Gold Bug Variations

IX

Canon at the Third

Days later, Ressler still doesn't know the reason for Dr. Koss's visit. Neither seeking nor avoiding, he sees her everywhere — in the lab, in conference, in the creaking Georgian hallways of Biology. He studies her for flutter, but sees none. She is unaffectedly congenial. No secrets: so I was wrong about your birthday. He does his best to be congenial back. A week after the visit, coming out of the office he shares with Lovering, he practically knocks the woman over. Who knows how long she's been standing there. "You scared me," she says. All at once, the pound of blood pressure, hypertension bruits coming on like Mardi Gras. Excitement or fear? His or hers?

"Were you looking for me?" he asks stupidly.

Embarrassment clouds her face. She looks away shyly, confessing something for the first time since her visit. "No. Your office mate. Can you give him this?" She hands him a note and rushes off too quickly. Ressler battles with ethics for as long as it takes to peek. The message is unsealed and he kills no cats by looking. It's nothing; a reminder to Joe to get his paperwork in. The man has a mailbox for these things.

She's taken to dressing differently, but he can't say how. She seems airier, her walk a brisker cadence, her shoulders buoyant. She no longer fits the make he'd assigned her. She can't quite make the flamboyant smartmouth stick. He has no idea how to classify her, let alone interpret her late-night light arm around him the week before. Only her gift — those vinyl keyboard variations— proves irrefutably that she really dropped by. But that piece is the most ambiguous code wheel of all.

He needs real work to distract him from speculation. He throws himself into the rate trials, promoting them from the make-work they were made for. He visits Ulrich's office without appointment. Rousing the team leader from a pile of papers, he feels the force of his ludicrous mission. Low man on the totem, with no productive work to speak of, asking a man of thirty years his senior to humor a proposal he hasn't even formulated. He sits nervously. "Stuart?" the chief asks, affecting pleasure.

"Dr. Ulrich, I—" He seizes up, choosing just that moment to remember Koss's departure at his door, his trailing I want, which he now can too clearly name. "I think we ought to leave amino sequence analysis to the chemists."

Ulrich smiles at the boy's diplomatic choice of words. "How do you suggest we get to the translation without the ciphertext?"

Ressler knows Ulrich to be intellectually capable of grabbing the heart of things. "There must be a way to determine the codon-to-amino map without pacing over every inch of resulting print. The thing's too dense. We'll be forever."

"I agree." Ulrich lets the full weight of silence spread without comment.

Ressler fights the urge to run. After an agonizing half minute, he tries feebly to elaborate. "The sequences on both sides are too numerous and complex to correlate without a key."

"You'd like some kind of Rosetta apparatus?"

"The cell is our Rosetta."

"Hmm. Have you any argument other than analogy?"

"No."

Ulrich forgives the antagonized monosyllable, remains the understanding boss. "Interesting. But let's follow through awhile longer with what we have. After the write-up on your trials, we'll see where we stand."

Hot-faced, humiliated, Ressler leaves. Yet in losing his discussion with Ulrich, he's gone a small step further in the elusive process.

The cell itself as Rosetta. Feed it the barest theme___He lavishes attention on the radiation-doped microbes in his care. He hangs about the lab, isolating, repeating, recording, filtering for telltale mutants that might surprise, prove him wonderfully wrong. He fishes for results that will buy him time to consolidate, gather strength, coax the next hint into place.

As he shepherds the petris, almost contaminating them with overcare, Ressler replays that day, ancient history, when Dr. Koss made him bend and surrender his head for toweling. The imprint will not extinguish. His temples tense under the contour of her recreated fingers. He maps his own, slow, reciprocal finger path over her head, the bridge over her eyes, the gentle ridge running along the sides of her skull to its crown. Her skin's capacitance courses down the length of his arm into an endocrine reservoir filling his abdomen.

These buzzers set off others, until he cuts the chain reaction, recalls another day when a clue from Koss sent him into the stacks in search of the gold bug. One deletion, one insertion, and one substitution brings him to goldberg. Too near a variation to be accidental. Koss, yet another code thug, infects him with some viral mess, injects him with some vital message mutation. Before his paranoia can flail out, finding hidden significance in every coincidental letter-string, another message arrests him. A clipping left on his desk: a cartoon of a marvelous, machine-age invention employing two dozen elaborate programmed steps to butter a piece of toast. The contraption is pencil-captioned, "Goldberg Variation #?" Lovering saunters over from his side of the office. "Dr. Koss left that. Said you'd know what it means." It means the woman likes puns. That he's been a first-class goldberg rube.

When the Blakes invite him to dine at K-53-A, Ressler gratefully accepts. He never imagined human company could be so welcome. Evie greets him at the door with an elbow squeeze. "I've prepared something incredible: a baste-a-bag turkey that ejects a little flag when done." She leads him into the kitchen, where the rest of the family peers intently into the oven. Tooney introduces him to Margaret, a seven-year-old marvel of precocity and miniaturization. "I bet it's a tiny Union Jack," Blake baits his daughter.

"Don't be silly," Margaret says, shoving him. "The bird's from Virginia. A Stars and Bars." With no trace of shyness, she commands Ressler, "Watch! Fowl in a flag-bag. It's going to wave when it's cooked."

"Maybe it's a white flag. Surrender?"

The kid rolls her eyes. "Funny friend you've got, Dad."

Ressler wonders what role Herbert Koss, the man who put Champaign-Urbana on the Food Technology map, had in developing the self-semaphoring bird. The family sits down to eat, making an unbelievable racket for a trio. Blake begs everyone's silence, then drops his head. "Bless food thank Lord selves service." Highspeed blur. Ressler is stunned; is the man truly devout, racing through the prayer for the visiting agnostic's sake? Or is the rapid-fire benediction for his amusement?

He looks at Eva, but she just mugs back pertly. "Service selves Lord thank food bless!" Retrograde grace, in Eva's mouth, the purest thanksgiving imaginable.

Little Margaret giggles and adds, "Amen. Dig in."

The invocation wrecks Ressler's appetite. "Dig in" these days has other connotations altogether. Home shelters, advertised in the backs of magazines. If the race knew the rads they've already released it would roll over and give up, adrift in a sea of brave new mutagens. Only this family's free affection keeps him from the thought. He and Tooney swap anecdotes about their colleagues. Eva entertains them with more Tales from the Civil Service. "I have the sneaking suspicion that despite the upward spiral in the standard of living, we're all getting poorer."

"Come again?" Ressler says.

"You realize my wife hasn't really quantified this."

"You should read some of these applications. 'How are you qualified for this position?' 'I need it real bad.' 'Why did you leave your last job?' 'False pretenses." One fellow filled out the space Below the Dotted Line reserved for previous employer's comments: 'Would you hire this worker again?' The guy wrote, Tes indeed.' Only he misspelled 'indeed.'"

In the general hilarity, Ressler leans over and whispers to Eva, soft enough so the kid can't hear, "You have a beautiful child. Mailorder."

Eva claps her hands. "No, I assure you we got her through the conventional channels. Oh! That's rude, isn't it?"

"All right, short stuff," Tooney says from the head of the table. "Do your thing."

"Have to?" Both parents nod gravely. The child groans, clearly delighted. " 'Margaret are you grieving over goldenglove unleav-ing?' What the heck is a 'goldenglove,' anyways?"

"It's 'Goldengrove,' sweet," Mother corrects. Eva, with her ambidextrous brain capable of retrograde inversions, must have a soft spot for postromantic poetry. "As in groves of plants that have lost their green."

"Oh. I like 'goldenglove' better. As in golden glove."

"So do I," Ressler concurs.

"Get on with it," Tooney mock-growls.

"'Leaves….'"

" 'Like the things of man….' Come on, girl!"

" 'Leaveslikethe things of man you with your fresh thoughts care for can you? Ah! As the heart grows older it will come to such sights colder by and by.'"

As recitation, the half-dozen lines are mediocre at best. But the child cuts Ressler to the quick. To a scientist habituated to the microscopic, her snip nose, proto-mouth, tiny eyes that actually focus and see are miracles. Blood courses through Margaret as she recites. Lungs pump, kidneys filter. Systems and subsystems weave an intricate, interdependent free-for-all. Her nervous system, a fine spray of veil, a cascading waterfall of paths and signals, subdivides into web-bouquets, structures more elaborate and beautiful the more he imagines their constituent firings.

This is the awful northern face that molecular self-duplication must scale, an ascent as unlikely as the climb of chemicals out of the primordial soup of reducing atmosphere. The superstructure alone is inconceivable. Just the thought that a single zygote, in less time than it takes the average Civil Service gang to dig a bed for a mile of interstate, differentiates into vertebrae, liver, dimpled knees, and ears complete with recording membrane is enough to knock Ressler flat on the metaphorical mat. Yet nucleotide rungs alone curve this child's cornea, curl her lashes. Nothing else needed; he's sure of that. The entire, magic morphogenesis is explainable as terraced chemical mechanisms.

This machine, this polyp, this self-assembling satellite of two parents with no special technical ability outside of inserting complementary parts inside one another, this self-governing bureaucratic republic of mutually dependent parasites (every one incorporating a transcript of the master speech), has mastered speech. Mimicked language. Biggest of the big L's, from fist to lash, the real tissue. Margaret's cells have found out how to say what they mean, or a rough approximation. Her hierarchy of needs insists it is more than chance initiation.

This child, all of seven, creates, in a few phonemes, real grief, the shorthand sequence until then only metaphored. The metric, or rather Margaret's meter, invokes the strangest insight: this morphologically perfect package is not a little girl, but a chemical unknown putting itself through reduction analysis. Her life is the task of isolation, the desperate longshot of learning. Margaret's virtuosity denies objective treatment; he gets sucked into the shape of the line, the precocious musculature, the labial coordination.

He stares at the juvenile a nanosecond longer than is appropriate, begins to see in that self-delighting, self-affrighting library of sentient routines a thing to spook the strongest empiricist. Design without designer. Effect, perfect and purposive, without even casual cause.

The child — with that sensitivity, like linguistic preknowledge, built into children — picks up on his fear. Half into "by and by, nor spare a sigh," she stops. The silence does it: his nose flares, blood flushes his cheeks, his glands secrete. A reaction mechanism, one of those instincts that puzzles the issuing organism as much as anyone. Margaret shoots a pitying look at him.

"Peg, my leg," Tooney jokes. "What's up? Why heck you stop?"

"That man is crying," she whispers, suddenly no more precocious than her years. Ressler looks away, unable to evade this minutest observation. He has somehow grasped her, not as a performing child, but as this trial run. The helix's experiment.

"Well, maybe this poem is sad. Did you ever think of that?"

She looks at Ressler, eyes huge: can this be? He makes no denial. Incredulous, danger past, racing through the syllables for sheer love of the sound, shooting out of the gate again in amazing breach of decorum, in that elaborate, cumbersome, ornate, mathematical, obsolete, and hopelessly contrapuntal ritual of rhyme, she shouts, " 'Nor spare a sigh though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie.'" "Wan-wood leafmeal" cracks her up. She cannot keep a seven-year-old's smirk off her face as she finishes the postponed feat. And yet you will weep and know why. " 'Now no matter, child, the name!'"

But Ressler no longer listens, let alone cries. He knows the name. He was that little girl's age once. He knows the layout, the mortgage of that miracle — the process that has coarsened features, thickened spirit, and slowed joy while leaving him a perverse window through which to see the place he has left. He was himself that exploration once, despite his mother's repeated objection "You were never a child."

How could the enormous head, passing only with agony through Evie's conventional channels, a design resulting in years of dependent helplessness — the longest adolescence in the animal kingdom — ever have been selected for? A liability for millennia before earning anywhere near its keep. Yet that outsized organ is his biome, his stock in trade. He was the prodigy once, not much older than this girl. He lavished this precocious love on the home nature museum — a walk-in catalog of the planetary pageant. Every Saturday he redrew the floor plan: protective coloration got pushed against the kitchen wall and the ant colony went into the living room, clearing the place of honor in the front foyer for this month's cause célèbre, the struggle between Allosaurus and Triceratops, in 3-D.

His parents suffered the formaldehyde stench in happy silence. While classmates spent their energies on kick the can, he curated. It took him until sixteen even to consider running away, and then it wasn't to join the circus but Byrd. Yes, like the rest of his peer group, he avoided sidewalk cracks. But he kept to the clear concrete on account of Pascal's Wager: the consequences of coming home to find the ambulance carting off broken-backed mother prohibited taking the infinitesimal chance.

His protoself, a thing independent of who he has become: a boy completely, passionately in love with links. The more esoteric the system, the more ecstatic his pleasure in tricking out its hidden form. His sixth-grade math teacher, introducing summation notation by brutal means, made the class add up all the numbers from one to a hundred. The plan was to imprint in the half-shaped charges how trivial the task was once one had the formula. But a few seconds into the assignment, while the rest of the poor slaves labored to total their columns, little Stuart raised his hand. "Sir?"

The dumbfounded educator listened to the preteen derive a perfect copy of Gauss's great work. "Look: one plus one hundred is one hundred and one. So is two plus ninety-nine. See the pattern? If you split the numbers in the middle and reverse the second group, you get fifty sums of one hundred and one. Instead of a hundred hard additions, one easy multiply."

"That's… right," the teacher whispered, going pale. Original thought, the once-a-generation find, in his classroom. Stupidly, he asked, "And what exactly is fifty times one hundred and one?" As if the answer mattered. But this simple product was beyond Stuart. Adult Ressler still takes a minute to get it. Once he'd rediscovered Gauss, the problem lost its interest and he went on to calculate which two rings on his wooden desktop he'd been born between. To figure the weather that year, by ring width. Teacher could solve the multiplication for himself if he tried.

His whole childhood was an unsuccessful effort to show various instructors that the crucial thing is not fifty times one hundred and one, but how one got those terms. Not what a thing is, but how it connects to others. In the second grade, shown a card with the words "little wind how today Mr. ask," and told to make a sentence from them, he wrote: "My teacher has a card with the words 'little wind how today….'" The following year, he discovered that when one flipped one's tongue over, a touch applied to the bottom seemed to emanate from the top. By junior high, he had proved to disbelieving high schoolers that almost all possible numbers have an eight in them, or a seven, or nine, but an infinity of numbers contain none of these. In late teens, he announced to an uncomprehending English teacher that the word "couch," repeated a thousand times at high speed, deteriorated into semantic nothingness.

Each thing is what it is only through everything else. Life is a crystal, combinatorial. A surreptitious system. Feel the pull to uncover it while still a child, or that pattern will never, not even in the cells' collapse, open its hidden order. Ressler remembers this boy, how he usurped Western Civ from Mr. Jameson, scorned the Safety Patrol, barked about some ship called the Beagle, and corrected Mrs. Rapp on the bituminous/anthracite debacle. Even his mother gave up trying to teach him anything outside of never to wear blue with brown.

He's paid the toll in playground hate. Hate of his memorizing and explicating the Gettysburg Address overnight. Hate of his never, not even in the face of electrons, Greeks, and other hopeless abstractions, getting flustered. The annual resentment of a new crop of classmates at his hearing sounds and sweet airs of the sweetest simplicity, a whole home nature museum of shifting voices, each claiming to be the melody. His learning everything from scratch. Everything connected; all classroom assignments, aspects of one theme. He heard what the rest of the percentiles had to take on faith.

This Margaret already suffers the same exile. He sees it in her anxious face, her rapid flashes of recitation. They two are of a piece. Out of the ubiquitous, sick anxiety of childhood, he and this girl, skipping past those classmates blundering through the accepted steps, are off on their own, cataloguing, curating their own internal, interwìred discoveries, attempting to dance, as fast as lips and breath and understanding can.

After Margaret goes to bed, the adults spend the remaining evening pleasantly. Suffering community with the Blakes is vastly superior to another evening of overloaded solitude. Since Dr. Koss's visit, he has lost his capacity for productive isolation. He finds himself driven to company, not sure what exactly he hopes to find there. They gravitate to the front lawn, stroll down the street toward the university. The air is brisk. Students have poured back to campus, in the erotic uncertainty of a new term. Eva relates her latest cerebral misadventures. She has just mastered the trick of delayed dictation. With her right hand, she jots down whatever someone is saying; with left, she writes the previous sentence in the past tense. "I'm not sure what practical advantages this has," she says, smiling fetchingly in streetlight.

Tooney puts his arm around his wife. "Do you know that we are walking in the presence of a woman who does crossword puzzles in pen?" Blake shakes his head. "When I first discovered that, I knew this was the sexiest woman I'd ever meet. I had to marry her."

The rhythm of the evening, the pitiful, arms-flung attempt to articulate the thrust, is drowned in cicada swarms. Ressler is shot through, unable to rid himself of the idea, the face, the scent of that woman who has attached herself to his brain like a water parasite. Why isn't she here? She is at this minute home, with her husband, while his thoughts are thick with her shape and spore. He grasps the slack truth: he is already lost, the one person alive who knows he isn't a native speaker. Ressler smiles as Tooney relates his own courtship. He watches this man and wife, such obvious mates, and suddenly decides to risk the infant friendship on an outside chance that can tell him nothing except how lost he already is. "Your wife is phenomenal," he blurts out. "I'm in love with her."

"Terrific!" Blake shouts, shaking his hand. "Hear that, wife?" Eva blushes. "See that? She thinks you're neat too."

"I mean it. I want to have an affair with her."

"Don't blame you in the least," Blake chuckles. "But I ain't gonna letcha, lecher." He cuffs Stuart's ears, rubs his hair with his knuckles, dangerously close to a hug. "You may kiss her good night, when the time comes. But no tongue!" Both cackle nervously, good-naturedly. The woman in question pretends outrage, but shoots Ressler a look that says, Well, we might have been an item, you and I, in other circumstances.

"Suppose it were," he persists, but the experiment is ruined by descent into hypothetical. "Suppose it were Eva. Magnet, built in, like migration. That I had to come back to her, to that beach, even the first year, never having seen it. Suppose it were Eva. And everything depended on my making Margaret." Ressler rubs his neck, embarrassed. "You have an amazing child."

"That time of year, is it? G'wan. Get married. What're you waiting for? Can bachelor days last forever?"

"Does ripe fruit never fall?" Eva adds, her quota for the day. "Do, Stuart! Not even science compares with parenthood."

"Seems irreversible at first," Tooney says. "Terrifying. You look for the sign that she, out of every active genome in the species, is the one you're after. But the one you are after___"

Eva interrupts him with a nod toward Ressler. Tooney, noticing, clams up. Ressler announces quietly, "The one I'm after is already married."

"Stuart, I'm sorry." Eva takes his arm. "We're so stupid. We had no idea."

They walk another block, then circle back. The Blakes ask nothing, probe no further. How much has Tooney inferred? Ressler's been here but months, is a notorious hermit, knows no one except the crew. He can't believe how obvious he has been. He's just been waiting for the chance to commit this carelessness. They wind up back at K-53-C. Nobody is ready to break up the company, but the night is clearly over. "Can I still get that kiss good night?" Eva takes him in her arms, shoves her husband away.

"Deep and lasting osculation," Blake says, as his wife and this stranger kiss fully on the lips. "Nothing like it."

Ressler turns his back and lets himself into his apartment. Closing the door, he enters a vault, a time vacuum. He feels the first seed of what could easily become panic if he nudges it. He goes to the record player. But the flowering, formal perfection of the music is so close that he rips the playing arm off the motionless canon. The needle lurches hideously across the vinyl. He flings the record into the corner and with the same violent, emotionless wrist twist puts the banished Robeson on. But spirituals, smacking of theology, only intensify his shakes.

He digs in, steadying. Fear? Grief? The intrusion registering down his nerve sheaves, the radical dissection has its root somewhere before words: in the self-describing semaphore. The home nature museum. The work undone at the lab. The fallout shelter signs on stadium and stacks. That syntax-generating syntax. Jeanette's genome. The code bug. Now no matter, child, the name. Sorrow's springs are the same. It is the blight man was born for. It is Margaret he mourns for.

Program Notes

A handful of visits to Manhattan On-Line revealed that the night staff were not completely cut off from the rest of the firm they worked for. There really was a business behind them. If I came early enough in the evening, I caught the remnants of the swing shift who enjoyed hanging around after hours, avoiding rush commute or baiting the company recluses.

Jim Steadman was a regular, always late punching out. He had ostensible business: "Transfer of power, Ms. O'Deigh. Somebody's got to steer this pitiful ship." But Jimmy's nautical function was, if anything, ballast. Compensating for a lack of skill at the helm, he tried to run things by the manual. With those two on night watch, that was impossible. Jimmy was dear: he rarely transcended the accidents of his life and time, but was squarely in the camp of good men. Franklin had trained under him and took to calling him Uncle within days. Uncle Jimmy never objected to the sobriquet, although he was only a dozen years Franklin's senior. Avuncularity sat on his chest like a Good Conduct medal. The man would have made a great counselor, or one of those folksy district representatives, prematurely senile, whom the constituency returns term after term because he's a harmless institution.

Convinced that Chief of Operations included the duties of utility fielder, Jimmy patrolled the grounds, did minor maintenance, set rat traps in the attic, swept the stockroom, cleaned the corporate fridge, and managed to run the computer in only three or four times what it would take a teenager who stuck to the task. He would come in early, kill the morning, gossip with the keypunch girls. He would frequently still be there in the evening when Todd and Ressler arrived, modestly martyred by the OT, with horror stories about how he'd been checking the circuit breaker when he somehow brought the shop to a standstill just as the machine was closing out totals. The three of them would spend hours restarting the process from the top. Jimmy would stay on happily, around the clock. The computer room was his home, the staff, his family.

He flirted outrageously with all females, a snips-and-snails teasing. Jimmy had no wife or girlfriend. Shyness made him clownishly aggressive. He was sweetly overweight, suffered from an emotional skin condition, and nursed a "bum leg," a circulatory symptom telegraphing an advance notice nobody paid attention to. He lived at home with his widowed mother. He called her each evening just before leaving. Presumably, this mobilized supper or instructed her to call the police if he wasn't home within the hour.

He struck a wary symbiosis, a nonaggression pact, with the system. He did not trust the machine but treated it well and hoped for the best in return. He had no explicit grasp on what the computer did. It seemed to run itself, a part of the mundane miraculous. He liked to take me aside and inform me confidentially about the little men inside the CPU, at the consoles of their own little machines, which they, in turn, did not entirely understand, but which kept the whole she-bang going.

Todd and Ressler got along with their colleague, even liked him. But they couldn't help treating him as a young Walter Brennan, lost in the vast backroom poker game of the Information Age. Jimmy would sit in the lunchroom at ten to seven, eating his neglected bologna with mustard and browsing the Daily News as Todd clipped current events, waiting for the system to do the afternoon's General Ledger, which Jimmy should have finished by five. He'd limp to the computer room, punch the code into the electronic lock, rush to the printer, and discover that it had jammed at the beginning of the run. At this setback, he'd offer up an oath on the mild side of "Oh, nuts!" Todd insisted that Uncle Jim would not say shit if he had a mouth full of it. Jimmy would return to the cafeteria, throw up his hands, and half-happy, say, "I give up. Gonna quit and start that chicken farm."

He was an affable, engaging, hopeless plodder who talked in homilies. After a dozen truisms, winding up with "It matters not how strait the gate, how charged with punishments the scroll," he'd head back to the computer room and rerun GL, bloody, but unbowed. Todd would match the man's Victoriana, remarking, "We wander between two worlds: one dead, the other on the critical list." Unimaginative, dedicated: in short, the ideal operations manager. Todd always said he would die one. Still, for all his happy ineptitude, Jimmy could point to ten fully vested years without failing to bring his machine on-line in time for the next shift. Franklin had failed twice already by sophomore season.

Other hangers-on sometimes strayed into the late show. Occasionally, an upper-middle exec in full three-piece regalia worked late, auditing some process or another. This was my cue to pretend I'd only dropped by to deliver a message. The office also employed a succession of earnest teenagers, their eyes on Wall Street, to collate and sweep up. A knot of females sometimes stayed late to offer Todd bits of their unfinished lunches. "The Frank Todd Fan Club," Uncle Jimmy enviously called it.

In the second month of my regular rounds at MOL, Dr. Ressler buzzed me in one evening. He met me at the door, as charmingly distant as ever. "Ah, a familiar face! May one presume to call you Jan, after this length of time?" I nodded enthusiastically. Although now on first-name basis, I was afraid to say anything, lest I scare him off. "What is Jan short for?"

"I'm afraid that's what's on the birth certificate." I still knew little more about him than on the day I made my photo discovery. His mystery had drawn me here in the first place. I felt shame at how easily I'd dropped pursuit, distracted by more immediate pleasures. I suppose I thought: He has taken decades to get this lost. I have time to find him at leisure.

"On the topic of birth certificates," he said, grinning in advance at his own Byzantine connection, "I suppose your expertise makes it an easy matter for you to identify what was born today, twenty-six years ago?"

I waved my hand for time, but didn't need it. "Sputnik." My pulse picked up: an event from the year that Todd and I would have given anything to hear him talk about.

"On the nose! A quarter century after the first transpacific flight. Five years before Wally Schirra. It would be tough to measure that kind of acceleration in G's, would it not, Jan?" The sound of my name in his voice froze me. Dr. Ressler took my fluster in stride. "Your friend is in the machine room, with an artificial moon of his own." He left. But not before I'd talked to him, come within a syllable of his past.

Outside the computer room, I stopped at the punch-in lock, although I knew the secret letter combination. Through the plate glass, Franker entertained a woman in her early twenties who I could not stop looking at. Frank must have been at his most charming, as the woman kept hiding her face in her hands. In a minute, he saw me and waved me in, a look of irritation asking why I was hanging around waiting for an invitation. "Bon soir, bud. Where you been?" He grabbed my hand and pumped it, as always. I was slow returning the pressure. He smiled and said, remiss, "Ms. Martens, Ms. O'Deigh, Vice versa," I don't feel especially attractive, rememberine the introduction. "Annie here is an affiliate of MOL.

A teller for the Mother Ship." The bank that was parent company of their firm. "While Jano___"

The beautiful girl cut him off. Her eyes lit up as if she had just met a celebrity. She smiled, clearly seducing me with an innocent display of unearned affection. "You're the one who discovered all about Stuart."

I shot Todd a look. He shrugged. "I wish I had," I said.

Annie Martens looked puzzled. The dazed confession of missing something — her "frog face," as Todd called it — came on her often, but never for very long. "Franklin thinks so much of you," she said, eager to start again.

I'd think highly of him, too, I thought, if I knew the first thing about him.

Pocket Score

No climate can resist colonization; the city seeped into even that remote outpost. But my MOL, the place's true state, started around nine at night when the supporting cast cleared out. (I say mine, though I won't be going back.) Only after nine did my adopted electronic cave take on the full flavor of dark. For an hour or so before I had in all conscience to return home, the deserted office bloomed.

Their work, starting when most of life was knocking off, was as aloof as a deep-space probe. The almanac says that a sixth of the employed population of industrial countries works other than standard daylight hours. But even in a city notorious for staying up around the clock, the derangement of late shift put them outside the frame. They moved about in a world after the long-expected evacuation, inhabiting one of those heavily worked mezzotint prints of vine-covered ruins, two rococo foreground figures with walking sticks.

Only people who wake in late afternoon and spend their lives in polar dark glimpse the place as it really looks. The nocturnal world disperses light's artificial still life. Dark does something to perception, baffles the rods and cones with a color-flat landscape where touch becomes the chief navigation, even in a room blazing with fluorescence. Certain mood disorders are brought on by reduced daylight; some sufferers of acute depression respond to houseplant UV. Prolonged time in the dark casts the imagination off. Everyone who lives in it ends a romantic, permanently jointless, unappeasable.

The graveyard world is as big as day, but abandoned. Inhibitions are at best irrelevant. Conversation gets strangely quaint. All earth's supervisors are in bed, narcotized. Only the outcasts are up and about, pretending production: decoupled old Belgians in the Congo after colonial withdrawal, playing squash on concrete as lichened as ruined Mayan ball courts. After nine, Todd and Ressler could choose any path they wished, providing the disk packs were processed and the reports in the bin when the morning shift punched in. The office was theirs to use as they pleased: candelabra dinners, masques, music.

And music first persuaded Dr. Ressler to open. Frank was sitting with Annie, on another of her late visits. I joined them for half an hour before heading down the hall on an uncharacteristically bold, dark-inspired whim. I found Dr. Ressler where he always spent the first hours of the shift: in the cramped control room, the closet of consoles and flickering modems. I listened at the door, although I hardly needed to: on the far side, the same music that had been playing the day I met him. I knocked, not even hoping he'd let me in.

But he did, as genteelly as ever. I'd already discovered that frontal assaults would not overcome his privacy. When I'd confronted him point-blank with the printed proof of his earlier profession, Dr. Ressler responded only with amusement. "You can't be interested in such inconsequentials." That night, I easily might have run into the same impasse. He asked with a concealed smile how the news scrapbook was going, then scowled when I told him Todd had already lost interest in the project. "Our friend's cultivated character flaw," he said, "is a refusal to finish things."

He was attentive; he several times asked if I would prefer the swivel chair, if I would like the room a little warmer or cooler, if the music bothered me. But he just as easily fell into unselfcon-scious silence, and he never once asked why I'd dropped in. We might have sat mute all evening if I hadn't at last said, desperate for a topic, "I used to play these things once. In my teens."

He sat forward as if slapped. "You play?"

" 'Played' would be closer to the fact. I haven't touched a keyboard in years."

"You were good?" he asked, gesturing to the pealing from the speakers. "Good enough to play these?"

"That was part of the problem. I could play the easiest of the set. With a few, I even reproduced something more than the notes. But the harder ones—"I imitated his wave, not knowing whether to direct it toward the speakers as he had, or toward the turntable, where the generation was taking place. One of the more demanding variations was in the air, a juggling act demanding three separate hands each under the control of its own brain.

I kept talking, not wanting to do anything to endanger his alertness. As with stalking, smooth motion seemed better than sudden, even sudden freezing. "There are two sorts of piano students. The first is proud of the piece she's just mastered. The second hears the next piece snickering. I started out as the first, but drifted into the second."

"I know," Dr. Ressler said. He'd grown as effusive as a boy on a first date. "Oh, I can't say I know. I've never taken a music lesson in my life. I am your classic, digital autodidact. I can clunk along on a keyboard fairly grammatically, but with the thick accent of a Pole who has learned to speak English through books." He looked at me, and his eyes shone. "You give me a chance to learn something from a native speaker." I demurred, but he took no notice. "As a self-taught listener, I've often felt, as you describe, pieces snicker at my inability to hear a fraction of what's going on in them." This time he didn't bother to wave at the offender.

We listened, quiet in the exertion. Even his silence seemed preparation. "Certain pieces," he resumed, "have to be put away for a long time. I can't listen to them; they're too evocative. They possess an intensity incommensurate with everyday life. But when I take them out again from their place in the back of the closet where they've waited for years, I can't stop listening." I couldn't stop listening to him, to what I'd first haunted this place hoping to hear. "Not long ago, around the time your friend took up as my shift assistant," he grinned, "after several years of not being able to bear it, I found I wanted to study this set again." He contracted his mouth into a grimace: the architecture of the sound, despite his best effort, still held his ears' ability in joyful contempt.

I took a chance. "You've studied them before?"

The grimace broke into a full good humor. He knew I was fishing — the same pond I'd pointlessly trawled a few times before. He was no more eager now to grant an interview, but as someone who might be able to tell him something, however modest, about keyboards, I had him over a barrel organ. He might never have talked so easily had Todd been there. Maybe he considered me a cousin who had also failed to end up in her chosen field. Maybe he saw that I was ready, after thirty years, to begin my education in information science.

Whatever his reason, Ressler told me a story. He spoke of a series of nights as a young man when he first discovered the Goldbergs. A week of concentration, when the closed code of music at last broke. "Dangerously close to turning twenty-six, paid to do genetic research, I instead spent evenings lying in an army barracks bed, listening to that aria over and over in my ears, eyes, throat, and head. I was trying to discover why the thirty minute waltzes reduced me to hopeless emotion, to neutralize them through over-exposure so I could forget them and recover an even emotional keel.

"I had secured myself a pocket score. You must understand that as late as my mid-twenties, I could detect little more in printed notes than inscrutable black bugs crawling across the bars of their prison. I'm still illiterate, to some degree. Some things one must learn before five or they never come fluidly."

I had a hard time imagining this man as illiterate at anything. But I didn't dare contradict; he was venting decades of introspection, and I wasn't about to stop him for polite objection.

"Who knows? Perhaps I have repressed all memory of an unspeakable grade-school accident involving an unmarked glockenspiel that left me unable to listen to rhythmic pitches without suspicion." He checked my face, to see if he had lost the cadence of humor. "But oddly," he went on, shaking his head, "for some reason I am still trying to puzzle out, from my very first listening, this piece seemed to me less like music than a rescue message. Word from a place I had lived once, but could not find my way back to. That sounds ridiculously romantic, especially for an eighteenth-century piece! But after uncountable listening to a beaten-up copy of the variations lent me by a labmate, I began matching aural events in the rush of notes with the complex symbols standing for those events on the page. The day I finally figured out how the correspondence actually worked, it took the top of my head off. Incrementally, over hours of effort, I found one night that I could actually read the score. Incredible! Without actually playing the record, I could transcribe the aria from the page to my head. I could hear the chords themselves, just as if the Wunderkind on the recording were in fact playing it. That, young woman, is power."

He paused long enough to shoot me a playful look. "As you know from bibliographic snooping, I was then engaged in tracing the exact mechanism by which macromolecules code for inherited traits." He took a breath. For a terrible moment, I thought he was about to choke. "A big project. Several of my colleagues are still at the task. Their offspring will still be at it. We had arrived at a cusp. We knew a little; enough to know that further extrapolation would require a whole new zoo of relational models. Certain things we already suspected: a long, linear informational string wound around its complement, like a photo pinned to its own negative, for further, unlimited printing."

I had only a dilettantish idea what he was talking about, a modest background from answering a rash of alarmed questions about patented new forms of life. I'd been proud of the bit I had mastered until that moment, when I saw it would not be enough to carry me through this discussion, let alone this decade or the approaching millennium.

"We were looking for the right analogy, the right metaphor that would show us how to conduct the next round of experiments. We were in a furious, often-mistaken model-building stage. Exciting — unmatched for human effort, as far as it went. But slippery. You see, DNA is itself a model, a repertoire for proteins. And the convolutions of protein shape are themselves analogies for the processes they facilitate. In programmers' terms___" He gestured through the one-way glass to the computer room. On the other side, Frank Todd stood on a chair, making sublime, exaggerated, Buster Keaton gestures for the entertainment of Annie Martens. She was trying to leave for the evening, and he was clowning her into staying a little longer. I watched as he gave up, thumbing nose at her. She laughed and waved goodbye.

"You're not supposed to know how to program," I objected.

Ressler smiled. "In programmers' terms, the incredibly complex chemical routines of the cell blur the distinction between data and instruction. All this is an overly long digression to give you some idea of what preoccupied me when I first heard Bach's solution for recombining his modest aria. I lay there in bed, concentrating on a line in a particular variation. Say, the first entry of a canon, although I could not at the time have told you what a canon was. After intensive, repeated listening, I could hear the first suggestion of what had covertly fascinated me. The strain separated like an independent filament of DNA — part of the melodic line, but simultaneously apart. I made the momentous discovery that it was a note-for-note transcription of the master melody. My little fragment played against a copy of the musical idea it had just been, a moment before. Disengaging my focus, transferring it from the first to the second voice, I could hear the same fragment matched against the shred it would in the next moment become. When I shifted awareness like this for any length of time, the whole variation, at first inscrutable, dissipated into crabs crawling over each other in a bucket. Just as my ears got hold of the rhythm, it would strobe hot potato with the motive. The two lines would twine themselves back into a double strand. I had found my model for replication."

Dr. Ressler pulled on his earlobes, a characteristic gesture he used whenever he caught himself being inexplicably human. "I thought: 'No wonder this Bach fella is so great a composer. He anticipates Watson and Crick by two hundred years.' Idiot! And I grew worse with the piece before it was all over. It didn't take me long to discover in the music all sorts of outrageous parallels. Nor was it all my fault. The piece has the same numerology as the systems we were working with. Do you know how the variations are built?"

I shook my head. Music had never been a formal thing to me. It had always been a run of expressive moments — urgencies that words only interfered with. But I watched in fascination as Dr. Ressler stood and walked to the turntable, curtly jerked the needle. He placed it back down on side one, track one, and to my astonishment, when the music started again, he began to sing. But not the melody, not the right-hand filigree I had concentrated on when learning to hack out the little aria. He sang, instead, the simple sequence spelled out in the bass. "This," he said, "is what the composer will vary through his gigantic construction. Not the melody; the harmonic sequence. The first great analysis of the piece, written at the moment of Mendel's triple rediscovery, set a precedent by calling this theme the Base. Handy English coincidence." He sang, batching the Base into four-note blocks:

He launched into numerology: triplet triads over each theme note. Superimposed over those first four triplet rungs, a diversionary tune that, with grace notes, contains twenty tones. Two halves of the aria, each sixteen bars, both scored to repeat, totaling sixty-four measures. He went to his earlobe again. "All the numbers we were after. The coincidence meant nothing, of course. But to a snot-nosed kid of twenty-five, the exercise was invigorating." To an old woman of thirty, too. It brought out the closet gnostic to hear him talk. Not for the correlations themselves, at best novelties, but for the look at a mind that years of night shift had not put to sleep. One that still drew connections between all things, if now only with embarrassment at its own profusion. A mind that looked for the pattern of patterns, the structure that mirrored mind itself, gave it something to recognize in the landscape around it.

This was my first introduction to musical experience I had not even suspected existed. As Dr. Ressler sang along with the record player, I began to see that he listened to these variations not as if they followed one after another, but as if they stacked up simultaneously, sounding all at once in an unbearable polyphonic chorus. He listened to the world, more attuned to its awful fullness than its expendable melody: a set of variations all based on one, simple, thirty-two-note ground bass; a giant passacaglia preserving the harmonic structure of the original, fleshing it out into every conceivable design.

My hush made Ressler self-conscious. He snorted. "As you can imagine, I fast approached the conviction that either everything in the universe fit into a regular pattern or that I was, at my tender age, perilously close to a weekend at what people in the late fifties were fond of calling the Funny Farm."

I looked away from his self-deflation, through the silvered glass at Todd, preparing a night's work in the other room. Although he could not see us through the mirror, Frank now and then looked up at the room where his delinquent shiftmate sat talking. Ressler, anxious to join him, wound up with that favorite expression of Bach: All things must be possible. A pedagogical goading-on to performances that lay just outside the fingers. What exactly did the phrase mean? "Everything that is, is possible" was possible, if redundant. "All things that might be, can be" rubbed up in my mind against unlikelihood. Yet an evolutionist might say the same. All permutations on an amino acid theme are possible; given sufficient time and the persistent tick of the mutation clock, everything might be tried, with varying success. Not every experiment will fly; but every conceivable message string is — whatever the word means — possible.

The mind, emerging from blind patterning in possession of catastrophic awareness, condensed the eon-work of random field trials into instants. Did Bach's baroque ditty harbor the political horrors of Ressler's own lifetime? Everything that humans can imagine will be implemented. Bergen-Belsen, Nagasaki, Soweto, Armenia, Bhopal: he had lived through all manner of atrocity. These mutations too were built on the little phrase, and then some. To listen to a theme and variations, he suggested, one had to be prepared for dissonance severe enough to destroy even the original theme.

"You see," Ressler at last broke our moratorium, "once the experiment gets underway, all possible outcomes are already implied." He spoke with a spittle of fear in his throat. "The impossibly delicate pineal folds of your ear, for instance. Just one of the infinite ways a child's ear might unfold." He winced, as if at the memory of a specific child. He ended our first lesson by returning to the phonograph and lifting the needle. "I listened to these miniatures for a year, pulled out of them the most marvelous genetic analogies. But at the end, the music refused to reduce, and it hurt worse than before. I was a good empiricist, and just as causality was forbidden me, so was prescription. All an empiricist is allowed to do about terrible possibility is describe it. All things being possible, description is everything."

He grew curt, perhaps ashamed at choosing this moment to break so long a silence. He asked forgiveness with his eyes— ridiculously inappropriate. Only with a woman twenty years younger, one he'd known just weeks, could he reveal his ambivalence toward human company, the host in the hermit. Quietly, his back turned as he punched a few console keys, he asked, "Do you think it would cost you a great effort to recover what you've lost?"

I couldn't for the life of me make out what he was talking about. Then it hit me: my piano skills, never more than modest. He wanted someone to play for him. "Do you two have a baby grand tucked away in all this electronics?"

"I'll get one tomorrow." He laughed, a sound that went straight into my chest.

Time passed before Dr. Ressler trusted us with the rest of the story; he'd dug a great deal more out of the sarabande than a handful of genetic metaphors. He had discovered, in the most painful way, why the aria and its wayward children made unspon-sored appearances in his mind's ears, keeping him awake in his barracks at night. It cost him considerably to find out. The music would remain unlistenable for decades. Love was long over, but what was lost to him he still loved so harshly that it prevented him from listening even to its trace.

I would never get from him, in so many words, why he chose the moment of Todd's arrival to return to the unlistenable piece. Why take it up again, just then, obsessively, once more finding in it more than he suspected? Perhaps it had something to do with the incurable Bach's other favorite quote. Asked how he made the keyboard perform miracles of interchanging voices when he possessed only the same finger-bound hands as the rest of mankind, he would say: It's simple. Just hit the right notes at the right time, and the thing virtually plays itself.

Double Check

Three months under the bridge; with frugality and luck, eight more in front of me before I have to hit the classifieds. Sickening to consider, so I won't. Human prerogative. Still: three months of reading, jotting, recalling. It feels as if I quit yesterday, that I'm on that most contrived of civilized symbolic stopgaps, a vacation.

A quarter year of unbroken booking and I begin to acquire a layman's understanding of mutation at the molecular level. Information in the nucleic acid string is carried by the order of base pairs, the sequences of genes. The sum of gene messages — the tangled program of genotype — expands from single egg to runaway cell civilization. The same linear long set (more possible messages than atoms in the universe) chemically juggles the whole fantastic hierarchy until at last it impairs itself with old age and dissolves.

I have a rough analogy of the master plan. Each DNA spiral is two chains. The rules of complementary base pairing and the undulating regularity of the molecule give each half-helix the ability to act as imprint for the whole. This trick of molecules to sort, arrange, and assemble odd parts of random world into copies of themselves arose spontaneously, from the early chemical mix and the energy of an electrical storm. Miller produced the essential building blocks by exposing hydrogen, methane, ammonia, and water vapor to electrical discharge and ultraviolet light. By 1956, Khorana had synthesized polynucleotides in the lab. Ressler was then younger than Todd is now, and I was a toddler.

Replication is simple enough to model with a drawing. The split strands separate, each becoming a template for duplication:

The two daughter strands are identical 10 the parent. One third of the great bridge: Mendel's factors, embodied in a self-perpetuating molecule. That length of string — TAAGCTCGGA, plus hundreds more bases in strict sequence — encodes particular inheritable traits, say smooth seed or wrinkled. Molecular neo-Mendelism is consistent with the rules of gross segregation and assortment, requiring no metaphysical rules — just the constraints laid down by chemists: purine with pyrimidine, electrons in the lowest energetic state.

But that "just" is enormous. Genetic mechanism contains nothing transcendental. Cell growth, organism development conform to the principles of undergrad chemistry. The grammar does not change from generation to generation — only individual sentences do. A simple lookup table, one or more triplets of nucleotides to each amino acid, is universal for all life. Yet to get hold of this, to learn what it means, I must look into a creation story more miraculous than any human genesis myth.

I try to imagine a machine that, through a design stumbled upon by trial and error, has developed the ability to sniff out compounds that it then strips and welds to create another such machine. I cannot. Then I can: deer, euglena, snowy egrets, man. Self-replication is the easy part of the story, the simplest way that the purposive molecule arranges its environment. The sequence of bases in a gene is nothing in itself. Not phalanx, strut, tooth, claw, or eye color. Merely a mnemonic for building an enzyme. The enzyme does the work, steers the shape and function of the organism. The gene is just the word. I must follow it down, make it flesh.

I begin to understand how the real power of this self-duplicating machinery lies not in how perfectly it works but in how, incredibly rarely, it fails to work perfectly. If inviolable process allowed the magic crystal to seed itself in the first place, occasional fallibility permits life to crack open the sterile stable of inorganics and scream out. On the order of once every million replications, something goes wrong. Perhaps a base in a daughter string pairs with a base other than its required complement:

i

A mistaken daughter: CAAGCT— Who knows what this new chain might mean? Slightly different from its parent, it may produce a different enzyme, an unexpected convolution in the unfolding ear. I draw the repercussions, repeat the replication process with the impostor cytosine going on to pair with its normal mate, guanine. One of the four granddaughters differs from all the other copies. Noise invades the system. One bad pairing alters the gene's original message. Unlike the surnames of American daughters, the change need not be lost in generations. This aberrant offspring— with a new arsenal of enzymes — may be more successful at making further copies than her dutiful sisters, though the odds against this rival the odds against mutation in the first place.

Now I must link Darwin and his riot of proliferating solutions to that one-in-a-million molecular mistake. I must trace how chance static — a dropped, added, or altered letter in the delicate program — can possibly produce the mad, limitless variety of the natural history plates. That forethought and design could come of feedback-shaped mistake is as unlikely as the prospect of fixing a Swiss watch by whacking it with a hammer and hoping. The element I lack is the odd eon. I have eight months. The world has all the time in the world.

Whatever works is right, worth repeating: not much of a first principle. How can blind unplan produce a string thick with desire to reveal its own fundament? Where is the master program he was after? Somewhere in the self-proliferating print, the snowy egret, a keyboard that plays itself when you hit the right notes. The theme Ressler hoped bitterly to forget urges me on, whispering in enzymes to rebuild the buzz all around him.

The Question Board

Q: There is an enclosure with ten doors. When one is open, nine are shut. When nine are open, one is closed.

A: Once we held metaphor cupped in our hands. But it's foreign to us now, the riddle, lost to our repertoire except in the short span of childhood and the handful of adult months when we recover a glimpse of where we're going. We can predict, measure, repeat our results better than anything that has ever lived on earth. But we cannot answer this simplest of games.

Its beauty is verbal ingenuity: how well the hidden comparison fits. The sorrowful romance of three lines says more in hiding than it would by spelling out. But what good are riddles? Why bother with them? One might as well ask why bother with growing old. They are ways to begin to say what wonder means.

But my lost friend, this one is easy! One needn't be Solomon to solve it. When the umbilical is open, all other ports are still sealed. But cut the cord, and the stitch in time opens nine. You have one, proved by your effort to escape it. I have one, a full complement of symmetric parts; you knew it intimately once. Forgotten already? There is an enclosure with ten doors. We are each locked up in one for life.

J. O'D., October '85