“Every young writer who becomes a mature writer has to go through that.”
“It’s easy to repeat; it’s hard to speak, Mocky.”
“Good, if you’re learning that now. Why don’t you start by telling me exactly how this…this business of your understanding works?”
She was silent for five, stretching to ten, seconds. “All right. I’ll try again. Just before I left the bar, I was standing there, looking in the mirror, and the bartender came up and asked me what was wrong.”
“Could he sense you were upset?”
“He didn’t ‘sense’ anything. He looked at my hands. They were clenched on the edge of the bar and they were turning white. He didn’t have to be a genius to figure out something odd was going on in my head.”
“Bartenders are pretty sensitive to that sort of signal. It’s part of their job.” He finished his coffee. “Your fingers were turning white? All right, what was this General saying to you, or not saying to you, that he wanted to say?”
A muscle in her cheek jumped twice, and Dr. T’mwarba thought, Should I be able to interpret that more specifically than just her nervousness?
“He was a brisk, ramrod efficient man,” she explained, “probably unmarried, with a military career, and all the insecurity that implies. He was in his fifties, and feeling odd about it. He walked into the bar where we were supposed to meet; his eyes narrowed, then opened, his hand was resting against his leg, and the fingers suddenly curled, then straightened. His pace slowed as he came in, but quickened by the time he was three steps toward me—and he shook my hand like he was afraid it would break.”
T’mwarba’s smile turned into laughter. “He fell in love with you!”
She nodded.
“But why in the world should that upset you? I think you should be flattered.”
“Oh, I was!” She leaned forward. “I was flattered. And I could follow the whole thing through his head. Once, when he was trying to get his mind back on the code, Babel-17, I said exactly what he was thinking, just to let him know I was so close to him. I watched the thought go by that perhaps I was reading his mind—”
“Wait a minute. This is the part I don’t understand. How did you know exactly what he was thinking?”
She raised her hand to her jaw. “He told me, here. I said something about needing more information to crack the language. He didn’t want to give it to me. I said I had to have it or I couldn’t get any further, it was that simple. He raised his head just a fraction—to avoid shaking it. If he had shaken his head, with a slight pursing of the lips, what do you think he would have been saying?”
Dr. T’mwarba shrugged. “That it wasn’t as simple as you thought?”
“Yes. Now he made one gesture to avoid making that one. What does that mean?”
T’mwarba shook his head.
“He avoided the gesture because he connected its not being that simple with my being there. So he raised his head instead.”
“Something like: If it were that simple, we wouldn’t need you,” T’mwarba suggested.
“Exactly. Now, while he raised his head, there was a slight pause halfway up. Don’t you see what that adds?”
“No.”
“If it were that simple—now the pause—if only it were that simple, we wouldn’t have called you in about it.” She turned her hands up in her lap. “And I said it back to him; then his jaw clenched—”
“In surprise?”
“—Yes. That’s when he wondered for a second if I could read his mind.”
Dr. T’mwarba shook his head. “It’s too exact, Rydra. What you’re describing is muscle-reading, which can be pretty accurate, especially if you know the logical area the person’s thoughts are centered on. But it’s still too exact. Get back to why you were upset by the business. Your modesty was offended by the attention of this…uncouth stellarman?”
She came back with something neither modest nor couth.
Dr. T’mwarba bit the inside of his lip and wondered if she saw.
“I’m not a little girl,” she said. “Besides, he wasn’t thinking anything uncouth. As I said, I was flattered by the whole thing. When I pulled my little joke, I was just trying to let him know how much in key we were. I thought he was charming. And if he had been able to see as clearly as I could he would have known I had nothing but good feeling for him. Only when he left—”
Dr. T’mwarba heard roughness work back into her voice.
“—when he left, the last thing he thought was, ‘She doesn’t know; I haven’t communicated a thing to her.’ ”
Her eyes darkened—no, she bent slightly forward and half-dropped her upper lids so that her eyes looked darker. He had watched that happen thousands of times since the scrawny near-autistic twelve-year-old girl had been sent to him for neurotherapy, which had developed into psychotherapy, and then into friendship. This was the first time he’d understood the mechanics of the effect. Her precision of observation had inspired him before to look more closely at others. Only since therapy had officially ended had it come full circle and made him look more closely at her. What did the darkening signify other than change? He knew there were myriad marks of personality about him that she read with a microscope. Wealthy, worldly, he had known many people equal to her in reputation. The reputation did not awe him. Often, however, she did.
“He thought I didn’t understand. He thought nothing had been communicated. And I was angry. I was hurt. All the misunderstandings that tie the world up and keep people apart were quivering before me at once, waiting for me to untangle them, explain them, and I couldn’t. I didn’t know the words, the grammar, the syntax. And—”
Something else was happening in her Oriental face, and he strained to catch it. “Yes?”
“—Babel-17.”
“The language?”
“Yes. You know what I used to call my ‘knack’?”
“You mean you suddenly understood the language?”
“Well, General Forester had just told me what I had was not a monologue, but a dialogue, which I hadn’t known before. That fitted in with some other things I had in the back of my mind. I realized I could tell where the voices changed myself. And then—”
“Do you understand it?”
“I understand some of it better than I did this afternoon. There’s something about the language itself that scares me even more than General Forester.”
Puzzlement fixed itself to T’mwarba’s face. “About the language itself?”
She nodded.
“What?”
The muscle in her cheek jumped again. “For one thing, I think I know where the next accident is going to be.”
“Accident?”
“Yes. The next sabotage that the Invaders are planning, if it is the Invaders, which I’m not sure of. But the language itself—it’s…it’s strange.”
“How?”
“Small,” she said. “Tight. Close together—That doesn’t mean anything to you, does it? In a language, I mean?”
“Compactness?” asked Dr. T’mwarba. “I would think it’s a good quality in a spoken language.”
“Yes,” and the sibilant became a breath. “Mocky, I am scared!”
“Why?”
“Because I’m going to try to do something, and I don’t know if I can or not.”
“If it’s worth trying, you should be a little afraid. What is it?”
“I decided it back in the bar, and I figured out I’d better talk to somebody first. That usually means you.”
“Give.”
“I’m going to solve this whole Babel-17 business myself.”
T’mwarba leaned his head to the right.
“Because I have to find out who speaks this language, where it comes from, and what it’s trying to say.”
His head went left.
“Why? Well, most textbooks say language is a mechanism for expressing thought, Mocky. But language is thought. Thought is information given form. The form is language. Th
e form of this language is…amazing.”
“What amazes you?”
“Mocky, when you learn another tongue, you learn the way another people see the world, the universe.”
He nodded.
“And as I see into this language, I begin to see…too much.”
“It sounds very poetical.”
She laughed. “You always say that to me to bring me back to earth.”
“Which I don’t have to do too often. Good poets tend to be practical and abhor mysticism.”
“Something about trying to hit reality; you figure it out,” she said. “Only, as poetry tries to touch something real, maybe this is poetical.”
“All right. I still don’t understand. But how do you propose to solve the Babel-17 mystery?”
“You really want to know?” Her hands fell to her knees. “I’m going to get a spaceship, get a crew together, and get to the scene of the next accident.”
“That’s right, you do have Interstellar Captain’s papers. Can you afford it?”
“The government’s going to subsidize it.”
“Oh, fine. But why?”
“I’m familiar with a half dozen languages of the Invaders. Babel-17 isn’t one of them. It isn’t a language of the Alliance. I want to find out who speaks this language—because I want to find out who, or what, in the Universe thinks that way. Do you think I can, Mocky?”
“Have another cup of coffee.” He reached back over his shoulder and sailed the carafe across to her again. “That’s a good question. There’s a lot to consider. You’re not the most stable person in the world. Managing a spaceship crew takes a special sort of psychology which—you have. Your papers, if I remember, were the result of that odd—eh, marriage of yours, a couple of years ago. But you only used an automatic crew. For a trip this length, won’t you be managing Transport people?”
She nodded.
“Most of my dealings have been with Customs persons. You’re more or less Customs.”
“Both parents were Transport. I was Transport up till the time of the Embargo.”
“That’s true. Suppose I say, ‘yes, I think you can’?”
“I’d say, ‘thanks,’ and leave tomorrow.”
“Suppose I said I’d like a week to check over your psyche-indices with a microscope, while you took a vacation at my place, taught no classes, gave no public readings, avoided cocktail parties?”
“I’d say, ‘thanks.’ And leave tomorrow.”
He grinned. “Then why are you bothering me?”
“Because—” She shrugged. “Because tomorrow I’m going to be busy as the devil…and I won’t have time to say goodbye.”
“Oh.” The wryness of his grin relaxed into a smile.
And he thought about the myna bird again.
Rydra, thin, thirteen, and gawky, had broken through the triple doors of the conservatory with the new thing called laughter she had just discovered how to make in her mouth. And he was parental proud that the near-corpse, who had been given into his charge six months ago, was now a girl again, with boy-cropped hair and sulks and tantrums and questions and caresses for the two guinea pigs she had named Lump and Lumpkin. The air-conditioning pressed back the shrubbery to the glass wall and sun struck through the transparent roof. She had said, “What’s that, Mocky?”
And he, smiling at her, sun-spotted in white shorts and superfluous halter, said, “It’s a myna bird. It’ll talk to you. Say hello.”
The black eye was dead as a raisin with a pinhead of live light jammed in the corner. The feathers glistened and the needle beak lazed over a thick tongue. She cocked her head as the bird head cocked, and whispered, “Hello?”
Dr. T’mwarba had trained it for two weeks with fresh-dug earthworms to surprise her. The bird looked over its left shoulder and droned, “Hello, Rydra, it’s a fine day out and I’m happy.”
Screaming.
As unexpected as that.
He’d thought she’d started to laugh. But her face was contorted, she began to beat at something with her arms, stagger backwards, fall. The scream rasped in near-collapsed lungs, choked, rasped again. He ran to gather up her flailing, hysterical figure, while the drone of the bird’s voice undercut her wailing: “It’s a fine day out and I’m happy.”
He’d seen acute anxiety attacks before. But this had shaken him. When she could talk about it later, she simply said—tensely, with white lips, “It frightened me!”
Which would have been it, had the damned bird not gotten loose three days later and flown up into the antenna net he and Rydra had put up together for her amateur radio stasiscrafter, with which she could listen to the hyperstatic communications of the transport ships in this arm of the galaxy. A wing and a leg got caught, and it began to beat against one of the hot lines so that you could see the sparks even in the sunlight. “We’ve got to get him out of there!” Rydra had cried. Her fingertips were over her mouth, but as she looked at the bird, he could see the color draining from under her tan. “I’ll take care of it, honey,” he said. “You just forget about him.”
“If he hits that wire a couple of more times he’ll be dead!”
But he had already started inside for the ladder. When he came out, he stopped. She had shinnied four-fifths up the guy wire on the leaning catalpa tree that shaded the corner of the house. Fifteen seconds later he was watching her reach out, draw back, reach out again toward the wild feathers. He knew she wasn’t afraid of the hot line, either; she’d strung it up herself. Sparks again. So she made up her mind and grabbed. A minute later she was coming across the yard, holding the rumpled bird at arm’s length. Her face looked as if it had been blown across with powdered lime.
“Take it, Mocky,” she said, with no voice behind her trembling lips, “before it says something and I start hollering again.”
So now, thirteen years later, something else was speaking to her, and she said she was scared. He knew how scared she could be; he also knew with what bravery she could face down her fears.
He said, “Good-bye. I’m glad you woke me up. I’d be mad as a damp rooster if you hadn’t come. Thank you.”
“The thanks goes to you, Mocky,” she said. “I’m still frightened.”
3
DANIL D. APPLEBY, WHO seldom thought of himself by his name—he was a Customs Officer—stared at the order through wire-framed glasses and rubbed his hand across his crew-cut red hair. “Well, it says you can, if you want to.”
“And—?”
“And it is signed by General Forester.”
“Then I expect you to cooperate.”
“But I have to approve—”
“Then you’ll come along and approve on the spot. I don’t have time to send the reports in and wait for processing.”
“But there’s no way—”
“Yes, there is. Come with me.”
“But Miss Wong, I don’t walk around Transport Town at night.”
“I enjoy it. Scared?”
“Not exactly. But—”
“I have to get a ship and a crew by the morning. And it’s General Forester’s signature. All right?”
“I suppose so…”
“Then come on. I have to get my crew approved.”
Insistent and hesitant respectively, Rydra and the officer left the bronze and glass building.
They waited for the monorail nearly six minutes.
When they came down, the streets were narrower, and a continuous whine of transport ships fell across the sky. Warehouses and repair-and supply-shops sandwiched rickety apartments and rooming houses. A larger street cut past, rumbling with traffic, busy loaders, stellarmen. They passed neon entertainments, restaurants of many worlds, bars, and brothels. In the crush the Customs Officer pulled his shoulders in, walked more quickly to keep up with Rydra’s long-legged stride.
“Where do you intend to find—?”
“My pilot? That’s who I want to pick up first.” She stopped on the corner, shoved her hands into the pockets of
her leather pants, and looked around.
“Do you have someone in mind?”
“I’m thinking of several people. This way.” They turned on a narrower street, more cluttered, more brightly lit.
“Where are we going? Do you know this section?”
But she laughed, slipped her arm through his, and, like a dancer leading without pressure, she turned him toward an iron stairway.
“In here?”
“Have you ever been to this place before?” she asked with an innocent eagerness that made him feel for a moment he was escorting her.
He shook his head.
Up from the basement café, black burst: a man, ebony-skinned, with red and green jewels set into his chest, face, arms, and thighs. Moist membranes, also jeweled, fell from his arms, billowing on slender tines as he hurried up the steps.
Rydra caught his shoulder. “Hey, Lome!”
“Captain Wong!” The voice was high, the white teeth needle-filed. He whirled to her with extending sails. Pointed ears shifted forward. “What you here for?”
“Lome, Brass is wrestling tonight?”
“You want to see him? Aye, Skipper, with the Silver Dragon, and it’s an even match. Hey, I look for you on Deneb. I buy your book too. Can’t read much, but I buy. And I no find you. Where you been a’ six months?”
“Earthside, teaching at the University. But I’m going out again.”
“You ask Brass for pilot? You heading out Specelli way?”
“That’s right.”
Lome dropped his black arm around her shoulder and the sail cloaked her, shimmering. “You go out Caesar, you call Lome for pilot, ever you do. Know Caesar—” He screwed his face and shook his head. “Nobody know it better.”
“When I do, I will. But now it’s Specelli.”
“Then you do good with Brass. Work with him before?”
“We got drunk together when we were both quarantined for a week on one of the Cygnet planetoids. He seemed to know what he was talking about.”
“Talk, talk, talk,” Lome derided. “Yeah, I remember you, Captain who talk. You go watch that son of a dog wrestle; then you know what sort of pilot he make.”