Ratner's Star

by Don DeLillo

  “What’s that?” Hoad shouted.

  “Why bother telling me this kind of news? My job is supposed to be the code, break the code. What’s the difference to me whether Ratner’s star is one star or two stars? The message exists. That’s all that matters to me.”

  “Exactly what I just said.”

  “I didn’t hear.”

  “Exactly what I said. The message exists. Your job is the code, not the star. But we wanted to tell you about the star because we thought it might help you with the code. Now that you know there are two stars instead of one, you might want to alter your calculations. Or at least view the transmission in a different light. I don’t know. We don’t pretend to know. We hope you’ll know. Come on—Poebbels is waiting in the chopper.”

  “I’m not sure I want to ride in that thing.”

  “I’ve logged I don’t know how many hours in spiral-wing aircraft,” Hoad yelled. “It’s safer than your own two feet.”

  “Who is Poebbels?”

  “Who?”

  “Poebbels, who’s waiting in the chopper.”

  “Poebbels,” Hoad shouted. “Senior to me. Respected and feared. Supervises plausibility studies. The transmission. The telescope. The computer. The star system and planet. Othmar Poebbels. I hope he dies.”

  “You hope he dies?”

  “You weren’t supposed to hear that.”

  “Why are you wearing that outfit?”

  “Poebbels insists we dress this way. Come on, let’s get going. Whatever you do, don’t act frightened. Even if you’re terrifically scared of being aloft in a small aircraft, don’t, whatever you do, show it. Poebbels hates to fly. If he knows you’re scared, he’ll be doubly scared. I don’t think I could bear that.”

  The only good thing about the trip, from Billy’s viewpoint, was the part where he approached the helicopter with ducked head and unnatural scuttling steps. Although he wasn’t wearing a hat he put his right hand to his head as he proceeded importantly to the aircraft. Despite his bent-over shoulder-first approach, he didn’t feel foolish. He liked getting on the helicopter; it was, after all, an executive helicopter and he felt as he imagined six-figure executives probably feel when they duck under the blades and fly off to lavish spas for rub-downs and hard bargaining.

  He was seated behind the two men. Hoad at the controls manipulated switches. The noise inside the aircraft reached a punishing intensity, all conversation edging gradually toward the level of an outright scream. Poebbels was about twice Hoad’s age, Hoad twice Billy’s. The boy had noticed, as he climbed aboard, that Poebbels had very heavy eyes. They gleamed in his head like die-cut precision parts. Hard to imagine eyes like that ever slipping out of focus. Above the eyes was a single broadband eyebrow and above that was dark vigorous hair growing downward into Poebbels’s forehead. The noise level brought about contorted looks on all three faces, an automatic shrinking inward.

  “We agree the message exists,” Hoad cried. “One star or two, the message is not negated. The kid agrees on this. We agree. The pulses and gaps exist. We have contact. There is transmission. Something intelligent lives in the vicinity of Ratner’s star.”

  “Get this zombie ship in the air,” Poebbels screamed.

  As the helicopter abruptly rose, Poebbels’s entire body became taut. Billy felt his own fear uncurl from his stomach (a slick veneer of freak tissue) and dissolve into artless vapors. Poebbels, unclenching a bit, turned slightly in his seat and, although his mouth was only inches from Hoad’s right ear, began to direct to Billy a series of high-volume remarks.

  “I have work-ed in many fields,” he shouted. “I have done work with discrete things. I have done other work with continuous things. How do discrete things relate each to the other? I have wish-ed to answer this question. In the final resolve, all there is to do with discrete things is to count them. One two three four five. There is to count them and there is to use them in a universal logical language, which I hope one day to live to see. I am individually distinct. The individual Hoad is equally distinct. There is unbroken space between us. Of the continuous, I have also done good work. Flow and grow. This is my way to put this work in a short rhyming phrase. Flow and grow. To help me remember. This is what we do right now in this zombie ship. Rate of change every little instant. Move, movement, motion. All together in one smooth whoosh. We have broad wings and soar in untrammel-ed way through the sky of creatures of scant mass. If I give the order to suspend and float on air, then we are all of a sudden a discrete thing and good only to be counted. I make second order and we are continuous again. Flow and grow. I believe this is the meaning giv-ed by the star people. How to join together discrete with continuous. I have hope in your methods, smart fellow. To be sure, this is purely theoretical hope, since it is a fact that my studies in plausibility lead without escape to the conclusion that all events thus far pertaining to the star are lacking in verisimilitude, acceptability and likelihood.”

  In the distance, beyond the main structure, Billy could see the synthesis telescope—hundreds of tiny dish antennas. A fear bubble traveled upward through his respiratory system. The eye-narrowing mouth-tensing expressions remained unchanged on all three faces. The sun was low now in the western sky. Othmar Poebbels, resuming his address to the boy, once again began screaming in his assistant’s ear.

  “Simultaneous great men of history,” he said. “Ideas bred in two scientific minds at one and the same time. Many examples. Two men thousands of miles away. Speak unsame languages. Differ in all respects. Twin theory phenomena. The dance of two radiant minds in the endless night. But always some conflict sneaks in. Dichotomy. Clash and counterclash. You have seen Endor. A sight to see. Digging in the ground. Endor and Poebbels. In the early days we did much good work together. I have progress-ed little by little to the belief that all thought can be put in scientific language which we then manipulate according to strict laws. Submit all reasoning to calculation. Throw in symbolic structure. In this way we end man-made error in the universe. The purest of pure science. This is my hope for the future of everything. Endor meanwhile is trapped in matter. I have talk-ed in this intimate way to show you my respect of your career, small American colleague.”

  The aircraft began its slow passage down. Immediately all tension vanished. The noise and screaming, the vibrations, the grimaces, the fear bubbles, the lack of sufficient space—all were forgotten at once. Billy watched the horizon correlate itself with the helicopter’s flickering descent. Evening peace was settling over the land in patterns of startling visibility. It was a time of precise and unimpelled delight, plain lines of blue and gray, things taken in, men returning, all scattered creatures come together from their day of tumbling in the sun. Units glided into place, every level of descent opening to the fall of the toy-bright object. There seemed no force in nature. All motion was uniform motion occurring in a straight line. Shadows of departed figures themselves departed. To fall in this way, uniformly, equal to but never influenced by other falling things, seemed almost to dispel the sorrow of ponderous being. Free, unswerving and independent of friction, the plunge was like a childhood sigh, devoid of obedience and rote, never evolving, nowhere close to the boned-out howl of those voices departed to the edge of the pure word, evident in the sequence of related sounds only as a timeless sigh—not of this woman in murmurous bliss or that man half leaping in her arms in a spangled blaze of bird-fish symmetry and delicate brute creation, but of a child, only that, a child is all, his sigh a knowing contemplation of time and place and all those darker energies that constitute his peril.

  “The craft is down,” Hoad cried. “I’ve brought the craft to earth.”

  He flipped switches and then jumped out and circled the helicopter in an analytic manner, appearing in his smock and high sneakers to be a doctor of parked cars. As Billy began to rise from his seat, Poebbels put a hand to his forearm and looked carefully into his face.

  “I will accompany you to the outskirts of the lobby,” he said.
“Yes, I will be honor-ed to walk at your side, mathematical phenomenon.”

  “Where’s the lobby? I never saw any lobby.”

  “Fourteenth floor.”

  “What’s it doing there?”

  “Whatever lobbies do,” Poebbels said. “Your face is notably clean. This is most important in one’s overt conduct. In my group I insist that all subordinates devote themselves to being neat, clean and quick. In order to win their fear, I am often irrational on the subject. Plausibility studies demand the utmost in these areas. We discover this empirically time and again in our daily work. I see you wear sneakers. Very excellent boy-model. I am happy at this moment. I abound with joy. The zombie ship is down and still we live. I have many times remark-ed to my colleagues that the only miracle attach-ed to human flight is that the human heart does not cease to beat in midair. You are happily an exemplar of neatness despite your time in or near the hole and I am glad to accompany you, transcendent intellect, to a point within sight of the lobby. But beyond that I have no wish to go, for I must hurry down to the first floor or I fear I will miss the arrival of the vaunted black fanatic from Australia.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “He is said in words to be a dervish, fiend, deity and seer. On other occasions he is referr-ed to in purely scientific terms.”

  “As what?”

  “Master of space and time,” Poebbels said.

  6

  CONVERGENCE INWARD

  The blandishments of Softly’s hands, Billy recalled, had made the small animal seem to frown, lap-pampered though it was, whispered to and courted in the pedagogic manner children use with pets (although Softly, of course, had left childhood far behind), and it was afternoon and very green on Softly’s porch, immersed in spiral vines and bordered by trees and uncut shrubs, and they’d been talking of this and that, Billy recalled, when Softly plucked from nowhere the speculation: “I wonder if an object too dense to release light is any purer for the experience. Does it rank as a sort of Everyobject? Are catatonic people setting a standard for the rest of us? Is the electromagnetic spectrum a model for the perceptual limitations implicit in any nonblind species of life? And other related questions.”

  One zero one.

  Not only the lowest three-digit prime but the smallest three-digit palindrome. Not only reads the same forward and back but rightside up and upside down. And not only when looked at directly but also when reflected in a mirror. Continues to yield palindromes not only when squared and cubed but when raised to even higher powers.

  Thus he passed the time, in regressive play, feeling certain there was nothing to be found anyway, no code to break. He glanced from time to time at the manuscript just to his right. Something about eighteenth-century men working in the service of kings and dowager queens. Court mathematicians of Russia and Prussia. “Only a small fraction of the work that shaped their art was devoted to the dim practicalities of the day. Every new paper, memoir, volume broadened the scope of mathematics itself. Ironic that this amplitude of class should be accompanied by such grim individual funneling of effort, convergence toward an existential center. And curious to find two men doing interrelated work and suffering for it so differently. Both of them were productive well beyond the inner margins of old age. Genial cyclops with a weakness for children. Detached gentleman content to die.” It was odd to sit at a desk called a module inside a room known as a canister and to read, under such conditions, of a man who had begun his work before the birth of Catherine the Great and who did not end it until nearly nine hundred books and articles had been published in his name. It was doubly odd to be engaged in trivial calculations based on a series of radio pulses believed to have been transmitted by living things in another part of the galaxy and to reflect, in such circumstances, on a man whose genius had been acclaimed by Napoleon but who was drawn into star-ponds of such inertia that he left his greatest work unopened on his desk for two full years.

  The videophone chimed.

  “It was as though no experience could escape such minds. The neural center was intent on total concentration. At the bottom of it all dwelt a collapsed object, fallen into its own fundamental being, model of the mathematician himself, invisible except in madness and final pain.”

  The videophone chimed. He pressed a button and listened as a small male head, calling itself Simeon Goldfloss, announced the existence of a shortcut to the amphitheater in the armillary sphere. Billy didn’t know why the man was giving him this information but he was grateful for the excuse it provided to shun further work on the code, at least for the time being, and so he followed Goldfloss’s directions, although not with much enthusiasm. A few people were scattered around the amphitheater. Goldfloss stood, nodding, and Billy walked slowly over there, trailing his lack of interest like a baby sister. Then he sat, arms folded across his chest. In the narrow aisle the man maneuvered himself into semi-erect posture, facing the boy, one foot up on the seat adjacent to Billy’s.

  “A lot of people think this might finally be the answer to the secret of Ratner’s star. But before the hall fills up and we get started, I’d like to summarize our findings up to now.”

  “What might finally be the answer?”

  “The aborigine,” Goldfloss said.

  “Summarize what findings? I didn’t know there were any findings. I thought that’s what I was here for. To make the findings.”

  “There have been and will continue to be findings. In the next ten minutes about eighty people working on various aspects of the star project will fill this little theater. They’ve all made findings of one kind or another. That’s why we have the computer universe. To simulate events in order to reach conclusions.”

  “Who’s this aborigine?”

  “We hope to answer that question here today.”

  “How can an aborigine help out on a scientific project?”

  “It’s not inconceivable that some things exist beyond the borders of rational inquiry. Most everyone will come here to gibe and twit. Fair enough. I may decide to join the fun. But it’s important to remember that we haven’t gone into this without first investigating every shred of evidence concerning the aborigine’s totemic powers.”

  People were entering the amphitheater. The chatter began to spread in intersecting lines as men and women turned in their seats, moved from tier to tier, stage-whispered improbable rumors up and down the gallery. The sense of festivity, however, was never really total. Across the spaces between bodies a secondary communication seemed to be developing, a secret accompaniment to words and gestures, and it was simply the mass suspicion that through every level of hearsay and high delight there might eventually pass the shaft of a primitive spear.

  “We’re on the verge,” Goldfloss said. “I’ve never sensed this kind of excitement. I have the feeling something sensational is going to come out of this operation in a matter of days. A new way of viewing ourselves in relation to the universe. A revolutionary human consciousness. And you’re at the very center of events.”

  “Me and the aborigine.”

  Goldfloss sported dundreary whiskers and wore a silvery denim suit.

  “Ratner’s star is a main sequence star and its sister star is a black hole. We can’t see it but we know it’s there because of the pattern of X-ray emissions. So what we’re dealing with is a planet in an orbital situation that involves a yellow dwarf, namely Ratner’s star, and a supermassive invisible object, or gravitational singularity if you will, or black hole, to use the popular term. That concludes our summary.”

  A woman wearing an eyepatch entered the chamber. Billy had never seen a woman with an eyepatch. Wondering why, he decided men get in more fights. It was a black patch and covered the right eye. He watched her climb to the fourth or fifth row across the aisle, where she sat alone, a well-shaped woman in her forties, hair cut short, complexion pale, idle lilac scent humming in the air about her.

  “Ratner’s star is our future,” Goldfloss said. “What we’ve received is mo
st likely the key to their language and to every piece of knowledge they possess. Once you break the code we’ll have no trouble reading future messages. We’ll know everything they know. In that sense the star is our future. The message itself is probably boring. ‘Eight squared is sixty-four.’ ‘We have twisted molecules.’ Typical cosmic announcement. What follows, however, will alter the very core of our being.”

  A man appeared on the floor of the amphitheater. Silence was instantaneous. Goldfloss, still semi-erect in the aisle and with his back to the man, reacted to the sudden hush by turning slowly and then easing into the seat next to Billy.

  The man standing below them, although obviously accustomed to wilderness and excessive sun, was just as obviously white; that is, he was clearly Caucasian, pink-tinged in some spots, ruddy in others, merely freckled elsewhere. He wore old khaki shorts, bark sandals and a string headband ornamented with eucalyptus nuts. His bare sunken chest was scarred and pigmented—three linked circles in red and black. He gazed up one tier of seats and then across the top row and slowly down the second tier.

  “Most of you know me, if at all, by the name Gerald Pence. However, I haven’t used that name for a very long time. I am called Mutuka now. I arrived, you see, among the nomadic people of the outback in a motor car. Mu-tu-ka, you see. I’ve been given this name and use no other. Those of you who know me are probably aware of the extensive work I once did in futurology. This is no longer part of my dreamtime, or tjukurpa. I use stone tools now. I eat lizard and emu. I find peace in the contemplation of rock art. Since deciding to live among the foragers, I’ve learned the language, wangka nintiri, and have begun slowly to understand the higher reality of nonobjective truth. The secrets of the bush are extraordinary indeed. Hard to unravel, harder to explain. Yet with the passage of time, they become less and less extraordinary and soon appear to be nothing more than the natural schemeless flow of nonevents. I don’t intend to reveal the secrets of the bush. My role here is a very limited one. The man, the extraordinary individual who grows less extraordinary by the day, the forager and seer whom, it is fitting to say, I am privileged to accompany to this point in geographical history—his role is to accomplish nothing less than the creation of an alternative to space and time.”