Ratner's Star (23 page)

“Definitely forget it.”

The expression on Troxl's face did not change. He did some excessive sweating in the area of his left knee. After a while he leaned over and blew in that direction several times, apparently trying to dry the moisture on his pants leg. Then he looked at Grbk.

“The childnik isn't very gemütful,” he said.

Grbk neither replied nor indicated in any way that he'd even heard his superior's remark. A fretful prickling silence began to accumulate in the room. Billy didn't like the way the air felt. It was like subway air or tenement hallway air, aged and layered, moist with body poisons. Maybe Grbk (the man-shaped foot) was exuding his personal odor. Billy didn't want the silence to grow more important than it already was.

“Is Grbk's name Grbk or is that just the name he gives his name the way you do?”

“Grbk a nom de nom? Hilario!”

“I'm curious to hear how he spells it.”

“Unspellable,” Troxl said.

“If you can say something, you can spell it.”

“There are things past spelling and far beyond counting. No word or number reaches there. You must live inside a schnitt not to know of this. I can only say tant pis, piccolissimo. I position you neither here nor elseplace. Oblivio obliviorum.”

“Capital G-r-b-k.”

“Prove it,” Troxl said.

“Make sense for a change.”

“Show me the vowelles at least.”

“None.”

“At variente with general usage, no be so? Fit for eye charts.”

Grbk spoke for the first time. His voice was a near gargle, the protolaryngeal
reconstruction of the sound of a lost language. It seemed to be forcing itself through a medium more resistant than air.

“Gwo turd heil.”

Billy looked at Elux Troxl.

“Go toward hell,” Troxl interpreted.

Grbk took a deep breath before speaking again.

“Thing-cud, sea worts mor bett.”

“Thing-kid, I say words more better than you.”

“Gud yr lungo,” Grbk said.

“Guard your language.”

“Tlung mv utmo spd.”

“His tongue moves with more utmost speed than your tongue,” Troxl said.

“Hindlag bemost.”

“You lag behind. You are hindmost.”

Grbk took another great breath before exhaling the next remark. “Hins fins.”

“His hands are finished,” Troxl said.

“What does that mean?”

“It's the way he says the number ten.”

“You mean counting fingers.”

“Hins fins,” Grbk said.

“He's guessing your age. He says you're ten.”

“Thing-cud, he, it, sit, muck sud, betuk to wesperole wo nama ta bu sakro nix farbioten yooz, sud muck, he, it, sit.”

“Thing-kid, he, it, sitting, maker of sums, is betaken to the night hole where names exceedingly marked as sacred will be no more forbidden of usage, sum-maker, him, it, sitting.”

“I'm expecting his tonsils any second,” Billy said.

He sat tensely in the twofold, ready for nearly anything. Compared to Grbk's dumb blunt semispeech, Troxl's locutions appeared in retrospect to be models of formal cultivated discourse. He tried to watch both men at once.

“Katzenjammer time,” Troxl said. “I feel maldressed for the occasion. Sad to see how partitionage diseffectuates the young. Suffering and
phanguish. But this is life as it is lived in the world of existenz. A nothingness full of pitfalls.”

“Pitfallful,” Grbk said.

“We're forced to conclude you extemporarily from our cartel. Nihil ex nihilo. A thing deprived of living existenz.”

“Don't say that word any more. I don't like it.”

“Beyond the final number you'll find nothing to cling to but existenzphilosophie. In your case the philosophie will have to suffice since you possess no existenz. Being bjorn isn't enough to give you claim to existenz; it must be merital. Nilly will be clingless beyond the ultimate number.”

“There is no ultimate number. Mathematics depends on infinity. You can keep on counting forever. It never ends, the number series.”

“The others grow fativi on bulk orders of goods and orderables. Real money is germed and clumsy of usage even if capable of spendfulness. We call it the negauchable currency in the transargot of cartel regulation. The curve, however, is pure. It is ours to control with the help of your precisionized brain. Think of yourself enwrapped by lady-people. Such will be the fame of your power. A penthouse manned by women. All sizes dressed in filmed subgarments. Merely agree to follow the curve. Otherwise beyond the last number is the faceless chaos, which is just a gateway to the abysm itself. All limits twisted out of shapule. Impossible to converge thereon. Your existenz becomes unthinkable in this warped region. But this is just a warm-up, for beyond the big abysm is the voidal nicht y nacht. Metamathematik. Zed to the minus zed power. Much más than that I don't even dare to whisper.”

“Máslessness,” Grbk said.

“Beware of that over there. His hands are verging on the shirt. This means he dwells in the fixed idée of unbuttoning. Double conical protuberances. Nipples as nipples. This is something I as myself have no wish-inclination to look upon. As observer I remain but as myself I am very much repelled by the erotic corruption of children. He's done this to many boys and girls, the publication of nipples, but up to now I've yet to see it as myself.”

“Tell him I'm fourteen. If he knows this, he may not want to expose to me. I'm a lot older than I look. He probably likes to expose to younger kids. Tell him he won't get anything out of it, my being older than he thinks. I'm getting up and leaving unless you start explaining fast. I know there's no reason to run. It's just a man's nipples and all he wants to do is show them to me. In my mind I know this. But I'm running anyway.”

“Decommence,” Troxl said to his assistant. “The boykid is determined not to join us. No point in depraving the air further. I say haltung and rebutton. You're contractually bound to obey me. Don't take that shirt ovsk. Decease at once, fetid mammal.”

Billy was away, bumping out the door and hieing himself to the play maze. From here he staged his escape, coming eventually to a small and lavishly mirrored room, a barbershop in fact, all tile and ivory, smelling of coroner's tonics. There was no barber in sight and only one chair, occupied. The chair was angled in such a way that the occupant's head was about five feet off the floor. Since the head was wrapped in a towel and the body covered with the customary tonsorial bib, all he could see was the person's shoes. Slowly he circled the chair, halting immediately when he saw a hand emerging from the sheet, fingers extended. There was nothing repulsive about the hand—no warts or raised and rampant veins—and so he took it and shook it.

“Shlomo Glottle,” the man said in a smothered voice. “I knew it was you from your footsteps. Where's the barber?”

“I don't know.”

“I fell asleep and dreamed I was screaming. When I woke up, no barber. I've been hoping to meet you for a long time. When I heard you were coming here I couldn't believe it. Then word reached me that you were actually here. ‘He's on the premises, he's in the building.' Imagine how excited I was, a person who's always wanted to chitchat with someone like you. Have you met the aborigine?”

“I'm having a little trouble hearing you.”

“Let me rephrase the question. Nobody's actually met the aborigine. The aborigine seems to be unmeetable. If he exists at all, we'll have to depend on poor old Mutuka to act as spokesman and since Mutuka's
gone back to the bush, that ends that. Were you at the demonstration? That's the question I should have asked in the first place.”

“There's a towel on your face.”

“Talk up. Don't be shy. Use some of the lung power you were born with. It's my understanding the aborigine visited more than one planet when he traveled to Ratner's star. I was the person who informed Mutuka at the outset that we were receiving signals from Ratner's star. Mutuka then consulted with the aborigine in the bush and eventually brought him here for the demonstration and it's my understanding and correct me if I'm wrong that at the demonstration the aborigine was quoted more or less parenthetically as having claimed there is life on more than one satellite of Ratner's star. Space Brain has now confirmed a two-satellite configuration. We have computer confirm on this. The white-haired one didn't just say life, life, there is life. He said more than one world, more than one planetary body, making your work here no less urgent more than ever. ‘He's on the premises,' they said. ‘He's actually in the building.' It is you, isn't it? Those are your footsteps, right? You're the math wizard, aren't you?”

Shlomo Glottle's right hand had been so free of imperfection that Billy, watching the same hand now unwrapping the face towel, unreasonably feared the effects of some awful law of reverse compensation, a counterbalancing deformity of the face perhaps, Glottle's face, a half-mouth maybe or exposed mucous membrane, the face that at this moment was coming out of the towel, and so, knowing it was stupid on several levels, he left the barbershop and hurried toward the source of the odd toneless music sounding along the corridor.

“I tell the truth about people.”

In an antique chair sat a small wan woman playing a string instrument triangular in shape, its neck unbent and body obviously carved by hand from raw reluctant wood. The room was soft with dust and shadow, everywhere the ruck of clustered objects, most of them plainly put together and left to themselves to grow into the look of familiar things, every angle, plane and coloration recalling the hush of some mellow room where beaded dresses rest limply on the arms of rocking chairs. In a wide glance he saw old piano benches and cellos in repose;
medieval wind instruments; puppets, toys and small statuary; ceremonial spears and halberds; a white tricycle; stoic bamboo bound in corners; two-string Oriental violins; and finally an enormous organ with neon tubing for pipes.

From her chair the woman, at eye level with the boy, seemed to smile him into the room, almost imperceptibly, her eyes measuring his hesitation in the melting desert light.

“People come to me to discuss their names, if interesting and strange. It's my avocation, my serious amusement, the study of names. Naturally I have other work here, crystal structure, but often I wonder which is more useful, silly hobby or vital science.”

She continued playing the crude instrument. The sound it produced made him uncomfortable. It was stark and dry, lacking all resonance, a small voice howling through cork.

“I like literally to segment a name until nothing remains. Few names yield completely to this practice. I remove one letter at a time, retaining meaning, it is hoped, to the very end.”

“What's your name?” he said.

“Siba Isten-Esru.”

“Pretty good.”

“Seven Eleven.”

“Serious?”

“These are number words of a people who go back to the very dawn. The half-name Isten is of special consequence to me.
Isten
is the word for the number one in Assyro-Babylonian. We can ask ourselves what this particular number one contains. By removing the first letter, the
i
, we arrive at the root word
sten
, indicating narrowness, as in the Greek
stenos
, or narrow. This inclines us to be encouraged, this
stenos
, since what we are engaged in is the very process of contraction. What next then? We remove the
s
from
sten
. This yields ‘ten,' our second number word, this one in English as you're well aware. But there is more to this particular ten, for it is contained within
isten
, giving us ten and one, or eleven, which is doubly curious because my full surname, Isten-Esru, means precisely that, eleven; or, expressed literally, one and ten,
isten
stroke
esru
. This eleven, which we've discovered not only in my full surname but in the English ten contained in the Assyro-Babylonian
one, is the loveliest of two-digit primes, an indivisible mirror image of itself. Remaining with ten a moment longer, we know that in Roman numerals it is written large X. When we shrink this monster, we are left with an unknown number, not to mention an illiterate kiss. So thus far we have severed twice, to
sten
and ten. We now remove the
t
of ten. Our segmentation would seem to weaken here but not if we gaze carefully into the artful enate process taking place. For here we have a reversal, a sudden shift from the narrowing trend to a new phenomenon, one of growing outward, of expanding. In English the fragment
e-n
is often used to make verbs out of adjectives, adjectives out of nouns, and is likewise added to nouns to make verbs—‘lengthen' and ‘heighten,' for instance. To grow, to increase, to gain. Reversing the letters
e-n
for a moment, we concentrate on the Greek
nu
, or
n
, and we see that it comes from the Phoenician word for ‘fish,' which in turn developed from a Semitic root meaning ‘to increase.' So there it turns up again—expansion. Now the Greek
e
, after some refinement, turned out to be the reverse, graphically, of the Phoenician
e
, which itself was somewhat Chinese-looking. In the parlance of my own field, crystallography, these
e
's are enantiomorphic, unable to be superimposed because one mirrors the other. To conclude our stimulating discussion of the fragment
e-n
, I would like to refer to the ancient practice of gematria. In the Greek form,
epsilon
is assigned the number five,
nu
the number fifty. The resulting fifty-five, totaled in digits, equals ten, or
esru
, of which the digital root is one, or
isten
. Not uninteresting, eh? Now to the final contraction. We have removed the
i
, the
s
, the
t
, and now we take away the
e
, leaving us with lonely
n
, the well-known mathematical sign for an indefinite number. This suggestion that precise limits are lacking tends to reinforce the sense of expansion inherent in contraction. There is also large N to be considered. This is Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington's cosmical number, his symbol for the total number of particles in the universe. And little
n
is as well the abbreviation of the Latin
natus
, meaning ‘born,' which returns us full-belly to the word ‘enate,' growing outward, and to its fetal twin ‘enatic,' related on the mother's side. So we begin with
isten
, or one, and through shrinkage, growth and reversal we have come finally to an indefinitely large quantity, giving birth to blank space and silence.”