Wall Around a Star

ONE

Jen Babylon was physically exhausted, but he was too angry to go to sleep. He dropped his briefcase of tapes and transcripts, too precious to trust to a bellboy, in his hut and stamped back along the beach toward the only lights visi­ble, the tethered schooner that served as a bar and late-night snack shop. For a miracle it was not raining, but the mosquitoes were out. In five weeks in Western Polynesia he should have had time to get used to them. But that hadn't happened. He hadn't gotten used to the hostility of the Free Polynesians, either, and if the desk clerk hadn't been one of them he was certainly a sympathizer.

He stopped, his train of thought interrupted. Somebody was walking up out of the lagoon.

For a moment he had, been startled; few of the guests swam after sundown, when some people thought the sharks came in from the open sea. But swimming, after all, was one of the things people came here for, and there was no northern-hemisphere insistence on lifeguards or regular hours here. So it was not surprising there was a swimmer. It was not even surprising that the swimmer was female, and apparently entirely nude. Here there was no northern- hemisphere hangup about skin, either. What was a little surprising was that she was walking straight up to the beach, not sidestepping the little patches of sea growth, not even staying on the paths raked free of shells and broken coral. She reached the high-water mark, and stopped, look­ing around in what appeared to be some uncertainty.

Babylon stopped a meter or two short of where she stood. >She was a striking woman. Not beautiful, perhaps.

Too slim to be classically beautiful, and her coloring was— strange. It almost did not exist. Even in the weak light from the Moon and from the rigging of the distant schooner he could see that her hair was so pale as to be almost transparent, like spun lucite, and her eyes were al­most colorless behind colorless lashes.

He realized he was staring, and stammered, "Excuse me." There was a little pile of clothing tucked between the roots of a banyan. He said helpfully, "Is that yours?"

She looked at him in a strange way. Not as one person usually looks at another, making contact eye to eye, but as one looks at a statue, or a machine. It was not in any way hostile, but Babylon could find no other way to interpret it. He felt himself on the defensive. "Excuse me," he said again. "I'm going to have a nightcap." Just at the pier he turned. She was standing there, with the clothing in her hand, looking thoughtfully at one of the chambermaids going from cabin to cabin to turn down the bedspreads.

He ordered a brandy and ginger ale. His anger had be­gun to simmer down, but a certain amount of irritation re­mained to mix with the fatigue. His grant had been for eight weeks in the islands, traveling from one tiny atoll to another to find the oldest surviving Polynesians and get them to speak what they remembered of the native tongue into his bubble-recorder. Of course, there was no such thing as a pure Polynesian tongue anymore. The grand­fathers' grandfathers of the old people he talked to had al­ready begun to incorporate words of French and English and Russian into their everyday speech; the consonants had shifted to match the white man's way of writing them down, rather than retaining the original, not quite reproduc­ible sounds of the untouched islands. But that was his spe­cialty. Jen Babylon's first doctorate was in evolutionary linguistics, his second in semantic analysis. He was the world's outstanding expert in the history and development of tongues. "Babylon's Algorithms" were taught in every university in the world, as a procedure for mapping loan words from a known contaminating tongue against current dialects and reconstructing the lost original of the dialects.

Not just in this world. Babylon's contributions to linguistic theory were among the very few specimens of human sci­entific thought that any of the other races of the Galaxy considered worth the trouble of knowing about That knowledge gave Babylon a good deal of pleasure. It was a source of pride for him. Sources of pride were welcome. Babylon had spent his youth as a college grind, subsisting on scholarships, seldom finding time enough to go out and raise hell with his peers, seldom finding anyone who wanted to share hell-raising with him when he did. He was not the sort of man who attracted women. He was too short, a little too plump, a good deal too soft ever to look heroic or macho, and although he could speak easily in fifteen languages and get by with some difficulty in half a dozen others, he had never learned the words to talk to a girl.

So when the woman from the beach entered the bar he glanced at her only briefly, and then turned away.

She was dressed now—at least, she had wrapped a pareu around her, though she was still barefoot and her glassy-soft hair was wet. To his surprise she came up to the bar next to him. She inspected the stool beside his, sat on it, and said, in a voice almost as colorless as her eyes, "I'm going to have a nightcap."

Well, there were times when you didn't really need the right words. "Would you like to join me? Yes? I'm having brandy and ginger ale."

She looked at the drink as he held it up. "Yes," she said. "Brandy and ginger ale."

But even after he had bought her a drink the woman did not seem to want to talk. She was willing to listen, appar­ently, as she tasted her drink and stared about the little bar. "I'm going back to Boston in the morning," he offered, without getting a response. She seemed interested in the rope festoons and seashells that were the principal decora­tions. There was almost no one else in the bar; February was not the tourist season on Moorea, and the hotel's com­plex of thatched-roof cottages was almost deserted. He tried again. "I've been out in the smaller islands. I'm in linguistics."

The woman did not respond, but the bartender looked up from his American newspaper crossword puzzle. "Were there a lot of those Polyndsie-libre types out there?"

"Quite a few," Babylon admitted. "I think I would have had more cooperation from some of the old people if it hadn't been for them. But they didn't make any real trou­ble for me."

"Bet they didn't," the bartender said. "They caught one of the ringleaders, you know. That Te'ehala Tupaia. A mad bomber! Worst of the lot. Between them and the Kooks, this place is going to hell."

Babylon was startled. "No! I didn't know you had Kooks out here."

The bartender shrugged moodily. "Not right here, but over yonder"—he waved toward the distant lights of Pa­peete, climbing the mountain on the other side of the strait—"there's plenty of them all over Tahiti. I never go there anymore. Would've stayed in Cleveland if I'd wanted to see a bunch of nuts dressing up like freaks and acting like the world was coming to an end. Maybe it is. When I was a boy—"

Jen Babylon didn't want to hear about how things had been when the bartender was a boy. "Are there Kooks where you come from?" he asked the woman.

She glanced briefly at him through her pale eyes, then away. "No."

"There are plenty in Boston," he told her. "It's a new religion. They said that object that was discovered a few years ago—Cuckoo, most people call it—anyway, they think that when it reaches our Galaxy we will all be de­stroyed. Or reborn, as something bigger than human. Or something . . ." She wasn't paying attention. At least, she wasn't looking at him, although there was something about her that made him sure she was hearing every word. He was receiving mixed signals from her, and it was both irri­tating and in some way provocative.

More irritating than provocative, on balance; he was still not over the anger left from his unsatisfactory conversation with the desk clerk. Were there any messages for M'sieur Jen Babylon? Perhaps yes. Perhaps no. One had so many messages—but it was obvious the hotel was nearly empty, and there were hardly any signal lights glowing over the room indicators. But couldn't he just look? With great re­gret, m'sieur, not at this moment, since the press of duties was so formidable. And m'sieur's bags could not be brought just now, but surely within the hour, perhaps. Babylon had stalked out, jangling the key to his cottage. He was certain that there must be messages, if only one from the univer­sity to explain why he had been called back so urgently from his field trip.

"Do you want another drink?" the bartender asked. "Looks like you'll be here awhile."

Babylon realized that the staccato drumming that had been nagging at his consciousness was rain, beating down on the moored old copra schooner with the sudden violence of any tropical storm.

"Might as well. How about you?" he added to the girl.

She stood up. "No." She moved toward the door without looking at either of them.

"Miss, where are you going? It's pouring out there," the bartender cried.

She paused in the doorway. "I'm going to Boston in the morning," she said. Babylon and the bartender glanced at each other, then turned together to stare out of the port­hole. She strode steadily down the pier, ignoring the down­pour, looking neither to left nor right until the rain swal­lowed her.

It was five drinks later before Babylon was willing to follow her. The rain had diminished, but not stopped. By the time he reached his hut he was soaked and more irrita­ble than ever. The desk clerk did not even answer his call; the vision cube glowed orange and empty, with a taped voice saying brightly in four languages that the guest's call would be returned as soon as possible. Babylon understood them all, and none of them made him happier. He was more certain than ever that the clerk was a Free Polynesia fanatic, with the cold rage toward all Europeans that he had experienced on the outer islands. But knowing that did not suggest anything to do about it. He slept.

He did not sleep well—too many drinks, too much fa­tigue, too much irritation. At first he was dreaming of his speech laboratory in Old Cambridge, and the dean was snapping at him as he tried to puzzle out an obscure un­known language. His best Pmal translators could offer no clue; his computers rejected all programs as nulls or errata; and he was aware that more than his job, or even his life, depended on the outcome. He woke abruptly, in a sweat of fear, fumbling for his glasses.

It was still raining. He had slept less than an hour, but a cold wet wind was coming in through the slatted blinds. He closed them and climbed back into bed, reassuring himself that it was only a dream.

This time his dreams were more pleasant. A beautiful woman who seemed transparent as glass was leading him through a marvelous drusy cave. All about them were fac­eted diamonds and opals and rubies set into the rock walls. Not rock; even the walls glimmered and glowed, like a pre­cious metal. The woman did not speak, but he was content to be with her in silence. And then he looked away, and turned back to her, and she was gone. In her place was a cluster of great bright flowers that hung in air, while giant butterflies swam among them. It was hard to tell blossom from butterfly. Both seemed to be speaking to him, too low to understand, in tones like the chiming of a golden bell • . .

He woke up.

There was a chiming, and it came from his stereo cube. The bright orange number 4 danced under a legend that read messages waiting.

He sat up on the edge of the narrow bed, rubbing his eyes as he peered nearsightedly at the stereo. Jen Babylon was one of the very few human beings who wore glasses, rejecting both contacts and surgery, preferring to accept the amused stares of his colleagues and of strangers. And of course the confounded things were never there when he wanted them. He could see, behind the glow of the messages-waiting legend, what looked very much like the fluttery figure of his dream, but its outlines were fuzzed and unreal as the dream itself.

His search for his glasses was not in the least helped by the fact that his head was feeling the drinks he had had the night before, or that it was only five in the morning, more than an hour before he had planned to get up. When at last he found the glasses, next to the bed where they always were, the image snapped into clarity.

It was a butterfly! Or not quite, but something with filmy wings and more eyes than seemed necessary, dancing back and forth in the limited loop of the stored image.

It was a T'Worlie!

Babylon's jaw dropped. There were only a handful of T'Worlie on Earth. One of the oldest and proudest races of the Galaxy, they spent little time on the new member of the Galactic Confederation, the Earth, or its semicivilized peoples. And this one, he saw at once, was not on Earth. The T'Worlie came from a light-gravity planet, far out in the Orion arm. One of the reasons they disliked Earth was that its heavy pull crushed them to the ground; a T'Worlie on Earth had to creep around the surface like a wounded moth, prisoner of a tenfold weight increase that its filmy wings could not support. But this one was flying free.

Bemused, he stared at it for several minutes before it occurred to him that the message itself might answer his questions. "Release message," he ordered the stereo, and at once the repeating loop opened out and the butterfly crea­ture drew itself up and spoke to him, dancing and whisper­ing. It was speaking in its native language, Babylon knew, but the whispery-chirpy T'Worlie speech was not one of the galactic tongues he understood at all. "Translation mode," he commanded, and obediently the stereo interrupted the audio portion of the message to recirculate the message through its built-in Pmal circuits. Out here in the islands one could not expect really sophisticated machinery, but the artificial voice-over was clear enough:

"Communication for Dr. Babylon Jen," it rattled. "Mode urgent. Concur requisition to study unidentified spacecraft. Urge immediate compliance." And the image faded.

Babylon got up and made himself a cup of coffee from the autobar. It was strongly laced with chicory or some other substance, not at all what he was used to in Old Cambridge, but it contained caffeine enough to shock his nervous system awake.

He stood frowning at the lightening sky across the strait. What requisition? What was he being urged to comply with immediately? Above all, what "unidentified spacecraft"? And how much of his uncertainty was due to the inade­quacy of the stereo's primitive translation circuits, and how much to the peremptory nature of the T'Worlie?

The stage chimed gently to remind him that there were other messages. He sighed and said, "Release next mes­sage."

As he turned back to the stereo an ugly image was form­ing. It was not flesh and blood at all. It was a queer, box­like shape that hung in space within the three-dimensional stage, so lifelike that he could almost smell the acrid reek of the faint wisps of steam that issued from its edges. It was a robot, probably Scorpian—and again, since it hung easily in air, almost certainly not originating from Earth.

The creature spoke, and the Pmal rattled out its transla­tion:

"Jen Babylon," it rapped, "you are not under any cir­cumstances to accept transmission to Cuckoo. The conse­quences will be extremely grave. You have been notified."

Babylon swore softly to himself; it was a morning for confusing messages. "Release next message," he com­manded; might as well get all the confusion at once.

This one at least was human—even a human being he knew! It was the dean of his department, Margaret Kooseman, seated at her desk and beaming pleasantly at the transmitter. "I'm terribly sorry to interrupt your trip, Jen, dear," she said, "but this is a very great honor! Not only for you. The whole school will benefit." Her leathery old face was flushed with pleasure. "By now," she went on, "you will have received your travel itinerary, and I suppose this message will catch up with you somewhere before you get to Boston. Please come to see me as soon as convenient. I want to take you over to the public-relations people so we can get a little publicity out of this appointment for you. I can't tell you how much I envy you!"

And the stage went to orange fuzz again.

Babylon did not try to interpret. He snapped, "Release last message."

But all it was, was a telephone code and instructions to call someone named Ben Pertin at it; and, when Babylon tried the number, it did not answer.

That was a puzzle of a whole other kind. Ben Pertin! He knew the name. It was an old school chum whom he had not seen in a good many years. Why would Pertin be call­ing him here? For that matter, how had Pertin tracked him down? He had not himself known he would be staying at this hotel until the peremptory recall order and travel in­structions caught him between atolls, the day before . . . And something else nagged at him about Ben Pertin, al­though he could not think just what.

It was all very puzzling. Babylon, sitting on the tiny porch of his shack, with the rising sun making ripples of blood on the gentle lagoon, could understand only that he was being asked to do something, which someone else didn't want him to do, but which the powerful dean of his department could see a solid advantage in for herself.

He shook his head and got up for more coffee from the autobar. One alien creature told him to do something. An­other ordered him not to. His dean was all smiles and sweetness without saying what she was being sweet about; and he had a call from someone he hadn't seen in years; and why was it all happening? What had suddenly made a respected, but really rather obscure, professor of quantum- dynamic linguistics suddenly so interesting that people sought him out?

There was no answer. He lifted the cup to his lips—then caught sight of the stereo box. The time! He should have been packed and out of there! That Polynesie-libre desk clerk had failed to call him; and now he had about ten minutes to get to the island's hoverport!

Jen Babylon's specialty was the deep structure of lan­guage. The fact that it was technically called "quantum- dynamic linguistics" offered clues as to what it was all about, but hardly one human being in a thousand could have explained what the name meant, and fewer than one in a million had any real grasp of its principles.

Linguistics had come a long way since the early studies of Chomsky and Babbage and Korzybski and Claude Shan­non. As the pure study of the structure of language, it dated from Chomsky's discovery that sentences which seemed identical in structure were, in fact, essentially and wholly different from each other, and that, even more puz­zling, every English-speaking person knew this without knowing that he did. The sentences were not complicated: "John is easy to please." "John is eager to please." Every­one understands both those sentences, and generations of grammar-school teachers have shown their ten-year-olds how to parse them, as if they were identical. Then Chom­sky came along. He pointed out that they could not be the same since if you translated them from the active to the passive voice they could not follow the same rules. "It is easy to please John" is good English. "It is eager to please John" was instantly recognized as a false sentence by everyone who spoke the language, even the ten-year-olds. From clues like this Chomsky developed his theory of deep structures and of an underlying rule of law that pertained to all languages—every language that had ever existed on Earth, and even every language that ever could exist, any­where. Sometimes his rules were called transformational grammar, and that was the beginning.

At about that same remotely historical time, Korzybski began that search for meaning he called semantics, Shan­non developed the notion of the unit-quantity of informa­tion that he called a bit, and many workers, building on the pioneering Babbage and others, developed rules of expres­sion that permitted them to draw diagrams and equations to test statements for truth or falsity. Boolean algebra and Venn diagrams played a part in what Jen Babylon did, but they, too, were only a beginning. The science was known as quantum linguistics when he came to it. The "dynamic" part was his contribution. For with Babylon's Algorithms, it was easy to write computer programs that could pene­trate the deep structure of even a totally unfamiliar lan­guage, given almost any contextual clues at all.

Jen Babylon, however unprepossessing he might seem at first contact, had revolutionized his science, and now, still young, he was receiving the rewards and paying the penal­ties. Sometimes they were the same thing. Travel was one of the perquisites, but it also kept him from any permanent relationships. He needed the freedom to go where his work took him, sometimes at a moment's notice: to Indonesia to work on the symbolism of predawn man's first few scratched symbols (were they true writing? the most ex­haustive studies had yet to be sure); to Baffin Island, to tape a few dying words from the suddenly discovered last survivor of a vanished Eskimo tribe; here to Western Poly­nesia. Even to the Extra-Solar Studies Commission in Bei­rut, when a thorny problem came up in designing transla­tors for the languages of the other galactic races. So he spent a great deal of his time in aircraft. When he missed his shuttle to the supersonic field on Tahiti, he had experi­ence and resource enough to find another hovercraft from the other side of Moorda; he battled through customs, car­ried his bag in his hand, and leaped onto the hydrogen- fueled 3000-class jet just before the doors closed and the loading ramp pulled away.

He was used to having people stare at him as he made one of these last-minute rashes. This time, though, the heads were turned in a different direction, and to Baby­lon's surprise he saw the woman from the hotel beach standing in a distant aisle, looking as remote as ever while an Air France stewardess expostulated with her. At least this time she was dressed! But she seemed to be wearing the same pareu, no more carefully tied than before. Whatever the problem was, it was submerged in the seat-belt sign's urgency; Babylon strapped himself into his reclining couch. The big hydrogen jet streaked off the long over-the-water runway from Faaa-Faaa Airport and pointed its narrow nose toward the distant North American shore. As it climbed at its steady 3,000 kilometers an hour Babylon pressed the sleeper button, and his chair elevated and ex­tended itself to become an upper berth. He had cultivated the ability to sleep when he could; and he began to drift off easily . . .

And then came abruptly awake.

Ben Pertin! The man who had called him, the man he had not seen for years—suddenly Babylon remembered why that was so. They had lost touch, true, but there was a stronger reason than that.

It had been just a few years after graduation, in an acci­dent while spearfishing in Long Island Lake. Pertin was always a restless, ever-moving sort of person, always look­ing for a new experience.

He found one there, at the bottom of Long Island Lake. His oxygen regulator failed, and he drowned.