Ratner's Star (49 page)

Billy noticed the raised seal of a notary public in a lower corner of the page. Below the seal, in diminutive italic type, were the words:
Central American Intercorporate Control Combine
(
formerly Consortium Hondurium
)
, Elux Troxl, prop
.

“Who are some of the influences on your work?”

“Softly.”

“In what way?” Jean said.

“He shows me how to use what I have. He was a pretty good mathematician himself. He knows how to bring me out.”

“Rob's a living influence. What about people long ago? Old masters. The titans.”

“Rob explains their work to me. He takes me through it step by step.”

“What about Sylvester and Cayley?” she said. “Strong influences? Mild influences? In betweens?”

“Not too many people know about most mathematicians, no matter which century they belong to. How do you know about them?”

“Research.”

“I don't see what they have to do with a book on the Logicon project.”

“The more I research mathematicians, the more I know about you,” Jean said. “I want to know all I can about all the people here. I can't achieve any depth unless I do that. That's why I ask about influences. Was it Sylvester or Cayley who said the best inventions of analysis result from our probings of the continuous as it exists in our own perception of space? Direction. In mathematics, don't you try to build a sense of direction into ideas like space, time and motion? Make it a game, isn't that it, with specific rules that govern every operation.”

“We're not allowed to talk about this,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“Rob doesn't allow it. He said to skip people in history. He wants me to concentrate on Logicon.”

“Is this a formal ban?”

“I'm only telling you what he said.”

“We can say what we want, pigsney. Don't let Rob talk you out of anything.”

“Would you be interested in some special material for your notes?” he said.

“Absolutely.”

“I have a hunch I'm going to die soon.”

“More,” she said. “More like that. Give me everything you've got.”

Not what something really is, Softly thought, but how we think of it. Our struggle to apprehend it. Our need to unify and explain it. Our attempt to peel back experience and reveal the meaning beneath. The task is to attempt a logical design that may or may not duplicate the structure of the thing itself. His desk, unlike the others in the antrum, thrown together and wobbly, was an elaborate sectional apparatus with automatic drawers, a pop-up typewriter, modular shelving and a built-in pencil sharpener that operated on batteries. The desk ran parallel to all but one side of the cubicle, where the entrance was located. The cubicle itself was considerably larger than the other living units, hardly suited to the word “cubicle” in fact. The bed, adorned with huge silk pillows, had little in common with the cots elsewhere in the area. Sweating excessively Softly undid the belts on his leather briefcase, lifted the worn flap and began sifting among bottles, tubes and packets of stimulants, relaxants, euphoriants, deliriants, sedative-hypnotics, local anesthetics and animal tranquilizers. Among the collection a sample-sized bottle made him smile, containing as it did the high-grade synthetic intensifier he'd given Maurice Wu to chew soon after the latter had first arrived in the antrum. The label included a warning:
Insightful experiences may intensify existing psychosis
. Far from showing panic reaction, however, Wu had emerged from a period of chills, irregular breathing and slurred speech with a tentative and rather engaging idea about counter-evolution. Softly found what he wanted now. He lifted out a vial, twisted off the cap, removed the cotton packing and shook a capsule into his hand. He swallowed it without water and then got into bed, wearing socks, slippers and his robe. He became drowsy almost at once. His perspiration smelled less tense and septic. Another ephemeral chemical event, he thought. Opiate receptors functioning nicely. Sense data less demanding. He stuck his thumb in his mouth, thinking suddenly of the peculiar demonic genius of street games, the secret vernacular
passed down for centuries, the sense in so many games of something fearful transmitted through certain words or the wile of simple touch. He began to vomit calmly. Tag—you're
it
. What was
it
but something or someone too evil to be named? Hoodman blind. Hango seek. Skin the cuddy. He raised his head from vomiting position, eyes closed (to avoid seeing the ejected matter), and then leaned back on one of the pillows and thought of the game he and the boy had more or less jointly invented, halfball, a “meaningless formal game” designed to be played almost anywhere—street, pasture, alleyway, an empty green in summer's murmuring dusk. Elements of rounders, baseball, tag, cricket, one o' cat, stickball and children's verse. The task is to work out an abstract scheme which may or may not reflect the composition of the thing itself. Convenient fictions, he thought. Děń sə-tē, he thought. Water flowing along a gutter on a city street. A figure trying to hail a cab. Umbrella and suitcase. This was Mainwaring, a well-barbered man of middle age—tall, ruddy, fit and trim, emitting an executive scent. He knew the large puddle beyond the curb was an invitation to cab drivers to veer this way and splatter his clothes but he wasn't worried, being certain he could step aside in time and seeing the entire process (from the driver's viewpoint) as an exercise in perceiving functional relations between entities (puddle, figure, vehicle). It was his conviction that taxi drivers are no more than theoreticians of massive insult, delighted by the
prospect
of splattering or maiming, having no inherent need to think beyond relationships to the literal disfigurement of objects or people. The truly brutal ones were bus drivers. Give a bus driver a nearly empty bus during an off-hour with no one waiting at the designated stops and he'll go smashing down the avenue, pupils dilated, a convulsive hum bubbling up from his throat, Softly opening his eyes, the great painted van careening down on stray dogs, derelicts, children, an interior point system in effect. He dipped the umbrella and a cab stopped just short of the puddle.

“The international airport,” Mainwaring said.

“Right or left side of the street.”

“Either, I suppose.”

“Near corner or far?”

Edna Lown's spectacularly archaic undies were hanging up to dry. Nearby, working, was the woman herself. This happiness puzzled her. Every symbol she wrote in her notebook seemed to possess the resolve of a finished work, an isolated operation neatly free of assumption and shaved of the danger of intuitive reckoning. This work was all there was. Her life had been reduced to a process of selection and refinement. This was merciful, she believed, considering the atmosphere of horror that so often prevailed in the world outside. Nothing in her work was accidental. This is the single theme variously affirmed, tested and modified. She realized she hadn't seen her own face since taking the ramshackle elevator down. The past, the whole chromium world, none of it was more than meek recollection, the negative image of colleagues, family and friends; of university towns, fellowships and travels; of visits to suburban Bellevue. It was puzzling, this happiness she felt, an extended measurement of the textures we're able to achieve beyond the sum total of events that compose our lives. In this hole in the ground Edna knew she lacked nothing, wanted nothing, could easily dismiss all past associations and all prior honors. She lived in the grip of scientific rapture. The complicated longings of the woman who had made her way in the world (through the force of intellect alone) were so subordinate now as to be nearly nonexistent. Ambition, love, friendship, the pleasures of giving and of winning away, the comfort of professional acceptance, the soul's snug glow at the failure of others—all those fitful inclinations, those urgencies and yearnings were so much dead air compared with this simple and total absorption,
holism
, a state of unqualified being. Edna Lown was entering herself just as surely as if she'd been able to bend her arms into her mouth and swallow them to the shoulders; arms, legs, torso; a bewitchingly comic meditation technique; leaving the head balanced on a cushion, head and skull, abode of the layered brain, everything we are and feel and know; the universe we've made.

The small craft began its vertical descent. Despite the many hours of travel, the plane-changing, the time zones, Mainwaring remained fresh, his hair brushed straight back, faintly gray in places, his jaw seemingly locked into position with cotter pins. Across the aircraft's fuselage was
the inscription: OmCopter SkyHop. The entire journey had been made at night. Different parts of different hemispheric nights. One long night.

Edna's wet underwear dripped onto a stack of papers she had set on the ground. She read the previous session's notes. These were notes essentially for her own nonspecific use, not the kind of background material she'd given the boy to read and not more immediate work directly applicable to the Logicon project. She'd been jotting down these particular notes and others like them for a number of years, simply to order her thinking, to clarify certain general areas she believed worthy of investigation. It is both silly and useful, she thought, feeling completely relaxed now, very ready, working well ahead of the pencil.

Jean Venable sat in her room high above the antrum. Her notes were all over the floor, unreadable, and there were packets of research material stacked under the bed, unread. She was beginning to think Softly had been right when he'd accused her of viewing the whole thing as a lark. If she were to make a prediction she would predict that she was on the verge of something strange. A decision about her book. What it should and shouldn't be. “Strange” in the sense of previously unknown; in the sense of unfamiliar; in the archaic sense of alien or foreign. What kind of rotgut prose would she write about a project she hadn't really been interested in since the very beginning? What was she here for if
not to test herself against the dangers of true belief? What good was solitude to a writer if it didn't lead her into something deeper in the way of living and thinking? The fact that she was having nearly continuous sex with a child-sized man seemed to confirm (in an inexplicit way) that she was ready to take a nervous little step into the coiled room she'd seen from time to time mingled with the reflections in a train's dusty windows or in the glass halves of a tenement's outer doors. Sex with Rob was very much a part of the isolation she'd been submerged in since coming here. Not that she didn't enjoy it on “a purely physical level.” Softly was an antidote to fantasy. His very dimensions mocked those drowsy episodes she used to devise apart from reality. What were these mental images but fairytales for adults, whimsical tintypes that did little more than confirm the childish appeal of illogical relations (maidens, amphibians etc.)? From her reaction to the bluntness of Rob's marred body, his special unalterability, the abrupt initiatives of his sexual nature, she readily inferred that fantasy, her own, had reached its vanishing point, an event that returned sex to those locations she felt it had long abandoned, between the actual legs, in and around the actual mouth, on the breasts and under the testicles and in the hands, on the tongue, in the actual hole. Together they filled a natural space. There was a real feeling of bodies giving out, signs of rashes, skin burns, bruises and teeth marks, her mind distantly aware of chancing the wastes of nonentity, a prospect that forced her to speak her physical involvement, to pant out sounds against this break in the continuity. Funny how she and Rob avoided every preliminary gesture, even a hint of a kiss or nonfunctional caress. Kissing him would have disgusted her. It was his organ of copulation her body craved, the Latinate folds between her legs that stirred him to ithyphallic meter. Funny all right. It made her laugh at past loves, at the banality of the past itself.