Gold Bug Variations

XVIII

Canon at the Sixth

"Does it have any side effects?" he asked one night in my room, our habitual place for love. We lay still straddled; 1 crouched exhausted on top of him. Although subzero outside, we were moist from exertion. Sex, slack and slow, expansive, aesthetic, like serious wine tastings where nothing gets drunk but everything sampled, sometimes turned fierce for no reason, vocal, frantic, a muscle purge. The first such escalation scared the daylights out of us. Neither had initiated any change of pace, but all of a sudden we were both running hard, testing the edge of control. The more frightening it became, the more wildly we went at each other. Afterwards, still winded, I murmured about not knowing he was a sprinter.

"Sprinter? 'Hurdler' wouldn't half say it. You get that from a book? Private reference?" I made an embarrassed pun about open circulation. After that, even our most passive encounters — wide-eyed stroking — had a whiff of danger, as if anything could trigger fierce surprise.

Following such an outbreak, we lay motionless in my room, awkward in the impossible non sequitur, the return to nonchalance. The behavioral masterstroke, more crucial to human evolution than the opposable thumb: the ability to pretend that nothing just happened, that there is no seam. "Does it have any side effects?" he asked in the dark, after geologic pressing desperate enough to crystallize carbon. He could make himself obscure in half a dozen languages, including his mother tongue.

"Hair on my palms, you mean?"

"Can it do that?" he blinked.

"Can what do that?" Even reaching the conclusion that we didn't get each other was endlessly difficult.

He leaned toward me confidentially. "Safeguarding." I stared, unable to crack the euphemism. "Here we've been happily tilling the fields for weeks, with nary a mention of prevention. That leaves, to my knowledge, only two possible methods by which you___"

His speech ground to a halt. He locked eyes and stuttered, "Uh-oh."

I laughed a monosyllable. "Idiot."

"I suppose I should have asked beforehand, huh?" He was abashed only a second. "Which is it then? I don't want you using anything that's going to give you___"

"Don't worry."

"What do you mean, don't worry? I'm worrying."

"We don't have to worry about pregnancy. Or any birth-control side effects." We dressed slowly. I stood looking outside, wishing for all the world that we could go for a walk.

After a respectable pause for a man, Todd broke into Cockney constable. "What's all this then?"

I faced him, as self-possessed as a health professional. "I had a ligation."

"You what?" Dead silence. "You're not even thirty."

"Pretty soon," I said, suddenly too girlish.

We lay back on the bed, fully clothed. He put tentative fingers through my hair. "Mind if I ask…?" I waited placidly, relaxed, until he put it in so many words. "What prompted you… or did you need to?"

"No. Tuckwell and I decided that, with our lives, our careers, we would never do well with babies."

"But I didn't think___Did you expect…? Did you think you would live with him forever?"

I snorted — a sharp exhalation that expanded my lungs as it emptied them. "Evidently I must have, on our good days."

"Jesus. One of you must have been pretty certain. I mean, 'permanent' means—"

I discarded the argument that the operation could conceivably be reversed. The odds against that loophole made it irrelevant. Permanent meant permanent. "He had nothing to do with it, really." I was sorry I'd mentioned Keith at all, ashamed to have tried to palm off on him an interest in the decision. "It was all me. The idea of passing on accumulated adult knowledge to a helpless infant — how to expectorate phlegm and not swallow it, how to tell the difference between 'quarter to' and 'quarter after,' how to stay off the stove, how to tell when people were trying to hurt them — was too much. I couldn't see myself selecting all those clothes and birthday presents year after year, keeping them from inserting screwdrivers in electrical outlets, nursing them through the destruction of favorite toys."

"Jan. No. You're joking." Franklin was pale, shaking. "Motherhood is tough, so you tied your tubes!"

I could have crushed him with one word. It would never be his pregnancy. He wasn't even responsible enough to have thought of prevention. The male model of parenthood: everything between ejaculation and tossing the football with the twelve-year-old is trivial. The matter didn't concern him in the least. The fight had begun, after all, with his wanting to avoid contributing to any child of mine. I had made an irreversible decision, a choice self-evident at the time, one that would have been made for me anyway in a few more years. I did not care to reproduce, and although I was still relatively young, removing that possibility meant clearing the anxiety from my remaining sexual life.

"How hard would it have been to leave the door open…? Bad metaphor. Sorry." Todd smiled queasily, about to be sick. "I mean: as negative life insurance, the pill would have been cheap at the price. Suffer the less radical premiums for a couple years, against the outside payoff if you change your mind. Or partner," he added sadly, touching me on a flank already changed to terra-cotta.

I shook my head. Having come this far, all I could do was explain the variable that had swung the calculation. I told him why it was not a question of my mind or situation changing. A few years before, I'd found on the Question Board a request for the latest scientific line on mongolism. My first response was mild irritation; any modestly educated adult ought to have been able to find a satisfactory answer within minutes. I started at the obvious place, followed the well-marked trail through reliable sources, and delivered the broadly established explanation: Down's syndrome is the result of trisomy — a third chromosome 21. Airtight, complete, exact. I couldn't imagine improving upon it.

But the day after I posted this answer, the board carried a follow-up: What causes trisomy? I felt ashamed at not answering the first question at all. I went back to the sources, beginning to appreciate the issue, how much subtlety the research in fact required. The immediate mechanism was undoubtedly genetic. But nature and nurture were not entirely distinct. That extra chromosome, research suggested, may in turn be the result of an older ovary in which chromosome 21 fails to separate in egg formation. I attached a rider to the first explanation: chromosomal nondisjunction, while not entirely understood, increased in frequency in proportion to the mother's age.

Two days later, a third question: How old is an at-risk mother? "I was exasperated," I told Todd, crawling back under the weight of his arms. "Someone was putting me through the hoops. You know: like a child, repeating 'why?' until the word evaporates?" Todd shook his head, made me continue.

The day after the third question, before I could form a definitive response, a woman materialized at the Reference Desk asking if I was J. O'D. She reached down into a stroller and lifted an infant for me to inspect. The child had the unmistakable spatulate features of deformity. She said she was twenty-three.

"I could still see, for probably the last week, a faint profile of normal boy already being drowned out by the crosstalk of that extra twenty-first chromosome. I finally knew what she was asking. Was it her fault? I asked what her doctors had told her. Her answer destroyed me: 'They're less helpful than you.' I spent the rest of the afternoon with the two of them. I showed her how to follow the citations, and we pushed them hard. At the end, we discovered two distinct etiologies. The first was sporadic, without inheritance patterns, some slow, possibly viral cause. The second, the minority of cases, was a permanent chromosomal attachment in the mother, a translocation trisomy, a fluke of a fluke that struck mothers of all ages equally.

"After some hours, I apologized: the library would have to be a lot more current and specialized, I myself would have to have a medical degree to move her any closer. But by then she was almost grateful, having learned along the way about cretinism, microcephalia, PKU, anencephaly, spina bifida. Oh, Jesus! The whole, grisly catalog."

In the middle of the list I broke down, scaring Todd witless. He sat by helplessly, uncertain whether to comfort or cower in a corner. I tried to compose myself, aggravating the shakes. My voice was still wild when I spoke again. "The girl thanked me for the one promising bit anyone had thrown her since her boy's birth.

The books said that an extra twenty-first often leaves mongols with the sweetest dispositions."

Todd did not need the rest spelled out. The endless catalog of things that can go wrong — so comforting to this woman, whose punishment began to look like commutation — had killed me. I felt a dread I previously couldn't have imagined. Because of a lucky statistical aberration, because I and everyone close to me had been born healthy, I had assumed that childbearing was a perfected process with a few tragic accidents impinging on the periphery. I now saw that the error-free lived on a tiny, blessed island of self-delusion. I could hear my own mutations accumulating; it was either hurry into a baby-making I was not ready for, or wait, Russian roulette, for my own blueprint to betray me.

Lying in the dark, I felt the revulsion return with full force. As at his apartment, listening to that Viennese song, I heard how we lived in a room of privileged music above the screaming street. I closed out the syllogism, wishing I'd stuck with the less defensible line that I'd sterilized myself because I hadn't the time or patience to bear children. "I told Tuckwell I was going in for the operation. He didn't argue. It never occurred to me to consult anyone else." Least of all one I hadn't met yet.

I watched Franklin's face as he assembled the facts. Something had been broken; but the thing was done, and even he was smart enough to see that he would only break things worse by probing. "Well," he said at length. "That answers my original question." The time for theory was over. All that was left was practice, and we fell back to working over one another's bodies again, more circumspectly this time. That night, at least, there were no side effects.

Friends of the Family

She must still be a benign, lovely woman. From the day I met her, Annie Martens struck me as impossibly well-adjusted. She worked as a remote teller for MOL's mother bank, entering the financial world's dirty linen that Todd and Ressler washed every night. She seemed perfectly happy with that deadly-dull career, preferring it to anything more ambitious. She would have gladly accepted a demotion for the good of the firm.

She was suspiciously sunny for this city. Her only claim to psy-chopathology involved an early marriage, which had ended in amicable divorce the year before. Uncle Jimmy reported from the day shift that the abandoning mate persisted in meeting Annie every day for lunch. The uncomplicated woman was happy to hold hands and neck in the corridor with her ex as if a newlywed.

She was infinitely patient, cohabiting comfortably with the incomprehensible, her face wearing the perpetual surprise of Mary ambushed at her prayers. She had a deep, throaty laugh, like underground water. She was intuitively musical; we often listened to her wrap herself angelically around a guitar and produce, in round pitches, old frontier songs about wandering, gambling, or brutal stabbings of love objects. Even I loved her when she played. Her face radiated. She closed her eyes when she sang, inhabiting a garden far away.

Annie had no faults except a propensity to speak incoherently. She punctuated her small talk with advertising slogans: "Betcha can't eat just one," or "Even your friends won't tell you." She was, Franker assured me, impossible to take anywhere, because she unconsciously read all wayside text out loud until the patter became intolerable. This habit explained how her husband could sue for divorce without losing his affection for the woman.

There was something else that took me months to put my finger on. She liked aphorisms, annoying if forgivable in themselves. But she could not reproduce these cliches accurately. The errors were easily missed. To recount amazement, she'd exclaim, "I flipped my wing." She'd crack a joke without apparent punchline, laugh throat-ily, and conclude, "That went over like a wet balloon." When Jimmy teased her, she responded, "Watch it. You're walking on thin eggshells."

Once her problem became apparent, listening to her filled me with embarrassment at the whole race. She was not a stupid woman; her problem was not imbecility in an environment requiring alertness. Rather the reverse. She was born in 1963, a year I'm old enough to remember. The date itself consigned her to another era. Todd, five years older, slipped in under the wire, old enough to know that the world is racing toward the most crucial drop since Galileo. Annie was too young to know what the good fight was and certainly would never have fought it without us.

The paintings that made Franklin's life palatable to him, that opened up a channel to a resonant past, Annie knew instinclively to be treacherous impostors. She was a matter-of-fact woman, loving what was at hand and not at all awed by what was not. Sfumato mystery, the flame of the past scumbled around her in a Washington Heights pastiche of the Cluny cloisters. La Gioconda munching on corn chips. Great Expectations abridged to fit on ninety-minute car cassette. Stains spreading into underarms to Beethoven's Fifth. Mozart's in the closet: let 'im out, let 'im out, let 'im out.

She was true to the culture she was born into, truer than Todd, who has abandoned it. She was endowed with a great capacity for care. She could cry at pop tunes and laugh at Yellow Pages ads. Her sloganeering, her mangled proverbs, her utter incomprehension of irony, her ability to recite "Buckle up for safety" as if it were a Pater Noster, marked in her genuine humanism. Along with the clear forehead and angelic chin came a propensity for what her how-to manuals called "personal engagement." The news account of a zoo giraffe that had died in copulation almost shattered her. She loved things. Anything. Rain showers. Pretty stationery. Sandwich wrappers. Her Doberman, ten pounds heavier than she was. Anything nearby and knowable Annie cared for indiscriminately with all her heart.

The need to distribute surplus care led her to sacrifice personal preference to prescribed taste. In another time or place, she might have fixed as easily on Shaw as she did on Burma-Shavian quatrain. Nothing mattered except giving compassion in the available dialect. I can't imagine what pleasure she found in staying around after hours, eavesdropping on the roundtable rotogravure. She couldn't have had the first idea of what those men were up to. When I saw her with them, wading bravely into cross-purpose conversation, I felt I was witnessing one of those confrontations beloved of science fiction: carbon-based life meets living silicon. She would clip shirt ads for Franker as a way of telling him his were hopelessly worn out, and admonish a startled Dr. Ressler about the dangers of smoking. She confided in me that the two fascinated her because they minced no bones.

She would have made herself a satellite of whoever was at hand. Todd, in one of his rare, Orphic ascents into the day shift, had accosted this stranger just as he did so many streetsweepers, cabbies, and commuting power brokers, demanding a full working account of her machine, her job, her sensibilities, and her life. That, followed by the requisite lunch, and Annie became a devoted friend. Words so freely given were to her a pact with him and all his friends. The casual contact he was so good at made Todd something real for her, not ever to be wholly understood, but cared for.

I often thought that Uncle Jimmy would have been Annie's ideal mate. They were both obliviously gentle people. They might have offered one another some protection against events. Even Todd suggested the idea to him: "Take her out to a show. See what happens."

Jimmy laughed him off. "Are you mad? I'm old enough to be the girl's father." The difference in their years was not great. But Annie was still a child and Jimmy already an old lady. He did, in fact, carry a torch for her, a crush that made him even more puppyish than usual whenever she was in the room. He flirted with her shyly, as he did with every woman who came through the suite of offices. "Have a boyfriend yet? Must be half a dozen guys who would jump at a chance to dance with the likes of you." Annie would say that she was ready anytime, say that evening. Jimmy would excuse himself, insisting that his expert supervision was required just then by the night shift. "Other men get to play with the ladies. Me, I've got to keep this ship running."

In fact, he was a nuisance, and every hour he stayed on into the shift cost Ressler and Todd two on the other end, in the early a.m. He liked to organize the stockroom and the card deck library, to create new rotation systems for the disk packs. Each scheme led to complete confusion. He would call his infirm mother. "These night-shift boys have fouled things up again; don't look for me until late."

Jimmy caught me in possession of the door password again, but this time resigned himself to my coming and going. I had free rein to let myself into the computer room as if I were on salary. A few nights after my confession to Todd, I arrived to find the entire population missing. Someone, in theory, was supposed to be laundering the day's data at all times. I sat and waited, thinking that the shift must have stepped out to an all-night sandwich dive. A minute later, all digital hell broke loose. Sys B began making the distress ah-oo-gahs of a wounded submarine. The spindles on Sys A powered up and the console spit cathode fireworks. Helpless, I ran to the screen, thinking I might at least jot down error codes. The screen erupted in animated celebration:

Our Dearest O'Deigh. Welcome to the median. The U.S. Bureau of On-Line Statistics assures us that 30 splits the country in half. As usual, you're right on the fence. Get out of that frilly blur of an apartment and acquire a mortgage. Accumulate some debt. Numbers compel you to do something middling___

The display was amazing: letters grew, skidded across the screen, recombined into new words, surged in normal distribution curves, twisted into visual syntax, "fence" forming one for "you" to sit on, "frilly blur" dissolving into one, "debt" coming out gothic, "middling" in Times Roman. The letters exploded into life, accompanied by bells and whistles on the terminal speaker:

Happy B-day. We hope that 30 is your most profound variation yet. Never forget that you are living at life's critical instant. Your fellows in aging, SRESSLER & FTODD

Then the screen went blank, came back with its inscrutable system prompt politely inquiring "Command?" I looked up from the console and clenched a fist at the initiators, doubtless observing behind the two-way mirror. Todd came out, followed by a sheepish Ressler. I cold-shouldered Todd, addressed the professor. "How did you do that?" He shrugged: all Boolean. A matter of access.

I wheeled on Todd. "How did you know it was my birthday?"

"You told me."

"I only said it was coming. How did you get the date?"

He grinned, thick with significance. "We looked it up."

Operation Santa Claus

Blake's departure hits Cyfer hard. The lab is poorer without the force of his arbitrating humor, his even keel. The defection makes the remaining members suspect they've been kidding themselves; chemical inheritance will evade them. To restore morale, Ulrich turns the last Blue Sky session of 1957 into a Christmas party. He invites other department members, staff, favored graduate students: anyone who might keep the remaining team from staring at one another in stunned silence.

Christmas is an odd holiday to be observing, intent as they are on substituting a molecular model for the miraculous winter birth.

Nevertheless, they go through the motions, set out a wassail bowl, paper cups depicting Santa Claus in various postures of levity, a herd of wax reindeer, and a university record player on which Toveh Botkin, music committee, keeps up a stream of modal progressions insisting glad tidings of great joy.

Ressler wants to know how it has come to pass, despite his friend's exit, the flicker of the tired capacitance lights, Sputnik standing in as Nativity Star, the daily radioed word of low-level violence decimating the unwatched flocks by night, that Christmas still lodges itself so deeply under his skin. It can't be the fugitive baby on the run from the authorities, a story he saw through when not much older than the infant in question. Still, he finds himself steeped in the crusty old four-parters Botkin churns out on the turntable. Their modulations draw him toward the pitiful speakers, exhalation of synchronized air through the trachea suggesting chords that might lift the edge of the translation table for a quick look. These medieval intervals, a fossil record of his dazed arrival here in this room of reagents and gauges, this change of venue, with no quantitative test for discerning the way back. A camaraderie he wishes he could admit: he too, smothered in the stink of gingerbread and pine needles, lapsing into Lydian under forever unangeled skies, might be culpable, guilty of trying to reach beyond his grasp, of attempting to comprehend something he can't hope to name, something that might better be left to metaphor, myth, popular fiction, the beautiful counterfeit.

At the record player, he asks Botkin with his eyes for an explanation. His old friend raises her finger. At the end of the current tune, she slaps on another sprightly chorale. "Samuel Scheldt," she identifies. "From the Köln Gesangbuch, early seventeenth century." Ressler cocks an eyebrow at her, uncomprehending. The piece has some slight charm, aura of otherworldliness. But as full of leftover Renaissance censer scent as this tune is, it cannot minister. It has no healing power, no explanation.

Botkin notes his confusion. "Wait. Wait." She musses about in the cardboard sleeves and pulls out another disk. "O Jesulein Suss." She drops the needle down on exactly the same tune. Only everything different. The thing now arches and breathes, soars through agonizing suspensions, pours across a new, unexpected support in the bass, moves its four lines independently yet in a coordinated harmonic terrace of beauty. "Bach," she says, shrugging, the attribution self-evident.

The two works differ as a salt crystal and a spider's web. Scheldt, competent craftsman, labors on a carved doll that, however lifelike, remains wooden, while the other joiner need only apply the lightest imaginable touch to transform the clunky melody, lift the crippled thing to life. "A cradle song," Botkin glosses. "Composers cut their eyeteeth on chorales. No musical form is less sophisticated. A year of theory and you could churn them out blindfold. Bach manufactured them by the hundreds. And yet___" She points to the turntable, as if the secret behind the miraculous transformation searing Ressler lies there. On the vinyl. In the vibrating diamond.

Just as she is about to make the critical point, to identify what turns beats into beating, Toveh is interrupted by Dan Woytowich. He grabs them both in a friendly embrace, happier than Ressler has ever seen him, happy enough to be another person. The only happy soul in the room. Team setback can't touch him. Wife Renée, after losing two first-trimester fetuses, has finally passed the danger point and is on her way to making the couple a family. Woyty has chosen the party to announce, sure that this time the news will not turn out premature.

"Christmas music: is that the topic here? You two hear about the phantom of Urbana? Yesterday's paper. Two undergrads walking on the quad at night in the snow hear this harpsichord tinkling. Nowhere in the world it could come from. But they both hear it, and track it down, with difficulty, to one of those cast-iron grates in the sidewalk. Turns out a fellow's been living down in the steam tunnels for months. Persian rugs, stuffed chair, harpsichord, candelabra, bookshelves full of classics pinched from the library."

Ressler listens to the transformed Woyty. After a bit more banter, he excuses himself. The snippet of excruciating chorale, Toveh's interrupted explication, confirms it: some part of him has hem-orrhaged. Companionship, connection to another is now as locked off as that beautiful halo of notes hanging above the winter cradle. He turns from the music, from his friend Botkin, from grinning Woytowich, turns into the decorated lab. Clots of partygoers, the forced gaiety of holiday streamers close the matter. He wanders the lab, a priori lost; it's not miraculous birth all these desperate preparations are for, not birth at all. Each face swinging to greet him is etched with the same scrimshaw hysteria. The thought of doing his bit for this outfit repulses him. Behind the sickening melange of aromas — the light Euglena petri mildew, the smoky paraffin and dye of burning reindeer, the sweet-greasy thermoplastic mistletoe, the unguent perfumes, hair oil, deodorant, skin lotion, the beakers of astringent and rinsing acids, furtive fart vapor trails — is a smell so stand-out that not even this richness can smother it: the mammal-gland emission, out-and-out animal bafflement at being left here, spoorless, to toast in another New Year.

Then another scent, as neutral as air. Thin aromatic hydrocarbon, one part per billion in the room, catalyzes him. The smell fits; he knows it. There, shining from a corner, standing out against the sepia clumps of conversation, a still spot in the sea of relayed distress, a face as familiar to him as speech. Clear as the cold, cloudless night, a lucid journey of features framed in a shell of hair, eyes that flash recognition, that have been marking him all along, a mouth smiling broadly at his rush of relief, a young head shaking at him in wonder, in pure pleasure from across the room, announcing one, unambiguous certainty: be of good cheer.

Jeanette. His Jeannie. He can no longer keep away. Nor can he remember, so strong is this welcome home, why he needed to. He forces his way through the celebrants, drawn to her north. She takes a few steps to him, verifying: inevitable. In the blaring secrecy of this public place, she places the flat of her palm across his ribs. "I love you," he tells her. He expects her to spring fawnlike at the snap of a tree branch, the flush of this snare. Instead, she melts against him, catches her breath.

"Don't say it," she answers. She looks up, all forgiveness. She moves her hand minutely against him. With that gesture, she assumes all blame, confesses to a symmetrical wedge. She lowers her eyes, awaiting further sentence. Every program in his body, every enzyme, every gemule collaborates on synthesizing a single biophor: take this woman and kiss her. He does, here in the middle of danger, hard, moist, lasting. Empty symbol, leading nowhere, appeasing only the immediate edge of hunger, explodes in his brain. A hand grasps his shoulder and he steels himself to receive the blow. But it is not the enemy, the legitimate complement to this jean-home. It is Joe Lovering, pulling Ressler out of the clinch.

"OK, Buddy. Move over." Ressler, reeling, looks up where Joe points: a dismal piece of plastic mistletoe. The crowd around them smiles indulgently. Jeanette straightens his tie. He backs off, dizzy. Lovering steps into his place, looking over his shoulder confidentially as he takes his turn at grabbing Jeanette. "Sandy doesn't need to hear anything about this," he winks to Stuart.

After preliminary recon, Lovering launches his frontal campaign.

To Ressler's horror, Jeanette kisses the cretin back, with a laugh of anonymous pleasure in the license. Of course: she has to. Protective coloration, or they are both exposed. But her easy subterfuge makes him crazy. Lovering at last breaks off, pronouncing, "Hmm. In Sandy's league. Could substitute in a pinch. But doesn't quite ring the bell one hundred percent."

"Thank you very much," Koss sniffs. Lovering goes on to regale them with his astonishment at actually being more fixated on the polymorphous Sandy than when she was still a veiled novelty, so many months ago. Koss and Ressler ignore him. Unflapped, Joe snags a cup of wassail. "What is this stuff?" Lovering swills a mouthful, cocks his head contemplatively, and declares, "1889 Jolly Roger Green. Cheeky bouquet. Sandy's a great wine connoisseur. Me, all I know is 'Beer then whiskey, pretty risky. Whiskey then beer, never fear.'"

Koss blinks, rests a sympathetic hand on Lovering's shoulder. "Joey, it might be furlough time." Lovering downs another glass and goes on to perform combinatorial studies on the gifts from "The Twelve Days of Christmas."

Ressler mingles, his gaze scrambling back to the buoy of Jeanette's. She catches his glance with one just as helpless: Where can we go? We need to talk. He checks his watch; how long can the bash last? He is cornered by Ulrich and Woytowich, the euphoric father-to-be. Anxious to follow up the coup of the first paper, they are debating the next step: might the table be based on a super-symmetry of purines and pyrimidines? Never angels and shepherds for very long.

His earthbound colleagues exasperate Ressler. "Why don't we go in and have a look? Study the effect of positional havoc." He tries to take the edge out of his voice. "Induce point mutations along the length of the message. Compare the synthesized proteins. The words will fall like dominoes___"

He doesn't labor the ramifications of Ike's metaphor. The seniors smile in the thing's glare. Ressler receives, for his pedagogical pains, a clinical gaze. Woyty strokes his chin, scanning the notion for flaws. "We'd have to work out a few bugs, of course." Vogue expression, derived from the moth that crashed a complex program on one of the first sequential logic machines. Sent the coded instructions out into the electronic ether.

Ressler nods. He feels the blast of the kiln: the method, a complete experimental attack, all but here. He dies a slow death for the chance to work it out with someone who'll grasp it, help him past the last hurdle. He bursts inside to diversify. Multiply, subdue with fruition. But he is alone — no ears to hear, no hands to understand. Except perhaps hers.

He slips out of the party, the mocked-up festive lab. He stands in the darkened hall, a hundred steps down, in a blind recess, waiting. Five minutes turns into an agonized ten. Surely she must have seen him leave. At last, she hurries out furtively, looking over her shoulder in fear, sheer erotic terror at being caught. He steps from his shadow. She stifles a shout and collapses into him, clinging.

"Listen," he orders. "Nature, 1955. Gale and Folkes. Test-tube protein synthesis. Incorporation. I told Tooney, before he left. He thinks it'll work. We place the sequence to study in glass. Out comes the offending enzyme."

"Shh," she says, convulsing rhythmically. "I love you." The sound of singing, candle scent from the far end of the hall. He holds her to him, all along his length. Her tangled hair, her face, her muscular shoulders, the small of her back, her upper legs. "Make up for lost time," she laughs, sniffling. She lets out a short, soft, pained cry midway between a howler monkey and a gothic angel's et exultavit. He signals her, unnecessarily in the dark: Don't even say it.

Deus ex Machina

Q: Who made me? Defensible evidence only please.

A molecule able to influence two others that would not react otherwise: can my miracle reside here? Does DNA, the map unfolding the whole organism, do no more than manufacture reagents, golem formulae, tinctures where soul emerges if the secret proportions are hit on? The code I am after must embody not just stuff but substance: process, decision, feedback. Not data alone; behavior at molecular level.

The lint-ball tangle of an enzyme — its charged terrain of twists and turns, vise-grips for welding chemical substrate — makes it a three-dimensional, supple machine. Here is the muse of fire I've been needing. Certain of these enzyme proteins become single-molecule transistors, devices that test and respond to feedback, creating a free repertoire from predictable physics. The assembled amino string of an allosteric enzyme can tangle into two different shapes. With unique twists in each shape, it thus possesses two separate sets of binding sites. The molecule may be enzymatically active in one shape and inert in the other, like a shoehorn that sometimes warps into worthlessness. A substance that binds to a site in either the active or inert shape will lock the enzyme into that configuration:

The inert shape of this enzyme has a binding site that fits substance A. The active shape has a site matching B as well as materials C and D that it transforms into product E. If A grabs the molecule first, it locks it into inert shape, eliminating those sites that accept the catalyzable materials. The enzyme is switched off, C and D can't bind, and manufacture of E stops. But if B first binds to the enzyme in active form, it locks the molecule into a shape with C and D's sites intact. The faucet is held open; the enzyme joins C and D into E so long as supplies of C and D exist.

Ressler's magic Boolean circuitry begins to emerge. The presence of A inhibits the manufacture of E; B promotes it. None of the compounds reacts with the enzyme itself; the machine remains unchanged except for switching on or off, always capable of switching back if the splint-substances detach. Even wilder: the inhibitors, promoters, and inputs, binding to independent sites, need have nothing to do with one another. A, B, C, D, and E can be anything at all. In theory, any chemical can be made to inhibit or promote the formation or degradation of any other. The effect can even be nonlinear; multiple binding sites on an enzyme could cause small amounts of compound to have enormous effects on the synthesis of others.

Here it is, my escape act from chemical necessity. Microcircuitry I can't begin to map: a single allosteric enzyme made up of a few hundred amino acids, weighing less than a million billionth of a gram, accepting multiple, graded inputs and producing nonlinear output, a free-floating if-then program. It smacks of religion to me.

But the conjuring act hasn't even begun. Link the logical feeds of an allosteric circuit together, and the molecule virtually lives. E, the reaction product, can be the same as A, the inhibitor. Every successful catalysis then shuts off the switch. Or E, used up by the body, might degrade into promoter B, ensuring that new E is created whenever old stock is expended.

With self-regulating feedback, the enzyme becomes its own economy, gauging supply and demand in the chemical soup, even acting to adjust these. I enter loops, linked regulatory patterns more ingenious than theistic design. One molecule's manufactured product can inhibit or promote another's. Two enzymes activate each other in conjunction or opposition. Metabolic pathways branch and conjoin, one enzyme setting off two others, or two in tandem combining to shut down a first. These and, or, and not operations create a complete prepositional calculus.

Coordinated microprograms capable of changing their own environment, able to spring into production modes within an instant of encountering a trigger, create a cybernetic network powerful enough to initiate the impossibly articulated behavior of the composite cell. Q: Is the tracery of microprogramming networks too complex to have arisen through guided chance? Q: Is it complex enough to account for the autonomy that high-level enzyme byproducts — Ressler, Todd, myself — all suffer from?

I've started four times today, on four separate sheets — what? Nothing. Trivial message strings going no farther than Dear Franklin. Even the adjective is problematic. After months, I have the man's address. I have a world of things to tell him. Nothing stops me. I want to write. But even today — Caesar crosses Rubicon, 49 B.C. — I can't. I won't. English doesn't have the modality to say what's keeping me. Writing him is fine, but words are out. A is too functional, B too forgiving. C and D are transparent excuses for E, which I will never bring myself to say to him again.

I own his mailbox, the lookup table to the one spot where he can be reached. If I could finish a fifth sheet, seal and mail it without reading… I could; I want to. The first letter of the first sentence, and I waver from one urge to the other. I am truly stochastic, indecisive. Do all inputs, computed, already drive me to one course or the other, or can they still be interfered with by some messy conglomerate circuit, me?

I try on Laplace's old dream — to solve the world through giant inference engine. Ressler, alert, talkative as I had never before seen him, racing through the data stacks looking for our place to cut, cracked a joke about the final triumph of the reductionist program. "NASA's eyes in the sky determine the vectors on every molecule of atmosphere. They feed all these numbers into a Cray, and the animal pounds away, megaflops, on a simulation that knows everything about adiabatic cooling, turbulence, vapor pressures, topography, solar radiation. The machine assembles and delivers a perfect prediction of tomorrow's weather. Only it takes two days to run."

The problem is irresistible. Do all my active enzymes plus the running average of the chemical soup they find themselves in, the jungle of bioeconomy (vast, uncatalogued tracts of electrochemical memory, mine and earlier), all the stimuli bombarding me from outside — the January sun's false springs out my window, the glass of water at my elbow (complete with Brooklyn reservoir heavy impurities), the feel of the keys under my fingers — do all these independent effectors sum to one unique output: write him or not? They couldn't sum to more than one outcome. What would it even mean to say the choice, the final cybernetic weighing were left open? Open to what? Whom?

I must be asking the question wrong. Any outcome, once reached, must have been decided by something. The sort of freedom I am talking about — Dear Franklin, Where are you? When can I see you? How long you have been away! Come home — must be constraint by another name. Constraint that jumps some complexity threshold. The molecules I look for need not be capable of autonomous behavior; the word, when pushed, probably has no meaning. But are they enough, in themselves, to escape the determinism of physical vectors? Do these microprograms, once fired up, always run the same way, water down an arroyo? Or can they self-determine, self-modify, rewrite their own program listings?

They can. Allosteric enzymes are themselves synthesized. The microtransistors are drawn up, tailored, detached, and sent into the fray by a macroprogram, the nucleotide sequence — semantic bursts of DNA thread. Worker bees, assembled by the queen in her hive, these hatchetmen, day laborers, have the critical ability to apply their logical toolboxes back on the master program. Allosteric proteins can bind to and influence DNA, inhibiting or promoting the synthesis of allosteric enzymes themselves. I stare at purpose, at the molecular level. The running program — DNA synthesizing enzymes — creates and executes subroutines that double back, influence the way the master program executes, cascading into new subroutines, run-time solutions.

To the best of my metaphoric understanding, it goes like this. Codons along a stretch of DNA direct the sequencing of amino acids in a protein. This sequence constrains the lint-ball molecule to adopt one of two or more possible shapes. Held in one shape by an attached brace, its personality — the lure of its binding sites— is inert. But when that jamb is removed, the protein recoils, takes on a new surface. Part of that switched-on surface attaches to a segment of DNA, switching oíf that segment's instructions. The segment of code temporarily patched out could even be the one manufacturing the binding molecule itself. The substance that switches the protein's code-modifying abilities on and off theoretically could be anything, even the by-product of enzymes manufactured on that or other DNA segments. The master control and its agents combine to alter their own combined behaviors.

One allosteric enzyme, working by itself, is already a formidable machine, reactively linking unrelated substances. Thousands of them, joined into branching, judging, regulating feedback networks, can just about account for the numbing inventories, the shifting assembly lines that run the corporate cell. With meta-programming — the ability of the central network to reset even its own switches — the last constraints of the hardwired universe are shed. The field is broken wide open. Anything can happen, and does.

But can chance alone create such structures? Oh, yes. I have become abandoned to the idea. Chance is necessity by another name, thrown over the complexity barrier. The building blocks for self-replicating molecules can emerge from a milky suspension of ammonia, methane, water, and free hydrogen treated with an electrical spark. All the other steps from polypeptide to vanished near-Nobelists can be derived.

Solution can take shape — slowly, stupidly, agonizingly inefficiently — on trial and error alone. Error takes care of itself, in the hardwired universe's unforgiving compulsion to extinguish its dead ends. The trial: that much emerges from quantum perturbation — random mutation that infests the duplicating life molecule with variation. Molecular rules are not fixed, but statistical. That mother lode of modern anxiety — indeterminacy — lifts the whole dance off the ground and holds out the promise of sending it anywhere there might be to go.

Who made me? My answer, all but demonstrated, ten days past New Year's, 1986, has none of the crisp, winter, nighttime traveler's comfort offered by the old Baltimore Catechism. The science I study doesn't even frame the question the same way. Each system answers only the question it asks. The magic, memorized chants of my girlhood dealt in revealed things — truths that could be got at only by leap, flash, obedience, and rejection of human comprehension. They will never be reconciled with a skepticism based on repeatable test.

Yet in both, the name is not the thing. The one scientist I really knew came within a hair shirt's breadth of being a divine. Ressler was a Franciscan minus the cassock. He of anyone I've ever met was free from use's hammerlock, the blundering functionalism that leaves us blind to the miracle of our presence here. I can't begin to describe his speech, his actions, his days — they were so empty, selfless, contemplative. For a brief moment, he achieved a synthesis between scientist's certainty in underlying particulars and the cleric's awe at the unmappable whole.

Who made him? Chance made him. But that wasn't the crucial issue. The second question in the catechism — why? — was, to Dr. Ressler, more important. In his short run at science, he had learned the trick of seeing every living creature as elaborate baggage for massive, miraculous, internal goings-on. Every itch, every craving, every store run, every spoken word arose in a switchboard of enzyme messages splaying out in an overflowing veil that made the sum of all water droplets tumbling over Niagara seem a simple, sophomore differential equation.

The knowledge left him mute, punctual, meticulous, polite, weakly good-humored, pained by human contact, a nibbler on food yet quietly omnivorous, good with words but only when pressed into them. Mostly, he took things in: listened. For some reason, a full understanding of enzymes left him still able to love me, to love Todd. Like all good Franciscans, he had this thing about affection for fellow creatures of chance's kingdom.

The answer my Catholic training years ago had me memorize, if I carry through the blasphemous substitution, turns out to be exactly the answer Dr. Ressler's work on the coding problem left him: Why did chance make him? To know, love, and serve it in this life. And be happy with it in the next. Only: Dr. Ressler knew— as now I do — that our chemicals, in the next life, will be stripped of their self-coding repertoire. There'll be no chance to be happy with chance. It won't be in the lexicon. No lexicon. Chance will resume its maiden name. I have only this afternoon, this moment, to decide whether to go on writing. Perhaps it's letter-answering time after all. I pull out blank sheet number five, take a sip of suspect water, feel the waiting keys under my fingers, study the sunny January outside. I feel unaccountably, blessedly free.