Ratner's Star

by Don DeLillo

  “They leased.”

  “What do they need Space Brain for?”

  “Didn’t say.”

  “I guess if someone’s in hiding, it figures he won’t tell you what he wants your computer for.”

  “Quite the modern master of sarcasm, aren’t you?” LoQuadro said. “Anyway he wasn’t in hiding. He was in isolation. There’s a big difference.”

  “I heard hiding.”

  “We’re going to the outer void core. From there we can work our way down between the augment interrupt mechanism. In theory there isn’t the slightest obstacle in our path.”

  “Wait.”

  “That’s where the dream originates.”

  “Wait please.”

  “In an unnamed sector at the center of the void core.”

  LoQuadro made a sudden turn and led the boy past a group of workmen installing tape drive units at a frenzied pace. He didn’t remember passing this area with the woman in the funny truck. He wanted to heed his own words (“Wait please”) but he kept right on moving as if he were being drawn into LoQuadro’s wake through natural enforcement of some low-lying aerodynamic law. They walked through a blinking corridor and into a semicircular storeroom full of folding chairs partially folded. LoQuadro approached a small door at the far end of the curved wall. The door was no more than three feet high, leading Billy to think it was some kind of emergency escape panel similar to the metal grating in his canister. There was no doorknob in evidence but he noticed a small white circular device set into the door. Maybe a bell or buzzer. Sliding door leading to an elevator maybe. There were no printed warnings or coded symbols. Only the small inscription: OMCO RESEARCH. Looming above the door LoQuadro turned to face him.

  “Forgot the goggles,” he said. “Have to go back for them. Can’t go in there without goggles. You’ll have to wait here. You’re not authorized to draw equipment or even to enter the area where equipment is drawn. Am I correct? You have limited access.”

  “Nobody told me one way or the other.”

  “Your canister has what kind of module?”

  “Limited input.”

  “Then you have limited access. The two go together. Promise me you’ll be here when I get back with the goggles.”

  “I definitely promise.”

  “But will you definitely be here?”

  “I didn’t go away last time you left.”

  “I’d like some further assurance. All my life people have been making promises to me and consistently breaking them. What further assurance can you give me?”

  “I give you my word.”

  “Not nearly enough,” LoQuadro said.

  “I’ll swear on a stack of Bibles.”

  “Forget Bibles.”

  “Any stack.”

  “What about a stack of books of my choosing?”

  “What will you put in there?” Billy said. “Give me some titles.”

  “First say you’ll swear.”

  “First tell me what you meant when you said that thing about the dream.”

  “What did I say?”

  “It originates in the void core.”

  “Actual fact.”

  “Because if you’re saying the computer has dreams, I saw that movie on ‘Hollywood Ghoul School’ a long time ago.”

  “D-r-e-a-m.”

  “Which is what?”

  “Discrete retrieved entry-assembled memory,” LoQuadro said. “A series of data flashes in mnemonic code form tend to occur in certain nonoperational phases and are later retrieved.”

  “The guy ends up going crazy after his father and the girl take apart the computer and they find little pieces of baby human brain tissue grafted onto the circuits, which explains why the hospital was missing all those kids.”

  LoQuadro’s right foot was tapping uncontrollably. Its movements did not seem related to any other part of him. Tapping in this manner he resembled a wildly impractical household robot designed to step on passing insects. Seconds later he toppled into a cluster of partly folded chairs. Billy thought the fall would wake him but it didn’t. Neither did the noise of crashing chairs. Nevertheless the boy backed quietly out of the room. He didn’t try to imagine what was on the other side of the little door. It didn’t occur to him to peek inside or even knock. Void core. The name was enough to send him in the other direction.

  In his canister he thought about the message from Ratner’s star. One hundred and one total characters. As U.F.O. Schwarz had pointed out, one hundred and one was the first three-digit prime—indivisible except by itself and the number one. Possibly important. He thought for a moment about the pulses or ones. Fourteen. Twenty-eight. Fifty-seven. This, in digits, was a recurring decimal. One four two eight five seven. Worth thinking about.

  The answer, assuming there was a question, had to be simple. He tried to think along the lines of the simplest arithmetic. One zero one. Ninety-nine ones and two zeros. One four two eight five seven. Fourteen gap twenty-eight gap fifty-seven. He knew the others who’d worked at decoding the message had started out the same way but there was always a chance they’d overlooked something obvious. He thought of Softly wobbling in a rocker on his front porch in Pennyfellow. What would Softly do? Crack a joke and whistle through his pinky fingers. Which is about what this whole thing deserves.

  There was a light knock on the door, a sort of loose-knuckled frolicsome blow. He found a woman standing outside and remembered to move back so she could enter. Her clothes were of the freely swirling type that might be classified either as terribly dramatic evening wear or out-and-out pajamas. She was tall and silvery, her expression one of painstaking animation, as if she didn’t realize it was no longer necessary to be vivacious. A ribbon was awry in her hair and there were specks of confetti on her shirt and pants.

  “I’m Soma Tobias.”

  “H’o.”

  “Were you at my party?”

  “I don’t think so. Be seated anywhere. What party?”

  “My going-away party.”

  “When was it?”

  “It started last night and it’s still going on. I just wandered away for a while. Saw the light under your door and knew you were up.”

  “It’s only afternoon,” he said. “Sure I’m up.”

  “But don’t you love to languish in bed all day long? To grow more feeble by the hour like so many French geniuses of the arts and sciences. Don’t you think there’s a wistful tenderness attached to those brilliantly apathetic periods of time we tend to spend in bed during the day? I fully expected to find you a-dawdle in your twofold.”

  “Are you drunk?”

  “It’s my going-away party,” she said. “I’m going away.”

  “What were you here for in the first place?”

  “Checking the structural soundness. Making sure they did justice to my concept.”

  “Are you the woman architect?”

  “Some years ago I abandoned myself to the rhythms of the cycloid. Most gorgeous curve in nature. A figure of magical properties. It was then I resolved to apply that shape to a building, a city, a giant tombstone if need be—whatever kind of commission I could wangle.”

  “Tombstone?”

  “Pascal became seriously ill the same year he did important work on the cycloid. They found a lesion on his brain.”

  “I just read something about that.”

  “What do you think of my design?”

  “It’s good from a distance.”

  “What about close up or inside?”

  “I’m nodding.”

  “The Jesuits oppose the cycloid form. Did you know that? There’s an old man named Verbene who’s been after me ever since I got here.”

  “How could anybody be against a geometric shape?”

  “The Jesuits oppose anything that can be turned upside down and still give pleasure. The cycloid of course is one such thing. Stunning gravitational wedding bowl. Marvelous pendulum properties. This priest Verbene has been at me hammer and tongs.”
r />   “What do you call that outfit you’re wearing?”

  “His red ants give me a pain,” Soma said.

  “What do you mean, red ants?”

  “He studies red ants. He’s founded a whole system of learning based on red ants. It’s called red ant metaphysics. Met him yet?”

  “He studies red ants?”

  “Red ants and their secretions.”

  “And you think he’s after you because things upside down shouldn’t give pleasure?”

  “The cycloid is geometry. I don’t know why they have to get sex mixed up in it. Really I can’t get over my surprise at not finding you in bed. Mathematics and pain. Bed-rest and meditation. Growing feebler by the hour. Puling and moaning in the iridescent fatigue of your genius.”

  He listened to her talk about the going-away party. It was like a monologue on insomnia. Or insomnia itself. Not that he minded. He had no special desire to resume work on the code. And it was nice having a woman around, even if she was all partied out, too weary to make dissolute history on his behalf. Beyond Soma Tobias’s presence, however; beyond her voice; beyond the objects in the room, the room itself; beyond all these was the picture of a pale blue line, the locus of a point having one degree of freedom. Blue on white. Figures and movements. Pulses humming through the anesthesia of coordinate four-space. Was he meant to seek an equation and stretch its variable frame across an interstellar graph? Might be worth exploring. Axiomatic method. One fleeting motion true of another. The coordinate system had made calculus imaginable and this study of fluid nature’s nonsequential sum had fueled the growth of modern mathematics. He saw it crowding its boundaries. Coordinates numbering n. Nature’s space and his. To increase in size by the addition of material through assimilation. To become extended or intensified. What did mathematics grow against? Not nature but imagination. Yet when it poured through the borders, did it return to the physical world? Fundamental laws. Pebbles racing in vain down the slopes of an inverted cycloid. All minds meet in equal time at the bottom of the geometric hole.

  “There he was,” Soma mumbled. “Fourteen years old. Spending entire mornings in bed. Thinking how utterly useless were all those demonstrations of the authoritarian mind. All those sophistries and subtle equivocations. Frail of body, fond of bed.”

  “Who, Pascal?”

  “You weren’t listening.”

  “I was thinking,” he said.

  She rose and moved toward the door, so tired she sagged, defeated cheer still painted on her face. He followed along urbanely, managing to dodge her elbow when she opened the door.

  “You’re very spry for your age,” she said.

  “I almost understand that remark.”

  In seconds she was gone. He noticed the emblem sketched on the teleboard screen, a star pentagram drawn with the unbroken motion of the hand, and he knew Endor wanted to see him.

  5

  DICHOTOMY

  Through the night there had been a competition in the topiary garden, people flying box kites adorned with paper lanterns. Prizes for design, color, maneuverability, speed of ascent, time in the air. Several kites had fluttered into soft flame, every such event accompanied by sounds of pleasurable regret from below. The burning frameworks remained briefly aloft, no longer parts of flying toys but in the lazy breezes of that perfect night resembling a class of mythical invertebrates determined to burn themselves away rather than return to the porous earth, where they’d earlier shed the silk of transfiguration.

  In the morning the bulletproof Cadillac headed due east. Billy once again had the back seat to himself. The driver was a man named Kidder. The road was very straight and he barely had to move his hands on the wheel. He was so motionless in fact that Billy was reminded of LoQuadro’s body disrupted by the human glitch. Reverse dissociation.

  “We’re not too far from the silos.”

  “What silos?”

  “You must be a city boy,” Kidder said.

  “That’s right.”

  “You never find silos in cities. That’s true no matter where you travel in the world. You never find a silo in or near a city.”

  “How far is it, where we’re going?”

  “Ten miles hole to hole. That’s supposed to be a joke. Door to door. Hole to hole. Get it?”

  “I only get half of it.”

  “I’ll settle for that,” Kidder said.

  “Door to hole. That’s the part I get.”

  “Let’s not talk for a while. I’m concentrating on the road. I can’t drive on straightaways unless I really bear down. Even as I talk, I’m paying no attention to what I say for fear of losing my concentration. I have no idea whether I’m making sense or not. For all I know I’m speaking in a foreign language. Or even crazier than that. If I lose my concentration, I veer. It’s like something’s grasping at the car.”

  “The last time I was in this car there were two other people where you’re sitting.”

  “Then you weren’t in this car,” the man said. “You were with different people in a different car.”

  “How fast does it say you’re going?”

  “A jack rabbit could keep up with this car the way I’m driving right now.”

  “Never.”

  “Do you know how fast our friend the rabbit travels at top speed?”

  “No.”

  “Seventy-four feet.”

  “Per second?”

  “Per second per second.”

  “I don’t even get half of that one.”

  “Maybe there’s nothing to get,” Kidder said.

  “I thought we weren’t talking.”

  “Cute as a tack, aren’t you?”

  The driver gradually eased off on the accelerator. There wasn’t much scenery in the area. The morning was clear and mild. Billy had made double knots with the long laces of his low-cut sneakers. He wore jeans and a pullover shirt. Something hit the windshield now, leaving a melancholy gob on the tinted glass. Endor. What does he want? Why is he behaving this way? A famous person for thirty years and he’s living in the ground. One failure and he gives up everything? Maybe it’s not even genuine contact. Just some radio waves traveling through space. Coming from a hydrogen cloud or all somebody’s idea of a joke. Playing tunes on the computer. Endor had married three times, suffered injuries in two wars, flown jet aircraft to nearly record-breaking altitudes to do photographic research in astronomy. He had written several books of a speculative nature, best-sellers every one. He was an accomplished cellist and founder of an all-mathematician chamber group. Heads of state had honored him in marble halls.

  “We’re there,” Kidder said.

  “Why don’t you stop?”

  “What do you think I’m doing? It takes time to stop. You don’t just stop. I have no idea what I’m saying to you at the present time because I’m engaged in bringing this car to a complete stop and my attention is so focused that I’m not aware of my own conversation. So you’ll excuse me if I make a foolish remark or two. Even now, with the car almost totally brought to a stop, I couldn’t tell you what words I’m in the process of saying.”

  Billy walked thirty yards to the edge of the hole. Endor was standing at the bottom of the hole, exactly where everyone had said he’d be. The hole was about fifteen feet long, eight wide and twelve deep. There seemed to be another hole inside the first, a tunnel gouged out of the dirt at one corner of the original hole, the hole proper. Endor’s shirt and trousers were well shredded. The five-rayed star he’d always worn on a chain around his neck was no longer there. His sage face was sunburned and muddy. Several small crawling things moved about in his white beard. Hands on hips he looked up at the boy, who was reluctant to sit at the edge of the hole (with legs dangling in suitably youthful fashion) for reasons he did not care to articulate to himself.

  “You’re the only one I’ll talk to, lad.”

  “I’m ready for anything you have to say.”

  “I sneaked up to the computer area yesterday to get one last look
at all the sequence grids and radio maps and print-outs and other crapola. The whole stinking computer universe. Hoping it would all come together in this one last look. But it stayed apart. It definitely did not come together. Back to your hole, Endor. Get back before they see you and start moving their lips. Expecting you to react to their idiot phonemes. Talk to the boy. The boy’s done pure work in the pure field. Am I right, Big Bill? You’ll find the answer. It’s yours for the asking. You’re the right mind in the right body. Wouldn’t surprise me if you’ve found it already. Am I right? You’ve deciphered the message?”

  Without waiting for a reply he lowered himself to his knees and crawled across the floor of the hole into the second hole. Billy didn’t try to see what he was doing in there. Couldn’t possibly result in anything beneficial. He turned to make sure the Cadillac was still in the area. Kidder leaned on the front door, flipping a coin. About ten minutes passed. Endor crawled out of the lateral hole. He appeared to be chewing on something. He looked up at the boy but didn’t bother standing.

  “If all matter possesses one nature and seeks to unite with all other matter, why are things flying apart?” he said. “Answer me that.”

  He crawled back into the second hole and remained concealed there for several more minutes. When he emerged this time he got to his feet.

  “Our galactic center is leaking gas like crazy. What does it mean?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Colossal explosion, methinks. It’s so dense in there. A million times denser than where we are. Planets get torn out of orbit in that kind of density. Too many stars. Too much force and counterforce. In just our galaxy alone, do you know how many stars there are?”

  “No.”

  “That’s just our galaxy alone. It’s just too much, too big. There’s no need for everything to be so spread out. Why is the universe so big? And why despite the billions and billions of stars and hundreds of millions of galaxies is there so much space left over? They say things are still fleeing from the original explosion. Things flee, eventually to come together again, blue instead of red. What do they say about me, Big Bill? Do they say I eat worms?”

  Endor crawled into the second hole again. He was gone for about half an hour this time. The boy sat crosslegged on the grass, flicking his index finger at the tips of his shoelaces. The famous scientist returned and got slowly to his feet. Strips of clothing hung loosely from his lean body. Everywhere on his face was a sense of the wailing contradiction that lives along the edges of science and time. He scratched at his beard and spat some rusty stuff into the mud.