Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

What name? Not nucleotide sequences; not the codon catalog; not any of the reading machinery; not the enzymes. Not even the cell is the code. It is just its working out. The code is — so near as he can figure — a figure. A metaphor. The code exists only as the coded organism. There is no lexicon or look-up book. Not in the molecules, nor the cell, nor anywhere else but in that place— unnameable except by comparison — that houses all translation, all motivation, all that self-propagating structure that only by rough analogy and always in archaic diction (but not yet in his own words) can only inescapably be called desire.

The Food Chain

A knock at the door awakens him. After a moment, he establishes the approximate time of day: late afternoon, deepening sun. He thinks first to ignore the sound, stay away from the windows until it goes. But the knocking persists; perhaps he is due the intrusion of humanity on work that for the last several hours has made no progress at all.

Ressler opens the front door and sees no one. He is almost ready to accept the knocking as hallucination when he looks down and notices a miniature human on the stoop. Little Margaret Blake, trekked over from K-53-A for unknown end to stand on Ressler's stoop, motionless and martyred, as if the world were already lost despite her pilgrim effort. Ressler is taken aback. "Hello there, little cowgirl," he opens tentatively.

"Will you let me in please? It's very cold out here."

"Your dad doesn't think it's cold yet."

"My dad is a pacifist."

Ressler bursts out laughing and lets the child in. Margaret investigates the place, awed by an apartment almost without furniture, decorations, the usual adult totems. "Wow! Amazing! What do people sit on?"

"Same place they always sit on," he says, making as if to spank her on that spot. Margaret collapses in a heap of giggles. When she sobers, Ressler asks, "So, little lady. What's up?"

"The sky." This time-honored comeback sends her into another paroxysm.

He feels the unforgettable first signs of a playground pit in his stomach. Terrible at taunts, he never understood the oppressed dialect of children, even as a child. He rejects Wrap your head in bubble gum and send it to the navy as an appropriate rejoinder for a Ph.D. "What's the matter?"

"With who?" Her giggle is nervous this time as she tests his face. She stops goofing and works herself into righteous indignation. "Bruce Bigelow."

The name signifies little to Ressler. It sounds vaguely familiar, so Bruce is either one of Stadium Terrace's preteen terrorists or the secretary of the interior. He's had a bad dose of Jesse James Clerk Maxwell Taylor Caldwell syndrome lately, all personalities, public and private, fusing into each other, indistinguishable flip sides of a common entity. "What about him?"

"He is Ass Hole."

Ressler snickers. "You've got to say, 'He is an asshole.' But don't say it, OK? You have to go through puberty before you're allowed to say that."

This sets Margaret to crying, perhaps at the thought of one day having to deal with puberty on top of that asshole Bruce Bigelow. Ressler looks at her flushed cheeks, the hot springs leaching to the surface under her lower eyelid, and recalls the child's virtuosic sprung-verse performance. He frowns, chides, "Margaret? Are you? Grieving?" She smiles in mid-sob, gasps for air, coughs up a little sputum-laugh at her own ridiculousness. "What exactly did this Bruce so-called Bigelow do, woman?"

"He loosened this tooth. See?" She wiggles a canine whose time on this earth had come anyway.

"So what? Don't you get tooth-fairy payola for that? You ought to cut Brucie in for ten percent."

"You are Strangeness, know that? Strange Ness." The phrase I'm rubber and you're glue flashes through his mind, but he doesn't commit to it. Margaret, matter-of-fact, asks, "You know how to fight? You've gotta teach me."

"Oh I do, do I? Why me? Get your dad to teach you."

"My dad? Didn't you hear me? My dad believes in nonviolence." She sighs, a mix of incomprehension and pity.

Ressler laughs to recognize Tooney from this angle. "Ask him for a few lessons. Tell him they're hypothetical."

She doesn't even flinch at the word, but only shakes her head sadly. "He won't budge. He says, wait a few decades, and Bruce will die all by himself. You don't know how to box either, do you?"

"OK, kid. Them's fightin" words. Put up your dukes." Against his better judgment, he raises his palms and presents them to the little girl for target practice. Margaret jumps up in delight, claps her hands, rushes at him as if to kiss him in thanks, and takes a swing.

"Not too wild. You're leaving yourself open. Keep your guard up. Don't lead with your right all the time. Confuse him. Save your secret weapon. Left, left, left, then come in with the roundhouse. Shake 'im up, shake 'im up, then knock 'im down."

The phrase startles him. Perhaps his father taught him the cadence, but he has no memory of learning the words. They spring unsponsored from some antiquated chunk of neurons in the limbic, reptilian segment of his brain. He has always looked on all physical combativeness short of card games as evolutionary regression. He has never fought for anything in his life. That is, he has never applied overt violence to achieving his ends. Now the ancient formula of force, the somatic record of every successful bash that brought his forebears along their way upright presents arms, ready to address not only little Margaret's self-defense but his own akossting.

Over eons, undeniable advantage has conferred the Brute Force gene pretty ubiquitously throughout the population. But the last few millennia have produced a wrinkle — too soon to say if it's a true evolutionary variation or just a dress-up game. Capacity for violence — as unshakeable as any of the body's track record — has found a way of making itself even more propitious for survival by remaining latent. He can't take a poke at the chops of the editorial board of Nature in order to persuade them to accept the paper on the rates experiment he is writing up. Yet the paper is a way of going twelve rounds with Herbert Koss without ever once declaring himself in competition.

Werewolf, apeman, creature from the lagoon of lost souls: the killer instruction set still rattles loose in there. Locked in mock violence with this laughing little girl, her fists flaying at his palms as she picks up the trick of bodily injury, he sees that the unique achievement of this species, the thing that recursive consciousness ultimately permits, is the pretense that one does not actually manifest a trait even when taking maximum advantage of it. Everything the hominid branch has achieved — every treatise, tower, or diatonic tune — came about from surviving two out of three falls, prettying up the results after the fact. Jacob, after all, went all night against God's palooka, winning himself a name by avoiding the angel's pin. Shake him up, knock him down, do him in.

Man will never be anything better than a clever boxer. Maybe one that wins by footwork rather than punches, but still a creature always accountable to the win. The realization sickens him: advantage, self-interest, short-term gain are the only forces that carve a population. Every rung not higher, but shrewder, slier. The logical extreme is a species so clever it overruns its niche, bringing down the whole round robin. He quickly drops his target palms, timing it so that little Margaret's latest playful jab slams an uppercut to the kisser.

His lip breaks open. The child screams a terrified apology. Res-sler comforts her, assures her it was his fault. But he is as shocked as the little girl. He puts a dishrag to his mouth to stanch the blood. How did that slip in? How can natural selection make room, in this advanced a model, for such a pathetic, pointless, destructive little hit me of contrition? He clots the bleeding and calms Margaret by letting her eat cold cereal dry, right out of the box. Distracted by this novelty, she forgets the tragedy in minutes. "What do you do?" she asks him, munching happily.