Gold Bug Variations

XXI

Canon at the Seventh

They rut. No other name for the humping that takes them. He kisses her blood-filled face, scattering the hits, surrendering to dizzy inertia. She sinks her teeth into his shoulder, sick desire clamping her to him. Her frightened, little-lamb's-backsliding capitulation passes into his tissue and he can only clamp back. Sobbing, startled, she looks at him, realizing the place where they've arrived. They fall into the fabled clearing, forbidden and inevitable, the place they knew from the first caught glance they would one day inhabit. She loosens from him long enough to lead him to the back lab corner, beyond equipment shipment boxes: for form's sake, out of the public thoroughfare.

Den, hive, nest, nidus, eyrie, newlywed starter home: they build themselves a pallet on the floor. They pull each other down hungrily. He unfastens her organdy, exposing the final freshness of her breasts to the air. She stretches along the length of her flank, moans an admixture of pleasure and regret. Her exertion ripples like the paroxysms of a barometer giving up in the eye of the storm. We can't. Don't do this. Wrong, childish, wicked, degenerate. Please. Faster. Here. Home. They are to go through with it, in full cognizance, commit the self-seeking, indulgent act. It stops his breath.

He lifts the crumpled olive skirt up around her waist. Jeannie gasps once, an angry aspirant. Her stockings and panties give way. She utters sharp, soft forest noises. The sound, the pungency of her vaginal quiff undo him. He rolls into her. Her legs lift, ready to receive. The space is his only. They fit. Her small-mammal Whimpers condense in violence. He clasps his hand over her mouth.

but even now does not really care if every living thing just down the hall hears. He is drawn up her by capillary action, deeper than anticipated, into an encircling center. Never did he imagine a woman could have so much room. The fluid folds of that infinite passage press up against the intruder, welcome it with all the ingenuity of design. She is crying now, from the lungs, where he feels her from the other side. "Stop. I don't want," and then, throatier, garbled: "I love you," or "I love this."

Each races the other to unilateral surrender. Something more than sex: an excavation, mohole, metric and insufficient, each time farther down, nearer a remembered core. By turns, his whole body is a coition-charged conductance and something else — the effortless, mate-free budding of plants. There is no Herbert; whatever pain they cause the man is erased by his wife's abandon. Ressler's forward motion into her becomes a rocking apology: clandestine. Never again. He has her, as he needed from word go.

He owes no one anything but compassion. His lone accountability is solely to the code. This woman was long ago inscribed in his genotype. She is his working out, his text made flesh, made enzyme. He will join himself to her, however pointless that deposit. He cannot do otherwise. She is underneath, around him: he feels her organic list. Her voiced breath dissolves into syllables, self-defense shouts, bird's cooing. He pins her, presses a spot in her back that touches off further thrashing. Their sure lives in this moment end. Even if they escape this writhing, they can never again be safe. She heaves again. The base of Ressler's brain floods with chemical keys he will not, not ever, neither viscerally nor in mind, recapture.

Jeanette's pumping leaves her spent. Then, as suddenly, she is crazy again to pump, elude pursuers. The force of her desperation frightens him. What bloody business has she come to transact? She rolls against him, thighs first felinely soft, now shoving with a drive that would be rid of itself, of all its tensile load. Ressler cushions, absorbs, protects her from her own tranced rage, keeping this speaker-in-tongues from crashing against the sharp corners of their makeshift pew.

She is only here, nowhere else but her body, manning her cartilage factory. She spasms, an enormous sustained cramp that runs from the nape of her neck along her whole length, at last pulling the arch of her foot taut, from Romanesque to gothic. She is only here, in frenzied pleasure, knowing she will take it like this only once in life. Frenzy enough for both of them: he is lost to the dictates in the master program, locked onto her, coupled, forever sacrificed, shutting out last objections and letting the old sarabande in.

Her face, when the shock of the last muscular lift comes on it, is surprised, flushed out of the thicket in ancestral wonder. All an "O" of astonishment — her eyes, mouth, fingers circling his arms, her labia concentrated around him, drawing him over the edge into his own, rounded O. Sustained effort, every minute of recent months is here made real. Here, only here. Then, the collapse back on confusion and particulars.

They glide at the end, after violent discharge, released to familiars. His cells swim into her, spend. But for a brief ever, molecular memory of the deed persists in muscle, fades through shoulders, torso, limbs, limbic system like immense pipe-organ fundamentals banging around in the baroque dome an eternity before slipping back to nave level, sinking through flagstones into the crypt. He lies capitulate on the floor next to Mrs. Koss, sharing the last shred of companionship left them. They are free of the chief anxiety in animal delight: she can have no child. But facing a worse eventuality.

Jeanette Koss, still in the dream of remembered recklessness, stiffens, comes unstunned. She tries to sit, look at him. She succeeds painfully, staring as if he has just revealed himself. How can you do that to me? She closes her eyes again, lies down, and places a delicate, stray hand between her legs, as if that will keep the somatic impression of their animal abandon from leaking out with his semen. This long, undulating modesty, endless current of hair, hand pressed innocently and curiously to the pudenda. Residual image from the generic feminine.

She does not need to look at him to know what he sees. She smiles through closed lids, uses one finger to explore the passage he has just inhabited, withdraws it with a globe of milky, opaque fluid. She draws it to her mouth, places the drop on the tip of her tongue. Eyes still closed, she turns her lips up and pronounces, "Millions of stukaryotes." He kisses her and she passes the taste perversely back. She hums, piano in pleasure, already wanting more. She closes her eyes, tasting, recalling.

The memory, this woman passing one unsolicited secret name to him now and for good on the exposed lab floor, will be as suddenly lost, taken from him. More than he can endure. But Jeanette only drifts her hand back under her stained olive dress, between her absorbing thighs.

Trace Mutagen

"Let's give Uncle Jimmy a raise." I picture him alert, playful in front of the console, perched on the edge of a techno-chair, ready to write his graffiti into the system at the first nod from the professor. MOL was again in the clear. Ressler and Todd had returned the Master Fille to working order. The auditors had come and gone, dragging their trails behind them. They had given the restoration a clean bill of health. The console log carried no trace of catastrophe. We passed the anniversary of the Maine, that explosion half-made in the American press. Ours was the opposite engineering feat: from out of real burst, erasure. The sense of delivery from disaster was still so strong that Todd's manic suggestion seemed a simple extension. "Who would know?" he asked. "The easiest thing in the world."

"What does ease have to do with anything?" Ressler replied. The two of them had developed an elliptical way of talking to each other over long nights alone. Members only. I listened but was locked out in the static.

"Tell me he doesn't deserve one," Franklin said.

"He does. Unquestionably. After what we've put him through." Ressler collected forms from the printer and collated them with amusement. "But he's not on our payroll."

"Of course not. Good data-processing procedures. Send your own checks to be cut out of house. Simple safety." Ressler's objection was so transparent that Frank didn't even counter it: one can get to any machine from any machine, if one knows the sesames. And Ressler had taught us those. Franklin talked through the steps hypothetically. "We could penny-shave him. Take every salary we handle. Round the fractional cents down, pitch the remainder into Jimmy's account. No one is out more than a partial cent, and Jimmy is___" He did a calculation in the air. "Lots richer."

Ressler detached the day's log, folded it carefully for the archives. "Penny shaving means a permanent program patch."

"We could do it."

"Again, possibility is not the point. The manipulation leaves a permanent print."

"Snake the code around. Relative-address Jimmy's record so that his name isn't sitting in broad daylight. Make the siphon look like something else, an error trap."

"If someone writes the program, another can always read it. Logic is easier to trace than to scramble."

Franklin twaddled with his contrast knob. "What if we just went and injected a new figure directly into his salary field?"

"Exactly," Ressler said. "Why get ingenious, when you can accomplish the same thing by simpler means?"

"But would it work? I mean, if we cleaned up after it? Balanced all the cross-sums?"

"Never underestimate the power of bureaucracy to believe what their electronic ledgers tell them."

"So you're in, then?"

"No." Dissociating himself from the suggestion, Ressler thwacked his stack of forms in exasperation. "Good God! Pope was right on the money about knowledge. You can't teach a kid anything these days." With an affectionate shake of the head, he left us alone to our own devices.

"It could be done, you know," Todd murmured defensively. He riffled idly across linked data lines as he'd watched Ressler do. He punched up a prohibited, distant file, flexing his apprentice prowess. "We give him a one-time bonus. Flat fee. We enter the change in a way that could be mistaken for a Mylar typo. If the tinkering should be traced back to us — assuming the unlikelihood of anyone noticing — we can always say it was a piece of driftwood from our recent flood."

I watched him perform the surgery. He inserted a paper clip into the console print head to keep it from logging. Then, with a simple record edit, he turned the trick. Unreal. What was he changing? Just screens. Alphanumerics on the CRT. "There." He lifted his fingers from the keys long enough to warm them. "How's that for moral compromise?" He backed out to the system, signed on again locally, and returned to the familiar operations prompt. He rolled the printer platen back over the blank transcript and removed the paper clip. What could be simpler? "How's that for victimless crime?"

The Adaptor Hypothesis

"What do we do now?"

She smiles, lids still beatifically closed. "Now, you love me." Still lying indecorously on their corner of floor, she arches enough to allow him to lift her stockings, smooth the olive skirt, restore the organdy.

He places a guilty fingertip to the stain on her hem. "Do you need to rinse this?" he asks stupidly. "Before you go home?"

Her thigh moves beneath his hand. It already wants touching again. "Don't worry." She assures him with her eyes. He helps her outside to her car, escorting as if the assault has weakened her. He closes her car door, contrite, abandoning her to sneak home alone. He is ready to call Herbert, read his confession into the wiretap. Only it's not just his confession any longer.

He walks home. The premature warmth of February air blankets him. He is lost in the calendar; he cannot, for a moment, say when in the year he is or which season follows, cannot even fix the ordinary sequence of warming and cooling. Helpless in the face of a mild breeze, his skin remarks on the glorious night this night has brought in. But the breeze, the false thaw, does not displace what he and Jeanette just transacted. It must keep happening now, transposed throughout the year.

He wades in illicit, erotic revulsion: retained impression is no more than a command to repeat. The weighted average of every surviving drive compels him to another go-round with this woman. Arousing, irresistible, and like most enticing hybrids, sterile. Yet through that revulsion, this breeze insists that hope grow even in an empty place. The Base, overlaid with a contrary voice, whispers that the night feels good, nevertheless; something may yet happen; you've been surprised this far; more of the same is never just more of the same. He reaches the familiar barracks and lets himself in.

He concedes to an English muffin, then straight to music. He needs: what? To prostrate in front of plainsong from a cloister so empty that the echo relay is antiphonal? To join the high, pure head tones of boys in a Byrd Kyrie? To be knocked unconscious by a bit of dislodged opera-buffa stucco? To smile ironically at the Eroica, its canceled dedication? To sit quietly stewed outside the locked door of a rolling concerto cadenza just before the last, rescuing tutti? To admit the impossible poignancy of neo-romance? To make a space for grief four last songs wide? To breathe the air of a new planet? To trace the permutations in the ILLIAC Quartet? To lie in caged silence?

He opts for the master blueprint: music with no past or future, existing in the perpetual now, a standing Schrödinger wave. He could kiss Olga, so paralyzed has she held her plastic arabesque. Once more he lowers the needle on the scratched disk, unleashing a keyboard exercise that wanders far off the face of the earth into a canonic minor modulation as full of pathos as the first creation. Chromatic beyond recognition, the Base slips inconceivably downstream from the peaceful thematic trickle of its source Brook, the most outrageous claimant in the most unprovable paternity suit ears have ever heard.

He and Jeanette have worked upon each other's nakedness, done all they ever wanted to do. He has no inclination to go back to the lab, now or ever. He wants to resign, sign on to the obscurest work available — making pizzas, hawking Fighting Illini pennants, whatever unskilled labor the local economy will support. He is overwhelmed with the urge to trash his radio, cut the phone lines, and hole up in his bungalow alone with Olga, listening without dissection, assembling without violating the unforgiving weight of particular parts.

He wants her here, to see, speak with, listen to as she vocalizes those rhythmic, objecting stammers. She must call, now. But she doesn't. Those moments when she will pity him, deign to drop by, are already too rare. Each minute out of contact is awash in variables — all the accidents that perhaps have already led her forever away. Research recovers nothing; knowledge doesn't knit. He sits in the stream of sound, unable to avert a collapse of volition, not even wanting to.

Criminal scenarios edit themselves in his head. Cloak-and-dagger, skulking affairs where they press against one another for a quarter hour out of every forty-eight. Magnanimous Herbert lend-leasing her or throwing in the towel, acknowledging the omnipotent heart. Ressler appealing to Jeannie, begging for a noble, lifelong separation. His taking up surgery, returning her somehow to fertility.

Each permutation more inspired, more insipid than the last. They take him at once, gang-rape him. He sits wedged in the inseam between wall and floor, listening, thinking that he can hear distant song straining the contour of a variation beyond the variation. He's lost it; accumulated stress pushes him into the realm of imaginary acoustics. But the trace is real, waving the air molecules however faintly. Then he figures it: the pianist singing, caught on record, humming his insufficient heart out. Transcribing the notes from printed page to keypress is not enough. Some ineffable ideal is trapped in the sequence, some further Platonic aria trial beyond the literal fingers to express. Sound that can only be approximated, petitioned by this compulsory, angelic, off-key, parallel attempt at running articulation, the thirty-third Goldberg.

Canon at Seventh (II)

We began living together, I suppose. Not even what lawtalk would call a verbal contract. Todd had the key, and he checked in periodically. He even moved a few things over: a backpack of clothes, few but washed frequently enough to stretch forever. His precious notebooks, kept by the bed in case of emergencies that never emerged. His sketchpads, filled with closely observed nature and lacking only that last urgency to become truly remarkable. I was so pleased the day he brought them by that he felt compelled to squash any hope that he might start drawing in earnest: "Can't leave these in my apartment for the burglars to find. I'd be drummed out of grad school if anyone saw them."

"You're not in graduate school."

"There's still the dissertation. Any year now."

He kept his own apartment and left most of his treasures there. He gave me a copy of his key, more out of moral parity than enthusiasm. I'd been back to his cult museum at the tip of the island a handful of times since our first listening session, but it never felt right. "Should we spend more time at your place?" I asked one weekend.

"I like it better here. The curtains. The rocker. The bedspread. Your touch." It was his embroidered, endangered bastion, his last holdout in an overrun world: the amber oil lamp in the second-story corner above the antique shop, abiding in tragic coziness. There were more economical arrangements, but anything beyond this tentative fit — a nocturnal burrower braving danger to accept the handout — would be invasively unstable.

We ate evening meals together. He insisted on washing all dirty dishes. Sometimes he stocked the pantry. I took the phone off the hook when I left in the morning, to let him sleep. He came and went freely. I had no expectations. When he was around, we read out loud together, did anagrams, experimented on each other's body, assembled a list of what hurt, what was indifferent, what felt good.

We worked together on our 1040s, finishing long before they were due. On this one ballot alone did he vote his conscience and go head to head with Western Civilization. At great fiscal sacrifice, Franklin buried most of his money in tax shelters, charitable deductions, and losses until the Amount You Owe was zero. Not stinginess on his part. Just the opposite: by the time he had it all legally diverted, he had nothing left to spend. The year 1 saw him file, he'd accumulated write-offs that would square him for two more years.

It wasn't foresight; he never thought he'd make it to old age. "Part of me dearly wants to pay taxes. I love schools, sidewalks, museums, research funding, food relief. You simply cannot get a better return on investment. But I hate to pay for anything that can incinerate twenty million people at a pop. I know. At my infantile tax bracket, less all desirable governmental expenditures, my contribution wouldn't even cover the decals on one of those things. It makes no measurable difference. But withholding is all I can do."

Efficiency had Franker by the throat. He would urge bananas on me, broccoli — anything that might be in danger, in some future, of spoiling. "We've got to keep at that pilaf." He was brutal when I took slices from the fresher loaf. Yet he refused the antidote that progress held out to people with his mania: the bacteria-resistant, stabilized foodstuff, BHA added to preserve freshness. "I try not to eat anything that's newer to the food chain than I am."

He liked the dark and the cold. Saved on utilities costs, but more than that. He aspired toward that life that would not use any of the earth's resources. He deserved only what absolute efficiency could not eliminate. While he roomed with me, the compulsion got noticeably worse.

But when I pressured him to make use of the years already tied up in his obscure painter, efficiency became another matter. "I need more work. I just came across an early primary source that…"

"You already know more about him than anyone alive."

"Me? I haven't even seen all the panels."

"Go see them, then." I cringe to think of it: my suggestion. I even offered to pay, forgetting that he could write the flight off.

"Can't. Got a job."

"This thesis is your job. It's important."

He looked at me sardonically: right. Raging issue. But he did not speak the sarcasm. He seldom stooped to snideness. The words he used in his defense were so much smoke. He believed; he wanted. The project was lodged in him, staved off a worse drift. But he would never knock off a perfunctory proofwork. And putting a closely reasoned and deeply felt piece on the public auction block as a bid for self-promotion, packaging ongoing thought as a completed effort, was worse than immoral.

I frequented MOL as often as ever. I still assisted in dangling in front of Dr. Ressler the slow coax of companionship. Now that he was ready to emerge, I felt I had to make the place as ample as we'd advertised it. I couldn't have been more wrong. Yes, he loved me, loved Todd, loved, for the first time in decades, talk for pure talking. And yes he was again researching. But not what I thought, or for my reasons. What had coaxed him out again, said go, recalled him to the roster, was something else: the one liberating whiff.

Dr. Ressler refused to take part in my debates with the club creationist. Annie, even-tempered, devoid of suspicion, never knew these were anything but earnest exchanges of conviction.

Do you believe that the earth was made in 4004 B.C.?

Don't be silly! That was some medieval bishop. The Bible doesn't give the age. It's very old, the beginning. But put together in no time flat.

Do you believe that species change?

No. They were made. Look around! Two creatures that need each other to survive: wouldn't they have to be made together? One without the other would be like a ship without a carriage. They'd die if left to chance.

What of the fossil record? Small horses, huge lizards, cats with fangs?

I don't know. Perhaps the Flood— Trilobites? Fish covered with plate bone?

I don't know.

I flush in shame. I didn't want to destroy the woman's faith, but it maddened me that I couldn't. Ressler sometimes stopped to clear up facts, and Todd liked to push the argument back on track, like a kid righting a slot car. But Annie was unshakable; she would, after a day or two of quiet thought, match any forensics I sprang on her with an equal and opposite blow for verbatim truth.

I should have known that measurement and religion will always be two split continents bumping up for the first time, without interpreters. What drove me to distraction, made me ready to jump into the breach every time however ashamed I always came away, was the woman's insistence that the spirit could address the mechanical world, but mechanics weren't allowed to mess with the spirit. She accepted the age of the earth, dog breeding, inheritance of variant characteristics, organic chemistry, even the reality of genetic tampering. But not evolution.

"Try this," she said, "it can't hurt. A simple experiment, and who knows? It might mean a lot to you in the future." She handed me a pocket Bible, which she carried at all times. "Open it randomly to a passage and read what's written there." I don't know how I managed, but I kept sober as I read the passage chance had sent me. "Does it mean something to you?" I nodded gravely, and handed the passage to Todd. He had to leave the room to keep from bursting. Exodus 22, xviv: Whosoever copulateth with a beast shall be put to death. Contemptible just remembering it.

I was guilty1 of believing that evidence had progressed so far that a creature like Annie, endowed with native intelligence, would have to accept it. And it broke her heart to fail to convert me. Todd and Dr. Ressler were lost causes, to be loved more strongly on earth because they wouldn't make the last cut come the signs, seals, and trumpets, unless through benevolent intercession of the Maker. But me: for some reason, Annie thought she could win me for belief.

How did I ever presume to undermine her certainty? What did I have to replace joy with? Annie was surer of her right to happiness than I ever was of mine. Even the loss of her life savings did not ruffle her. She told us of the ugly event one night, still trembling, not in anger, but at the danger she had just come through.

Three days before, while looking over the books in those stalls at the southeast corner of the Park, she noticed something on the sidewalk near her feet. Just as she realized it was a purse, another book-browsing woman also noticed it, bent down, picked it up, and handed it to her. "Did you drop this?"

Annie said no. The two women looked around, finding only one other nearby browser. The third woman also said that the purse wasn't hers. "Perhaps there's an address," Annie suggested. Still in possession, she opened it. No address. No credit cards. No ID. Only about fifteen thousand dollars in cash. The second woman yelped. They were holding the proverbial hot tuber. The three drew toward one another, herding instinct, and sat down on an empty bench. "This doesn't look good," Annie said. "Maybe we should notify the police."

"The New York Police?" the others objected.

They sat in a scared knot, no one knowing what to suggest. At last the third mentioned, "My brother-in-law's a lawyer." Instant relief. The second woman was parked in a lot not far from Columbus Circle, and they drove to the brother-in-law's on the Upper West Side.

The lawyer laughed at their nerves, asked facetiously if they were being tailed. "Relax. You'd be surprised at the amounts of cash some people carry on them."

"Only they usually notice if they've left it lying on the street," the second woman said acidly.

The brother-in-law rummaged in his red-spined library and found the passage he was after. "If you three can put up a cash retainer equal to a third of the amount, and if we make a public declaration of the find — a newspaper ad will do — and if no legitimate claimants show after one week, then it's all yours. Manna from heaven."

They punched the numbers up on a calculator. Adding a dash for the ads, they each needed to put up sixteen hundred dollars. They drove to their apartments, each woman running in and securing the funds. Annie and the second had to cash checks; the third, embarrassed, admitted that she kept her money under a rug. Annie's collateral cleaned her out. They left the earnest money with the brother-in-law, who notarized receipts. They exchanged names and numbers, and agreed on the restaurant where they would eat out a week from then.

"The next day, no ad. I called the first woman, and got some poor man in the Bronx. The second number gave me one of those dee-dee-deeps." She sang the no-longer-in-service triad. "I took the subway to the lawyer's office, my stomach in my throat. Cleaned out. For rent. I even tried to go back to the buildings where the two women got their money. Nobody by that name. The police say the notarized receipt is meaningless." Annie stopped, swallowed, could not go on.

She didn't need to, except to say that the handle on the inside car door where they had her sit was broken; her door had to be opened from the outside. "These people play for keeps." Ressler and Todd had their heads down. Old, their faces said. Old, treacherous, and transparent. It took a genuine naif like Annie to get so blindly stung. Yet I had never been tested against so elaborate a setup. If the con thrived, always with new wrinkles, now out of some other uptown office or in another city, marks must be in steady supply.

In the wake of the story, Annie was the first to revert to form. She said she'd planned to give the windfall to an ecumenical food drive for Africa. "Just imagine, when I finally figured things out! You could have knocked me over with a truck."

Adaptor Hypothesis (II)

Cryptography lives in the seam between sense and randomness. Its deforming rules sow noise into a signal. But by reversing the rules, the signal reforms, like Dr. Ressler's undispersed oil drop. I can't quite put my hands through this paradox: scattered nonpattern and articulated message are somehow — what can the word mean? — equivalent.

The entire Library of Congress, encoded with a single notch on a stick, like those colossi bestriding the narrow world under whose legs we book researchers peep about, keeping one foot on each of two unspannable coasts. The straddle is its own contradiction. The mark on the stick is trivial, blank, without significance. And yet, it inscribes everything in the archive. Even more counterintuitively, the mark could fall anywhere on the stick at all. An infinity of transforming schemes: take the fraction formed by the letter string, divide by its cubed root, add.344___Any notch at all could fold out into the Library of Congress, including all books not yet catalogued.

Such a notch would have to subdivide quantum spaces. But not even that physical catch clears things up. The rub remains: with an infinity of available enciphering keys, a meaningful string of letters can be translated into any available gibberish. So any random string of gibberish I choose already stands for that original string, provided I can locate, out of infinity, a transform that equates them.

This unsettling two-way mapping of any sense onto any nonsense works because the key — the enciphering rule — itself contains information. Information (a science unfolding just moments before Ressler hit the scientific scene) is the degree of restriction clamped onto the set of all possible messages. Information is not meaning, but can be used to reveal it. It has, as Todd's favorite living novelist notes, replaced cigarettes as the universal medium of exchange.

Knowledge might be extracted from simple clues if given the right key: an idea as old as consciousness, existing in precursor form even in animals. Codes, ciphers, impresas, enigmas, mots, emblems, all forms of enfolded text propose not just their own hidden significance but a secret system where inscribed meaning built into the half-obscuring, half-revealing world surface is revealed.

If any gibberish string can reveal not just one but all possible patterns (given an infinity of information-bearing keys), then gnosticism — arcane manipulation until pattern emerges — can't return me to source meaning. The pattern such bit-fiddling produces would say more about its own manufacture than about the subcutaneous nature I'm after. Information between cipher, key, and source is conserved. If the key is simple, then the cipher, however mysterious, will carry much of the order of the original. But if the codetext contains little information — if it is random, full of possibilities — then information must be present in the clamped-down key. The revealing key would then be as difficult to arrive at by trial as the plaintext itself.

The veil between signal and noise never lifts as easily as it falls. Any teenager can take a car apart, but few would be thrilled with a complete parts inventory for their coming-of-age gift. If signal is rich and noise deafening, then the deforming garble is practically irreversible without the formula. A hard code is like a lump of peat for an engagement stone, with the instructions: Press firmly and long. From message to code is trivial; but getting back to tonic, if the clamp on possibilities lies in a complex transposing scheme, is as entropically prohibitive as the postman springing back from the pool, the dog backing away, the letters shedding their droplets and returning to dryness.

I may never come across the clause that revokes his exile. The journey back, however much it seems a birthright, a trip I ought to be able to do blind, remains as unlikely as my making it from alien Maple and Jefferson to unknown Walnut and Monroe with nothing but a world globe. Each cognate I stumble across gives a shock of recognition: here is the grammatical clue, something I can at last make out. The nearness is uncanny. The clues are all eall mast, al meist, allr mestr. But run through the decipherer, they remain all most. No ladders lead back up from where I've been lowered. I must lie down where all the ladders start.

Science is hard, the notch intractable. It is not secret knowledge, but nominalism. Not facts; only a means of verifying the endless, tentative list. Like Lear's look there; and there. Information theory proves that for a given purpose, an optimum code exists. But it supplies no means for finding it. The purpose of investigation seems to be to find the optimal code for purpose. Nature freely hands out isomorph variants of herself. Signals jam the air — patterns not nature but the shaped equivalents of her writing. Sometimes information lies entirely in particulars, and their uniting pattern lies only a light tweak away. But if the key packs a larger fraction of crucial information than the signal, reading it remains as statistically unlikely as launching at random and hitting upon life.

How is it possible, in those cases, to recover anything? I have only the old, empirical trump: set up a local peep-holed world and watch; follow the effects, trace the shadow of the key as it encodes. Eavesdrop over the codebook. Then, with the silhouette of the transforming rule traced out, its transforms become trivial. Briefly: the thing I want to hear more than sound itself is the bliss beyond the fiddle. But the fiddle itself remains my only conveyance.

The information of an organism is spread out over its substance, processes, organization. No one part embodies the life semantic. Nowhere in my cells does it say, "Woman, thirtyish, pretty to some, deserted, unemployed, desperate to know." The code is not the gene, nor the enzymes, nor the lookup table, although these are the core of what the code knows.

All of these assembled leave a bit of information still out: I lack a key. To make the catch, I must grab the adaptor.

What are my odds of succeeding in the time remaining? By saving chance, the school where I learn to read obeys the same laws of probability constricting the codes that life writes itself in. There is a limit on the coding mechanism, on the information it contains. Evolution sets such unlikelihoods into existence that it seems, given time, universally ingenious, eternally able to one-up. In fact, it's a patch job, short-term kludges barely breaking even, ducking down blind alleys, working only with existing parts. The map is full of places that one can't get to from here. A fin might come in time to grasp marvelously as if designed for it, and a hand turn back into a fin. An air bladder, used to solve the flotation problem, might be tucked into a structure that can sustain a crawl into naked air. But nothing is a priori. Other solutions will never hit upon the particular next trick, no matter how many eons you let spin. Life on the planet could have been entirely different: billions of years of prokaryotes, unchanged since inception, stretching on steadily until the sun dies.

The "hopeful monster" — Goldschmidt's variation — has been resurrected from the scrap heap with the suggestion that evolution need not always progress by imperceptible gradualism. But despite the haggle in step size, all jumps are essentially local, for there are infinitely more ways of jumping wrong than jumping right. Small text changes ripple into huge phenotypic differences. But the way the text is read and processed will never change, short of the complete annihilation and improbable respark of all life. The code key is fixed, clamped from the first fluke discovery of self-propagation. The translator, the adaptor, is information-rich, determined, locked in. If we stumble on the place once, in the dark, during a storm, after a quarrel that has driven us wildly from home, we may never find the way again. The accumulation of accident along the way makes the journey irreversible. Each step is sculpted, restricted, feasible, frequently brilliant, on rare occasions even optimal. But the sum of these steps is unrepeatable. It will not happen again, not in this way, perhaps not at all.

I look for a go-between. Inside the machine, deep in the cell, the molecule must take the rich hieroglyphics of the DNA string— randomly accumulated dots, crots, and mots — and, its own structure housing the missing key, translate the jiggles of the varying sequence into the purposeful, programmed, cybernetic, living enzymes. Outside, in the warehouse of time, the adaptor I look for must bridge the paradoxical equivalence of message and notch, caprice and complexity, theme and variation.

I wake to sleep and take my waking slow. What falls away is always, and is near. Why are three quarters of my analogies drawn against lyric poetry? One would have to be a lingering sap to still think, with Wordsworth, that poetry is the impassioned expression that is in the countenance of all science. I don't deny the sentimentality charge, but perhaps I keep reverting to anthologies— the ones I have memorized over a life of erratic reading — because they too are their own evolutionary kludge, new vehicles resurrected from modified parts, an historical stratigraphy, packets announcing, "This works, or worked once; use it, or lose it in favor of something else." I learn by going where I have to go.

Four months from now, I'll have starved to death or will be employed again, somewhere. Either way, my education, these notes, the extended aside of this last year, will be over. Only two ways I might still get moonlight into a chamber. I can sit and wait for the calendar and capricious weather to accommodate. Or, even at this time of the night, I might find an intermediary. Get hold of the adaptor. Dress up as the visiting moon.

The Transfer Molecule

He can't explain it — maybe because from here on nothing can work out as hoped — but the morning after he makes love to Jeanette Koss on the floor of the Cyfer lab, he feels inappropriately alive. The physiological component is undeniable: yesterday's nerve-shattering release produced a sleep deeper even than clean conscience. He wakes, lies in the bunk, arches, feels the muscles in the back of his thighs, the full power of the intellectual biped.

He has had a dream: a world-renowned gynecologist, looking suspiciously like Toveh Botkin, told Jeanette Koss that her conception problem lay in sperm getting lost on their way through the egg. The doctor implanted an ultramicroscopic device, a sort of converter shaped to let the sperm enter at one end, pass easily through the cell wall, and sail through to the other end, snapped snugly over the egg nucleus.

Stretched on his back, he tenses at the obvious message he has sent himself in sleep. He knows why they haven't been able to get the cell-free system to work. He, Botkin, and Koss have assembled, in their simulated broth, messenger RNA for the instructions, ribosome material for the factory, ATP for the energy, amino acids for the contractors' materials, GTP to glue them together, two types of enzymes as cut-and-paste wage laborers, and a handful of inorganic cations as a chemical hunch, salts over the shoulder. They have left out the key, the go-between, the bridge.

Ressler, with the oceanic feeling of calm that makes investigation the most sustainable gratification available to living things, conceives of what they are missing. A molecule amorphous but vaguely familiar, one of those UN simultaneous translators. At one locus, the molecule has a spot, an anticodon that matches a codon on the message string. Another spot on this bilinguist holds the amino acid called for in the lookup table. No: the adaptor molecules— for there must be a whole class, each with different anticodon sites and corresponding amino acids—are the lookup table written into matter.

The adaptor molecule is both sorter, porter, and rivet-holder. The anticodon gives it away: more nucleic acid, another RNA chain itself transcribed from — where else? — the parent DNA. Once they season their preparation with this interlocutor, they will be able to make nature break her own code, as she does constantly in the maniacal specific density of self-construction. But before he has time to work out the details, he hears the jiggle in the latch, the intrusion of human sympathy. Company, carrying something, muffled with care. Koss floats into his bedroom, crimson with cold, hazel in triumphant proximity. "Ah!" Ressler looks up, helpless to waylay elation. "The Man from Porlock." But she is so lovely, so here, that he can't resent the desertion of insight, its replacement by her.

"I thought," she says, looking away a little wickedly, a little shyly, "you might like a bite of breakfast." She sits at his bedside and unwraps her packages. Coffee, sweet rolls, fruit. Ressler, slack, lets her insert torn-off pieces into his mouth. He chews, eyes closed, while her hands, losing their chill, colonize the covers. Slowly, seamlessly, they are forsaken again. She undresses, this time showing him. Now they are infinitely patient, exploratory, stripped of yesterday's violence. Yesterday was public, awful, dangerous. Today is soft, secluded, trembling, expectant, admission of mutual rabbit-sin. Her throat takes over again at the end. Anyone home at this hour hears the decibels, knows what blood ritual takes place. Exultant, shouting for help, finding it.

When she transfers control from ape back to angel, that sound is the first thing she mentions. "These barracks walls are pretty thin. They could present a problem for us." Never did he expect a single word could trigger such instant, enzymatic rush. "How are the troops supposed to do their women without dispatching a communique?"

"Enlisted men are not permitted to have sexual relations."

"And officers do it by semaphore?"

Pretty Jeannie wrinkles her nose, kneels over his body, exploring everything in that inscribed universe. He rests a hand above her breasts, protects her even at the cost of this child-like moment. He tenses his metacarpals. "This is crazy, you realize."

Her change is astonishing. She collapses against him like a sensitive plant. She bows her head, hiding it. Muscles along her length clasp him with a desperate rocking. "Don't forsake me now, Stuart." The plea electrifies him.

The discharge is doubled by the phone selecting that instant to ring. "That'll be the HUAC," Ressler jokes weakly. He gets up, throws a blanket around him, glad for the excuse to retreat to the front room. He grabs the receiver and mumbles hello.

"Sleeping in this morning?" the other end says. The voice chills Ressler to the quick. Ulrich. His supervisor knows. "Not that sleep hurts. Look at Poincaré, Kekulé. Major work while unconscious."

Jeanette creeps naked out of the bedroom. She reattaches to him, curled, like a small child, a gibbon on the ground, a hermit crab displaced from its shell. Ressler strokes her hair while she strokes the inside of his legs. He cannot concentrate, makes Ulrich repeat his message.

"I said," the chief enunciates, amusement and annoyance waiting for each other at a four-way stop, "you'd better get down to the lab. Some gentlemen from Life are here to see you."

Transposon

I have made a Bush League mistake. Idiot! Pulling his words out for the thirtieth time, for the stupid pleasure of hoping they might be different this time, I see it, as self-evident as just out of the envelope. I could smother myself. The boy's affectation has been staring me in the face, begging to be understood, obvious from the day of arrival.

Had I remembered the first thing about him, I would have worked this out weeks ago. He always said the trick to picking up a foreign language was to wear it. Affect its idiom. Act. Assume a virtue if you have it not. I should have known that his method would extend even to written dates. He posted me from Europe. There, people have the good sense to arrange their calendar units in ascending order. He wanted local fluency as fast as possible. So why revert to old habits, just to write a friend back home?

12/6: Not the sixth day of twelfth month. The twelfth of the sixth. I can hardly take it in. He wrote, not in early December, but in the middle of last June. Not X number of weeks ago. X months. Half a year before I thought he'd written. The opposite season. Every word I read of his was wrong, bungled, lost over the lines. The smallest tweak of context changes every sentence. Nagging anachronism, that weird sense of collapsed time disappears. Of course he had no grief. When Todd wrote me, Dr. Ressler was still alive. One stupid transposition and I hear what the man is saying for the first time. Only, after explanation, his message is more cryptic than ever.