Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

This child, all of seven, creates, in a few phonemes, real grief, the shorthand sequence until then only metaphored. The metric, or rather Margaret's meter, invokes the strangest insight: this morphologically perfect package is not a little girl, but a chemical unknown putting itself through reduction analysis. Her life is the task of isolation, the desperate longshot of learning. Margaret's virtuosity denies objective treatment; he gets sucked into the shape of the line, the precocious musculature, the labial coordination.

He stares at the juvenile a nanosecond longer than is appropriate, begins to see in that self-delighting, self-affrighting library of sentient routines a thing to spook the strongest empiricist. Design without designer. Effect, perfect and purposive, without even casual cause.

The child — with that sensitivity, like linguistic preknowledge, built into children — picks up on his fear. Half into "by and by, nor spare a sigh," she stops. The silence does it: his nose flares, blood flushes his cheeks, his glands secrete. A reaction mechanism, one of those instincts that puzzles the issuing organism as much as anyone. Margaret shoots a pitying look at him.

"Peg, my leg," Tooney jokes. "What's up? Why heck you stop?"

"That man is crying," she whispers, suddenly no more precocious than her years. Ressler looks away, unable to evade this minutest observation. He has somehow grasped her, not as a performing child, but as this trial run. The helix's experiment.

"Well, maybe this poem is sad. Did you ever think of that?"

She looks at Ressler, eyes huge: can this be? He makes no denial. Incredulous, danger past, racing through the syllables for sheer love of the sound, shooting out of the gate again in amazing breach of decorum, in that elaborate, cumbersome, ornate, mathematical, obsolete, and hopelessly contrapuntal ritual of rhyme, she shouts, " 'Nor spare a sigh though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie.'" "Wan-wood leafmeal" cracks her up. She cannot keep a seven-year-old's smirk off her face as she finishes the postponed feat. And yet you will weep and know why. " 'Now no matter, child, the name!'"

But Ressler no longer listens, let alone cries. He knows the name. He was that little girl's age once. He knows the layout, the mortgage of that miracle — the process that has coarsened features, thickened spirit, and slowed joy while leaving him a perverse window through which to see the place he has left. He was himself that exploration once, despite his mother's repeated objection "You were never a child."

How could the enormous head, passing only with agony through Evie's conventional channels, a design resulting in years of dependent helplessness — the longest adolescence in the animal kingdom — ever have been selected for? A liability for millennia before earning anywhere near its keep. Yet that outsized organ is his biome, his stock in trade. He was the prodigy once, not much older than this girl. He lavished this precocious love on the home nature museum — a walk-in catalog of the planetary pageant. Every Saturday he redrew the floor plan: protective coloration got pushed against the kitchen wall and the ant colony went into the living room, clearing the place of honor in the front foyer for this month's cause célèbre, the struggle between Allosaurus and Triceratops, in 3-D.

His parents suffered the formaldehyde stench in happy silence. While classmates spent their energies on kick the can, he curated. It took him until sixteen even to consider running away, and then it wasn't to join the circus but Byrd. Yes, like the rest of his peer group, he avoided sidewalk cracks. But he kept to the clear concrete on account of Pascal's Wager: the consequences of coming home to find the ambulance carting off broken-backed mother prohibited taking the infinitesimal chance.

His protoself, a thing independent of who he has become: a boy completely, passionately in love with links. The more esoteric the system, the more ecstatic his pleasure in tricking out its hidden form. His sixth-grade math teacher, introducing summation notation by brutal means, made the class add up all the numbers from one to a hundred. The plan was to imprint in the half-shaped charges how trivial the task was once one had the formula. But a few seconds into the assignment, while the rest of the poor slaves labored to total their columns, little Stuart raised his hand. "Sir?"

The dumbfounded educator listened to the preteen derive a perfect copy of Gauss's great work. "Look: one plus one hundred is one hundred and one. So is two plus ninety-nine. See the pattern? If you split the numbers in the middle and reverse the second group, you get fifty sums of one hundred and one. Instead of a hundred hard additions, one easy multiply."

"That's… right," the teacher whispered, going pale. Original thought, the once-a-generation find, in his classroom. Stupidly, he asked, "And what exactly is fifty times one hundred and one?" As if the answer mattered. But this simple product was beyond Stuart. Adult Ressler still takes a minute to get it. Once he'd rediscovered Gauss, the problem lost its interest and he went on to calculate which two rings on his wooden desktop he'd been born between. To figure the weather that year, by ring width. Teacher could solve the multiplication for himself if he tried.

His whole childhood was an unsuccessful effort to show various instructors that the crucial thing is not fifty times one hundred and one, but how one got those terms. Not what a thing is, but how it connects to others. In the second grade, shown a card with the words "little wind how today Mr. ask," and told to make a sentence from them, he wrote: "My teacher has a card with the words 'little wind how today….'" The following year, he discovered that when one flipped one's tongue over, a touch applied to the bottom seemed to emanate from the top. By junior high, he had proved to disbelieving high schoolers that almost all possible numbers have an eight in them, or a seven, or nine, but an infinity of numbers contain none of these. In late teens, he announced to an uncomprehending English teacher that the word "couch," repeated a thousand times at high speed, deteriorated into semantic nothingness.

Each thing is what it is only through everything else. Life is a crystal, combinatorial. A surreptitious system. Feel the pull to uncover it while still a child, or that pattern will never, not even in the cells' collapse, open its hidden order. Ressler remembers this boy, how he usurped Western Civ from Mr. Jameson, scorned the Safety Patrol, barked about some ship called the Beagle, and corrected Mrs. Rapp on the bituminous/anthracite debacle. Even his mother gave up trying to teach him anything outside of never to wear blue with brown.

He's paid the toll in playground hate. Hate of his memorizing and explicating the Gettysburg Address overnight. Hate of his never, not even in the face of electrons, Greeks, and other hopeless abstractions, getting flustered. The annual resentment of a new crop of classmates at his hearing sounds and sweet airs of the sweetest simplicity, a whole home nature museum of shifting voices, each claiming to be the melody. His learning everything from scratch. Everything connected; all classroom assignments, aspects of one theme. He heard what the rest of the percentiles had to take on faith.

This Margaret already suffers the same exile. He sees it in her anxious face, her rapid flashes of recitation. They two are of a piece. Out of the ubiquitous, sick anxiety of childhood, he and this girl, skipping past those classmates blundering through the accepted steps, are off on their own, cataloguing, curating their own internal, interwìred discoveries, attempting to dance, as fast as lips and breath and understanding can.