He started, for one absurd moment convinced she had read his mind. But of course, she would know that. Wouldn’t she?
“General Forester, has your Cryptography Department even discovered it’s a language?”
“If they have, they haven’t told me.”
“I’m fairly sure they don’t know. I’ve made a few structural inroads on the grammar. Have they done that?”
“No.”
“General, although they know a hell of a lot about codes, they know nothing of the nature of language. That sort of idiotic specialization is one of the reasons I haven’t worked with them for the past six years.”
Who is she? he thought again. A security dossier had been handed him that morning, but he had passed it to his aide and merely noted, later, that it had been marked “approved.” He heard himself say, “Perhaps if you could tell me a little about yourself, Miss Wong, I could speak more freely with you.” Illogical, yet he’d spoken it with measured calm and surety. Was her expression quizzical?
“What do you want to know?”
“What I already know is only this: your name, and that some time ago you worked for Military Cryptography. I know that even though you left when very young, you had enough of a reputation so that, six years later, the people who remembered you said unanimously—after they had struggled with Babel-17 for a month—“ ‘Send it to Rydra Wong.’ ” He paused. “And you tell me you have gotten someplace with it. So they were right.”
“Let’s have drinks,” she said.
The bartender drifted forward, drifted back, leaving two small glasses of smoky green. She sipped, watching him. Her eyes, he thought, slant like astounded wings.
“I’m not from Earth,” she said. “My father was a Communications engineer at Stellarcenter X-11-B just beyond Uranus. My mother was a translator for the Court of Outer Worlds. Until I was seven I was the spoiled brat of the Stellarcenter. There weren’t many children. We moved rockside to Uranus-XXVII in ’52. By the time I was twelve, I knew seven Earth languages and could make myself understood in five extraterrestrial tongues. I pick up languages like most people pick up the lyrics to popular songs. I lost both parents during the second embargo.”
“You were on Uranus during the embargo?”
“You know what happened?”
“I know the Outer Planets were hit a lot harder than the Inner.”
“Then you don’t know. But, yes, they were.” She drew a breath as memory surprised her. “One drink isn’t enough to make me talk about it, though. When I came out of the hospital, there was a chance I may have had brain damage.”
“Brain damage—?”
“Malnutrition you know about. Add neurosciatic plague.”
“I know about plague, too.”
“Anyway, I came to Earth to stay with an aunt and uncle here and receive neurotherapy. Only I didn’t need it. And I don’t know whether it was psychological or physiological, but I came out of the whole business with total verbal recall. I’d been bordering on it all my life so it wasn’t too odd. But I also had perfect pitch.”
“Doesn’t that usually go along with lightning calculation and eidetic memory? I can see how all of them would be of use to a cryptographer.”
“I’m a good mathematician, but no lightning calculator. I test high on visual conception and special relations—dream in technicolor and all that—but the total recall is strictly verbal. I had already begun writing. During the summer I got a job translating with the government and began to bone up on codes. In a little while I discovered that I had a certain knack. I’m not a good cryptographer. I don’t have the patience to work that hard on anything written down that I didn’t write myself. Neurotic as hell; that’s another reason I gave it up for poetry. But the ‘knack’ was sort of frightening. Somehow, when I had too much work to do, and somewhere else I really wanted to be, and was scared my supervisor would start getting on my neck, suddenly everything I knew about communication would come together in my head, and it was easier to read the thing in front of me and say what it said than to be that scared and tired and miserable.”
She glanced at her drink.
“Eventually the knack almost got to where I could control it. By then I was nineteen and had a reputation as the little girl who could crack anything. I guess it was knowing something about language that did it, being more facile at recognizing patterns—like distinguishing grammatical order from random rearrangement by feel, which is what I did with Babel-17.”
“Why did you leave?”
“I’ve given you two reasons. A third is simply that when I mastered the knack, I wanted to use it for my own purposes. At nineteen, I quit the Military and, well, got…married, and started writing seriously. Three years later my first book came out.” She shrugged, smiled. “For anything after that, read the poems. It’s all there.”
“And on the worlds of five galaxies, now, people delve your imagery and meaning for the answers to the riddles of language, love, and isolation.” The three words jumped his sentence like vagabonds on a boxcar. She was before him, and was talking; here, divorced from the military, he felt desperately isolated; and he was desperately in…No!
That was impossible and ridiculous and too simple to explain what coursed and pulsed behind his eyes, inside his hands. “Another drink?” Automatic defense. But she will take it for automatic politeness. Will she? The bartender came, left.
“The worlds of five galaxies,” she repeated. “That’s so strange. I’m only twenty-six.” Her eyes fixed somewhere behind the mirror. She was only half-through her first drink.
“By the time Keats was your age, he was dead.”
She shrugged. “This is an odd epoch. It takes heroes very suddenly, very young, then drops them just as quickly.”
He nodded, recalling half a dozen singers, actors, even writers in their late teens or early twenties who had been named genius for a year, two, three, only to disappear. Her reputation was only a phenomenon of three years’ duration.
“I’m part of my times,” she said. “I’d like to transcend my times, but the times themselves have a good deal to do with who I am.” Her hand retreated across the mahogany from her glass. “You in Military, it must be much the same.” She raised her head. “Have I given you what you want?”
He nodded. It was easier to lie with a gesture than a word.
“Good. Now, General Forester, what’s Babel-17?”
He looked around for the bartender, but a glow brought his eyes back to her face: the glow was simply her smile, but from the corner of his eye he had actually mistaken it for a light. “Here,” she said, pushing her second drink, untouched, to him. “I won’t finish this.”
He took it, sipped. “The Invasion, Miss Wong…it’s got to be involved with the Invasion.”
She leaned on one arm, listening with narrowing eyes.
“It started with a series of accidents—well, at first they seemed like accidents. Now we’re sure it’s sabotage. They’ve occurred all over the Alliance regularly since December ’68. Some on warships, some in Space Navy Yards, usually involving the failure of some important equipment. Twice, explosions have caused the death of important officials. Several times these ‘accidents’ have happened in industrial plants producing essential war products.”
“What connects all these ‘accidents,’ other than that they touched on the war? With our economy working this way, it would be difficult for any major industrial accident not to affect the war.”
“The thing that connects them all, Miss Wong, is Babel-17.”
He watched her finish her drink and set the glass precisely on the wet circle.
“Just before, during, and immediately after each accident, the area is flooded with radio exchanges back and forth from indefinite sources; most of them only have a carrying power of a couple of hundred yards. But there are occasional bursts through hyperstatic channels that blanket a few light-years. We have transcribed the stuff during the last three ‘accidents’ an
d given it the working title Babel-17. Now. Does that tell you anything you can use?”
“Yes. There’s a good chance you’re receiving radio instructions for the sabotage back and forth between whatever is directing the ‘accidents’—”
“But we can’t find a thing!” Exasperation struck. “There’s nothing but that blasted gobbledygook, piping away at double speed! Finally someone noticed certain repetitions in the pattern that suggested a code. Cryptography seemed to think it was a good lead but couldn’t crack it for a month; so they called you.”
As he talked, he watched her think. Now she said, “General Forester, I’d like the original monitors of these radio exchanges, plus a thorough report, second by second if it’s available, of those accidents timed to the tapes.”
“I don’t know if—”
“If you don’t have such a report, make one during the next ‘accident’ that occurs. If this radio garbage is a conversation, I have to be able to follow what’s being talked about. You may not have noticed, but, in the copy Cryptography gave me, there was no distinction as to which voice was which. In short, what I’m working with now is a transcription of a highly technical exchange run together without punctuation, or even word breaks.”
“I can probably get you everything you want except the original recordings—”
“You have to. I must make my own transcription, carefully, and on my own equipment.”
“We’ll make a new one to your specifications.”
She shook her head. “I have to do it myself, or I can’t promise a thing. There’s the whole problem of phonemic and allophonic distinctions. Your people didn’t even realize it was a language, so it didn’t occur to them—”
Now he interrupted her. “What sort of distinctions?”
“You know the way some Orientals confuse the sounds of R and L when they speak a Western language? That’s because R and L in many Eastern languages are allophones, that is, considered the same sound, written and even heard the same—just like the th at the beginning of they and at the beginning of theater.”
“What’s different about the sound of theater and they?”
“Say them again and listen. One’s voiced and the other’s unvoiced, they’re as distinct as V and F; only they’re allophones—at least in British English; so Britishers are used to hearing them as though they were the same phoneme. Now Americans, of course, have the minimal pair ‘ether/either,’ where the voicing alone marks the semantic difference—”
“Oh…!”
“But you see the problem a ‘foreigner’ has transcribing a language he doesn’t speak; he may come out with too many distinctions of sound, or not enough.”
“How do you propose to do it?”
“By what I know about the sound systems of a lot of other languages and by feel.”
“The ‘knack’ again?”
She smiled. “I suppose.”
She waited for him to grant approval. What wouldn’t he have granted her? For a moment he had been distracted by her voice through subtleties of sound. “Of course, Miss Wong,” he said, “you’re our expert. Come to Cryptography tomorrow and you can have access to whatever you need.”
“Thank you, General Forester. I’ll bring my official report in then.”
He stood in the static beam of her smile. I must go now, he thought desperately. Oh, let me say something more—“Fine, Miss Wong. I’ll speak to you then.” Something more, something—
He wrenched his body away. (I must turn from her.) Say one thing more, thank you, be you, love you. He walked to the door, his thoughts quieting: Who is she? Oh, the things that should have been said. I have been brusque, military, efficient. But the luxuriance of thought and word I would have given her. The door swung open and evening brushed blue fingers on his eyes.
My god, he thought, as coolness struck his face, all that inside me and she doesn’t know! I didn’t communicate a thing! Somewhere in the depths the words, not a thing, you’re still safe. But stronger on the surface was the outrage at his own silence. Didn’t communicate a thing at all—
Rydra stood up, her hands on the edge of the counter, looking at the mirror. The bartender came to remove the glasses at her fingertips. As he reached for them, he frowned.
“Miss Wong?”
Her face was fixed.
“Miss Wong, are you—”
Her knuckles were white; as the bartender watched, the whiteness crept along her hands till they looked like shaking wax.
“Is there something wrong, Miss Wong?”
She snapped her face toward him. “You noticed?” Her voice was a hoarse whisper, harsh, sarcastic, strained. She whirled from the bar and started toward the door, stopped once to cough, then hurried on.
2
“MOCKY, HELP ME!”
“Rydra?” Dr. Marksu T’mwarba pushed himself from the pillow in the darkness. Her face sprang in smoky light above the bed. “Where are you?”
“Downstairs, Mocky. Please. I’ve g-got to talk to you.” Her agitated features moved left, right, trying to avoid his look.
He squinched his eyes against the glare, then opened them slowly. “Come on up.”
Her face disappeared.
He waved his hand across the control board, and soft light filled the sumptuous bedroom. He shoved back the gold quilt, stood on the fur rug, took a black silk robe from a gnarled bronze column, and as he swung it across his back the automatic contour wires wrapped the panels across his chest and straightened the shoulders. He brushed the induction bank in the rococo frame again, and aluminum flaps fell back on the sideboard. A steaming carafe and liquor decanters rolled forward.
Another gesture started bubble chairs inflating from the floor. As Dr. T’mwarba turned to the entrance cabinet, it creaked, mica wings slid out, and Rydra caught her breath.
“Coffee?” He pushed the carafe and the force-field caught it and carried it gently toward her. “What’ve you been doing?”
“Mocky, it…I…?”
“Drink your coffee.”
She poured a cup, lifted it halfway to her mouth. “No sedatives?”
“Crème de cacao or crème de café?” He held up two small glasses. “Unless you think alcohol is cheating, too. Oh, and there’re some some franks and beans left over from dinner. I had company.”
She shook her head. “Just cacao.”
The tiny glass followed the coffee across the beam. “I’ve had a perfectly dreadful day.” He folded his hands. “No work all afternoon, dinner guests who wanted to argue, and then deluged with calls from the moment they left. Just got to sleep ten minutes ago.” He smiled. “How was your evening?”
“Mocky, it…it was terrible.”
Dr. T’mwarba sipped his liqueur. “Good. Otherwise I’d never forgive you for waking me up.”
In spite of herself she smiled. “I can…can always c-c-count on you for s-sympathy, Mocky.”
“You can count on me for good sense and cogent psychiatric advice. Sympathy? I’m sorry, not after eleven-thirty. Sit down. What happened?” A final sweep of his hand brought a chair up behind her. The edge tapped the back of her knees and she sat. “Now stop stuttering and talk to me. You got over that when you were fifteen.” His voice had become very gentle and very sure.
She took another sip of coffee. “The code, you remember the c-code I was working on?”
Dr. T’mwarba lowered himself to a wide leather hammock and brushed back his white hair, still awry from sleep. “I remember you were asked to work on something for the government. You were rather scornful of the business.”
“Yes. And…well, it’s not the code—which is a language, by the way—but just this evening. I t-talked to the General in charge, General Forester, and it happened…I mean again, it happened, and I knew!”
“Knew what?”
“Just like last time, knew what he was thinking!”
“You read his mind?”
“No. No, it was just like last time! I could tell, from
what he was doing, what he was saying…”
“You’ve tried to explain this to me before, but I still don’t understand, unless you’re talking about some sort of telepathy.”
She shook her head, shook it again.
Dr. T’mwarba locked his fingers and leaned back. Suddenly Rydra said in an even voice: “Now I do have some idea of what you’re trying to say, dear, but you’ll have to put it in words yourself. That’s what you were about to say, Mocky, wasn’t it?”
T’mwarba raised the white hedges of his eyebrows. “Yes. It was. You say you didn’t read my mind? You’ve demonstrated this to me a dozen times—”
“I know what you’re trying to say; and you don’t know what I’m trying to say. It’s not fair!” She nearly rose from her seat.
They said in unison: “That’s why you’re such a fine poet.” Rydra went on, “I know, Mocky. I have to work things out carefully in my head and put them in my poems so people will understand. But that’s not what I’ve been doing for the past ten years. You know what I do? I listen to other people, stumbling about with their half thoughts and half sentences and their clumsy feelings that they can’t express—and it hurts me. So I go home and burnish it and polish it and weld it to a rhythmic frame, make the dull colors gleam, mute the garish artificiality to pastels, so it doesn’t hurt anymore: that’s my poem. I know what they want to say, and I say it for them.”
“The voice of your age,” said T’mwarba.
She said something unprintable. When she finished there were tears starting on her lower lids. “What I want to say, what I want to express, I just…” Again she shook her head. “I can’t say it.”
“If you want to keep growing as a poet, you’ll have to.”
She nodded. “Mocky, up till a year ago, I didn’t even realize I was just saying other people’s ideas. I thought they were my own.”
“Every young writer who’s worth anything goes through that. That’s when you learn your craft.”
“And now I have things to say that are all my own. They’re not what other people have said before, put in an original way. And they’re not just violent contradictions of what other people have said, which amounts to the same thing. They’re new—and I’m scared to death.”