Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

He was attentive; he several times asked if I would prefer the swivel chair, if I would like the room a little warmer or cooler, if the music bothered me. But he just as easily fell into unselfcon-scious silence, and he never once asked why I'd dropped in. We might have sat mute all evening if I hadn't at last said, desperate for a topic, "I used to play these things once. In my teens."

He sat forward as if slapped. "You play?"

" 'Played' would be closer to the fact. I haven't touched a keyboard in years."

"You were good?" he asked, gesturing to the pealing from the speakers. "Good enough to play these?"

"That was part of the problem. I could play the easiest of the set. With a few, I even reproduced something more than the notes. But the harder ones—"I imitated his wave, not knowing whether to direct it toward the speakers as he had, or toward the turntable, where the generation was taking place. One of the more demanding variations was in the air, a juggling act demanding three separate hands each under the control of its own brain.

I kept talking, not wanting to do anything to endanger his alertness. As with stalking, smooth motion seemed better than sudden, even sudden freezing. "There are two sorts of piano students. The first is proud of the piece she's just mastered. The second hears the next piece snickering. I started out as the first, but drifted into the second."

"I know," Dr. Ressler said. He'd grown as effusive as a boy on a first date. "Oh, I can't say I know. I've never taken a music lesson in my life. I am your classic, digital autodidact. I can clunk along on a keyboard fairly grammatically, but with the thick accent of a Pole who has learned to speak English through books." He looked at me, and his eyes shone. "You give me a chance to learn something from a native speaker." I demurred, but he took no notice. "As a self-taught listener, I've often felt, as you describe, pieces snicker at my inability to hear a fraction of what's going on in them." This time he didn't bother to wave at the offender.

We listened, quiet in the exertion. Even his silence seemed preparation. "Certain pieces," he resumed, "have to be put away for a long time. I can't listen to them; they're too evocative. They possess an intensity incommensurate with everyday life. But when I take them out again from their place in the back of the closet where they've waited for years, I can't stop listening." I couldn't stop listening to him, to what I'd first haunted this place hoping to hear. "Not long ago, around the time your friend took up as my shift assistant," he grinned, "after several years of not being able to bear it, I found I wanted to study this set again." He contracted his mouth into a grimace: the architecture of the sound, despite his best effort, still held his ears' ability in joyful contempt.

I took a chance. "You've studied them before?"

The grimace broke into a full good humor. He knew I was fishing — the same pond I'd pointlessly trawled a few times before. He was no more eager now to grant an interview, but as someone who might be able to tell him something, however modest, about keyboards, I had him over a barrel organ. He might never have talked so easily had Todd been there. Maybe he considered me a cousin who had also failed to end up in her chosen field. Maybe he saw that I was ready, after thirty years, to begin my education in information science.

Whatever his reason, Ressler told me a story. He spoke of a series of nights as a young man when he first discovered the Goldbergs. A week of concentration, when the closed code of music at last broke. "Dangerously close to turning twenty-six, paid to do genetic research, I instead spent evenings lying in an army barracks bed, listening to that aria over and over in my ears, eyes, throat, and head. I was trying to discover why the thirty minute waltzes reduced me to hopeless emotion, to neutralize them through over-exposure so I could forget them and recover an even emotional keel.

"I had secured myself a pocket score. You must understand that as late as my mid-twenties, I could detect little more in printed notes than inscrutable black bugs crawling across the bars of their prison. I'm still illiterate, to some degree. Some things one must learn before five or they never come fluidly."

I had a hard time imagining this man as illiterate at anything. But I didn't dare contradict; he was venting decades of introspection, and I wasn't about to stop him for polite objection.

"Who knows? Perhaps I have repressed all memory of an unspeakable grade-school accident involving an unmarked glockenspiel that left me unable to listen to rhythmic pitches without suspicion." He checked my face, to see if he had lost the cadence of humor. "But oddly," he went on, shaking his head, "for some reason I am still trying to puzzle out, from my very first listening, this piece seemed to me less like music than a rescue message. Word from a place I had lived once, but could not find my way back to. That sounds ridiculously romantic, especially for an eighteenth-century piece! But after uncountable listening to a beaten-up copy of the variations lent me by a labmate, I began matching aural events in the rush of notes with the complex symbols standing for those events on the page. The day I finally figured out how the correspondence actually worked, it took the top of my head off. Incrementally, over hours of effort, I found one night that I could actually read the score. Incredible! Without actually playing the record, I could transcribe the aria from the page to my head. I could hear the chords themselves, just as if the Wunderkind on the recording were in fact playing it. That, young woman, is power."

He paused long enough to shoot me a playful look. "As you know from bibliographic snooping, I was then engaged in tracing the exact mechanism by which macromolecules code for inherited traits." He took a breath. For a terrible moment, I thought he was about to choke. "A big project. Several of my colleagues are still at the task. Their offspring will still be at it. We had arrived at a cusp. We knew a little; enough to know that further extrapolation would require a whole new zoo of relational models. Certain things we already suspected: a long, linear informational string wound around its complement, like a photo pinned to its own negative, for further, unlimited printing."

I had only a dilettantish idea what he was talking about, a modest background from answering a rash of alarmed questions about patented new forms of life. I'd been proud of the bit I had mastered until that moment, when I saw it would not be enough to carry me through this discussion, let alone this decade or the approaching millennium.

"We were looking for the right analogy, the right metaphor that would show us how to conduct the next round of experiments. We were in a furious, often-mistaken model-building stage. Exciting — unmatched for human effort, as far as it went. But slippery. You see, DNA is itself a model, a repertoire for proteins. And the convolutions of protein shape are themselves analogies for the processes they facilitate. In programmers' terms___" He gestured through the one-way glass to the computer room. On the other side, Frank Todd stood on a chair, making sublime, exaggerated, Buster Keaton gestures for the entertainment of Annie Martens. She was trying to leave for the evening, and he was clowning her into staying a little longer. I watched as he gave up, thumbing nose at her. She laughed and waved goodbye.

"You're not supposed to know how to program," I objected.

Ressler smiled. "In programmers' terms, the incredibly complex chemical routines of the cell blur the distinction between data and instruction. All this is an overly long digression to give you some idea of what preoccupied me when I first heard Bach's solution for recombining his modest aria. I lay there in bed, concentrating on a line in a particular variation. Say, the first entry of a canon, although I could not at the time have told you what a canon was. After intensive, repeated listening, I could hear the first suggestion of what had covertly fascinated me. The strain separated like an independent filament of DNA — part of the melodic line, but simultaneously apart. I made the momentous discovery that it was a note-for-note transcription of the master melody. My little fragment played against a copy of the musical idea it had just been, a moment before. Disengaging my focus, transferring it from the first to the second voice, I could hear the same fragment matched against the shred it would in the next moment become. When I shifted awareness like this for any length of time, the whole variation, at first inscrutable, dissipated into crabs crawling over each other in a bucket. Just as my ears got hold of the rhythm, it would strobe hot potato with the motive. The two lines would twine themselves back into a double strand. I had found my model for replication."