Ratner's Star (12 page)

Billy had been told Natasha squinted because her mother ran away
from home. She was extremely frail, her body quivering as though suspended from the end of an eyedropper. Her father often took the kids to the botanical gardens. Together Izzy and Natasha expressed the unfocused sadness of love divided. On notably sad days Billy sometimes felt obliged to whisper in their presence as a way of deferring to their mutual loss. Natasha squinted at many different speeds, depending on the situation.

“Girls have three armpits,” Ralphie Buber said. “The extra one's between their legs.”

Across the airshaft the scream lady cursed the universe. During movie nights, as Faye and Billy sat laughing in the cave-glow of the TV set, the woman shrieked and rattled, none of her words seeming to belong to any known language. One day Billy and two friends were being chased by the janitor through a series of passageways and alleys that ran under and between several adjacent buildings. With the route to his own building sealed off, he climbed the first set of stairs he found. It took him eventually to the fourth floor of the building behind his own. A door was partly open and there the woman stood. Although he had never seen her before, he knew it couldn't be anyone but her. The scream lady. She was standing about five feet away from him in the dark doorway of her apartment. A white paper napkin was pinned to her hair. She wore two or more bathrobes. The outer robe was opened, revealing another beneath it, and judging by the unwarranted mounds and ridges in this second and tightly belted robe, there may have been one or more beneath that. The woman's feet were bare and this more than her curious way of dressing, this even more than the fact that she was the scream lady, this really worried him. Old people's bare feet had always caused him some concern. It was not in the order of things for old men and women to go around barefoot and it made him want to throw lighted matches at their feet to teach them a lesson. He stood watching her now, ready to dash away, already leaning, one second from all-out flight. She took something from the pocket of her outer robe, a piece of paper with writing on it. He kept his eyes on her pitted face, abysmally collapsed, looking as though it had been blown in by some natural force. She rubbed the paper against her forehead
in a circular motion over and over. Then she bit it fiercely and extended it in his direction, producing sounds all the while, acoustic interference so random it seemed to come not from her jawless sucking mouth but from a small hole in her throat. He leaned toward the staircase, all his weight on one leg, and then suddenly and without forewarning even to himself he propelled his body in the opposite direction, snatching the paper from the scream lady's hand. He read it on the roof five minutes later, teethmarks still indenting its surface, tinges of pearly spittle evident in these jagged spaces, while a few feet away a man with a long stick guided a flock of pigeons in training arcs of gradually increasing length.

Settled in front of the TV set with a lapful of muscatel grapes, Faye pointed out to Billy why certain performers were considered classic. “I like to watch him work,” she'd say of a particular actor. “Watch the way he does this bit with the water glass. Watch this now. See it, see it, the way he rubs the edge of the glass against his lower lip before he drinks. Nobody else could get away with that. It's a classic bit. I like to watch him work.” Other times she spoke of growing. Certain performers were interested in growing as artists. Others were not, either because they were too dumb to grow or because they were classic and not only had no use for growth but would be diminished by it.

Sitting on the blanket at the beach he studied his father's belongings. The sawed-off poolstick was there, brought along for riot protection. The stainless-steel cigarette lighter was there, nearly the size of a deck of cards. The flame it made was immense. Every time his father put his thumb to the rickety wheel, Billy moved away. With the huge bluish
flame would come a surge of furious air, an effect he associated with something being put out rather than something kindled, the last breath of a body hardly formed, heat and light sucking at an ultimate moment. Walking through slush outside the supermarket he asked his mother why they'd named him William Jr.

“We didn't think you'd live.”

“What do you mean?”

“You were born early, mommy. They rushed you into an incubator. You were so itty-bitty we didn't expect you to last the weekend.”

“What's that got to do with being named after my father?”

“We didn't want to waste a new name.”

“Big joke.”

“We thought we'd save the new names for a healthier kid.”

“Fun-nee.”

His father's shoes were also there, scuffed and monumental, located between the cigarette lighter and the newspaper. It was hard to believe that creatures with feet large enough to be suitable for these containers actually walked the earth and that one of these creatures was his own pop, his flesh and blood, Babe of the subway tunnels. Are we really of the same race of people? Did I really come from him and her or is it all some kind of story they tell to kids? Ovulation, intercourse, fertilization, pregnancy, labor, delivery. It can't be that simple. There must be more they aren't telling us. A circling bird, a dream, a number whispered in the night. At his side Natasha seemed to look directly into the sun. Izzy Seltzer cautioned her, semitragic in his faded swimming trunks, hair everywhere on his body, white-tipped clusters curling from his nose and ears.

Billy at four still thought of himself as something that would never be altered. “Small boy.” He did not yet perceive the special kinship between humans of different sizes and failed to realize he was destined for other categories. This part of childhood then was a brief chapter of immortality that would be recognized in due time as having been set between biological states reeking of deathly transformation. Some years later, sitting in the bathtub, he would bounce in prepubescent rage on the smooth porcelain as his mother's head appeared in the doorway.

“Is you is or is you ain't my baby?”

“Drop dead please.”

At four, however, completely in accord with the notion of forever being this thing called “small boy,” he lived in a deep sunny silence unthreatened by a sense of his own capacity for change. There was no doubting the fact he was exactly what he was meant to be. He was sure he met the requirements. It was all so totally fitting. He was native to a permanent inner environment just as certain fish as a species never stray from coastal waters. His shape was carved in the very air, body and mind forever.

LoQuadro led him back across the complex, seeming to take the same route and make the same small detours that Shirl Trumpy had taken and made when earlier she'd driven him in the opposite direction. Shadows were cast on the walls and floors by hulking computer units.

“Did they lease?”

“They leased.”

“What do they need Space Brain for?”

“Didn't say.”

“I guess if someone's in hiding, it figures he won't tell you what he wants your computer for.”

“Quite the modern master of sarcasm, aren't you?” LoQuadro said. “Anyway he wasn't in hiding. He was in isolation. There's a big difference.”

“I heard hiding.”

“We're going to the outer void core. From there we can work our way down between the augment interrupt mechanism. In theory there isn't the slightest obstacle in our path.”

“Wait.”

“That's where the dream originates.”

“Wait please.”

“In an unnamed sector at the center of the void core.”

LoQuadro made a sudden turn and led the boy past a group of workmen installing tape drive units at a frenzied pace. He didn't remember passing this area with the woman in the funny truck. He wanted to heed his own words (“Wait please”) but he kept right on moving as if he were being drawn into LoQuadro's wake through natural
enforcement of some low-lying aerodynamic law. They walked through a blinking corridor and into a semicircular storeroom full of folding chairs partially folded. LoQuadro approached a small door at the far end of the curved wall. The door was no more than three feet high, leading Billy to think it was some kind of emergency escape panel similar to the metal grating in his canister. There was no doorknob in evidence but he noticed a small white circular device set into the door. Maybe a bell or buzzer. Sliding door leading to an elevator maybe. There were no printed warnings or coded symbols. Only the small inscription:
OMCO RESEARCH
. Looming above the door LoQuadro turned to face him.

“Forgot the goggles,” he said. “Have to go back for them. Can't go in there without goggles. You'll have to wait here. You're not authorized to draw equipment or even to enter the area where equipment is drawn. Am I correct? You have limited access.”

“Nobody told me one way or the other.”

“Your canister has what kind of module?”

“Limited input.”

“Then you have limited access. The two go together. Promise me you'll be here when I get back with the goggles.”

“I definitely promise.”

“But will you definitely be here?”

“I didn't go away last time you left.”

“I'd like some further assurance. All my life people have been making promises to me and consistently breaking them. What further assurance can you give me?”

“I give you my word.”

“Not nearly enough,” LoQuadro said.

“I'll swear on a stack of Bibles.”

“Forget Bibles.”

“Any stack.”

“What about a stack of books of my choosing?”

“What will you put in there?” Billy said. “Give me some titles.”

“First say you'll swear.”

“First tell me what you meant when you said that thing about the dream.”

“What did I say?”

“It originates in the void core.”

“Actual fact.”

“Because if you're saying the computer has dreams, I saw that movie on ‘Hollywood Ghoul School' a long time ago.”

“D-r-e-a-m.”

“Which is what?”

“Discrete retrieved entry-assembled memory,” LoQuadro said. “A series of data flashes in mnemonic code form tend to occur in certain nonoperational phases and are later retrieved.”

“The guy ends up going crazy after his father and the girl take apart the computer and they find little pieces of baby human brain tissue grafted onto the circuits, which explains why the hospital was missing all those kids.”

LoQuadro's right foot was tapping uncontrollably. Its movements did not seem related to any other part of him. Tapping in this manner he resembled a wildly impractical household robot designed to step on passing insects. Seconds later he toppled into a cluster of partly folded chairs. Billy thought the fall would wake him but it didn't. Neither did the noise of crashing chairs. Nevertheless the boy backed quietly out of the room. He didn't try to imagine what was on the other side of the little door. It didn't occur to him to peek inside or even knock. Void core. The name was enough to send him in the other direction.

In his canister he thought about the message from Ratner's star. One hundred and one total characters. As U.F.O. Schwarz had pointed out, one hundred and one was the first three-digit prime—indivisible except by itself and the number one. Possibly important. He thought for a moment about the pulses or ones. Fourteen. Twenty-eight. Fifty-seven. This, in digits, was a recurring decimal. One four two eight five seven. Worth thinking about.

The answer, assuming there was a question, had to be simple. He tried to think along the lines of the simplest arithmetic. One zero one. Ninety-nine ones and two zeros. One four two eight five seven. Fourteen
gap
twenty-eight
gap
fifty-seven. He knew the others who'd worked at decoding the message had started out the same way but there was always a chance they'd overlooked something obvious. He thought
of Softly wobbling in a rocker on his front porch in Pennyfellow. What would Softly do? Crack a joke and whistle through his pinky fingers. Which is about what this whole thing deserves.

There was a light knock on the door, a sort of loose-knuckled frolicsome blow. He found a woman standing outside and remembered to move back so she could enter. Her clothes were of the freely swirling type that might be classified either as terribly dramatic evening wear or out-and-out pajamas. She was tall and silvery, her expression one of painstaking animation, as if she didn't realize it was no longer necessary to be vivacious. A ribbon was awry in her hair and there were specks of confetti on her shirt and pants.

“I'm Soma Tobias.”

“H'o.”

“Were you at my party?”

“I don't think so. Be seated anywhere. What party?”

“My going-away party.”

“When was it?”

“It started last night and it's still going on. I just wandered away for a while. Saw the light under your door and knew you were up.”

“It's only afternoon,” he said. “Sure I'm up.”

“But don't you love to languish in bed all day long? To grow more feeble by the hour like so many French geniuses of the arts and sciences. Don't you think there's a wistful tenderness attached to those brilliantly apathetic periods of time we tend to spend in bed during the day? I fully expected to find you a-dawdle in your twofold.”

“Are you drunk?”

“It's my going-away party,” she said. “I'm going away.”