Ratner's Star

by Don DeLillo

  “So that’s a dog in there you sneaked aboard,” he said. “What happens if it barks?”

  “Basenji,” she said.

  He found a dark lounge and went inside. Two men sat at a table playing an Egyptian board game. Squares of equal size. Penalties levied. Element of chance. Billy recognized the game; he’d seen it played at the Center by colleagues of his. Numerous geometric pieces. Single bird-shaped piece. He thought of the “number beasts” of that time—animals used to symbolize various quantities. Tadpole equaled one hundred thousand because of the huge swarms that populated the mud when the waters of the Nile retreated after seasonal flooding. Men called rope-stretchers had surveyed the unplotted land, using knots to measure equal units. Taxation and geometry. In the dimness Eberhard Fearing gradually assumed effective form. Legs walking left.

  “Good to see you.”

  “Right.”

  “Absolutely correct.”

  “Good.”

  He had a passing knowledge of the mathematical texts of the period. Problem of seven people who each have seven cats which each consume seven mice which each had nibbled seven ears of barley from each of which would have grown seven measures of corn. Legs walking left were a plus sign on a papyrus scroll.

  “How was the bathroom?” Fearing said.

  “I liked it.”

  “Mine was first-rate.”

  “Pretty nice.”

  “Some plane.”

  “The size.”

  “Exactly,” Fearing said. “You’ve hit on it. I was telling a gal back there all about you. She’d really like to hear you hold forth. What say I get her and make a threesome out of it.”

  “I may not be here later.”

  “Where will you be?”

  “I may have to meet some people.”

  “Just tell me where. We’ll have a get-together.”

  “I’m not sure they’re aboard,” he said. “See, the thing of it is I’m not sure they’re aboard.”

  “In other words you made an appointment beforehand to see these people. Before you even got on the plane.”

  “Right.”

  “Certain section of the aircraft at a certain time.”

  “Near the toilets.”

  “And now you’re not even sure they’re aboard.”

  “Right.”

  “These people of yours.”

  “That’s the thing.”

  “How many of them?” Fearing said.

  “Could be four, could be more.”

  “What are they—mathematicians?”

  “Some yes, some other.”

  “Near the toilets.”

  “I just inspected,” Billy said. “They’re not there yet.”

  “I admire your intellect, sir. Admire it mightily.”

  “I heard that. Good to hear.”

  “Because there is no commodity we’re shorter of than intellectual know-how. A man like me understands that. Nice talking to you. Ever find yourself nearby, why, drop on in. I’m near everything. Great churches. A lot of parking. Bring your associates if they ever turn up.”

  “They’ll like to come.”

  “I use you people in my work.”

  The men at the board appeared to be on the verge of sleep. No theoretical reasoning or basic theorems. The practical science of physical arrangement. Sense of mass. Scientists still probing limestone blocks with radar to discover what’s buried in those pyramids. He thought of the obelisk in Central Park and wondered if he’d ever get to examine an actual fragment of sacred writing.

  Directions for knowing all dark things.

  The plane flew above the weather. He went to sit alone in a rear area behind equipment racks and anticrash icons. A stressless hour passed. Or maybe four such hours. He’d forgotten which motion he was using to stroke through time, minute or gesh. This part of the airplane had apparently not been used for a while. It was dusty and cramped, its true dimensions concealed by an intricate series of partitions. Real plastic here as opposed to the synthetic updated variations in the forward areas. A sort of Old Quarter. He put both feet up on the front of the seat and hunkered, noting the array of digits molded into the chair, a set of individual polymerized bumps located between his shoes——such that, rightsided and divided by a scrambled set of its own first three digits, yields a result just one number away from the divisor; such that digits of divisor and result match digits of original array (save one); such that each consecutive number (divisor and result) is the sum of the cubes of its digits. In fact nothing bored him more than playful calculations. Yet his capacity to fathom the properties of the integers was such that he sometimes found himself watching a number unfold to reveal the reproductive structure within. Eberhard Fearing. It was only a partial lie he’d told that travel-happy man. A meeting was scheduled to take place (person or persons unknown), although not at this altitude. He closed his eyes. Jetliner passing through the sphere of vapor, through the blank amalgam of gases, moisture and particulate matter. Bloated metal ritually marked. A loud buzzer sounded.

  He calculated with the ease of a coastal bird haunting an updraft. But beauty was mere scenery unless it was severe, adhering strictly to a set of consistent inner codes, and this he clearly perceived, the arch-reality of pure mathematics, its austere disposition, its links to simplicity and permanence; the formal balances it maintains, inevitability adjacent to surprise, exactitude to generality; the endless disdain of mathematics for what is slack in the character of its practitioners and what is trivial and needlessly repetitive in their work; its precision as a language; its claim to necessary conclusions; its pursuit of connective patterns and significant form; the manifold freedom it offers in the very strictures it persistently upholds.

  Mathematics made sense.

  He lowered his feet to the floor, eyes still closed, a circumstance that gave anyone watching enough time to determine what it was that made the boy appear an adept of concentration—simply his physical stillness, the seeming compression of his frame into a more comprehensive object. It was a stillness unaffected by the shifting of his feet and yet completely obliterated the second his eyes came open. This latter act served to release upon the world a presence essentially seriocomic in nature, that of early adolescence trying to conceal itself in a fold of apathy.

  The buzzer sounded once more and a light flashed on and off. He returned to his seat. The plane landed to refuel again and this time he was one of the passengers getting off. He made his way through a dense crowd of people, none of whom seemed to be going anywhere or meeting anyone. He wondered if they lived at the airport. Maybe there was no room for them in the city and they came out here to settle, sleeping in oil drums in unused hangars, getting up at sunrise and heading indoors to loiter. He reached his destination, a special boarding gate in an isolated part of the airport. Two men were there to meet him. They’d already collected his suitcase and now led him aboard another plane, much smaller than the first, no other passengers, some space to yawn and sprawl. His escorts were named Ottum and Hof. The flight was relatively short and after the aircraft set down on a deserted landing strip the boy and two men walked to a waiting limousine. Billy had the enormous back seat to himself. As Ottum started the car, his partner turned and pointed to a small sign taped to the folded-over underside of one of the jumpseats.

  Please refrain from smoking out of consideration for the driver of this vehicle, who suffers from:

  Hypertension

  Tuberculosis

  Asthma

  Bronchial asthma

  Walking pneumonia

  Smoke-related allergies

  Labored breathing

  Other

  “We’ll be there in twenty some odd minutes,” Ottum said.

  “This a Cadillac, this car?”

  “None other.”

  “It came almost as a shock to see it. That’s why I ask. Way in the middle of nowhere.”

  “No mistaking one of these vehicles,” Hof said. “Custom job from top to
bottom. What we call a meticulously customized motor vehicle. It’s a Cadillac all right.”

  “The Rolls-Royce of automobiles,” Ottum said.

  Billy had been instructed not to tell anyone where he was going. There wasn’t much he could have said, to Eberhard Fearing or anyone else, even if he’d wanted to. He knew the name of the place but very little about it. Apparently the people in charge were still defining their objectives and therefore did not release information except in minimum trickles. As to the reason his specific presence was considered essential, not a word had been spoken.

  “Is this thing bulletproof?”

  “Absolutely, top to bottom.”

  “I never thought so. I just asked the question because you think of a limousine this big as might as well having all the extras.”

  “It’s for the top people,” Hof said.

  “Did it ever get shot at?”

  “Course not.”

  “It’s not a bubbletop, I notice.”

  “He notices,” Hof said.

  “I heard,” Ottum said.

  “Not a bubbletop, he notices.”

  “Two terrific sense of humors.”

  “Be a kid.”

  “I was only talking back.”

  “Just be a kid,” Hof said.

  He tried to revel in the expensive pleasures of the back seat, toying with gadgets and scraping the soles of his shoes on the edges of the collapsed jumpseats, freeing himself of whatever foreign matter had accumulated there recently.

  “I didn’t go through customs.”

  “We took care of that,” Hof said. “You’re a special case. It’s a courtesy they extend to special cases.”

  They traveled over bad roads on a gray plain. He saw one sign of life, an old man with a counting stalk. Must be for tourists, he thought. In time a sequined point appeared on the seam of land and air.

  “Maybe you don’t know it,” Hof said, “but you’re more or less a legend in your own time.”

  They were coming to something. He knew immediately it was something remarkable. Rising over the land and extending far across its breadth was a vast geometric structure, not at first recognizable as something designed to house or contain or harbor, simply a formulation, an expression in systematic terms of a fifty-story machine or educational toy or two-dimensional decorative object. The dominating shape seemed to be a cycloid, that elegant curve traced by a fixed point on the circumference of a circle rolling along a straight line, the line in this case being the land itself. His attention was diverted for a moment as the car passed through a field of dish antennas, hundreds of them, surprisingly small every one. Closer now he was able to see that the cycloid was not complete, having no summit or topmost arc, and that wedged inside the figure by a massive V-form steel support was the central element of the entire structure, a slowly rotating series of intersecting rings that suggested a medieval instrument of astronomy.

  In all, the structure was about sixteen hundred feet wide, six hundred feet high. Welded steel. Reinforced concrete. Translucent polyethylene. Aluminum, glass, mylar, sunstone. He noticed that particular surfaces seemed to deflect natural light, causing perspectives to disappear and making it necessary to look away from time to time. Point line surface solid. Feeling of solar mirage. And still a building. A thing full of people.

  Field Experiment Number One.

  The car stopped next to some construction equipment. He got out, fascinated most of all by the slowly moving focal component, the structure’s medieval element. Blinding silver on both sides. Streaks and textures elusive in their liquid iridescence. But the huge central sphere, propped by the V-steel, which itself was lodged inside the discontinuous cycloid, was filled with bronze-colored rings and was distinctly three-dimensional, spinning bountifully above him.

  “What happens next?” Hof said.

  “He goes to his quarters.”

  “Sure he doesn’t see Dyne?”

  “We take him to his quarters,” Ottum said.

  There was no sense of movement on the elevator. Absolutely no vibration. Not the slightest linear ripple across the bottoms of his feet. He might have been at rest or going sideways or diagonally. Not fond of this idea of stationary motion. He wanted to know he was moving and in which direction. He felt he’d been given a restraining medication and then placed in a block of coagulated foam, deprived of the natural language of the continuous.

  The two men led him through a series of subcorridors that ended at the mouth of a masonite labyrinth. The reason for this, Ottum said, was “play value.” After going through the maze they reached Billy’s quarters, which Hof referred to as a “canister.” There were no windows. The lighting was indirect, coming from a small carbon-arc spotlight focused on a reflecting plate above it. The walls were slightly concave and paneled in a shimmering material decorated with squares and similar figures, all in shades of the same muted blue and all distorted by the concave topography. The optical effect was such that the room seemed at first to be largely devoid of vertical and horizontal reference points. It was also soundproof, equipped with a “twofold” (or bed-chair unit) and an imposing wall assembly. Ottum explained this last element. It was called a “limited input module” and it consisted of a desk unit, tape recorder, videophone and monitor, temperature controls, calculator, “teleboard screen.” This screen was part of a transmission system that included lasers, self-developing film, location indicators, a piece of chalk, a blackboard and ordinary phone lines; and it recorded and displayed anything written on the blackboard in Space Brain Complex, more than fifty stories straight up. Billy took off his jacket but couldn’t find a closet for it until Hof released a lever in the module.

  “See that grill down on the wall there?” Ottum said.

  In one corner of the room was a metal grating about two feet square. It was set into the wall, down low, its base side an inch off the floor. Through the network of thin metal bars Billy saw nothing but darkness. He nodded to Ottum, who took a card out of his pocket and read slowly in an official voice.

  “The exit point to which your attention has been directed is the sole emergency exit point for this sector and is not to be used for any purpose except that contingent upon fire, man-made flooding, natural trauma or catastrophe, and international crisis situations of the type characterized by nuclear spasms or terminal-class subnuclear events. If you have understood this prepared statement, indicate by word or gesture.”

  “I have understood.”

  “Most people just nod,” Ottum said. “It’s more universal.”

  Billy added a nod to his verbal affirmation.

  “How long has all this been here?” he said. “The whole big building.”

  “Relatively brand new,” Hof said. “Another few days of touching up and that’s it. People are already hard at work. So far everything’s operating as per planned.”

  “Except the toilet bowls flush backwards,” Ottum said. “I happened to notice earlier today. The eddy is right to left. Exact opposite of what we’re used to.”

  As Billy opened his suitcase, the two men paused at the door.

  “He’s supposed to rest now,” Hof said. “First he rests. Then he gets cleaned up. Then he eats and sleeps. Then he sees Dyne.”

  “When do I unpack?”

  “Does he know he’s supposed to stay away from the construction equipment?” Ottum said. “Maybe he should be told that officially. Does he know it can be dangerous for a kid to get too close to a giant crane?”

  “This place has a lot of rules, it’s beginning to look like.”

  “Be yourself,” Hof said. “Only don’t go too far.”

  He wrote a postcard to his parents in the Bronx, telling them about the bulletproof Cadillac. Then he lay on the twofold, supposedly to rest. Rest, clean, eat, sleep. If he slept now, it would throw everything off. He considered Ottum’s remark about the giant crane. Why did he say “giant”? Why not just “crane”? Weren’t all construction cranes pretty gigantic? He
curled into the barely yielding pad of heavy clothlike material. Was it possible Ottum meant a bird? No, not possible. But not impossible either. Okay, if a bird, what kind of bird? A stick-legged silent bird with giant wings that closed over the heads of small sleeping people.

  Keep believing it, shit-for-brains.

  He felt a cramp in his right foot. The toes bent down and in, locked in that position. Whenever he had this feeling he assumed he’d be lucky ever to walk again. Wondering what he’d do if the cramp began to spread he realized for the first time how truly soundproof the canister was. In his experience all rooms possessed a tone of some kind and he tried now to pick something out of the air, to isolate a measured breath or two, a warp in the monumental calm. Always a danger linked to the science of probing the substratum. In time he forgot he was supposed to be listening intently. He rested along an even line, ending at last this long day’s descent to the surface of fixed things.

  2

  FLOW

  To bear a name is both terrible and necessary. The child, emerging from the space-filling chaos of names, comes eventually to see that an escape from verbal designation is never complete, never more than a delay in meeting one’s substitute, that alphabetic shadow abstracted from its physical source.

  “Knowledge,” Byron Dyne said. “The state or fact of knowing. That which is known. The human sum of known things.”

  He was a slight man, neatly dressed, his ears, lips and nose giving the impression they had been taken from a much larger person and grafted on to this random face as part of a surgical jest. He sat alongside the main thalamic panel in Gnomonics Complex, an area occupied by rows of consoles. Billy in an ovoid chair tried to pay attention. There was no one else in sight. Photographs of great and near great scientists covered the wall behind Dyne’s head. He smiled experimentally, apparently a habit of his.