Ratner's Star

by Don DeLillo

  This second silence was extremely fragile. The sense of something vast produced from something very small—an explosion of laughter, for instance, from a tiny bubble at the end of someone’s tongue—seemed to threaten the carefully woven equilibrium in the hall. An alternative to space and time. The phrase was so neatly pre-emptive, so crisp in its implication that the coordinates of all human perception might be not only less reliable than had been thought but completely disposable as well; the sheer efficiency of the phrase, its self-assurance—these were probably enough to guarantee that any laughter of sufficient duration would eventually find its way to the hysterical end of the spectrum. But the silence held and tightened.

  “The nomadic family I live with has no name even in its own language. Its language has no name. The secrets of the bush have no name. The man himself, the aborigine, has neither name nor descriptive title, even among his people, most especially among his people. The few white men, walypala, who know of his existence call him variously seer, demon, traveler, god. He doesn’t wish to be given a name. He doesn’t wish to be seen. Indeed there’s been some question as to whether there is anything to see. It’s not a simple matter to talk of someone who has no name or title and does not wish to be given any. One could try to get around it by referring to such a person as ‘he who has no name.’ But this description then becomes his name. The names of the various dialects spoken by the desert nomads are usually descriptive in precisely this way. Let me offer an example: ‘the language having the words foot and hand but not feet and hands.’ This is the actual name of a dialect. For obvious reasons those who speak the dialect don’t refer to it this way. My own nomadic family are a noncounting people. They forage and make throwing spears. Some have blond hair. This is fairly common among desert aborigines. Our visitor’s hair, so it’s said, is completely white. My people can count only as far as one. They don’t understand the multiple form at all. Beyond one, everything is considered a heap. What we call a boomerang has no name in their dialect except on its return trip to the person who hurled it. Stuck in the dust it is nameless. Held in hand, nameless. Released, it remains nameless. Returning, however, it acquires a name—a name so sacred that even if I knew what it was I could not speak it here. A colleague of mine in the early days in the bush was clever enough to ask what the boomerang was called as it pivoted in midair. This was Beveridge Kettle, as some of you may have guessed by the cleverness of the remark—dear man, never found. Happily, the foragers have adopted me. I drink from their billabongs. I see their ghosts—I see their mamu. When a boy was circumcised recently I was among those chosen to eat the foreskin. I hunt their kangaroo. I help care for their dingo dogs. I throw their barbed spear—I throw their kulata.”

  Billy shifted in his chair. He was tired of Mutuka and wanted to see the real aborigine, if there was one. If not, he wanted to go to his room and spend a few moments mentally dwelling on the ingestion of the foreskin. This was new to him. He’d heard about puberty rites and he knew about circumcision but the idea of concluding such antics by eating the kid’s foreskin was completely new to him. Something that novel and disgusting deserved consideration in an atmosphere of total solitude. He looked across the aisle toward the eyepatched woman but someone had taken the seat to her left, effectively blocking his view.

  “In the dreamtime there is no separation between man and land. The people act out events in the lives of the dreamtime beings. We become the dingo, the eagle, the bush turkey, the one-one-one-eyed man, the man of beating stick-stick, the man who forages in nameless space. People visit the places of their dreaming—a rockpile, for example, that contains the spirit of the lizard, snake or bandicoot from which they’ve descended. And they address the rockpile as ‘my father, my father’—ngayuku mama, ngayuku mama. People wail at the places of their dreaming. The kangaroo novice performs his dance. Human and animal forms are considered as one. Time is pure and all place is birthplace, the dreamtime site. The bandicoot, incidentally, is a ratlike marsupial.”

  A man got wearily to his feet and left the amphitheater. Across the aisle another man leaned forward for a moment, giving Billy an unobstructed view of the woman with the eyepatch. She happened to be writing something in a notebook. He watched her tear out the page and pass it down to the man in front of her.

  “The bush abounds with tektite,” Mutuka said. “These glassy objects are found elsewhere in the world but only in our particular strewn field are they used so successfully in the conduct of magic. Tektite, as all of you must know, is possibly of meteoric origin. The white-haired aborigine, our visitor, uses an uncommonly smooth tektite object for magical purposes that transcend anything ever known in the bush and, I would venture to say, beyond the bush as well. This curious juxtaposition of the primitive and the extraterrestrial is hardly a recent development. Among the desert aborigines, sorcerers have been using tektite in their magic for unnumbered generations. It is almost certain that the white-haired aborigine’s magic object, his tektite, his mapanpa, is what enabled him to travel to the radio star in the timeless time of the dreamtime.”

  Mutuka scratched his forehead under the eucalyptus nuts. To Billy he no longer looked strange in his shorts and body paint. There was something almost noble in the unsuitability of his dress. Comedy and nobility were interchangeable among some people. Noble or not, what he said was pretty boring and Billy hoped the aborigine would soon appear. He noticed a piece of note paper being passed across the aisle. Three people got up and walked out. He didn’t know whether they were leaving out of boredom or because Mutuka had claimed that the aborigine was capable of traveling into outer space. Both circumstances were equally believable. Monotony and nonsense. Comedy and nobility. Mutuka appeared not to notice the people leaving.

  “The dream-being known as the one-one-one-eyed man is in fact a three-eyed man. Their difficulty with multiple forms is what leads the foragers into somewhat awkward terminology. Nevertheless there is reason to believe not only that some animals of the archaeological past on planet Earth had three eyes but also that man himself possessed a third eye and that the pineal gland is a vestige of such an eye in the middle of the forehead, the human forehead. Our visitor himself may or may not possess a third eye. Such are the secrets of the bush.”

  Ten people walked out.

  “Extrasensory perception is the least of his gifts. With his tektite object he is able to sit in time and then whirl faster and faster until this very motion becomes a sort of nth dimension, as the mathematicians say. When word reached me in my brush hut of the apparent contact between Ratner’s star and this installation, I went immediately to the revered totemic site where the white-haired one sits, as we say, in time. My informant, your own Dr. Glottle, had given me stellar notations, schematic diagrams, an evolutionary track profile and so on. With my own tektite object I asked the aborigine, who was hidden from my view inside a shell-like rock formation—I asked by striking the object on the most sacred stone of his dreamtime site—I asked whether there was life as we know it in that part of the universe or great undulating desert-sea of light and dark, as it’s often called. I do hope you’ll bear with me as I try to recount what happened next and at the same time seek to avoid referring to him, him, by any name or designation. This is the most sacred part of the narrative. It must be free of naming. Circumlocution is absolutely essential. The narrative must be pure. Direct naming on my part from this point forward would surely cause me to be excluded from any further participation in whatever is destined to happen here today.”

  These last few sentences, which seemed sincere enough to Billy, led to a nearly general exodus. Mutuka simply paused in his recitation until the movement ceased. About twenty people remained of the original eighty or ninety. Next to Billy, Goldfloss sat nodding, his eyes totally blank, a picture of dignified fatigue.

  “Augury is the least of his powers,” Mutuka said. “The answer to me at the dreamsite indicated in ways I am not permitted to recount that yes, yes, yes, there may we
ll be totemic dream creatures living on more than one of the more than one worlds that revolve around the star that sits in time in the part of the desert-sea that speaks by radio to the walypala at Field Experiment Number One. There then occurred the gyration that invariably follows the sitting in time. I heard but did not see the gyration. When it ended I was informed that yes, yes, there is without doubt a dreamtime of creature beings on that world. The journey taken during the gyration is what we have come here to repeat, although the word ‘journey’ is just as inadequate in this instance as it would be if we used it to describe the way electrons change positions in nuclear space without actually moving through this space. Time and space will be replaced by the nameless dimension of the whirl. They will be purified, if you will. Pure time. Pure space. There will be sitting in time. There will be tektite manipulation. There will be whirl. There will be journey, although that word is inadequate, to the area of the radio star. Then we’ll have a question and answer period.”

  An attendant wheeled a miniature flatcar onto the floor of the little theater. It was about eight feet square, apparently a freight-loading device of some kind. In the middle of it was someone or something covered in white canvas. The shape of the canvas indicated that the person beneath it, if it was a person, was probably sitting with legs crossed and head slightly bowed. That’s all there was, a white canvas mound in the middle of a little flatcar. The attendant left the hall. Billy waited for Mutuka to say something. But he simply stood there, waiting, apparently no more useful at this stage of the demonstration than the twenty spectators who remained in the hall. For a long time everyone waited. Then Mutuka left his spot at the side of the flatcar and took a seat in the first row of the section that Billy was in. In less than a minute twelve people left the chamber. The fact that Mutuka no longer had any influence on matters seemed to have no effect on those who remained. Maybe they had nowhere else to go. Goldfloss had degenerated to a splayed position, limbs extended, head flung back in a profound swoon. The others were sprawled in their seats and in several cases across two seats; all but Mutuka, who sat erect with legs formally crossed, hands resting on upper knee. Billy thought there were few things less appealing than the sight of a man’s bare legs in a crossed position. Twenty minutes passed. The canvas mound sat on the flatcar. A man up front stood and yawned, turning as he did so, his arms spread like the wings of a banking plane. His face was empty of everything but the yawn itself. A tender grimace. A photograph of time-drams ingested by the human mouth.

  Slowly the canvas began to move. Yes. There was movement in the specific area of the white canvas mound that sat in the middle of the loading device. The yawning man took his seat. Aside from that, response to the movement was slight. Mutuka’s head may have gained several degrees of arc in a tiny rightward sweep. Billy nudged Simeon Goldfloss, who reacted slowly, as though unaligned with the landscape, expecting to find himself on a Mexican bus.

  The canvas was clearly whirling now. In a matter of seconds it had picked up a good deal of speed. Billy couldn’t believe that a man sitting with his legs crossed was capable of whirling that fast. His hands and arms would be doing all the work and it just wasn’t possible for human hands to move that quickly or for human arms to take that much stress. If Mutuka had said that the whirler was a holy man from India, an expert in gyrational body-control, Billy would have had less trouble believing what he saw. But the person under the canvas, if it was a person, was supposedly an aborigine. The answer had to be a rotary mechanism that the person was sitting on. The person simply sat on a disk that turned when a button was pushed. Either that or it wasn’t a person. The entire thing was mechanical, an oversized model of the agitator in an automatic washer. Those were the two best answers: 1) a large disk and someone sitting on it; 2) a large agitator and no person at all. He thought of two other possibilities. One ridiculous: a small individual running in very tight circles. The other intriguing: an aborigine with white hair and possibly three eyes who had recently finished sitting in time and was now in the process of whirling into the nth dimension, where he would come upon Ratner’s star.

  The white canvas no longer seemed to be turning. There was a distinct sense of motion but he now realized that the canvas itself was relatively still. Occasionally it would flutter a bit as though being influenced by the moving thing inside. The bottom edges of the canvas were now and then lifted off the flatcar, indicating that the thing beneath it was moving at speeds so tremendous that a hovering factor had been introduced into the relationship between canvas, flatcar and moving object. The canvas, which looked fairly heavy, was definitely being lifted into the air and at times dented by the centripetal action within. Even if he’d been able to time the little hops made by the canvas and to tilt his head accordingly, Billy was much too high in the gallery to get a good view of events taking place beneath the canvas.

  For the first time since the whirling began, a sound became evident. The thing or person was apparently moving fast enough to cause sound to be emitted. The sound was faint and remained so, a distant whimper too stylized to be called childlike or animal but never less than terrible to hear, a process sustained at the edge of nonentity. He found it hard to believe that the friction or vibration produced by physical forces alone could bestow such emotion to sound.

  A long time passed. The whirling beneath the canvas continued. The low moan delivered itself, neither rising nor dropping in volume. The canvas was lifted more frequently and showed further evidence of the incredible speeds attained by the thing beneath it in the suddenness and depth of the indentations that appeared on its surface. Nobody in the audience spoke. There was no movement aside from an occasional shifting of weight. A good show, he thought. A good performance and maybe more than good and maybe more than a performance. A man below him picked a sheet of paper off the floor, read it without interest and then handed it up to Billy, who assumed it was the note written earlier by the woman with the eyepatch. She had left long ago but the note paper had evidently been making the rounds.

  Without warning the noise stopped. A long moment passed. He was in the midst of framing the thought: something is about to happen. Before he could finish, it happened. The canvas shroud leaped violently, not unlike a living thing responding to a terminal instinct. It was quickly sucked out of the air in a broken-back spasm, snapped inside out by some horrible inhaling natural trap.

  Deep silence ensued. Nothing stirred. The canvas lay flat on the loading device. Whatever it had once covered was no longer there. It had vanished completely and only a canvas puddle remained. Sitting in time. Tektite manipulation. Nameless dimension of the whirl. This latest development no doubt meant the aborigine was embarked on phase four, the “journey” to Ratner’s star. Billy sat immobilized, pondering the vastness of what he’d seen and hadn’t seen. No one else seemed very interested. After a while Mutuka rose from his seat, went to the flatcar and carefully lifted the shroud. There was nothing under it that could be seen by the unaided eye. It wasn’t until this point that Billy realized he was holding the note in his hand. It took a conscious effort to raise the paper to his face and read it.

  It’s done with an isometric graviton axis.

  I saw it twice in a nightclub act in Perth.

  Pass it on.

  He was certain she had written the note before the flatcar had been wheeled in. How had she known what was going to happen? Had she guessed it from something Mutuka said? Or had Mutuka himself been part of the nightclub act? Maybe that was it. She’d not only witnessed this kind of trick; she’d seen it done by the very same man. Billy imagined this Gerald Pence guy, an ex-futurologist, going from town to town in the outback with his space-and-time disappearing act, fooling the half-breeds and superstitious miners. But what was an isometric graviton axis? And could he be sure that the note found on the floor was the same one written by the woman with the eyepatch?

  He went down to the floor of the amphitheater. First he inspected the canvas and flatcar, finding noth
ing, certainly no trace of a large disk or agitator. Then he got on his knees and peered under the flatcar, even reaching in with his hand to feel for trap doors or soft spots. Nothing interesting. He stood up for a closer look at the canvas shroud, shaking it out and then fingering along the seams. Affixed to one corner was a small tag that read: PROPERTY OF OMCO RESEARCH. Nothing else anywhere. He turned toward the six or seven people in their seats, well spread through the gallery, and simply shrugged, palms up. Mutuka was sitting at the edge of the loading device, facing a blank wall. Billy decided to approach.

  “So where’s the aborigine?”

  “I don’t know,” Mutuka said. “Who are you?”

  “A mathematician who works on the star project and who wonders if the aborigine is now on his way to the star.”

  “No, no, no, no.”

  “Why no?”

  “You see, he sits in time. Then he whirls, you see.”

  “Then he goes to the star.”

  “No, no,” Mutuka said. “He’s never done it that way. You see, the whirl is the journey. The journey takes place during the gyration. He’s not supposed to disappear. He’s never done it that way.”

  “Then the whirl itself is the nth dimension. He doesn’t whirl and then become invisible and then come back. He just whirls.”

  “Yes, of course, absolutely.”

  “He makes the journey while he’s whirling.”

  “Yes, yes, of course.”

  “He makes the journey while he’s whirling,” Billy said to the others. “This wasn’t supposed to happen.”

  He shrugged again. The other people made their way out, dazed and sated, a collection of volunteers roused from prolonged experimental sleep. Goldfloss was the last to depart. Billy walked with him to the elevator outside.