Wall Around a Star

EIGHT

He should have taken the subtrain to Cambridge, but he wanted the exercise. Now the weather had turned wet and cold and the wind whipped raindrops up the Charles River. Jen Babylon shivered and tried to walk faster across the bridge.

That was hard to do, because there were knots of people standing about, staring at the water—strange time for rub­bernecking! Babylon stepped down off the sidewalk to pass one milling cluster, coming perilously close to the rushing stream of hovertaxis and vans, and an elderly woman stepped out ahead of him, coming toward him. "Careful!" he snapped, rescuing her from the traffic lanes.

"Oh, sorry," she said, putting her hand out to reassure herself by touching him. "Ugly-looking things, aren't they?"

Not knowing what she was talking about, he nodded, slipped past her back onto the sidewalk, and found himself in a clear place. He glanced over the railing at the water, and then he saw.

The river's edge was alive with huge, glass-bodied crabs.

The woman had certainly been right; the ugly things sur­rounded the water-filtration plant like scuttling crustacean ghosts. Babylon imagined he could hear the clicking and slithering even on the bridge, though it was impossible, of course, with the traffic so close behind him. Filthy crea­tures! And more and more of them all the time, appear­ing at shipyards and LH-storage facilities, stopping traffic on main arteries and even threatening the tachyon- transmission center. The authorities first tried to control them, then to destroy—explosives, flamethrowers, clubs, even by running Army tanks and road rollers over them to crush them. But the beings were virtually indestructible. Men with hammers, they had discovered, could blind them by pounding their eyes into rubble, and then the creatures became immobile and could be carted away. But they mul­tiplied faster than one-on-one tactics could destroy them— in what way, no one knew. In the Middle Ages people be­lieved that mice were spontaneously generated in piles of unwashed clothing; now the best opinion anyone could give was that the crabs appeared automatically in shallow water. So much for the steady advance of scientific knowledge!

They were a problem—but not particularly Jen Baby­lon's problem, and he had plenty of his own. A robot hover- taxi hesitated before him, waiting for a clump of pedes­trians to get out of the way, and Babylon gave up the thought of exercise and jumped in. His problems were waiting for him at the university. It was impossible to put them off forever—though, Babylon thought wistfully, what an attractive idea that was! It seemed impossible that only a few weeks ago he had been taping old native dialects on Bora-Bora, with no worry in the world except the hope of promotion and the demands of his work.

As soon as he got to his desk he tried one more time to confront the most personal of his problems by dialing Sheryl's call code on the stereophone.

And, one more time, it was her recorded image that an­swered him, not herself. "I'm terribly sorry," it said, "that I am not able to be here in person just now. I am occupied in higher work." Higher work! Madness, Babylon thought, as the recorded figure paused. There was a look of exaltation on her gaunt, consecrated face. This was not the off­handed, faintly bored Sheryl who had been his bed com­panion for so many months. The real Sheryl was drawling and mostly amused, where this person was . . . obsessed; Sheryl was fastidious about her appearance and dress, while this person had thrown on the first garments that presented themselves, and her hair had not been washed, or even brushed, for days. In a sudden burst of rapture the figure whispered, "I Cry the imminent majesty of Cuckoo" . . . and vanished.

Babylon watched the image shatter into golden mist and fade away. He was sorely troubled. It was not as if he had any commitment to Sheryl. They had never talked of any permanent relationship, much less marriage. Yet—they had been lovers for more than a year, had shared more intimacies than merely the bed. Could he let her do this to herself?

Or—more to the point—did he have any way to stop her?

A voice from the doorway brought him face to face with the second of his problems: Dean Margaret Kooseman. "Oh, Jen dear," she whispered, a sad smile of compassion on her weather-beaten face, "how terrible this must be for you. Such a sweet, pretty girl, to get mixed up with those horrid Kooks!"

"Yes, well, thanks, Margaret," Babylon said gruffly, taking off his glasses to see her more directly. It did not pay to let Margaret Kooseman too far inside your private life. "What can I do for you?"

She came in and sat primly down beside his desk, re­laxed as she gazed around the room. In one corner the pro­cessor was turning pages in an old missionary's dictionary of Hawaiian, inputting dialects to correlate against Baby­lon's own, more recent data; in another, two different information-handling machines were purring to each other as they matched sounds against sense. "What a nice, or­derly person you are, Jen," she said approvingly. "In this very disordered world, you're priceless!"

"You're very kind, Margaret. Is that what you came here to tell me?"

"And so direct and to the point, too," she sighed, favor­ing him with a smile. "But you have to let me just breathe hard for a moment, Jen. I've just come from a faculty sen­ate meeting and, oh, the noise and argument there! You know what they're like." He didn't, of course; plebes like himself weren't allowed in. "And this time worse than usual. Those crabby things! We were given some samples by the Public Safety Commission to try to figure out what to do about them—and would you believe it, everybody wanted them? The veterinary medicine school said they were animals, Charley Kentwell said they belonged to him because they were silicon-based and therefore inorganic chemistry, the computer people claimed they were ma­chines—we had to give one to each of them to shut them up."

"I wouldn't have thought there was any scarcity of them," Babylon commented.

The dean nodded enthusiastically. "You see what I mean? You're always right to the point! But there's more to it—somebody even suggested you ought to take time out from your very valuable work to study them, because there's a chance that they come from one of the known galactic planets, and may have a language—"

"Margaret!"

"No, of course that was silly. I put my foot right down on that. Especially since I'm afraid you're going to have to postpone all your other work for something else, anyway."

So at last they were coming to the point! Babylon's voice was almost shaking with repressed anger as he demanded, "What are you talking about?"

"Cuckoo, I'm afraid."

"But I've already done what you asked!"

She nodded sadly. "Isn't it terrible? One does so much, and then they always demand just one more thing from you. This time it's a packet of data from Cuckoo." She fished in her dispatch case and brought out a glimmering silver ball. "This is it—ion-coded, because there's so much of it You'll have to feed it into your databank before you can work with it. It just came from the tachyon station for you."

"Margaret! My work with the ancient Polynesian dia­lects—"

"Yes, isn't it a pity? But we can't give you any more processor time, so you'll just have to feed all that into slow storage and clear the machines for this. I know I can rely on you. That's why, when I retire—"

"Give me the damn thing," he said sharply, unwilling to hear those vague promises again. What a waste! At least an hour to clear the databanks of the ongoing material— another hour, maybe five or six hours, for the processors to assimilate this unwieldy mass of material from Cuckoo— and then God knew how many more hours and days of puzzling it over before he could get back to his real work.

She smiled and got up, coming around the desk to touch the top of his head with her dry lips. "You're so good, Jen," she sighed, setting the gleaming sphere gently on his desk. "And, oh, yes, there's a message for you on the stereostage concerning this stuff." She giggled. "It's so funny, really—it's from yourself!"

Universities, which are always underfunded in compari­son with the projects they would like to undertake, cannot function without copious supplies of slave labor. These are called "graduate students." I suppose I should be grateful, Babylon told himself, that at least Margaret gave me two extra pairs of hands—of course, I had to beg for them.

But the two graduate students were a big help all the same. Marco, the Filipino-Malay-American, had listened quietly to his instructions, nodded and gone off to arrange storage for the Polynesian material; Althea, the blond young woman from Texas, went to work instantly with a portable processor to read out the index codes from the glittering sphere and plan its storage in the databanks. She was quite a pretty young woman, and having her move about his office, with the faint wisp of perfume that seemed to follow her everywhere, reminded Babylon un­comfortably that it had been a long time since he and Sheryl had released their sexual tensions on each other. He punched out Sheryl's code once more, got the same re­sponse, swore to himself . . . and, after a moment's thought, replayed the message from Cuckoo.

His own face looked out from the stage at him, and his own voice spoke. A shiver ran up his spine as he heard himself say, "Hello, me. Is that how you say it? I mean, how I say it—or we say it?" Jen's face grinned at the other

Jen, unhappily. "Well, listen, we both know this is strange, and we both know everything either of us knew up until old Margaret talked us into this thing—so I'll come right to the point. I know you're busy. I know you don't want to do this. But I need help. I have this body of material and I have to have total interpretation of it—semantic, morpho­logical, grammatical, every parameter there is. It's a matter of life and death, Jen. Our life."

The one and original Jen Babylon—the one on Earth— snapped it off at that point; the rest was technical instruc­tions, and they were already being carried out.

Since there was no help for it, Babylon was slowly begin­ning to come around to the feeling that this new task was going to be interesting in its own right. What made Baby­lon a professor in the first place was the pure lust of the scholar, and here was a whole new family of tongues, tachyon-transmitted from forty thousand light-years out in space, and all his. No ear on Earth had ever heard these sounds before, no eye ever seen the markings. He drew a pad toward him and began to make notes.

"Dr. Babylon?"

He looked up, irritated. "Yes, Althea?"

"I didn't want to interrupt you, but you know I used to be pretty friendly with Sheryl, and I couldn't help seeing that you were trying to call her."

He nodded, and she went on.

"I think she's there, really, Dr. Babylon. My boyfriend lives right down the block from her and he's seen her, along with, uh, some of the—"

Babylon finished for her: "The Kooks."

"Yes. The Kooks. They've got a sort of a pad, or a com­mune, or whatever they call it right in her apartment house. Right next door to hers, in fact." She broke off to look at the display on her portable processor, punched a quick command, studied the result, and then looked up. "You know, Dr. Babylon," she said, "it's going to be at least a couple of hours before there's anything for you to do here."

He leaned back and rubbed his neck. "I suppose so," he agreed.

"Well, I was just thinking—you'll probably be working late once you get started. So if you wanted to take off for a few hours, Marco and I can certainly cope with inputting the data."

The more Babylon thought about it, the more it seemed like a good idea. And then there was the question of Sheryl . . .

He was already in a hovercab, human-driven this time, across the Charles and heading for the old buildings behind the Criminal Courts when he realized just how tactful Althea had been. Quite a nice girl! She had put the idea in his head and then reminded him he could do something about it, all without appearing to interfere in his private affairs at all. A woman like that, he thought, would go far—

Which his taxi would not, it seemed. It had come to a complete halt. "Sorry, pal," the cabbie said, leaning back toward the passenger section. "The damn Kooks again, wouldn't you know it? They're blocking the whole square."

Babylon leaned forward to stare over the driver's shoul­der. There were more of them than ever, thousands at least, as dirty and ragged and—exalted—as ever. They were chanting in such disorder that he could make out no words, but some of the placards they carried were read­able: don't defile cuckoo! and criminals belong on earth, not in heaven! and a dozen others. The police were making no effort to disperse them, just to keep them from overflowing into the streets around the Criminal Courts Building.

Babylon glanced at his watch and made a decision. "Let me out here," he told the driver. "I'll walk the rest of the way."

But, he thought, maybe what he sought was in that square . . .

In the detention-area halls of the Criminal Courts Build­ing Te'ehala Tupaia heard the noise from outside and dis­missed it. There were nearer problems. He followed the stooped Judas-ram of the file of Purchased People through one more barred door, and stopped short, eyes outraged by a flashing of cameras. Noise and confusion reigned here, too—fortunately, for no one noticed his lapse. He let his head fall forward and shambled docilely toward the prison­ers' corral. Clearly they were in the news again, though he did not know why.

The court attendants managed to quiet the press and public long enough for the hearing to begin, but the noise outside continued to grow. Tupaia listened alertly, eyes looking up under lowered brows to try to follow what was going on. It was of no real interest, he decided, just more whiteskin foolishness, some legal point that required the presence of the Purchased People in the courtroom, but certainly nothing that would ever yield freedom to Te'ehala Tupaia of Polynesie-libre. He would have to get that by himself!

Because the Purchased People were either firmly con­trolled or apathetic, the courtroom authorities had not both­ered to handcuff them. Because Tupaia knew that his only hope of escape was to pretend the same apathy, he kept his muscles relaxed and his eyes downcast. But he missed nothing. That guard, just outside the rail, scowling at a photographer trying to get one last shot—surely that was a pistol in the holster at his belt? Those disheveled creatures by the door, reluctantly taking their seats as attendants whispered savagely at them—Kooks? They had to be; no normal human being, not even a whiteskin, would allow himself to appear in such wretchedly unkempt condition. And what was outside the door? It was a continuous rum­ble, like the combers crashing over the breakwater outside a lagoon, but he could almost hear words in it. More Kooks, no doubt . . .

He folded his hands placidly in his lap, while inside his skull his mind was racing with schemes. He let the court­room talk flow past him. Whiteskin justice! Whiteskin madness! Neither of them meant anything to Te'ehala Tu­paia.

There had been a time, of course, when he had not yet learned the bitter truths about whiteskin "fair play." He remembered, with both nostalgia and rage, those long-ago, hot teenage years, working in the tourist hotels, always at a trot at the dinner hour to be sure M'sieur's wine carafe reached Table 10 and to lug the huge, searing silver tureen of soup to the six American ladies at Table 45. A fifteen- year-old kid—could he be blamed? All he knew was that he wanted enough money to buy a Moped and, someday, rise in the whiteskin world until he, too, could be a rich tourist. Fantasy! It had all turned out to be lies and betray­als.

For a moment he let himself listen to the endless wran­gling drone from the front of the courtroom. Attorney for the defense was saying that his clients had paid good money, strictly according to Statute 53 U.S. 195, and they weren't getting their money's worth—"clients" meaning strange creatures from another world, and "money's worth" meaning Tupaia and the other Purchased People them­selves! And the attorney for the prisoners was protesting that no one doubted that, all they had to do was abandon their plans to use these Purchased People on Cuckoo and destroy their tapes.

Whiteskin lunacy! How could grown human beings per­suade themselves that this meant anything, when it af­fected no one nearer than forty thousand light-years away, and at that distance was unenforceable anyway? He cared not at all whether the attorney for the prison system suc­cessfully defended their sale, or the Civil Liberties lawyers won their technical point. Let the judge decide what she would, it would mean nothing.

But the growing volume and frenzy of the noise outside the courtroom . . . they might mean something. They meant, at least, confusion and turmoil—and in some sud­den confusion was Tupaia's only hope.

But the hope dwindled and, at last, died away. The judge impatiently cut the lawyers off, announced that she had heard the arguments and would give her decision in chambers at a later date.

And that was the end of it.

The bored attendants prodded the torpid Purchased Peo­ple toward the door, and Tupaia felt despair soak into his heart once more. Back to the detention cells again, with the strange screams and moans in the night and the queer, in­human things that looked out of his fellow prisoners' eyes.

But perhaps not.

The guards were nervous, whispering to each other. As they approached the rear entrance where the prison vans waited to take them back to their cells, Tupaia heard the crowd noises from outside, closer and louder than ever. The guards stopped them at the door. Then two guards, side by side, thrust it open and shoved their way out into the milling, shouting mob.

Then it became easy.

The guards expected nothing threatening from their pris­oners; it was the Kooks they were worried about. Tupaia found himself directly behind the one who had stood guard nearest him in the courtroom. And the gun was still in the holster.

Tupaia stood up to his full height and reached forward, one great arm encircling the man's neck. He snapped it as easily as he had long ago plucked hibiscus blossoms for the breakfast tables of the tourists. He let the man fall under the stampeding feet of the mob and turned, the gun swiftly concealed in his blouse. No one had noticed as Tupaia melted swiftly into the rioting crowd.

Long before then Jen Babylon had given up the useless scan of ecstatic faces in the Kook mob, pushed his way through, and hurried the few short blocks to Sheryl's apart­ment building. The autodoorman passed him readily enough—his facial profile had been recorded long ago— and in moments he was hammering on the door to Sheryl's apartment.

No one answered the door. Yet Babylon was sure he heard sounds from within. He could not identify them; not the voices of a party, or a show on the stereostage. Not any sounds he recognized, even with the sharpened ears of his profession. They were so faint that he was hardly con­vinced they were real, but they sounded like—like what?— like cards shuffling? or dice rattling?

"Sheryl!" he called. "It's Jen Babylon!"

Still no answer. He shrugged and moved grimly down the hall. It was the only other apartment on the floor, far bigger than Sheryl's little corner; if Althea's information was right, perhaps the girl was inside. He banged on the door, bruising his knuckles.

The answer he got was not the one he might have ex­pected. The door to Sheryl's own apartment opened down the hall, and she stood in the frame, peering toward him. "Yes, Jen?" she said softly.

He was back there at a bound, furious, brushing past her into the tiny room. "My God, Sheryl!" he cried. "Don't you know I've been worried about you? What have you been doing?"

She followed him slowly inside, her face radiant. "The very greatest of things, Jen," she told him solemnly. "You had no cause to worry."

"No cause! With you mixed up with these maniacs! Starving yourself. Letting yourself go to pot—look at you!" he said bitterly, turning her to face a mirror. She had been thin; now she was almost ethereal, except that the smudged face, the careless hair, the shadows under her eyes were nothing that could be called ethereal. The whole apartment was as uncared-for as its owner. Furniture appeared to have been shoved out of the way, for what purpose Baby­lon could not guess; the place had not been dusted or swept in some time, and there was a sour, metallic reek that he could not identify.

"Please go away, Jen," Sheryl said softly.

He shook his head, almost ready to admit defeat. What was he doing here, anyway? She had a right to do what she chose with her life— But on the other hand, what she was doing seemed insane, and didn't he owe her at least an attempt to bring her back to her senses? "Do you know what you're doing to yourself?" he demanded.

"Of course I do, Jen! I am redeeming myself—and all the rest of the sad, shamed human race, too! I Cry the majesty of Cuckoo. It is coming to save us all!"

"Oh, Sheryl," he said, pitying and almost fearing her, as one pities and fears a lunatic. "Won't you come with me and let me get you cleaned up, get some food into you, see if you need medical—" He broke off, listening. "What's that?" He turned toward the closed closet door, and Sheryl gazed serenely with him.

"Don't open it, please," she said. It was as if she had asked him to pass the butter. He stared at her, suddenly angry.

"Sheryl! Don't tell me! You can't have another lover in the closet—that's farce!"

"Please don't open the door, Jen," she insisted softly.

He stared at her, then at the door. There was a repeti­tion of the thin, rattling sound that had caught his atten­tion. It made up his mind for him.

"Be careful," Sheryl begged as he whipped the door open, but he hardly heard her. The closet was a closet no longer; it led through the ragged remains of what had been its back wall to the apartment next door. Forgotten gar­ments were hanging on racks still, and he could not see past them; but he could hear, and there were a great many people in that other apartment. People—or something else.

For in the foreground was definitely "something else." It was one of the unearthly crystal crustaceans, far huger at close range than they had seemed from the bridge over the Charles. Standing before it, Babylon could see that it was no terrestrial crab. Apart from the transparency of its body and limbs, its anatomy was only vaguely crablike. No eye- stalks, but two huge bulging orbs like a fly's; no great crush­ing claws, but half a dozen slim pincers. Yet as it reared up to face him, the limbs clicking against the carapace, it looked surely menacing.

Babylon fell back a step. "What—what's it doing here?"

Sheryl's eyes shone with rapture. "It belongs here, Jen! I don't want it harmed!"

"I won't hurt the wretched thing," he said, falling back as it moved slowly into the room—actually, he was far more worried about harm going in the other direction. "But you have to tell me what's going on!"

"We are redeeming the Galaxy!" she cried proudly. "They're servants of the Crystal Maid, and so am I!"

Babylon stared at her, incredulous. He shook his head. "You're out of your mind," he said. It was not a reproach. It was meant as a statement of fact—fact as Babylon per­ceived fact—the same conviction that a thousand others like Babylon had held over the millennia, as someone dear to them followed Sun Myung Moon or the Reverend James Jones, or joined the Hitler Youth or the Komsomol, or went singing off to the Crusades. "Anyway, this thing can't be here," he said firmly. "It's dangerous. I'm going to call the police."

He moved toward the stereostage, but the giant glassy creature was faster than he. It scuttled, with a quick, dry, tinkling sound, to put itself in the way.

"Oh, Jen, stop!" Sheryl cried.

But it was not Sheryl that stopped him. The creature rose up, bright, faceted eyes gleaming out of the crystal shell. The flutelike hissing of its breath formed into words. "Oh, Jen, stop," it whispered, and then, "I won't hurt the wretched thing."