Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

Jeanette, all in white lab coat, a cat burglar working the day shift, is utterly altered from that irreverent sass he met at Ulrich's soiree. Could she always have walked like this? Is that her same sweep of cheeks, nape, thigh? He cannot imagine when the new signal has taken her over. With a subtle muscular refraction, an imperceptible lip-twinge not directed at him but still returning his, she gives him the slightest, recursive suggestion of mutual cueing, letting him know she knows. There; it is out. She concedes. For an instant, she looks back. His silhouette is under examination. There, clear: she examines him for trace imperfections that will save them.

Or did he project that glance, erased in an instant? He can no longer distinguish prey, no longer say precisely who titillates whom. In the tag, the tangled affinities, her every labcoat adjustment, her avoiding friendly greeting is tacit admission of complicity. Their each move changes the other's. He studies her technique, indifferent to how the lines between them separate, oblivious to which of them is tagger, which taggee.

Dr. Koss puts the injected, virally mauled animal out of its misery according to procedures. With smooth filleting swatch, she removes the skin and bares the soft tissue. She locates the organ she is after, removes it, makes a light mash, centrifuges, titrates it with reagent from a burette. At stopwatch intervals, she prepares a time series and labels each slide. What is she up to with this experimental detour into higher animals? Does work in autosomal inheritance truly necessitate such efficient rodent murder? Her method springs from facility.

When she turns to leave the lab, he can't help himself, doesn't even want to. He's compelled to turn his head a fraction, glimpse her lovely leave-taking. Dr. Koss chooses precisely that instant to pause, turn her own wide eyes in time to catch him in the act of looking. She turns at the lab door — unforgettable! — inquiring, challenging, yet timid. They turn simultaneously to inspect each other. Undeniable public confession: he heats and distresses her as much as she does him. There, the guilty exchange, admitted in her eyes: he opens analogous gateways in her senses, awakes her longing to travel beyond the courtyard, to recite the words that will throw off this walking trance, the sleeping-spell of mind.

Then she is gone, leaving him alone in the lab with the apparatus he has been bludgeoning incoherently for the last hour. His viscera hold the impression — her turning pertly on that strategic threshold to announce that, yes, they are together in a hopeless impasse. He circles the recalcitrant fact. The woman is married; she made her selection long before he arrived on the scene, chose the display plumage of the man who finally got breakfast cereal to talk when you pour on milk. Herbert Koss: dependable, well-off, patient, kind — all those desirable qualities of mate- and fatherhood Ressler himself lacks. He can beat the man nowhere; he has no caught creature to lay at her den door as dowry. None except — it gives him a guilty rush — a crack at the secret of life.

He slows, tries once more to back down into the reasonable. He is happy with lab bachelorhood. She has every reason for sticking to her field-tested bond. There is no forgivable reason to tamper with what isn't broken, no possible attraction to exercise over one another. And yet, there is. Is one. It alleviates nothing to call it enzymes. Obscene cat-and-mouse, one that, if they can just this once transcend the way of the race, ought to remain cat-and-mouse forever, never developing into the thing it is surrogate for. Hot, gratifying confirmation fills him to recollect her hurried, questioning eyes. It maddens him, the extent of pleasure in this prolonged fiction, swarmed with all the alarm of the event it must never indulge in.

She leaves him alone in the lab, abandons him to the old detective story, the sober mystification of the bug. Yet Jeanette— fawn legs, down-scaped neck — has clearly announced a catalog more inscrutable than the sixty-four codons. Nature's ciphers are at least objective, potentially solvable. But Koss is a thing apart. What the two of them do to one another may be no more than a complex-carbohydrate tease, cybernetic systems feeding back into each other, an infinite Do-loop, a sentence grammatical but out of syntactical control, whom looping around to subject subject who. The moment arrests him all afternoon: Jeanette, arched, aroused, frozen at the door in fight-or-flight, scared nocturnal mammal caught in the light. What frightened her? It could only have been him, his own cross-hands panic, his broadcast desire.

The marathon sessions with the rate trials are over; he has verified them with all possible precision. He must now present his findings — the survival-value enzymes — at the next Blue Sky. Cyfer will appreciate the implications: a colinear, unidirectional, non-overlapping, redundant triplet code. They've suspected, but he has demonstrated it, assembling the facts in a configuration not entirely anticipated by anyone. He has checked and rechecked for coherence, consistency with the literature. The model is airtight, obvious in retrospect. His bit of crucial synthesis will in a few days become public currency.

He has delayed, savored the edge his extra lucid pieces give him. By month's end, the world will have everything he has, all the cards down. He must lay out his technique for controlled point mutations, selective garbling. But is he ethically compelled to point out that this technique, even more than the nonresults, holds the possibility of wrapping up the rest of the puzzle? Is he honor-bound to harp on a hunch, tip them off to his own intuitive certainty?

He looks up to see Dan Woytowich lugging unusual equipment into the lab. "You know, they bill this as a portable, but the damn thing's twice as bulky as a sewing machine." He sets up the TV in a lab corner, where it blends into the background instruments. The tube is the size of the Svedberg centrifuge and chromatography equipment combined.

"Dr. Double-U. What's new? How's the wife?"

"Renée's fine. Almost done with the dissertation. She's blotted more than nine hundred lines of Shakespeare to date."

"Great. Just a hundred to go. Has she tried Titus Andronicus?" Woyty adjusts the dials, fiddles with the rabbit ears, and in a flurry of static (residual background radiation from the Big Bang), Ed Murrow springs On the Air. The invasion of outside news seems a violation of laboratory controls. The two of them sit entranced, Seeing It Now, Person to Person. Ressler must at least ask. "Not your ordinary piece of test apparatus, Dan. Are you working on something arcane?"

Woyty doesn't hear. He is submerged, watching Dulles announce that he won't give Eleanor Roosevelt a visa to visit China because China doesn't exist. He surfaces long enough to unload out of left field. "I think we ought to quit calling what we're doing here 'decoding.' Technically, 'decoding' is restoring a coded message to plaintext by someone who already has the key. What we're doing is 'cryptanalysis,' since the genetic code is probably not a code at all, but a cipher. Distort the description, and you distort the thing you try to describe."

Ressler listens to this impassioned plea for linguistic purity. He may be witnessing the first stages of total organic dissolution here. Woyty doesn't blink; he gestures at the set, where the You Bet Your Life birdie descends on its wire like a dove ciborium, bearing a piece of paper around its neck reading "Grace." "You know, I dreamt I was a contestant on What's My Line? From the studio wings, I could see the panelists put their blindfolds on. I went up to the chalkboard to sign in, but instead of writing 'Research Biologist,' I wrote, 'Crypt Analyst.' Then the panelists grilled me about my profession. Get this: their questions were in code."