"I've never seen you here before."

"I don't come here," he said.

"They change the panel arrangement every day. I find it renewing, I really do. Serious play usually is. Of course, there's a thin line between serious play and neurosis. The same famous thin line we find nearly everywhere. What were you thinking about?"

"Sitting in the dark."

"Charming," she said. "You've existed in my mind a long time, you know. Ever since I first read about you in the journals and technical digests."

"You keep yourself well."

"What do you mean?"

"I don't know," he said. "It just came out."

"Turn left here."

"A nervous remark, that's all."

"It must be a curious feeling to exist in someone's mind and not even know that person is alive."

"It's hard for me to say what it's like because I don't know who out there might be thinking about me."

"I expected a stark and haunted face."

"Why?"

"One hears things about pure mathematics. But you don't look especially driven."

"What did you think of the aborigine?" he said.

"It was just an excuse to gather together. We were all very lonely.

Loneliness among the overeducated is the saddest thing in the world. Your own work here is the only touch of romance in our lives. An idealized exploit at last. We want you to discover a beautiful sentiment in the message of the star people. We expect your announcement any day now. In fact we're depending on it."

"But what about the note you wrote? Do you really think it was all a trick?

"I didn't write that note. The note I wrote was about my horoscope. I was passing it to a friend down front. Some time later somebody passed me a note about a nightclub act. That's when I decided to leave."

"The whirl was pretty good. You should have stayed for the whirl."

At a junction in front of them, two men with books to their noses nearly bumped heads. They moved in silent glides, seeming to overstep themselves, to be walking beyond their physical limits. Objects in topo-logical space, he fancied. "Isoperimetrical readers of Virgil." Human members of open sets in reciprocal orbit. Several more people were evident here and there, their bodies crossing the space at the end of matching panels.

"Science avers that for every black hole there's a white hole," she said. "All matter lost in black holes must inevitably reappear through white holes either in another part of the universe or in an alternate universe. My work here is interdisciplinary. This is the loneliest kind of work. I find it hard to make real friends."

He liked the way she'd said that: science avers. He also liked her close-cropped hair and the way the bangles clicked when she moved her arm. He'd never associated close-cropped hair with lonely people. In his experience that kind of hair went with firm, self-controlled and unflinching people. He was happy to learn that Celeste Dessau had a soft interior to counterbalance her somewhat hard-edged surface. Nevertheless he doubted that science averred the existence of white holes. It appeared too convenient an explanation. Maybe science supposed, conjectured, surmised and pulled its hair out by the roots, guessing. He didn't think it went beyond that. On the other hand maybe it did. How would he know? Maybe science did aver. One white for every black. Who knew? In a dumb kind of way maybe it made sense.

"Symmetry is a powerful analgesic," the woman said. "Tell me more about sitting in the dark. Maybe I can work up enough courage to do it myself."

"Sometimes I write in the dark. At first it would come as a shock to turn on the light and see how big all the writing looked on top of each other or falling off the page. But I'm a lot better at it now."

"Living defensively is the central theme of our age. How else can we live? Biologically we've instructed ourselves in the deepest way possible that living in a defensive manner is the only way we'll survive, both in theme and fact. Maybe your hunch is right. Sitting alone in a room isn't enough. We should turn out the lights as well. The only way to survive is to curtail one's perspective, to exist as close to one's center as possible."

"I just do it because it helps me concentrate."

"How old are you?"

"Fourteen."

"The worst age," she said. "Too old to be cute. Too young to be sexy. A haunted fourteen. That's the kind of face I thought you'd have."

He felt he should be getting back to work. He hadn't experienced this eager yielding to a sense of obligation since he'd left the Center. In a roundabout way the aborigine was responsible. Billy had been impressed by the gyration and disappearance. As the impact of these events began to manifest itself, he found he was more receptive to the idea that events in general merited his attention. If the aborigine could spin off into the nth dimension, maybe there was something to this star business after all. Plausibility by association. People were crowding into the play maze. This must be what they do instead of naps, he thought. Serious play. To enter an area in order to find your way out.

"We sit in our dark rooms," Celeste Dessau said. "Traffic in the area is being rerouted for reasons nobody is willing to discuss. Wild animals have been seen entering the city. All air-mail letters are returned to sender. We are determined not to turn on the lights. Manhole covers begin shooting into the air. It rains in triplicate."

Throughout the maze there was a general mood of well-being, most likely arising from the basic satisfactions of negotiating intricate pathways. It was necessary to move sideways now because of the mass of people.

"Now I exist in your consciousness as you've existed in mine. When you least expect it, I'll surface to share your life."

In his room he sat at the module and took a number two pencil in hand. He thought he heard a metallic click behind him. It was so slight he didn't even turn around. He started working and a second later heard a papery slither followed by another click. This time he turned, seeing an envelope propped against the emergency exit grating at the base of the wall. He went and got it. It was a manila envelope, roughly nine inches by twelve. He wasn't surprised to find nothing inside it. Two notes in one day were one too many. Nothing remarkable about an empty clasp-envelope coming through the exit hatch. Not in this place. Perfectly in keeping. When he sat down again he realized there was something drawn on the front of the envelope, its face, as it were. The envelope had come into the room backside-and blank surface-showing. He studied the labeled drawing with some interest.

He assumed this was Celeste Dessau's way of continuing to exist in his mind and he assumed furthermore that other reminders of her existence would be forthcoming, every new message designed to reaffirm her image. Already he could see her black-clad figure lurking among a mass of cells in his brain, passing softly through every synaptic cleft. He saw her crouched behind his eyes, co-opting his vision, opening the world to further mistranslation. He went to work now, looking into ring structure and fields, coming quite by accident upon a twillig nil-potent element. This was one of two mathematical entities named in his honor. The other was a stellated twilligon-a figure, coincidentally, that had more than a casual resemblance to the drawing on the manila envelope. He continued his present explorations almost to the notched dot of midnight, rearranging the surface of one zero one, looking for fresh connections in the texture. As always when he worked with this much concentration he began to feel a sense of introverting pressure. There was no way out once he was in, no genuine rest, no one to talk to who was capable of understanding the complexity (simplicity) of the problem or the approaches to a tentative solution. There came a time in

 

every prolonged effort when he had a moment of near panic, or "terror in a lonely place," the original semantic content of that word. The lonely place was his own mind. As a mathematician he was free from subjection to reality, free to impose his ideas and designs on his own test environment. The only valid standard for his work, its critical point (zero or infinity), was the beauty it possessed, the deft strength of his mathematical reasoning. The work's ultimate value was simply what it revealed about the nature of his intellect. What was at stake, in effect, was his own principle of intelligence or individual consciousness; his identity, in short. This was the infalling trap, the source of art's private involvement with obsession and despair, neither more nor less than the artist's self-containment, a mental state that led to storms of overwork and extended stretches of depression, that brought on indifference to life and at times the need to regurgitate it, to seek the level of expelled matter. Of course, the sense at the end of a serious effort, if the end is reached successfully, is one of lyrical exhilaration. There is air to breathe and a place to stand. The work gradually reveals its attachment to the charged particles of other minds, men now historical, the rediscovered dead; to the main structure of mathematical thought; perhaps even to reality itself, the so-called sum of things. It is possible to stand in time's pinewood dust and admire one's own veronicas and pavanes. Before going to bed he looked once more at the drawing on the outside of the envelope and he wondered whether it was by accident or design that the figure resembled a boomerang.

 

7 REARRANGEMENT

 

Synthetic figures on the glass slide moved at timed intervals in a bright clasping skater's blur of identity and division. As one micro-sphere parted from another, a third joined a fourth. This coincident symmetry did not astonish the lone brown eye that watched from above. Billy thought of the process as a simple one, that of artificial objects being rearranged on a limited surface. There was something wholly touching about these microspheres, these subcreatures of polypeptide origin. They possessed the innocence of small things viewed from a distant point.

"Shouldn't you be getting back to work?" the woman said. "I feel guilty about letting you linger. So much depends on you."

He raised his head from the eyepiece. Desilu Espy in her starched close-fitting tunic and high white socks resembled a puffy schoolgirl whose age had somehow doubled before she'd found time to don appropriate clothing. She and Billy stood in a glass booth in an area set aside for research in extramolecularism. Beyond the enclosure, in every direction, were all the elements of modern laboratory swamplife- electron microscopes, optical rotation instruments, rows of precision devices for measuring, photographing and synthesizing the unseeable, everywhere a sense of insomnious acids. He put his eye to the microscope once more.

"We're analyzing a giant molecule," she said. "It's more complex than anything ever found in the spectral lines in the Milky Way. Perfectly stable under heat and light. This is a good sign in terms of do we or do we not find the building blocks of life beyond the solar system. Don't you have work to do?"

"I'm not finished looking at this."

"Sometimes I wonder wouldn't it be simpler if the Ratnerians just turned up one day. Or wouldn't it be almost as simple if we used an enormous topographical marking to indicate to any visual monitoring device that there's intelligent life on Earth. Somebody thought of a huge pine forest planted in Siberia in the form of a right triangle. The monitoring device would see it and report back to its people. Ideas like that really appeal to me. They're such human ideas. Only humans could think of ideas like that. Radio emissions are impersonal. What can you learn about a civilization from pulses and gaps? We could plant a right triangle of pine trees with a square of blue spruce attached to each side. The extraterrestrials would be charmed by it. If not, we wouldn't want to know them anyway."

She stood five feet away, watching over him with a clear concern for the object entrusted to his secular pleasure. Without raising his head from the instrument he closed his scope eye and simultaneously opened his free eye. He shielded this action from Desilu Espy by putting left hand to forehead in a pretense of deep concentration. As she continued to talk, he stared at her knees, the only items discernible under the circumstances. Very clean. Clean knees. A clean-kneed woman.

"Are you sure you shouldn't be getting back to work?"

"I worked last night."

"Here comes whosis himself. What's-his-name. He's probably going your way. He can take you back."

"I didn't know I needed taking."

"I've put together a tiny discussion group for this evening," she said. "The gymnasium just around the corner. You have to come. They'll want to see you."

"Haven't they seen me yet?"

"Your wrong eye's open."

He raised his head and stepped down the small aluminum ladder he'd been using to position himself at microscope level. A man was standing outside the glass booth, smiling ironically. He was small and seedy-looking, dressed in a wrinkled ill-fitting suit that gave the impression it had just traveled thousands of miles, perhaps with him inside it, at the bottom of a steamer trunk. He was so close to the booth when he spoke that his words made small clouds on the glass.

"Tea more noot."

"Now I remember," the woman said.

"We meet at last."

"Who?" Billy said.

"Timur Nüt's his name."

"You in your area of mathematics. I in mine. The two colossi. You with your loyal supporters. I with my own fervent assemblage. We bestride the mathematical firmament like colossi. Each with his own following. Each able to refute the accepted formulations of the past with laughable ease, no? Keen sense of competition to be sure. But we are never less than gentlemen. Mutual respect. The true beneficiary is mathematics itself. You with your pure preoccupations. I with mine. Our combined genius beggars everything, including description."

Billy had never heard of Timur Nüt. He didn't know how to respond. Almost anything he said might be taken the wrong way. The man seemed very sure of his position. Someone this seedy and foreign, smiling ironically, couldn't be taken lightly. There were two possible ways to proceed. One was to say little or nothing. The second was to attempt a systematic destruction of the man's imagined stature. He felt two things could happen if he took the second approach. His devastating arguments would cause Nüt to break down completely, leading to one of two responses. Either an embarrassing plea for mercy or an episode of semiphysical retaliation. This latter possibility might include recriminating looks, one, and maybe abusive gestures, secondarily. But an attempt at systematic destruction could have an alternate effect, one much more likely than a breakdown and very terrible to contemplate. Timur Nüt by Logical means would prove he was indeed a renowned mathematician, the equal of any. Using both inductive and deductive reasoning he would demonstrate an astounding verity, the kind of undislodgeable truth that would render absurd everything Billy had previously believed to be true. He had the seediness to do it.

"Okay, what's your specialty?"

"Nütean surfaces."

"Never heard of them."

"They're pseudospherical."

"Zorgs."

"I know them well," Nüt said. "We'll be a match for each other. Two massive intellects. It's only natural we meet on the field of battle. I must warn you, however. I never take prisoners."

"How do we do this?"

"Two out of three," the small man said.

His face had disappeared behind the vapor made by his breath on the glass. With his index finger he drew an ironic smile on the shapeless second face formed in steam. Desilu Espy unlocked a panel in the glass booth and Nüt led the boy to the nearest corridor. The elevator door opened.

"Come in," a voice said.

There was a chubby man standing in a corner of the elevator. Billy and Timur Nüt got on. The passenger introduced himself as Hoy Hing Toy. The door closed.

"I ask three questions and then you ask three," Nüt said. "If there's a tie, a neutral observer asks three more. Two series out of three is the winner. Don't answer too quickly. There are layers of meaning here."

"I'm ready."

"Question one. An equation of the nth degree may have how many solutions?"

"It may have n solutions."

"Don't be so quick to answer correctly. Tragic mistakes can result."

"It's pretty obvious. The answer is n."

"Question two. Remember, layers of meaning. Using no more than one hyphen, how would you characterize a geometry that is not Euclidean?"

"Non-Euclidean."

"Question three. You're answering too fast. How many dimensions am I talking about if I'm talking about umpteen dimensions?"

"Dimensions that are many in number but the exactness of said number being left unsaid."

"Syntax counts."

Hoy Hing Toy nodded his head slowly. Billy couldn't tell whether he was agreeing with the answers or paying silent tribute to the subtlety of the questions. There was nothing very distinctive about the questions, he felt, aside from their childishness. The questions strongly supported his conviction that Timur Nüt wasn't what he claimed to be. Of course, he'd twice said something about layers of meaning. This indicated a logical trap of some kind. Questions so simple they were all but unanswerable. He recalled the questions one by one and they were simple all right but in the dumbest of ways, especially the one about umpteen dimensions, although non-Euclidean with one hyphen wasn't far behind. He stopped wondering about the questions and turned his attention to the elevator. It should have arrived in his sector long ago. These were highspeed elevators. Soundless, free of vibration, extremely rapid.

"We're not there yet," he said to Hoy Hing Toy, asking a question in effect.

"I seem to agree."

"Is it because we haven't arrived, you think, or because we're stuck?"

"I know what you mean."

"If we're not there yet, it could be because we just had to slow down for some reason. But if we're stuck, we're not moving at all."

"It's impossible to tell," Hoy said. "You know how these elevators are. We must take them on faith. I have always suspected they never move at all. There is simply a new backdrop erected and then the door reopens."

"It's an interesting sensation," Nüt said. "Always we have stood in the elevators without seeming to move. Now we are really not moving and there is no change in sensation. It's absolutely the same whether we move or stand at rest. Something is being violated here. Some rule of motion or logic, no? Perhaps we're not stuck at all. We're moving with infinite slowness. There are three of us in an elevator that by law holds no more than twenty-one people. We are one seventh then. Zero point one four two eight five seven, one four two eight five seven, one four two eight five seven, on and on and on. Multiply decimal by number of people. One becomes four as four becomes two as two becomes eight as eight becomes five as five becomes seven as seven becomes one. Infinite place-changing. I don't like nonrepeating decimals. Pi makes me furious. To how many places have they calculated pi? And never any semblance of lawful progression. Over one million decimal places. A book-length whimper. Your turn now. Three questions. No more or less."

"I'm concentrating on getting out of this thing."

"I'm sure they've been alerted either above or below," Hoy said. "The alert mechanism is almost certainly automatic. Wouldn't you think? In a building like this? Even as I speak, they're probably working feverishly to repair the cables."

The fact that Nüt was aware of recurring decimals disturbed Billy almost as much as the stalled elevator did, assuming it was stalled. The monologue on decimals supported the haunting possibility that Nüt was exactly what he said he was. True, the support was slight but it was enough to be worrisome. And of course he'd chosen to discuss a decimal that had the same digits, in the same order, as the number array transmitted from Ratner's star. A person could do a fair amount of multiplying without changing these digits-merely their order. Nüt had already demonstrated what happens when the array is multiplied by three. Were the Ratnerians trying to indicate something about multiplication? About the fraction one seventh? About original digits rearranged? If so, why hadn't they put the first gap after pulse one instead of pulse fourteen? He slouched in his corner, arms crossed on his chest, each hand clutching the opposite shoulder.

"Two great savants," Timur Nüt said. "You in your rarefied specialty. I in mine. You have flung down the gauntlet and I have taken up same. Your turn to make the questions. Cluster of three."

"I'm in no mood right now with the way this elevator's been behaving."

"Very well, I ask again. Be prepared for hidden levels. Question one, second series. What word leaps to mind when I say that one hyper-complex number times a second hypercomplex number is always equal to the second such number times the first?" " 'False.' The word 'false' leaps to mind." "No extra credit for speed of reply."

"Come up with something tougher. Maybe that's the way to slow me down."

"Do your dreams exceed your grasp?" "Wait a minute."

"Question two, second series. Do your dreams exceed your grasp? I am counting off the seconds."

Billy looked at Hoy Hing Toy. Hoy was tugging absently at his necktie as though the fiendish complexity of the question had reduced him to inane reverie. It would be interesting to see how Nüt justified the question on mathematical grounds.

"If dreams don't exceed grasp, all human life is futile. Science offers many basic differences between man and animal. We have symbolism, organized speech, self-awareness. We are more often than not repelled by our own vomit. But the most important difference is that man's dreams exceed his grasp. There is no future for mankind unless this is so. Think of a Dedekind. Or a Riemann. Think of a Riemann. These men fulfilled the dreams of an earlier mind. They were dreams in living form. That a Riemann was able to do original work on n-sheeted Riemann surfaces was hardly accidental when we consider how very well the way had been prepared for him. That a Dedekind was able to formulate the Dedekind cut was due in part to a non-Dedekind influence. In their mentor's intellect was the first white flash of the mathematical existence of these men. They exceeded his grasp."

"I think we're moving," Hoy said. "Are we moving?"

"Inability to answer duly noted. Your dreams most certainly do exceed your grasp."

"We're moving."

"How do you know?" Billy said.

"Something has changed," Hoy said. "I seem to believe we're moving. I have a sixth sense in these matters. Any opinions anyone? The door will reslide open any second now. Do they expect us? Will the scene be set? Or will we walk out upon absolute void? I believe we seem to be moving. Feelings pro or con?"

They were silent for a time, listening for distant whispers or trying to apprehend whatever spectral information might be sealed into the elevator with them.

"Question three, second series," Nüt said. "Who invented Nütean surfaces?"

"That one I can guess."

The trifling nature of this last question made Billy feel better. It was one of the sillier questions, almost as dumb as umpteen dimensions, and it tended to negate the effect of Nut's discourse on Dedekind and Riemann. Billy didn't like the way he'd referred to them as "a Dedekind" and "a Riemann," as if he'd been talking about a peach and a pear. But it was true he knew their work to some extent. Doubly fortunate then his question about Nütean surfaces.

"We've stopped moving," Hoy said. "What do you think? Are we still moving or did we just stop? Even as you hear the sound of my voice, I am sensing a stoppage."

"If that's good or bad, I think it's bad."

"Two men, both giants, each in his own field," Nüt said. "It now becomes the turn of the younger of the two to question the older thereof."

"Maybe later."

"No hidden levels."

"Why not?"

"All meaning restricted to one layer."

"You had extra layers."

"Zorgs excluded."

"They're my field."

"We're here," Hoy said. "The door is opening. The door has opened. We can step out. I knew it. I have a sixth sense. Who heard me say it? We're here. They fixed it just in time. We won't fall after all."

In his canister Billy showered and washed his hair. He put on his terrycloth robe and shadowboxed a while. Then he sat down to work in purposeful isolation, tracing whatever relationships he could find between the common whole numbers fourteen, twenty-eight and fifty-seven, soon extending his search to include fractions where there had been integers alone, negative quantities where positive had prevailed, imaginary numbers to replace the real, managing in a remote part of his mind to watch himself at work, an old man (cuter than most) in a small old cluttered study, wearing a robe and peeling slippers, sitting at an oak desk rough to the touch because it was layered with the sprinkled pink grains of his brush eraser, thriving on plain food, irregular sleep, constant work, finding himself pleased by this history of his future, a factually accurate illusion, electric heater on the floor, desk lamp with crooked shade, manuscripts stacked in four corners of the room. Systematic inquiry. Precise definitions. Complete proof. Every new dawn brings paeans to his universality. Number-theoretic insights to big-game theory to post-Nütean surfaces to bi-level nonstan-dard analysis. Credited as the engineer of a vast shift in mid-twenty-first-century mathematical thinking. Age times six. Eight five seven one four two. He was distracted from this interlude of austere self-veneration by the awareness that the sheet of paper on which he was calculating was not perfectly flat, containing many distortions in the form of furrows and grooves, meager ravines, curvature rampant from point to point. He practiced his signature for a while and then got dressed and returned to the research area in which he'd spent part of the afternoon. In minutes he found the gymnasium where Desilu Espy, the clean-kneed woman, had gathered the members of her discussion group.

Here and there on the burnished floor men and women greeted each other with elusive half-kisses. This was something he had never seen in the Bronx, the way they darted at each other's cheeks and ears, the custom of puckered conversation at short range. He'd expected his hostess to come sweeping toward him in stylish evening attire, laughing in the silvery lilting manner that people employ at such gatherings, dressed (he'd expected) in nonfunctional satins and moody little shoes, coming across the gym haunch by haunch in a motorized feline glide of supple perfection. But she turned out to be wearing the same canvas shoes, knee-socks and bacteriologist's harness she'd had on earlier. Of course this wasn't a party, he reminded himself. It was just a discussion group. They were here to discuss something. However, the lights were low and there was that pigeon-kissing everywhere he looked. She took him past the swimming pool and introduced him to Commander and Mrs. Burris Shrub. The commander was large and broad-chested. He wore a gray business suit, double-breasted, with enormous sagging lapels. His wife was decrepit, a pink-white woman who kept striking herself in the face with a lacy handkerchief. Every dreamy swipe released a pinkish mist of face powder from the outermost stratum.

"I'm Calliope Shrub," she said. "Are you one of us?"

"Depends what you mean."

"She means outsiders," the commander said. "I'm here merely to observe. Possibly learn a thing or two about hypothetical weaponry. Mrs. Shrub is vague at times. Pay no mind. Happens to people married to dominant figures. I understand you're planning to do some tricks with matches and coins."

"She's hitting herself in the face."

"Historical inevitability has changed since my day," Shrub said. "There's no longer any grand sense of sweep to the affairs of men. Where are the complex historical forces, the tides, the currents? What happened to the wide canvas on which we were supposed to play out our roles? It was simpler in my day. We could talk about the surge, the tragic pageant."

"Does your wife know she's hitting herself with that hanky?"

"No and I don't want you telling her."

"I won't."

"She's better off not knowing."

"Why does she do it?"

"That's something I hope I never find out."

"Nervous habit maybe."

"I'd rather not know."

"I won't say a word."

People moved through the dimness, touching and murmuring. He took a walk around the gym, finally choosing the parallel bars as his vantage point and sitting in a folding chair that was set beneath them. Involuntarily he began thinking about the code. It had never really left his mind of late. It was part of him now. It was distinct from everything else but just as much a part of him, conditionally equal, the problem located in whatever neocortical region nurtures the intuition, that contrapuntal faculty his mathematics relied on. It was as though he had two existences, right and left terms in an equation, and was obliged to face the danger that one of them, the mathematical, might overwhelm the other, leaving him behind, name and shape. To consider invisibility as a skill. To forget your own existence in the will to persist. He'd always felt, Billy had, that thinking constantly about a problem was tantamount to solving it. A neatly dressed man with a thoughtful goatee squatted alongside his chair, whispering a name, Haroun Farad, knees creaking as he settled into his crouch. He wore a black armband. Risks in this system of fixed idea.

"In my dog-ravaged land they would rip each other apart to drink as we drink here."

"I was told discussion. Is it refreshments too?"

"My voice whispers," Farad said. "The book in the inside pocket of my suit coat is in very feverish demand here. Three-dimensional photos. Babies with tails. Antlered men. A woman with a pouch. Meet me at an arranged site and we'll discuss terms."

"Let's see some samples before I say."

"A duck-billed lady."

"Who died if you're wearing that black on your arm?"

"It's for the aborigine," Farad said. "A little joke we started up."

Desilu Espy approached the parallel bars with a glass of eggnog wobbling on a tiny saucer. Billy retreated into shallow darkness a few yards away. People stood in small groups, speaking quietly. He watched Haroun Farad get to his feet and accept the glass.

"Milk content?"

"Someone said you were thirsty."

"What is the milk content?" Farad said. "If the number of drops is more than there are letters in the world Ilâh, the drink must be re-purified. Take it out please. Remove the milk."

"And they told me you had no sense of humor."

"I'm serious when I say this thing to you. Take the milk out or I won't drink of it."

"Terrific, the richness and variety of native forms of humor."

Nonintersecting straight coplanar lines, he thought. Given a straight line and any point not on this line, it is possible to draw through this point only one line that is parallel to the given line. Once upon a time, he thought.

"In my dog-ravaged land we don't make cheap gestures in the direction of friendship. The dogs make such things impractical, shall we say. They roam the country in packs of ten thousand or more. At the smallest provocation they're at each other's throats, snarling and ripping. In this environment of large thirsty dogs there is not the time for gestures. We live, those few of us who still live, in a state of concurrent but separate existence vis-à-vis the dogs. The land is lean and bare. So is the conversation. Submission to the rightly guided one is the only accepted form of behavior. Milk is the subtlest of insults. These are the realities. The dogs have made it so. We don't expect others to understand. In our ability to coexist with the ravaging dogs, we have made the beginnings of something mysterious."

Billy moved slowly around the gym, keeping close to the walls. At the exit stood Calliope Shrub, casually slapping herself with the handkerchief. When his hostess was alone, finally, Billy approached her.

"What's under discussion here anyway? I thought this was supposed to be a discussion group. Everybody's standing around whispering. What's the topic under discussion? I came here expecting to hear something discussed."

"We're discussing you," Desilu said. "You're the topic under discussion. Not only that but you're scheduled to address the group in about two minutes flat."

"What's supposed to be my subject?"

"Matches and coins was my understanding. A combined demonstration-address."

"While I'm still here, what do you know about a book that's in very feverish demand, I hear, because of its pictured deformities."

"Deformities in what context?"

"Tails and pouches."

"The feather baby is my all-time favorite," she said.

 

They made a point of staying away from the kitchen. Faye reached in there once to get something from the refrigerator but was careful not to look toward the sink. Her arm came around the door frame and her right hand groped for the upturned handle on the old Crosley Shelvador. She quickly snatched what she needed and slipped back out, lizardlike as possible, keeping body to wall. At no time did she look toward the sink or toward whatever was growing in the sink, whatever boneless archesporial horror. Occasionally they heard a knife or fork slide off a stack of dirty dishes and fall into the wan lymphatic solution that had begun accumulating many meals ago and that apparently had spawned the thing itself, the horror, the overripe science-fiction vege-toid. Of course, they didn't really believe something was growing in there. It was an extended fantasy, a joke arising from the fact that the material remains of roughly twenty meals were packed into the sink, everything sitting in semiliquid matter due to a clogged drain. Occasionally they heard tiny gargling sounds, flatulent rondos, a plate (or something) sliding across the face of the plate beneath it. They laughed at these noises, continuing to avoid the kitchen.

It was Faye who first referred to the thing as a vegetoid. It was her theory that the vegetoid threatened something even deeper than their lives. It would not bite or sting. It would not emit a deadly stench. Instead the vegetoid would absorb them. It would continue to grow until it slopped over the rim of the sink and eventually filled the apartment.

They would be powerless to move. People in such situations were always powerless to move. This became Faye's theme. Absorption by the shapeless mass. Total assimilation. They would be incorporated, transformed and metabolized. They would become functions of the inner liquid maintenance of the vegetoid. More extreme than death, this was de-occurrence, the most radical of cancellations. It was funny, a funny theory. They shared a number of laughs over it. Occasionally they heard a stacked glass overtilt (somehow) and fall into the equatorial blend. Their speech began to deteriorate.

"Coming to get, get, get you."

They sent the dog in there several times but it always emerged unchanged, conveying no sense of traumatic creature-experience. They spoke to each other like very small children, making up scare words, using mimicry to ridicule. They heard more sounds from the kitchen. They joked some more. They talked of laying cinder blocks in the doorway and pouring cement. The vegetoid will ooze under, Faye said. It will seep through. We are powerless to move. That night Billy was awakened by the wordless cries of the scream lady who lived across the airshaft. It was the first time she'd ever screamed loud enough to interrupt his sleep and he listened for a time, failing as always to distinguish a word or two. Then he heard a second noise and it came from the opposite direction, the kitchen, and he sat up and concentrated, the sink maybe, the drain, a prolonged watery gasp, suction-whirl and a general settling of utensils, and he got out of bed and took the stunted poolstick with him into the kitchen, where he turned on the light and saw that the thick colorless fluid had drained from the sink, taking with it whatever hellish anomaly, if any, had been engendered there earlier and leaving behind nothing worse than the massive litter of dishes and pans, and so he turned off the light and went back to sleep and in the morning someone told him the scream lady was dead.

"She was no worse than some I could name," Faye said. "Naming no names but I've seen worse."

As a first-grader with his friend Natasha in what was left of the schoolyard at P.S. 32, he was confronted one day by Aniello Vaca, the eleven-year-old son of a man reputed to have tentacles-the metaphorical kind that reach into every area of legitimate business. Aniello himself had an operation going here and there and liked to use the relevant terminology, often describing the cash results of his extortion activities in and around the schoolyard as "a tremendous envelope." This particular day he approached the two first-graders, addressing his remarks to Billy.

"I want to see how smart you really are. Let's say I give you a job. You work for me thirty days. Running numbers, makes no difference, doing anything, I don't care. Now you can get paid two ways. Listen to this, because it's up to you which way. I give you ten thousand dollars right up front and you do thirty days' work. Or, listen to this, I give you a penny the first day, two cents the second day, four cents the third day and I keep doubling it for thirty days. You start with one measly cent. You work thirty days right through, Sadays and Sundies. I double each day. Or you get ten thousand big ones, straight up and down, I peel them right off, cash on the barrelhead. So which way is it? I want to see how smart everybody says you really are."

"Penny first day and keep doubling."

"Why is that, jerko?"

"I end up with lots more."

"I'm ready to peel off ten thousand chibonies and you stand there and look me in the face and tell me this penny-ante deal is a better envelope. Tell this girl to stop squinting, hey. This girl gets on my nerves, this girl."

"I end up with five million three hundred and sixty-eight thousand seven hundred and nine dollars and twelve cents. Penny the first day and keep doubling for thirty days."

"This girl squints one more time, I'll kick your ass."

"Why my ass? Kick hers. Or maybe you're afraid she'll kick back."

"That I'd like to see."

"Natasha, kick."

"I'm waiting and hoping," Aniello said.

"She won't kick today. But that doesn't mean you're safe forever. Let's see you come back tomorrow. Bring your friends. She'll kick every ass that gets in her way. That's the way she is. Some days she really feels like kicking ass."

On Mr. Morphy's first day as special tutor he asked the small boy to add all the numbers from one to twenty-four. Billy knew there was a key. The number one went with twenty-four, two with twenty-three, three with twenty-two and so on, each pair totaling twenty-five. The key was twenty-five, which was simply to be multiplied by the number of pairs, obviously twelve. It was like climbing a ladder. You went up to twelve and then from thirteen down the other side to twenty-four (a ladder, he'd one day reflect, or a stellated twilligon) and it was easy to see that every corresponding set of numerals added up to twenty-five. The number twenty-five also possessed a certain immovability, refusing to disappear or even change places when raised to the second, third, fourth or higher powers. While the resonant number twelve matched one-to-one the letters in his fictional name, the scrawl on his birth certificate (William Denis Terwilliger Jr.) represented a unit length that totaled a satisfying twenty-five.

Babe began to spend more time at the window, sipping Champale and looking across the street at the playground four stories down. The reason was Raymond (Nose Cone) Odle. Raymond was seven feet, two inches tall but his finesse on the basketball court contradicted this fact. Although Babe wasn't a basketball fan he couldn't help being impressed by Raymond Odle, a senior at DeWitt Clinton High whose moves were already legendary among the syndics of the tristate basketball underground, heralding the age of the little big man. When people witnessed his implausible wrist-dribble or his zero-gravity double-pump fadeaway jumper off a pick at the high post (a shot that often concluded with the metal-gripping drollery of backspin and dead-rimming), they knew they weren't seeing just another demonstration of giantism engaged in a parody of faunlike grace. Raymond was truly fluent and his moves were essentially those of a guard or small forward. His touch was light and deft, his movement toward the basket an uninterrupted medley of hip-swerves and epigrammatic deceptions. When he came off the boards with a rebound he seemed to drop more slowly than the other players, able to pause up there, a final ripple of his body, easily shaking people off in the course of his serene descent. The name NOSE CONE began to appear in headlines on the sports pages. Also spray-painted on the walls of buildings. Raymond's largesse as an athlete, his fullness of style, was most evident in the free and easy atmosphere of the playground games. Babe watched from the window. People stood outside the fence, nodding. In the playground the little kids chanted: "No'Co, No'Co, No'Co."

Billy was just starting at Bronx Science when Raymond Odle was a senior at Clinton and they rode the same bus. One day he found himself sitting next to the seven-foot-two-inch athlete. The length of Raymond's fingers almost made Billy faint. Dusty brown bones. Leathery sticks. So ancient and breakable. How could fingers that long and fierce seem delicate as well, seem readable, ten numbered documents made from the stems of aquatic sedges. He was sure one blow from Raymond's thumb would be enough to disfigure him for life. Yet he felt secure next to the long man, figuring no marauding gang was likely to attempt a raid on any bus that contained Raymond (Nose Cone) Odle. So whenever possible he shared a seat with the basketball player, squeezing nervously past Raymond, who got on a stop earlier and liked to sit in the aisle seat and stretch his legs. There was a lot of conversation on the bus, most of it from Raymond's schoolmates, directed Raymond's way, particularly before an important game.

"Lose their shoes, No'Co."

"No'Co, shoot the eyes, little-big."

"Throw the rock, No'Co."

"Put some hurt on their heads, No'Co pivotman."

Billy sat in the window seat, huddled in his mighty parka, a book or two opened in his lap. There was an intricate knowingness to the voices, the ever tensile quality of street experience, something old and secret, possibly dangerous to hear. He liked the fact that Raymond never replied to comments made by the other boys. Raymond was above it all. Raymond had the moves.

"Bring us a move, No'Co."

If in the right frame of mind, on the right day, he would oblige by doing a silent little sit-down version of one of his moves on the court. He did this by bouncing in his seat and simultaneously tapping out an abbreviated foot-routine without bothering to uncross his legs. He wrung out every such move in deadpan fashion while his schoolmates went wild, pounding the sides of the bus and uttering near sobs of joy. In all the months they shared the same seat Billy heard Raymond speak but one sentence and it was directed at him, Billy, in evident wonder at the disparity between his age and the involved titles of the mathematical texts he carried and gingerly read, sometimes two at a time.

"What I got sitting downside me here is getting to be nothing but two eyes and a head."

Babe made crazy faces to entertain the kids, among them Ralphie Buber, who was twice Billy's size but appeared to be sharing his brain, as Faye put it, with a silent partner. It wasn't unusual to see him coming along the street carrying a live crab taken from one of the fish markets on Arthur Avenue. He would hold the crab in his right hand and improvise a prehensile claw with the left. Then he would stand on a corner and leap out at passing cars, left hand and live crab extended, making as he leapt a strangulated glottal sound that may have been intended to represent what crabs say when trying to scare automobiles.

"Movies are the dreams I never had," Faye said. "They say everybody but everybody dreams. It's just a question of remembering is how they usually put it. I'd like to believe that, mommy, but it's no go. In my case it's not a question of remembering. It's a case in my case of sorry lady no dreams for sale. Movies take place in the dark. That's their magic for me. I saw them all, every one of them I could get to go see. At the Fairmont, the Deluxe, the RKO Fordham, the Paradise, the Valentine, the Ascot, the Fox. I went everywhere and saw every picture, the greats and the stiffs, great and stiff alike. What's great is that they were all great, even the stiffs. Because they took place in the dark. Because everybody wore costumes. Because it was like something you were remembering instead of seeing for the first time. We talked back to movies then. You could do that then. If somebody in the picture said something stupid, you said something back. If you wanted action, you told them to stop kissing behind the ear and get to the swordplay. The ushers went up and down the aisles with their flashlights, trying to shush people up and telling people to get their feet off the seats. Boys tried to pick up girls. People squeezed in and out of the aisles through the whole movie, going to the bathroom, going for candy and soda, going to the lobby to just hang around. Meanwhile the balcony is a total zoo with smooching, arguments, heavy necking, candy wrappers flying around, feet up on the seats, talking back to the picture. Now if I want to go to a movie I have to go downtown. Around here they're either shut down, or supermarkets, or high crime areas with chandeliers. So it's TV for me. No great loss as long as they keep showing the classics. The movie industry perished in about the nineteen forties anyway. Artistically it just dropped dead. Maybe the war killed it. But they were great all the same, pictures then; I vouch for every one of them, swordplay or no swordplay. I was a little girl. Then I was a grown woman. It all happened in the movies."

There was a shooting on the second floor late one night. Babe went down to watch the police outline the body's position in chalk. People stood in the doorways clutching their own arms. Little kids slid out from the massed adults and played in the halls, running up and down the stairs in their underwear. A transistor radio played Latin soul. Babe was the last person to leave the scene, having observed the details with the same degree of attention he lavished on construction sites and people changing flat tires.

"Who was it?" Faye said.

"Alphonso Rackley."

"Do I know him?"

"Fishnet shirt."

"Wears a T-shirt underneath?"

"Him."

"Do they know who did it?" she said.

"There was talk his brother-in-law. I overheard a remark or two being passed. Common Saturday night occurrence."

"Overheard who-cops?"

"Ballistics team."

"Then what happened?"

"They marked the body," he said. "It was spread up and down four or five steps, so it took them a while to mark it."

"Then what?"

"Put him in a body bag and carried him down. Three patrolmen. Two front, one rear."

"Do they have the brother-in-law in custody?" she said, "He fled the scene."

"What about the blood?" she said. "Do I have to walk through a pool of blood on my way downstairs tomorrow?"

"The super cleaned it."

"It must have left a gorgeous stain. I never talked to this Alphonso person in my life. Now I'll be avoiding his personal bloodstain for the next ten years."

"D.O.A.," he said. "That's the way they'll log it in their log books when they get him to the morgue."

"Dead upon arrival."

"I talked to a detective on the scene. He asked me any family. I said the only family's the guy that shot him. I told him I knew the deceased. I told him we talked in the hall once or twice. The deceased carried a small lead pipe in his back pocket everywhere he went. So with me and my poolstick, it gave us something to talk about whenever we saw each other in the hall. He was quiet and soft-spoken. Never had much to say. Everybody liked Alphonso. I told him that. I told him I couldn't think of any reason why anyone would want to do a thing like this to a person like the deceased."

Raymond Odle's grades were not good. Naturally this fact alone wouldn't have prevented most colleges from recruiting him. There was a worse problem. He had accepted a sum of money (four figures, it was said) in return for lending his name (or nickname) to a recently incorporated ice cream franchise operation that had outlets in all five boroughs. Double Dribble Nose Cones. It was Babe's opinion that the young man's amateur status should not be shattered by one minor mistake. Strict legality prevailed, however, mainly because the case received a great deal of attention at the height of a public outcry against pampered athletes and questionable recruiting practices. In the end the only school that would accept Raymond was an unaccredited junior college that specialized in maritime studies. The school was located on an old supply ship permanently at anchor near the Shackleton Ice Shelf. The basketball team played only four or five games a year. A pickup team of scientists from a research station near the Ross Ice Shelf flew in every six months, weather permitting, and the forty members of a New Zealand basketball club, the Christchurch New Celtics, took a chartered flight down to Antarctica whenever they found themselves with surplus funds. So Raymond Odle's moves on the court, those effortless serifs of his, were destined to be witnessed only by novices, fellow students and a few bearded meteorologists.

The playground games continued for a while. But Babe noticed that the players now wore combat boots. The games grew edgy. Glass from broken wine bottles littered the asphalt court. No one seemed to care about the score. The players wore combat boots and gave each other immoderate chops to the neck in lieu of strategic fouls. He stood by the window, the poolstick at arm's length, and on the lumbering blue bus his small son remembered the strange dangerous language spoken to the giant at his side by boys of an ageless race.

 

Hoy Hing Toy was waiting for him when he came sneaking out of the gym to avoid addressing the members of Desilu Espy's discussion group. They went to a remote sector well below ground level. Beyond the experimental accelerator they descended a flight of metal stairs and entered a ramp at the top corner of a spacious chamber. A gigantic balloon filled much of this space. Hoy led the way to a small glassed-in office set away from the ramp and located about fifteen stories above the floor of the chamber. Radio maps and pulse charts were scattered over the desk top. Billy looked down on the silver balloon.

"Important new development," Hoy said. "I seemed unable to reveal it earlier because of that fellow Nüt in the elevator with us. I must identify myself fully and forthrightly. I'm the Toy of the Toy-Molloy affair. It's only right you should know. I tell all my associates."

"What's the new development?"

"Star collapse," Hoy said. "I have always suspected that other people's opinions matter a great deal, considering the incident. Of course, this happened long before your time, meaning I may have to re-delineate."

"First tell me why I'm here."

"The Toy-Molloy incident. In case you were wondering what incident."

"What about it?"

"I was senior consultant in obstetrics and gynecology in an ultramodern hospital affiliated with a world-renowned university. In the delivery room one day, demonstrating advanced procedures to a distinguished panel of observers, I delivered a baby, clamped and cut the umbilical cord, handed the baby to a nurse, waited for the placenta to emerge, scooped it up and ate it in five huge gulps, then examined the woman's uterus to make sure everything was out, a fairly routine procedure, this last part."

"What made you want to eat that thing?"

"Something came over me."

"What happened after that?"

"There was a lot of commotion," Hoy said. "Then I was seen leaving hurriedly."

"So you figured you'd better change jobs."

"Naturally I wanted to put as much distance as possible between myself and childbirth. After a period of wandering and soul-searching, I ended up here. Expert on star collapse. Do tricks with matches and coins in my spare time."

"Who's Molloy?"

"Beg pardon?" Hoy said.

"The Toy-Molloy affair. Who's Molloy?"

"The mother and child," Hoy said. "It was their placenta, so their name got attached to the incident. I think I hear him. He's coming. Pretend we've been working. Look busy."

"You think who's coming? I don't hear anything."

"I thought I knew those steps."

"Whose steps?"

"Are you saying it was nothing? If so, I seem to agree, based on the fact that we're still alone."

"Clue me in."

"Ratner's star is on the verge of becoming a red giant," Hoy said. "Increase in luminosity. Startling increase in radius. According to the computer universe, we must go forward with all possible speed. Of less importance is the fact that the star is not binary after all. It is definitely one star. However, it seems to have two planets. So now we know, within reason, what we're dealing with. Even as I speak, we should be expediting accordingly."

"Expediting what?"

"The code," Hoy said. "Go forward on the code. The Ratnerians may be trying to tell us how to avoid the very disaster they're faced with. Expansion and subsequent collapse. They may well have the answer but not the time in which to implement it, even with their vastly superior technology. The time is now. Wouldn't you think? In a situation like this?"

"I don't see the hurry."

"We launch at dawn," Hoy said.

"Launch what?"

"The cosmic photo balloon-what else?"

Hoy Hing Toy took out a cigarette and lit it. With a fancy backhand maneuver he tossed the match into the air and walked away. Billy watched the match come down. It landed in the left cuff of Hoy's trousers. Hoy at the moment was looking out at the huge balloon. A burn mark appeared on his cuff. Then his pants were on fire. Billy wondered whether it was all right to tell him. He didn't understand his own hesitation. Why wouldn't it be all right? Of course it was all right. It was his duty to say something. Nevertheless he stood there watching the tiny fire. Sometimes it was hard to say things. Things were so complicated. People might resent what you said. They might use your remarks against you. They might be indifferent to your remarks. They might take you seriously and act upon your words, actually do something. They might not even hear you, which perhaps was the only thing worth hoping for. But it was more complicated than that. The sheer effort of speaking. Easier to stay apart, leave things as they are, avoid responsibility for reflecting the world and all its grave weight. Things that should be simple are always hard. But hard things are never easy.

"Pants on fire."

"My pants are on fire," Hoy said. "Fire burn burning."

"Who else should I tell?"

"Foot leg fire flame."

"Try rolling," Billy said. "Roll over on the floor. Smother. That's the word I want. Roll on the floor and smother the flames."

He followed Hoy around the desk as the chubby man hopped on one foot and tried to remove his pants in transit. Smoke gathered in the small office. Hoy lost his balance and skidded kicking across the top of the desk, spraying maps and papers. Eventually he regained a measure of equilibrium and sat on the desk, left leg bent in as he tried to get a smoldering shoe off in order to simplify removal of his pants.

"Things like this make me self-conscious," he said. "I feel a seeming urge to apologize, first for making demands on other people's attention and then for my own deep sense of embarrassment. I am too grown to inflict my public suffering on others. I appreciate your patience and fully hope you will accept my expression of genuine regret."

It was hard to distinguish the dwindling smoke from its own pale shadow shifting on the walls. Billy took a chair in the corner and browsed through an atlas of the heavens, wondering how a person might manage to hide inside a page-thin surface in order to measure curvature that varied drastically from point to point.

 

8 SEGMENTATION

 

The note said only that representatives of the Honduran cartel wanted to see him. Time and place were not given. The words were written in singular idiot script on the back of a manuscript page that he himself had misplaced earlier in the day when he'd taken Softly's work-in-progress to the dining unit to read while he picked at his shrimp analogue.

"The shadow of the modern age of mathematics began to rise on whitewashed walls about the time that the spirit of the guillotine made itself known, deranging the dreams of one slight child who later made his mark through exactitude, ably dispelling much uncertainty from the fluid patterns of analysis."

He glanced again at the unsigned message, wondering why it was stamped with the seal of a notary public. Then he inserted the page in the manuscript and returned to the module to calculate. Before him was a printed tape of the one hundred and one units of information. He stuck a decimal point at the beginning of the array of zeros and ones, viewing the sequence as an infinite binary fraction that paraphrased the extraterrestrials' natural number system, the ones representing composite integers, the zeros designating primes. Although nothing he'd done had yielded specific evidence that the code was genuine, he felt increasingly confident that something positive would soon happen. The transmission was simply too suggestive to lead nowhere. He was even ready to believe he was getting close to an answer or at least half an answer, whatever that meant. There was fresh pleasure in his toil. (But did it enrich the discipline?) From the corridor he heard what sounded like someone gargling. When he opened the door he found two men on the other side of it, standing in single file. They walked into the canister. After a pause he followed.

"The best place to begin a story is as close to the end as possible," one said. "So let's by all means proceed with the placing of the bodies rearward first in sitdown locations. I have appropriated for myself the nom de nom Elux Troxl. This is not my nom. This is merely and simply the sound-identity I have assigned to my nom. That over there is Grbk. Beware of how you address remarks to him. He is mal y bizarro, officially rebuked many times for exposing his nipples to little children. A tragic person, very sadiensis. Of course, the law in such matters is far from clarid. A man's nipples, so to be, are not legal private parts, et so on. Just be sure to speak in tones gentivo and get not too close. He smells like a foot, that over there. His whole body is like one large nonshapen foot in terms of odoriferens."

"So what's the end of the story if you want to begin as close to the end as possible?"

"One slice at a time," Troxl said. "The way to arrive at a limit is to take segmentable things and make them littler, to snip and clip."

"I heard your name before from the lips of someone who said you go around renting computer time."

"You never heard my name-only my name's name. I as myself have citizenship and air rights in a dozen-half countries. That over there is my coadjutor. We are here under the single auspice of an international monopoly with headquarters outside Tegucigalpa. Nothing triv-ionis about this operation."

He had noticed when the two men were standing in single file that Grbk was a full head shorter than Elux Troxl. Now that they were seated he could find nothing characteristic about Grbk. The man was nondescript. If he were asked then and there to describe Grbk, he wouldn't have known what to say. Grbk was nondescript. Of course Troxl had said he smelled like a foot and that was a distinguishing feature of sorts but Billy was seated across the room from Grbk, too distant to confirm the other's appraisal. Troxl himself was carrying an attache case and wearing a white linen suit that was gray (in the strangest places) with perspiration stains. He had flesh-colored hair parted just over his left ear. His face was empty of any center of interest, badly needing a mustache or other unifying element, Billy felt, observing that there was nothing at present to hold things together. It was Hummer, a colleague of Cyril Kyriakos, who had first mentioned Troxl. Then LoQuadro in Space Brain Complex had said a thing or two. Few people here had any link to speak of with others in the structure. An occasional name was mentioned, a hint dropped, and that was the extent of it, a set of rapid sequential jumps, no suggestion that something continuous was taking place.

"A Sino-Chinese group tried to take us over," Troxl said. "But we had a leasing agreement with your computer and that made the dif-ferenz. Space Brain is a science in itself. Fascinating monolithic children, the computers of today. I love the whole cuckoo gestalt. We rent by the solar month, all fees payable in Nipponese new yen. Signed, sealed, sworn and notarized. Space Brain helps us stabilize the variables in money access curves on the graph economique. We manipulate abstract levels of all theoretical monies in the world today. Since no other group shares time on Space Brain, we are mathematically in a regulating position that others may not even dare to envy. These others have machines that are computers manque compared to Space Brain. Perhaps you would like to be shown a glance at our leasing agreement, merely in the spirit of collaborundi. As a duly self-sworn notary public I'm granted the empower to use the raised seal of my profession. It's all perfectly llegalismo. That over there does the stamping. His hand is footsore. A furious blister of a man. I tell you watch him every momentito, that over there. Do nothing agitante. One fake move and out come the nipples."

"Yet I still don't know why you're here."

"First we confirm your identidad. First name first. Nilly. This is correct?"

"Billy, not Nilly."

"Meaningless slip-do forgive. Nada de nadiensis. Full begging of pardon."

"I hope that was an accident."

"Try to excuse my wordage. Half of it is my fault. But most of it is the fault of that over there. I find him distraxis at times. But enough funyaka and gameski. We're here to make an offer."

"What kind?"

"We want to lease you," Troxl said. "Your human mind added to Space Brain will help us manipulate the money curve with greater assurity than ever. What absolute glück in the subskirts of Tegucigalpa when I announce that you've undersigned with us, witnessed here this day and affidavitized by me in extenso. We admit to a lust for abstraction. The cartel has an undrinkable greed for the abstract. The con-cept-idée of money is more powerful than money itself. We would commit theoretical mass rapine to regulate the money curve of the world. Sign here please. That over there will stamp."

"Not interested."

"I doubt my ears," Troxl said.

"I don't know anything about money curves and I'm not interested in finding out. I'm not even sure what a cartel is. I just know you must be pretty shifty if you're sharing computer time in a scientific project where just getting into the place is supposed to be out of bounds for practically everybody."

"I'll describe our work modus so as not to confuse your expectment. We acquire air space. We make motion studies in and out. We lease and sublease multi kinds of time-makeshift, standby, conceptual et al forth. Then we either buy, sell, retain or incite revolution, all totally nonprofitless, done merely to flux the curve our way."

"Definitely forget it."

The expression on Troxl's face did not change. He did some excessive sweating in the area of his left knee. After a while he leaned over and blew in that direction several times, apparently trying to dry the moisture on his pants leg. Then he looked at Grbk.

"The childnik isn't very gemütful," he said.

Grbk neither replied nor indicated in any way that he'd even heard his superior's remark. A fretful prickling silence began to accumulate in the room. Billy didn't like the way the air felt. It was like subway air or tenement hallway air, aged and layered, moist with body poisons. Maybe Grbk (the man-shaped foot) was exuding his personal odor. Billy didn't want the silence to grow more important than it already was.

"Is Grbk's name Grbk or is that just the name he gives his name the way you do?"

"Grbk a nom de nom? Hilario!"

"I'm curious to hear how he spells it."

"Unspellable," Troxl said.

"If you can say something, you can spell it."

"There are things past spelling and far beyond counting. No word or number reaches there. You must live inside a schnitt not to know of this. I can only say tant pis, piccolissimo. I position you neither here nor elseplace. Oblivio obliviorum."

"Capital G-r-b-k."

"Prove it," Troxl said.

"Make sense for a change."

"Show me the vowelles at least."

"None."

"At variente with general usage, no be so? Fit for eye charts."

Grbk spoke for the first time. His voice was a near gargle, the protolaryngeal reconstruction of the sound of a lost language. It seemed to be forcing itself through a medium more resistant than air.

"Gwo turd heil."

Billy looked at Elux Troxl.

"Go toward hell," Troxl interpreted.

Grbk took a deep breath before speaking again.

"Thing-cud, sea worts mor bett."

"Thing-kid, I say words more better than you."

"Gud yr lungo," Grbk said.

"Guard your language."

"Thing mv utmo spd."

"His tongue, moves with more utmost speed than your tongue," Troxl said.

"Hindlag bemost."

"You lag behind. You are hindmost."

Grbk took another great breath before exhaling the next remark.

"Hins fins."

"His hands are finished," Troxl said.

"What does that mean?"

"It's the way he says the number ten."

"You mean counting fingers."

"Hins fins," Grbk said.

"He's guessing your age. He says you're ten."

"Thing-cud, he, it, sit, muck sud, betuk to wesperole wo nama ta bu sakro nix farbioten yooz, sud muck, he, it, sit."

"Thing-kid, he, it, sitting, maker of sums, is betaken to the night hole where names exceedingly marked as sacred will be no more forbidden of usage, sum-maker, him, it, sitting."

"I'm expecting his tonsils any second," Billy said.

He sat tensely in the twofold, ready for nearly anything. Compared to Grbk's dumb blunt semispeech, Troxl's locutions appeared in retrospect to be models of formal cultivated discourse. He tried to watch both men at once.

"Katzenjammer time," Troxl said. "I feel maldressed for the occasion. Sad to see how partitionage diseffectuates the young. Suffering and phanguish. But this is life as it is lived in the world of existenz. A nothingness full of pitfalls."

"Pitfallful," Grbk said.

"We're forced to conclude you extemporarily from our cartel. Nihil ex nihilo. A thing deprived of living existenz."

"Don't say that word any more. I don't like it."

"Beyond the final number you'll find nothing to cling to but ex-istenzphilosophie. In your case the philosophic will have to suffice since you possess no existenz. Being bjorn isn't enough to give you claim to existenz; it must be merital. Nilly will be clingless beyond the ultimate number."

"There is no ultimate number. Mathematics depends on infinity. You can keep on counting forever. It never ends, the number series."

"The others grow fativi on bulk orders of goods and orderables. Real money is germed and clumsy of usage even if capable of spendful-ness. We call it the negauchable currency in the transargot of cartel regulation. The curve, however, is pure. It is ours to control with the help of your precisionized brain. Think of yourself enwrapped by lady-people. Such will be the fame of your power. A penthouse manned by women. All sizes dressed in filmed subgarments. Merely agree to follow the curve. Otherwise beyond the last number is the faceless chaos, which is just a gateway to the abysm itself. All limits twisted out of shapule. Impossible to converge thereon. Your existenz becomes unthinkable in this warped region. But this is just a warm-up, for beyond the big abysm is the voidal nicht y nacht. Metamathematik. Zed to the minus zed power. Much mas than that I don't even dare to whisper."

"Máslessness," Grbk said.

"Beware of that over there. His hands are verging on the shirt. This means he dwells in the fixed idee of unbuttoning. Double conical protuberances. Nipples as nipples. This is something I as myself have no wish-inclination to look upon. As observer I remain but as myself I am very much repelled by the erotic corruption of children. He's done this to many boys and girls, the publication of nipples, but up to now I've yet to see it as myself."

"Tell him I'm fourteen. If he knows this, he may not want to expose to me. I'm a lot older than I look. He probably likes to expose to younger kids. Tell him he won't get anything out of it, my being older than he thinks. I'm getting up and leaving unless you start explaining fast. I know there's no reason to run. It's just a man's nipples and all he wants to do is show them to me. In my mind I know this. But I'm running anyway."

"Decommence," Troxl said to his assistant. "The boykid is determined not to join us. No point in depraving the air further. I say haltung and rebutton. You're contractually bound to obey me. Don't take that shirt ovsk. Decease at once, fetid mammal."

Billy was away, bumping out the door and hieing himself to the play maze. From here he staged his escape, coming eventually to a small and lavishly mirrored room, a barbershop in fact, all tile and ivory, smelling of coroner's tonics. There was no barber in sight and only one chair, occupied. The chair was angled in such a way that the occupant's head was about five feet off the floor. Since the head was wrapped in a towel and the body covered with the customary tonsorial bib, all he could see was the person's shoes. Slowly he circled the chair, halting immediately when he saw a hand emerging from the sheet, fingers extended. There was nothing repulsive about the hand-no warts or raised and rampant veins-and so he took it and shook it.

"Shlomo Glottle," the man said in a smothered voice. "I knew it was you from your footsteps. Where's the barber?"

"I don't know."

"I fell asleep and dreamed I was screaming. When I woke up, no barber. I've been hoping to meet you for a long time. When I heard you were coming here I couldn't believe it. Then word reached me that you were actually here. 'He's on the premises, he's in the building.' Imagine how excited I was, a person who's always wanted to chitchat with someone like you. Have you met the aborigine?"

"I'm having a little trouble hearing you."

"Let me rephrase the question. Nobody's actually met the aborigine. The aborigine seems to be unmeetable. If he exists at all, we'll have to depend on poor old Mutuka to act as spokesman and since Mutuka's gone back to the bush, that ends that. Were you at the demonstration? That's the question I should have asked in the first place."

"There's a towel on your face."

"Talk up. Don't be shy. Use some of the lung power you were born with. It's my understanding the aborigine visited more than one planet when he traveled to Ratner's star. I was the person who informed Mutuka at the outset that we were receiving signals from Ratner's star. Mutuka then consulted with the aborigine in the bush and eventually brought him here for the demonstration and it's my understanding and correct me if I'm wrong that at the demonstration the aborigine was quoted more or less parenthetically as having claimed there is life on more than one satellite of Ratner's star. Space Brain has now confirmed a two-satellite configuration. We have computer confirm on this. The white-haired one didn't just say life, life, there is life. He said more than one world, more than one planetary body, making your work here no less urgent more than ever. 'He's on the premises,' they said. 'He's actually in the building.' It is you, isn't it? Those are your footsteps, right? You're the math wizard, aren't you?"

Shlomo Glottle's right hand had been so free of imperfection that Billy, watching the same hand now unwrapping the face towel, unreasonably feared the effects of some awful law of reverse compensation, a counterbalancing deformity of the face perhaps, Glottle's face, a half-mouth maybe or exposed mucous membrane, the face that at this moment was coming out of the towel, and so, knowing it was stupid on several levels, he left the barbershop and hurried toward the source of the odd toneless music sounding along the corridor.

"I tell the truth about people."

In an antique chair sat a small wan woman playing a string instrument triangular in shape, its neck unbent and body obviously carved by hand from raw reluctant wood. The room was soft with dust and shadow, everywhere the ruck of clustered objects, most of them plainly put together and left to themselves to grow into the look of familiar things, every angle, plane and coloration recalling the hush of some mellow room where beaded dresses rest limply on the arms of rocking chairs. In a wide glance he saw old piano benches and cellos in repose; medieval wind instruments; puppets, toys and small statuary; ceremonial spears and halberds; a white tricycle; stoic bamboo bound in corners; two-string Oriental violins; and finally an enormous organ with neon tubing for pipes.

From her chair the woman, at eye level with the boy, seemed to smile him into the room, almost imperceptibly, her eyes measuring his hesitation in the melting desert light.

"People come to me to discuss their names, if interesting and strange. It's my avocation, my serious amusement, the study of names. Naturally I have other work here, crystal structure, but often I wonder which is more useful, silly hobby or vital science."

She continued playing the crude instrument. The sound it produced made him uncomfortable. It was stark and dry, lacking all resonance, a small voice howling through cork.

"I like literally to segment a name until nothing remains. Few names yield completely to this practice. I remove one letter at a time, retaining meaning, it is hoped, to the very end."

"What's your name?" he said.

"Siba Isten-Esru."

"Pretty good."

"Seven Eleven."

"Serious?"

"These are number words of a people who go back to the very dawn. The half-name Isten is of special consequence to me. Isten is the word for the number one in Assyro-Babylonian. We can ask ourselves what this particular number one contains. By removing the first letter, the /, we arrive at the root word sten, indicating narrowness, as in the Greek stenos, or narrow. This inclines us to be encouraged, this stenos, since what we are engaged in is the very process of contraction. What next then? We remove the s from sten. This yields 'ten,' our second number word, this one in English as you're well aware. But there is more to this particular ten, for it is contained within isten, giving us ten and one, or eleven, which is doubly curious because my full surname, Isten-Esru, means precisely that, eleven; or, expressed literally, one and ten, isten stroke esru. This eleven, which we've discovered not only in my full surname but in the English ten contained in the Assyro-Babylonian one, is the loveliest of two-digit primes, an indivisible mirror image of itself. Remaining with ten a moment longer, we know that in Roman numerals it is written large X. When we shrink this monster, we are left with an unknown number, not to mention an illiterate kiss. So thus far we have severed twice, to sten and ten. We now remove the t of ten. Our segmentation would seem to weaken here but not if we gaze carefully into the artful enate process taking place. For here we have a reversal, a sudden shift from the narrowing trend to a new phenomenon, one of growing outward, of expanding. In English the fragment e-n is often used to make verbs out of adjectives, adjectives out of nouns, and is likewise added to nouns to make verbs-'lengthen' and 'heighten,' for instance. To grow, to increase, to gain. Reversing the letters e-n for a moment, we concentrate on the Greek nu, or n, and we see that it comes from the Phoenician word for 'fish,' which in turn developed from a Semitic root meaning 'to increase.' So there it turns up again-expansion. Now the Greek e, after some refinement, turned out to be the reverse, graphically, of the Phoenician e, which itself was somewhat Chinese-looking. In the parlance of my own field, crystallography, these e's are enantiomorphic, unable to be superimposed because one mirrors the other. To conclude our stimulating discussion of the fragment e-n, I would like to refer to the ancient practice of gema-tria. In the Greek form, epsilon is assigned the number five, nu the number fifty. The resulting fifty-five, totaled in digits, equals ten, or esru, of which the digital root is one, or isten. Not uninteresting, eh? Now to the final contraction. We have removed the i, the s, the t, and now we take away the e, leaving us with lonely n, the well-known mathematical sign for an indefinite number. This suggestion that precise limits are lacking tends to reinforce the sense of expansion inherent in contraction. There is also large N to be considered. This is Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington's cosmical number, his symbol for the total number of particles in the universe. And little n is as well the abbreviation of the Latin natus, meaning 'born,' which returns us full-belly to the word 'enate,' growing outward, and to its fetal twin 'enatic,' related on the mother's side. So we begin with isten, or one, and through shrinkage, growth and reversal we have come finally to an indefinitely large quantity, giving birth to blank space and silence."

The wind-dry music cried from her hands. She wore several layers of pale yellow material and her feet were encased in monumental sandals.

"People ask about their names in an attempt to add to their self-knowledge. Anyone of woman born is by nature superstitious. We stand in awe over the unseen and half-known. Our work here helps us escape this tradition. We try to leave the dark behind. Positive numerical values. Bright shining stars."

He thought of a passage in an old textbook. Back of the chapter where review questions lurk. Acres of windswept italics.

When do we say that a variable quantity becomes infinitely small?

We say that a variable quantity becomes infinitely small when its numerical value decreases indefinitely in such a way as to converge toward the limit zero.

"Your name is a contraction, is it not?"

"Terwilliger was shortened by subtracting e-r at the beginning and e-r at the end."

"With your permission I'd like to examine the result."

"Twillig."

"Obviously a highly artificial name. This is good. I like this. It's a silly name, true, but it vibrates with felicitous little ripples. My first reaction is strictly a sense impression. Twinkle and twig. I see and touch star and stick. Twinkle' is cute, insufferably so, a verb put together solely for the nursery purpose of reiteration. I believe it derives from the Old English word for 'wink,' suitably enough, and it has some relevance, I suppose, to your work on the star code. It's a fact that centuries ago in my part of the world men studied mathematics in order to become astronomers, to ponder the heavens. Astronomy was not the ultimate goal, however, but merely a preparation for astrology. 'Twig' is perhaps more germane."

"So far I don't see myself at all."

"Undoubtedly twigs were employed as one of the earliest means of numeration and most likely evolved into the tally sticks and counting stalks used at the very dawn or soon thereafter by the most advanced peoples of the Near, Far and Middle East. But let's to more important matters get."

She moved her body as she spoke, side to side, and his eyes were on her hands at rest on the rough wood rocking in her lap.

"There are two distinct parts to your name and they comprise the essence of my analysis. Twi-two. Lig-to bind, as in 'ligate' and 'ligature.' Is it your destiny then to bind together two distinct entities? To join the unjoinable? We all wait for your answer."

"I don't know how I'm destined. Nobody knows that about him- or herself. I'm surprised somebody in crystal structure can expect an answer to a question like that."

"Considering your name, it's the obvious question to ask," she said. "It would surely be remiss of me not to ask it. We anticipate a reply at your earliest convenience."

"Is it possible to leave without feelings being hurt?"

"Twi, it's important to note, means not only 'two' but 'half,' while lig can mean 'constrict' as well as 'bind.' I think of half-light, or twilight, and further of twilight sleep, that self-erasing condition induced by drugs and designed to ease the constricting pain of childbirth. But who or what is being born?"

"You're the expert."

"It's your name," she said. "That means you're responsible for whatever pointed references I can shake out of it. You're the two-part toy and boy in a made-to-order carrying case. Names tell stories. Twinkle and twig. The first two bites of the suppertime story poem. Naturally names that go back to the very dawn have greater storied content than modern names, most of which are merely convenient denotations packed with noise value."

"I make no reply."

"We conclude," she said. "Twalif, Germanic compound, gives us two left over, two beyond ten. So both two and twelve figure in your story. We follow the root word through various twists and forks in the road until we spy the Old English twigge, or 'branch,' which justifies my original sense impression and returns us to 'twig,' 'stick,' 'stalk.' Enough, it's over, run."

"This room and these old things," he said. "What are these old things doing here? It's like a storeroom. What's all this stuff for?"

"These are Endor's effects. Henrik Endor had these things sent here soon after he arrived. This is all his. He was a collector. He used to collect things. This room wasn't being used, so he had everything put in here."

"Is this Endor's room?"

"Endor's room is padlocked. This is the hobby room. Nobody has been in Endor's room since he started living in the hole. They padlocked Endor's room and named this the hobby room. Those are the two changes we have witnessed since Endor departed for the hole."

"I'm leaving now," he said.

"Names tell stories and so do numbers. Zahl and tale. One coils continuously into the other. Zahl, tal, talzian, tala, tale. Number, speech, teach, narration, story. Not uninteresting, eh? Whorls of a fingerprint. Convolutions of tree-ring chronology."

"Here I go."

"Is that an idiomatic expression?" she said.

"Here I go?"

"Charming speech form. Very peculiar to itself. I must remember to use it at the first opportunity or soon thereafter. I wonder if you'd mind repeating it for me just once."

"Here I go."

"I think I have it," she said. "Thank you so much."

Her fingers returned to the strings of the singular instrument. The lost sound commenced, toneless and hollow. He decided to take a walk on one of the broad lawns that stretched nearly to the synthesis telescope. It was still light. Sweet mist was suspended in the air, making everything tremble. He saw someone in red kneeling at the base of a distant tree. Everything else was aquamarine, a sunken meadow, fresh scent of vespertine breezes, sounds he'd never heard before, how the wind made forests seem to verge on bursting and where a hidden stream failed in sand, all tempered within by vanishing light, the abundant sundown blush that made this oceanic hour whisper to the senses. The figure was that of a man wearing a cassock that was fire-engine red. At first he appeared to be meditating but as Billy drew closer he realized the man was looking at something as he knelt in the grass. A small hill. A nest of some kind. An ant hill. The man had silver-white hair with a perfectly round bald spot in the middle and he was studying the ants as they moved from one opening of the nest to another and then out again. Billy got down on one knee for a closer look.

"Armand Verbene."

"Say again please. What language is that?"

"It's my name."

"I thought you were telling me welcome in a foreign language."

"Armand Verbene, S.J. Forty years a priest. A condition wholly accidental to beatitude. These are my ants, my red ants. For years I've been trying to convince the scientific power structure that red ant metaphysics is a hard science."

"I hear you're opposed to the cycloid as a geometric figure because it has valuable properties even when it's upside down."

"My work deals with the proposition that the divine essence is imitable outside itself. There's nothing soft here. This isn't long-range weather forecasting. I study my ants rigorously. I use rigorous methods. Every creature possesses a divine likeness and therefore attains to the divine ideal through assimilation. This is in theory. For proof we cite the creatures of the physical world as evidence of the reflectability of selfward-tending ideological perfection, rightside up, red ants in particular."

"I draw a blank."

"What kind of ignorance am I dealing with here?"

"How many kinds are there?"

"As many as the mind of man can catalogue. Don't they teach ignorance in school anymore? In your case I believe I'm dealing either with antecedent causal ignorance or consequent causal ignorance. If antecedent causal, either compound antecedent causal or simple antecedent casual. Of course, consequent causal ignorance always follows upon culpable retention, which can be caused and spread by three subsidiary kinds of ignorance-affected, connatural and crass."

"What do you learn from the ants?"

"The ants and their semifluid secretions teach us that pattern, pattern, pattern is the foundational element by which the creatures of the physical world reveal a perfect working model of the divine ideal. Now can you tell me what it is that serves as the foundational element?"

"Pattern, pattern, pattern."

"Correct," the elderly priest said. "Notice the uniform spacing maintained by the ants as each one emerges from the nest. Notice how interchangeable the ants seem to be. Try to observe secretion patterns with your untrained eyes. Everything they do for us here today is part of a plan. This is self-perfective activity, the patterned plan, and it is this evidence in nature that tends to be supportive of the notion of a divine essence imitable outside itself and that also tends to lead us implicitly to the conclusion that self-perfective free activity in this life leads to beatitude in the next."

"For ants?"

"For people."

"But why study ants?" Billy said. "Why not snow leopards or albatrosses?"

"Why not ants?"

"Why not snow leopards?"

"Why not ants?"

"Okay, but why red ants? Why not black ants?"

"Why not yellow ants?" Verbene said.

"Okay, why not?"

"Because red ants secrete uniformly. Their secretions are nonran-dom. They can be classified and studied."

"What do you learn from these secretions?"

"Everything," the priest said. "A given ant will always secrete at a fixed number of centimeters from the secretion of the previous ant save one. Within this pattern we find secondary and tertiary patterns. It's all very measurable. There's nothing soft about it. I use strict empirical methods. What kind of methods do I use?"

"Strict and empirical."

"Correct," the priest said.

"I'm only answering because you're old. I know I don't have to answer."

"There are more terrifying questions than mine waiting just around the corner. This is because you've reached the most terrifying of ages. Passion is the violent outward thrust of the sense appetite and it's always accompanied by extreme bodily changes. I know the operative appetitive urges you must be encountering. Urges and semiurges. Your little body is beginning to grow and to sprout and to want. It needs, it pleads, it desires. I think it's worthy of note that passions do not tend to be inflamed without the presence of concomitant phantasms. This is what you have to be on guard against. There are two kinds of concomitant phantasms, mild and erotomaniacal."

"Dirty thoughts, you mean."

"Correct."

"So far you haven't told me anything I really want to know."

"Many people die while having sexual coitus," the Jesuit said. "It puts a strain on the heart and causes cardiac arrest. Sex should never be furtive. This causes added strain. If it must be done, it should be done with a spouse in a bed in an atmosphere of mutual love and trust. Avoid technique. Technique causes many problems. Technique can kill. If heart palpitations occur during coition, interrupt at once and think about parasitic worms infesting your anal canal. This is called ideational analogous restraint. If, in interrupting, you cannot by strength of will or imagination dispel the urge to emit, then effect your emission in a clean drinking glass or sanitized specimen bottle left at your bedside for this purpose. Do not discard your emission. Take it at once to your spouse and assist in the immediate and direct uterine ingestation of your emission, using whatever nonmechanical means are necessary so as to effect nonimpediment of fertilization. It is not necessary to actively seek fertilization; it is sufficient not to impede it. These are fine but thrilling distinctions. If spillage of your emission is willed as end or means, you have committed the sin of sins."

"In the middle of a heart attack?"

"End or means," the priest said. "Sin of sins."

"What's the story on premature genuflection?"

"We dip to one knee just before we enter a pew and then in cadence with the word 'peace' every time the priest says: 'Peace, peace, peace, it's a long time a-coming.' Some people kneel on the steps outside the church and I suppose this sort of kneeling might be termed premature. Pilgrims still crawl on their knees from shrine to shrine. There's been more of that lately but there aren't many shrines left and so the distances they have to crawl are very great."

"I'm trying to understand this."

"Think upon it," Verbene said.

He picked up one of the ants and let it move across the palm of his hand. He studied it with what appeared to be total concentration. The ant traveled the length of Fr. Verbene's middle finger and disappeared beyond the tip. Verbene turned his hand palm down and watched the red ant move across his knuckle.

"He'll wound me with his mandible. Then he'll spray formic acid directly into the wound."

"Why?"

"Because he's an ant. Everything he does is based on patterns of self-perfective activity."

He returned the red ant to the earth. Billy realized the ants were going in and out of the nest without collecting food or carrying nest-building materials. He asked the priest about this.

"The workers have already gathered the food. What we've been observing all this time is a very special class of ant. They aren't workers, soldiers, queens or brood. They don't secure food. They don't perpetuate the species. They don't protect themselves from the elements. These ants simply crawl and secrete. These are the pattern ants. They enter, they exit, they secrete. These are the ants of red ant metaphysics."

"Do you ever expect red ant metaphysics to be called a hard science?"

"Not in our lifetime," the priest said.

"You mean not in your lifetime."

"We all die, boy."

"But my lifetime figures to be longer than yours."

"Here's the secondary pattern," Verbene said. "See, this one's about to secrete right now, zunk, lovely, and then he'll pick up the secretion of the previous ant and carry the sticky substance into the nest, whereupon he'll emerge and redischarge it exactly so many centimeters from his own previous secretion save two. We see here evidential proof of the divine ideal."

Billy continued to watch the ants emerge from the nest at fixed intervals. He wondered whether, beneath the nest, there was a huge tunnel in which a hundred million ants waited in line to come out and secrete in their well-ordered patterns. Or was he seeing the same five or six? The mist was thicker now, making the background fade. Light seeped into the trees and earth, into the nest and the bodies above it.

"I'm haunted by the thought that red ants don't need red ant metaphysics," Verbene said. "Just as stars don't need astronomy. Just as numbers don't need number theory. Red ant metaphysics is inherent in the colony. If anyone has formulated this study, credit the ants themselves. I'm in a state of personal anguish over this question because the scholar-priests of my order have been historically driven to adopt a pose of agonizing self-doubt. This done, I can tuck up my skirts and leave. Be it said first, however, that every colony of ants represents an extremely complex social organization. They have labor, they have self-defense, they have procreation, they have architecture. What of the pattern ants then? What of those that simply crawl out to secrete? Reflect and ponder. Deliberate a while. Theology? Logic? Mathematics? Art? Think upon it, boy."

On his knees the old priest hummed his evening prayers. Billy rose to leave, his pants moist and smudged at one knee, coming away with blades of grass smeared to the fabric. He walked across the lawn, enjoying the wet smells and dense underwater sensation, last light strained through haphazard gauze. In his canister he turned off the light and worked, making progress in several directions. There was often an element of suspense in his calculations and when he felt this heightened interest coming over him now he got up, as always, and began to pace, trying to order his thoughts, space them to the rhythm of his pacing. Because the canister was dark he immediately noticed a span of light under the bathroom door. He went to the door and opened it. The light was on, all right, and the tub was occupied. Someone was in his bathtub. It was a woman, fully reclined, immersed in suds up to her neck, expressionless, right there in front of him. She was blond and strong-featured, hair upswept in an aromatic bale, clinical blue eyes studying the figure of the boy, who had halted in midstride like a small forest creature downwind of some novel beast, some danger-laden presence sufficiently near to spike the wary nostrils with fabulous balm. Her clothing hung on a towel rack inches from his face. It was an outfit full of slits and apertures, dynamic evening wear, extremely high-powered, rich in fetish content, and he found himself wishing to see her dressed in this ultraseductive apparel, aware of the irony of his desire, backing into the totally serene confusion of it all, the inverted fundamentalism of maleness allowed its answered prayer. His body remained taut. He didn't think he could take a step forward or back to save his skin. He tried to keep his face blank, a level eye steadied on her chin just above the water line.

"Who are you?" he said. "Not that I mind."

"Thorkild."

"What about a first name?"

"What about it?"

"You do what kind of work here?"

"Decollation control."

Her arms were extended along the edges of the tub. He thought she must be pretty tall, judging by her name.

"So how come you're here?" he said. "Checking up on how close I am to working out the code? Somebody send you to check?"

"I'm here because the plumbing's run amuck in my sector."

"No water?"

"Too much water," she said. "It's in the walls and under the tiles."

"The wet shadow. The shadow-flow."

"Precisely."

"Come back when you're finished."

"You'll have to explain that."

"In other words, I'm saying use my tub anytime. Not just this once. Find it convenient to return."

"Yours was the first unoccupied canister, so I slipped right in."

"If you're interested, I think I'm almost close' to getting somewhere. I can feel it beginning to happen. You're the only person who knows this of my work on the code up to now."

"I was never in favor of bringing you here. I'm telling you this because I believe in ruthless honesty even when using another person's facilities. For years it's been assumed that interstellar radio communication would have to be mathematical in nature. Mathematics, so the argument goes, is the universal language. A civilization initiating contact would surely attempt to establish an identifying link through the grammar of mathematics, which is a higher grammar than all others and the only conceivable bond between creatures who differ in every other respect. Numbers would be used. The concepts of addition and subtraction. The rudiments of logic. This is our programming, this is what we've agreed upon and this is precisely what I deny. Those aren't human beings out there. What we believe to be logical may have no bearing on the way they think, assuming they think at all in our sense of the word. The fact that they've apparently constructed an apparatus for transmitting signals doesn't mean they've used the same scientific means we would use. Perhaps there is no apparatus. There may be other ways to transmit radio signals, ways unimaginable to us. And perhaps there is no message. This is even more likely, that the signals were the result of errors in our receiving equipment or computer. You have no business here really. This is the cruel hurting truth, regardless of whose bathtub I happen to be occupying at the time."

"I can't get rid of this feeling that I'm close to half the answer."

"Remember, we're dealing with interstellar distances. Probability of misinterpretation is quite high. Even if the signal is genuinely artificial, cosmic noise could easily cause a slight error, perhaps one pulse too many, a misplaced gap. There's always the chance the signal hasn't been separated out properly. The decollation effect is even more of a problem. Blank intervals between pulses being cut off. Haven't you ever wondered why there were ninety-nine pulses and only two gaps? The decollation effect. Gaps shortened or eliminated completely. The message wasn't repeated, remember, and this makes error detection a hopeless task at best."

"Let's have some thigh."

"It was not only wrong of them to bring you here; it's wrong of them to allow you to do advanced mathematics at all. You shouldn't be allowed to touch a mathematical text until you're seventeen or eighteen. Rudiments, yes, all right, certainly. Advanced work, not until you're older. You lack the broad-based education that produces a savage spark of intellect. Yes, all right, it's easy to cite Abel and Galois. Epochal work while still in their teens. But look how they ended. One destitute and tubercular, dead at twenty-six. The other shot to death at twenty, buried in a common grave. You're brilliant but not savagely brilliant. I miss the killer instinct of the liberal arts major."

She put the soap in the soap dish. He had the impression, as he rarely did with an adult female, that nothing he said or did was subject to those special allowances made for his age and sex. Thorkild did not seem to acknowledge modifying circumstances. It was like dealing with a female his own age. He was not automatically regarded as an endearing specimen. There was none of that mock coquettishness he'd come to take for granted. He was denied the skittish delight of being talked down to or smiled upon or led along. She prepared to get out of the tub.

"Before the accident," she said, "I wouldn't have cared one way or the other. But in my present condition I don't wish to be seen naked. So leave please, for both our sakes."

"What accident?"

"I have no lap."

"That's hard to picture."

"Very little lap to speak of."

"How do you sit?"

"That's the question," she said. "No major difficulty as long as I extend myself. Seated, there's a problem, the lap being a factor in a person's seated state."

He waited outside, not even able to enjoy the sound of Thorkild standing up in the tub, rising in a silver cascade that should have been spectacular to listen to, trickle-tongue streams taking murmurous routes over her body. He moved out of the small entranceway and into the canister proper. The room was still dark. He smelled something unpleasant. Body mold. Debris lodged between toes. It was faint but clinging, a hard-core odor. He didn't turn on the light, afraid he'd see Grbk in a chair. His mind couldn't produce a clear picture of Grbk sitting. The chair was there, quite detailed, but the man in the chair was no more than a latent shape. He thought of running for the door. He had laplessness behind him and a latent man ahead. With luck he'd be able to get to the door before Grbk could snatch at him and force him to watch the nipples being exposed. Suddenly the smell became a noise, easier to locate, coming from the wall to his right, down low, an ambiguous noise, maybe the sound of Grbk's zero-grade voice gargling out some stop consonants. The sound was definitely in the wall and he knew that if he tried to run past the sound to the door, the sound would hear him and lunge, becoming pure touch. But he was desperate enough to try it. He had confidence in his quickness, his ability to cut and veer. Being small he presented an imperfect surface to anyone prepared to grab. He heard the sound become another sound and then a voice in the dark.

"Open up."

He paused, not moving out of his runner's crouch.

"Open up what?" he said.

"The stupid dumb-ass grating."

"Are you Grbk?"

"What kind of Grbk? It's Harry Braniff. Open up, okay?"

"I'm not opening anything until I turn on the light."

"As a personal favor to me, I wish you wouldn't do that. My left eye is light-sensitive. It can take normal lighting in the outside world but the light the way it bounces off the shiny walls of these canisters it's too much for me, causing personal injury and mental aggravation. So do me that favor."

"No talk without lights."

"You insist, right?"

"Lights we talk."

"Okay, wait'll I close my left eye and put my hand over it for added protection. The eye's closed. Here comes the hand. Okay-now."

Billy turned on the light and went over to the grill set into the wall just above the floor line. Through the metal latticework he saw Harry Braniff's face, hand over left eye. Billy sat on the floor in front of the grating. He couldn't tell whether Braniff was standing on a ladder or on solid ground, some kind of access tunnel or interior walkway. Either way, Braniff's body was below the level of the grating, leaving only face and hand visible in the dimness beyond the barrier.

"I thought that smell was Grbk, What's that smell?"

"That's my breath. People notice it wherever I go. A matter of dietary preference. I eat a lot of Limburger on onion roll smothered in garlic."

"What was the first sound I heard?"

"That was my breath too. I was breathing pretty hard. It's not easy getting up here."

"What was the second sound?"

"That was me trying to get the grating opened up so I could deliver the object. I didn't know anyone was here. It was dark in here. I was told open the grill, put the object in the room, close the grill, make your departure. But I couldn't get the grill opened up. So do me that favor and open it up."

"First tell me what the object is you're supposed to be delivering."

"I was told a tape cartridge," Braniff said. "Judging by its look and feel, that's exactly what it is."

He helped the man remove the grating and then accepted the cartridge. To be on the safe side he reinstalled the barrier before going on with the conversation.

"You're not supposed to be in there," he said. "They read me a prepared statement the first day I was here. That's the exit point for this whole sector. We're not supposed to use it except in emergencies. I can get in trouble over this."

"I was told open the grill, put the object in the room, close the grill, make your departure."

"Who told you?"

"I was told if anyone asked I shouldn't vouchsafe a reply. But because you're only a kid and you helped me open up the grating, I'll let you in on a piece of hard-earned wisdom gleaned from many years of delivering things to dumb-ass places. Are you prepared to remember this and learn from it?"

"Yes."

"There is always a higher authority than you think."

"Is that it?"

"Sometimes the person in charge isn't the person or persons who seem to be in charge. No matter how far up or down the line you go, there's always someone else. That's what Harry Braniñ has gleaned."

"The person who gave you this tape to deliver to me was a one-eyed woman or at least a woman with an eyepatch. She said she wanted to exist in my mind, so one time she put an envelope with a drawing on it through the grating or probably you're the one that put it there and now she's sending me this tape with probably her voice on it just to keep me aware of her existence so she can keep on existing in my mind. I know it's her. The woman in the play maze. She had one bad eye and you have one bad eye and hers was the right and yours is the left and that's the way things have been happening around here. Celeste Dessau sent you. It all holds together. It makes sense. It fits right into the pattern."

Thorkild opened the bathroom door and appeared in the entrance-way, dressed in that hit-and-run outfit he'd seen hanging on the towel rack. When he looked back to the grating, Harry Braniff's head and hand were gone but the sound of his voice, barely audible, drifted up from the darkness below.

"Keep believing it, shit-for-brains."

 

9 COMPOSITE STRUCTURE

 

News of the conference spread rapidly, causing rumor to flourish, much of it humorous in nature, centering on the notion that ninety percent of the universe is missing. It was the second formal conference in the brief history of Field Experiment Number One. (The first, predating Billy's arrival, had been presided over by Endor and concerned the transmission from the area of Ratner's star.) It even had a name. Conference on Invisible Mass. As the hours passed, there was less jocularity in evidence and a greater degree of uneasiness, particularly among those who'd heard the latest rumor.

He walked into the conference room.

The latest rumor concerned the people who'd been selected to attend the conference. All (with one exception) were experts in alternate physics. Why did this cause uneasiness and tense speculation? Because many scientists questioned the utility and general merit of alternate physics, dealing as it did with the effects of suppositional laws on hypothetical environments.

Since he'd been invited merely to "sit in" on the meeting, Billy took a chair in the corner and tried to look like someone "sitting in." Three men and a woman sat at a large octagonal table. There were no pencils, note pads or glasses of water. He took this to mean that extremely serious matters were about to be discussed. No time for customs, rules, formalities or informalities. The woman's name was Masha Simjian. The men were Maidengut, Lepro and Bhang Pao.

"Who's chairing?" Simjian said.

She looked from face to face, sucking on hard candy all the while, cheeks indented and thin lips thrust sourly outward.

"Let's all chair," Maidengut said. "Except whoever's sitting in."

"All right then, who's participating and who's sitting in? Show of hands please."

"I'm sitting in," Billy said.

"Show of hands."

He raised his hand.

"It's my understanding," she said, "that persons invited to sit in on a formal conference aren't permitted to speak unless directly addressed."

"Why or because," Lepro said.

"What do you mean?"

Maidengut, a blocklike man, spoke out on Lepro's behalf.

"He has trouble distinguishing between 'why' and 'because.' In his language the same word is used for both. So in order to save time and avoid confusion he uses 'why' as well as 'because' and leaves it to the listener to match the right word to the context. In other words he says 'why or because' instead of 'why' individually or 'because' individually."

"Time to begin," Simjian said. "Who wants to get things moving?"

Bhang Pao shifted in his chair, drawing everyone's attention. He wore a dark suit and tie. His face was round and pleasant, shady manila in color, and on his head was a bowl-shaped toupee, incongruous not only because it suggested an unprofessional haircut but also in view of its glossy look and poor fit, these factors combining to engulf any trace of authenticity.

"We've long known about invisible mass," Bhang Pao said. "Galaxies are no longer flying apart at previous rates of speed. We must presume they are being held together by gravity. However, the mass needed to generate this much gravity is not present in or between the galaxies themselves. There is unexplained mass. A great deal of unexplained mass. Really a whole lot. What is it? Where does it come from? Why can't we find it?"

"Succinctly put," Simjian said.

"Don't interrupt my train."

"Please go on."

"Visible matter cannot account for the failure of the galaxies to disperse at prior speeds. Therefore we frame a hypothesis based on missing matter and we estimate that this matter is many times greater than the sum of all detected matter in the universe. Of course not everyone accepts this model. Some years ago it was determined that interstellar deuterium abundance relative to hydrogen is lower than was thought. This means less density than suspected, which in turn means not as much invisible mass as previously conjectured. However, I regard these findings as tentative in the extreme."

"Bravo."

"Everything I've stated may prove to be total poppycock," Bhang Pao said. "Perhaps time will tell. Perhaps time will do nothing of the kind. All we can do as scientists is try to determine the nature of the invisible mass, assuming there is such mass and that it's invisible. Some say the laws of physics are different in remote parts of the universe. Others argue that hydrogen clouds invisible to our most sensitive devices account for the missing mass. But now a new theory has been put forth, one of vast implications."

"Do we ask questions as he goes along," Maidengut said, "or do we hold them in abeyance?"

"Let's let him finish, but when he does I've got some extremely incisive queries to make," Simjian said.

"But now a new theory has been put forth."

The telephone buzzed once.