Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

Days into his journal binge, intent on latching onto the remaining piece in the synthesis, Ressler returns to the musical set to test a bizarre hypothesis. For weeks he has assumed that his lack of training would forever preclude his hearing how each single-minded permutation was a variation on anything. But recently he detects an unexpected pattern. The theme he begins to hear — the element drawing all filial generations into a family tree — is not a theme at all. It is a determining genotype. The existence of the Base is still a hypothesis. He will not swear to it until he hears it underwriting each of the aria's progeny. Testing the idea takes time. But listening is exactly the focused release he needs.

He began scientific life — natural history's home museum — a closet Laplacian: solving the real world required only a set of differential equations defining the movement of every independent piece in it. But a few days into his marathon session — never once leaving K-53-C, alternately sampling Bach and teasing protein synthesis — he scraps the engine. All measurement is not inherently valuable. Science is choked by unrestrained data as a pond is by too luxurious plant growth. Cyfer has attacked the coding problem by attending to every amino sequence ever unearthed. Given an English library and an identical, jumbled collection in Bulgarian, they've tried to write a bilingual dictionary by reading every book in both sets, tallying tables larger than the two libraries together, searching for spurts that correlate. Brute tabulature might work, if the underpinning translation were preordained, symmetrical. But there's no guarantee the runaway data enfold formulaic simplicity. In fact, just the reverse.

If nature is truly objective, as the entire scientific project must assume, then science can prove nothing except that we don't speak the same language as the outside world. Still, the double helix is a better map than the old homunculus or arcane pangene, which are both in turn miles beyond clay and spiritus dei for correspondence. Man may understand only artificial shorthand and nature speak only in innumerable instances; dim Berlitz phrases may never be the thing they describe, but they're the only visa available.

Three quarters of his reading aims not at throwing open the window but at stopping down his aperture. First, he discards the idea, plaguing the symposia since mid-decade, that specific enzymes are required to thread each amino onto each terminus of a growing bead string. Each of these joiner enzymes, themselves amino acid strings, would require sufficient enzyme-synthesizing enzymes to synthesize it, and so ad infinitum. Regress: he remembers the lullaby his mother used to sing, about how she would sing him a lullaby if he stopped crying.

Dispensing with enzyme-dispensing enzymes, he reviews the possibility of direct template synthesis. DNA might split, exposing a half-chain plaster cast where aminos line up into proteins. The idea is pleasing, but the chemistry is wrong; the bases don't have the right shape to distinguish among the twenty amino acids; a codon and an amino acid aren't even the same size. Yet just as clearly, some templating takes place. DNA doesn't leave the nucleus, and proteins are synthesized outside, in the immense cytoplasmic sea. Some intermediary must reproduce the DNA codon arrangement and carry it out of the nucleus. He goes to Olga, dips into a variation that confirms, in a burst of quavers, the only possible mechanism: transcription. RNA transcribes DNA, ports its message away for translation.

At intervals of a few hours, Ressler gets impatient with himself for belaboring the obvious. But cobwebs are only obvious after they're cleared. He smiles, recalling the Von Neumann anecdote, repeated endlessly after the man's death earlier this year. The cybernaut, considered by some the century's most intelligent man, while deriving a complex theorem on a chalkboard in front of a class, skipped a step, saying it followed obviously. A student said he didn't see how. Von Neumann scratched his head, stared at the board, set the chalk down, left the room, came back minutes later, and declared, "Yes, it is obvious," and carried on with the proof.

By forgetting common knowledge, by starting again with only the proved, Ressler begins to hear with new clarity the composition he is after. Transcription only shunts the problem of translation from DNA onto RNA. He must still make a rigid distinction between code text and code book. He goes to his door for a gulp of fresh air. Deep, metallic cold in the lungs might even be healthy. He stands on the threshold, sucking in vapor that condenses in each exhalation. He turns to go in, tripping over a basket on the stoop. Cold artichoke with hollandaise, two chicken piccata breasts, and a bottle of Médoc. He carries it inside, where he reads its attached note: "Inform us if the matter breaks. Remember the essential trace elements. We are all beginners in our own lives. Best, T.B."

Ressler smiles, breaks to eat, wonders how long he has been away, then returns to the publications, searching for evidence of an intermediary molecule, a translator that might align with the transcribed RNA codon and attach the correct amino acid into the growing polypeptide. At the back of his brain is an ironic hint about the most likely class of molecule for such a go-between, one capable of reading the subtle, raised-dot Braille of the nucleotide sites. Finding such an intermediary is prerequisite to his process, still only a matter of faith, for determining codon assignments. If he is to find it, it must be soon. The field is heating up. Insights are going public. He might pick the next journal off the stack and see the first islands of the transcription table drained of their opaque, deep-water enigma.

He bathes. The hot bath scalds his few fleshy parts a pale rose. Tub thermodynamics — heat loss, entropy, the chaff of the system — is hindered by a nineteenth-century slant: bath as steam engine, body as conditioned caldron of excess libido, cathexis cathartized. His bath cools like soup in a blown-upon spoon, the water's heat gone as random as recessing schoolchildren, too quickly for thermodynamics to explain. It cools only to him, would still surprise the outside touch. The analgesic property of hot water is a message, an instruction in warming. But the text evades him as he adjusts to reading it. The code is dimmed to the immersed, but will spring scalding to the unaccustomed hand. How to leave the water and still feel? The question is as still, as paradoxical as any aria. His skin burns with the fluid's prompting though the tub is already cold.

He sleeps a few anemic hours, a dreamless carpet of feral activity, a tapestry-forest that proves, on close examination, rioted with animal communities. Asleep, he thinks: nothing in the cell knows the code. Neither nucleotide nor transcription nor the hypothetical reading molecule nor the target enzyme contains anything resembling the codon table. No part of the code, not even the entire assembly, can say what it is. The triplet ACG could paint cysteine or arganine or any of the twenty, or even nonsense, and what difference would it make? What code are they after, after all? Where does it reside? In what level of that steep hierarchy of cells, the aggregate organism where every level depends on the one below, and all depend on the ineffable?

And should he be still — astonishingly — alive when the secret words are at last uncovered, should he of all searchers be blessed to find it, what will this self-generating, self-defining system — residing nowhere, unknown by any of its constituent parts — what will the assignment of CAG to glutamine lay open? What relation, what revealing rule? Will it be, after all, the first small link revealing how this flourishing, odds-prohibited architecture can come about, flower into militantly uncountable variety, build itself blindly into ever more complex communities of communication, all cooperating under the aegis of that never-itself-comprehended code, achieving more precarious orders of order, culminating in a construct that may just now be growing capable of a grammar able to articulate, to speak, to code a rough symbolic analogy, a name for the Code?