Ratner's Star (42 page)

“Where is he?”

“Cube one.”

“Will he fold under pressure?”

“He's my protégé, Edna.”

“What took you so long?”

“Had to talk to someone about some questions bearing on incidental matters related to the project.”

“We work in absolute privacy, Rob. I won't give an inch on that. Neither will Lester. This seclusion business was your idea. Now don't start bending.”

“Edna-doll.”

“You've got tendencies.”

“We work without outside interruptions. That was and is my formal promise.”

“When do we see him?”

“Anytime you're ready,” Softly said. “Is that the latest notation work?”

“I'm not happy with it.”

“Of course you're not happy. This is a revolution in the making. All science, all language wait to be transformed by what we're doing here. I am the leader. Nobody's happy until I'm happy and I won't be happy until we've finished what we've come to do.”

The boy did not move when they entered his cubicle. Softly sat on
the bed. The woman remained in the entranceway, examining the apathetic figure in the chair. She wore glasses with dark frames and round lenses.

“We expect this will be a long and intensely productive period for all of us,” she said.

“I haven't even shut my suitcase. That's how long I'm staying.”

“Events aren't influenced by one's wishful application of significance to commonplace objects. Whether your suitcase is opened or closed, we'll be here quite a while.”

“This is a lady dentist talking.”

“Behave yourself, Willy. I told you the fun's over. Edna Lown is here at my request, my entreaty, my urgent supplication. Learn from this woman.”

“Naturally I'm familiar with your work,” she said. “I detect a strong computational strain running through it. Not much sense of discrimination. Not much use for logic. Paradoxically yours is the kind of intellect we need. The basis of mathematical thinking is arithmetic. The whole numbers and how we use them. On the other hand the basis of arithmetical thinking is pure logic. We can trace the foundations of arithmetic to a handful of logical propositions. It seems to be the rule for top people to come to mathematical logic only after considerable work in other areas. That's nice. I like rules, regulations, formats.”

“It seems to me if I remember correctly they got me here to explain a message from outer space. Do I keep on doing that too or do I just work on this other stuff?”

“You can play with the code in your spare time,” Softly said. “If you sincerely feel the ARS extants are using a nondecimal system, attack it from that angle. I think what they're using is what we're looking for. A universal logical language. Help us develop that and the code will take care of itself.”

The woman spat a grain of tobacco from the tip of her tongue.

“Mathematics is a model of precise reasoning, subject only to the requirements of an inner discipline,” she said. “It's an annex of logic. Nothing more. All the rules of what we call ‘number' derive from logical propositions. Logic precedes mathematics. And since the fundamental
elements of logic have no content, mathematics has no content. Form, it's nothing but form. It stands on thin air. The symbols we use are everything. What they represent we discard without the slightest misgiving. The focus of our thought, the object of our examination, our analysis, our passion if you will, is the notation itself. And this is what our work will involve to a large extent. It's nothing you haven't done before really. The emphasis is on classes rather than numbers. That's all.”

“Is that all?”

“I enjoy listening to my logic-mongers talk,” Softly said. “They make the creation of an artificial language seem anything but difficult. Remember, Willy, the greatest work is both simple and inevitable. That's my final word for the moment. I'll leave you with Edna now. See you in a few pangs.”

“What's that?”

“There's no day or night down here. The body makes its own time, usually very different from what we're accustomed to. Waking time we measure in pangs. Hunger pangs. Sleep time we measure in lobsecs. This refers to a Lester Bolin snore cycle. Lester's Edna's associate. The average full-length sleep is about half a dozen lobsecs.”

“Don't you think that kind of talk offends adolescents?”

“Willy, if you think Edna is sensible, there's always Lester to contend with. I remember telling him once how interesting I thought it was that the first use of zero as a number probably took place a great deal earlier than the usual estimates would have it and in Indochina no less, where we can imagine a sort of common abstract boundary between the Taoist concept of emptiness and the Hindu notion of void. He flailed, literally flailed at the air.”

“Of course, there was Cantor,” the woman said.

“I'm late for an appointment.”

“After all the breakdowns, depressions and seizures, after he died, finally, didn't they find in his papers a statement to the effect that mathematics can't be explained without a touch of metaphysics?”

“Juju mama mumblety-peg.”

“Obviously I agree,” she said. “I just mean it's curious enough to be
interesting, not unlike your emptiness and void. What does our young man think?”

“If it's in his papers, I guess that makes it history.”

“History is full of interesting things,” Softly said. “It has no worthwhile statement to make to us, however, in our current preoccupation. We're permitted to deduce, at least at the outset, that everything is either
a
or non-
a
. What we're not permitted to do is say that everything is either the Great Wall of China or something else. In our present circumstance we don't even know the Great Wall exists. We've never heard of it. So let's forget about history.”

Edna Lown spoke for a time on the possible form an interstellar vocabulary might take. She pointed out that a “grammar” would have to be communicated gradually through the medium of radio signals of different wavelength and duration. It would be a step-by-step operation, the elements of our synthetic language defining themselves as they were transmitted and, we trust, deciphered. There would be no inconsistencies or exceptions to rules. As we formulated our cosmic discourse, basing it on principles of neo-logistic thought, we could make our transmissions increasingly abstract and difficult, assuming, we hope safely, that those on the other end had correctly interpreted previous transmissions. In this way we could progress from
“a
plus
b
equals
c”
all the way to a definition of “truth,” if indeed this word is subject to definition. The radio signals in combination would be the equivalent of a set of ideographic units written in Logicon. Connectives, binding variables, arrays of signs gradually emerge from the radio noise. The concepts of “plus,” “minus,” “equal to,” “is implicit in,” “can be interpreted as” soon accumulate in a solid body of planet Earth knowledge. He sat in the chair listening to her as Softly emerged from the shaft, hurried across the catwalk and headed toward the metal ladder. In her room the young woman sat on her bed trying to make sense of the notes she'd written earlier in the day. She seemed to have trouble
expressing anything resembling annoyance or frustration; all such displays were inevitably absorbed by her utter presentableness. Well-tailored pants and shirt. Trim figure. Roundish, soft and overpretty face. Whenever she gestured in the direction of vexation, the act automatically endowed itself with a glow of tomboyish pathos, much too adorable to be taken seriously. Hair coasting over the juncture of jawbone and ear, slightly upcurled, the palest of browns. Eyes overripe with sensibility. Softly was halfway out of his pants before he'd taken a couple of steps into the room.

“Let's go,” he said.

“What is this, a nuclear holocaust copulation drill?”

“I'm in a hurry.”

Softly seminude resembled a Roman sculptor's serious jest. He appeared ludicrous only to the extent that parts of his body were still bound in cloth. Elsewhere nothing was in miniature and it could be maintained, as now he removed the final stretchable sock, that naked he was even more imposing than when fully dressed, his chest fairly broad, his head more closely related in size to the rest of his appendages, an illusion fostered by the balancing factor of his sex organ, a piece of equipment that seemed to hold him together, structural bond and esthetic connective.

“Rob, I'm kind of busy.”

“So am I, so am I, but I took time to come up here. You don't have to undress completely. Just give me something to aim at. A suitable accommodation.”

“Unfunny,” she said.

“Come on, let's get moving.”

“These notes are all messed up. I can't read my own notes. How will I ever get a book out of this?”

Lester Bolin glanced at the envelope and strolled over to cube one, where his associate was saying that any civilization advanced
enough to have constructed an apparatus for receiving radio transmissions from other parts of the universe would most likely be able to interpret any series of messages based on strict logic. In fact the artificial radio source extants would probably have less trouble understanding a message from Earth than we ourselves experience every time we try to decipher fragments of an ancient language found buried somewhere on our own planet. This seeming irony, she said, merely emphasizes the absence of logic in our spoken languages.

“In any case Logicon is not designed to be spoken. As we go along we'll doubtless see it reveal an innate resistance to being articulated.”

“By humans,” Bolin said, standing in the entrance.

“Lester's been working on an experimental
thing
. He believes he can get it to speak Logicon.”

“Sorry I'm late, all. Cut myself and couldn't stop the bleeding for the longest time. Isn't there supposed to be a limit for that sort of thing? Coagulation? Doesn't blood clot on schedule or something?”

“How'd you do it?” Billy said.

“I was opening my mail with a long thin instrument consisting of a flat-edged cutting surface terminating in a handle.”

“A knife?”

“If you want to put it that way.”

“Lester's notion of a joke,” Edna said. “Lester's a joker. Except jokes don't work very well down here. This is dead time. You can't cut it.”

Bolin was a large man who gave the impression of being unmade. It wasn't simply that his clothing fit badly; certain items either missed connections with other items or were connected in the wrong way. The back of one trouser cuff was stuck in his sock. The reckless knot in his tie failed to conceal the fact that his shirt was fastened, starting from the top, with button
a
in hole
b
and so on down to his belt buckle. Part of his shirt was tucked into his shorts, the elastic band folded over his belt for an interval of several inches. His hair was thinning up front and he seemed to want to pat it often. Softly took a cigar from the little metal box. Minor rockfall on the north slope. Mushrooms, mosses, algae, phosphorescent fungus. The trancelike sleep of sated bats digesting
upside down. Bolin stepped outside a moment, returning with a chair. Edna Lown stood a few feet to one side of the entranceway. The simple act of sitting was for Lester something nearly ceremonial, his rump and thighs settling ever deeper, investigating the chairness beneath them, and Billy felt this was a man intent on compressing every second in order to discover the world-point within, a
serious
man, look how he
enjoys
his sitting, watch his scraping feet, see him
exist
, a man (Softly mused, of sitting men in general) concluding an infinite sequence of states of rest to begin this period of self-limiting motion. Constant temperature, humidity, darkness.

“My husband, when we were married,” the young woman said, “didn't recognize my handwriting. We never left notes for each other. We never wrote letters, even when separated for months. It was always
dring-dring
the telephone. Isn't that remarkable? What we've come to? His own wife's handwriting. My own husband's. Both ways it worked.”

“Is that why your marriage broke up?” Softly said.

“We forgot to have fun. That's what happened. No kidding, we just forgot. There he goes. A fleeting figure in the dawn.”

“And now you can't even recognize your own handwriting.”

“I can recognize it all right. I know it's mine. I just can't read it. So don't draw full circles.”

“Remember, you don't talk to anybody unless I give the word. Edna will not like this. It will take every last ounce of my massive powers of persuasion.”

“Is smoking allowed in this crate?”

“I want you to straighten out those notes so I can have a look. That's the first order of business. Then you see my friend Terwilliger. Then we go back up. I don't want to push things. I need Edna's good will. This is a smuggling operation. You are being smuggled in. When you're finished interviewing the boy, you will be smuggled out.”

“I'd rather stay in the antrum.”

“You will be smuggled out,” he said.

Serious people. No way no how, Billy thought, to avoid them in this setup. That one sitting inside his chair. The other one standing there in a blouse, a skirt and desert boots, her age and size wearing those tall
shoes, not that you can blame her, this setup down here, not even any planks over the ditches. Envelope resting on Lester B.'s knees. Serious very serious. As Lester and Edna spoke of the discipline they would all have to exercise in order to succeed in this venture, Billy put his right index finger in his mouth and bit away part of the fingernail without detaching it completely. He then used this jagged fragment to scrape dirt from under the fingernails of the other hand. Eventually he reversed the process (left index finger, right hand), feeling good about the whole thing, partly because it seemed so ecologically sound. After a while he thought of his own funeral, another favored pastime, resorted to whenever his mood needed a boost, his self-esteem a measure of support. There he is in a heartrendingly cute casket lined with napped fabric, white and velvetlike. Everyone he's ever known shows up for the wake. They stand about solemnly, shopkeepers and doctors of philosophy, dozens of boys and girls, colleagues by the score. Their sorrow at his passing mingles with his own self-pity (as he watches). It's fairly obvious. There's not much doubt about it. Guilt. They feel guilty. What they feel is guilt. They bear this terrible guilt for not having treated him better, loved him more, valued his life above their own.