Ratner's Star (16 page)

One zero one.

Not only the lowest three-digit prime but the smallest three-digit palindrome. Not only reads the same forward and back but rightside up and upside down. And not only when looked at directly but also when reflected in a mirror. Continues to yield palindromes not only when squared and cubed but when raised to even higher powers.

Thus he passed the time, in regressive play, feeling certain there was nothing to be found anyway, no code to break. He glanced from time to time at the manuscript just to his right. Something about eighteenth-century men working in the service of kings and dowager queens. Court mathematicians of Russia and Prussia. “Only a small fraction of the work that shaped their art was devoted to the dim practicalities of the day. Every new paper, memoir, volume broadened the scope of mathematics itself. Ironic that this amplitude of class should be accompanied by such grim individual funneling of effort, convergence toward an existential center. And curious to find two men doing interrelated work and suffering for it so differently. Both of them were productive well beyond the inner margins of old age. Genial cyclops with a weakness for children. Detached gentleman content to die.” It was odd to sit at a desk called a module inside a room known as a canister and to read, under such conditions, of a man who had begun his work before the birth of Catherine the Great and who did not end it until nearly nine hundred books and articles had been published in his name. It was doubly odd to be engaged in trivial calculations based on a series of radio pulses believed to have been transmitted by living things in another part of the galaxy and to reflect, in such circumstances, on a man whose genius had been acclaimed by Napoleon but who was drawn into star-ponds of such inertia that he left his greatest work unopened on his desk for two full years.

The videophone chimed.

“It was as though no experience could escape such minds. The neural center was intent on total concentration. At the bottom of it all dwelt
a collapsed object, fallen into its own fundamental being, model of the mathematician himself, invisible except in madness and final pain.”

The videophone chimed. He pressed a button and listened as a small male head, calling itself Simeon Goldfloss, announced the existence of a shortcut to the amphitheater in the armillary sphere. Billy didn't know why the man was giving him this information but he was grateful for the excuse it provided to shun further work on the code, at least for the time being, and so he followed Goldfloss's directions, although not with much enthusiasm. A few people were scattered around the amphitheater. Goldfloss stood, nodding, and Billy walked slowly over there, trailing his lack of interest like a baby sister. Then he sat, arms folded across his chest. In the narrow aisle the man maneuvered himself into semi-erect posture, facing the boy, one foot up on the seat adjacent to Billy's.

“A lot of people think this might finally be the answer to the secret of Ratner's star. But before the hall fills up and we get started, I'd like to summarize our findings up to now.”

“What might finally be the answer?”

“The aborigine,” Goldfloss said.

“Summarize what findings? I didn't know there were any findings. I thought that's what I was here for. To make the findings.”

“There have been and will continue to be findings. In the next ten minutes about eighty people working on various aspects of the star project will fill this little theater. They've all made findings of one kind or another. That's why we have the computer universe. To simulate events in order to reach conclusions.”

“Who's this aborigine?”

“We hope to answer that question here today.”

“How can an aborigine help out on a scientific project?”

“It's not inconceivable that some things exist beyond the borders of rational inquiry. Most everyone will come here to gibe and twit. Fair enough. I may decide to join the fun. But it's important to remember that we haven't gone into this without first investigating every shred of evidence concerning the aborigine's totemic powers.”

People were entering the amphitheater. The chatter began to spread
in intersecting lines as men and women turned in their seats, moved from tier to tier, stage-whispered improbable rumors up and down the gallery. The sense of festivity, however, was never really total. Across the spaces between bodies a secondary communication seemed to be developing, a secret accompaniment to words and gestures, and it was simply the mass suspicion that through every level of hearsay and high delight there might eventually pass the shaft of a primitive spear.

“We're on the verge,” Goldfloss said. “I've never sensed this kind of excitement. I have the feeling something sensational is going to come out of this operation in a matter of days. A new way of viewing ourselves in relation to the universe. A revolutionary human consciousness. And you're at the very center of events.”

“Me and the aborigine.”

Goldfloss sported dundreary whiskers and wore a silvery denim suit.

“Ratner's star is a main sequence star and its sister star is a black hole. We can't see it but we know it's there because of the pattern of X-ray emissions. So what we're dealing with is a planet in an orbital situation that involves a yellow dwarf, namely Ratner's star, and a supermassive invisible object, or gravitational singularity if you will, or black hole, to use the popular term. That concludes our summary.”

A woman wearing an eyepatch entered the chamber. Billy had never seen a woman with an eyepatch. Wondering why, he decided men get in more fights. It was a black patch and covered the right eye. He watched her climb to the fourth or fifth row across the aisle, where she sat alone, a well-shaped woman in her forties, hair cut short, complexion pale, idle lilac scent humming in the air about her.

“Ratner's star is our future,” Goldfloss said. “What we've received is most likely the key to their language and to every piece of knowledge they possess. Once you break the code we'll have no trouble reading future messages. We'll know everything they know. In that sense the star is our future. The message itself is probably boring. ‘Eight squared is sixty-four.' ‘We have twisted molecules.' Typical cosmic announcement. What follows, however, will alter the very core of our being.”

A man appeared on the floor of the amphitheater. Silence was instantaneous. Goldfloss, still semi-erect in the aisle and with his back to
the man, reacted to the sudden hush by turning slowly and then easing into the seat next to Billy.

The man standing below them, although obviously accustomed to wilderness and excessive sun, was just as obviously white; that is, he was clearly Caucasian, pink-tinged in some spots, ruddy in others, merely freckled elsewhere. He wore old khaki shorts, bark sandals and a string headband ornamented with eucalyptus nuts. His bare sunken chest was scarred and pigmented—three linked circles in red and black. He gazed up one tier of seats and then across the top row and slowly down the second tier.

“Most of you know me, if at all, by the name Gerald Pence. However, I haven't used that name for a very long time. I am called Mutuka now. I arrived, you see, among the nomadic people of the outback in a motor car. Mu-tu-ka, you see. I've been given this name and use no other. Those of you who know me are probably aware of the extensive work I once did in futurology. This is no longer part of my dreamtime, or
tjukurpa
. I use stone tools now. I eat lizard and emu. I find peace in the contemplation of rock art. Since deciding to live among the foragers, I've learned the language,
wangka nintiri
, and have begun slowly to understand the higher reality of nonobjective truth. The secrets of the bush are extraordinary indeed. Hard to unravel, harder to explain. Yet with the passage of time, they become less and less extraordinary and soon appear to be nothing more than the natural schemeless flow of nonevents. I don't intend to reveal the secrets of the bush. My role here is a very limited one. The man, the extraordinary individual who grows less extraordinary by the day, the forager and seer whom, it is fitting to say, I am privileged to accompany to this point in geographical history—
his
role is to accomplish nothing less than the creation of an alternative to space and time.”

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.