native speakers, a language sufficiently complex and flexible to speak into existence the inconceivable commodity of self-speaking. The treasure in Poe's tale is not the buried gold but the cryptographer's flicker of insight, the trick, the linguistic key to unlocking not just the map at hand but any secret writing. Ressler must bring the team to see that they are up against something considerably larger than the pleasures of the Sunday Cross-word, fitting a few letters into empty boxes. Not the limited game of translation but the game rules themselves. Sprawled between the girders of the 8OOs, in the summer of his twenty-fifth year, he gets his first hint of the word puzzle he is up against. He must latch onto a language that can articulate its own axioms, a technique that can generate — in the effortless idiom it models — endlessly extensible four-letter synonyms for Life.

Quote of the Day

When I left the library, I took my entire collection of index cards, the complete file of the three boards I'd established at the branch. The records would have disappeared long ago had I not squirreled them away in the first place. Still, the data theft will hurt more than a couple of old friends, who over the years have come to rely on my pocket score the way we all rely on Bowker or Wilson Line. Let them find their own materials. Yet by taking the card collection into custody, I've created my own problem. Squarely on my grandfather's desk, a private encyclopedia of three-by-fives cries out to be transcribed.

Any attempt to extract affidavit from these facts requires dirtying my hands. Franker, with his charming idiocy, liked to compare existence to a mound of potatoes: "You can't proverbially mash 'em till they been proverbially skinned." Information theory phrases the problem more elegantly but not as well. Yet the thought of putting my card hoard to account fatigues me beyond saying. A flood victim's, a chemotherapy patient's fatigue. July 15, 1985: I look over the options from the file, the day's previous incarnations. One stands out from the cycle, one that positions me on the timeline.

I was no longer fresh in the field when I posted it. Much of the novelty of the job had worn off. But I was working full time, for myself, for achieved adulthood, for the sheer pleasure of work.

The Event Calendar, my pride, had run smoothly for a couple of years. I posted everything from Savanarola to Synthetic Rubber, and people enjoyed the end results. In 1978, I took a small risk. I posted as canonical history an event only three years old. July 15, 1975: two spacecraft, each the peak technological achievement of two supernations, inimical enemies at ground level, take off from the earth. The enemy craft dock and join crews somewhere in the endless, frozen, neutral vacuum. The crews visit one another's quarters. The coupled craft float soundlessly in orbit. Back on earth, everything is, for a moment, wonder.

The risk in posting this had nothing to do with going out onto a predictive limb. Beyond doubt the Apollo/Soyuz linkup, symbolically at least, was the equal of half the revolutions and three quarters of the assassinations that mark the usual mileage posts of progress. My risk was not in jumping the canonical gun. It lay in my four lines of accompanying caption — shriller than public servants were supposed to let themselves become. I held out the hope that the event had not come too late to save us from the rest of history. I announced, supported by facts I felt no need to produce, that we were pitched in a final footrace, not between Manichaean political ideologies but between inventiveness and built-in insanity. July 15 tipped the calendar ever so slightly toward the euphoric, exploratory. The risk I took was editorial, insisting that event was real.

This was years before I met Dr. Ressler and his clear-faced protege. That same day, six years later, for a reason preserved in artifact, I posted, as quote of the day, Aristotle's critique of the Pythagoreans in the Metaphysics: They say that things themselves are Numbers. The risk this time was entirely mine.

The Husband's Message

For days after meeting Frank Todd for seafood — my dinner, his breakfast — I heard nothing from him. I'd turned up the facts; our business was transacted. But we weren't done with one another. The flavor that kept coming back at odd hours as I fielded calls or directed question-traffic was the look that had come over my makeshift date's face as I told him of Stuart Ressler's disappointing early collapse. Todd had looked for an instant as if he were hearing, after the fact, the obituary of a childhood hero.

Time passed with no follow-up on Todd's invitation to dig deeper. My job was to discard the content once I'd handed it over. In those few previous instances where professional assistance had aroused other interest, I'd always nipped it quickly in the stamen. Not that I felt any need to avoid temptation. Tuckwell had never demanded monogamy, at least not overtly. Keith referred to our commitment as a "Five-Year Plan" or a "Great Leap Forward," depending on the humor his adwork left him in on a given day. If I steered a course of noninvolvement through daily contacts it was for my own sake: my research skill exceeded anything else I had to offer anyone. But Todd's taciturn courtship, comical when delivered, confused me when withdrawn. I resented that professed infatuation with my face — sheer, male data — bribery. His semantic waffle over whether I was beautiful, a question more aesthetic than erotic, was simply clinical fascination for a woman who had him momentarily at her mercy.

I had wanted at dinner to preserve my informational advantage, to surrender the hard-won facts only at a favorable rate of exchange. But for some reason I still don't understand, I gave in to pity, told him everything, bared my throat like low dog in a fight. I heard myself give him abstracts of every article I'd turned up. When all shred of danger to him had passed — one of those predators capable of remaining inert for hours as prey blunders blithely over it — Mr. Todd took the proffered parcel and was gone. My resentment kept doubling back on that moment when I'd caught him disconsolate, his confidence dropped. That quick glimpse of facial bruise told me he wanted something from me that had nothing to do with biographies. He needed what he would never know to ask for. It wrecked my equanimity: he requested less and went away satisfied.

When he called the Reference Desk again, he did not bother to identify himself. "Can we try this again? Same place and time? Round two?" I couldn't imagine his motive in calling back. No hope of anything fresh, no new esoterica. I didn't know whether to cut him or accept with pleasure. I went for a frosty yes.

I found the restaurant again, and Franklin Todd was waiting. I knew instantly the reason for this follow-up. I could tell from his posture, his welcoming grin. This date meant to erase whatever impression of weakness the first might have left. We were not to mention the case. We were to be absolutely upbeat. And afterwards, as befit cheerful strangers, never see each other again, I confirmed that he was lamentably attractive, taller and sandier than I remembered, his light stubble two years ahead of fashion. He looked completely incapable of being devastated by the deterioration of an older coworker. But then, I did not then look like a woman capable of quitting her profession for nothing. He was in midsentence when I reached the table. "So what happened this morning?"