Ratner's Star (24 page)

The wind-dry music cried from her hands. She wore several layers of pale yellow material and her feet were encased in monumental sandals.

“People ask about their names in an attempt to add to their self-knowledge. Anyone of woman born is by nature superstitious. We stand in awe over the unseen and half-known. Our work here helps us escape this tradition. We try to leave the dark behind. Positive numerical values. Bright shining stars.”

He thought of a passage in an old textbook. Back of the chapter where review questions lurk. Acres of windswept italics.

When do we say that a variable quantity becomes infinitely small?

We say that a variable quantity becomes infinitely small when its numerical value decreases indefinitely in such a way as to converge toward the limit zero
.

“Your name is a contraction, is it not?”

“Terwilliger was shortened by subtracting
e-r
at the beginning and
e-r
at the end.”

“With your permission I'd like to examine the result.”

“Twillig.”

“Obviously a highly artificial name. This is good. I like this. It's a silly name, true, but it vibrates with felicitous little ripples. My first reaction is strictly a sense impression. Twinkle and twig. I see and touch star and stick. ‘Twinkle' is cute, insufferably so, a verb put together solely for the nursery purpose of reiteration. I believe it derives from the Old English word for ‘wink,' suitably enough, and it has some relevance, I suppose, to your work on the star code. It's a fact that centuries ago in my part of the world men studied mathematics in order to become astronomers, to ponder the heavens. Astronomy was not the ultimate goal, however, but merely a preparation for astrology. ‘Twig' is perhaps more germane.”

“So far I don't see myself at all.”

“Undoubtedly twigs were employed as one of the earliest means of numeration and most likely evolved into the tally sticks and counting stalks used at the very dawn or soon thereafter by the most advanced peoples of the Near, Far and Middle East. But let's to more important matters get.”

She moved her body as she spoke, side to side, and his eyes were on her hands at rest on the rough wood rocking in her lap.

“There are two distinct parts to your name and they comprise the essence of my analysis.
Twi
—two.
Lig
—to bind, as in ‘ligate' and ‘ligature.' Is it your destiny then to bind together two distinct entities? To join the unjoinable? We all wait for your answer.”

“I don't know how I'm destined. Nobody knows that about him- or herself. I'm surprised somebody in crystal structure can expect an answer to a question like that.”

“Considering your name, it's the obvious question to ask,” she said. “It would surely be remiss of me not to ask it. We anticipate a reply at your earliest convenience.”

“Is it possible to leave without feelings being hurt?”

“
Twi
, it's important to note, means not only ‘two' but ‘half,' while
lig
can mean ‘constrict' as well as ‘bind.' I think of half-light, or twilight, and further of twilight sleep, that self-erasing condition induced by drugs and designed to ease the constricting pain of childbirth. But who or what is being born?”

“You're the expert.”

“It's your name,” she said. “That means you're responsible for whatever pointed references I can shake out of it. You're the two-part toy and boy in a made-to-order carrying case. Names tell stories. Twinkle and twig. The first two bites of the suppertime story poem. Naturally names that go back to the very dawn have greater storied content than modern names, most of which are merely convenient denotations packed with noise value.”

“I make no reply.”

“We conclude,” she said. “
Twalif
, Germanic compound, gives us two left over, two beyond ten. So both two and twelve figure in your story. We follow the root word through various twists and forks in the road until we spy the Old English
twigge
, or ‘branch,' which justifies my original sense impression and returns us to ‘twig,' ‘stick,' ‘stalk.' Enough, it's over, run.”

“This room and these old things,” he said. “What are these old things doing here? It's like a storeroom. What's all this stuff for?”

“These are Endor's effects. Henrik Endor had these things sent here
soon after he arrived. This is all his. He was a collector. He used to collect things. This room wasn't being used, so he had everything put in here.”

“Is this Endor's room?”

“Endor's room is padlocked. This is the hobby room. Nobody has been in Endor's room since he started living in the hole. They padlocked Endor's room and named this the hobby room. Those are the two changes we have witnessed since Endor departed for the hole.”

“I'm leaving now,” he said.

“Names tell stories and so do numbers.
Zahl
and tale. One coils continuously into the other.
Zahl, tal, talzian, tala
, tale. Number, speech, teach, narration, story. Not uninteresting, eh? Whorls of a fingerprint. Convolutions of tree-ring chronology.”

“Here I go.”

“Is that an idiomatic expression?” she said. “Here I go?”

“Charming speech form. Very peculiar to itself. I must remember to use it at the first opportunity or soon thereafter. I wonder if you'd mind repeating it for me just once.”

“Here I go.”

“I think I have it,” she said. “Thank you so much.”

Her fingers returned to the strings of the singular instrument. The lost sound commenced, toneless and hollow. He decided to take a walk on one of the broad lawns that stretched nearly to the synthesis telescope. It was still light. Sweet mist was suspended in the air, making everything tremble. He saw someone in red kneeling at the base of a distant tree. Everything else was aquamarine, a sunken meadow, fresh scent of vespertine breezes, sounds he'd never heard before, how the wind made forests seem to verge on bursting and where a hidden stream failed in sand, all tempered within by vanishing light, the abundant sundown blush that made this oceanic hour whisper to the senses. The figure was that of a man wearing a cassock that was fire-engine red. At first he appeared to be meditating but as Billy drew closer he realized the man was looking at something as he knelt in the grass. A small hill. A nest of some kind. An ant hill. The man had silver-white
hair with a perfectly round bald spot in the middle and he was studying the ants as they moved from one opening of the nest to another and then out again. Billy got down on one knee for a closer look.

“Armand Verbene.”

“Say again please. What language is that?”

“It's my name.”

“I thought you were telling me welcome in a foreign language.”

“Armand Verbene, S.J. Forty years a priest. A condition wholly accidental to beatitude. These are my ants, my red ants. For years I've been trying to convince the scientific power structure that red ant metaphysics is a hard science.”

“I hear you're opposed to the cycloid as a geometric figure because it has valuable properties even when it's upside down.”

“My work deals with the proposition that the divine essence is imitable outside itself. There's nothing soft here. This isn't long-range weather forecasting. I study my ants rigorously. I use rigorous methods. Every creature possesses a divine likeness and therefore attains to the divine ideal through assimilation. This is in theory. For proof we cite the creatures of the physical world as evidence of the reflectability of selfward-tending teleological perfection, rightside up, red ants in particular.”

“I draw a blank.”

“What kind of ignorance am I dealing with here?”

“How many kinds are there?”

“As many as the mind of man can catalogue. Don't they teach ignorance in school anymore? In your case I believe I'm dealing either with antecedent causal ignorance or consequent causal ignorance. If antecedent causal, either compound antecedent causal or simple antecedent casual. Of course, consequent causal ignorance always follows upon culpable retention, which can be caused and spread by three subsidiary kinds of ignorance—affected, connatural and crass.”

“What do you learn from the ants?”

“The ants and their semifluid secretions teach us that pattern, pattern, pattern is the foundational element by which the creatures of the physical
world reveal a perfect working model of the divine ideal. Now can you tell me what it is that serves as the foundational element?”

“Pattern, pattern, pattern.”

“Correct,” the elderly priest said. “Notice the uniform spacing maintained by the ants as each one emerges from the nest. Notice how interchangeable the ants seem to be. Try to observe secretion patterns with your untrained eyes. Everything they do for us here today is part of a plan. This is self-perfective activity, the patterned plan, and it is this evidence in nature that tends to be supportive of the notion of a divine essence imitable outside itself and that also tends to lead us implicitly to the conclusion that self-perfective free activity in this life leads to beatitude in the next.”

“For ants?”

“For people.”

“But why study ants?” Billy said. “Why not snow leopards or albatrosses?”

“Why not ants?”

“Why not snow leopards?”

“Why not ants?”

“Okay, but why red ants? Why not black ants?”

“Why not yellow ants?” Verbene said.

“Okay, why not?”

“Because red ants secrete uniformly. Their secretions are nonrandom. They can be classified and studied.”

“What do you learn from these secretions?”

“Everything,” the priest said. “A given ant will always secrete at a fixed number of centimeters from the secretion of the previous ant save one. Within this pattern we find secondary and tertiary patterns. It's all very measurable. There's nothing soft about it. I use strict empirical methods. What kind of methods do I use?”

“Strict and empirical.”

“Correct,” the priest said.

“I'm only answering because you're old. I know I don't have to answer.”

“There are more terrifying questions than mine waiting just around
the corner. This is because you've reached the most terrifying of ages. Passion is the violent outward thrust of the sense appetite and it's always accompanied by extreme bodily changes. I know the operative appetitive urges you must be encountering. Urges and semiurges. Your little body is beginning to grow and to sprout and to want. It needs, it pleads, it desires. I think it's worthy of note that passions do not tend to be inflamed without the presence of concomitant phantasms. This is what you have to be on guard against. There are two kinds of concomitant phantasms, mild and erotomaniacal.”

“Dirty thoughts, you mean.”

“Correct.”

“So far you haven't told me anything I really want to know.”

“Many people die while having sexual coitus,” the Jesuit said. “It puts a strain on the heart and causes cardiac arrest. Sex should never be furtive. This causes added strain. If it must be done, it should be done with a spouse in a bed in an atmosphere of mutual love and trust. Avoid technique. Technique causes many problems. Technique can kill. If heart palpitations occur during coition, interrupt at once and think about parasitic worms infesting your anal canal. This is called ideational analogous restraint. If, in interrupting, you cannot by strength of will or imagination dispel the urge to emit, then effect your emission in a clean drinking glass or sanitized specimen bottle left at your bedside for this purpose. Do not discard your emission. Take it at once to your spouse and assist in the immediate and direct uterine ingestation of your emission, using whatever nonmechanical means are necessary so as to effect nonimpediment of fertilization. It is not necessary to actively seek fertilization; it is sufficient not to impede it. These are fine but thrilling distinctions. If spillage of your emission is willed as end or means, you have committed the sin of sins.”

“In the middle of a heart attack?”

“End or means,” the priest said. “Sin of sins.”

“What's the story on premature genuflection?”

“We dip to one knee just before we enter a pew and then in cadence with the word ‘peace' every time the priest says: ‘Peace, peace, peace, it's a long time a-coming.' Some people kneel on the steps outside
the church and I suppose this sort of kneeling might be termed premature. Pilgrims still crawl on their knees from shrine to shrine. There's been more of that lately but there aren't many shrines left and so the distances they have to crawl are very great.”

“I'm trying to understand this.”

“Think upon it,” Verbene said.

He picked up one of the ants and let it move across the palm of his hand. He studied it with what appeared to be total concentration. The ant traveled the length of Fr. Verbene's middle finger and disappeared beyond the tip. Verbene turned his hand palm down and watched the red ant move across his knuckle.

“He'll wound me with his mandible. Then he'll spray formic acid directly into the wound.”

“Why?”

“Because he's an ant. Everything he does is based on patterns of self-perfective activity.”

He returned the red ant to the earth. Billy realized the ants were going in and out of the nest without collecting food or carrying nest-building materials. He asked the priest about this.

“The workers have already gathered the food. What we've been observing all this time is a very special class of ant. They aren't workers, soldiers, queens or brood. They don't secure food. They don't perpetuate the species. They don't protect themselves from the elements. These ants simply crawl and secrete. These are the pattern ants. They enter, they exit, they secrete. These are the ants of red ant metaphysics.”