Ratner's Star (41 page)

“I thought we weren't staying.”

“It depends on events,” Softly said. “We'll be here in general but elsewhere in particular, I suspect.”

They began to walk again. It was still possible to hear an occasional parade sound, very faint at this distance, tiny rips in the air, the brief repeated
pop
of tearing seams. Softly kept the jacket over his head.

“I think we're free to break off, split away, to follow a new course. In line with the rigorous approach I'd like everyone to stop using expressions like ‘Ratnerians,' ‘superbeings,' ‘extraterrestrials' and so forth. It's a radio source we're in touch with. If Moholean relativity is the real thing, the source isn't even where it seems to be. So why assume it's a planet orbiting a star? Remember the homely old adage: ‘Belief in the causal nexus is superstition.' So let's from now on be sure to use the term ‘artificial radio source.' And let's find a more precise name for the so-called beings who are presumed to have initiated the transmission. How about ‘artificial radio source extants'? ARS extants. Just so we know what's what.”

“Getting tired?”

“From talking more than walking. Hard to adjust to the fact I'm walking with someone who doesn't tower over me. The size we share makes it easier for me to imagine you in the palsied grip of middle age, hee hee, which in turn makes my own years fall away like dry leaves. The fate of man, recto verso, is to go to his grave in a rented hearse-o.”

In time they returned to the vicinity of the cycloid structure. A woman opened the gate that led from a small enclosure known as the abstract garden. She walked toward them, carrying a small piece of luggage and some books.

“Look at the ass on that.”

“What ass?” Billy said. “She's coming toward us.”

“I like to anticipate.”

Softly put his jacket back on and they settled into adjacent chairs in the abstract garden. The paraders had evidently passed this way, leaving tokens of their frolic. A man with a pointed stick jabbed daintily at pieces of paper and stray fragments of costume.

“So in conclusion,” Softly said, “what we've got to do is restate and strengthen our method of reasoning. Make it exact and supremely taut. Introduce distinctions and fresh relationships. Argue our propositions in terms of precise ideographic symbols. Submit our mathematics, in short, to a searching self-examination. In the process we'll discover what's true and what's false not only in the work before us but in the very structure of our reasoning. There's been no concerted attempt to eliminate slackness and ambiguity from the work you've done up to now. I've got news for you, mister. The goddamn fun is over.”

They were alone in the small garden. The afternoon had lost some of its rabid glare. A smell of mown clover rose from the earth. It summoned a special presentness, that particular time-sense in which animal faculties conspire to rouse the spirit, the ordering force of memory, and Billy was stirred to relive some elemental moments separately blessed within the flow of past events. They could be counted, the times in which he'd guided a length of string through the hole he'd nail-scraped in a chestnut, the lumps of clay he'd thumbed and gouged into some amorphous model, the cherry pits he'd buried and people he'd learned
to believe. They could be counted, the times in which he'd flexed his toes in dense wet sand, the bites of ice cream he'd chunked out of dixie cups with a flat wooden spoon, the caves he'd made in his mashed potatoes, the pages he'd detached from his composition notebook, tearing down along the row of wire rings, and the white flakes that bounced down out of the air as a result, also distinct and countable. They could be named and listed, the places he'd hidden from danger, the nights he thought would never end.

Softly got up, stretched and headed abruptly toward a remote rear entrance of the building. The boy followed, carrying the briefcase. It wasn't until he walked toward the reflecting surface of an electronic door, now sliding open, that he realized he was still wearing the false mustache.

REFLECTIONS
Logicon Project Minus-One

Everywhere dense the space between them seemed a series of incremental frames that defined their passion's dark encompassment, man ostensibly engrossed in dressing, woman nude and on her side (a horizontal dune anagrammatized), neither failing to be aware of the sediment of recent links and distances, that variable material suspended in the air, living instants of their time within each other, sweat and re-echoing flesh serving to confirm the urgent nature of their act, the industry involved, the reconnoitering for fit and placement, the fundamental motion, the pursuit of equable rhythm, the readjustment of
original position, the effort of returning to oneself, of departing the aggregate, and in the slightly pasty daze in which they now remembered their fatigue, their sense of well-merited weariness, it was possible for each to examine even further the substance of that space between them, so reflective of their labor, the odors transposed, the strand of hair in the mouth, the experience of whole body breathing, the failure (or instinctive disinclination) to produce coherent speech, the bright cries, the settling, the eventual descent to slackness, the momentary near sleep in milkiness and cling, the recapturing of normal breathing tempo, the monosyllables and blocks of words, the raw awareness of the dangers of exchange, the oddly apologetic uncoupling, mutual recognition of the human demonology of love. She rose from the bed, not without a glib tickle of the springs, this done with a bounce of her amazing buttock, the left, notable for its star-shaped birthmark. He sat atop a footstool, engaged in double-lacing his shoes, taking time between knots to watch her dress, an operation that seemed to portray the correspondence between position and time, one action generating the next, step-in, shake-into, hoist-on, her limbs and torso covered now, fluidly moving woman, her eyes appearing to follow the delicate pebbling sound of Softly's voice. She sat back on the bed as he spoke, the bottoms of her feet identically smudged with dust, arms enfolding her raised knees to form a body-hut that wobbled. Softly rubbing his pale stubble took time to glance inside the folder she'd left propped against the footstool. He spoke a moment longer (about terms, formulas, sentences and proofs), then got up and hurried out of the room, moving with his customary lurch. Had he happened to turn, a step beyond the doorway, for a final word or sweet and simple farewell nod he might have found himself a trifle mystified by the wry smile on his lover's face.

The boy was packed and waiting when Softly arrived in his canister. His pants were pressed and he wore his good sport coat and tie. His fingernails were clean. The part in his hair was nearly straight.
His shoes were shined. The mustache was gone. While Softly nosed his way around the room as though they were about to move in rather than vacate, Billy picked up his suitcase and headed toward the door.

“Not that way.”

“What other way is there?”

“Straight down.”

“Explain please.”

He watched Softly approach the metal grating located near the base of the wall. This, of course, was the emergency exit point for the whole sector. Softly unclasped the grating and set it on the floor.

“We can't go in there except for man-made or natural disaster,” Billy said. “They told me that. I nodded my head to show them I understood their statement. Floods, fires, wars, earthquakes.”

“Do I get to pick one?”

“I don't like going down there for no reason.”

“There's an emergency all right. I thought all along this would happen and it has. Cable traffic is heavy beyond belief.”

“So what is it, some kind of alternate physics situation or the bottom is falling out of space or water doesn't boil at the boiling point anymore? Because around here that's the kind of emergency you get.”

“Tensions,” Softly said.

“What kind?”

“The worst kind. International tensions. Mounting international tensions. First there were states of precautionary alert. Then there were enhanced readiness contours. This was followed by maximum arc situation preparedness. We can measure the gravity of events by tracing the increasingly abstract nature of the terminology. One more level of vagueness and that could be it. It's not just a localized thing either. We're dealing with global euphemisms now. Exactly how soon it'll break out depends on when
x
, representing the hostile will of one set of nations, and
y
, the opposing block, slip out of equilibrium in terms of capability and restraint coefficients. We could frame any number of cutie-pie equations but we've got more important work to do.”

“So how far down do we go? Is there a basement with a shelter right under here?”

“We go deeper.”

“Where they keep the proton accelerators? I think that's about as far down as the building goes.”

“Deeper.”

“I know where. Where the balloon is that they keep in that big room, the balloon for astronomy. That's about thirteen levels down. Or the Great Hole. We go to the Great Hole, right?”

“Deeper,” Softly whispered.

“Deeper than the Great Hole?”

“What I find most satisfying about this structure is the fact that it comes in more than one part. The first, naturally, is the cycloid. The second is the first in reverse, completely below ground level. Same shape upside down. Same distance down as up. Nothing goes on down there in the sense of official goings-on. It's nothing more than an excavation. But it fulfills the concept.”

“I think I'll stay here.”

“I call it the antrum. Just a fancy way of saying hole in the ground. I've had the floor of the excavation fixed up a bit. Just the bare essentials. And I've selected the very best people to help us in our work. Every one a supersavant. It took all the persuasiveness I could muster. I think the world tensions helped. In this kind of chancy muddle everybody agreed the only way to stay intellectually fresh was to put ourselves in a state of total isolation. Consider yourself lucky to be working with these people.”

“I'll take my chances with the global phrase-calling.”

“Follow me down,” Softly said.

On his hands and knees he backed into the exit hatch. Billy handed down his suitcase and followed. After descending a long metal ladder they had to step over a series of sewer pipes to the edge of a catwalk. It was hard to see, the only light being provided by a dusty bulb. To one side was a stack of beams and thick boards set on sawhorses, all apparently left by workmen. They crossed the catwalk and headed toward another light, avoiding puddles as they went. This time the bulb was inside an open shaft. Softly cranked a lever and eventually a small elevator ascended and stopped, roughly at their level. It was really the
frame of an elevator, much of its wiring exposed, no paneling at all, a few yards of hexagonal mesh closing in all but one side. In this lame cage they were lowered into the excavation, a journey that took them through storage and maintenance areas, restricted sectors, down along porous shale and rock, past timber underpinnings and assemblies of masonry and steel that formed support for subtunnels and emergency access routes, the elevator suddenly dropping into open air, free of its shaft, cabling into the darkness of the inverted cycloid, air currents, oscillation, a bucketing descent through drainage showers and rubble-fall, the cage shaking so badly that Billy sought to convince himself there was a pattern to the vibrations and changes of speed, a hidden consistency, all gaps fillable, the organized drift of serial things passing to continuum. Gradually the elevator slowed down, steadying its descent. Then it fitted into its housing, a sort of armored toy-box located on a platform about a dozen feet off the ground. The riders stepped out and walked down makeshift wooden stairs to the very bottom of the vast excavation. An awful lot of trouble, the boy thought, just to fulfill a concept.

A short distance away was a series of cubicles for working and sleeping. Larger units included a first-aid room, a kitchen, a primitive toilet, some field telephones. Everything was set on a slightly curved surface of clay and rock and there was nothing above but darkness. Oil drums, wooden crates and natural debris were set around the cubicles to keep dislodged rocks from bouncing in. A generator droned nearby. Water dripped, splashed and occasionally cascaded in the distance. It was cool down here but not uncomfortably so. The smell of earth was firm and gripping, mineral-rich, and humid air could be felt on the tongue like the taste of a lead penny.

“Frightening ride, I freely concede, but better this than a block and tackle descent,” Softly said. “If we ever short-out down here due to flooding, that'll be next. Up and down we go, sitting in a loop of high-grade rope.”

In Billy's cubicle were a cot, a footlocker, a large shiny blocklike chair and a TV table on casters, this last item meant to serve as a desk. The partitions were about twice his height. There was no door, just an
entranceway; no ceiling; a clay floor. Softly left him alone to do his unpacking and Edna Lown lowered herself toward a kitchen stool, moving slowly as befitted her bulk, a cigarette aslant at the corner of her mouth. He opened the lone piece of luggage but found that only half his things could be pressed and kneaded into the locker. The rest he left in the suitcase, which remained unclosed at the foot of the bed. Then he sat in the chair, not accustomed to free time, Lown's blouse littered with pale ash from her cigarette. Softly took his ease across the table, watching her thumb through a sheaf of papers, hair fairly gray and worn in an uneven page-boy cut, clear eyes set in a broad strong face, sedately aging woman, tank-driver of the neo-logistic school, her thumb accelerating the page count now.