Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

Their silence is not the shyness of setting out but the stunned assemblage of memory after a decade of separation. They have known one another longer than either guesses. They parted bitterly, years ago, in mitotic anger, broke off all communication. Now, they have rejoined, discovering their utter failure of imagination then, recovering it in silence and waiting. She strokes his bare back. The touch opens a strange, two-way mirror between her fingers and his spine. Her skin signals to his what it's like to feel itself from the far surface. His back reaches and returns her fingertips' touch. The double-stroking goes on, difficult to say how long, as the only delineations of time are the irregular strokes themselves. In this quiet way, the two bring themselves dangerously close to believing that a discovery of the other's axiom might indeed be possible. A matter of working out the transfer in vivo.

She breaks off stroking. She wraps herself around him as if already for the last time. "Forgive me. I had to know."

He rolls over, catches her ribs. How could you not have? He ruptures his lips, grinning helplessly. "You know." It will soon be daylight. Neither has closed an eye, except to concentrate more fully on the feel of the other. In all but the colloquial sense, Jeanette Koss has spent the night. And yet, as she has just said, it was all heuristic, hypothetical. She simply needed to verify the suspicion. Every pleasure of contact has known it can go no farther. Nothing can come of it. Nothing. The thought makes him rise up and begin to undress her.

She sinks and yields a moment, proof she would in a different world. Proof she wants where he is going, but cannot. She places a hand on his, bends it to a more innocent place of hayloft and pine, a quick foray of unrealizable possibility, all that can obtain, here, just yards from the inhabited picnic ground. She is right. He catches himself, slows. But each restraint revives something more dangerous, the sense of all that the other deprives herself of. He holds her cheeks between his hands and places the smallest, seismic probe on her closed lids. "Well," he breathes. "What are we supposed to do now?"

She looks at him, apologizing, self-castigating. She touches the flare of his nose in wide-eyed wonder. They have already had more than either thought possible. A half-dozen hours flush against one another. She shakes herself all over, and tickles him. "Breakfast!"

Ressler groans. "It would have to be that. I'm cleaned out. We can't very well go to the Pancake House together. Imagine getting caught without having committed the felony."

She nuzzles against him and sighs. "Mm. You know, maybe you're right." He laughs in agony. They get to their feet, unkink. She falls into his chest, stretches her every cord, then goes limp. He has never felt anyone relax so totally. "You're the man," she says dreamily. She nudges him. "Go bring home the bacon. Haven't you ever played house before?"

If she has meant, by spending the night without cost, to work some crazy blackmail, she now has the goods. If she means to hurt her husband, retaliate for past infidelity, she has accomplished that, too. If she planned by feigning heat to reduce him to an emotional appendage, exercise her female rights over the drone half of the species, she has handled that much handily. He doesn't care about her motive anymore. The lie is enough. Jeanette herself, these unexpected minutes suffice. He dresses slowly, lingering over his winter layers at the door. She comes up beside him, crawls in under his coat before he closes it. He grabs her shoulders, holds her at arm's length. "Promise me."

She raises her right hand. "I'll stay put until you get back." They laugh, and he falls outdoors. He has forgotten how weird the world is, the man-violated world. He wanders the few blocks to stores that might be open at this hour, collecting random provisions— coffee, fresh fruit, obscenely glazed doughnuts she might find funny. Giddy, he asks the grocer what women eat for breakfast. He gets a look: why do nuts always shop at the crack of dawn? He sees a newspaper on a stand. He picks it up, unable to believe this wonderful, forgotten artifact. It opens like Tut's Tomb to everything that happened yesterday. "Can I buy one of these?" He overpays, folds it like a precious magna carta.

He returns home with his treasures. She has waited. She is sitting on the floor, surrounded by his periodicals, reading the notes he has scribbled into several canary-yellow legal tablets. She looks up in alarm as he slips in, an exact inversion of their positions hours ago. Her eyes hold a new admiration, a new fear. "You never told me you were this close."

Ressler comes over to her, combs his hand into one full lock of that swirling rose hair. He holds the hank as if it were the leash of a seeing-eye dog. For the first time since it became light enough to see, he looks into her face. Her features, malleable enough to disguise their beauty, are now smashed into the code for unmitigated anxiety. He has his first real look at her. She is a scientist.

Her eyes drink and live and address the code — the latest twist of the tumbler puzzle. Close, he wants to say, is not yet there. There is no more dissonant an interval than a semitone. We can be closer, he wants to tell her. Work with me. Let me spread the plan in front of you, for your appraisal. But all he can manage to get out is, "See what I've brought you. Coffee. Fruit. A paper!"

She takes the provisions from this helpless boy's hands. She looks at him oddly again as she moves to the kitchen to prepare their meal. "Have you a knife? Thanks. Now tell me everything you know."

He does, willingly, with growing relief that someone else is now in part responsible. His entire stockpile of insight is remarkably compact. "There must be a messenger molecule, to get the message from the nucleus into the cytoplasm where translation takes place. The messenger must have stereochemical properties analogous to the master library. Thus, RNA."

Jeanette stops slicing fruit, grabs her elbow, bracing for a fall. "What is it?" he asks. In all his dictating to the cell what it must do, has he overlooked what it does? She tells him to look in the journal she brought as a visiting excuse. Prominently featured, a beautiful article by Crick lays out the same inescapable conclusion. He scans it, knowing what it will say, and sets it aside. "That's all right. We're still OK, here. The idea's in the air. I've traced it back a decade, in fact, and nobody has gotten any farther. It's welcome confirmation to hear Crick behind it." He pauses and giggles nervously. "I think.

"Combine Ingram and Neel. A change in the gene is a change in the enzyme. It's all sequence; we know that. There may be an intermediary, a mechanism that reads or decodes or assembles the protein globule. But it's informationally inert. The information we're after has nothing to do with anything except translating one linear sequence into another. That's where we must start. Look. Siekevitz, 1952. 'Uptake of Radioactive Alanine in Vitro into the Proteins of Rat Liver Fractions___'"

"Please. I'm making breakfast." But Dr. Koss sets the knife down and turns, comprehension spreading on her face. "Do you mean we might be able to synthesize proteins in a tube, without any cell, from raw homogenate? Get the mapping that way?"

He looks directly into her, eyes sunk in eyes. He walks toward her. She turns, putting up a weakly protesting arm. He moves against her backside, puts his hands on the muscle just above her breast, saying, "You are not only beautiful___"

"Mm." She rocks imperceptibly up and down on her heels, her curve against him. "If you don't stop right now, neither of us will live to regret it."

They sit to eat. She plies him hungrily for the next step. "Sorry," he says. "That's the missing bit."