Ratner's Star (47 page)

Softly pushing in and out.

Defenseless love is suicide. Under that open sky nothing falling survives the rigors of identification. Where once men and women sought communion in sexual love, innocent of the need for programmatic valuation, they now deploy themselves across a level of existence composed of silences and daunted withdrawals. The theme of modern love is isolation. No longer is the lover prepared to experience sentimental pain, that traditional embellishment that gives desire a degree of symmetry. We did not fall into the trap of matter in order to be redeemed by love and thrust upward into the world of pure form. Clearly we did not, she thought. No longer can lovers regard sex as the mysterious chrism of their life together, as nature partaken, the rayed balsamic flowers worn by a woodland god. Sex is painted on the very walls, spread on white bread. Lovers, then, once their secret language has been despoiled by synthetic exchange, are forced to disengage their love from biology and keep it in seclusion. What replaces erotic language? Oral sex, she answered brightly. Tongues wagging in appointed crannies. Lap, pal, left to right. Unsuspecting mouth devoured by the genitals to which it presumes to communicate its moist favors. Defenses must be built to save the lovers from what unfolds around them and then again
within their love itself to shelter each from the other's patent treachery. What is defenseless love but an invitation to nipple-pricking pain? Knowing the rules, we all shout at the jumper to jump. On the other hand, she thought, love does not speak to theorists.

“Evil pelvis,” Softly said. “Unscrupulously seductive mouth. Belly a bowl of fruit. Labyrinthine navel. Resilient milky thighs. Cute pudendum, hee hee. Lickable armpits. Predatory eyes. Surging breasts. Hair rare. Smile terribly foudroyant. Backside a-twinkle.”

Maurice Wu unencumbered by equipment and heavy clothing crossed the path to cube one. He was still a fairly young man, slender, appearing cheerfully relentless atop a long informal stride.

“Unfunny, ass, and totally inaccurate needless to say.”

“Call me names and see how far you get.”

“I want to see Edna next.”

“Next we do this.”

“We just did that.”

“We do it again.”

“I'll settle for Lester.”

“How lucky for me to be so crudely unattractive. What tinctures of wetness it loosens from your innermost loam.”

“God how horrible.”

“Admit it, bitch; my titmanesque frame, my gross and pettish mouth, collapsing jaw, unnatural skin pigment, my eye color; admit the jingle you feel. I kiss my own thumb every day on waking. Think what little chance I'd have as an idealized Hollywood dwarf. Get used to my lewds and moods, sweet Jean, foul runt and lecher that I am, because I control the flow of material and nothing of note gets said to the likes of a keen journalist like yourself without my considered okay.”

“You don't have baggy flesh,” she said. “It's baggy flesh I count on for my cheapest thrills.”

“You think this is a lark, don't you?”

“You're firm, Rob. I give you credit, your age.”

“You think you walk in here and just talk to some people and organize some notes and there it is, the whole story, all ready for the bookbinder's tools.”

Bolin and Lown left their cubicles.

“This area of the world is rich in caves,” Wu said. “Up on the slopes there are openings, if you look closely enough. Some of the caves they lead to are first-rate. Tons of guano. Just a question of burrowing under.”

“You go in it and look?”

“Countless decades of accumulated bat shit.”

“What do you find underneath?”

“In this particular excavation, nothing that goes back very far. Pottery and bones mostly. I've found stuff in other places that goes back so far your flesh would crawl.”

“Fifteen centuries.”

“Don't make me laugh,” Wu said.

Bolin put the pot on, nodding to Softly as he passed. In the boy's cubicle Maurice Wu stood leaning with his elbow up high against the partition, hand on head.

“Understand you're running a fever, Willy.”

“Hello, Rob,” Wu said.

“Hello, Maury. Hi, Willy. Understand you're running a fever.”

“It's not much.”

“Starve it,” Softly said. “Okay.”

“What do you think of Maurice?”

“I barely met him just now.”

“What I value most about Maurice is this flair of his for syncretistic thinking. Sweet and sour pork. Diametrically opposed entities partaking of each other's flesh. It permeates all his thinking. The reconciliation of opposites. Childish and dumb but I love it. Did you read the notes Edna gave you?”

“It's like Weierstrass wanting to take things like continuity and limit and base them on the integers.”

“I told you never mind that stuff, mister. Forget about historical figures. Pretend you never heard of those people, places and things. Besides it's not ‘wire-strass.' Did you read the notes Edna gave you? Edna gave you notes to read.”

Bolin was intent on composing the whole of Logicon on his old portable typewriter. Why not? If he and Edna and the youngster were sufficiently stringent in their methods, a handful of symbols would suffice. That plus the alphabet. More than enough to work with, ideographically. This sort of notation would appear at times to resemble cartoon obscenities. Nevertheless the meanings and relationships concealed by ordinary language would stand out sharply. In normal times Lester lived with his wife in a converted barn. The horse stalls they'd turned into dinettes. The haymows were now sleeping lofts. They'd found a hand-cranked washing machine and made an end table out of it. Elevator descending. A plant stand was formerly a butter churn. They bought Tiffany glass for their spirit lamps. A Civil War whiskey barrel became a pre-Revolutionary soup tureen. Conclusions must follow necessarily. We must compel acceptance of conclusions.

“Did you know you'd get the prize?” Jean said.

“I had a hunch.”

“Where were you when you heard the news?”

“At Rob's house.”

“Give me more.”

“I was sitting in a chair. He came in and told me. Then we shook hands.”

“That's not too terribly interesting,” Jean said. “Give me something better.”

“That's what happened.”

“I want better than that. You have to give me better.”

“How come you keep riding back and forth? Why don't you just stay down here?”

“I'm not allowed,” she said. “The logic-mongers might object. Come on, slyboots, give me some more.”

“Rob said I wouldn't have to make a speech. Then he did this trick he does with turning his jacket inside out without taking it off. That's all that happened.”

“I understand whenever Rob lectures at the Center, the place swarms with mathematics groupies.”

“Who do you want to know about, me or him?”

“You're not giving me anything to pounce on. You were a better subject last time.”

“Talk about pouncing, better not bring your husband around if you have one. Rob doesn't care what he says in front of husbands.”

“Our marriage failed for lack of fun,” she said. “Fun is the only way to survive. A marriage is doomed without it. Think of all the time you have to spend alone, the pair of you. You have to renew, renew, renew. It's time that wrecks marriages, obviously. For a long while we managed well. This is because we made sure we had fun. We played tricks on each other. We stuck out our tongues. We called each other on the phone and used funny voices. These weren't necessarily impulsive acts. Often there was a great deal of premeditation involved. We thought it was essential to do these things and so we worked at it, we worked at it very hard, so very hard. And it was successful for the longest time.”

“But then you ran into trouble.”

“We used to scare each other a lot,” Jean said. “Of all the kinds of fun, this was probably the one that worked best. Jumping out of doorways at each other. Pretending to be dead. Screaming into the telephone. I loved pretending to be dead. I was terrifically good at it. He was never completely sure it was just fun. There was always an element of doubt in his mind. When he'd lean over me for a really close look, I'd jump up screaming. That would keep our marriage going for another week.”

“I'm surprised it wasn't longer.”

“I know it sounds foolish. Between us, we totaled I don't know how many years of very expensive higher education. Still, we felt we had to do these things to keep from going stale, you know? One morning he got up and left as usual. He always left before I did. I can barely remember his face but I know he left early, he liked to leave early, he liked to be the first one in the building to hit the streets. That was the day I realized we'd had no fun in a long time and I knew at once this was the reason we hadn't been getting along. I made it a point to get home first that
evening. Emptied a large bottle of aspirin. Hid the tablets. Put the bottle next to the bed. Got into the bed—torso nudo for documentary shock effect. I sprawled and waited, trying to look puffy. But he never came home. That was the day he'd decided to leave for good.”

“Sure it wasn't sex that caused the trouble? Maybe you just never brought it out in the open.”

“Sex was fine,” she said. “It wasn't sex at all. Sex was the least and best of our worries.”

“How many times a night?”

In the kitchen unit they worked and talked. Cigarette ash was scattered over Lown's blouse. She slipped her feet out of the desert boots and discussed Lester Bolin's latest work on notation, which she considered far too cumbersome, overburdened with content. It was pleasant to sit with Rob and Lester, exchanging ideas and objections, seeking to extend the technical possibilities of their method by making it ever more reductive.

“It's like doubling to get half,” she said. “A negative number doubled yields half the original value. A series of doubled reflections gets continually smaller by half. I don't think we'll be rewarded with a sense of genuine precision until we get as close as possible to a kind of beneficially corrective infinite regress. Lester, I think you'd profit immensely by clearing your work through our young man.”

“I showed him some stuff very recently. He just walked out. It seemed to depress him. I'm anxious to work with him but he just isn't interested. I wonder if we really need him. Do we really need him?”

“I'm reminded of a family that lives across the road from me in Pennyfellow,” Softly said. “Years ago they adopted a very small child an Asian girl, orphaned by the bombing. In a matter of days she became the focus of that home as none of the natural children in the family even did. This is because she possessed something unique. Moral authority Time and again I heard one member of the family chide another for piggishness, insolence, bad grammar, always saying in effect: ‘What will Phan think of us when she's old enough to understand?' Remark able, the sheer authority of that small round object. Because she was tiny, virtually mute, because she was Asian, an orphan, a victim of war
Phan was the ultimate moral force in that household, a living contradiction of nearly everything the family had once held to be eternal; that is, justice, truth, honor, so forth. Now I don't say my pal Willy is a moral force exactly. But I do believe his presence here has extramathematical significance. True, as Edna says, mathematical thinking is based on the whole numbers, Willy's specialty, and it's also true that his powers extend to related areas and that once he gets deeply involved in what we're doing here he'll probably put us all to shame, his mind working like a beam of light searching out a target. But Lester, when Lester asks whether we really need the boy, that's a valid point. After all, we're dealing with a form of mathematics that substitutes classes for numbers. This is what makes him reluctant to enter. He knows he may have trouble finding his way around. Nevertheless I maintain we absolutely need him. He's our living contradiction. His intransigence speaks against us. We need him to balance things. He's the listener, the person we need to judge what we do. This is the power of the young. They know what's right, if not what's left.”

“It's unlike you to put things on a human level,” Edna said.

“Does it erode my formal authority?”

“It's a pleasant change, truth be known.”

“Jean Venable would like to spend some time with you and Lester. Journalist I told you about. Briefest of interviews. In and out. Give her a feel for the subject.”

“Sorry,” Edna said.

“Everything she writes crosses my desk.”

“That's not the point.”

“Lester-pet, what about you?”

“I don't think so, Rob, no. The last thing we need is that kind of distraction.”

“I'm going back to work,” Edna said.

“How's it coming?”

“Fair to good.”

“The boy will respond,” Softly said. “He's very young. These are strange circumstances. He'll come around. Wait and see.”

Lacing her boots she thought how close they'd be coming in the final
stages to the rudiments of primitive number systems. Repetition, order, interval. Lester's shoes were scuffed and battered and she could see them pressing into the earth, which was his way of thinking and working, a concentration downward. Softly's shoes were quite immaculate, set neatly parallel, almost touching, his feet swinging in little arcs several inches off the ground. She began to rise, cigarette in mouth, as Billy went through the handwritten notes she'd left him. The first phases of communication would center on the integers. The symbols that compose Logicon will eventually have to be recoded in the form of suitable radio signals. What we have then, he read, is English to Logicon to radio-pulse idiom or systematic frequency fluctuations. The statement “every number has a successor” becomes asterisk-N (or some such) in Logicon; this in turn, pending advice from the technical end, becomes something like pulse-pulse-gap, the point being that with a few key modifications, a juxtaposition here, a repetition there, we can establish a scheme of affirmation and negation, assent and denial, giving simple “lessons” in number and following up with some kind of basic information as to where we are in time and space. The most likely thing we'd have in common with the ARS extants is interest in numbers and in celestial events. Earth people, who differ widely (spoken and written languages, etc.), share use of the Hindu-Arabic number system. Also it's instructive to note that calendar-making is one of our earliest cognitive labors and evidence of interest in lunar cycles, eclipses, so on. Strange, she thought, how the integers, which are discrete, and our attempts to chart time, which is continuous, may well combine to give us a common area of reference with extraterrestrials. However, if she correctly interpreted the remarks on Moholean relativity made by Softly some time earlier, it was plain that we here on Earth do not know the location of the artificial radio source. So either we must figure it out or wait for them to tell us. In fact she didn't really care whether we ever replied to the original signal. She viewed the Logicon project as an intellectual challenge and nothing more. An advance in the art of mathematical logic. A breakthrough in economy and rigor. The transformation, in Softly's phrase, of all science, all language. She had no strong conviction that Logicon was essential to celestial communication. It would be, ir
her view, a breathtaking addition to the body of human knowledge, period. As far as she was concerned it might be easier to step directly from English to radio-pulse idiom without an intervening form of discourse, no matter how strictly logical. Her handwriting began to collapse and he read only one more section, this being Lown's estimate of how the expression “a plus
b
equals c” might actually be transmitted. There would be a pulse followed by a double time interval to indicate an operation pending, in this case addition, the plus sign itself signified by a particular kind of beep or dash. Repetition, order, interval, she thought, continuing to rise from the kitchen chair.