Ratner's Star (55 page)

Softly had never set eyes on his own semen. He regarded this fluid not primarily as a transporting medium but as some defensive secretion of the body, a reaction (perhaps) to danger or excessive stress. Danger from what source? The excessive stress of intercourse? He didn't ask these questions in so many words or examine the reasons why this secretion might be defensive. He hated the feel of semen on his thighs or on the sheet beneath him, bleak lick of damp, that adhesive resistance to the possibilities of flow, the chill synthetic stickiness of it. Thinning there in cubic centimeters. Approaching the “appearance” of transparency. Sugar fuel in that plasma to rouse my sperm from its quiescent state. To maintain its fertility. To boost its movement into the female apparatus. But do I know for certain there is sperm in my ejaculate? Noughts and crosses. Shepherd's score. Hopscotch. Cybernetics. Precisely why he avoided the sight of his own semen was another question he didn't ask in so many words. It was a sight to be avoided, that was all. What could you say about your own semen and why you hated the feel of it and avoided the sight of it? It was not a subject to be nudged toward some finished insight. So Softly thought, the same Softly (all too aware of the irony of it all) who believed in the wholesomely promotional idea that sex is not what you do but what you are. This made the fluid in question an ambiguous topic at best.

He left Jean (muttering) on her stomach and took the elevator down to the bottom of the antrum, Jean (on her stomach) not unloved, not unmarked by the incidental menace of this loving, by Softly's roistering maul, good luck to her arms and legs, physically a shade slack, he thought, lacking all in all her customary purpose and zeal, that expressive force through which her body explored some silent ideal of spacelessness, moving now against the sheets to rewarm herself and wearily to clean his nervous semen from that itching patch of lower belly. He went straight from the elevator to the crude shower stall near the barrier. Here he undressed, eyes averted from the center of his body, and stepped with terrible suddenness into what proved to be no more than a trickle of freezing water, enough at any rate to freshen his armpits, crotch and feet. He hurried into his clothes, body taut against the cold, and walked on down to cube one.

There was a dusty tarpaulin draped over the entire cubicle. It covered
most of the entranceway as well. Softly leaned way over, lifted the canvas and stepped inside. Moldy gloom. There was a blanket over the plastic table that was supposed to serve as a desk. He assumed the boy was under there. It didn't seem absurd that the boy would be under there. It was sort of Willy's way these days. On the bed was a piece of mail. There was also the chair to be noted. The footlocker. Finally the suitcase. The suitcase was opened, its contents giving every indication of having gone untouched since the time they were first carried down here.

Softly sat in the chair and took one of the small cigars out of the tin he carried in his jacket pocket. He lit it up, squirming further back into the seat. He recalled that Lester Bolin had once told him how boring it was to teach game theory to sophomores. That was a long time ago. That was Lester on the brink. Now he was inescapably within the confines. Prenex normal forms. Recursive undecidability. The pure monadic predicate calculus. A firm foundation for analysis is all that got it going.
EXERCISE
: Prove that every consistent decidable first-order theory has a consistent decidable complete extension.

“That's my cigar smoke you smell. I don't want you to think the place is on fire.”

“I'm very calm.”

“Calm,” Softly said. “Wonder what our young man means by that.”

“It's easy to concentrate in here.”

“He must be trying to lift the general morale in the place, declaring his readiness to concentrate. On what, of course, remains to be seen. This must be a phase of the polar hysteria syndrome that the experts are not ready to confirm just yet. Utter calmness. Readiness to concentrate.”

“What's polar hysteria?”

“He's able to squeak out occasional questions, it would appear. Very encouraging indeed. Sunlessness. That's your problem. Aggravated sunlessness.”

“Keep believing it.”

“Any plans for making an appearance sometime in the near or distant future?”

“I'll play it by ear.”

“He gives every sign of being alive, at any rate, and in tentative control of his faculties.”

“That brings up an interesting point.”

“We're all anxious to hear what sort of points are deemed interesting by people who spend their time crouching in shrouded environments.”

“You got this whole thing started down here by talking about the tensions going on in the outside world.”

“True enough.”

“Maybe I'd like to know what's happening lately.”

“Things, if anything, are worse,” Softly said. “We're getting reports about aggression and counter aggression. The meaning of the term ‘counteraggression' defeats me for the moment but I suppose in this kind of situation there's bound to be a certain amount of muddled thinking.”

“I'd like the talking to end now.”

“Wants to be alone, does he, with his newly discovered sense of calmness? Desires the kind of quiet even blankets and waterproof coverings can't guarantee? Plans to concentrate, does he? Chooses to listen to his circulating blood as it bears tender nutrients through his body? Decides he needs an interval of quiet breathing, right? Intends to invent the nonce word that renders death irrelevant.”

“Somebody's getting carried away.”

“It's very uncomfortable in here,” Softly said. “Do you know that or not? If not, why not? This canvas I find depressing. You've never behaved this way before. I think I'll keep talking just to annoy you.”

Immense bedraggled dishevelment.

Because it was possible to get infected without even being bitten. It had been known to happen. There were cases on record. Because of the saliva in the air. Or because of the parasitic insects floating around. Or because of the guano. Or because of the urinous mist surrounding the colony itself. So this possibility alone was reason to think of a bat
cave not as a place inhabited by bats, inviting to bats or even swarming with bats but rather as a place that was
bat-infested
.

Jean Venable wearing a raincoat walked into Softly's cubicle and finding it unoccupied sat down and waited for Rob to return, which eventually he did, Billy's head coming out from under the blanket, Softly moving right past Jean and seating himself formally at the elaborate desk, where he pretended to engage in a series of engrossing tasks, the boy's head withdrawing again, damp wool, the humidity of stilled midnights.

There is a life inside this life. A filling of gaps. There is something between the spaces. I am different from this. I am not just this but more. There is something else to me that I don't know how to reach. Just outside my reach there is something else that belongs to the rest of me. I don't know what to call it or how to reach it. But it's there. I am more than you know. But the space is too strange to cross. I can't get there but I know it is there to get to. On the other side is where it's free. If only I could remember what the light was like in that space before I had eyes to see it with. When I had mush for eyes. When I was dripping tissue. There is something in the space between what I know and what I am and what fills this space is what I know there are no words for.

I TAKE A DRINK

“If you're busy, Rob, I'll go, although it's silly, isn't it, this artifice.”

“You have something for me to read, do you?”

“I want to interview Edna,” Jean said.

“I thought you might have some notes for me to go over, or even some prose, actual prose, a first draft, you know, not so finely styled but
full of raw technical data or something on that order. Didn't you tell me you were devising a new system of note-taking or note-arranging or whatever? Aren't you that person? I want to read, Jean. I want something to look at. I want to be of service to you. Don't talk to me about artifice please. We're supposed to be doing a book. You write it, I read it and make helpful suggestions. This is the arrangement. This is what you're here to do.”

“Fine, fine.”

“Edna doesn't want to talk to you,” he said. “But I'll talk to you. I'll tell you anything Edna can tell you.”

“Let me go over my questions here.”

“Whenever you're ready.”

“What about Lester?” she said. “Will Lester want to talk to me?”

“Seriously doubt it.”

“Am I allowed to enter his presence and request a few moments of his time? I've talked to everyone else at least once and after all these are the key people, more or less, aren't they? I mean this is the Logicon project and they're the mathematical logicians. I want to hear their unfiltered ideas, opinions and convictions. What kind of journalist would I be if I settled for less than a face-to-face encounter?”

“Let's have sex,” he said. “Take off your clothes and never mind the people here. The people here are working, sleeping, climbing the slopes, camped under tables. To even things up, I will take off my clothes at the same time you are removing yours. This equalizes things.”

Coiled room, she thought. A nervous little step into the coiled room I've seen from time to time to time. Oh, well, how could you have nearly continuous sex with a child-sized man and expect things to progress in a routine manner, as in the non-half-crazy world of people the same size. Look at him in this weak light, how eager to mock my past, how aware of my cooperation in this undertaking, the return of my body, the canceling of subscriptions to reverie, fancy and illusion. Touching me just his touch I think insane. From time to time mingled with the reflections in the broken glass I pass in the street or in the windows of trains crossing dead sections of town, bodies nodding under the glass halves of a tenement's outer doors, I see this room occupied by a female figure inside concentric rings. Oh, well, how could you be
a man the size of a child and possess a touch that could be anything but insane, if only halfway so. I laugh at past loves, at the dreary predictability of the past itself, which may or may not make sense. Darker the better with him. Hate to see all that face-making and bizarre dimpling. Here we are now, set inside ourselves, let him have his say or nay, ruttish tyrant, cycloid, stunted pasha whirling in his silk pillows.

Once more the boy's head protruded from the blanket. He heard water running somewhere and after a while he crawled out from under the blanket and sat on the floor of the cubicle, listening intently. Sitting in the dirt was pleasant, although he was sure there was no calm that compared with the calm prevailing under the table. In time he crawled over to the segment of canvas that covered most of the entrance and he peered beneath this overhang into the dimness at the bottom of the antrum. He heard the running water. Not on the slopes this time. Closer to this level, swelling, looking for an outlet. Chill water moving through joints and break lines and over flowstone formations. Cavern water rich in nitric acid that dissolves limestone to widen existing holes. Cave-maker, Wu thought, hearing the same sound, thinking the stream might be traveling upward, carving out an embryonic cave, a living structure with a cycle that ends in death, wondering how much trouble it would be to order a rubber dinghy, neoprene wet suit, aqualung and waterproof spotlight, dismissing the idea on the grounds he would not be here long enough to see it through. The higher he climbed the darker it got. Along the rippling beam of the lamp, his eyes sought an opening.

Billy left his cubicle and walked quietly toward the barrier and out over it. There was water nearby. He could feel as well as hear it. Where the floor of the antrum curved severely upward he put the heel of his shoe to a large flat stone and kicked it right through the natural hatch in the earth where it had been wedged. Water roaring engaged his senses. He lowered himself into the nearly vertical crawlway, knowing from the roar that it was only several yards long, and then braced his shoulders against one surface and his feet against the other and descended with some difficulty to solid ground. He could see almost nothing but knew he was on the edge of the underground river. It was fully a river in power and sound. It came flowing past him, carrying clay, silt and organic debris, carrying limestone to redeposit, straight on past,
leaving him only a hint of its animal presence, that complex and adaptive motivation that directs living things toward the strangeness, beauty and freedom of repeated sequences. Naturally he put his hands in the water. It was cold enough to make him tremble and when he cupped his hands and brought some water to his lips to drink he felt some seconds later a brief assertion of pain behind his right eye. Mildly frightening. When it subsided he simply listened to the river, feeling no special need to see it, photograph it or take samples home to study. He had
tasted
it, after all. Some element of river-taste would subtract itself from the recollection of that unit of pain and he would learn again that hidden inside everything he knew was half of what he was. The river carried with it a near-sweet breeze, although not really that, nor a mineral redolence, nor whatever quality of freshness might result from its continuous onward movement, but something more complex, traveling with it from its source, that clarified whatever distance intervened between the river and the mind through which it flowed.