Ratner's Star

by Don DeLillo

  “A deal,” the boy said. “I’ll take the greenie if I can keep it for later.”

  “Done,” Mohole said. “Once it’s out of my hands and in yours, I know you’ve accepted it and I feel less inclined to raise my voice, much less fill the streets with random gunfire.”

  “The lady told me to get back at once.”

  “That reminds me. I’m having some female companionship drop up later today. Maybe you’d like to stay around and meet it.”

  “What’s it consist of?”

  “There’s only one but she might have a sister.”

  “They told me to get back at once and I didn’t. If you could find out for sure about the sister thing, I could try to leave the meeting early again.”

  “Do you like it here?”

  “What, here?”

  “The whole big place.”

  “I don’t see myself making a career out of it.”

  “Are you entering into things?”

  “No.”

  “Enter into things,” Mohole said.

  “I don’t see it.”

  “Make an effort. Are you making an effort?”

  “No.”

  “Make an effort,” he said. “That’s what I failed to do at your stage of the game and even much later. I didn’t enter into things, with the result that I felt left out, consistently on the verge of snapping. I didn’t make the effort. So what would happen? I would see myself with a high-powered rifle and big boxes of ammo. I’m standing in a window high above the street. I’m firing wildly. I’m shooting anything that moves. Then I’m yelling at anyone left out there who’ll listen. ‘I’m a snapper! I snapped! It’s not my fault!’ Yelling and firing simultaneously.”

  “What then?”

  “Maybe you’d better tell me your partner preference,” Mohole said.

  “Whatever’s normal in my situation.”

  “Maybe you don’t want someone’s sister. There are different varieties of companionship dropping up to a place like this.”

  “Let’s stay with the sister thing for now.”

  “Tell you what let’s do,” Mohole said. “You go on back to the conference and I’ll contact you when I’ve made arrangements. It might turn into a very unique soiree. It just happens that I’m a paid consultant to a sex engineering outfit. Devices galore.”

  “I like the name.”

  “That’s not their name. That’s what they make. Remember not to tell anyone I’ve had this place converted. No one knows who shouldn’t know. And don’t worry if I seem to raise my voice. When I stop shouting at you, that’s the time to worry.”

  He showed the boy around the rest of the suite. The furniture in every room had the same surly gleam, a waxless finish that seemed an indestructible trait rather than something adhering to the objects themselves. There were towel racks everywhere. Refrigerated air seeped from large vents in the wall. The sofas, drapes and lampshades had plastic covers labeled OMCO RESEARCH. There was no sign of the translucent inner surface of the sphere itself; partitions had been erected as part of the renovation. An ornamental footbath graced the vomitorium. Mohole opened a cabinet and displayed his collection of “specialty scents”—artificial fragrances packaged in aerosol cans. Billy noted a few of the labels. “CHEESE, CRACKERS AND DRINKS.” “DINNER FOR TWO—SEAFOOD SERIES.” “WOOD-BURNING FIRE.” “COFFEE TABLE AURA—FRESH FLOWERS, CIGARETTES, AFTER-DINNER CORDIALS.” “HEAPED GARMENTS.” “BEDSHEETS AND HAND LOTION.” “NUDE FEMALE BODY (MOIST)—SENSE OF URGENCY SERIES.” One can was simply marked “YVONNE, YVONNE.” The suite’s seeming contradiction, that of functional objects contained in a space of baronial proportions, made the boy feel slightly dislocated. But the sight of so many TV sets, all with swivel mechanisms, revived him. It was like a nineteenth-century motel, magnificent and bland, the traveler desolate in this unnatural immensity, a painless estrangement for all.

  “Poverty is exhausting,” Kyzyl said. “I’ve seen it etched on many a face. We used to make early dawn sweeps across the urban centers, tagging indigents for further study. We’d proceed forth in unmarked half-tracks and commence tagging with coded markers. These were tired people. When we speak of poverty, this is co-synonymous with extreme fatigue. Migration patterns can’t be studied without tagging. But the average migrant indigent, even when we talk of his fatigue and his flagged-out spirits, he sometimes posed a bodily threat to the funded personnel. He with his people resisted being tagged, resisted wearing the tag, resisted the idea of tagging, the whole concept enforcement. It was a study. There was funding. But the poverty mentality resists this. Migrant workers, as opposed to indigents, were too lethargic one way or the other. People who follow the sun are easy to tag and we had checkpoint activity throughout the warmer zones. But the indigents resisted. We utilized no force or prereaction sweeps except as they applied. Applied force is sanctioned by most confederations of the destitute. This is first-hand from personal experience that we utilized only optional weaponry and never inflicted as we say incommensurate pain. Pain inflicted had to be equal to the threat to our persons. There’s a difference between exhaustion and lethargy. Exhausted people are known to be dangerous. They don’t display the torpor and stupor of people who follow the sun by the truckload, making them easy to tag. So the question of fatigue is double-edged, commingled with the language problem, and many experts on dialect proceeded forth into the urban enclaves to explain to the indigents that this was all a study to learn more about their migratory patterns. A funded study. But they resisted the coded markers. They fought with their teeth and feet. In our lightly armored vehicles we conversed among ourselves. ‘How tired they seem,’ we said.”

  Billy realized that Kyzyl was escorting him back to his canister rather than to the large room with the bare octagonal table. This made sense, come to think of it, because Kyzyl didn’t know he was supposed to return to the Conference on Invisible Mass. Once inside, with Kyzyl waiting beyond the door, he decided in a moment of minor defiance to do some further work on the star code. He turned off the light and began to calculate, his silky pencil forming giant numbers on the plain white sheet. The videophone chimed five times. He pushed a button on the panel and the screen filled with light. There was no one there, however. The only thing he could see was a tricycle in the background, dimly.

  “Big B., can you hear me?”

  “Where are you?”

  “It’s Endor.”

  “Talking from where?”

  “On the floor,” the voice said. “Don’t want you to see me. But I want you to hear. Can you do that?”

  “You’re coming in weak.”

  “How about now?”

  “Better.”

  “I’m down on the floor shouting up into the talk gadget. Don’t try to see me. Do you know where I am?”

  “Down on the floor.”

  “I mean where in what locale.”

  “The hobby room.”

  “Good guess.”

  “I recognized the tricycle.”

  “That’s where I am, all right. Walked in early this morning. Came in from the hole. Came limping through the mud and grass. I’ve been digging, lad. Clawing my way down. But I wanted to take a break and come weaving in all mud-laden and scrawny for the express purpose of talking to you. You can’t see me, can you?”

  “No.”

  “They padlocked my room. You know that?”

  “Yes.”

  “What are we going to do about that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Neither do I,” Endor said. “With no room of my own, I had to come up here to the so-called hobby room. At least they haven’t touched my things. My things are intact. Important to have things of your own. Untouched and intact. But there’s still the other room to think about, the real room, padlocked. We’ll have to figure something out, Big Bill, because eventually you’re going to want to sit in my room a spell. Things are scheduled to get worse around here. That much I know. You can count on it, although you’ll
wish you hadn’t.”

  “So what do I do?”

  “Sit tight and listen. I want to tell you all I know. Admittedly it’s not much but we have to assume it’s better than nothing. Might help you forestall the mongers. I’m all skin and bone. You can’t see me, can you?”

  “You’re coming in weak again.”

  “My hands are cupped to my mouth. I’m on my back with cupped hands to mouth to get my voice up to the talk mechanism.”

  “Hardly hear you.”

  “Skin, bone and whisper,” Endor said. “Tell you what, Big Bill. Close your eyes and I’ll get myself up on my feet and talk right into the thing. Tell me when you’re ready.”

  “Now.”

  “Eyes closed?”

  “Shut tight.”

  “I don’t trust you,” Endor said. “I’m going back down to the floor. On the count of three, you can open your eyes. I’ll cup my hands tighter this time. That should funnel my words up to you in the loudest death-wheeze I can manage. One two three.”

  “All open.”

  “I love to count,” the voice said. “Counting has given me special pleasure down through the years. I can think of innumerable occasions when I stopped what I was doing and did a little counting for the sheer intellectual pleasure of it. I admire the work of the Prussians in this regard. Kronecker, Jacobi et al. Those Prussians could count. Since getting settled in the hole I’ve gone back to finger counting. Usually I start with the thumb of the left hand. Sometimes the pinky finger just to vary the routine. I’m taking some pebbles back with me this trip. One thing the hole lacks is pebbles. That’s what I’ll do on the way back. Gather some pebbles. It’ll break up the trip. Also give me something to count besides fingers. What’s eighteen times eleven times twenty-three minus five hundred and one plus forty-three multiplied by two minus eight thousand one hundred and ninety-two?”

  “Zero.”

  “Just testing your wits,” Endor said.

  “I don’t like that kind of calculating. I do it automatically but it’s dumb.”

  “I worked it out beforehand in the hole. I know you can do much tougher but my mental apparatus isn’t what it used to be. I wanted to throw in some logarithms and cube roots but couldn’t remember how they work. Settled for a lot of odd numbers. Thought that might throw you.”

  “It makes no difference odd or even.”

  “Your wits have to be sharp for what’s ahead so I thought I’d give you a flash quiz just to help you hone up. It won’t be long, lad. Seventeen times forty-one.”

  “Six ninety-seven.”

  “I know you can do tougher.”

  “Do you know a person or persons named Harry Braniff?” Billy said.

  “Person or persons?”

  “This Braniff person delivered an object to my room through the exit grating and I’m wondering if you know him or know who the person is who told him to do it.”

  “I have no standing around here.”

  “I listened to the object and it sounded like it might be important but I don’t know in what way important.”

  “I have no standing, lad. I have no resources to call on. I live alone in a hole. I claw through dirt with a wire hanger and my bare nails, uttering nonverbal sounds as I dig deeper. There’s nothing important I’m capable of doing except tell you what little I know and offer you the psychological security of my padlocked room if you can figure out how to negate the padlock. I have no current status.”

  “Person or persons unknown, I guess.”

  “I lit out for the hole because I couldn’t break the code. What’s doing on the code, Big Bill? The code about finished me. I grew to hate the thing and the people who devised it. Lost faith in myself. Cursed science and the natural limits of man. Finger counting is one of the few pleasures left to me now. Number systems are beautiful structures and none is more beautiful than the set of natural numbers and there’s no better way to appreciate this beauty than to count your way upward, starting with the number one. You can count and count and count and count. No matter how long you count, how many unnamable numbers you utter beyond googolplex and glossolalia for how many years and decades, there’s still one more number, it’s still an open-ended sequence, it still outflies the imagination. I tried to break the code but the code broke me.”

  “I have a feeling the answer’s very simple.”

  “The universe is so big, lad. What are we going to do about it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Neither do I,” Endor said.

  “A lot of it is missing, so it’s not nearly as big as it could be. The value-dark dimension. A lot of the universe is trapped in there. We can’t find it. That’s why the galaxies aren’t flying apart the way they should be.”

  “I thought they were flying apart in orderly fashion,” Endor said. “Things flee. Everything hurtles to the edge and over the edge.”

  “Moholean relativity.”

  “This is new to me. Word of this hasn’t reached me. They keep changing things on me. If it’s not an addition it’s a subtraction and if not a subtraction then a correction. Extremely depressing at times.”

  “Mohole told me all about it,” Billy said. “He has a whole room just for vomiting.”

  “The history of science is crosshatched with lines of additive and corrective thought. This is how we try to arrive at truth. Truth accumulates. It can be borrowed and paid back. We correct our predecessors, an effete form of assassination, and then we wait either in this life or the next for the corrective dagger to be slipped twixt our own meatless ribs. Here it comes, zip, the end of an entire cosmology.”

  “A lot of people are worried.”

  “It’s the size of things that worries people. No reason for the universe to be so large. It contains more space than I deem absolutely necessary. More time as well. Know who I envy?”

  “No.”

  “Take a guess.”

  “Don’t know.”

  “Low-gravity creatures,” Endor said. “On a low-gravity planet the inhabitants are long, slender and delicate. This is how I think of the Ratnerians. I see them drifting across the terrain, almost ectoplasmically, a race of emanations merely flecked with solid matter. Yes. Beings nearly free of their planet’s gravity.”

  “There is no planet. There’s nothing up there but a couple of dwarf stars. The message came from somewhere else. This is what they’re trying to find out more than what it says.”

  “This is new to me.”

  “Me too.”

  “What happens next?”

  “Practically nothing,” the boy said. “I keep my distance. I play around with the message but nothing more. That’s what happens next.”

  “You go along with this?”

  “I never asked to come here. I didn’t care about the star code or even know if it was real. So now I’m just starting to get somewhere and they tell me to hold off. If that’s what they want, maybe that’s what I’ll do. Out of spite. I believe in spite. Spite makes me feel good.”

  “Never misuse the freedom to invent,” Endor said.

  “What’s that mean?”

  The elderly former scientist cleared his throat for a full ten seconds, obviously building up to some kind of oration.

  “Work till it hurts, lad. This is demanded of you. We all demand it. It’s what you owe your chosen field. We insist on the highest striving of your intellect. There’s only one way to create, as if your life depended on it, which it does. The message will tell us our place in this largest of all possible universes. No less than a total effort of your imagination must be brought to bear on this task. Every part is interconnected and all the numbers flow in proper sequence. If you don’t give us every scrap of what you are, we die in strongly scented heaps. Whatever order can be conceived by the left-handed mind is yours to impose elsewhere. Whatever sense of form can be induced to rise out of the horizontal mist is yours to reapportion. Where perfect measurement beckons, no one but you is fit to sand the final beam.
Mathematics is an expression of the will to live. Merely to play with it is to see your own basic nature crushed. Only the fiercest risks make existence possible. Throw yourself forward, lad. Devise forms that will explain the things around you. Wriggle out of your mortal silk. Avoid the body’s wane in events of spectral perfection. Know the names of things and write them like a child in elemental lists. Who was it said names and numbers give us power over the world? Spengler no less. Never dismiss the intuition of the ancients, who believed that number is the essence of all things. The mathematical vision is not manifest in what is written and taught alone. Number is a metaphysic, the secret source of entire cultures, and men have been killed for their heresies and seductive credos. The whole history of mathematics is subterranean, taking place beneath history itself, misunderstood, ignored, ridiculed, unread, a shadow-world scarcely perceived even by the learned. Of adventure, greatness, insanity and suicide, it is nevertheless a history of nothing happening. Of nothing happening. Magnitudes correspond in terms of proportion. Variables in terms of function. But nothing ever happens. Statements are proved to be neither provable nor disprovable. Nothing has happened, yet everything is changed. Existence would be sheer dread without the verifiable fictions of mathematics. So sacrifice all, Big Bill. Fill every delicate invention with all your pain and every raging extract of your talent. Nothing less than sanity itself must be tipped into the scheme. Compulsions, tumults, fevers, epileptic storms. What is unlearned, along with your craftiest fabrications. Remember the savage and what he accomplished in his instinct for pure space and the mathematics of motion. Inventor of the boomerang. Yes, he pulled the string on space itself. The right side of his brain outprocessed the left. Intuition and motion and the conquest of time. It’s the object of your labor, lad, to join the hemispheres. Bring logical sequence to delirium, reason to the forager squatting, language and meaning to the wild child’s dream.”

  “All that?”

  Endor began to cough and spit. The last of his strength had apparently been exhausted by the requirements of the formal speech he’d chosen to make and Billy imagined him on his back, arms and legs extended, chest pumping, warm spittle mingling in his beard with slime mold and the living mucus of his last meal. As time passed his cough assumed a tone of total desolation, the sound of a near bark, sufficient to define the residue of an existence.