Ratner's Star

by Don DeLillo

  The playground games continued for a while. But Babe noticed that the players now wore combat boots. The games grew edgy. Glass from broken wine bottles littered the asphalt court. No one seemed to care about the score. The players wore combat boots and gave each other immoderate chops to the neck in lieu of strategic fouls. He stood by the window, the poolstick at arm’s length, and on the lumbering blue bus his small son remembered the strange dangerous language spoken to the giant at his side by boys of an ageless race.

  Hoy Hing Toy was waiting for him when he came sneaking out of the gym to avoid addressing the members of Desilu Espy’s discussion group. They went to a remote sector well below ground level. Beyond the experimental accelerator they descended a flight of metal stairs and entered a ramp at the top corner of a spacious chamber. A gigantic balloon filled much of this space. Hoy led the way to a small glassed-in office set away from the ramp and located about fifteen stories above the floor of the chamber. Radio maps and pulse charts were scattered over the desk top. Billy looked down on the silver balloon.

  “Important new development,” Hoy said. “I seemed unable to reveal it earlier because of that fellow Nut in the elevator with us. I must identify myself fully and forthrightly. I’m the Toy of the Toy-Molloy affair. It’s only right you should know. I tell all my associates.”

  “What’s the new development?”

  “Star collapse,” Hoy said. “I have always suspected that other people’s opinions matter a great deal, considering the incident. Of course, this happened long before your time, meaning I may have to re-delineate.”

  “First tell me why I’m here.”

  “The Toy-Molloy incident. In case you were wondering what incident.”

  “What about it?”

  “I was senior consultant in obstetrics and gynecology in an ultramodern hospital affiliated with a world-renowned university. In the delivery room one day, demonstrating advanced procedures to a distinguished panel of observers, I delivered a baby, clamped and cut the umbilical cord, handed the baby to a nurse, waited for the placenta to emerge, scooped it up and ate it in five huge gulps, then examined the woman’s uterus to make sure everything was out, a fairly routine procedure, this last part.”

  “What made you want to eat that thing?”

  “Something came over me.”

  “What happened after that?”

  “There was a lot of commotion,” Hoy said. “Then I was seen leaving hurriedly.”

  “So you figured you’d better change jobs.”

  “Naturally I wanted to put as much distance as possible between myself and childbirth. After a period of wandering and soul-searching, I ended up here. Expert on star collapse. Do tricks with matches and coins in my spare time.”

  “Who’s Molloy?”

  “Beg pardon?” Hoy said.

  “The Toy-Molloy affair. Who’s Molloy?”

  “The mother and child,” Hoy said. “It was their placenta, so their name got attached to the incident. I think I hear him. He’s coming. Pretend we’ve been working. Look busy.”

  “You think who’s coming? I don’t hear anything.”

  “I thought I knew those steps.”

  “Whose steps?”

  “Are you saying it was nothing? If so, I seem to agree, based on the fact that we’re still alone.”

  “Clue me in.”

  “Ratner’s star is on the verge of becoming a red giant,” Hoy said. “Increase in luminosity. Startling increase in radius. According to the computer universe, we must go forward with all possible speed. Of less importance is the fact that the star is not binary after all. It is definitely one star. However, it seems to have two planets. So now we know, within reason, what we’re dealing with. Even as I speak, we should be expediting accordingly.”

  “Expediting what?”

  “The code,” Hoy said. “Go forward on the code. The Ratnerians may be trying to tell us how to avoid the very disaster they’re faced with. Expansion and subsequent collapse. They may well have the answer but not the time in which to implement it, even with their vastly superior technology. The time is now. Wouldn’t you think? In a situation like this?”

  “I don’t see the hurry.”

  “We launch at dawn,” Hoy said.

  “Launch what?”

  “The cosmic photo balloon—what else?”

  Hoy Hing Toy took out a cigarette and lit it. With a fancy backhand maneuver he tossed the match into the air and walked away. Billy watched the match come down. It landed in the left cuff of Hoy’s trousers. Hoy at the moment was looking out at the huge balloon. A burn mark appeared on his cuff. Then his pants were on fire. Billy wondered whether it was all right to tell him. He didn’t understand his own hesitation. Why wouldn’t it be all right? Of course it was all right. It was his duty to say something. Nevertheless he stood there watching the tiny fire. Sometimes it was hard to say things. Things were so complicated. People might resent what you said. They might use your remarks against you. They might be indifferent to your remarks. They might take you seriously and act upon your words, actually do something. They might not even hear you, which perhaps was the only thing worth hoping for. But it was more complicated than that. The sheer effort of speaking. Easier to stay apart, leave things as they are, avoid responsibility for reflecting the world and all its grave weight. Things that should be simple are always hard. But hard things are never easy.

  “Pants on fire.”

  “My pants are on fire,” Hoy said. “Fire burn burning.”

  “Who else should I tell?”

  “Foot leg fire flame.”

  “Try rolling,” Billy said. “Roll over on the floor. Smother. That’s the word I want. Roll on the floor and smother the flames.”

  He followed Hoy around the desk as the chubby man hopped on one foot and tried to remove his pants in transit. Smoke gathered in the small office. Hoy lost his balance and skidded kicking across the top of the desk, spraying maps and papers. Eventually he regained a measure of equilibrium and sat on the desk, left leg bent in as he tried to get a smoldering shoe off in order to simplify removal of his pants.

  “Things like this make me self-conscious,” he said. “I feel a seeming urge to apologize, first for making demands on other people’s attention and then for my own deep sense of embarrassment. I am too grown to inflict my public suffering on others. I appreciate your patience and fully hope you will accept my expression of genuine regret.”

  It was hard to distinguish the dwindling smoke from its own pale shadow shifting on the walls. Billy took a chair in the corner and browsed through an atlas of the heavens, wondering how a person might manage to hide inside a page-thin surface in order to measure curvature that varied drastically from point to point.

  8

  SEGMENTATION

  The note said only that representatives of the Honduran cartel wanted to see him. Time and place were not given. The words were written in singular idiot script on the back of a manuscript page that he himself had misplaced earlier in the day when he’d taken Softly’s work-in-progress to the dining unit to read while he picked at his shrimp analogue.

  “The shadow of the modern age of mathematics began to rise on whitewashed walls about the time that the spirit of the guillotine made itself known, deranging the dreams of one slight child who later made his mark through exactitude, ably dispelling much uncertainty from the fluid patterns of analysis.”

  He glanced again at the unsigned message, wondering why it was stamped with the seal of a notary public. Then he inserted the page in the manuscript and returned to the module to calculate. Before him was a printed tape of the one hundred and one units of information. He stuck a decimal point at the beginning of the array of zeros and ones, viewing the sequence as an infinite binary fraction that paraphrased the extraterrestrials’ natural number system, the ones representing composite integers, the zeros designating primes. Although nothing he’d done had yielded specific evidence that the code was genuine, he felt i
ncreasingly confident that something positive would soon happen. The transmission was simply too suggestive to lead nowhere. He was even ready to believe he was getting close to an answer or at least half an answer, whatever that meant. There was fresh pleasure in his toil. (But did it enrich the discipline?) From the corridor he heard what sounded like someone gargling. When he opened the door he found two men on the other side of it, standing in single file. They walked into the canister. After a pause he followed.

  “The best place to begin a story is as close to the end as possible,” one said. “So let’s by all means proceed with the placing of the bodies rearward first in sitdown locations. I have appropriated for myself the nom de nom Elux Troxl. This is not my nom. This is merely and simply the sound-identity I have assigned to my nom. That over there is Grbk. Beware of how you address remarks to him. He is mal y bizarro, officially rebuked many times for exposing his nipples to little children. A tragic person, very sadiensis. Of course, the law in such matters is far from clarid. A man’s nipples, so to be, are not legal private parts, et so on. Just be sure to speak in tones gentivo and get not too close. He smells like a foot, that over there. His whole body is like one large nonshapen foot in terms of odoriferens.”

  “So what’s the end of the story if you want to begin as close to the end as possible?”

  “One slice at a time,” Troxl said. “The way to arrive at a limit is to take segmentable things and make them littler, to snip and clip.”

  “I heard your name before from the lips of someone who said you go around renting computer time.”

  “You never heard my name—only my name’s name. I as myself have citizenship and air rights in a dozen-half countries. That over there is my coadjutor. We are here under the single auspice of an international moñopoly with headquarters outside Tegucigalpa. Nothing trivionis about this operation.”

  He had noticed when the two men were standing in single file that Grbk was a full head shorter than Elux Troxl. Now that they were seated he could find nothing characteristic about Grbk. The man was nondescript. If he were asked then and there to describe Grbk, he wouldn’t have known what to say. Grbk was nondescript. Of course Troxl had said he smelled like a foot and that was a distinguishing feature of sorts but Billy was seated across the room from Grbk, too distant to confirm the other’s appraisal. Troxl himself was carrying an attaché case and wearing a white linen suit that was gray (in the strangest places) with perspiration stains. He had flesh-colored hair parted just over his left ear. His face was empty of any center of interest, badly needing a mustache or other unifying element, Billy felt, observing that there was nothing at present to hold things together. It was Hummer, a colleague of Cyril Kyriakos, who had first mentioned Troxl. Then LoQuadro in Space Brain Complex had said a thing or two. Few people here had any link to speak of with others in the structure. An occasional name was mentioned, a hint dropped, and that was the extent of it, a set of rapid sequential jumps, no suggestion that something continuous was taking place.

  “A Sino-Chinese group tried to take us over,” Troxl said. “But we had a leasing agreement with your computer and that made the dif-ferenz. Space Brain is a science in itself. Fascinating monolithic children, the computers of today. I love the whole cuckoo gestalt. We rent by the solar month, all fees payable in Nipponese new yen. Signed, sealed, sworn and notarized. Space Brain helps us stabilize the variables in money access curves on the graph economique. We manipulate abstract levels of all theoretical monies in the world today. Since no other group shares time on Space Brain, we are mathematically in a regulating position that others may not even dare to envy. These others have machines that are computers manqué compared to Space Brain. Perhaps you would like to be shown a glance at our leasing agreement, merely in the spirit of collaborandi. As a duly self-sworn notary public I’m granted the empower to use the raised seal of my profession. It’s all perfectly Ilegalismo. That over there does the stamping. His hand is footsore. A furious blister of a man. I tell you watch him every momentito, that over there. Do nothing agitante. One fake move and out come the nipples.”

  “Yet I still don’t know why you’re here.”

  “First we confirm your identidad. First name first. Nilly. This is correct?”

  “Billy, not Nilly.”

  “Meaningless slip—do forgive. Nada de nadiensis. Full begging of pardon.”

  “I hope that was an accident.”

  “Try to excuse my wordage. Half of it is my fault. But most of it is the fault of that over there. I find him distraxis at times. But enough funyaka and gameski. We’re here to make an offer.”

  “What kind?”

  “We want to lease you,” Troxl said. “Your human mind added to Space Brain will help us manipulate the money curve with greater assurity than ever. What absolute glück in the subskirts of Tegucigalpa when I announce that you’ve undersigned with us, witnessed here this day and affidavitized by me in extenso. We admit to a lust for abstraction. The cartel has an undrinkable greed for the abstract. The concept-idée of money is more powerful than money itself. We would commit theoretical mass rapine to regulate the money curve of the world. Sign here please. That over there will stamp.”

  “Not interested.”

  “I doubt my ears,” Troxl said.

  “I don’t know anything about money curves and I’m not interested in finding out. I’m not even sure what a cartel is. I just know you must be pretty shifty if you’re sharing computer time in a scientific project where just getting into the place is supposed to be out of bounds for practically everybody.”

  “I’ll describe our work modus so as not to confuse your expectment. We acquire air space. We make motion studies in and out. We lease and sublease multi kinds of time—makeshift, standby, conceptual et al forth. Then we either buy, sell, retain or incite revolution, all totally nonprofitless, done merely to flux the curve our way.”

  “Definitely forget it.”

  The expression on Troxl’s face did not change. He did some excessive sweating in the area of his left knee. After a while he leaned over and blew in that direction several times, apparently trying to dry the moisture on his pants leg. Then he looked at Grbk.

  “The childnik isn’t very gemütful,” he said.

  Grbk neither replied nor indicated in any way that he’d even heard his superior’s remark. A fretful prickling silence began to accumulate in the room. Billy didn’t like the way the air felt. It was like subway air or tenement hallway air, aged and layered, moist with body poisons. Maybe Grbk (the man-shaped foot) was exuding his personal odor. Billy didn’t want the silence to grow more important than it already was.

  “Is Grbk’s name Grbk or is that just the name he gives his name the way you do?”

  “Grbk a nom de nom? Hilario!”

  “I’m curious to hear how he spells it.”

  “Unspellable,” Troxl said.

  “If you can say something, you can spell it.”

  “There are things past spelling and far beyond counting. No word or number reaches there. You must live inside a schnitt not to know of this. I can only say tant pis, piccolissimo. I position you neither here nor elseplace. Oblivio obliviorum.”

  “Capital G-r-b-k.”

  “Prove it,” Troxl said.

  “Make sense for a change.”

  “Show me the vowelles at least.”

  “None.”

  “At variente with general usage, no be so? Fit for eye charts.”

  Grbk spoke for the first time. His voice was a near gargle, the protolaryngeal reconstruction of the sound of a lost language. It seemed to be forcing itself through a medium more resistant than air.

  “Gwo turd heil.”

  Billy looked at Elux Troxl.

  “Go toward hell,” Troxl interpreted.

  Grbk took a deep breath before speaking again.

  “Thing-cud, sea worts mor bett.”

  “Thing-kid, I say words more better than you.”

  “Gud yr lun
go,” Grbk said.

  “Guard your language.”

  “Tlung mv utmo spd.”

  “His tongue moves with more utmost speed than your tongue,” Troxl said.

  “Hindlag bemost.”

  “You lag behind. You are hindmost.”

  Grbk took another great breath before exhaling the next remark. “Hins fins.”

  “His hands are finished,” Troxl said.

  “What does that mean?”

  “It’s the way he says the number ten.”

  “You mean counting fingers.”

  “Hins fins,” Grbk said.

  “He’s guessing your age. He says you’re ten.”

  “Thing-cud, he, it, sit, muck sud, betuk to wesperole wo nama ta bu sakro nix farbioten yooz, sud muck, he, it, sit.”

  “Thing-kid, he, it, sitting, maker of sums, is betaken to the night hole where names exceedingly marked as sacred will be no more forbidden of usage, sum-maker, him, it, sitting.”

  “I’m expecting his tonsils any second,” Billy said.

  He sat tensely in the twofold, ready for nearly anything. Compared to Grbk’s dumb blunt semispeech, Troxl’s locutions appeared in retrospect to be models of formal cultivated discourse. He tried to watch both men at once.

  “Katzenjammer time,” Troxl said. “I feel maldressed for the occasion. Sad to see how partitionage diseffectuates the young. Suffering and phanguish. But this is life as it is lived in the world of existenz. A nothingness full of pitfalls.”

  “Pitfallful,” Grbk said.

  “We’re forced to conclude you extemporarily from our cartel. Nihil ex nihilo. A thing deprived of living existenz.”

  “Don’t say that word any more. I don’t like it.”

  “Beyond the final number you’ll find nothing to cling to but existenzphilosophie. In your case the philosophie will have to suffice since you possess no existenz. Being bjorn isn’t enough to give you claim to existenz; it must be merital. Nilly will be clingless beyond the ultimate number.”