Gold Bug Variations

XIX

Winter Storm Waltzes

sea_change(odeigh,todd,ressler) if reawakened(ressler) or

in_love(todd,odeigh) and not(scared(Anyone)) and

journey (Anywhere).

Ressler knew we were sleeping together. Every indication suggested he approved. He toted in a sack full of squash and tomatoes. "For you." Plural you, in ambiguous English.

"They're beautiful," I thanked him. Todd seconded. "Where did you find such nice ones this time of year?"

"My cold storage. I grew them."

"In Manhattan?" we both asked, overlapping.

"I happen to live on the sunny side of the World Trade. Over several years, I've hauled three tons of soil up to my roof. My landlord puts up with it; she likes the beans. Organic gardening is the perfect supplement to a night position." These were the first of a steady harvest — jar, juice, fresh — that kept us fed all winter.

He was lighter than I'd ever seen him. One day, a blue Icelandic sweater in place of the impeccable fifties suit and tie. He talked longer, exchanged brighter banter — often off-colored, anthropological double entendres about how it was up to us young to provide the heat needed to get the race through the winter. It was Ressler's idea to do my computerized birthday card; he had pursued my birthday through the federal electronic statistics.

I hardly dared believe it: our happiness made him happy. A quiet, remarkable last process started up in him. He experimented successfully with a beard. Once when Annie treated us to guitar, he forced us all into descant, benevolently dictating which lines to take. "Do you know 'Smoke Gets in Your Eyes'?" he asked. Annie shook her head, embarrassed for him. "How about 'Soap Gets in Your Ears'?"

He brought in a pack of art postcards and quizzed Todd. He suckered us into outrageous debates: whether Vaughan's "I saw Eternity the other night" might be treatable these days by a few milligrams of something from Hoffman-La Roche. Whether Marx's class warfare might in the future be fought between information-rich and information-poor. He would dismiss Todd early. "Nothing left I can't run through these rough beasts myself. Take this woman to live the life she deserves." He would give me a gentlemanly cheek-brush of the lips, saying, "Your quote for tomorrow is Alain-Fournier," supplying edition and page.

quote_of_day(alain-fournier,edition(Y,page(X1)),"I still say 'our' house though it is ours no longer").

knows(jimmy,news) and curious(jimmy), knows(annie,news) and unchanged(annie).

My new relation to Todd seemed to be public knowledge. Even Uncle Jimmy asked me confidentially, "What's this I hear about you and my junior staff cohabiting?" Todd, delighted, took up the euphemism as buzzword of the hour: "Let's go cohabit the cafeteria." "Care to cohabit a little after I get off tonight?" Jimmy's trusting grin was tinged around the edges with a droop suggesting he would have preferred Todd and me to altar the thing legitimately. Jimmy was from another time. His mother, patiently invalided at the other end of the phone, probably understood the cohabiting world better than he.

Annie too began treating us as a couple. "Look at you two, both in maroon. Cute as two peas in a pie." She told us we ought to wear more maroon; maroon was a largely misunderstood color. Annie's acknowledgment capped it: romance discloses more than it knows. Everyone saw what we were up to but us.

reawakened(ressler) if

Dr. Ressler paced the digital warehouse, slipping deeper into human ways. During machine lulls, over paper cups of wine, he volunteered topics rather than just politely annotating ours. He'd bring us colored bits of the world's specificity: "Listen to this," he said, sporting a shampoo label. " 'Lather, rinse, repeat.' An infinite loop." He made us try the Dial-an-Atheist number, laughing broadly when we discovered it was disconnected. He roped us into working difficult British crosswords where puns, imbeddings, weddings, retrograde inversions, anagrams, counterpoints, and subtle substitutions combined in fluid wordplay that seemed beyond human ingenuity to invent let alone solve.

Imperceptibly he thawed. He told terrific stories of scientists. An aged teacher who'd spent seventeen years in Morgan's fruit fly room. A colleague who left his research team to surface, years later, as codeveloper of the first artificially intelligent encyclopedia. The famous Swiss botanist Nägeli, whose habit of tasting bacterial cultures was a great source of information but shortened his life. So it would go until, at the end of an evening, I would realize that we hadn't had to draw the man out once.

astonished(todd) or scared(todd).

Frank was unable to believe the turnaround. As Ressler grew daily more voluminous, Franklin clammed up, afraid to say anything that might dispel the fragile moment. "Did you see the man?" he'd ask later in bed. "Searching through his pockets for clippings to give me? Like a third-base coach giving signs!" The clipping-gifts were superfluous; Todd's notebooks had closed. He no longer needed them. The companionship they'd substituted for had sprung to life.

Frank would play the fool out of sheer terror. While the mainframes processed end-of-day transactions, he'd bait his mentor with silly challenges. "How high can you count on your fingers?" He whispered in my ear the proud target thirty-five, one hand standing for digits and the other for groups of six. Ressler paused a few polite minutes before responding with 1,024—each digit a single place in binary notation. Todd sulked. "Yeah, well… anything higher?"

"Always," confided Ressler. And they took to the problem together, like competing cousins at a family reunion, chucking the softball, testing each other's arms.

"It says here," Franker announced one night, "that we have genetics to thank for the killer bees heading north o' the border from down Mexico way." He spoke the word from Ressler's past, sidling up surreptitiously to the conspicuously avoided issue.

Dr. Ressler nodded, not at all reluctant to take up the topic. "That's right. An attempt to tame an aggressive African strain with a docile South American one backfired. One of hundreds of plagues we've initiated by improving the ecosystem. Transplanted gypsy moths; imported rat-catching cats that destroy South Pacific islands; mongooses overrunning the West Indies: cures worse than the diseases. This one's especially damning. We haven't just replaced one pest with another. We've created a new one to call our own." He huddled us around the console, created a workspace, and whipped up a Mendelian genetics lab, a field where we could put our creations to the test. A simple simulation, but complex enough to prove his point. "There are a lot more ways to fall off the tightrope than to inch forward."

Ressler, the author of every declaration fed into the machine, was often surprised by the executing program's outcome. Todd and I, who had to have each line explained to us, were floored to see self-modifying behavior built from a few innocent assertions. I learned not only the danger of intervening in systems too complex to predict, but about declarative programming, the thin line between determined and emergent, the ability to surprise. Looking down at Dr. Ressler, newly bearded, Icelandic blue, typing keys, leading us with infinite patience through the nuances of his composition, I knew the world had lost in him not just a scientist of the first order, but something more important: a gifted teacher.

We ran the simulation many times, each time failing to steer the model toward anything but collapse. Todd threw up his hands. "The discerning intellect of Man bested by bees. I've a suggestion: we greet the little buggers at the border. Instantly upon their crossing the Rio Grande, we lavish them with Walkmen, warm-up suits, the whole nine yards. They'll shed their asocial ways in a flick of the Zippo — get ahead, secure the Mercedes, et cetera. Adieu national panic."

Still, the conclusion of the ecosimulation distressed Todd's Renaissance belief in the perfectability of the natural world. "You aren't suggesting we stop cross-breeding?"

"No," Ressler affirmed.

"Or that we quit with all this inheritance and population dynamics stuff?"

"No again."

"But we aren't yet ready to build a better mouse?"

"No."

This last answer was ambiguous: No, we're not ready? No, we never will be? No, that's not what I mean? But Franklin was afraid to pursue the point. I could hear him form and reject delicate questions in his head. At last he blurted out, "Bacteria engineered to protect potatoes from freezing?"

An art-history ABD specializing in obscure 450-year-old panelists, the spokesman for technological progress, versus a Ph.D. in molecular genetics, once the comer to keep one's eye on, cautioning that the possible and the desirable were not the same. Ressler fielded Todd's question without flinching. He ran his hand lightly over his head, smoothing his hair. He seemed not a minute over thirty. He was spoiling for something — not for a fight. For the mystery and heft and specificity of conversation. "If we're to do recombinant DNA, you'll need more background."

journey(north-woods) if

Todd jumped at the chance. He suggested we three drive up the following Saturday to a cabin in New Hampshire. "Belongs to a college friend who will gladly lend it for a weekend."

Inviting the professor for a camping weekend seemed just short of asking one's priest if he'd care for a round of racquetball. Had Todd run the idea by me first, I certainly would have squashed it. But Dr. Ressler broke into a boy's grin and said, "Do you know how long it's been since I've gotten out of this damn city?" Both men turned to me, and I nodded with enthusiasm.

"Should we ask anyone else?" I couldn't think, aside from our day-shift friends and the man at the sandwich shop, who Todd had in mind.

Ressler handled Todd's question with his usual grace. "Having put our hand to this three-personed plow, I suggest we stay with it. This is a congenial enough group as it stands."

That was all it took. I arranged my hours at the branch. Todd secured not only the cabin but a beaten-up Plymouth to ferry us there. I was in charge of food and Dr. Ressler of kerosene and campfire reading. They picked me up at three in the morning after their Friday stint. Todd met me at the door of the antique shop, shushing hysterically, as if this were a teen-aged prank. I guess it was.

The roads were clear, and after we jumped the city, the night was crisp and quick. We got free of the interstate, preferring seat-of-the-pants navigation up through empty New England towns. Todd drove, and we passengers were assigned the task of keeping him awake. For a stretch, Dr. Ressler had us all rolling with a dry commentary about how every road sign in existence—"Slow children," "Cross traffic does not stop" — contained unintentional slipped meaning. Todd ruddered via Boston, Saturday morning. We spent two hours in the Fine Arts, studying the conflagration he was after, and he bought a postcard of it. Then he hauled us across the Fens to the Gardner and that domestic chamber music in amber by Vermeer.

We arrived at the cabin late Saturday. I felt, by contrast, how my life in New York had become a spasm of hormone and acid jolting my system into continuous speculation on how I was going to get killed. My key to surviving, or not dying too quickly, had been to swim in stress without feeling it. Adaptation to environment. Suddenly this place: rag-quilted, smelling of sap and kindling, spices hanging from kitchen beams, squirrels marauding in the walls. A foot-pumped parish church organ stood against a wall with a Lutheran hymnal on the music rack. A five-thousand-piece picture puzzle that Franklin identified as an Aelbert Cuyp lay spread over the dining-room table. Salvation, in short. I hadn't known I needed it until I was there.

We unpacked, laughing, pitched up on the beach of the New World. We put on coats and fell into the bracing air. Snow was falling thickly. A carpet gathered around the cabin clearing and up the stony hillside. The thought passed through us: head back now, while still possible. But all we spoke out loud was, "Let's try this way."

There were so many stars that the sky seemed black gaps pasted over a silver source. The same lights as hung over the city, invisible. Todd looked up and quoted, " 'The stars get their brightness from the surrounding dark.' Dante, but who's keeping track?"

We walked in silence, in one another's footholes in the drifts. I felt, in the constriction in my chest, the intractable riddle facing the first species saddled with language: why are some things alive and others not? Snow, rock, star, lichen, rabbit scat, pine. It was the easiest, most blanketing protection in the world to imagine that everything partook of the same animation.

"Let's have it," Todd wheedled Ressler after we'd walked half a mile in chill awe. "You're the life scientist. Tell us what's happening here."

"I was never a life scientist, to my misfortune." His breath came out in white, frozen puffs against the snowy air. All our patient field work was about to come to fruition. "I was always, at best, a theorist. But before I was a theorist, I was a child. And every child knows… shh! Look. There. Just past that birch."

Ressler didn't even need to point. Against the black of the woods, a pair of eyes, reflecting dim analogy of starlight, observed us from a distance, measuring our every move, theorizing. We froze, matching it, watching for watching, not even whispering a guess as to what it was.

alive(X) if grows(X) and reproduces(X,Y) and member(Y,class(X)) and not (equals(Y,X)) and

A long, deliberate draw of observation, and the eyes blinked off. The creature vanished, freeing us to turn and retrace our path through the drifted snow. I knew it now: the world, even in the pitch of winter, metabolizing all around us. Every ledge of it, trampled by a permutation on the first principle, each straining for a crack at the Krebs cycle, a slice of the solar grant money. "Hubert's Infinite Hotel," Ressler described it. "Perpetually booked up, but always ready for more occupants, even an infinity of them." The place was penny-wedged, crammed, charged with doppelgängers, protean variants on the original: radial, ruddy, furred, barked, scaled, segmented, flecked, flat, lipped, stippled. Who knows how? The place was beyond counting, outside the sum of the inventory. And we, as of this weekend, were but a particular part.

As day broke, we returned to the cabin, spread ourselves in the existing beds, and slept. I had joined the night shift. I woke to soft talking in the room downstairs. Dr. Ressler was tutoring Todd, laying out the rudiments of the new, biological alchemy. It was afternoon, already dark. On the windowpane, thick flakes had been collecting for hours. I put my hand to the cold glass, leaving a negative ghost when I drew away. I hoped for the worst the elements could do, hoped harder than I've hoped since I was a girl.

I came downstairs. The men had a semblance of warm meal waiting. Flush with eating and drinking, we piled close together on the couch, in front of a fine fire. I thought: This could last forever, long evenings, passing around murder mysteries, losing weeks without glancing at the papers. A place where progress was obscene, unwanted. Todd could putter perpetually at his dissertation, I over some project in Maritime wool, Ressler fiddling with the smoky spruce logs.

Franker roused us to attack the bellows organ. He took the right pedal, Ressler the left. They each took a line in the upper staff, and I, on account of six years of piano lessons as a child, was expected to handle both tenor and bass while simultaneously pulling stops. Conquering the skittish entrances and squashing some unscored tritones, we flew along well. We pumped out Lobe den Herren and Nun danket alle Gott. After a while, we even grew bold enough to let the inner lines out and improvise on the cantus firmus, Todd laying on a counterpoint from "Mood Indigo." But human, we grew tired of hymns. Todd was the first to break off, pace back to the fire. Warming himself, with his back to Ressler, he asked, "How about it, then? Let's hear it for those man-made bacteria."

Ressler sighed with exasperated pleasure. "Ice-minus Pseudomonas." He returned to the couch, wrapping himself in a discarded quilt. "Not man-made. Man-manipulated. The process is neither so formidable nor so erotic as you think."

I wandered to the dining room. "Who's up for a little jigsaw?" Neither man responded. "How 'bout a big jigsaw?" Flat. "Think your friend would mind if I worked on this thing?"

"Of course not," Todd smirked. "Just so long as you take out any pieces you put in before we leave." I pottered away at Mr. Cuyp's cows, an ear posted to the conversation I avoided.

"How erotic is it?" Todd took the rocker opposite Ressler.

"The lab technician identifies, by a lot of boring scutwork, that particular restriction enzyme with the ability to clip out from the bacterial DNA the sequence that directs the synthesis of a given protein. In the case of Pseudomonas, the deleted protein acts as a seed for ice-crystal formation. No gene, no protein. No protein, no crystal seed. No seed, no ice at that temperature. We aren't bestowing any new characteristics on the microbe; we're depriving it of one."

"Like clipping a Scotty's tail?"

"Only this snip is inherited."

"And this sort of deletion — can it happen in nature?"

"It is nature. Only infinitely quicker."

"So where's the danger?"

Ressler shrugged. "Where's the danger in a mongoose?"

"But a mongoose is a separate species. Ice-minus bacteria are just a protein away."

"And you are just proteins away from either." It thrilled to hear the man, the edge of alertness in his voice, discernible only in outline until then. "Yes, the Frankenstein fear is overblown. Transgenesis is not about creating life from scratch. It's about juggling existing genes — existing formulas for protein manufacture. Deleting, adding, moving the factory parts from one organism to the other. You're right: the whole genetic engineering revolution is only a quantitative extension of the ancient art of livestock breeding. Even interspecies gene transfer has a viral precedent. Only human snipping is a billion times faster, more facile."

"Moving around existing traits? That's all we're talking?"

Ressler smiled. "All," he said ironically. "For the time being."

Todd was high-strung. He spoke rapidly. "That just proves my point, then."

"No." Ressler shook his head painfully. "That proves my point. Genetic engineering is not one single thing, but an assortment of various techniques and projects, all with different risks. By far the largest is ecological imbalance. Unpredictable, irreversible environmental mayhem that used to take selective breeders a lifetime to produce can now be knocked off in a dozen weeks."

"Mayhem?" Todd sounded personally wounded. "Are we that stupid? I'd think that any science capable of reaching down into the cell with a syringe a few molecules thick, of doping out the genetic commands and figuring out just where to cut and paste, should be able to predict the effect a simple rearrangement will have once it's in place. The hard part's doing it. Figuring out what you've done ought to be trivial."

"One would think so. But remember our simulation, back at the office. We wrote the piece. We knew what every line of the code did. We knew what effect a change to a given parameter would have locally. But the only way of determining the overall outcome was to run the code." He learned forward under his quilt. "It surprised us. And that program was only a hundred instructions long. The human genome, in twelve-point Roman, is several thousand printed pages. The linked biosphere___"

"This strikes me as a strange argument for an arch-empiricist to be taking."

"Names will never hurt me," Dr. Ressler laughed. "I could do without the 'arch,' I suppose."

"We can learn about things by breaking them into parts?"

"That's the only way I know of to learn about things."

"But it sounds as if you're describing some impenetrable big picture. Some transcendent sum that evades final analysis."

"I wouldn't put it that way. Life is an immense turbulent system. Small changes produce large swings in outcome."

"Are you saying that even a complete understanding of the working parts can never predict how they fit together?"

"I'm saying we don't have anything close to a working understanding of any of those parts. A year and a half ago, two fellows at large state schools, using one of those miraculous syringes you mentioned, injected the gene for rat growth hormone and a promoter into a fertilized mouse cell. Their mighty mouse made the cover of Nature. Only: nobody knows how the mouse DNA took up the injected gene. It's hard to condone commercial applications of work where the basic mechanism isn't understood."

"Unfair. How can we possibly go after a breakdown of 'how' without first mapping out 'what?'"

Ressler was delighted that Todd, despite his lack of formal training, felt equal to the argument, even this deeply in. "Suppose the fault is not in what technology can tell us, but in what we are willing to hear from it?" Hope: the life cycle's lethal enemy.

I worked steadily on the jigsaw, a dozen times aching to jump into the dialogue, but knowing better than to risk involvement. Franker argued from a position of urgent altruism. He wanted to believe that by eliminating the blind, backsliding, short-interest, error-driven, groping element from the spark — the code at last rendering itself self-knowing, literate, able to grasp and correct the insensate message it has for eons posted forward to its later by-products — life might reach the verge of a new relation, cross the threshold of liberty. Dr. Ressler, for private reasons, put Franker's hope through the burner.

"Check out Chargaff's piece in Nature. Half-dozen years old. 'Have we the right to counteract, irreversibly, the evolutionary wisdom of millions of years…? The world is given to us on loan.

We come and we go__' This, from the fellow who first revealed the base ratios in DNA."

"Hey lady," Todd called me. "Verily this man's citations."

It felt good to be spoken to. "First tell me where this tree branch with the two nubby end things goes."

The men came over to the table and began worrying the puzzle with me. Frank looked for spaces where particular pieces would fit, Ressler for pieces that would fit particular spaces. They were both infuriatingly good.

"Do you have an ethical problem with it?" Todd asked casually.

"That depends, I suppose, on what part of the 'it' we're concerned with. Perhaps some genetic engineer somewhere is embarking on eugenic nightmares, but that's another matter. I guess I'd say that I have no more moral qualms with ordinary gene transfer than with hybrid corn."

"Where in the world is the problem, then?"

Ressler shrugged. " 'Where in the world,' indeed. The field is only a decade old. In a little less than three years, the government has granted a dozen patents on new forms of life. Patents! There's even talk of copyrighting segments of identified genome."

"OK, then. What part of recombinatory research would you legislate against?"

"That's just the problem. Legislation is too late. Legislation is about commerce, rights, equity. Once you need to pass laws about science, you've taken a wrong turn."

"Galileo muttering 'But it does move,' under his breath, just after recanting?"

"Exactly. Of course, the state is right to prevent any process it thinks might harm the public interest, just as it takes action against phosphates in freshwater lakes,"

"So what bothers you about genetic engineering?"

"It's not science. Science is not about control. It is about cultivating a perpetual condition of wonder in the face of something that forever grows one step richer and subtler than our latest theory about it. It is about reverence, not mastery. It might, from time to time, spin off an occasional miracle cure of the kind you dream about. The world we would know, the living, interlocked world, is a lot more complex than any market. The market is a poor simulation of the ecosystem; market models will never more than parody the increasingly complex web of interdependent nature. All these plates in the air, and we want to flail at them. 'Genetic engineering' is full of attempts to replace a dense, diversified, het-erogenous assortment of strains with one superior one. Something about us is in love with whittling down: we want the one solution that will drive out all others. Take our miracle superstrains, magnificent on the surface, but unlike the messy populations of nature, deceptive, thin, susceptible. One bug. One blight__No; the human marketplace has about as much chance of improving on the work of natural selection as a per diem typist has of improving Bartlett's Familiar Quotations."

"But does recombination research necessarily mean selling the field into the market? We have this incredible leverage, this light source, mind. The ability to work consequences out in advance. Shed the stone-and-chisel, save ourselves—"I could make out his humanist's evolution: cell, plant, animal, speaking animal, rational animal, laboring animal, Homo fabor, and ultimately: life as its own designer. Something in Franker too, voting for wonder. But wonder full of immanent expectation.

Ressler was not buying, not all the way. "All we've done to date is uncover part of a pattern. We can't mistake that for meaning. Meaning can't be gotten at by pattern-matching."

"That's why work is more crucial than ever. We're so close."

"The experiment you want to extend is three billion years old. It may indeed be close to something unprecedented. All the more reason why we need to step back a bit and see how it runs."

When we went to bed, Todd joined me in mine. I was up early. It had stopped snowing at last, but nearly three feet had obliterated the contour of ground. Standing out against the unbroken white, as conspicuous as the pope without clothes, conifers went about as if there was nothing more natural in the world than converting sunlight into more fondled slang thesaurus entries on the idea of green. My eyes attenuated to movements, birds, squirrels, the extension of that trapped energy in the branches. I picked up a cacophony of buzzes, whirs, and whistles — an orchestra tuning up, about to embark on big-time counterpoint. Imagining the invisible sub-snow system — the larvae, grubs, thimblefuls of soil a thousand species wide — I suddenly understood Ressler's point of the previous night: the transcendent, delivering world Franker so badly ached for: we were already there. Built into the middle of it, tangled so tightly in the net that we could not sense the balancing act always falling into some other, some farther configuration. The point of science was to lose ourselves in the world's desire.

Ressler came out, putting a biscuit in his mouth as if dipping litmus into solution. He greeted me happily. He gauged the snow and rubbed a palm over his temple. "The prospects of returning to the city in time to do tonight's work have apparently slipped to less than slim."

Of course they had; we hadn't left ourselves a margin to get back. We'd counted, covertly, on this emergency, and now we had it. We inspected the car, made token efforts at clearing the wheels. I got in and started the engine. Dr. Ressler wedged himself against the fender and tried to rock it down what was once the cabin path. But we were not so much stuck as buried. The back door of the cabin slammed and out ran Todd. "Brought you some traction!" Smirking like a schoolboy, he produced a salt shaker.

"Save it for the boids' tails," I shouted. Giddy, euphoric.

We rocked a while, stupidly, humanly, going a dozen feet.

"Shovel time," Todd suggested gaily.

"You're mad," Ressler said. "It's three hundred meters to the road."

"Note the metric precision," Todd told me.

"And the main road is itself under."

"Just as well. We don't have a shovel anyway."

"We'd best call Jimmy," Dr. Ressler suggested. "Not that he'll be able to do much to pick up the pieces."

"Oh God," Todd giggled, despite himself. "Jesus. East Coast Fiscal Collapse."

"Is there a problem?" Knowing what their typical evening consisted of, I couldn't conceive of their being anywhere near indispensable to anyone.

"We may not do anything. But those big metal boxes do. Quite a bit."

"Can't Jimmy run them?"

"Around the clock? Without cohabitors? Maybe for a day."

"At half speed," Ressler clarified.

"With the night operations procedures manual at his side."

"A book we haven't kept current for months."

"So who has a phone up here?" Todd yodeled, listening for the echo.

Ressler cocked his head in the direction of the path we'd taken Saturday night. His eyes flashed: it was not, perhaps, the shortest route, but was by far the more beautiful. This being North America, it had eventually to lead to a phone. We took off happily up the drifted hill. We made slow progress, propping up one another. At the spot where that pair of eyes had looked us over in the dark, we stopped and searched but found no tracks. The snow had long since rubbed out all trace. We crested and saw, a few hundred yards off, a house that looked lived in. We threaded our way down the valley, between the bare trees, hunters returning home. Making the most of the last few minutes before human contact, Todd asked, as if nothing had intervened between their conversation and now, "So is that why you quit?"

I was walking next to Ressler, and he took my arm. "Not in so many words." And because we weren't going anywhere that night, or the night after, he suddenly had all the time in the world to tell us what had happened. And he did. In so many words,

Storm Waltz II

sea_change(ressler,koss,X) if in_Jove(ressler,koss) and

not(knows(X)).

Briefly humanity recalls, in a dream of distant past, that use is no use. For a week, it's again clear that the question is not ends and applications, but shape, sound, angels arriving on the raw doorstep, an ache, an instant hint, singing the new year in, in a bleak midwinter. Then back to grim progress. In a dim hall just off the Christmas party, the folio-wing afternoon in a public lecture, passing in crowded corridors, seated pointedly apart in team brain-storming, a few excruciating minutes alone in the lab: they fall deeper, more carelessly into unwished desire. Her confession of love, at the close of the old year, sweeps away his last sense that this has all been self-torture. He pays for that relief by losing all say in the outcome. He has confessed to her, too.

He feels in Jeanette a perverse urge for danger. She is crazy reckless, slipping hand between his thighs at a faculty meeting. In their stolen clinches, she strains her head around with fear at the least rattle or click, only to relax her neck desperately again, hating herself, her nerves, loving the near-escape, moaning for more, moist fear. Startled, silky, mottled, new to the place, terrified, perpetually about to bolt.

Away from her, he vows to break off, a resolution already hobbled by attached fatalist clauses. Hopeless. She demands to be pressed, kneaded, her trembling animal lip down registering the. punishment of pleasure they cannot forego. Creature-reversion, triggered simply by touching certain spots on her — he can't stop re-experimenting with it. The image comes involuntarily just before he falls asleep, how she closes her rolling eyes, shudders, lets her focal "I" slip twenty centimeters down her spinal column. He can feel it in her muscles, in how she stands against him, indentured to the flood response of her body, teaching him how.

He too is addicted by the sense, new to him, of being victim to a thing he cannot help. Debauched, depraved; the words give him an erotic thrill proportionate to the pro forma resistance he still manages. He knows her public composure is the thinnest wallpaper patch above a seething hive in the board beneath. She wanders from the lab to the supply closet nearby, looking for something: tubing, glassware, him. He follows her into the distant room. She stands at the shelves, the picture of business. But turning, she grabs him like a vegetative trap, nudges closed the door, begins to mouth him as if the verb were truly transitive.

"If we get caught," he says, we'll be dead on many levels."

"I know." She kisses him, pushing away and pulling at the same time. "Leave me alone, why don't you?" She kisses again, more circumspectly. "I must want to get in trouble."

He hears her struggle to keep from cooing audibly. "This is as far as I go without a note from your parents." He nearly says husband.

"Me too," she replies dreamily, drugged, aroused. "As far as I go." They catch one another's eyes. The danger is real. They sober, swing back to adulthood, agreeing they must wean from this madness. "Little boy," she says, restoring her glasses, "in another life, I could take you around the block a few times."

The brave kindness, the funny, forlorn way Dr. Koss delivers it pulls him back regretfully to her face, where they lose another moment. In this bittersweet heuristic, he is not the experimenter. He is the subject of these trial runs. That car will go around the block itself if he doesn't brake.

They share lucid moments, but only under supervision. She visits him in his office, in Lovering's gaze. "I've just read Gale and Folkes," she says. Ressler looks across the office. He can't very well ask her if she'd like to talk outside, now that talk is really talk.

"And?" he asks weakly. "What did you think?"

"Incredible. 'Incorporation reactions for specific amino acids can be activated by specific recombinations of nucleotides.'"

"Spitting distance of an in vitro system that will crack the game wide open."

"You're right. You must be right." She smiles, her back to Lovering, a double entendre smile.

"Two Cambridge scientists…" he doubts out loud.

"… who've missed a follow-up. You've seen wrong turns before?"

He's more than just seen one. "A two-year-old article in one of the most prestigious journals going___"

"And no one's noticed it? No one picked up Mendel for thirty years."

"What's this over yonder?" Lovering banters. "I distinctly hear dreaming."

"Joey," Koss says, returning to the thuggish quip-trader Ressler first took her for, "call your wife, Sandy. I hear she's at home taking a delivery from the furniture man."

"She's not my wife. Sandy doesn't believe in the hypocrisy of the institution. We live in sin. And believe me, sin's gotten an undeserved bad name."

"Have you told Ulrich about this?" Koss readdresses Ressler.

"I tried to," he claims.

"How hard?" She grins.

"You know the man's bias. You told me yourself. Hung up on pushing the thing through statistically. The last time I spoke with him, he tried to interest me in doing some machine coding."

"Sounds interesting," Lovering throws out.

"Damn it, it's not." Ressler slams his hand on his desk, surprising even himself. "He thinks we can put together some kind of grind-out generator of all sequenced nucleotides, throw it up against some data structure showing every known protein, and let the thing iterate a couple hundred hours___"

"Couple hundred?" Jeanette almost falls in his lap. "On the ILLIAC?" CU's trimmed-down, transistor-overhauled, performance-boosted, cutting-edge version of the power-hungry rooms full of hardware, brave new programmable switch boxes, descendants of those devices originally built in the forties to assist in cracking wartime codes.

"Sounds like it would work," Lovering says.

"I'm not saying it wouldn't."

"What's the problem, then?"

"It's overlaborious, superfluous drudgery, that's the problem." Koss and Lovering both laugh at his adjective production line. "I can't believe it. Not after the success of the first paper." Ressler's first work has already caused ripples. The English and French, as well as the Californians, have requested reprints. But the more notorious the work gets, the more cautiously Ulrich pursues it.

Lovering shows his allegiance. "Come on. How hard could the programming be?"

"Oh, the algorithm is trivial. Little more than a nested loop, with cases hooked on to it. It would take a few weeks to throw together, test it, get the bugs out. But it would be a time-eating monster."

Koss blurts out, "Joey! Friend. How much programming have you done in your wee lifetime?"

"Zero. Null. Nil. Naught. Void."

"Good. I'll teach you everything I know."

"Everything?"

"Everything that can be expressed politely in FORTRAN. And Joey." She stares at him and whispers. "We'll race you there."

helps(heaven,X) if helps(X,X).

Koss and Ressler get clearance from a dubious Ulrich to try the incorporating techniques suggested by Gale and Folkes, under condition that they give Lovering a hand in formulating an algorithm for the matching program. They are to split their time between in vitro synthesis and computer tutorials. He gives them a two-month probation, not enough time for anything, yet more than Ressler expected. If they have something tangible to show by then, Ulrich will talk extension.

Ressler tries to cop assistance from Woyty, but the man is tied up reading Baby and Child Care. Renée, pregnancy safe from spontaneous abortion, is due in weeks. Stuart visits Toveh Botkin in her oriental-carpeted office. He surprises her, slumped back in chair, in a Ringstrasse Hapsburg reverie. "Where were you?" he asks softly.

"In the Café Centrale," she smiles.

"Talking to Mahler?"

She scoffs. "To Trotsky. In French. He was trying to make me pick up his check." She laughs at herself, a laugh that trails off into a tsk. "Friend, it may be time to retire."

"I've something that will change your mind." He shows her the article, which she devours in minutes. He tells her about the release time he and Koss have won from Ulrich.

"Let me wash beakers. Pull periodicals. Anything." Her eyes plead for one more shot at the code before giving in to it.

"We can pull our own damn periodicals. From you, we need chemistry. And the appropriate inspirational music."

"Be not afeard," she says. "The isle is full of noises."

What noises? Down the quad, over in the Music Building, Lejaren Hiller and Leonard Isaacson put the finishing touches on their composition, "ILLIAC Suite for String Quartet," spawning a new genre. They use the computer as a giant random-number generator, an engine that produces, within restrictions set by the programmer-composers, sounds and suite airs for four-pair hands to unvary. The project reflects a dawning awareness that the life score itself is assembled from successive iterations of random mutation. It is left to the unprepared audience's ears to unalgorithm as best they can, to reverse the random process, to hear in the blips and bleeps of this new, startling conch shell the steady surf of the first sea.

theme(goldberg,list[g,f#,e,d,b,c,d,g,g,f#,e,a,f#,g,a,d,d,b,c,b,g,a,b,e,c,b,a,d,g,c,d,g]).

variation(X,Y) if theme(Name,X) and equals(Y,mutation(X)).

mutation(X) if

"ILLIAC Suite" shares processing time with Cyfer's attempts to secure the definition of life. Compared to the tunes coming in over the transistors at that moment, it comes from a new planet. "Honeycomb" is the hit of the season. Even Ressler, after laborious attention now able to distinguish between Haydn's London and Mozart's Prague, dissects the disposable tune in two hearings. For the week in question, he is forced to listen to it twice an hour. The message is inescapable — the measure of the minute. It blasts from a thousand portable radios all across town. For the invention of the transistor, blame crosstown physics faculty member John Bardeen. The 1956 Nobel laureate, Bardeen has come to Urbana to continue the work that will make him the first repeat winner in the same field.

The transistor itself is a flexible current junction: small voltage differences at the base produce large differences between emitter and collector. With this simple lexicon, the transistor can serve as everything from current amplifier to logic gate. In the ten years since its evolution, the device has crept into circuits ranging from ILLIAC to the portable radios giving white kids of Anywhere, America, their first taste of black sonority, racy innuendoed danger. R and B currently mutates to R and R, a dialect banned in several communities as subversive, destructive, and unpatriotic. In years, changed beyond recognition yet virtually the same, the sound will go from threat to ubiquitous backdrop: decorative prop for everything from news broadcasts to barber shops.

William Shockley, Bardeen's collaborator and corecipient of the '56 Nobel, has gone from Bell Labs to California. There he begins thinking taboo thoughts about the inherited nature of intelligence. Might it be passed along as discretely as wrinkled pods? He becomes possessed by an idea in embryo — a sperm bank for geniuses. Keep the genetic pool from pollution. The racist tinge and resultant outcry are picked up, reported, and amplified in the general transistor noise.

As for the text of "Honeycomb," it strikes Ressler as a straightforward variation on the time-honored metaphor of Love-as-Edible-Food. Nuzzle, nibble, chew, swallow your baby, your honey-pie, your sweet. Until now, he always considered the pap embarrassing, indulgent drooling. Now he no longer holds it in contempt. Soft, tuneful, pathetically appropriate. He'd like to nuzzle, suck, sing to her, even. Jeanette's form sears him with the instantly consumed melancholic cheer of radio tunes. Heartbreaking, vulnerable, in black-pleated narrow waists, peach tapering bodices, she is the core of girlishness, a fleeting goodbye to summer, sailboats on the lake, the downy, borrowed body about to be eaten and spit out by the shape-hungry world. She hovers at her last moment, soon to be expelled from visitation. He must preserve, fix her at this unarrestable peak of loveliness. He doesn't know how. All he can do is attach himself to her at the mouth.

They preserve enough presence of mind to work together on in vitro. With Botkin's assistance, they advance on a clean technique. Lab work is exciting again, not solely on account of their proximity, hours spent within touching distance, more secret because more open. Back in the barracks, doing a dish, he is struck by how much repetitive maintenance it takes just to exist. Existence is the cycle extraordinaire; everything tangent, constantly spinning just to stay in place. But the missing piece of the coding problem offers entree to another process — lines, deltas. They stand at the base of Jacob's Ladder. Can they be on the threshold of completing what until then had been merely repetitive climb?

For weeks Ressler has bankrolled a private research venture, exploring to what extent a toothache is imaginary. When the tooth abscesses one morning, flash burning at the stake makes him recant, tear to the dentist. In the waiting room he blunts himself into oblivion over back issues of Life. He reads Dulles's brinksmanship quote, which he missed the first time around. He scans the magazine's breezy treatment turning high-ranking Nazi von Braun into the Rock Hudson of Rocketry. He has a premonition: the final solution to the modern crisis will be to turn the threat of news into light entertainment.

The world is at war, perpetual war, moving at all tangent angles. All over the world, a spreading collection of brushfires extends the head-on conflagration by other means. Wars come down to the control of information. They purport to be about the attainment of battlefields, defense of property, renovation of antiquated systems of ownership, liberation of oppressed peoples, geopolitical dominance. But these are just material proxies for pursuing conflict's real end: the testing of new technologies, the stockpiling of data.

Information is ordered contrast; it can be won only by building a differential between sound and noise. The purpose of gathering information is to increase predictability. Information theory was born in the War, when Norbert Wiener was asked to build a gun-sight that could tell where an enemy plane would be in the next few seconds. He's read Wiener: wars are won by making your enemies more ignorant than they can make you. A state's ability to wage war is measured only loosely in kilotonnage. A better indicator is a country's ability to wage randomness, to impose a signal-to-noise problem on the enemy, render his informational stockpile incoherent.

Since Caesar, warring states have known that the best way to protect information from enemy corruption is to disguise it as noise. A coded message already appears random, protectively colored. But since the Gauls, warring states have studied how to break the noise barrier, reverse the garble. The history of warfare is the story of cryptology. In one of the paperback cipher books he pored over when the coding problem was forming, Ressler read that the British alone during the recent outbreak sported thirty thousand information troops. The number has risen steeply since. The Cold War marks that moment in organized violence when the number of people attached to various code books surpasses the number toting rifles.

No matter how well coded a message, how ingeniously the treasure is reduced to apparent gibberish, there is always a key that reveals the underground sense under the cloak of noise. This gives secret writing its otherworldly quality. The cryptanalyst's arcane ritual of incantations — MAGIC, as the army/navy wartime decoding efforts were named — transmutes seeming meaningless-ness into firm predictions. The one who renders the message readable possesses all the import of the original.

In Life's breezy treatments of Dulles and von Braun — aided by the swatch his abscess cuts across his brain — Ressler sees that even the safe haven of academia, so far from the industrial trenches, will not prevent his being conscripted. The genetic code, however selflessly and reverently, will be co-opted in the broader code war. Life, use's henchman, serves up as comestibles everyone from assassins to scientists ("modern mandarins, modern necromancers"). His act of pure research, done with religious indifference to consequences, delivers all organic creation, codebroken and codespoken, into warring hands.

Just as his tooth sends up another flaming wave, Ressler stumbles across a photo essay of the twenty-odd-year-old pianist, interpreter of the Goldberg recording that Koss gave him. Given the ends of photojournalism, Ressler is not surprised to catch the gist: the boy is young, single, romantically eccentric, a crank hypochondriac, never seen without his panoply of pills and jars of spring water. He possesses the Lovering allele of cold virus paranoia, wearing wool coats in the height of summer. He sings out loud while recording— ghostly, alternate vocalizings the technicians can't muffle. He has a carefully worked-out, outlandish theory about recordings rendering the concert obsolete. Yet the nut is a genius. He has inherited a contrapuntal brain, and the Bach decoding algorithm is congenitally embedded into his ten-bit, digital circuitry.

Suddenly the notes are in Ressler's ears, conspiring voices, sounding of lost days, lost names, affections, friends. Those variations, fragments, flint-splinters of the original: how long he has lived with them since his first, dull attempts at theory. His slow, purpose-free pursuit of the four-by-four-by-four aria, the Sixty-four Sarabande Dollar Question has become so instilled, so somatic, that he has forgotten the point of the experiment until this moment.

Jeanette! Why infect a stranger in the first place? She hadn't a clue to his nature, yet she came, brought this unprovoked birthday encyclopedia of crystallized sounds — iced trees clicking together after a storm; scrape of metal runners coasting down a hill near evening, sparking bare rock, reticent snow brushing the blades; shouts in the city; the clink of tipping scales; the slosh of ankle-dangling euphoria; summer insect swarms; plash of sun's rays lengthening over the lawn; baroque silliness; French fluff; political fervor; the chill call of last illness; the swelling sound of always, of never. Did she know already where they would arrive, long before either dared to consider the first touch? He forgives himself this once the too-brief two-manual figure in the thick of his chest, deciding that the only measure that can crack these patterns is beauty.

Ressler reads the profile three times but finds no key to the Goldberg code. He is called into the operating theater. As the dentist administers the composite anesthetic, preparing to yank out the offensive handiwork of bacteria, Ressler calms himself, grips the arms of the chair, and relaxes, following the contour of the seductive melody he has never really put aside since that unbirthday party long ago. He recreates tracts of the piece in his head. Preexistent knowledge of the piece, recovered in a hundred hours of close listening, allows him perfect recall. But the music, the note-for-note isomorph in his interior concert hall, is not the piece she gave him. One cannot step into the same theme twice.

His dentist saws oíf the tooth's crown, ferrets out the roots. His mouth is blown apart. At that moment, when pain ought to rack his body, the pain of violent mistake, murderous razor-pain, Ressler is cast adrift, at sea on sound. A Pentothal haze of realization: every sound wave ever uttered could be packed into a single generating pattern a few measures long, the world's pocket score. He barely flinches as the chunks of infected, lodged bone are ripped from his head.

asks(ressler,koss,question(Today,X)). question(2/l/58,"Why can't I tell you what I hear?"). equals(question(Day,X), question(Day + 1,X)).

At home, a bloody cotton wad in his mouth, still under the protective residue of anesthetic, he calls Koss. He gets the husband. Pleasant acquaintance from faculty parties, dignified man of standing, food technologist of the first order, impediment, innocent victim, human being who has never shown Ressler anything but trust. "Hello, Herbert. Ressler here. Wife home?" No mean feat with a mouth of pebbles and blades.

"I didn't recognize your voice. Drinking?"

"Dentist."

"Ha! Not the slurred speech of choice. The wife's in the study, all bothered over this new experiment of yours. Hold on."

After gruesome pleasantry, Ressler doesn't mind being left dead on the line. He stares at where his hand has been tracing out automatic writing on the phone pad: phonenumber phonember phonembryo phenomeber.

A silence comes across the receiver, one whose breathprint he has come to hear most hours of waking and deep into sleep. Her lungs, in and out, are a muffled Morse. Those soft pulses of silence are the one message they can transmit to one another uncoded. At last she says, "Stuart!" Cheerily, a little surprised for the benefit of her husband, listening in the distant room. Yet cloaked in a subtext intelligible only to him. Quite a trick, making the word serve double purpose for two parties. Her subsequent lines are the same — masterly ambiguous hermeneutic chestnuts. It scares him to hear that actress's modulation, her flawless delivery. She lies beautifully, as confidently as Eva Blake doing cross-words in pen.

But fright is also deeply silken, burgundy, arousing. He hears her excitement across the line, cadenced so that her husband cannot. He relishes the awful irony: she lets the man think we're discussing biochemistry. And we are. "Jeannie," he grits out through numbed mouth. "Jeannie, I'm sorry."

"No need for that. Hold on a moment. Let me get a pad. OK. Now: were you speaking in the short or long term?"

"I'm sorry for calling. I'm sorry for falling in love with you. I've had a hundred opportunities to stop. I wanted to. I'm sorry for ruining your life."

"Oh, I'm sure it's nothing we can't salvage. What's the damage, in your estimate?"

"Jeanette," he says "Darling. Friend. We have to quit."

"We can't." Perfectly modulated. "Not while we're ahead."

"Jeanette. You're killing me. Every minute is a terror that something's happened to you." Without thinking, he blurts, "You have to leave your husband."

At the other end, excruciating, ambiguous silence.

"We have to have each other."

"Well?" she giggles, eighteen, baiting, ignoring the chaperon. April invitation. "What's keeping you?"

Where is Herbert? Has he stepped out? Does she no longer care? Her invitation burns like a fist of opium, warm, loose, nothing to be done. He will go over this minute, taste her, feed her, make her call out to her husband in the next room that no, she wasn't shouting. Nothing wrong. Ressler looks down at his growing list: genenumber genome genehome. "I'll die, otherwise."

"Nobody likes death," she says, hands cupped to receiver.

"Listen. I need to ask you something. When you brought me that record___"

"Record?"

No longer in control, he begins to sing, through shattered mouth, half of a twisting, two-manual arabesque. No, a third of a trio: a simple descending line that, in this instance, implies, in abstentia, a flowing semiquaver figure, transparent, effortless, advancing in all directions, nowhere.

"Oh, that record," she laughs, despite his tuneless butchering of the Base. "De goole bug."

"When you bought me that record___"

"Used," she corrects.

"When you gave it to me, did you love me already?" Did you think: We'll listen to this together, in some future life, you and I, free from all distraction, from the duplicitous waltz, innocent again, free to follow the tune, to go nowhere with it? "Why do I think of you when you aren't here?" He does nothing to help her out of the bind. She must deceive her own way out, with her own sick skill with words.

"That's a tough one. We could throw that one up for brain-storming, if you like."

"I need you. God, I'm sorry I'm even saying this. Why am I saying this?"

"No doubt there's a mechanism somewhere. But we shouldn't be too hasty, hmm? Perhaps we can't blame everything on ribosomal RNA?"

"Jesus Christ."

"I beg your pardon?"

"Say that again."

"I beg your—"

"Before that."

"Aren't we being a little hasty in blaming ribosomal…?"

"Dr. Koss!" An electric connection. She grasps it instantly. Whatever her weakness, her acting skill, her addiction to danger, her animal need, she too is driven by love of the pattern. "Oh, Stuart," she says, hushed. '"Jesus Christ' is right!" Crescendoed in those four words almost to a yell, she lowers her voice back to business tones. "No, Herbert. Everything's all right." Giggling almost hysterically into the phone. "Isn't everything all right, Dr. Ressler?"

It is. "How could we have been so stupid? Don't answer that. The ribosome isn't our message carrier. It's not the software transcript. It's just…"

"… the reading hardware," Jeanette supplies, giving the word a delicious twist. "Our messenger boy is…"

"… someone else by the same name. The RNA we're after disappears as soon as it's read." Of course: not the stuff that persists in the cell. Theirs is another transcript, ephemeral, one that can't stick around to clog the works with old commands. No wonder vitro hasn't produced yet; they've confused identities. When he speaks again, it's to himself. "How beautiful! The thing assembles its own assembly plants. It sends out an isomorph of orders for the production run. It uses its own end product to keep the whole process running. Magnificent." Its own hardware, software, storage, executor, writer, even client. What else? The code cannot be decoded except through by-products of the code. He might have known, he, another of the thing's by-products. "I'll call Botkin."

"She'll flip. You can't be wrong about this," she gushes carelessly. That slight oversight of tone recalls them from the intoxicating insight. She returns to the brisk voice of science, perfect in contrivance, disguised signaling. "Stuart. You've all but done it. I'll be in the lab early tomorrow. The procedures for testing this ought to be trivial."

"Goodbye, friend," he exhales, weary.

She returns, "Good night," imperceptible overtone catching in her throat, suggesting, Dream of me, as if that parameter were not already an errand boy, persisting, racing through his cell.

Storm Waltz (Da Capo)

writes(X,Y,Z) if knows(X,Y), alive(X), alive(Y) and helps(heaven,X) and message(Z) and (curious(X) or reawakened(X) or scared(X)) and ín_love(X,Y).

message(Z) if quote_of_day(Anyone,Any_source,Z) or question(Today, Z) or variation(Any_message,Z).

in_love(X,Y) if sea_change(X,Y,Anyone).

goal: writes(odeigh,todd,Z)?

1 Solution: Z =

Dear Franklin,

Your letter arrived just when I'd cured myself of waiting. I read it — I've lost count how often — and it still breaks my heart. What am I supposed to make of you? Not one mention of the fact that has driven me for months. Do you even realize? The man is dead.