Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

Hearing that much, however modest, was a small triumph. I knew that fugues — while most not as compact as this one — did not necessarily require enormous musical gift to create or hear. Marvelous in my ear, and yet, every note just as it should be. But that much was just the surface of the form, one that went all the way down, as far as I chose to follow. Listening to the cyclical subject-passing entrances, I all at once heard something else. Something going on in the lines after they'd made their grand, identical entrances. In between the formal constraints of fugal entry, percolating up through the piling voices, was the outline of a musical idea I'd heard somewhere before.

My ear flipped back and forth between figure and ground, focus and periphery. What was the bass doing in the second four measures, when the tenor has the subject? Or the bass and tenor, in exultant dialogue, four measures along, while soprano took up the fugue? I heard it in a single stroke, endowed with new ears: the growing braid of free voices sang out nothing short of a mutation on the Base, the original, template theme.

The music ran beyond cleverness, outside admiration. According to my scholarly reference, it follows that fugues, because the same subject enters slavishly in each voice, however brilliantly carried forward, are more or less determined by the thrust of the subject itself, in this case, the fughetta's first four bars. But holding both vertical and horizontal at the same time, I heard that theoretical limit being shed, left behind like a spent chrysalis. Packed in the thirty-two measures of information was a harmonic structure informed by but also perpetually advancing the original aria from which it was merely descended.

The compositional triumph of the piece, both for Bach in the eighteenth century and the three of us lost in the twentieth, came eight bars from the end. The bass, taking its turn with the second fugue subject, extended the harmonic progression and completed the constraints of variation in the same four bars. Breath of air, genuine surprise although absolutely predictable. Rigidly perfect, but moldable to all the nuanced sworls of living ears.

The whole piece, as well as my brief understanding of it, lasted forty seconds. How Bach could meet both horizontal and vertical constraints with such efficiency of material, how he could add insight to inquiry without showing either seam or sweat left me in awe, even after my ability to hear it died away. During those forty seconds, I first felt the resonant, connecting joints holding together this experiment in reversing the randomness of inert matter. I heard the sound that caused Dr. Ressler's eyes to water, the sound that had once vibrated in the tones of scientific reduc-tionism. Pure analogy. No, I need a better name for being unable to tell where I left off and the piece began. I heard, for a moment, the explosion of shape, the diversity of living awareness, dovetail into one simple, accidental, but necessary and breathtaking generating form. For forty seconds, I understood that all evolution was accomplished by juggling only four voices. In the fughetta:

SATB. In us listeners, in the fughetta-writer himself: GATC.

The three of us stopped conversing long enough to follow the shadow of technical virtuosity at patient work, to listen to the fughetta map its own grateful ability to map at all. We eavesdropped, undetected for an instant, on a discussion supremely urgent and articulate but entirely without content. That sound took us, for forty seconds, beyond the point where experience commonly defers: beyond cleverness to joy, outside admiration into understanding, rubbing shoulders against wonder. I heard, in a word, my first few measures of music.

The Enigma Machine

A line runs down the office he shares with Lovering, straight as a surveyor's cut, an osmotic membrane separating the organization of Ressler's area from the entropic mayhem of his office mate. On Lovering's side, arboreal colonies of books, lush, vegetative pools of mimeograph, and ruminant herds of manila-enveloped crap creep up to the divide and abruptly drop off. On Ressler's side: the formal gardens of Versailles. He'd feel better if the barrier were physical — firebreaks, barbed wire — instead of nothing more explicit than mutual goodwill.

His office mate's filing system for the proliferating piles is astounding. Asked to retrieve any paper that has ever come into his possession, Lovering can pull it from the papyrus morass. Nevertheless, the watering hole gives Ressler the heebie-jeebies. He finds it hard to think, seated at his desk; he can feel tinea corporis in the damp air, jungle rot crawling behind him, tendrils sucking him into Lovering's data sprawl.

This afternoon, he can avoid the place no longer. Ulrich distributes progress-review forms to be completed by semester end. He must describe all lab activity in the last four months. His one experiment — with its blaring negative results — must be reported with great care. He heads to his office, breathes deeply, and enters. Lovering sits at the desk opposite, red-lining, dispersing professional confetti. "Stuart Ressler! You still on the payroll? Thought you'd skipped town."

"Afternoon, Dr. Lovering," Ressler replies, affable emphasis on the title. "I've been around. Lab work." He keeps his eyes diverted, lest they register the excitement of what he's stumbled upon. Head down, he cuts a path to open spaces.

"Work? You know what the good Dr. Freud says about work?"

"N-no." Ressler sits gingerly on the edge of his chair and eyes the border for any recent incursions. He spreads the form in front of him. "I can't honestly say I do."

"But you do know what Saint Paul says about marriage?" This delivered with sly, shit-eating grin.

Quietly, placidly, Ressler resigns himself to the reproaches of conversation. "What's that supposed to mean, Joe?"

"You know damn well!" Lovering rocks dangerously back in his chair, arms all over the place. Suit jacket and tie are suddenly belied by hayseed, goofy, boys'-locker-room intonation.

"What do I know damn well, Joe?"

"Poontang, my friend." Lovering shakes his head, laughs. "You dog! You animal!"

Ressler does some rapid cryptography. "Oh, no. No, Joe. Really. Believe me. It's nothing like that."

"It's something, then!" Lovering proclaims, as if verifying another organism's distress were cause for publication. "Now we're making headway. Come on, man. What else could it be? You found a little something? No, you haven't. That's the problem. No poon-tang!"

"Uh, Joe. Would you mind keeping it down? This is a university."

"I knew it! How could you hope to keep anything like that from your close office mate?"

How indeed. "No, Joe. Really. It's not… loneliness. I've just been winding up—"

"We're not talking about loneliness, Stu. We're talking about the hot-to-trots. The savage scrotum. Your balls're backed up. Nothing to get embarrassed about. Wouldn't be surprised if the compulsion were programmed into the old transistors at a fairly deep level." Lovering, smirking, tapping a retort rapidly against an ashtray, enjoys himself immensely. Ressler wonders how a nervous distraction he has just identified himself can already be public knowledge. For a professional decipherer, he's shy on a few key secret-communication commodities. "Fortunately, there's a fairly specific treatment," Joe insists. "You just need to find a chick who'll sully herself with you. Barring that," Joe holds up his hand and wriggles his fingers, "there's always the lab assistant's assistant.

Blood pressure is entirely incapable of telling the difference."

Ressler sits mum as a skewered saint, nauseated by this crowing cockdom. Even pretending to the ugliest mechanical bias, Joe lies to himself about what blood pressure is after. There is a gene, flexibly distributed throughout the pool. It codes for a protein___