Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

Canon at the Fourth

Ressler replaces the receiver even as she identifies him, picks his voiceprint out of a field of ambiguous noise. She guesses what he called to ask, and why he cannot. Koss. He grows frantic for communication. Woytowich's polling problem triggers an infant connection that he must run past someone. If he cannot find some safe other with whom he can coax it out, the link struggling to the surface will be lost. But he cannot call Koss back; the first phoneme of her voice already trickles with forgetting.

He rushes from his office to Toveh Botkin's Viennese study. Her door is unlocked, but Botkin is not there. Ressler scans the lavender, heavy furnishings and thinks: She will be dead soon. Her century of science will stop. She will disperse into ammonias, hydroxyls, aromatic hydrocarbons. Rilke and Furtwängler will scatter in auction. A regret passes through him that he cannot stop and predicate. No one at all in the building. He remembers: nighttime. The ordinary world goes home. Ressler runs out into the autumn air, following the route by heart. He reaches Stadium Terrace, K court, then 53, but at that gauge, his internal pointer veers toward A, the Blakes' end of the triplex. Ressler has not visited Tooney since the night he was shaken by child and wife. But he needs his neighbors now, needs to sound them out. Only words will get to the issue, however much he distrusts the medium. He rings the bell, stands on the stoop listening to the muffled sounds of surprise on the far side of the door. While the porch light floods on and the door lurches open, a shock of excitement stretches over his chest. The world is continuous, unlimited rearrangement: Jeanette knew his silence.

The Blakes greet him with great huzzah. Ressler, here on their turf, so late, uncoerced. Margaret cheers the reprieve from bedtime. "Hello," she greets him, wary with memory.

"Hello," Ressler grins. "Know any new poems?"

Little Margaret turns her face into her shoulder. Ressler pecks Eva on the cheek shyly and pumps Tooney's hand, grateful that the man has survived to be here at this moment. "Drink?" his host offers. "Eat? Be merry?" Ressler shakes his head. Blake, nonplussed but delighted, leads him into the front room.

They barely sit down when Ressler bursts into things. "Tooney. What, in your opinion, have we been up to?"

"Don't know about you. I've been putting the kid to bed."

Ressler doesn't even break stride. "Cyfer. These months. Trying to solve the coding problem by equating specific base sequences with amino acid arrangements in protein polypeptides."

"Now you tell me." But Stuart's excitement is contagious.

"And how have we gone about it? Like bloody Poe. Studying all known enzymes. Looking for patterns. Letter frequencies. Clumps where we might wedge a lever of correspondence. But we're making one, glaring, freshman presupposition."

"I give up."

Ressler is too fired up to be disappointed. "We're combing amino sequences for some evidence of prior necessity. Why? There is no codemaker, Toon." Ressler speaks as if bluntly urging a child to shake off a scrape.

"All right," Blake says slowly. "Assume I follow. I'm afraid I don't see the ramifications, except___"

"Except that we've been attacking the problem ass-backwards." Talking to another is still superior to talking to himself, even if he must explain everything. "Listen, Tooney. I've got to talk dirty for a minute."

"Wife! Leave the room."

Eva, in the other room, hears her husband bellow and enters just in time to hear Ressler say "In vitro."

Eva laughs and says, "Et in terra pax. " Ressler, Lutheran, looks blank. But he latches onto Evie, her unspecialized ears every bit as helpful as her scientist mate's. He explains the vitro/vivo dichotomy. To Eva, the difference between running an experiment outside rather than inside a living system seems functional. "I thought y'all did everything with test tubes," she drawls. "Don't you choose the most convenient method? Careful isolation under glass…."

"… can stand in for runs on the real thing?" Ressler informs her of the hitches. He feels renewed need to make the point hurriedly. "In vivo — testing with living things — is like Murrow's report from a street under fire. Firsthand information, but chaotic. In vitro gives a coherent but dangerously simplified recreation, from the calm of the studio. A whole new can of helical worms."

Blake whistles. "You want a cell-free system."

"Exactly," Ressler shouts, jumping up. A moan of resigned fear comes from the just-dozing child in the next room, and he lowers his voice. "I knew you would come through." Blake has supplied him with the thing he was after. A name.

"Stuart. I don't know. Even supposing that synthesis behaves no differently outside the cell than in. That a reaction's a reaction, that living things form no special domain." The whole point of the last hundred years. "Still___"

Stuart waits for the objection, the use of talk. Blake thinks in silence, knowing what's at stake and measuring ambiguities the best he can. After some seconds, he says, "In simulating the translation reactions outside the cell, reducing the case to manageable proportions, we might___"

"Yes?"

"I don't know. Violate the complexity threshold?"

"The what?"

"I know. It sounds mystical. But can we be sure that reduction to constituents won't strip out emergent phenomena?"

"Is there such an animal?"

"Jesus. Maybe I'm in the wrong line of work." Eva sits next to her husband, squeezes his feet. "In vitro," Blake works out tentatively, "might give us repeatable evidence. But would it ignore some cellular interdependence?"

The two pore over the new angle while the third party sits by, asks for occasional clarification, keeps them honest. They push on the problem into early morning, hitting a hard spot that won't budge. Tooney looks at his watch, laughs, and announces, "I have to drive to Chicago in five hours." Ressler apologizes, Blake waves him off, and they tap the matter another fifteen minutes. It's impossible to say, as the meeting breaks up and the Blakes lead Ressler to the door, how all three know that this talk, so highly charged, innocent, irrepeatable, will be the last of its kind. Blake walks Stuart across the lawn to K-53-C.

"No coat?" Ressler asks, solicitous in the crisp air.

"Don't you start now. You sound like Lovering. Have you seen that pup recently? The man is so convinced that cold germs are gunning for him that he won't even shake hands. It's one thing to rage against a wet-head. Another to run around in permanent parka. I saw the madman yesterday, wearing gloves, indoors. He refuses to take off his muffler even to talk. And here it's still practically summer."

"Tooney, it's getting cold. There is a flu virus going around. I can sympathize with Joe's desire to keep a distance. The idea of a packet of DNA attaching itself by landing gear on my cell wall, injecting me with alien nucleic acid, using my cell to reproduce itself by the hundreds, and then bio-wing it up in a grand exit is not especially savory."

"Tell me. But don't you see how he practically forces me to bike to the lab in bermudas? I'm fatalistic about disease. I mean, if a virus has your cell's name on it___I always say anyone can have Tea for Two, but it takes phage to make T4 tumor. Heard the one about the Cysteine Chapel? I gotta Millon ovum."

Ressler draws up short. '"If a virus has your cell's name on it…'?" But the idea, too far ahead of its time, is lost to a failure of concentration. They stand outside Ressler's door, waiting for the vagaries of inspiration to visit once more in the pre-sunríse.

"You want to trace protein synthesis forward?" Blake asks, summarizing, although the point is long since solidified. Ressler nods. "In a cell-free system? But how, man?" Ressler shrugs. He feels the answer inching on him, as inevitable as infection.