Ratner's Star (11 page)

“We can discover the truth or falsehood of our own final designs only if we teach ourselves to think as a single planetary mind. This is the purpose of Field Experiment Number One.”

“So I hear.”

“True or false. Yes or no. Zero or one. Data is processed in. Current travels through the core magnets in the memory unit. The problem is transistorized and solved. The answer is processed out on cards, tapes or sheets of paper. Computers are like children. Yes-no, yes-no, yes-no. Space Brain is a superhybrid. A little bit of yin in yang. A microdot of yang in yin. This machine is a science in itself. Bi-Levelism, I call it. I'd like very much to take you into void core storage. It may help you see the message in a new perspective.”

“What do you mean by take me into?”

“Physically.”

“The woman before said it's stretching out past its own hardware. That doesn't sound like something I want to get taken into physically.”

“The problem concerns the true nature of expansion,” the man said. “Consider science itself. It used to be thought that the work of science would be completed in the very near future. This was, oh, the seventeenth century. It was just a matter of time before all knowledge was integrated and made available, all the inmost secrets pried open. This notion persisted for well over two hundred years. But the thing continues to expand. It grows and grows. It curls into itself and bends back and then thrusts outward in a new direction. It refuses to be contained. Every time we make a breakthrough we think this is it: the breakthrough.
But the thing keeps pushing out. It breaks through the breakthrough.”

“What thing?”

“Our knowledge of the world. The world itself. Each, the other and both. They're one and the same, after all. It's been said that philosophy teaches us to talk with an appearance of truth about all things and to make ourselves admired by the less learned. There's one branch of philosophy this definition doesn't cover. Bi-Levelism. Bi-Levelism teaches us to talk with an appearance of truth
and falsity
about all things and to make ourselves admired by the
more
learned. True-false. Zero-one. Yes-no. On-off. Come, we'll visit the void core.”

“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.