Ratner's Star (17 page)

“The dream-being known as the one-one-one-eyed man is in fact a three-eyed man. Their difficulty with multiple forms is what leads the foragers into somewhat awkward terminology. Nevertheless there is reason to believe not only that some animals of the archaeological past on planet Earth had three eyes but also that man himself possessed a third eye and that the pineal gland is a vestige of such an eye in the middle of the forehead, the human forehead. Our visitor himself may or may not possess a third eye. Such are the secrets of the bush.”

Ten people walked out.

“Extrasensory perception is the least of his gifts. With his tektite object he is able to sit in time and then whirl faster and faster until this very motion becomes a sort of nth dimension, as the mathematicians say. When word reached me in my brush hut of the apparent contact between Ratner's star and this installation, I went immediately to the revered totemic site where the white-haired one sits, as we say, in time. My informant, your own Dr. Glottle, had given me stellar notations, schematic diagrams, an evolutionary track profile and so on. With my own tektite object I asked the aborigine, who was hidden from my view
inside a shell-like rock formation—I asked by striking the object on the most sacred stone of his dreamtime site—I asked whether there was life as we know it in that part of the universe or great undulating desert-sea of light and dark, as it's often called. I do hope you'll bear with me as I try to recount what happened next and at the same time seek to avoid referring to him,
him
, by any name or designation. This is the most sacred part of the narrative. It must be free of naming. Circumlocution is absolutely essential. The narrative must be pure. Direct naming on my part from this point forward would surely cause me to be excluded from any further participation in whatever is destined to happen here today.”

These last few sentences, which seemed sincere enough to Billy, led to a nearly general exodus. Mutuka simply paused in his recitation until the movement ceased. About twenty people remained of the original eighty or ninety. Next to Billy, Goldfloss sat nodding, his eyes totally blank, a picture of dignified fatigue.

“Augury is the least of his powers,” Mutuka said. “The answer to me at the dreamsite indicated in ways I am not permitted to recount that yes, yes, yes, there may well be totemic dream creatures living on more than one of the more than one worlds that revolve around the star that sits in time in the part of the desert-sea that speaks by radio to the
walypala
at Field Experiment Number One. There then occurred the gyration that invariably follows the sitting in time. I heard but did not see the gyration. When it ended I was informed that yes, yes, there is without doubt a dreamtime of creature beings on that world. The journey taken during the gyration is what we have come here to repeat, although the word ‘journey' is just as inadequate in this instance as it would be if we used it to describe the way electrons change positions in nuclear space without actually moving through this space. Time and space will be replaced by the nameless dimension of the whirl. They will be purified, if you will. Pure time. Pure space. There will be sitting in time. There will be tektite manipulation. There will be whirl. There will be journey, although that word is inadequate, to the area of the radio star. Then we'll have a question and answer period.”

An attendant wheeled a miniature flatcar onto the floor of the little theater. It was about eight feet square, apparently a freight-loading
device of some kind. In the middle of it was someone or something covered in white canvas. The shape of the canvas indicated that the person beneath it, if it was a person, was probably sitting with legs crossed and head slightly bowed. That's all there was, a white canvas mound in the middle of a little flatcar. The attendant left the hall. Billy waited for Mutuka to say something. But he simply stood there, waiting, apparently no more useful at this stage of the demonstration than the twenty spectators who remained in the hall. For a long time everyone waited. Then Mutuka left his spot at the side of the flatcar and took a seat in the first row of the section that Billy was in. In less than a minute twelve people left the chamber. The fact that Mutuka no longer had any influence on matters seemed to have no effect on those who remained. Maybe they had nowhere else to go. Goldfloss had degenerated to a splayed position, limbs extended, head flung back in a profound swoon. The others were sprawled in their seats and in several cases across two seats; all but Mutuka, who sat erect with legs formally crossed, hands resting on upper knee. Billy thought there were few things less appealing than the sight of a man's bare legs in a crossed position. Twenty minutes passed. The canvas mound sat on the flatcar. A man up front stood and yawned, turning as he did so, his arms spread like the wings of a banking plane. His face was empty of everything but the yawn itself. A tender grimace. A photograph of time-drams ingested by the human mouth.

Slowly the canvas began to move. Yes. There was movement in the specific area of the white canvas mound that sat in the middle of the loading device. The yawning man took his seat. Aside from that, response to the movement was slight. Mutuka's head may have gained several degrees of arc in a tiny rightward sweep. Billy nudged Simeon Goldfloss, who reacted slowly, as though unaligned with the landscape, expecting to find himself on a Mexican bus.

The canvas was clearly whirling now. In a matter of seconds it had picked up a good deal of speed. Billy couldn't believe that a man sitting with his legs crossed was capable of whirling that fast. His hands and arms would be doing all the work and it just wasn't possible for human hands to move that quickly or for human arms to take that much stress. If Mutuka had said that the whirler was a holy man from India, an
expert in gyrational body-control, Billy would have had less trouble believing what he saw. But the person under the canvas, if it was a person, was supposedly an aborigine. The answer had to be a rotary mechanism that the person was sitting on. The person simply sat on a disk that turned when a button was pushed. Either that or it wasn't a person. The entire thing was mechanical, an oversized model of the agitator in an automatic washer. Those were the two best answers: 1) a large disk and someone sitting on it; 2) a large agitator and no person at all. He thought of two other possibilities. One ridiculous: a small individual running in very tight circles. The other intriguing: an aborigine with white hair and possibly three eyes who had recently finished sitting in time and was now in the process of whirling into the
nth
dimension, where he would come upon Ratner's star.

The white canvas no longer seemed to be turning. There was a distinct sense of motion but he now realized that the canvas itself was relatively still. Occasionally it would flutter a bit as though being influenced by the moving thing inside. The bottom edges of the canvas were now and then lifted off the flatcar, indicating that the thing beneath it was moving at speeds so tremendous that a hovering factor had been introduced into the relationship between canvas, flatcar and moving object. The canvas, which looked fairly heavy, was definitely being lifted into the air and at times dented by the centripetal action within. Even if he'd been able to time the little hops made by the canvas and to tilt his head accordingly, Billy was much too high in the gallery to get a good view of events taking place beneath the canvas.

For the first time since the whirling began, a sound became evident. The thing or person was apparently moving fast enough to cause sound to be emitted. The sound was faint and remained so, a distant whimper too stylized to be called childlike or animal but never less than terrible to hear, a process sustained at the edge of nonentity. He found it hard to believe that the friction or vibration produced by physical forces alone could bestow such emotion to sound.

A long time passed. The whirling beneath the canvas continued. The low moan delivered itself, neither rising nor dropping in volume. The canvas was lifted more frequently and showed further evidence of the incredible speeds attained by the thing beneath it in the suddenness and
depth of the indentations that appeared on its surface. Nobody in the audience spoke. There was no movement aside from an occasional shifting of weight. A good show, he thought. A good performance and maybe more than good and maybe more than a performance. A man below him picked a sheet of paper off the floor, read it without interest and then handed it up to Billy, who assumed it was the note written earlier by the woman with the eyepatch. She had left long ago but the note paper had evidently been making the rounds.

Without warning the noise stopped. A long moment passed. He was in the midst of framing the thought:
something is about to happen
. Before he could finish, it happened. The canvas shroud leaped violently, not unlike a living thing responding to a terminal instinct. It was quickly sucked out of the air in a broken-back spasm, snapped inside out by some horrible inhaling natural trap.

Deep silence ensued. Nothing stirred. The canvas lay flat on the loading device. Whatever it had once covered was no longer there. It had vanished completely and only a canvas puddle remained. Sitting in time. Tektite manipulation. Nameless dimension of the whirl. This latest development no doubt meant the aborigine was embarked on phase four, the “journey” to Ratner's star. Billy sat immobilized, pondering the vastness of what he'd seen and hadn't seen. No one else seemed very interested. After a while Mutuka rose from his seat, went to the flatcar and carefully lifted the shroud. There was nothing under it that could be seen by the unaided eye. It wasn't until this point that Billy realized he was holding the note in his hand. It took a conscious effort to raise the paper to his face and read it.

He was certain she had written the note before the flatcar had been wheeled in. How had she known what was going to happen? Had she guessed it from something Mutuka said? Or had Mutuka himself been part of the nightclub act? Maybe that was it. She'd not only witnessed this
kind
of trick; she'd seen it done by the very same man. Billy
imagined this Gerald Pence guy, an ex-futurologist, going from town to town in the outback with his space-and-time disappearing act, fooling the half-breeds and superstitious miners. But what was an isometric graviton axis? And could he be sure that the note found on the floor was the same one written by the woman with the eyepatch?

He went down to the floor of the amphitheater. First he inspected the canvas and flatcar, finding nothing, certainly no trace of a large disk or agitator. Then he got on his knees and peered under the flatcar, even reaching in with his hand to feel for trap doors or soft spots. Nothing interesting. He stood up for a closer look at the canvas shroud, shaking it out and then fingering along the seams. Affixed to one corner was a small tag that read:
PROPERTY OF OMCO RESEARCH
. Nothing else anywhere. He turned toward the six or seven people in their seats, well spread through the gallery, and simply shrugged, palms up. Mutuka was sitting at the edge of the loading device, facing a blank wall. Billy decided to approach.

“So where's the aborigine?”

“I don't know,” Mutuka said. “Who are you?”

“A mathematician who works on the star project and who wonders if the aborigine is now on his way to the star.”

“No, no, no, no.”

“Why no?”

“You see, he sits in time. Then he whirls, you see.”

“Then he goes to the star.”

“No, no,” Mutuka said. “He's never done it that way. You see, the whirl is the journey. The journey takes place during the gyration. He's not supposed to disappear. He's never done it that way.”

“Then the whirl itself is the
n
th dimension. He doesn't whirl and then become invisible and then come back. He just whirls.”

“Yes, of course, absolutely.”

“He makes the journey while he's whirling.”

“Yes, yes, of course.”

“He makes the journey while he's whirling,” Billy said to the others. “This wasn't supposed to happen.”

He shrugged again. The other people made their way out, dazed and
sated, a collection of volunteers roused from prolonged experimental sleep. Goldfloss was the last to depart. Billy walked with him to the elevator outside.

“It was very ambiguous. I feel ambivalent about it. All I really remember is somebody named Motor Car talking about boomerangs. I guess I dropped off once or twice.”

Goldfloss patted his side whiskers. The elevator door opened and he stepped in, yawning. Billy headed back to the amphitheater, where Mutuka was still seated at the edge of the little flatcar.

“So then he hasn't come back yet.”

“Who are you?”

“I was here for the demonstration. I was one of the ones who stayed for the whole thing.”

“I believe he's still here,” Mutuka said. “Somehow he's compressed himself. He hasn't actually gone away. He's here but we can't see him.”

“What's a graviton isometric axis?”

“You've got it backwards.”

“Maybe I reversed the words purposely to see if you'd let on to knowing.”

“Odd if I didn't know,” Mutuka said. “I spent twenty-three years in futurology before going into the bush. I was a futurologist before the word was even coined.”

“How were things in Perth last time you were there?”

“Exactly who are you?”

“Just wondering about the nightlife in Perth.”

“I spent two days there. Never been back. My home is the bush.”

“Two days and two nights?”

“They usually go together,” Mutuka said.

“So you think he's compressed himself.”

They sat without speaking for a long time. This period of waiting began to take on the character of a vigil. The feeling between them grew nearly fraternal, drawing them to the subject of their ritual observation. Of course, there was also something comic about the watch they kept. They were watching over something that wasn't there. The aborigine wasn't there and neither was the tektite object. Nothing was there but
the idea of an nth dimension. They watched over this idea until well past dinnertime.