Ratner's Star (2 page)

“H'o.”

“I'm Eberhard Fearing,” the man said. “Haven't I seen you in the media?”

“I was on television a couple of times.”

“I was duly impressed. You demonstrated an absolute mastery as I recall. ‘Brilliant' doesn't begin to say it. Loved your technical phraseology in particular. Mathematicians are a weird breed. I know because I use them in my work. Planning and procedures. Let's hear you say a thing or two.”

“I'm not brilliant in person.”

“I want to assure you that I admire your kind of intellect. Hard, cold and cutting, sir. What's your destination?”

“Not allowed to say.”

“Flying right on through or deplaning along the way?”

“I do not comment.”

“Where's your spirit of adventure?”

“First time in the air.”

“Nervous, is it? Let's hear some mathematics then. Seriously, what say?”

“I don't think so for the time being.”

“No room for cunctation in any line of work. But yours especially. Gifts can vanish without warning. Reach sixteen and it's all gone. Nothing ahead but a completely normative life. Shouldn't you be smiling?”

“Why?”

“We're strangers on a plane,” Fearing said. “We're having a friendly talk about this and that. Calls for smiles, don't you think? That's what travel's all about. Supposed to release all that pent-up friendliness.”

A door opened and from one of the toilets limped an elderly woman with a plum-colored growth behind her left ear. He hesitated before entering the same toilet, afraid she had left behind some unnamable
horror, the result of a runaway gland. Old people's shitpiss. Diseased in this case. Discolored beyond recognition. Possibly unflushed. Finally he stepped in, determined to escape Eberhard Fearing, bolting himself into the stainless-steel compartment and noting in the mirror how unlike himself he looked, neat enough in sport coat and tie but unusually pale and somehow tired, as though this manufactured air were threatening his very flesh, drawing out needed chemicals and replacing them with evil solvents made in New Jersey. Around him at varying heights were slots, nozzles, vents and cantilevered receptacles; issuing from some of these was a lubricated hum that suggested elaborate recycling and a stingy purity, this local sound merely part of a more pervasive vibration, the remote systaltic throb of the aircraft itself.

Cunctation.

Something about that word implied a threat. It wasn't like a foreign word as much as an extraterrestrial linguistic unit or a vibratory disturbance just over the line that ends this life. Some words frightened him slightly in their intimations of compressed menace. “Gout.” “Ohm.” “Ergot.” “Pulp.” These seemed organic sounds having little to do with language, meaning or the ordered contours of simple letters of the alphabet. Other words had a soothing effect. Long after he'd acquainted himself with curves of the seventh degree he came across a dictionary definition of the word “cosine,” discovering there a beauty no less formal than he'd found in the garment-folds of graphed equations (although there were grounds for questioning the absolute correctness of the definition):

The abscissa of the endpoint of an arc of a unit circle centered at the origin of a two-dimensional coordinate system, the arc being of length
x
and measured counterclockwise from the point
(
1, 0
)
if
x
is positive; or clockwise if
x
is negative
.

He undid his zipper, bent his knees to rearrange a snarled section of underwear and then slipped his dangle (as he'd been taught to call it) out of his pants. Words and numbers. Writing and calculating. Tablet-houses between two rivers.
Dubshar nished
. Scribe of counting. How did it go?
Aš min eš limmu ia aš imin ussu ilimmu u
. Ever one more number, individual and distinct, fixed in place, absolutely whole. He tapped
the underside of his dangle in an effort to influence whatever membranous sac was storing his urine. Oldest known numerals. What had he read in the manuscript? Pre-cuneiform. Marked with tapered stylus on clay slabs. Number as primitive intuition. Number self-generated. Number developing in the child's mind spontaneously and nonverbally. Whole numbers viewed as the spark of all ancient mathematical ideas. How did it go? “The fact that such ideas consistently outlive the civilizations that give rise to them and the languages in which they are expressed might prompt a speculation or two concerning prehistoric man and
his
mathematics. What predated the base of sixty? Calendric notations on bone tools? Toes and fingers? Or something far too grand for the modern mind to imagine. Although the true excavation is just beginning, it's not too early to prepare ourselves for some startling reversals.” Clockwise positive. Counterclockwise negative.

Eventually he managed to dispatch a few feeble drops of urine into what appeared to be a bottomless cistern. Then he washed his hands and combed his hair, using the large teeth of the comb because he believed wide furrows made him look older. A bandage covered a small cut on his thumb and he peeled it off now, sucking briefly at the crude wound and then flushing the bandage down the germless well, imagining for a moment an identical plastic strip floating to the surface of the water that filled a stainless-steel wash basin in a toilet on an airliner above an antipodal point. He double-checked his zipper. For the mirror he poured forth a stereotyped Oriental smile, an antismile really, one he'd learned from old movies on TV. He added a few formal nods and then unlocked the door and eased out of the tiny silver cubicle.

In his seat he rolled his tie carefully all the way up to the knotted part and then watched it drop down again, doing this over and over, using both hands to furl and then timing the release precisely, left and right hand opening at the same instant. After a long time the plane landed for a refueling stop. When they were in the air again he went sideways up the aisle past the toilets and into the rock garden. The area was crowded. He sat in a little sling, trying hard not to stare at this or that woman arranged in the odd deltoid chairs that were scattered about, ladies poised for worldly conversation, and he wondered what there was about high-altitude travel that made them seem so mysterious and available,
two stages to contemplate, knees high and tight, bodies partly reclined and set back from the radiant legs. All around him people were solemnly embalmed in their own attitudes of conviviality. They drank and gestured, filling the paths of the rock garden. Occasionally a particular face would collapse toward a kind of wild intelligence so that within the larger block of features a shrunken head appeared, aflame with revelation. Inner levels. Subsets. Underlying layers. In a chair nearby was a woman in her fifties, wide-eyed and petite. She wore a bright frock and her hair was cut straight across the forehead at eyebrow level. For her age she was the
cutest
woman he'd ever seen. Glancing at the travel folder she was reading, he was able to make out the large type on the front cover.

She looked up, smiled and pointed to a plaid shoulder bag that sat drooping between her feet. He tried to respond with an expression that would make her think he had misinterpreted her gesture as a simple greeting that required no further communication.

“Basenji,” she said.

“Translate please.”

“I smuggled him aboard in my bag. Such a good puppy. I'm sure he'd like to say hello to you. ‘Hi, pally. Where ya headed?' ”

“I make no reply.”

“You're not an Amerasian, are you?”

“What's that?”

“What they used to call war kids,” she said. “GI papa, native mama. They sold for five hundred dollars in Bangkok. ‘And that's no phony baloney, bub.' You're about the right age for an Amerasian. My name's Mrs. Roger Laporte. ‘Hi, I'm Barnaby Laporte. Whereabouts you go to school, good buddy?' ”

She listened to every word of his reply with the eager obedience of someone about to undergo major surgery. When he finished telling her about the Center, she leaned toward the shoulder bag and patted it. In
addition to being cute, Mrs. Laporte had a distinct shimmer of kindness about her. It was amazing how often kind-looking people turned out to be crazy. He wondered gravely whether things had reached such a bad state that only crazy people attempted commonplace acts of kindness, that the crazy and the kind were one and the same. When she spoke on behalf of the dog, she tucked her head into her body and squeaked. It was the cutest thing about her.

“You must be very lonely,” she said. “Spending all your time with grownups and doing all that research behind closed doors without the sunshine and exercise your body needs for someone your age. Mr. Laporte went to night school.”

He hadn't clipped his toenails in a while and he realized that when he moved the toes of his right foot up and down, one particularly long nail scratched against the inside of his Orlon-acrylic sock. He passed the time allowing his toenail to catch and scrape, making a tiny growl. He wanted to sit somewhere else but was sure Mrs. Laporte would say something the moment he got to his feet. A man fell out of a hammock, his cocktail glass shattering on one of the rocks in the garden. If the dog's called Barnaby, did she name her kids Fido and Spot? Her large eyes blinked twice and then she hugged herself and shrugged, smiling in his direction—a series of gestures he readily interpreted as perkiness for its own sake. Of course that left him the problem of figuring out what to do in return.

“So that's a dog in there you sneaked aboard,” he said. “What happens if it barks?”

“Basenji,” she said.

He found a dark lounge and went inside. Two men sat at a table playing an Egyptian board game. Squares of equal size. Penalties levied. Element of chance. Billy recognized the game; he'd seen it played at the Center by colleagues of his. Numerous geometric pieces. Single bird-shaped piece. He thought of the “number beasts” of that time—animals used to symbolize various quantities. Tadpole equaled one hundred thousand because of the huge swarms that populated the mud when the waters of the Nile retreated after seasonal flooding. Men called rope-stretchers had surveyed the unplotted land, using knots to measure equal
units. Taxation and geometry. In the dimness Eberhard Fearing gradually assumed effective form. Legs walking left.

“Good to see you.”

“Right.”

“Absolutely correct.”

“Good.”

He had a passing knowledge of the mathematical texts of the period. Problem of seven people who each have seven cats which each consume seven mice which each had nibbled seven ears of barley from each of which would have grown seven measures of corn. Legs walking left were a plus sign on a papyrus scroll.

“How was the bathroom?” Fearing said.

“I liked it.”

“Mine was first-rate.”

“Pretty nice.”

“Some plane.”

“The size.”

“Exactly,” Fearing said. “You've hit on it. I was telling a gal back there all about you. She'd really like to hear you hold forth. What say I get her and make a threesome out of it.”

“I may not be here later.”

“Where will you be?”

“I may have to meet some people.”

“Just tell me where. We'll have a get-together.”

“I'm not sure they're aboard,” he said. “See, the thing of it is I'm not sure they're aboard.”

“In other words you made an appointment beforehand to see these people. Before you even got on the plane.”

“Right.”

“Certain section of the aircraft at a certain time.”

“Near the toilets.”

“And now you're not even sure they're aboard.”

“Right.”

“These people of yours.”

“That's the thing.”

“How many of them?” Fearing said.

“Could be four, could be more.”

“What are they—mathematicians?”

“Some yes, some other.”

“Near the toilets.”

“I just inspected,” Billy said. “They're not there yet.”

“I admire your intellect, sir. Admire it mightily.”

“I heard that. Good to hear.”

“Because there is no commodity we're shorter of than intellectual know-how. A man like me understands that. Nice talking to you. Ever find yourself nearby, why, drop on in. I'm near everything. Great churches. A lot of parking. Bring your associates if they ever turn up.”

“They'll like to come.”

“I use you people in my work.”

The men at the board appeared to be on the verge of sleep. No theoretical reasoning or basic theorems. The practical science of physical arrangement. Sense of mass. Scientists still probing limestone blocks with radar to discover what's buried in those pyramids. He thought of the obelisk in Central Park and wondered if he'd ever get to examine an actual fragment of sacred writing.

Directions for knowing all dark things.

The plane flew above the weather. He went to sit alone in a rear area behind equipment racks and anticrash icons. A stressless hour passed. Or maybe four such hours. He'd forgotten which motion he was using to stroke through time, minute or
gesh
. This part of the airplane had apparently not been used for a while. It was dusty and cramped, its true dimensions concealed by an intricate series of partitions. Real plastic here as opposed to the synthetic updated variations in the forward areas. A sort of Old Quarter. He put both feet up on the front of the seat and hunkered, noting the array of digits molded into the chair, a set of individual polymerized bumps located between his shoes—
—such that, rightsided and divided by a scrambled set of its own first three digits, yields a result just one number away from the divisor; such that digits of divisor and result match digits of original array (save one); such that each consecutive number (divisor and result) is the sum of the cubes of its digits. In fact nothing bored him
more than playful calculations. Yet his capacity to fathom the properties of the integers was such that he sometimes found himself watching a number unfold to reveal the reproductive structure within. Eberhard Fearing. It was only a partial lie he'd told that travel-happy man. A meeting
was
scheduled to take place (person or persons unknown), although not at this altitude. He closed his eyes. Jetliner passing through the sphere of vapor, through the blank amalgam of gases, moisture and particulate matter. Bloated metal ritually marked. A loud buzzer sounded.