Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

"I agree." Ulrich lets the full weight of silence spread without comment.

Ressler fights the urge to run. After an agonizing half minute, he tries feebly to elaborate. "The sequences on both sides are too numerous and complex to correlate without a key."

"You'd like some kind of Rosetta apparatus?"

"The cell is our Rosetta."

"Hmm. Have you any argument other than analogy?"

"No."

Ulrich forgives the antagonized monosyllable, remains the understanding boss. "Interesting. But let's follow through awhile longer with what we have. After the write-up on your trials, we'll see where we stand."

Hot-faced, humiliated, Ressler leaves. Yet in losing his discussion with Ulrich, he's gone a small step further in the elusive process.

The cell itself as Rosetta. Feed it the barest theme___He lavishes attention on the radiation-doped microbes in his care. He hangs about the lab, isolating, repeating, recording, filtering for telltale mutants that might surprise, prove him wonderfully wrong. He fishes for results that will buy him time to consolidate, gather strength, coax the next hint into place.

As he shepherds the petris, almost contaminating them with overcare, Ressler replays that day, ancient history, when Dr. Koss made him bend and surrender his head for toweling. The imprint will not extinguish. His temples tense under the contour of her recreated fingers. He maps his own, slow, reciprocal finger path over her head, the bridge over her eyes, the gentle ridge running along the sides of her skull to its crown. Her skin's capacitance courses down the length of his arm into an endocrine reservoir filling his abdomen.

These buzzers set off others, until he cuts the chain reaction, recalls another day when a clue from Koss sent him into the stacks in search of the gold bug. One deletion, one insertion, and one substitution brings him to goldberg. Too near a variation to be accidental. Koss, yet another code thug, infects him with some viral mess, injects him with some vital message mutation. Before his paranoia can flail out, finding hidden significance in every coincidental letter-string, another message arrests him. A clipping left on his desk: a cartoon of a marvelous, machine-age invention employing two dozen elaborate programmed steps to butter a piece of toast. The contraption is pencil-captioned, "Goldberg Variation #?" Lovering saunters over from his side of the office. "Dr. Koss left that. Said you'd know what it means." It means the woman likes puns. That he's been a first-class goldberg rube.

When the Blakes invite him to dine at K-53-A, Ressler gratefully accepts. He never imagined human company could be so welcome. Evie greets him at the door with an elbow squeeze. "I've prepared something incredible: a baste-a-bag turkey that ejects a little flag when done." She leads him into the kitchen, where the rest of the family peers intently into the oven. Tooney introduces him to Margaret, a seven-year-old marvel of precocity and miniaturization. "I bet it's a tiny Union Jack," Blake baits his daughter.

"Don't be silly," Margaret says, shoving him. "The bird's from Virginia. A Stars and Bars." With no trace of shyness, she commands Ressler, "Watch! Fowl in a flag-bag. It's going to wave when it's cooked."

"Maybe it's a white flag. Surrender?"

The kid rolls her eyes. "Funny friend you've got, Dad."

Ressler wonders what role Herbert Koss, the man who put Champaign-Urbana on the Food Technology map, had in developing the self-semaphoring bird. The family sits down to eat, making an unbelievable racket for a trio. Blake begs everyone's silence, then drops his head. "Bless food thank Lord selves service." Highspeed blur. Ressler is stunned; is the man truly devout, racing through the prayer for the visiting agnostic's sake? Or is the rapid-fire benediction for his amusement?

He looks at Eva, but she just mugs back pertly. "Service selves Lord thank food bless!" Retrograde grace, in Eva's mouth, the purest thanksgiving imaginable.

Little Margaret giggles and adds, "Amen. Dig in."

The invocation wrecks Ressler's appetite. "Dig in" these days has other connotations altogether. Home shelters, advertised in the backs of magazines. If the race knew the rads they've already released it would roll over and give up, adrift in a sea of brave new mutagens. Only this family's free affection keeps him from the thought. He and Tooney swap anecdotes about their colleagues. Eva entertains them with more Tales from the Civil Service. "I have the sneaking suspicion that despite the upward spiral in the standard of living, we're all getting poorer."

"Come again?" Ressler says.

"You realize my wife hasn't really quantified this."

"You should read some of these applications. 'How are you qualified for this position?' 'I need it real bad.' 'Why did you leave your last job?' 'False pretenses." One fellow filled out the space Below the Dotted Line reserved for previous employer's comments: 'Would you hire this worker again?' The guy wrote, Tes indeed.' Only he misspelled 'indeed.'"

In the general hilarity, Ressler leans over and whispers to Eva, soft enough so the kid can't hear, "You have a beautiful child. Mailorder."

Eva claps her hands. "No, I assure you we got her through the conventional channels. Oh! That's rude, isn't it?"

"All right, short stuff," Tooney says from the head of the table. "Do your thing."

"Have to?" Both parents nod gravely. The child groans, clearly delighted. " 'Margaret are you grieving over goldenglove unleav-ing?' What the heck is a 'goldenglove,' anyways?"

"It's 'Goldengrove,' sweet," Mother corrects. Eva, with her ambidextrous brain capable of retrograde inversions, must have a soft spot for postromantic poetry. "As in groves of plants that have lost their green."

"Oh. I like 'goldenglove' better. As in golden glove."

"So do I," Ressler concurs.

"Get on with it," Tooney mock-growls.

"'Leaves….'"

" 'Like the things of man….' Come on, girl!"

" 'Leaveslikethe things of man you with your fresh thoughts care for can you? Ah! As the heart grows older it will come to such sights colder by and by.'"

As recitation, the half-dozen lines are mediocre at best. But the child cuts Ressler to the quick. To a scientist habituated to the microscopic, her snip nose, proto-mouth, tiny eyes that actually focus and see are miracles. Blood courses through Margaret as she recites. Lungs pump, kidneys filter. Systems and subsystems weave an intricate, interdependent free-for-all. Her nervous system, a fine spray of veil, a cascading waterfall of paths and signals, subdivides into web-bouquets, structures more elaborate and beautiful the more he imagines their constituent firings.

This is the awful northern face that molecular self-duplication must scale, an ascent as unlikely as the climb of chemicals out of the primordial soup of reducing atmosphere. The superstructure alone is inconceivable. Just the thought that a single zygote, in less time than it takes the average Civil Service gang to dig a bed for a mile of interstate, differentiates into vertebrae, liver, dimpled knees, and ears complete with recording membrane is enough to knock Ressler flat on the metaphorical mat. Yet nucleotide rungs alone curve this child's cornea, curl her lashes. Nothing else needed; he's sure of that. The entire, magic morphogenesis is explainable as terraced chemical mechanisms.

This machine, this polyp, this self-assembling satellite of two parents with no special technical ability outside of inserting complementary parts inside one another, this self-governing bureaucratic republic of mutually dependent parasites (every one incorporating a transcript of the master speech), has mastered speech. Mimicked language. Biggest of the big L's, from fist to lash, the real tissue. Margaret's cells have found out how to say what they mean, or a rough approximation. Her hierarchy of needs insists it is more than chance initiation.