Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

Keith watched with me as the lights came on — Japanese-lantern bridges, street pearls, block skyscrapers that flared as if half the executives in the world worked late. He burlesqued the view, the most overwhelming display of scale that the race has yet assembled, dropping into his smarmy announcer's voice. "Experience the charm of Halogen." He did it to relax me, but I hated him for it all the same. I picked a block on this side of the river and populated it: two souls of unfortunately high intelligence sitting alone among precision machinery, watching over the magnetic data by night, arguing, as if it mattered, over whether we were the only going show in the universe. Clear-faced Todd, obvious closet romantic, held out for other intelligent life, while his night-shift companion, a generation older, told the boy to stop kidding himself. Imagining this insignificant dialogue in this uncounted corner of a sprawl too dense to map adequately, I reversed my mother's terrified conviction about the city. This was not a world. It was an abandoned colonial outpost, a private conversation. Only the buildings were big.

Fear of scale came over me: if I lay there any longer, every uncountable block in these awful islands would become inhabited. Clicking heels and chanting "There's no place like Elkhart" was no longer an option. I had to do something quickly — leave some entry on this July 15—or lose myself in the cycle of torn-off days. I lifted myself like a wet foal. Without explaining, I left Tuckwell still talking to himself, in lone possession of the front room. Shutting the door with a furtive thump that echoed badly down the months ahead, I locked myself in our bedroom. I picked up the receiver and dialed the number Todd had given me. A number I'd filed for easy retrieval.

The half of the night shift I could claim some knowledge of answered. Franklin professed to be glad I'd called. "You'll never guess what has happened. I confronted Dr. Ressler with your evidence. He was greatly impressed." I waited for him to go on. Ten seconds, an epoch over the phone. How do messages travel simultaneously over phone wires without colliding? It occurred to me that while wires did not technically carry any information when both parties were mute, passed silence nevertheless required a phone.

I looked for anything to fill the gap. "I've contacted your extraterrestrials. If you come by the branch—"

"Maybe it's time you visited us here." He gave me the address, one that took my breath away. A dozen buildings from the branch. I knew the exact place, a brick turn-of-the-century warehouse that gave away nothing of its contents. The city, big, uncountably massive, had a way of turning viciously small, like Nauru, digging itself into disappearance. A range of adjoining neighborhoods that refuse to collect. Ten million neighborhoods of one. It is not skyscrapers; it is the bottoms of deep troughs, deeper than the carved canyons out west, cut from harder stone.

Familiar forward motion, bandying between the two of us: the tone of our first social phone conversation stated that it was all right to feel all right, even in mid-July, even with a bad conscience. Bad conscience has no survival value. Todd's confidence cascade gave me a go-ahead to go ahead and do what I wanted to, to indulge in whatever worked. But a slight condition, an extra saddle, was tucked away in the injunction. I could not beat this conversation in one. To give in to the rush, the thrill of voices piling up against voices, colliding over the phone wires, I had to count the thing in three. In my mind, I already stood on a July evening outside their warehouse. Keith, at last coming in to bed, found his POSSLQ lying motionless but wide-awake. He asked if anything was wrong. I answered no, hearing the word leave me, too late to retrieve. The first time I ever lied to him.

The Quote Board

For all knowledge and wonder (which is the seed of knowledge) is an impression of pleasure in itself. — Francis Bacon

"I only ask for information." — Rosa Dartle, in David Copperfield

Transcription and Translation

In those weeks when we were happiest, and well into that nightmare period when he learned what was coming, Dr. Ressler's theme was always the same: the world was awash in messages, every living thing a unique signal. We were all cub interpreters at a babble-built UN, obligated to convert the covert metaphor, tweak the tuner, read the mechanism by actively attacking its surface. The catch to this elaborate Wissenschaft was the active obligation to extract cache from courier. I managed to avoid that imperative, ignore the mess in his message, until Frank left, Ressler died. Now time forces the issue. Time, as the Bacon entry says, just below the quote linking knowledge to pleasure, is the author of authors. Time to start my cub translation, to learn the place, as I'm likely to be here a little longer.

The whole day free, hours without end. How hard to make anything of unbudgeted time. In my remaining free days, I've decided to learn something, become expert, exchange fact for feeling, reverse what I've done with my life to date. A needy soul once asked me, through the anonymous three-by-five, what old film had an important state secret transported across Europe via musical code. Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes, 1938: a banner year for secret European messages. I remembered the question this morning, listening to that other musical code whose message our circle carried through a similar plague year. I could whistle that melody in the dark, its pleasure returned permanently to school by grief. The tune of my new career.

My chief problem is what to study. Something empirical, something hard! My prospect of success depends on where in the hierarchy I attach myself. I start with top magnification, fix my lens on cosmology. If that level remains abstract, I could drop to the step below, stop down an order of magnitude, make due with astronomy. A working knowledge of galaxies must be of some use in naming the place where I'm left.

But the light-year is too long for me to get my bearing. I must reduce the magnification another exponent, start my study with the earth under my lens. A geologist I suppose, or oceanographer. But the explanations of this critical niche are still too large. I am after not earth science but its underwriting specific. Down another order. The search for a starting point begins to resemble that painful process of elimination from freshman year, spent in the university clinic, a knot across my abdomen from having to choose which million disciplines I would exclude myself from forever.

This time I narrow ruthlessly. I sharpen my focus to the raw component populations inhabiting this planet. Zoologist, anthropologist? Neither would yet clamp down on the why I'm after. I go a finer gauge, assuming that understanding can be best arrived at by isolating terms. That means downshifting again to the vocabulary of political science. The first limb of the hierarchy that speaks human dialect: what do we need, and how best to get it? The question is powerful, but as I zoom in on the increasingly precise concern, explanations recede, grow fuzzy and qualified. A faction of me secedes, insists that political science can be understood only in terms of constituent economics. But the study of goods, services, and distribution produces more problems than prescriptions.

Herds, it seems, are hundreds of individuals. Feeling no edge, I scale myself down into psychology. Here my lens reaches that cusp magnification: one-to-one. But a complete explanation of behavior requires somatic cause. Focal ratio flips, increases again, now in the microscopic direction. Psych shades over the bio threshold. The gradients, the gauges are continuous. Fields of study, like spectral bands, differ only in wavelength. No discrete moment when red ends and orange begins. Yet every constituent bent from white has its precise and particular name.