Ratner's Star (3 page)

He calculated with the ease of a coastal bird haunting an updraft. But beauty was mere scenery unless it was severe, adhering strictly to a set of consistent inner codes, and this he clearly perceived, the arch-reality of pure mathematics, its austere disposition, its links to simplicity and permanence; the formal balances it maintains, inevitability adjacent to surprise, exactitude to generality; the endless disdain of mathematics for what is slack in the character of its practitioners and what is trivial and needlessly repetitive in their work; its precision as a language; its claim to necessary conclusions; its pursuit of connective patterns and significant form; the manifold freedom it offers in the very strictures it persistently upholds.

Mathematics made sense.

He lowered his feet to the floor, eyes still closed, a circumstance that gave anyone watching enough time to determine what it was that made the boy appear an adept of concentration—simply his physical stillness, the seeming compression of his frame into a more comprehensive object. It was a stillness unaffected by the shifting of his feet and yet completely obliterated the second his eyes came open. This latter act served to release upon the world a presence essentially seriocomic in nature, that of early adolescence trying to conceal itself in a fold of apathy.

The buzzer sounded once more and a light flashed on and off. He returned to his seat. The plane landed to refuel again and this time he was one of the passengers getting off. He made his way through a dense crowd of people, none of whom seemed to be going anywhere or meeting anyone. He wondered if they lived at the airport. Maybe there was no room for them in the city and they came out here to settle, sleeping
in oil drums in unused hangars, getting up at sunrise and heading indoors to loiter. He reached his destination, a special boarding gate in an isolated part of the airport. Two men were there to meet him. They'd already collected his suitcase and now led him aboard another plane, much smaller than the first, no other passengers, some space to yawn and sprawl. His escorts were named Ottum and Hof. The flight was relatively short and after the aircraft set down on a deserted landing strip the boy and two men walked to a waiting limousine. Billy had the enormous back seat to himself. As Ottum started the car, his partner turned and pointed to a small sign taped to the folded-over underside of one of the jumpseats.

“We'll be there in twenty some odd minutes,” Ottum said.

“This a Cadillac, this car?”

“None other.”

“It came almost as a shock to see it. That's why I ask. Way in the middle of nowhere.”

“No mistaking one of these vehicles,” Hof said. “Custom job from top to bottom. What we call a meticulously customized motor vehicle. It's a Cadillac all right.”

“The Rolls-Royce of automobiles,” Ottum said.

Billy had been instructed not to tell anyone where he was going. There wasn't much he could have said, to Eberhard Fearing or anyone else, even if he'd wanted to. He knew the name of the place but very little about it. Apparently the people in charge were still defining their objectives and therefore did not release information except in minimum trickles. As to the reason his specific presence was considered essential, not a word had been spoken.

“Is this thing bulletproof?”

“Absolutely, top to bottom.”

“I never thought so. I just asked the question because you think of a limousine this big as might as well having all the extras.”

“It's for the top people,” Hof said.

“Did it ever get shot at?”

“Course not.”

“It's not a bubbletop, I notice.”

“He notices,” Hof said.

“I heard,” Ottum said.

“Not a bubbletop, he notices.”

“Two terrific sense of humors.”

“Be a kid.”

“I was only talking back.”

“Just be a kid,” Hof said.

He tried to revel in the expensive pleasures of the back seat, toying with gadgets and scraping the soles of his shoes on the edges of the collapsed jumpseats, freeing himself of whatever foreign matter had accumulated there recently.

“I didn't go through customs.”

“We took care of that,” Hof said. “You're a special case. It's a courtesy they extend to special cases.”

They traveled over bad roads on a gray plain. He saw one sign of life, an old man with a counting stalk. Must be for tourists, he thought. In time a sequined point appeared on the seam of land and air.

“Maybe you don't know it,” Hof said, “but you're more or less a legend in your own time.”

They were coming to something. He knew immediately it was something remarkable. Rising over the land and extending far across its breadth was a vast geometric structure, not at first recognizable as something designed to house or contain or harbor, simply a formulation, an expression in systematic terms of a fifty-story machine or educational toy or two-dimensional decorative object. The dominating shape seemed to be a cycloid, that elegant curve traced by a fixed point on the circumference of a circle rolling along a straight line, the line in this case being the land itself. His attention was diverted for a moment as
the car passed through a field of dish antennas, hundreds of them, surprisingly small every one. Closer now he was able to see that the cycloid was not complete, having no summit or topmost arc, and that wedged inside the figure by a massive V-form steel support was the central element of the entire structure, a slowly rotating series of intersecting rings that suggested a medieval instrument of astronomy.

In all, the structure was about sixteen hundred feet wide, six hundred feet high. Welded steel. Reinforced concrete. Translucent polyethylene. Aluminum, glass, mylar, sunstone. He noticed that particular surfaces seemed to deflect natural light, causing perspectives to disappear and making it necessary to look away from time to time. Point line surface solid. Feeling of solar mirage. And still a building. A thing full of people.