Ratner's Star (54 page)

He got out of bed, took the blanket off the cot and spread it over the TV table. Then he crawled under the table, wedging himself between its plastic legs before proceeding to even out the edges of the blanket so that it completely shrouded the table and the person under the table. He felt foolish but determined. The foolishness of the gesture only strengthened his resolve. He thought of a characteristic of his. Whenever people expected him to like something, he either didn't like it or concealed his liking of it. He supposed he didn't want his feelings to be anticipated by others. But in this case it wasn't his feelings that were the issue, or liking something or disliking it. He didn't really know what the issue was and he was sure no one could tell him. All he knew was that in a very short while he no longer felt foolish.

Wu's backpack was stenciled with the letters MXW. He filled a canteen with water from a larger canteen. He reknotted his boots. He
was just starting to roll up his sleeping bag when Softly entered his quarters, followed by Mainwaring, Bolin and Lown, Lester's eyes shifting (Mainwaring noticed) as he appraised Wu's cubicle. For one thing there were no chairs. For another there was no cot. There was no desk either and no sign of luggage. Wu dragged the backpack into a corner and sat down on top of it.

“Before you get going,” Softly said, “I'd like you to fill these people in.”

“Sure,” Wu said. “On what?”

“Events.”

“You mean events in the field?”

“The field and after the field,” Softly said. “These people know nothing about it. They need to be filled in.”

“It's like this,” Wu said. “We were in Sangkan Ho under the auspices of the Chinese-American Science Sodality. We seemed to be witnessing an unusual thing taking place. After a certain point, the deeper we went the greater the complexity of the tool types, of the culture in general. This is after a certain point. Up to that point, everything was normal. After that point, we found a progressive increase in complexity.”

“Interesting,” Mainwaring said.

“Everything we found was carefully analyzed. The methods of optical confirmation are very advanced. And we don't anticipate the slightest controversy as to our dating techniques and so on. The controversy we may get will be the culturally based sort of thing that doesn't question the findings but only the implications of the findings. This is simply a case of people not being able to accept revolutionary truths.”

“To be expected,” Lown said.

“We're in no hurry to publish,” Wu said. “There is plenty of work to be done. When Rob no longer needs my services, I'm heading back to the field. It wasn't until I left the field and came here that I first realized the extent of what I'd seen in the field.”

“Man more advanced the deeper we dig,” Softly said.

“Charming,” Bolin said.

Someone using a crayon had written out the number eighteen on the
undersurface of the TV table. To read the word he'd had to roll his eyeballs way up. The blanket smelled of stale traffic, the corroborating truth a laboratory of research onanists might produce in their methodical throbbing and desperation for pictures. His body filled the space between the blanket walls. He had never before been so aware of himself as a biological individual. He smelled, he sweated, he ached. Between himself and his idea of himself there was an area of total silence. What would happen if this space could be filled with some aspect of that collective set of traits that enabled him to qualify as a persisting entity? He put his hands under his shirt and rubbed his chest and stomach. He was growing, he was aging. The greater sag of his left testicle, natural as it was, seemed an intimation of some massive dysfunction soon to manifest itself. Death he felt to be anything but senseless. In ways he could not put into words, it appeared to be a perfectly reasonable occurrence. A logical conclusion, in short. But in thinking about it, in preparing (as it were) to evade it, he seemed to lead himself into a series of inexpressible mental states. These were states that weren't so much bleak as negative, lacking some fundamental element. He felt there was something between or beyond, something he couldn't account for, between himself and the idea of himself, beyond the negative mental invention; and what he knew about this thing was that it had the effect of imposing a silence. That was as far as his thinking went on the subject. There was nowhere else for it to go, he believed. In a while he began to feel better about the site he'd chosen for his life and thought.

Googolplex and glossolalia.

Jean was alone in her room on her bed working a needle and thread. Earlier she had written a number of pages and now she was trying to busy herself into a different line of thinking. She mended this and that. She bit apart thread. She mumbled instructions to herself, not very successfully. The results, that is, were not successful, dangling buttons, loosely stitched seams; the mumbling itself was quite flawless. Oh, well, worship of the body always ends in fascism. Of the body and the body's armor. What had surprised her in the relatively brief time she'd spent at the typewriter was the very direct correlation between writing and
memory. Writing, in this case, being of the nonjournalistic type. Memory being not just the faculty of recollection but the power to summon the density of past experience. The author of
The Gobbledygook Cook Book
(as she sometimes thought of herself) had never before realized the degree of concentration she might succeed in reaching simply by staring into the keys of a typewriter and now and then tapping on one or more. Writing is memory, she thought, and memory is the fictional self, the powdery calcium ash waiting to be stirred by a pointed stick. She didn't believe the book she was determined to write would include a great many of her own past experiences, at least not as they occurred in the special trembling weather in which she'd stood. Still, memory might yield the nuance and bone earth necessary to make fictional people. Having herself been a character in someone else's novel, she tried to anticipate the nature of the successive reflections she might eventually have to confront. She sat on the bed, playfully mingling the words “fear itself fear itself fear itself” into the instructions she mumbled concerning needles and threads and a different line of thinking.

He heard someone step into his cubicle, Billy did. Pretty heavy meant probably Bolin. Wu took long sort of bounces. Rob hobbled. Edna Lown with desert boots dragged her feet. Mainwaring, he didn't know how Mainwaring walked but he bet on Lester, judging not only by the weight expressed in those footsteps but the accompanying sound, paper rattling in someone's hand and almost definitely paper being sailed onto his cot, a single sheet, Softly thought, beatific Chinese, lovely how my Lester-pet does his stuff on an old Royal portable, quaint as a puking babe on some far-off plain, if only now the object of our concerted love will blink to indicate his willingness to play.

When everything was quiet the boy slipped out from under the TV table and without even looking at the bed or the piece of paper on the bed went down the narrow trail of clay and gravel to the barrier nearest his own quarters, where he found among the boulders, crates and oil drums a very large section of heavy canvas which he struggled
to dislodge from a numb mound of rubble, finally taking it in tow and heading back to cube one, time to rest, to catch his breath before proceeding to stand on the chair and place the edges of the tarpaulin if that's what it was over the edges of the partitions of his cubicle, getting off the chair to move it several times to new locations until the placement was complete, time to rest and resettle, so that what he had now was a canvas roof with enough material left over to block all but a few inches at the bottom of the entranceway, his immobile home, not that he was foregoing the blanket-shrouded table, oh no, here we go, down and in, the enclosed area's concealed zone's secluded figure.

We used to ring people's bells and run, crossing the street in zigzags, building to building, wedging broken toothpicks into the cracks around the doorbells of people we didn't like or who we thought would probably want to kill us if they could. In the Chinese laundry the old man kept an ax under the counter and what we used to do was pick one person to go stand in the doorway and make meat-cleaving motions with his or her hand until the old man reached under the counter and then you could run but not before you screamed into the store:
“Halloween! Halloween!”

He took excessive pleasure in the progress of his fever, luxuriating in the unprecedented smell of his sweat, a chemical stench that led him to credit his body with greater toxic power than he'd believed it to possess. His clothing was drenched, emitting a stink of its own, as did the blanket that hemmed him in and the canvas beyond that. He alternated between chills and periods of dawning warmth, his body at the mercy of these fluctuations, his mind “asleep” in elements of form, in angularity and curvature. Salutary hallucinations. Miner's hat with headlamp. Phlegm deposits in his lungs or someplace. Perseverations. Spitting in the dust. Thinking of bats. Repeating a phrase. There were few things more pleasantly disgusting, he believed, than watching his own spit hit the dust, half quivering with fragments of earth, a tiny spoonful of drool. He curled up tighter, head between his knees, hands in the dirt, happy in his sub-reckonings, his dumbbody whiff, his spittle glisten, the persistent images of pure form, the sense that he was accompanying himself out of some systematic pattern.

Wu put on his miner's hat with headlamp. Across the path Mainwaring
sat back in a swivel chair, his legs crossed on top of a small filing cabinet. His umbrella and suitcase were in a corner. His attaché case was on its side in the middle of his cot. This will not take long, he thought. This will be handled with dispatch. As such projects go, this one gives promise of being very elegant. It would also seem to lend itself to expeditious performance on all fronts. Promptness, efficient speed, general dispatch. It must be the antrum that gives me this feeling. Compulsion to perform according to standards. Convergence of a number of ideas at a single point. That is undoubtedly what Rob is aiming at. To approach the same point from different directions. To tend toward a definitive conclusion, result or balance. This woman standing here telling me she has been granted permission by “our friend Rob” if it is all right with me, this standing woman, to conduct an interview concerning my particular area of competence. There goes Mr. Wu.

“Sit,” he said.

“You were probably warned about a writer on the prowl.”

“I don't imagine I have to apologize for the accommodations.”

“What is your role in the Logicon project?”

“I'm associated with a firm called Cosmic Techniques. We're in the process of developing an echolocation quantifier, patent pending, and we believe and hope and trust that this device will help us locate that part of the universe where the artificial signals originated. Concurrent with this, we are trying to identify a mohole, something that's never been attempted before.”

“Speaking more slowly, would you describe this quantifier in detail?” Jean said.

“Restricted information.”

“How do you plan to identify this mohole?”

“Without getting too technical, I would say that the latest findings tend to support the theory that wherever there are moholes, we can expect to turn up a trace of exo-ionic sylphing compounds, or vice versa. With a very stylized computer-generated map of the galaxy and using observations made by the synthesis telescope here and fed to our facilities in Canada—that is, to Cosmic Techniques—we are ready and willing
and able to sylph; that is, to locate absorption holes, or places in space where dust, gases, cosmic debris and electromagnetic information are being absorbed by sylphing compounds, as I explained to Mr. Bolin, pleasant man and very capable, I'm sure.”

“If I had to put what a mohole is into words, what would I say?”

“You'd have a problem,” Mainwaring said.

This sitting woman intent on duplicating what I say, always a partial shock to find someone who thinks enough of fact to get it absolutely right, this woman sitting here at half my age. I have been photographed for the newspapers half a dozen times. I have been interviewed for this and that publication on more than a score of occasions. I have, let's see now, been called on the telephone and asked for my opinion on the latest findings perhaps a dozen times. I belong to this this this this this organization. I have won that that that and that award. I own nineteen dress shirts.

Edna Lown was beginning to think of this set of notes as a subprofession, her cryptic existence in an alternate system of relationships. Puzzling, isn't it, how I'm beginning to look forward to this scribbling, making time for it, setting aside more immediate things, sneaking it into what's supposed to be an inflexibly tight schedule. It was quiet in the antrum. Lester Bolin was between snore cycles and there was no sound at all except the clear faint measures of water flowing in the distance. There was no reason for Edna to regard her note-taking as a secret occupation and yet she did, thinking of it often while engaged
in other tasks or in conversations with Lester and Rob. It's like something I keep behind a closed door, she thought. A bed, she thought. To meet with someone behind a closed door, a man or woman (or woman?) who is not known to any of those who know me. To engage in these meetings between scheduled events. To never change the sheets on the bed behind the door. To barely know the person not known to those who know me. To be in this sense a witness to my own adventure. Wandering, she thought. I am wandering badly. A thing she rarely did in the extreme setting of the excavation. Some fairly large rocks came bouncing down the slope and crashed (judging by the sound) into a sturdy cluster of oil drums. Yes I love it here.