Wall Around a Star

SEVEN

"1 give you greeting," said a voice in Jen Babylon's dreams. He struggled against waking up, failed, and opened his eyes.

Hanging in the air in front of him was a creature with five oddly placed eyes in a bat's gnarled face, supporting itself on filmy wings. "I am Mimmie, Dr. Babylon," said the creature through the Pmal translator by Babylon's head. "I am familiar with your work on linguistics and wish to associate myself with your efforts."

Still more than half asleep, Babylon said automatically, "Good morning." He pushed the restraining webs of this place he had slept in aside and sat up, catching himself just in time as the muscular effort almost flung him across the sleeping chamber . . . and memory flooded in.

"It is known," the creature went on remorselessly, "that Earth sapients have prolonged start-up periods after power- down status. Query: Are you functional?"

Babylon straightened out, grasping one of the catch- cables and reaching instinctively for his glasses. His ears were still ringing, and he felt a stiffness in his joints that had not been there before coming to this strange place. "If you mean am I awake, yes." Not finding the glasses, he remembered they were no longer necessary.

"Disjunct, Dr. Babylon," the creature said politely. He had already recognized it as a T'Worlie, that oldest of space- going races, the ones who had originally discovered Cuckoo. Perhaps the T'Worlie he had met before. From it a series of pungent, not unpleasant aromas wafted: a vinegary scent of curiosity, burnt-honey of controlled impatience, coppery concern. "You seem perturbed."

Babylon said bitterly, "I guess you could call it that, yes."

"Confirmation," the TWorlie agreed. "You are con­cerned over recent happenings on surface."

"Wouldn't you be? One of my oldest friends dead—"

"Reference is assumed to Ben Pertin," the T'Worlie piped. "Understood. Offer ameliorating data: There is no shortage of Ben Pertins in vicinity of Cuckoo. Fourteen- plus known specimens, at least three surviving."

Babylon shook his head, incredulous. How could one re­late to these creatures who took life so lightly? Even the humans like Ben—like the late Ben—himself? Much less this thing that floated before him.

Still, the situation was interesting. His scholarly mind awoke to curiosity. Babylon had learned some of the T'Worlie scent vocabulary as a part of his graduate studies. But to sniff the stoppers of tubes in the linguistics lab at the university was no real analog to the presence of a crea­ture sending them out in waves of feeling. Babylon shook himself, dismissing the burden of worries and fears as best he could. "Did you say you wanted to help me?"

"Confirmation. Mimmie, deceased, was our race's great­est linguist, Dr. Babylon."

"I see. And you studied with, uh, this Mimmie?"

"Negation, Dr. Babylon. I am identical with this Mim­mie. I am Mimmie."

"Oh, I see. You're a tachyon copy," Babylon said, feel­ing an embarrassment that he could not account for.

Garlicky waves of amusement came from the T'Worlie. "Confirmation. I am tachyon copy of Mimmie. You are tachyon copy of Dr. Jen Babylon."

Babylon was startled, but then he grinned. "Right you are, Mimmie. As you say, Earth sapients have prolonged start-up periods after power-down. IH be pleased and hon­ored to work with you. Do you want to get started?"

"Disjunct confirmation, Dr. Babylon. Confirm that I want to get started. Potential negative feasibility of doing so. Council meeting has been requested with you in atten­dance concerning events resulting in loss of lander and dam­age to Being HG-87, Scorpian robot."

Babylon was startled. "I'm going to be put on trial? When?"

"Negative trial, Dr. Babylon. As to time, twenty hours, error bar two hours plus or minus."

"Great!" Babylon snarled. "I come all the way out here to do a job for somebody who gets himself killed in the process, I nearly get killed myself— Oh, hell," he said, as the T'Worlie exuded a saffron scent of sympathy, "I guess there should be some sort of inquiry, after all. Twenty hours? Well. That's a long way away; do you want to get started on the data I brought back?"

Since Pmal translators were a human invention, though greatly improved by technologies borrowed from other ga­lactic races, the T'Worlie was not entirely familiar with them; but with Jen Babylon working alongside he quickly joined in running through the first tests on the data from the wrecked ship.

Pmal translators operated in three separate modes: syn­chronic, diachronic, and morphological. For most human languages, the synchronic mode was usually enough. It only meant that the translator stored words and matched them against its library of known words. A sample of a few dozen lexigrams would allow it to recognize that the lan­guage was, say, from the Indo-European group rather than the Algonkian or one of the languages of Southeast Asia. Generally it could also instantly detect the rattle of Sirians, the tweeting of T'Worlie or the half-dozen other principal galactic tongues. A few more words would generally cut between, say, the Germanic and the Latin; no more than a couple of sentences would allow it to determine that the language was not French or Portuguese or Romanian, but Italian, and then it was only a matter of discriminating the right dialect. From then on it deployed its database of lan­guages and grammars, and cross-mapping was easy.

Of course, it was not really that simple. Spoken lan­guages do not come in discrete packets of "words." "Words" are a linguists' invention. The analyzed sound trace of any spoken sentence shows breaks and fusions that do not correspond to the conventions of the written lan­guage. The Pmal circuits that learned to average out the actual pauses and redivide the sounds into the units of for­mal analysis were quite sophisticated; they were, basically, what made Dr. Linebarger's translators work.

When the synchronic mode failed, the Pmal had the diachronic resource. It matched root words against its data­base of known protolanguages, looking for resemblances according to a complex algorithm of vowel and consonant shifts. It was this aspect of linguistics in which Jen Babylon was one of the Galaxy's great experts. But it failed him now. The portable Pmal could not even make a beginning. Even the programs Jen Babylon had brought from Earth, now stored in the farlink memory, could find no analogs in any of the families or phyla or even macrophyla in the store.

Remained morphological mapping. In this mode the portable Pmals were very slow, and even Jen's own pro­grams pored over the possible match between sounds, col­ors, and rhythms of the data taped from the block, match­ing them against hypothesized events and phenomena, for hours without result. The T'Worlie fluttered away, and re­turned with a Sirian eye tugging instruments of its own to Babylon's workplace . . .

And another blank. None of the known languages or dia­lects of the Galaxy matched in any way to the phonemes, symbols, or structures of the unknown tongue. Or tongues.

Or gibberish.

After eighteen hours of trying to decide which, Jen Babylon was exhausted. When the skinny form of Doc Chimp peered around the doorframe and asked, "All right if I come in, Dr. Babylon?" he suddenly realized how tired he was.

"Certainly, Doc Chimp. But I was just thinking of going to sleep. Maybe a night's rest will give me a clue about this language."

"It hasn't been working out?"

"Not in the least, Doc. There is no great galactic lan­guage cognate to it, both Mimmie and I will attest to that."

"What a shame," the chimp said sympathetically. "I sup­pose, of course, you've also tried matching against the na­tive languages of Cuckoo? Well, certainly—"

"Native languages?" Babylon repeated.

"—certainly you have, you don't need a dumb old mon­key to tell you that\ Please excuse me, Dr. Babylon." The chimp looked embarrassed at his own presumption. "How­ever," he said, "that's not why I'm here. I thought I'd bet­ter take you to the hearing myself—this place is so confus­ing!"

"Hearing?" Babylon realized how fatigued he was; all he could seem to do was repeat what Doc Chimp said. And then he remembered. "The hearing!"

Doc Chimp nodded, his little shoe-button eyes worried. "I wish you'd been able to get a little rest first," he said fretfully. "To make a good impression, you know. Al­though this isn't anything serious—don't misunderstand me—or at least it shouldn't be. Although the way things are going now, you never know what's going to be serious and what isn't, and that's the truth, Dr. Babylon!"

Babylon took a deep breath, and pulled himself together. The inquiry meeting had escaped his mind entirely, and now that it was at hand it began to seem worrisome indeed. If only Ben Pertin were here to advise him!

But he wasn't, and that was that. "All right," he said. "Just let me speak to Mimmie first."

The T'Worlie was hovering politely a few feet away. "You wish me to proceed with the matches of the Cuckoo tongues in your absence," it trilled, and the Pmal conveyed the English words. "Confirmation, Dr. Babylon. Will do so." And it fluttered away to the instruments, leaving a frying-bacon scent behind that Babylon recognized as laughter.

It was the first real chance Jen Babylon had had to look around the orbiter. The shock of the death of his own du­plicate, the rising concern about the council meeting he was about to face, even his fatigue were set aside as he rubbernecked like any tourist. So strange a place! he thought as he launched himself after the chimpanzee from one handhold to another, and: What am I doing here, any­way?

But there was no answer to that.

They shot through corridors, drifted across open com­mon rooms. Babylon had expected to see more beings than were in evidence. They encountered only a few; but what a few! Another of those doughy shape-changing creatures called Sheliaks, a great blue Sirian eye, with little crablike pincers hanging below the orb, passing them with a ripping sound of electrostatic force, a silvery cloud of insectlike creatures that he recognized as Boaty-Bits. Once he saw four or five actual human beings, working over a dismem­bered copper-colored machine. He almost called to Doc Chimp to pause so that he could speak to them, when he noticed the telltale opacity of expression and incipient locomotor-ataxia gait that told him they were Purchased People. Convicts, who had been bought as proxies by crea­tures so alien that they could not survive in oxygen-bearing air, supporting a water-based chemistry. He wondered if any of the group who had been transmitted with him were among them, but recognized none.

Doc Chimp was cowering at an intersection, gesturing frantically to him to stop.

Babylon caught a handhold with flailing arms, started to speak, saw the pleading look in the chimp's eyes, and de­sisted. There was a droning, malevolent sound growing in the next corridor; it peaked, a triangular shape shot swiftly past, and the chimpanzee sighed. "That's a deltaform, Dr. Babylon," he whispered. "They're the worst of the lot. I just didn't want him to see us here."

The little ape's shoe-button eyes were dull, and his fur seemed bedraggled; all the cheerfulness with which he had come to meet Babylon was gone. "Why shouldn't we be here?" he asked the chimp. "I was summoned to the meet­ing, after all."

The chimp coughed apologetically, lifted his kepi, and scratched the hairy scalp beneath it. "Well, that's what I was just getting around to telling you, Dr. Babylon," he said. "The meeting's not for almost an hour yet. We're going to make a little stop first. We're almost there," he added, pushing himself away and across the broad corridor. Babylon pursued hastily.

"Where's 'there'?" he demanded of the retreating chimp.

"It's Ben Line's room," the chimpanzee called over his shoulder. "Real nice place, too. Old Ben came here years and years ago, you know, so he got first pick of quarters. Fixed it up to suit himself." He caught a holding strap and hung by the side of the passage, just outside a door, until Babylon caught up with him.

Babylon clung to another strap, looking around. It seemed almost ghoulish to be going to the room of his dead friend. "Why are we doing this?" he panted. "Couldn't it wait till after the meeting?"

"I don't think so," the chimp chattered nervously, look­ing up and down the hall. "You'd better go inside now, Dr. Babylon. This is the place."

Babylon hesitated. "I really don't see why—"

"Just go in, Dr. Babylon!" said the chimp, doing some­thing with the door. As it slid open he caught Babylon's shoulder in his astonishingly strong hand and gently thrust him inside.

The door closed behind him.

The room Ben Line Pertin had slept in was dimly lit, but Babylon could make out the shape. It was a good deal more homey than the bare cubicle Babylon had been given: a faceted, polyhedral enclosure, with most of the interior faces covered with flat photographs of scenes from his life. Next to the entrance was an exterior shot of the great orbiter Sun One, where Ben Pertin had first been transmitted from Earth. Over his bed loomed the immense majesty of a mountain that, Babylon knew, had been the grave of several Ben Pertins; it was called "Knife-in-the- Sky" in one of those Cuckoo languages that, Babylon re­membered to hope, the T'Worlie was now feeding into the great Pmals. And, in the bed—

In the bed something was moving. A figure sat up and peered at Babylon, and a familiar voice said, "Well, Jen, about time you got here!"

In astonishment, Babylon lost his grip on the handhold. "Ben!" he gasped. "But—but you're dead."

Two of the facets of the cubicle glowed a little more brightly, as Ben Pertin turned up the lights of his room. "Why, I guess I am, a lot of me," he said bitterly. "Grab hold of that strap, for God's sake. Else you'll be bumping all over the place."

Babylon flailed around until he caught the end of the holding strap and pulled himself back to the wall, still un­able to take it in. "You're a tachyon copy," he guessed.

"Well, sure—what else? We all are. But if you mean I'm not the Ben Pertin who got blown away with you down by the old ship you're wrong."

"But we left you there!"

"Yes, you did," Pertin agreed moodily. "Oh, I'm not blaming you—after all, I pushed you in ahead of me. But I have to tell you I didn't like it, after you'd all gone and the tachyon transmitter shorted out. Still, that's all water under the bridge now. The important thing's what we do now."

He sat up, and for the first time Babylon realized Pertin was not alone in the bed. A slower stirring on the far side of the coverings produced a female human face, which stared at Jen Babylon without speaking. "Excuse me," Baby­lon said automatically.

Pertin scowled. "For what? Oh, you're looking at Doris." He laughed. "Don't worry about Doris; she's a Purchased Person. Her owners have this academic interest in human sexual behavior, so sometimes when things aren't busy for them they let me borrow her for a while. And sometimes I need to, believe me. Never more than when I finally got the transmitter fixed and got back here!" He threw the covers off; the movement half buried the woman, who seemed not to mind, perhaps not even to notice. "But that doesn't matter," he said sharply. "Listen, Jen! I told Doc Chimp to bring you here without saying anything, because out of all this trouble we've got a good break!"

"What's that?"

"No one knows I'm here!" he cried triumphantly.

Babylon pulled himself over to a more comfortable posi­tion—more comfortable mostly because it hid the bright, empty eyes of the woman named Doris. "I really don't see why that is going to help us translate the language," he said.

"Not help us translate. Help us get this place straight­ened out!" Pertin snapped. "As long as they don't know I'm here I have freedom of action, don't you see?"

"To do what, exactly?" Babylon demanded.

Pertin hesitated. "Well, that I can't say, exactly," he ad­mitted. "What I know for sure is that some of them are out to wreck this place—even destroy the whole of Cuckoo! And, no, I don't know which ones. Not for sure. The Scorpians, yes, almost certainly. The deltaforms—I wouldn't put anything past those bastards! I don't think the T'Worlie are in it, or the Sheliaks, either, although there's always a chance of an aberrant individual in even a friendly race—"

"Ben," Babylon said patiently, suddenly feeling a rush of sympathy for the worn, harried man who had once been his friend, "are you sure you're not imagining all this?"

Pertin scowled at him. "You're not one of those aberrants yourself, are you?" he demanded. "No, of course not. Sorry. But you just don't know what it's like here. Some­times I even worry about Doris, although her owners have never, ever shown any interest in the politics of what hap­pens here; they're just curious, want to observe without tak­ing part. I even worry about the Doc. No. Don't think I'm crazy, Jen—even if I am. I know I'm not crazy on the subject of some of these creatures wanting Cuckoo de­stroyed, and you and me with it!"

He flung back the cover, launched himself across the chamber to a cupboard, began pulling out fresh clothes. "While you're in the meeting, I'm going to look around. The worst ones are sure to be at the meeting—they only convened it to embarrass you and Doc Chimp, and any other friends of mine that might still be around. Say! I wonder! Do you suppose they could have arranged it so I'd be left down there to die? —No, I suppose not; but they would have if they could!"

A thought was insistently forming itself in Jen Babylon's mind, and the word that summed it up was paranoia. What did you do with a man who had gone over the edge? Heaven knew Pertin had every reason; but that did not make it easier. He said gently, "You know, Ben Line, I think you ought to rest a while longer."

"Don't call me that!" Pertin spun to glare at him. "Ben Line Pertin's dead down there in the lander. The one you're talking to is—is—is Ben Omega Pertin. The last of the Ben Pertins—and maybe one too many, at that!"

The situation was getting to be more than Babylon could handle, exhausted as he was, with his mind full of a hundred other concerns. A scratching at the door rescued him: Doc Chimp, leathery face poking in timorously, warning that it would not do to keep the meeting waiting. Fortunately it was only a short distance, but Babylon found time to say a word to the chimpanzee as they brought up before a larger, more official-looking door than any he had yet passed through. "Hold on a second," he panted. "I'm worried about Ben!"

The chimp poked its muzzle at him in what would have been a pout if he had had lips. "You're worried, Dr. Baby­lon? What do you think I've been, all this terrible long time?"

"Well—isn't there a medical service here on the orbiter? Some sort of psychotherapy?"

Doc Chimp looked puzzled. "What would Ben want therapy for, Dr. Babylon? Any more than any of the rest of us, I mean? . . . Oh, I see!" The leathery lips split in a grin. "You think he's having delusions about the wicked­ness of the deltaforms and the Scorpians and all those other beasts and buckets of junk! Wish it were true, Dr. Baby­lon! I'm afraid he's sane as you and I where that's con­cerned—maybe a lot saner! Now," he said, reaching for the door, "spruce up your posture and put a smile on your face! Make them think you've got the Galaxy by the tail and you'd just as soon as not swing it out past Andromeda! 'Cause if you let them think for a minute you're weak or scared—then you'll find out just how evil those beings can be!"

The room was huge and irregular, and it seemed to be packed with creatures and—things! Some he recognized, others not. A furry, big-eyed kitten-shape purred on the fat black cushion of its life-support system. A slithering eel­like shape squirmed restlessly in among and behind the other creatures, with tentacled eyes that thrust themselves in all directions. Babylon caught his breath. There was a creature that was the surest shape of a nightmare, clad in armor that glittered slimily like an insect's chitin, black on its back and scarlet on its belly; its eyes were multiple globes of greenish jelly, and it had yellow, leathery wings. It was staring directly at Babylon, and without volition he moved away. And that was only the beginning: a pair of T'Worlie, a silver hive of Boaty-Bits, three Purchased Peo­ple, a soggy-dough Sheliak—and, yes, there was a Scorpian robot. No, wrong. There were two of them, but one was stripped down, most of its casing removed, the propulsion system dead. It traveled on the back of the other one like a papoose. There is no easy way for a human being to tell one mass-produced Scorpian from another, but Babylon was sure that the one being carried had been his compan­ion down below.

There was a racket of drumroll, squeak, shriek, and yowl as he came in, but the sound stopped. Everyone turned and stared at him, and Jen Babylon halted, gripping a handhold, for the first time aware of just what sort of council he was dealing with.

Doc Chimp, entering behind him, saw his hesitation and moved to ease it. He launched himself toward the center of the room, thrusting one long, skinny paw against Babylon's shoulder and stopping himself with a recoil-less collision against the Sheliak. "Let me introduce you!" he shrilled, hanging lazily in midair with the red flaps of his vest flying like small wings. "Folks and gentle beings, this is Dr. Jensen Babylon, our planet's most distinguished expert in quantum-dynamic linguistics—and not unknown to members of his craft throughout the Galaxy. Even herel He has come to risk his life for us—even to lose it, now and then, as so many of us have. Bid him welcome, beings all!"

The uproar broke out again, dominated by a roar of sur­prising volume from the kitten-shaped creature on the black hassock. Babylon's Pmal translated: "Terrestrial monkeys behave like monkeys everywhere. Be still, pri­mate, for significant business of this council!"

Doc Chimp licked his lips, but faced the kitten bravely. "True," he chattered, "I am only a humble monkey, and no one cares for me. But no one cares about any of us here. We go to our many deaths without hope of reward. Yet be of good cheer! With terrestrial primate brawn and ter­restrial primate courage to help you, you may yet—"

"Be still!" the growl thundered. "Babylon! Why are you here?"

It was not a question Jen Babylon had expected. The only true answers were that he didn't really know, and cer­tainly had never desired it, but Doc Chimp was glancing at him nervously and he saw that the little creature was ac­tually trembling. He temporized. "I thought this meeting was to discuss the wreck of the lander," he said.

Uproar of many queer voices again, with the kitten's basso purr breaking through: "It is to discuss you, Dr. Jen Babylon. We have no use here for quantum-dynamic lin­guistics practiced by primitive races. You are a waste of scarce resources! What makes you think this language can be translated? Suppose the creatures who spoke it do not think of the world the way we do? Suppose their interests are internal? abstract? mathematical? Suppose their mode of communication is telepathic, or evocative, or—"

Suddenly Babylon was fed up. "Suppose you shut up," he snapped. "It's obvious that your race is among the prim­itive ones in this respect! Look. What do you use lan­guage for? To communicate. What do you communicate about? Matters of mutual interest. Without the mutuality there is no communication—not because the language fails to conceptualize the material, but because the material it­self is not mutual—"

He paused, because Doc Chimp was shaking his head worriedly. "At any rate," he went on after a moment, "I have confidence that I can untangle the language, farlink will help. If necessary I'll send tapes back to my lab—to the laboratories in Boston for analysis by the main­frame equipment there. Trust me, we'll get it solved," he said, aware that he was trying to placate this group of un­pleasant personalities.

A rattle sounded from the whole Scorpian, translated by the Pmal as harsh laughter. "Negative trust," it said. "De­fer decision on 'solved.' Not relevant in any case. Entire project, also entire function of investigation of 'Cuckoo' ob­ject, as well as 'Cuckoo' object itself, of no further impor­tance. Recommend termination."

The meeting went on beyond that, but Babylon under­stood little of what was happening. The galactic creatures seemed to have had the practice of the disorderly assem­blies long enough that they could understand what was going on. Or more likely, didn't really care. Babylon had not. When all of them were chirping or buzzing or thunder­ing at once, the Pmals were swamped. Only fragmentary phrases came out, in disconnected order.

Yet when they were outside Doc Chimp said moodily, "Well, I think it went well enough, Dr. Babylon—"

"Jen, please."

"—Jen, but you never know with these creatures." He tugged Babylon out of the main corridor into a smaller one, heading back toward their own quarters of the orbiter; a flight of T'Worlie fluttered out of the way, exuding a quick barnyard odor of mild annoyance. "But maybe you'd better do what you said and get your other self back on Earth to help. We may not have very much time."

"All right," Babylon said, gasping with the effort of trying to match the chimpanzee in tug-and-kick along the corridors. "I don't see what the hurry is, though."

The chimp paused, grabbing a handhold with one skinny arm and snatching Babylon in midflight with the other. He glanced up and down the corridor, his face stiff with worry. "You don't?" he whispered softly. "I thought you were listening, inside there. Didn't you wonder what that Scorpian meant by 'termination'?"