"Do you mean that Babel-17 decodes into some other language?"
"Not at all. That's the first thing I checked. We can take a probability scan on various elements and see if they are congruent with other language patterns, even if these elements are in the wrong order. No. Babel-17 is a language itself which we do not understand."
"I think"—General Forester tried to smile—"What you're trying to tell me is that because it isn't a code, but rather an alien language, we might as well give up." If this were defeat, receiving it from her was almost relief.
But she shook her head. "I'm afraid that's not what I'm saying at all. Unknown languages have been deciphered without translations. Linear B and Hittite for example. But if I'm to get further with Babel-17, I'll have to know a great deal more."
The General raised his eyebrows. "What more do 'you need to know? We've given you all our samples. When we get more, we'll certainly—"
"General, I have to know everything you know about Babel-17 where you got it, when, under what circumstances, anything that might give me a clue to the subject matter."
"We're released all the information that we—"
"You gave me ten pages of double-spaced typewritten garble with the code name Babel-17 and asked me what it meant. With just that I can't tell you. With more, I might. It's that simple."
He thought: If it were that simple, if it were only that simple, we would never have called you in about it, Rydra Wong.
She said: "If it were that simple, if it were only that simple, you would never have called me in about it, General Forester."
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 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 up like astounded wings.
"I'm not from Earth," she said. "My father was a Communications engineer at StellarcenterX-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."
"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 neuro-sciatic plague."
"I know about plague, too."
"Anyway, I came to Earth to stay with an aunt and uncle here and receive neuro-therapy. 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 fair mathematician, but no lightning calculator. I test high on visual conception and spatial 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 back, 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 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 greatness, love, and isolation." The three words jumped his sentence like vagabonds on a boxcar. She was before him, and was great; 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 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?"