Ratner's Star (50 page)

Charming, Edna thought, perhaps a bit wearily, hearing Softly's peculiar footfalls as he went past her cubicle, picturing him in a suit, vest and dark tie, those resplendent little shoes, all of which he was in fact wearing as he made his way to cube one, where Billy was found to be in bed, hands clasped on his head, knees upraised, a general sense of adolescent languor in the air.

“Where's the ball?” Softly said. “I'm in the mood for some exercise. Some distraction. We all need a little distraction.”

“What ball?”

“Didn't I see you pick up a rubber ball recently?”

“A rubber ball,” the boy said. “I brought it in here, I think.”

“Get it out and cut it in half.”

“What for in half?”

“You really are socked in, aren't you?”

“Halfball, is that it? You want to have a game of halfball.”

“About time,” Softly said.

“I don't want to play.”

“You love halfball.”

“Not in the mood, that's all.”

“It's your game,” Softly said. “Yours and mine. Get the ball, cut it in half and let's go play. Maurice cleared away an area just beyond the crates. He's cutting down a mop handle now. Jean's going to play too. You like Jean. You and Jean get along. I've taught them the rules. Edna and Les will watch. It's more fun with spectators.”

“I thought the fun was over.”

“You need a fresh dose.”

“Maybe I'll feel like playing later on.”

“Wee Willy, hit 'em where they ain't.”

“I want to either stay right here in this dirt room or get completely out of the whole place.”

“Look, we'll go out on the ‘field,' loosen up a bit, play one game of halfball and then you can come back here and ‘rest.' Halfball is a beautiful game. You love halfball. It's exactly what you ‘need,' some ‘exercise,' a period of ‘distraction.' So what do you say, hey?”

“I want to stay here.”

“Why the sudden obsession with immobility?” Softly said. “What kind of dopey routine is this? Some kind of mystic trance you're falling into?”

“No.”

“Because if it is, you know what I have to say to you.”

“I know.”

“Musjid pepsi kakapo.”

“What else?”

“Huwawa djinn.”

Billy had always enjoyed the unfamiliar word clusters that Softly used to counteract serious remarks about religion, the supernatural or the fuzzier edges of quantum physics. What he didn't like was his mentor's very occasional tactic of pronouncing certain words as though they warranted quotation marks. The practice seemed to have a source deeper than mere sarcasm. Softly sometimes employed this vocal rebuke, if that's what it was, in circumstances that appeared to be completely unsuitable. He would refer to a table, for instance, as a “table.” What sort of inner significance was intended in such a case? It was one thing for Softly to use a sprinkle of emphasis when speaking of someone's
“need” for “rest.” But when he put quotes around words for commonplace objects, the effect was unsettling. He wasn't simply isolating an object from its name; he seemed to be trying to empty an entire system of meaning.

“If you're not ready to play, are you ready to work?”

“Definitely.”

“You'll do whatever Edna and Lester ask?”

“Yes.”

“See, I told them you'd come around. And I haven't even had to get mean. My displays of adultism are minor legends wherever children congregate.”

“Do I have to play halfball?”

“No,” Softly said. “Just give me the rubber ball and I'll have Maury cut it in half.”

The game was played on the negative curvature of the small clearing. Softly removed his jacket and tossed it to Lester Bolin, who sat with Edna on a crate. The fey spectacle about to unfold brought to Edna's face a look of delighted expectation laboring to hide the strain that went into its manufacture, as though she were attending a garden party for the criminally insane. Wu cut along the seam of the rubber ball with his penknife, then pocketed one half of the ball and gave the other half to Softly, who began to warm up, being the bunger, or thrower. Jean had a lot of trouble holding on to his deliveries. The ball behaved erratically once or twice (when Softly tossed it end over end) but very smoothly at other times (when he gripped it along the edge and hurled it in a sidearm motion straight in or went three quarters to fashion gracefully breaking slow curves). Wu stood off to the side taking lazy stylized practice cuts with the sawed-off mop handle. The field was marked with rocks and cans set apart from each other in complex patterns. When everyone was finished warming up, Softly addressed the spectators.

“Strict rules add dignity to a game. At specified points in the contest, certain verses have to be recited, certain moves and countermoves have to be made. There are no bases, as in baseball. There is no wicket, as in cricket. However, there are runs, hits, errors and breaks for tea. In halfball, errors count in the errormaker's favor. Imagine a scoreboard
if you will. Runs, hits, errors. The final result depends on all of these, not just runs. It is the total array of digits that determines the winner. If a player keeps making errors, he adds to his sum. Once his errors get into double figures, the total spills over to the run column. Therefore, you say, it is necessary only to make error after error in order to win. Not so, I reply. For while one player is making errors, his adversary is scoring runs. The errormaker must balance the gains he is making in his error column against the gains he is allowing the other player to make in the run column. I am the bunger. Jeanie is the munch. Maury is the doggero. Normally we'd have a lippit as well but I think we can do without. As the game progresses, we switch positions. The objects scattered on the ground are either skullies or wacks, depending on the situation. The purpose of each will become clear as we go along. Please don't leave until we're ready for tea break. It annoys me no end when people leave before tea break.”

Softly, a lefthander, threw some billowing curves to Wu, keeping the ball down and in, mixing in an occasional flutter pitch that he kept hauntingly outside, presumably away from the doggero's power. Finally Wu managed to hit the ball—a weak grounder that spun and wobbled in circles of ever decreasing limits. At this stage the munch and doggero addressed each other.

“What's your trade?”

“Lemonade.”

“Where do you ply it?”

“Where we dry it.”

“Dry what?”

“Apricot.”

From his bed, hearing the voices, Billy tried to remember how old he was when they'd invented the game, realizing for the first time that he'd actually had little to do with any of it, that it was almost all Softly's—the rules, the verse, the reliance on connective patterns. His hands were still clasped on his head. He moved them forward and
back, the top of his head shifting with the movement. He liked that feeling. After a while he thought of a scantily clad woman with enormous breasts bazooms boobs titties. She was “scantily clad” only in the sense that he told himself such a condition prevailed; the fact was he couldn't quite picture the flimsy items she was supposed to be wearing. He tried to include himself—that is, an image of himself—in the painted haze. For some reason it was extremely difficult. He didn't really care that much. As long as they let him stay where he was. As long as they didn't force him to be logical. He heard someone moving in the cubicle next to his and went to see who it was. The man unpacking introduced himself as Walter Mainwaring, Cosmic Techniques Redevelopment Corporation.

“We both have something in common.”

“The Nobel Prize,” Mainwaring said.

“Right.”

“My father was a mathematician. Didn't give me a middle name. Just an initial. X. Idea of a joke, I suppose.”

“What are you here for?”

“Rob is eager to know more about sylphing compounds. I'm not sure how he plans to apply this knowledge but I'll be happy to tell him what I can. My latest work involves aspects of mohole identification. Know what that is?”

“No but it sounds funny.”

“Things are funny up to a point,” Mainwaring said. “Then they aren't funny anymore. Alternate question. Do you know anything about Moholean relativity?”

“I know Mohole the person.”

“Mohole's work happens to tie in with sylphing. What this all leads to remains to be seen.”

“He wears padded shoulders and swallows greenies.”

“I gather Rob's assembling a team. Good. I like teamwork. I believe in teams.”

DOGGERO
and
MUNCH
: “Bunger, bunger, let us go forth; the sun, the sun is shining.”

BUNGER
: “Fall down a well and never tell and I'll let you be born in the morning.”

The boy returned to his cubicle and got into bed. Eventually he heard Softly announce the tea break. There was a minor landslide on the north slope. Jean Venable and Maurice Wu remained in the playing area while the others went to the kitchen unit for tea.

“Full name please.”

“Maurice Xavier Wu.”

“Where did you get the Xavier?”

“My father was a missionary,” he said.

“Where?”

“U.S. of A.”

“Did you grow up there?”

“Off and on.”

“Did you date American girls?”

“Did I date American girls?” he said. “What kind of book are you writing?”

“I try to ask whatever comes into my head,” Jean said. “It's a new technique I've been developing. But I think I may abandon it. Nothing but junky things have been coming into my head. Everything's up in the air right now. Don't tell Rob I said that. I'm sort of going through the motions, frankly. But keep it to yourself.”

“Maybe we should do this another time,” Wu said. “I'm preparing a journey up the slopes. Some caves here and there I'd like to look into. I have to get some supplies together. Then I have to polish my
wu-fu
.”

“Let me ask this one thing,” Jean said. “What's your role in the Logicon project?”

“You're not taking notes, I see.”

“I'm not taking notes. You're right, aren't you?”

“Maybe by the time I'm back down here, Rob will have some firm plans for me. Don't know yet exactly what's on his mind. In the meantime I'm having a good time seeing the caves.”

“What's a
wu-fu
?”

“It's a medallion I wear around my neck whenever I go into the field. It's a circular thing that has a cluster of bats set into it. Bats with their wings extended. The bats themselves form a sort of circle around a symbol of the tree of life. The Chinese are probably the only people who think of bats in connection with good luck and a long life. Anyway,
before I go into the field I like to sit on a mat and polish my
wu-fu
for exactly seventeen minutes.”

“What does that do?”

“Nothing,” he said.

“I think I understand.”

Jean feared dishevelment. The silken puckers above her shirt cuff. The winning fit of her handsomely tailored pants. It was no joke to imagine what her life would be like without a firm commitment to utter presentableness. She'd been thinking a great deal about dishevelment lately. Increasingly she wondered, thinking of images in the glass halves of tenement doors, in the jigsaw spill of silver that had always seemed to crunch beneath her shoes in the worst parts of town. With each new cycle of wondering came the fear experience, a sensation she tended to characterize not just as fear but as “fear itself.” This was the comic element at work. An attempt to overdramatize for comic effect. Jean had always thought of herself as too modern and complex to experience the kind of primal fear that would qualify as “fear itself.” She found it difficult to appear pestered much less frightened. The soundly proportioned near neutrality of her figure, her looks, her manner; the supremely intact rightness of it all—these were meant to accompany brilliantly modern inner rifts, spaces and vague negations. But she was beginning to see that somewhere on the edge of these ponderings on the subject of dishevelment was the essence of fear itself. What depths of immense bedraggled dishevelment she feared, and why, it was hard at the moment to say. She had never heard anyone speak of this kind of fear. All around her all her life people recounted episodes that involved fear of heights, fear of depths, fear of slipping away, falling off, dropping into; fear of earth, air, fire, water. Where was fear itself, the backward glance of a woman in unspeakably soiled rags, collector of shopping bags, victim of spells, mumbling to herself in the stale corner of some cafeteria? Fiction, Jean thought, sitting surrounded by her notes, dozens of stunningly disordered pages spread across her bed; fiction, she thought, idly biting the skin on her index finger.

In the kitchen they listened to the water boiling. Bolin still held Softly's jacket, keeping it neatly folded on his lap.

“Dent is terribly, terribly old,” Edna Lown said.

“Old Dent,” Softly said.

“Too, too old to be of any conceivable help to us.”

“Lester-pet, how can he help?”

“I can't perfect the control system without a metalanguage. Logic rendering just won't work. The machine won't be able to render Logicon or speak Logicon until I figure out how to separate the language as a system of meaningless signs from the language about the language.”

“The old problem,” Edna said.

“Old Dent,” Softly said.

The water boiled furiously.

“Does anybody know how to get in touch with him?” Lester said.

“He has an appointments secretary,” Softly said. “The only way to get in touch with old Dent is to try to reach this man known as the appointments secretary.”