Ratner's Star

  “How about holding it for later?”

  “Let me allay your fears.”

  “The woman said to tell you I should stay at code analysis checkpoint.”

  “Trumpy writes programs. That’s all she does and all she knows. The void core isn’t part of the computer’s reasoning assembly. Trumpy is concerned with routes of language and logic. She hasn’t been to the void core and in fact has no direct knowledge of its existence. Space Brain contains a deeper electronic route than Trumpy ever dreamed of. The void core is at the hypothetical center of this route. I think you should spend some time here. It will help you understand the implications of bi-level coding in its latest form.”

  “You want to take me to the actual place.”

  “Yes.”

  “I wouldn’t be good at it.”

  “It’s not a question of skill,” LoQuadro said. “The only thing you’re doing is coming with me to another part of the area.”

  “It’s a physical event. I wouldn’t be good at it. Physical things are something I’m not used to doing in my work, being a pure mathematician.”

  “So was I.”

  “She told me.”

  “I was a mathematician.”

  “She said.”

  “I missed the world,” LoQuadro said. “The seas and beaches.”

  “Is that why you switched?”

  “I was, oh, better than some. But no hope of true greatness. Mathematics is the wrong discipline for people doomed to nongreatness. However, that’s not why I switched. I didn’t switch to computers because I missed the world or because I was haunted by my own inadequacy per se. It was all too occult for me. I’m the type of person who’s willing to confront moderately awesome phenomena. Beyond that I lose my bearings. Chipping away at gigantic unproved postulates. Investigating the properties of common whole numbers and ending up in the wilds of analysis. Intoxicating theorems. Nagging little symmetries. The secrets hidden deep inside the great big primes. The way one formula or number or expression keeps turning up in the most unexpected places. The infinite. The infinitesimal. Glimpsing something, then losing it. The way it slides off the eyeball. The unfinished nature of the thing.”

  “There may be a lot of crazy things in the world that scare you and me but mathematics is the one thing where there’s nothing to be afraid of or stupid about or think it’s a big mystery.”

  “Did you find that carved on a temple wall somewhere?”

  “I’m just saying.”

  “Because it has a ring of lyrical antiquity.”

  “Make remarks.”

  “And I am stirred beyond all imagining.”

  “Go ahead, say things, I don’t care.”

  After giving Billy a long searching steel-rimmed look, LoQuadro explained that a visit to the void core would provide the boy with a chance to observe bi-level coding procedures firsthand (enabling him perhaps to adapt such methods to his own attempts to decipher the transmission from Ratner’s star) and might also furnish an insight into the glitch problem. Glitches, he said, were irritating little kinks in a computer, often difficult to locate and straighten out. He went to one of the display screens nearby and with the index finger of his left hand tapped several times at the keyboard that occupied the bottom third of the unit. The screen went white. Then a series of alphanumeric characters appeared, shimmering a bit before going still.

  LoQuadro returned to the padded chair next to the console. He continued to give the impression that he was a clandestine witness to his own thoughts.

  “Every so often it turns up while we’re scanning some graphics material,” he said. “It just turns up. It’s just there. I can’t find it in the routing system. It’s too well integrated. Trumpy claims she can’t find it either. But I suspect she’s the one who put it there. It’s her glitch. What’s more, it seems to be a double glitch. First it interrupts other visual data. Then it interrupts itself. It’s a six-bit hollerith double glitch. Do you know what I just realized about you?”

  “No.”

  “You never say anything clever.”

  “Why should I?”

  “Kids are always saying clever things. They’re famous for it. People are always quoting their kids’ clever remarks.”

  “I’ll write home. Maybe they keep a scrapbook.”

  “Not now,” LoQuadro said. “I have to leave for a while. Important appointment. Wait for me here. I’m meeting with representatives of a Honduran cartel. They’re flying in from Germany. They want to lease computer time.”

  “That must be Elux Troxl.”

  “You know?”

  “Just his name.”

  “How do you know?”

  “This person Hummer who’s on a committee to define the word ‘science’ said something about a person with that name being from Central America who rents computer time and is hiding out in Germany.”

  “Except that’s not his name. Nobody knows his name. It could be anything. I don’t even know if they’re Hondurans. The cartel is Honduran but the agents, I suppose, could be something else.”

  “What’s your part in this?”

  “I market excess time,” LoQuadro said. “Don’t tell anyone I told you. Not a soul knows this. The cartel wants to take advantage of Space Brain’s tremendous versatility. Computer time-sharing usually benefits everyone in the long run. If time is available, someone might as well market it and that someone might as well be me. Computers are like children.”

  “What happens if I’m not here when you get back?”

  “Day-night, play-sleep, on-off.”

  Within the series one, two, four, seven, eleven, he was quick to discover the buried series one, two, three, four. He could walk but not talk. He didn’t talk until he was past the age of three. His mother used to look directly into his mouth and urge him to say something. She would speak to his mouth and beg it to answer. It was his father’s opinion that the boy knew words but simply didn’t want to say them. His mind knew words. He spoke with his mind and to his mind. To and with his mind. In time he will speak to his mouth with his mind and then from his mouth to the room and the people in the room.

  “Soon as he talks I’m taking him into the subways,” Babe said. “I’m taking him down into the tunnels. I’m anxious to show him what the tunnels are like. But not until he talks. I want to hear his reaction.”

  The attack dog was given no name at first. It was simply called “puppy.” As the dog grew bigger and blacker, this means of identification became by default the animal’s official name, at least as far as Faye and Babe were concerned. Billy didn’t call the dog anything and never had. He tried to stay out of its way and remembered most of the time to keep his books at a level that the dog-up-on-hind-legs could not reach. This meant he had to stand on a chair to put his books away and then again to get them down. This was part of the normal course of events on Crotona Avenue. Faye, defrosting the refrigerator, would hurl potfuls of hot water into the freezer compartment. A cooking mitt on each hand, she would hold the large pot well away from her body and then slowly ease back, dipping like a discus thrower, before uncoiling in a grimacing vortex to splash water all over the icebound walls of the freezer. Babe sometimes walked through the apartment with the TV set in his arms. Whenever the rabbit ears failed to deliver a clear picture he would pick up the unwieldy set and take it to another room. On hot summer nights, during the three-hour span of a ballgame, he sometimes touched down twice at each room in the apartment, getting a better picture with every maneuver but then losing it a short time later. The set was heavy enough to force his legs into an occasional stagger-spasm. On the set, as he carried it, were several empty bottles of Champale, a pack of Camels, an ashtray, an enormous cigarette lighter and ten or twelve of Faye’s movie magazines. On many such nights, as Babe made his silent bulky passage through the rooms and as Faye sat by the window commenting on events below, Billy and his friend Ralphie Buber stood in the kitchen spitting in each other’s face. Whoever ran out of saliva
first was declared the loser. However, the game was not discontinued at this point. The winner went on spitting until dry, at which time both boys, not ready to end the contest, were reduced to mere simulation, their lips and tongues going through the motions with nothing of consequence being expelled besides the recurring sound: two two two two.

  “That’s about the dumb-assest thing I’ve ever seen,” Babe said.

  The car he owned was an officially defunct Ford model called the Urban Eco-Pak. It was an extremely bland automobile, too lacking in distinction to be called homely, and it had recently become infested, as though to compensate for its utter dullness, with several forms of insect life, roaches predominating. During the winter months Babe rarely used the car, being content to look it over every time he walked the dog. Any vandalism short of flagrant didn’t bother him and on most nights he circled the small lump of metal just once and continued on his way. In the summer he took family and friends to the beach. Leaving the car to bake in the huge crowded parking lot he accompanied Faye, Billy and the two Seltzers (Izzy, from the subways, and his small daughter Natasha) past rows of automobiles and through the handball courts and onto the boardwalk and across the tract of hot sandy stone to the rail above the beach itself, the teeming strand, that long radiant curve endlessly submissive to the bleak waters of the Sound. Midsummer Sundays at Orchard Beach were like troop maneuvers on desert terrain with every man using live ammunition.

  “They have a religious problem,” Faye said of a married couple in the building. “They’re both Irish Catholic.”

  Often it ended incoherently. There were stabbings, riots, thunderstorms. Faye would wrap Billy in a large towel and he would take off his bathing suit and then sit down to squirm into his pants. On the boardwalk they’d watch the police come sweeping across the beach in full uniform, nightsticks held at chest level, legs pumping high. In disstant tidal flats male swimmers wearing religious medals did gymnastic exercises. Lightning tore across the dark sky and the boy felt an overwhelming sense of urgency, of odd tense giddiness, an emotional voltage in the air, something coming, more than storm or violence, something to run from laughing, fear and expectation together, and he was soaked through with rain now but feeling lighter, more sentient, brushing away his matted hair to see a group of men and women attacking a few individuals and then a second group charging into the first, slash and batter, a lone enormous woman sitting in the sand trying to get her shoes on and being rocked back by her own shifting weight, foot eluding hand, the high-stepping cops beginning to knock people down, everywhere this ever sweetening tension, people bleeding, thunder going whomp, a squad car bouncing over the sand, gunfire in section seven, wind and rain, a raw sundering in the impetus of bodies, people fleeing into the water, death and sheepish laughter, whomp, dark sky and life.

  Billy had been told Natasha squinted because her mother ran away from home. She was extremely frail, her body quivering as though suspended from the end of an eyedropper. Her father often took the kids to the botanical gardens. Together Izzy and Natasha expressed the unfocused sadness of love divided. On notably sad days Billy sometimes felt obliged to whisper in their presence as a way of deferring to their mutual loss. Natasha squinted at many different speeds, depending on the situation.

  “Girls have three armpits,” Ralphie Buber said. “The extra one’s between their legs.”

  Across the airshaft the scream lady cursed the universe. During movie nights, as Faye and Billy sat laughing in the cave-glow of the TV set, the woman shrieked and rattled, none of her words seeming to belong to any known language. One day Billy and two friends were being chased by the janitor through a series of passageways and alleys that ran under and between several adjacent buildings. With the route to his own building sealed off, he climbed the first set of stairs he found. It took him eventually to the fourth floor of the building behind his own. A door was partly open and there the woman stood. Although he had never seen her before, he knew it couldn’t be anyone but her. The scream lady. She was standing about five feet away from him in the dark doorway of her apartment. A white paper napkin was pinned to her hair. She wore two or more bathrobes. The outer robe was opened, revealing another beneath it, and judging by the unwarranted mounds and ridges in this second and tightly belted robe, there may have been one or more beneath that. The woman’s feet were bare and this more than her curious way of dressing, this even more than the fact that she was the scream lady, this really worried him. Old people’s bare feet had always caused him some concern. It was not in the order of things for old men and women to go around barefoot and it made him want to throw lighted matches at their feet to teach them a lesson. He stood watching her now, ready to dash away, already leaning, one second from all-out flight. She took something from the pocket of her outer robe, a piece of paper with writing on it. He kept his eyes on her pitted face, abysmally collapsed, looking as though it had been blown in by some natural force. She rubbed the paper against her forehead in a circular motion over and over. Then she bit it fiercely and extended it in his direction, producing sounds all the while, acoustic interference so random it seemed to come not from her jawless sucking mouth but from a small hole in her throat. He leaned toward the staircase, all his weight on one leg, and then suddenly and without forewarning even to himself he propelled his body in the opposite direction, snatching the paper from the scream lady’s hand. He read it on the roof five minutes later, teethmarks still indenting its surface, tinges of pearly spittle evident in these jagged spaces, while a few feet away a man with a long stick guided a flock of pigeons in training arcs of gradually increasing length.

  Stockmark ave/rage 549.74 (29/1929) grim pill of pilgrim welfare (fare/well) scumsuckers inc. & brownshirt king/pres. (press/king) of U.S. of S/hit/ler & secret (seek/credit) dung of U.S. Cong/Viet Cong & Christ/of/fear Columbus discovered syph/ill/U.S. 1492 + 1929 = 3421/1234/4321 astro/bones buried under ever/grin tree in Rock/fooler Center 50 St. + 5 Ave. = 55 St/Ave/Stave (Cane Abe/L/incoln 1865 + 1492 + 1929 = 5286/PANCA DVI ASTA SAS

  Settled in front of the TV set with a lapful of muscatel grapes, Faye pointed out to Billy why certain performers were considered classic. “I like to watch him work,” she’d say of a particular actor. “Watch the way he does this bit with the water glass. Watch this now. See it, see it, the way he rubs the edge of the glass against his lower lip before he drinks. Nobody else could get away with that. It’s a classic bit. I like to watch him work.” Other times she spoke of growing. Certain performers were interested in growing as artists. Others were not, either because they were too dumb to grow or because they were classic and not only had no use for growth but would be diminished by it.

  Sitting on the blanket at the beach he studied his father’s belongings. The sawed-off poolstick was there, brought along for riot protection. The stainless-steel cigarette lighter was there, nearly the size of a deck of cards. The flame it made was immense. Every time his father put his thumb to the rickety wheel, Billy moved away. With the huge bluish flame would come a surge of furious air, an effect he associated with something being put out rather than something kindled, the last breath of a body hardly formed, heat and light sucking at an ultimate moment. Walking through slush outside the supermarket he asked his mother why they’d named him William Jr.

  “We didn’t think you’d live.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You were born early, mommy. They rushed you into an incubator. You were so itty-bitty we didn’t expect you to last the weekend.”

  “What’s that got to do with being named after my father?”

  “We didn’t want to waste a new name.”

  “Big joke.”

  “We thought we’d save the new names for a healthier kid.”

  “Fun-nee.”

  His father’s shoes were also there, scuffed and monumental, located between the cigarette lighter and the newspaper. It was hard to believe that creatures with feet large enough to be suitable for these containers actually
walked the earth and that one of these creatures was his own pop, his flesh and blood, Babe of the subway tunnels. Are we really of the same race of people? Did I really come from him and her or is it all some kind of story they tell to kids? Ovulation, intercourse, fertilization, pregnancy, labor, delivery. It can’t be that simple. There must be more they aren’t telling us. A circling bird, a dream, a number whispered in the night. At his side Natasha seemed to look directly into the sun. Izzy Seltzer cautioned her, semitragic in his faded swimming trunks, hair everywhere on his body, white-tipped clusters curling from his nose and ears.

  Billy at four still thought of himself as something that would never be altered. “Small boy.” He did not yet perceive the special kinship between humans of different sizes and failed to realize he was destined for other categories. This part of childhood then was a brief chapter of immortality that would be recognized in due time as having been set between biological states reeking of deathly transformation. Some years later, sitting in the bathtub, he would bounce in prepubescent rage on the smooth porcelain as his mother’s head appeared in the doorway.

  “Is you is or is you ain’t my baby?”

  “Drop dead please.”

  At four, however, completely in accord with the notion of forever being this thing called “small boy,” he lived in a deep sunny silence unthreatened by a sense of his own capacity for change. There was no doubting the fact he was exactly what he was meant to be. He was sure he met the requirements. It was all so totally fitting. He was native to a permanent inner environment just as certain fish as a species never stray from coastal waters. His shape was carved in the very air, body and mind forever.

  LoQuadro led him back across the complex, seeming to take the same route and make the same small detours that Shirl Trumpy had taken and made when earlier she’d driven him in the opposite direction. Shadows were cast on the walls and floors by hulking computer units.

  “Did they lease?”