Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

The message, which at the low end of taxonomy began as a simple impulse toward excess, learns to communicate, first to constituent parts, then to coordinated cells within an organism. Up a second slope — classes, orders, families of behavior — the text learns to pass itself between organisms. One more minor magnification lights upon language — a newcomer in the garden dashing off transcripts, elaborate travelogues to no one.

Maybe I'm not congenitally adrift after all. I watch a videotape of the famous gorilla Koko reading a children's book, signing learned hand-words into the empty air. Signing the way I scribble here, for an audience long gone. These notes, my evolving, catch-all phylum, live and die, propagate their own excess. I arrange them, perpetually revising, inventing writing as I go, assembling a classification system large enough to name what Ressler already knew.

How high is the biosphere? How wide? I list degrees and kilometers. I'd do better to steal from Wallace Stevens; classification, after all, is just a record of neighboring plagiarisms. "Life consists of propositions about life." Shape and behavior are guesses at the place where they've been set down. Eons-long accumulation, the organism itself is only a theory of what it might still be. My hyperactive classroom screams out its answers, constantly recanting, amending, reaffirming, anything but silent and archived, fired by the same single fact that keeps me revising. However many un-classifiable ways there are of being alive, there are infinitely more ways of being dead.

B. Ecology

Death too, at the heart of variety. Every message I turn up whispers it in code. There's only so much to go around. The splintering catalog rushes after the same circuit of available energy. Not all miracles make it. Each excess program copy is shaped by limit. Checked by scarcity, populations are pruned in constant edit. And pruning makes the garden proliferate. Death is the mother of experiment.

The earth is a differential engine — gradients of heat, cold, dry, w et, fat, lean. Some terrains snicker at all hope for a meal; others rain continuous free lunch. Even this asymmetry shifts. Currents churn up cold; mountains buckle, wear down in an era or two. Seas recede; poles reverse. The pool is played on a table so warped that players can either shoot or wait for a change in the rules.

The game, I figure out, is to figure out the game. My runaway catalog's every proposition is about the prepositional calculus. Two strange succulents, one African, the other Arizonan, converge by distant routes. Each is a lab transcript, a probe of local conditions. Living diversity maps the diversity of available space. The race for the curve of best fit fractures at every rapid into an alluvial fan.

I pose the naif's Q: Which of these million unclassifiable experiments is the most successful? A first, satellite glance gives the hat tip to my own chromosome set. Five billion, from Sahara nomads to Antarctic scientists. Flexible, omnivorous environment shaper, top of the food chain. But almost upon arrival, it crests in oversuccess, chokes on its own effluent.

My second candidate is grass. As widespread as man, greater in biomass. And it rarely annihilates its own niche. A good enough solution to have diversified into five hundred genera, five thousand species: corn, wheat, rice, bamboo, sorghum, reed, oats, timothy, fescue, Kentucky blue. It encourages others to cultivate it, the sweet, sugarcane smell of global success. But even grass is colossally one-upped by Insecta. I trace a range greater than grass and man combined. Undivertable clouds, a single species can outnumber all humans a hundredfold. And Insecta contains as many different species as there are humans in Lower Manhattan.

Then I discover bacteria. They coat every cubic meter of the planet. A gram of soil can contain 100 million. Every cycle required for life involves them integrally. They have remained essentially unchanged since emergence, three billion or more years ago. They make their way inside every large organism. The successes of the pyramid's cap depend inextricably on success at the base. Their success is the success of the animate code, the living engine's linchpin. Supremacy of the sheet of cells spread passively over earth's surface is measured in tens of thousands of duplicating tons per second.

"Success" mutated from Ur-roots sub and cedere, to follow after. Its hold on my English mind is a loaded model where B competes with, bests, and replaces A. The word warps my research. Scarcity undeniably demands competition, but living success does not mean beating out all comers. Cooperation of ever tighter skeins ties the web together, interanimates the nets of success. Emerson came remarkably close for an American: "All are needed by each one; /Nothing is fair or good alone." That one I learned as a schoolgirl. Successful hunters are not too good at killing, and successful prey must be pared and pruned.

The word I need is not "to follow after." I need another etymology: parasitism, helotism, commensalism, mutualism, dulosis, symbiosis. Local labels for the ways one solution requires another, from the bribes of fruit trees to the bacteria in my gut. Joint solutions everywhere, from ants and their domestic aphid farms to lichen, a single plant formed of two organisms that feed and water each other, breed and reproduce together.

One remarkable night, snowed solidly into a New Hampshire cottage, Dr. Ressler laid it out. "Mimicry is also an interlock. A snapping turtle's tongue depends on the shape of a fly. The beetle that borrows the look of a thorn lives off the rose's solution. Half a dozen harmless snakes ape the bands of a coral without paying to produce the poison. Jammed frequencies of passed semaphores, real, faked, intercepted, abused: everybody trafficking on the river dabbles in this pidgin." His speech was soft because the night was late, the kerosene flame revealed the blanketed world outside, and we knew we were going nowhere the next day.

"Every animal cell is itself a contract. A primitive cell may have co-opted a bacterium, enslaved it as the first mitochondrion, a genetically independent cell enclave. Believe me, we're all in this together. No cheating this economy. The books must balance. No," he said, breathing, his face obscured by the lamp, on the far side of the room where Frank and I lay touching. "The world is a single, self-buffering, interdependent organism. Or has been until this moment. Individual persistence is not the issue. Neither is species stability. If permanence were the criterion, nothing in the animate world could come close to the runaway success of rocks."

I would trade what's left of my savings to hear his monologue again, to jot down even a draft of a rough transcript of what he said. But he and his words have gone the way of probabilities, back into the loop. Death has returned him to school. I mimic him now, live off his solution.

"Why can't we speak that pidgin more fluidly than we do? Speak it the way everything else lives it? The definition of life we've lived with for too long is flawed. We presuppose the ability to tell haphazard from designed. The whole community is about to go under, pulled in by our error. Why do we want to revoke the contract, scatter it like a nuisance cobweb, simplify it with asphalt? Because we still believe, despite all the evidence, that the place was made. And what's made, by definition, can be improved. But suppose the whole, tentative, respiring, symbiotic message is no more improvable than chance. The superorganism takes its local shape — each part at the mercy of all others — because that is the configuration that chance conditions permit. Design might benefit from human ingenuity. Conditional fit cannot.

"Oh, it's worse than you think. Worse for us. Worse for you two." He looked at us as if at two crosses in a French cemetery dated a day after V-E. "Your generation, everyone from now on, faces the most serious shake-up in history. Because my generation," oblique mention of his departure from science, "has already killed life for you. I mean the old definition, the vitalist idea. We did something twenty years ago that people haven't gathered yet. It's all mechanism now. Self-creation. The game has changed. Only we haven't responded."