Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

Ressler, not yet out of earshot, ignores him. He converges rapidly on an idea so beautiful that it needs his full attention. He can't foster the notion alone. He needs to speak it to someone who can follow his thought, add to it. He races down the Georgian corridors to his office. He fumbles with keys, throws open the door, a sea of Lovering's papers scattering in the gust. He blesses Joe for choosing that moment not to be around.

He sits at the phone, runs a shaking finger down the names in the staff directory, picks up the receiver and dials. When the voice connects, pastel and alive, it shocks him to hear who he has called. He cannot talk, so amazing is the spectrum of composite pitches in that voice at the other end of the wire. "Hello? Is someone there?" As he places the handset back in its cradle, Ressler distinctly hears her catch her breath, whisper, "Is that you?"

The Natural Kingdom

11/3: Arrived again in November. Just being alive this late in the year is not in itself proof of having hit on a solution worth preserving. Here, now, as professional cold sets in in earnest, all the anticipation of autumn comes to this: surviving in changed conditions. New strategy for a new climate. I have twenty-five weeks left, twenty-seven if I shower with cold water. What to show for the months already spent? Only the months themselves. I've dabbled in the hard sciences, picked up a hint of chemistry. But I'm no closer to recovering that tune I dreamed myself inside of the night I heard of Dr. Ressler's death. No closer to recording that score, the dance step that made me quit the working world.

I've learned that the one panel Todd has sent me since running away did come not from over the ocean but from up the coast. The definitive cross-reference proves he brought the landscape along with him, knowing in advance not to leave traces. QED: I am here alone. And that's best, when all is figured. Alone, flat out against myself. Close to the grain of the neighborhood, no motive except making it to the next calendar island. My days familiar, but flavored strange again. The closure of solitude, the only way of knowing I am here again in wet November, still imprinted with every shed skin.

I now know the problem Ressler was after. He wanted to determine how clusters of inert particles able only to roll down potential-energy hills could stack themselves into grammars, loaded configurations readable and enactable: blueprints for assembling and regulating other clusters themselves capable of erecting, dismantling, rearranging, and elaborating every strategy that has ever emerged on this sliver of rock. A modest problem for a by-product of those same, inert particles.

11/4: I've learned how the molecular archives are written in sinuous ribbons tightly packed into each cell nucleus. How these chromosomes are demarked into discrete sentences. My file proves I've actually relearned this:

Q: How many genes do I have?

L.N., 3/23/78

A: This number is not likely to be determined with precision anytime soon. The order of magnitude is 100,000. The complete genome of a human being is written on almost 7 feet of microscopic thread. Every human cell contains 3–6 billion nucleotide pairs.

J. O'D., 3/25/78

I've gotten a first sense of the tetragrammatonic golem recipe. I've won an analogic understanding of how seven feet of aperiodic crystal unzips, finds complements of each of its billion constituents, integrates them perfectly without tearing or entangling, then winds up again into a fraction of a millimeter, all in two minutes. I grasp, barely, that this process is taking place all over my body at this instant.

I see in rough outline the dogma Ressler was out to extend: one gene, one nucleotide sequence, one synthesized enzyme, one chemical reaction, one inherited quality. I accept that synthesis takes place at the speed of two amino acids per second, constantly, for countless enzymes in every cell. I can, in cartoon, conceive how this codex might be read, how merely speaking its words creates three-dimensional globules whose folds make each a miniature chemical computer. I grant that one enormous concatenated clause of A's, T's, C's, and G's is the plan for hemoglobin and another, every bit as inanimate, for insulin.

But I lack the critical keystone in the arch he was after: I cannot see how form emerges from the same mechanism. When to make bone, when pancreas, scale, hair, skin, or bowel? How large should the heart get? How to start it pumping? How indicate a heart at all? Take a broad, leafy, sun-spreading tuber factory, root, plumule, stolon: does the blueprint read, "Sprout a villus in the ileum; lace it up with veins"?

Pattern-juggling pattern actually makes life. From brittle and spiny to sleek and silver: an impossible spreading text for four letters. Even crisp illustrations, the bright primary pastels by the Herris of natural history, their unambiguous lines running from luxurious organ encampments to the affixing term—"cilia," "thorax," "vascular bundle" — cannot convince me. How much worse, a millionfold more incomprehensible, the passage from monocot to monogamy.

I find the evolution of eyesight remotely credible, but the production of perception from those same four letters baffles me. Behavior: the retreat of a sensitive plant from touch, phototaxis of plankton, nyctinasty in the morning glory, the butting of rams' horns, neo-Palladian mud-and-twig palaces, the engineering monuments of colonial insects, the clicks and whistles of distress, the motor rhythm of walrus sonar (irresistibly sexy to their opposites), speech, for God's sake? Are these enormous structures somehow in the invisible code? Can all this babel come from the same idiot idiolect?

11/5: And that catalog is a mere draft, no, the draft of a draft. Years ago I received a scrawled Question Board submission, unsigned: Q: How different can you get? Inside joke, private incoherence. As it was anonymous, I felt no obligation to answer. But ever the compulsive collector, I kept the card, a record of what elbow-nudging humanity, Brooklyn branch, wanted to know in the late twentieth century. Now, five months since I've set foot in my old haunt, I've read enough to propose molecular biology's stupefying solution.

First, in a seven-year-old Scientific American —already fossil artifact — I learn that for an average human, almost every characteristic is homozygous. Only 6.7 percent of human genes are composed of different alleles. From that small fraction, all variability in legacy arises. How small is small? Taking 100,000 genes as a ballpark genome, 6,700 will be heterozygous. That gives 26700 ways of shuffling divergences — a number of more than two thousand digits — to pass on to a child. The growth of genetics has been the growth of realizing how huge the gap between individuals is.

By contrast: the human genome, considered as a whole, represents only the slightest divergence from the closest living trial. More than 98 percent of our DNA is identical to that of both chimp and gorilla. Less than 2 percent of that seven-foot text is proprietarily human. The incredible conclusion is that two children of the same parents differ more from one another than Homo sapiens as a whole differs from the apes. Superabundance of intraspecies diversity holds across the spectrum of all the few million species nature is currently testing. The ways of varying the original life molecule have multiplied beyond any ability to conceive of them. How much do species themselves differ? I have only to look. Eel on one hand, elm on the other: two recombinations on the same letter set. How many different yous can you have? How different can you get?

11/6: So different I can go no further on the coding problem until I narrow down my intended landing spot. If I'm to cross the bridge he was building, I've got to begin anew, with the question of what, if anything, all those coded strings are possibly after with their unbounded text scrambling. I accredit the ability of inanimate molecules to arrange themselves in configurations capable of coding. But I need to find why they go on coding for ever more elaborate configurations.