Wall Around a Star

NINE

What a place! It had been terrifyingly alien in the first moments, baffling after a day, and now, as time passed and he saw more of its strangeness, it had become totally incomprehensible.

It was also huge—he was just beginning to discover how huge. Jen Babylon's new home was an artifact, created in the first place from tachtran patterns assembling the ran­dom elemental particles that floated in space into a tiny orbiter, then gradually expanded by mass drawn from the surface of Cuckoo itself. He had not formed a good idea of its size, because there were parts of it where he was not welcome and parts where neither he nor any other human could penetrate—refrigerated sections, blazing-hot sections, sections filled with poisonous gases or even liquids, where the few representatives of wholly nonhuman galactic races lurked, appearing among the carbon/oxygen/water races only through Purchased People or robots. The few parts he had seen were dismaying enough, especially considering their occupants! The Scorpian robots, the T'Worlie, the Sirians that seemed to be a single immense floating eye, the horse-headed Canopans, the deltaforms—he had not yet managed to catalog them all in his mind, much less to know who they were or where they were from. Less still to know friend from foe.

And why, in so dispassionate a scientific enterprise as the exploration of Cuckoo, should there be friends and foes?

But there were; and Babylon felt himself plunging deeper each day into a kind of paranoia of his own. What saved him was his work. Even his feelings of personal loss and anger receded in the face of the most interesting chal­lenge his professional self had ever received.

The language of the ancient ship was opaque to every probe he could summon to his service. The big farlink computer munched the facts he poured into it, and re­turned only null results. The datastore he had sent to his other self in Boston had brought nothing in return—not even an acknowledgment. Doc Chimp chattered and joked and sympathized, but could not help; Ben Pertin appeared briefly and mysteriously, most often with dire warnings— "Say nothing to the Canopans!" "Be careful, there's a Scorpian asking questions!"—and then disappeared on strange errands. His best and closest companion was the TWorlie, Mimmie. "Every language must have the same basic structure!" Babylon declared to the little butterfly- thing, getting a sweet carnation-and-maple-sugar scent of sympathy in response. "That's fundamental to the concept of communication. The naming of objects, the description of action, the qualification of the 'nouns' and 'verbs' that they represent—how can you have a language without those things?"

"Agreement," trilled the T'Worlie. "Concur in state­ments. Conclusion drawn: We will succeed, Dr. Jen Baby­lon."

"But when?" Babylon snarled, and the T'Worlie fell si­lent. "There are shared assumptions in all languages, but there are also assumptions that are unique. Or anyway dif­ferent, and here's an example right now. You don't really understand why I'm frustrated and upset, do you?"

"Agreement," the T'Worlie signaled. "Statement: Our time horizon much longer than yours."

"And therefore you're more patient, right. Well, whoever built that ship has a history completely separate from yours or mine, otherwise we would have found congruences be­fore this. We're wasting our time with Pmals. We need to go back to plotting frequencies, making assumptions, test­ing them out—like code-breaking. If we only had some na­tive languages to work with."

The T'Worlie chirped, "Statement. Native languages ex­ist. Qualification. Apparently limited to beings of galactic origin, circumstances of presence on Cuckoo not known."

Babylon nodded; it was true that many of the galactic species seemed to have close relatives on Cuckoo. But then he changed the nod to a headshake. "But that's not good enough; we need real autochthonous languages. If we had that, it would be straightforward. The techniques were es­tablished long ago, by a man on my own planet named Jean Francois Champollion. He worked with ancient Egyp­tian, an extinct language of which we had only written rec­ords. —What's the matter?"

He had detected the scorching smell of disagreement. "Inability to concur in statement," the TWorlie chirped mildly. "No language 'extinct' if population speaking or af­fected by it survives."

"Well, right, that's true enough. I didn't mean it was wholly gone, but the only record we had was in convention­alized pictures. What happened in the long run was that this linguist found a stone—it's called the Rosetta stone— on which the same message was carved in the unknown language and a known one. If we only had something like that, we might have some hope."

"Estimate probability high that such or analogous break­through will occur, Jen Babylon."

Babylon grinned and brushed his hair back. "Well, let's get back to it." He stared around the room. "We've made a mess of this place, haven't we?" There was a litter of hard work in the chamber, half-dismantled Pmal translators, sound tapes and spheres, optical records in a dozen physi­cal forms, frequency analyzers, and all the other tools of their trade. "Well, let's play the audio tapes again. If we can spot any phonemes that look like inflections maybe we can subtract them and get down to root words, at least— but I'd still like a Rosetta stone."

"Dear friend," piped a familiar chatter from the door, "perhaps this old monkey has brought you one—though you may not like the way it looks!"

It was Doc Chimp, of course, clutching a handhold with one long, skinny arm as he floated easily in the entrance. There was nothing easy about his expression, however. His head was cocked as though listening, and he darted glances back over his shoulder as he spoke. He said hurriedly, "He's coming. He's a little, uh, unusual, Dr. Babylon, but I think he may be able to help you. —Ah, here he is!" And he swung inside the entrance to give the next creature a wide berth. From safety at the side of the wall Doc Chimp piped nervously, "Allow me to introduce our guest, from the dis­tinguished, and possibly autochthonous, race of Watchers."

The words were not necessary. The smell was introduc­tion enough. The TWorlie whistled feebly and fluttered over to the air vent, but Babylon had no such escape.

The creature that came slowly through the door, handing itself carefully from one holdfast to another, was as evil in appearance as anything Jen Babylon had ever imagined. Its top was black, its belly red, both fused out of shiny chitin armor. It had small leathery wings that looked useless but in fact were ample within the orbiter, or on Cuckoo itself. It had a parrot beak, with its ears queerly set beside it; the eyes were farther back on the head, like a squirrel's. And it stank.

It squeaked peremptorily, and all of the working Pmals near Babylon translated its words: "I will assist you infe­rior races, but you must respond quickly. Now! What can you tell me of your problem?"

Babylon's one previous glimpse of a Watcher, at the strangely inconclusive meeting he had been summoned to, had been so diluted by the presence of a dozen other strange creatures that the Watcher had been little more than one additional horror in a saturating sufficiency of them. All by itself, it was something special. It was one of the few Cuckoo creatures that did not seem to have some analog on one of the galactic planets—because it was na­tive? Or simply because its home planet had not been inte­grated into the galactic web? That was a good possibility! Who would want to include these things in any possible congeries of cultures?

"I instructed you to be quick!" the Watcher squealed dangerously, and Doc Chimp nervously cleared his throat "If you will, Dr. Babylon," he pleaded. "I know our, uh, guest is somewhat, ah, disconcerting"—the Watcher squealed a disdainful laugh—"but his entire race maintains some sort of contact with the oldest, maybe vanished cul­tures on Cuckoo. The ones who built the other orbiters, maybe; maybe even the wrecked ship. And his language has not been entered in the databanks in any complete way, because of the, uh, lack of social accommodation—" "Be quiet, animal!" the Watcher commanded. "You other animals are investigating matters that concern me greatly. I will exchange information, but begin!"

From its position beside the air vent the T'Worlie gasped: "Recommendation: comply. Alternative: termi­nate dialogue."

Babylon nodded, and bent to the instruments. "Very well," he said, searching for the datastores he needed—any help was worth having, at this stage! "These are the sound sections of our records from the ship, and they seem to be associated with certain visuals." He slipped two of the hex­agons into the reader and started the playback, and at once the raucous noises he had heard under such terrifying cir­cumstances filled the chamber. The Watcher thrust itself across the chamber to remove itself as far as possible from the lesser breeds and settled down to watch and listen. The smell was nearly strangling Babylon, and something was buzzing annoyingly around his ear. He swatted irritably at it—a floating mote of silver, just hovering—and stung his hand. It was like slapping a sharp flint.

Doc Chimp cried, "Oh, Dr. Babylon, it's a Boaty-Bit! Don't hurt it!" He thrust himself toward the spinning fleck of diamond brightness, then sighed in relief. "Ah, there's another"—as a quicksilver gleam darted toward its com­rade—"and it seems all right You don't usually see them in ones and twos like this. The more they are the smarter they are, you see—collective intelligence. Ah, they're flying off. I'm glad you didn't damage it, Dr. Babylon. You don't want the Boaty-Bits mad at you—oh, no!" The two little midges had drifted too close to the Watcher, who had flashed out a pink, slimy tentacle and whipped one of them into its mouth. The other darted away furiously, hesitated, then streaked out and down the corridor. "Cannibal!" Doc Chimp cried. "That's an intelli­gent creature, Watcher!"

Astonishingly, the Watcher laughed, a raucous bark that was unmistakable regardless of language. He whistled a se­ries of short, sharp sounds, and the Pmal rendered it into English for Babylon:

"True I eat flying Bits and even Earth bipeds," he said contemptuously. "Untrue to call it cannibalism. Not my species! But I give you assurance I will not eat anyone here in this room now."

"Kind of you," Babylon murmured, resisting the impulse to edge away. The Watcher laughed again.

"Spoken with humor. Good. We Watchers appreciate courage, even from lower forms such as yourself. Now maintain silence while I inform you. We Watchers are sub­ject to certain behavior constraints, acting on behalf of an­other species that you have never seen. I myself have never seen them, receiving instructions only at second remove. I now desire to complete study of your records, to shed light on matters concerning wrecked ship that do not concern you, therefore be silent while I listen."

As time wore on the smell dwindled in Babylon's nos­trils, though it never became tolerable. Still, he almost for­got it, for the Watcher almost at once reacted. "Stop!" he commanded. "Reverse! Play again— Yes, now stop there!" And he switched from the painful squeals to a deeper, rumbling sound very like the sounds from the hexagons themselves.

The Pmal hesitantly rendered his new language as, "Dis­play . . . graphics."

And the whirling images on the visual track suddenly settled down and revealed a mottled red scene, evidently the surface of Cuckoo, with curious markings that called attention to two points on the chart. Doc Chimp squealed faintly. "That—that's where the wrecked ship is!" he cried.

"And that other—I don't know, except I recognize that mountain. They call it Knife-in-the-Sky."

The Watcher commanded in his own language: "Be still, animal. It is where the ship should have been, of course."

"Of course," the chimpanzee said finally. "Listen, Dr. Babylon. I'd better go check, see if the Boaty-Bit that got away is all right. I'll be back—"

"It is unimportant whether you will be back!" the Watcher howled. "Continue transcription!"

The creature was both loathsome and frightening, but with its aid the translation began to become possible. Not easy. But there were breakthroughs. Babylon forced him­self to endure the stink and revulsion for hours at a time, tending the Pmals while the Watcher slowly built up a store of congruences.

And of course the little Pmal translators that every being on the orbiter carried as a matter of course were no use. They were no more than compact library stores, with some learning circuits. They contained the roots and equiva­lences of all the known galactic tongues, and from them were able to construct dictionaries for any related lan­guage. For unrelated languages they were of no use at all, and so the first task for Babylon and the TWorlie had been to put together a much larger translator, inputting to the farlink computer. Like all Pmals, their translator con­tained a nucleus of semiliving cells. The basic design, like so much of the Galaxy's technology, was T'Worlie, but an ancient Earth linguist named Paul M. A. Linebarger had predicted it, and so most humans gave it his initials. It was not enough. To the word-matching and grammar-building of the Pmal, Babylon had to apply his quantum-dynamics procedures, and the T'Worlie contributed his race's own form of entropic analysis . . . and gradually, slowly, the vocabulary grew.

Grammar was another problem entirely. It was on the rock of grammar that the mechanical translators of early Earth languages had failed. The old grammarians tried to construct a logical grammar for the English language and fell victim to the golden-age myth. They thought there must once have been some language that was constructed from prime principles and had not yet been corrupted by the easy slippage of everyday speech (which was wrong in itself), and they thought that language was probably Latin, which was even more wrong. Latin is an inflected lan­guage. By the inflected form of the verb "to love" you can see who is the lover and who the loved, a sort of relation­ship that English conveys by the position of the words in the sentence; so there the grammarians failed.

They failed, even, in deciding just what a grammar was. The old-time conception of a grammar was as a sort of black box. You put thoughts into it, and it converted them into sentences, so that a grammar was defined as a device which could generate every possible grammatical sentence, but would not generate any nongrammatical ones. No use. The definition was circular, like defining "red paint" as that which paints things red. It also took no account of the differences in meaning of the word "grammar," defining a deep structure indispensable to communication as well as the conventions of ordinary talk. But that latter grammar depended on who was using it. That grammar, really, was no more than a system of identification codes to let the hearer know that the speaker was upper-class-educated, working-class-tough, urban black, whatever. One of the great triumphs of quantum-dynamic linguistics was that it cut through the semantic maze and struck right to the heart of meaning.

But not easily.

Not with pleasure, either, as long as the Watcher contin­ued to show up at regular intervals to listen for analogs and input his own language. Babylon and the T'Worlie worked out a bargain—they would take turns in milking the crea­ture's knowledge—and when it was the T'Worlie's turn Babylon explored the orbiter. He did it mostly by himself; Doc Chimp had been staying away, and when the little chimpanzee's absence had continued for several days Baby­lon sought him out.

He found Doc Chimp huddled over a stereostage, whis­pering to someone whose identity Babylon could not deter­mine. When he glanced up at his visitor the chimp's ex­pression was almost triumphant, but darkened instantly. "Oh, Dr. Babylon," he chattered. "How nice of you to visit this old monkey. If only you'd given me a little warning, though!" He seemed to be talking as much to the stereo as to Babylon.

"I'm sorry to interrupt you," Babylon offered.

"No, no! Of course not! Just let me say good-bye to my friend here—" Babylon stayed near the doorway, politely out of range, while the chimp whispered a few more words. Babylon had never before been in Doc Chimp's quarters. As a senior inhabitant of the orbiter, Doc Chimp had squatter's rights on the cubicle he preferred, and he had decorated it to suit—a semiliving T'Worlie painting moved slowly on one wall, a stereophoto of the Serengeti plain occupied another. One end of the chamber was filled with a steel-pipe jungle gym, a children's playground thing that seemed to be the chimpanzee's sleeping place, since some of the pipes were hung with scraps of cloth to make a nest. "It's not much," Doc Chimp apologized, "but it's my home, and welcome to it." He sprang to find a drinking bulb and a few pieces of synthetic food. "At least have some coffee, please? Heaven knows it's no good—there's no good food on this whole orbiter."

"I didn't mean to interfere with what you were doing."

The chimpanzee was silent for a moment, scratching at his leathery cheek with one long, skinny finger. "Can you stay here for about an hour?" he demanded suddenly.

"Why—I suppose so, but what for?"

"I want you to meet somebody."

"The last time you brought somebody to meet me," Babylon said, "he secared me half to death. Not to mention how he smelled."

Doc Chimp grinned. "But you have to admit he helped you, right? Well, this time it will be different—although I think you'll find there will be some help, too. They'll be here in a little while, but please don't ask any questions— you never know who might be listening!"

Babylon squeezed a mouthful oi the tepid imitation cof­fee past his lips, shuddered, swallowed, and said mourn­fully, "Are we ever going to get to the point where every­thing isn't a mystery?"

"Not on Cuckoo, I'm afraid. Everything's a mystery— not least of all, what we are doing here!" He pressed some levers on the stereostage and nodded to Babylon to come to look over his shoulder. "There it is," he said, as a holo­graphic virtual image formed in the stage. "Cuckoo. Three hundred million kilometers in diameter and made out of—what? Space? It has so little mass there's nothing we know of that can account for it. See the markings in bright relief? That's what we've mapped so far. And the dark ones? Those are what we've actually explored." He heeled a bar moodily, and the great simulated sphere began to spin until it was almost a blur. "That's what we've got to show for more than a dozen years and a lot—oh, yes, Dr. Babylon, a lot—of lives. And no system, really. Every race wanted a priority given to its own analogs here on Cuckoo. And, my goodness, Dr. Babylon, we don't have unlimited resources! So we wasted fifteen hundred launches, lost more than a dozen landers, killed off better than a thou­sand creatures, one way or another, just to peek at the least interesting parts. It's all politics, you know. And we ter­restrial primates, like you and me, we don't have as much muscle as some of the older, more powerful races. When the T'Worlie want something they get it! Same with the Sheliaks. One of the Sheliaks took a whole expedition down to that jungle there—you can only see it as a blur, but it's a thousand miles across! He was studying thermosynthesis— the way Cuckoo's life feeds on the heat flow from below, like some submarine colonies do in our own oceans back home on Earth, instead of light from the Sun. An interest­ing study, right? I thought so. That's why I went along . . . And when the Sheliak probed too hard and started a volcanic eruption, I was one of the ones that died!"

"I'm sorry," Babylon muttered. It was a foolish thing to say—how do you condole a person for his own death, when he is alive and well before you?

The chimp nodded moodily. "They're all alike, Dr. Babylon," he sighed. "Crazy theories. The Boaty-Bits and the Scorpians and the Canopans, they all think that Cuckoo might be made of some other kind of matter, with zero mass. Well, that's moonshine! I've been there! So have you! It's solid rock and soil and plants and lakes and oceans."

"Of course it is," Babylon said soothingly.

But of course it wasn't. He recalled enough undergradu­ate science to be certain of that. No solid body of any such size could possibly exist. Or even a thousandth this size. The gravitation of its own enormous mass would squeeze it down into a black hole with no size at all, squeeze it finally out of the physical universe.

But—

What was it? How had it come to be, and what strange new science could explain it? What sort of beings had lived on or around it? Maybe still lived? What had those orbital forts been built to defend? What had brought down the one they had entered?

Again he grappled with those perplexities, and again he saw no answers.

The chimp scratched his leathery cheek. "The Boaty- Bits you can understand, a little," he said. "They're so dif­ferent, being a collective entity and all—they don't have the same feelings as individual organisms like the rest of us. They think we individuals are almost like amputees— they're sorry for us, would you believe it? But the Sirians! They have no real sense of time—if it won't happen in the next week they couldn't care less, and that makes them dangerous . . ." He paused. "What's the matter, Dr. Baby­lon? You're giving me a funny look."

"I'm wondering," Babylon said, "why you're telling me all this right now. I get the feeling you're just making con­versation to keep me here."

Surprisingly, the chimp grinned. "Right you are, Dr. Babylon," he agreed. "And I guess it worked, because the people I want you to meet are here now. Come in, folks! Let me present, direct from Earth, the Galaxy's foremost expert in quantum-dynamic linguistics and heaven knows what else, Dr. Jen Babylon!"

The pair that gently launched themselves into Doc Chimp's chamber were almost more surprising than any of the monsters Babylon had seen. Human, yes, undoubtedly. But what humans! They were a man and a woman, each more than two meters tall, and slimmer than human beings had any right to be. "This is Org Rider, Dr. Babylon," the chimp said proudly. "He's a real person, not a tachyon dupe like the rest of us." He didn't look real to Babylon, he looked grotesquely stretched—like a normal man of a hundred and seventy-five centimeters or so who has been pulled thin, like taffy. He wore a cache-sex, a belt with pockets and loops, a few straps of harness, and nothing else. "Of course," Doc Chimp went on meditatively, " 'real' is a kind of comparative word, isn't it? I mean, Org Rider isn't 'real' Earth primate in the sense that you and I are, or anyway used to be—he doesn't come from Earth. He comes from here. And this is his good lady, Zara, who I think you may have met before."

Babylon was staring. "Zara Gentry!" he exclaimed.

The wraith-thin woman laughed—a solid, human laugh, regardless of her appearance. "As good a name as any," she acknowledged.

"No, no. I mean I've met you before. You're a famous newscaster, back on Earth, Mrs. Gentry."

"Just Zara, please. I was born Zara Doy, then I married and I was Zara Doy Gentry—I understand that on Sun One I'm Zara something else—but here my husband and I don't share the same name. He is Org Rider. I am simply Zara—an edited version of myself," she added wistfully, "but still the same person."

Babylon said humbly, "I really don't know very much about what an 'edited' version of a person is—in spite of the fact that it happened to me, and I'm reminded of it every time I wake up and reach for the glasses I don't have anymore."

Doc Chimp laughed. "Let me tell him, Zara," he volun­teered. "Dr. Babylon hasn't been here long enough to learn all our little ways. But it's simple enough. When you're tachyon-transmitted, you know, all that really gets sent is a sort of blueprint of what you are. Then it gets put together at the other end, out of whatever odds and ends of matter happen to be about; and you can always edit the blueprint Change it, you see? Adapt the pattern to special needs. Suppose you want to live on a water world; well, it's easy enough to modify your blueprints to let you breathe water. It takes gills, o' course, and some changes in your metabolism, but that's easy enough. Lots of the folks you see around the orbiter are edited copies—chlorine-breathers, changed to an oxygen atmosphere. Light-gravity people— well, you don't see them changed much here, because it isn't necessary, but there are plenty of them rebuilt for heavy duty, as you might say, back on Earth. So, in order to make Zara less conspicuous when she was first sent down to Cuckoo, minglin' with the aborigines, as you might say, she was just stretched out a little."

Babylon listened thoughtfully, but his mind was work­ing. "Doc," he said at last, "you're an absolute gold mine of information today, but I still get the idea that you're talking to keep me from asking questions."

Zara answered for him. "It's true, Jen," she said. "There's something we don't want to talk about yet, and it's true that we came here just to see you."

"All right, so when are you going to stop being mysteri­ous?"

She laughed. Her dimples were just as attractive on a face stretched thirty percent beyond its norm as they would have been on the original, Babylon decided. "As to what we don't want to talk about, that will have to wait a day or two. As to what we came here for—tell him, Org Rider."

"Very well, I will tell it," said the man with her, pulling a small glittering sphere from one of his belt pockets. "This is for you, Jen. It does not directly relate to your linguis­tics, but it will, I think, be of interest. It is the record of certain investigations Zara and I made." He tossed the sphere to Doc Chimp, who retrieved it nimbly from the air and fitted it into his stereostage. "Display the first view," Org Rider ordered, and obediently a landscape filled the stage, dominated by an immense, distant mountain. Org Ri­der said, "That is my home. That is Knife-in-the-Sky, as it is seen from my tribe's mountain. My ancestors have lived there for as long as the oldest singer can say. But when Zara comes, and I see her, I ask questions. Why are we so alike? Are my people once from that little planet where she comes from? How can I find out these things. So I ask Zara, and she tells me, 'paleontology.' And I ask her, how can we get 'paleontology'?"

Zara grinned. "I explained what it meant—digging down for fossils and so on—and we imported texts and manuals from Earth and made ourselves paleontologists. We started digging. Our work is very sloppy by Earth standards, of course. But it's also a lot easier. We don't have to mark geologic formations with precision, because there haven't been any big faults or earth shifts. Just a gradual deposi­tion of silt and sand and clay from the rivers that run off Knife-in-the-Sky. The dating was hard—well, I'll be honest. It was impossible. We tried radio-carbon dating ourselves, working out of a textbook—forget it! For one thing, there were too many unknowns that might contribute radioactiv­ity from the Cuckoo atmosphere, but the worst part was we just didn't know what we were doing. But then we were lucky."

She hesitated, and glanced at her husband. "I guess we were lucky," she amended. "What I mean is we got some help from the Sirians. They were interested too, because there are analogs of Sirians on Cuckoo as well, just as of the Boaty-Bits and the Sheliaks and lots of others. Most of them don't seem to care. The Sirians care. They are a very vain, proud race, and working with them was no pleasure. Have you ever seen a Sirian? Looks just like a large, float­ing eye? Almost all soft tissue, nothing to leave fossils? Yes. Well, that's why they came to us for help. They're very good at potassium-argon dating; they can pinpoint the argon-isotope balance to within almost a century or so, and that goes back much farther than the carbon procedures. And so we dug. Show him, Org Rider," she said to her husband, who nodded and punched out commands on the stereostage. A virtual image of the skeleton of a hand ap­peared. "This is the earliest we found, Dr. Babylon. Thir­teen thousand years ago, according to the Sirians. And as soon as they got that dated they suddenly lost interest, wouldn't even talk to us anymore."

Babylon studied the virtual image uncomprehendingly. "Do you see how short the fingers are?" Org Rider de­manded.

Babylon shrugged. "I wouldn't call them short. They look about the same length as your own—much longer than mine."

Org Rider flexed his long, supple hand, laughing. "I see you are no anatomist either, Jen Babylon. I had to learn this, too. See here. You think your fingers are only the part that extends beyond your palm and hand, because that is what you see. But that is not all. Rub your fingers across the back of your hand—do you see? Those bones you feel, those are the hidden parts of your fingers. They go all the way to the wrist."

Babylon did as instructed, then stared at the stereo im­age. "Why, those are just the same as mine! Not stretched out of all reason like— oh, excuse me!"

Org Rider shook his head, smiling. "We are not Sirians or Sheliaks, Jen Babylon, so we do not take offense lightly. You are correct. The fingers are in exactly the same pro­portion as your own. Exactly the proportion of an Earth human now, or of the Earth humans who were alive there at the date given by the argon isotopes, which is perhaps thirteen thousand four hundred years ago. Those are the earliest we found. We dug further. But below that— nothing."

When Jen Babylon told Mimmie about the results of Org Rider's digging, the T'Worlie exuded a cinnamon-bun odor of understanding. "Concurrence," it peeped. "Statement: Similar findings for other Cuckoo analogs of galactic races. Conclusion: Event of thirteen thousand four hundred years ago brought them here simultaneously. Query: Nature of event?"

Babylon rose and stretched, catching at a handhold to keep from drifting away from the instruments. "Yes, that's the question, isn't it?" he replied. "Something happened here, all those years ago. Before that the only life was na­tive—whatever that was. After it, there were immigrants from almost all the galactic planets. But how? I guarantee the Cro-Magnons didn't have the tachyon-transmission links on Earth—I don't know how it was with you T'Worlie."

Over the time they had been working together Babylon had discovered that the TWorlie had a sense of humor— hard to pin down, with the dehumanizing effect of transla­tion through the Pmals, but popping out at unexpected times; they had become accustomed to exchanging pleasan­tries. But Babylon had forgotten the third being present. The Watcher hissed in rage, and the Pmal struggled with its furious squeals with only partial success: "—blas­phemous—offensive little animals! What you deserve—" The Pmal could not manage to say what they deserved, and it was no doubt as well. The Watcher's slimy pink tentacles were quivering with fury and, abruptly, it turned and hurled itself out of the chamber.

Babylon gazed after it in dismay. "What did I say?" he demanded.

The T'Worlie said hesitantly, "Statement: Watchers are deputies of some older, perhaps extinct race. Conjecture: Attempts to discover identity of same may be offensive, especially when levity is involved."

Babylon found he was shaking. "Well," he said at last, "we've pretty nearly pumped it dry anyway—and I admit I was getting tired of the way it smelled. Tell you the truth, Mimmie, I kind of hope it never comes back."

And for several days he got his wish; the Watcher re­mained absent, while the two of them worked at correlating the data it had provided. It was not particularly difficult work, since by now the Pmals had the sketchy beginnings of a vocabulary to work with, and at least some tentative grammatical models. There was still no word from that other Jen Babylon on Earth, but the farlink computer put a great deal of power behind their processing, and it be­came clear that what they had rescued from the wrecked ship was of immense value. Item: a detailed map of the surface of Cuckoo, so huge that it could be presented only in segments a thousand miles square—there were more than a million of them! Item: On the segmented maps, symbols that indicated places of special interest—what the interest was, was still unclear, but one of them had been the location of the wrecked ship itself. Item: What ap­peared to be operating manuals for the ship's equipment: weaponry (but none of the weapons were available to test); drive controls (but the ship itself would never move again); communications. And, of course, every datum was a fresh puzzle, not made easier by the accumulating debt each of them was beginning to owe to fatigue. Babylon passed his hand across his eyes. "The wrecked ship is marked," he muttered, more to himself than to the T'Worlie. "See those radiating lines? And the same pat­tern shows up five—no, seven more times on the globe." He peered blearily at the stereo image and nodded. "Yes,' he said, "the globe is divided into octants, and there's one of those special marks in each one. What do you suppose it means? A sort of local capital for each section? A military headquarters? Some particularly important spot—that maybe the wrecked ship was attacking?"

There was no answer from the TWorlie, except an unfa­miliar burning odor. "And these symbols in the communi­cations data," he went on. "farlink gives us a match— they represent the concept 'zero-mass tachyon.' But what's a zero-mass tachyon when it's home?"

The T'Worlie was silent for a moment before it replied, while the scorching odor grew. Babylon turned uneasily to face it. "Statement," it said faintly. "Tachyon is defined as particle that obeys law of velocity of light as limit, but in its case as lower limit. Statement: Photon is defined as par­ticle that has rest mass of zero. Conjecture by analogy: 'Zero-mass tachyon' may be particle that has infinite speed. Further conjecture . .

But the peeping voice faded away, and the Pmal fell silent. "Oh, hell," cried Babylon, suddenly aware of the bedraggled filmy wings, the dullness in the five clustered eyes. "You're bloody exhausted, aren't you? I've been driv­ing you too hard!"

The T'Worlie managed a faint chirp, which the Pmal rendered as, "Concurrence."

Babylon shook his head in self-reproach. The T'Worlie were almost the most ancient of the civilized galactic races, with a time sense that extended centuries into the future . . . and an unhurried, placid way of life to match. "I'm sorry," Babylon said. "You need rest! We both do, I guess, and it's my fault." He pushed himself away from the pro­cessors and gazed around the room. "We've made a lot of progress, anyway," he said. "We're entitled to a break. Take the day off, Mimmie—I mean, please," he added hastily, conscious that he was giving orders to one of the race that had essentially founded the galactic culture. "I will, too. Then when we get back maybe we can figure out just what to do with all this stuff . .

The butterfly wings trembled, and gently eased the crea­ture toward the exit. It managed a faint, "Thank you," and was gone.

Babylon did not at once follow his own instructions. He hung relaxing from one of the straps that festooned the wall—for him alone, really, because the TWorlie cer­tainly had no need of them. With the Watcher's help they had achieved a great deal, but not without cost. The bill was coming due. Babylon was suddenly aware of his own fatigue and, worse, his general tackiness. His beard bris­tled, his hair was unkempt. He had not troubled to bathe in—how long? Several days at least, and he was abruptly conscious of the fact that he showed it in unpeasant ways—Wrong. The smell that assailed his nostrils was not his own. He spun quickly to confront the doorway, and his suspicion was right.

The Watcher hung there silently, staring at him with one immense, faceted eye.

What a revolting creature it was! Babylon repressed a shudder of distaste, but managed to say civilly, "Nice to see you again."

The Watcher squealed contemptuously, "That is a lie! You are not pleased to see me, and I could never be pleased to see you."

Babylon nodded, angry at himself for attempting cour­tesy with this incarnate evil. "Then why are you here?" he demanded.

"Because of urgency," it squealed, "Our interests coin­cide for one short step more. Come!" And it flapped its leathery wings toward him, and the hideous pink tentacles caught him by arm and torso and dragged him away.

Jen Babylon was of average strength, but in those whip­like pink tentacles he was helpless. He was carried through the orbiter's passages faster than he had ever traveled them before, as the Watcher's powerful wings beat waves of its foul stench back at him. Dizzy from the kaleidoscope pas­sage of the chambers and corridors and halls, retching from the stink, exhausted from struggling against the py­thon grip of the tentacles, Babylon was half dazed when at last the Watcher thrust him free. He catapulted through a door, and was caught by the quick long arm of Doc Chimp. "Why, Dr. Babylon! I asked the Watcher to bring you here, but I never expected it to be this way!"

Babylon shook himself free, clutching at a wall fixture. "It doesn't matter," he said, looking about. The chimpanzee was not alone in his chamber; the two stretched-out human beings he had met before were there, Org Rider and Zara; so was Ben Pertin—some Ben Pertin or another. And so was a stranger.

Zara pushed herself close to him, her face concerned. "You look like you've had a hard time, Jen. I'm sorry. I asked the Watcher to be gentle, but it's not in his nature." She turned and squealed commandingly at the Watcher— not bothering to use the Pmal, Babylon observed with won­der. The Watcher made a contemptuous sound in return, hovering solidly just outside the door. "He'll stay out there, Jen," Zara said. "Since he's a Watcher, we'll let him watch for us—and the air's better in here that way. There are beings on the orbiter we don't want to come in here just now. I promised you that we'd stop acting mysterious as soon as we could—and now we can." She nodded toward the stranger in the room. "Jen Babylon, I want you to meet Redlaw, the human being who knows more about Cuckoo than anyone else."

If Org Rider and Zara were tall, this man was a giant. He overtopped them both by inches, and where their frames were stretched and slim his was solid. "Hello, Jen Babylon," he boomed, bright green eyes staring at Baby­lon's. "I hear you're the one I have to thank."

"For what?" Babylon asked, and it was Zara who re­plied:

"You gave us a key we've been looking for for a long time, Jen. When the Watcher helped you interpret the graphics Doc Chimp realized at once what it meant. One set of coordinates for where the wrecked ship hit the ground. Another for where it was supposed to be going—its home base, in other words. And he came at once to Org Rider and me, and we got word to Redlaw, on the surface of Cuckoo, not too far away—and so he went there."

The giant nodded. His hair was red and so was his beard, and his voice was deeper than any human's Babylon had ever heard. "And I found something important," he said.

Babylon cast a quick look at the Watcher. "Wait a min­ute," he said. "If there's anything secret—"

"It's all right, Jen," Zara reassured him. "The Watchers aren't friends, not by any stretch of the imagination. But they've got problems of their own. They're called Watchers because they are supposed to serve as scouts and guardians for someone else—probably the people who built the wrecked ship and the base. They haven't been able to com­municate with them for a long time. They want to know how to get back in touch. It's a religious matter to them"— from the doorway the Watcher squealed warningly, but she paid no attention—"or at least it's a sort of built-in impera­tive. So we made a deal to exchange this information. As soon as we're finished the deal ends—but for now, Redlaw, go ahead. Tell what you found."

Redlaw nodded to Doc Chimp, who produced another of the bright dataspheres and inserted it into his scanner. "Here's where I went," he said, as a scene of a pretty lake with what looked like some kind of temple at its narrowest end appeared on the stage. "It's got a special marking on the chart you showed Doc Chimp—do you remember?"

"I don't think so," Babylon began, and then suddenly, "Yes! Of course! It's one of those special points in each octant of the surface of Cuckoo—like the place where the wrecked ship is lying!"

"Exactly. So I naturally thought it would have something to do with spaceships. The orbiters, of course; maybe a re­pair and maintenance base of some sort for them. But, as you can see, there's nothing like that visible." He stroked his long, lean chin, and rumbled, "That building had never been observed before. Not surprising, you know—there's just too much of Cuckoo! But it's not even in a common style. Certainly Org Rider's people never worked in stone. The other races all have their own styles of construction, and none of them is like this ... So I went inside."

He gestured again to Doc Chimp. The scene disappeared in a cloud of golden flakes, then solidified to show the interior of a great pillared chamber. Overhead was a vaulted dome; by bending and peering up into the three- dimensional image Babylon could see that the dome was ornamented with a representation of a galaxy, lenslike, whirlpool-lined, made of a myriad of tiny points of light. "I don't know how long it has been since this place was used last," Redlaw said, "but there was still power to light that display—and for other things." He stepped over to Doc Chimp's side and manipulated the display; the holographic image revolved slowly, and they were looking out through the great pillars. "See that road?" he demanded, as a white, trenched avenue appeared. "It goes down directly into the lake. I have a theory about that. I think it goes down a long way under the water—why I don't know. Maybe it was something like a launchway for water craft? I don't think so. I think it was all exposed at one time, going down into that hollow to something else—something I couldn't see, much less get to, under the water. And over the years, when it was untended and forgotten, rain or springs filled it and made the lake. Now look inside!" He rotated the image again, and Babylon gasped.

There was a statue at the end of the chamber, in hard white metal, the figure of a three-eyed biped. Though the flat head seemed utterly alien, the torso gave an impression of femininity. Its delicate arms were lifted. One three- fingered hand held a ball, the other a handled ring. There was something Babylon took to be a blouselike garment, portrayed perhaps as blowing in the breeze; but as Redlaw increased the magnification he saw that the unknown artist had portrayed wings.

From the doorway there was a sharp, hurting squeal which the Pmals could not translate. The Watcher was quivering with excitement, its pink tentacles crawling long­ingly.

Redlaw glanced at the creature, then lowered his voice to Jen Babylon. "I think those are the things he used to work for—wherever they are now. But they've left some­thing behind. Defenses—all around that little valley are the same crystal towers you found near the wrecked ship; it took them a while to react, but as I was leaving they nearly finished me. And what they were defending was in that chamber. Records—the same kind of six-sided rod you found in the ship; I brought a batch of them back for you, Jen. I had no way of playing them, of course. Weapons— perhaps like the ones that were in the ship. Perhaps some­thing different. I left them there. And—one other thing."

He pulled out what looked as much like a collapsed hot- water bottle as anything Babylon had ever seen. It was open at one end, and possessed a structure of coppery, feathery metal tendrils at the other. "I didn't know what it was either, Jen," Redlaw boomed, grinning through his scarlet beard. "So—I put it on."

Babylon accepted it and turned it over in his hands. It was lighter than he had expected—less massy, he corrected himself, since everything was "light" in the orbiter. It was even more flexible than it had appeared while Redlaw still held it; he could twist it, turn it, fold it; he could even imagine himself doing as Redlaw had, and drawing it on over his head.

But there was ancient power in the device; he could feel it. He temporized. "What is it?"

Zara answered for him. "Do you know what Purchased People are, Jen?"

"Sure. Everybody does. They're criminals who have been sold to aliens to use," he said impatiently.

"Yes, exactly. But do you know how the aliens use them?"

"Why, yes, I suppose so—I mean," he said, floundering, "of course the technical details are a little out of my field—"

Zara laughed, nodding in friendly sympathy. "Mine too, Jen. Almost everybody's. All we know, really, is that the Purchased People are given some sort of implant, which then puts them in direct communication with their owners. The owners can feel with their senses, see with their eyes, control their actions. Of course, some sort of tachyon com­munication must be involved, but that's about all any of us knew. But this helmet—" She looked at it almost with awe. "It lets us listen in, Jen! It lets us experience whatever any Purchased Person in range is experiencing—and that means anyone on or near Cuckoo! And that means—"

Her husband interrupted harshly. "It means that for the first time we can find out what's really going on here! Why some of the races are determined to destroy the re­search project, if not Cuckoo itself. Put it on, Babylon!"

He flexed it in his hands, still hesitating, and glanced at the doorway. He was startled to see that it was vacant.

"He's gone, Jen," Zara said, nodding. "This part of what we found doesn't interest the Watchers; I think our truce with them is over." She came closer and touched his arm reassuringly. "But our part is just beginning, Jen. Put it on!"