Gold Bug Variations

XXVII

The Goldberg Variations

Its published name is wildly unassuming: "Keyboard Practice, Part IV. Composed for music lovers to refresh their spirits." One of only a handful of his thousand compositions to be published in his lifetime, in a form he never cared for, although perfected here.

Bach's first biographer tells the story, already thirdhand, of how Count Kaiserling, former Russian ambassador to Saxony, employed a young harpsichordist named Goldberg, one of Bach's star pupils. Goldberg's duties included making soft music in an adjoining room on those frequent nights when the Count had trouble sleeping. The Count commissioned Bach to compose for Goldberg something "of a soft and somewhat lively character," to assist against this periodic insomnia. A musical calmative, a treatment that now consists of two tablets and the low drone of talk radio.

Theme and variations, a form limited to "the sameness of the fundamental harmony" throughout, was just the ticket: sedative, soporific permutations jumping like counted sheep over a stile. From beginning to end, the Goldbergs were conceived, if not as an attempt to sing the listener to sleep, as a catalog that would at least keep the sleepless sufferer company, to hold at theme's length the nightmare of wakefulness. The best one can be is either doctor or musician. Both, if possible.

For this work, legend has it, Bach was rewarded with a goblet of one hundred gold louis, more than he was paid for scores of other works combined. The ambassador got off cheaply, taking possession of one of the supreme works in music history. Throughout the rest of his life, he referred to the piece as if it were his own composition. "Dear Goldberg, do play me one of my variations."

So much for the reading tale. The stuff any librarian can turn up. As for the architecture: the Goldbergs are twice as long as any previous variation collection. They form the most virtuosic and demanding piece for solo keyboard in any form until middle Beethoven. The set is built around a scheme of infinitely supple, proliferating relations. Each of the thirty is a complete ontogeny, unfolding until it denies that it differs at conception from all siblings by only the smallest mutation. Together they achieve a technical inventiveness and profundity unsurpassed in the rest of music, a catalog hinting at every aspect of tonal experience.

And the whole archive is hatched from an insipidly simple theme. One musicologist tried to convince a fellow scholar that the germ aria, a heavily ornamented period piece, was not even Bach's own. The eminent colleague disappeared into his study, emerging some time later (like Von Neumann affirming the obvious) shaking his head. "You're right. It's a piece of French fluff."

Bach's first act out of the block is to strip down this aria bacterium to its even simpler bass. For the longest time, until Ressler pointed it out, I couldn't hear how the wayward offspring had anything to do with parent. That's because the variations aren't descended from the aria per se. Rather, the aria itself is just another variation, built upon the all-generating, sarabande Base:

The Goldbergs are not even variations in the modern sense, but an imperceptibly vast chaconne, an evolutionary passacaglia built on the repetition and recycling of this Base. Music that goes nowhere, that simply is, hovering around the fixed center of diatonic time.

A line of pitches can be heard as a melodic sequence or as a series of harmonies. Bach's Base is both, at times even hybridizing horizontal and vertical. As with 90 percent of standard tonality, it is no more than an exploration of the possibilities hidden in the scale. The sequence is symmetrical to an extreme: two paired, complementary halves of sixteen notes each. Each half comprises four similar-shaped paired phrases — tension, release, tension, release — four notes long. Each pair of four-note phrases creates an eight-note harmonic section, four in all, tracing the fundamental journey from tonic to dominant to relative and back to tonic. Sixteen twos, eight fours, four eights, and two sixteens: with repeats, the trip from home and back takes sixty-four notes.

Dr. Ressler — already fighting gnostic tendencies — must have loved discovering in Bach two paired strands, four phrase-building blocks, a sixty-four-codon catalog. Bach had a habit of imbedding mystic numbers in his compositions; these ones happen to correspond to the number-game nature imbeds in its own. But this coincidence was the least of the qualities that made this music Ressler's best metaphor for the living gene.

I begin to hear, too late, how the Base's symmetry ripples through the piece, unfolding ever-higher structures, levels of pattern, fractal self-resemblances. Having made my layman's survey of the synthesis his science was after, I begin to hear in this encyclopedia of transcription, translation, and self-replication something of the catalog he carried around inside of himself for a quarter century.

Like the master molecule and its living scaffolding, the Goldberg schema is a self-spun hierarchy. First: the transcription of the Base into each variation, even those transposed to relative minor, is faithful, either note for note or harmony for harmony. Oh, it strays from its source, sometimes implying the sarabande while straining to leave it, sometimes filling out the step with jarring accidentals. At times it too becomes a new thing, a new theme, overhauled for all its treading water. But the basic sarabande bass, its thirty-two-note journey, completely informs each child, in turn thirty-two bar-equivalents long. The code is universal throughout creation.

The variations unfold a second level of emerging pattern. Every third variation is a canon, a strict imitation of staggered voices. "Row Row Row Your Boat" self-replication taken to terminal degree. In the first canon, the duplicating voice begins on the same pitch a measure later. In the second canon, the interval between voices is a second: the replication begins one tone higher than the original. The third canon is a canon at the third, and so on through every interval of the major scale plus one — the same scale the theme is built upon. Two canons occur in inversion: whatever happens in the first voice is mirrored upside down in the second. A rising interval is answered by equivalent fall. But in all the canons the situation is the same; the melody harmonizes not with another tune but with itself, a replica of its immediate past and future.

The second voice in every canon is determined: the template first voice right-shifted, transcribed into new scalar position. Two copies twist about each other with helical precision, at ever-increasing steps, coding for their own continuation. Some of the canons are content to be canonical: the template is still audible when the replication arrives. Others push the form's limits, holding a note away from falling into a single voice or mapping out intervals so dissonant that each constrained part seems to insist on its own, discrete decisions — strict, deterministic contrapuntalism forcing freedom.

In each canon but one, strict imitation takes place over a third, persistent, unifying voice across the widening intervals. The second level of order enfolds the first: underneath each canon, the original Base matrix continues to churn. Canons at every scalar interval arch across the work like a giant backbone. But at each vertebra, the canonic lines are tied into position by the spinal cord of a theme that released them, the last to anticipate what spreading skeletons swirl around it. In the final canon — the replication at the ninth, the interval beyond the octave — the imitative voices draw up into their tag the contour of the Base itself.

That much, already a tour de force of both conception and execution, would have easily engaged Ressler the scientist and pattern-seeker. But the primary structure of informing theme and the secondary emergence of canons at increasing intervals does not yet account for his lifelong devotion to the piece. A third level of structure, emerging after a week of my nonstop listening, hints at the successive layers of fascination peeling from the piece, bringing the man constantly back to listen, to make his next discovery.

I have just come to hear how the variations group locally, how they arrive in threes, triplet codons together spelling out a fundamental word of human experience. The third of each set is a canon, as the second level of ordering dictates. But after the first triplet set, a regular rotation also generates the form, color, and scope of the other two members of the triplet. The first of each codon is a dance, strikingly rhythmic or in a unique musical form. These moments of clarity are followed by brilliant duets, outbursts of virtuosic display, two-manual arabesques tearing across the keys. Dance, arabesque, canon: the variations produce a triangulation of feeling, sensing, and thinking that could only have arisen from a three-chambered arrangement of body, soul, and mind in perfect coordination. Harmony consists of propositions about harmony.

The dance variations explore a variety of musical genres: a complete, compact fugue without episodes. An outrageous French overture, that most stylized of Baroque puff pieces, opening with a vertical flourish in the jungle of surrounding counterpoint and proceeding with eighteenth-century aristocratic optimism. A vigorous, syncopated alia breve. A four-voice stretto-fit of well-being over before you can say hallelujah. Two transcendent adagios, one in poignant, resigned major, the other a heart-stabbing minor where every pitch in the chromatic scale puts in an appearance, the two together an unendurable duet of deliverance wedded to dissonance, promise unwinding in pain.

Each of these formal dances is built upon clear renditions of the Base. The difficulty of satisfying the constraints of variation within the bravura of overture or the rigor of fugue is considerable. But more disconcerting than the technical accomplishment is the plan. Take the variation number and divide by three. If the remainder is 1/3, the piece is a formal genre or dance; 2/3, and it's a toccata. No remainder, and the piece is a canon built on the interval given by the quotient.

Each dance stands in utter emotional contrast to the previous canon. And each is followed by a two-manual tear that draws the ear up in a second reversal of decision upon appeal. This constant broadening of technical and emotional contrast must have taken Ressler years to train for: each variation is so arranged to throw off the spell of the previous, and before the ear has time enough to savor any crystallization of mood, a reaction at once pitches the listener into new tempi, meters, and melodic figures probing radically opposing kernels of feeling, pulling open the full complexity of the piece, the inexhaustible variety extracted from the modest four-by-four-by-four sarabande. Each variation asserts its own myth, its own melody, its lack of precedent. Yet underneath, shining through each arpeggiated outburst, the theme asserts itself as master gene.

My attending ear learns not to give over entirely to the sorrow or exuberance of the moment. The most stupendously brilliant piece in the set is also a premonition of the emotional devastation that must follow. The variations each announce the consequence each itself creates. Just after a variation harboring harmonies that will not surface again until this century comes the most rococo of diversions. Grief spills over into buffoonery. Every beauty has its bitter answer. Yet each reversal doesn't dispel its sibling. They are all obedient, first-filial offspring of the same parent; while different phenotypes, they carry the same underwriting code. They exist side by side, superimposed in my unforgetting ear, apparent incommensurates, but one at the core.

And they are a unity in a way that becomes clear to me only as I discover an even higher order of order imbedded in the set. The aria, itself just another organism synthesized from the Base, is repeated — completely overhauled, although note for note the same — da capo at the end. So there are not thirty but thirty-two variations in the set, one for each measure in each variation, for each note in the generating Base. Any reductionist attempt to capture the work in its understandable particulars, dropping from the set down to the variation down to one measure, produces a germ that is not a part of anything but a microcosm of the infolded whole.

The theme is all thirty-two notes, the Goldbergs, all thirty-two variations. Each moment is a miniature globe, an encoding of everything above it., The Goldbergs are layered all the way from bottom to top and back down again, with every layer of ordering — from canonically entering canons to contrasting triplet groups, from note to measure to line to variation to entire work and back to note — contributing to, particularizing, and lost in the next rung of the hierarchy it generates.

But the severe mathematics of recursive architecture are lost in the first ornament of aria. By the time the potential of the original sequence emerges, no ear can trace any but the faintest line of that all-embracing ground plan. No; Ressler was not listening to inversions and midpoint symmetries and numerologies and the closing of the diatonic circle. He was following the death of his friends, listening to how love fled, anticipating the dissonance of Jimmy's crippling, detecting and replaying his own departure from science: hearing, in the descent of four notes from Do, the script of life's particulars, brute specifics that too often became too much, too full, too awful to bear, too unendurably, transiently beautiful.

The canons proceed beyond the octave, start all over again at the ninth, as if to suggest, "We could do this for eons." The Goldbergs threaten to expand the modest four-note germ of the thirty-two note Base to the scale of infinite invention, a perpetual calendar. I hear Ressler talking to his love every night for thirty-two years, using no words other than those built on the alloted four letters, and never exhausting all he had to say to her. Once a grammar passes the complexity threshold, no algorithm can list all possible well-formed sentences. The diversity of language defies physical law, or rather, endless sentence-generation displays law in a new, unprecedented predication.

Sufficiently complex, the Goldbergs no longer know their own sarabande. They are no longer about permutation, manipulation, pattern. They are about the bliss of the sixth, the cut of the seventh, this drooping cadence, the suspension selecting for sorrow or serenity, a snowed-in weekend, late nights of conversation, anger, abandonment, disaster, the decision to act, to rejoin for a last moment the condition of human politics, a brute insistence modulating worlds from G before coming home. The Goldbergs reach the threshold where each variation denies that it is a variation. And at that point, they no longer are.

Like proliferating species, the variants do not improve or advance. There is no question of progress here. Under the pressure of evolutionary restlessness, they simply spread out across the map of available biomes, unearth more of the embedded germ material, bring some as yet unrealized alternative — similar to all others, only different — into existence. The sarabande is never escaped, however much migration takes place. Its shape squarely inhabits mid-measure. It may wander freely across voices and beats, be for a few bars almost unbearable. But it is always there. The distance between any two incarnations is immense, as wide as the immigrant's awe at native idiom. It is improvisation in here tonight. We listeners can do nothing but stand back and wing it as it wings. Where will the next dance step come from, the next flying arabesque, the wilder, more cunningly contrived canon?

More than enough room in this world for him to move around in, respond to, to laugh at, to feel the quick, sure flash of recognition. He could hear in it not just the faithful transcript of lost love, his early work on the coding problem, the years of obscurity, and the premonition of a few affectionate months with us, the first. hint of what today in history would call him to. The sound was also an invitation to run this experiment of independent parts— crossing, racing, colliding, mimicking, moving in contrary motion, teasing each other into brighter, freer passages, informed by what has passed and what is still to come. The variations are the working out of that instruction, buried deep in the Base string, that commands itself to translate, to strain against the limits of its own synthesis, to test the living trick of Perhaps, to love.

It is, as the young pianist on Ressler's thirty-year-old recording proclaims in the liner notes, music with no beginning and no end. Music of no particular style or period: its eighteenth-century decorum constantly upset by backward glances and embryonic predictions — by turns monkish cloister, Renaissance brass, skittish romantic soaring, and the jarring atonality of my own evening. Darwin might have found his elusive pangene, if he'd only looked in the right place: higher up, deeper down, outside the cell, in the codes the cell creates and sends out to probe and describe its inexhaustible world.

The variations take on the language of the time and place they require, obeying no formal principle except the continuance of their parent. Conflicting musical ideas tear across the page, from the page to the keys, and the keys to the ear — rising into free-fall, daring chromatics, turning triolet shorthand, leaning, crashing in exhilaration, creeping meekly across the keyboard, descending to earthy folk song, daring the dead stop of anguish. The Base on which the entire piece is built, while everywhere manifest, loses its original, independent identity. It is subsumed in the general fanfare, swallowed up in invention, changed in the accumulation of minute mutations. Its sequence becomes a sustained pedal point, a repeated, ultimately stationary strain that changes as all else changes around it.

And the immense set as a whole becomes a scalar expansion of the sarabande, each of the thirty-two notes enlarged into thirty-two variations that are themselves, apart and together, a macrocosm of a single idea. Nowhere in the patterned sequence is there the remotest suggestion of what might arise out of it. To try to locate, in the thematic germ, what Ressler spent a life listening to would be to search in those schematics — line drawings showing every subassembly of every carburetor part — for a semblance of the functioning car. The germ shares nothing with its inheriting variations except the investing metaphor at the heart of life.

Yet the only way over the threshold, down into the full sound he heard, lies along this line, parallel to the one connecting organism to circulatory system to heart to chamber to valve to pumping muscle cell to nucleus to copy of the master theme. The line sought by the systematic researcher. The thing he hoped one day to uncover on the ancient, battered disk he toted around his entire adult life, the thing every beat of the piece encoded, the thing he was living, the set inside him: the infinitely pliable four-note theme.

Ultimately, the Goldbergs are about the paradox of variation, preserved divergence, the transition effect inherent in terraced unfolding, the change in nature attendant upon a change in degree. How necessity might arise out of chance. How difference might arise out of more of the same. By the time the delinquent parent aria returns to close out the set, the music is about how variation might ultimately free itself from the instruction that underwrites it, sets it in motion, but nowhere anticipates what might come from experience's trial run.

The relentlessly repeating thirty-two-note Base traces out that same unintentional contradiction in terms that Dr. Ressler read to us from the operations manual on the night we sat down to commit our crime. "These two procedures are exactly similar." "Exactly similar" elicited a laugh. But shouldn't "the same" get the same? "A is the same as B." Impossible. What Ressler listened to in that tightly bound, symmetry-laced catalog of unity was how nothing was the same as anything else. Each living thing defied taxonomy. Everything was its own, unique, irreducible classification.

The Goldbergs were his closest metaphor to the coding problem he gave his life to studying. Exactly similar, with one exception. Bach liked to inscribe his compositions with the triplet SDG, Soli Dei Gloria. To God alone the glory. Even this secularly commissioned soporific possesses the religious wonder at being joyously articulate, alive to extend the pattern. But in Ressler's hierarchy of transitional rungs, the thing beyond the composer, on the other side of the threshold from articulate breath, was only dumb designless matter, arising from and led only by the shape of experience. The world's pattern was not assembled for the mind's comprehension; rather the other way around. And that made the metaphor more miraculous.

To play the piece — to buzz the length of the keyboard for an hour, to barrage, to cross over, careen dangerously — requires only a feat of digital dexterity. Just hit the right notes at the right time, and the thing virtually plays itself. To compose it, Bach insisted, required only that one work as hard as he did. To hear in the organizing software the unique, unspecifiable odds against any metaphor ever arising on this earth out of nothing, out of mere notes, requires something more. It needs the conviction, in a third favorite phrase of the provincial choirmaster, that all things must be possible, sayable, particular, real.

A Terrorist's Primer

When we returned to MOL from visiting Jimmy, Dr. Ressler set to work on the second-to-the-last experiment he would ever be involved in. He laid out the contour of his plan. "What we're looking for is a program exactly similar to this operating system." The work required over the next several days steadied Todd, gave his hands something to eradicate. We all resolved to do anything needed to keep from abandoning Jimmy to the world.

The office was in a shambles since Jimmy's stroke. The daily processing was getting out, but only just. The day shift ran on automatic, and the least irregularity would have chucked the whole operation into chaos. While Jimmy's crippling was still novel enough to play on imaginations, the staff to a person worked until the work got done, without compensation. But gradually imagination failed, folks tired of reality, and self-interest set in. Management appointed an "interim" replacement, more eager than competent. And under this blanket of confusion, Todd and Ressler, never very supervised to begin with, had free rein to implant our seed into the on-line processing.

MOL had been suspicious enough of the original irregularity to begin inquiries, inquiries quickly and discreetly canceled in light of their role in Jimmy's stroke. The insurers had dodged a million-dollar bullet; the chronology of Jimmy's skipped premium and high-profile disaster was drilled into them. All surreptitious attempts to backdate reinstatement, to sneak Jimmy in the electronic side door, were out of the question.

Frank, getting the gist of Ressler's plan, wanted to dispose of it in favor of the less subtle, more expeditious, full-frontal approach. "The easiest thing in the world: we buy a bulk tape eraser from the hobby electronics store, change the combinations, barricade ourselves in, take a few Master File packs hostage, and give them forty-eight hours to cover the man's indefinite hospital stay."

Dr. Ressler's eyes measured the extent of Frank's desperation. For a moment, he seemed about to attack. Instead, he relaxed and lit a cigarette. "Ah! The postwar solution. No, we're too close to terrorism as it stands. We can do this thing more effectively without violence or property damage." He shrugged, having said everything needed about the superiority of legitimate retaliation. And Todd acquiesced.

Combining the words supplied by Jimmy's horrifying dictation with their own batch of gradually acquired contraband knowledge, Dr. Ressler and his graduate assistant went to work on a last recombination. They raided the program listings room and before the new manager could reinstate punch-lock security, they copied all the sections of the system software they needed, stashing the copies each night in the bottom of stockroom supply boxes.

For all they had taught themselves about how the system worked, how to make it jump through hoops, they now had to figure out why it did what it did, to trace its internal logic at machine level. For four nights running, program listings littering the computer room, they dissected the routines and procedures. They raced the clock. Jimmy's mother had seen a lawyer, who had convinced the increasingly nervous hospital to restrain itself and keep the man stabilized under care while his mother looked into every conceivable financial strategy for meeting the unmeetable bill. We had no idea of how much time we had for the delicate surgery we meant to pull off.

I was there every night. I hunched over the listings alongside them, threw in my guesses as to what fit where, ran back and forth to the massive, meter-long documentation manual. They accepted my help, but when they talked, they clearly talked to each other. They were men, in the end, and had begun, in challenge, to discover just what the other might be capable of. When their eyes locked on a piece of particularly tangled code, I could sense that they threw themselves into the untangling not just for Jimmy but to earn and keep the love of the other.

In addition to helping speed things up, I wanted to leave my fingerprints in the affair, to stand implicated alongside them. Dr. Ressler allowed me that chance, giving me a list of two dozen credit unions and financial institutions, all clients of MOL. I was to check Who Owns Whom, and establish which if any had parent-child connections to the insurance company in question. He wanted to make his bullet as precise, discriminating, and manageable as possible. "Oh," he added, as I left to do the assignment. "We'll also need your entire index card collection from the last five years." I laughed.

The financial audit was trivial but surprising. A few hours of legwork in the stacks confirmed the classic postindustrial para-noiac's fantasy: four of the two dozen names on the list belonged to the same tier of the same sprawling hierarchy of ownership as our insurance company target. "I thought we might snag a couple," Dr. Ressler said mildly, when I gave him the results that evening. "Contracts and kickbacks tying together one big happy family."

"I personally think the Trilateral Commission is behind us all," Todd said, not lifting his head from the listing where he traced calling routines with colored pencils.

Dr. Ressler chuckled. "Maybe. The world certainly is more connected than anyone supposes. Perhaps in another few years, we'll all be owned by one little old lady in Kansas City." He thanked me for the work. Looking over the list of linked businesses, he grew apprehensive. "Can you get names? Addresses?"

"Child's play," I assured him. What could be simpler?

"And the quote cards? Your collection of 'Today in History'?"

"You really want those? I thought you were joking."

"Not at all. They're instrumental."

I brought in my massive card box the following evening, years of trivia typed up on three-by-fives. He sat down with me and in fifteen minutes taught me the criterion by which I could divide the stack into two piles, Yes and No. In the samples we sorted together, one by Swift caught his eye. Dr. Ressler instantly taped it to the front of the CPU. It inspired him throughout the most difficult parts of subsequent decoding:

I have heard of a man who had a mind to sell his house, and therefore carried a piece of brick in his pocket, which he shewed as a pattern to encourage purchasers.

After they had deciphered the system logic, Dr. Ressler duplicated the relevant programs and data files. Then came the task of building the mutation, the exactly similar, only different system. Ressler carefully selected locations where they might place the needed patches — electronic detours and amendments. The point was to make their baby look, feel, and behave exactly the same as the template, the original operating system. But be the serpent underneath.

It seemed to take weeks. Every night I arrived expecting to hear that Jimmy had been turned out, that the hospital was suing his mother for immediate payment, or that our project to avert that scenario had been uncovered. In reality, the insertion of program patches went quickly, and the bulk of the replacement code actually got written in the few days between the founding of the Library of Congress on April 24 and the combined Lusitania sinking/Nazi surrender on May 7–8.

Live testing of the modifications — bringing them on-line on scores of remote terminals — was the most difficult and dangerous part. An insignificantly small alteration, whose logic is impeccable in isolation, can have unforeseen consequences that multiply out of control when dropped in the middle of a complex system. It came down either to testing a number of changes in one batch, which increased the chance of untraceable bugs, or to tracing the effects of single differences, which took far more time and showed little about the combined behavior. And each on-line test increased the odds of our being discovered.

For live testing, Annie was indispensable. As a remote terminal user herself, she could report to Dr. Ressler the effects of the modifications at a typical station. She could also enter keystrokes remotely, sequences that triggered a routine, set in motion as if by accident. This made it possible to invoke and trace changes during a normal day without irregularities back in the computer room. Annie did this in full knowledge of the risks, aware that her complicity violated the state criminal code if none of God's own minor statutes. We each loved Jimmy after our own fashion.

The operation involved some degree of what white-collar espionage calls backstopping: dummying up the record after the fact. Todd, the artist, enjoyed this part: creating on the text editor bogus console logs that looked exactly like real ones. Faking labels and directory histories for the packs they experimented on. Going into the low-level driver software and altering the dates on modified files. "Do you remember that Holmes story where the bad guys create the complete, simulated, subterranean bank vault one story above the real one? That's what we're up to. Hijacking an entire office."

I hadn't seen him in such spirits since Jimmy's stroke; no, before — since we began living together. As they closed in on debugging the last subtle change they meant to introduce into the machine, I saw how much the two of them enjoyed the work, enjoyed one another, the exertion. It was an elaborate game, an intellectual challenge, momentarily divorced from real-world consequences, the emergency motive. They got carried up in the charge of making it work, making it ingenious. The life-or-death matter became play, lab for lab's sake: what would happen if we put the patch here? Wouldn't it be prettier if we rebuilt the allocation table? Why not read the records directly from the cross-index?

They were both vital for a few days. Strong and inventive with effort. Alive. Franklin earned momentary respite from feeling that he'd personally crippled Jimmy. And Dr. Ressler had, here at the end, finally found an outlet, a call to put to use that superlative skill in pattern-searching and manipulation that had always been his second nature. The young post-doc would never, in a lifetime, have imagined this experiment. But after a long detour, it was his belated return to biology. To Life Science.

Canon at the Ninth

He leaves the Biology Building, walking slowly, too slowly to get anywhere, strolling into the middle of the place he's been trying to reach from the start, from before childhood. The last click of in vitro reverberates in his head with the clang of a meter-thick cell door being thrown wide open. Sprung in the open air, he explores its layout, feels its foliage, wholly foreign yet still familiar. The landscape he has lucked into is wider, more surprising than he ever imagined. A difficult passage in arriving, blind alleys and doublings back that he could never retrace, reroute, so obvious is this place in retrospect.

Ressler feeds into pedestrian turbulence, the passing hour between classes. People scowl at him for failing to get out of their way, or smile tolerantly at his distraction. He cannot quite take in his breakthrough, cannot believe that his own mental construct— string-and-cardboard mock-up, manipulation of the available tools — has led him to this threshold. Research, that inefficient recombination of insufficiencies, has rewarded him with the one prize every researcher lives for but never expects: a chance to locate part of the palpable world's terrain, to summarize some fraction of the solidity that cares nothing for theory, to say something definitive about their real home, to speak some word about the grammar carried around in every oblivious mote, down there, inside.

His idea is simplicity itself: they must feed the in vitro decoder a stripped-down signal of their own devising that will yield a message beyond ambiguity. The peal of the carillon just now breaking out of the university bell tower rings a change in him, slows his walk further. The waves of enabled air circle him, bang up against one another, create in him a standing crest of astonishment and gratitude. He cannot accept his good fortune, the odds against it. For a moment, he has been appointed caretaker of the entire, immensely delicate experiment, trustee of the living possibility. Whatever happens from here, he will be glad to have — well, just this once — to have made a joyful noise.

The decoding can be done. He glimpses the necessary process and knows it will work. What's more, this afternoon, walking aimlessly across the quad in May air, Ressler understands that this work, the lookup table — that rung of the hierarchy linking the life principle with slavish molecular mechanics — will, the minute it is published, be turned to further work, extrapolated, taken farther afield than he can now guess. Ideas are as self-exploiting as tissue. Everyone ever pressed into service — Mendel, Avery, Crick, Cyfer — is but a primitive precursor. The problem each has worked on, the postulate passing through their hands, mutates with every generation. It must, to remain viable. The concerns of those working on the codon table will soon appear as blunt and unsubtle as those old biological models of animism and spontaneous generation.

The future of his science sweeps across Ressler with physical certainty: in a very few years, the Sunday-school work of cryptography will go public, enter commercial politics. Too much need always hinges on knowledge for it ever to remain uncorrupt, objective, a source of meditative awe. After wonder always comes the scramble, the applications for patents. Perhaps, he thinks, unable to keep from grinning at the oblivious undergrads who pass him under the sycamores, it won't be patents at all. Perhaps it will be copyrights, like books and magazines: genes written, amended, and edited like any other text. Only alive. Cold goose flesh runs up his back at the word that profit requires and biology refuses to mention: improvement. Everything life has ever been, this magnificent accident of doubling, error, and feedback, changes forever in this minute, makes an incalculable macro-step of fatal evolution here, now, as he walks across the quad.

Yes, the message has changed before, momentously. The marshaling of the organelles, the development of the eukaryotic membrane, energy by ingestion, colonies, differentiation, the notochord, the brain, the first croak of distress, courtship, self-expression: the word has always been permanently restless, wanting only to repeat imperfectly, recast what it has been until then. Life can't be protected against a fate it's coveted from the beginning. But this break is something else again. Angelic, catastrophic, unprecedented except in the origin. Life is passing the second threshold, emending the contract. The next generation will wrap their opposable thumbs around processes he can't even begin to conceive. What can be filled in of the map will be filled in.

Worse: everything that can be done to the process will be done. The thing the adaptor molecule has for billions of years tried to articulate will, in the last click of the second hand, be channeled into massive habitat clearance, would-be property improvements, trillion-dollar toxicity, terminal annihilation. A million species lost irretrievably by the time he dies, an acceleration of slaughter that can only be ignored by an effort of will. One species a day, soon one an hour, one a minute. Not research's fault per se, but tied to the same destructive desire to grow, be more. And in return — he can't grasp the grotesque trade-off — a few new species that, for the first time in creation, can be signed by the artist.

The realized ability to masquerade as the creator — not achieved this week yet, but certainly next — this slim, second shot at the garden calls out for nothing less than a complete, instant maturation. Anything short of the creator's wisdom will chuck us into chaos. Ressler skims his eye across the open space of this campus: a quaint building for math, another brick Georgian for music, a curious, classical colonnade for English literature. Clearly, we lag behind ourselves, knowledge always hopelessly outstripped by available information.

At one end of the trimmed rectangle, in front of the auditorium, a boy and girl, both sweet-and-twenty, stand propping their bikes, one's thighs brushing the other's. Each pretends they are talking. Neither admits the real issue, both crazy with spring, aroused to inchoate blur by sap-distraction. These two children will be first-time lovers tonight, find a way to violate the segregated dorms. Neither realizes the historical moment they inhabit — the sad potential, the willful waste of it. They may never know the place the way he does in this minute, wider, stranger, more calamitous than he suspected, the place research from the first has been desperate to reach. They will feel rushing finality in everything they do without ever being able to name the utter change in life's program that researchers at their own school have set inexorably in motion.

He weighs the odds against the day being saved by the arrival, in the nick of time, of that judicious, adult nature that must accompany this discovery. No chance. They are on their own, lost, lost to this obscene place, a place larger than anyone can safely care for, the place his carefully isolated adaptor molecules locate and leave him to. Left to whistle in the dark the tune described in information-bearing strands that life itself will now be able to compose, perform with the chemical philharmonic he and his friends now conduct. Even now the piece must be further improvised, built up from the given ground, played on that piano roll he will pass through test-tube ribosomes. The cell-free spinet must take up the tune, singing as it goes, the way the record his love gave him sings under the reading needle.

But his experiment, a first solution to the coding problem, will put him no step closer to solving the code-breaking urge, a place unlocatable in either the lookup table or any aggregate survey of it. Investigation is an ache, a permanent displacement, an accidental by-product of necessity written into the program itself. He sees it briefly, the random outline thrown up for an instant in an electrical storm: he will spend what remains of his life guessing at a pattern that is itself nothing more than exactly similar. Those codons all in a row: just successive approximations about the possibilities of pattern in this world. The gene is an experiment in its own decoding. It too, like the commands it shapes, remains a beginner in its own life. An educated guess. A blundering amateur.

How can the one place where that fragile experiment thrives, how can it be protected, kept from being trampled? Investigation cannot and ought not be stopped. The command to decipher was present at the start, driving the first clunky, unshelled, self-duping, primitive amino-assembler. But if research, life, is to protect itself from itself here at the eleventh hour, the moment of its second revolution, curiosity must be amended, matured. He cannot bring that new thing to life by himself. But there is one he might ask about this idea forming in his mind, a friend who might already be halfway toward founding that new science required to save creation from the creative urge.

A nervous coed approaches him as he drifts by the library. Are you the one from the picture magazine? She thrusts out a scrap of cash-register receipt and asks him to sign his name. "Oh, no," Ressler objects. "Thank you, but this is premature. I haven't done anything yet. Ask me next year, perhaps." He grins to smooth her apology and backs away. He runs for the barracks. Sprinting, gulping air, he knows it is high time — yes, even this late in life — to tie himself forever to his companion. There is something they must find, develop together as helpmates. They will only be able to reach it in combination, each contributing a half-proposal to the corrective that pure research calls out for. It is not too late to fabricate, between them, an answer to the riot of silence awaiting life on the far side of the patent. They will put the finishing touches on the in vitro catalog. Then they will use the international reputation the work will lay at their doorstep to convince the world that it is not too late for the getting of wisdom.

This something else: he hasn't gotten it yet, he does not know its precise shape. But they can arrive at it together — the one descendant he and Jeanette can leave to this teetering place. Herbert can, of course, visit anytime he wants. Even live with them if he likes. That will not be the last concession to the law of human averages they will need to make in the decades in front of them.

They must perfect the only way home, the one trick of natural pattern forever unpatentable. They must learn quickly, this afternoon, to care for living existence with the tender survey of parental love. It's time for him to become a husband. A father.

He sprints the distance to Stadium Terrace, arriving on the stoop gasping for breath. He is about to stumble inside when something stops him. Through the thin wooden door, he hears a strain of music as familiar to him as breathing. She has anticipated him. She is inside, playing this disk hinting of the new science they must originate. He stands for a moment, simply listening, hearing a certain play of counterpoint for the first time. He pushes the door open, shouting her name on the air.

The record is indeed playing, Olga indeed centrifuging dutifully above it. But Jeanette is, like the decoding urge, nowhere. He thinks: The bedroom, enters shyly, wondering what tender, depraved rendezvous she has arranged for him. But the room is empty, the linen unmussed. He calls once, softly, pointlessly, to her attending ghost.

His answer waits in the front room, both sides of a full sheet in his laboratory notebook, left lying on top of the stack of delinquent periodicals that has become his de facto reference library. Every relationship he enters into on this earth comes down to a carefully printed message. Her hand, that spidery, runic script — as much as her voice, her scent, the curve of her forehead where his fits— begins carefully, perfectly across the horizontal.

I didn't want you to hear from Ulrich tomorrow, secondhand, about what concerns you at first. I worked up the courage to tell you face to face, but as you know, courage has always been at best a periodic phenomenon with me. A few minutes of sitting, waiting for you to catch me here, and I rush into the cowardice of print. I keep thinking I can hear your step coming up to the door. I keep rushing up, shutting this thing with guilty relief. Impossible hope that you might somehow still free me from having to say all this. You always could revise even my firmest rules. Why don't you come home?

Here is what has happened. Herbert, my husband, foreseeing every eventuality, knowing I might take it in mind really to fall in love with you long before I did, put in for a transfer some months back. The arrangements have at last come through. He has been assigned to — no matter where. The world is flattening out to uniformity anyway. The next choice is mine: Wife, are you coming or staying? Coming.

You will walk in now before I can finish this clause. You'll look over my shoulder, read this, laugh. You will turn and walk out, leave me, unable to understand. How could you? I told you once that I have never lied to you. It's true, Stuart. But all along, from the opening note I passed you, I've let you draw your own conclusions. The line between that and lying now seems more equivocal than it did before I turned thirty. What good is it to claim that I never misrepresented myself to you, if I never presented, either?

Oh, love. If all I had to do now was admit, make out that we two stole your baby. If I could say: my husband, all along, was the barren one. That we two, in sickness and health, in love so deep that it reached bottom, colluded to dupe you. That he told me: go find someone, someone brilliant, soft, crystal in temperament, kind. That I found the most intelligent, gorgeous seed imaginable to use. (Beautiful isn't enough: I see your tightening lids, the flush of your cheeks as you tense under me. Brilliant doesn't suffice: your leaps are like nothing I will see again.)

If only we had stung you for a little fertility. I could have lived with that on my conscience. Isn't that love, when it comes down to it? The old pollen trick? Mutually profitable trade, exploitation. I give you pleasure to match your inbred fantasy, and take, in return, a painless biopsy, a little tissue you will never miss. I could forgive myself for having tried to steal your genes.

But that isn't how it went. That wasn't how I came to you. It's exactly as I told you long ago: Herbert is fine. I'm the one with something wrong. He could leave me cleanly by anyone's rules of fairness. Give me the severance payoff, go land a twenty-five-year-old with all her parts working as advertised, and even now start a family. That's what all the tests showed. But, good radical skeptic, I didn't believe the tests. I had to run my own. All I needed to disprove them was the perfect man.

I told you I never lied to you. I wanted you, wanted to give myself to you from the moment I toweled dry your angelic hair. But from the start, want was couched in hysterical denial. I thought we might remake physiology, you and I, if we were fierce enough. All selfless and abject, but everything I ever gave you I handed over with an eye toward the impossible return on investment, your saving me. You see, I've never wanted anything in my life as I want to be a mother. Think of the deepest desire you have ever felt. Then let it last unanswered every day for ever.

He looks up from the page, up where the walls meet the ceiling. She means discovery. Science. An urge greater than what I am after: in vivo. And she will never have it.

All this makes what I did even worse. I loved you, I love you this minute. Stuart, believe none of this but that. I would retract, qualify beyond recognition, to be able to promise you again all the mutual evers we have ever given each other. That's really why I came by. Not to tell you about my going: to stare you in the face, get you to swear that you will never leave me.

The most selfless love I ever felt was self-serving. The deepest altruism I am capable of feeling is still after something, the thing I was after in you. You were going to rewrite the rules for me, or at least explain, at cell level, why I'd been singled out, left with a desire beyond solving. But you couldn't do that for me. You could do nothing for me but love me.

You have cause to trust my truths less than my lies, but believe me. Your love has become, despite my best self-interest, as necessary, as desperate, as the little window of time that we've had. I seem to have reached a pitch of knowledge with you that I will never know again. But I'll never be without it entirely, now. I see you teaching our little girls to sing rounds. I watch us selecting chemistry sets for them for birthdays, together, carefully. Oh God. It will break my heart to go on. I'll never get through this. You've let me see what it might have been like to have a real home.

I am leaving to be with a man who, during the course of my hysterical year, looked the other way. Nothing, nothing in it for him. He knew what I was going through — my refusing the proof of sterility. He let me sneak, granted me the dignity of pretending not to know, and when pretense became impossible, arranged to leave. And still, he booked a place for me, should I want to leave with him. I'm leaving because I'd like for once to follow something other than the calculus of personal gain. I'm not trying to be worthy of him or to offer myself to sacrifice. You see, for whatever the sloppy term means, I love Herbert. I loved him for years before I fell for you. His is the only love I can carry through without invalidating the whole shooting match.

I've made some noises about being taken on at the university twenty miles from where we're heading. It won't be much, but perhaps Herbert will agree to follow me for the next move. We move a lot in this country, don't we? So know I will still have our work, in some form at least, to compensate me for all I have lost in you. I will read about you in the lit, and the children Herbert and I adopt may well yet read about you in the texts. Stuart, I hope it. I know it. But you must agree that that can be all the contact we can allow.

It seems you're going to force me to get all the way through this. But I will not leave without asking what I came here to ask. Friend, love me. Marry me, in some other, hypothetical life? Barring that (and I understand perfectly if you refuse), think of me sometimes, and of the time we had. It was a time. How much will still happen to you! Tell the woman you end up loving all about me. Never let her live a day for granted. And prove to the gold bug that it is ingenious enough to crack itself. You have cause, so have we all, for joy.

He flips the page, as if everything she has written might still be canceled out by one more amendment. But she has written nothing more except "Sorry to have spoiled a beautiful notebook." The record has run out while he read. It was in the high twenties when he entered. If she'd put it on from the beginning, as fortification for her act of mercy killing, he must have just missed her. She is still in town, at the building perhaps, cleaning out her desk. He could intercept her, pretend not to have seen the note. Incite that change of mind she seems to half hope for in every paragraph. Or he could help her, just this once, to locate the sequence for love.

He stares blankly at the stacks of journals for several inaudible variations before he sees something else there. Another, out-of-place publication: a goodbye gift, a chaste kiss between yearning cousins, the pocket edition of A Field Guide to Flowering Plants. He searches the front pages for an inscription. She has indeed left a message there, the only possible one. In her irreproducible script she has written, "Flowers have names." But neither book nor letter — nor any communication in his possession — bears Jeanette's signature.

He flips through the book. It opens, at random, or perhaps to where she has creased the spine, to a picture of a flower — delicate, blue-purple petals piled up along a thinning stalk. He remembers having seen it before, in another, hypothetical life. The only clue to her whereabouts, her one return address. The caption gives both scientific and popular names. "Polemonium vanbruntiae. Jacob's Ladder."