Ratner's Star

by Don DeLillo

  “I know who you are,” the woman said.

  He opened his eyes, not bothering to force a polite smile. She gestured him forward. He went to sit next to her among tall plants and scattered magazines. He had never been so close to anyone this old. It occurred to him that when he was a child he wouldn’t have thought twice about this episode, having viewed old people as static forms of theater, even less changeable than he was. But now the simple act of sharing a sofa with this woman filled him with distant suspicions. He was alert to sour odors or the possible grossness of the inside of her mouth. He didn’t like the idea that she was striking in appearance, feeling that people her age should travel in groups in order to melt into each other’s presence. Rouge seemed to be baked into her hands, face and arms. A black silk scarf was wound tightly around her head, making him think she might be bald. She wore a full cape with fur collar.

  “Do you say yes to life?”

  “I guess so,” he said. “Sure, why not.”

  “In the science of subjective mind-healing, both cause and effect exist in the full and perfect idea that the mind is Mind. Everything depends on mental typography. This is why we use capital letters so often. Not only in the pamphlets in our reading rooms but in the way we picture our thoughts. Fear-Chains of Asthma. Dominant Drift. Ether of Timeless Being. My name is Viverrine Gentian. Who are you?”

  “You said you knew.”

  “And so I do,” she said. “I was simply wondering if we agreed.”

  “What’s that book?”

  “It’s a story called Somnium. A beautiful and extremely rare book. Written in Latin with a smidgen of Hebrew and Greek.”

  “What’s it about?”

  “It’s an experimental novel, an allegory, a lunar geography, an artful autobiography, a cryptic scientific tract, a work of science fiction. A man goes to sleep and dreams he is reading a book. In the book is a boy whose mother makes a living by selling goatskin pouches to sailors as charms. When the boy is fourteen she sells him to a sea captain who leaves him on an island. Here he learns astronomy from the famous Tycho Brahe. In five years he returns to his mother, who announces her intention of calling forth, or stating as a proposition, her demon-teacher, the spirit of knowledge. Mother and son sit with robes over their heads and hear a voice. It delivers a veiled narrative of the moon. Only certain people are fit to undertake a journey to the moon, says the voice, and here I quote verbatim: ‘Especially suited are dried-up old crones who since childhood have ridden over great stretches of the earth at night in tattered cloaks on goats or pitchforks.’ The voyager must make his journey during a lunar eclipse, traveling along the axis of the cone of the shadow cast by the earth on the moon.”

  “So far I like it.”

  “The year of the dream was sixteen aught eight and the dreamer’s sleep was dissolved in wind and rain, as was the book he was reading. Perhaps you’d like to feel it in your hands.”

  Her smile was a ghastly pressed rose. Carefully he turned the shaky pages, all so old they appeared on the verge of self-granulation. His respect for the antiquity of the volume was secondary to a swarming fear of the woman’s reaction if the book should in fact crumble in his hands. She might lash out or spit. (K.b.i.s.f.b.) Speak a phrase so devastatingly apt he would never be able to forget it. Taunt him with logical paradox.

  “Here.”

  Viverrine Gentian took back the book. Sunlight was everywhere now, a late-afternoon profusion, the air bursting with musical dust. She appeared to withdraw slightly, sinking further into the cape.

  “When must the voyager make his journey?”

  “During a lunar eclipse,” he said.

  “What was the year of the dream?”

  “Sixteen aught eight.”

  “True prayer is scientific,” she said. “The answer to a prayer is in the prayer when it is prayed. This is called Mind Science Unity. Cap M, cap S, cap U. When you touch yourself in the male or female region, you dementalize the secular prayer. This is important for someone your age.”

  “What about washing?”

  “When did you last wash?”

  “This morning.”

  “How do you know those were your parts you washed?”

  “Who else’s would they be?”

  “Can you be absolutely certain those weren’t female privates you were washing?”

  “I ought to know my own by now.”

  “The genitals are famous for the tricks they play on the brain. It’s merely a question of genus, isn’t it? Shape-changing, I mean. A question of numbering one’s holes. Did you look carefully at the items you washed?”

  “I know my own.”

  “When you touch yourself too often, you change the shape.”

  “What shape?”

  “It’s no longer pleasant here,” she said. “I much prefer the solarium when the sun’s not shining.”

  He sat with feet well apart and arms not only extended but lifted slightly above the arms of the chair. He was fairly sure nothing would happen to him if his arms touched the arms of the chair but what worried him slightly was the fact that the arms of the chair were called “arms” and that his arms were also called “arms” and it was just barely possible that this business of self-touching applied not only to parts of the body but to parts of the body and parts of other objects that happened to have the same names. Arms of chairs, legs of tables, hands of clocks, eyes of needles. He knew that what the old woman said would not have permanent effect but for the time being he was determined to be alert, particularly careful of where he sat and how he conducted himself in the bathroom. He took comfort in the properties of sunlight and in sunlight’s negative print—the shadow cast by the armillary sphere. He couldn’t see the shadow from his chair in the solarium but he knew the figure it made on the earth below could be one shape and only one, that of a pristine ellipse.

  4

  EXPANSION

  Slowly he pivoted, careful to note every square foot of floor space. It was definite. Someone had dismantled and removed the cubicle in which U.F.O. Schwarz had told him about the radio message from outer space. Nothing in particular had replaced it. Around him, everywhere he looked, were the component parts of Space Brain itself, far from dormant now. The computer extended to the ends of the complex, coded along the way by various colors, lights, bells and strange arrays of symbols. Technicians were at work, perhaps a hundred of them, tending the huge machine. There were several levels of noise, people in shifting groups, rotary units turning, a sense of hypertrophia, something growing outward toward a limit. A small industrial vehicle came to a stop alongside him. It was equipped with a sidecar and carried a sticker on its front bumper that read BEEP BEEP. Behind the wheel was Shirl Trumpy, a woman who often laughed right through her own words (he was soon to learn), making it hard at times to understand what she was saying and therefore why she was laughing.

  “You’re late,” she said. “I’m on my third lap of the day.”

  “I forgot the appointed time.”

  He climbed into the sidecar and they moved off. As she steered around objects and people, Trumpy explained that Space Brain was beginning to spread beyond its own hardware. Originally they’d used the smallest crystals in existence and the result was a stored-program sequential machine—of unprecedented sophistication—weighing only fifty pounds. But it was too successful. It began to solve problems that couldn’t be posed without new components and new housing. The problem board had to be expanded. This led to additions elsewhere. Space Brain helped with the additions and was therefore self-designed, at least in part.

  “Ridiculous, of course, to refer to it as a brain,” she said. “But we had a contest to name the machine and ‘Space Brain’ was the winning entry. So we’re stuck with it. Tremendous excitement over your presence. Word’s been getting around. We all feel this is finally it.”

  “Where are we driving?”

  “Code analysis checkpoint.”

  “What for?”

 
“To show you what we’ve come up with so far in the way of statistical analysis. One notion everybody agrees on. We’re the only ones who picked up the signal from the planet that’s orbiting Ratner’s star because we’re the only ones in the world who are tuned to the secret frequency. It’s our frequency and it’s secret. Obviously they’re a super-technical civilization. It’s up to you to tell us what they’re saying.”

  “Other telescopes have picked up signals. This has been taking place for years. They all claim it’s outer space making contact. Everybody thinks they’re hearing from some superior beings. What makes these beings so superior?”

  “Relax, Mr. T.”

  “Have they proved Fermat’s Last Theorem?”

  Speaking and laughing simultaneously, Shirl Trumpy headed the vehicle to a remote part of the complex, stopping finally behind a series of blank display screens that were part of the computer’s graphics unit. He had a little trouble getting out of the sidecar and she annoyed him by offering to help. She was a lanky woman with prominent bones and when she laughed he had the feeling her skeletal structure would crack in a dozen places. It irritated him when people enjoyed themselves with such intensity. They looked ugly laughing. If they could see what they looked like, they’d probably learn how to restrict themselves to a smile. She led him to a lone console near the display screens and asked him to press a button. A card dropped from a slot and he took it in his hand to study. It was about eight inches long and six wide, covered with vertical and horizontal lines forming small squares of equal size, most of them blacked in, the demarcating lines being pale blue in color. This was a sequence grid, Trumpy explained. The pulses from Ratner’s star were represented as black squares, the gaps or intervals as white squares. Many such grids had been devised, both by Space Brain and by the people who had tried to decipher the message. These diagrams were meant to help the searchers ascertain whether or not the message had been intended as a two-dimensional picture. Using such a picture, she pointed out, the extraterrestrials might convey an enormous amount of information even though they’d transmitted nothing more than ninety-nine pulses interrupted twice—a total of one hundred and one units of binary information. She pressed the button a dozen times, getting that many sequence grids from the slot and explaining why a statistical analysis had failed in each case to confirm that the pattern was indeed an attempt to convey an intelligible picture or a series of coded symbols that might tell us something about the senders’ physical characteristics, the chemical composition of life on their planet and so forth. The fact that there were only two gaps (or white spaces) led most people to conclude that the message was numeric in character rather than pictorial.

  The small squares made him think of graph paper. Early days of compass and straight-edge. Thin blue lines intersecting to the ends of the page. Horizontal x and vertical y. Numbers as points, as positions on a surface, and equations as sequences of points, as geometric shapes, and shapes as sequences of numbers sifted through the intersecting lines and represented as equations. He remembered exploring those otherworldly curves from one degree to the next, lemniscate and folium, progressing eventually to an ungraphable class of curve, no precise slope at any point, tangent-defying mind marvel.

  Trumpy described how Space Brain had investigated the possibilities of explaining the message in terms of wavefront reconstruction, contour mapping, a simulation response program that was part of their (the Ratnerians’) computer universe. None of these inquiries yielded the slightest evidence that the message was of intelligent origin.

  “So you think it’s pure numbers or nothing,” he said.

  “Exactly.”

  “I think it’s nothing.”

  “True, the signals weren’t repeated. But we’re confident this is genuine contact.”

  “What happens next?”

  “You talk to LoQuadro,” she said. “He used to do your kind of mathematics before he had the first of his attacks, so maybe the two of you between you can figure out the star code and then I can go back to programming a search for what’s true after the computer has declared everything false.”

  “What’s this about attacks?”

  “Sleep attacks,” she said. “Attacks of deep sleep.”

  “What happens, he falls down?”

  “Sleep spells. Recurring and uncontrollable.”

  “And you really think we’re in contact.”

  “Is Ratner’s star an illusion? Of course not. It’s out there and everyone knows it. Is the planet’s existence a hoax? Ridiculous. There’s clear evidence of a planet in orbit around the star. Is someone transmitting signals? Absolutely. Is our synthesis telescope receiving on the secret frequency? Nods of affirmation.”

  “But isn’t it possible to give instructions to the computer to make it print out a wrong series of zeros and ones?”

  “A child could do it.”

  “Then maybe that’s why Endor or nobody else could find a pattern. There is no pattern. Everything got jumbled up between the telescope and the computer.”

  “Theoretically it’s possible. I don’t deny it. But it would take an awfully clever child.”

  “That almost makes sense.”

  “An awfully clever child or a very psychotic adult.”

  “So it’s possible this whole thing might be a waste of time is what you’re saying.”

  “Many things are a waste of time,” she said. “How can we learn from the past unless we repeat it? Time for me to go, Mr. T. Stay at code analysis checkpoint.”

  She laughed, said something, got into the little vehicle and drove off. He dragged a chair to the console and sat down. His mind blunted by the cybernating drone in the distance, he leaned toward the console and put his head on his arms just as he’d done so many times in first grade during the ten-minute rest period every afternoon, nicks in the wood desk, sleep pulling, chalk trails in the air. From a series of three dreams had evolved a life fulfilled in mathematics and philosophy. The dreams occurred within a single night. The first two concerned the terror of nature not understood and the last of them harbored a poem that pointed a way to the tasks of science. The world was comprehensible, a plane of equations, all knowledge able to be welded, all nature controllable. These were dreams generated by the motion of a straight line, a penciled breath of linear tension between day and night, the limit that separates numbers, positive from negative, real from imaginary, the dream-edge of discrete and continuous, history and prehistory, matter and its mirror image. The dreamer, a soldier in repose, applied the methods of algebra to the structure of geometry, bone-setting the measured land, expressing his system in terms of constants, variables and position coordinates, all arranged in due time on the scheme of crossed lines forming squares of equal size. Compass and straight-edge. His periodic segregation from the other children. Private time to plot coordinates on pale blue lines. Then rest at last. Head settled on well-notched wood. Fingers identifying every penknifed name and date. He loved a girl who squinted, Billy did, but this was just the first grade and he knew he’d love again.

  When LoQuadro touched the back of his neck, he nearly leaped from the console. With his foot the man moved a chair across the floor and sat next to the boy, who wasn’t sure how long LoQuadro had been standing behind him. The latter wore steel-rimmed spectacles and a gray suit and tie. He was nervously alert, seeming to be engaged in self-espionage, ever attentive to the fluctuations of electric potential in his brain.

  “We can discover the truth or falsehood of our own final designs only if we teach ourselves to think as a single planetary mind. This is the purpose of Field Experiment Number One.”

  “So I hear.”

  “True or false. Yes or no. Zero or one. Data is processed in. Current travels through the core magnets in the memory unit. The problem is transistorized and solved. The answer is processed out on cards, tapes or sheets of paper. Computers are like children. Yes-no, yes-no, yes-no. Space Brain is a superhybrid. A little bit of yin in yang. A micr
odot of yang in yin. This machine is a science in itself. Bi-Levelism, I call it. I’d like very much to take you into void core storage. It may help you see the message in a new perspective.”

  “What do you mean by take me into?”

  “Physically.”

  “The woman before said it’s stretching out past its own hardware. That doesn’t sound like something I want to get taken into physically.”

  “The problem concerns the true nature of expansion,” the man said. “Consider science itself. It used to be thought that the work of science would be completed in the very near future. This was, oh, the seventeenth century. It was just a matter of time before all knowledge was integrated and made available, all the inmost secrets pried open. This notion persisted for well over two hundred years. But the thing continues to expand. It grows and grows. It curls into itself and bends back and then thrusts outward in a new direction. It refuses to be contained. Every time we make a breakthrough we think this is it: the breakthrough. But the thing keeps pushing out. It breaks through the breakthrough.”

  “What thing?”

  “Our knowledge of the world. The world itself. Each, the other and both. They’re one and the same, after all. It’s been said that philosophy teaches us to talk with an appearance of truth about all things and to make ourselves admired by the less learned. There’s one branch of philosophy this definition doesn’t cover. Bi-Levelism. Bi-Levelism teaches us to talk with an appearance of truth and falsity about all things and to make ourselves admired by the more learned. True-false. Zero-one. Yes-no. On-off. Come, we’ll visit the void core.”