Ratner's Star

by Don DeLillo

  “You’re new here,” Cyril said.

  It seemed he was always new. Newness was his personal curse. He was forever being told that he was new here or there or somewhere. It was an injunction to explain himself, to give his listeners a brief summary of his existence thus far. To be new among adults, however, was not nearly the problem it was when he was with people his own age. The challenge was not as direct here. It could be met with an oblique remark which those assembled would be content to ascribe to shyness.

  “All I knew about coming here was I was coming to a place with this name.”

  “They haven’t given you any clues as to what sort of project you’ll be involved in?” Una said.

  “I find out tomorrow, let’s hope.”

  “I’m not sure any of us knows why we’re here,” Cyril said. “I have a suspicion we’re a bunch of technocrats pretending to be Earthlings or grown-up planetary children. Maybe we shouldn’t be here at all. Maybe it’s all a great big toy designed for significant play. Enjoy the pork analogue last night?”

  “I’m a picky eater, everybody’s always saying, so the type of food doesn’t make too much difference.”

  “I think the food’s good,” Una said. “Everybody thinks it’s good. We love the food here. We all really love it.”

  “I hate overcooked analogue.”

  “Cyril alone has looked on pork chops rare.”

  Una mentioned the fact that Cyril’s wife Myriad was in the maternity ward at the top of the armillary sphere, many hours overdue. As though to change the subject, Cyril explained his assignment at Field Experiment Number One. He was part of a committee formed to define the word “science.” The committee had begun meeting regularly long before a site had even been chosen for the structure itself. It was thought a definition would be agreed upon about the time ground was being broken. But the debate continued to drag on and the definition at present ran some five hundred pages. In addition to his work on the substance of the definition, Cyril headed a subcommittee devoted solely to phrasing.

  “Just that one word?” Billy said.

  Una was softer than moon daisies, blessed with erotic madonna’s eyes, hair of vandyke brown. There was a sundial behind her. Embedded in the grass, it was carved from a limestone block the size of a funeral marker for a pet, its wrought-iron indicator casting an arrow-streak across the calibrated surface of the dial.

  “There’s never been a satisfactory definition of science,” Cyril said. “I’m trying to apply rules of valid argument to the defining procedure. A noteworthy boondoggle thus far. I’ll tell you our current problem. Our current problem seems to be whether or not the definition of science should include such manifestations as herb concoctions, venerated emblems, sand-painting, legend-telling, ceremonial chants and so on. There’s a distinct methodology to each of these pursuits. Experimentation, observation, identification. Nature is systematically investigated, its data analyzed and applied.”

  “What is scientific about sand-painting?” Una said.

  “A sand-painting represents the journey of a sacred being on behalf of a sick person. The medicine man has to learn to combine sands of many different colors so they’ll trickle out of his hands in such precise mixtures that they’ll form exactly the right kind of painting on the floor.”

  “Legend-telling and ceremonial chanting?”

  “If a medicine man chants over your body all night and you wake up cured, that’s science. At least some of my colleagues so maintain. You have to learn every nuance of hundreds of healing legends and chants. You need thorough knowledge of a great many medicinal herbs. Not only that but you have to be a good dancer.”

  They were joined by a man with ashes thumb-smudged on his forehead. To Billy’s left he sat, white-shoed and affectedly sedate, introduced by Una as J. Graham Hummer, “widely known as the instigator of the MIT language riots” and a member of Cyril’s subcommittee on phrasing. Telling time by the sun’s shadow. More or less scientific than clock-recorded mean time? A group of people carrying garden chairs advanced across the lawn.

  “There are rumors,” Hummer said. “Something big’s about to be announced. Seriously, the air is rife. Could involve our mathematical friend here.”

  “The only thing I anticipate right now is more shadow-flooding,” Una said.

  “No, something’s happening. I know rife air when I see it. Something big and not necessarily water-borne.”

  Cyril: “ ‘All things are water,’ said the Greek.”

  Una: “ ‘All things flow,’ said the Greeker of the two.”

  Mimsy Mope Grimmer chose this moment to approach the picnic quilt. She sat very close to Billy, even tapping his wrist with lovely brooding intimacy, as though affirming a solemn connection between her knowledge of infantile sexuality and his particular state of affairs. Despite the melancholy blessedness of the gesture, he continued sneaking looks at Una Braun, whose gentle heat he found enveloping.

  “Four to a blanket,” Cyril said.

  “We want to know about your beautiful wife,” Mimsy said. “Tell us when the baby’s coming.”

  “I don’t know when but I know how many and what. Siamese quintuplets. Joined at the top of the head. We’ll have to roll them to school like a hoop.”

  “You beast, Cyril. Don’t. Awful man.”

  “The truth is I’d rather she gave birth to a wisteria tree or pair of mittens. Children make me uneasy. They seem the only ones able to escape their set places. They’re continuous, you see, and mock us in secret ways. I have a recurring daydream about an afternoon game show on television. ‘Abort that Fetus,’ it’s called. The studio audience is composed of obviously pregnant women, far too far gone for any corrective measures to be taken but a great studio audience nonetheless, keying the theme of the show and rooting very hard for the contestants. The applause light flashes and the master of ceremonies comes suaving out, all hair spray and teeth. He looks at the audience, points a jaded finger and says: ‘How would you like to play’—slight pause—‘ab-orrrt that feetusss!’ The women scream and cry and moan and then the first contestant is brought on.”

  “Enough,” Una said. “More, more than enough.”

  “All through marriage I thought to avoid childmaking not by the usual means but by trying to separate myself mentally from the implied sublevel process of biological reproduction. My reasoning was that nothing significant happens without a psychic link. A test, then. An attempt to deny a localized point to those transient energies that guide the reproductive cells. Superstitious self-delusion perhaps. But who’s to say for sure? In any case I remained a distinct and unconnected entity. Myriad, however, has immanence enough for two. At least that’s how I interpret her present condition.”

  “We await the result,” Una said.

  She drifted off to sit in a basket swing attached to the lowest branch of a dawn redwood. Hummer went on about rumors and events, wondering aloud how different kinds of significant announcements might affect phrasing in the finished definition of the word “science.” Perhaps someone here had discovered a new form of matter. Evidence of a buried continent. Signs of a tenth planet in the solar system. Hands curled, he allowed the ends of his fingers to meet and part perhaps twice every second.

  “Tell us about the MIT business,” Mimsy said. “I’ve never heard the details.”

  “There were no details.”

  “Did people really throw stones at each other and overturn cars and the like? I mean was there actual killing in the streets?”

  “I was simply trying to assert that what there is in common between a particular fact and the sentence that asserts this fact can itself be put into a sentence.”

  “And this led to rioting?”

  “It was simply a question of constructing models and then evaluating the structures. Shallow diagrams and deep diagrams.”

  “What was the final toll?” Mimsy said.

  “There wouldn’t have been any problem if I’d been able to arrange total c
omputer access. But somebody named Troxl had leased overlapping time segments on all the area’s computers. Elux Troxl. There wouldn’t have been a problem if I’d been granted access. A Central American, I believe.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “Hiding.”

  “In Central America?”

  “In Germany,” Hummer said. “They’re all in Germany, hiding, lots of them.”

  “When did all this actually happen?” Mimsy said. “I mean the actual killing in the streets.”

  “It was the year everyone was using the words ‘parameter’ and ‘interface.’ But there wouldn’t have been any problem if that fellow hadn’t monopolized computer time.”

  Billy was not interested in plotting the orbits of Jovian moons. If Hummer’s supposition was correct—that they’d brought him here to calculate a planetary path or the mass of a neo-electron—it was a waste of everybody’s time. His kind of mathematics was undertaken solely to advance the art. In time to come, of course, what had been pure might finally be applied. He saw how the virginal circles of Eudoxus had led to a more coherent astronomy, how the conic sections of Apollonius had prefigured the spirit of universal gravitation. The world had its uses, yes; ideas could be rotated to expedient planes. It wasn’t his method to test the disposition of the physical universe but this didn’t mean he reacted skeptically to those who drove hooks into nature. He considered the case of Archimedes, son of astronomer, floating body, lever adept, nude runner, catapulter, weigher of parabolas, tactician of solar power, sketcher of equations in sand and with fingernail on own body anointed in after-bath olive oil, killed by dreamless Romans.

  “Do you ride?” Mimsy said.

  “Ride what?”

  “Well, see, I was wondering about recreation. What sort of active things you do.”

  “The usual.”

  “Golf, watercolors, growing pretty things?”

  “That’s not usual. Is that usual?”

  “I guess it depends,” she said.

  “In handball there’s a thing called a Chinese killer. That’s an active thing I do, hit Chinese killers. It’s when the ball hits right where the wall meets the ground so that there’s no bounce. It’s impossible to return a Chinese killer. The ball just skids along the ground, impossible to return. They have courts here? I could show you.”

  His voice seemed too big for his body. It was rough-edged and fairly deep, delivering every kind of statement with equally sneak bluntness, a dull abrupt impersonal voice that might have belonged to someone who called out names for a living.

  “The ball just skids, does it?”

  “What kind of sex goes on in a place like this?”

  “All sorts, I’d imagine,” Mimsy said.

  “In universities it gets pretty oral, going by what I hear. I was thinking about this place if it’s the same or similar.”

  “Maybe I should poll the staff.”

  “Nice bit of imagery,” Cyril said.

  “I suppose I should have said canvass the members.”

  “In my case, a good idea, however belated. My luck to cast my lot with a hyperfertile woman. Internal contradictions are at the very center of my life. Hooray for transitional logic. Helps expose the counterexamples that haunt our arguments.”

  “Wind chimes,” Hummer said.

  More people came into the garden, indicating the shadow-presence was spreading through the building. Mimsy leaned toward the boy, speaking in a mock whisper.

  “How’s your genital organization?”

  “Remind me to check.”

  “You’re already past your prime, sexually speaking. The golden age is early infancy. Soon after this the corruption of the erotic instinct takes place. In a very short time everything falls apart. The solidarity of opposites is completely shattered. Before you’ve learned to put two words together, you are mired in an existence full of essential dichotomies. I feel free to speak, since you raised the subject yourself a moment ago.”

  “For the body to become unafraid,” Cyril said, “we need to live beyond the brain and with less talkative genitals.”

  “Someone’s installed wind chimes.”

  Only the ashes on his forehead marred Hummer’s antiseptic manner. Cyril looked toward the eighty-foot redwood, calling to Una Braun.

  “Hydromancer, divine us a drink.”

  “Mere hydrologist,” she said. “More’s the pity.”

  “We can’t escape our places, don’t you see? Our sole hope is silver liquid wishboned from the earth. Otherwise forever fixed, our places in the series. That species of tree was once extinct, you know. Stayed that way for millions of years. Then an intrepid man traveled from a distant land with a handful of living seeds. Now the tree bears cones at opposite ends of the earth. Nourishment comes from unexpected places, doesn’t it then, at times?”

  “What’s that mean?” Hummer said.

  “I hope it doesn’t mean Eastern mysticism and Western science,” Una called.

  Mimsy Mope Grimmer bypassed the primroses, stopping to pick a buttercup from a speckled bed. Her place on the grass was taken by Una, legs disappearing under wide skirt, redwood needles clinging here and there.

  “Question of perspective,” Cyril said. “If we’re ever going to reach a definition of the word ‘science,’ we’ve got to admit the possibility that what we think of as obscure ritual and superstition may be perfectly legitimate scientific enterprises. Our own view of the very distant past may be the only thing that needs adjusting. This past, after all, continues to live not only in remote cultural pockets but more and more in the midst of our supercivilized urban centers. Simply admit the possibility. That’s all I say. Primitive kinship systems are not necessarily antiscientific.”

  “Phrasing is the element that makes or breaks the definition,” Hummer said. “The phrasing is the definition. An analysis of how we say what we are saying is itself a statement of the precise meaning of the word we are defining.”

  “No definition of science is complete without a reference to terror,” Cyril said.

  “Explain,” Una said.

  Billy tried to imagine the birth of Cyril’s wife’s baby. It would happen in grim lights violently. A dripping thing trying to clutch to its hole. Dredged up and beaten. Blood and drool and womb mud. How cute, this neon shrieker made to plunge upward, odd-headed blob, this marginal electric glow-thing. Dressed and powdered now. Engineered to abstract design. Cling, suck and cry. Follow with the eye. Gloom and drought of unprotected sleep. Had there been a light in her belly, dim briny light in that pillowing womb, dusk enough to light a page, bacterial smear of light, an amniotic gleam that I could taste, old, deep, wet and warm? Return, return to negative unity.

  “Mysticism’s point of departure is awareness of death, a phenomenon that doesn’t occur to science except as the ultimate horrifying vision of objective inquiry. Every back door is filled with the terror of death. Mysticism, because it started at that very point, tends to become progressively rational.”

  “Gabble, hiss, gabble,” Hummer said.

  For the first time since the “picnic” began, Cyril Kyriakos changed position. He sat upright, legs crossed, and took off his shirt. Then, beginning to speak, he unbuckled a figure-eight harness and proceeded to adjust some locks, rings, cables and joints before removing his left arm from his body. Automatically, Billy looked away even as he continued to stare. Cyril put his shirt back on. He placed the arm and its suspension system across his lap, where the sunlight accentuated the high shine of the plastic laminate material. A small emblem set just below the triceps pad carried the words: A PRODUCT OF OMCO RESEARCH.

  “It’s been suggested that the logic I espouse isn’t rigorous enough to do justice to the sheer dispersion of modern thought. But wasn’t Aristotle too lax and Russell too insistent on being all-devouring? Sometimes I think I’d like to relocate, as they say in the business community. Give me algebraic invariants to play around with. Or too, too solid geometry.”

 
; Some people in one of the lower gardens were seated in the kind of triangular pattern studied in depth by early believers in the selfhood of numbers. What was ten was also four, triangle and password, tetraktys, holy fourfoldness. Hummer got up and left. Una got up, smiling, and shook out her skirt. Cyril nodded, rising, making ready to go, the woman lifting the quilt, smiling once more at the boy on the grass, while the man, Cyril, headed off now, side by side with Una, the plastic arm in his right hand and held parallel to the ground, glinting a bit, still, as they moved into the distance. Billy heard the wind chimes now, tone surprisingly precise, a sequence of whole-numbered harmonies, music as mathematics whistled into.

  Hours later he stood naked in his room looking around for his pajamas, a moldy sock still in his hand. He felt something of himself in the material, a corporeal dampness, the faintest sense of coating, of his own rubbed-off yeast. His fear of the body’s fundamental reality had not yet fully disclosed itself. In fact he often occupied himself with thoughts of rot. His own death, wake and burial were recurring themes. Of secondary interest was the putrefaction of his immediate family and then of close relatives and then more distant and then of friends in descending order of importance and finally mere acquaintances, broken down to compost. This was formal rot to be enjoyed on a theoretical level. Equally marvelous were the jams and scabs of his own living body. Excrement worried him a bit. Shitpiss. He did not have reveries about excrement. Not his own and certainly not anyone else’s. There was something about waste material that defied systematic naming. It was as though the many infantile names for fecal matter and urine were concessions to the fact that the real names (whichever these were) possessed a secret power that inhibited all but the most ceremonial utterance. He saw a segment of pajama leg sticking out of a stack of pillowcases and other linen that sat in a basket near the bathroom door. The sock in his hand reminded him of something he’d known for a long time in the vaguest of ways, a sort of accumulated fact; namely, he’d developed a personal stink.