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 autistic twelve year old girl had been sent to him for neuro-therapy, 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 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?"
"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 fit 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 tongue."
"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. The 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 good-bye."
"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 shook him. When she could talk about it later, she simply said—tensely, with white lips, "It frightened me!"