by Don DeLillo
“It’s unlike you to put things on a human level,” Edna said.
“Does it erode my formal authority?”
“It’s a pleasant change, truth be known.”
“Jean Venable would like to spend some time with you and Lester. Journalist I told you about. Briefest of interviews. In and out. Give her a feel for the subject.”
“Sorry,” Edna said.
“Everything she writes crosses my desk.”
“That’s not the point.”
“Lester-pet, what about you?”
“I don’t think so, Rob, no. The last thing we need is that kind of distraction.”
“I’m going back to work,” Edna said.
“How’s it coming?”
“Fair to good.”
“The boy will respond,” Softly said. “He’s very young. These are strange circumstances. He’ll come around. Wait and see.”
Lacing her boots she thought how close they’d be coming in the final stages to the rudiments of primitive number systems. Repetition, order, interval. Lester’s shoes were scuffed and battered and she could see them pressing into the earth, which was his way of thinking and working, a concentration downward. Softly’s shoes were quite immaculate, set neatly parallel, almost touching, his feet swinging in little arcs several inches off the ground. She began to rise, cigarette in mouth, as Billy went through the handwritten notes she’d left him. The first phases of communication would center on the integers. The symbols that compose Logicon will eventually have to be recoded in the form of suitable radio signals. What we have then, he read, is English to Logicon to radio-pulse idiom or systematic frequency fluctuations. The statement “every number has a successor” becomes asterisk-N (or some such) in Logicon; this in turn, pending advice from the technical end, becomes something like pulse-pulse-gap, the point being that with a few key modifications, a juxtaposition here, a repetition there, we can establish a scheme of affirmation and negation, assent and denial, giving simple “lessons” in number and following up with some kind of basic information as to where we are in time and space. The most likely thing we’d have in common with the ARS extants is interest in numbers and in celestial events. Earth people, who differ widely (spoken and written languages, etc.), share use of the Hindu-Arabic number system. Also it’s instructive to note that calendar-making is one of our earliest cognitive labors and evidence of interest in lunar cycles, eclipses, so on. Strange, she thought, how the integers, which are discrete, and our attempts to chart time, which is continuous, may well combine to give us a common area of reference with extraterrestrials. However, if she correctly interpreted the remarks on Moholean relativity made by Softly some time earlier, it was plain that we here on Earth do not know the location of the artificial radio source. So either we must figure it out or wait for them to tell us. In fact she didn’t really care whether we ever replied to the original signal. She viewed the Logicon project as an intellectual challenge and nothing more. An advance in the art of mathematical logic. A breakthrough in economy and rigor. The transformation, in Softly’s phrase, of all science, all language. She had no strong conviction that Logicon was essential to celestial communication. It would be, ir her view, a breathtaking addition to the body of human knowledge, period. As far as she was concerned it might be easier to step directly from English to radio-pulse idiom without an intervening form of discourse, no matter how strictly logical. Her handwriting began to collapse and he read only one more section, this being Lown’s estimate of how the expression “a plus b equals c” might actually be transmitted. There would be a pulse followed by a double time interval to indicate an operation pending, in this case addition, the plus sign itself signified by a particular kind of beep or dash. Repetition, order, interval, she thought, continuing to rise from the kitchen chair.
FEMALE HAIR DOWN THERE
He heard Lester Bolin begin the first snore cycle of this particular sleep period. His things, Billy’s, were still divided between the footlocker and the suitcase and he didn’t know and had no intention of finding out in which of these containers his pajamas were located. There was a single light in the antrum right now and it originated in the cubicle farthest from his, a periodic surge of candleflame, Softly’s quarters, diagonally across the path. He heard a sound above the snoring, very faint at first, a gentle impact somewhere on the slopes, repeated more than once. He stepped out onto the path and immediately saw something come over the barrier and bounce several times, barely visible, its forward motion ending in the gravel and soft clay, the object spinning in place, a rubber ball, eating out a slot for itself, unmistakably a Spalding Hi Bouncer, still rotating as he walked toward it past Maurice Wu lodged in a sleeping bag in a corner of his cubicle, past Edna Lown motionless in her bed, past Lester Bolin asleep on his cot; a spaldeen, as it was commonly known, just an ordinary faded-pink rubber ball that had bounced down from the top of the excavation. He picked it up and turned toward the opening of Softly’s cubicle, detecting motion in the shallow glow and knowing what it was before he actually sorted out the allusive shapes. Jean Sweet Venable was in bed with Rob, moving over and around him, uncomplexioned in the dimness, a fine-grained and purposeful figure. Billy was stilled by the sight of her. The very notion of “female hair down there” had long been a source of contemplative ache and wonder; to see it, actually set eyes upon a woman’s pubic hair, filled him with a stunned hush, a reverence for the folklore of the body. But what they were doing now, man and woman, had no connection to beliefs, legends or culture. It seemed to him that the sex act was something no one could make up in a story. He watched reluctantly, afraid they would perform some variation of the act, assume a position of such deft fury that he might once again grow feverish, his mind and body unequal to the burden of sexual possibility. That people might do nameless things to each other caused him some concern; he did not care to witness the unimaginable, particularly as it applied to crypts and fissures of the body. For the moment, at least, the lovers remained within the limits of his own borrowed knowledge. It was hard work, sex. Jean was breathing through her mouth, Rob through his nose. They seemed to be striving toward something that existed beyond a definitive edge. Her legs were ill-adapted to this event, too long, the sole flaw in the composite. Odd how the force of Softly’s physical innocence produced abnormality from model proportion. Jean’s breathing became more rapid and she began to speak as though in tongues. It was here that the lovemaking abandoned its industrious manner, its claim to uniformity and craft, and started to resemble an act of appalling power, an incoherent labor meant to be performed in the dark or near-dark. He was in awe of what they were doing because they themselves seemed driven to it and lost in it. Her head at a slant, her body moving loosely beneath the impetus of Softly’s more systematic cadence, Jean continued to utter fabricated babble, terrible for Billy to hear because he did not associate it with intensely compiled delight but rather with an obliteration of self-control and the onset of an emotional state that bordered on prophetic frenzy. There was no sequential meaning to this, no real process of thought and repetition. The sex act did not have organized content. It was unrelated to past and future time. It was essentially unteachable. It did not represent anything or lead necessarily to a conclusion, a sum, a recognition that someone or something has been part of a structured event. No one could have made this up if it hadn’t actually been known to occur, whatever it was, whatever the body’s need for this brief laboring void. He began to back away now, Jean’s voice winding down, Softly thinking:
Olleke bolleke
Rubisolleke
Olleke bolleke
Knull
Back in cube one he tossed the ball into the open suitcase and sat in the chair. Bolin had stopped snoring and stared into the darkness directly above. He and his wife were the kind of people other people liked to describe as being devoted to each other. But he rarely thought of her now. She was in the converted barn and he was in the antrum.
“Say something
.”
“I thought you wanted me to shut up,” Jean said.
“Then shut up.”
Maurice Wu slowly dressed, thinking of the slopes, the bat caves set within the slopes, the guano fields spread across the bat caves. He hummed a smudge of breath on each lens of his spectacles, then wiped the glasses on his shirttail before slipping them on. Man more advanced the deeper we dig. This revolutionary thesis was beginning to develop urgency. He’d seen evidence of it in the field over the past several months—elaborately notated bone objects, increased cranial capacity. But the notion itself—that at a certain layer of soil the signs of man’s increasing primitivism cease abruptly, to be replaced by a totally converse series of findings—this idea had been too radical to take firm hold in his mind until recently, when, in Softly’s presence, he’d felt the first trifling stir of implication. Wu had assumed the entire series of layers had been disarranged by haphazard burial practices or some kind of earth spasm in the area of the dig. He realized, however, that the findings showed far too much consistency and sense of progression (however negative) to be explained away in this fashion. The indications were in the field. Man’s mental development shows signs of surging upward as we dig past a certain point and continue down. Layer by layer there is evidence of greater complexity. Working in the area of the Sangkan Ho strata, he and his colleagues had traveled farther back in “primatial time” than anyone before them, a fact confirmed by potassium-argon dating. Eventually they’d come upon the partial skull of an adult hominid of small brain capacity and only the most elemental toolmaking skills. Considering what they’d previously found, the appearance of these remains was not surprising. But several feet deeper, and about half a million years earlier, were decorative tusk fragments. Below these were signs of fire maintenance, signs of complex tool types and weapons, signs of pottery making, signs of elaborate costumes. Below these was clear evidence of a culture versed in seasonal processes and number thinking. There were tools that bore lunar notations—systematic chartings of the phases of the moon. There were bone objects engraved with planetary observations. There were limestone slates that carried records of pregnancy and birth. All these patterns had been verified in the laboratory through microscopic analysis, the markings clearly indicative of a culture that perceived the notion of time itself as a nonrandom process that enabled humans to reckon their acts and conduct their lives against a fairly predictable setting of climate, geography and celestial event. Deeper, there were clay huts and drainage systems and below this was a flat stone that could not be clearly analyzed as decorative or notational; it was marked with a quartz engraving tip as follows:
Bats in flight, Wu concluded, pleased that the engraving suggested his avocation. Then it occurred to him that he might be holding the stone upside down. It was at this point that he was lured from the site by Softly’s abrupt summons, later to be informed by colleagues that below the stone they’d found skull fragments, vertebral and pelvic components, hand and foot bones, teeth and an upper jaw—all of which pointed to a male “hominid” who not only had a brain capacity equivalent to modern man’s but also (judging by his noncranial parts) resembled us in body size, manual dexterity, posture, locomotion and even the way he chewed his food. So it was that Wu speculated as he crossed the path to Billy’s cubicle: what would the remaining levels reveal: bronze, iron, plastic, neoplastic? He entered striding.
“Tell me about mathematics.”
“What’s to tell?”
“I understand it’s a crazy way to live.”
“What are you doing here anyway?”
“Visiting,” Wu said. “Saying hello.”
“I mean here in the antrum. Rob has us here for different reasons for each person. What’s your reason?”
“He hasn’t told me.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know.”
“How will you find out?”
“He told me to ask Mainwaring when Mainwaring gets here. But he hinted Mainwaring wouldn’t tell me either. Wouldn’t or couldn’t. I don’t mind waiting. I like it here. I go artifacting and study the bats. Hobby of mine for years.”
“What do you learn from bats?”
“Bat lore.”
“Give an example.”
“Depending on the hemisphere, bats fly out of caves in leftward-tending spirals or rightward-tending spirals. Taking the globe as a whole, we see that bilateral symmetry is preserved.”
“Where did you meet Rob?”
“The Chinese-American Science Sodality. A few years ago.”
“What was he doing there?”
“Rob has a deep interest in things Chinese. He was born in China. Did you know that?”
“He never told me about an event like that.”
“In fact his physical condition is a result of something called Chinese gnome disease. This is a crippling illness that was prevalent in a particular area of China for an entire millennium. It attacks the bones and muscles, preventing normal growth in children and reducing adults to a gnomelike state. It wasn’t until recently that the cause was found. A lack of certain minerals in the water.”
“He never told me that.”
“Maybe because you’re not Chinese,” Wu said. “I’m Chinese.”
“What’s your field?”
“Prehistory.”
“How far back?”
“Practically out the other end.”
“Are bats known to be dangerous?”
“Just the opposite,” Wu said. “We should do everything we can to see they survive and prosper. This is because their waste material is useful as fertilizer. Maybe you don’t know it but the economies of entire countries are based on the export and domestic use of bird droppings. Skirmishes have already taken place between neighboring countries disputing the ownership of coastal islands where millions of sea birds do their shitting. Bats are next. The commercial market for bat guano is already growing. It won’t be long, people being what they are, before some individual or group tries to get a monopoly. Of course, going back to your question, you don’t want to get bitten by a bat with rabies. If you don’t have the antibodies you’ll get infected, which means you acquire the consciousness of the animal in question and become antagonistic to water. Crazed bat consciousness. I think about it from time to time when I’m crawling through a bat cave.”
Before leaving, Wu reached in his pocket and took out a crumpled letter, saying someone had evidently left it in his cubicle by mistake.
Man, woman or child:
You have been nominated to be part of our chain. The document you are reading, rest assured, is not an ordinary chain letter. It is unconditionally guaranteed to be effective, having been devised and mailed with the help of computer time-sharing techniques of unprecedented scope and accuracy.
Our mailing list is brutally selective. Only the world’s leading intellectuals are part of our chain. These are men and women whose work has been accepted for publication in those leading journals of opinion whose lists of subscribers and contributors are readily available in return for cash considerations.
We have been commissioned by a vast research organization to undertake this project. In the past we did purely abstract work in the area of the world-market money curve. Since moving our operation beyond the legal maritime limit, we have broadened our scope to include actual cash transactions. It is our current conviction that the idea of money must yield eventually to money itself. Money facilitates the exchange of goods and services and is of vital importance to central planners who wish to gain control of specific world-market commodities most in demand at present and likely to continue as such.
Now that you know us better, our immediate concern is that you maintain the chain. This letter has traveled around the world sixteen times. No one has broken the chain. Most chain letters continue to circulate due to the age-old force of superstition. We expect more of the members of our chain. To break the chain is to disrupt nothing less than a mass speculation on
the will to exist. We count on your cooperation in this matter.
By now a question has probably occurred to you: “What do I get for maintaining the chain?” There is no simple answer to this question. It would be easy for us to say: “In a matter of days you will receive something wonderful in the mail.” We make no such claim, however. The chain is its own justification and reward. The terms of our contract clearly specify that we say no more on the matter.
To maintain the chain, you must draw a straight line through your name where it appears below. Then you must mail this letter to the person whose name has been placed directly below your own:
Chester Greylag Dent
This letter has been in circulation for years and years. Don’t be the one who breaks the chain!
Billy noticed the raised seal of a notary public in a lower corner of the page. Below the seal, in diminutive italic type, were the words: Central American Intercorporate Control Combine (formerly Consortium Hondurium), Elux Troxl, prop.
INTERVIEW
“Who are some of the influences on your work?”
“Softly.”
“In what way?” Jean said.
“He shows me how to use what I have. He was a pretty good mathematician himself. He knows how to bring me out.”
“Rob’s a living influence. What about people long ago? Old masters. The titans.”
“Rob explains their work to me. He takes me through it step by step.”
“What about Sylvester and Cayley?” she said. “Strong influences? Mild influences? In betweens?”
“Not too many people know about most mathematicians, no matter which century they belong to. How do you know about them?”