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 look another sip of coffee. "The code, you remember the 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—I 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 any more: 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."
“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 farther, 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—"